Welcome to the solid verbal. Call that for me. I'm a man, I'm forty. I've heard so many players say, well, I want to be happy. You want to be happy for day Edith State? Is that? Woo whoom? And Dan and Tie? All right, Hello everyone. I'm Tie Hill de Grandt, the author of Campus Quick Slance on SI on Campus and joining me from the far end of the country. What's welcome in, Dan Rubinstein, Dan, you are the SI tour guy. Welcome to the the the solid verbal, that's what we're calling this.
Now, that's what the working title is. Anyway, Yeah, welcome to the podcast. It's great to be on the West coast, and I'm sure it's sort of okay to be on the East coast.
It is very sort of okay to be here on the East coast, but it is good to be on the podcast with you. Dan. Of course, we've all admired your work that you've done, and you've done a lot in the off season, so we'll talk about that in a little bit. But have we ironed out yet exactly what we're going to be talking about in this podcast. I'm not sure how this is going to turn out. Are we just kind of going to shoot from the hip or do we have an actual topic list to work off of?
Absolutely no topic lists. Yeah, we hit We're very unprepared and unprofessional, even though we have like the words sports illustrated next to our names in some form of another.
Don't at all be mistaken.
Absolutely no topic list, Dan Rubinstein, those were our words back in two thousand and eight.
Was that that was our first show. That was our very first show. Can I you sounded so good? You? I was very bad. I did not bring enthusiasm. I did not engage you. I did not engage the audience, and you were just you were shot out of a cannon. As if we have the listenership we have now, the problem is I haven't improved since two thousand and eight. That's okay, you were already so high.
We can get into that here over the next hour plus, depending on however long it takes to kind of get the message across here.
Let's start. Let's start from the very top though. First we're in the same room. Yes, we are in New York recording this. This is the aforementioned history of Solidverbal, the exhaustive naval gazing history of the show. We've had a lot of people say, how did you guys meet, how did you guys get started? How did you I want to be a what? This is the show? This is the show.
We're going to link this up on like the main menu for anybody who has questions about like how do you spell tie? Is it thha, We're going to have you covered here and however long it takes. As we've mentioned for quite some time now, this is going to be our tenth college football season doing the show Dan Yes, which is incredible and kind of in the spirit of our friends over at the Starters, who have been very
successful in a previous life as TB basketball. Previous life is the Basketball Jones now is the Starters with the NBA. They did a tant anniversary show not so long ago. We thought maybe it'd be a good time to do one of her own, since we're roughly around the same podcast age.
Yeah, we were on the Grantline Network with them in twenty eleven, so yes, there's some there are a lot of similarities. We like those guys a lot, So this is what we're going to do. Though, we are going to go through the exhaustive history of the show. We're going to answer your questions about the show and how we've sort of felt about various topics and times. But I think it's it's best if we start from the top. Right. Absolutely, So you were raised.
Somebody wrote in, by the way, wanted to get the conception, the conception play by play from mom.
H she's not with me, unfortunately, here's what I want. I actually thought about calling our moms to see, but then it's just going to be them. Your mom is so much better educated as for podcasting and the show.
If we called MoMA age she would answer and give you commentary.
But here's what I want to start with, though before because this show in Arnest begins with you graduating college. I think a year before. I graduated two thousand and four from Penn State. Yeah, two thousand and five for Oregon. From me, so, you grew up a Notre Dame fan, and that is because family members of years were Notre Dame fans. You grow Catholic in the Northeast and that was your team growing up, right, correct, Right? Okay, I don't have that sort of singular focus. I think I
liked UCLA a good amount. There were UCLA people in my life, but I really like honestly, my favorite team growing up for it varied, but it was probably Florida State, just because I liked watching work done Peter Warwick and Peter Bowl, all those people, all those incredible athletes for Florida State. So I had Florida State gear. I liked Florida State, but I didn't have that same sort of like that's my team year and in, year out, whatever.
So my background with college football was just sort of I enjoyed it during the season, but wasn't a diehard. I didn't grow up in that culture in the way that a lot of people I'm sure that are listening to this show grew up with it until I got to college, and that's when it became a little more real. I appreciated uscmore because that was the Reggie Bush thing in there my hometown. And then, of course my freshman year was the Joey Harrington senior year at Oregon and
got I really got into it going to a college town. You, of course yourself went to a school that is located in a big college football area in Penn State, And so that is how did did I summarize, Okay, just our base level background.
Yeah, I mean mine is kind of a weird one. People are always confused as a well, how is that even possible that you root for Notre Dame and you live and went to Penn State. You live in the same state and went to Penn State. But as you mentioned, yeah, grew up with like strong Catholic influences. Notre Dame's got a pretty strong fan base where I'm from in eastern Pennsylvania, so it certainly not out of the realm of possibilities to come out of that part of the world as
a Notre Dame fan. What was weird for me is and I think a lot of people will attest to this if you grow up in an area where one team kind of rules supreme. I was kind of raised to root against Penn State, and that created an interesting conflict as I decided to go to school at Penn State. My grandmother, hopefully not rolling over in her grave as I say this, was never a fan of Penn State. Was never a fan of like George Paterno on the radio, Joe's brother.
And I didn't even know he was on the radio.
He was on the radio for a long time, and that was probably part of the reason why we weren't raised to be Penn State fans. But I went to school. There was very ambivalent towards the football team, ambivalent at best towards the football team through my four years in state college. And then it wasn't actually until after I graduated that I warmed to the football program. And you know, if you listen to the show, you know that that I've come a long way in regards to Penn State football.
But it was not something that took hold for me, at least in terms of my alma mater, until after I graduated.
Let the record show that the perhaps most influential figure in Ty's life as a Notre Dame fan was a senior citizen.
It's entirely possible. Senior radio and she will strike you down, brothers.
I believe it entirely. So, yeah, so you go to you go to Penn State, you graduate in two thousand and four, and podcasting is not even so, it's it's an MTV v JA. Here's the way you have a connection. I do have a connection. So my story is this.
I won't go into the full college college deal, but I started at Penn State in broadcast journalism and after two years as people want to. I switched over to more of a technical major, a computer technology related major, for various reasons that I won't go into here, but suffice to say I didn't want to work for eighteen grand a year in Altuna. I don't blame you, and so I decided to pursue a different course of action, hoping that at some point I could find my own way into a broadcast.
Did you have a radio show? Did you write for the college?
I did.
I did a little bit for the student radio station, wrote a few hot takes to the Daily Collegiate h but beyond that wasn't wasn't too involved in on campus media. But after graduating college and just with having that technical background, I got into this whole internet streaming thing. At the time, we're talking two thousand and four, podcasting wasn't even a word right back then. If you mentioned podcast really as late as maybe twenty twelve, people still looked at you
like two heads. But certainly back in two thousand and four, two thousand and five, what the hell is a podcast?
Yeah?
I was one of the handful of people on the Internet who was dabbling with this.
So this is post Nabster Napster, what did the other you know, the music sharing program? So things are slowly migrating digitally. You have your MP three.
This is right around the time Facebook was becoming more of a thing.
The first iPod comes out two thousand and one, two thousand and two ish, right around.
There before iPhones were talking, before iPhones. I was one of a handful of people, certain in the sports world that had figured out how to do podcasting. Didn't quite have a deep following yet, but it seemed to me the kind of thing that could Did I ever envision it be where it is now?
No, right, no one could have.
But I dabbled with it. So I talking about right now, we're talking two thousand and four, two thousand and five, Right after graduating, I had a Yankees podcast with with Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe cal Russo, who's was his actual uncle that's not just like a literal uncle, yea, and my cousin Tony.
We did a Yankee show for about four or five years. How did it sound like? That was just the audio quality compared to what we're doing now horrible, but compared to compared to the market at the time, you know, we maximized every decibel out of that Logitech webcam we talked into with a sock over it to reduce the pop. I mean, this was really, I mean, really hacked together.
You're not wrong to do it, though, but back then we were trying her hand at streaming a live show, doing some on demand stuff. At one point, I had exchanged an email with Adam Curry, Adam Curry DJ Adam Curry, Yeah, from MTV, who is widely regarded as the guy who kind of put it all together and figured out the podcasting medium.
On demand radio talk audio in digital form.
That's right, And I had chatted with him via email, and that that kind of got me started down the path of doing this in a more serious capacity.
Which, by the way, that hasn't stopped for you. Like whenever you come across somebody that you really admire for some reason audio wise, especially in the technical aspect, You've reached out to all sorts of people, and that that's just sort of a broader lesson of how we've become to whatever success we've gotten to. It's you technically reaching out to people saying, wait, how did you this was
really cool? How did you do this? And people are of like almost always, if not always responsive, And you know it's not just technical.
Yeah, because as we're going to talk about here, as we get into like the timeline of the show, one of the first big guests that we had on the show was Bruce Fellman. And we know Bruce really well now, but back then we didn't, and initially it was a cold email to him like, Hey, we're doing this thing,
would you be interested in coming on. You would be surprised at how many people are responsive to your emails, I would say, to a man, pretty much everyone reads everything that they get, depending on how popular they are, but in my experience, most people read everything, and it extends to the writers you see on your favorite pub on your favorite publications, and certainly to the technical realm
as well. So yeah, we've tried to borrow bits and pieces here from other shows that we admire, and that's been something that I've tried to do all along. But that's kind of the origin story for me as it relates to podcasting. Now, I want to jump back to what you said in the beginning, which is kind of
foreign to me. You grew up in southern California, which obviously has again as it relates to college football, pretty strong USC, UCLA and yeah, you didn't have a particular identity, No, with one of those teams.
No, I liked Ucla. I liked the Cade McNown. I think it was the ninety eight season where they were really good but then lost to Miami at the end of the year as the postponed Hurricane game. But no, I didn't really have a strong allegiance. I didn't go to many games. I went to the Ron Dane I think it was Wisconsin' Stanford Rose Bowl maybe ninety nine. But no, there was no diet in the Wolf fandom
for anybody beyond Florida State from Afar, I guess. But when I went to college, I really hated Oregon at first. I really truly, Why did you decide to go to Oregon? They had and they still do have a very good journalism and it's called electronic Media program. I wanted to go away from home. I really liked USC, but I didn't want to stay in Los Angeles, and there's a lot of people from my high school going there, our friends going there too. I had a lot of friends
going there. Visited Oregon in Maye. It was super nice and I was like, Oh, this is what it must be like all the time, just not true. Went to Oregon, hated it, partially because I had a really bad, long distance breakup with my high school girlfriend. But freshman year, one of like the outlets for being depressed in the grayness of Eugene, Oregon was I got a radio show.
And I did that with this guy Mike, who was in my hall, and we had a really good time playing emo music and just being stupid and very bad at broadcastings called Morningwood. Yeah, because we were mature and cosmopolitan. And we did that all four years, and by the end of college, I don't know if we were any better, but we were weirder. We would play game shows like we do now. We would just we would become this very strange talk show. And it really woke me up to
how much I liked the sound of my own voice. Honestly, I really liked trying to come up with like, there'll be eight people listening, and I'd put in hours trying to come up with like game shows and stuff like that. And I realized I like creating stuff no matter how many people listen. So I graduated from Oregon, and my story is very different from yours. I wanted to be a comedy writer in LA and there's no real one way to do that. You have to write scripts and
you have to go through all sorts of motions. And I majored in electronic media, so it's like broadcast journalism at Oregon. And I just knew I wanted to make stuff somehow. And this is two thousand and five. So like, video cameras are more affordable, video editing software is easier and easier, iMovie final cut and bootlegable, and yeah, you can pirate whatever. I mean, Listen, everybody lives by their own code. I'll let you decide what you got to
do to get things done. But so in two thousand and five, I worked for a production company as a paid intern. Like it was miserable. I drove around LA traffic and delivered scripts. It was not that fun, but I made a little bit of money. It was for the guy, the music video director who directed the All the Small Things video, who directed a couple of Weezer videos, He directed the popa Roach Last Reason video. Yeah, so
he's a famous director. His name is Marco Siega. He directed a Future He's a big deal and I was an internet his production company and it was fine. But I had come up with ideas about making stuff that I wanted to do. And I interviewed for a job at the Office, the television show The Office, and the job was to be a writer's PA, basically going to get donuts for writers, but you got to sit in the writer's room, you got to take notes. You know, you were a grunt, but you were there. And I
interviewed for the job. I was told I was a finalist for the job. I was told it was between me and one other person. I was told I was probably going to get the job. I had. So my connection to this was a family member used to date the executive producer of the old show Blind Date. Remember that show. Oh yeah, So that like got me in touch with X, who got me in touch with Y, who got me in touch with Z. And I got the interview with the Office. I didn't get the job
with the Office. They said, Okay, you're going to get this job with this Andy Richter sitcom. And I was like, oh cool, whatever, I'll do it. And then they were like it has to go to series, it has to be picked up. The shot six episodes, but if they do the full full Run, you get a pa job. You'll get to get donuts for the writers on that show. And I said great, and then I never heard anything. I never heard anything, and I was like, if I can't get hired to get donuts for people, I'm just
gonna try my own thing. So what I did is I had this idea. So this is now two thousand and six. I had this idea to go to college football games. After going to Oregon and figuring out that like, oh, this atmosphere is fun and weird and something that could be a canvas for my creativity, I decided to start my own website with iweb. Do you remember Iweb? I remember it, Yeah, I started my own website with iweb.
I started a YouTube channel. I took my dad's old Sony camcorder and most sizable, it's like the size of a big like muffle atta, you know, it's a tr TRV something like that. And sometimes with a friend, sometimes solo, I would take a plastic tripod and this old stupid we're talking tapes, tapes, the little tapes, the tapes, many mini DV tapes and wired microphone and I would interview tailgaters, and it would look pretty bad, like I was not
a great shooter, a one man band shooter. And I would interview them and I would try to be funny and try to be weird, and I'd try to come up with three to six seven minutes whatever it was worth of material. And I started that and I was called the College Football Tour Guide, and I watermarked it, and I put them on YouTube, and I put it on my I website and some of them did pretty well. All things sit are ten fifteen, twenty thousand views. Some of them did Okay, it was a big deal, by
the way, and that in two thousand and six. That's a big deal. It's a pretty big deal thousand and six. Yeah, So I did that at seven schools. At this point, I am living with my parents. I am I have some money saved up. But you know, I was sleeping on couches when I was on the road of friends or like sister, I slept on the couch in Berkeley of my now ex girlfriend's sister. I slept on her couch and bertle like, you know, it's just one of
those things. It was totally shoe string. I would drive everywhere and I don't think I. I paid for maybe one hotel, so I did it shoe string. But you know, I was losing money on you had a product. But I had a product and I felt good about it, and I was making something and I was getting it out every week. I did eight episodes I think, during the two thousand and six season, and it was fun.
And after the two thousand and six season, I made a DVD of that and I sent it to as many addresses email and snail mail as I could possibly find. And one of these so the first response I got was from Neil Everett from ESPNSPN, Oregon guy. Even. I don't know if I realized it at the time. I put the DVD in a Manila envelope. I wrote him a note and I sent it to Bristol. I just blindly, I said, like, Neil Everett could have been Anthrax. Yeah, instead was It was a dquity of and it was
like way too long for a sizzlereel. It's like eleven minutes long. Kids, sizlereels shouldn't be more than two minutes, No two minutes. Watch after two minutes. But a couple of weeks later I look at my phone and I have a call from an eight six to OHO number and I don't know what eight six so is, but I still to this day know what it is. And I answer the phone and I go hello, or I was probably like oh, and I was like is this Dan? I was like yeah, it was like it's Neil Evert ESPN.
I was like, oh, that was in my mind. I was like, I'm going to be a star, But in reality, it was just a call to say, you know what, I got your DVD. I think you got something here. It was really good. It really entertained me, Like I think you can do something with this, Like you should try to contact like the best damn Sports show or something like that. But like I just wanted to give you a call and let you know, like you're pretty talented,
and I like this idea and good for you. And that gave me the confidence to like keep pushing through. I emailed it to the MySpace page of SI on campus. A Raschmarcazi. This is still two thousand and six. A Raschmarcazi, who's now at ESPN, was running that page then sent me an email back, I love this. I'm sending it to my bosses, you should be doing this for us, And I met with him a couple of times. I went out to I went out to Sports Illustrated in New York when I think I happened to be there.
Met with SI and they were like, we'd love to have you do this in two thousand and seven. You have to pay your own way, but like, we'll reimburse your expenses and give you you know, it was nothing. It was like, I can't even remember what I cleared and after expenses, but it was I don't know, twenty thousand dollars, fifteen thousand dollars. Actually that might have been including expense. I might have cleared like eight thousand dollars for the season or something like that. And I was ecstatic.
So I did that. In two thousand and seven four Sports Illustrate. I did twelve episodes. I took a friend each week on the road with me. That was the extent of our shoot. And the big advantage that I had was in two thousand and six Sports Illustrate. And this is something I think we talked about in our early emails. Sports Wilstraate was paying a woman. You might
remember her, you might not remember her name. Is Jen Sturger to do something very similar but with like a whole film crew, and I basically undercut her and said, you're probably paying her thousands of dollars a week her and her crew. I'll do this for way cheaper and I'll be funnier. And so I did that, and they responded really well to it, and so I became the SI tour guy in two thousand and seven, the fall
of two thousand and seven. Meanwhile, between football seasons, I'm like temping, I'm a secretary, I'm a you know, an executiveever you can do try and make some money. I'm picking up work along the way. I move in with West Coast Kevin and a lion I fan Scott, guys that have been sort of floating on the xterior of the show forever, but nothing with podcasting at this point,
nothing at all with podcasting. But I had gotten it in with Sports Illustrated through making my own video series in my website and just hustling to try to get it out there. And this is still like the very early days, like Dead Spinning the Big Lead are the only sports blog, or maybe DESBS is in its infancy, but this is the very very beginning of like digital sports and around the time of blogging.
Yes, this is when blogging was big because that was your path to get to Sports Illustrate, which is an awesome story, right, incredible story. As I mentioned before, Around the same time, I'm doing this Yankee show, and I was affiliated with a local like Yankee Fan Club, and we kind of use that as a way to get in the door and interview some cool people like John Sterling. You know it's commentator again. We're talking two thousand and five.
What's a podcast to get an interview like that? Talking into a webcam, holding up a speaker phone to the webcam. I mean, we're not talking high society when it comes to equipment. But we still found a way to make it happen, and so that was cool. We had a little bit of a following. We still have people who
email us about it today. But around that time, when blogs were becoming more of a thing, Fox Sports was trying to launch its own sports blog community, and in order to try and drum up a little bit of interest in that, they ran something they call the Next Great Sports Writer Competition. Yes, so I had always written about sports, always written about sports. I could probably make a pretty good case that I'm better at doing.
That is two thousand and five. This is two thousand and five. Yeah, you're right.
I could make a case that I'm probably better at the writing than I am at the spoken word thing. But a friend of mine said, hey, you know, if you're interested, there's this contest going on over at Fox Sports called the Next Great Sports Writer. They're billing it as the American Idol for sports writing. And all you got to do is post a blog about whatever you want.
Okay.
At this point, I'm working a fairly stable job in technology. I like the people I will was the same job, same job, the whole the whole way through the same mysterious day job. It's always been the same company. And so I entered and I won out of thousands of entries. Lo and behold, somehow I end up winning this thing?
May I jump in real quick? I was one of those thousands of entries. Really, you know this. You don't know this. I don't know if I remember that. If you go back and find the web cash or whatever of the original Next Great American Sports Writer, yeah yeah,
you won it. I did. There was like, okay, everybody enter it and then we're going to select a bunch of finalists and then they're going to keep writing that's right, and then we are going to figure out I don't know if there were two finalists and then you won, whatever it was. I did not make the finalists, but I got an honorable mention. I really almost a finalist, no kid, because I remember like bitching and moaning about Lee Corso saying bad things about Oregon in two thousand and five.
It was It was one of the more stressful experiences of my life. But in a weird way, it kind of let us down this path. Yeah, I win this, and in winning it, not only are you exposed to like the negative commentary and all the stuff that we have to deal with now talking about college football as regularly as we do, but you also have to learn what it's like to be on deadline. You have to learn what it's like to work try and you know, adhere to a work out, adhere to a format, a topic,
whatever your editor is asking you to do. So it was a good learning experience through winning that I ended up getting a contract to write like twenty five articles for Fox Sports.
It's great, which is cool.
Yeah, and around the time I got to maybe article twenty two, Fox Sports at the time had chosen to go a different direction with its managing editor, and I distinctly remember a phone call I had with the managing editor where it was very clear the man did not take me seriously because I'd want a contest in order to get my writing contract. I knew the writing was on the wall at that point that after I wrote my twenty five there was a pretty good chance there wasn't gonna be another twenty five.
But I enjoyed doing it. Foxsports dot Com making dubious decisions as far back as two thousand and five, Ladies a gentleman.
I knew at that point that if I wanted to keep doing it, I needed to send clips out to people. Yeah, and it was I think either through Jimmy, Treana God Bless or any great Yeah, one of those two guys over at SI that I got hooked up with SI on campus and started writing Campus Quickslants, which if you heard the intro, our first intro, when I mentioned campus Quickslants, that was the title of my thing.
Did you come up with that name? I did? Good for you? Two thousand and six. So this is early two thousand and six. This is you don't know when. This is in two thousand and sex.
Probably later on in this is around two thousand and seven. So I had written Fox Sports in two thousand and six after I won the contest, and then in two thousand and seven I started looking elsewhere and landed with Sports Illustrated. Two thousand and seven was also the same time when I found you. Yes, all right, this is kind of how our paths start to cross a little bit. I found your videos, and on one date in particular, it was this.
Is week two.
I believe Week two was September nineteenth, so week two, week three, two thousand and seven, you did a video up in State College, and I just happened to be at work browsing the internet as your wont to do when you're.
On your kill some time, Yeah, on sign campus.
And I saw that you had been up there. I had been up there too. I hadn't seen you, but I liked what you did. And so here is the text of the email that I wrote you saw earlier. This is our first correspondence. Hey Dan, I'm tie Hilldebrandt, the author of Campus Quick slants every Wednesday for SI on campus. I just wanted to let you know and shoot you a line to commend you want a job
well done. Yes, I've really enjoyed your videos thus far, especially the Penn State once since I graduated from there.
A few years ago.
I was in town for the game writing about Paternalville two bad we doing cross paths. I could have steered you in the direction of one of the more over the top tailgates you'll ever see. I'm sure everyone says that, Yeah, that was my in. And I said, anyway, keep up the good work. Where you headed next?
Right? And I responded to it. I was so famous that I didn't need to respond to it. Of course, No, I remember this. I remember this correspondence and Penn State was great. The first week of that year, I think was Georgia, which was tricky. I really liked doing this for SI. It was just the first time outside of the West Coast I traveled across country. My shooter was not that great, but I brought a friend of mine, Casey, from college, who knew what he was doing a little
bit and had a great time. It was crazy. It was the first really crazy tailgate I had been to, and there was a woman who was probably eighty seven years old, and I asked her what she hoped Penn State did to Notre Dame, and she was like, beats the shit out of him. And that's in my reel. That's like one of the first clips in my reel because she was so great. So I had it. It was a lot of loud, sort of Jersey trash types at Penn State, which shouldn't shock anybody who's been to
a Penn State tailgate at that game. It's accurate. No, it's fine, it's accurate. Listen, I'm la trash. We're all trash in our own way. Anyway. So I got this email from Tye and in looking back at the correspondence that I'm we must have both been either very lonely there must. I don't know what it was, but like you would email me every week, and I would email like you would email me after videos, being like, oh man, Colorado looks great.
In my emails for anyone who's emailed with me are not short, No, I'm not. I'm not succinct when it comes to email. I will write you a book, and I think in a lot of cases I did.
But it was it was always thoughtful, like you would watch the videos and you were like, was it as pretty in Colorado as it looked like? It was just like, Wow, he really likes these videos, but he's also he's not like the strangest person. He's also writing for this website. And I really liked you. You incorporated a lot of pop culture stuff into your campus quick slance wrestling references, stuff like that, and I liked your column a lot.
So it was just sort of a mutual admiration. This also all feels like when you're at a wedding rehearsal dinner when they show like the slideshow of the you know, the each the spouse is growing up and then coming together. But no, it was just it was genuine like we were pen pals, which sounds strange to say right now, but like we worked the same company and we were
both covering the same sport. And at a certain point in two thousand and eight, I guess because I had re upped with Sports Illustrated to do videos about not just college football but all college sports, and so I was at Shryzhevsky Ville at Duke, I was at the National Collegiate Competitive Eating Contest and there's emails after each one of these events that you sent me asking me questions about like how many fries did you eat like at these things.
So, and I will say this for anyone out there who listens and you work in corporate America, you must have been very bored.
I was not.
In the most responsible positions at that time. You know, the people I work with are great and the company that I work for is great, but in that particular role, yeah, having someone to email about sports.
Well, there's no Twitter, so there's no way to entertain yourself with like seeing what's going on in the world in real time like we have now. We can waste our time on Twitter, on Instagram, whatever. There wasn't that. There was you go on dead Spin and argue about burritos in the comments of an NCAA football video game post or something like that. But beyond that, there was no real time nothing there, right, So, as you said,
I would, I would email you after the videos. I would watch all the videos.
I think in a digital sense, we turned into pretty fast friends because you would email me after my columns and vice versa, and we started spinning our wheels. And I don't know the point at which it clicked for both of us. But I'm pretty sure.
It was you. I looked at the email today, I'm.
Pretty sure it was you who initially said, you know, I've been thinking about starting a podcast. Do you know anything about there? Might you be interested?
Yes?
And it was at that point that I jumped all over it and I said, I happen to know a lot about it because I've been doing this now for a couple of years. And at that point in time, things were shifting from trying to live stream through a U stream or real player, real player you could do it through.
It was the other one other than you. It was you stream live stream. Yeah, there there were a whole variety of them. I had had a server somewhere up here in New York City that I paid thirty five dollars a month for and it was a dedicated stream for my show. Things were shifting from that realm more of in, more of the on demand thing, and we kind of got in on the ground floor of that, and I said, yeah, let's do it. We could do it,
so I believe, if memory serves. We started brainstorming names, and we did a pilot recording which I dug for and couldn't you find I have to go back and look as I know why I have it.
Yeah, but that was June twenty third, two thousand and eight, the pilot, the pilot, and around that time here are some of the names that we were trying to workshop. The Irrefutable Audio Evidence or Irrefutable Evidence podcast.
I can't even say it.
The Red Shirts, which I got a bad mind, The walk On Program, which I like that it I still like it. I believe there's a basketball show called the walk Ons.
Right, but not walk On Program because the program is the double word there. The Shady Booster Program. I'm okay with that too, Shady Boosters. I like this.
And we had another booster club in there, Yeah, another Booster club in there. So we kicked it around a little bit more after our pilot, and eventually the solid Verbal was born on August eleventh, Yes, two thousand and.
We came up with it.
You did, of course, quote maybe something with the word verbal in it. Oh, the solid verbal, Yes, something like that. Even if we're no good at doing your college football podcast, we'll go down with a damn clever name.
It's true, stand by it.
Solid Verbal was born August eleventh, two thousand and eight. Our first show was August twenty seventh, two thousand and eight, the intro for which you heard at the top of our show. And so the question is where did it go from there? Two thousand and eight. As you heard, we didn't really know.
We didn't have a plan for this. We didn't know what we were going to do.
I think we knew that the nature of the medium was such that you needed to keep doing it on a regular basis if you wanted to maintain and grow an audience. We estimate we had about eleven listeners for a good six to eight weeks. No idea how the original eleven. If you've been with us for a long time, you know that we've referenced the original eleven for quite
some time. But it really was a slow burn in the beginning, a good six to eight weeks, we figured about eleven listeners and at even subscribers.
We knew eleven. We didn't know how many listeners eleven eleven subscribers, that's correct.
It wasn't until we started bringing on guys like Andy Gray from Sion Campus, Jimmy trena s Ion Campus. Our only connection to like the outside sports media world. It wasn't until we started bringing those guys on that we were able very slowly to grow or follow h.
And this was also we started the year Twitter started basically like two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight we started. I was on the road every weekend, so I was going to I was traveling on Fridays, and I think that's when we did our some of our Thursdays. I think, you know, whatever it was, I would do shows from an airport gate. I would call you and you had You're gonna have to tell me what it was. It's fine now. I think the statute of limitations is up.
You had a shadily attained switcher of some kind a call switcher that you can't buy in stores. It's a it's an industrial product for radio stations.
I bought some sort of phone coupler on eBay that, per my understanding, was illegal for.
Private use, for private use the manner in which I could wire tap with it. Yeah. Yeah, So that's what we used for Colin interviews, and it worked. It served the purpose for a while.
Obviously, we've got a lot better equipment now, but we use that for a long time to make this thing go on that was a airport gate or in the car wherever.
Yeah, but we had guests call in and we had you know, there were sports writers that we would meet on the road or whatever at this point, or I would meet and they'd ask like, how do you put calls on? How do you do that? And I was like, Ty has a thing. Yeah, don't don't.
You don't want to know how, don't ask too many questions. You want to know how we're doing this. But for a good chunk of time, really, for the first like two to three years, yeah, we were using that device. We were using that device. We kept going through two thousand and eight, Yeah, very slowly, and we picked up a following. We tried to get to forty. That was
like our big pie in the sky goal. We tried to get to forty subscribers, and we said, if we can get to forty, if all eleven of you can convince three to four of your friends to subscribe and listen to this show, I promise you, Ty and I will videotape ourselves. Relax, relax well, videotape ourselves running forty our dashes, doing various physical challenges, throwing a football as far as we can punting a football, as far as we can in just the spirit of competition, if we
can get to forty, and we got to forty. We got to forty. The videos are still out on YouTube. Yeah, and God's honest truth. My cousin will back me up because the videotape me running the forty we couldn't get a good framing of me running it all right, So I got like the fastest time marked down on a piece of paper, and then I think you combine that with the best footage that we could find. Yeah, but I went over to and this is horrible, but you know how in a park they have like those memorial
trees planted. Yeah, I ran the forty yard dash so many times that I ran over to one of those memorial trees and puked all over it.
Wow. Yeah, okay, that's dedication. It was dedication. This was We're just losing nothing but money at this point. Nothing. I mean, if time is money, we're just giving all of our time after work on whatever day we're edit, we're doing the show. We're recording the show, ties editing the show, we're putting it up. What were you editing the show on at this point. I think at the time we were using a freeware product called gold Wave. Okay, we had a PC. Yeah, back then gold Wave was
what I knew best. And this is once a week, once a week, we're doing shows once a week during the season. They would be preview shows, but I guess at the beginning we would recap or whatever. Yeah, so they we'd recap in preview and then the season ended. So we're talking about two thousand and nine, the very beginning of two thousand and nine, and the season ended, and do we stay with the show in the off season or do we say i'll see in August? What do we do?
We were very on the fence about it, Yeah, because the big problem we had and it's not as much of a problem anymore, but it's still something that we have to think about. What are you going to talk about in the off season? Yeah, what are you going to talk about? Even back then, college football didn't have as vibrant of an off season as I think it does now. There's just more money involved now, so there's more of an interest. But back then, we were really
worried that we weren't going to have enough content. But we decided we were going to give it a go. We're going to give it a go. And actually, for a chunk of time, even in the nine off season, we were doing two shows a week. Yes, we were doing two shows a week to try and just produce more content, get more people hooked. Certainly through the season we did two shows a week like we do now.
It wasn't until twenty ten that we decided, all right, we'll do two a week during the season, one a week in the off season because that's a little bit more sustainable. But that end of eight beginning of nine timeframe was really when we started connecting the connecting dots. We could see that numbers were going up on our FeedBurner subscription carets. We were able to track downloads to the best of our ability. At that point in time, we could see that there was a steady drumbeat of
people becoming more interested. And of note, was around that time iPhones became a thing.
Yes, iPhones were two thousand and six, two thousand and seven, but they really sort of launched in popularity in the next couple of years.
The iPhone three G came out, without a doubt that had an impact. Now, it wasn't until years later that they actually had an app for it that was native on most iPhones. But it was around that time when people who had any kind of smartphone for that matter started figuring out, oh, we we can download it on our computer and upload it either to our iPod or.
To sink it up.
Yeah, and we can listen on the go. And that's how this whole podcast thing got its initial burst. It was from smart devices.
Yeah, no, it totally got the iPod. It was from smartphones. Yes, it was definitely from smartphones. And the way that we sort of split up the responsibilities is you handled a lot of the technical aspects. So I sounded like shit, like I had like a Logitech, a really crappy one. And to anybody that it's writing in the least important thing. When you're first starting out as the equipment, get something
that makes you sound okay. You know, don't spend more than like fifty bucks or one hundred bucks or whatever, get into rhythm, but you should sound good eventually. So I didn't sound great, but slowly I I got a better and better microphone. But you handled all of the back end stuff because that was your specialty, and what I was okay at because I was on the road and I wouldn't need sports writers at games and stuff like that. Is I would send out so many emails
to sports writers. I would say, Hey, would you come on our college football podcast? We've had on Bruce Felman and Andy Staples and Jimmy Trayina and pretty much everybody would come on. We really got a ton of people to come on. And at that point, also you have Twitter, so we said, you know, hey, we're going to tweet out the show. Would you mind like tweeting out the
fact that you were on the show. And they were said sure, whatever, and we would start going on their podcasts and radio shows or whatever the case may be. I remember in two thousand and eight I shot I think it was two thousand and eight. I shot at Ohio State and Stu Mandel, who is, you know, my coworker technically at that time, even though I live in LA and he lives in New York whatever, but I remember him emailing me. He was like, Oh, I'm gonna be at this game too, would love to say HI,
would love to see how you shoot. I was like, stupid, I want to see how I shoot. So it was one of those things were like I felt like I was in this rhythm of Sports Illustrated and he really liked the solid verbal and it was very cool to see that, like we were becoming a thing in this nerdy universe of college football writers because we had a lot of them on the show. We've had Dan Wetzel
on the show forever. We've had Stumandel and Andy Staples and Bruce Feldman, and they've been on the show for I mean it's twenty seventeen, so they've been on going on eight nine years. And so we're getting this following of people and we've gone away from this somewhat is we've had, you know, like if we've had a Clemson writer and we'll have Brian Cook on from m GO blog. We were it was so specific to that school, but that's the way we got people fans from those schools interested.
And that's an important point because we got to forty, we got to one hundred, and we could tell from the traffic to our website, soliverbal dot com. We could tell where people were coming from. Yeah, and you were in California at the time. I was in Pennsylvania. Could see that most of the traffic was from our two states, and so the only logical conclusion is that it was
you and I right. It was at that point that I said to you, we can light some of these states up if we bring on a guy from Texas, if we bring on Brian from someone from Clemson, so on and so forth, and so very systematically. I'm not going to say we had a master plan, but that
was the general theme. We tried to bring people on from different bigger programs, Notre Dame, and see if we can turn Some of it was Google analytics that we're still using Google Analytics, but it could show you a light green or a dark green depending on how much traffic you had from a particular state. And so, oh, we want to light up Georgia. Let's bring on someone
from a Georgia blog. And so we kept doing that, and throughout the course of an off season, you bring on enough people, you hit enough of the big programs, you see most of those states, especially in the southeastern part of the country, start to turn a little darker shade of green. And again we're talking very incremental here, probably not at a thousand listeners by the end of two thousand and nine, no, but we could see again that we had an upward traject print.
Yeah, and I will also jump in here with something to remember. Ty and I have never met in person at this point. He is living in eastern Pennsylvania and Allentown. I am living in LA and it's studio city, still living with a couple friends. Maybe at one point I started living alone when Swartz Illustrated paid me a living wage. But we had never met. This is two thousand and nine. We've been doing the show for at least a year, a couple times a week, and sometimes it would be weird.
It was we had listeners. Sometimes we get an email from somebody like Mike Knoebler, who was one of our first eleven listeners who more on him in a second Well on him was one of the He was the head of video at the University of Nebraska, their football program. And so we still never met. We still had no concept for each other in person. And you know, it's just something we're doing bi coostally. Yeah. Yeah, it was the kind of thing that no one I knew could relate.
Do you have a girlfriend in this time? Not at that time? Okay I did, Yes, I did not at that time. Yeah, but it you know.
You try to communicate this to your friends, like I'm giving this on like a Wednesday night we've jumped around, or what nights we record, but nobody could really understand it. The only thing I could really attribute it to is that we're just wired in such a way that this is totally acceptable. Yeah, and for a lot of people it isn't. But for you and I, we just that's one of the common threads. And it's an isolating thing too. People don't understand.
You know, you listen to podcasts of people that are doing it forever and they're in the same room constantly. They're shooting video together, they're doing audio stuff together. This is a brand new thing for us, at least I don't know how other people at that time were doing things, but like, it was extremely isolating. I would go into my room and talk to a stranger for an hour and a half two nights a week. It was a different experience. It was it felt kind of natural. It
was a leap of faith. We got to know each other very well, but it was weird when we met for the first team, it definitely was.
It was weird for the first time. So turning the calendar now to twenty ten and one of my favorite moments. I won't play the clip, but we had we had. This is probably one of my top five favorite moments. We started doing the show, we started interviewing coaches. Yes, first coach we ever interviewed was Jimbo Fisher right as he got the Florida State job and was super nice.
I'm sure he still is super He was officially the first I know. It was Al Golden too around that Al gold was around the same time. I remember we talked to his secretary for like a half hour because she was running late. She sent me a thank you note.
I mean just super nice people at Temple. Everybody that we dealt with was was genuinely nice, but Jimbo couldn't have been friendlier. He was our first coach interview. I remember I was nervous, what am I gonna say Jimbo Fisher? Like, I don't even know who is Jimbo Fisher. I didn't even know who he was the time, but he was kind enough to come on our show and at.
The time a man who completely destroyed Notre Dame. That's right, thank you, thank you for that anecdote. JaMarcus Russell, we interviewed houston nutt yeah, And one of the funnier early moments of the show is we caught houston Nut on the toilet. Yeah. We didn't realize this till after the fact. I don't know he's coach.
Elliott, a friend of mine, noticed that houston Nut was very clearly on the toilet because beginning part of the interview, there is a very distinct echo. While you were asking a question, you could hear very loudly a toilet flush, like a jet engine toy.
His voice was very hollow, it was echoe yeah, and.
Then you hear a door close, and then by the time you get done asking your question, he's in like a perfectly insulated sound studio. And so upon further review, you could tell that he is clearly indisposed when he's yes. Doing the initial interview, it was March twenty fourth, twenty ten. If you want to go back and listen to that.
Let me tell you, by the way, just before you go on, how we booked coaches when we were just an anonymous podcast, because we were not on any platform at this point. I had the Football Writers Association of America like black Book, which has the contact information of everybody in college football because I was in the Writers' Association and I went through and I emailed one hundred and twenty five sids and I said, Hi, my name is Dan. I do a podcast, and Ty and I
were we work at Sports Illustrator. We used to work at Sports Illustrated at this point. But we have the show and we'd love to have the coach on for twenty three minutes to talk about the Tigers or the you know whoever, the buck Eyes, and I think we booked, Yeah, I don't know, four or five or something like that out of like one hundred and twenty. But that's pretty good because as soon as you book four or five, you can say we've had on head, had Jimbo Fisher on. Yeh,
We've had Jimbo Fisher on. We've had Kyle Whittingham on whoever. And so that was that was a pretty good hit rate, the fact that we got those four or five guys, and I mean we had I have I might still have a message that Bill Stuart left me. He called my cell phone instead of your instead of the studio number when we had him on. May he rest in peace. But we had on head coaches and at this time. I then we can go back to where you are professionally.
So this is two thousand and nine, twenty ten. I was writing a little bit in two thousand and nine for Sports Illustrated. Because they rolled back their video, I was offered a shift in video. I was doing the tour Guide show for Sports Illustrated and then they said good news, bad news, and I said, okay, cool, weird but cool. So the good news is we sold the college Football Travel show to Nissan for their Heisman campaign. I was like, whoa, that seems like a very good thing.
And I was like, what's the bad news. The bad news is they don't really want you to like joke around with tailgaters and like eat food and drink beer. They just want you to interview a older Heisman winner. And I said, no, I'm not doing that. That's compromising my creative freedom. George Costanza, your artistic totally. What happened? Yeah,
And they said are you sure? And I have this dream job traveling going to college football games as my job, and they want to keep paying me to do that, but with a wrinkle, and I said, I turned them down. And I said, no, that's not what I want to do creatively, and so they gave it the job to somebody else and I just sort of wrote, and then they stopped asking me to write. Check stop coming. The check stopped coming. And this was two thousand and nine,
so the economy's not great. They're not doing any video basically anymore. It was just like Swimsuit at this point, and I stood up from my artistic integrity. I started a new video series. I set up a green screen in my apartment and I did a recap show called The Postgame Tailgates. Yeah, and there were some goofs, so I looked real crazy and weird back then, or at least crazier, but it was a green screen show. I was trying to be like The Soup but for college football.
And it was fine. Some episodes are funnier than others, but I constantly had to be making so I'm doing the solid verbal. I'm not on the road anymore. I'm just recapping games. I'm wearing like an old corduroy blazer and standing in of this green screen and like I'm doing motion graphics behind me. It's very strange and cheap looking, but that's what I did. And sports Oustralia would post it every so often, and they liked the show, but
they didn't pay me to do it. A good deal for them, by the way, a great deal for them, A great deal. They would just post it on their like campus or hot Clicks, Jimmy Train or whatever. And that was fine because it got me a lot of attention for that too. But We're doing the show, We're having coaches on, but I'm not making any money. So I'm like back to temping. I'm like picking up I picked up catering jobs. But like, this is totally true. Scott,
my really good friend Scott. His parents own this successful barbecue restaurant in La and I would go work catering jobs because they would pay me one hundred bucks for doing two hours worth of work, and that seemed fine. Got to my bed broke at a certain point, like the slats in my cheap ikea bed, like it just broke, the thing that goes down the middle of the bed. It broke, and I was like, I'm not buying another bed, so I slept on a mattress on the ground inside
of the frame bed. I mean, listen, people were way worse off than me. I recognize how fortunate and privileged I am to be like, that's the worst problem I had, But like I wasn't you know, I was not living any sort of comfortable life at this.
Day, and we weren't making any money on the show, on the show podcast advertising. It hadn't even been conceived at that point in twenty ten, and kind of along the lines of what you said with SI on Campus, I wasn't writing at this point either. I wasn't writing at this point either.
But had you had a secure day job, I had a secure day job.
I was not reliant upon it like you might have been in the video realm for any kind of steady income. But the writing thing had ceased because they had, I think, pretty much closed up shop on SI on Campus at some point, and so for me, the primary creative outlet was truly the solidverbal yea, at that point, I wasn't writing. I was doing a little bit of blogging here and there, but I really turned all of my attention creatively to
doing our show. And it was also at this point that you and I recognized that it was continuing to grow a very very fast clip and we still hadn't met. We still hadn't met so by virtue of our friend Mike Nobler, who was the video director at University of Nebraska for then who Bo Polini. He said, why don't you guys come out to the Nebraska Texas game. We'll
make sure that you get in the door. We'll give you a tour of the press box, give you two of a tour of all the video operations up here, and it'll give you guys an opportunity to meet We called verbicon verbicon.
There have been many.
Alternate spellings created for verbicon. This is one of the things I'm very anal about that I've never said to you. I prefer the v erba capital con so like comic con, but verba con not verb not verb e verb uh con was always my preferred spelling.
See, I've always interpreted as the Spish pronunciation vera bak on, vera back on.
I've been under the impression for all the year said we're a very cultural show. But we did get that behind the scenes tour of uh acilities. Uh you had your first trip to five guys, which I booked on my phone. Actually still have a video, which he seems slightly annoyed that a kickoff I caught.
No, no, I could have caught a kick. But it was my first time on the field for a game. I had been on the field a bunch from me.
And I was worried that if I caught the ball, it'd be like a baseball game where they throw me out Jeffrey Meyer. So I decided I'm going to let the guy next to me catch the ball. And he did, and it was like the thrill of his life.
It was cool.
He took a step out, he held the ball up like it was a big deal for this guy. I was terrified to be anywhere near a live football in a college football stadium. But we had a chance to meet, and I remember, I don't I think it was a holiday in that we stayed at. I remember that you had arranged for the management to put out on an easel welcome verbicon and and I remember walking in seeing this on an easel and I'm gonna curse folks, thinking what the fuck is going on here? Verbicon? Like there
is no real verbicon? Do these guys know it? And then you kind of popped out from around the corner. Yeah, and we had a chance to meet.
Yeah, we didn't meet in the hotel lobby, though we met outside of the bar. I think that was going at that night. But in any case, yes, this is all true. We met in Lincoln, Nebraska. We had a great time. The game was great, the game experience, the game itself wasn't that good. I think it was Texas one with like a quarterback who was mobile, who's not normally mobile. I don't even remember who it was. It wasn't David Ash, it's pre Ash, but it was it
Garrett Gilbert. Yeah, in any case, twenty ten for me, though, this is where I'm at. I email. I sent a cold email because I'm tired of sleeping on the ground. I sent a cold the email both I both physically cold and out of nowhere. I sent it to Eric ride Home, who is the executive producer of PTI and still is and is like a total empire builder at ESPN, and I said, Hey, if you ever need anybody to do to write research or something like that, let me know.
And he was like, nobody ever leaves PTI, nobody ever leaves, nobody ever wants to leave. But if you're ever in DC, let me know, and I'd love to meet with you. And so I found an excuse to get to d C. My middle brother is a pilot, and so I was in Chicago at Blogs with Balls, which is a big sports media blogger conference, met Spencer Hall for the first met Spencer for the first time, met all sorts of people that you know are just sort of in the sports blog world. It was a great time. And then
just continued onto DC from Chicago. Stayed with a friend who had recently moved out there who I liked. This friend, I was fine and sending a note to Eric ride home before I went. I was like, having to be in d C. Does the offer still stand? Because I had sent him like a reel from Sports Illustrating. He was like, sure, yeah, come on buy And I with him and he was incredibly nice, just like super kind, and I still am friendly with him to this day.
But he he sent me like three email addresses of people, one of whom is Ron Wexler, who was at ESPN is now at NBC, a guy from Yahoo who I forget, and Jim Bankoff, who is the current CEO of you know, Vox Media and was at that point just Espnation. And
I contacted all of them. I met Jim Bankoff that night in DC at a party and sent Ron Wexler an email and started doing stuff for ESPN, just sort of tangentially helping them research and produce and stuff like that out in LA and I actually ended up getting a couple pilots with ESPNU, and so that cold email got me going sports media wise, but also like we would start having Spencer Hall on the show and he was always hilarious. So we were slowly expanding our footprint
of people that would come on the show. And at the end of two thy ten, what is our next step platform wise? Because I feel like there's about to be a hit here.
The other thing that I'll mention before we go onto the platform is also in twenty ten, I had a chance to audition with the Big ten network. That's right, which I totally forgot to put.
Down on our on our outline. So you did. You did some piloting for ESPNU, and that was through Eric ride home and saying I had solid verbal and sports illustrated. You know, I have this at least record of activity.
I got a cold email from a producer at the Big ten Network to go out there and try out for show. I had never been on camera before, I had no idea what the hell I was doing, and I tried.
And this was best I could. This was from the solid verbal.
This was from the solid verbal. This was just you know, me being the hosts that I try to be on our show. But went out there, flew out from Allentown direct to Chicago, was out there for a couple hours, did a tryout. Didn't get it, obviously, because I didn't really know what I was doing, didn't know a camera to look at him, and I was but it's so flattering. I was a total mess, but didn't get it. Had a good experience out there. Just getting to see the
studio was kind of a cool thing. And it was at that point for me that I'm like, we must actually be pretty good at this.
Pretty good. We must be pretty good at this.
If I am getting an email just out of the blue from a real network with real equipment, maybe we should consider improving our equipment. Yes, maybe we should consider beefing up our equipment. So it was at that point that we started to get a little bit more serious about what what's that's right, what what equipment are we using, and what other platforms can we be on to try and grow our footprint at this point, again steady growth,
continuing to grow. We're up over a thousand users, clearly by a thousand users, maybe by you know, around like three thousand at this point.
Yeah.
In twenty and ten, we catch on with the Score. Yes, which was.
They email us or did we contact them? How did we get into communicate? I don't even remember.
I don't remember how. I think they may have looked us up yet. Nonetheless, the Score was actually where the Basketball Jones was calling home at that point in time. They were a Canadian outlet. They were on serious radio, but only in Canada.
No, they were on serious in the States as well. They were definitely because I remember my uncle. Yeah, yeah, they were. But the TV show was a Canadian thing. Yeah, it was a Canadian company. But we caught on with them. They started promoting our content and they paid us so many zeros of dollars, so many zeros of dollars.
Yeah, we got some added exposure through their website. And it was also around this time that Chris the Capper, you remember Chris the Kapper, who has prolong time now given us his weekly college football picks. But he had emailed us and said, you know, I've done some handicapping. I'm pretty good at it. Would you mind if I called in a pick or wrote in a pick?
Every week? We said, hey, let's do it. Why don't you do it.
Let's try and let's try and grow this as much as we can. So Chris started contributing picks. We felt pretty good about the state of affairs. In twenty ten, podcasting was very slowly picking up steam. You still couldn't go to a bar and say I do a podcast and expect anyone to know what the hell you were talking about. But podcasting at that point seemed like it was doing better than all life support.
Right, Yeah, it's It's one of those things too, where if we could say that we were on SERIOUSXM, which was enormous, we convinced them to send us to the National Championship in Arizona, or like give us our money back for that's our travel expenses whatever. So it was it was a badge of like, no, we're not making money, but like more and more sids are responding to us saying, would you like to have your coach on word SIRIOUSXM whatever,
and so it was. It was a nice badge, was a nice thing to have on our resume and increase the footprint. You know, we have thousands of listeners at this point, but we're not making any money.
Not making not making a single dime. But it was definitely about collecting references.
And so this is year three. Yeah, yeah, so your three you'ar three. Yeah. We interrupt this special edition of the Solid Verbal to tell you about our good friends over at proper Cloth. Look finding a dress shirt that fits perfectly, that's hard to do. Whether the collar's too tight, the sleeves are too long, something's always off. Luckily, ordering a custom fit shirt has never been easier thanks to
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Through the Score, we end up going to the BCS National Championship. Came back when it was still the BCS in Glendale, Arizona. This was a big deal for you because not only do we get to go and have it paid for by somebody else, which we'll talk about momentarily obviously, but it was also Orgon against Auburn.
It was the two of us in West Coast, Kevin my roommate at the time. We drove from LA so it was very easy for us. You flew in from from Allentown, shipped all your audio equipment via Fax. Big freaking box. Yeah. It cost me like one hundred bucks this ship. So you ship all your audio equipment. I bring some video equipment out and we were credentialed because
of Sirius XM and the score. So we went to media days and we shot fun video stuff, and we eventually cut together a video that we filmed in a very Tom Rinaldi ish style about the fact that you know, and if you've ever seen the Media Hotel in Phoenix, it's a beautiful resort. We stayed at a just awful place across the street from a strip club, a very shady strip club. Not even like a fun, exciting Atlanta
Hawks strip club. No, no, this was a terrible, terrible strip club that we listen, Ty and I are not above going to a strip club. Let me get that right out in the open right here. We looked at that place and we're.
Like, I don't know, that is not wouldn't even go in there for like a six pack, not even for a story, not even to like tell the story of how groedy it was.
We're like, now, I think we're good. I think we've grown up now, I think life is better than.
We stated a country inn in suites in Tempe in Tempe, Arizona, across from a shady strip joint, and it was there that we wrote a script. We narrated you cut video. You did narration under a blanket in our room, under a blanket to try and get like some kind of
acoustic integrity in this thing. Yeah, but we cut together our story are Improbable Journey to the BCS Championship, And I look back and I watched the video and it's like, I don't even know how that story really even came about, right, I don't know what our headspace was at the time to think that that was funny or a good thing, or how that came to fruition. I have no idea, but it caught on.
Yeah, we did a good job, all things considered, with the crack tom we have. I just remember we went to the media party and you and Kevin were drinking. Oh my god, this was the drinking contest. Yeah, you guys were drinking a bunch and you got back and you start you of course, go to your computer and start editing audio, and Kevin goes b lines to the bathroom and you guys were drinking drink for drink and just pukes everywhere. Yeah, he was.
He was in rough shape after that, and I was. I was a more seasoned drinker. I was able to handle. I was able to handle audio. But we were at the BCS party and at that point, everybody you see that you sort of recognize is like a star.
It was a big deal if we're in a college football media wise.
Yeah, we went drink for drink, Kevin and I did because you were driving with Spencer Hall, who if you've ever met Spencer dude, can drink, can drink. And Clay Travis yea at the time who I don't know who Clay was with at that point in time, right, been dead Spin ye then, I don't remember, but we went drink for drink with those two guys. We came back from that party. I was editing, Kevin was in the bathroom duking.
But yeah, we shut the video and it was in the very Rinaldi Tomernaldi esque style. I cut it together. We put it up a couple days after when we got back, and you know, Twitter is a thing at this point. We tweeted out and I don't know at this you know, this is twenty ten or the very
beginning of twenty eleven. Maybe there were other college football podcasts, and if there were other college football podcasts, they'd record like only during the season, or they'd record, you know, once a week, and we were doing twice a week, and it was one of those things where we just didn't have a lot of competition, not because we were better, but because we just were more consistent than everybody.
More consistent and probably more demented to want to keep doing it again, not making any money, right, not making any money.
We'd post this thing. People seem to enjoy it. It gets spread around a whole bunch. I get an email from ESPN that they want to show it on ESPN News. Steve Weisman, who were still pals with to this get to this day, is the host. He loves the video. He brings Tom Ernaldi on the show. We eventually have Tom Renaldi on the show a couple of years later. But it becomes a thing, and it's I'm trying to figure out how to describe what this meant. It didn't make us any more money, It didn't really get us
any more listeners. But I think it gave us the confidence that, like, we have a good sense for what people might think is funny, and.
It was validation that what we were doing, yeah, was not totally off base, right, And still I'm at this point, it's two thousand, the beginning of twenty eleven. So I am doing some work around, like freelancing, but you know, not making a ton of money, and you're still at the day job, and we don't have any expectation that we're going to grow this into something larger and profitable.
Exactly interesting side note. You saw an interesting side of me as we tried to collect the reimbursement check from the Score. Oh wow, very nice people at the Score. Enjoyed working with the Score. I won't name the gentleman that we worked with, but I did go back and count our correspondence. It took me six months and eleven follow up emails to collect that reimbursementship.
How it couldn't have been much either.
I don't think boks a few hundred bucks, but it was principal. Yeah, if you say you're going to send us and reimburse us, don't leave us hanging.
Yeah. We had spoken, and I'm really glad this didn't come to pass. We had spoken a little bit about selling the show to the Score and how much we would want for the name and like the rights to the solid verbal because that's in some way how the starters and Basketball Jones that they had to change their name when they went to NBA TV, and it never
really came to pass. We had no idea how to value our worth and our company, but it was cool to start having those conversations that people were interested in acquiring the show.
At that point, we decide we should probably trademark our name, and to this day, I think that was one of the better decisions that we made at that point, where like, what we're doing clearly has value.
Let's try to protect ourselves. Oh we can, so we trade more the solid verbal. What equipment are we using at this point? I think I'm twenty eleven a blue snowball, You're using a blue snowball and then a blue yetty. Yeah, I'm using a Sure SM seven B. Oh yeah, it's a great mic. I'm using a Sure SM seven B.
And I will also add we're still recording on one track. Yes, all right, this gets a little too tactical maybe for this show. It's a Skype record, but it's a Skype recording. I'm recording everything on one track. And then I'm using a program called a level later. Oh yeah, which was freeware that you could find out on the internet. Still exists, still use still still exists to this day. I still recommend it to people who aren't looking to really jump
headfirst into the whole podcasting thing. But it's this kind of magic algorithmic software that's able to use a compressor and some sort of limitter and.
It automatically levels things out to your audio levels.
It balances your audio out. It doesn't always do a great job, but in a lot of cases it's good enough quick and in a case like ours, where we're co located in different spots, it was it was ideal to try and make a sound like we were in the same room.
Yeah, this is true. And the way this is our general feeling of the show is we're not taking college football too seriously. We were nerdy about things. You know, we have people like Phil Steele on and we we do some deep diving. But we find that people respond most when we're weird. We're talking about robot surgeons that you know, I don't know what year we came up with clemsoning, but that that was the sort of attitude we took where we were coming up with terms and
our general philosophy as a show. Because people are so hyper local about their own teams, their tribal about their own teams, and we're doing a national show, so we just want to be entertaining. We want to build a universe. I think both of us are fans of you know, the Simpsons and stuff like that. We're like, the star of the show is not the Simpson Family, it's Springfield. So the star of this show is not Oregon and
Notre Dame. It's college football. It's the weirdness. It's the the NC State, the fat NC State fan waving his towel, like when they beat Florida State. It's excuse me, hefty or husky whatever. Yeah, but we're trying to tap into that, and you know, it's it's like edsbs there, you know, we try to emulate that sort of attitude where like
everything is ridiculous, let's just have fun. It's college football and it resonates with people to whatever extent, and we have a really good People are emailing the show all the time. They're tweeting us. You know, Clemson loses a dumb game to an unranked team after impressing people, and we get a bunch of tweets Clemson and Clemson and clemsoning. Is this clemsing? So but we're getting these terms into
the college football lexicon. And it's again no money, but there is something fulfilling about establishing a very tiny, tiny place in the college football media universe.
And the other thing that we tried to do not only was to tap into that community, but we were very I thought strategic about how we tried to give people ownership of the show. And this is really the differentiator for us. There were other shows that were popping up around that point in time, but most of them were with bigger personalities and it was a lot of one way chatter. This is what we heard from this coach, This is what we heard from this player. There weren't
any shows out there that answered email questions. There weren't any shows out there that had audio from fans on their program. This was something that we started figuring out how to pull in now known as the Reverbs. Yes, we've been doing the reverbs for a while.
And Bill Simmons had his mail bag, and you know, there was stuff like that in written form, but not in audio in the same way, not an audio and certainly not in the college footballwork right, And that was the little area we tried to carve out for ourselves and so with the ESPN news hit that we got and with the continued success of the podcast. That was when Grantline so I had mentioned doing ESPNU pilots and
for the show Unite. I don't know if people remember that show, good for them, but I shot a couple of pilots for that. In La met a lot of ESPN people. One of those people was Dave Jacobi, who is now a famous radio host now I guess. Yeah. He was just a development guy for ESPN when they had a development partner department and original content development department, and he was put in charge of podcasts. He left ESPN for Grantland and put in charge of podcasts, and
I had known him. Ron Wexler was the other name who's now at NBC Sports, but he was one of the heads of ESPN Original content and they were looking for external podcast for this grant Land network of podcasts. Dave Jacoby contacted me and he said, and I had known him already, but he said, you know, would you be interested in doing this and having the cliverbal on Grantland? And I said, of course, absolutely, yeah. You know, didn't
pay us again, American dollars did not pay us. But yeah, you could definitely make the case, and I will make the case having that exposure was worth more than any paycheck they could have cut to us. Yeah, we are. We had an ad in the New York Times. We had, you know, the influence of grant Land. Obviously Bill Simmons his huge show, we had. You know, this was at the same time that and Blazers joined Grantland. This is the same time that I think it was a year
before maybe the Basketball Jones had joined Grantland. But it was by far our best exposure because all of a sudden, we're in this universe that is not super technology forward. College football is sort of an older media type thing, and then we get into grant Land and it's all just like people our age, new technology, fun writers, whatever, and it's our sensibility. And it really did a number.
We were on like the Grantland Network podcast feed and then you could subscribe to the Solid Verbal separately, and it was just once a week. We were doing two shows a week, but our Sunday show was on grant Land. And did you edit that special for them or something like that? Yeah, I mean it was.
Never cut in a special way. It was a different file, yes, said I provided to them. But ESPN and Dave Jacobe were really good about our content. We didn't have any shackles placed on us as always like this, yeah, this thing that people seem to have with ESPN, they're always all there, they're kelly you what to say that.
Nobody ever told us what to say. They were so cool about it. Yeah, they would always like The only note that Jacoby would give us was be like, just get weirder, get fun like Nick Foles in a losing effort was something that happened at that point. He was like, lean into stuff like that. That's funny and weird and unique, and so we tried to. Yeah, that was that was the big thing. Nothing, if anything, ESPN and Grantland made us weirder, So it was it was very cool to
see how that expanded our footprint. So that was twenty eleven and that was a big deal.
That was pretty much the inflection point for us and from that point forward, and that's our fourth season, fourth season, we're going to be entering season ten. Yeah, but fourth season is when we absolutely saw an uptick in the people who were being driven to our show, to our website are our following grew by a factor of like ten at that point, and we really felt like we were picking up steam with this thing, and so we
did the season with Greatland. The calendar turns to twenty twelve. Yeah, you moved to New York City.
I do so. Mentioned Spencer Hall before and so that pilot for a unite it. They wanted me to reach out to Spencer to hire him at ESPNU. I had a call with Spencer. Spencer said, oh, that's interesting, that's something to think about. But we're also doing our own thing here at Espanation, and you're on our list of potential people. And one I'm making a ton of cash, and two I don't know what the future is with ESPN. And three I'm sort of in like a personal rut
in LA. I'm ready for something different. And so I interviewed with est Nation. I spoke with a number of people. I came out late November or excuse me, early November. It was the week right before nine to six LSU, Alabama, So that was like November fourth eleven. Yeah, and I came out here. I met everybody Espination and liked everybody was very cool. Really wanted the job. Finally figured out, finally was told. I got the job in late December and moved to New York in early twenty twelve. So
that's February twenty twelve. I moved to New York and we're still we're year round. We're doing it once a week, twice a week, depending on guests. We're trying to get coaches. I don't have a couch. I'm broadcasting. This is totally true. I didn't have a couch. I was waiting for the new couch to arrive that I ordered from some discount couch warehouse in New York. I did the show. I've done at least three or four shows from a really
grody New York apartment floor. I did shows that spring from a rat infested stairwell at the old Espianation Loft studio office. And you know, it's I think we started sponsorship in twenty twelve, but it was still like I don't know if at that point I was like what am I doing with this? Because there was so much positive But that's when I specifically remember, like I was working twelve hour days at this startup basically, and that's when I remember like the podcast started taking a lot
out of me. That's I was like, this is great. I love doing it. But there were definitely shows around that time when I had moved to New York War I just twenty seven minutes and I was just like, I don't have anything.
I'm totally gassed. And I was in a very similar place. You know, because you stay at a company for any point in time. At this point, I'm there eight years, you start getting more responsibility. You start working a little bit harder when you're there, not that you're not always trying to do a good job, but you just have more on your plate, and so you're coming home, you're tired from your work day. In your case, sometimes you're still at work, which was not always the most tenable
situation for you. I'm sure a little bit uncomfortable because you're not supposed to be doing that stuff when you're at the office. And yeah, I'm wondering the same thing mostly in the off season.
For me.
During the season, you're just kind of like in the ocean, you go with it. But in the off season you start having these thoughts. And I think it's common across anyone who does anything on the internet. They'll tell you thinking about quitting thinking about how this affects me personally is not something that comes about like once in a blue moon. It's something that comes about fairly regularly. Yeah, and it certainly happened to me back then. It happens
to me now sure all the time. Yeah, you start wondering, like, what kind of a personal toll has this taken on me?
And we stuck with it. Yeah. The interesting thing is, at this point, the solid verbal is sort of grandfathered into our lives as the oldest relationship. This is It's like, my actual negotiation with Espanation included the fact that, like, I can do this podcast, this sports thing, even though
it's not Espianation, and they were cool with it. And you know, I was with somebody for seven years in LA six and change years and broke up when we when I moved to New York, and you know, had just dealing with interpersonal things, dealing with this new job and you know, not too much in the way of job security. Still at this time, even though I moved across the country, there was just a lot on our plate.
There was a lot in our plate. So the calendar turn us to twenty twelve. You moved to New York City. You start working for Espionation, you and I get an invite from our friend Andrew down at south By Southwest. They were starting SX Sports at the time to try and launch a sports track. He invites us to go and do a live podcast, which was cool. It wasn't like the best setting for a.
Podcast, only open to south By people, only.
Open to write a select gathering of people who could afford the ticket price, but it was a great experience. The only interesting anecdote from that is that there was a printing issue in the official program, and so people showed up hoping to get a how to podcast type of presentation from us, and we were under the impression that we're there to do a college football show. Now, if you ever have the luxury of doing a college football show, right right, if you ever have the luxury
of doing a presentation is south By Southwest. It's not uncommon for people to like get up midway through and start walking out. Well, we knew something was wrong when people were walking out like two minutes in yep. And I'm trying not to react to this because they they say everyone who goes there says, don't worry if people walk out. Well, people are looking disgruntled and they're walking out quickly, and eventually some British girl kind of raises
her hand and heckles the shit out of us. Like I was under the impression this was going to be a how to and you guys, I don't know what.
College football is. Whoa, WHOA, what are we talking about here? Yeah? It was fun. We had a good time. It rained like crazy, but it was. It was one of those just cool experiences to put a as a notch on our belt.
But we met Koba Yashi or we didn't meet him, but he was at a honky tonk that we were at. Spencer Hall was there. The guys from the starters were there, were networking. It was a good time. But again another thing that we can use as a reference also into twenty twelve through your connections at es BE Nation. We end up doing a piloted video show. Yeah, we did some video stuff on the weekend. Sometimes it was Saturday and then Sunday we decided to do our live show.
So there was more back and forth in person, more video availability, just to get you some reps under our belts. So that was That was twenty twelve. And it was successful, and we started getting ads. We started getting ads, a little bit of cash, which was promising, and then an indication that we were going in the right direction. And I think we went into twenty thirteen in a good space. We end up in Miami for the National Championship Game, which was a great trip. That was Miami, that was
the Notre Dame Alabama. I convince you not to spend a crap ton of money. I fell asleep about ten minutes into the game.
You fall asleep a few minutes into the Notre Dame Alabama National Championship Game. We're all over South Beach in a very nerdy way. We do a podcast from a rental car. But the idea is in all of this, it's that we never said, you know what, why don't we not go to this National Championship game. We never said, you know, I just want to stay home. I just want to enjoy the holidays. It's that we just kept going. We kept hitting record, we kept uploading to the internet,
we kept doing dumb stuff. The only thing and we got a lot of questions, and I know we're going to go over the questions because there's not that much to add from this point on, we've just grown and grown and grown, and we're now Espionation whatever. And I'm not skipping over. But there's a lot of questions about
quitting the show. You it was ever a point I think that was probably twenty twelve, Not that we actively talked about stopping the show, but it was like, you know, a lot of people asking for advice, a lot of people saying I'm interested in podcasts and how you guys grew, a lot of people saying like, I have so many listeners, but how do I you know, I have one hundred listeners, how do I make it a thousand or whatever. The only thing we can tell you is you got to
keep hitt and record, don't stop. You got to keep the record. And if there's anything disagreement wise that Tye and I have had is I'm never super not never okay. I am more unrealistic about how much I want to record. Through the years, I've always said, like, let's record a third show during the week, Let's do a Q and A show, Let's do a video show during the week where we and I don't even think about if I have the time. I just want to overwhelm the market
with Ty Heildon Brand and Dan Rubinstein. And it hasn't even really been disagreements. It's been just you are more realistic about twice a week is good, and let's do it five days a week, Let's do it every day. I've never been a fan of the daily podcast yea for a Matt and I've always I've always been really skittish on that.
Some people abide by it. I hate it, I like it, I hate it. I've never liked it, especially for what we do, but you know it, there's definitely something to establishing your own rhythm.
And I don't care what it is.
You know, if it's five days a week, if it's two days a week, one day a week, one day a month, one day year, whatever it is, be consistent with it. And it was around this twenty twelve twenty thirteen time frame. So we go to we go to Miami for the championship game. We had a weird interview with Lex Steel sure which you know, people have asked how did that come about? A friend got his contact information.
Just like LinkedIn Slow Things very bizarre.
I had a friend who found our little confusion between Phil and Lex to be funnier than anyone else. He got his contact info to me, we brought him on. He talked about, well, I have.
This sound clip.
I won't play the sound clip now because we're going to try and get to some of these questions here. But twenty thirteen again, all the while, we're still growing. We're not on Grantlin though. No, we're not a Grantlin though, because Grantlin made an editorial decision. It wasn't that they didn't like what we were doing, but they made an
editorial decision to try and build from within. You also had this concurrent career with esp Nation and it was awkward, yeah, to try and across the streams, right.
It's true. I was full time at Espanation and I would hear from Jacoby every once in a while, but it was just and when I asked him, he was like, yay, you're an explanation. We can't really move forward.
It has been a tight rope to walk, Yeah, with you working for another sports media entity. Not so much for me working in corporate America because there's not much overlapped there, right. But for a long time we've had to try and find that balance. I have needed to be respectful of that, you know, and admittedly sometimes I've had a harder time than others as certain opportunities have presented themselves.
But you know, ultimately, and I would say that's the other push pull. That's the push pull in terms of disagreements to the year i've you know, I was ambitious and still am ambitious about you know, I want to record every day, I want to do video every day. I want to do whatever I want to like, you know, be this inescapable entity in people's college football universes. But you've you know, you have the responsibilities that you have,
and I have the responsibilities that I have. But in opportunities of like we've okay, so we have spoken with Fox Sports, we have spoken with CBS Sports, we have had conversations with people at ESPN. We've had conversations with an agent, and we've had conversations with people at streaming services and social media networks that are doing live and
high quality streaming videos. And issues range from well that's sort of unrealistic to they want us to pay them for airtime or hearing back once every three or four weeks. And it's one of those things where we need to find the right fit. We need to find the right situation in which if you were to leave your corporate job that you would have full time, you would have health insurance, but I would have health insurance. And college
football is seasonal. It's not like we could do this all year If somebody wants college football show all year round, okay, we'll have a conversation. Sure, But you know, we have to find the right place, and we're still doing that. We've had a lot of strong interest from a couple places, but if the fit isn't right, if they want to pair us with other people and it would hurt the show, it's not We're We're fortunate to be in a position where we don't have to accept offers that don't feel
right to us. So a lot of people have asked that we are looking, always looking to bring the show into a place that we can grow it in a an organic way.
So I'm going to run through a couple of the major highlights here. Wait, let's seeah over the next couple of years. So that that's kind of the origin story. But you know, uh, twenty thirteen, we brought on Taylor as our intern. He's been having us for a long time.
Reverbs.
Twenty fourteen, we went to the Rose Bowl, the National Championship at Larda House. We did our hot tub show, excuse me, the Jacuzzi Show with Spencer and Ryan. Ryan got chlorine poisoning because we were.
In got deeper dehydrated in the jacuzzi for like three hours. How long was that show? So we did a podcast from the jacuzzi. We had four microphones set up. Yeah, you miked up the jacuzz miked up the jacuz We'll put in some audio in post here, but miked it up. It was a three hour show. Yeah, it is a three hour show that we did, and I think we cut it up into two distinct parts. But that's I mean, that's sort of indicative of what and who we are.
Like if you listen to the Paul Fine Bomb Show, if you listen to whoever they're taking calls, it's straightforward, it's whatever. We're doing shows from Jacuzi's. We're doing shows with Lex Steele.
We're trying weird stuff that no one else is necessarily trying to do.
Yeah, we're doing Google hangouts for my parents. Like it was just really really weird stuff. If there is a technology platform out there we are, we are on it. So twenty fourteen, the big thing was hanging out at your place in Rose Bull. You get to meet your family, hang out at the house that you grew up in. We do a bunch of shows out there. Twenty fifteen, we go back to south By Southwest again, did a
podcast with Bruce and Spencer. Yeah, hung out of the four seasons, got to meet Bill Simmons, tell them that we were Yeah, this podcast network. You employed us but didn't pay us, And I mean that was it was. It was awesome, It was all cool. It was cool.
We also in twenty fifteen announced kind of this loose partnership with Espionation, which people have also asked us about.
We're not part of Espianation. We've gotten tweets by the way, No, we're not part of Espianation. It's a distribution deal. It's just you know, I work here. We all like each other, let's all. You know. We put our show on the Chorus platform. We've gotten tweets of like, I don't know, you guys just start the same. Since you went to Espenation, let me tell you about how many notes I've gotten about the contents of this show. Positive, negative, wondering if
it's still happening. Zero notes. I've gotten zero opinions about what we're doing here and what we should or shouldn't be doing. We it's full autonomy. So if we're not as good as we used to be because we have a distribution deal with Espanation, it's only our fault. It's entirely it's we are just bad now.
Also started a newsletter in twenty fifteen and oh, by the way, I gotten married.
Yeah, you got married in twenty fifteen. Apparently people are still upset at me for questioning the food at your wedding. It wasn't the food at the wedding. The comment, the comment that got people yeah, was not the food at the wedding. Uh huh.
The comment that you made was that the food at the wedding was good. I didn't feel so good the morning after. Really, that was the comment.
That was the comment. Why you're only bringing this up now? That was a comment that did people in. Wasn't the music. That's probably my fault. Wasn't the food.
It was that you implied that maybe got me sick at the wedding, got you sick?
That's fine. I make a lot of bad food decisions, so it was probably mine. But everybody still loves you. Yeh. Yeah, I'm mostly playing this up for show, but sure. We did a live show in twenty sixteen at the National Championship. So we're originally with a company called podcast one for advertising, and then we found a company that was a better fit for us in mid Roll Midroll, And we've been with and have been very thrilled with mid Roll since
and they'd been great. They provide us with advertisements and whatever and a lot of the like when Ty and I endorsed the products, we have turned down products like gambling sites and financial advisors and stuff like that, just like we're not going to try to convince people to trust this weird startup we know nothing about with their money. So when we endorse things like, for instance, do we have a sponsor for this show? Is this a good
proper cloth? Yeah, we have proper cloth. I wore a proper cloth shirt yesterday and it was super It fit me really really well, and I'm going to wear it undersuits and I don't know anything about suit shirts, and they said that, hey, here's a suit shirt that's going to fit you really well. Would you like to try it on.
I say yes, and it worked, And the mattress that I got for free has cured me of whatever woes I had going on physically when I was asleep on the old mattress.
So we try to like, actually, I'm wearing an MVMT watch as we speak.
We try to actually use these things before we endorse them. But mid roll has been great, and as the show has gotten bigger, yeah, we have made more in the way of ad.
Revenue off this. Now.
People all always ask me specifically, well, when are you going to quit the mysterious day job to do this? I don't know if that will ever happen right right now, we do well enough like it would sort of be a pretty good part time job.
Yeah, it's a nice for one person. For one person, it's a nice part time or like a chunk on top of your income right now. But by no means are we ready to leave.
It is not something that would be a financially sound decision, especially for both of us now that we are both married. Yes, both have to think about someone else beyond ourselves. So, but that was twenty fifteen.
Although I'm always looking to become a kept boy, right right, I've always looked for for that.
Yeah, twenty sixteen, excuse me, So we did. We did a live show at the National Championship. We did our Verbie's megaproduction, which I'm still very proud of, so great.
Not actually at Radio City Music Hall.
There took weeks, three weeks to be exact, to try and mix that guy up. We did an Espianation radio show every morning, every Saturday morning. It was on the Espianation radio waves. After Espimation acquired Yahoo Sports Radio gave us exposure to a different audience. And then there's all the stuff that we did over the last year. You know, we did a first paid live show at hill Country
Chicken in New York City. You got married, and we're going to be doing another live show in the coming week plural which we're at time of recording, yet to announce. But we've got our show on Spotify. We're going to do a new logo, we're going to do new site.
We're gonna do some new shirts. Is there. Okay, So not to cut you off, but the same somewhat related people want to know when you felt or when we felt that, you know, oh my god, this person is listening or these people are listening, or wow, we've really sort of made it? Is there? Like, is it the the IOWA on game Day thing? Is it? You know what is it?
It's been, It's been a couple of things. The video on ESPN News to me was confirmation that, like you said, we had our finger on the pulse of what was funny and what was Yeah, getting our little meme on game Day wasn't a feather in the cap, you know, It wasn't any kind of great source of validation again, more just affirmation that, hey, I broader audience really does find what we're doing funny. The big thing for me was having our show as an ad in the New York Times.
Yeah, that was that was great.
I have that ad cut out and to this day I'm still trying to frame it because it's kind of oddly shaped, but yeah, it's pinned to a.
Bulletin board in my old bedroom.
To me, that was like the ultimate source of validation. And that was the moment when we started doing things with Grantlin, when we started getting you know, more a sense for who was out there. That to me, I think was a bigger deal than any one person emailing and I'm always sort of taken by any media member that listens to us. For me, I still feel like we're just two guys like college football. I don't consider myself an expert. I know you don't either.
I do. I definitely do consider myself an expert. How dare you?
But I mean, you know what I mean, Like, I take way more from the guy in Afghanistan who's like on the front lines it's so cool and emails us and says, hey, man, I listen to you guys when I'm out of patrol than I do any media members do that by the way, Yeah right, all right, pay attention. But I mean that to me is really meaningful. And I don't care so much about who listens. I care more about how we affect the people that actually do listen.
And so whether you're out on patrol or you're out like Stephen Godfrey cutting his grass, or if you put us on in the same room as your child who's trying to fall asleep, I am fascinated by those little stories about how we connect with people more so than I am the actual people.
So yeah, I the things that mean the most to me as far our reach with the show is like when I get stopped on the street. There was a guy who took off his earbuds on the train the New York City Subway who saw me on the train took off his earbuds and said, I'm listening to you right now, which is weird but at the same time so cool. It was so cool when Katie the Kapper
Katie works at Vox Media. She came on our show a couple of times and she was at her boy her then boyfriend now husband's place with his roommate and they were listening to the show while they were cooking, and Katie was like, Oh, that's Dan. I was on that show. I was on that podcast. And he said what do you mean. He was like, and Katie was like, Oh,
I'm Katie the Kapper and that blew his mind. That blue Like those are moments where I'm like, we have infiltrated, yeah, and it's so cool to hear that, Like we're part of people's lives, whether you said, like serving overseas or just like walking around New York. The military one gets me and you know, I don't have any We've heard from coaches that listen that that's like so weird to me, but it's cool.
Yeah, I mean I don't have any connection otherwise to the military. Everyone's thankful for the church and all that, but especially Cam Newton of course.
Yeah.
But you know, I for some reason that that kind of connection has always been something like wow, And whenever I have these thoughts of like, maybe we should pack this in right, maybe maybe I'm maybe I'm doing this for not it's stuff like that that I that I think of when we did our live show, our first live show back in January. The connection that we apparently have to our audience is not something that I think
we're really exposed to a whole lot. When we're doing this from your dark corner at the office or my dark corner, my makeshift studio in my townhouse back in in Allentown. That kind of thing, to me is really redeeming and it's really validation that that we're onto something. But it is a question that I think keeps recurring. Where does the show go? Where does the show go? Where do you see the show going in the next year, two years, three years, four years, five, I don't know
how many years. I don't know if either one of us can answer that, But where where is it that you hope to take this now? And how often do you think about whether or not this is something we should keep doing.
I never doubt it anymore. I want to keep it. It's just fun for me. It's it's not really too much work for me. But you do more back end stuff. I do more of, like the booking of guests and the networking to get people on the show, and figuring out social media, social media shops, and like coming up with the weird games we play in the off season. That's a lot of what I do, but I obviously contributes a ton to that as well. I would like
to keep doing live shows. I'd like to keep doing a couple of shows during the season, every show a week, you know, a weekly show during the off season. I'd like to figure out ways in which we can extend the brand, whether it's you know, merchandising, whatever, the shirts
that we create, I design all of those. If you don't like it, I apologize, but and then you know, figuring out We've spoken to a number of production companies, not just networks, but production companies that come up with shows that we really like in sports and outside of sports, and they're enthusiastic about the show, so figuring out some sort of video or TV platform. We've had these opportunities to figure out the right fit and to go from
there and grow the footprint the show that way. Yeah, what about your TI.
The question that I have gotten more than any other has been a how do you get the audit quality? Which we could talk about what is talk about that? With the questions, Yeah, but when are you quitting the day job? Why do you still work the mysterious day job? The short answer is you need the money. The longer answer is that I actually like the day job. I like the people I work with. If the opportunity ever presented itself that I could focus entirely on this, I'd love to do that.
Yeah, when I was a little kid, he went to IT camp. That's right.
I'd be crazy. We'd be crazy not to try and pursue it. It's been such a huge chunk of our lives.
At this point, I think we're very much on the same page about where we'd like to take it. There are definitely times when I lose patients in that process because it's a lot of hurry up and wait.
I think we can do it. I know we can do it, and I think personally, I've learned a lot from this journey. When we had the opportunity to be part of Grantland. If I go back and listen, I paid way closer attention to things like hardcore stats than I do now. I kind of tightened up knowing that there was a bigger audience that was paying attention to what we were doing. Now, in retrospect, I think I could have done a much better job, and I think I'm better at doing this because of that, knowing what
that experience was like. And I think if an opportunity ever comes well to present itself where we can turn this into a video thing or a bigger audio thing, I don't know, I think I'll have a better sense for what will work and what won't work. So I think I am probably less apt to say let's pack it in now than I would have been then, just because I feel better about where we're at as a show given past experience. But it is hard sometimes it is.
It's still hard, it's still grind. I think now it's flipped a little bit, and it's harder during the season for me personally than.
It is in the off season.
Because the off season, we've developed a rhythm, we know what works, we know the kinds of thematic shows that people like to listen to, and it's more muscle memory for us. Not that we're mailing it in in any of those off season shows, right, We're absolutely not speak for yourself. But during the season it's a grind. You miss parties, you miss well if you do do doing things during the week, and if you don't miss parties during the season, you miss games, you miss game, which hurts the show.
Yeah, so it's both of us.
Yeah, it's a constant balancing act for us during the season. And there's definitely a point every year around week seven where I'm like, shit.
That there's another at nine weeks left? How am I? How am I going to do this? How am I going to sell this to my wife? Yeah?
Who is the ultimate good soldier for understanding yeah about this And it has always been incredibly supportive. Mom h always asks the quot question like if you have kids someday, how's that going to factor in? I don't have answers to any of those.
You would be the first podcaster to have children, the very first even find a spouse that's the sequel to Children of Men, Children of Podcaster. So it's a balancing act and it's something that each and every year is a kind of unchartered frontier in that you have to reinvent ways to make it all come together. But I'm confident in what we have. I like what we have. But that's the difference. That is the difference that we've
established with our show and other shows. Not that we are better broadcasters, not that we're funnier, not that that we know more stats, we hit record more often. That is the thing, like we feel, and like there are there have been times where we get feedback that people are so happy that when they go to work on Monday that our show's already there. And we used to do recap shows on Monday. Now we get up early on Sundays. And so yes, we make money doing it,
and but we did this before. We made money, and we're not doing it solely to make the money. No we're not. But I'm just saying it's it doesn't you know, waking up. I wake up at six am on Sundays, both for the day job and for the solid verbal to do three or four hours of research. And it's both because I feel when I'm doing a show and I'm not prepared, it feels terrible, and I know I'm
putting out a bad product and it's happened. So it feels really good that our show is out twenty eight hours before and it's not really competitors because we're friends with all of these people.
This is the thing that I think gets lost in translation. Maybe because you and I play off each other as well as we do, and we try to put together a friendly show.
Yeah, we don't.
You're right, I don't look at any other college football show and I don't care if it's a big show. Yeah, like any of the ones your espionation. I like all those guys.
Yeah, full Cast, the Shutdown Forecast. They're funnier than.
We All of those guys we've had on our show, and we are more than happy to promote their show. Our philosophy has always been the rising tide lists all boats. You know, We've been fighting this battle for so long just to get recognition for the word podcast. To have more of them, have more good ones of them is a good thing for us ultimately. So I've never had this like this, this jealousy towards any other shows.
It's not like, oh, well full Cast got that forward sponsor. We don't care.
We want to be ranked higher, But ultimately it's not because we want to try and beat out Bruce and Stew or anybody else.
I want to point out, we just we've outlasted We have outlasted Brus and Stew. That's another story altogether.
What does not come through, though, is how competitive you and I are. Yeah, that's true, and how obsessive compulsive you and I are when it comes to trying to put content out there that we think people are really going to care about. And I think people most people who listen to the show know that I'm doing a lot of the back end stuff, and they have an appreciation for the kind of audio quality that we're putting
out there. What doesn't come through is how nutso you are, how nuts so you are for trying to put something out there that's a little bit different, a little bit quirky. I don't know why people don't give you credit for that. It's cool, but people don't give you enough credit for that. Dan, you very much are a creative engine that gives this show a dimension that I couldn't give it on my own.
We have always been this thing where I am trying always to pull it back onto college football or back into some kind of serious and paced and structured format, and you are always, ever so desperately trying to pull it as hard as you can away from that. Yeah, and that push pull makes us what we are. What people don't see is what goes in behind the scenes.
A lot of Google docs, a lot of Google docs, a lot of weird ideas, and I think a lot of just obsessive compulsiveness on your end to try and come up with something that's a little different it actually is. It physically pains me if we go a week without recording. It's like on my honeymoon when Bob Stoops retired, I was like, God, should I call Tie? It's four in the morning there, But yeah, no, it's totally true, and that I just I want to work at work everybody.
We have had conversations not just with like production companies on the video front or wherever, yeah, but also with like podcast networks, because podcast networks have been awesome. And one of the things that many podcast networks will tell you if you go and talk to them is that they can help you with the production of your show, right, they can help you. Yeah, and for that they'll take money. They'll take money, but they can help you and they do a good job. There are a lot of really
good ones out there now. But it requires you to turn over those keys.
Yeah, not a chance.
And I've considered it as like, oh, you know, it's hard for me during the season to try to manage life and the sh and the thought of turning over those keys is painful.
Yeah, I'm sure is painful. I see the goosebumps on you.
I cannot do it. This is very much our baby. For me to turn over those keys, those production keys, to anyone else, not to say that someone else couldn't do it better. I'm always trying to find a way to make this sound a little better. But I know the beats, I know the rhythms. We know each other so well. To turn that over to someone else is like I would incur a physical ailment.
At this point, I believe that you want to do some questions real quick. Let's do it. We'll go out because we've we're at about two hours, about a couple hours, okay, a negative feedback. How do we respond to it? How did we respond to it. Initially, I can answer this that I used to be way more of a dick, both via email and social media. Our Twitter account is
much tamer now. Yeah, I take it personally because we put so much time into the show and if it's just like me saying North Carolina was good and a North Carolina State fan saying you're in now, I took it personally.
I used to be when we started doing this show, the kind of person on Twitter who would for kicks cut other people down. And there are a lot of people out there who still do that.
We've grown up, tie.
Maybe it's because you grow up and get a little wiser. Maybe it's because you've been we've been doing this for a while now and we kind of know what it's like to be on the other end of that.
I don't do that anymore.
I don't do that anymore because no matter what people say, they read it, and unless you're like a megastar and someone else handles your Twitter, it always has a little bit of an effect on you. It's not the kind of thing that causes me to lose any sleep. And certainly, if it's a content thing and opinion driven a thing,
reasonable minds can disagree. But if you're coming at me because you don't like the way that something sounded, or you know you should put more production muscle behind this, but you don't have any real feedback as to how it's just a throwaway comment because you feel the need to make that comment. That's the kind of thing that that ultimately pisses me off more than anything else. If you disagree with me, if I missed a fact, then hey, I mean that that's just the way this goes sometimes.
But you mispronounce a Polynesian last name, like, yeah, I mean that that kind of thing happens.
I will try. I believe me.
I will try harder next time to try and get it right. If I make a dumb mistake, that's on me. But if it's just a comment to try and like assert your dominance over us, or you want to try it like, that's the kind of thing that it's like, go away, dude.
You know. Favorite guest, Oh God, I can tell you our early favorite guest was early favorite. Early favorite was Jed Williams oh Wow, who worked for an ACC affiliated outlet did radio stuff in North Carolina. He was a friend of camera guy Dave Dave's Trump who works now for the Dodgers Network. Just an ACC machine, and I think we contacted him once. We didn't hear back from
and that was cool. Whatever. We don't hold anything against him, but so great, just a wealth of information when we would do ACC shows.
It's tough for me to say that anyone's a favorite. We've invited all these people on because they were a favorite of ours in some respect before we even invited them on. Right, I may have told our Friendship Patterson that if you ever got hit, if you ever got hit by a bread truck, I would inquire if he would like to fill your that's fine your seat.
I really like Check. He's far more charming than I and I. Yeah, he's a good dude. Yeah, I'd still probably say Bruce just because Yeah, he even early on didn't have to give us as much time as he did and always has been super He never had any reservations about coming on this show. Yeah, Bruce Feldman never
had any reservations about coming on the show. But still like Andy Staples, Spencer Hall, Stu Mandel, all these people, Nicole Auerback, all these people been super generous with their time and it's been great, and we wouldn't be where we are without them, because part of what goes into inviting a guest on is knowing that they've got a social media following that they can blast this out to excuse me.
Yeah, so they don't have the following. If they're not willing to come on the show, we're not where we are.
The most frustrating aspect of producing a show from a technical standpoints, microphone's not working. Finding time when you're both free audio not recording time has been you know, generally we're on a pretty regular schedule, so that hasn't been too much of an issue in the most recent years.
Yeah, it's way easier now to do a show than it used to be. Yeah, it's way easier now. The technology is there.
And by the way people have asked we record separate tracks. We record locally and I send my half of the show to Tie and he has a method to sync it up. Yeah, it's not as frustrating now as it used to be. Usually.
The most frustrating part now is if we're pulling in audio from the guests, someone who's on skype the phone, you can't always get a pretty good fix on how that's going to sound yeah.
But beyond that, I think we've gotten it down to a point.
Where where we're pretty formulaic with how we do the show. In the early days though to Skype's going to cut out, Yeah, you're in California, I'm in eastern Pennsylvania. There's no telling what Skype is going to do. Those shows. Trying to cut them together was always a bit of a challenge.
How seriously did coaches take you since you weren't really backed by ESPN or some other big media company. We went through go betweens like sids, But when we'd be at national championship games, we would have coaches, we would have sids, we'd have staffers because we'd have our like little Soliverrble sign as record come by and say oh love you. Guys just wanted to real quick and say hi,
and that's always super cool. So through the years we've gotten that sort of that sort of feedback, so we've our names have been raised.
It's it's very much on the backs of Bruce Fellmans and having Stuart Man, Ellen Adye Staples and and all these guys that have been on the show as guests and in some capacity over the years.
Yes, but buh buh buh. How did ties very down to earth, humble and straight laced personality blend so well with Dan's uber, flashy, outgoing and cosmopolitan self, also embodied by the teamy roots for and where he's lived. I would expect Dan to be a New York Calley guy for life. Maybe DC or Chicagoy really wants to slum it, but that's definitely it for him. I just say, we got fortunate. You can never really figure out chemistry, so I think that's an accurate depiction of both of us. No,
I'm not flashy at all. I'm not flashy. No, I'm so boring. But I say weird things, and you are, you know, more down to earth and what you say.
And I think I think, by and large the personalities that we have on our show is.
Pretty close to what we are in real life.
Yeah, maybe I'm a little bit more outgoing, Yes, that have to be on the podcast. I think people get a bad read on you. It's probably honestly, Yeah, I think I think there are a lot of people who they hook on to a controversial thing that you say or an opinion that you have, and they think that you're a dick. You're not, I hope not a dick. You're a good guy. You're someone I genuinely enjoy spending time with. You're not that guy that some people think
you are. Just through doing the show, I think we've answered pretty much. I mean, there's a lot of like when did you stop? Let me a question you wanted to address. Let me close out with this because we've been doing this for two hours, and if people want to write in solid verbal at gmail dot com, find
us on Facebook, on Twitter. We got a bunch of other questions that I or you we will go through wherever you post them, Facebook or even the reddit Subreddit would probably be a good place to just put them all down, or email. We'll try to answer all these because we're trying to make a little event out of this. But go to one of those places let us know if you have a question. Yeah, what have you.
Learned the most from doing this for ten years? Two things that I've learned the most I have a much better time on the show in or outside of the season, the better prepared I am. I think I'm good off the cuff, but I'm better off the cuff when I already have less sort of my my bullets ready whatever, for lack of a better term, that when I am when I am studied or with a loaded guns. Yeah yeah, when I when my arsenal one, when my rep weaponry
is good to go, I do a better job. And sometimes I don't have time for that, and it shows the other The second thing is when we really zeroed in on the fact that we want to produce a really, really good show that happens to be about college football. When we zeroed in on that more we're just like, let's do a good show. We could be doing a knitting show. We could be doing a food show, and sometimes we do do a food show. We could doing
a fashion show. But it's the idea of let's put together a really good concept that in our canvas is college football, canvas is podcasting, and the subject is college football. But the idea of let's do a really good show that happens to be about college football, not let's do a college football show, that to me was like the big realization of where we should go and what sort of fuels me.
Now Yeah, I mean, I could probably talk until I'm blue in the face about digital media and podcasting and in truth.
We were there.
At the very beginning of podcasting, which is probably a big part of why we're still.
Doing it now. Yeah, and why we've grown as big as we have.
So I could talk about that in some other medium, I'm sure if people are interested. The thing that I have learned most is really about identity. Two things that I think I I've learned first when I started doing writing, when I started doing any kind of sports media, I always wanted to be the funny man, okay, and no matter how hard I tried, I always ended up being more of the straight laced, traditional pacer, the host, the host of a show, and I always tried to be
something else. I always wanted to be something else. I always wanted to be what you are, and I never could pull it off. And it's not to say I'm not good at it or couldn't be good at it. But it took me a while to realize that naturally I was better at doing what I've done for us. And I don't know when it hit me, but at some point I got really confident in doing what I do on our show and stop trying to be something else.
And for me, that's when I think this It clicked, and we start of putting something together that was reliable and funny in its own way, on a consistent basis. And so the first was the first thing that I learned was just be be confident in what kind of show you think you can just do naturally and comfortably. The second thing that I learned, and I give you total credit for this, I am the kind of person that is always trying to drive forward with anything, not
like an aggressive corporate executive type. I want to be in charge of the company. That's not really my speed. But if I feel like something goes stagnant, I get really upset and not like depressed depressed, but I really like I feel it deeply.
And you said something to me.
I want to say at the start of like twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen, we were at that point in time talking to somebody about trying to turn this into like a digital show or a TV show or a ard knows what kind of show, and you made a point to me that there was nothing wrong with owning our own little corner of the Internet and not trying to be a TV show, not trying to be sports Center. I don't know, but just owning what we do and kind of owning our own little corner, our little niche
in the digital space. And that really stuck with me nice really truly, I'm I'm speaking truth to power man. That really stuck with me. Cool, and I have to a large degree stopped getting that kind of dark sense if things I feel go stagnant for a little bit in time. I'm very comfortable with where we're at. I'm very happy with what we've done.
You've now everybody officially listened to both the history of the solid verbal and the very last solid verbal episode ever to be recorded. You probably didn't know that when you started. But we're done now. I'm just kidding. We're gonna keep going so cool man.
Uh you know, I don't know if there I don't know, if we've got ten more good years in US.
I don't know. I don't know if this is Bartola cologne or if this is like, you know, get fat with you. That's fine.
Uh yeah, but whatever whatever this ends up being, it's been a fun nine seasons, is going to be an awesome tenth season, and well we'll see where this takes us next. But it's been a hell of a journey and thank you so much for putting up not only with this show, but for many of you out there who I'm sure are listening to the full verbal history of the solid verbal. Thank you for all your support for making us into what we are.
If you're still listening, tweet at ty hilden Brands. If you're still listening, t y h I L D E N B R A N D T. Don't tell them where you came from, who sent you, and just tweet Tie, I love you you Tye. Just tweet them that they make me to prove, to prove that you're still listening. So you're list you want to sign off, you want to do? You want to take it?
For that guy over there, literally over there, seated to my left, looking very spelt, thank you.
His name is Dan Rubinstein. For myself, Tie Hildebrand, thank you so much for listening all these years. We will catch you on a week's stay solid peace. Don't forget to visit our friends over at proper Cloth. Do it today. It's propercloth dot com slash Solid. If you're interested in the deal, enter the gift code Solid S l I D and save twenty dollars off your first custom fitted perfectly fitting dress shirt,