Sports Fans Killed Woke Sports. This Is What Comes Next | Clay Travis

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0:38This 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. 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.

1:21That'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. What do you make of generally like the economics around sports these days that is just so freaking expensive to go to any game with the family?

1:49All 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? I'm doing great. Where is the how many different destinations do you have for August plant? 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? That sounds fun. I'm actually always been envious of vanishing for August. You know, you can do it too, my friend.

2:31You've built businesses. You've sold businesses. You run your operations. It's all a matter of will. 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 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.

3:10There'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. 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 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.

3:41And 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 yeah people focus on that but let's go back to 2011 what was young clay travis how old was clay travis in 2011 we're about i was 32 um is that the right math basically uh yeah 31 ish yeah 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 yeah it was i was ahead of the curve then and um 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 People don't remember you had to sign up for AOL.

4:42You'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. 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 think so. I look up, have your team look up that it's still a revenue producing. Some people think they have to pay to keep their email addresses, right?

5:18Like if you're older, you're like, hey, I've been at 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 of 2011, Sporting News, another site that basically doesn't 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 were probably a couple of hundred of us. I loved that job. I was traveling all over the country. And I decided then and there with my three-year-old and my four-month-old, I didn't want anybody else to ever control whether I could make a living online.

5:54So 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. First 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.

6:32and 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 could 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's an awful, fundamentally racist place. And that put me in a corner of not very many supporters. Edgy stuff, man, edgy stuff. America's not racist, edgy. Um, do you look back on, I want to talk about what, with that 2015, 2016 sports going crazy. Cause obviously that's kind of when politics went crazy too.

7:10Cause that's original Trump, you know, 45, but do you look back on those days of the grind? So you lose your job, you have young kids, you're doing all that 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 V 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. Cause I look at my days like that and I, I I'm so much happier now.

7:40I have so much more, but they still feel like the good old days. Well, I think it's 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.

8:19Like 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.

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10:15And it also I think it made me better as a pundit because I had more real world experience. I knew how to pay people. I knew how to balance books, et cetera, et cetera. 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. 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.

10:56And 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 business, look at that hair, man, you're doing all right. Still got hair. 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 is 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.

11:36And 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 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.

12:21When 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. 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 Ruben right in there. There was no way. There was no way I could have scrolled out of that. What year did you sell outkick? That's got to be 21. 21. Okay. Yeah. So my deal as a part of the acquisition ends basically at the end of this calendar year.

12:59So I'm kind of sitting around like, hey, 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 if 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.

13:37And 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. I still think it largely does individuals over big brands, even if those are big, successful brands. 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 broadcaster, boy, that is sad.

14:18It's dark. Yeah, it is. It is kind of dark. So tell us. So you sell Outkick. Yeah. I assume that was the first time you probably had like real money, like real serious money. Right. How did that change you or not change you? Or how did that embolden you to do more of what you do or whatever? It was a great feeling. Like we signed the papers late at night. And, you know, my wife, Laura, who, you know, it's like two thirty in the morning and I got to get up and do my radio show. It's 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.

15:04For 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 power ball, 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.

15:40I 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 I, 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.

16:20And 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. When you were in Australia, did they tell you about the koalas who all have gonorrhea? Yeah. I didn't realize that those koalas were so horny. We all got our picture taken with them. Um, 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, uh, this will, you'll appreciate this. I probably, if you want to, there are many flaws that I have one of them, and it can be good or bad as most, uh, most, uh, attributes are, um, I am not very fearful.

17:03so everybody was like they have these jellyfish uh 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 uh but they were like dad you're not putting the jellyfish suit on and i was like ah jellyfish that's a covet of the ocean if they get me i'll be fine and my kids loved it because i called it the covet of the ocean um and so literally we're on like snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef, everyone on the entire boat is like head to toe in these wildly uncomfortable, you know, like suits, which I don't even know how effective they are.

17:43And I'm just out there and, 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 and work as hard as I can. And when my time's up, tap me on the shoulder, I'm good to go. So let's jump back to that 2015-16 thing that you mentioned, because I think most people view that as the beginning of when politics obviously changed and everything kind of went on steroids and Trump derangement and all that.

18:16And everyone understands the political version of that. And then COVID, blah, blah, blah. The sports version in retrospect now fully make 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? 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. 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 is 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?

19:13Like 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 combines like a slave auction. That's what Colin Kaepernick said on YouTube. I mean, sorry, on Flicks. 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.

19:48I couldn't even remember. Yeah, he was gay. He was a first-round draft pick and 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 um and then it went to caitlin jenner and they gave espy's espn's back-to-back years only for identity not for something that someone had done outside of the identity wait so michael sam won one two i don't even remember did he ever did he ever play in the nfl even ever played in an nfl game was the seventh round draft pick he He was seen as kind of the classic, not big enough to play defensive end, not fast enough to play linebacker.

20:37He was a very successful player at the University of Missouri, and he did not make it in the NFL. And so he got the ESPY for courage in 15. Caitlyn Jenner got, or sorry, 14, I think. Caitlyn Jenner got the ESPY 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 to everybody loves great athletes to, hey, your identity is going to define you in some way. whether it's Megan Rapinoe, Steve Kerr, Greg Popovich, LeBron James, they all kind of started to slice and dice what had been a universal sports audience.

21:24And 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. This month, Tax Network USA is celebrating American Pride Month with 10 percent off all services honoring freedom, resilience and financial independence. If you miss the April 15th deadline or you have back taxes, don't wait.

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22:42Do you think that that's at all possible? 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. You stole that from Clay? I said, well, I used to talk about helicopter dicks back in the day and twirls dick like a helicopter. 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.

23:21But I did put it in the book. 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 I 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 since then, it's kind of continued to grow, I would say, the audience. So even though we both kind of agreed that, okay, 2015, 2016, you can see how sports and politics, it was on the same track going together.

23:56Do you find it weird that somehow the athletes themselves didn't have a better defense against 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.

24:28Yeah, 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' 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.

25:07A 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 Rhea 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.

25:52And 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. 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 Kaepernick really was going crazy with all this stuff and then BLM and all this stuff, that, you know, he couldn't get on a team and he went to a couple of 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 OK.