Dave Portnoy GOES OFF On Bitcoin, AI, Socialism & Being Fired From Barstool

**Dave Portnoy** (0:00)
Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them, that's bull spend.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
And marketers are calling it out. In.

**Dave Portnoy** (0:07)
Dashboard.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
Confessions. I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow.
Yeah, it wasn't.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:17)
Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more.

**Anthony Pompliano** (0:21)
Advertise on LinkedIn.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:23)
Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:26)
Go to linkedin.com/campaignterms and conditions apply.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:30)
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**Dave Portnoy** (1:00)
I walked out of that meeting, called Renee, my ex. I go, I just got fired from Barstool. I couldn't believe it. And we're changing. It's changing from Barstool Sportsbook to ESPN bet. And they did this gigantic deal. I think it was 10 years, 2 billion is what this deal ended up being.
And ESPN would market everything. I talked to Erica, I talked to Dan, and we all kind of regrouped. What do we want to do here?

**Anthony Pompliano** (1:22)
All right, guys, today we got a conversation with Dave Portnoy. He's the founder of Barstool Sports, and he wrote a great book, Cancel Me If You Can. It is absolutely hilarious. In this conversation, we talk about how he almost got fired from Barstool, or he did get fired. We talk about his investments, how much money he's got, how much money he spends on a monthly basis. Talk about AI, what stocks he likes, what stocks he doesn't like, Bitcoin. Is he a fan, is he not? How much does he hold? There's incredible amount of detail in here, and he does it all in his own style. He just tells you the truth, it's pretty entertaining. Enjoy, here's my conversation with Dave Portnoy.
All right, Dave, you got a new book out. Everyone is worried about all these little anecdotes, but the craziest story to me is that Penn, the company that had bought Barstool, fired you from Barstool Sports. How's that happen?

**Dave Portnoy** (2:04)
Yeah, so I thought that would be the number one story in the book. It hasn't been so far, but essentially what happened, and I tell this story, we're in New York, and I had a great relationship with Jason Oden.

**Anthony Pompliano** (2:14)
CEO of Penn.

**Dave Portnoy** (2:15)
CEO of Penn, we were lockstep, I trusted him totally, he trusted me. We hadn't met in a bit. I was like, I'm going to be in New York City. Can you meet me for lunch? Of course, sure. And hand to God, walking into the restaurant, it was a little Italian place, empty. I go, this looks like where somebody would get whacked. Like in a mob movie. I literally said it. To him. To him. As we were walking, we sat at the back table in the corner, nobody around, and he starts telling me updates, like updates in the business. He's like, we are doing a huge deal with ESPN.
Which is shocking to me, but great. I didn't know. In my head, I'm like, all right, so is ESPN going to promote Barstool Sportsbook? What's going on?

**Anthony Pompliano** (2:57)
Because you guys were kind of competitive a little bit in terms of you had a sportsbook and ESPN wanted to have a sportsbook, and now the company was going to essentially do a deal.

**Dave Portnoy** (3:05)
Yeah, ESPN was basically a hired gun at that point. They could advertise it. They may have been advertising DraftKings, FanDuel, whoever. They didn't have a specific company that they're advertising with. We were branded. So when you think FanDuel, DraftKings, we had Barstool Sportsbook along those. Then we hadn't actually promoted the Sportsbook in quite a while because we got this new technology overhaul. So we had waited. I think we skipped an entire football season of doing any promo. The thought being, once the new technology launched, we would want to put all our marketing weight in and the market share would go up. So don't promote it till we're ready. Market share lower. We promote, boom, we got the new technology overhaul and it goes up. So I thought that was going to be what the meeting was about. And he says, we did this big deal with ESPN.