Speaker 1: Welcome to the solid verbal. Call that for me. I'm
Speaker 1: a man, I'm forty. I've heard so many players say, well,
Speaker 1: I want to be happy. You want to be happy
Speaker 1: for day Edith State? Is that? Woo whoom? And Dan
Speaker 1: and Tie? All right, Hello everyone. I'm Tie Hill de Grandt,
Speaker 1: the author of Campus Quick Slance on SI on Campus
Speaker 1: and joining me from the far end of the country.
Speaker 1: What's welcome in, Dan Rubinstein, Dan, you are the SI
Speaker 1: tour guy. Welcome to the the the solid verbal, that's
Speaker 1: what we're calling this.
Speaker 2: Now, that's what the working title is. Anyway, Yeah, welcome
Speaker 2: to the podcast. It's great to be on the West coast,
Speaker 2: and I'm sure it's sort of okay to be on
Speaker 2: the East coast.
Speaker 1: It is very sort of okay to be here on
Speaker 1: the East coast, but it is good to be on
Speaker 1: the podcast with you. Dan. Of course, we've all admired
Speaker 1: your work that you've done, and you've done a lot
Speaker 1: in the off season, so we'll talk about that in
Speaker 1: a little bit. But have we ironed out yet exactly
Speaker 1: what we're going to be talking about in this podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how this is going to turn out.
Speaker 1: Are we just kind of going to shoot from the
Speaker 1: hip or do we have an actual topic list to
Speaker 1: work off of?
Speaker 2: Absolutely no topic lists. Yeah, we hit We're very unprepared
Speaker 2: and unprofessional, even though we have like the words sports
Speaker 2: illustrated next to our names in some form of another.
Speaker 1: Don't at all be mistaken.
Speaker 3: Absolutely no topic list, Dan Rubinstein, those were our words
Speaker 3: back in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: Was that that was our first show. That was our
Speaker 1: very first show. Can I you sounded so good? You?
Speaker 1: I was very bad. I did not bring enthusiasm. I
Speaker 1: did not engage you. I did not engage the audience,
Speaker 1: and you were just you were shot out of a cannon.
Speaker 1: As if we have the listenership we have now, the
Speaker 1: problem is I haven't improved since two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: That's okay, you were already so high.
Speaker 3: We can get into that here over the next hour plus,
Speaker 3: depending on however long it takes to kind of get
Speaker 3: the message across here.
Speaker 1: Let's start. Let's start from the very top though. First
Speaker 1: we're in the same room. Yes, we are in New
Speaker 1: York recording this. This is the aforementioned history of Solidverbal,
Speaker 1: the exhaustive naval gazing history of the show. We've had
Speaker 1: a lot of people say, how did you guys meet,
Speaker 1: how did you guys get started? How did you I
Speaker 1: want to be a what? This is the show? This
Speaker 1: is the show.
Speaker 3: We're going to link this up on like the main
Speaker 3: menu for anybody who has questions about like how do
Speaker 3: you spell tie? Is it thha, We're going to have
Speaker 3: you covered here and however long it takes. As we've
Speaker 3: mentioned for quite some time now, this is going to
Speaker 3: be our tenth college football season doing the show Dan Yes,
Speaker 3: which is incredible and kind of in the spirit of
Speaker 3: our friends over at the Starters, who have been very
Speaker 3: successful in a previous life as TB basketball. Previous life
Speaker 3: is the Basketball Jones now is the Starters with the NBA.
Speaker 3: They did a tant anniversary show not so long ago.
Speaker 3: We thought maybe it'd be a good time to do
Speaker 3: one of her own, since we're roughly around the same
Speaker 3: podcast age.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we were on the Grantline Network with them in
Speaker 1: twenty eleven, so yes, there's some there are a lot
Speaker 1: of similarities. We like those guys a lot, So this
Speaker 1: is what we're going to do. Though, we are going
Speaker 1: to go through the exhaustive history of the show. We're
Speaker 1: going to answer your questions about the show and how
Speaker 1: we've sort of felt about various topics and times. But
Speaker 1: I think it's it's best if we start from the top. Right. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: So you were raised.
Speaker 3: Somebody wrote in, by the way, wanted to get the conception,
Speaker 3: the conception play by play from mom.
Speaker 1: H she's not with me, unfortunately, here's what I want.
Speaker 1: I actually thought about calling our moms to see, but
Speaker 1: then it's just going to be them. Your mom is
Speaker 1: so much better educated as for podcasting and the show.
Speaker 3: If we called MoMA age she would answer and give
Speaker 3: you commentary.
Speaker 1: But here's what I want to start with, though before
Speaker 1: because this show in Arnest begins with you graduating college.
Speaker 1: I think a year before. I graduated two thousand and
Speaker 1: four from Penn State. Yeah, two thousand and five for Oregon.
Speaker 1: From me, so, you grew up a Notre Dame fan,
Speaker 1: and that is because family members of years were Notre
Speaker 1: Dame fans. You grow Catholic in the Northeast and that
Speaker 1: was your team growing up, right, correct, Right? Okay, I
Speaker 1: don't have that sort of singular focus. I think I
Speaker 1: liked UCLA a good amount. There were UCLA people in
Speaker 1: my life, but I really like honestly, my favorite team
Speaker 1: growing up for it varied, but it was probably Florida State,
Speaker 1: just because I liked watching work done Peter Warwick and
Speaker 1: Peter Bowl, all those people, all those incredible athletes for
Speaker 1: Florida State. So I had Florida State gear. I liked
Speaker 1: Florida State, but I didn't have that same sort of
Speaker 1: like that's my team year and in, year out, whatever.
Speaker 1: So my background with college football was just sort of
Speaker 1: I enjoyed it during the season, but wasn't a diehard.
Speaker 1: I didn't grow up in that culture in the way
Speaker 1: that a lot of people I'm sure that are listening
Speaker 1: to this show grew up with it until I got
Speaker 1: to college, and that's when it became a little more real.
Speaker 1: I appreciated uscmore because that was the Reggie Bush thing
Speaker 1: in there my hometown. And then, of course my freshman
Speaker 1: year was the Joey Harrington senior year at Oregon and
Speaker 1: got I really got into it going to a college town. You,
Speaker 1: of course yourself went to a school that is located
Speaker 1: in a big college football area in Penn State, And
Speaker 1: so that is how did did I summarize, Okay, just
Speaker 1: our base level background.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean mine is kind of a weird one.
Speaker 3: People are always confused as a well, how is that
Speaker 3: even possible that you root for Notre Dame and you
Speaker 3: live and went to Penn State. You live in the
Speaker 3: same state and went to Penn State. But as you mentioned, yeah,
Speaker 3: grew up with like strong Catholic influences. Notre Dame's got
Speaker 3: a pretty strong fan base where I'm from in eastern Pennsylvania,
Speaker 3: so it certainly not out of the realm of possibilities
Speaker 3: to come out of that part of the world as
Speaker 3: a Notre Dame fan. What was weird for me is
Speaker 3: and I think a lot of people will attest to
Speaker 3: this if you grow up in an area where one
Speaker 3: team kind of rules supreme. I was kind of raised
Speaker 3: to root against Penn State, and that created an interesting
Speaker 3: conflict as I decided to go to school at Penn State.
Speaker 3: My grandmother, hopefully not rolling over in her grave as
Speaker 3: I say this, was never a fan of Penn State.
Speaker 3: Was never a fan of like George Paterno on the radio,
Speaker 3: Joe's brother.
Speaker 1: And I didn't even know he was on the radio.
Speaker 3: He was on the radio for a long time, and
Speaker 3: that was probably part of the reason why we weren't
Speaker 3: raised to be Penn State fans. But I went to school.
Speaker 3: There was very ambivalent towards the football team, ambivalent at
Speaker 3: best towards the football team through my four years in
Speaker 3: state college. And then it wasn't actually until after I
Speaker 3: graduated that I warmed to the football program. And you know,
Speaker 3: if you listen to the show, you know that that
Speaker 3: I've come a long way in regards to Penn State football.
Speaker 3: But it was not something that took hold for me,
Speaker 3: at least in terms of my alma mater, until after
Speaker 3: I graduated.
Speaker 1: Let the record show that the perhaps most influential figure
Speaker 1: in Ty's life as a Notre Dame fan was a
Speaker 1: senior citizen.
Speaker 3: It's entirely possible. Senior radio and she will strike you down, brothers.
Speaker 1: I believe it entirely. So, yeah, so you go to
Speaker 1: you go to Penn State, you graduate in two thousand
Speaker 1: and four, and podcasting is not even so, it's it's
Speaker 1: an MTV v JA. Here's the way you have a connection.
Speaker 1: I do have a connection. So my story is this.
Speaker 3: I won't go into the full college college deal, but
Speaker 3: I started at Penn State in broadcast journalism and after
Speaker 3: two years as people want to. I switched over to
Speaker 3: more of a technical major, a computer technology related major,
Speaker 3: for various reasons that I won't go into here, but
Speaker 3: suffice to say I didn't want to work for eighteen
Speaker 3: grand a year in Altuna. I don't blame you, and
Speaker 3: so I decided to pursue a different course of action,
Speaker 3: hoping that at some point I could find my own
Speaker 3: way into a broadcast.
Speaker 1: Did you have a radio show? Did you write for
Speaker 1: the college?
Speaker 2: I did.
Speaker 3: I did a little bit for the student radio station,
Speaker 3: wrote a few hot takes to the Daily Collegiate h
Speaker 3: but beyond that wasn't wasn't too involved in on campus media.
Speaker 3: But after graduating college and just with having that technical background,
Speaker 3: I got into this whole internet streaming thing. At the time,
Speaker 3: we're talking two thousand and four, podcasting wasn't even a
Speaker 3: word right back then. If you mentioned podcast really as
Speaker 3: late as maybe twenty twelve, people still looked at you
Speaker 3: like two heads. But certainly back in two thousand and four,
Speaker 3: two thousand and five, what the hell is a podcast?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I was one of the handful of people on the
Speaker 3: Internet who was dabbling with this.
Speaker 1: So this is post Nabster Napster, what did the other
Speaker 1: you know, the music sharing program? So things are slowly
Speaker 1: migrating digitally. You have your MP three.
Speaker 3: This is right around the time Facebook was becoming more
Speaker 3: of a thing.
Speaker 1: The first iPod comes out two thousand and one, two
Speaker 1: thousand and two ish, right around.
Speaker 3: There before iPhones were talking, before iPhones. I was one
Speaker 3: of a handful of people, certain in the sports world
Speaker 3: that had figured out how to do podcasting. Didn't quite
Speaker 3: have a deep following yet, but it seemed to me
Speaker 3: the kind of thing that could Did I ever envision
Speaker 3: it be where it is now?
Speaker 1: No, right, no one could have.
Speaker 3: But I dabbled with it. So I talking about right now,
Speaker 3: we're talking two thousand and four, two thousand and five,
Speaker 3: Right after graduating, I had a Yankees podcast with with
Speaker 3: Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe cal Russo, who's was his actual
Speaker 3: uncle that's not just like a literal uncle, yea, and
Speaker 3: my cousin Tony.
Speaker 1: We did a Yankee show for about four or five years.
Speaker 1: How did it sound like? That was just the audio
Speaker 1: quality compared to what we're doing now horrible, but compared
Speaker 1: to compared to the market at the time, you know,
Speaker 1: we maximized every decibel out of that Logitech webcam we
Speaker 1: talked into with a sock over it to reduce the pop.
Speaker 1: I mean, this was really, I mean, really hacked together.
Speaker 3: You're not wrong to do it, though, but back then
Speaker 3: we were trying her hand at streaming a live show,
Speaker 3: doing some on demand stuff. At one point, I had
Speaker 3: exchanged an email with Adam Curry, Adam Curry DJ Adam Curry, Yeah,
Speaker 3: from MTV, who is widely regarded as the guy who
Speaker 3: kind of put it all together and figured out the
Speaker 3: podcasting medium.
Speaker 1: On demand radio talk audio in digital form.
Speaker 3: That's right, And I had chatted with him via email,
Speaker 3: and that that kind of got me started down the
Speaker 3: path of doing this in a more serious capacity.
Speaker 1: Which, by the way, that hasn't stopped for you. Like
Speaker 1: whenever you come across somebody that you really admire for
Speaker 1: some reason audio wise, especially in the technical aspect, You've
Speaker 1: reached out to all sorts of people, and that that's
Speaker 1: just sort of a broader lesson of how we've become
Speaker 1: to whatever success we've gotten to. It's you technically reaching
Speaker 1: out to people saying, wait, how did you this was
Speaker 1: really cool? How did you do this? And people are
Speaker 1: of like almost always, if not always responsive, And you
Speaker 1: know it's not just technical.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because as we're going to talk about here, as
Speaker 3: we get into like the timeline of the show, one
Speaker 3: of the first big guests that we had on the
Speaker 3: show was Bruce Fellman. And we know Bruce really well now,
Speaker 3: but back then we didn't, and initially it was a
Speaker 3: cold email to him like, Hey, we're doing this thing,
Speaker 3: would you be interested in coming on. You would be
Speaker 3: surprised at how many people are responsive to your emails,
Speaker 3: I would say, to a man, pretty much everyone reads
Speaker 3: everything that they get, depending on how popular they are,
Speaker 3: but in my experience, most people read everything, and it
Speaker 3: extends to the writers you see on your favorite pub
Speaker 3: on your favorite publications, and certainly to the technical realm
Speaker 3: as well. So yeah, we've tried to borrow bits and
Speaker 3: pieces here from other shows that we admire, and that's
Speaker 3: been something that I've tried to do all along. But
Speaker 3: that's kind of the origin story for me as it
Speaker 3: relates to podcasting. Now, I want to jump back to
Speaker 3: what you said in the beginning, which is kind of
Speaker 3: foreign to me. You grew up in southern California, which
Speaker 3: obviously has again as it relates to college football, pretty
Speaker 3: strong USC, UCLA and yeah, you didn't have a particular identity, No,
Speaker 3: with one of those teams.
Speaker 1: No, I liked Ucla. I liked the Cade McNown. I
Speaker 1: think it was the ninety eight season where they were
Speaker 1: really good but then lost to Miami at the end
Speaker 1: of the year as the postponed Hurricane game. But no,
Speaker 1: I didn't really have a strong allegiance. I didn't go
Speaker 1: to many games. I went to the Ron Dane I
Speaker 1: think it was Wisconsin' Stanford Rose Bowl maybe ninety nine.
Speaker 1: But no, there was no diet in the Wolf fandom
Speaker 1: for anybody beyond Florida State from Afar, I guess. But
Speaker 1: when I went to college, I really hated Oregon at first.
Speaker 1: I really truly, Why did you decide to go to Oregon?
Speaker 1: They had and they still do have a very good
Speaker 1: journalism and it's called electronic Media program. I wanted to
Speaker 1: go away from home. I really liked USC, but I
Speaker 1: didn't want to stay in Los Angeles, and there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people from my high school going there, our
Speaker 1: friends going there too. I had a lot of friends
Speaker 1: going there. Visited Oregon in Maye. It was super nice
Speaker 1: and I was like, Oh, this is what it must
Speaker 1: be like all the time, just not true. Went to Oregon,
Speaker 1: hated it, partially because I had a really bad, long
Speaker 1: distance breakup with my high school girlfriend. But freshman year,
Speaker 1: one of like the outlets for being depressed in the
Speaker 1: grayness of Eugene, Oregon was I got a radio show.
Speaker 1: And I did that with this guy Mike, who was
Speaker 1: in my hall, and we had a really good time
Speaker 1: playing emo music and just being stupid and very bad
Speaker 1: at broadcastings called Morningwood. Yeah, because we were mature and cosmopolitan.
Speaker 1: And we did that all four years, and by the
Speaker 1: end of college, I don't know if we were any better,
Speaker 1: but we were weirder. We would play game shows like we
Speaker 1: do now. We would just we would become this very
Speaker 1: strange talk show. And it really woke me up to
Speaker 1: how much I liked the sound of my own voice. Honestly,
Speaker 1: I really liked trying to come up with like, there'll
Speaker 1: be eight people listening, and I'd put in hours trying
Speaker 1: to come up with like game shows and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: And I realized I like creating stuff no matter how
Speaker 1: many people listen. So I graduated from Oregon, and my
Speaker 1: story is very different from yours. I wanted to be
Speaker 1: a comedy writer in LA and there's no real one
Speaker 1: way to do that. You have to write scripts and
Speaker 1: you have to go through all sorts of motions. And
Speaker 1: I majored in electronic media, so it's like broadcast journalism
Speaker 1: at Oregon. And I just knew I wanted to make
Speaker 1: stuff somehow. And this is two thousand and five. So like,
Speaker 1: video cameras are more affordable, video editing software is easier
Speaker 1: and easier, iMovie final cut and bootlegable, and yeah, you
Speaker 1: can pirate whatever. I mean, Listen, everybody lives by their
Speaker 1: own code. I'll let you decide what you got to
Speaker 1: do to get things done. But so in two thousand
Speaker 1: and five, I worked for a production company as a
Speaker 1: paid intern. Like it was miserable. I drove around LA
Speaker 1: traffic and delivered scripts. It was not that fun, but
Speaker 1: I made a little bit of money. It was for
Speaker 1: the guy, the music video director who directed the All
Speaker 1: the Small Things video, who directed a couple of Weezer videos,
Speaker 1: He directed the popa Roach Last Reason video. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: he's a famous director. His name is Marco Siega. He
Speaker 1: directed a Future He's a big deal and I was
Speaker 1: an internet his production company and it was fine. But
Speaker 1: I had come up with ideas about making stuff that
Speaker 1: I wanted to do. And I interviewed for a job
Speaker 1: at the Office, the television show The Office, and the
Speaker 1: job was to be a writer's PA, basically going to
Speaker 1: get donuts for writers, but you got to sit in
Speaker 1: the writer's room, you got to take notes. You know,
Speaker 1: you were a grunt, but you were there. And I
Speaker 1: interviewed for the job. I was told I was a
Speaker 1: finalist for the job. I was told it was between
Speaker 1: me and one other person. I was told I was
Speaker 1: probably going to get the job. I had. So my
Speaker 1: connection to this was a family member used to date
Speaker 1: the executive producer of the old show Blind Date. Remember
Speaker 1: that show. Oh yeah, So that like got me in
Speaker 1: touch with X, who got me in touch with Y,
Speaker 1: who got me in touch with Z. And I got
Speaker 1: the interview with the Office. I didn't get the job
Speaker 1: with the Office. They said, Okay, you're going to get
Speaker 1: this job with this Andy Richter sitcom. And I was like,
Speaker 1: oh cool, whatever, I'll do it. And then they were
Speaker 1: like it has to go to series, it has to
Speaker 1: be picked up. The shot six episodes, but if they
Speaker 1: do the full full Run, you get a pa job.
Speaker 1: You'll get to get donuts for the writers on that show.
Speaker 1: And I said great, and then I never heard anything.
Speaker 1: I never heard anything, and I was like, if I
Speaker 1: can't get hired to get donuts for people, I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna try my own thing. So what I did is
Speaker 1: I had this idea. So this is now two thousand
Speaker 1: and six. I had this idea to go to college
Speaker 1: football games. After going to Oregon and figuring out that like, oh,
Speaker 1: this atmosphere is fun and weird and something that could
Speaker 1: be a canvas for my creativity, I decided to start
Speaker 1: my own website with iweb. Do you remember Iweb? I
Speaker 1: remember it, Yeah, I started my own website with iweb.
Speaker 1: I started a YouTube channel. I took my dad's old
Speaker 1: Sony camcorder and most sizable, it's like the size of
Speaker 1: a big like muffle atta, you know, it's a tr
Speaker 1: TRV something like that. And sometimes with a friend, sometimes solo,
Speaker 1: I would take a plastic tripod and this old stupid
Speaker 1: we're talking tapes, tapes, the little tapes, the tapes, many
Speaker 1: mini DV tapes and wired microphone and I would interview tailgaters,
Speaker 1: and it would look pretty bad, like I was not
Speaker 1: a great shooter, a one man band shooter. And I
Speaker 1: would interview them and I would try to be funny
Speaker 1: and try to be weird, and I'd try to come
Speaker 1: up with three to six seven minutes whatever it was
Speaker 1: worth of material. And I started that and I was
Speaker 1: called the College Football Tour Guide, and I watermarked it,
Speaker 1: and I put them on YouTube, and I put it
Speaker 1: on my I website and some of them did pretty well.
Speaker 1: All things sit are ten fifteen, twenty thousand views. Some
Speaker 1: of them did Okay, it was a big deal, by
Speaker 1: the way, and that in two thousand and six. That's
Speaker 1: a big deal. It's a pretty big deal thousand and six. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I did that at seven schools. At this point,
Speaker 1: I am living with my parents. I am I have
Speaker 1: some money saved up. But you know, I was sleeping
Speaker 1: on couches when I was on the road of friends
Speaker 1: or like sister, I slept on the couch in Berkeley
Speaker 1: of my now ex girlfriend's sister. I slept on her
Speaker 1: couch and bertle like, you know, it's just one of
Speaker 1: those things. It was totally shoe string. I would drive
Speaker 1: everywhere and I don't think I. I paid for maybe
Speaker 1: one hotel, so I did it shoe string. But you know,
Speaker 1: I was losing money on you had a product. But
Speaker 1: I had a product and I felt good about it,
Speaker 1: and I was making something and I was getting it
Speaker 1: out every week. I did eight episodes I think, during
Speaker 1: the two thousand and six season, and it was fun.
Speaker 1: And after the two thousand and six season, I made
Speaker 1: a DVD of that and I sent it to as
Speaker 1: many addresses email and snail mail as I could possibly find.
Speaker 1: And one of these so the first response I got
Speaker 1: was from Neil Everett from ESPNSPN, Oregon guy. Even. I
Speaker 1: don't know if I realized it at the time. I
Speaker 1: put the DVD in a Manila envelope. I wrote him
Speaker 1: a note and I sent it to Bristol. I just blindly,
Speaker 1: I said, like, Neil Everett could have been Anthrax. Yeah,
Speaker 1: instead was It was a dquity of and it was
Speaker 1: like way too long for a sizzlereel. It's like eleven
Speaker 1: minutes long. Kids, sizlereels shouldn't be more than two minutes,
Speaker 1: No two minutes. Watch after two minutes. But a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks later I look at my phone and I
Speaker 1: have a call from an eight six to OHO number
Speaker 1: and I don't know what eight six so is, but
Speaker 1: I still to this day know what it is. And
Speaker 1: I answer the phone and I go hello, or I
Speaker 1: was probably like oh, and I was like is this Dan?
Speaker 1: I was like yeah, it was like it's Neil Evert ESPN.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, that was in my mind. I
Speaker 1: was like, I'm going to be a star, But in reality,
Speaker 1: it was just a call to say, you know what,
Speaker 1: I got your DVD. I think you got something here.
Speaker 1: It was really good. It really entertained me, Like I
Speaker 1: think you can do something with this, Like you should
Speaker 1: try to contact like the best damn Sports show or
Speaker 1: something like that. But like I just wanted to give
Speaker 1: you a call and let you know, like you're pretty talented,
Speaker 1: and I like this idea and good for you. And
Speaker 1: that gave me the confidence to like keep pushing through.
Speaker 1: I emailed it to the MySpace page of SI on campus.
Speaker 1: A Raschmarcazi. This is still two thousand and six. A Raschmarcazi,
Speaker 1: who's now at ESPN, was running that page then sent
Speaker 1: me an email back, I love this. I'm sending it
Speaker 1: to my bosses, you should be doing this for us,
Speaker 1: And I met with him a couple of times. I
Speaker 1: went out to I went out to Sports Illustrated in
Speaker 1: New York when I think I happened to be there.
Speaker 1: Met with SI and they were like, we'd love to
Speaker 1: have you do this in two thousand and seven. You
Speaker 1: have to pay your own way, but like, we'll reimburse
Speaker 1: your expenses and give you you know, it was nothing.
Speaker 1: It was like, I can't even remember what I cleared
Speaker 1: and after expenses, but it was I don't know, twenty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars, fifteen thousand dollars. Actually that might have been
Speaker 1: including expense. I might have cleared like eight thousand dollars
Speaker 1: for the season or something like that. And I was ecstatic.
Speaker 1: So I did that. In two thousand and seven four
Speaker 1: Sports Illustrate. I did twelve episodes. I took a friend
Speaker 1: each week on the road with me. That was the
Speaker 1: extent of our shoot. And the big advantage that I
Speaker 1: had was in two thousand and six Sports Illustrate. And
Speaker 1: this is something I think we talked about in our
Speaker 1: early emails. Sports Wilstraate was paying a woman. You might
Speaker 1: remember her, you might not remember her name. Is Jen
Speaker 1: Sturger to do something very similar but with like a
Speaker 1: whole film crew, and I basically undercut her and said,
Speaker 1: you're probably paying her thousands of dollars a week her
Speaker 1: and her crew. I'll do this for way cheaper and
Speaker 1: I'll be funnier. And so I did that, and they
Speaker 1: responded really well to it, and so I became the
Speaker 1: SI tour guy in two thousand and seven, the fall
Speaker 1: of two thousand and seven. Meanwhile, between football seasons, I'm
Speaker 1: like temping, I'm a secretary, I'm a you know, an
Speaker 1: executiveever you can do try and make some money. I'm
Speaker 1: picking up work along the way. I move in with
Speaker 1: West Coast Kevin and a lion I fan Scott, guys
Speaker 1: that have been sort of floating on the xterior of
Speaker 1: the show forever, but nothing with podcasting at this point,
Speaker 1: nothing at all with podcasting. But I had gotten it
Speaker 1: in with Sports Illustrated through making my own video series
Speaker 1: in my website and just hustling to try to get
Speaker 1: it out there. And this is still like the very
Speaker 1: early days, like Dead Spinning the Big Lead are the
Speaker 1: only sports blog, or maybe DESBS is in its infancy,
Speaker 1: but this is the very very beginning of like digital
Speaker 1: sports and around the time of blogging.
Speaker 3: Yes, this is when blogging was big because that was
Speaker 3: your path to get to Sports Illustrate, which is an
Speaker 3: awesome story, right, incredible story. As I mentioned before, Around
Speaker 3: the same time, I'm doing this Yankee show, and I
Speaker 3: was affiliated with a local like Yankee Fan Club, and
Speaker 3: we kind of use that as a way to get
Speaker 3: in the door and interview some cool people like John Sterling.
Speaker 3: You know it's commentator again. We're talking two thousand and five.
Speaker 3: What's a podcast to get an interview like that? Talking
Speaker 3: into a webcam, holding up a speaker phone to the webcam.
Speaker 3: I mean, we're not talking high society when it comes
Speaker 3: to equipment. But we still found a way to make
Speaker 3: it happen, and so that was cool. We had a
Speaker 3: little bit of a following. We still have people who
Speaker 3: email us about it today. But around that time, when
Speaker 3: blogs were becoming more of a thing, Fox Sports was
Speaker 3: trying to launch its own sports blog community, and in
Speaker 3: order to try and drum up a little bit of
Speaker 3: interest in that, they ran something they call the Next
Speaker 3: Great Sports Writer Competition. Yes, so I had always written
Speaker 3: about sports, always written about sports. I could probably make
Speaker 3: a pretty good case that I'm better at doing.
Speaker 1: That is two thousand and five. This is two thousand
Speaker 1: and five. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 3: I could make a case that I'm probably better at
Speaker 3: the writing than I am at the spoken word thing.
Speaker 3: But a friend of mine said, hey, you know, if
Speaker 3: you're interested, there's this contest going on over at Fox
Speaker 3: Sports called the Next Great Sports Writer. They're billing it
Speaker 3: as the American Idol for sports writing. And all you
Speaker 3: got to do is post a blog about whatever you want.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: At this point, I'm working a fairly stable job in technology.
Speaker 3: I like the people I will was the same job,
Speaker 3: same job, the whole the whole way through the same
Speaker 3: mysterious day job. It's always been the same company. And
Speaker 3: so I entered and I won out of thousands of entries.
Speaker 3: Lo and behold, somehow I end up winning this thing?
Speaker 1: May I jump in real quick? I was one of
Speaker 1: those thousands of entries. Really, you know this. You don't
Speaker 1: know this. I don't know if I remember that. If
Speaker 1: you go back and find the web cash or whatever
Speaker 1: of the original Next Great American Sports Writer, yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: you won it. I did. There was like, okay, everybody
Speaker 1: enter it and then we're going to select a bunch
Speaker 1: of finalists and then they're going to keep writing that's right,
Speaker 1: and then we are going to figure out I don't
Speaker 1: know if there were two finalists and then you won,
Speaker 1: whatever it was. I did not make the finalists, but
Speaker 1: I got an honorable mention. I really almost a finalist,
Speaker 1: no kid, because I remember like bitching and moaning about
Speaker 1: Lee Corso saying bad things about Oregon in two thousand
Speaker 1: and five.
Speaker 3: It was It was one of the more stressful experiences
Speaker 3: of my life. But in a weird way, it kind
Speaker 3: of let us down this path. Yeah, I win this,
Speaker 3: and in winning it, not only are you exposed to
Speaker 3: like the negative commentary and all the stuff that we
Speaker 3: have to deal with now talking about college football as
Speaker 3: regularly as we do, but you also have to learn
Speaker 3: what it's like to be on deadline. You have to
Speaker 3: learn what it's like to work try and you know,
Speaker 3: adhere to a work out, adhere to a format, a topic,
Speaker 3: whatever your editor is asking you to do. So it
Speaker 3: was a good learning experience through winning that I ended
Speaker 3: up getting a contract to write like twenty five articles
Speaker 3: for Fox Sports.
Speaker 1: It's great, which is cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and around the time I got to maybe article
Speaker 3: twenty two, Fox Sports at the time had chosen to
Speaker 3: go a different direction with its managing editor, and I
Speaker 3: distinctly remember a phone call I had with the managing
Speaker 3: editor where it was very clear the man did not
Speaker 3: take me seriously because I'd want a contest in order
Speaker 3: to get my writing contract. I knew the writing was
Speaker 3: on the wall at that point that after I wrote
Speaker 3: my twenty five there was a pretty good chance there
Speaker 3: wasn't gonna be another twenty five.
Speaker 1: But I enjoyed doing it. Foxsports dot Com making dubious
Speaker 1: decisions as far back as two thousand and five, Ladies
Speaker 1: a gentleman.
Speaker 3: I knew at that point that if I wanted to
Speaker 3: keep doing it, I needed to send clips out to people. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it was I think either through Jimmy, Treana God
Speaker 3: Bless or any great Yeah, one of those two guys
Speaker 3: over at SI that I got hooked up with SI
Speaker 3: on campus and started writing Campus Quickslants, which if you
Speaker 3: heard the intro, our first intro, when I mentioned campus Quickslants,
Speaker 3: that was the title of my thing.
Speaker 1: Did you come up with that name? I did? Good
Speaker 1: for you? Two thousand and six. So this is early
Speaker 1: two thousand and six. This is you don't know when.
Speaker 1: This is in two thousand and sex.
Speaker 3: Probably later on in this is around two thousand and seven.
Speaker 3: So I had written Fox Sports in two thousand and
Speaker 3: six after I won the contest, and then in two
Speaker 3: thousand and seven I started looking elsewhere and landed with
Speaker 3: Sports Illustrated. Two thousand and seven was also the same
Speaker 3: time when I found you. Yes, all right, this is
Speaker 3: kind of how our paths start to cross a little bit.
Speaker 3: I found your videos, and on one date in particular,
Speaker 3: it was this.
Speaker 1: Is week two.
Speaker 3: I believe Week two was September nineteenth, so week two,
Speaker 3: week three, two thousand and seven, you did a video
Speaker 3: up in State College, and I just happened to be
Speaker 3: at work browsing the internet as your wont to do
Speaker 3: when you're.
Speaker 1: On your kill some time, Yeah, on sign campus.
Speaker 3: And I saw that you had been up there. I
Speaker 3: had been up there too. I hadn't seen you, but
Speaker 3: I liked what you did. And so here is the
Speaker 3: text of the email that I wrote you saw earlier.
Speaker 3: This is our first correspondence. Hey Dan, I'm tie Hilldebrandt,
Speaker 3: the author of Campus Quick slants every Wednesday for SI
Speaker 3: on campus. I just wanted to let you know and
Speaker 3: shoot you a line to commend you want a job
Speaker 3: well done. Yes, I've really enjoyed your videos thus far,
Speaker 3: especially the Penn State once since I graduated from there.
Speaker 1: A few years ago.
Speaker 3: I was in town for the game writing about Paternalville
Speaker 3: two bad we doing cross paths. I could have steered
Speaker 3: you in the direction of one of the more over
Speaker 3: the top tailgates you'll ever see. I'm sure everyone says that, Yeah,
Speaker 3: that was my in. And I said, anyway, keep up
Speaker 3: the good work. Where you headed next?
Speaker 1: Right? And I responded to it. I was so famous
Speaker 1: that I didn't need to respond to it. Of course, No,
Speaker 1: I remember this. I remember this correspondence and Penn State
Speaker 1: was great. The first week of that year, I think
Speaker 1: was Georgia, which was tricky. I really liked doing this
Speaker 1: for SI. It was just the first time outside of
Speaker 1: the West Coast I traveled across country. My shooter was
Speaker 1: not that great, but I brought a friend of mine, Casey,
Speaker 1: from college, who knew what he was doing a little
Speaker 1: bit and had a great time. It was crazy. It
Speaker 1: was the first really crazy tailgate I had been to,
Speaker 1: and there was a woman who was probably eighty seven
Speaker 1: years old, and I asked her what she hoped Penn
Speaker 1: State did to Notre Dame, and she was like, beats
Speaker 1: the shit out of him. And that's in my reel.
Speaker 1: That's like one of the first clips in my reel
Speaker 1: because she was so great. So I had it. It
Speaker 1: was a lot of loud, sort of Jersey trash types
Speaker 1: at Penn State, which shouldn't shock anybody who's been to
Speaker 1: a Penn State tailgate at that game. It's accurate. No,
Speaker 1: it's fine, it's accurate. Listen, I'm la trash. We're all
Speaker 1: trash in our own way. Anyway. So I got this
Speaker 1: email from Tye and in looking back at the correspondence
Speaker 1: that I'm we must have both been either very lonely
Speaker 1: there must. I don't know what it was, but like
Speaker 1: you would email me every week, and I would email
Speaker 1: like you would email me after videos, being like, oh man,
Speaker 1: Colorado looks great.
Speaker 3: In my emails for anyone who's emailed with me are
Speaker 3: not short, No, I'm not. I'm not succinct when it
Speaker 3: comes to email. I will write you a book, and
Speaker 3: I think in a lot of cases I did.
Speaker 1: But it was it was always thoughtful, like you would
Speaker 1: watch the videos and you were like, was it as
Speaker 1: pretty in Colorado as it looked like? It was just like, Wow,
Speaker 1: he really likes these videos, but he's also he's not
Speaker 1: like the strangest person. He's also writing for this website.
Speaker 1: And I really liked you. You incorporated a lot of
Speaker 1: pop culture stuff into your campus quick slance wrestling references,
Speaker 1: stuff like that, and I liked your column a lot.
Speaker 1: So it was just sort of a mutual admiration. This
Speaker 1: also all feels like when you're at a wedding rehearsal
Speaker 1: dinner when they show like the slideshow of the you know,
Speaker 1: the each the spouse is growing up and then coming together.
Speaker 1: But no, it was just it was genuine like we
Speaker 1: were pen pals, which sounds strange to say right now,
Speaker 1: but like we worked the same company and we were
Speaker 1: both covering the same sport. And at a certain point
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight, I guess because I had
Speaker 1: re upped with Sports Illustrated to do videos about not
Speaker 1: just college football but all college sports, and so I
Speaker 1: was at Shryzhevsky Ville at Duke, I was at the
Speaker 1: National Collegiate Competitive Eating Contest and there's emails after each
Speaker 1: one of these events that you sent me asking me
Speaker 1: questions about like how many fries did you eat like
Speaker 1: at these things.
Speaker 3: So, and I will say this for anyone out there
Speaker 3: who listens and you work in corporate America, you must
Speaker 3: have been very bored.
Speaker 1: I was not.
Speaker 3: In the most responsible positions at that time. You know,
Speaker 3: the people I work with are great and the company
Speaker 3: that I work for is great, but in that particular role, yeah,
Speaker 3: having someone to email about sports.
Speaker 1: Well, there's no Twitter, so there's no way to entertain
Speaker 1: yourself with like seeing what's going on in the world
Speaker 1: in real time like we have now. We can waste
Speaker 1: our time on Twitter, on Instagram, whatever. There wasn't that.
Speaker 1: There was you go on dead Spin and argue about
Speaker 1: burritos in the comments of an NCAA football video game
Speaker 1: post or something like that. But beyond that, there was
Speaker 1: no real time nothing there, right, So, as you said,
Speaker 1: I would, I would email you after the videos. I
Speaker 1: would watch all the videos.
Speaker 3: I think in a digital sense, we turned into pretty
Speaker 3: fast friends because you would email me after my columns
Speaker 3: and vice versa, and we started spinning our wheels. And
Speaker 3: I don't know the point at which it clicked for
Speaker 3: both of us. But I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1: It was you. I looked at the email today, I'm.
Speaker 3: Pretty sure it was you who initially said, you know,
Speaker 3: I've been thinking about starting a podcast. Do you know
Speaker 3: anything about there? Might you be interested?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 3: And it was at that point that I jumped all
Speaker 3: over it and I said, I happen to know a
Speaker 3: lot about it because I've been doing this now for
Speaker 3: a couple of years. And at that point in time,
Speaker 3: things were shifting from trying to live stream through a
Speaker 3: U stream or real player, real player you could do
Speaker 3: it through.
Speaker 1: It was the other one other than you. It was
Speaker 1: you stream live stream. Yeah, there there were a whole
Speaker 1: variety of them. I had had a server somewhere up
Speaker 1: here in New York City that I paid thirty five
Speaker 1: dollars a month for and it was a dedicated stream
Speaker 1: for my show. Things were shifting from that realm more
Speaker 1: of in, more of the on demand thing, and we
Speaker 1: kind of got in on the ground floor of that,
Speaker 1: and I said, yeah, let's do it. We could do it,
Speaker 1: so I believe, if memory serves. We started brainstorming names,
Speaker 1: and we did a pilot recording which I dug for
Speaker 1: and couldn't you find I have to go back and
Speaker 1: look as I know why I have it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but that was June twenty third, two thousand and eight,
Speaker 3: the pilot, the pilot, and around that time here are
Speaker 3: some of the names that we were trying to workshop.
Speaker 3: The Irrefutable Audio Evidence or Irrefutable Evidence podcast.
Speaker 1: I can't even say it.
Speaker 3: The Red Shirts, which I got a bad mind, The
Speaker 3: walk On Program, which I like that it I still
Speaker 3: like it. I believe there's a basketball show called the
Speaker 3: walk Ons.
Speaker 1: Right, but not walk On Program because the program is
Speaker 1: the double word there. The Shady Booster Program. I'm okay
Speaker 1: with that too, Shady Boosters. I like this.
Speaker 3: And we had another booster club in there, Yeah, another
Speaker 3: Booster club in there. So we kicked it around a
Speaker 3: little bit more after our pilot, and eventually the solid
Speaker 3: Verbal was born on August eleventh, Yes, two thousand and.
Speaker 1: We came up with it.
Speaker 3: You did, of course, quote maybe something with the word
Speaker 3: verbal in it. Oh, the solid verbal, Yes, something like that.
Speaker 3: Even if we're no good at doing your college football podcast,
Speaker 3: we'll go down with a damn clever name.
Speaker 1: It's true, stand by it.
Speaker 3: Solid Verbal was born August eleventh, two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3: Our first show was August twenty seventh, two thousand and eight,
Speaker 3: the intro for which you heard at the top of
Speaker 3: our show. And so the question is where did it
Speaker 3: go from there? Two thousand and eight. As you heard,
Speaker 3: we didn't really know.
Speaker 1: We didn't have a plan for this. We didn't know
Speaker 1: what we were going to do.
Speaker 3: I think we knew that the nature of the medium
Speaker 3: was such that you needed to keep doing it on
Speaker 3: a regular basis if you wanted to maintain and grow
Speaker 3: an audience. We estimate we had about eleven listeners for
Speaker 3: a good six to eight weeks. No idea how the
Speaker 3: original eleven. If you've been with us for a long time,
Speaker 3: you know that we've referenced the original eleven for quite
Speaker 3: some time. But it really was a slow burn in
Speaker 3: the beginning, a good six to eight weeks, we figured
Speaker 3: about eleven listeners and at even subscribers.
Speaker 1: We knew eleven. We didn't know how many listeners eleven
Speaker 1: eleven subscribers, that's correct.
Speaker 3: It wasn't until we started bringing on guys like Andy
Speaker 3: Gray from Sion Campus, Jimmy trena s Ion Campus. Our
Speaker 3: only connection to like the outside sports media world. It
Speaker 3: wasn't until we started bringing those guys on that we
Speaker 3: were able very slowly to grow or follow h.
Speaker 1: And this was also we started the year Twitter started
Speaker 1: basically like two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: we started. I was on the road every weekend, so
Speaker 1: I was going to I was traveling on Fridays, and
Speaker 1: I think that's when we did our some of our Thursdays.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, whatever it was, I would do
Speaker 1: shows from an airport gate. I would call you and
Speaker 1: you had You're gonna have to tell me what it was.
Speaker 1: It's fine now. I think the statute of limitations is up.
Speaker 1: You had a shadily attained switcher of some kind a
Speaker 1: call switcher that you can't buy in stores. It's a
Speaker 1: it's an industrial product for radio stations.
Speaker 3: I bought some sort of phone coupler on eBay that,
Speaker 3: per my understanding, was illegal for.
Speaker 1: Private use, for private use the manner in which I
Speaker 1: could wire tap with it. Yeah. Yeah, So that's what
Speaker 1: we used for Colin interviews, and it worked. It served
Speaker 1: the purpose for a while.
Speaker 3: Obviously, we've got a lot better equipment now, but we
Speaker 3: use that for a long time to make this thing
Speaker 3: go on that was a airport gate or in the
Speaker 3: car wherever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but we had guests call in and we had
Speaker 1: you know, there were sports writers that we would meet
Speaker 1: on the road or whatever at this point, or I
Speaker 1: would meet and they'd ask like, how do you put
Speaker 1: calls on? How do you do that? And I was like,
Speaker 1: Ty has a thing. Yeah, don't don't.
Speaker 3: You don't want to know how, don't ask too many questions.
Speaker 3: You want to know how we're doing this. But for
Speaker 3: a good chunk of time, really, for the first like
Speaker 3: two to three years, yeah, we were using that device.
Speaker 3: We were using that device. We kept going through two
Speaker 3: thousand and eight, Yeah, very slowly, and we picked up
Speaker 3: a following. We tried to get to forty. That was
Speaker 3: like our big pie in the sky goal. We tried
Speaker 3: to get to forty subscribers, and we said, if we
Speaker 3: can get to forty, if all eleven of you can
Speaker 3: convince three to four of your friends to subscribe and
Speaker 3: listen to this show, I promise you, Ty and I
Speaker 3: will videotape ourselves. Relax, relax well, videotape ourselves running forty
Speaker 3: our dashes, doing various physical challenges, throwing a football as
Speaker 3: far as we can punting a football, as far as
Speaker 3: we can in just the spirit of competition, if we
Speaker 3: can get to forty, and we got to forty. We
Speaker 3: got to forty. The videos are still out on YouTube. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and God's honest truth. My cousin will back me up
Speaker 3: because the videotape me running the forty we couldn't get
Speaker 3: a good framing of me running it all right, So
Speaker 3: I got like the fastest time marked down on a
Speaker 3: piece of paper, and then I think you combine that
Speaker 3: with the best footage that we could find. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: I went over to and this is horrible, but you
Speaker 3: know how in a park they have like those memorial
Speaker 3: trees planted. Yeah, I ran the forty yard dash so
Speaker 3: many times that I ran over to one of those
Speaker 3: memorial trees and puked all over it.
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, okay, that's dedication. It was dedication. This was
Speaker 1: We're just losing nothing but money at this point. Nothing.
Speaker 1: I mean, if time is money, we're just giving all
Speaker 1: of our time after work on whatever day we're edit,
Speaker 1: we're doing the show. We're recording the show, ties editing
Speaker 1: the show, we're putting it up. What were you editing
Speaker 1: the show on at this point. I think at the
Speaker 1: time we were using a freeware product called gold Wave. Okay,
Speaker 1: we had a PC. Yeah, back then gold Wave was
Speaker 1: what I knew best. And this is once a week,
Speaker 1: once a week, we're doing shows once a week during
Speaker 1: the season. They would be preview shows, but I guess
Speaker 1: at the beginning we would recap or whatever. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: they we'd recap in preview and then the season ended.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about two thousand and nine, the very
Speaker 1: beginning of two thousand and nine, and the season ended,
Speaker 1: and do we stay with the show in the off
Speaker 1: season or do we say i'll see in August? What
Speaker 1: do we do?
Speaker 3: We were very on the fence about it, Yeah, because
Speaker 3: the big problem we had and it's not as much
Speaker 3: of a problem anymore, but it's still something that we
Speaker 3: have to think about. What are you going to talk
Speaker 3: about in the off season? Yeah, what are you going
Speaker 3: to talk about? Even back then, college football didn't have
Speaker 3: as vibrant of an off season as I think it
Speaker 3: does now. There's just more money involved now, so there's
Speaker 3: more of an interest. But back then, we were really
Speaker 3: worried that we weren't going to have enough content. But
Speaker 3: we decided we were going to give it a go.
Speaker 3: We're going to give it a go. And actually, for
Speaker 3: a chunk of time, even in the nine off season,
Speaker 3: we were doing two shows a week. Yes, we were
Speaker 3: doing two shows a week to try and just produce
Speaker 3: more content, get more people hooked. Certainly through the season
Speaker 3: we did two shows a week like we do now.
Speaker 3: It wasn't until twenty ten that we decided, all right,
Speaker 3: we'll do two a week during the season, one a
Speaker 3: week in the off season because that's a little bit
Speaker 3: more sustainable. But that end of eight beginning of nine
Speaker 3: timeframe was really when we started connecting the connecting dots.
Speaker 3: We could see that numbers were going up on our
Speaker 3: FeedBurner subscription carets. We were able to track downloads to
Speaker 3: the best of our ability. At that point in time,
Speaker 3: we could see that there was a steady drumbeat of
Speaker 3: people becoming more interested. And of note, was around that
Speaker 3: time iPhones became a thing.
Speaker 1: Yes, iPhones were two thousand and six, two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: but they really sort of launched in popularity in the
Speaker 1: next couple of years.
Speaker 3: The iPhone three G came out, without a doubt that
Speaker 3: had an impact. Now, it wasn't until years later that
Speaker 3: they actually had an app for it that was native
Speaker 3: on most iPhones. But it was around that time when
Speaker 3: people who had any kind of smartphone for that matter
Speaker 3: started figuring out, oh, we we can download it on
Speaker 3: our computer and upload it either to our iPod or.
Speaker 1: To sink it up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we can listen on the go. And that's
Speaker 3: how this whole podcast thing got its initial burst. It
Speaker 3: was from smart devices.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it totally got the iPod. It was from smartphones. Yes,
Speaker 1: it was definitely from smartphones. And the way that we
Speaker 1: sort of split up the responsibilities is you handled a
Speaker 1: lot of the technical aspects. So I sounded like shit,
Speaker 1: like I had like a Logitech, a really crappy one.
Speaker 1: And to anybody that it's writing in the least important thing.
Speaker 1: When you're first starting out as the equipment, get something
Speaker 1: that makes you sound okay. You know, don't spend more
Speaker 1: than like fifty bucks or one hundred bucks or whatever,
Speaker 1: get into rhythm, but you should sound good eventually. So
Speaker 1: I didn't sound great, but slowly I I got a
Speaker 1: better and better microphone. But you handled all of the
Speaker 1: back end stuff because that was your specialty, and what
Speaker 1: I was okay at because I was on the road
Speaker 1: and I wouldn't need sports writers at games and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. Is I would send out so many emails
Speaker 1: to sports writers. I would say, Hey, would you come
Speaker 1: on our college football podcast? We've had on Bruce Felman
Speaker 1: and Andy Staples and Jimmy Trayina and pretty much everybody would
Speaker 1: come on. We really got a ton of people to
Speaker 1: come on. And at that point, also you have Twitter,
Speaker 1: so we said, you know, hey, we're going to tweet
Speaker 1: out the show. Would you mind like tweeting out the
Speaker 1: fact that you were on the show. And they were
Speaker 1: said sure, whatever, and we would start going on their
Speaker 1: podcasts and radio shows or whatever the case may be.
Speaker 1: I remember in two thousand and eight I shot I
Speaker 1: think it was two thousand and eight. I shot at
Speaker 1: Ohio State and Stu Mandel, who is, you know, my
Speaker 1: coworker technically at that time, even though I live in
Speaker 1: LA and he lives in New York whatever, but I
Speaker 1: remember him emailing me. He was like, Oh, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be at this game too, would love to say HI,
Speaker 1: would love to see how you shoot. I was like, stupid,
Speaker 1: I want to see how I shoot. So it was
Speaker 1: one of those things were like I felt like I
Speaker 1: was in this rhythm of Sports Illustrated and he really
Speaker 1: liked the solid verbal and it was very cool to
Speaker 1: see that, like we were becoming a thing in this
Speaker 1: nerdy universe of college football writers because we had a
Speaker 1: lot of them on the show. We've had Dan Wetzel
Speaker 1: on the show forever. We've had Stumandel and Andy Staples
Speaker 1: and Bruce Feldman, and they've been on the show for
Speaker 1: I mean it's twenty seventeen, so they've been on going
Speaker 1: on eight nine years. And so we're getting this following
Speaker 1: of people and we've gone away from this somewhat is
Speaker 1: we've had, you know, like if we've had a Clemson
Speaker 1: writer and we'll have Brian Cook on from m GO blog.
Speaker 1: We were it was so specific to that school, but
Speaker 1: that's the way we got people fans from those schools interested.
Speaker 3: And that's an important point because we got to forty,
Speaker 3: we got to one hundred, and we could tell from
Speaker 3: the traffic to our website, soliverbal dot com. We could
Speaker 3: tell where people were coming from. Yeah, and you were
Speaker 3: in California at the time. I was in Pennsylvania. Could
Speaker 3: see that most of the traffic was from our two states,
Speaker 3: and so the only logical conclusion is that it was
Speaker 3: you and I right. It was at that point that
Speaker 3: I said to you, we can light some of these
Speaker 3: states up if we bring on a guy from Texas,
Speaker 3: if we bring on Brian from someone from Clemson, so
Speaker 3: on and so forth, and so very systematically. I'm not
Speaker 3: going to say we had a master plan, but that
Speaker 3: was the general theme. We tried to bring people on
Speaker 3: from different bigger programs, Notre Dame, and see if we
Speaker 3: can turn Some of it was Google analytics that we're
Speaker 3: still using Google Analytics, but it could show you a
Speaker 3: light green or a dark green depending on how much
Speaker 3: traffic you had from a particular state. And so, oh,
Speaker 3: we want to light up Georgia. Let's bring on someone
Speaker 3: from a Georgia blog. And so we kept doing that,
Speaker 3: and throughout the course of an off season, you bring
Speaker 3: on enough people, you hit enough of the big programs,
Speaker 3: you see most of those states, especially in the southeastern
Speaker 3: part of the country, start to turn a little darker
Speaker 3: shade of green. And again we're talking very incremental here,
Speaker 3: probably not at a thousand listeners by the end of
Speaker 3: two thousand and nine, no, but we could see again
Speaker 3: that we had an upward traject print.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I will also jump in here with something
Speaker 1: to remember. Ty and I have never met in person
Speaker 1: at this point. He is living in eastern Pennsylvania and Allentown.
Speaker 1: I am living in LA and it's studio city, still
Speaker 1: living with a couple friends. Maybe at one point I
Speaker 1: started living alone when Swartz Illustrated paid me a living wage.
Speaker 1: But we had never met. This is two thousand and nine.
Speaker 1: We've been doing the show for at least a year,
Speaker 1: a couple times a week, and sometimes it would be weird.
Speaker 1: It was we had listeners. Sometimes we get an email
Speaker 1: from somebody like Mike Knoebler, who was one of our
Speaker 1: first eleven listeners who more on him in a second
Speaker 1: Well on him was one of the He was the
Speaker 1: head of video at the University of Nebraska, their football program.
Speaker 1: And so we still never met. We still had no
Speaker 1: concept for each other in person. And you know, it's
Speaker 1: just something we're doing bi coostally. Yeah. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that no one I knew could relate.
Speaker 1: Do you have a girlfriend in this time? Not at
Speaker 1: that time? Okay I did, Yes, I did not at
Speaker 1: that time. Yeah, but it you know.
Speaker 3: You try to communicate this to your friends, like I'm
Speaker 3: giving this on like a Wednesday night we've jumped around,
Speaker 3: or what nights we record, but nobody could really understand it.
Speaker 3: The only thing I could really attribute it to is
Speaker 3: that we're just wired in such a way that this
Speaker 3: is totally acceptable. Yeah, and for a lot of people
Speaker 3: it isn't. But for you and I, we just that's
Speaker 3: one of the common threads. And it's an isolating thing too.
Speaker 3: People don't understand.
Speaker 1: You know, you listen to podcasts of people that are
Speaker 1: doing it forever and they're in the same room constantly.
Speaker 1: They're shooting video together, they're doing audio stuff together. This
Speaker 1: is a brand new thing for us, at least I
Speaker 1: don't know how other people at that time were doing things,
Speaker 1: but like, it was extremely isolating. I would go into
Speaker 1: my room and talk to a stranger for an hour
Speaker 1: and a half two nights a week. It was a
Speaker 1: different experience. It was it felt kind of natural. It
Speaker 1: was a leap of faith. We got to know each
Speaker 1: other very well, but it was weird when we met
Speaker 1: for the first team, it definitely was.
Speaker 3: It was weird for the first time. So turning the
Speaker 3: calendar now to twenty ten and one of my favorite moments.
Speaker 3: I won't play the clip, but we had we had.
Speaker 3: This is probably one of my top five favorite moments.
Speaker 3: We started doing the show, we started interviewing coaches. Yes,
Speaker 3: first coach we ever interviewed was Jimbo Fisher right as
Speaker 3: he got the Florida State job and was super nice.
Speaker 1: I'm sure he still is super He was officially the
Speaker 1: first I know. It was Al Golden too around that
Speaker 1: Al gold was around the same time. I remember we
Speaker 1: talked to his secretary for like a half hour because
Speaker 1: she was running late. She sent me a thank you note.
Speaker 3: I mean just super nice people at Temple. Everybody that
Speaker 3: we dealt with was was genuinely nice, but Jimbo couldn't
Speaker 3: have been friendlier. He was our first coach interview. I
Speaker 3: remember I was nervous, what am I gonna say Jimbo Fisher? Like,
Speaker 3: I don't even know who is Jimbo Fisher. I didn't
Speaker 3: even know who he was the time, but he was
Speaker 3: kind enough to come on our show and at.
Speaker 1: The time a man who completely destroyed Notre Dame. That's right,
Speaker 1: thank you, thank you for that anecdote. JaMarcus Russell, we
Speaker 1: interviewed houston nutt yeah, And one of the funnier early
Speaker 1: moments of the show is we caught houston Nut on
Speaker 1: the toilet. Yeah. We didn't realize this till after the fact.
Speaker 1: I don't know he's coach.
Speaker 3: Elliott, a friend of mine, noticed that houston Nut was
Speaker 3: very clearly on the toilet because beginning part of the interview,
Speaker 3: there is a very distinct echo. While you were asking
Speaker 3: a question, you could hear very loudly a toilet flush,
Speaker 3: like a jet engine toy.
Speaker 1: His voice was very hollow, it was echoe yeah, and.
Speaker 3: Then you hear a door close, and then by the
Speaker 3: time you get done asking your question, he's in like
Speaker 3: a perfectly insulated sound studio. And so upon further review,
Speaker 3: you could tell that he is clearly indisposed when he's yes.
Speaker 3: Doing the initial interview, it was March twenty fourth, twenty ten.
Speaker 3: If you want to go back and listen to that.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you, by the way, just before you
Speaker 1: go on, how we booked coaches when we were just
Speaker 1: an anonymous podcast, because we were not on any platform
Speaker 1: at this point. I had the Football Writers Association of
Speaker 1: America like black Book, which has the contact information of
Speaker 1: everybody in college football because I was in the Writers'
Speaker 1: Association and I went through and I emailed one hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty five sids and I said, Hi, my name
Speaker 1: is Dan. I do a podcast, and Ty and I
Speaker 1: were we work at Sports Illustrator. We used to work
Speaker 1: at Sports Illustrated at this point. But we have the
Speaker 1: show and we'd love to have the coach on for
Speaker 1: twenty three minutes to talk about the Tigers or the
Speaker 1: you know whoever, the buck Eyes, and I think we booked, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know, four or five or something like that
Speaker 1: out of like one hundred and twenty. But that's pretty
Speaker 1: good because as soon as you book four or five,
Speaker 1: you can say we've had on head, had Jimbo Fisher on. Yeh,
Speaker 1: We've had Jimbo Fisher on. We've had Kyle Whittingham on whoever.
Speaker 1: And so that was that was a pretty good hit rate,
Speaker 1: the fact that we got those four or five guys,
Speaker 1: and I mean we had I have I might still
Speaker 1: have a message that Bill Stuart left me. He called
Speaker 1: my cell phone instead of your instead of the studio
Speaker 1: number when we had him on. May he rest in peace.
Speaker 1: But we had on head coaches and at this time.
Speaker 1: I then we can go back to where you are professionally.
Speaker 1: So this is two thousand and nine, twenty ten. I
Speaker 1: was writing a little bit in two thousand and nine
Speaker 1: for Sports Illustrated. Because they rolled back their video, I
Speaker 1: was offered a shift in video. I was doing the
Speaker 1: tour Guide show for Sports Illustrated and then they said
Speaker 1: good news, bad news, and I said, okay, cool, weird
Speaker 1: but cool. So the good news is we sold the
Speaker 1: college Football Travel show to Nissan for their Heisman campaign.
Speaker 1: I was like, whoa, that seems like a very good thing.
Speaker 1: And I was like, what's the bad news. The bad
Speaker 1: news is they don't really want you to like joke
Speaker 1: around with tailgaters and like eat food and drink beer.
Speaker 1: They just want you to interview a older Heisman winner.
Speaker 1: And I said, no, I'm not doing that. That's compromising
Speaker 1: my creative freedom. George Costanza, your artistic totally. What happened? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And they said are you sure? And I have this
Speaker 1: dream job traveling going to college football games as my job,
Speaker 1: and they want to keep paying me to do that,
Speaker 1: but with a wrinkle, and I said, I turned them down.
Speaker 1: And I said, no, that's not what I want to
Speaker 1: do creatively, and so they gave it the job to
Speaker 1: somebody else and I just sort of wrote, and then
Speaker 1: they stopped asking me to write. Check stop coming. The
Speaker 1: check stopped coming. And this was two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: so the economy's not great. They're not doing any video
Speaker 1: basically anymore. It was just like Swimsuit at this point,
Speaker 1: and I stood up from my artistic integrity. I started
Speaker 1: a new video series. I set up a green screen
Speaker 1: in my apartment and I did a recap show called
Speaker 1: The Postgame Tailgates. Yeah, and there were some goofs, so
Speaker 1: I looked real crazy and weird back then, or at
Speaker 1: least crazier, but it was a green screen show. I
Speaker 1: was trying to be like The Soup but for college football.
Speaker 1: And it was fine. Some episodes are funnier than others,
Speaker 1: but I constantly had to be making so I'm doing
Speaker 1: the solid verbal. I'm not on the road anymore. I'm
Speaker 1: just recapping games. I'm wearing like an old corduroy blazer
Speaker 1: and standing in of this green screen and like I'm
Speaker 1: doing motion graphics behind me. It's very strange and cheap looking,
Speaker 1: but that's what I did. And sports Oustralia would post
Speaker 1: it every so often, and they liked the show, but
Speaker 1: they didn't pay me to do it. A good deal
Speaker 1: for them, by the way, a great deal for them,
Speaker 1: A great deal. They would just post it on their
Speaker 1: like campus or hot Clicks, Jimmy Train or whatever. And
Speaker 1: that was fine because it got me a lot of
Speaker 1: attention for that too. But We're doing the show, We're
Speaker 1: having coaches on, but I'm not making any money. So
Speaker 1: I'm like back to temping. I'm like picking up I
Speaker 1: picked up catering jobs. But like, this is totally true. Scott,
Speaker 1: my really good friend Scott. His parents own this successful
Speaker 1: barbecue restaurant in La and I would go work catering
Speaker 1: jobs because they would pay me one hundred bucks for
Speaker 1: doing two hours worth of work, and that seemed fine.
Speaker 1: Got to my bed broke at a certain point, like
Speaker 1: the slats in my cheap ikea bed, like it just broke,
Speaker 1: the thing that goes down the middle of the bed.
Speaker 1: It broke, and I was like, I'm not buying another bed,
Speaker 1: so I slept on a mattress on the ground inside
Speaker 1: of the frame bed. I mean, listen, people were way
Speaker 1: worse off than me. I recognize how fortunate and privileged
Speaker 1: I am to be like, that's the worst problem I had,
Speaker 1: But like I wasn't you know, I was not living
Speaker 1: any sort of comfortable life at this.
Speaker 3: Day, and we weren't making any money on the show,
Speaker 3: on the show podcast advertising. It hadn't even been conceived
Speaker 3: at that point in twenty ten, and kind of along
Speaker 3: the lines of what you said with SI on Campus,
Speaker 3: I wasn't writing at this point either. I wasn't writing
Speaker 3: at this point either.
Speaker 1: But had you had a secure day job, I had
Speaker 1: a secure day job.
Speaker 3: I was not reliant upon it like you might have
Speaker 3: been in the video realm for any kind of steady income.
Speaker 3: But the writing thing had ceased because they had, I think,
Speaker 3: pretty much closed up shop on SI on Campus at
Speaker 3: some point, and so for me, the primary creative outlet
Speaker 3: was truly the solidverbal yea, at that point, I wasn't writing.
Speaker 3: I was doing a little bit of blogging here and there,
Speaker 3: but I really turned all of my attention creatively to
Speaker 3: doing our show. And it was also at this point
Speaker 3: that you and I recognized that it was continuing to
Speaker 3: grow a very very fast clip and we still hadn't met.
Speaker 3: We still hadn't met so by virtue of our friend
Speaker 3: Mike Nobler, who was the video director at University of
Speaker 3: Nebraska for then who Bo Polini. He said, why don't
Speaker 3: you guys come out to the Nebraska Texas game. We'll
Speaker 3: make sure that you get in the door. We'll give
Speaker 3: you a tour of the press box, give you two
Speaker 3: of a tour of all the video operations up here,
Speaker 3: and it'll give you guys an opportunity to meet We
Speaker 3: called verbicon verbicon.
Speaker 1: There have been many.
Speaker 3: Alternate spellings created for verbicon. This is one of the
Speaker 3: things I'm very anal about that I've never said to you.
Speaker 3: I prefer the v erba capital con so like comic con,
Speaker 3: but verba con not verb not verb e verb uh
Speaker 3: con was always my preferred spelling.
Speaker 1: See, I've always interpreted as the Spish pronunciation vera bak on,
Speaker 1: vera back on.
Speaker 3: I've been under the impression for all the year said
Speaker 3: we're a very cultural show. But we did get that
Speaker 3: behind the scenes tour of uh acilities. Uh you had
Speaker 3: your first trip to five guys, which I booked on
Speaker 3: my phone. Actually still have a video, which he seems
Speaker 3: slightly annoyed that a kickoff I caught.
Speaker 1: No, no, I could have caught a kick. But it
Speaker 1: was my first time on the field for a game.
Speaker 1: I had been on the field a bunch from me.
Speaker 3: And I was worried that if I caught the ball,
Speaker 3: it'd be like a baseball game where they throw me
Speaker 3: out Jeffrey Meyer. So I decided I'm going to let
Speaker 3: the guy next to me catch the ball. And he did,
Speaker 3: and it was like the thrill of his life.
Speaker 1: It was cool.
Speaker 3: He took a step out, he held the ball up
Speaker 3: like it was a big deal for this guy. I
Speaker 3: was terrified to be anywhere near a live football in
Speaker 3: a college football stadium. But we had a chance to meet,
Speaker 3: and I remember, I don't I think it was a
Speaker 3: holiday in that we stayed at. I remember that you
Speaker 3: had arranged for the management to put out on an
Speaker 3: easel welcome verbicon and and I remember walking in seeing
Speaker 3: this on an easel and I'm gonna curse folks, thinking
Speaker 3: what the fuck is going on here? Verbicon? Like there
Speaker 3: is no real verbicon? Do these guys know it? And
Speaker 3: then you kind of popped out from around the corner. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and we had a chance to meet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we didn't meet in the hotel lobby, though we
Speaker 1: met outside of the bar. I think that was going
Speaker 1: at that night. But in any case, yes, this is
Speaker 1: all true. We met in Lincoln, Nebraska. We had a
Speaker 1: great time. The game was great, the game experience, the
Speaker 1: game itself wasn't that good. I think it was Texas
Speaker 1: one with like a quarterback who was mobile, who's not
Speaker 1: normally mobile. I don't even remember who it was. It
Speaker 1: wasn't David Ash, it's pre Ash, but it was it
Speaker 1: Garrett Gilbert. Yeah, in any case, twenty ten for me, though,
Speaker 1: this is where I'm at. I email. I sent a
Speaker 1: cold email because I'm tired of sleeping on the ground.
Speaker 1: I sent a cold the email both I both physically
Speaker 1: cold and out of nowhere. I sent it to Eric
Speaker 1: ride Home, who is the executive producer of PTI and
Speaker 1: still is and is like a total empire builder at ESPN,
Speaker 1: and I said, Hey, if you ever need anybody to
Speaker 1: do to write research or something like that, let me know.
Speaker 1: And he was like, nobody ever leaves PTI, nobody ever leaves,
Speaker 1: nobody ever wants to leave. But if you're ever in DC,
Speaker 1: let me know, and I'd love to meet with you.
Speaker 1: And so I found an excuse to get to d C.
Speaker 1: My middle brother is a pilot, and so I was
Speaker 1: in Chicago at Blogs with Balls, which is a big
Speaker 1: sports media blogger conference, met Spencer Hall for the first
Speaker 1: met Spencer for the first time, met all sorts of
Speaker 1: people that you know are just sort of in the
Speaker 1: sports blog world. It was a great time. And then
Speaker 1: just continued onto DC from Chicago. Stayed with a friend
Speaker 1: who had recently moved out there who I liked. This friend,
Speaker 1: I was fine and sending a note to Eric ride
Speaker 1: home before I went. I was like, having to be
Speaker 1: in d C. Does the offer still stand? Because I
Speaker 1: had sent him like a reel from Sports Illustrating. He
Speaker 1: was like, sure, yeah, come on buy And I with
Speaker 1: him and he was incredibly nice, just like super kind,
Speaker 1: and I still am friendly with him to this day.
Speaker 1: But he he sent me like three email addresses of people,
Speaker 1: one of whom is Ron Wexler, who was at ESPN
Speaker 1: is now at NBC, a guy from Yahoo who I forget,
Speaker 1: and Jim Bankoff, who is the current CEO of you know,
Speaker 1: Vox Media and was at that point just Espnation. And
Speaker 1: I contacted all of them. I met Jim Bankoff that
Speaker 1: night in DC at a party and sent Ron Wexler
Speaker 1: an email and started doing stuff for ESPN, just sort
Speaker 1: of tangentially helping them research and produce and stuff like
Speaker 1: that out in LA and I actually ended up getting
Speaker 1: a couple pilots with ESPNU, and so that cold email
Speaker 1: got me going sports media wise, but also like we
Speaker 1: would start having Spencer Hall on the show and he
Speaker 1: was always hilarious. So we were slowly expanding our footprint
Speaker 1: of people that would come on the show. And at
Speaker 1: the end of two thy ten, what is our next
Speaker 1: step platform wise? Because I feel like there's about to
Speaker 1: be a hit here.
Speaker 3: The other thing that I'll mention before we go onto
Speaker 3: the platform is also in twenty ten, I had a
Speaker 3: chance to audition with the Big ten network. That's right,
Speaker 3: which I totally forgot to put.
Speaker 1: Down on our on our outline. So you did. You
Speaker 1: did some piloting for ESPNU, and that was through Eric
Speaker 1: ride home and saying I had solid verbal and sports illustrated.
Speaker 1: You know, I have this at least record of activity.
Speaker 3: I got a cold email from a producer at the
Speaker 3: Big ten Network to go out there and try out
Speaker 3: for show. I had never been on camera before, I
Speaker 3: had no idea what the hell I was doing, and
Speaker 3: I tried.
Speaker 1: And this was best I could. This was from the
Speaker 1: solid verbal.
Speaker 3: This was from the solid verbal. This was just you know,
Speaker 3: me being the hosts that I try to be on
Speaker 3: our show. But went out there, flew out from Allentown
Speaker 3: direct to Chicago, was out there for a couple hours,
Speaker 3: did a tryout. Didn't get it, obviously, because I didn't
Speaker 3: really know what I was doing, didn't know a camera
Speaker 3: to look at him, and I was but it's so flattering.
Speaker 3: I was a total mess, but didn't get it. Had
Speaker 3: a good experience out there. Just getting to see the
Speaker 3: studio was kind of a cool thing. And it was
Speaker 3: at that point for me that I'm like, we must
Speaker 3: actually be pretty good at this.
Speaker 1: Pretty good. We must be pretty good at this.
Speaker 3: If I am getting an email just out of the
Speaker 3: blue from a real network with real equipment, maybe we
Speaker 3: should consider improving our equipment. Yes, maybe we should consider
Speaker 3: beefing up our equipment. So it was at that point
Speaker 3: that we started to get a little bit more serious
Speaker 3: about what what's that's right, what what equipment are we using,
Speaker 3: and what other platforms can we be on to try
Speaker 3: and grow our footprint at this point, again steady growth,
Speaker 3: continuing to grow. We're up over a thousand users, clearly
Speaker 3: by a thousand users, maybe by you know, around like
Speaker 3: three thousand at this point.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: In twenty and ten, we catch on with the Score. Yes,
Speaker 3: which was.
Speaker 1: They email us or did we contact them? How did
Speaker 1: we get into communicate? I don't even remember.
Speaker 3: I don't remember how. I think they may have looked
Speaker 3: us up yet. Nonetheless, the Score was actually where the
Speaker 3: Basketball Jones was calling home at that point in time.
Speaker 3: They were a Canadian outlet. They were on serious radio,
Speaker 3: but only in Canada.
Speaker 1: No, they were on serious in the States as well.
Speaker 1: They were definitely because I remember my uncle. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they were. But the TV show was a Canadian thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a Canadian company. But we caught on with them.
Speaker 1: They started promoting our content and they paid us so
Speaker 1: many zeros of dollars, so many zeros of dollars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we got some added exposure through their website. And
Speaker 3: it was also around this time that Chris the Capper,
Speaker 3: you remember Chris the Kapper, who has prolong time now
Speaker 3: given us his weekly college football picks. But he had
Speaker 3: emailed us and said, you know, I've done some handicapping.
Speaker 3: I'm pretty good at it. Would you mind if I
Speaker 3: called in a pick or wrote in a pick?
Speaker 1: Every week? We said, hey, let's do it. Why don't
Speaker 1: you do it.
Speaker 3: Let's try and let's try and grow this as much
Speaker 3: as we can. So Chris started contributing picks. We felt
Speaker 3: pretty good about the state of affairs. In twenty ten,
Speaker 3: podcasting was very slowly picking up steam. You still couldn't
Speaker 3: go to a bar and say I do a podcast
Speaker 3: and expect anyone to know what the hell you were
Speaker 3: talking about. But podcasting at that point seemed like it
Speaker 3: was doing better than all life support.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, it's It's one of those things too, where
Speaker 1: if we could say that we were on SERIOUSXM, which
Speaker 1: was enormous, we convinced them to send us to the
Speaker 1: National Championship in Arizona, or like give us our money
Speaker 1: back for that's our travel expenses whatever. So it was
Speaker 1: it was a badge of like, no, we're not making money,
Speaker 1: but like more and more sids are responding to us saying,
Speaker 1: would you like to have your coach on word SIRIOUSXM whatever,
Speaker 1: and so it was. It was a nice badge, was
Speaker 1: a nice thing to have on our resume and increase
Speaker 1: the footprint. You know, we have thousands of listeners at
Speaker 1: this point, but we're not making any money.
Speaker 3: Not making not making a single dime. But it was
Speaker 3: definitely about collecting references.
Speaker 1: And so this is year three. Yeah, yeah, so your
Speaker 1: three you'ar three. Yeah. We interrupt this special edition of
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Speaker 3: Through the Score, we end up going to the BCS
Speaker 3: National Championship. Came back when it was still the BCS
Speaker 3: in Glendale, Arizona. This was a big deal for you
Speaker 3: because not only do we get to go and have
Speaker 3: it paid for by somebody else, which we'll talk about
Speaker 3: momentarily obviously, but it was also Orgon against Auburn.
Speaker 1: It was the two of us in West Coast, Kevin
Speaker 1: my roommate at the time. We drove from LA so
Speaker 1: it was very easy for us. You flew in from
Speaker 1: from Allentown, shipped all your audio equipment via Fax. Big
Speaker 1: freaking box. Yeah. It cost me like one hundred bucks
Speaker 1: this ship. So you ship all your audio equipment. I
Speaker 1: bring some video equipment out and we were credentialed because
Speaker 1: of Sirius XM and the score. So we went to
Speaker 1: media days and we shot fun video stuff, and we
Speaker 1: eventually cut together a video that we filmed in a
Speaker 1: very Tom Rinaldi ish style about the fact that you know,
Speaker 1: and if you've ever seen the Media Hotel in Phoenix,
Speaker 1: it's a beautiful resort. We stayed at a just awful
Speaker 1: place across the street from a strip club, a very
Speaker 1: shady strip club. Not even like a fun, exciting Atlanta
Speaker 1: Hawks strip club. No, no, this was a terrible, terrible
Speaker 1: strip club that we listen, Ty and I are not
Speaker 1: above going to a strip club. Let me get that
Speaker 1: right out in the open right here. We looked at
Speaker 1: that place and we're.
Speaker 3: Like, I don't know, that is not wouldn't even go
Speaker 3: in there for like a six pack, not even for
Speaker 3: a story, not even to like tell the story of
Speaker 3: how groedy it was.
Speaker 1: We're like, now, I think we're good. I think we've
Speaker 1: grown up now, I think life is better than.
Speaker 3: We stated a country inn in suites in Tempe in Tempe, Arizona,
Speaker 3: across from a shady strip joint, and it was there
Speaker 3: that we wrote a script. We narrated you cut video.
Speaker 3: You did narration under a blanket in our room, under
Speaker 3: a blanket to try and get like some kind of
Speaker 3: acoustic integrity in this thing. Yeah, but we cut together
Speaker 3: our story are Improbable Journey to the BCS Championship, And
Speaker 3: I look back and I watched the video and it's like,
Speaker 3: I don't even know how that story really even came about, right,
Speaker 3: I don't know what our headspace was at the time
Speaker 3: to think that that was funny or a good thing,
Speaker 3: or how that came to fruition. I have no idea,
Speaker 3: but it caught on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we did a good job, all things considered, with
Speaker 1: the crack tom we have. I just remember we went
Speaker 1: to the media party and you and Kevin were drinking.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, this was the drinking contest. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: guys were drinking a bunch and you got back and
Speaker 1: you start you of course, go to your computer and
Speaker 1: start editing audio, and Kevin goes b lines to the
Speaker 1: bathroom and you guys were drinking drink for drink and
Speaker 1: just pukes everywhere. Yeah, he was.
Speaker 3: He was in rough shape after that, and I was.
Speaker 3: I was a more seasoned drinker. I was able to handle.
Speaker 3: I was able to handle audio. But we were at
Speaker 3: the BCS party and at that point, everybody you see
Speaker 3: that you sort of recognize is like a star.
Speaker 1: It was a big deal if we're in a college
Speaker 1: football media wise.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we went drink for drink, Kevin and I did
Speaker 3: because you were driving with Spencer Hall, who if you've
Speaker 3: ever met Spencer dude, can drink, can drink. And Clay
Speaker 3: Travis yea at the time who I don't know who
Speaker 3: Clay was with at that point in time, right, been
Speaker 3: dead Spin ye then, I don't remember, but we went
Speaker 3: drink for drink with those two guys. We came back
Speaker 3: from that party. I was editing, Kevin was in the
Speaker 3: bathroom duking.
Speaker 1: But yeah, we shut the video and it was in
Speaker 1: the very Rinaldi Tomernaldi esque style. I cut it together.
Speaker 1: We put it up a couple days after when we
Speaker 1: got back, and you know, Twitter is a thing at
Speaker 1: this point. We tweeted out and I don't know at
Speaker 1: this you know, this is twenty ten or the very
Speaker 1: beginning of twenty eleven. Maybe there were other college football podcasts,
Speaker 1: and if there were other college football podcasts, they'd record
Speaker 1: like only during the season, or they'd record, you know,
Speaker 1: once a week, and we were doing twice a week,
Speaker 1: and it was one of those things where we just
Speaker 1: didn't have a lot of competition, not because we were better,
Speaker 1: but because we just were more consistent than everybody.
Speaker 3: More consistent and probably more demented to want to keep
Speaker 3: doing it again, not making any money, right, not making
Speaker 3: any money.
Speaker 1: We'd post this thing. People seem to enjoy it. It
Speaker 1: gets spread around a whole bunch. I get an email
Speaker 1: from ESPN that they want to show it on ESPN News.
Speaker 1: Steve Weisman, who were still pals with to this get
Speaker 1: to this day, is the host. He loves the video.
Speaker 1: He brings Tom Ernaldi on the show. We eventually have
Speaker 1: Tom Renaldi on the show a couple of years later.
Speaker 1: But it becomes a thing, and it's I'm trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how to describe what this meant. It didn't
Speaker 1: make us any more money, It didn't really get us
Speaker 1: any more listeners. But I think it gave us the
Speaker 1: confidence that, like, we have a good sense for what
Speaker 1: people might think is funny, and.
Speaker 3: It was validation that what we were doing, yeah, was
Speaker 3: not totally off base, right, And still I'm at this point,
Speaker 3: it's two thousand, the beginning of twenty eleven. So I
Speaker 3: am doing some work around, like freelancing, but you know,
Speaker 3: not making a ton of money, and you're still at
Speaker 3: the day job, and we don't have any expectation that
Speaker 3: we're going to grow this into something larger and profitable.
Speaker 3: Exactly interesting side note. You saw an interesting side of
Speaker 3: me as we tried to collect the reimbursement check from
Speaker 3: the Score. Oh wow, very nice people at the Score.
Speaker 3: Enjoyed working with the Score. I won't name the gentleman
Speaker 3: that we worked with, but I did go back and
Speaker 3: count our correspondence. It took me six months and eleven
Speaker 3: follow up emails to collect that reimbursementship.
Speaker 1: How it couldn't have been much either.
Speaker 3: I don't think boks a few hundred bucks, but it
Speaker 3: was principal. Yeah, if you say you're going to send
Speaker 3: us and reimburse us, don't leave us hanging.
Speaker 1: Yeah. We had spoken, and I'm really glad this didn't
Speaker 1: come to pass. We had spoken a little bit about
Speaker 1: selling the show to the Score and how much we
Speaker 1: would want for the name and like the rights to
Speaker 1: the solid verbal because that's in some way how the
Speaker 1: starters and Basketball Jones that they had to change their
Speaker 1: name when they went to NBA TV, and it never
Speaker 1: really came to pass. We had no idea how to
Speaker 1: value our worth and our company, but it was cool
Speaker 1: to start having those conversations that people were interested in
Speaker 1: acquiring the show.
Speaker 3: At that point, we decide we should probably trademark our name,
Speaker 3: and to this day, I think that was one of
Speaker 3: the better decisions that we made at that point, where like,
Speaker 3: what we're doing clearly has value.
Speaker 1: Let's try to protect ourselves. Oh we can, so we
Speaker 1: trade more the solid verbal. What equipment are we using
Speaker 1: at this point? I think I'm twenty eleven a blue snowball,
Speaker 1: You're using a blue snowball and then a blue yetty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm using a Sure SM seven B. Oh yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a great mic. I'm using a Sure SM seven B.
Speaker 3: And I will also add we're still recording on one track. Yes,
Speaker 3: all right, this gets a little too tactical maybe for
Speaker 3: this show. It's a Skype record, but it's a Skype recording.
Speaker 3: I'm recording everything on one track. And then I'm using
Speaker 3: a program called a level later. Oh yeah, which was
Speaker 3: freeware that you could find out on the internet. Still exists,
Speaker 3: still use still still exists to this day. I still
Speaker 3: recommend it to people who aren't looking to really jump
Speaker 3: headfirst into the whole podcasting thing. But it's this kind
Speaker 3: of magic algorithmic software that's able to use a compressor
Speaker 3: and some sort of limitter and.
Speaker 1: It automatically levels things out to your audio levels.
Speaker 3: It balances your audio out. It doesn't always do a
Speaker 3: great job, but in a lot of cases it's good
Speaker 3: enough quick and in a case like ours, where we're
Speaker 3: co located in different spots, it was it was ideal
Speaker 3: to try and make a sound like we were in
Speaker 3: the same room.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is true. And the way this is our
Speaker 1: general feeling of the show is we're not taking college
Speaker 1: football too seriously. We were nerdy about things. You know,
Speaker 1: we have people like Phil Steele on and we we
Speaker 1: do some deep diving. But we find that people respond
Speaker 1: most when we're weird. We're talking about robot surgeons that
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know what year we came up
Speaker 1: with clemsoning, but that that was the sort of attitude
Speaker 1: we took where we were coming up with terms and
Speaker 1: our general philosophy as a show. Because people are so
Speaker 1: hyper local about their own teams, their tribal about their
Speaker 1: own teams, and we're doing a national show, so we
Speaker 1: just want to be entertaining. We want to build a universe.
Speaker 1: I think both of us are fans of you know,
Speaker 1: the Simpsons and stuff like that. We're like, the star
Speaker 1: of the show is not the Simpson Family, it's Springfield.
Speaker 1: So the star of this show is not Oregon and
Speaker 1: Notre Dame. It's college football. It's the weirdness. It's the
Speaker 1: the NC State, the fat NC State fan waving his towel,
Speaker 1: like when they beat Florida State. It's excuse me, hefty
Speaker 1: or husky whatever. Yeah, but we're trying to tap into that,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's it's like edsbs there, you know,
Speaker 1: we try to emulate that sort of attitude where like
Speaker 1: everything is ridiculous, let's just have fun. It's college football
Speaker 1: and it resonates with people to whatever extent, and we
Speaker 1: have a really good People are emailing the show all
Speaker 1: the time. They're tweeting us. You know, Clemson loses a
Speaker 1: dumb game to an unranked team after impressing people, and
Speaker 1: we get a bunch of tweets Clemson and Clemson and clemsoning.
Speaker 1: Is this clemsing? So but we're getting these terms into
Speaker 1: the college football lexicon. And it's again no money, but
Speaker 1: there is something fulfilling about establishing a very tiny, tiny
Speaker 1: place in the college football media universe.
Speaker 3: And the other thing that we tried to do not
Speaker 3: only was to tap into that community, but we were
Speaker 3: very I thought strategic about how we tried to give
Speaker 3: people ownership of the show. And this is really the
Speaker 3: differentiator for us. There were other shows that were popping
Speaker 3: up around that point in time, but most of them
Speaker 3: were with bigger personalities and it was a lot of
Speaker 3: one way chatter. This is what we heard from this coach,
Speaker 3: This is what we heard from this player. There weren't
Speaker 3: any shows out there that answered email questions. There weren't
Speaker 3: any shows out there that had audio from fans on
Speaker 3: their program. This was something that we started figuring out
Speaker 3: how to pull in now known as the Reverbs. Yes,
Speaker 3: we've been doing the reverbs for a while.
Speaker 1: And Bill Simmons had his mail bag, and you know,
Speaker 1: there was stuff like that in written form, but not
Speaker 1: in audio in the same way, not an audio and
Speaker 1: certainly not in the college footballwork right, And that was
Speaker 1: the little area we tried to carve out for ourselves
Speaker 1: and so with the ESPN news hit that we got
Speaker 1: and with the continued success of the podcast. That was
Speaker 1: when Grantline so I had mentioned doing ESPNU pilots and
Speaker 1: for the show Unite. I don't know if people remember
Speaker 1: that show, good for them, but I shot a couple
Speaker 1: of pilots for that. In La met a lot of
Speaker 1: ESPN people. One of those people was Dave Jacobi, who
Speaker 1: is now a famous radio host now I guess. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He was just a development guy for ESPN when they
Speaker 1: had a development partner department and original content development department,
Speaker 1: and he was put in charge of podcasts. He left
Speaker 1: ESPN for Grantland and put in charge of podcasts, and
Speaker 1: I had known him. Ron Wexler was the other name
Speaker 1: who's now at NBC Sports, but he was one of
Speaker 1: the heads of ESPN Original content and they were looking
Speaker 1: for external podcast for this grant Land network of podcasts.
Speaker 1: Dave Jacoby contacted me and he said, and I had
Speaker 1: known him already, but he said, you know, would you
Speaker 1: be interested in doing this and having the cliverbal on Grantland?
Speaker 1: And I said, of course, absolutely, yeah. You know, didn't
Speaker 1: pay us again, American dollars did not pay us. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you could definitely make the case, and I will make
Speaker 1: the case having that exposure was worth more than any
Speaker 1: paycheck they could have cut to us. Yeah, we are.
Speaker 1: We had an ad in the New York Times. We had,
Speaker 1: you know, the influence of grant Land. Obviously Bill Simmons
Speaker 1: his huge show, we had. You know, this was at
Speaker 1: the same time that and Blazers joined Grantland. This is
Speaker 1: the same time that I think it was a year
Speaker 1: before maybe the Basketball Jones had joined Grantland. But it
Speaker 1: was by far our best exposure because all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: we're in this universe that is not super technology forward.
Speaker 1: College football is sort of an older media type thing,
Speaker 1: and then we get into grant Land and it's all
Speaker 1: just like people our age, new technology, fun writers, whatever,
Speaker 1: and it's our sensibility. And it really did a number.
Speaker 1: We were on like the Grantland Network podcast feed and
Speaker 1: then you could subscribe to the Solid Verbal separately, and
Speaker 1: it was just once a week. We were doing two
Speaker 1: shows a week, but our Sunday show was on grant Land.
Speaker 1: And did you edit that special for them or something
Speaker 1: like that? Yeah, I mean it was.
Speaker 3: Never cut in a special way. It was a different file, yes,
Speaker 3: said I provided to them. But ESPN and Dave Jacobe
Speaker 3: were really good about our content. We didn't have any
Speaker 3: shackles placed on us as always like this, yeah, this
Speaker 3: thing that people seem to have with ESPN, they're always
Speaker 3: all there, they're kelly you what to say that.
Speaker 1: Nobody ever told us what to say. They were so
Speaker 1: cool about it. Yeah, they would always like The only
Speaker 1: note that Jacoby would give us was be like, just
Speaker 1: get weirder, get fun like Nick Foles in a losing
Speaker 1: effort was something that happened at that point. He was like,
Speaker 1: lean into stuff like that. That's funny and weird and unique,
Speaker 1: and so we tried to. Yeah, that was that was
Speaker 1: the big thing. Nothing, if anything, ESPN and Grantland made
Speaker 1: us weirder, So it was it was very cool to
Speaker 1: see how that expanded our footprint. So that was twenty
Speaker 1: eleven and that was a big deal.
Speaker 3: That was pretty much the inflection point for us and
Speaker 3: from that point forward, and that's our fourth season, fourth season,
Speaker 3: we're going to be entering season ten. Yeah, but fourth
Speaker 3: season is when we absolutely saw an uptick in the
Speaker 3: people who were being driven to our show, to our
Speaker 3: website are our following grew by a factor of like
Speaker 3: ten at that point, and we really felt like we
Speaker 3: were picking up steam with this thing, and so we
Speaker 3: did the season with Greatland. The calendar turns to twenty twelve. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you moved to New York City.
Speaker 1: I do so. Mentioned Spencer Hall before and so that
Speaker 1: pilot for a unite it. They wanted me to reach
Speaker 1: out to Spencer to hire him at ESPNU. I had
Speaker 1: a call with Spencer. Spencer said, oh, that's interesting, that's
Speaker 1: something to think about. But we're also doing our own
Speaker 1: thing here at Espanation, and you're on our list of
Speaker 1: potential people. And one I'm making a ton of cash,
Speaker 1: and two I don't know what the future is with ESPN.
Speaker 1: And three I'm sort of in like a personal rut
Speaker 1: in LA. I'm ready for something different. And so I
Speaker 1: interviewed with est Nation. I spoke with a number of people.
Speaker 1: I came out late November or excuse me, early November.
Speaker 1: It was the week right before nine to six LSU, Alabama,
Speaker 1: So that was like November fourth eleven. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: came out here. I met everybody Espination and liked everybody
Speaker 1: was very cool. Really wanted the job. Finally figured out,
Speaker 1: finally was told. I got the job in late December
Speaker 1: and moved to New York in early twenty twelve. So
Speaker 1: that's February twenty twelve. I moved to New York and
Speaker 1: we're still we're year round. We're doing it once a week,
Speaker 1: twice a week, depending on guests. We're trying to get coaches.
Speaker 1: I don't have a couch. I'm broadcasting. This is totally true.
Speaker 1: I didn't have a couch. I was waiting for the
Speaker 1: new couch to arrive that I ordered from some discount
Speaker 1: couch warehouse in New York. I did the show. I've
Speaker 1: done at least three or four shows from a really
Speaker 1: grody New York apartment floor. I did shows that spring
Speaker 1: from a rat infested stairwell at the old Espianation Loft
Speaker 1: studio office. And you know, it's I think we started
Speaker 1: sponsorship in twenty twelve, but it was still like I
Speaker 1: don't know if at that point I was like what
Speaker 1: am I doing with this? Because there was so much
Speaker 1: positive But that's when I specifically remember, like I was
Speaker 1: working twelve hour days at this startup basically, and that's
Speaker 1: when I remember like the podcast started taking a lot
Speaker 1: out of me. That's I was like, this is great.
Speaker 1: I love doing it. But there were definitely shows around
Speaker 1: that time when I had moved to New York War
Speaker 1: I just twenty seven minutes and I was just like,
Speaker 1: I don't have anything.
Speaker 3: I'm totally gassed. And I was in a very similar place.
Speaker 3: You know, because you stay at a company for any
Speaker 3: point in time. At this point, I'm there eight years,
Speaker 3: you start getting more responsibility. You start working a little
Speaker 3: bit harder when you're there, not that you're not always
Speaker 3: trying to do a good job, but you just have
Speaker 3: more on your plate, and so you're coming home, you're
Speaker 3: tired from your work day. In your case, sometimes you're
Speaker 3: still at work, which was not always the most tenable
Speaker 3: situation for you. I'm sure a little bit uncomfortable because
Speaker 3: you're not supposed to be doing that stuff when you're
Speaker 3: at the office. And yeah, I'm wondering the same thing
Speaker 3: mostly in the off season.
Speaker 1: For me.
Speaker 3: During the season, you're just kind of like in the ocean,
Speaker 3: you go with it. But in the off season you
Speaker 3: start having these thoughts. And I think it's common across
Speaker 3: anyone who does anything on the internet. They'll tell you
Speaker 3: thinking about quitting thinking about how this affects me personally
Speaker 3: is not something that comes about like once in a
Speaker 3: blue moon. It's something that comes about fairly regularly. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it certainly happened to me back then. It happens
Speaker 3: to me now sure all the time. Yeah, you start wondering, like,
Speaker 3: what kind of a personal toll has this taken on me?
Speaker 1: And we stuck with it. Yeah. The interesting thing is,
Speaker 1: at this point, the solid verbal is sort of grandfathered
Speaker 1: into our lives as the oldest relationship. This is It's like,
Speaker 1: my actual negotiation with Espanation included the fact that, like,
Speaker 1: I can do this podcast, this sports thing, even though
Speaker 1: it's not Espianation, and they were cool with it. And
Speaker 1: you know, I was with somebody for seven years in
Speaker 1: LA six and change years and broke up when we
Speaker 1: when I moved to New York, and you know, had
Speaker 1: just dealing with interpersonal things, dealing with this new job
Speaker 1: and you know, not too much in the way of
Speaker 1: job security. Still at this time, even though I moved
Speaker 1: across the country, there was just a lot on our plate.
Speaker 3: There was a lot in our plate. So the calendar
Speaker 3: turn us to twenty twelve. You moved to New York City.
Speaker 3: You start working for Espionation, you and I get an
Speaker 3: invite from our friend Andrew down at south By Southwest.
Speaker 3: They were starting SX Sports at the time to try
Speaker 3: and launch a sports track. He invites us to go
Speaker 3: and do a live podcast, which was cool. It wasn't
Speaker 3: like the best setting for a.
Speaker 1: Podcast, only open to south By people, only.
Speaker 3: Open to write a select gathering of people who could
Speaker 3: afford the ticket price, but it was a great experience.
Speaker 3: The only interesting anecdote from that is that there was
Speaker 3: a printing issue in the official program, and so people
Speaker 3: showed up hoping to get a how to podcast type
Speaker 3: of presentation from us, and we were under the impression
Speaker 3: that we're there to do a college football show. Now,
Speaker 3: if you ever have the luxury of doing a college
Speaker 3: football show, right right, if you ever have the luxury
Speaker 3: of doing a presentation is south By Southwest. It's not
Speaker 3: uncommon for people to like get up midway through and
Speaker 3: start walking out. Well, we knew something was wrong when
Speaker 3: people were walking out like two minutes in yep. And
Speaker 3: I'm trying not to react to this because they they
Speaker 3: say everyone who goes there says, don't worry if people
Speaker 3: walk out. Well, people are looking disgruntled and they're walking
Speaker 3: out quickly, and eventually some British girl kind of raises
Speaker 3: her hand and heckles the shit out of us. Like
Speaker 3: I was under the impression this was going to be
Speaker 3: a how to and you guys, I don't know what.
Speaker 1: College football is. Whoa, WHOA, what are we talking about here? Yeah?
Speaker 1: It was fun. We had a good time. It rained
Speaker 1: like crazy, but it was. It was one of those
Speaker 1: just cool experiences to put a as a notch on
Speaker 1: our belt.
Speaker 3: But we met Koba Yashi or we didn't meet him,
Speaker 3: but he was at a honky tonk that we were at.
Speaker 3: Spencer Hall was there. The guys from the starters were there,
Speaker 3: were networking. It was a good time. But again another
Speaker 3: thing that we can use as a reference also into
Speaker 3: twenty twelve through your connections at es BE Nation. We
Speaker 3: end up doing a piloted video show. Yeah, we did
Speaker 3: some video stuff on the weekend. Sometimes it was Saturday
Speaker 3: and then Sunday we decided to do our live show.
Speaker 3: So there was more back and forth in person, more
Speaker 3: video availability, just to get you some reps under our belts.
Speaker 3: So that was That was twenty twelve. And it was successful,
Speaker 3: and we started getting ads. We started getting ads, a
Speaker 3: little bit of cash, which was promising, and then an
Speaker 3: indication that we were going in the right direction. And
Speaker 3: I think we went into twenty thirteen in a good space.
Speaker 3: We end up in Miami for the National Championship Game,
Speaker 3: which was a great trip. That was Miami, that was
Speaker 3: the Notre Dame Alabama. I convince you not to spend
Speaker 3: a crap ton of money. I fell asleep about ten
Speaker 3: minutes into the game.
Speaker 1: You fall asleep a few minutes into the Notre Dame
Speaker 1: Alabama National Championship Game. We're all over South Beach in
Speaker 1: a very nerdy way. We do a podcast from a
Speaker 1: rental car. But the idea is in all of this,
Speaker 1: it's that we never said, you know what, why don't
Speaker 1: we not go to this National Championship game. We never said,
Speaker 1: you know, I just want to stay home. I just
Speaker 1: want to enjoy the holidays. It's that we just kept going.
Speaker 1: We kept hitting record, we kept uploading to the internet,
Speaker 1: we kept doing dumb stuff. The only thing and we
Speaker 1: got a lot of questions, and I know we're going
Speaker 1: to go over the questions because there's not that much
Speaker 1: to add from this point on, we've just grown and
Speaker 1: grown and grown, and we're now Espionation whatever. And I'm
Speaker 1: not skipping over. But there's a lot of questions about
Speaker 1: quitting the show. You it was ever a point I
Speaker 1: think that was probably twenty twelve, Not that we actively
Speaker 1: talked about stopping the show, but it was like, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of people asking for advice, a lot of
Speaker 1: people saying I'm interested in podcasts and how you guys grew,
Speaker 1: a lot of people saying like, I have so many listeners,
Speaker 1: but how do I you know, I have one hundred listeners,
Speaker 1: how do I make it a thousand or whatever. The
Speaker 1: only thing we can tell you is you got to
Speaker 1: keep hitt and record, don't stop. You got to keep
Speaker 1: the record. And if there's anything disagreement wise that Tye
Speaker 1: and I have had is I'm never super not never okay.
Speaker 1: I am more unrealistic about how much I want to record.
Speaker 1: Through the years, I've always said, like, let's record a
Speaker 1: third show during the week, Let's do a Q and
Speaker 1: A show, Let's do a video show during the week
Speaker 1: where we and I don't even think about if I
Speaker 1: have the time. I just want to overwhelm the market
Speaker 1: with Ty Heildon Brand and Dan Rubinstein. And it hasn't
Speaker 1: even really been disagreements. It's been just you are more
Speaker 1: realistic about twice a week is good, and let's do
Speaker 1: it five days a week, Let's do it every day.
Speaker 1: I've never been a fan of the daily podcast yea
Speaker 1: for a Matt and I've always I've always been really
Speaker 1: skittish on that.
Speaker 3: Some people abide by it. I hate it, I like it,
Speaker 3: I hate it. I've never liked it, especially for what
Speaker 3: we do, but you know it, there's definitely something to
Speaker 3: establishing your own rhythm.
Speaker 1: And I don't care what it is.
Speaker 3: You know, if it's five days a week, if it's
Speaker 3: two days a week, one day a week, one day
Speaker 3: a month, one day year, whatever it is, be consistent
Speaker 3: with it. And it was around this twenty twelve twenty
Speaker 3: thirteen time frame. So we go to we go to
Speaker 3: Miami for the championship game. We had a weird interview
Speaker 3: with Lex Steel sure which you know, people have asked
Speaker 3: how did that come about? A friend got his contact information.
Speaker 1: Just like LinkedIn Slow Things very bizarre.
Speaker 3: I had a friend who found our little confusion between
Speaker 3: Phil and Lex to be funnier than anyone else. He
Speaker 3: got his contact info to me, we brought him on.
Speaker 3: He talked about, well, I have.
Speaker 1: This sound clip.
Speaker 3: I won't play the sound clip now because we're going
Speaker 3: to try and get to some of these questions here.
Speaker 3: But twenty thirteen again, all the while, we're still growing.
Speaker 3: We're not on Grantlin though. No, we're not a Grantlin though,
Speaker 3: because Grantlin made an editorial decision. It wasn't that they
Speaker 3: didn't like what we were doing, but they made an
Speaker 3: editorial decision to try and build from within. You also
Speaker 3: had this concurrent career with esp Nation and it was awkward, yeah,
Speaker 3: to try and across the streams, right.
Speaker 1: It's true. I was full time at Espanation and I
Speaker 1: would hear from Jacoby every once in a while, but
Speaker 1: it was just and when I asked him, he was like, yay,
Speaker 1: you're an explanation. We can't really move forward.
Speaker 3: It has been a tight rope to walk, Yeah, with
Speaker 3: you working for another sports media entity. Not so much
Speaker 3: for me working in corporate America because there's not much
Speaker 3: overlapped there, right. But for a long time we've had
Speaker 3: to try and find that balance. I have needed to
Speaker 3: be respectful of that, you know, and admittedly sometimes I've
Speaker 3: had a harder time than others as certain opportunities have
Speaker 3: presented themselves.
Speaker 1: But you know, ultimately, and I would say that's the
Speaker 1: other push pull. That's the push pull in terms of
Speaker 1: disagreements to the year i've you know, I was ambitious
Speaker 1: and still am ambitious about you know, I want to
Speaker 1: record every day, I want to do video every day.
Speaker 1: I want to do whatever I want to like, you know,
Speaker 1: be this inescapable entity in people's college football universes. But
Speaker 1: you've you know, you have the responsibilities that you have,
Speaker 1: and I have the responsibilities that I have. But in
Speaker 1: opportunities of like we've okay, so we have spoken with
Speaker 1: Fox Sports, we have spoken with CBS Sports, we have
Speaker 1: had conversations with people at ESPN. We've had conversations with
Speaker 1: an agent, and we've had conversations with people at streaming
Speaker 1: services and social media networks that are doing live and
Speaker 1: high quality streaming videos. And issues range from well that's
Speaker 1: sort of unrealistic to they want us to pay them
Speaker 1: for airtime or hearing back once every three or four weeks.
Speaker 1: And it's one of those things where we need to
Speaker 1: find the right fit. We need to find the right
Speaker 1: situation in which if you were to leave your corporate
Speaker 1: job that you would have full time, you would have
Speaker 1: health insurance, but I would have health insurance. And college
Speaker 1: football is seasonal. It's not like we could do this
Speaker 1: all year If somebody wants college football show all year round, okay,
Speaker 1: we'll have a conversation. Sure, But you know, we have
Speaker 1: to find the right place, and we're still doing that.
Speaker 1: We've had a lot of strong interest from a couple places,
Speaker 1: but if the fit isn't right, if they want to
Speaker 1: pair us with other people and it would hurt the show,
Speaker 1: it's not We're We're fortunate to be in a position
Speaker 1: where we don't have to accept offers that don't feel
Speaker 1: right to us. So a lot of people have asked
Speaker 1: that we are looking, always looking to bring the show
Speaker 1: into a place that we can grow it in a
Speaker 1: an organic way.
Speaker 3: So I'm going to run through a couple of the
Speaker 3: major highlights here. Wait, let's seeah over the next couple
Speaker 3: of years. So that that's kind of the origin story.
Speaker 3: But you know, uh, twenty thirteen, we brought on Taylor
Speaker 3: as our intern. He's been having us for a long time.
Speaker 1: Reverbs.
Speaker 3: Twenty fourteen, we went to the Rose Bowl, the National
Speaker 3: Championship at Larda House. We did our hot tub show,
Speaker 3: excuse me, the Jacuzzi Show with Spencer and Ryan. Ryan
Speaker 3: got chlorine poisoning because we were.
Speaker 1: In got deeper dehydrated in the jacuzzi for like three hours.
Speaker 1: How long was that show? So we did a podcast
Speaker 1: from the jacuzzi. We had four microphones set up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you miked up the jacuzz miked up the jacuz We'll
Speaker 1: put in some audio in post here, but miked it up.
Speaker 1: It was a three hour show. Yeah, it is a
Speaker 1: three hour show that we did, and I think we
Speaker 1: cut it up into two distinct parts. But that's I mean,
Speaker 1: that's sort of indicative of what and who we are.
Speaker 1: Like if you listen to the Paul Fine Bomb Show,
Speaker 1: if you listen to whoever they're taking calls, it's straightforward,
Speaker 1: it's whatever. We're doing shows from Jacuzi's. We're doing shows
Speaker 1: with Lex Steele.
Speaker 3: We're trying weird stuff that no one else is necessarily
Speaker 3: trying to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're doing Google hangouts for my parents. Like it
Speaker 1: was just really really weird stuff. If there is a
Speaker 1: technology platform out there we are, we are on it.
Speaker 1: So twenty fourteen, the big thing was hanging out at
Speaker 1: your place in Rose Bull. You get to meet your family,
Speaker 1: hang out at the house that you grew up in.
Speaker 1: We do a bunch of shows out there. Twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: we go back to south By Southwest again, did a
Speaker 1: podcast with Bruce and Spencer. Yeah, hung out of the
Speaker 1: four seasons, got to meet Bill Simmons, tell them that
Speaker 1: we were Yeah, this podcast network. You employed us but
Speaker 1: didn't pay us, And I mean that was it was.
Speaker 1: It was awesome, It was all cool. It was cool.
Speaker 3: We also in twenty fifteen announced kind of this loose
Speaker 3: partnership with Espionation, which people have also asked us about.
Speaker 1: We're not part of Espianation. We've gotten tweets by the way, No,
Speaker 1: we're not part of Espianation. It's a distribution deal. It's
Speaker 1: just you know, I work here. We all like each other,
Speaker 1: let's all. You know. We put our show on the
Speaker 1: Chorus platform. We've gotten tweets of like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: you guys just start the same. Since you went to Espenation,
Speaker 1: let me tell you about how many notes I've gotten
Speaker 1: about the contents of this show. Positive, negative, wondering if
Speaker 1: it's still happening. Zero notes. I've gotten zero opinions about
Speaker 1: what we're doing here and what we should or shouldn't
Speaker 1: be doing. We it's full autonomy. So if we're not
Speaker 1: as good as we used to be because we have
Speaker 1: a distribution deal with Espanation, it's only our fault. It's
Speaker 1: entirely it's we are just bad now.
Speaker 3: Also started a newsletter in twenty fifteen and oh, by
Speaker 3: the way, I gotten married.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you got married in twenty fifteen. Apparently people are
Speaker 1: still upset at me for questioning the food at your wedding.
Speaker 1: It wasn't the food at the wedding. The comment, the
Speaker 1: comment that got people yeah, was not the food at
Speaker 1: the wedding. Uh huh.
Speaker 3: The comment that you made was that the food at
Speaker 3: the wedding was good. I didn't feel so good the
Speaker 3: morning after. Really, that was the comment.
Speaker 1: That was the comment. Why you're only bringing this up now?
Speaker 1: That was a comment that did people in. Wasn't the music.
Speaker 1: That's probably my fault. Wasn't the food.
Speaker 3: It was that you implied that maybe got me sick
Speaker 3: at the wedding, got you sick?
Speaker 1: That's fine. I make a lot of bad food decisions,
Speaker 1: so it was probably mine. But everybody still loves you. Yeh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm mostly playing this up for show, but sure. We
Speaker 1: did a live show in twenty sixteen at the National Championship.
Speaker 1: So we're originally with a company called podcast one for advertising,
Speaker 1: and then we found a company that was a better
Speaker 1: fit for us in mid Roll Midroll, And we've been
Speaker 1: with and have been very thrilled with mid Roll since
Speaker 1: and they'd been great. They provide us with advertisements and
Speaker 1: whatever and a lot of the like when Ty and
Speaker 1: I endorsed the products, we have turned down products like
Speaker 1: gambling sites and financial advisors and stuff like that, just
Speaker 1: like we're not going to try to convince people to
Speaker 1: trust this weird startup we know nothing about with their money.
Speaker 1: So when we endorse things like, for instance, do we
Speaker 1: have a sponsor for this show? Is this a good
Speaker 1: proper cloth? Yeah, we have proper cloth. I wore a
Speaker 1: proper cloth shirt yesterday and it was super It fit
Speaker 1: me really really well, and I'm going to wear it
Speaker 1: undersuits and I don't know anything about suit shirts, and
Speaker 1: they said that, hey, here's a suit shirt that's going
Speaker 1: to fit you really well. Would you like to try
Speaker 1: it on.
Speaker 3: I say yes, and it worked, And the mattress that
Speaker 3: I got for free has cured me of whatever woes
Speaker 3: I had going on physically when I was asleep on
Speaker 3: the old mattress.
Speaker 1: So we try to like, actually, I'm wearing an MVMT
Speaker 1: watch as we speak.
Speaker 3: We try to actually use these things before we endorse them.
Speaker 3: But mid roll has been great, and as the show
Speaker 3: has gotten bigger, yeah, we have made more in the
Speaker 3: way of ad.
Speaker 1: Revenue off this. Now.
Speaker 3: People all always ask me specifically, well, when are you
Speaker 3: going to quit the mysterious day job to do this?
Speaker 3: I don't know if that will ever happen right right now,
Speaker 3: we do well enough like it would sort of be
Speaker 3: a pretty good part time job.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a nice for one person. For one person,
Speaker 1: it's a nice part time or like a chunk on
Speaker 1: top of your income right now. But by no means
Speaker 1: are we ready to leave.
Speaker 3: It is not something that would be a financially sound decision,
Speaker 3: especially for both of us now that we are both married. Yes,
Speaker 3: both have to think about someone else beyond ourselves. So,
Speaker 3: but that was twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1: Although I'm always looking to become a kept boy, right right,
Speaker 1: I've always looked for for that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, twenty sixteen, excuse me, So we did. We did
Speaker 3: a live show at the National Championship. We did our
Speaker 3: Verbie's megaproduction, which I'm still very proud of, so great.
Speaker 1: Not actually at Radio City Music Hall.
Speaker 3: There took weeks, three weeks to be exact, to try
Speaker 3: and mix that guy up. We did an Espianation radio
Speaker 3: show every morning, every Saturday morning. It was on the
Speaker 3: Espianation radio waves. After Espimation acquired Yahoo Sports Radio gave
Speaker 3: us exposure to a different audience. And then there's all
Speaker 3: the stuff that we did over the last year. You know,
Speaker 3: we did a first paid live show at hill Country
Speaker 3: Chicken in New York City. You got married, and we're
Speaker 3: going to be doing another live show in the coming
Speaker 3: week plural which we're at time of recording, yet to announce.
Speaker 3: But we've got our show on Spotify. We're going to
Speaker 3: do a new logo, we're going to do new site.
Speaker 1: We're gonna do some new shirts. Is there. Okay, So
Speaker 1: not to cut you off, but the same somewhat related
Speaker 1: people want to know when you felt or when we
Speaker 1: felt that, you know, oh my god, this person is
Speaker 1: listening or these people are listening, or wow, we've really
Speaker 1: sort of made it? Is there? Like, is it the
Speaker 1: the IOWA on game Day thing? Is it? You know
Speaker 1: what is it?
Speaker 3: It's been, It's been a couple of things. The video
Speaker 3: on ESPN News to me was confirmation that, like you said,
Speaker 3: we had our finger on the pulse of what was
Speaker 3: funny and what was Yeah, getting our little meme on
Speaker 3: game Day wasn't a feather in the cap, you know,
Speaker 3: It wasn't any kind of great source of validation again,
Speaker 3: more just affirmation that, hey, I broader audience really does
Speaker 3: find what we're doing funny. The big thing for me
Speaker 3: was having our show as an ad in the New
Speaker 3: York Times.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was that was great.
Speaker 3: I have that ad cut out and to this day
Speaker 3: I'm still trying to frame it because it's kind of
Speaker 3: oddly shaped, but yeah, it's pinned to a.
Speaker 1: Bulletin board in my old bedroom.
Speaker 3: To me, that was like the ultimate source of validation.
Speaker 3: And that was the moment when we started doing things
Speaker 3: with Grantlin, when we started getting you know, more a
Speaker 3: sense for who was out there. That to me, I
Speaker 3: think was a bigger deal than any one person emailing
Speaker 3: and I'm always sort of taken by any media member
Speaker 3: that listens to us. For me, I still feel like
Speaker 3: we're just two guys like college football. I don't consider
Speaker 3: myself an expert. I know you don't either.
Speaker 1: I do. I definitely do consider myself an expert. How
Speaker 1: dare you?
Speaker 3: But I mean, you know what I mean, Like, I
Speaker 3: take way more from the guy in Afghanistan who's like
Speaker 3: on the front lines it's so cool and emails us
Speaker 3: and says, hey, man, I listen to you guys when
Speaker 3: I'm out of patrol than I do any media members
Speaker 3: do that by the way, Yeah right, all right, pay attention.
Speaker 3: But I mean that to me is really meaningful. And
Speaker 3: I don't care so much about who listens. I care
Speaker 3: more about how we affect the people that actually do listen.
Speaker 3: And so whether you're out on patrol or you're out
Speaker 3: like Stephen Godfrey cutting his grass, or if you put
Speaker 3: us on in the same room as your child who's
Speaker 3: trying to fall asleep, I am fascinated by those little
Speaker 3: stories about how we connect with people more so than
Speaker 3: I am the actual people.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I the things that mean the most to
Speaker 1: me as far our reach with the show is like
Speaker 1: when I get stopped on the street. There was a
Speaker 1: guy who took off his earbuds on the train the
Speaker 1: New York City Subway who saw me on the train
Speaker 1: took off his earbuds and said, I'm listening to you
Speaker 1: right now, which is weird but at the same time
Speaker 1: so cool. It was so cool when Katie the Kapper
Speaker 1: Katie works at Vox Media. She came on our show
Speaker 1: a couple of times and she was at her boy
Speaker 1: her then boyfriend now husband's place with his roommate and
Speaker 1: they were listening to the show while they were cooking,
Speaker 1: and Katie was like, Oh, that's Dan. I was on
Speaker 1: that show. I was on that podcast. And he said
Speaker 1: what do you mean. He was like, and Katie was like, Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm Katie the Kapper and that blew his mind. That
Speaker 1: blue Like those are moments where I'm like, we have infiltrated, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's so cool to hear that, Like we're part
Speaker 1: of people's lives, whether you said, like serving overseas or
Speaker 1: just like walking around New York. The military one gets
Speaker 1: me and you know, I don't have any We've heard
Speaker 1: from coaches that listen that that's like so weird to me,
Speaker 1: but it's cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I don't have any connection otherwise to
Speaker 3: the military. Everyone's thankful for the church and all that,
Speaker 3: but especially Cam Newton of course.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But you know, I for some reason that that kind
Speaker 3: of connection has always been something like wow, And whenever
Speaker 3: I have these thoughts of like, maybe we should pack
Speaker 3: this in right, maybe maybe I'm maybe I'm doing this
Speaker 3: for not it's stuff like that that I that I
Speaker 3: think of when we did our live show, our first
Speaker 3: live show back in January. The connection that we apparently
Speaker 3: have to our audience is not something that I think
Speaker 3: we're really exposed to a whole lot. When we're doing
Speaker 3: this from your dark corner at the office or my
Speaker 3: dark corner, my makeshift studio in my townhouse back in
Speaker 3: in Allentown. That kind of thing, to me is really
Speaker 3: redeeming and it's really validation that that we're onto something.
Speaker 3: But it is a question that I think keeps recurring.
Speaker 3: Where does the show go? Where does the show go?
Speaker 3: Where do you see the show going in the next year,
Speaker 3: two years, three years, four years, five, I don't know
Speaker 3: how many years. I don't know if either one of
Speaker 3: us can answer that, But where where is it that
Speaker 3: you hope to take this now? And how often do
Speaker 3: you think about whether or not this is something we
Speaker 3: should keep doing.
Speaker 1: I never doubt it anymore. I want to keep it.
Speaker 1: It's just fun for me. It's it's not really too
Speaker 1: much work for me. But you do more back end stuff.
Speaker 1: I do more of, like the booking of guests and
Speaker 1: the networking to get people on the show, and figuring
Speaker 1: out social media, social media shops, and like coming up
Speaker 1: with the weird games we play in the off season.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of what I do, but I obviously
Speaker 1: contributes a ton to that as well. I would like
Speaker 1: to keep doing live shows. I'd like to keep doing
Speaker 1: a couple of shows during the season, every show a week,
Speaker 1: you know, a weekly show during the off season. I'd
Speaker 1: like to figure out ways in which we can extend
Speaker 1: the brand, whether it's you know, merchandising, whatever, the shirts
Speaker 1: that we create, I design all of those. If you
Speaker 1: don't like it, I apologize, but and then you know,
Speaker 1: figuring out We've spoken to a number of production companies,
Speaker 1: not just networks, but production companies that come up with
Speaker 1: shows that we really like in sports and outside of sports,
Speaker 1: and they're enthusiastic about the show, so figuring out some
Speaker 1: sort of video or TV platform. We've had these opportunities
Speaker 1: to figure out the right fit and to go from
Speaker 1: there and grow the footprint the show that way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what about your TI.
Speaker 3: The question that I have gotten more than any other
Speaker 3: has been a how do you get the audit quality?
Speaker 3: Which we could talk about what is talk about that?
Speaker 3: With the questions, Yeah, but when are you quitting the
Speaker 3: day job? Why do you still work the mysterious day job?
Speaker 3: The short answer is you need the money. The longer
Speaker 3: answer is that I actually like the day job. I
Speaker 3: like the people I work with. If the opportunity ever
Speaker 3: presented itself that I could focus entirely on this, I'd
Speaker 3: love to do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when I was a little kid, he went to
Speaker 1: IT camp. That's right.
Speaker 3: I'd be crazy. We'd be crazy not to try and
Speaker 3: pursue it. It's been such a huge chunk of our lives.
Speaker 1: At this point, I think we're very much on the
Speaker 1: same page about where we'd like to take it. There
Speaker 1: are definitely times when I lose patients in that process
Speaker 1: because it's a lot of hurry up and wait.
Speaker 3: I think we can do it. I know we can
Speaker 3: do it, and I think personally, I've learned a lot
Speaker 3: from this journey. When we had the opportunity to be
Speaker 3: part of Grantland. If I go back and listen, I
Speaker 3: paid way closer attention to things like hardcore stats than
Speaker 3: I do now. I kind of tightened up knowing that
Speaker 3: there was a bigger audience that was paying attention to
Speaker 3: what we were doing. Now, in retrospect, I think I
Speaker 3: could have done a much better job, and I think
Speaker 3: I'm better at doing this because of that, knowing what
Speaker 3: that experience was like. And I think if an opportunity
Speaker 3: ever comes well to present itself where we can turn
Speaker 3: this into a video thing or a bigger audio thing,
Speaker 3: I don't know, I think I'll have a better sense
Speaker 3: for what will work and what won't work. So I
Speaker 3: think I am probably less apt to say let's pack
Speaker 3: it in now than I would have been then, just
Speaker 3: because I feel better about where we're at as a
Speaker 3: show given past experience. But it is hard sometimes it is.
Speaker 3: It's still hard, it's still grind. I think now it's
Speaker 3: flipped a little bit, and it's harder during the season
Speaker 3: for me personally than.
Speaker 1: It is in the off season.
Speaker 3: Because the off season, we've developed a rhythm, we know
Speaker 3: what works, we know the kinds of thematic shows that
Speaker 3: people like to listen to, and it's more muscle memory
Speaker 3: for us. Not that we're mailing it in in any
Speaker 3: of those off season shows, right, We're absolutely not speak
Speaker 3: for yourself. But during the season it's a grind. You
Speaker 3: miss parties, you miss well if you do do doing
Speaker 3: things during the week, and if you don't miss parties
Speaker 3: during the season, you miss games, you miss game, which
Speaker 3: hurts the show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's both of us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a constant balancing act for us during the season.
Speaker 3: And there's definitely a point every year around week seven
Speaker 3: where I'm like, shit.
Speaker 1: That there's another at nine weeks left? How am I?
Speaker 1: How am I going to do this? How am I
Speaker 1: going to sell this to my wife? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Who is the ultimate good soldier for understanding yeah about
Speaker 3: this And it has always been incredibly supportive. Mom h
Speaker 3: always asks the quot question like if you have kids someday,
Speaker 3: how's that going to factor in? I don't have answers
Speaker 3: to any of those.
Speaker 1: You would be the first podcaster to have children, the
Speaker 1: very first even find a spouse that's the sequel to
Speaker 1: Children of Men, Children of Podcaster. So it's a balancing
Speaker 1: act and it's something that each and every year is
Speaker 1: a kind of unchartered frontier in that you have to
Speaker 1: reinvent ways to make it all come together. But I'm
Speaker 1: confident in what we have. I like what we have.
Speaker 1: But that's the difference. That is the difference that we've
Speaker 1: established with our show and other shows. Not that we
Speaker 1: are better broadcasters, not that we're funnier, not that that
Speaker 1: we know more stats, we hit record more often. That
Speaker 1: is the thing, like we feel, and like there are
Speaker 1: there have been times where we get feedback that people
Speaker 1: are so happy that when they go to work on
Speaker 1: Monday that our show's already there. And we used to
Speaker 1: do recap shows on Monday. Now we get up early
Speaker 1: on Sundays. And so yes, we make money doing it,
Speaker 1: and but we did this before. We made money, and
Speaker 1: we're not doing it solely to make the money. No
Speaker 1: we're not. But I'm just saying it's it doesn't you know,
Speaker 1: waking up. I wake up at six am on Sundays,
Speaker 1: both for the day job and for the solid verbal
Speaker 1: to do three or four hours of research. And it's
Speaker 1: both because I feel when I'm doing a show and
Speaker 1: I'm not prepared, it feels terrible, and I know I'm
Speaker 1: putting out a bad product and it's happened. So it
Speaker 1: feels really good that our show is out twenty eight
Speaker 1: hours before and it's not really competitors because we're friends
Speaker 1: with all of these people.
Speaker 3: This is the thing that I think gets lost in translation.
Speaker 3: Maybe because you and I play off each other as
Speaker 3: well as we do, and we try to put together
Speaker 3: a friendly show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we don't.
Speaker 3: You're right, I don't look at any other college football
Speaker 3: show and I don't care if it's a big show. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like any of the ones your espionation. I like all
Speaker 3: those guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah, full Cast, the Shutdown Forecast. They're funnier than.
Speaker 3: We All of those guys we've had on our show,
Speaker 3: and we are more than happy to promote their show.
Speaker 3: Our philosophy has always been the rising tide lists all boats.
Speaker 3: You know, We've been fighting this battle for so long
Speaker 3: just to get recognition for the word podcast. To have
Speaker 3: more of them, have more good ones of them is
Speaker 3: a good thing for us ultimately. So I've never had
Speaker 3: this like this, this jealousy towards any other shows.
Speaker 1: It's not like, oh, well full Cast got that forward sponsor.
Speaker 1: We don't care.
Speaker 3: We want to be ranked higher, But ultimately it's not
Speaker 3: because we want to try and beat out Bruce and
Speaker 3: Stew or anybody else.
Speaker 1: I want to point out, we just we've outlasted We
Speaker 1: have outlasted Brus and Stew. That's another story altogether.
Speaker 3: What does not come through, though, is how competitive you
Speaker 3: and I are. Yeah, that's true, and how obsessive compulsive
Speaker 3: you and I are when it comes to trying to
Speaker 3: put content out there that we think people are really
Speaker 3: going to care about. And I think people most people
Speaker 3: who listen to the show know that I'm doing a
Speaker 3: lot of the back end stuff, and they have an
Speaker 3: appreciation for the kind of audio quality that we're putting
Speaker 3: out there. What doesn't come through is how nutso you are,
Speaker 3: how nuts so you are for trying to put something
Speaker 3: out there that's a little bit different, a little bit quirky.
Speaker 3: I don't know why people don't give you credit for that.
Speaker 3: It's cool, but people don't give you enough credit for that. Dan,
Speaker 3: you very much are a creative engine that gives this
Speaker 3: show a dimension that I couldn't give it on my own.
Speaker 3: We have always been this thing where I am trying
Speaker 3: always to pull it back onto college football or back
Speaker 3: into some kind of serious and paced and structured format,
Speaker 3: and you are always, ever so desperately trying to pull
Speaker 3: it as hard as you can away from that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and that push pull makes us what we are. What
Speaker 3: people don't see is what goes in behind the scenes.
Speaker 1: A lot of Google docs, a lot of Google docs,
Speaker 1: a lot of weird ideas, and I think a lot
Speaker 1: of just obsessive compulsiveness on your end to try and
Speaker 1: come up with something that's a little different it actually is.
Speaker 1: It physically pains me if we go a week without recording.
Speaker 1: It's like on my honeymoon when Bob Stoops retired, I
Speaker 1: was like, God, should I call Tie? It's four in
Speaker 1: the morning there, But yeah, no, it's totally true, and
Speaker 1: that I just I want to work at work everybody.
Speaker 3: We have had conversations not just with like production companies
Speaker 3: on the video front or wherever, yeah, but also with
Speaker 3: like podcast networks, because podcast networks have been awesome. And
Speaker 3: one of the things that many podcast networks will tell
Speaker 3: you if you go and talk to them is that
Speaker 3: they can help you with the production of your show, right,
Speaker 3: they can help you. Yeah, and for that they'll take money.
Speaker 3: They'll take money, but they can help you and they
Speaker 3: do a good job. There are a lot of really
Speaker 3: good ones out there now. But it requires you to
Speaker 3: turn over those keys.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not a chance.
Speaker 3: And I've considered it as like, oh, you know, it's
Speaker 3: hard for me during the season to try to manage
Speaker 3: life and the sh and the thought of turning over
Speaker 3: those keys is painful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm sure is painful. I see the goosebumps on you.
Speaker 3: I cannot do it. This is very much our baby.
Speaker 3: For me to turn over those keys, those production keys,
Speaker 3: to anyone else, not to say that someone else couldn't
Speaker 3: do it better. I'm always trying to find a way
Speaker 3: to make this sound a little better. But I know
Speaker 3: the beats, I know the rhythms. We know each other
Speaker 3: so well. To turn that over to someone else is
Speaker 3: like I would incur a physical ailment.
Speaker 1: At this point, I believe that you want to do
Speaker 1: some questions real quick. Let's do it. We'll go out
Speaker 1: because we've we're at about two hours, about a couple hours, okay,
Speaker 1: a negative feedback. How do we respond to it? How
Speaker 1: did we respond to it. Initially, I can answer this
Speaker 1: that I used to be way more of a dick,
Speaker 1: both via email and social media. Our Twitter account is
Speaker 1: much tamer now. Yeah, I take it personally because we
Speaker 1: put so much time into the show and if it's
Speaker 1: just like me saying North Carolina was good and a
Speaker 1: North Carolina State fan saying you're in now, I took
Speaker 1: it personally.
Speaker 3: I used to be when we started doing this show,
Speaker 3: the kind of person on Twitter who would for kicks
Speaker 3: cut other people down. And there are a lot of
Speaker 3: people out there who still do that.
Speaker 1: We've grown up, tie.
Speaker 3: Maybe it's because you grow up and get a little wiser.
Speaker 3: Maybe it's because you've been we've been doing this for
Speaker 3: a while now and we kind of know what it's
Speaker 3: like to be on the other end of that.
Speaker 1: I don't do that anymore.
Speaker 3: I don't do that anymore because no matter what people say,
Speaker 3: they read it, and unless you're like a megastar and
Speaker 3: someone else handles your Twitter, it always has a little
Speaker 3: bit of an effect on you. It's not the kind
Speaker 3: of thing that causes me to lose any sleep. And certainly,
Speaker 3: if it's a content thing and opinion driven a thing,
Speaker 3: reasonable minds can disagree. But if you're coming at me
Speaker 3: because you don't like the way that something sounded, or
Speaker 3: you know you should put more production muscle behind this,
Speaker 3: but you don't have any real feedback as to how
Speaker 3: it's just a throwaway comment because you feel the need
Speaker 3: to make that comment. That's the kind of thing that
Speaker 3: that ultimately pisses me off more than anything else. If
Speaker 3: you disagree with me, if I missed a fact, then hey,
Speaker 3: I mean that that's just the way this goes sometimes.
Speaker 3: But you mispronounce a Polynesian last name, like, yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean that that kind of thing happens.
Speaker 1: I will try. I believe me.
Speaker 3: I will try harder next time to try and get
Speaker 3: it right. If I make a dumb mistake, that's on me.
Speaker 3: But if it's just a comment to try and like
Speaker 3: assert your dominance over us, or you want to try
Speaker 3: it like, that's the kind of thing that it's like,
Speaker 3: go away, dude.
Speaker 1: You know. Favorite guest, Oh God, I can tell you
Speaker 1: our early favorite guest was early favorite. Early favorite was
Speaker 1: Jed Williams oh Wow, who worked for an ACC affiliated
Speaker 1: outlet did radio stuff in North Carolina. He was a
Speaker 1: friend of camera guy Dave Dave's Trump who works now
Speaker 1: for the Dodgers Network. Just an ACC machine, and I
Speaker 1: think we contacted him once. We didn't hear back from
Speaker 1: and that was cool. Whatever. We don't hold anything against him,
Speaker 1: but so great, just a wealth of information when we
Speaker 1: would do ACC shows.
Speaker 3: It's tough for me to say that anyone's a favorite.
Speaker 3: We've invited all these people on because they were a
Speaker 3: favorite of ours in some respect before we even invited
Speaker 3: them on. Right, I may have told our Friendship Patterson
Speaker 3: that if you ever got hit, if you ever got
Speaker 3: hit by a bread truck, I would inquire if he
Speaker 3: would like to fill your that's fine your seat.
Speaker 1: I really like Check. He's far more charming than I
Speaker 1: and I. Yeah, he's a good dude. Yeah, I'd still
Speaker 1: probably say Bruce just because Yeah, he even early on
Speaker 1: didn't have to give us as much time as he
Speaker 1: did and always has been super He never had any
Speaker 1: reservations about coming on this show. Yeah, Bruce Feldman never
Speaker 1: had any reservations about coming on the show. But still
Speaker 1: like Andy Staples, Spencer Hall, Stu Mandel, all these people,
Speaker 1: Nicole Auerback, all these people been super generous with their
Speaker 1: time and it's been great, and we wouldn't be where
Speaker 1: we are without them, because part of what goes into
Speaker 1: inviting a guest on is knowing that they've got a
Speaker 1: social media following that they can blast this out to
Speaker 1: excuse me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so they don't have the following. If they're not
Speaker 3: willing to come on the show, we're not where we are.
Speaker 1: The most frustrating aspect of producing a show from a
Speaker 1: technical standpoints, microphone's not working. Finding time when you're both
Speaker 1: free audio not recording time has been you know, generally
Speaker 1: we're on a pretty regular schedule, so that hasn't been
Speaker 1: too much of an issue in the most recent years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's way easier now to do a show than
Speaker 3: it used to be. Yeah, it's way easier now. The
Speaker 3: technology is there.
Speaker 1: And by the way people have asked we record separate tracks.
Speaker 1: We record locally and I send my half of the
Speaker 1: show to Tie and he has a method to sync
Speaker 1: it up. Yeah, it's not as frustrating now as it
Speaker 1: used to be. Usually.
Speaker 3: The most frustrating part now is if we're pulling in
Speaker 3: audio from the guests, someone who's on skype the phone,
Speaker 3: you can't always get a pretty good fix on how
Speaker 3: that's going to sound yeah.
Speaker 1: But beyond that, I think we've gotten it down to
Speaker 1: a point.
Speaker 3: Where where we're pretty formulaic with how we do the show.
Speaker 3: In the early days though to Skype's going to cut out, Yeah,
Speaker 3: you're in California, I'm in eastern Pennsylvania. There's no telling
Speaker 3: what Skype is going to do. Those shows. Trying to
Speaker 3: cut them together was always a bit of a challenge.
Speaker 1: How seriously did coaches take you since you weren't really
Speaker 1: backed by ESPN or some other big media company. We
Speaker 1: went through go betweens like sids, But when we'd be
Speaker 1: at national championship games, we would have coaches, we would
Speaker 1: have sids, we'd have staffers because we'd have our like
Speaker 1: little Soliverrble sign as record come by and say oh
Speaker 1: love you. Guys just wanted to real quick and say hi,
Speaker 1: and that's always super cool. So through the years we've
Speaker 1: gotten that sort of that sort of feedback, so we've
Speaker 1: our names have been raised.
Speaker 3: It's it's very much on the backs of Bruce Fellmans
Speaker 3: and having Stuart Man, Ellen Adye Staples and and all
Speaker 3: these guys that have been on the show as guests
Speaker 3: and in some capacity over the years.
Speaker 1: Yes, but buh buh buh. How did ties very down
Speaker 1: to earth, humble and straight laced personality blend so well
Speaker 1: with Dan's uber, flashy, outgoing and cosmopolitan self, also embodied
Speaker 1: by the teamy roots for and where he's lived. I
Speaker 1: would expect Dan to be a New York Calley guy
Speaker 1: for life. Maybe DC or Chicagoy really wants to slum it,
Speaker 1: but that's definitely it for him. I just say, we
Speaker 1: got fortunate. You can never really figure out chemistry, so
Speaker 1: I think that's an accurate depiction of both of us. No,
Speaker 1: I'm not flashy at all. I'm not flashy. No, I'm
Speaker 1: so boring. But I say weird things, and you are,
Speaker 1: you know, more down to earth and what you say.
Speaker 3: And I think I think, by and large the personalities
Speaker 3: that we have on our show is.
Speaker 1: Pretty close to what we are in real life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe I'm a little bit more outgoing, Yes, that
Speaker 3: have to be on the podcast. I think people get
Speaker 3: a bad read on you. It's probably honestly, Yeah, I
Speaker 3: think I think there are a lot of people who
Speaker 3: they hook on to a controversial thing that you say
Speaker 3: or an opinion that you have, and they think that
Speaker 3: you're a dick. You're not, I hope not a dick.
Speaker 3: You're a good guy. You're someone I genuinely enjoy spending
Speaker 3: time with. You're not that guy that some people think
Speaker 3: you are. Just through doing the show, I think we've
Speaker 3: answered pretty much. I mean, there's a lot of like
Speaker 3: when did you stop? Let me a question you wanted
Speaker 3: to address. Let me close out with this because we've
Speaker 3: been doing this for two hours, and if people want
Speaker 3: to write in solid verbal at gmail dot com, find
Speaker 3: us on Facebook, on Twitter. We got a bunch of
Speaker 3: other questions that I or you we will go through
Speaker 3: wherever you post them, Facebook or even the reddit Subreddit
Speaker 3: would probably be a good place to just put them
Speaker 3: all down, or email. We'll try to answer all these
Speaker 3: because we're trying to make a little event out of this.
Speaker 3: But go to one of those places let us know
Speaker 3: if you have a question. Yeah, what have you.
Speaker 1: Learned the most from doing this for ten years? Two
Speaker 1: things that I've learned the most I have a much
Speaker 1: better time on the show in or outside of the season,
Speaker 1: the better prepared I am. I think I'm good off
Speaker 1: the cuff, but I'm better off the cuff when I
Speaker 1: already have less sort of my my bullets ready whatever,
Speaker 1: for lack of a better term, that when I am
Speaker 1: when I am studied or with a loaded guns. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: when I when my arsenal one, when my rep weaponry
Speaker 1: is good to go, I do a better job. And
Speaker 1: sometimes I don't have time for that, and it shows
Speaker 1: the other The second thing is when we really zeroed
Speaker 1: in on the fact that we want to produce a really,
Speaker 1: really good show that happens to be about college football.
Speaker 1: When we zeroed in on that more we're just like,
Speaker 1: let's do a good show. We could be doing a
Speaker 1: knitting show. We could be doing a food show, and
Speaker 1: sometimes we do do a food show. We could doing
Speaker 1: a fashion show. But it's the idea of let's put
Speaker 1: together a really good concept that in our canvas is
Speaker 1: college football, canvas is podcasting, and the subject is college football.
Speaker 1: But the idea of let's do a really good show
Speaker 1: that happens to be about college football, not let's do
Speaker 1: a college football show, that to me was like the
Speaker 1: big realization of where we should go and what sort
Speaker 1: of fuels me.
Speaker 3: Now Yeah, I mean, I could probably talk until I'm
Speaker 3: blue in the face about digital media and podcasting and
Speaker 3: in truth.
Speaker 1: We were there.
Speaker 3: At the very beginning of podcasting, which is probably a
Speaker 3: big part of why we're still.
Speaker 1: Doing it now. Yeah, and why we've grown as big
Speaker 1: as we have.
Speaker 3: So I could talk about that in some other medium,
Speaker 3: I'm sure if people are interested. The thing that I
Speaker 3: have learned most is really about identity. Two things that
Speaker 3: I think I I've learned first when I started doing writing,
Speaker 3: when I started doing any kind of sports media, I
Speaker 3: always wanted to be the funny man, okay, and no
Speaker 3: matter how hard I tried, I always ended up being
Speaker 3: more of the straight laced, traditional pacer, the host, the
Speaker 3: host of a show, and I always tried to be
Speaker 3: something else. I always wanted to be something else. I
Speaker 3: always wanted to be what you are, and I never
Speaker 3: could pull it off. And it's not to say I'm
Speaker 3: not good at it or couldn't be good at it.
Speaker 3: But it took me a while to realize that naturally
Speaker 3: I was better at doing what I've done for us.
Speaker 3: And I don't know when it hit me, but at
Speaker 3: some point I got really confident in doing what I
Speaker 3: do on our show and stop trying to be something else.
Speaker 3: And for me, that's when I think this It clicked,
Speaker 3: and we start of putting something together that was reliable
Speaker 3: and funny in its own way, on a consistent basis.
Speaker 3: And so the first was the first thing that I
Speaker 3: learned was just be be confident in what kind of
Speaker 3: show you think you can just do naturally and comfortably.
Speaker 3: The second thing that I learned, and I give you
Speaker 3: total credit for this, I am the kind of person
Speaker 3: that is always trying to drive forward with anything, not
Speaker 3: like an aggressive corporate executive type. I want to be
Speaker 3: in charge of the company. That's not really my speed.
Speaker 3: But if I feel like something goes stagnant, I get
Speaker 3: really upset and not like depressed depressed, but I really
Speaker 3: like I feel it deeply.
Speaker 1: And you said something to me.
Speaker 3: I want to say at the start of like twenty
Speaker 3: thirteen or twenty fourteen, we were at that point in
Speaker 3: time talking to somebody about trying to turn this into
Speaker 3: like a digital show or a TV show or a
Speaker 3: ard knows what kind of show, and you made a
Speaker 3: point to me that there was nothing wrong with owning
Speaker 3: our own little corner of the Internet and not trying
Speaker 3: to be a TV show, not trying to be sports Center.
Speaker 3: I don't know, but just owning what we do and
Speaker 3: kind of owning our own little corner, our little niche
Speaker 3: in the digital space. And that really stuck with me
Speaker 3: nice really truly, I'm I'm speaking truth to power man.
Speaker 3: That really stuck with me. Cool, and I have to
Speaker 3: a large degree stopped getting that kind of dark sense
Speaker 3: if things I feel go stagnant for a little bit
Speaker 3: in time. I'm very comfortable with where we're at. I'm
Speaker 3: very happy with what we've done.
Speaker 1: You've now everybody officially listened to both the history of
Speaker 1: the solid verbal and the very last solid verbal episode
Speaker 1: ever to be recorded. You probably didn't know that when
Speaker 1: you started. But we're done now. I'm just kidding. We're
Speaker 1: gonna keep going so cool man.
Speaker 3: Uh you know, I don't know if there I don't know,
Speaker 3: if we've got ten more good years in US.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know if this is Bartola
Speaker 1: cologne or if this is like, you know, get fat
Speaker 1: with you. That's fine.
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, but whatever whatever this ends up being, it's
Speaker 3: been a fun nine seasons, is going to be an
Speaker 3: awesome tenth season, and well we'll see where this takes
Speaker 3: us next. But it's been a hell of a journey
Speaker 3: and thank you so much for putting up not only
Speaker 3: with this show, but for many of you out there
Speaker 3: who I'm sure are listening to the full verbal history
Speaker 3: of the solid verbal. Thank you for all your support
Speaker 3: for making us into what we are.
Speaker 1: If you're still listening, tweet at ty hilden Brands. If
Speaker 1: you're still listening, t y h I L D E
Speaker 1: N B R A N D T. Don't tell them
Speaker 1: where you came from, who sent you, and just tweet Tie,
Speaker 1: I love you you Tye. Just tweet them that they
Speaker 1: make me to prove, to prove that you're still listening.
Speaker 1: So you're list you want to sign off, you want
Speaker 1: to do? You want to take it?
Speaker 3: For that guy over there, literally over there, seated to
Speaker 3: my left, looking very spelt, thank you.
Speaker 1: His name is Dan Rubinstein. For myself, Tie Hildebrand, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for listening all these years. We will
Speaker 1: catch you on a week's stay solid peace. Don't forget
Speaker 1: to visit our friends over at proper Cloth. Do it today.
Speaker 1: It's propercloth dot com slash Solid. If you're interested in
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