The Barstool Case Study
Does working for a morally questionable company make you morally questionable yourself? Let's talk about it.
This email is going to be about Dave Portnoy’s moral compass. But before we get to that…
Gooooood morning! Welcome back to the Thinking Is Cool blog, your one-stop shop for thought-provoking Friday reads, illustrious conversation starters, and corny jokes. We’ve got a few new faces around here since last week’s email—if you’re an OG, skip this next paragraph.
If you’re new, thank you and I love you. The purpose of this blog is to introduce upcoming Thinking Is Cool podcast episodes to all of you, our growing community of thinkers, ponderers, and all-around smart people. I’ll tell you about an episode coming out soon and why I can’t get it out of my head, and you’ll respond with questions, ideas, feedback, general musings, really anything that might need addressing in the episode itself. Got it? Got it.
Last Friday, I opened up about my fixation on making adult entertainment suck less and asked your thoughts. You guys delivered—thank you. Your responses were diverse and intelligent and gave me so many fantastic ideas for the episode.
Which brings me to the first bit of good news: Episode 1 of Thinking Is Cool—all about building a better p-o-r-n industry (p-o-r-n is chill, email spam filters are not)—is coming out on Monday. At long last, May 17 is finally (almost) here.
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Now...it’s time to introduce our topic for Episode 2 of Thinking Is Cool. Let’s rock.
The Barstool Case Study in Morality
I have a confession: On more than one occasion, I have imagined what my life might be like if I were Alex Cooper from Call Her Daddy. Not in a Freaky Friday way, but in the way that I might by some miracle become Barstool’s hot girl in residence for the business podcasting world. What she did for sex, I might do for earnings season.
It’s easy enough to imagine—Barstool Sports is as omnipresent in the lives of Millennials and Gen Z-ers as generalized anxiety or iced coffee. Sometimes Barstool is funny, most of the time it’s irreverent.
For the uninitiated (hi, mom and dad) Barstool is a media company that found its footing online with raunchy coverage of sports and hot girls mostly geared toward men. It still covers those things, but now it hires women, too. Sorry, “chicks.”
Since its founding in 2003, Barstool has evolved into a branding demigod that lines its leaders’ and investors’ pockets with money made toeing the line between comedy and news. It has an almost endless array of podcasts, blogs, and merch, plus the backing of Penn National Gaming, which bought a huge stake in Barstool last year that valued the company at $450 million.
Barstool Sports’s founder and figurehead, Dave Portnoy, seamlessly jumps from pizza reviews to interviewing presidents like it’s nothing, much to the delight of Barstool’s millions of followers (10.1 million on Instagram for its main brand account...which is bonkers).
Now...as my bangs or general persona or sending of this email might suggest, I didn’t become the Alex Cooper of business podcasting. In fact, Barstool CEO Erika Nardini didn’t respond to my thirsty DMs last fall. But I thought about it often before I left my job at Morning Brew: What might it be like to host a podcast for Barstool?
The first answer to that question: Lush, probably. Barstool is profitable and known far and wide as a powerhouse in podcast production. Any fool (me, I did it here) could understand that talent has been gaining power across media, and Barstool’s not exempt. I didn’t need to have the No. 1 show in the world to potentially make more at Barstool than I was making at Morning Brew.
The second and more important answer to that question: Morally complicated. Even if you’re a Barstool superfan (I refuse to call you a Stoolie), you can recognize that Dave Portnoy and his legions of bros have a history of making bad decisions, ostracizing marginalized groups, and being huge dicks online. What did that make me if I was so enticed by the idea of joining their ranks in return for distribution, acclaim, and a boatload of followers?
It made me confused. I’m a feminist who's spent a lot of hours talking shit about Barstool with my feminist friends. But I also really like achieving my goals, one of which has always been to create a show that positively impacts as many people as possible.
Could I recognize the incredible wins and the seemingly boundless potential of this company without fixating on its troublingly deep-seated misogynistic past? Was the $40 million the Barstool Fund raised for small businesses impacted by Covid-19 enough to erase the memory of Dave Portnoy joking that women who wear size 6 skinny jeans (Hello! It’s me!) “kind of deserve to be raped?”
This internal reckoning (which, again, was hypothetical since no one at Barstool really knew my name until I started reaching out about this episode) stirred something in me. It forced me to think about how we’ve reached the point at which companies—not just their a-hole founders—bear morality.
They earn the designation of “good” or “bad,” with little grey area in between the two. I said Barstool has a troublingly deep-seated misogynistic past, not Dave Portnoy. I stand by it—businesses are in no small part a byproduct of their leaders. And that opens them up to criticism of the moral, ethical variety.
It also opens them up to risk. Here’s what I’ll say in the episode coming out May 24:
“How do we decide to work for companies we distrust, disagree with, or find morally compromising? I’m using Barstool as the sacrificial lamb, but you could really insert any company here: Exxon. Koch Industries. Banks that fund private prisons. Basecamp. The list goes on.”
Ultimately, I’ve come to a conclusion that I’ll share more about in the episode itself (get ready for a cost/benefit analysis of biblical proportions). But the gist is this: We—you, me, anyone—have the power to take a stand and draw our own conclusions. But not everyone has the privilege of being the David to a corporate Goliath. We can all think Barstool is troubled, but we can’t all act on those thoughts.
My decision to go independent instead of pursuing a job at Barstool reeks of privilege. I made up my mind that Barstool was bad (or at least too “bad” for me), and I decided to do my own thing. I had options, but not everyone seeking employment does.
It begs the question: If you do have that privilege of being the master of your career fate and captain of your professional soul—if you can pass moral judgment—how can you use that ability to affect change? Should I have pursued a job at Barstool despite my misgivings and attempted to eradicate perceived sexism and racism from the inside out? Should I have rioted in the streets? Should I even care at all?
I’m not sure, at least not yet. But what I do know is this: Barstool and companies like it don’t exist in silos. They’re reflections—polarizing ones, but reflections nonetheless—of the worlds they occupy. There will always be someone who wants to work for Juul, the Koch brothers, Wells Fargo, etc.
The question, though, is why. Listen to the episode on May 24 to hear some of the brightest minds I know explain their reasoning. And until then, go talk to your friends about it.
I’m not going to lie: Preparing for this episode has been tough. I’ve shamelessly DM’d about a dozen of Barstool’s biggest stars and even more shamelessly had to follow up with the “hey! Just making sure you saw this” message. Nightmare.
Worse than that, I’ve had to mentally prepare myself for an onslaught of vitriol from Barstool’s superfans (again, I refuse to use the word Stoolies). I’ve read about what happens to reporters who dare to speak against Barstool Sports, and it’s not pretty.
I’m actively poking the bear, and I recognize that it will eventually wake up and try to eat me. My hope is that any of you who’ve ever sent a nasty DM to a journalist doing her job (making you think twice about a company for which you’re a ready and willing evangelical) will reconsider. Be nice! It’s a good strategy.
Better yet, share your thoughts and feedback with me in a productive way!!! Ask anyone—my response rate to emails and DMs is very, very high.
Honestly, I’d love to hear from all 2,576 of you, Barstool fans or not. Because I’ve got a lot of questions:
What do you think about Barstool Sports, Dave Portnoy, or the media world both have contributed to?
Do you think it’s fair to consider companies (or people, for that matter) good or bad with any degree of permanence?
If a company or its leaders do bad things, does it become a bad company?
What makes a job worth taking to you if you have moral reservations?
Have you ever worked for a company that made you feel slimy? What was the experience like, and how did you decide to stay or leave?
Think about it, ask your friends and family about it, stew on it, start a conversation. Hit reply and tell me what you can’t stop thinking about. Or HMU on Twitter by responding to this Tweet. Anything goes.
’Til next time,
Kinsey
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VIVA!