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The Rubin Report
Sports Fans Killed Woke Sports. This Is What Comes Next | Clay Travis
00:39:57
Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” talks to Clay Travis about building OutKick during the early days of independent media; the evolution of sports journalism before and after 2015; how podcasting shifted from audio to YouTube dominance; the impact...
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- [00:00]
Clay Travis
And we move from what I would say was the Jordan era to hey, your identity is going to define you in some way. This is where my book opens. Lia Thomas Winning the women's 500 meter NCAA championship to me in March of 22 was the absolute apex, the high tide, as it were, of woke sports. I also think this is where the dishonesty of social media had so much to do with it. You're making tens of millions of dollars as an athlete. You've got a team that's pretty much advising you on what you put up on Instagram or what you put up. And they were saying, hey, you don't want to get in crosswise with the trans community or you don't want to seem like you are speaking out against blm. That's the actual attack to me on sports is everyone is amoral. If the talent is good enough, that's where you can really like hey, is this the right message? My new book called Balls and it's how Trump Young men and sports fans saved America in the 2024 election.
- [01:01]
Dave Rubin
What do you make of generally like the, the economics around sports these days that it is just so freaking expensive to go to any game with a family. All right guys, as you know, it's August, so I am off the grid. But I did not want to leave you without content because content is king and you people need to watch us talk all the time. So I brought on another talker, Mr. Clay Travis, the breast man in all of sports media. How are you, my friend?
- [01:40]
Clay Travis
I'm doing great. Where is the. How many different destinations do you have for August planned?
- [01:46]
Dave Rubin
I don't want to reveal all of the secrets, but we'll be out and about, just not in places where people can find me. How about that?
- [01:55]
Clay Travis
That sounds fun. I'm actually always been envious of vanishing for August.
- [01:59]
Dave Rubin
So, you know, you can do it too, my friend. You've built businesses, you've sold businesses, you run your oper. It's all a matter of will.
- [02:07]
Clay Travis
But you know, whenever I miss on radio with Buck, it's a huge deal because people expect us to be there. YouTube, where you have built your universe, I think is actually the future. And I'm kicking myself for being, you know, a little bit behind the curb in a substantial way. But you were like, like on the front edge of this throughout and I saw a stat the other day I was reading over the weekend more people watch podcasts now than listen to them. Which if you had told me that five years ago, I would have said You're a total moron. There's no way that's going to happen. But guess where my boys spend all their time? YouTube and TikTok. That's it. That's where they are.
- [02:46]
Dave Rubin
That's actually, that's actually very interesting. And it's kind of where I wanted to start because obviously I kind of want to just talk a little bit about everything, a little bit more about life and career rather than just the usual minutia that we do with politics and everything else. But you, I, you started outkick in 2011, I started Rubin Report in 2013. And you just mentioned the audio podcast thing. And I always see these audio podcast lists ranking all of us in sports and politics. And I always think that I'm like, wait a minute, I don't really care where I'm at in audio because I'm a video show and that's where people are and yet people focus on that. But let's go back to 2011. What was young Clay, how old was Clay Travis in 2011?
- [03:25]
Clay Travis
We're about to say 32. Is that the right math? Basically, yeah. 31ish.
- [03:34]
Dave Rubin
What was Clay Travis thinking back in 2011 when he thought, boy, I'll build my own thing instead of going the mainstream route? Because that was early on. That was early on.
- [03:44]
Clay Travis
Yeah, it was. I was ahead of the curve then and I was terrified. I had a three year old and I had a four month old in January of 2011. And you may remember this site, some people may remember it called fanhouse.com. it was basically the front page of sports on aol.com which was still a very popular place to start the Internet. Even back in 2011.
- [04:10]
Dave Rubin
People don't remember. You had to sign up for AOL. You'd get that freaking CD, sign up for that. Well, they'd send you a new CD every day, but if you got one, you could get on. AOL was basically the portal to the Internet. I mean, it's making us sound old, but it is what it is.
- [04:22]
Clay Travis
Yeah. And by the way, Yahoo.com is still a place where tons of people start. Like it is their homepage when they get on the Internet every day. AOL still makes, I think several hundred million dollars off of aol. Like the dial, like, yes, I, I think so. I look up, have your team look up the. It's still a revenue producing. Some people think they have to pay to keep their email addresses. Right. Like if you're older, you're like, hey, I've been@aol.com forever. And so they're worried and they keep paying even though they don't use like the dial up Internet anymore. But so January 2011, Sporting News, another site that basically does exist, bought all of the site traffic that Fanhouse was using and they fired all of us. Like the whole group. I don't know, there are probably a couple of hundred of us. I love that job. I was traveling all over the country and, and I decided then and there with my 3 year old and my 4 month old, I didn't want anybody else to ever control whether I could make a living online. So I started outkick and did every ad sale, wrote every article. Like any small business that anyone starts, you had to wear a bunch of different hats. And we grew and you know, 2011, the world hadn't gone insane. This is what my book that's coming out in November is a little bit about. When did sports start going insane? I peg it right around 2015. 2016 was when like the wheels came off. For several years we just did fun. Hey, sports are awesome. Let's do drinking games for big games. Let's like make people laugh. And then sports suddenly turned into the most serious thing on the planet. And I wasn't willing to basically get in line and say, oh, you know, the NFL is racist. And man, the worst thing that could ever happen to somebody is they can play in the NBA. You know, I kind of like the idea of being a pro athlete and I don't think they're being unfairly treated or that America is an awful, fundamentally racist place. And that put me in a, in a corner of not very many supporters.
- [06:28]
Dave Rubin
Edgy stuff, man. Edgy stuff. America's not racist. Edgy. Do you look back on, I want to talk about with that 2015, 2016, sports going crazy. Because obviously that's kind of when politics went crazy too, because that's original Trump, you know.
- [06:42]
Clay Travis
Yeah, 45, that's right.
- [06:43]
Dave Rubin
But do you look back on those days of the grind? So you lose your job, you have young kids, you're doing all you said, you're wearing all those hats, all those. Do you look back on them as the good old days? Like obviously you're huge success now, financial success, you sold out kick, you're doing all. You're on a. The, I think, is it the number one talk radio show in the country? Like you're doing all this great stuff. But do you look back on that crazy moment as like, man, those were the good old days? Because I look at my days like that and I, I, I'm so much happier now. I have so much more. But they still feel like the good old days.
- [07:13]
Clay Travis
Well, I think it's the, the way to think about it is, and I think there's a sports analogy. I think a lot of coaches feel this way. A lot of times it's more fun to build than maintain. You've got a big audience now. I've got a big audience now. But you're maintaining the audience that you've already built as opposed to kind of being out in the open and fighting to kind of make your voice heard. And the highs and the lows. I would say for anybody out there that, you know, when we would get a new advertiser back in the day, you know, I'd run through the house, like, wanting to do cartwheels, jumping around like, hey, the mortgage is covered for the next several months. Like, my family's not going to go hungry. The stakes felt more substantial, and I would say this, too, in the wake of Trump winning, the stakes in the 2024 election felt big. I think when you're in the outside and you're looking in the whole Biden era, Covid, everything else, I felt like we were on the outside trying to get to the inside. And then I felt a tremendous sense of relief when Trump won in late November, because I just thought, okay, we got four years. I can breathe a little bit. I don't think it's going to be an unmitigated disaster, but I do think that challenge of maintaining versus building is something I think about a lot.
- [08:30]
Dave Rubin
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- [09:45]
Clay Travis
Out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
- [09:48]
Will
Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom offer.
- [09:56]
Dave Rubin
That's not the itinerary we're following.
- [09:58]
Will
Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.
- [10:12]
Dave Rubin
Bon voyage.
- [10:14]
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- [10:39]
Dave Rubin
Boy, I do like building. And it also I think it made me better as a pundit because I had more real world experience on the I knew how to pay people, I knew how to balance books, et cetera, et cetera.
- [10:50]
Clay Travis
Yeah, like I saw it. I bet you would feel this. Skip Bayless came out recently and said hey, in order to be great at my profession, I had to decide that I couldn't have kids. And I don't think I would have been a scintilla as successful as I am if I hadn't had kids. Right. It was the drive, I think, to provide and the drive to have success. And yeah, I loved all of it. I liked the fact of marketing. I liked ad sales. I you know, there was one point where I was making $45,000 a year doing local sports talk radio in Nashville three hours a day. And I went on the ad sales and one of our advertisers who was selling like bald men hair stroked a check for $50,000 for six months of ads that I was going to do and I Remember sitting there thinking, that check is more than I'm going to make for a whole year from one advertiser. So I think when you learn the.
- [11:42]
Dave Rubin
Business, look at that hair, man, you're doing all right.
- [11:45]
Clay Travis
Still got hair here. But when you learn the business, it makes you better at figuring out how to be better. And I think one thing I was a little bit unique of, I would just look at the data and I would say, if I'm going to be busting my ass, I want to bust my ass with topics that people care about, topics that are going to resonate. And, and, and I think that doing all of that, I'm still kind of amazed how many people have no idea how to make money at their for profit job or how that impacts their own ability. And remember, I mean, I think when you have young kids and you got a mortgage to pay and you are just grinding, that that motivation to learn is actually immediately usable. Right? You got all these guys sitting around getting MBAs that have way more knowledge about how to use an Excel spreadsheet than me, but they don't understand how to make money to actually run a profitable business because it's all philosophy to them. And they make 200k to work at some business and their success or failure is really hard to peg to the company. When you do everything, you take all the ownership on your shoulders and I think there's a great deal of freedom in that because you can't turn to somebody else and be like, you screwed this up, buddy. It's all on you. And I liked it.
- [13:02]
Dave Rubin
And not only is it all on you, but if it falls apart, like, dude, that's your. Like you're. At least you were wise enough to call it. Outkick.com I put Reuben right in there. There was no way, There was no way I could have scrolled out of that. What year did you sell? Outkick?
- [13:16]
Clay Travis
That's gotta be 21.
- [13:18]
Dave Rubin
21. Okay.
- [13:19]
Clay Travis
Yeah. So my deal as a part of the acquisition ends basically at the end of this calendar year. So I'm kind of sitting around like, hey, what. What is the world going to look like there? You don't get everything right. I was mentioning YouTube earlier. I think I probably overemphasized Twitter video. And I should have been way more. I could go back in time to myself and be like, hey, in 2018, you should have been like, twitter videos, fine. Periscope, all that stuff. Go all in on YouTube. I think we would have done better. You know, hindsight, you learn a lot but you know, like, in general, I think if you stack up that every day when you run a business, you have to make 20 decisions, I think I probably made 15 pretty good ones, three or four bad ones. And, and my one big gamble that was right is again, sports analogy. I figured name on the back of the jersey is going to matter more than name on the front. So I didn't feel compelled to work at CBS or ESPN or any of those. I saw that the social media era was going to favor, I think, and I still think it largely does individuals over big brands, even if those are big successful brands.
- [14:28]
Dave Rubin
No, and that's absolutely true. We can look at everything that's happened at espn. You know, Skip, who you mentioned might be a bit of an exception in that he ended up going for an organization, but the idea that, the idea that he felt he had to give up kids to become a successful spot broadcaster, boy, that is sad.
- [14:44]
Clay Travis
That's dark.
- [14:45]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, it is. It is kind of dark. So tell. So you, you sell outkick. Yeah, I, I assume that was the first time you probably had like real money, like real serious money, right? How, how did that change you or not change you or how did that embolden you to do more of what you do or, or whatever?
- [15:01]
Clay Travis
It was a great feeling. Like I, we signed the papers late at night and you know, my wife Laura, who, you know, it's like 2:30 in the morning and I got to get up and do my radio show, which the time was early in the morning and I'll talk about that in a sec. But I turned to her and I was like, hey, you know, we just paid for every kid or grandkid and you're probably going to live long enough to see great grandkids, to be able to go to any college they want to go to, to be able to pursue any education, any dream that they want to. That's a pretty amazing feeling for me personally. I slept for a couple of hours, I woke up and I went and I did my sports talk radio show. We weren't announcing it yet. And I think the ultimate sign that you're living life the right way is if you are fortunate enough to feel like you won the lottery. Everybody sits around and thinks, boy, what would I do if that scratch off lottery ticket? What if I won the Mega Ball or the Powerball, whatever the millions are. I wanted to do the exact same thing that I was already doing. And so that's when I felt like, hey, I really kind of won. Now sometimes I think I work Too much. And like you're going away for August. I think, you know, I took the kids to Australia. I think I'm more cognizant, as the kids have gotten older, of the fact that we don't have a ton of time with them. Meaning they're going to have their own girlfriends, they're going to have their own lives, college. And so I want to like, kind of fill in as many things as we can. So, you know, that was probably the biggest change is like, hey, we can afford to take an unbelievable two week trip to Australia and I want to go on a safari and I want to do a lot of cool travel things and we built a couple of awesome houses and that's great. But you know, the practical matter of it is I feel like I've got the best jobs in the country and I just want to keep doing what I do. And I think that's the ultimate sign of maybe living right in some way is wanting to continue to do more of what you've already done.
- [16:53]
Dave Rubin
When you were in Australia, did they tell you about the koalas who all have gonorrhea?
- [16:57]
Clay Travis
Yeah, I didn't realize that those, those, those koalas were so horny. I. We all got our picture taken with them and, and actually we saw a koala actually in the wild, which I don't know if it's incredibly common. My kids were all terrified of saltwater crocodiles, of course. And this will, you'll appreciate this. I probably. If you want to. There are many flaws that I have one of them and it could be good or bad as most, most attributes are. I am not very fearful. So everybody was like, they have these jellyfish that, you know, that everybody's supposed to be afraid of. And they tell you to put on a wetsuit and if you get stung, you might die. And I was like, the hell with this. Like, I mean, my kids were in it, but they were like, dad, you're not putting the jellyfish suit on. And I was like, ah, jellyfish. That's a Covid of the ocean. If they get me, I'll be fine.
- [17:52]
Dave Rubin
Of the ocean.
- [17:53]
Clay Travis
And my kids loved it because I called it the COVID of the ocean. And so literally we're on like snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. Everyone on the entire boat is like, you know, head to toe in these wildly uncomfortable, you know, like, suits, which I don't even know how effective they are. And I'm just out there, you know, don't even have flippers on. Just in A bathing suit, nothing else. Looking at, you know, pretty majestic sites. So I am not somebody who sits around, probably why I started a company and thinks, oh my goodness, this is going to go awful. I'm just going to bust my ass, work as hard as I can, and when my time's up, tap me on the shoulder, I'm good to go.
- [18:30]
Dave Rubin
So let's jump back to that 201516 thing that you mentioned, because I think most people view that as the beginning of when politics obviously changed and everything kind of went, went on steroids and Trump derangement and all that. And everyone understands the political version of that. And then Covid, blah, blah, blah. The sports version in retrospect now fully makes sense to me why it went crazy at the exact same time. Does it make sense to you as to why those things were lined up that way?
- [18:58]
Clay Travis
Yeah. So my new book that's coming out in November is called Balls B A L L S and it's how Trump young men and sports fans saved America in the 2024 election. So my thesis, and now I think you kind of get a little bit of a historic window to look at it is to me, sports started to go crazy about 2015 and it was pre Trump. And I'm curious if you remember this. What I saw was suddenly identity politics took over instead of merit. And the way that I would see it is instead of saying like, hey, I think this guy's going to be a good quarterback or not, somebody would be like, oh, you're saying that because he's black. And I'm like, what? Like every quarterback gets examined to the nth degree because it's a hard job to do and they're paying tens of millions of dollars and suddenly they're like, you know, the NFL combine is like a slave auction. That's what Colin Kaepernick said on YouTube. I mean, sorry, on Netflix. And I'm looking around like, did slaves get multi million dollar guaranteed contracts? You know, and so I think it started in retrospect now actually with Michael Sam, because he is the first player that wasn't actually that good that I remember got covered entirely because of his identity. Because he was gay. He was gay. I couldn't even remember.
- [20:15]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, he was gay.
- [20:16]
Clay Travis
He was a first round draft picking gay. Okay, let's talk about it a little bit. But most sports fans just care about, for better or worse, how good of a player you are. Don't give away. Look, you can kill somebody in a car accident, you can murder someone. But if you're really good. They'll make excuses and they'll be like, hey, you should be able to play. And then it went to Caitlyn Jenner and they gave ESPYs. ESPN did back to back years only for identity, not for something that someone had done outside of the identity.
- [20:47]
Dave Rubin
Wait, so Michael Sam won one too? I don't even remember.
- [20:50]
Clay Travis
I don't even.
- [20:51]
Dave Rubin
Did he ever play in the NFL?
- [20:53]
Clay Travis
Even never played in an NFL game. Was a seventh round draft pick. He was seen as kind of the classic, not big enough to play defensive in, not fast enough to play linebacker. He was a very successful player at the University of Missouri. And, and he did not make it in the NFL. And so he got the SB for courage in 15. Caitlyn Jenner got or, sorry, 14. I think Caitlyn Jenner got the SV for courage in 15. And from there then Colin Kaepernick takes a knee in 16 and it was like all that mattered was identity politics. And we moved from what I would say was the Jordan era of hey, Republicans buy sneakers too, everybody loves great athletes to hey, your identity is going to define you in some way. Whether it's Megan Rapinoe, Steve Kerr, Gregg Popovich, LeBron James. They all kind of started to, to slice and dice what had been a universal sports audience. And I, I would say this is where my book opens. Leah Thomas Winning the women's 500 meter NCAA championship to me in March of 22 was the absolute apex, the high tide as it were, of woke sports. And that was the moment when it finally went too far. And the pushback now has been intense and I think has wrapped up with sports fans, young men trump all the people just saying we're over this.
- [22:21]
Dave Rubin
This month, Tax Network USA is celebrating American.
- [22:24]
Clay Travis
Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
- [22:28]
Will
Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips but I did switch to T Mobile with their new family freedom offer.
- [22:36]
Dave Rubin
That's not the itinerary we're following.
- [22:39]
Will
Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.
- [22:52]
Dave Rubin
Bon voyage.
- [22:54]
Commercial Announcer
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- [23:19]
Dave Rubin
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- [24:06]
Clay Travis
It's funny that you mentioned the propeller angle. I deleted a tweet. This is in the book where when Leah Thomas won the title, I said, Leah Thomas wins women's 500 meter title, pulls dick out, swings it like a propeller to celebrate.
- [24:21]
Dave Rubin
Stole that from Clay.
- [24:22]
Clay Travis
I I said, well, I used to talk about helicopter dicks back in the day and twirls dick like a helicopter. And, and I deleted it because I was like, well this I don't want to. We actually did really good work that is adult like on outkick covering this. And I was like, well, I don't want to step all over my guys that are covering this as a real news story. But I did put it in the book and, and look, I think Trump is actually more of a symptom of the crazy than the cause of it. I think he kind of just stepped into it and started looking around a little bit like you and me and remember we met when they tried to cancel me because I said the first Amendment and boobs on CNN eight years ago now. And that was when they really kind of came for me and said we're going to end this guy. They failed. And, and since then it's kind of continued to, to grow, I would say the audience.
- [25:12]
Dave Rubin
So even though we both kind of agree that, okay, 2015, 2016, you can see how sports and politics, it was on the same track Going together. Do you find it weird that. That somehow the athletes themselves didn't have a better defense against it? Like political people, they all move in herds and everyone's got their whatever. But sports is the ultimate. Is the ultimate negation of what should be, of what we think of as identity politics. You don't care when you're on the court. So it's one thing that the corporations were pushing BLM and all the garbage on us, but you would have thought maybe, or maybe this is just fantasy land, that the athletes themselves would have done a better job. But I guess at the end of the day, everyone's getting a check.
- [25:50]
Clay Travis
Yeah, everybody's getting a check. I also think this is where the dishonesty of social media had so much to do with it is you're making tens of millions of dollars as an athlete. You've got a team that's pretty much advising you on what you put up on Instagram or what you put up. And they were saying, hey, you don't want to get in crosswise with the trans community, or you don't want to seem like you are speaking out against blm. And so you would like to think that these guys would be. Not be cowards, but the Aaron Rodgers is of the world. Were actually a rarity. And what I would say is I think this is where the teams kind of often have these players by the balls. A lot of these guys don't make very much money, and so they don't want to rock the boat, most of them, because the guaranteed contract, $50 million a year Guy is actually the extreme exception. And so a lot of the guys, I think, were making a decision, hey, you know, in the NFL in particular, average career is like three and a half years. I'm 23. Do I want to lose my job because I say that Michael Sam's not a hero or that Leah Thomas, you know, shouldn't be winning a championship while he still had a dick. And women's swimming? No, I'm just going to pretend that doesn't exist. And then I think the algorithms were so rigged that a lot of these executives who knew this was all bullshit were cowards. And now you're seeing them do what they know they should have done years ago, and they're basically using Trump as the protective shield to allow them to do what they know they should have been doing for years.
- [27:26]
Dave Rubin
Right. I think behind the scenes, especially now, these guys are all applauding Trump across the board because they can get back to what the core competency is. But what do you make of, like, when. When Kaepernick really was going crazy with all this stuff and. And then BLM and all this stuff that, you know, he couldn't get on a team, and he went to a couple tryouts, he couldn't get on a team. And my position kept being, well, first off, he was aging out a little bit, but he was still basically okay. But what I kept saying about it was, even if he was basically okay enough to get on a team or maybe even a little better than okay, teams just won't pick him up because they just don't want the headache like that. The headache was actually bigger than the whatever return they thought they were going to get with his arm.
- [28:07]
Clay Travis
Look, what I always say, and I think this is a good life lesson. No matter what you do, if you're a roofer, if you're a mechanic, if you're a YouTube host, if you are a star athlete, as long as your talent exceeds your problems, people will employ you. Right? But then when you go off the crazy train, like Keith Olbermann did, or you start losing $40 million a year like Stephen Colbert did, you can sometimes be arrogant enough to think that your talent exceeds your problems. And what you will find is the market will tell you. And I think the market told Colin Kaepernick. Look, I've said it for a long time. People used to get mad at me back in the day. If Aaron Rodgers had taken a knee because he thought America was too mean to isis, somebody would have signed him to play in the NFL. Right. Aaron Rodgers could have been like, hey, I'm taking a knee during the anthem because isis, we're killing too many terrorists. And somebody would have been like, yeah, you know, I don't really agree, but, man, he's a better quarterback. He's the mvp. He's better than anybody else. You can get away with a lot. I don't think it's coincidental that Aaron Rodgers, like, screw you guys. I'm not taking the COVID shot. Most receivers who are making $600,000 a year, like, you know, I'm way more in danger from football than Covid. You can give me 50 shots, I don't care. Guys are warriors, Right? Right. And so I think the number of players whose talent truly exceeds their problems and is actually very low. And I think that's true across the board. And so I think most teams looked at Colin Kaepernick, said, we don't see him As a top 10 quarterback in this league. Why do we want to Bring in the distraction to our team for a backup quarterback. Again, if he had been Patrick Mahomes, Patrick Mahomes could take any political stance he wants on the planet right now. Josh Allen could. Heck, Deshaun Watson got accused of when they still thought he was good, sexually assaulting, like 30 women. And the Cleveland Browns gave him the biggest contract in the history of sports. Now, they not happy with it now, but it's because he's not very good, not because of what he did off the field.
- [30:09]
Dave Rubin
Right.
- [30:10]
Clay Travis
That's the actual attack to me on sports is everyone is amoral. If the talent is good enough, that's where you can really like, hey, is this the right message? Ray Rice knocks his girlfriend out. We're going to not fire him until we realize he only averaged 3.9 yards of carry and we can actually find somebody better. It's not because he knocked his girlfriend out. It's because he knocked his girlfriend out and he wasn't averaging six yards of carry. That's a real criticism of sports, that all that matters is your talent. But most people went to race, they went to identity, and I think they missed the mark on that.
- [30:44]
Dave Rubin
Right. In general, it tells you something about power. I mean, there's plenty of people that were partying with Harvey Weinstein for years. Plenty of. Plenty of people that were partying with P. Diddy for years. Plenty of people that were partying with both of them for years.
- [30:54]
Clay Travis
But, you know, will they be And Epstein. Right, like, exactly. Until somebody actually faces Even if you even. And you can't tell me some of those guys weren't like, boy, you know, some of these Harvey stories. Little bit, A little bit. They sound a little odd. They even made jokes about. Right? Like, you go and look, everybody was joking. Boy, Harvey's always banging some new Hollywood star. Like, really, why are they doing that? You know, Tom.
- [31:18]
Dave Rubin
Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder basically plays Harvey Weinstein. And it's pretty obvious what he was anyway.
- [31:25]
Clay Travis
And by the way, Tropic Thunder, great movie.
- [31:28]
Dave Rubin
Great movie, Great movie. Never go full retard, bro.
- [31:31]
Clay Travis
Yes. Robert Downey Jr. Played. I'm talking about, played a black guy. Tom Bruce played Harvey White. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
- [31:44]
Will
Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new family freedom offer.
- [31:52]
Clay Travis
That's not the itinerary we're following.
- [31:55]
Will
Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.
- [32:08]
Dave Rubin
Bon voyage.
- [32:10]
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- [32:38]
Clay Travis
I think you and I have talked about it. You know I'm hopeful that good comedies can come back because for about a decade Hollywood's been so afraid of offending anybody that they really haven't made a great comedy in about it. And you know, since 2012, ish. Probably that's also popped in I think with this era.
- [32:54]
Dave Rubin
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- [34:47]
Clay Travis
Yeah, look, when I was a kid, we didn't have a lot of money. Got to go to games occasionally, and we were experts at watching to see who the ushers were, doing a very good job. And you'd be like, okay, we got two options. We can risk it and hope that people aren't coming late. Or, you know, and then you keep scooting over and you're always looking over your shoulder like, oh, no, is this person going to tell us that we're in their seat? Right. Is the usher going to come kick us out? Or you would sometimes wait till like the fourth or fifth inning and then you try to sneak in to get closer. I am blown away by what it costs to be a dad taking a couple of kids to a game Now. I it. And I feel fortunate, like, we can get good seats now. Like, my kids have a. Have a good. Have a good life. But I do, as a guy who grew up knowing how important it was to go to a game, the fact that players just sit out. Right. That load management exists, you know, every time that you got to go. I got to watch Michael Jordan in an exhibition. He didn't have to play. He played. Cause he wanted to put on a show for kids like me that might have never gotten to see him in person otherwise. He didn't want to be a poor representation. I think Charles Barkley's got it right. He said, look, if you sit out and you're healthy, you should have to sit on the concourse and sign autographs and post the whole game. Right. You know, and I don't think that's bad advice. I think about this all the time. You know, you get Christmas and your dad got you tickets, mom got you tickets for one game, and then it's your favorite player, and you go. And I'm not talking about being injured. I'm talking about they just decide they're not willing to play. It's like, man, that sucks. And I think the cost and, and to your point, the ability and ease of watching high level. A lot of times my kids, look, they can find any game on the Internet without having to have a cable subscription or without having to pay for anything. I think they're going to have to figure this out. And I think continuing to charge more, which has been the solution so far, eventually you get to a price point where people just say that's too much for me.
- [36:52]
Dave Rubin
Do you see any solution to that on the horizon? Because also the tech is obviously getting so much better that you will consistently feel and more like you're at the game to the point that, I mean, they're already starting this. You'll wear a meta and someone else will have the camera on the floor of the Lakers game and you're, you're going to be right there with them.
- [37:08]
Clay Travis
So I think my boys, probably not a surprise because of what I do, we watch a lot of sports. When I talk to my friends who have young kids and I'm talking about, you know, like teenage kids on down, they're like, man, they never sit and watch a whole game anymore. They get on Instagram and they see like a two minute highlight reel.
- [37:25]
Dave Rubin
That's interesting.
- [37:26]
Clay Travis
Yeah. And so I think one of the challenges you have, and I give credit to baseball for instance, and saying, hey, we're going to try to make all our games about two hours long. I think some of the stuff you're going to have to the NFL maybe is, is, is safe because they only have one game a week where you have to watch in college football too. But I think when you're trying to get 162 games or you're trying to get 82 hockey games or 82 NBA games, look, when I was a kid we didn't have a lot of great options for entertainment. You know, like nowadays every kid expects that everything that has ever existed in the history of entertainment should be immediately findable at like one click on their phone or on their iPad, their tablet, whatever it is. And I do think that Reed Hastings is, he's got a great take on this. The, the guy at Netflix said, look, we're not really competing with anybody at this point. Other than sleep. There is only so many hours a day that people can consume content. And I think about this now when everybody's going to have their own streaming service and when everybody's going to have all of this different competition rolling in, there are only so many hours. And so developing die hard fans is important. And I don't know that sports is doing that with 10, 12, 15 year old kids.
- [38:39]
Dave Rubin
What do you think the next evolution of all of this is? The sports stuff, the politics stuff. You mentioned the audio side, there's the YouTube side, just all of these. You mentioned a contract ending. I mean, where do you see going for all of us, for you, et cetera?
- [38:54]
Clay Travis
I think everything's becoming one. When I started, I was, I would dream of getting on an ESPN or Fox or CBS on television. I've done that. Now I would rather have a powerful YouTube channel of my own than be on any television network in America at this point. And I think what's interesting is you're now seeing the TV people and I was a little bit on the front edge of this, but they're taking the people from the Internet and giving them television shows and sometimes not even, not even producing it, they're just like, hey, we're taking this and we're going to put it on television. And so I think what you're seeing is everything's coming together. And I think ultimately being smart, original, funny, authentic, you got to be at least one of those four. If you hit all four, your audience gets bigger. I think audiences for the big shows are going to get bigger. I think there's going to be like a hollowing out where there is either you're huge or you don't matter. And, and I think the battle to be huge is going to be colossal because like you and I, we had to build audiences on the Internet. I like to use the analogy where like Bane, you know, like we were born in the darkness.
- [40:03]
Dave Rubin
We were born in it.
- [40:05]
Clay Travis
Yeah. You know, I didn't even see the light, whatever that that phrase is. You know, when you're on television or you're in a newspaper or these other media companies, you only have to beat like two or three people. Right. If you're on Fox News, you just have to beat the moron on msnbc, at cnn. When you're on the Internet, you have to be better than like a thousand people. And so the quality of content on the Internet, to me, because competition makes everybody better, has to be way better in general than what you would find on newspapers or websites back in the day or certainly on television. So I think we're going to have a huge battle royale. And I think you're already starting to see it. Big media companies are going to try to go buy the guys and gals who already have audiences because they're aware that they don't create stars anymore. And it used to be like you could snap your fingers. Hey, the friends, kids are all going to. Everybody's going to. There's that great story where it's like they go out to dinner in Vegas and they're like, your show is about to start. This is the last time you're all going to be able to be together and be anonymous. Netflix front page, Fox News, maybe. I think they're like the last two places that can actually still make stars. Otherwise, you've got to fight it out in the mud of the Internet and over time produce good content and create an audience.
- [41:25]
Dave Rubin
Right. It's so interesting. The chair itself used to mean something.
- [41:29]
Clay Travis
That's right.
- [41:29]
Dave Rubin
They could just put you in the chair and it would mean something. That's why I always, you know, this Abby Phillips on cnn, she strikes me as so dim and untalented and not bright or anything. And I'm like, lady, they just put you in a chair and one day they're just going to move you out of that chair. It's as simple as that.
- [41:46]
Clay Travis
Yeah. And look, these executives, or Colbert even.
- [41:49]
Dave Rubin
Who you said, yeah, I took a lot of money, dance around with the vaccine.
- [41:53]
Clay Travis
And by the way, not just those guys, it's the executives used to make a lot of money to decide who's the best. Now I think the Internet, the public at large decides. It used to be top down. We're going to make you think. Now I think it's bottom up and I think all that's coming together.
- [42:09]
Dave Rubin
Well, Clay, Travis, I have a feeling we'll do this again. But I'm off staring at nothing right now, probably. And you're still working. So who's really winning here?
- [42:17]
Clay Travis
You know, you're winning, you're winning. At some point, I'm going to take a kid, my wife. I'm going to take my phone. I'm going to throw it as far into the ocean as I can. I'm going to vanish for like six months. Just travel. Nobody's going to know where I am. I don't know what it's going to be, but it's going to happen.
- [42:30]
Dave Rubin
You know, I think I saw some of the plans for one of those houses you're building, and I think you'll be okay.
- [42:36]
Clay Travis
I think we're doing okay.
- [42:38]
Dave Rubin
Good to see you, my man.
- [42:39]
Clay Travis
Good to see you as well.
- [42:44]
Dave Rubin
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- [43:12]
Clay Travis
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Clay Travis
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Clay Travis
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Clay Travis
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