Katie Nolan on the sports gambling takeover, covering politics, and the slow return of the boys' club

0:10Well, it's official. It's the summer of sports here in America. The World Cup has brought soccer to North America and the homes of millions of Americans watching every night and every day. The offices, including our office, you know, across the country. Knicks mania right here in New York City has brought A-list celebrities and even the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, right to Madison Square Garden for the NBA finals. Live sports are seemingly kind of the only thing that people are still watching on television. Ratings are up for Major League Baseball. They're up for the NHL. They're up for men's and women's basketball.

0:48People are watching this stuff still on live television. And of course, the team valuations and the broadcast rights for these games and these teams are commanding astronomical price tags. But not all of this is rosy and uncomplicated. Sports gambling money has changed the leagues, the players, and even the sports media outlets that are covering all of this. Politics and sports remain a sticky topic as political figures debate gender in sports and the global nature of sports has created thorny geopolitical situations. One need look no further than the situation with Johnny Infantino, who we talked to at the Semaphore media event earlier this year.

1:30But to help us sort through all of this and navigate the new sports media landscape, Ben Smith and I sat down with Katie Nolan. In sports terms, Katie is kind of like the sports media journeyman. She has been everywhere. She's a longtime personality familiar to viewers at Fox Sports. She's appeared on ESPN. She's hosted shows. She's hosted Snapchat shows. She's hosted YouTube shows. And now she is hosting the new podcast Casuals for Sirius XM. And she's appearing on fan service on the Mad Dog Sports Radio Network for Sirius XM. Well, we wanted to talk to her about her new show and whether a market still exists for casual sports fans.

2:11We wanted to ask her why she's never shied away from the kind of difficult and thorny and sometimes challenging sports political stories that a lot of sports reporters and shows want to run far away from. And we wanted to ask her about why she still doesn't take money from sports gambling companies, even though it seems to be a pretty lucrative situation these days. So just a quick note, we're trying to do more of these interviews in person. And this episode had a few slightly kind of annoying audio hiccups. So please excuse us for that. But it's all in service of the show and making the interviews more dynamic and interesting, which we think happens when we do these things in person.

2:50We thought it was a really interesting conversation still, and we wanted to bring it to you warts and all. So Katie Nolan, Mixed Signals, we've got her on the show right after this break.

3:06Hi, I'm Joshua Spania, VP of Marketing at Google. And you might assume I have all the answers when it comes to marketing. The truth, I'm just as curious to learn, discover the answers to everything as everyone else. We are living through a total reset of our marketing industry. The old maps don't work, which means we get to chart a new path forward. It's dynamic, it's fast-paced, and honestly, there's never been a more exciting time to be in marketing. That is why we've started a new podcast, Frontier CMO. It's from Think with Google, and I promise it's not just a bunch of corporate waffle. I'm sitting down with people who really know what's going on.

3:50CMOs, creators, technologists, the lot. And we're having a proper, unfiltered chat about what's working, and quite frankly, what isn't? These are your notes from the frontier. So do me a favor, search for Frontier CMO wherever you get your podcasts or watch us and subscribe on YouTube.

4:15I was listening to your show Casuals on SiriusXM. Yeah, absolutely. And it was interesting because you know, it's, it's a, it's on YouTube, it's built kind of for the internet. And yet you kind of steer it in a way that reminds me of like shows like PTI or these other shows like on ESPN, where you're just like rattling through a bunch of topics really quickly. And you are like the captain of the ship, kind of like the anchor steering between, you know, world cup stuff, NBA stuff, you know, NFL, uh, you know, NFL stories. I mean, are you, do you feel like you've brought some of kind of that old, you know, television, you know, TV anchor kind of stuff style to kind of this new medium?

4:58Yeah, that's really interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way, but probably, yeah. Like when we launched Casuals, my whole vision for it was that I had been a little bit removed from sports for a sec and was kind of re-approaching it with new, fresh eyes. And in the time that I wasn't working as closely in sports, I would talk to a lot of people who were like, yeah, I like sports, but I don't know them like you. And they were always qualifying it with like, I won't talk sports with you. You are such an expert. And in my head, I always feel like I don't know enough anyway, because there's so much to know in sports.

5:28And so when I launched Casuals, I wanted to make those people feel invited and welcome in the conversation. And I also wanted to take like smaller sports and make sure that they all, if something very interesting happened in a smaller league or a sport that maybe doesn't get covered as much on TV, I wanted to make sure that we got it into the show because it was something interesting and worth talking about. And so because of that, and because we try to keep it to an hour, which we do a horrible job of doing, I don't think they've ever been an hour. It just sort of, yeah, naturally, I guess, started to organize our rundown for the show the same way that you would for a TV show.

6:01Because for me, it's just easier to always have a framework to eventually blow up and go off book. But if I have something to stick to, I just feel like a responsibility to make sure we get to every sport that has something interesting to talk about that day. The way I pictured casuals working was that it would sort of be a pipeline to people to those things. So if they were not, you know, maybe they come into it as a big basketball fan, but they really don't care for hockey. But we talk about hockey on the show and then they go, oh, I'm starting to like hockey. Now I'll find my local hockey team.

6:34Then I'll get into a niche hockey podcast. I sort of saw it as like a a gateway into all of that, the things that sports media has to offer, which like you said, a lot are focusing on more niche audiences. I think it's easier, not saying it's easy to do that, but it is easier when you have an audience, you know, is tuned into that team. You know, they don't, you basically know what they're looking for and what they want to hear and care about. Whereas on casuals and with a more broader audience, it is sometimes tough to go. Are we talking about this? Cause I care about it. Or is this something that more people will care about?

7:07And I think sometimes what I struggle with when we're building our rundown is like, how much time do you give each thing? Whereas on a more niche podcast, it sort of naturally flows. And if the conversation stays in one place for a while, that's where the conversation was going to stay anyway. Whereas on our show, I have to be like, we can only give three minutes to what happened in lacrosse because we have to move on to the World Cup. The show strays into politics quite a bit or drives into politics a lot, which is kind of out of fashion at the moment in American media. certainly in sports media.

7:37Is that a choice? Are your friends at Sirius trying to get you to stop? No, they've been actually fantastic with like not, I don't want to say not caring, but certainly have not like come to me and been like, hey, maybe less of that. And look, I hate talking about it, but a lot of the time it's inserting itself into sports. I think I feel like politicians have figured out that there's a lot of passion and excitement in sports and they like to co-sign it to try to take draft off of it basically and get some of the motion. I'm thinking specifically of like the way the White House involved itself in the hockey team winning the Olympics.

8:17And it was sort of like unavoidable in terms of a topic to discuss because, I don't know, just as a hockey fan who's watched hockey forever and who has been advocating loudly for hockey, It was frustrating for me to be like, you know, in general, why would you want to party with the top cop in the locker room? It's not the first thing I think of when I'm like, let's drink and invite the FBI. It just like doesn't seem logical to me. And so, you know, I wish they would go away and stay out of sports so that we wouldn't have to talk about it. We had Clay Travis on a little while ago. And to the degree politics is talked about in sports, it is mostly sports has gotten too woke and there's a lot of backlash energy.

8:56are there people I mean have you found that there are people who like want to they're who want to talk progressive politics in sports I mean it feels like you and Pablo sort of opened a bit of a vein there yeah it feels like uh it's funny mentioning Clay Travis because I feel like when he started getting very popular it was that he didn't want anyone to talk about politics right yes that was his thing and now but it's your fault it's a it's but what backlashes are about now somehow that's his whole thing yeah so a little interesting um but yeah i just feel like it did become very quickly like oh too woke we don't want to talk about it and now i yeah i think it's silly i think my job as a person who watches a lot of sports considers herself sports fan but is not an athlete and covers the sports is just like if the athletes voice an opinion or have a thought about um you know how they're treated or perceived um it's our job to kind of listen to that and help them communicate what they're feeling and thinking and so those are usually the moments that i feel like we step into it uh or at least used to and then the clay travis's of the world figured out how to monetize the opposite is that aperture widening like we get more kind of like jackson dart kind of like do you feel like it's more which was sort of like a medium-sized mess but maybe five years ago there would have been like a huge mess and it sort of like it kind of came and went and his teammates yelled at him, but it didn't ever boil over.

10:21Like, do you think that's changing in some way? Yeah, I have no idea. I wish I knew better. I wish I understood better where everybody was at and what was happening politically. All of us. I just feel very confused by a lot of what's happening in the moment. I know what I feel and what I think, but I also know that a lot of people might not care what I feel and what I think. And so I try to wait until it collides with sports. And then I tried to explain for those who might not understand where the person is coming from. So like the Abdul Carter angle of the Jackson Dart stuff was more like I felt like explaining why he might have an issue with Jackson Dart endorsing the president in the way that he did.

11:00Which, by the way, what we kind of focused on was how weird the words were. It was just like a confusing, starting a giant's chant at the, and then when he said, I'm pleasured to introduce, it was a tough choice I think he maybe backed himself into. So, yeah, I think the whole thing's kind of, it feels like a circus to me right now, and I don't really know why he. But it isn't, maybe he was just tripped up because Trump couldn't stop talking about how handsome he was. Maybe. His thigh, the size of his thighs. That would trip me up as well. Yes, of course. Trump was talking about my physical appearance.

11:34Before we kind of move on from the topic, I, you know, did you, you worked at Fox, you worked at ESPN. There were, those were places that had some big, particularly ESPN had some like big internal conversations to a lot of the people who were there at the time around like how much, you know, particularly several years ago around like, how much should they discuss, how much should politics be a part of like, it's in particular moments of what it was incredibly obvious part of the story, how much Should they kind of focus on that? I mean, did they ever kind of, you at times had moments that got picked up, you know, for your comments that you were making and, you know, about like, for example, like sexual assault and violence in the NFL.

12:10Was there ever anybody who told you like, hey, like, you know, you should cool it on this, like at ESPN or Fox? No, but I also, one of the most fascinating things about working in TV for me was how little I heard from anybody. I was always very surprised by like, oh, even when an article would be written that was like, oh, should this happen to this person? I was like, no one's ever coming to me and really giving me a note. So, no, I don't think anybody. Also, most of my angles towards politics were like, why do we have to keep talking about this? But not in the way that's like, let's never talk about this or like no one else can talk about this.

12:48My thing was more like, why, what a boring thing to discuss when we could be discussing the fun and the craziness of what happens on the field. There's so much to talk about. The, like, insertion of politics into it was frustrating. But no, I don't think anybody ever sat me down. I also differ with people on what qualifies as politics. Yeah. So to me, like LGBTQ issues, while I understand there are you have to politically advocate for human rights in that regard. To me, it's not political for somebody to be gay or for somebody to be like, I'd like to be treated like a human being and have the same rights just because I'm, you know, a lesbian.

13:27Like, I think that that to me is not politics the same way that other people would say, like Clay Travis was like, basically said that being black or gay is political inherently. And to me, I was like, I think that's more inherently human and humans engage in politics. And so I feel like anytime I kind of got into it on political stuff, it wasn't actually about politics. It was about like women's rights. or congressional map. Yeah, we're not talking about like healthcare. We're talking about like, you know, people having people issues.

14:10In this week's branded segment from Think with Google, I talked to Google's VP of Marketing, Josh Spanier, about AI's evolution. It's been a few weeks since we talked about AI, Josh, but in your Frontier CMO podcast and in your conversations with marketers, how are feelings about AI evolving? Ben, this sounds a little cheesy, but I've been thinking about this in terms of uh-oh to let's go. The first three years of the digital transformation, the AI transformation we've all been going through was really around uncertainty and efficiency, getting more for less. But what I'm seeing with really advanced progressive marketers is that efficiency only gets you so far.

14:49And actually, the let's go part of this is reinventing marketing, using new tools, new systems, new ways of working to actually do things that in marketing we've never been able to do before. So inside of Google Marketing, we've been able to synthesize creative testing, outcome-based planning, synthetic audiences, idea generation in the space of an afternoon to actually find new things that we've never done before. That's really, really exciting. This let's go attitude is actually being reflected in how people are using Google's products as well, which is really, really exciting. How they're using AI mode in search, how they're using creative tools to generate stuff for YouTube.

15:25It's actually seeing people really excited about the possibilities. Instead of asking or fearing what AI is going to do to them, asking what they can do with AI. That's a whole mindset shift, which I think is really, really exciting. You can hear more of Josh's conversations with marketers on his new show, Frontier CMO.

15:50so what other thing you know to to move on from uh you know one light topic to the other i'm kind of curious one thing that's happened a lot in your industry in the sports media industry is the impact of prediction markets of uh sports gambling i'm actually surprised given how much they spend uh that like polymarket and calci aren't here or like why thinking that i just haven't bumped into that. I have not seen... No, they're not here. We haven't seen... I don't see, like, DraftKings. Like, there's no... Why are they just... They're not in the advertising business. They're in a better business, you know.

16:20Taking money from people. Yes, yes, yes. But they do spend a lot on advertising. But I'm curious, like, you know, I feel like I picked up some skepticism of, you know, the prediction markets and sports gambling in some of your coverage in some of the podcasts. I'm kind of curious, how do you think sports gambling and And the sports gambling advertising has changed sports media. Yeah, it's tough because we are at an advertising conference. And I always have to couch my full opinion because I don't want to off-put anybody. Our strategy and what Sears has actually been very supportive of is I said I don't want any gambling advertising on our sports podcast.

16:59Just because I'm not even like morally opposed to gambling. I don't do it, but that's because I wouldn't be good at it. And it would make me more upset by sports than I already am. I sort of gamble with my heart instead of with my money and it hurts just as bad. But I just feel like very quickly, as soon as it was legal, everything became gambling. And as a person who watches a lot of sports content throughout the day, like I've always got on sports TV in the background, it just was immediately everywhere. And I wanted there to be a space, especially if the idea and the ethos of casuals was to help bring people into sports.

17:36I wanted to make sure I wasn't immediately handing them off to something that could become a real problem in their lives. Because I don't personally yet know anybody, thank goodness, with a gambling addiction. But from what I've heard, it is one of the more insidious addictions. It happens very quietly and privately. It can destroy someone's entire life. And it's not to say that you can't gamble responsibly. And I know a lot of people who do. um it just felt like if it was going to be everywhere and somebody was going to allow me to keep it from being in mine then i was like why not because if i were tired of hearing it maybe that would be a reason i would tune into casuals because i'd be like i just am sick of bumping into everything being brought to you by calcene there's this sense that like like like a high percentage of all alcohol is bought is purchased by like very very heavy drinkers do you feel like as as gambling marketing takes over sports media that sports media is program is shifting its programming toward programming for for gamblers basically for people who are more intense consumers i do i feel like the you know when i started it was they were very protective of the shield of the brand of the actual game on the field i remember there were a lot of conversations about when you could mention what the spread was and it was like pre-game shows weren't allowed to say it the shows like during the game they weren't allowed to say it and how quickly again once this all became legal suddenly during the game i remember watching a hockey game where there was uh they had must have done right before a goal was scored they did like a parlay on screen where they were like if you do this this and this this'll hit and then during the call of a goal the announcer i don't remember who it was said something like if you had that last parlay and it made my stomach turn where i was like this is a 180 from where we used to be.

19:28And I know, won't somebody think of the kids is an annoying thing to say, but I pictured like a young hockey fan, not even having the context that the two used to be separate, that it used to be the sport. And then you could gamble on it, but it wasn't immediately obvious and, and the same. And so like when fantasy football started, I remember a lot of older people being like fantasy football is ruining football because the kids only care about the players they don't care about the teams anymore which to me i was like i don't care about that that doesn't seem like a problem but now that gambling is legal and that it's on your phones and the kids are on their phones all the time it just feels like sports and gambling on sports are too quickly becoming the same thing instead of it being like you can be a sports fan and you can gamble on sports so for me i just feel like too quickly they're becoming like if you like sports you put money on sports because why wouldn't you because you could make so much money yeah instead of it being like you know that you can have a relationship with sports outside of a financial one you can risk this instead of this you know are you so you're are you a good sports scam do you ever sports gamble have you ever done it good sports game i actually do know one of i'm sorry i don't know i guess i don't want to blow up his spot on the show but our other producer manny is an amazing sports really yeah but you know what he tells you when he wins no no no as no no i know because I've been keeping track because I'm just, I'm like, I want to make sure that we don't, you know, send it down.

20:58He doesn't mind. If he doesn't like this, he can edit it out because it is literally the producer of the show. Just betting on the outcomes of war is like, were you more? Yes. Do you like that better? I hate it. It's true. I hate it. I can't believe it's allowed. I don't know. I think that, I think that sports gambling in some ways, well, there's two ways of thinking about it, right? Sports gambling, it has, there are clear rules, right? Like there are clear rules, you know if if it's a fumble it's a fumble like if there's if there's a turnover there's a turnover right like and if you're betting on the turnovers that kind of thing happened the problem with a lot of these events is uh you know there were so there was a popular bet on calci or polymarket about um the removal of the president of iran and whether that was going to happen within a certain amount of time and it was either calci or polymarket basically said he wasn't removed from office because he was killed and it didn't actually count as technically him being removed from office So everybody who bet on it was really upset.

21:51And there's some actual lawsuit around it right now. In some ways, sports has much clearer boundaries and guidelines. That being said, there's the house in sports, right? There are the odds. There's the people who set the odds. And that's not necessarily the case with prediction markets. Yeah, I mean, sports was sort of invented. People have been gambling on sports as long as there was sports. Right, and I get it. I think it's just the phone, truly. Right, you can do it here. If you want to go to Vegas. it there were ways to go and do it and they were harder for people that didn't have any connections or know anybody right now that you can just all day you used to have to go talk to some guy uh some like uh yes some very yeah yeah absolutely yeah and the case for the the world prediction markets is that they actually give some insight like they give you a sense of like sure what is the likely outcome of this and businesses can hedge and stuff this and that there's no pro social version of that in sports.

22:46It's true. Okay, so just because we're running out of time here, I am kind of curious about one thing we actually had on a fellow Sirius XM personality Andy Richter on a few months back. Oh, he was great. One thing that you guys have in comedy is you guys both do Colin shows still. Yeah, absolutely. Which is super fun and I think interesting. I'm curious, what is that experience like for you? Did you do that before? Because the Colin show is new, right? You're doing the one that you're doing with, you're doing it on, is it with Mad Dog or is it on Mad Dog? Okay. Yeah. Sirius XM channel. I mean, what's that, what's that like for you?

23:21Is it kind of terrifying? Okay. So it's called Fan Service. The idea came from, you know, we launched Casuals with Sirius and then the opportunity to do radio came. And I, I'm big on like, if I can't do something well, I don't want to do it. And the two of them were happening so close together in the morning that I was like, not really going to have a lot of time to prep to do a sports talk radio show. Because the audience for casuals, if theoretically is people I'm trying to bring in, most of them are not the audience on Mad Dog Sports Radio. I don't think like random people that don't already like sports are finding Mad Dog Sports Radio and spending a lot of time there.

23:59So I knew I had to speak to a more tuned in sports audience and I just wouldn't have time to like fully talk for an hour, prep like all the interesting stuff I wanted to say. And so I was like, since it's only an hour, I was like, can I just spend it on the phone? Can I just open the phone lines and spend the whole time on the phone with people? And they were like, yeah, that sounds awesome. So the idea was to make it like if you've got a fan question or if you've got a take or you've got a, you know, something you want to say, call in. And like, of course, the first nervous thing that happens when you launch is you're like, what if no one calls?

24:32We have nothing to talk about for an hour. But the response was fantastic. And now I have like 60-year-old men who listen to sports talk radio call in. And at the end of a phone call will be like, love you, mean it, and hang up the phone. And it's like kind of cool to talk to these people that maybe wouldn't have had access to my content or that I wouldn't have reached. and now I can like talk to them one-on-one and challenge them on things when they go, well, I think this is stupid. And I'm like, well, I don't. Here's why I think it's not stupid. And they'll go, well, I guess that makes some sense.

25:02And then, you know, maybe it's just they're nervous because we're on the phone together, but it's like kind of nice to actually interact with people. Do you think it's like one of the last kind of community forms of media that still exists? I mean, you've gone on Brian Lehrer's show a bunch. It's kind of the same thing, right? Did you, what was your experience like in those, like being on that show? I mean, it's still like every single person in the Upper West Side, you know, is listening. I mean, live is sort of magic. Yeah. Yeah. As we mentioned at the top, you've had a lot of different jobs in media, but you know, you've never had like the top job.

25:32You're not like Stephen A. Smith. Yeah. I'm kind of curious. Do you think, you know, as a, you know, a prominent woman who's a sports media personality, do you think, is there a ceiling do you think still on? Hmm. That's tough. I would say, you know, for me, the reason is because I've never really gone after that that's not really like what i'm seeking i when i started uh fox sports one was just launching and they were like we need we're trying to find people that can speak to a social audience that are kind of plugged into that sort of vibe but that are also like a little younger and that we can put throughout our programming um and then that sort of evolved into doing the the regis show crowd goes wild and and then we turned that into garbage time which was my late night show and i just feel like my my lane has always been not sports center i guess so like not the marquee programming but sort of yeah like the the the show that can kind of rage against the machine even if it's inside the machine so but i would say uh it has been interesting watching the progress that women have made and then also seeing a little bit of it does feel like after a while they sort of went like okay we did that and now back to the boys and so that does suck and I hope is not but then you've got like Mina Kimes who's like the we lift her up she's our our savior our hero our queen um and there's a lot of women across sports media that have worked so hard at this for so long um that I think I'm still hopeful that you know that it will they will prevail and it will you know not be just a passing fad to have had women in sports media because they're here and they're working and they're paying attention and they have such interesting insight in my opinion because as a female viewer it's like sometimes i forget about the female dollar that like we also have money to spend and if you can speak to a female audience um part of what i really love about casuals is that people be like my wife now talks about sports with me like we list i was listening to casuals she heard you make a reference that i didn't understand that she did and now she's kind of in she listens to your podcast now my wife and i can talk about sports so to me it's always made a lot of sense to have both represented uh especially with the growth of women's sports yeah but um we'll see i guess uh before we wrap here one last question unless you had another one ben you were uh you were a celebrity jeopardy uh are you a champion finalist all-star technically if you win this is what ken jennings told me okay if you win an episode of jeopardy you are a jeopardy champion great nature so technically thank you but then i feel really icky saying it because I lost like at the end of the whole thing so uh but you won some games you're a champion yeah but otherwise you're just you're just a contestant I'm curious what was the prep okay what was the prep like for that like okay I picked I zeroed in on what was finite finite groups of knowledge because sometimes you can go I could learn everything about history there's too much to know I actually did try to learn I'm very bad at history so I wrote down everything that had ever happened.

28:33And I didn't remember any of it. I tried, I did, I had memorized the presidents, but those are gone. It's the same guy a bunch of times. It's like, they all look the same and have a, they're all a John. But the thing I really, I was like, I need to make sure something that would embarrass me would be if they asked me a question like what country, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I named like a city or if they said what city and I named a country. So I made sure because it's a finite group of information and I knew I could have a start and a stop point I memorized every country and every capital of every country and so before I got into Jeopardy like to to do Celebrity Jeopardy I geography I didn't know where anything was I didn't know all the countries I didn't know anything and now I know where all the countries are and I know what their capitals are and is that useful not really that warming story anytime a country comes up I I now just say the capital at whoever's talking about it.

29:29Hopefully for the World Cup, for sure. Yeah, it's been fun. People were like, what is Cape Verde? I'm like, well, it's an island off the northwest coast. I believe it's Apia, but I'd have to check. That's, I mean, the fact that that's, yeah, that's impressive to me. Yeah. Well, thank you, Katie. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thank you.