PFT Commenter and Dan “Big Cat” Katz pride themselves on being two regular guys. Only, they’re two regular guys who have become two of the more prominent personalities on the Internet—and that growing popularity, along with the continued success of their recently released sports/comedy podcast Pardon My Take, means it's probably time to start taking two not very serious dudes at least a little seriously.
PFT Commenter (who has long been anonymous) amassed a following by lampooning the foolish opinions of NFL fans populating the comments section of football blogs, piggy-backing on their “hot takes” with his own equally preposterous ones. When they said, “Russell Wilson isn’t black enough,” he said, “Maybe Ben Roethlisberger isn’t white enough.” He has echoed their notion that none of us really know if concussions are that bad. But the genius of PFT is the same thing that makes the reality he’s mocking so very frightening: his satirical takes are outrageously ludicrous—and yet entirely something you could see a large swath of (Trump-voting) America actually believing. (Consider: “Women are simply too illogical and emotional to be A.M. sports talk radio hosts.” PFT column or not?)
Katz, on the other hand, is a blogger from Chicago. Seemingly the #2 to Boston-based founder of Barstool Sports, Dave “El Presidente” Portnoy, Katz has always been the more measured, less inflammatory version of the character his boss plays. And though the site’s tone mirrors both the space it comes from and who it appeals to—largely, white males—and has been responsible for content like "Guess That Ass," the narrative of “Barstool as barbaric bros” often outweighs the reality: in the digital age where pace of news and volume of posts are often two of the most integral metrics of success, Barstool is a force to be reckoned with. (Most recently, Barstool caught heat for a Facebook Live video where since-fired Fox Sports reporter Emily Austen made disparaging comments about Mexican, Chinese, and Jewish people; though, if you watch it, the Barstool guys arguably handled it well.)
That’s why Peter Chernin and his investment group bought a majority stake of Barstool in early 2016, valuing them at somewhere between $10 and $15 million. Together, PFT and Big Cat—and "Handsome Hank," a producer who Big Cat says "is really the third member of the show" and runs the social media accounts and helps come up with bits—have teamed up to make Pardon My Take. Since its release in early March, the podcast has hovered in the top five sports podcasts in iTunes (it was at #1 when I interviewed them last week, and is currently #4 as of this writing). Not bad for just a couple of regular dudes.
GQ: If you are out at a bar and someone asks you what your job is, what do you say?
PFT: I would probably tell them they need to sit down and I need to buy them a meal because it’s going to take forever. But I still have trouble explaining to my friends what it is that I do. I would say we satirize the worst sports talk radio with just a look at the lighter side of it all. We don’t take ourselves very seriously, but we do take seriously making fun of other people.
Dan: I usually go with just blogger and then get weird looks and people just kind of judge me. “Okay, this guy is a fucking loser.” And then occasionally I’ll get follow-up questions. “Actually I do more than that and it’s bigger than that.” But for the most part I say blogger, and I let people dismiss me overall.
PFT, I know you’re anonymous, but Dan, Barstool has such a big cult following, do you get noticed a lot?
Dan: In Chicago, it’s nonstop. No one really asks me what I do at a bar because they’re usually like, “Hey, Big Cat, what’s up?” There’ll be some neighborhoods that I know that are maybe not as much twenty-year-old white guys, and we won’t get recognized as much. It’s been a progressive buildup for me, probably over the last three or four years. It started as a trickle, but now I can’t really go anywhere in Chicago without people yelling out their car windows or coming up to me at a bar.
A famous blogger.
Dan: It’s the weirdest dynamic in the world and it’s something I wrestle with because at the end of the day, I’m not famous. I’m not a celebrity. But also, I am recognized, so it’s this weird feeling where I get recognized, but I know I’m not important. You don’t want to take yourself too seriously because we pride ourselves on being regular guys and approachable.
PFT, it seems like you’re starting to shed the anonymity now with Barstool.
PFT: I think it was inevitable. I still am not totally comfortable with being completely out there, with my face totally in the public eye and my name out here. It’s so much funnier for people to get as involved in the character. And I think being at Barstool, we’re going to have cameras around doing a lot of the stuff that we’re doing. But I’m not eager to get to Dan’s huge level of stardom where I’m getting stopped by random people in the middle of the street all the time.
Give the good GQ people the Pardon My Take elevator pitch.
Dan: It’s a show that’s masquerading as a sports show, but it’s really a comedy show.
PFT: It’s a comedy show that uses sports as a vehicle to get a point across. For anyone who’s watched First Take for way too long or woken up to the 7th repeat episode of SportsCenter in the morning, and find yourself being like, “What the hell are these takes that these people are saying?”
Dan: We try to take their takes one step further, or try to predict what the next outrageous take is going to be.
I know you guys got a cease and desist letter from ESPN regarding the name of the show [a play off of ESPN shows "Pardon the Interruption" and “First Take”]. What was the fallout from that?
PFT: That was honestly the best thing that could have happened to us. And I’ll be the first to say that I’m a total moron. I didn’t understand the combination of "Pardon the Interruption" and "First Take" until I saw the logo. And the logo was a blatant rip-off of the shows from ESPN. So that probably caught their attention. But because they sent us a cease and desist letter, we got to write them a cease and desist letter back, saying, “You need to cease and desist sending us cease and desist letters.”
Dan: When it happened, I was actually flying to Florida, and I got an email that was like, “Hey, ESPN just filed a cease and desist.” And as soon as I got off the plane, I texted PFT and he was like, “That’s awesome.” So we were very excited that it happened because at the end of the day, anything that can make content and anything that we can joke about is great for us. Obviously, we had to change our logo because it was a blatant rip-off, I’ll admit it. And PFT can plead ignorance on that. I knew exactly what we were doing when we did that.
PFT: We haven’t heard anything else about it since then. So I think, legally speaking, we’re on friendly ground with ESPN right now.
Has it surprised you guys that the podcast has been as big as it has? Did you think it would do this well?
Dan: Not this quickly. Because if you listen to our first two episodes, it was the worst show of all time. Our ideas were so bad. And I’d say the reason why we’ve had this early success is we’ve been very quick to adapt. And that’s also a credit to our listeners because they’ve given us good criticism, both saying “this sucks” or “this is great.” And this is probably something that a lot of sports shows that we’re mocking don’t do. I [would] guess that the big ESPN and Fox shows don’t give a shit what their listeners are thinking about them. They just want to see numbers, whereas we just want to make people laugh. I mean the numbers are great, but we always have thought if we can make people laugh, the numbers will come later.
It seems a large part of the appeal is the “regular guys who don’t take sports too seriously” that you touched on. You seem like the guy on the end of the couch in a way ESPN or FOX doesn’t maybe.
PFT: There’s a hilarious construct that you see these days, which is the concept of what regular guys watching sports look like, and they get it so wrong. Like, “Take away his man card.” That never happens. Guys don’t say “man card.”
Dan: There’s a show on ESPN, there’s a show out here in Chicago where they’ll be like, “Hand over your man card.” And it’s like, “What are you guys even talking about?” No guys talk like this. A lot of our show is mocking what Hollywood, what the advertisers, and what ESPN, FOX, and CBS what they think guys talk about when it’s so far from the case. We had a whole bit about, you know, Buffalo Wild Wings ran all those commercials during March Madness. I’ve never been in a bar setting like what they had set up where it’s a Kentucky fan and a Wisconsin fan watching a game together and they’re strangers. What are you talking about? Either you’re on your couch by yourself, or you’re at a bar with a couple of old friends.
That's true.
Dan: So it’s this weird element where they try to shove this thought down our throats. And we’ll make that joke, too. “We’re the first show by guys for guys. Where men can be men.” Males dominate the sports entertainment industry and the journalism industry, so when people kind of say, “Oh, it’s a safe place for guys,” we’re mocking them. It’s ridiculous.
PFT: The podcast that I did on Sirius XM back in October was The Steam Room, and the tagline was, “Finally sports talk radio for men.” And it’s that exact type of mentality we like to fuck around with and get to the next level on the show.
Dan: I think people find humor in that, and I would probably contend—and obviously I don’t have numbers in front of me—that we have more female listeners, average-wise, than all the big shows. Because when it comes down to it, we’re a comedy show. But you can tell when we’re joking. When we say, “Finally a show by guys, for guys,” we’re almost being more inclusive because you know we’re mocking that thought process.
I feel like a lot of people miss that though. That a lot of people don’t get that as a joke.
PFT: I would say a vast, vast majority of our listeners get it. Like 90% of people get it, and the ones that don’t, within the first show or two, they’re going to be the ones sending us hateful messages on Twitter like, “You guys are pussies.” If people actually take the time to listen to the show, we weed out the ones that don’t have a good sense of humor pretty quickly.
Dan: But I also love the thought that there’s someone listening to our show and taking everything seriously. Like just the thought of a guy out there, and every time we say, “There’s not enough websites for white males out there,” he’s sitting out there nodding his head being like, “Yeah, finally. They’re finally talking to me.”
...he’s a Trump supporter.
Dan: Although it could be a Bernie Bro, too. We try not to get into politics. It’s like the old Michael Jordan saying: “Republicans buy shoes too.”
PFT: There are political-tinged sports shows that I listen to occasionally and that I really enjoy, but when it comes down to it, I’d say 99% of people who talk about sports for a living are really way too dumb to ever get into politics. They’re just parroting talking points that they’ve seen somewhere else. But I’ll say this: I’m glad they exist because they’re easy to make fun of.
Dan: In an hour-long podcast, I don’t really want to talk about serious stuff. I want to laugh.
You guys are under the Barstool Sports umbrella. But—especially compared to something like "The Rundown" [a daily news/sports/pop culture video on the website] which is somewhat comparable to a podcast—you have a very different, perhaps less explicit tone. Is that at all conscious a decision to make it more mass-appealing or more palatable in a way?
PFT: I think it’s a natural byproduct of our senses of humor. It’s different. We never sought out to make the show different from anything. We just sought out to make the show appealing to what we thought was funny. I think just naturally that comes across in a different tone than some of the Rundown stuff.
Dan: And "The Rundown," which is great, and we’re trying to get it on TV, is a little bit more fiery-er. I know that’s not a word. It has that element to it, which in a perfect, perfect world, I don’t think I’d ever want to go in that area. But that’s why I love Pardon My Take. It’s something totally different from what Barstool has done in the past, and that’s good because that means there’s people out there who are Pardon My Take fans and not Barstool fans, that’s awesome, because you know what? You’re still consuming a piece of what we’re putting out there.
The nice thing about working at Barstool and having Dave [Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports] as a boss is he is very hands-off. He trusts us to do something and to come up with something that’s going to work, and that’s why you see a show that is truly me, PFT, and Hank. It is our personalities, it is our sensibilities. We haven’t had any outside pressure. We haven’t had anyone say, "You can’t do this," or "You can’t do that."
There’s conversation now, following the Chernin Group investment, that if you really want to have mass appeal in the way some of the other brands do, you will need to dial back that “fiery-er” content. Is that a conversation you guys have had?
Dan: Well there’s two things there. Obviously my taste is a little bit different than Barstool overall in that I think the show you see now with Pardon My Take is not going to ever really change. We kind of walk that line at all times, and I think people love that, and we do it in a funny way.
Dave has a lot of critics. He has a lot of people that shout down at him and yell at him all the time. He’s pretty true to who he is, and he has a belief that his sense of humor and our sense of humor as a company will eventually win out, and people like us, because we have that ability to laugh at everything. We laugh at everything. There’s no one who’s really off limits—including ourselves.
And people have been telling Dave that for probably a decade now. And it’s a testament to Dave to basically say, “I’m going to keep doing it this way, and we’re going to keep snowballing and getting bigger and bigger.” And that’s really what’s happened. There’s nothing really you can say contrary to that. It has gotten bigger and bigger every single year.
And you also are held accountable for the “Army of Stoolies” that you have—these Barstool fans who some have criticized you for setting off on people to say horrible things on social media.
Dan: I’ve said it a million times: If you go out and you’re tweeting nasty things over and over, you’re a scumbag, I don’t even want you reading our site. There is an element where we have very loyal fans, and that’s an asset, obviously, because they read everything and they want to come up to us and talk to us and that’s awesome. There is an element where probably 5 percent of those—or not even—1 percent of those fans can get nasty on Twitter, and I do think that we probably should do a better job of, “Hey, cut that shit out.” And I’ve tried over and over, but I think the Internet is really tough when you’re dealing with millions of people and millions of different views and you’re asking us to control every single one of them.
PFT: That was a concern of mine when I decided to go over to Barstool from SB Nation. And I don’t think that Dan ever did anything or anyone at Barstool ever really did anything to sic attack dogs on people online. But as the site had grown, they just developed such a following of loyal readers that when something was re-tweeted, there would be a small percentage that would say some really out-of-bounds shit, especially to women, on Twitter.
Between Dave and Dan and the main website’s Twitter account, that’s a million people, and if you were to re-tweet somebody who has what you think is a bad opinion online, they’re going to end up being the target of some really nasty shit. So I’ve seen a dramatic decrease in just re-tweeting people because they realize that this is something that can happen. At least for me, every website has their issues, and what you can hope for is people to try to address them.
Dan: And I think we have on a greater scale. It’s obviously not going to change over night, and there will always be people who follow me, follow Barstool Sports, and say shitty things online. But I keep trying to stress: don’t be a dickhead online. Eventually maybe those people will get weeded out a little.
You guys have obviously carved out a very successful niche. But what did you parents say about this as your profession along the way?
PFT: My parents have been very cool about it. I grew up having these types of sports debates with my dad all the time. And I think he’s happy and a little bit boastful to his friends. “My son was forged in the flames of my sports debate back when he was a kid. I taught him everything that he knows about takes, and now he’s a professional blogger.”
Dan: My mom, we don’t talk about it as much. I don’t think Barstool and Pardon My Take is geared towards [her]. My dad has been very supportive. He listens to every Pardon My Take. Also, like PFT’s dad, maybe a bit jealous because he knows we’re doing some fun stuff and making jokes about sports online. [But] if you’re asking me point blank would my parents rather me be a doctor? I’m sure they’d say yes. [laughs]
When did each of you hit your athletic peak?
Dan: Not to brag, but I actually am probably still gonna peak. But we were in the basketball tournament, and I was [Cleveland Cavaliers player] Dahntay Jones’ enforcer. I didn’t play at all, but I got to break up a fight for him, so that was probably my peak. Yeah, he’s in the NBA finals. No big deal.
PFT: I want to say freshman football, and we were playing against the nerd school, which is like the magnet school for science and math that was in our district, and I was freshman football and I wasn’t a returner on the kickoff, but I was a blocker. I blocked this dude probably like 60 yards and scored a touchdown. I just blocked him for 60 yards. That one play is probably where I get the vast majority of my football expertise acumen.
Dan: If you include that question, please make sure that you quote “I have yet to peak.”
Who wins in a good old-fashioned Oklahoma drill? Roger Goodell or Donald Trump?
PFT: Donald Trump because he would cheat. He would find a way to mess with Goodell’s cleats beforehand. Also Goodell is just kind of a doofus. I said it before, I think he’s really good at his job, but his job is just to basically be an idiot and to be the punching bag for the 32 owners of the league. I think he could be very easily tricked.
Dan: Right. Or I was going to say, I would see Roger Goodell being so dumb, not starting when the whistle blows—or Donald Trump being like, “Look at my thumb,” then the whistle blows and he just blows him up. Goodell is probably stronger, but Trump is definitely a lot smarter than Goodell.
What was the grittiest thing you saw on your recent Grit Week (partially) cross country road trip?
PFT: When we were driving like 60 mph on the highway and some Bills fans pulled up next to us in the car. The driver had a tallboy Natty Ice, and he saw an RV, and they honked their horn and going down the highway at this high speed, stuck his arm out and handed a tall boy to Feitelberg [another Barstool blogger] who was riding shotgun.
Dan: Buffalo won Grit Week. I think people sometimes think some of our stuff is staged. It really isn’t. We threw some guys in Buffalo through a table. They actually did just come up to our bus on a Monday at 12:30, and said, “Can Big Cat throw me through a table?” That was the exact conversation that happened.
Worst tattoo (or maybe it’s the best?) you saw at the Indy 500?
PFT: The sunburned skin that the guy did in the shape of the American flag was—I mean that took a lot of commitment right there to put tape down on your back so that you would purposely get the striped sunburn into yourself? But that just goes to show you what a patriot that guy is.
Dan: There was one guy though that had Tom and Jerry tattooed on his ribs that he said he drew and tattooed himself.
PFT: There’s a definite sliding scale for like how good a tattoo of Tom and Jerry on a man’s ribcage can be.
Dan, you've been able to party with some of the Chicago teams after their recent championships. What's your best story from those nights?
Dan: I wasn’t working for Barstool in 2010, but the last two Stanley Cups for sure it’s been—the Chicago Blackhawks were so gracious. Patrick Sharp especially and Scott Darling, who were both on the team, they basically treated me like another guy, so I was able to go around [with them]. Obviously, I’m still an outsider because I didn’t actually win anything, but basically what happens when they win the cup is the night after, they get a couple big buses, and they have a police escort, and they go from bar to bar across the city. They walk in, they spray some champagne, they take some shots, they take a few pictures, and they hop back on the bus and they do it again. And it’s insane. It’s like being in the Beatles when you walk off the bus.
PFT, you're famous for popping up with outrageous shirts and signs at big-time events. How many places do you think you’ve been kicked out of, and what’s your best getting-kicked-out story?
PFT: I can’t even begin to estimate how many places I’ve been asked to leave. My guess is a couple dozen. The best story that I have is actually the place that I was not kicked out of: the RNC afterparty, in Cleveland in September. It was a black-tie affair. And I had been at the hotel bar drinking fireball and writing my blog for like the last three hours. I was dressed in cutoff American flag shorts and a T-shirt that said, “Internet commenters for Trump” and an American flag. I was so ridiculous looking and out of place and intoxicated. But they just assumed that I was meant to be there. That I was the clown or something. So I just stayed at their open bar for the next four of five hours, dancing with all these 50-year-old former debutantes and eating all their expensive food and drinking all their free liquor until finally I was just like, it’s time for me to kick myself out because obviously they’re not going to do it for me.
But I was at Super Bowl Media Day this year and there was a sports some Canadian sports game website that had odds of whether or not PFT Commenter was going to get kicked out of Media Day. The odds were 3-1, and I spent the next week trying to find somebody in Canada to place a bet for me, knowing that I could get kicked out of Media Day. And I couldn’t find anybody. Because all I want to do is make a quick $900 or whatever. Then on Media Day I was going around with an air horn as people were trying to answer questions. I asked Cam Newton if he was such a great athlete, why he wouldn’t go overseas and fight against ISIS. And I came to the conclusion that there’s absolutely nothing you can do, short of—I don’t even know what. There’s nothing you can do. I could have thrown stink bombs all over the room, and I would not have been kicked out of that Media Day.
Quick round of Hot or Not, with takes. First one: Hot Dog is a Sandwich.
Dan: Not.
PFT: Yeah, that was a blazing 2015 take, and we’ll always have that one summer. That’s going on the summer mix tape of the hottest takes of the year.
Next one. Harambe the gorilla had it coming.
Dan: That’s a hot one.
PFT: If you can do the meme with Harambe in the background, it’s a hot take right now.
Chick-Fil-A. Not that good.
PFT: That’s a terrible take. I don’t even want to categorize that. Now you’re just trying to piss me off.
Ultimate Frisbee will sell out a stadium in 2020.
Dan: Oh my God. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!
PFT: That’s like Hank!
Dan: So you have to mention Hank at some point in this article because he’s such an integral part to the show. But he’s convinced lacrosse is going to be the next big thing, but he said it’s going to be the next big thing in fifty years, so none of us are going to be alive to see if it’s the next big thing or not.
PFT: I would say there are these people out there that care more about whether or not you like their sport than whether or not they do, and you could put Ultimate Frisbee into that. Everyone who said, “This is going to be the next big sport in America,” whether it’s ultimate Frisbee, lacrosse...
Dan: ...soccer, rugby...
PFT: It’s all people that just really, really want you to like their sport as much as they do.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
