027: Who the Hell is Dave Portnoy? feat. Robert Silverman

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Tour. Sold out.
Some critics also say that blackout parties promote an
atmosphere that puts women at risk.
You posted the following on yoursite.
I never condone rape, but if you're a size 6 and you're
wearing skinny jeans, you kind of deserve to be raped, correct?
I stand by that. I think it's a funny joke.

(00:20):
You think rape is funny? No, I didn't say that.
I think it's a funny joke. Do you understand how offensive
that is? No, I obviously don't.

(01:47):
Welcome back to posting through it.
I'm Jared. I'm Mike.
And I'm Bob. And today, we're going to return
to our Who the Hell Is series with Dave Portnoy.
I'm excited about this one, AKA Stool Presidente, the founder of
Barstool Sports. The revised theme song was

(02:10):
performed by Jared himself. Almost like by request from me,
I guess you would say what I said.
I want to play something that sounds a little sporty, so he
did it. That was a lot of fun to record
something a little special for aguy who is very special, but
maybe not in the best way. So Dave Portnoy and Barstool

(02:31):
Sports are a big deal. Dave Portnoy's net worth is
reported to exceed $100 million.Barstool Sports.
You've probably seen it at some point on Instagram or Twitter or
wherever you get your sports media if you're into sports, and
maybe even if you're not into sports.

(02:51):
A week ago, Fox Sports announcedthe partnership with Barstool
that'll bring their content intotheir coverage of college
football and basketball, which is about as mainstream as it
gets. So you might be seeing even more
Barstool in the near future. Barstool Sports is not just
influential in sports media, it's also hugely influential in

(03:12):
the world of sports betting, an industry that's now worth
billions and billions of dollars.
Portnoy himself is hugely influential when it comes to
cryptocurrency and other risky financial investments.
You'll see Dave Portnoy putting on live streams where he calls
himself Davey Day Trader. Yeah, and even if you're not

(03:33):
into sports, you've definitely seen Dave online.
You've seen him do his pizza reviews.
He's sort of low effort content where he just buys pizza pies
from random places and gives theplace scores based upon the
taste and texture or whatever. It's the equivalent of a
Pitchfork review score, kind of like one through 10 or whatever.
They didn't do that. One bite of minor rolls.

(03:54):
Chuck E Cheese. Oh, by the way, Florida, this is
like a delicacy. When you're in Florida, you go
to Chuck E Cheese. That's five star dining.
And while he isn't always reliably on board with
everything Trump says or does, he is pro Trump and a big part
of the MAGA coalition online dueto his prodigious influence with
young men. He travelled to the White House

(04:16):
to interview Trump in July of 2020.
Your son's a big fan of our website.
He's a big fan of. You I've tried to get even
before the start. I was trying to get a retweet
out of him for about 6. Months.
He kept oh, you got me on one, but he DM me.
I'd be like get the old man to get a retweet, get the numbers
up. We'll talk business.
Well, you do. Pretty well on that.
Yeah, so well, so are you. A very important feature of this

(04:40):
podcast and a very important part of his story and what makes
him worth covering, quite frankly, is that many critics
have accused Dave of misogyny, even extreme misogyny, and women
20 years younger than him have alleged that he engaged in
violent sexual encounters with them.
He has denied any wrongdoing. So loyal posting through it.

(05:01):
Listeners know how these Who theHell episodes work by now.
We bring on a guest to help us dive into the back story of
somebody who's influential online, particularly as it
relates to the type of things wecover on this show.
So returning to the podcast today, Bom Bom Bom Bom is
investigative reporter Bob Silverman.
He appeared on one of our most popular episodes.

(05:23):
In fact, I think it is the single most popular episode of
this podcast since the reboot. Who the hell is Tim Poole?
And Bob is really the perfect fit for this because in addition
to writing about the MAGA, right, Bob has done his fair
share of sports reporting too. So Bob, who the hell are you?
Hi. My name is Bobby Silverman.

(05:44):
I'm an investigative reporter who yes, it is absolutely true.
I did make that classic career move of shifting from covering
sports to covering everyone's favorite far right dinguses, and
a big part of that transition was me starting to report about
Dave Portnoy and Barstool Sportsin 2018.

(06:05):
In fact, I think you can say that Dave Portnoy is the place
where sports reporting and online extremism intersect.
I think a lot of listeners by the end of this are going to
agree before we get going, per usual, the link to the tip jars
in the episode description, but here's today's plug.
It's a little special, just likethe theme song.

(06:28):
Some of the money dropped in thetip jar today is going to the
cause of Mike taking Bob to CitiFields for a Mets game.
Bob did all the heavy lifting for this episode, so let's
reward him with more suffering to go see the Mets.
So without further delay, I think it's about time we try to

(06:48):
figure out. Who the hell?
Who the hell? Who the hell is Dave Portnoy
getting? High in the morning and things
on the Internet. Sports.
Sports Sports Dave Portnoy, Jewish, born March 22nd, 1977 in

(07:17):
Swampscott, MA. He's 48 now and Swampscott, the
birth place at the Lobster Pot, is a town that is over 90%
white. I asked beloved Massholes Ben
Collins and Hannah Gase about the town and got very little
useful info and reply, but Ben didn't note quote on the mass
town name list. It's no brain tree or sandwich,

(07:37):
but Swampscott is pretty good. Portnoy, A talented varsity
baseball player, loses track of the game after suffering a
shoulder injury. He later graduated from Michigan
with a degree in education. He chose education because he
said he struggled with the university's widespread Spanish
requirement, and the education department was exceptional,
needing no such thing. So basically it had no

(07:59):
requirements. So he was a that's the reason he
chose it. Dave said he always wanted to
enjoy his life. He's a big Boston sports fan.
It's sufferable Patriots socks, Celtics guy.
He loves sports, so he briefly entertained becoming a gym
teacher. I'm going to read now from the
doc that Bob sent us ahead of this episode.
Portnoy, a recent college grad from the North Shore of

(08:21):
Massachusetts, grew weary of hisjob doing IT market research.
With a loan from his parents, hestarted the print edition of
Barstool Sports. This was a four page gambling
rag and was almost entirely written by him, sometimes under
his own byline, but padded out with pseudonyms I guess.

(08:43):
What's the idea here, Bob, that?He was, he's trying to make it
if he's like he, he writes this four page thing and he's trying
to make it seem as if he has allthese writers on hand, but it's
just him. So he writes under pseudonyms
when it's just him writing the whole thing.
It seems like a lot of effort for four pages, but yeah, what
do I know? So it this is a gambling rag

(09:03):
first and foremost. I mean, Portnoy's own father
said, believe me, he is a legitimate degenerate.
And so, you know, this will comeup later in the episode because
despite earning hundreds of millions of dollars, Dave
Portnoy has also lost untold millions of dollars on gambling,

(09:25):
sports gambling specifically. So he puts together this
newspaper and 2003 maybe a seem like a strange time to get into
print journalism, but that's theway that Portnoy goes.
And it's a free paper, similar to, say, any alternative paper
that you may find in your town, the New York Press, the

(09:45):
Washington City Paper. And you keep he puts them into
little boxes near T stations. He's got this ancient van, and
he's driving around dropping offnewspapers.
At one point, he hires homeless people to hand them out for him.
And it doesn't really catch on. Within a few months after
starting, he has already filed for bankruptcy.

(10:07):
But he keeps plugging away. And the thing that made this
unremarkable newspaper start to catch on is the Dave has the
brilliant idea is put sexy ladies on the cover and he so he
finds locals who might want to appear on the page, does very

(10:28):
low rate model shoots and the paper starts picking up steam.
He does get some advertisers, but it again in order to give
off the impression that this is a newspaper that people might
want to advertise in. He also makes up fictional ads
or fictional businesses and putsthem in the paper as well.

(10:48):
So this is like classic fake it till you make it kind of thing.
This print publication runs to like 2009, but a couple years
before that, in 2007, that's when Barstool goes online,
right? He he finally realizes that that
local Boston area print distribution isn't the way to

(11:09):
earn a living and that the Internet exists, which is really
interesting from a guy who is working in IT.
But it takes him three years to figure that out and he
thebarstoolsports.com goes online.
If you'd like to know what the blogs are like from that time,
let's all take a trip in the Wayback Machine to the 2007 era

(11:29):
Internet. And most of it is absolute
garbage. What Portnoy and his cohort are
tracking in is really Tucker Macstyle stuff.
For all you Tucker Mac's fans out there, the jokes are crass.
They're body, they're not very funny.
The general format for a blog post will be two or three

(11:50):
paragraphs stolen from a publication from the Boston
Globe or the Times or the Post or any other paper.
And then Portnoy or other of hiswriters, because he started to
attract other writers by now, we'll add one or two
unremarkable paragraphs beneath it of their commentary.

(12:12):
Do you actually know the timing of like when Deadspin started?
Like I'm just curious like is itit like where?
Around the same time Deadspin. So these are because, because
they sort of become, you know, they, they, they sort of become
like competitors or or rather they become, you know, they're,
they're sort of intertwined in some ways.
I actually love Deadspin. I used to read Deadspin all the

(12:33):
time. Yeah, right.
They're they're two sides of thesame coin.
Whereas Deadspin is, is Will Leach and all of his writers
putting up dozens upon dozens of, you know, quick hitting blog
posts a day that are often very,very funny.
Barstool is doing the exact samething but with the six year
senior who never left the frat house and was waking and baking

(12:58):
every morning writing the post and said would be the difference
between the two. But it's very much of that era
when blogging was something thatpeople could do.
We add incredible volume. Like I don't think those kind of
posts really exist anymore. But at the time, that was the
currency of sports media. That wasn't established

(13:20):
publications. Right, so there are a lot of
fanboy type articles you had mentioned, you know, for like
Boston and New York area sports and stuff like that and just
sort of, you know, glazing, you know, whatever players that
people want to click on. But but I'm in I'm more
interested in in in this game. Guess that ass.
That's what I want to know. I want to hear about.

(13:40):
Guess that ass. That's the that's the thing that
jumped out to me. Of course.
You do, Bob. You should probably explain what
guess that ass is first. We should do, we should do guess
that ass with the people who areon this show right now and see
if everybody can pick it up. All righty then.
So it probably does not take an advanced degree to figure out

(14:01):
what a guest that asked blog post is.
What they would do is for the blog posts header art they would
show a disembodied pair of buttsand then if you clicked on the
link and Scroll down it would reveal what famous person or
just sexy woman they found was the owner of that ass.

(14:23):
So that was the click bait. Do you want to know whose ass
this is? Yes, dear God I must know whose
ass this is. I will click.
This is what sports audiences crave.
Yeah, ass content. They there was and for those who
aren't or aren't into the gluteus maximus, there was.
Also. Guess that rack.

(14:45):
So basically the same idea and. Smart smart to diversify your
portfolio that way. Yeah, you, you, I mean you can't
lean a publication just on like one vertical when?
There's no guest that feat. What about?
What about that we don't? No, no, no, no, no, no.
They didn't get that far, but they did have Twerk Wednesday,
which is what I think of every Wednesday is a butt that's

(15:06):
shaking. That's important to me as they
started to expand this cheesecake content they also
started doing, which is goes back right back to the paper
local smoke show of the day. And this is from a time before
when every when people could getfamous by posting thirst straps
on Instagram. So you had to work a little
harder to find them on Facebook or message boards or other

(15:30):
social media sites. But it's the same principle.
They would take some woman's social post that they found
sexy, put them up and add their insta handle or whatever handle
they had, their Twitter handle, their whatever.
Sometimes they would do it with the permission of the smoke show
in question. Sometimes they would do it
without the permission of the smoke show in question.

(15:52):
A smoke show? Just for the record, is
Barstool's in house term for an attractive woman a smoke show?
I think I've used that phrase before and I didn't without
knowing it was from barstool. Barstool.
Like, is it like, you know, is that OK?
And then now I'm starting to think, is it like, OK, I mean,
there's nothing inherently offensive about.
It there, there's not. Like if I, if I call a pretty

(16:13):
lady, if I, you know, one's texting me, I'm like, wow,
you're a real smoke show or something like am I, am I, you
know, am I, you know, is that amI being because now, because I
know it's so, so important and Ifeel kind of he did
uncomfortable. Barstool did invent the term
smoke show and when we're talking about barstools creative
output, this is their most lasting contribution to broader

(16:36):
American culture. The term smoke show, which was
invented, yes, by Barstool Sports.
Honestly, that puts them above some of the other people that
we've done in The Who the Hell Is episode just by doing that,
But continue. So sometimes these cheesecake
content gets a little dark. They also had a recurring
feature that I think continued up until a few years ago called

(17:00):
grading the latest sex teacher scandal.
And if again, if you remember the late 2000s, early 20 tens,
there was a lot of reporting about female and male teachers
who were violating their students and committing.
I just say that's really disgusting, honestly.
Like I would just say because I have, I mean, I like I have a 12

(17:22):
year old son and it's like, you know, I don't know something
about it. It's like really the way it gets
celebrated by people kind of really grosses me out.
If I may take a sober tone not to be square, sorry.
No one at the time, by the way, just to be clear, was saying, Oh
my God, like people were rollingtheir eyes at it or saying, you
know, that's kind of gross, but they weren't getting cancelled
for this. I mean, the basic principle was
is they would look at A at an adult woman who was alleged to

(17:46):
have committed statutory rape and they rated her on her
sexiness in a blog post. That was the blog post that was
that was what they decided to blog about.
Yeah. This is some real like bottom
feeding shit. I just have to say this is like

(18:07):
bottom of the rung media outlet behavior.
This is this is like the sketchyas you get on the sidebars of
like websites you shouldn't be on.
You know where it's where. It's just like.
It's Tabula. Yeah, it's the Chum Box.
You'll never believe who's ass this is.
And you're like, yeah, I bet I won't.

(18:28):
And then you know it. It's like that kind of thing.
For guys who can't figure out how to click over into a new tab
and and open porn. So, so we've got, you know,
derivative sports content, we'vegot horny old man content.
What's next in the Barstool story?
OK, the first point that you know barstool this kind of if

(18:51):
you remember theCHIVE everyone avery popular you know chive on
brother. Oh God, Unfortunately, yeah.
That was like the the peak of Chive was like also when I was
in college. So like it was inescapable.
Yeah, Chive on brother or Bro Bible, which by the way, I found
out this week still exists, and I'm kind of impressed by the

(19:14):
fact that Bro Bible is still going on.
But there was a whole world of these sort of vaguely sportsy,
bro first and very horny blogs that were very prominent for
guys in college, just out of college, getting into the
Internet. But the first time Portnoy

(19:35):
actually and his site gained anynational attention was for an
incident that they called Babygate.
Babygate. Babygate.
Portnoy, by the way, refers to every single controversy and
dust up that he or his site getsinto by adding gait at the end
of it. It's not the most original way

(19:56):
of categorizing it, but that's what they went with.
So here's the story of Babygate.Some photos were snapped of Tom
Brady, his wife Giselle, and their two year old child on the
beach. And the child was not clothed.
These photos. What year is this this?
Is 2011 Tom Brady, his wife on abeach, 2 year old kid, 2 year

(20:18):
old kids on the beach. Sometimes they're not wearing
clothes, they're having a diaperchange, that sort of thing.
It was very normal, but a paparazzi caught them, snapped
the picture and it started goingaround.
It got taken down as quickly as possible by every single
legitimate website that saw it or posted it and realized, uh
oh, that's bad. We do not want to share a photo

(20:41):
of a naked 2 year old. Dave Portnoy had a different
take on this, which is I'm goingto blog this.
So he throws the photo up on Barstool Sports and he describes
the two year old's penis as a howitzer.
Basically what happened is Dave,Wait, wait.

(21:02):
What for anybody who doesn't know, what's a howitzer?
A howitzer is a big World War 2 era munitions.
It's a giant cannon. He is basic Dave Portney saying
this baby is hung like a horse. A baby.
It's it's so fucking gross. I'm sorry this is so fucking
gross. He's praising it.
He's he's like. It's being so gross, being so

(21:25):
fucking. Gross.
His mindset is Tom Brady, greatest QB of all time.
Which OK, fair, but Tom Brady isso great and such a paragon of
masculinity that he has birthed a child with a very large penis.
I, I, I don't know how to say that without needing a God damn,
you know, chemical bath. But that's what Dave Portnoy

(21:47):
wrote. He gets a a ton of crap for
this. Everyone is saying take this
post down. It is wrong.
What is wrong with you? Stop, don't do this.
It stays up for a little bit andhe does take it, take it down.
But the press writes about not the photo, but Dave Portnoy's

(22:07):
blog, and they asked him why didyou do this?
And his response is, I said he had a big howitzer.
So that's not sexual. If you're making a connection to
that being sexual, then I would look in the mirror is what I
would say because it's not sexual at all.
End Quote. So he complimented the size of a

(22:30):
baby's penis. Yes.
And then was like, come on, get your mind out of the gutter.
Correct. Sweet.
Cool. Makes sense to me.
Yeah, it. Gets so bad that the that the
police are called to come to David's house because because he
did publish CSAM, that's what hedid.
CSAM is acronym the stands for Child Sex Abuse Material which

(22:55):
can refer to child pornography. Yes.
It gets enough media attention that Dave Fortnight makes his
first appearance on The Howard Stern Show, and Dave Portnoy is
a huge Howard Stern fan. He has said he has modelled his
career after Stern at various times.
Well, there's the problem right there, yeah.
Yeah, he also says that he's theSaturday Night Live of the 21st

(23:18):
century. But leaving that aside, Stern
brings him on. And Stern is not treating it
like it's a joke at all. He does not find any of this
funny and he basically grills Portnoy for the entire segment,
making it clear that he thinks Dave is a weirdo for publishing
this and asking him. Like, what was going through

(23:38):
your head Dave? People said you must take this
down, it's kiddie porn. And I saw the picture and quite
frankly, I do think it's kiddie porn.
I don't think you should put a picture of a 2 year old nude.
After a few days of a week or so, the hubbub fades down.
People stop talking about it. But I mentioned this episode as
being vitally important because this was the only time when

(24:01):
Portnoy really sort of took a step back and apologized and
said, yeah, I screwed up. By the end of it, he was saying,
OK, that's a bad idea. His initial response was, what's
the big deal? It's just a joke, you guys.
By the end, I think you realizedthat he'd screwed up and he was
apologizing in contrite and he took it down, etcetera,
etcetera. He will pretty much never do

(24:23):
that again for the entire history of his career as a media
mogul, let's call it. Apologize or publish naked
children on his website. Well, both really.
He'll do other disgusting things, but he will not publish
any more photos of naked babies and compliment their penis size.

(24:44):
Sounds like he got what he wanted out of it though.
I mean like he got on the HowardStern show.
He did, but what he realized is there was a way to turn this
negative attention into his favor and he didn't do it.
And later on, he absolutely willdo that.
Bob did all the heavy lifting onthis episode and he must be
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(25:06):
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So Mike mentioned misogyny. He used that word in the opener.
And in terms of Dave Portnoy andthe reputation he has more

(27:32):
broadly in public, that's kind of like what I know about him is
that like many people have accused him of misogyny.
And enough people and enough credible people that I'm
inclined to think there's probably something there.
You told us that that reputationkind of starts after this

(27:56):
episode. I I'm curious how it's related.
Am I getting that right? Like is that related or it?
It's. What?
What happens now? That's part.
Of it. But now that the press is paying
a little bit of attention to him, people are wondering, OK,
what is this website? And if you actually read the
website at that time, there are a ton of blog posts written by

(28:16):
Portnoy and his other bloggers that are even viewed from
20/12/2013. It would be really difficult to
describe them as anything but powered by misogyny.
Women. If they are attractive, they are
only described as chicks or hot sluts.

(28:36):
If there is a woman who is vaguely left of center
politically or could be perceived as a feminist, they
are. Pardon my language, I am just
quoting from the website here. Ugly bitches and fat dykes.
We already discussed the gradingthe latest sex teacher scandal.
But there are all kinds of poststhat are making fun of sex

(28:59):
crimes, making fun of rapists, and they often put the onus on
women for being sexually assaulted.
If a woman is sexually assaultedand she was dressing in a way
that Dave Portnoy or one of the bloggers think it's too
provocative, they basically insinuate that she had it
coming. I also want to ask about the the

(29:19):
post in May 2010. The opening clip of the show is
from an interview where Dave wasasked about this post.
It's a little bit raunchier thana lot of the sort of cold open
clips I normally do, but this was about a blog post that you
described as the skinny jeans blog post.

(29:41):
Yeah. What is this?
What? What was Dave responding to?
Dave was Dave wrote a blog post responding to a news article in
which in Australia, where evidently a man was on trial for
rape and he ended up being acquitted.
And part of the acquittal had todo with the fact that this woman

(30:05):
was wearing very, very tight jeans, skinny jeans, which in
this instance, it would have been nigh impossible for this
guy to remove and commit a sex crime.
So Dave writes a paragraph he, you know, he block quotes the
whole article, and he ends it bysaying if you're a size 6 woman

(30:28):
and you are wearing skinny jeans, you kind of deserve to be
raped. Jesus.
The insinuation being that a woman who is a size 6 is too fat
to be wearing skinny jeans and therefore by committing the
crime of being too fat for Dave Portnoy, they deserve to suffer

(30:51):
at the hands of a rapist. That's the joke.
He has later defended this joke.Not just Inside Edition and
other places by saying he did not realize that size 6 was not
that large that he thought a size 6 was a size 20.
That's his defense. That has been his defense at

(31:12):
times. At times it changes.
Other times he said you just an expression like you deserve to
be raped. Is there just a throwaway thing
that he says where he says someone needs to be murdered or
you deserve to die of cancer andthat there's no difference
between them? It just means he doesn't think

(31:34):
this is a good person so they should have bad things happen to
them. This is right.
Truly disgusting. Yeah.
So tell us a little about the these.
So around the same time he they he launches these things called
a Blackout tour. This is not for fans of the
Redman and Method Man album Blackout from 1999.

(31:54):
A delightful a delightful LP. This is not that and obviously
implied here, blackout is like blackout drunk, right, which
sometimes has on college campuses, which is what this is
targeted towards can have, you know, intubates a sort of a
rapey situation sometimes. I mean that that is at least the

(32:16):
way I think of it, right? The idea is that somebody's a
completely unconscious and it was a little bit as far as based
upon what I'm learning from you and, and, and, and, and
following what you wrote and doing the prep for this episode.
It's a lot like something that Iused to see ads for when I was
in my my teens and early 20s, which is Girls Gone Wild.

(32:36):
See the world's hottest all real, all naked girls going
wild. Girls Gone Wild is delighted to
offer you exclusive free VIP access for a limited time only.
Two uncensored videos on your mobile and online.
Jared, you are a bit younger than me.
I was just curious if you have any familiar with this Joe
Francis product. He's a he's a different kind of
sleazeball. I'm familiar.
I never watched Girls Gone Wild.I was too young.

(32:57):
But I if I was watching like Comedy Central and it was
getting a little bit too late, I'm, I'm familiar with the ads
at least. Yeah, my, I remember being like
with my high school girlfriend and like watching TV at like at
like after midnight. And then all of a sudden it
would it, it would, it would presumably just like, come on
and be like, oh, this girl's gone wild, whatever.
But this is kind of for people who don't know, there was just

(33:18):
like supposedly candid shots of,you know, college and high
school girls or I don't know about high school, but college
girls very young. And they would, you know,
they're just frolicking and doing things and getting drunk
and maybe making out or something, right?
Like that was the kind of content.
And this is sort of like this barstool product, this blackout
is sort of the tour of that. Is that fair to say?

(33:41):
Yeah, they, the barstool had tried to do live events before
and they didn't really work out for them.
It was very expensive. They weren't really equipped as
a company to host a touring bacchanal up and down the East
Coast. But the blackout tours, they
sell out pretty quickly. And part of it is, as you said,

(34:03):
the advertising is absolutely with the Joe Joe Francis Girls
Gone Wild model. They will show B roll of women
wearing next to nothing, foam parties, blackout lights.
And the implication is, is that these women are going to get so
drunk and look at all these sexywomen.
Couldn't you have some fun with them And for and they're all all

(34:24):
the all the parties are also tangentially attached to a
college. So if they were having a party,
say, near Boston University, it's the Boston University
blackout tour. Even though Boston University
itself has absolutely nothing todo with this and they do this,
these parties are really successful.
The site itself, by this point, even given the nature of the

(34:48):
blog posts, is starting to do better and better.
Rob Gronkowski, famously by the way, showed up to a blackout
tour party in 2011 dressed as a very large furry dancing on
stage. It's a whole thing.
The parties are also, to be clear, they are sausage fests.
They are mainly guys buying tickets to these things.

(35:10):
I did in some reporting. I I went through as many videos
as I could find. I went through Reddit posts
discussing people who actually went to the tour parties as they
were happening concurrently. They were a sausage fest.
To me, it's, it's just like a recipe for disaster, right?
I mean, when I was in college, there were parties like this.

(35:32):
You knew they were around. Similarly, also Sausage Fest,
but it was not openly advertised, right?
It wasn't like, come on down to this frat house and everyone's
going to be like the drunkest you've ever seen them, right?
I I mean, it just sounds like a a disaster and.
That's what happens. Like the parties are, there are

(35:55):
lots of instances of the cops being called to deal with public
intoxication, kids overdosing onvarious substances, incidents
like it's it, it gets media attention because they are
really that rowdy, that dangerous.
And if you were a young person going to the like, they're the

(36:16):
kind of place where I would say a woman should not want to be
within 1000 feet of them. But for barstools 20 something
male centric audience, they are exceedingly.
Popular. It seems like the topic of a
local media segment you would watch that would be like all the
kids in town are spudornking andspudornking is going to kill

(36:37):
your kid, right? Like I mean, did it generate?
That. That kind of response.
Absolutely. And of course, every it's.
Like catnip for that, yeah. Yeah, it's it's a great local
news segment because one in college kids gone out of
control. Exactly the kind of thing that's
going to scare a middle-aged person or an older person who's

(36:58):
who still turns to the Evening News to get their information.
Oh, and guess what? The news producer can also throw
in some of the exact same B rollof girls in skimpy outfits
dancing around that Portnoy usedin their advertising.
So all of this fear mongering and Pearl clutching is free
advertising for Barstool. So what happens though is to

(37:20):
change the tide a little bit andreally kick it into OverDrive is
that there are a group of students from Northeastern
University in Boston. There about 20 people, 95%
women. All are self identified
feminists. A lot of them are queer a lot.
Some are non binary. They're exactly the kind of
person who would say, what the hell is this immediately.

(37:42):
And they organize a protest group.
The the thing that I think really caught their eye was
another blog post by Portnoy in which he wrote, and I'm going to
quote him again here. He was writing about a different
UVA frat that had put out a questionnaire asking on campus
if I could rape somebody, who would it be?

(38:03):
So Portnoy is blogging about this and he's writing about, he
writes. Well, I can understand why
feminists would be upset about this, but he felt that the
punishment for the frat which got suspended, that was a little
bit too much. And so Portnoy rights just to
make friends with the feminists.I'd like to reiterate that we
don't condone rape of any kind at our blackout parties in mid

(38:27):
January. However, if a chick passes out,
that's a Gray area. Again, I just need to jump in.
Just say how fucking disgusting this is for anybody who enjoys
having sex. The the celebration of forcing
sex upon somebody, you know it'snot sex anymore.
Obviously it's so you know, it'sit's just brutality.

(38:49):
The celebration of that is like it's so far from sexiness.
You know, it's so it's so centered in in somebody's own
psychosis. Like, you know, in this case
with with Portnoy or whatever that it, it's, it's hard to
believe that so many people werewilling to continue to run with
the guy. I mean, I think it really says
something. I guess we'll talk about this in
deeper in a deeper way at the end, but I do feel like jumping

(39:11):
in everyone so often because Portnoy is so mainstream, right?
Like he's so it's not like we'retalking about even Jack the
Zobec or Tim Poole, right? Portnoy is as, as we mentioned
early on now as a partnership with Fox Sports, right?
It's just it's it's it's really like, you know, that the the the
this sort of not even shrugging your shoulders at rate, but

(39:34):
also, you know, seeming to wink towards that is really fucked
up. Yeah, that's his joke.
His joke is, if you come to my party, ha ha ha, there will be
women who will be so intoxicatedthat you can commit sexual
violence and they won't rememberit.
That's the joke. I don't think it's a very good
joke, but that kind of rhetoric around this time.

(39:54):
So we're still 2011 here. 20/11/2012 Yeah.
We've got a long way to go that's starting to drive more
interest in Barstool Sports, thewebsite and it's seems to be.
Just sort of leaning into it. It's that no press is bad press,

(40:14):
very bad. I mean, then that is just kind
of the operating order of politics now.
But but at that time, I mean, this was like, it seemed like
Dave Portnoy really just liked being the bad guy who said these
like shitty rapey things. Well, yeah, here's the here's
the thing. In contrast to how he dealt with

(40:36):
Babygate, this group of women from Northern University, they
put up a Tumblr page and they announced they're going to
protest when KO bars, when the blackout tour comes to their
Northeastern University outpost.And someone from Northeastern
University sends Dave Portnoy their Tumblr page.

(40:56):
And Portnoy, instead of, say, apologizing for his jokes or
expressing anything resembling contrition, leans in.
And in a cynical, awful way. This was very, very smart.
Because now instead of Howard Stern saying what is wrong with
you, it is a bunch of blue haired SJW feminists.

(41:20):
He has an enemy that he can nameand shame.
And he does it again and again. He writes a slew of of ball of
blog posts and all of them attacking this 20 Again, we're
talking about 20 women who are are calling themselves Knockout

(41:42):
Barstool. That was the name of their
online protest group. And he again, he refers to them.
He writes A blog post saying no,no, no, no, I'm not here
encouraging rape and I'm quotinghim.
I want a safe campus where hot chicks can dress as slutty as
they want and act as slutty as they want and fuck whoever they
want without being judged. And that's exactly how our

(42:05):
Northeastern Blackout party willbe on Wednesday night.
Fat chicks not invited. What happens next is, I think,
crucially important not just in the history of Dave Portnoy and
Barstool Sports, but in the history of the Internet.
It is a Gamergate style harassment campaign that gets
organized in the comments section of Barstool Sports.

(42:27):
Most of our audience knows what Gamergate is.
Let's just do like a very quick summary.
So Gamergate is how people referto a period online where a
handful of news blogs and a whole lot of online communities,
including four Chan, including parts of Reddit, including

(42:49):
communities on Twitter and so ongot mad.
And, and there's a lot of details, but in the interest of
time, I'm going to skip why theywere mad.
But like, basically the idea that was like was that game
developers were fucking game reviewers.
And what spun out of it was thisincredibly vicious online

(43:11):
harassment campaign targeting female game developers and
really expanding scope and and just becoming a giant
misogynistic swarm that would kind of roam around the Internet
and pick and choose targets thatseem to be too woke.
It, it ended up marrying into that sort of anti SJW, anti

(43:31):
Tumblr blue hair kind of vibe that was in conservatism at the
time. And a lot of people, you know,
identify it as one of the turning points that sort of
shuttled this kind of nasty, nasty underbelly of the Internet
into the Trump movement. And the story goes from there.
You know, probably didn't do it justice there.

(43:51):
I mean people could and probablyhave written books about
Gamergate, but like that's the short version.
So that is more or less abbreviated history of
Gamergate. You said this is like barstools
Gamergate. What do you mean by that?
I mean is that it was a targetedharassment campaign that was at

(44:13):
times implicitly and other timesexplicitly encouraged by Portnoy
and much as Gamergate started at4 Chan and then spilled out into
Twitter, into Facebook, and theninto real world, this harassment
campaign, which by the way started a good year and a half
before Gamergate, was created inthe comments section of Barstool

(44:38):
Sports blogs and then migrated out to the real world from
there. So you sent us a selection of
some of the comments from this moment.
And, you know, I think this is interesting because this is the
first time in the show that we're talking about the
community that kind of gets built up around Barstool.
So we're we've talked about someof the content.

(45:00):
You can imagine the kind of people that's attracting and the
kind of people that that's attracting to the degree of
being loyalist, right? And I'm going to have to wash my
mouth out after this, but some of the replies on these stories
range from rape jokes to thinly failed threats.
One of them says PS that bitch in the picture couldn't get

(45:21):
raped if she tried. Another one said, and again,
excuse my language here, but wowthat dyke looms so angry.
I think looks is what they meant.
Wow that dyke looks so angry. I think she needs a beer and a
Dick in her ass to help her relax a little bit.
Others included. It's not rape if you yell

(45:43):
surprise first, then it's surprise sex.
And another said it isn't rape if I cannot hear them over the
duct tape. So, so like all these comments
are going around and then other commenters are being like, well,
here is knockout Barstool's Tumblr page.
Here is their contact e-mail. And Stoolies, which is what

(46:05):
Barstool Sports fans call themselves, just proceeded to
overload them with messages. They were targeted, their family
members were targeted. At one point the underage, I
think a 16 year old girl who wassomehow related to one of the KO
bar stools members got targeted.They were terrified and as you'd

(46:28):
expect, they tried to go to the police.
And in 2012, the police were notequipped to handle an online
harassment campaign. They're still not equipped now,
but in 2012 the idea that the comments section on the Internet
could pose an actual threat to people's safety was not
something the police had even considered, so they were

(46:50):
ignored. It's the Tyler, The Creator
tweet of like how a cyber bullying reel just look away
from the screen. But one thing I'd like to
mention about this in any case, the protests though, and
Portnoy's constant egging on. He blogged about them
constantly. He he, and in fact he used the
term KO barstool to describe every feminist that he wrote

(47:10):
about pretty much through 2020. Like this group stayed as an
enemy of theirs even though it existed for maybe 3 months in
the real world. Pause because I'm seeing 2
patterns that feel very familiarto anybody who like looks at
MAGA and the way MAGA operates in terms of scapegoating and
stuff like that. Calling everything KO barstools
is like the way everybody calls everything antifa or something

(47:34):
right? Like it becomes as it right.
It's like anything bad as Antifaor or whatever else.
Then there's this other angle here where it seems like he is
deliberately needling attacking these folks to get a reaction
and then posting the reaction, right.
And that is like it becomes likea huge, you know, this, you
know, he's a forerunner in many ways, it seems like to the

(47:56):
Trump, right, Like it just in terms of using the Internet
outrage that sort of back and forth cycle in order to kind of
fuel, you know, some sort of fuel engagement.
It absolutely does it in this issomething like there are two
things I want to add to that one.
He he says he blogs at one point.
Like I don't want them to stop KO Barstool, that is, I want

(48:19):
them to keep coming at us because I love going at them so
much. I'm paraphrasing, but he
absolutely makes it explicitly clear that he wants these
protests to happen. The protests, of course, by KO
Barstow. They had a couple of outdoor
like 1 vigil and then they held one protest outside an event.
Those get picked up. Jezebel writes about it.
HuffPost writes about it. All your favorite lefty sites.

(48:41):
The time RIP though, write aboutit.
And this again brings me the attention.
But what Portnoy does differently than he did with
Babygate is he says I come at mebro again and again.
And every time KO Barstool responds, he UPS the ante.
He cements this group of 20 college kids as a perpetual

(49:02):
enemy of Barstool Sports. So much show that a picture of
one of the protesters face to face with Portnoy was still
being sold on their team store as recently as 2012.
It is an it has been called by Barstool readers the most iconic
photo in the sites history. And this, this naming and
shaming a specific left-leaning like archetype that they can

(49:26):
attack that Portnoy can say thisis the person who is out to ruin
your fun. This is the person who is
against you. And I am the only one fighting
for you. I am the only one standing in
your way. They're not trying to get me,
they're trying to get you. And I am the one in the way is
what creates this parasocial bond with this El Presidente

(49:47):
character that Portnoy has created and makes the site as
successful as it is today. Portnoy and other bloggers have
said explicitly that the KO Barstool incident and how they
dealt with it is part and parcelof what made the site the kind
of company that could be valued by Penn National Gaming as being

(50:07):
worth $450 million in 2020. I want to point out that is
another trope, like another maggot trope that you mentioned
there, that that photo for people who can't see it, there's
a picture of Portnoy looking like, oh, I'm just hearing what
you have to say. And a woman is like genuinely
angry at him. And then they're sort of faced,
you know, not face to face, but they're they're close enough.
And that's, that's a trope that's like a thing where where

(50:30):
these guys will will will go after an image of themselves
sort of standing face to face with the enemy, right.
It's a thing, you know, you see pozobic do like made his whole
book cover a picture of him faceto face with some person who is
Antifa or whatever. I've seen lots of different
people kind of do that. They just sort of standing up to

(50:51):
the to the hordes of of enemies,you know, in the name of
whatever bullshit, right? The right that they have to to
to both consider themselves the perpetual victims of these
social justice warriors of the OR of this 120 something college
student and have the right to behave however they want and

(51:12):
never receive anything resembling consequences for
their actions. Or even have to hear someone
else say actually what you're doing is really crappy.
And it's it. And, and I, and I want to
highlight credit to Portnoy. He was doing this a good 2 1/2
three years before the online right really figured out how

(51:34):
this tactic works before Gamergate.
Yeah, I, I mean, when we startedtalking about doing this
episode, I thought, OK, cool, this is going to be like the
story of a sports media guy who's just like, too online and

(51:56):
gets roped up in this stuff. But it's, you know, as we went
into production and as we're walking through it now, it
really stands out to me is how much Barstool was a prototype
for this kind of stuff. I think I had really
underestimated it. But let's keep going on this on
the clock here, 2013. Now this is Barstool is getting

(52:18):
all of this press attention. You've got the whole knockout
Barstool era of that website where they're at war with some,
you know, student protesters. What What's happening with
Barstool circa 2013? Well, Dave Portnoy gets the
dapper Nazi profile written of him.
Not. I'm not saying Dave Portnoy is a

(52:39):
Nazi. I'm saying it is the similar to
the kind that Richard Spencer got written about him in 2015.
There are all these stories about.
Well, what is this strange website where men tell off color
jokes and and and have attractedsuch a loyal fan base.
It's the, you know, Eastern liberal establishment's sort of

(53:01):
nose on the tip of their glass is peering at this world.
And there is all this damning with faint praise about how how
messy the offices and how fly bythe seat of their pants they all
are. And then they include, you know,
a couple of paragraphs of some critics say.
But the whole thing is just the end result is just that it's
gassing up Portnoy in his sight.And they are attracting more

(53:23):
readers. The blackout tour is a huge
financial windfall for them. They have started to staff up.
They had damn. Katz joined in around 2010, 2009
I believe. Clancy, Kevin KFC Clancy who was
an ex Deloitte accountant there full time at that point.
Soon after that they'd hire EricPFT commenter Sullenberger who

(53:48):
was a writer who was used to write for SB Nation and a bunch
of similar lefty sites. Finally got hired full time by
Barstool and they have attractedenough attention and enough of a
readership that they will that they are sort of considered a
part of. Well, the way they describe

(54:10):
themselves is a satirical men's sports and lifestyle blog, so
let's just leave it at their that.
But they are a they're considered a fairly decent sized
member of the online press. Around this time, it's March of
2013, Dave does his first pizza review.
We talked about that briefly at the beginning.

(54:31):
This becomes like a big part of,you know, his persona and his
branding. It's something to kind of
separate him from the this the the stuff focused on on young
women, right, even sport. So it's this kind of universal
thing. Who doesn't like pizza?
And you know, he kind of is likehe does this thing one bite.
Everybody knows the rules is what he says at the beginning of

(54:52):
all these stupid things. And that becomes like a kind of
a, you know, it's a very easy content to do and it becomes
like really, really successful. So so Bob, he does that.
What else is he kind of doing around this time?
He's trying to figure out a way to expand and he, he, what he
comes up with, the idea that they come up with is they're
going to do events where he and cats mainly sort of participate

(55:15):
in things. And Portnoy makes fun of the
people involved. He, they, they have this thing
that they called the Bros Show where they do things that Bros
do. They compete against pro
athletes. They go to the adult video, the
AVN Awards, which are the adult video Oscars.
At one point, Portnoy shows up at a women's lingerie Football

(55:37):
League. Yes, that is a real thing.
I think you can guess what a women's lingerie Football League
is. And tackles a kick returner at
midfield while wearing a tux, giving him a nice chance to do
some inappropriate touching and commit violence against women at
the same time. But those type of segments, they
don't really take off because they're kind of expensive to

(56:00):
send Portnoy and cats around thecountry and the resulting click
through rate isn't enough to make them profitable.
And and once again I can't help but point out that the bro show
is a direct knock off of the manshow that was a.
Was actually good. Yeah, the the Jimmy Kimmel thing
that was on like they don't haveoriginal ideas.

(56:23):
It's amazing the degree to whicheverything they put out is just
a 1° knock off from some established property.
Like they have a weekly YouTube roundup show of the events that
go on in their office. And the theme song is a direct
knock off of the NBC office theme song, like practically
note for note. I'm sure they changed enough to
get around a lawsuit, but we'll get into this more later.

(56:47):
They really, really don't have original ideas.
And this is not working that well.
Like their readership at this time, they're getting about 4
million uniques a month, which is not a lot.
And Despite that, Dave Portnoy refers to himself as Davey page
views because of his ability to get page views.
And it was nonsense. He also says things like I

(57:11):
invented the Internet. And when it comes to harassment,
he's not wrong. But it's it's, it's a part of
this. He what this time?
Is this really leaning into thispersona, this El Presidente
persona, which I, I don't think based on everything that's been
reported, is that different fromDave Portnoy himself?
But this guy who can get away with anything and say anything,

(57:33):
that's what he's selling and it really becomes crystallized at
this time. I, I just want to, maybe it's
just because I'm a media nerd orwhatever.
I, I want to try to put this like 4 million uniques per month
into perspective. Mike, you've talked about on
other episodes like what was it,chart beat or whatever, where
you could where? You could see I talked about in
the context of like ABC News andseeing like the seeing the, the

(57:57):
stories just go up like a, you know, it's like like a like a
slot machine, like all the coinscome out, whatever.
It's just like what? What's?
Like when you've been for like Newsweek or ABC, like a story
that does well, like how many unique visitors are we talking
about? It, it like, I can't remember
what it was at ABC, but I, I just know that it was, it was,

(58:19):
yeah. You would get stories of
sometimes about millions, like on its own, you know, And then
also you'd have on the like the home page itself there just be
swimming with people. There would be people who would
go and get their news directly from abc.com or abcnews.com.
So all of us to say like 4 million clicks a month or
whatever is not in the terms of like online publishing is not

(58:42):
like some mind blowing stat. I think it's better than SPLC.
How about that, right? It's better than.
It's better than. Better than this podcast, I
guess, but yeah. But I mean, it's, it's like,
yeah, I, I think that's fair. I think that it's that you would
expect for the amount of money that it has been produced by

(59:03):
Barstool, especially now like inretrospect and like the fame of
Dave Portnoy and the sort of ubiquity of the Barstool brand
that it would be higher than that at the time.
You you think it'd be higher before you start calling
yourself Mr. Page Views? Or or that you invented the
Internet. Yeah.

(59:24):
It's either it's either Dave Portnoy or or Al Gore.
Which way, Western man? The big secret of Barstool is
that for its entire history, thesite has never been that
popular. I think it it maxes out at
around 10 million uniques a month.
At least the last time I checkedit was at around 10 million.
It is not a popular website. The podcasts are very popular

(59:45):
and they rank in some of them are at the absolute top of the
charts, but reading this websiteis not a big deal.
What makes them have a cultural footprint is the Dave is the El
Presidente persona and the the the absolutely die hard Stoolie
persona where people are defining their entire identity

(01:00:06):
by being Barstool readers. And with that they sell a ton of
merch. Every time something happens in
the Barstool universe, they crank out a T-shirt.
They crank out T-shirts that just come right up against the
the absolute limit of copyright infringement for their teams or
players or people. Like there are their T-shirts

(01:00:28):
for everything and they buy them.
The other slogan that they sort of popularized around this time
is Saturday's Are for the Boys. Saturday's for the boys.
Which was something. That hurt.
Hurt that a lot. Yeah, it's a It was something
that another Blogger named John Feidelberg came up with because
he heard an old bar, a guy an anold, an older gentleman in a bar

(01:00:50):
being like who had a thick Irishaccent going, oy, yeah.
Fridays are for the women, Saturdays are for the boys.
Which honestly, if, if, if it was a if it if it was, you know,
dragged out of the banshees of inner Sharon, it would be
charming. But in barstools world it just
becomes this sort of horrible rallying cry about not having

(01:01:13):
any women near them ever. And, and I would just say
something about the stoolies whoare who, who, who are buying
these T-shirts and whatever. I've like, I've seen them, you
know, passively. I'm not reported on the bar
stool world like you have, but I've seen them like just just,
you know, filling up the reply like poor noise replies, making
memes of things like making gifts with like his head on it

(01:01:36):
and doing some sort of kind of almost like glorifying him, like
he's some sort of God, which is so weird because he's such a
he's such a shit head. But like you want to make, if
you want to make the comparison to Donald Trump, I think you
can. It is the the what they want.
What Portnoy does is he gives people license to be the worst

(01:01:58):
version of themselves. And that's a very powerful
attractor. It's the merch sales and the
advertising because of their imprint that allows them to make
money. The fact that very few people
click through the website is irrelevant, and it becomes far
more important when they get heavily into social media, which
we will discuss later. But the reason Barstool is a big

(01:02:23):
deal is because of a controversy, because of how
Portnet reacts to the controversy and how his fans
react to the controversy as well.
Because they will do what he says and we'll see that play
out. We saw it play out with KO
Barstool. We'll see it play out more as
time goes on. So I just want to note that

(01:02:45):
because Facebook and Google and now AI is like executing web
traffic, those numbers of visitors to the Barstool website
are almost certainly lower todaythan they were at their peak.
So it's around this time that Dave Portnoy is really starting

(01:03:05):
to find his voice too. So you know we have these old
blog posts where he's making these quote UN quote jokes about
rape, but he's getting more reactionary, not just horny and
misogynist, right? Yeah, in in 2015, which is when
the black 2014 and 2015 when theBlack Lives Matter protest first

(01:03:27):
started, they covered them. And the way the barstool
bloggers covered the Black LivesMatter protest is they basically
say in no uncertain terms that the protesters deserve to be run
over by people with cars. He also at the at that time
start selling a Make America Great Again hat.
How the Trump campaign never found out about that and said,

(01:03:48):
hey, stop, I don't know, but he's selling it.
Portnoy also explicitly in August 2015 endorses Donald
Trump for president. He is an early adopter of this.
And he said that the reason was he just likes the guy and likes
his attitude and likes his pole vibe.

(01:04:09):
It wasn't political, you see, Hejust liked what Trump was doing.
And of course, these kinds of posts start getting a different
kind of media attention, one that he really hadn't gotten
before, that was somewhat different from your local news
station running B roll of women and scantily clad outfits and

(01:04:29):
dancing around actual reporters.Start to look into Dave Portnoy
and say and his website and say what the hell is this?
Yeah, one, one of them is Laura Wagner, who is now with
Washington Post, right. And I have a vivid memory.
I don't know where this is. I tried to find the clip, but I
couldn't find it. Maybe you can find it.
But, you know, I I just couldn'tfind it.

(01:04:51):
I just remember him singing a love song to her.
Yeah. He was sitting at his desk, and
he did some video where he was singing some soul song.
I can't remember what it was. And he was just like, singing
like, you know, kind of in a taunting way about like, you
know, trying to like, as if you were sort of pursuing her as a
romantic interest, which is a sort of a bit that he continued

(01:05:12):
to do. And it's very it like leans in
very uncomfortably to the like unwanted advances, like element
of of of male, female interaction just deliberately
like, oh, she doesn't want this.I'm going to keep doing it over
and over again. Yeah, I I don't remember the
song. Quick message from the editing

(01:05:36):
deck here. I was looking for the video that
Mike was referencing. It seems like it has been
deleted, but it is mentioned in a 2019 Fox News article about a
staff exodus at Deadspin. That article says when now
former Deadspin Media reporter Laura Wagner announced that she

(01:05:57):
quit, Portnoy posted a video of himself singing Billy Joel's The
Time to Remember dedicated to his long time nemesis.
We don't have the clip for you today, but that was a thing that
happened. But he basically said he
compared it to an episode of Seinfeld where I, I don't know,

(01:06:19):
this episode of Seinfeld where Elaine rejected Jerry and Jerry,
it only made Jerry or a woman had rejected Jerry and it only
make Jerry want her more. And so he constantly talks about
Laura Wagner, about how he's going to make her like, he says,
I want to, you know, I want to hire that sweet little potty
mouth of hers. And when she gets fired by

(01:06:42):
Deadspin or something and he, he, he's like I'm in.
He writes posts where he says I'm in love with her.
I'm in love with that vixen. Because she openly insults him
in a couple of blog vote posts. Calling him an angry Adderall
pill was 1 descriptor for Dave Portnoy, and the other was a
sniffly Raisin. And I'll let the listeners try

(01:07:02):
to suss out what Laura's implying by that.
Mike, that reminds me of what your sister said about Dave.
Should we share that now? I just told my sister Katie, you
know, about that. We're doing a porno episode.
She's like, you should, you should print that.
No one wants to have sex with him because he has the face of a

(01:07:24):
bridge troll and that's why he behaves the way he does.
And the only reason anyone has sex with him is because he's
rich. Just you should say that.
And I was like, well, I don't know if, but I do think because
of his behavior, women tend to have that I've spoken to have a
very sharp reaction to this guy in the sense of he there's

(01:07:45):
there's something something really primal that they pick up
on that they find hideous. I'll.
Also add one more descriptor, which is from Jay Caspian Kang's
article about Barstool Sports inthe New York Times, in which he
described Dave Portnoy as Mark Zuckerberg, but if he'd spent
the last two decades concentrating on tanning and

(01:08:05):
drinking heavily. These are all pretty good, but
they're also accompanying some serious scrutiny.
Some some outlets. Real outlets really digging into
them. You know, it's not just Tumblr
blogs and critics and rival sports blogs, but actual
journalists who are trying to figure out what's happening with

(01:08:28):
Dave Portnoy and Barstool Sports.
And we said earlier, Dave's kindof in his fuck you era.
I can probably imagine how he responds.
But what's his reaction to this sort of fresh blast of coverage?
As someone who was writing aboutsports at that time, there was a
general, I can say from the sites that I worked at, there
was a hesitancy to cover this because the thought was why give

(01:08:52):
these people free media attention?
And eventually they reached enough prominence that there was
no way to ignore it and that ignoring it wasn't doing
anything to diminish their prominence or, you know, let
people know what exactly is going on with this website.
Like the things that they published.
They they at one point, Portnoy filmed a male employee in the

(01:09:15):
shower and insisted he had the right to publish that on Twitter
and in a blog post. Another point, a barstool
personality on a like in a videogame stream told Joel Embiid to
go back to Africa. There was a photo of a barstool
Blogger in blackface that got published.
Another blog that someone else wrote got deleted because it was

(01:09:36):
defending a player who was committing intimate partner
violence on a radio show. They called a 17 year old girl a
hot piece of ass. He another blog called a 16 year
old girl hot. Portnoy defended Harvey
Weinstein saying would it be OK?You know like in this if it was
like a trade. So she got a big role and slept

(01:10:00):
with Harvey Weinstein. Is that bad?
This is how you know that cancelculture, the narrative around
cancel culture is is is largely is is largely misleading because
the idea because because, because if people were getting
canceled that they're really getting their opportunities kind
of cut because of things like this.

(01:10:22):
You you would think that defending Harvey Weinstein and
publishing commentary calling, you know, girls under a team hot
and piece of ass or whatever. I mean, these are the very
things that these guys claim to be like to to care about, which
is the same conundrum around Epstein right now.
But I'll let you continue. Yeah, so the the interesting

(01:10:44):
things that happened is, you know, Portnoy does what exactly
what he does every time someone challenges him, he double s
down, he lashes out, he UPS the ante.
And if it were just a question of Dave Portnoy writing or
posting things, calling the the reporters names or whatever,
that would be one thing. But what Dave Portnoy has is an

(01:11:06):
army of people willing to do hisbidding.
So every time someone writes about him, every time someone,
not even a reporter, just a random person criticizes
Barstool or him online, they know that they're going to hit
be hit with a metric ton of harassment.
There was a point in which in 2016 it looked like Barstool was

(01:11:28):
going to had going to have a show on ESPN called Barstool Van
Talk. It's a bad show and they got one
episode. But people who worked at ESPN
who are aware of Barstool's history started talking to the
higher ups in the company sayingwhat are you doing?
Why are you hiring these people?Why are you validating the
things they do? And one ESPN personality, a

(01:11:52):
woman named Sam Ponder, brought her back.
The fact that in a 2014 live stream, Portnoy, you know, had
called it was a blog post, actually called her a Bible
thumping freak, and then on air said that she was a fucking
slut. Quote UN quote who should sex it
up and be slutty instead of talking about her kid during

(01:12:13):
some NFL show. She's the worst.
No person who wants watches gameday wants to see a picture of
her in her ugly kid. Nobody cares.
Sam Ponder, we want to see you sex it up and be slutty and not
see it be some prude fucking jerk who everybody hates and
who's married to the worst quarterback who wears the ring

(01:12:36):
in God first in this and that. Shut up, That's not what you're
there for. So she brings these things backs
up and Portnoy makes it clear when this comes to a head that
Sam Ponder is to be targeted by stulies.
He posts a video with Sam Ponder's head on a character
from Game of Thrones. I'm not a fan of the show, I

(01:12:57):
don't know it, but evidently shewas shamed in public.
So he puts together a weird clipof Sam Ponder's head and, and
you know, an impact font saying shame, shame, shame.
He makes it clear on air that hewants this war to continue and
that he wants to suffocate Ponder slowly in an online war.
He says this on Barstool radio. He makes it very clear that this

(01:13:19):
woman is to be targeted. And he does this time and time
again. Anyone writes about him.
They know that they are going tobe harassed and worse.
The people that worked for him didn't necessarily, you know, I,
I think some of them, you know, you have in your notes here that
cats was maybe a little freaked out by this.

(01:13:41):
Yeah, and cats in Sullenberger both are like, you know, they
were, they were doing a radio broadcast.
And they're like, well, you know, look, I disagree with her.
She disagrees with me is how cats put it.
But, you know, we should let it.Let's let it go.
And Portnoy disagrees. He says what?
You know what I mentioned earlier that he wants to
suffocate her in an online war. And if I just for a brief star

(01:14:01):
bar about Katz and Sullenberger,their podcast isn't my thing.
Other people really like it. That's totally fine.
The general consensus is that the two of them are the good
ones. They are the ones who show for
people who want to partake of barstools content.
You can do it without feeling icky afterwards.

(01:14:21):
Or it means you know you're different than Dave Portnoy.
To me, that's a very comfortablefiction.
Katz and Sullenberger have equity in Barstool Sports.
They have become very rich by working for Dave Portnoy.
They could have spoken out or quit at any point over the last
15 years. None of them did.

(01:14:43):
To me. They are equally complicit to
him, and there's really no difference between the two of
them. So, yeah, so all of this is
going on. One of Dave Portnoy's favorite
types of people to pick on is journalists, including you, Bob,
when you wrote your big 2018 piece.
And I I've got a bunch of your coverage of barstool LinkedIn,

(01:15:05):
the description of this episode,if folks want to go read that.
Dave docks to you, right. What how was that?
I, I mean, you have some personal experience on the
receiving end. I mean, it's obviously the way
the stoolies behave towards, youknow, like women and and and
stuff. It is a whole different animal.
But like, what was your experience like being on the
receiving end of the stoolies? Yeah, let me let me say upfront,

(01:15:27):
the stuff that I've had to deal with because of Dave Portnoy
pales in comparison to what a whole lot of women have had to
deal with. There is no comparison between
the two. So what happened is I'm writing
a fairly long feature on Barstool Sports and I want to
reach out to him for comment. There is no media contact at

(01:15:48):
that point anywhere on the Barstool page.
There is no way to. I am really struggling to find
an e-mail address to find him. I tried LexisNexis, there was
nothing that came up and so I thought, OK, I'll e-mail one of
his PR people. I found a recent press release.
I found the name of the PR company.
I wrote a long e-mail saying, listen, I would I would like to

(01:16:10):
speak to Dave Portnoy, Dan Katz,Kevin Clancy, Eric Sullenberger
about these things. Can you please pass this request
along to your client? And at the bottom, it had my
phone number and my e-mail. Portnoy gets the e-mail,
screenshots it with my e-mail address and phone number at the
bottom and posts it and says, you know, I forget what his post

(01:16:34):
said. It was something like who is
this Jack hole? In fairness I don't think he
meant to tweet out my phone number to his then I think
800,000 followers. I do not think it was
intentional. He was at some concert they were
putting on and all he saw was ane-mail and he threw caution to

(01:16:55):
the wind. I, I will repeat, I do not think
it was intentional for him to dox me because he took it down
about 1/2 an hour later, but that half an hour was enough
that my phone was unusable for four days and my e-mail was
unusable for four days. I still have all the old ones.
It was just a constant stream ofcalls and texts and voicemails
and a handful of them I will saywere scary enough that I was

(01:17:22):
wondering if I should contact the police.
Nothing happened. No one came up to me, no one
approached me. It never got beyond rude things
that were said in my various inboxes.
But I did, you know, it was baby's first doxy and it was a
scary thing to go through. So much so that about a week
later I was going to a Mets game.

(01:17:43):
And it was a big Mets game because it was David Wright's
last game and Barstool personalities had said they were
going to be attending the game too.
So I'm in a panic leading up to this because I thought someone
there would be able to identify me.
Because in addition to the tweeting out of my phone number
and e-mail, Portnoy and Barstoolhad spent the prior week posting

(01:18:08):
blogs about me constantly. Those blogs included my photo.
They talked about me on the radio.
This was a big focus for them because partly because Will
Leach at New York Mag wrote a follow up story when all this
was happening and then Business Insider wrote about it and blah,
blah, blah. So this was sort of a big event
in barstools world. They were all very mad that I

(01:18:28):
went to clown school. They kept calling me the clown.
And I, I did go to clown school and, and honestly, that's fair,
but I was, I was freaked out enough going to this Mets game.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. But laughter.
That's like what clowns create. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Smile.
Yeah, this is a compliment. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I'll wear that prep. Laughter.

(01:18:50):
Parentheses. Flattering.
So before I go to the Mets game,I shave off my beard and
mustache because and I wear a baseball cap pulled down as
tight as I could so I could. So Incognito maybe, and they
wouldn't recognize me, was my thought at the time.
It was very silly. But you know, again, I want to
stress, so many of other people have had it so much worse than

(01:19:12):
me. The Mets are a franchise that is
really filled with weird lore because I think we, we, we
could, Whereas the Yankees keep getting like all these like Hall
of Fame players. We we only have like stories
like Grimace showed up and like this happened or whatever it is
all these like that's what the Mets have.
They just have myth and fable and like, you know, I, I for me
now, I can never, like, think ofthe day that David Wright

(01:19:34):
retired without knowing that Bobwas kidding.
I am stalking around the concourse trying to act in.
Harass for being a clown. I love it so much.
I love it so much. I feel like now that I've heard
that story from telling this story from here on and like if
and when the Mets win the World Series this year, everyone, it

(01:19:55):
starts with this podcast right here if the.
If the Mets win the series, I'm wearing a clown nose to the to
the the parade down down Wall Street.
I'll fucking. Join you, I'll fucking join you
and we'll do a live stream like something for a posting through
it. We'll do it for charity.
Or something. Yeah, I'll.
I'll fly to New York. We'll, we'll.
Actually, I actually wait. I don't know.
Are people actually listening tothis?
What if I have to do it anyway? All right, keep going all.

(01:20:17):
Right. I I mean, I think this is a good
point to kind of jump into like modern day, yeah, Barstool for
the sake of the show, let's callthat like 2016 onward.
So in 2016, on the business front, something important
happens at Barstool. What's that?
Well, the barstool again, they have attracted enough attention

(01:20:42):
and revenue to the point where Portnoy sells a controlling
interest to the churn in Group and the site is valued at being
between reportedly 10 and $15 million at that point.
But the basic the basic thing isthat they the the training group
promises the port and I will retain full editorial control as

(01:21:04):
it were. Nothing about the site will
change, but what they're they'redo what the thinking was is
well, look, this ramshackle shopis able to make a lot of money
despite having no one working there that anyone would qualify
as a media professional. So the churning group comes in.
They hire ACEO Erika Nardini, who is previously at AOL.

(01:21:26):
And for anyone who's a fan of some real deep Internet lore, do
you remember the Chingy blog in The New Yorker?
I don't know. Chingy is a wild haired guy
who's described as an Internet guru and just does things like
draws a pictures of a panda on aon a polka dot piece of paper

(01:21:48):
and says this is the future of the Internet.
Shingy. Shingy is meeting with Erika
Nardini while she's at AOL and she's felling over him.
So that was my knowledge of Erika Nardini and and Shingy.
I can't believe AOL didn't make it into the modern day.
Yeah. Right.
In any case, so they start scaling up and what they do, and

(01:22:09):
the main is what they realize isthe success of Barstool is never
about really the content they produce, whether that's radio,
blogs, these live events, whatever.
What Barstool is, is that they are influencers.
They are, they are a hype house.They're a collab house, which
means that everything that happens in Barstool's world gets

(01:22:31):
turned into content. Not just Dave Portnoy's constant
media about like battles with his critics and reporters and
the harassment campaigns. That gets turned into content
when KFC cheats on his wife in afair in a way that gets exposed.
Which one is KFC again? Kevin Clancy, he's.

(01:22:53):
Kind of like like a Mets Jets guy.
He's a New York guy. He's their new.
York guy That's that's sad, actually.
Sorry, Mike, you own that one. I own that one, and Gavin
McGinnis is also. Yeah, I know he he so Clancy has
this issue in his marriage and Barstool makes content about it

(01:23:13):
and it's obscene. Honestly from from my point of
view he calls it KFC Gate like baby gate before it.
So we've got another gate, yeah.Like Portnoy holds like what he
calls these emergency press conferences, which is just him
recording a video and posting iton Twitter and YouTube and
wherever and like talking about it and they talk about it on

(01:23:35):
podcasts and, and, and eventually it becomes something
that the media has to cover. Or the incident I mentioned
earlier where portray during Super Bowl week wanted to film a
male employee while he was in the shower.
And his defense was, well, you're here during the Super
Bowl covering it. If I film you in the shower,
that's content and you can't complain.

(01:23:55):
Like everything that goes on in that office is turned into
content because it's just an influencer house.
And for stoolies, that's a big part of it.
Yeah, it, it builds out that like parasocial relationship
where people get this impressionthat like these barstool guys

(01:24:15):
are like they're friends. My Bros.
I'm like one of the, I'm one of the Bros, you know, like.
Yeah, or, or when when there wasa moment when they were talk,
there was a lot of talking mediaabout unionization and someone
posted some Barcelo Blogger posted a joke about unionizing
and Portnoy comes back and says anyone who who tries to start a
union, I'm firing them immediately.

(01:24:36):
Well, that's against the. Law.
That's illegal. Yeah, that's.
Against. The law can't say that, right?
And Portnoy of course, sees an opening and he escalates it to
the point that Alexandria OcasioCortez comments and that leads
to a sort of beef with AOC. And that's content for them when
they're hiring new people. They do this celebrity

(01:24:58):
apprentice Big Brother type mashup.
Again, like I said, they have nooriginal ideas.
They just do third rate knockoffs of other people's
successful ideas. They make them stay in the
office and never leave for a week and compete in these events
for a barstool job. It's never about what they
actually produce. It's about, like you said,
strengthening and hard wiring these parasocial bonds until you

(01:25:21):
feel like KFC and Big Cat and PFT and El Prez.
Those are your buds. I think it's, I just, I just
want to interject something though.
I, I want to interject something.
There's something about that is a, you know, a, a theme in all
of those that, you know, all those concepts, you know,
content streams you mentioned isthat they're very anti labor or

(01:25:43):
they're very, or they're mockingthe very idea of working for,
for money, right? I mean, they're associating
labor with humiliation or they're being openly anti labor.
And I think that that's like a really big part of port noise
persona, right? Maybe a tick below the misogyny.

(01:26:05):
You put this in the notes for the show, Bob, but like, you
know, you observed that that whole debacle, KFC gig, you
know, where they made content out of this guy's divorce.
This is one of the guys who's like been in Portnoy's orbit the
longest. This is one of the people who
like via podcast and stuff has like generated who knows how

(01:26:30):
much money for him, how much value for him.
And this is how he treats that guy, right?
Publicly humiliating his employees is a constant feature
of Barstool Sports. Portnoy does that, has done
that. Maybe not cats, but every other
barstool employee that I've everthat gains any prominence.
At some point Portnoy will try to publicly humiliate them

(01:26:55):
because it's content he doesn't so much.
One might get the impression that he enjoys it, that it's not
just a money maker or a content and marketing strategy.
You kind of get the impression that he enjoys finding a low
level employee or even a mid level employee who needs this
job at Barstool. Because again, none of these

(01:27:18):
guys are great writers. None of these guys are
brilliantly insightful at breaking down sports or pop
culture or anything. Without Barstool, so many of
them would just be working a regular cubicle job.
And because they need that, because they are entirely
dependent on Port staying in Portnoy's good graces, he lets

(01:27:40):
them know it all the time. I mean, the guy who he filmed in
the shower of this Blogger namedChris Smith.
I'm sorry, Adam Smith, no relation to the Economist.
Adam Smith. Barstool Smitty on Twitter if
you'd like to follow him. It has happened time and time
again where Portnoy holds his behavior if he doesn't feel like

(01:28:00):
he's blogging enough or bloggingwell enough and rips him a new
one. And the way that he frames it is
a very Mogga thing. It's that he's doing it because
Bar Stool believes in maximum transparency.
We will show you everything. We will be honest.
We will be honest with you. On this show.

(01:28:21):
I honestly, yeah, we we will. We I gave Portnoy will never
lie. He constantly says that he never
lies. I fervently disagree with that
assessment. And the way he says is because
like, look, if I think this Blogger isn't whole, isn't doing
their job, I will not have a quiet conversation with them in
private. I will do it on air and make

(01:28:42):
sure everyone sees it. That's how you know that I am an
honest person. Because I'm showing you how I
really feel when I say that these women are sluts or I
decide. I think it was 2015 where he
started blogging about how important it was to bring back
the word. And again, I'm quoting him to
bring back the word. Cunt and make it socially

(01:29:03):
acceptable to say in public he'sbeing honest that see his baser
feelings his his. I would argue misogyny and
hatred of women by expressing itpublicly.
He's more honest than all those virtues signaling libs who are
trying to be nice. That's how Trump won, right?

(01:29:24):
He was also honest. And wouldn't you like to have
that power too? Wouldn't you like to have the
power to say some of the most awful thoughts you've ever had?
Wouldn't you like to have the power to be little a
subordinate? That's what Portnoy and Barstool
have always sold. Yeah, it's, it's, it is very
similar to Trump. Of course Trump would like, you
know, a compulsive liar, but I think succeeded as a politician

(01:29:49):
in part because it was like, well, he's you know, he's well,
you know, he's he's not pretending he's with when he
lies, it's it's honest because that's what anybody would want
to do in that scenario. He's he's he's an honest liar.
He lies when he feels like it. He had it's basically having no
filter. Let's talk about I know you have
claimed to this phrase, Barstoolconservatives.

(01:30:13):
The term Barstool Conservatives.I invented that term.
Yes, and now it's a term like it's a term that's wowed its way
into like MSNBC and CNN and stuff like that.
So let's talk a little bit aboutthat because I think like in the
post, I guess it's really post 2020, the post pandemic.
And I think every Jared, I thinkyou you would agree with this.

(01:30:34):
Every bio we've done here, everywho the hell is the pandemic
ultimately becomes like a big moment for all these figures.
It seems to be a thing where in which which everybody seems to
change all across the right. And I really think when we look
back at the at the pandemic, we're going to see like these
huge shifts culturally that we can't, you know, fully look at

(01:30:55):
now. But but Portnoy becomes like a
much more political figure. Yeah, we've been talking, we've
been talking about this is like 2 kind of parallel train tracks,
but like 2020 is when they like hit the junction, right?
I mean, like these are kind of bleeding into it.
And people talk about Portnoy and Barstool as part of what

(01:31:15):
people call the manosphere. I am not a fan of that term, but
you know that I think that is what most people have probably
heard What's going on in 20, 20 I, I, I mean, like the pandemic
hits and then, you know, it, it kind of fucked with everybody's
lives, but people dealt with it in different ways.

(01:31:36):
It changed people different ways.
How did it change, Dave? The the first thing that
happened is Barstool. Really, Barstool had a real
problem with the fact that all sports were canceled because
even though they were always, you know, touching on pop
culture stuff and blogging viraldetritus, there wasn't a lot of
that in the spring and summer of2020.

(01:31:58):
It was a, you know, if you remember five years ago, which
seems like a lifetime ago, anything that was happening was
fraught with the notion that there was this virus and, and,
and, and spread that we didn't know when it was going to end
and we didn't know how many people were going to die and we
didn't know what the world was going to look like after.
Every story necessarily had a COVID angle and Barstool was not

(01:32:24):
equipped to pivot in this way. They did not have the skill set
to be discussing this in any real serious way, and Portnoy in
particular. So they needed content because
if the site stopped moving like a shark, it's going to die.
So what Portnoy decided to do, and we touched upon this
earlier, is like a lot of people, he gets into day trading

(01:32:48):
the stock market at this time. And what he does is he comes up
with this fake firm called Davy Day Trader Global, which he then
abbreviates as DDTG Global. Yes, they repeat the G twice.
I think that was him being funnybecause he doesn't know how to
make an acronym or something. But what he does is for an hour

(01:33:09):
or two every day, or an hour at the beginning of the day and
then an hour at the end of the day, he sets up a camera and he
broadcasts himself live trading stocks.
And that's Barstool's chief content output at that point.
At one point, and I looked into this, it seemed like he might be
engaging in some slight market manipulation because he was

(01:33:31):
certainly tweeting about the things he's picking.
And he included all the caveats of this isn't stock advice.
I'm not giving advice about whatpeople should do.
But there were people who were following his trades.
I should also say it's it's around this time at.
Maybe the overlap isn't perfect,but this is also when people are
shorting GameStop. He is heavily involved in the

(01:33:53):
GameStop. Stuff.
So again, this is like him bandwagoning, you know, or
ripping off other people who aregetting interest at this time.
For a gambler, which we established he's he's kind of in
that that's it. This is where the action is
right? Wall Street bets crypto, which
he also gets into. I I remember, I remember him.
He he, you know he would, he would he pumped up more than one

(01:34:16):
that I that I he. Pumped a couple of shit coins
and he got busted. He never got busted for fraud
later on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, so, so, so, so this is wherethe action is.
Like we, we can't get, you know,we can't get Carlos Rodon on the
mount for a while and all of a sudden we are now gambling on.
It's a it's a natural progression.

(01:34:37):
This is sports gambling content that Portnoy got into and he
treated it exactly the same way.I'll just say a little word of
advice that is not financial advice for our listeners.
Most people who try to day tradelose money.
So if this seems like a good idea to you, let me say person
to person, not financial advisorto you.

(01:34:57):
Bad idea. So I think the way you're
talking about it, Bob, is exactly right.
This is an extension of Fort Noise Gambling.
Yeah. Also it's worth mentioning that
by 2020, Barstool was acquired by a gambling company, Penn
National Gaming, which ones a lot of local casinos and was

(01:35:18):
trying to get into the FanDuel DraftKings MGM Grand online
betting world. And Barstool gets bought by Penn
National Gaming and now the siteis valued at $450 million.
So the jump from 2016 to 2019 isfairly large.
And I would argue that it is that there are a couple of
reasons for that, one which we might get into later.

(01:35:42):
But the other one is the the controversies.
The controversies in the reporting absolutely pumped up
Barstool and his profile, but they are a gambling company
right now that has no gambling content to make.
The reason Penn buys them, as far as everyone can tell, is
that their hope is that the Barstool fanbase can be turned

(01:36:02):
into regular betters. That did not happen, but that
was the thought behind them. And again, suddenly they're in a
real bind. So Portnoy's doing this day
trading content, but he also feel it has this constant drive
to inject himself into the news cycle.
Because the other thing that powers Barstool is the
controversies. And So what is he going to talk
about? He's going to talk about Anthony

(01:36:22):
Fauci. He's going to sort of dabble on
the fringes of anti vax stuff. He is going to absolutely start
talking about the George Floyd protests that happened because
he's gambling and because he's getting, you know, doing these
day trading bets. He's suddenly appearing on Fox
Business more than he was in thepast.
There was a point during that summer where videos got

(01:36:43):
resurfaced of him calling Colin Kaepernick a terrorist because
he thought he was a Muslim. That gets resurfaced at this
time. And another video, which was
included in my 2018 story is there's a video of Portnoy in
2016 wrapping the N word along to a Ja Rule song and not saying

(01:37:03):
N word. He's using a hard R there as
well. And Portnoy gets some backlash
for that. And of course, because he's Dave
Portnoy, he doesn't know how to express contrition.
What he does is he starts shouting about how he's
uncancelable. And the combination of all of
this day trading in the market, COVID misinfo, George Floyd
protests, absolute aspects of racism from Portnoy suddenly

(01:37:26):
means he's going on Fox more andmore and more.
And he is becoming exposed to a Fox News specific audience.
And he really, really, really leans into this.
So by the time the 2020 electionrolls around, I, I mean, where's
Portnoy by then? I mean it.

(01:37:48):
But I feel like by the time you cross the bridge and you're a
Fox guest, you're pretty solid in the camp.
I mean, that's the the president's favorite TV channel,
right? Yeah.
And, and I think it's also worthnoting that Portnoy at this
time, it gets reported that six women accused him of who were,

(01:38:08):
by the way, all about 20 years younger than him.
They were in their one was as young as 19, he was in his 40s.
Accused them of filming them without consent during sexual
encounters and choking them without to the point where they
were legitimately afraid and that the sexual encounters
turned violent in ways that theydid not expect.

(01:38:30):
As we said at the top of the show, Portnoy has vehemently
denied that anything that happened there was non
consensual or that he did anything wrong.
But being credibly accused of this behavior is exactly the
kind of thing that'll hardwire you straight into the Mogga
camp, especially with a woman asconsiderably younger than

(01:38:53):
Portnoy. Yeah, I mean, rough sex is, is
is a complicated one for sure. But, you know, choking with no
consent, that sounds pretty fucking scary to me.
Yeah, right. If you read the stories, both of
which were publishing in Business Insider in November of
2021, it is also worth noting that Portnoy did sue Business

(01:39:14):
Insider for these stories. He lost.
But the other thing that I will say is that when Portnoy was
defending himself against these allegations, he made a number of
videos. And from his response, both in
the blog and in the videos, if you wanted to figure out the the

(01:39:36):
names, the event of these women were concealed.
But if you did some digging fromPortnoy's response, you could
figure out their real names and Barstool readers.
The way that I figured it out isbecause I followed the reply.
I I followed what Barstool fans were saying about this at the
time and they were able to figure out who this who at least
one of the accusers was. You can call it reckless if you

(01:39:59):
want, but to me it is very much part and parcel of the way he is
always reacted when he's been criticized was to get a horde of
stoolies to do his dirty work for him.
Yeah, yeah. I, I mean, I'm personally like
not inclined to give him benefitof the doubt on that just
because by this point he's had, I mean, God, what, more than a

(01:40:20):
decade of experience with his fan base, he knows like how they
will react, right? I, I, I mean, like, that's just
my take. I I mean.
Right. Yeah.
I mean, there's, there's not. And then As for the, you know,
again, all his denials and it isabsolutely true that famous
people, like sometimes people will accuse them of things in

(01:40:40):
order to whatever to try to siphon money off of them or
whatever that I mean that that that that type of thing has
happened. Ford or just angry about
something in the past or want tothat that can happen in theory.
Again, also age gap. There's nothing there's nothing
inherently necessarily wrong with that.
There's nothing wrong with consensual rough sex.

(01:41:01):
OK, but there's a pattern with this guy.
And when you hear this, you know, I again, you can't.
I, I, I, he has denied it and all that stuff.
But there is a pattern with thisguy that we have covered already
on this, on this episode that isgoing back a pretty long way,
which makes me take those accusations very seriously.
On that note, somebody else who's been accused of sexual

(01:41:22):
assault. Amazing pivot.
Yankee very much someone who's been accused of sexual assault
and somebody who is in the news for his associations with a a
certain financier, Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump.
The New York hedge fund manager.The the the financier Jeffrey
Epstein has Dave Portnoy at the White House, invites him to the

(01:41:49):
White House, has a very avuncular kind of attitude with
him, brings him out and they have a like they sit out in out
outdoors. It's a sit down interview.
Dave is looking really serious and it's kind of like a huge
moment for him. It's it's a moment in which I
feel like he becomes much more polarizing of a figure because

(01:42:09):
people who just passively watched him to that point may
have sensed that he was reactionary to to a degree.
But I feel like this like, you know, all of a sudden he's like,
whoa, he's a Trumper. Like it like it's it spells it
out because he you're not everybody knows that those
things you were talking about him selling MAGA hats and all
that, whatever else. This time you like really see
him separate from the sports stuff.

(01:42:31):
He's there with Trump. And Trump is like, you know,
really, you know, lathering him with attention in this
interview, which is a complete softball type thing.
Chance for Trump to just run wild saying like, you know
everything that he wants to say.Yeah, this is really the moment
where this question of barstool,this is it was about them.
And I think I, I tweeted about the tweet that I had which gives

(01:42:53):
me ownership over the phrase barstool conservatives was there
are two kinds. In the future, there will only
be two kinds of conservatives, neo Nazis and barstool
conservatives and some nice writers from Politico.
I don't think they saw my tweet.I think they came upon this
independently, to be clear. But the basic premise was, well,
how do we understand how conservatism works today?

(01:43:13):
Not all of them are neo Nazis, of course.
What about and, and, and there are still some vanishingly few
William F Buckley rock ribbed, you know, Mitt Romney type
conservatives who are really in it for, you know, reducing
capital gains tax. But what about all these guys,
these low information voters, these guys who just want a chug
of beer and Ogle a woman and rooted for and, you know, play

(01:43:36):
fantasy football and and place acouple of bets and bro down with
their buds. What if they voted?
Who are they going to vote for? How do we attract their vote?
How do we sell them on the idea of an authoritarian state while
cloaking it in something relatively harmless?
Well, I would argue the perfect person to do that is Dave
Portnoy. And this is that kind of zone

(01:43:58):
when people say the manosphere, this is like the target
audience, or at least conceptually the target audience
of like the manosphere is the guys, guys, dudes rock.
Let's drink some cold ones. I hate politics, but I love this
guy kind of thing. Yeah.
And what they love it that what they love about this guy is that

(01:44:19):
again, what I've said a couple of times is it'll it's it's it's
about a bunch of children who don't want to take
responsibility for anyone or believe that a lot of other
people in the world are real people.
And they would rather be able totreat them as objects of
derision or hatred or both. And both Trump and Portnoy give
them license to do that. Now, it's very clear to me that

(01:44:42):
port noise politics got explicitly far more mogified and
conservative starting in 2020. And I think the pandemic played
a huge role in that. I, I don't, however, think it
was conscious. I think he was just doing what
he always does, which is this preternatural instinct for
finding wedge issues, placing himself in an extreme and taking

(01:45:04):
up arms. And that the, the, you know, the
COVID stuff, the Floyd, the George Floyd stuff, the the day
trading stuff. That's just where the action
was. And that's where Portnoy went.
I think if you like sat him down, hooked him up to a lie
detector and really grilled him about what he thinks about
things, he would stay stuff likeactually he is pro-choice.

(01:45:24):
And I, I think I believe that orhe doesn't, you know, he's not
particularly down with some of the open anti-Semitism that
we're seeing these days. In fact, there was an incident
very recently where barstool, which by the way now has enough
juice to be able to open barstool themed bars in various
places, where a bunch of people showed up holding up a sign that

(01:45:47):
said fuck the Jews. And Dave Portnoy got livid about
this and he his first response was to track down the people who
did it and he was going to give them a free flight to Poland to
visit Auschwitz because he wanted to educate them about the
history of the Holocaust. And then there was some more

(01:46:07):
drama and whatever, it ended up not happening.
The guy who did it backed out. And of course he's just another
influencer looking for an angle and didn't really care about it,
blah blah blah. But Portnoy seemed absolutely
baffled as to why. The idea that someone would
spout open anti-Semitism at a barstool bar, that's not a place
for guys in sheets. That's not a place for Patriot

(01:46:29):
Front. The barstool bar is a place for
Bros hanging out, having a good time, chugging beers, watching
the game. Which, by the way, I enjoy all
those things and they're totallyawesome and you can enjoy them
too. But he didn't understand.
Why are these white nationalistshanging out in my bar?
I'm offended by that. I think it's the first time I've
ever heard Dave Portnoy say he was offended.

(01:46:52):
But he was offended by this and he got very mad on air when
another employee was giving him his own line back to him saying,
what are you talking about? This is Kirk Minahan, who used
to be a Boston sports radio chud, who got hired by Barstool.
He's his own story. But Minahan was saying what?
You want to ban jokes now? Jokes are illegal?

(01:47:15):
Portnoy lost. It what do you want to do with
those guys in jail for 50 years?Fine.
I don't say that you're you're you're you're quite literally
changing everything you say, Kirk.
If you just want me to kick him out, not mention it, not care
that this guy shut up. If you just want me to ignore,
tell me. Don't tell me to shut up.

(01:47:35):
Don't shut the fuck up, you baldfuck.
OK, Go ahead. How's that?
Oh, it's kill. I'll never recover from that.
Dave, go ahead, continue. I'll never recover.
Well, you are the one who like. Oh, big boss man, Don't tell.
I'll tell you. Work for me.
OK, Go ahead. Continue.
Bitch, you work for me. Sure.
You bet. For now.
You did you. For now.
Quit. Is it is it show or not a show?

(01:47:55):
Like is a show or not a show? Like We can't have a
conversation. You're an idiot.
OK? You're literally saying people
should be allowed to make Jew jokes, say whatever they want
right fucking now. That's what I think people
should be allowed to make jokes.So how many mother fucking Jews
have to be killed before you stop that?
Everybody? I don't think what.
In this case, Portnoy was the social justice warrior because

(01:48:19):
in any Internet fight, someone has to be the Nazi and someone
has to be the social justice warrior.
It's interesting what you're mentioning here or it's like all
of a sudden now we're in this place where all of a sudden he's
offended about anti-Semitism because I do want to talk about
this angle of him. So because he's on the Trump
online, right, and he's in the MAGA world, I have said before,

(01:48:41):
I do think that the kind of anti-Semitic Trump supporter
online is under represented. It's under counted.
I think there's a lot of them, there's a lot of them.
There's a lot of them that are really driven by the idea that
to actually be America first, you need to extricate Israel
from our politics. And because they're MAGA and

(01:49:04):
they're not like, you know, thissound like in some sort of left
criticism of war or something like that.
It really comes down to we need to get rid of Jews right there.
You there's a lot, at least on the online spaces, not
necessarily all as voters, but at least in online spaces,
there's a lot of these people and they're actually much more
influential, I think than than people realize.

(01:49:24):
And they fucking hate Dave Portnoy.
I don't know if you've noticed this, but but but the kind of
the anti-Semitic America first types view him as this
degenerate, right. He plays into this kind of the,
the, the sort of anti-Semitic stereotype of, you know, selling
sex, selling this, selling that right is sort of to corrupt the,

(01:49:48):
the, you know, the gentile population and make money,
exploit people or whatever. And he is portrayed that way
online by a lot of people. And you see in his replies now,
I actually, I don't remember he was ratioed or whatever, but I
saw like, like some of his postsgetting like absolutely shredded
by these by coming out like these.
These people were driven by anti-Semitism and I I don't know

(01:50:10):
if it's like, you know, you lay down with dogs, you get fleas
type situation in your mind. I mean, you're Jewish.
I mean, I'm just curious like what what you think about that
because it seems like he seems alittle shock I guess is what I
would say. I think he's absolutely shocked.
I think he had. I don't think he had any idea
that this existed. I think he stays very much in

(01:50:30):
his lanes and is not the kind ofperson who is going to go and
read a report from the Stanford Observatory about the rise of
online extremism, for example. I, I, I don't think he is aware
of who he has allied with because I mean, I, I get why the
Trump campaign reached out to him and the Nelk boys and Rogan

(01:50:53):
and all the other parts of the manosphere that they reached out
to in 2024. By the way Portnoy appeared, you
know, was, had had Trump on shows in 2024 as well.
Like he, Trump was part of the Barstow was part of their ground
game both in 2020 and 24. But other parts of the minister

(01:51:14):
took over in a weird way for Portnoy.
And I think he absolutely has noidea what this is beyond someone
is attacking me. But the reason that they were
brought in for a first place wasto creamy a permission structure
for the people who aren't explicit neo Nazis to get on the
Trump train. And that's what Portnoy was was

(01:51:35):
doing. And that's why they did that
White House sit down interview because they wanted that
manosphere vote in 2024. They got it.
Yeah, they needed somebody to bethe face of this, like, really
vicious thing. Yeah, they were pulling it.
Yeah, and Portnoy is more acceptable.
Rogan is more acceptable. The Nelk boys even, You know,
what's his name? Who's that little runty dude who

(01:51:58):
hangs around with Nick Fuentes? I forget his name.
In any case, doesn't matter. There's like 10 of those guys in
Ross. I mean, Portnoy was the
acceptable front for fascism, and that's the role that he has
now. Does he want it?
Absolutely not. I think he would very much like

(01:52:19):
to turn back the clock five years and just stick with the
rank misogyny and, and, and and sort of nodding and and winking
racism that he engaged in beforethen.
Well, I, what I would say to that actually, which I think is
a, you know, I, I, I feel like important, it is important to

(01:52:41):
kind of get out there. You can't have fascism without
misogyny. It is it it, it no, but but I
mean, I'm not saying anybody, you know, this is like a
revolution. I thought about me, but it's it
is, it is like it, it is the the, the foot in for like so
many of these guys. And you have a guy like Nick
Fuentes who's had like so many questions about, you know, his

(01:53:01):
sexuality and all this other stuff.
You mean Nick, almost everythingabout what he says.
It's like, you know, we we know already everything we know where
he gets really creative is usually these horrific things he
says about women. Like he'll talk about taking
people back to the Middle Ages and like, you know, we'll, we'll
do this. We need to stone.
I don't, I can't remember all ofit, but I just like those are

(01:53:23):
the things that usually would would pop off as the most
shocking. So it's like even somebody like
Nick Fuentes, it's such a driverand it's such a big thing for
MAGA. It is really a misogynistic
country in many ways. And we, when we elected Trump,
we really opened the door for just, you know.
This is a crazy. Amount of this.
It's historically accurate. The Nazis were were rife with

(01:53:45):
misogyny. Go read some Hannah Orient kids.
This is not anything new and when you see those shows like
speaking into the manosphere nowhere where they bring upon
only fans, actors or women that they find and they figure out
ways to humiliate them like thatentire the entire parts like the

(01:54:06):
the pickup artist see which are a huge entry point for Trump is
politics. They are entirely based around
hatred of women, and Portnoy grew up online in a parallel
track with all of these movements to the point where
there really wasn't any difference at all.
And I think that is the story ofDave Portnoy and how he became

(01:54:31):
such an influential Maggie figure by marrying ostensibly
sports coverage. I'm going to use air quotes
around the word coverage there with reactionary online
politics. So, you know, we're going to
keep talking for a little bit, just kind of reflect on what
we've covered here. But before we do, I also just
have to say, Bob, thank you again for all the research and

(01:54:55):
reporting you did that made thisepisode even possible.
I mean, this is this is the, youknow, Bobby Silverman podcast
featuring posting through it as far as I'm, I'm concerned, you
know, so, so thank you again. I'm sure your brain must just be
so cooked. They they need to put you in a
CAT scan or MRI or whichever onethey use on your noggin and just

(01:55:16):
figure out how you're still alive.
And I sort of point out, I'm sure the audience is also really
grateful to Bob because I think a lot of people who listen to
this show are not like, probablyjust see Portnoy and don't
really, you know what I mean? They, they, they the type of
audience that we attract. I think, you know, probably just

(01:55:37):
sees Portnoy as an annoyance. So I think this is a really, you
know, it just kind of, I mean, that's the way I would
personally if I, if I didn't really scrutinize him like this.
And I'm, I'm, I'm only doing it largely because of you.
Thank you and I'm sorry. And, and in addition to
everything else, you're also a Mets fan.
And I'm so sorry. No, we're saying really, we did.

(01:55:57):
Wait, wait, wait. It's better we're we're not
spending time talking about the Mets bullpen today.
OK, that's off limits. It's worse than that.
It's Mets, Jets and we, we shareit.
We, we went to a Jets game tomorrow.
It was a. Good time.
So Bob, question for you as somebody who's covered Barstool
and Portnoy post 2024 election, the kind of hot thing in
Democratic fundraising, according to some reporting by

(01:56:20):
places like the New York Times is trying to find, you know, the
left wing equivalent to people like Joe Rogan or Dave Portnoy
or whatever. There's all this renewed
interest in understanding the quote UN quote manosphere.
We're getting sort of round two of the, you know, Nazi next door
style pieces. Again, I'm not saying Dave

(01:56:40):
Portnoy is a Nazi, but but that style of peace of like
presenting them as a curiosity to be understood, you know, and
it's like it's it's educated liberal bait stuff, right?
I am curious to what extent you think these characterizations of
Portnoy, Barstool, this portion of online media, Like do you get

(01:57:05):
the sense that, I mean, it's hard to tell, I guess, but like,
do you get the sense that this is really moving the needle?
I mean, important and Barstool are important enough that we've
devoted a whole episode to it now.
But I'm curious, just in the broader political landscape,
like underrated, overrated. Don't make me go full Bill
Simmons. Is Bar still having a moment?

(01:57:30):
I kind of think I haven't been paying since the last story I
did on Barstool was about two years ago, and I really honestly
haven't been paying as much attention to them since then.
I kind of think, given the stateof the country, where right now,
I think that the kind of contentand the kind of influencers that

(01:57:52):
have sprouted up around Portnoy have gotten so extreme that I
don't think he's as centered as he was a decade ago or eight
years ago. I think whatever comes next is
going to be wildly different. But again, we're in.
We're in such a moment right now.
Living in a competitive authoritarian regime, it seems

(01:58:14):
very hard for me personally to care too much about what Dave
Portnoy says and does, let alonewhat his site does.
We didn't really have a chance to get into it, but for anyone
who is interested, I would encourage everyone to read the
story. The last story I reported on
Barstool, which was in 2023, which is a long examination of
how a great deal of their success is just built on theft.

(01:58:38):
Like they steal a lot and the stealing is about increasing
their social media footprint. And the reason advertisers sign
up for them is because their social media sites just keep
growing and growing and growing and growing.
And part of the way in which they grow is that they steal
stuff all the time. Like this is the the entire site

(01:59:01):
is powered by a mountain of theft.
And what they're selling to advertisers is not just the site
social media presence, but literally Portnoy's social like
Twitter account. Like they count engagements
against that. And when they're calculating how
many ad dollars they're going tospend on Barstool, that's via
Dave Portnoy who said that and kind as a strategy.

(01:59:25):
I kind of got to tip my hat to aman that's brilliant.
People think social media numbers are real and can
actually move product. Then that's what he'll give
them. Does it matter if the numbers
are are based on anything at all?
No, but he'll keep going there. And if you want me to say what
do I credit Dave Portnoy for? That would be it first and

(01:59:48):
foremost. But as far as as understanding
Barstool now, for better or for worse.
And I think the world would be better place if Portnoy was the,
the most stark example of misogyny among the influencer
set. And for worse, I, I, I don't
think he is right now. I think, I think the fact that

(02:00:08):
he's getting ratioed by Nazis online should let you know
exactly where Barstool and he sit in the zeitgeist, Jared.
Who the hell is Dave Portnoy? Well, like I said earlier, I
think Dave Portnoy is somebody who runs a sports website, but

(02:00:29):
his social impact was what he laundered through it.
Not necessarily. I, I can't recall a single like
barstool article covering a sports event that I thought
like, oh man, they really got the scoop on like this trade
happening or really got the scoop on like this ownership

(02:00:51):
change or whatever. It's a skeezy blog that marries
the topic of sports with a wholehost of just gutter shit.
And I think Dave Portnoy is the humanoid embodiment of that
model. And I also think he's just a
hustler. It's like he he is headstrong

(02:01:13):
and has found a way despite scandals, despite the fact that
the website's really not actually driving that much
traffic to the site, right? He has found a way to force
success with it. And that's why I think Dave
Portnoy is Mike. Who the hell is Dave Portnoy?

(02:01:33):
I'll try to keep it short here. I, I just want to say that I, I
mean, I to me, Portnoy is a living symbol of what America is
right now in this moment. Like this is what this, you
know, I mean, it, it's, it's just exactly this sadly, shitty
content, low effort, taking shortcuts everywhere you can

(02:01:54):
possibly go, dehumanization of women, patriarchy and stupidity.
And and it and it's, and it's, you know, it's, it's perfectly
my, my sister said he is a face like a bridge troll.
I would agree with that. I mean, like the his charisma
is, is is basically centered around being a, a complete

(02:02:15):
fucking Dick, but maybe attractive to some very insecure
men. But I just feel like that's
where America is. That's why we elected Trump not
once, but twice and almost threetimes.
So yeah, I think he sucks. I hate the fucking Celtics.
And when we beat the Celtics, Nick Spencer, when we beat the
Celtics as old problems. You know, I, I was so excited

(02:02:39):
largely because of how much I disliked Dave Portnoy.
And it shouldn't be like that. I should just be enjoying the
Knicks. But I had to actually save for
it because I can't stand this guy.
Bob, who the hell is Dave Portnoy?
I think the thing about Dave Portnoy is whether it would have

(02:02:59):
changed a single thing, I don't have any idea.
But when you know, I was doing the majority of my reporting on
him and the website from about 2018 to 2021, I would say mainly
2018-2019 is when I mainly was reporting on him.
And it's another instance where this is someone where I thought
and, and as we said, sites like Deadspin were covering him,

(02:03:24):
except we're covering him extensively in 20/16/2017.
It's one of those instances where a lot of people in the
press when those stories came out, we're sort of confused or
wondered why anyone would care about this guy and why it was
important to write this up. And I think what we've, as you
said, Mike, he is very much a harbinger of what was to come.

(02:03:46):
And I think if the world had paid more attention to not just
what was reported in 2016, but what those women went through in
2012 and what all kinds of womenwent through at the hands of
Dave Portnoy and really treated what they said seriously, maybe,
just maybe, we might be in a better place now.
I think that's a good place to wrap it up.

(02:04:08):
Just a reminder before we get out of here as a thanks for all
of Bobby tireless work, part of your tip jar donations this
week. Link in the description is going
to take our friend Bobby here togo see the Mets with Mike.
It's a make a wish fun for a sadsports fan.
Think about it that. I mean, get him a ticket, we're

(02:04:29):
going to buy him a couple beers,a hot dog if he's if you guys
come through, you know, I mean. I'm pescatarian.
Yeah, this is peak barstool activity.
I'm going to go to a sporting event with a male comrade and
possibly and buy beverages. Come on, let me bro out.
If you support a healthy men's relationships, he'll he'll die
to the tip chart that OK, I can't do this, leave it.

(02:04:52):
In, leave it in, leave it in, let's get, I said.
Leave it in. Let's get out of here, Bob.
Where can people follow you, check out your work, send you a
note of appreciation, or ask youto guess whose ass that is?
Yeah, if you want me to get someone's ass, I'm on Blue Sky

(02:05:14):
at Bobby Silverman dot bsky dot social and that has a contact
info where if you'd like to dropme a line, you can find me there
too. Mike, you want to close this
out? Yeah, go go ahead and guess my
ass. Thanks everybody.
You guys are the best and we'll be back next week.
We'll see you then. Down.

(02:05:39):
On the beach. Sports, sports, sports.

(02:06:01):
Volleyball, naked girls and naked boys do the dance down on
the beach smoking dope. Shorts.
Shorts.

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027: Who the Hell is Dave Portnoy? feat. Robert Silverman

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