Mixed Signals: Clay Travis on mixing sports and politics, his ‘pudding strike,’ and the billion-dollar bet on sports gambling

Max Tani:
Welcome to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media, where we’re tracking the wild changes in this media age. I’m Max Tani, Media Editor here at Semafor, and with me as always is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith.

Ben Smith:
I’m excited about this one, Max.

Max Tani:
Well, you’re excited because this week on the show, we are sitting down with OutKick Founder, Clay Travis. We’ll ask Clay about his origins in the darkest pits of new media, his bet on the merger of sports and conservative politics, the gambling takeover of sports media, and I’ll debate with him about a favorite topic of mine, the real reason behind the NBA’s ratings problems.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. Clay is a real man of this particular political and cultural moment.

Max Tani:
Well, we’ll ask him about this particular political and cultural moment and a lot more right after the break.

Ben Smith:
So, Max, you’re a real major sports news consumer. Can you just place OutKick for me in that space?

Max Tani:
I mean, I know OutKick from their frequent needling of players in the NBA who they see as too woke. In particular, I feel like they have really gone after LeBron James of my hometown, Los Angeles Lakers, which I have obviously taken great offense to as a LeBron stan and apologist.
So, I know them really as one of the few sites in sports that seems to really not be afraid of stepping into the politics and sports nexus. They’re not afraid of fusing them together, but obviously approaching it from a very conservative point of view, which is also different than a lot of other things in the space. I don’t know. Ben, what’s your feeling on OutKick?

Ben Smith:
I don’t know the site so well, but I know who Clay is because he’s basically of my generation of blogger and it’s a very recognizable thing. In 2004, I’m sure still true, but a lot of bored lawyers on the internet and Clay was one of them and did some weird stunts involving pudding that I really want to ask him about actually that got him some attention.
And then gradually made his way from there to CBS Sports. He was an editor/writer at Deadspin, actually, the Gawker, the notorious/brilliant Gawker Sports blog in ’09 to ‘11, then founded OutKick. I think he’s actually a right wing Gawker before you could be a right wing Barstool basically back then.
And has gradually gone from being an individual blogger to media operator and then back to being a sports radio, talk radio podcast, successor to Rush Limbaugh in a certain way. And there’s this funny arc from being a weirdo on the internet to being a media entrepreneur, back to being a weirdo on the internet, which I feel like is basically an arc that a lot of people track. And I’m just interested in the way in which in particular for him, like sports has turned I think into politics.

Max Tani:
Yeah, I mean he definitely would be a part of the constellation that constitutes what people are calling the manosphere, this type of media personality figure who ostensibly hosts shows about sports. But those shows have really become about politics and culture particularly told through a conservative lens.
And clearly, he’s done a pretty good job for himself. He sold his company in 2021 to Fox Corp and he’s become a regular personality on Fox News. And as you mentioned, he also replaced Rush Limbaugh, took Rush Limbaugh’s old show when Rush died. So, he clearly has carved out an interesting lane for himself. Seems like he’s friends with Trump. He’s interviewed Trump a few times. They’ve had Trump on OutKick a bunch. So, we’ll have to ask him about that.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. All that’s left really for him is to run for elected office to complete the storyline. Well, but I think we’ve got him here. Let’s bring him on. Thanks so much for joining us, Clay.

Clay Travis:
Thanks for having me on. You can ask me anything under the sun.

Ben Smith:
All right. He’s heard it all.

Clay Travis:
This is probably not going to shock you. I don’t tiptoe up to anything. So, whatever you want to ask is, don’t worry about it, I’ll have an answer. You might not agree with it, but I’ll have an answer.

Ben Smith:
We’re really thrilled to have you. So, I’m like an old blogger. I think we’re about the same age. And I remember when the whole internet was powered by board lawyers and I was looking as one does at your Wikipedia page and did not know the story that you were first attracted media attention with your personal blog when you were living in the US Virgin Islands and working for a firm called Dudley Topper and Feuerzeig. You were a Tennessee Titans fan, unable to get NFL Sunday ticket in the islands.
And so, you went on a pudding strike, eating only pudding every day for 50 days with the goal of forcing DIRECTV to carry the package in the Virgin Islands. The effort failed, but you apparently received media attention. And so, I guess I’m curious, I was also a blogger in that era. When do you go from, “I am doing this weird pudding” stunt to “I am a media professional”?

Clay Travis:
I don’t know that I would be considered a media professional now, according to some people. Look, I was, and I think you’re right, fortunate in some ways that in 2004 when I graduated from law school, I went to Vanderbilt Law School, graduated, moved to the Caribbean to work in the biggest law firm in the United States in Caribbean. There were 12 or 13 attorneys there.
And I had a midlife crisis where I looked around, I said, “I don’t necessarily want to be doing this for the next 40 or 50 years of my life.” And I had an idea that I wanted to make a living as a writer. And so, I started writing online in ’04. I’m just a guy who wanted to go out to a bar and be able to watch his favorite team play. And I have been able to do that anywhere in the United States because DIRECTV services, sports bars in every city and every place.
The only place under the United States flag that didn’t have DIRECTV Sunday ticket for people who have forgotten was the US Virgin Islands. And somehow, I ended up in this Bermuda Triangle of rights fees and overlapping universes.

Max Tani:
You’re still upset about this?

Clay Travis:
Oh, I’m still, look, I mean, I got fascinated by it still the way that I live now. And the pudding strike, which was very fun. We ended up getting an illegal DIRECTV connected to a boat. You could get it to your boat, but you couldn’t get it to land-based. And that was some form of a solution.

Max Tani:
Honestly, it feels a little bit like the local sports rights today.

Clay Travis:
Honestly, I was ahead of the curve. It’s super frustrating. They had a hearing about it on Capitol Hill today, and I get it. I can’t find anything. I’m an old man. My kids call me an unk. I just want to sit down with one remote and watch any game under the sun. It doesn’t seem like a crazy thing to want.

Max Tani:
No. And the thing is that everybody is upset about it. If you’re a sports fan, I mean obviously the teams don’t like it. I live here in New York, it makes no sense that I pay over about a $100 a month for YouTube TV. I’ve got NBA League Pass, and yet I can’t watch my two hometown basketball teams. I have an easier time watching teams from other places. It’s terrible if you want me to for the next generation of Knicks fans or Nets fans or whatever. I mean, it’s a terrible system. It’s horrible. So, it sounds just like I’d rather have a boat with the DIRECTV on it.

Clay Travis:
Think about this, guys. We’re going backwards on sports television rights in many ways. I really do think this. When we were kids, you guys are around my age I think.

Ben Smith:
I’m a little younger.

Max Tani:
Well that’s exactly is-

Ben Smith:
Sad to say.

Clay Travis:
Okay. So, you could put on WGN and watch Harry Caray and Steve Stone, calling the game around noon. They still didn’t have very many games on in the afternoon. I think ’88 was the first time they had lights at Wrigley Field, if I remember correctly. And then you could watch the Braves on WTBS. You could watch those games everybody nationwide. It was easy to see.
My kids are Braves fans now. The number of times that we get Braves blackouts here in Nashville were considered part of the footprint. Drives me insane. I can’t legitimately can’t watch it. And I’ve been texting everybody and obviously I know a lot of sports media execs, I’m like, “Dudes, you guys have to give us some form of golden ticket. I will pay a reasonable dollar figure.”
But I want to ensure that to your point, I’m never blacked out. If I want to watch my favorite NBA team, my favorite NHL team, favorite major league baseball team, NFL team, whatever it is, I should be able to watch it. You should be able to take my money for that. And you know what’s happening. My kids are smarter. They just get illegal streams of pretty much every game.

Max Tani:
This is what makes me think we’re just at the peak of this kind of unbundling. It’s like I’m subscribed to 50 Substacks, five entertainment services. I can’t watch sports games. I just think capitalism is pretty good at solving these things. And at some point, pretty soon for some exorbitant fee, you will get the one golden ticket where you get all that stuff and it’ll be exorbitant.

Clay Travis:
Yeah. I hope you guys are right. I’m fired up about this too. The idea that we’re going backwards in terms of ease.

Max Tani:
Have you considered a pudding strike?

Clay Travis:
I did, to be fair, cheat a little bit on the pudding strike because it is hard to get enough calories to eat when you’re only eating Hunt’s Snack Pack puddings. But I think I have a little bit more influence now than I did in ’04.

Max Tani:
That’s true, that’s true. So, Clay, just to give a little bit of background, you founded OutKick digital sports and politics site. Give our audience a little bit of a summary. I mean, how big are you guys? How many people do you have on staff? How much content are you guys producing every day? Walk us through some of those details.

Clay Travis:
Yeah. So, I initially started writing online. I went to CBS Sports, I went to Deadspin, if you guys remember Deadspin at the peak of its blogger era powers. And then I went to a site called FanHouse, which was the front page for AOL.com sports, which was still a huge audience. And then in 2011, I had just come back from the national title game, Oregon playing against Auburn out in the Fiesta Bowl for people who remember that game, the Cam Newton era, when they won that title, Auburn did.
And suddenly, I didn’t have a job. FanHouse sold its rights to sportingnews.com. Basically the placement on the front page of AOL.com. And most of us lost our jobs. There were a ton of people that I loved working with at FanHouse. It’s a great staff. And I was doing local sports talk radio and I had come to understand in Nashville, my hometown, how that business worked from an advertiser perspective.
I thought that I knew digital media decently because I had been at CBS Deadspin and then AOL FanHouse. I at least understood the content elements of it. And I never wanted to be in a position where somebody else could fire me again.
So, I understood that, hey, I may end up starting a business that’s going to fail, that’s going to go bankrupt, but I wanted to control everything. And so, in 2011, I started OutKick. And initially OutKick was a one-man shop. I sold every ad. I wrote every article. I ran the business completely, entirely on my own. And so, I said it was like an ugly Don Draper. I had to go in and pitch people on why they needed to be spending their money with me. And so, we gradually grew.
Now, when I started in ’11, we were really just a zany sports site more akin to Deadspin before it went mega woke more akin to the sports internet in general, back in the era of the Bill Simmons page two columns before everybody lost their mind there.
And then as we grew and as the universe around us changed starting, and I’m writing a book about this right now, which is going to be out in November, so I’ve been thinking about it a lot. But starting about 2015-ish sports suddenly, in my opinion, started to go really woke.

Ben Smith:
Was there a moment, would you remember a moment?

Clay Travis:
Yes, yeah. I think there were a couple of moments. One was, and if you guys remember this, Michael Sam became the first gay NFL draft pick and ESPN covered it like he was Tim Tebow or like he was, you remember Tebow was a huge flash point back in the day, or he was a first-round NFL draft pick and it was entirely identity based because he was a seventh-round draft pick.

Ben Smith:
I mean, it was a pretty good story.

Clay Travis:
It was an interesting story, but most sports fans don’t really care that much about an athlete’s sexuality if they’re performing on the field at a high level. But the guy never played a snap of an NFL game. 2015, building on that in some way, Caitlyn Jenner gets the ESPY for courage at the ESPN ESPY Awards that year, which was a, I think major cultural flash point.
And then in 2015-ish, you also had the continue, if you guys remember the Missouri protests that took over over a hunger strike. They alleged that there was racism at the University of Missouri. The football team threatened not to play. That was a huge story. And then the next year in August of ’16, Colin Kaepernick took a knee and everything changed almost overnight in terms of sports. That to me was the foundation of the woke era starting.
So, we went at that time at OutKick from a site that primarily had been focused on, “Hey, here’s Johnny Manziel out dressed up as Scooby Doo partying with a couple of cute college girls.” And “Oh, we’re going to cover conference realignment and we’re going to have drinking games for big college football games.” To all of a sudden, “Hey, what are the implications of BLM protests? And boy, what do we think about the Trump era intersecting completely with sports?”
And everybody went crazy. And I would argue it peaked in 2022 when Leah Thomas wins an NCAA championship as a man identifying as a woman in that swimming championship. And so, that seven-year process sports went crazy. And there’s a lot in there, but I’ve been writing about a lot. So, I think about it quite a bit.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. And just to go back a little bit, one of the innovations of Deadspin in a way was the understanding that they were covering sports media as much as they were covering sports and they were punching up at ESPN and everybody. But I guess as I understand, I mean you had this almost very, very pure experience of the last 10 years of politics through the lens of sports. You initially were someone whose line I think was, “Can we get the politics out of sports?” And it feels to me your line is now, “It’s all politics.”

Clay Travis:
Yeah. It’s funny.

Ben Smith:
How does that happen?

Clay Travis:
Well, so I would argue that we are the same people and we have to win battles to return sports to normalcy. I would actually argue that we are the side saying, “No, you know what? It’s not good to have athletes making strong political statements in the context of sports.”

Ben Smith:
Even if they’re conservative?

Clay Travis:
Even if they’re conservative, I don’t think it’s good. I’ll give you an example, and I wrote this in one of my books. I don’t think it would be smart if a super-conservative athlete took a knee during the national anthem and said, “Hey, I’m opposed to gay marriage being legal and therefore I can’t stand for the national anthem.” Or “Hey, I think that before Roe v. Wade had been overturned, Hey, I think Roe v. Wade needs to be overturned. I can’t stand for the anthem in a country where abortion is legal.”
My argument is like, hey, it’s not good business. My book was entitled Republicans Buy Sneakers Too. Won a couple of cycles ago, and it was a quote from Michael Jordan that he’s now acknowledged that he said, “When I grew up in the ’80s, the ‘90s and the early 2000s, nobody cared what an athlete said about politics. Nobody cared who an athlete voted for.” I actually think that’s healthy and I think that’s the era we should be in.

Max Tani:
We’ve had these moments, Muhammad Ali had his-

Clay Travis:
Yeah. No, and I write about that in the book, but by the time I was growing up, the 1960s were over. I think we went through a 1960s like era, the late ’60s. And then what happened? Reagan got elected and things got calm for the ‘80s, the ‘90s, 2000s. You might have fights with sports fans, but it’s over whether or not you agree with an athlete over his performance on the field.
To me, Nike giving Colin Kaepernick a shoe when he wasn’t playing. Caitlyn Jenner, getting an ESPY from ESPN for something that had nothing to do with athletics at all. To me, those were fundamental changes in the way that we talked about sports. We went from, to me, identity politics took over. Now the business side, you asked about the business side. I’ll tell you the business side.

Ben Smith:
I want to talk more about identity politics. No, no, go ahead on the business side.

Clay Travis:
Let me go to the business side. As a warrior, I had been expecting that sports gambling was going to be legalized. And when it was, the only time I’ve ever been to the Supreme Court was for the arguments over whether New Jersey could legalize sports gambling, basically, should it be a federal law or should individual states under federalism have the opportunity to make their own choices.
Supreme Court 63 says, “Hey, New Jersey can legalize sports gambling.” Everything changes almost overnight. I knew that we were going to have a really good business when it came to the gold rush of sports gambling. I didn’t realize it was going to be as good as it was. And so, very rapidly, OutKick got into the affiliate model with sports gambling.

Max Tani:
And this is just flood of marketing advertising from all these apps, right?

Clay Travis:
Flood of dollars, flood of dollars. We were either the best or second best affiliate that FanDuel had anywhere in the country. It was us and Pat McAfee. We were getting paid if the three of us had been out for beers in Nashville, my hometown where OutKick is based, and I would’ve turned to you back in those days and I would’ve been like, “Hey, go to FanDuel.com/Clay and make a bet.” And I would’ve gotten from the two of you $350 each for starting new FanDuel accounts.

Max Tani:
Now when you’re getting that money, doesn’t that make you nervous? I mean, I just feel like whenever there’s a transaction like that, that means they are just taking in so much revenue, so much profit from your loyal readers. I mean, doesn’t that make you a little queasy?

Clay Travis:
A couple of things on that. I’ve always been in favor of sports gambling. I mean, I would hope that some people would win money against FanDuel and DraftKings as opposed to, but I mean to me it’s not a dissimilar to walking into a casino. You understand that the house typically has built this entire casino because by and large, they do pretty well against you. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t go in and drop 50 or 100 bucks and feel like you had a good night, if that makes sense.

Max Tani:
Yeah. For sure.

Clay Travis:
So, in my mind, I’m always thinking, “Hey, you know what would make the game a little bit more fun? I can watch a game and if I’ve got 50 or 100 bucks on it. Unlike golfing or unlike going out to dinner, or unlike going out to a movie, I can watch and enjoy the game and I can actually make a little bit of money on the way that I’m choosing to be entertained.”
So, this thing continues to grow. Every state is its own battleground. I immediately said, “Hey, this is going to be like when Prohibition ended. Every different state is going to be its own battleground and they’re all competing for market share.” It continued to build. We were making millions and millions of dollars. And right before we sold on Super Bowl Sunday 2021, on that day alone, we made $2 million from FanDuel.

Max Tani:
That’s incredible. And so, do you think, I mean ultimately the valuation, the value, the commercial interest in sports media was driven really by gambling?

Clay Travis:
Oh, hugely. I mean, again, we hit it better than almost anybody else did. We made $2 million on Super Bowl Sunday. We would’ve continued to make millions and millions of dollars, but at some point, those companies, DraftKings, FanDuel, they’re going to hit economic reality. They’re going to have the market share that they want. Wall Street’s going to start saying, “Hey, you guys got to start showing us some profit.”
So, I knew that gravy train wasn’t going to last forever. So, that affiliate models going to continue, but it’s going to diminish. You could go the Barstool route like Dave and those guys decided, “Hey, we’re going to be the book.” This is a big multibillion dollar swing. Our audience, we’re going to be the book. I kicked the tires on that idea. That obviously failed for them, but they did fine.

Max Tani:
Why didn’t you go that route?

Clay Travis:
Well, first of all, people don’t realize how hard it is to get an affiliate license in every state.

Ben Smith:
It’s through a regulated industry.

Clay Travis:
Oh, I mean, you’re getting fingerprinted, you’re passing background checks in 30 different states, and I just didn’t think we had the ability to compete with the billions of dollars that FanDuel had and DraftKings had. And remember, those guys were smart because they already were on phones because of daily fantasy.
So, I thought it was going to be super challenging to try to do what Barstool did. I admire the swing from Penn Gaming and thinking, “Hey, this is a more affordable way to create a sports book through loyalty with media companies.” And I think there’s value in that, but I think it was hard to compete.
And when I looked at the marketplace, we weren’t going to have billions of dollars. And I think whether it’s ESPN or SI, a lot of brands tried to create their own books and it didn’t work because they didn’t have the money. Heck, Wynn didn’t have the money to compete at a high level. Caesars decided that the stakes were too high for them, and they’re a pretty decent sized business.
So, third option was sell. And Fox had a relationship with FanDuel, which was our biggest affiliate. I was obviously on Fox Sports. I took less money to sell to Fox because I thought the partnership made sense more for us because I didn’t just want to do sports gambling. And so, there at that time, we sold in May of ’21, there were sports gambling companies bidding more, but I thought the fit was better at Fox. I like Fox Sports. I was getting to know the Fox News side. And so, we sold in May of ’21.

Ben Smith:
And you sold for how much?

Clay Travis:
I don’t think we’ve officially been allowed to say.

Ben Smith:
I think it’s rumored to have been about $100 million. Is that right?

Clay Travis:
That’s not a crazy rumor.

Max Tani:
So, I guess just to stick on this for one more second, you told Dave Portnoy, who is of course the founder of Barstool Sports, that the thing that you worried about the most was are we selling too soon? Now you’ve talked about how it seemed like maybe there was the right, you thought about the timing of it and whether it was a bubble. I mean, what do you think now? Do you think it was too soon?

Clay Travis:
I think it depends on how you classify too soon. I think I made a solid decision. I love on some level, for better or worse, being able to make every decision. That’s why I liked running a media company. I’m married, so I get to make no decisions inside my own house. So, I’d like to make decisions somewhere.
And so, I wonder at the time in sport, from a sports gambling perspective, I think we sold at a good time because I think valuations for companies entirely predicated on sports gambling have declined. It wasn’t only that I sold OutKick. Remember that same month, I took over with Buck Sexton, the biggest radio show in the country.
So, the question you asked about sports and politics, I actually think I have solid sports opinions and I’ll give them all to you on any subject under the sun. But I also am super opinionated on politics. So, instead of trying to do a sports show and throw my political opinions down your throat that you may not want, I took over the biggest political talk show in the country alongside of Buck.
And so, to me, hey, if you want to know what I think about tariffs like, hey, Clay and Buck’s on 555 stations nationwide in all 50 states, 10 million people month or listening, you got plenty of opportunity to go listen there. But if you want to hear what I think about, I don’t know, NIL related issues, I do an OutKick show right after that where I would continue to dive in aggressively into entirely sports related topics.
And remember at Out Kick, we’ve always had a lot of pop culture. We’ve always had a lot of current events stories in addition to sports. Sports is the foundation, but I didn’t want people to be tuning in for my early morning sports talk show and you’re like, “Boy, the Nuggets had a heck of a win last night.” Or “Can you believe Knicks came back against the Celtics?” And then I’m like, “But I want to talk about this new India tariff decision with Trump.”

Max Tani:
So, I have a question about that because I think it’s interesting that you see it as a period maybe 2015 to 2022 when sports really politicized and I guess would like to have been looking at OutKick a bit and looking at the engagement you get on YouTube too, we’d like to try a theory out on you, which is that obviously, the time engagement on SCC football, women in bikinis, clips roundup.
And I’m looking at the political stuff and I saw something on, and particularly you guys writing a lot about the fights, this to me, shrinking fights around trans people playing sports in women’s sports. You have something about UK Women’s Pool. You got a piece about the Ithaca College rowing team. Something about the Vancouver Island Mariners.

Clay Travis:
This is on YouTube or this is up on the main OutKick site?

Max Tani:
No. This is on OutKick. Do you know what sport that is, the Vancouver Island Mariners?

Clay Travis:
The Vancouver Island Mariners. No, I have no idea.

Max Tani:
Me either. But I guess is there, and I don’t see much pickup on that stuff, is that driven by your audience? It just seems like this is not hot news to me.

Clay Travis:
It is driven by an audience that is very fired up about it. And we’re the only site that would cover it.

Max Tani:
Still?

Clay Travis:
Yes. Because I mean every Democrat-

Max Tani:
Because I obviously don’t doubt the heat around that story a year ago, but it feels to me like it’s fading. I think basically the right won a lot of fights, and as a result, you win a fight and it becomes boring often. And when I look at a fight about whether there’s a trans professional in UK Women’s Pool, I think these guys are running out of things to talk about.

Clay Travis:
I don’t think we’re ever going to run out of things to talk about.

Max Tani:
On that particular topic I’m in.

Clay Travis:
No, I don’t think so. Because look, I mean the opposition is still there. Every single senator, Democrat, all 47 refuse to vote to keep men out of women’s sports.

Max Tani:
So, this is coming from the audience, I guess here was my guess, it’s not coming from Fox.

Clay Travis:
From Fox, no. I will give Fox tremendous credit for this reason. No one in my tenure has ever said, “Clay, we need you to talk about this topic.” Now, I will spend a lot of time texting our editors like, “Hey, this is a great story for us and we need to be on this.” But no, Fox-

Max Tani:
But the politics are basically your politics in your political instance.

Clay Travis:
The site is like, “Hey, this is Clay Travis’s brain, let’s pull back for better or worse. Let’s pull back his skin. And that’s what he’s interested in.”

Max Tani:
And Portnoy beat you up recently. I don’t know if you saw this, because I know you guys had some feud rapprochement, but he beat you up recently for essentially being in the tank for Trump said that you would support him no matter what he does, and that if it was reported that he’d cut somebody’s head off, you would question that.

Clay Travis:
Well, whose head?

Max Tani:
Possibly Dave Portnoy’s. I don’t know.

Clay Travis:
No, no, no. I’m just making a joke. It would depend on who Trump’s head. I mean there are people out there, I’d be very happy if he cut their head off. That’s obviously a joke.

Max Tani:
But more broadly, the allegation as people often do around a president that you’ve fallen into the tank.

Clay Travis:
No. I don’t think that’s true. I happen to agree with most of the things that Trump does. And I think that particular criticism, if I remember it was over the tariff situation. And my argument was actually the mature adult one for a change. I said, “Hey, you should be buying stocks for long range. Whenever there are dips, take advantage of the buying opportunities.”
I think I went on Piers Morgan’s show and said, “Hey, look,” and I stand by this, “if stocks are lower 18 months after Trump comes into office than they are the day he went in or when he was elected,” I think I said, “then I’ll show up in a full clown outfit and admit that Trump has not done well economically.” I don’t think that’s going to happen.
And it’s not just Trump by the way. I really like and know very well personally many of the people that he’s put in his cabinet. I love Marco Rubio. I think Marco Rubio is a super smart guy that is doing, in my opinion, a phenomenal job. On election night, Pete Hegseth was hosting the show that he and I and Tomi Lahren and Ortegas were doing from Kid Rock’s Honky Tonk Bar. There obviously are a lot of Fox News people inside of the administration.

Max Tani:
I know as I think about it, you have a real shot at a cabinet position if you play your cards right.

Clay Travis:
Well, I might be the next attorney general, let’s be honest. And I think America would be better for it.

Max Tani:
You know I’m half laughing, half thinking maybe I should write that down. Clay, I mean you’ve interviewed Trump a few times.

Clay Travis:
Eleven. I’ve interviewed Trump 11 times now.

Max Tani:
You’ve interviewed Trump 11 times. It’s more than a few times. Tyrus, who’s on OutKick, has also interviewed Trump for you guys. I mean, are you at the point where you’re in the Rolodex, he’s calling you up when he is doing his evening check-ins with various people?

Clay Travis:
Trump is a big OutKick guy. I do not talk to him regularly on the phone. I talk with a lot of people in the administration regularly on the phone, but I’m not in the, hey, the phone’s ringing and I’m trying to get the kids. I got three boys in one of their sports games. I’m like, “Sorry, the president’s on the phone right now.” I do not regularly talk with him, but he is a fan and his staff is regularly reaching out.

Max Tani:
So, the last question we had for you on the OutKick politics stuff, which is really interesting is, I mean clearly you found an audience for the kind of sports coverage through a conservative lens. I guess what I’m curious about is are you ever scared that in asserting this very aggressive worldview that you are turning off some audiences and that that’s going to hinder growth, there might be some people who are like, eh, I don’t like all the politics stuff, but I like the women in bikinis or the dunks or whatever you guys are posting about.

Clay Travis:
So, here’s what I would say on that. I’m actually stunned that we don’t have competition because I feel like we created beer and no one else will share a competing beer.

Ben Smith:
You don’t think Barstool is competition?

Clay Travis:
I don’t really see them as competition. No, I don’t. Because I think if I were structuring the breakdown, first of all, Barstool employs a lot of people that are super libs. That would be the white dudes for Kamala. Nobody talks about it.

Ben Smith:
But you don’t employ libs. Is that like a policy?

Clay Travis:
Well, I don’t think we have a white dude who voted for Harris. If we did good for them. I would question why their testosterone is so low, but they’re able to vote for whoever they want.

Max Tani:
Let’s take a quick break and we’ll be right back with Clay Travis. Different question. You talk about so much of what you’re doing now is streaming is stuff like this is being on air, you got two different shows. But as somebody who comes out of the blogosphere in the web, do you feel like the web is basically going away?

Clay Travis:
I think about this a lot. Let me take it a backwards way. Don Lemon for eight years had exclusive access to CNN’s audience. Eight years, whatever it was. He’s on television. People are watching him. He only has to compete with Fox News and MSNBC. They fire him at CNN. He goes out into the internet and nobody cares about him anymore. Joy Reid, same thing. She’s just vanished.

Max Tani:
Actually, I will say, I mean she’s making more money now at Substack than she was before. I mean actually the people love Jim Acosta. Very confusing. Anyway.

Clay Travis:
So, my point is I think that they will fail because now they have to compete with everybody. And I feel like I came from, to use the Bane analogy, I was born in the darkness. When you’re on the internet, you’re in the muck. You have to fight for every single reader. You have to fight for every single digital viewer. You don’t have the top-down apparatus, which is going to create a huge audience just because some super smart executive says, “Oh, you are now on prime time and millions of people are going to watch you.”
So, what I think is interesting is I built OutKick from the ground up, from the muck to an audience. And now Fox News is a very top-down universe. And I’ve made the argument, I don’t know if you guys feel that way. So, my ideal when I sold was like, “Hey, your grandma is suddenly going to know who I am and the grandson and I’m going to bring every American together at Thanksgiving and they’re all going to love me. The old guy and the frat guy.”

Ben Smith:
That’s a great pitch. They should have pitched you more. But don’t you feel like, it’s funny you say that because I think that there’s a lot too, and there’s this funny convergence where it’s like it’s you, but it’s also the other people who are doing great in this independent ecosystem are, are the great broadcasters, the last generation Tucker, Megan, Piers, these are people who Fox News made actually. And I wonder, it just feels like there’s a funny convergence where I think people have lost track of maybe you were born in the darkness and these other people were elevated by corporate media, but you’re now all just fighting it out in the darkness or something.

Clay Travis:
Well, what I would point out is the three people that you happen to mention I think are the three most successful people too, have been on television and also work digitally. And I think what they have in common, Piers, Megan and Tucker, is they’re all very smart and they have unique perspectives.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. They’re gifted to broadcasters.

Clay Travis:
I think it goes back to the smart, original, funny and authentic.

Max Tani:
So, Clay, we want to end here because it’s the NBA playoffs. The ratings are up. So, people are taking shots at you because you’ve been long time ... Even somebody who’s talked a long time about what you were mentioning earlier about how the woke ideologies of some of these leagues have carved into the ratings leadership.

Ben Smith:
Alleged.

Max Tani:
Alleged. Yes, exactly. Well, let’s get into that.

Clay Travis:
I mean hold on.

Max Tani:
Wait.

Clay Travis:
It’s not alleged when you put Black Lives Matter on the court and you say their names on the back of a jersey instead of a game. That’s pretty woke.

Max Tani:
Yup. For sure. But there was somebody who took one of your peers in sports media, took a shot at you, Ryan Russillo. He was on the Bill Simmons podcast. I believe we’re going to have a producer play the clip. Chris, can you play this clip? And we want to have Clay respond to this.

Bill Simmons:
This is one of the best 24-hour stretches the leagues had in a while.

Ryan Russillo:
Yeah, Clay Travis. How about tweet about the ratings?

Bill Simmons:
Get Bobby Burack on that one.

Ryan Russillo:
Look, I realize group economics wasn’t a great jersey idea either.

Max Tani:
All right. So, yeah, I still am trying to figure out what the group economics things mean, but talk a little bit about that because you have some thoughts. Why do you think Rossillo and Bill were wrong there about the NBA ratings?

Clay Travis:
Well, first of all, I like Bill and I like Ryan. In fact, the studio that I’m in right now, Ryan watched the Red Sox in the World Series from my house during my Halloween party because he’s such a diehard Red Sox fan that he didn’t want to miss a pitch, but he had had friends that wanted to come to our costume party and be downstairs. So, he was in the studio where I am talking to you right now.
But they’re wrong. And they’re wrong, I mean, so, first of all, the first round that just finished, the NBA viewership was up 6% over last year. So, I would submit to you that if you are trying to spike the football on a 6% ratings increase, you’ve got a pretty low standard for what your expectation is. And with LeBron gone, I would expect that the numbers in the semi-finals, finals and then the NBA finals are going to struggle.
And to me, this is, I think the NBA lit its brand on fire like Bud Light did by alienating. You asked the question, are you worried about alienating people who would otherwise like you? No, because I’m amazing and they’re going to love me no matter what. But if they’re with me to this point.
But I would say if I ran the NBA, if I was Adam Silver or if I ran Bud Light, I would want everybody to buy my product. So, to me, if you are alienating in any way people who would love your product by something that has nothing to do with your product, that’s the definition of failure.
And let me point this out. NBA basketball is actually very popular. NBA is down by and large over the last decade plus. Men’s basketball setting record ratings. If you had asked me 2024, was it last year, six million more people watched Caitlin Clark play women’s basketball than watch an NBA finals game, any of them.

Max Tani:
That is true. Though, I mean, and you were tweeting about this earlier today. I mean, the WNBA is way, way more politically outspoken.

Clay Travis:
Well, and I think that’s one that’s going to light themselves on fire. Because I think if you look at the new WNBA fans, they are not political in nature. They just like Caitlin Clark and they’re making Caitlin Clark go into this woke identity politics era. The WNBA hasn’t left it. And by the way, WNBA has never made a dollar in 27 years. I’m not sure there’s any other business in America that has failed for 27 years to make a profit still exists.

Max Tani:
So, Clay, I think obviously, you have a sports site that has in a podcast that has these big audiences. And I do think obviously, you represent a point of view and certainly, there are probably people who do feel that way who saw some of the things on the court and thought, “Ah, this is too political for me during COVID.”
But I guess the point that you hear a lot from media executives and fans is, I mean the declines in viewership besides football with the NBA mirror the declines in viewership across all of television. I mean, in 2005, CBS was putting up 13 million viewers a night on CSI. Obviously, you look at the ratings now, that’s about half that.
So, to me it just seems like what the NBA is doing is mirroring broader trends. I mean, you look at the Major League Baseball, it’s the same thing. The ratings have declined in a very similar fashion. And I don’t think baseball has gone particularly woke in the last 20 years.

Clay Travis:
Well, I think baseball has made a lot of awful decisions, particularly as we started off, because it’s so hard sometimes to follow your favorite team.

Max Tani:
But I guess isn’t this just cord-cutting like the stuff that we were talking about earlier?

Clay Travis:
No. I think what defeats that argument is men’s college basketball has actually increased its audience by and large over that time.

Max Tani:
I guess, but I mean actually I think that the NBA has made a lot of errors. I mean there’s too many games. It’s late. I’m a Laker fan. I live in New York. I want to watch, it’s at 11:00 PM. It’s insane. My girlfriend is upset when we’re up and it’s 1:00 AM watching some of these games. The three-point shooting thing, maybe that’s ruined it. I guess I am a little bit skeptical of the idea that politics is totally sapped away 70% of the audience since Jordan, right?

Clay Travis:
Yeah. It’s 75% of the audience has vanished since Jordan in ’98.

Max Tani:
Yeah. But it’s the same for broadcast television. I mean, it’s the same logic.

Clay Travis:
Let me give you a stat. More people watched the Jordan era documentary, The Last Dance, than watched the actual NBA finals in 2020.

Max Tani:
Yeah. It’s true. That was obviously a major media moment.

Clay Travis:
So, your point, hey, does load management factor in? Yes.

Max Tani:
Jordan obviously was special. I think in general, clearly, there’s something about him that brought a bunch of people to the table that-

Clay Travis:
Oh, I think it was the fact that he said Republicans buy sneakers too. That’s why [inaudible 00:41:58].

Max Tani:
And he was amazing. I think he never said it, but he felt it.

Clay Travis:
No, no. He said it. He said he’s now admitted that he said it. But if Adam Silver called me and he said, “Clay, I want to come on your show and I’m going to acknowledge that we got the league too political and that you are right, that it has negatively impacted the overall NBA brand. And I want to admit that.” I would say, “Okay. Adam Silver, you have admitted this. I will stop my war against you for being the worst commissioner who has ever existed in the history of pro sports.” But he hasn’t reached out and I haven’t had that conversation. And until it does-

Max Tani:
You’re not a big fan of the Playing Game.

Clay Travis:
Playing Game is disaster.

Max Tani:
Oh, no, it’s awesome. It’s totally awesome.

Clay Travis:
Look, they play 82 games, they should play 40.

Max Tani:
I agree, that’s too many.

Clay Travis:
And then the games would matter more.

Max Tani:
I agree.

Clay Travis:
And they also, look, I got a lot of things that I think could fix the NBA. People love basketball. Maybe just give them basketball instead of Greg Popovich lecturing me about Kamala Harris or Steve Kerr lecturing me about trade policy.

Max Tani:
I mean, I’m just thinking about this, I’m an NBA fan and I actually feel like the league has gotten in the players in the league. I’ve actually gotten more conservative over the last few years. You look out at it, you got Jonathan Isaac, he’s obviously, he’s conservative guy. Speaks at TPUSA, defended Trump.
Kyle Kuzma, he’s a big RFK junior guy. He said something supporting Trump. Chris Topps Porzingis, he said, “You got to give Trump a chance.” Rudy Gobert is a big RFK guy. I don’t know. To me that’s almost an all-star starting lineup with like NBA guys who are pretty big fans of Trump. I just feel like actually the league hasn’t gotten more, at least the players in the league have gotten pretty ... If you’re a conservative and you’re looking for folks who share your message, who are out there, who are in NBA, I feel like you got a lot of candidates.

Clay Travis:
Well, first of all, I think you’re right in a large extent, we won. And that’s why I don’t even get attacked anymore. Maybe people attack me after things I say here ... People used to attack me all the time. But I do think if you look at NFL players doing the Trump dance, Christian Pulisic did the Trump dance, John Jones UFC responses to Trump in the Super Bowl. I mean, heck, Eagle fans booed Santa Claus and cheered Trump. I mean, they’re not exactly known. I was on the floor with him for the NCAA wrestling championships.
So, if you ask me why has OutKick worked? Why has our audience gotten so big? Why do we now have, I don’t know, 75 employees? Why do we have so many shows that are making a difference? Why is our site traffic growing? I think because the average sports fan and the average athlete and coach and GM and owner, they agree with us. I think the majority of them agree with everything we say.
And the sports media, which we spend a lot of time on, and you guys didn’t ask me a lot about this, but the sports media as a whole is further left-wing than the political media. And I say that as somebody who lives in both worlds, the political media is actually fairer and more balanced than the sports media is.
So, we are at OutKick, the alternative to what I would say is in many ways a left-wing hegemony committed to the idea that men should be able to compete in women’s sports, which is a crystallizing issue that you’re either think that’s okay, and I don’t obviously, or I think you’re crazy and have low testosterone and are a white dude for Harris.

Ben Smith:
I believe that’s called an ad hominem argument play in the legal profession. But yeah, I mean I guess my own view, and I think you disagree here, is just that you’re talking about the last era and that there’s some risks that we’re heading into a new one. Honestly, this feels boring to me.
I may not disagree with you, but when I watch a ball game and I understand why people were upset about this a few years ago, just feels like, as you said, you won. It’s over. And I think you’re going to face a challenge from competitors who I agree with you, got your left and you’re speaking to a majority of sports fans or to their right. But now we’re mostly just going to be talking about sports again.

Clay Travis:
I look at the data, we talk a lot about sports. I have a lot of sports opinions. All I will tell you is the data doesn’t reflect that what you’re saying is true. I actually think, I thought that the left in this country, after Kamala lost and lost ground in all 50 states and spent a billion and a half dollars on a campaign in 90 days, I thought they would look in the mirror and be like, “Man, our message sucks.”
And you saw Gavin Newsom a little bit doing this on his podcast. I thought they would take ownership of losing based on what the arguments were that they made and them being profoundly rejected by men and young men in particular. Instead, they have doubled and tripled and quadrupled down on crazy. And as long as they keep doing that, I think we’re going to keep growing and more and more people are going to be coming into the OutKick world.

Max Tani:
So, the OutKick, no traffic numbers say otherwise then?

Clay Travis:
No. Our numbers are up big. Oh, I thought you were trying to argue on the other side.

Max Tani:
No, no. That’s what I’m saying.

Clay Travis:
I sound like Trump. Our numbers are up bigly. But yes, we’re doing well.

Ben Smith:
Well, Clay, thank you so much for coming on here and chopping it up with us. This has been really, really fun and interesting. Well, Max, you’re now chopping it up. You’re in the manosphere now.

Max Tani:
I mean, we are.

Ben Smith:
Like talking to play has totally taken over your vocabulary.

Clay Travis:
And by the way, I didn’t say this. I’m impressed with what you guys have done. I’m subscribed to your Sunday newsletter, which I love the timing on that-

Ben Smith:
Let’s go.

Clay Travis:
... because I’m already trying to get my weekend started.

Ben Smith:
That’s right.

Clay Travis:
Look, my one bit of things, I know there’s a lot of people that are interested in business, start companies. Try new things. I don’t know what’s going to work any better than anybody else. I try and look at the data and when I see something working, do more of it. I mean, I’m not a rocket scientist. But I am encouraged by, to your point, the question you asked was a good one. I think there’s just so much dynamic energy in the media space, and I think it’s better. I’m a First Amendment guy, larger marketplace, better arguments, better options for consumers. I’m super optimistic about where we are.

Ben Smith:
And I love your band analogy. I’m definitely going to steal that having come up more or less that way myself.

Clay Travis:
Yeah. That’s in the book.

Ben Smith:
Thank you so much for joining us.

Max Tani:
Yeah. Thanks, Clay. Really appreciate it.

Clay Travis:
Thank you, guys. Appreciate y’all. Thanks a lot.

Ben Smith:
So, Max, I don’t feel, I really felt like he pulled us into the manosphere in some way. By the end, you were using words I’d never heard you use before.

Max Tani:
It is true. I think, well, three guys on a podcast, as we discussed with Matt Bellamy, that you automatically enter the manosphere, although I don’t know what he thinks about our testosterone levels.

Ben Smith:
He kept bringing that up.

Max Tani:
He’s very interested in. I think clearly, it’s a line that’s worked well on his show over the last few months. But I mean, what did you think about, well, I thought he talked about a lot of stuff there. I mean, it seems like you disagreed with his argument about the idea that there’s still this big growing audience for politics and sports. I think both of us, it should be probably said, we’re skeptical of his fundamental argument about that. But I don’t know, what did you think about his response?

Ben Smith:
Well, I mean, first of all, I think he was totally right to see 10 years ago that the culture was how polarizing what some people thought were universalist progressive social movements. They were incredibly polarizing and he managed to channel that at OutKick very effectively.
And there will be lots of people forever who want conservative politics with their sports. I guess I’m a little optimistic that that moment of max polarization is fading. Not that OutKick’s going to go away, not there won’t be a huge audience for play Travis on Fox and for Anon, what used to be the Rush Limbaugh show and things like that. But I do think his rival, Dave Portnoy, has kept his distance from politics, spends a lot more time talking about pizza. And I do think that there’s a big mainstream American audience that probably just wants to hear about basketball.

Max Tani:
Right. It seems like what he’s done is OutKick found a very specific audience, conservative sports fans who were outraged by what they saw on the other.

Ben Smith:
And sports fans, by the way, tilt. They were talking about men in particular. They tilt conservative, and I think he’s basically right. We’re being served generic mainstream media politics and was an audience that was already to the right.

Max Tani:
Right. But it’s going to be hard to grow once you’ve got that audience and you’ve captured them, and it seems like he probably has, it’s tough to grow the audience if you are going deeper into politics, which is the reason why some advertisers have been skittish about being on there, which he says has been frustrating. And it seems like he rightly pointed out some of the hypocrisies there.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. I mean, it is interesting. I think we got a scoop that by the way, that he sold the site for around $100 million. Sounds like that was a good guess. But I do think, and we didn’t get that deep into this, but the other big forte is sports gambling, and I do think he was correct actually.

Max Tani:
He was right.

Ben Smith:
That those outsized marketing budgets for gambling peaked, that Barstool’s experiment being owned by a gambling company didn’t work at all. And that now the people making most of the money off sports gambling are FanDuel, DraftKings, the sports gambling companies, not the media companies that helped them recruit this huge audience. By the way, I mean his enthusiasm for gambling, I mean, I think that’s another backlash that’s coming.

Max Tani:
Yeah. It’s interesting. And I think he probably also saw, or maybe he just got lucky in the sense that he didn’t have to experience what Portnoy experienced, which was that his own personality and his commentary could be used against him when trying to set up shop in these various states. I mean, that was what, as the New York Times reported about Dave Portnoy a few years ago, that was one of the things that was really difficult for them is that Portnoy’s complaints, not Portnoy’s complaints, sorry.

Ben Smith:
That’s a different low testosterone situation, Max.

Max Tani:
Wait, wait. No, no. But that Portnoy’s comments and commentary kept coming up in some of these applications.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. We got to watch out for the woke gambling regulators. That’s the real scourge. But no, I think I was really glad we had him on Max. Thanks for bringing him over.

Max Tani:
Yeah. It was so fun.

Ben Smith:
You’re deeper in the weeds on the NBA sports, but I love to talk to you about politics.

Max Tani:
Maybe a little bit too deep. Thanks for listening to Mix Signals from Semafor Media. Today’s episode was produced by Chris McLeod of Blue Elevator Productions. With special thanks to Max Toomey, Britta Galanis, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pezzino, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern, and Tory Core. Our engineer is Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Billy Libby.
Our public editor is Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA. The worst commissioner ever I hear. Apparently, the worst commissioner, I don’t know. Adam, if you have a different opinion, come on our show and let’s talk about it. And if you like Mixed Signals more than Clay likes Adam Silver, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to review us.

Ben Smith:
And take Clay’s note about Sunday evening’s best media newsletter. If you want more, you can always sign up for Semafor’s Media Newsletter, which is out every Sunday night.