Feb. 25, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
16:44
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the entire conceit of my business idea, right? | ||
| I believe 75 to 80 percent of sports fans are in no way woke, right? | ||
| Because sports is the ultimate meritocracy. | ||
| If you are the best at what you do, you get paid the most and you are allowed to excel. | ||
| That's what should happen in all of American society. | ||
| Instead, we're bringing identity politics and cancel culture to sports. | ||
| And I think 75-80% of sports fans don't want woke sports, right? | ||
| They don't want to sit around and talk about what a hero Caitlyn Jenner is. | ||
| And if you're in that group, then OutKick is for you. | ||
| If you're another 20%, By the way, there's a knife fight every day among sports media members to see who can be the wokest. | ||
| They can have their knife fight. | ||
| we're gonna serve the other 75 or 80% of the sports marketplace. | ||
| And I think they're gonna like what they find at Outkick. | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the founder of Outkick.com and truly, | ||
| and I mean this truly, one of the best men in all of journalism, Clay Travis. | ||
| Welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| I appreciate you having me. | ||
| I'm excited to be back on. | ||
| I think the first time I came on was after that CNN implosion, explosion, ridiculousness back in 2017, maybe the fall of 2017. | ||
| And a lot of what we talked about, frankly, the first time I came on your show has only gotten worse since then, and to your credit. | ||
| You predicted that was going to happen, and it's just become more chaotic. | ||
| Clay, I take no pride in it, but before we do anything else, for those that have not seen the incredible clip of you and Brooke Baldwin, you dared, dared to say the word boobs on CNN, and you paid the price. | ||
| Paint the picture for the people. | ||
| So, look, I mean, we know, you know, that much of much of TV is fundamentally artificial. | ||
| And so it's easy to say things like, hey, I'm a First Amendment absolutist. | ||
| But the cliche of a statement like that sort of deadens it on hearing because it's so transparently cliched and frankly, because so many people who say it are the exact opposite of First Amendment absolutists. | ||
| They don't absolutely believe in the marketplace of ideas. | ||
| And so what I started saying on my radio show years and years ago was the only two things that have never let me down are the First Amendment and boobs, right? | ||
| Sports talk radio is a staple. | ||
| Dangerous! | ||
| A lot of men out there, a lot of women as well, agree with that statement. | ||
| And so I would kind of say it as a tongue-in-cheek way to advance the First Amendment because that is a little bit of an outlandish thing to say, right? | ||
| I'm old enough to remember When the Hugh Hefners of the world were considered to be heroes for their willingness, the Larry Flints of the world, to push the boundaries of acceptable speech. | ||
| And so, in many ways you and I overlap here. | ||
| I'm much less troubled. | ||
| by the idea of disagreement than I am by the idea of agreement because agreement is what happens | ||
| in totalitarians, governments. | ||
| That's not, when everybody has the same opinion, it's not because they actually have the same opinion, | ||
| it's because so many people are afraid of being able to say exactly what they think. | ||
| So I just kind of tossed that line out. | ||
| I'd done it for years and Brooke Baldwin lost her mind. | ||
| She was like, oh my, you know, like basically, oh my God. | ||
| She immediately started to basically demand that I give an apology and I just leaned into it. | ||
| And in so doing, I think struck a blow for many people out there that are just so used | ||
| to anytime somebody says I'm offended that you're just gonna drop down on your hands and knees | ||
| and beg for forgiveness and frankly, she's an adult. | ||
| I'm an adult. | ||
| What I said wasn't in any way an offensive comment. | ||
| And so why would I apologize for it? | ||
| And she, I think, you know, began what has become the ritualized woke demand for an apology. | ||
| And the fact that I wouldn't do it, I think even people who didn't necessarily agree with | ||
| my phrasing respected the fact that I wasn't willing to embrace the ritualized apology, | ||
| which has become such a staple of modern day woke culture. | ||
| Yeah, and subsequently, flash forward three years, you're absolutely blowing up and OutKick is blowing up and you're about to launch on Locals, or you just launched on Locals this morning, which we're gonna talk about in just a sec. | ||
| And Brooke has apparently retired from CNN. | ||
| So these things have a way of working themselves out. | ||
| But before we do some of what you're launching right now, Do you find it sort of bizarre that you spend so much time talking about politics and all this stuff? | ||
| Because partly why OutKick is successful is because ESPN went all in on all of this stuff. | ||
| And I mean, this is what we were talking about three years ago, but if anything, it's gotten worse. | ||
| And now we're trying to give people some alternatives. | ||
| No, I think it certainly has gotten worse. | ||
| And I think sports, I know you're an old school 1990s NBA fan, as many people out there who watched The Last Dance, which sort of epitomized that era, the Jordan era NBA, were. | ||
| And to me, what it represents is using sports as a fulcrum upon which to attack basic American societal values and create a marketplace where only one opinion is allowed. | ||
| And it came to, I think, a head regarding people not even being willing to go visit the White House, where somehow if you were going to the White House, you were endorsing everything that the President of the United States was saying. | ||
| All of that was transparently ridiculous. | ||
| I think there is a massive demand out there for a marketplace of ideas in the world of sports. | ||
| And look, I think sports and politics by and large should be separate arenas because I think most people go into sports to escape the serious things in life. | ||
| You know, guys just want to kick their feet up and girls. | ||
| And watch a game instead of having to worry about everything else that's going on in politics. | ||
| That's why sports were so popular historically, I believe. | ||
| But even worse than sports going political is this idea that you can only believe that Colin Kaepernick is a hero or that Steve Kerr and Greg Popovich, when they were attacking Donald Trump, were speaking truth to power and deserve to be lionized for that. | ||
| Or LeBron James or Megan Rapinoe. | ||
| It's a one-way street. | ||
| If you are a left-wing activist masquerading in the world of sports, you become incredibly, incredibly praised by the woke sports media, which is even more liberal. | ||
| And I know this is crazy for a lot of people to understand. | ||
| The sports media is even more liberal than the political media is. | ||
| This is going to be crazy to you, I think, and I'm still kind of stunned by it. | ||
| Do you know that in the entire world of sports, I am the only person to publicly say that I was voting for Donald Trump? | ||
| Not one other person with any sort of substantial audience in the world of sports media came out and said, hey, I'm voting for Donald Trump. | ||
| And I laid out exactly why I was doing that. | ||
| And you would be amazed, or maybe you wouldn't be, by the hundreds of people in my industry who reached out and said, I am doing the exact same thing. | ||
| Thank you for going public with your vote. | ||
| I'm terrified I'll get cancelled or I will lose my job if I say that I am doing what you are doing. | ||
| And that to me is just an example of how bereft my own industry has become when you consider the larger arena of sports and how it intersects with politics. | ||
| Right, but of course the irony here is that you then, you saw all this, you started talking about it, and then what'd you do? | ||
| You didn't just complain about it, you started building your own stuff. | ||
| So can you just talk for a minute, before we get into the local stuff, about how OutKick is blowing up? | ||
| Because we're watching ESPN crumble. | ||
| I mean, I tweet about it all the time, that I can't watch any of these things anymore. | ||
| I simply, I can't watch them, but you're actually building something. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So one of the things that we're doing is we're building our own over-the-top network. | ||
| It will include my radio show, which is on nationwide from 6 to 9 a.m. | ||
| Eastern, and by the way, is absolutely exploding. | ||
| We have the biggest national sports talk radio show in the country for mornings across the entire United States, which is a pretty good endorsement of what I am selling being actually reflected as being popular among sports fans. | ||
| But we're gonna be live, basically competing with ESPN programming through our own OutKick over-the-top network from 6 a.m. | ||
| in the morning on the East Coast until 7 p.m. | ||
| on the East Coast, which is the time when there are typically not games going on. | ||
| So, 13 hours a day. | ||
| The plan is by the time we get to August to have 13 full hours set up. | ||
| By March 15th, we will have 7 hours up and running. | ||
| And basically be creating our own network. | ||
| Now, you'll be able to consume it, audio, video, as many different ways as possible. | ||
| You can go to Outkick.com. | ||
| I'm sure we're going to be using your site, which I give you tremendous credit for building, the OnLocals community to allow people to be able to interact with it. | ||
| We have set up our own VIP community where you can sign up and have exclusive access to our talent and to our events to be able to comment, all of those different things. | ||
| We're over 10,000 subscribers for that. | ||
| $99 for a year. | ||
| We think we're going to continue to grow that at a rapid rate. | ||
| And look, I believe in capitalism. | ||
| I believe in the marketplace. | ||
| And instead of just standing on the sidelines and complaining about what other people are doing, I want to fight with them in the marketplace of ideas and in the marketplace in general. | ||
| And I think we're going to win because I believe our ideas in the world of sports, as it intersects with politics, I think our fans are better than theirs. | ||
| I think our people are smarter, more original, more authentic, and funnier than theirs. | ||
| And I think that that is what sports fans are going to respond to in a big way. | ||
| We've already seen it start to happen. | ||
| And I think the future for OutKick is very bright as we continue to add more and more unique voices to our universe. | ||
| Yeah, and I just love it, man, because it's like, guys like us, it's sort of ironic, right? | ||
| Like, we talk for a living. | ||
| So, you know, there's value in talk. | ||
| But one of the things that I've really shifted on is like, I can't just sit around and talk all day. | ||
| I gotta do stuff. | ||
| So that's why I love everything that you're building with Outkick. | ||
| And now you're gonna launch on Locals. | ||
| So it's outkick.locals.com and you're gonna have all the community features there and people can come and it will be free of the big tech overlords. | ||
| Cause even in the world of sports, they're watching you, man. | ||
| No, there's no doubt. | ||
| And look, what I believe is there are a lot of people who just want to have honest conversations. | ||
| And if you sit there on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or wherever you are thinking about sharing your opinion and you share the quote-unquote wrong opinion, you are absolutely lambasted and many people may decide if you can be tracked down that you should be canceled. | ||
| And so I think what we're selling to many sports fans is water. | ||
| And they're in the middle of walking in the desert and they're going to see us and say, oh, thank God I can finally interact with people who have similar opinions that I do and also say exactly what I think about the world of sports. | ||
| And by the way, it can just be sports, right? | ||
| Like crazy, right? | ||
| Frustrated with the fact that every single thing that happens in the world of sports has to happen through an identity politics prism. | ||
| Oh, this coach got fired. | ||
| What was his race? | ||
| Is that why? | ||
| Oh, this new player didn't get the contract that they thought they were. | ||
| Oh, is that because they're... If you're just like, man, I like to watch sports and talk about the games that take place on the field and the actions that take place there. | ||
| There's frankly not a lot of that anymore. | ||
| And so we want to provide that opportunity for people as well. | ||
| You know, it's funny, I was thinking about you on the way back from Florida the other day, because I'm on American Airlines going through their TV app where, you know, you can watch whatever you want, and they have like a Black History Month channel or something. | ||
| So it's all black producers and black stars. | ||
| That's perfectly fine. | ||
| You go all the way to the end of it, and it's got the Megan Rapinoe HBO show. | ||
| And it's like, it just shows you how stupid intersectionality is. | ||
| She's not black. | ||
| If she was black, that would be just fine too. | ||
| But that they combine whatever her, It's woke programming, basically, for lack of a better way to describe it. | ||
| Look, I believe, and this is the entire conceit of my business idea, right? | ||
| I believe 75 to 80% of sports fans are in no way woke, right? | ||
| Because sports is the ultimate meritocracy. | ||
| If you are the best at what you do, you get paid the most and you are allowed to excel. | ||
| That's what should happen in all of American society. | ||
| Instead, we're bringing identity politics and cancel culture to sports, and I think 75-80% of sports fans don't want woke sports, right? | ||
| They don't want to sit around and talk about what a hero Caitlyn Jenner is. | ||
| And if you're in that group, then Outkick is for you. | ||
| If you're another 20%, by the way, there's a knife fight every day among sports media members to see who could be the wokest. | ||
| They can have their knife fight. | ||
| We're going to serve the other 75 or 80% of the sports marketplace. | ||
| And I think they're gonna like what they find at OutKick. | ||
| Let me ask you one other thing before I let you go. | ||
| You know, Super Bowl a couple weeks ago, very few people in the crowd. | ||
| You know, sports are sort of starting, half starting, a little bit more in Florida, maybe Texas. | ||
| Are we ever, because as you said, I watch those old NBA games, and one of the things I'm starting to notice now when I watch the games is there is something truly magical about being in a crowd with people. | ||
| Whether you're rooting for the home team or you're rooting for the road team, there is something magical about being around people, that shared experience. | ||
| You think we're ever gonna get back there or have we just done something to our collective psychology that half the country is just gonna be afraid of ever getting out there and rooting for teams and people they care about again? | ||
| My hope is, and my belief, is that even the most woke Corona Bro, as I call them out there, the people that have been curled up in the fetal position in their basements for nearly a year now, terrified they're going to die, are going to eventually, like groundhogs, peek their heads up, look around, and realize that the apocalypse didn't happen, and that many of us managed to continue to live our lives without fear. | ||
| You mentioned Florida. | ||
| I think Ron DeSantis has done the best job of any big state governor in the country, despite being the most criticized. | ||
| And I believe states like Florida and Texas are going to lead us out of the sports wilderness and have. | ||
| Full stadiums. | ||
| I really believe this by around July 4th in Major League Baseball. | ||
| I'm advocating for it already. | ||
| If you want to go, look, you just said you took a flight. | ||
| American Airlines flew back from Florida to L.A. | ||
| I'm hopping on a flight to Mexico tomorrow. | ||
| Dave, if I can sit in, and they told me that there's no middle seats open, right? | ||
| It's completely full flight because a lot of people want to go to Mexico where the weather's perfect and I don't blame them right now. | ||
| But if I could sit on an airplane, which is an enclosed metal tube with recirculating air, Next to strangers for hours at a time. | ||
| How can I not go sit outside at a Major League Baseball stadium in the sunshine and have a hot dog and a beer and kick up my feet and enjoy a baseball game surrounded by other people too? | ||
| We know COVID doesn't pass very much outdoors. | ||
| If you had to choose which was safer, why is airplane travel commonplace? | ||
| You're willing to do it. | ||
| I'm willing to do it. | ||
| But you can't go sit in a crowded baseball stadium and watch games. | ||
| That's one of the big issues I think so many people have is kind of the emperor with no clothes. | ||
| We've been sold artificial bills of good. | ||
| So I think by July 4th, I really do, that finally we're going to win this battle. | ||
| Schools are going to be opening back up. | ||
| And I think the country, ultimately, I hope we're going to get an adequate reckoning on this. | ||
| But I think as a society, we have made the worst decisions Yeah, well, listen, man, I really, I'm not just saying this because you're joining Locals. | ||
| I think what you're doing is the future of sports journalism. | ||
| and over the ensuing years and decades, we found out they were selling a false bill of goods. | ||
| I think that's what's happened to us with much of the COVID response. | ||
| Yeah, well, listen, man, I really, I'm not just saying this 'cause you're joining Locos. | ||
| I think what you're doing is the future of sports journalism. | ||
| I think the big boys are going down, and you're right, 80% of people, | ||
| they care about what happens on the field and on the court, and that's it. | ||
| And that's what you're bringing. | ||
| So it's outkick.locals.com to join the Locals community and you'll be interacting with people and all sorts of stuff over there and outkick.com and enjoy Mexico. | ||
| Have a couple margaritas in the free. | ||
| Keep up the good work yourself. | ||
| I'm proud of what you're doing and what you're building and happy to be a part of it as well. | ||
| Thanks for letting us. | ||
| Right on, good seeing you, man. |
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