This week on Wins & Losses, Clay Travis is joined by fellow Lock it In host Todd Fuhrman. Clay asks Todd about his life in Las Vegas and the steps he took that led him there. The two get into how Todd’s passion for sports gambling began, with some great stories involving Todd and his father. Todd speaks about his educational upbringing, his involvement in the game of hockey, where he played collegiately, and his early jobs he got following his graduation. Todd also explains how he went from working at a sports book to eventually becoming the TV and radio personality he is now, and how the landscape of sports media and gambling is growing at an incredible rate.
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This is Wins and Losses with Clay Trevis, play talks with the most entertaining people in sports, entertainment and business. Now here's Clay Trevis. Welcome in to Wins and Losses. I'm your fearless host, Clay Travis. Hope all of you have been enjoying the podcast so far. I want to mention as the new one gets ready, we talked with former Colorado men's football coach Mel Tucker, who now is the head coach at Michigan State. If you're listening to this right now and you're a big ten fan and you're curious what Mel Tucker might be like, I'd encourage you to go check it out now that he has taken over at Michigan State. But we go now out to Las Vegas, Nevada, where we are joined by the third of my co hosts on lock it In. We've talked with Rachel Barnetto, We've talked with cousin sal and now we talk with Todd Ferman as a guy I have known by far the longest of everybody on the show. Uh. First of all, thanks for getting up early with us in Las Vegas. Todd. Second, um, how long have you been in Las Vegas now twelve years running. I think at this point moved out here about nine months after graduating from college. Figured it would be a real short stint, we try something different and then figure out exactly what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Lo and behold, at this juncture, Las Vegas is pretty much home to me, all right. So I want to get into how you end up doing what you do, but I'll start before that because people are always curious how you end up meeting, uh, anybody that you end up working with, And so I do think our story is a little bit interesting. You uh said, was it a d M or just a regular tweet? I don't remember which one, but you sent a message that you would like Dixieland to light my first book. Was that a tweet or a d M? That was a tweet? I leave sliding into d M is for people like yourself, play and our co host Break of Vanetta to try and pull it off. So it was a tweet. After I had returned from a trip to Australia actually to go visit my sister said, Hey, I really enjoyed your book, and then, uh, I guess you can kind of throwing some of the gaps from there. I'm happy too as well. Well, this would have been one like a decade ago roughly. I mean you you may remember the date, uh it was? It was around the time. Hold on one second. I mean, I know a lot of people try and remember the dates they meet Clay Travis, but I'm not sure you can put me in that same bucket. I'll leave that to your lovely wife and some of your other colleagues along the way. But I think it was a little less than a decade ago though, because I was actually working in the sports book at the time, and I didn't actually start in the sports book of Caesar's until I was in about my third or fourth year with the company. All right, So so you're working at the sports book at the time I see the tweet, and I am at that time consciously moving more into the sports gambling arena because I could see it was going to grow and become a bigger and bigger part of sports media in general, and frankly just because I thought it was so much fun and based on my interaction, I always try to respond to what my audience seems to enjoy, and whenever we would do gambling content picks and whatnot. The response would be great. But I was a neophyight right. I mean it's not like I grew up with a gambling family or background in general. I had to learn as I went along. So I go out to Las Vegas, and as you like to say, I brought an autograph copy of my book for you, which I thought it was just a super nice thing to do, and you evidently considered to be a super cocky move. No, I mean I didn't say it was a super cocky move. It's something that we laugh about now, because at that point I had read the book and it was definitely something nice to kind of put on the bookshelf for a book that I truly enjoyed. But it was definitely an unusual encounter. The first time you shake hands with somebody when they walk into the sports book of Caesar's. Here they are right hand extended in the left hand. They're also handing you a copy of their books. So autograph copy of the book, but autograph copy. But I don't think it's personalized. I have to look on the bookshelf. I think I still have it, so I might have to double check. But obviously after working together as long as we had, I figured that was a microcosm for what has kind of been our working balance and our professional balance and personal life with one another. Well, all right, so that was let's say it's eight or nine years ago, whatever it was. I was after I started out Kick, I think, but I think I just started out kick. I don't think I've been doing it very long, or maybe I was even about to start out kick. Uh So you at that time had worked your way into working in the Caesar Sports Book. But let's go back in time a little bit. At what point in your life did you think I would like to work in the sports gambling industry. Was it a conscious decision, and if so, when did that sort of bug or interest begin. So I had always had a passion for sports, grew up playing sports, whether it was soccer hockey, the two activities that I stayed with the longest, uh throughout my youth. That I figured, hey, look, I'm not going to be good enough to be a professional athlete. But you have no idea exactly how you get into professional athletics in some capacity. But it was in the DNA because I could think back clayto I might have been four or five years old before the advent of the internet, and every Sunday night I would sit with my dad, whether it was during college football or college bath ketball season, regardless of it was baseball or anything else that was going on. And we had those old school magnetic standing boards, and I actually still have a lot of the magnets today that sit on my fridge to hold up wedding announcements and all that stuff. So my dad would go through the newspaper with me and I had to figure out who the teams were, which one of their logos was which, and then put them in ascending or descending order, depending on how we elected to set that board up. So I was familiar with both the college and professional sports landscapes pretty much from the start for as long as I can remember. And kind of one other thing along those lines. Growing up in the Midwest, I mean, you know what it was like that you couldn't stay up late to always watch Monday night football. So the first thing I would do was a kid, I watched the first half of the game, whether it was Sunday or Monday night football, go to bed, and my dad used to leave the house so early in the morning that on these trading cards he had as a commodities broker, he would have the two helmets. He would have a little football and he would leave the final score for what the game was that I would run down and that would be the first thing that I would look at, so fast forward from there, and it wasn't much further on down the road until I was probably about eight or nine, and you start filling out those office pools. I think everybody gets into it in some capacity. So for us, it was the confidence point. So for two bucks, you went through the NFL schedule each Sunday and the team you were most competent in fifteen or sixteen all the way down to one, and that was more or less where I started to get the gambling bugs. It would continue to steamroll from there. Going to hockey practice early in the morning at five thirty six o'clock, my dad would hand me the Chicago Tribune or the Chicago Sun time and we look at the Danny Sheridan odds or glanced in culver, and we go back and forth picking every single NFL game on the board, setting a bucket piece. He'd pick a game, I'd pick a game. Some weeks, he'd get lazy and he wanted to be the house so he'd let me pick every game. And I think it was at that point that I started to develop that fascination and six Station on sports betting had no idea obviously fast forwarding thirty years later where it was ultimately going to take me from a career paths standpoint. So you grew up in Chicago. We're talking to Todd Ferman. This is the Winds and Losses podcast. I know your background. You've got a younger sister, and it's you, your mom, and your dad. I know your mom and your dad. Uh, and I met your sister as well, all fantastic people. Uh. Your dad was he a big sports gambler? Like did he have a bookie back in the day? Um, what was his relationship like with sports gambling? Yeah, he was. He had been a better through and through and probably a couple of bookies along the way to try and move action back in the day. And so he always had that trading bug in him. So when you work on the stock market in the commodities broker, sports gambling becomes a logical segue. So they got involved in some of the biggest n c A tournament pools that were out there betting games, and a variety of different manners, and sure, you know, when we talked amongst friends, it was always interesting because I think a lot of people as they get into the sports betting space, now they've grown accustomed to betting online or they're depositing into a legal book where there's very little interaction. But there would be saturdays and Sundays as a teenager where my dad, you know, might have been busy. He had given me the phone number and go, hey, here's our account name. We need to call up, we need to check our balance, and he's going to give you what they called the full rundown. So you sit there with your sheet, you call up a guy on the phone who you never actually meet, and he lists off every single game in betting order and what the rotation was, so you knew what the point spreads were. I'd get all those numbers. My dad and I would kind of put our heads together and we figure out what the actually gonna for a given day would be. So there really is a true gambling education, and it's amazing to see how far the space has come from that old school way where you used to hear stories about those bookmakers that would take over banks of phones at airports to try and figure out how they were going to handle their workload on Saturday and the Sundays. It is really fascinating. And the reason why I bring it up with your growing up kind of exposed to sports gambling is I think about this with my kids now, and there are a lot of kids out there that it's gonna be the same for sports gambling in a way that wasn't necessarily the case for me growing up. I remember my dad saying, I remember asking, hey, do you ever gamble on sports? And he said no, because I like the game so much I don't want to get more stressed about him, or something along those lines. Whereas my boys now, uh, you know, the first question they ask usually when they see me watching a game is did you bet this game? Do you have one of the sides? Which side do you have? You know? Like? And so I worry a little bit now because we do lock it in and obviously sports gambling is a substantial part part of what I do for a living that I'm worried that I'm working to make as much money as I can so one day I can leave it all to my boys and they will eventually all lose it. Uh in sports gambling, which is gonna be the great sort of circle of life when it comes to two sports media and sports gambling. Um, but it is kind of fascinating in that respect to think about how much different things are gonna be. Do you remember the first bet that you actually placed with your own money. I'm trying to think back to what it was because normally, of course my dad would call the bets in, we would kind of share, and he always said, hey, you know, you're on the hook for you know, our wins and losses that come along with gambling debt. But I can't remember if he ever actually took money from me. So when I first started to do it, I want, you know what, I'm gonna try and do this. I'm my own And so you couldn't really just go online, open it up an account and deposit. You had to go through the rigamar role of sending money Western Union to places that you had never heard of. I mean you could barely find out a map, whether it was curised out, whether it was other spots in the Caribbean. So I remember working all summer long because they started cleaning pools and a pool attendant all that at fourteen years old, working at open gym for probably six dollars an hour, and at that point the minimum deposit to start with any of these accounts was two hundred bucks, so you had to worked for a long time. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that map at four dollars and twenty five cents an hour after taxes, to save up two hundred bucks to send off to Antigua. When I finally when I finally had the money and I'd figured out, all right, I'm really gonna do this, I'm gonna set it up. You know, you go in, you get on your bike, you put the cash in your pocket or wherever you're going, and you find that little currency exchange to Western Union the money. But what they don't tell you about it is you're not sending the money directly to the sports book when you call up, You're sending the money to Hector Gonzalez in Guatemala City, and they give you a whole laundry list of stuff that you have to fill out before you send the money over there. So in the back of your head, you're scared shitless going I worked my ass off to make this money and I have no idea if it's going to be in my account. So you open up the account, you fill out all the paperwork, you send the money, and they say you have to give it six ninety minutes. You pick up the phone, which a little bit more difficult to do because you don't quite want your parents phone bill to show you calling Antigua, were anywhere in the Caribbean at that point, and you make sure that your money is in the account. Once the money was there, it became much bigger stakes for me because the minimum bet at that point was, you know, fifty five to win. Fifty essentially is what you had a bet. So I had enough in there for four bets in total if I would have gone oh and four, And it was then figuring out, hey, you don't have a cell phone, how are you actually gonna call these bets in. So I had a buddy who his parents who were a little bit looser in terms of what he could get away within the house that I used to tell, hey, you need to call these bets in for us and be able to make it happen. And I remember going to the Big Ten tournament one day back in Chicago, and I would get up after each game, my dad goes, where the hell do you keep going? And I hadn't told him that I had deposited money and I was doing I think I was fourteen or fifteen, so that I had money on the side where and I would go look for a pay phone and I would try and call in a bet. And there I am calling in a beat on Iowa, Michigan between games and that thirty minute, you know, interlude between contest, and that's kind of the process that you go through. But one of the things I will say, and you talk about your kids, my parents are always big on, hey, we trust our kids. And my dad was huge on, you know, just being responsible with it. And that's one area that you know, I joke about all the time in terms of people that are reckless, and we know gambling can be a very dangerous activity if it's not properly monitored. But I had an open dialogue with my parents on a lot of things about everything. And one funny story along those same lines. So when I had a lot of cash in my pocket one day and came home, I had a little piece of notebook paper wrapped around it has thrown my jeans into the hand emper and didn't think anything of it. And apparently my mom had stumbled on it. And the first thing that any parents thinks when they see a lot of cash in their kids pocket is, oh, my god, my son or daughter is dealing drugs. So my mom sees this little lot of cash, asked my dad what it is. My dad kind of laughs and he sees the numbers that are written down there, and my dad sat me down. We had a man to man conversation. He said, you know what, here's the deal. He said, if you can be responsible with this, I can't tell you not to bet sports if I'm doing it on my own, but if you can prove to me that you can win, you know, your mother and I are going to trust you to make the right decisions, even at that young age. And that kind of launched me into Okay, I have to be responsible with my money. I am going to sweat the games. And you definitely get stressed out when essentially your entire network as a teenager uh is in you know, Inner tops or whatever the hell the sports book I was using back then, and that really got me off on the right foot in a positive mindset. But I will say trying to keep that even keel and you guys bust my balls more than anybody on the show. I really don't live and die with bets at this point. I kind of treat it like the stock portfolo. Yeah, you're gonna you're gonna want to win more best than you lose. But at the same time, if you get too excited when you win, or you get too down with when you lose, you shouldn't even be doing this as a recreational pursuit. What do you think your advantage is? Uh? And I'll get into this a little bit, but what I would say is you and Sal for instance, are instantaneously better at doing math than I am. Right Like I am good at writing, I'm good at speaking live math. And you know, people who listen to the radio show sometimes hear me doing live math on the air or whatever. I'll test fine on math. Can't instantaneously do odds. In my head, you're pretty good at that, right, Like to be able to assess value money lines, like the way the numbers are moving, things like that that kind of comes innately to you. Do you think that's an important advantage. I think one of the big parts of it. And I know you've read all of Malcolm Gladwell stuff. Sin slicing is the first term that comes to mind. I mean, I can kind of look at a betting board and without knowing every single player on every roster, as I just don't have the hours of the day that I used to when I was younger to memorize some of that stuff, and no statistics that I can spout off. You look at the number and go all right, something doesn't pass the sniff test here. Ultimately you find those some of those games you dig back in and see if you're intuition at least steered you in the right direction to try and to find a winner. But math definitely plays a big role. And I joke all the time with some of my younger cousins that if they had learned to bet sports, they would able to be able to do multiplication and division their heads a heck of a lot faster than most people that are out there. Because the perfect illustration of that is you bet a college basketball total at a hundred forty, the initial calculation is all right, a hundred forty into forty how many points per minute do I have? And you're constantly reassessing your risk and what has to happen for those various permutations as a game goes thirty five minutes to go, thirty minutes to go. And I think it's a valuable life skill to be able to think on your feet, maybe not necessarily to actually bet the games, but to be able to do mass that quickly identify the odds in the subsequent probability that comes along with it. Did you go to public school in Chicago when you were growing up? I did. I went to public school all the way up through my sophomore year of high school, and it was at that point that, you know, my academic course of action kind of took a very different turn, where I ended up at boarding school, a small school right out that of Boston called the Grottin School. And you want to talk about culture shock. That probably was the most transformative two years of my entire life, going from a public school where I never really had to open a book bag or do any homework at home, to essentially going to a six day week academic calendar, uh and being told that you wrote like a second grader and having to go over to my English professor's house before I turned in every single essay to have dinner with his family and go through multiple steps. That really took my writing from probably pretty pedantic at the public school level into something that I was actually not a shame to publish when you gave me the opportunity rite articles at out Kick. So junior year of high school was that the hardest year of your life? Hands down? Uh, nothing has ever been that difficult as going into that kind of environment. I mean, I was raised in a middle class family in a mixed neighborhood, uh, in a Jewish household, and now all of a sudden, I'm thrust into, you know, the richest of the rich. I was the only new junior mail that came on campus because they actually needed a goalie at that point, one that could read and write, since they just excused the current the goalie who was there before from an academic issue. So I kind of went into an environment site I'm seeing. I had done the tours, I had had my overnight visit, but you're talking about an Episcopalian boarding school with a rich tradition of you know, some of the biggest blue blood flat families throughout New England, across the country, and you end up going to Chapel Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, where you're sitting amongst your students, and you know, the school him essentially praises Jesus for your father's business. That's a little bit different than when you grow up in a Jewish household and you've grown accustomed to, you know, spending time in a religious institution, getting a little bit of religious education, uh, but also at the same time not seeing it as a fundamental cornerstone for everything that you were doing. Did you gamble much when you were there at Groton for junior and senior year? I tried to. It was it's hard to be on top of the sports, probably, right. That's different compared to when you were in regular high school. Just just didn't have access to being able to watch as much TV. We actually didn't have internet in the dorms back then, so you had to go to the computer labs and you were kind of limited in terms of how much time you could spend on the computers. But I did actually stumble into a website that more or less had a very similar concept to lock it In, where They gave you a thousand dollar bank roll every week and it was a contest. It was completely risk free where you had to pick games and whoever finished with the highest bank rolls would be awarded you know, free accounts, t shirts, swag and all of that kind of stuff. So I'm sitting here thinking, all right, this is the way I'm going to kind of get my actions fixed. I'm gonna get some of my classmates involved in this as well. And then one of my buddies actually started the stock Market Club and got permission school of funding to try and do this. So I'm thinking in the back of my head, hey, look, I'm gonn go to the headmaster and try and convince them that I should be able to start the sports gambling Club. Little to say, Grotten wanted no part of encouraging that kind of behavior, So the stock Market Club was a fixture there for the next two years. My Sports Betting Club never really got off the ground. So where do you go after you finished Groten? So after two years at Groton, like you said, two of the more difficult years from an academic and social standpoint from my side, I get accepted to Wesleyan University and Middletown, Connecticut, but wasn't quite sure that's where I wanted to spend the next four years of my life. So rather than going right from boarding school onto a college campus, deferred my acceptance and actually spend a year in Burlington, Vermont playing junior hockey for a program called the Green Mountain Glades. And junior hockey kind of becomes that segue or that intermediate step for kids to get a little older, bigger, faster, stronger before they can go on to potentially Division one scholarships or other types of athletic opportunities. Well, so I spent a year up there a playing hockey. We pretty much kept us on a professional schedule, or you know, we have practiced every day. You were required for a team lift in the afternoon. But you have to find a way to subsidize yourself. So I ended up working at a Starbucks as a barista as a brief stuck so I had to be there in Burlington, Vermont, so at six in the morning. And keep in mind, there wasn't a free standing Starbucks in Burlington at this time, so the Starbucks I worked at was actually inside a Barnes and Noble, so Monday through Thursday. I used to have to get into the Starbucks between six and six thirty before the store actually opened up at nine o'clock. I had to be responsible for all the baked goods, all the inventory. So here I am eighteen years old, trying to figure out how to balance playing hockey at a very advanced level and make sure that I could make ends meet with my job and to do so, I'm bacon cookies. I'm bacon. Oh. I mean when I say bake, it's a little bit different. It's not like I'm handling any of this stuff from scratch. You get giant boxes of short red cookie sent sent to you. You have to put them on the bake sheets, though, and make sure you have enough inventory for the day. So I'm making oatmeal raising cookies, I'm making short bread cookies, chocolate chip I'm making sure we have enough Panini's are properly set up in the display case and everything else, so we're ready for business. And this store manager would always come by check on me. Knew I was a little bit on the younger side, but that I was ambitious, and my boss typically didn't come in until about nine thirty. But here I am trying to balance not only that, balancing hockey, and for the first time, I'm really living on my own in an unsupervised environment. Because instead of electing to stay with a billet family, which is pretty common in junior hockey where you have a host family, two other guys on the team of myself were a little bit older, we decided we were going to rent an apartment months to months in one of the sketchier parts of Burlington, which quite frankly, was an experience in and of its own right. So how did you end up with that job? Of all the jobs that you could have gotten, how did you end up working at a Starbucks inside of Barnes and Noble. So the biggest thing was we had to find jobs that we're gonna work with our hockey schedule and when you're required to be in the team workout facility about two o'clock in the afternoon every day, I need some flexible ability on the weekends because you're typically traveling and playing game. It was all right, where can I get a job that will start me early enough in the morning. So I had gone. I had gone into the Bonton, a retail out was there and thought about working graveyard kind of stock shelves. I had gone into a circuit city to see if there was anything behind the scenes there to try and give me the flexibility of hours. And I'd always been an avid reader. So one day when I was walking through Barnes and Noble to pick up, you know, a book that I really wanted to buy, I happen to walk by the cafe and go, what are your hours of operation? What do you guys typically look for? And filled out an application. Probably about a week later, they got back to me and said, hey, we don't really have someone that's a true opener, you know, would you feel comfortable with these hours because what they had seen is college kids didn't want to work that shift so early in the morning to pay wasn't great. Uh, And ultimately they were willing to work with my schedule that I could work Monday through Thursday. I could work essentially six to one, six to one thirty, you know, end up getting out of there right after the lunch rush and still make practice and some of my team responsibilities. What did they pay you do you remember? I want to say it was seven dollars and twenty five cents an hour. Maybe a shade more. I probably spent every dollar that I didn't need for rent or food on books, using some of my discount And when I look around my man cave, now I have more of those you know, big sports book, you know, fifty greatest players, hundred greatest sluggers that I still have with me. Now they're a little bit out of date at this point. Both will always kind of serve as a reminder and all holdover from how hard I had to work to try and balance those two things to make it happen. You know, those books aren't autographed, though you didn't get to meet those authors. No, those books aren't autographed. Uh that I did not get to meet those authors. But if I ever have the chance to get some of the sports legends and icons that are still alive to sign those books, that those will immediately become significantly more valuable. My autographed copy of dixieland Delight. We're talking to Todd Ferman. This is the Wins and Losses podcast. I'm Clay Travish. You can find Todd at Todd Ferman on Twitter. Tell how much you think of of this podcast as well. Okay, so you like I guess you weren't good enough to get up to D one hockey level in that year. What happened there? So I had done so I end up playing for the Green Mountain Glades, ended up splitting time at goalie with with another kid on the roster. And what happened is I had done on a couple of Division one recruiting visits and I wasn't the biggest guy. Still won't consider myself a big guy in the grand scheme of things, and a lot of the coaches said, hey, look, you know at five ten and I might have been a d forty five pounds on some of my best days. They said, we're a little bit worried about your ability to withstand the barrage that you're going to face at the Division one level. And I kind of focused on more academically oriented schools. I always wanted athletics to be the conduit to get me into a good school. So I went on official visits to you know, Dartmouth, Brown, Yale, and a couple of the other ivs. Looked at Colgate for a little while before they'd really built their hockey program up, and kind of had a heart to heart discussion with my head coach at the time and my dad, and they said, look, I mean, what do you feel is going to be the most important part. Do you want to go to a big school and never have a chance to play just to say that you're on a roster, or do you want to try and explore, you know, some of the other schools that you had looked at before within the NESTCACK, which is the New England Small College Athletic Conference. And I said, I want to go somewhere where I think I can be a part of an organization. So, ironically enough, while I had deferred my acceptance from Wesleyan with minimal intentions of actually ever setting foot on that campus as a student, that's where I ended up um and realized that I was gonna have to compete for minutes and walked into a situation that was extremely difficult, uh and really didn't see that much playing time over the course of my three year hockey career there. The coach that recruited me ended up retiring after his sophomore year, and ironically enough, one of the assistants at Brown that had recruited me previously ends up taking over the head coaching job, but he was of the mindset that he wanted to turn a floundering Division three program into something more akin to what he'd grown accustomed to in the Ivy League. And when he had a senior class about thirteen or fourteen guys, it was a relatively rough transition to get full buy in from of us who for the most part loves playing hockey, but we love drinking on Friday and Saturday nights just as much. All Right, So you realize you're not going to be a pro athlete, not gonna be a pro hockey player. Uh, what did you major in at Wesleyan? So my degree in Wesleyan is uh a little bit long winded. It was American Studies with a concentration and international economics, And so essentially what that was in Lehman's term, it was me kind of taking the quantitative opponent quantitative components out of economics and focusing more on the qualitative side. So my concentration even within that was about developing economy, specifically in Latin America. And there you go, a liberal arts education, something that you probably weren't going to use anywhere going forward, but it gave me the foundation to do a lot of unique things and really carve out my course to study that ultimately helped lead me into the gambling field. All right, but that sounds also like something in the Northeast that would maybe be something that would lead somebody into let's say, an investment bank, right, I mean, it's your smart guy, They pay well for you, hard working three year old. You could maybe even go get an m b A. Uh did you think about doing that? And that's exactly where I thought that career path is gonna take me. Um, when I actually got to Wesley and part of me wanted to work in the natural sciences field, and then quickly realized that, hey, look, if I don't want to be a doctor, I'm not sure life as a researcher is going to suit me all that well. So pivoted relatively quickly into the more of the financial side. With just that thought process in mind, said, hey, look, if I graduate from here with an economics degree, some of the connections that I had made in the network that i'd formed through Rotten where all of these kids, a lot of their parents, uh and some you know, a lums were all tied into the financial world, that that's exactly what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go from you know, college campus to working ninety plus hours a week on Wall Street as an investment associate, spent two years there and figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. And actually one of the jobs that I considered most strongly and really wanted to do was moving to d C and working for the Inter American Development Bank, learning a little bit more about financial policy on that particular side. Lo and behold. Though instead of playing hockey my senior year, I end up pretty much selling the coach. Hey, look, I don't think we're seeing eye to eye in terms of the balance of you know, work and athletic commitment at the Division three level. I'm gonna kind of leave the program. And so I spent the first semester of my senior year down in Sydney, Australia and their economics program at University of New South Wales. To my buddies I was able to convince to go with me. We lived closer to the beach than we did to campus, so obviously you know where we spent both of our time. But then coming back to Wesleyan woke up one morning it probably was in early March, and like, you know what, I don't like the way these interviews are going. I'm not sure working on Wall Street is exactly what I want to do. You know, I have a passion for the casino industry. I have to figure out how I'm going to get into gaming and the sequence of events it took to be able to make that happen. It's one of those things you always need a fortuitous bounce, but you also need a game plan because the harder, the harder you work, sometimes the luckier you get. All Right, So, like, if you're gonna be atn actor actors, there's lots of people who are even where I live in Nashville. You know, you put your guitar in the back of your car, you drive into Nashville. You you know, your your best looking person, best actor actors all over the country. You drive out to Hollywood. Do you just get in a car and drive to Vegas? Like, how does that process work if you're going to get involved in gaming? No, it wasn't quite that easy at all. So when I tried to figure out exactly what I wanted to do once I graduated from college, I wasn't going to rush into anything. So I had really lived at home essentially full time since I was sixteen years old, and I had left for boarding school. So what I did, graduated from school, you know, had my fun a little bit, came back, ended up picking up right where I left off my summer job working at a restaurant bartending, trying to pick up as many shifts as I possibly could, trying to figure out ultimately how I was going to get into the casino business or something in that capacity. Took a battery of interviews, thought about being a corporate recruiter, you know, everything under the sun, just to kind of get out of working in the restaurant business because I knew it wasn't gonna help take me. So are you waiting or what are you doing? I was doing both. So I mean I would bartend three nights a week, and I would wait on tables and pick up as many shifts as I could. I knew I had the flexibility with the ownership group. I had been working for this family and their restaurants probably since I was eighteen um, and then had kind of migrated up to bartending. The nice part about bartending on a Friday and Saturday night, I was the one that able was able to control the remote, and I could sweat some of my games a lot easier there than I could walking through the restaurant worrying about if I made sure the appetizers came out in a timely fashion. But you know, when you look at it, you figure things out. There's always breaks everyone, regardless of who you know and how hard you work. You need a break here there. Well, my break came halfway around the world and something that I had absolutely no control over. So my aunt at the time was the dean of the Teacher's College at Columbia, and she was on safari in Africa and Joe, as luck would have it, she happened to end up meeting the president of Caesar's Palace on some safari they were on. They struck up a conversation. He had a young daughter that was looked to try and apply to some of the more prestigious schools on the East Coast. So my aunt offered some advice there about her extracurriculars and how she should kind of structure her application. Uh, And she said, well, my nephew is very interested in the gaming industry and he's looked for ways to try and be able to get into the field. Would you have any advice? Well, he gave her contact information. They swapped all that while they were commiserating because they couldn't get service on their BlackBerry somewhere in Africa. And he gets back to the States. My aunt gives me all the contact information. So I really think you should reach out to this guy. So I end up reaching out to him. We go through, you know, a quick casual conversation, and he goes, hey, I'd really like to send my resume. There might be a perfect role for you in the organization. And here I am thinking, you know what, I want to get into sports. If I'm gonna go out there, you know, how is this going to get me into sports to try and open up some of those doors and opportunities. Well, he passes my resume along to the head of HR and they brought in a new vice president at that point in terms of financial analysis, and that particular department talked to him. They all timately invite me out. I'm there for a full day of interviews, talking and to have pretty much every executive that I was going to work with on a day to day basis, And things go pretty well, so I'm not quite sure the next steps. I fly back to Chicago. I kind of wait to hear from him, and ultimately have a job offer extended to me. About two weeks later. They go, you know, how quickly can you move out here? And what do you exactly want to do within the organization. So this happens probably late fall. I have some family stuff playing around Thanksgiving. We don't want to bring you out here before the first of the year. Well, here's the other thing that becomes a sticking point. I end up hearing from Compliance probably about ten days after they had initially offered me a position, and they said, there's some things in your background were a little bit concerned about, and I'm going, you know, I have no idea what any of this is. So, and when they had gone through a background check on me, I would have been involved in a posting forum, a paper membership posting forum back in a day that was kind of a pet project, and we had aligned ourselves with an offshore sports book to take a filiate dollars. Well, I probably made about seventy eight dollars in total from those from those particular affiliate deals back in the day, and they said, you know what they were able to find. They were able to find that they can find. I mean, as people figure out, and this might be a better lesson for you know, some of the younger listeners out there. Whatever you put on the internet, whatever you do, someone is going to find good, bad, or in different So never put anything out there on your digital footprint that you don't want a future employer, future dating partner, anybody else along those lines to try and find. And if they do, you're you're going to have to own it. So they found that. Um they said, hey, we don't think we're gonna be able to extend the offer. But I wasn't gonna take no for an answer, so I said, okay, you know, I understand that, but let me talk to the head of legal. I end up getting the head of llegal on the phone through you know, the property president, go through it for about forty five minutes. Say hey, look here's what happened. I can explain everything that's there. I can show you a bank statement. We do really make much money. They said, all right, well, we're gonna have to take you back for you know, final review. Thankfully, they ended up going, you know what, we're not worried about it's not going to create a red flag. We still think you can get regulatory approval from the Gaming Control Board. Uh. And ultimately I end up moving out to Vegas at the end of February. Now, the challenge that came with that is I had nowhere to live. When I moved out there, wasn't making a lot of money. What are they paying you, Like, what does the starting job at that time paying like a casino like Caesar's starting salary at that point was forty two decent. It's a decent salary, but it's not like, I mean, for what were you twenty four? I mean, that's pretty decent. Yeah, twenty four years old. Cost of living in Vegas far less than what it would have been had I've been living in Manhattan or some of the other big cities out there. So I have nowhere to live. Don't know exactly how all of that's gonna go. Reach out to a buddy, he's got a friend of a friend, a family friend. They go, hey, we're happy to you know, let you stay in a room in our house and say you kind of figure things out. Lived there for three weeks, end up renting a room in somebody's house way the hell off the Strip, probably about twelves to fifteen miles. And for anybody familiar with the Las Vegas north of Craig Road, up by the Canary Resort and area clay that I don't think you'll ever set foot in. So I rent a room there. It's a girl that owns the house. One of the other rooms is rented to a guy named Doug who is a uh poker dealer in town. Him and I strike up a little bit of a friendship, and essentially, you I felt like I was a stranger in somebody else's house, that I was coming and going, didn't have much in the way of possessions, wasn't gonna buy a whole heck of a lot outside of the bed, you know, a cabinet here there, And I end up living there for a year until I ultimately moved closer to Strip as one of my colleagues had a room open up in the house he was living in, and that was kind of the transitional step as I spent year one living out in Las Vegas, not moving out here with any friends, not knowing what the working environment was going to be like as a financial analyst in Caesar's to try and learn the casino business. So a lot of people when they hear that, you know, like you're a twi year old in Vegas, they think it's gonna be incredibly glamorous. There's lots of fun where you go out a lot, like what was your existence like as a twenty four year old Vegas. Obviously you're making dollars a year. It's not like you're rolling in money compared to people who may come in one weekend and decide to blow through a couple of grand I mean, you can't do that every weekend, right, No, you're not rolling into nightclubs with bottle service and sitting at the DJ's table when you're making that kind of money, by any stretch of the imagination. So we've got smart and creative, like everybody does. Knowing that, you know, most of the analysts were relatively young as they were building up the group, So we would typically look for, you know, excuse me, dollar beers, for the opportunity to try and find a free happy hour on Friday nights, to get after it a little bit. You have friends that come to town at that point, and you're the Vegas guy or the Vegas girl. You have to show everybody around. So you're trying to do dinners. You're trying to live well beyond your means. But to catch twenty two becomes when you come stumbling out of a bar nightclub at two am. The temptation there is to play table games, and you're thinking to yourself, you know, what's fifty bucks playing black jack? You know, at five or ten dollars a hand. Well, if you're doing that times a month and you're not making a whole lot of money, and all of a sudden you're blowing through four or five hundred bucks and gambling, you know, that's a big problem, especially for someone like me who was betting sports, making money betting sports, but blowing it playing cable games. So that lasted for about six months before I kind of told myself, hey, look, you've got to stop this. Um you're gonna have nothing left for for a rainy day should sports gambling start to go awry. But we had fun. We went out. We tried to take advantage of industry nights. You start to develop your own little crew, uh and take advantage of some of the things that the city has to offer. When you're twenty four, twenty six years old, and you don't have any real responsibility outside of making sure you get to work for your morning meeting at a a in most days, So when you're working at Caesar's, you're not on the sports gambling side. Are you trying to figure out a way to get to the sports gambling side? And how does that happen? That was always in the back of my head. So my first office when I started with Caesar's Entertainment was actually in the Paris on the mezzanine level. So that's a little bit jarring and of itself that every day when you're getting into work at eight am, where you're leaving it, you know, seven thirty eight o'clock, because he typically put in about eleven or twelve hour days as analysts. That you're walking through a casino, so you're not walking through an empty office building or anything along those lines. The energy is just starting to get ramped up. You see a ton of people coming and going, and it was always in the back of my head, Hey, how how do I get involved in the sports betting side. The nice part about it was the same property president who ultimately gave me the opportunity to interview and getting my foot in the door. Was willing to make introductions for a gentleman by the name of Chuck Sposito, who was the vice president of race and Sports at Caesar's for all of Caesar's Entertainment back then, and he took a liking to me, and I would spend my weekends on Saturdays and Sundays, you know, working for free, going down there behind the counter, trying to learn the race and sports business because I knew that was what my true passion was. That was ultimately where I wanted to go, and it was just figuring out a means to an end to be able to pay my bills, learn the casino business, but ultimately find a way to get into the sports betting side of things. He ended up leaving Caesar's probably, I want to say, maybe two years, I'm not quite sure of did that exact timeline, uh, to take a bigger, more lucrative job at a casino called Fountain Blue. Well, the catch twenty two there was a Fountain Blue never actually opened, and the whole plan the entire time when he had gone there, Hey, look, you know, once we get this operation up off the ground. I want you to kind of come over and be pretty high up in my food chain because I know you can handle the financial analysis. I know I've taught you enough about how to handle the risk management, and you're gonna be my utility infield there. Once that casino didn't open, I had to kind of go back to square one and begin building some of those relationships in the sports betting space within Caesar's to figure out, Hey, look, how am I going to get into this, how is this going to happen, and what's going to be you know that crux, that initial tipping point that I can begin to make headway, uh and try and ultimately forge a passing myself in sports betting more so than financial analysis wins and losses. I'm Clay Travis East Tide Firm, and you can watch us on lock It in FS one Eastern, three thirty Central to thirty Mountain one Pacific every day there. So what is that? What is that move? What happens? So he ends up leaving. He had handled a lot of the media stuff and he was one of the guys, probably the leader in the space that was doing interviews with you know, E S T N S of the world radio networks across the country before gambling was really big in terms of radio content, and he had taught me an awful lot about ways to carry myself on air, things to kind of say, obviously, working for a casino, you have to be a little bit more buttoned up. You can't just kind of shoot from the hip, and you have to make sure that you're slightly more guarded on the answers. And so he had been gone for probably about a year or so. I've been working doing some financial projects, and some of the folks in PR had realized, Hey, look, we need to try and have a presence in media. We're not quite sure how it's going to happen. Um, the then VP of the entire race and Sports book, didn't quite feel comfortable doing some of the media stuff. So they said, how would you feel about kind of doing radio interviews and getting started on that particular front. And it started with a small radio show in Springfield, Illinois, where they had come out and they had done a remote. I got down there at the crack of dawn to do their radio show, had bantered back and forth for a half hour. They were extremely happy with the contemple with the casino in the station, end up going back and that was kind of the start of what would become an opportunity to speak as an ambassador for Caesar's, try to get on social media and do more and more around the space. Ultimately, what would then happen is they created a hybrid role for me in the Sports Book where I would work three days a week in international marketing with player development specifically in Latin America, and the far rest help helping structure you know, deals, discounts and everything else to keep that organization going kind of as a number crunch or there, and I would spend Saturday and Sunday in the Sports Book. So there isn't anybody in that space at that time, in my opinion, that had a more disjointed work week than what I had to do. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. It was one job. Saturday and Sunday was something completely different. But that was always the allure of the casino that yes, you were still under that name Caesar's Entertainment Umbrella, but you couldn't have had two jobs that would be more disparate if you try to hand take them. So you start doing radio with me right that's where we met initially. When you read Dixie Land Delight and you start coming on in Nashville and you still do those hits with the local show here three h L that I used to be on with those guys. But how many radio interviews are you doing? Like how does that grow? And did you start to see a return? I e. People are coming in asking about you. I did, so I started with you guys as well, and I think that was, hey, let's give a shot for one hit, Let's see how it goes, and like you mentioned, you know whatever it did. Eight nine years later, I've been on there every Wednesday, more or less in a standing spot. But it was trying to find markets where I knew some of the radio hosts. So that Springfield station, I knew they were going to be softball questions and there was gonna be nothing controversial with that. I started doing a show with you guys, and there were a couple other markets that I got into as well that had to be approved by Caesar's PR And at that point they listened to every radio spot I did. I mean, we kind of had to go We kind of had to go through and break down film after each hit and they go, hey, you know, we like your delivery here, we like some of this stuff. You said, you have to be careful about saying this because we don't want you to share proprietary information. And what was interesting about it was in the markets that I was in in a somewhat regular basis, people would start making Caesar's a destination market. They'd come in and say, hey, we heard Todd on the radio. Because I was always saying, hey, you know, you come in, say you heard me on whatever radio station, will buy you a free drink on Caesar's. So we would give them drink coupons and drink vouchers and more and more. Excuse me. That momentum started to grow and Caesar saw all of that, so they went, hey, this is great. We're starting to grow our brand everywhere around the country that we're in these radio markets. I just thought, I want to kind of do a little bit more on social media. Had to try and balance exactly what I couldn't couldn't say that as an ambassador for the company and my own personal brand, and you get radio interviews out of it, You get media interviews on covers. Dot Com back then was one of the only sites really covering sports betting on a daily basis, and there weren't a ton of guys in Vegas that we're willing to give quotes or talk eloquently about some of the topics. So the more and more opportunities that were there, I was happy to take on any interview I could. I would do any radio spot possible. Podcasts weren't really a thing, so I didn't have to worry about that, or if there was ever a chance to get a quote into print, I was gonna do anything and everything with approval from Caesar's to be able to make that happen. And then one of the other markets that I got into on a regular basis as well was Oklahoma City, where I had a friend from my posting forum days who actually knew one of the radio hosts pretty well, and I think everybody kind of laughed on a whim. They go, sure, you know, we'll put you on. We'll see how it goes well. That's another market that I've now been in as long as I've been on in Nashville. Um, because you go on there and you have one chance to make a first impression, and so it's not to put pressure on people to put themselves. Uh, and you're in a comfortable spot. But if you do a good job from day one, you'd be amazed at some of the opportunities that become recurring in life. Uh So, are you gambling the whole time that you're in Vegas? Because the one thing that I would think would be pretty cool for somebody like you who grew up as a huge sports gambler, all the hoops you had to jump through. You know, you talked about going to Western Union, getting your accounts set up, obviously dealing with a legitimate bookie back in the day in Chicago. Suddenly you could just walk into any sports book in America and bet on every kind of event. How do you balance that? That was exactly what I was doing. So Saturdays, I would get up real early in the morning and I would spend pretty much all day in the sports book watching college football. So this was kind of that weekend warrior approach um when I was not on the weekends that I wasn't working, which you know, oddly enough, you know, maybe would be one Saturday a month or were there about, And so I would sit there and I would back games pretty much from sunrise to sunset. I'd have different buddies that would poke their head and they'd want to stop for beer, and they'd come and go, And that's what I would do. Now during the course of the week, it was a little bit trickier. I mean I could bet obviously on my way into work. But what I would normally do is I would break my day right around three o'clock in the afternoon. So with my office in the Paris, the closest walk would have been to what is now you know, I'm trying to think of what the club is there and tells you how it's a little time I spent on the strip. It would have been Barbary Coast back then. So I would walk through the Paris, I would cut through valleys, uh, and I would walk into the Barbary Coast. That typically where I placed most of my best because that's where I was able to get the quickest back and forth within minutes. Put my stuff in for college basketball, and the nice part about being a financial analysts you have multiple computers in your in your cubicle, so I would have one that more or less became my score machine. I didn't stream game, but you try and follow it on those old school sports trackers. I would work and kind of sweat the games at my desk, you knowing that everything started at four o'clock in the afternoon, so being able to bet games at that point obviously significan getting be easier, you didn't have to worry about any limits or whatever you were looking for. Uh. And the funny part about that that some of my co workers would give me a hard time. Uh. For about three or four months, then I started dating a lifeguards that worked on property at Paris. So I would have lunch full suit, and this lifeguard that was nineteen or two, you know, twenty years old and I was twenty four, would be sitting next to me. And you want to talk about getting rased by your coworkers, both male and female. Uh. The amount of jokes that came hurled my way as I would typically try and get her to walk across the street with me when she was on break as well, but she couldn't come into the casino, so she had to stand outside the sports book area when I went into place my bet. And it's just one of those things when you're out here that you look back on you kind of get a good laugh. Uh. And crease for better stories, and it did anything else. So, uh, as you're you know, continuing to adjust to life in in Vegas and as you know sports gambling, the profile, I would say, in general is becoming more and more commonplace. What's your career path and transition at that point in time? Because you started out making you're a single guy, you're working your way towards being in a sports book. You've worked a lot at that point, But what you're in goal? What did you think at that point? So honestly, it wasn't quite sure. I mean I had thought at that point my goal was to be in charge of um a sports book. I wanted to be the one making all the decisions handling media, being in charge of a risk philosophy, setting numbers, hiring my own team, and making sure whatever organization I was a part of was going to be molded by me. Well, as everybody runs into regardless of the field, there are always obstacles in your way, and mind just happened to be my then boss, who uh, you know, more or less had been a guy that really didn't know the sports betting space, hadn't put the time in. He was a guy that had worked his way up the food change through food and beverage and been thrust in a sports betting more so on the hairs in Rio Side pre merger before they took over the Caesar's Entertainment brand, never thinking that he was going to be in charge of one of the more iconic brands in the sports betting space. And as the media profile continued to grow and there were more requests for interviews, radio, even some TV and everything else along those lines, I think he started to feel that I was infringing on his turf. A guy that had been you know, all about me trying to do more to try and help grow business suddenly saw my name appearing in print and people making Todd Ferman's anonymous with Caesar's Palace sports books. So he all of a sudden tried to rein in some of the things I could do, tried to make my life considerably more difficult, wouldn't allow any of my initiatives to pass, and any relationship I had, which was you know, pretty strong with a lot of folks at senior level management because I've been presenting my findings for so long, he tried to get in the way. Went so far as you know, an employee that had always scored extremely well on his employee survey and from a bonus standpoint, would do everything he can to try and chip away at the reputation I had built. And before one football season, I started looking around. I continued to network through the space and when you know, and I'm not sure I can get through another year, uh, in this particular organization, I don't think I'm gonna be given more opportunity to try and do some of the things I want. End up taking a consulting job for a company called don Best. They brought me on for a six month consulting position. I had never made more than sixty dollars in in a year working at Casers. I think I tapped out about fifty eight five. And this was six years after I had started there. So a lot of my colleagues and some of the kids that i'd broken into with finance, we're in now in positions where they were making a thousand dollars a year because they had been on the fast track the different director level roles within the casino. But I had always see true to the passion in sports and go, you know what, I'm gonna ride this thing out as long as I possibly can and make it work. So I end up getting a consulting job. We go through some negotiations and I hate you know, I said, you know, hey, for me to leave, you know, I need to make sure that there's enough money and I have security, so you know where you guys be willing to pay me sixty dollars for the six month consulting role and they don't hesitate at the chance at all. So I end up taking a six month consulting role, UH for sixty dollars at the time. And the one thing that this company did they had relationships with a lot of books, the European operators and through South America, all in the legal market, and they were big making white label content at that time. So if you were in you know, match Matchbook or you were in sports betting Australia, they would come to you. We go, hey, we want an NBA video. We need two of your hosts to try and break down the game. And that was kind of what we did. UH did a lot of media stuff try to figure out, you know, how we could monetize that strategy and create a business to consumer product line the exact same way and it was about that time as well, where I was still doing radio with you, where I reached out and said, hey, I really want to start writing for OutKick And I think you had already been bitten by the gambling bug long since before gave me the opportunity. And I was kind of doing those two things, working as a consultant for a sports betting uh company out here and also writing for outkicks at the same time. All right, and then we get into and I think we're moving up on that point, like FS one launching, right F S one h F S one probably would have launched the second year, so I had been consulting. It didn't launch the first year that I had been a consultant, but it was probably early August of what two thousand and fourteen, I think that's where we're at. Then when they launch August nineteen through thereabouts. I think they launched in thirteen. Okay, so it would have been two thousand thirteen. Uh so, But we pitched them on an idea of starting to do some sports gambling things. And you know, this is before the Supreme Courts acted and everything else. And so with the launch of FS one, we start doing an occasional let it ride segment, right, so they will bring you out, they hire me, and then I'm like, hey, this guy Todd Furman will be really good on television. I'm telling you. So you would come out and like as part of the Fox Sports Live show, we might do like a one or two benette thing with like Charissa Thompson sometimes Andy Roddick. Different. Andy Roddick actually hosted it with us, and they were pretty gung ho about it at five, which makes sense because they were already I think, contemplating the idea of what would eventually turn into a Fox bed and more substantial gambling relationship. But for people out there, what do you remember about those early days of shows? Um? How disjointed U. Some of this stuff was that we would do it first because we didn't actually do our segments live. We did all of our stuff tape to live. So you were talking about doing a three to four minute hit where, like you said, it was you and me sitting at a table typically and Erotic was our host. Charissa then took over some of that hosting responsibility as well, But it was just trying to figure out for somebody who had never been on a staged out large before. How do you get your points across. You're gonna basically be given, you know, a minute to speak in this three to four minute hit, and how can you make all of those words impactful? How can you figure out the games and create that rapport uh and that dialogue that I think the three of us ultimately built and four of us we throw Charissa in there as well. That it was, you know, no moment is too big, and just kind of reminding yourself that, no matter what happened, you're talking sports betting, you're trying to have fun on a sports show. And Fox Sports Live at that point was really trying to figure out its identity. But the biggest thing for me was just having a chance to interact, you know, not only with the executives who were always around that show. And so it was a real luxury to be able to fly out every Friday back and forth from Las Vegas to do the show. I think I think the network paying me a thousand dollars a day for all that. So by the time there's taxes and everything else, and if you've taken a few bucks, but it's more to try and be seen, uh and have that kind of platform, but just interacting with some of the athletes, meeting some of the host being able to talk to such talented producers. I mean back then Clay Royce was our producer for Let It Ride, was now, you know, the lead man for everything we do to rocket In. So pretty crazy to see how that relationship kind of stayed in tact and came full circle for all of us to continue working together. But the branding obviously switched. Some of the content was there, and I'll never forget the first night that we did the show, they tried to do a bad beat segment, and they tried to do the NFL, and by ten o'clock the next morning, the NFL it called said absolutely not, there will be no NFL gambling content to be had on this. So we became college football only for all of those Friday night hits. We're talking to Todd Ferman. So that continues to grow. Uh, And now we have the lock It In Show, which I imagine a lot of people here listening hopefully have seen the clips or watched the show in the first two years that we've been doing. UH, And we have a really good time. Rachel, but at a cousin sal Todd Ferman and myself on that show, uh less than two years ago. So we're recording this in February of because people will listen to this older or whatnot. In May of eighteen, sports gambling, according to the Supreme Court becomes a state decision. They strike down pass but which a which was a federal prohibition. Have you been surprised or not surprised by how quickly things have changed since May of two thousand eighteen, and what was your initial reaction when you heard about that Supreme Court ruling? Well, even before we get there, Clay, there is a part of this story as it pertains to Fox that I think it is kind of worth sharing. So we did let it ride. I want to stay on Fox Sports Live for two years. We did part of the College Football Show as well, but also in the interim there, I was able to kind of carve out a unique niche for myself with the network by covering Nascar. Yeah, that's a good point because the gambling, well, it was funny about it. I remember sitting in the wind and I think it was with Jacob Aleman, John Ent and Scott Atcherson. They were out here for an event and I can't remember exactly what it was. We had already done the first season of Let It Ride, and we're sitting shooting the ship in the Winds Sports Book and we're joking about NASCAR, and I want to say Steve Crattick might have been out here as well, who's still in charge of NASCAR operations in Charlotte for Fox? And then they go, you know, does anybody actually bet on Nascar? I said, well, ironically enough, I said, I actually do, uh and I spent quite a bit of time on it because it's one of the more inefficient markets that's out there. And they said, really, you know, we didn't think anybody better than I said, ya, yause, here's kind of the laundry list of stuff that you can bet. And so they started to get their gears grinding, going, you know what, this may be an opportunity to do something a little bit different in sports betting, not necessarily what we were doing on the Friday Night show, but in the fabric of everything Else's Fox knowing how invested they were a Nascar to get NASCAR's approval as something that they thought could potentially drive eyeballs. So I started doing race Hub on Thursdays. It was on a semi sporadic basis, you know, once every three or four weeks, probably the second year that I was within network, and that ultimately ended up being one of the better and more furtuitous bounces that my career in media would take because there was a shift in regime. We kind of went away from gambling, and I was never really appearing on Fox Works one for the next couple of years outside of doing our Nascar hits. So fast forward to as you mentioned, lock it In kind of gets paid. We should we should mention too, by the way, we did with the original Fox Sports Alive crew the first live show on a sports network from uh the Westgate super Book with Carrisso with Andy roddick Um, you and me and a lot of the awesome producers including Royce who's now the producer of our show now, but a lot of people involved in that production, and we did it live from from for back to back years, right from the from the Westgate Sports Book, which is pretty awesome. Yeah, we did it the first year we were there from selection Sunday on that Sunday night to do hits from there, and then we basically carried it through the entire week through I think Sunday nights. We were there full eight nights in Vegas Hotel. Yeah. And the second year, I think we only did a little bit more in a bridge that starting on that Wednesday night all the way through Sunday. But that was definitely one of the first It was the first time that's something had happened. Jake Cornegete and his team at Westgate, We're willing to do whatever it took to help us set up our set in the back corner, and it looks phenomenal like they did a spectacular job setting it up. Yeah. Yeah, the sidelines were outstanding and to be their live in the casino, it was simply incredible. And I think it was kind of at that point where it dawned on you and what, wait a second, you know this is gonna be a lot bigger than people think. We're not quite sure of what the evolution is going to look like. And then fast forward, as you said, the repeal of past but Fox On our boss Charlie at the time already having a vision. It's springing into action to try and figure out how quickly they could bring a sports betting show to market. But if you'd have told me, as we sit here in you know, two thousand and twenty, that sports betting would take off the way it had and to see all of the networks, not only Fox, get fully behind it and figure out, you know, monetization strategies and everything else, I just told you were nuts. And to that, you know, bright eyed, you know, Bushy paled Todd back in two thousand and five, first moving to Vegas saying, hey, look, fifteen years from now, not only are you gonna be able to cover sports gambling on TV and to do what you love, Vegas is going to have an NFL football team, They're gonna have a NHL team, They're gonna have a variety of professional sports as well. I just told you were absolutely the same. So a couple of things, uh that I think people will be intrigued by on this the uh, the passpal laws repealed. The Supreme Court strikes down the federal prohibition and allows individual states to make decisions in sports gambling. In May of eighteen, within a couple of weeks, Charlie Dixon, who is uh in charge of our show and put it together and built the entire show, and I think you did an incredible job on the work there calls me it's around a Memorial Day, so it's that month of May, and says, hey, I want to do a daily gambling show. Would you be interested in doing it? And I remember getting the call from him because I was at I was down in Florida at a and I'm pretty sure it was a Memorial Day itself, I feel like, but I was down in Florida at a water park with my kids because I remember having the conversation hanging up with my with with Charlie and turning my wife and being like, hey, I think Fox is gonna do a sports gambling show and they want me to be a part of it, and I think they want Furman uh. And I was like, this is gonna be really really cool. And then that same year, at the US Open, which I believe was in god, I can't even remember was anyway, I was in the we had a big conversation about it in June. A couple of weeks later, the show launched in September. I mean, so for people out there who are not familiar maybe with television, Charlie Dixon went album therese all the people who put this show together, they came up with the idea. I mean they've been contemplating in it, I think a little bit, but put it into execution in May and it launched by September. And you and me and cousin Sal and Rachel had never met as a group until August. So we've been now done. Yeah, I mean we didn't even know who was going to be on there. I mean you and I had kind of agreed in principle. We knew that we had the chemistry, we had worked together, but we couldn't even get answers in terms of some of the lists and potential candidates they were talking to to help round out that panel with us being talked about up front. Of the names, I know, Chris's name was thrown out for hosting, in a variety of other names in the space. We had no idea what the show was actually gonna look like. And this is probably what early August we still didn't have any idea, and we had with un totally all four were in a room together. I think we did it. We did a table read out in l a of like a mock show, and again we didn't know each other. We've now done over three hundred shows, which is pretty crazy since then three three D hour long shows. So, I mean we've obviously worked together a ton since then. But I thought our table read was pretty decent. I don't know what you thought. And uh, it's not fake, I mean, you know, and I'm not trying to throw anybody under under the bus here in terms of sports television, but you know, we just did the Super Bowl, and I would almost be willing to stake my life on I bet that our show went out to dinner and or drinks together more than almost any show did combined on any other sports network out we get the super Bowl. Do you think that's a crazy suggestion? You know, I don't think that's the leap of faith at all. I mean we did dinner, drinks together, or saw each other in some capacity outside of the actual time we spent on set every single day we were there. I mean, so we all had obviously other obligations. You was radio in the morning, I had some podcast stuff time on radio row. Cousin Sal and Rachel each with their own stuff too, But I mean everybody spent time together, and I think we did dinner at least three or four nights in some capacity with a couple of us, two or three of us, a couple of nights with everybody. Sal's wife was down there with us as well. I mean there was one night Clay where you had I think you had a radio dinner. It was Rachel cousin, Sal, Sal's wife, Melissa, myself, Scott, who one of the more talented writers we have on our show, and Mohun, our social media guys. All of us cramming into an uber to go get pizza in some often complex not being able to find a seat there. Coming back to the hotel, we end up sitting outside on the well deck eating pizza, end up going into the restaurant, and then you joined us later in the night. A lot of the other bosses from Fox were out there, and it just creates that real family atmosphere that well, we love to bust each other's balls more than probably any other show on TV on a day and day out basis, there is a genuine connection and it does have that family feel. So when people say we love the show because the report feels real, there's nothing faked about it. And quite frankly, for anybody that's watched the skit, they know you and I can't act, so I don't think we'd even be able to fake it if we tried. That's exactly true. And also the conversation is really not that much different on air than it would be during the commercial breaks of the show either, Like if you just kept everything running, the goal is to just have a conversation. So I think Charlie and Witt and Therese and everybody who was instrumental in putting the crew together, even though it happened so insanely quickly, I mean, I don't know how often that. I would wager again that if you talk to anybody who's ever put a show on television daily, there's never one that went from inception creation because again, there never been a daily sports gambling television show on So they had to build it, Charlie in particular, like the entire show element for itself, and go all the way through and launch it a couple of months later, like it's unheard of. Um. And so you have showed daily from Vegas, I'm daily and Nashville, and then Sal and Rachel are in l A. Sometimes we're together, but the vast majority not to have all those moving parts and have it come together and have it be successful is really kind of crazy. No, And I don't think anybody could have expected us to have the chemistry we did, or to build a rapport us quickly, you know, almost overnight, but there wasn't one. And I can't remember deathly with the timeline because you and I were in l a one summer and had to be two or three years before where they had actually pitch us on a gambling concept. Then there just wasn't funding to be able to get it off the ground because he hadn't had to repeal it passed by I think acts was the one that brought that proposal to Scott Ackerson was it was a great guy who was at Fox for a very long time. Yeah, And so we had one proposal that was there, just wasn't able. The timing for that particular show wasn't right. So everything kind of came together, perfect confluence of events for locking In to get off the ground. And obviously the assemblage of talent. You never know what you're gonna get until you put everybody in the room together. And by the way you were, you were a part. I I think I hold the record for most Fox Sports pilots that have never aired, Like I I feel like Petro's Petro's papadecas is up there too. But I did so many different iterations of potential shows that could air. Um, and you were a part we did right. Uh like it. They they brought us in and they were like, we want to do a weekly out kick show. Um. And they were like, uh, you know, we want you to do a pilot. So we did a pilot and you were a part of that pilot. And I remember we shot it. I don't remember what year it was, maybe maybe in like December or fifteen. I'm not sure which one, but it was the night after the Fox Holiday party. Do you remember that? And H and Matt Schneider, who's a really good dude who works at the NFL network now was involved in the production. And he was like, you guys have to be in your bed, you know, by like you know, midnight. This is a big deal. We're gonna be shooting all day tomorrow. You can't be hungover. Remember that conversation where like he talked to us like we were eighteen year olds on a school trip. Yeah, crack me up. I'm going okay, I just kind of sit there, going is this a real discussion that we're having about all of this to try and be able to get this potential pilot off the ground. But I can let you fill in the gaps because I think, as most of the listeners out there were realized, none of those pilots actually saw the light of day, So they might be somewhere very deep in the Fox laul. There's a there's a vault out there of me and like six different Fox Television shows that have never aired that we did pilots of that that I would think would be at some point funny to all put back together and just look at. And by the way, speaking of maybe we did need to get lectured when we we well, we had a lot of fun because we would do uh. Initially, when I went to work at Fox, we had a Saturday morning college football show. That was the first year I think that was. That was with Aaron Andrews, Mike Pereira, Petros Papadakis, Joel Klatt and me and Eddie George. I think that was the basically the entirety of the show and we were on every morning from seven to nine. Like that was the idea, We're going to compete with Game Day from an l A studio right when they launched FS one, and so that was a fun show. But it was super early in the morning. This was before I got up every morning at four thirty, and I remember thinking, oh my god, who in the world could get up at five am Pacific? You know, I was like, this is so early. It's not even you know, like I was such a total pussy then because I didn't get up super early in the morning. Now, you know, I'm up at four thirty every day. But so, so we did that show. It got canceled, right, but they're like, we want you to do a Friday night show and that's what you were talking about earlier, which was awesome. We did a Friday night college football shows me. You were a part of the Gambling Show. Stewart Mandel, Bruce Feldman, Lindsay Theory, Matt Leiner was on it a lot, George Rice Stir. We had an incredible job. And I still think Friday night college football show is something that I would like to do because I just think there's a lot of college kids and people who are geared up for college football that are ready for it to be able to go. And I still think there's a market for it even before it gets to Saturday morning. But that's a pitch out there for any executives who are happening to listen to this podcast. But so we did that Friday show. But it was awesome because we would finish it like on the West Coast and then you could go out Friday night, right, And I'm just gonna throw throw you under the bus. Here here we go. We know what. I know where this is going before it gets there. So I think my connection is starting to break up. So we went out for Halloween that year. Uh, and there was a party. Do you remember where the part the Viceroy? It was an awesome party in Hollywood? Right, costume party? Um, And so I don't even remember what I was dressed as, but you go, did you have the crab? Oh? Yeah, that's right. I did the show dressed as like James as a crab. They got a crab costume for me because Jamis Winston. That was the year that he sold the crabs. I think it was actually I was a lobster, but the difference to a lobster and a crab, like only a few people were enough of experts to notice that note that species failure. But so I was a lobster. You had a chicken costume, right, yep, giant chicken costume. Uh, because I remember Joel Klatt refused to dress up, Like Joel is just anti costume in general. And so I did the whole show dressed as a lobster. Um and uh and you know, we broke down games and everything else. Uh And then uh, you were like, I've got to get up early the next day. Because one of the fun things about doing uh college football or or NFL football is Fox is the Green Room is just a huge bank of television screen. So for people who may never have been on the Fox lot before, they call it the Avocado Room. But you can sit down and it's kind of like the awesome best sports bar you can imagine. Right, So every game is going on, there's a huge bank of TVs. You can basically get any sporting event that's going on anywhere in the world. There's somebody who could put the right satellite dish on and you can watch it, right. I mean, it's it's kind of like a sports lover's paradise. Oh, It's it's tremendous. I mean, you sit there and not only are you there, you're with some of the biggest names in the sport as far as personalities are concerned, whether they're former athletes that are working on the network or a lot of the talking heads. Yeah, so you can find yourself sitting like there there was a time I'm watching the World Series and a Rod, Pete Rose, Frank Thomas, They're all sitting there breaking down the game while you're watching let's say the World Series, right, I mean it's just crazy and the same thing. And then their guests walking through, like Justin Verlin, Like any big name you can think of in the world of sports that might do Fox Television can walk through. And so you know, whether for college football, like you're watching games with Joel Clatt, Matt Liner, Brady Quinn, uh, Mike Pereira, who's there breaking even when he's not on air, like he's watching every game and breaking down what the right calls are. And so you and I'm Bruce Feldman, Stewart Mandel are there Like it's an awesome crowd, right of people who are just all sitting around watching college football or the NFL or whatever is. And for the NFL, it's Jimmy Johnson, Erry Michael Strayhand, like you can just sit there and watch the games with him. It's it's really like fantasy camp if you are a sports fan. Right, So you're like, oh, I gotta be up early tomorrow. We're out like Halloween, West Coast Halloween, So it's gonna be like two or three am before everybody gets home. Uh, we get home. You know, you're staying at a different hotel than me, but it's literally right next door, and so we're I don't I don't even know if this were Uber air. I guess it was Uber air. Maybe we're in an uber We're in a cab, I don't remember which one, and I'm like, are you sure you're gonna be over there early tomorrow? It's like you're really you're really pretty drunk. And I was drunk, but I wasn't like you were a lot drunker than me. After being that was probably the drunkest I've been on any work related trip four Fox, to the extent that that's oh you mean, like, yeah, it was not a work related trip. It was me and you and a couple of people out of there. It wasn't a work event. I mean, I had done my responsibilities on Friday night. Um, I had ended up staying over. I didn't have any work stuff to actually do on Saturday outside of watching games. But I wanted to try and get over the early because my play wasn't of the late afternoon. And figured, all right, I'm gonna shoot the ship with everybody. I'm gonna come over there and watch games. So I think we're gonna absolutely let loose and go have a good time. So one of the fun things about waking up on the West Coast, if you're listening and you're an East Coast listener, Central Times on or whatever, is a lot of times you wake up on the East Coast. Let's say you gotta wait around till noon when the games kick off, and you watch Game Day or you watch the big big noon show on Fox, and there's a decent amount of time to to run up. The great thing about waking up on the West Coast is games are going at nine am, so I don't know we get back let's say three am, and and that might be even earlier than we actually get back. I wake up, I'm good to go. I don't feel bad at all. I walk over. So there's hotels right by the Fox A lot. You can just walk right over. You don't have to get in a car when you stay there. And I walk over and by the by the way, this is the Winds and Losses podcast. I'm Clay Travis. You're listening to me and Todd Ferman. I walk over and uh and I am walking over and I walk in, and I'm thinking, there's no way Furman is gonna be here. And you know Stewartman, Dell, Bruce, Feldman, Liner, that crew is all They're already watching games. They have food laid out force I should say, by the way, they have breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Oftentimes that they will deliver catered, which is crazy. You know, it's phenomenal food, like anything you want basically. Right. So we're sitting there, we're chilling. This is this is the life. Ferman is not there, and everybody's asking there, like, what do you guys do last night for Halloween? I'm like, you know, I don't know, I don't know where firm You know, when when's Firman gonna come in? And eventually you come in and you look like absolute death. I mean it's probably halftime, maybe even late in the in the third or fourth quarter of the early games. Yeah, I think it was a little bit later because I actually needed to go to find myself a drink before I even was going to come in there, because I needed a hair of the dog desperately. I think as far as Bloody Mary's go, that would have been a top five day that I need to get some alcohol back in my system. So and I look at you and I'm like, oh my God, Like, what happened to you? Your entire eye is just it's totally bloody, Like all the white in your eye is just blood. And I'm like, dude, what because it hadn't happened, you know, before I dropped you off. I'm like, what happened? And you tell me what happened? What did you do? So? Um, you know, as any of us have done, when you have a lot to drink in those that wear contacts, you sometimes forget that your contact may or may not be in your eye. And I apparently had taken my contact out, but unbeknownst to me, when I woke up in a drunken stupor, had pretty much tried to continue to take a contact out that had long since from my eye. So I'm just glad it wasn't more serious than that in terms of a crash Cornia or anything else along those lines, but that I was about his bloodshot as it's I've never said, I've never seen an eye that read in my life. I'm being honest and I mean, and I was trying to figure out trust me, Clay, I went through the whole cost benefit analysis and do I actually show my face on the lot to watch games or do I just sit in the hotel bar, because if the executives come through, they're gonna think I got in some sort of real racy shift the night before and I'm my not be the kind of employee that they want to try and keep on staff. And sure enough I walk in, you know, Bruce Feldman and Stewart Mandel look at me like, oh my god, you look like absolute death. And then you proceed to tell the entire room the entire story about what transpired the night before, how we had gotten after it as a bar and let's just say that was a rough day of watching college football and an even rougher flight home. So uh, Since that time Locking In launches, we've done a show at the Super Bowl which we just did recently for an entire week, which was awesome. We were out in Vegas. We did a show for an entire week from the MGM Sports Book, which was phenomenal and they did an incredible job setting it up. Uh And and maybe we're gonna be back out there again. I don't know, but I think I feel very strongly that we're going to continue to do more live shows because sports gambling is continuing to spread. I believe it's in twenty one states right now and the District of Columbia. So we've talked for a long time here and I'm Clay Travis again talking to Todd Ferman. And sometimes people say, why do you keep saying sing who the guest is? It's so we can put ads in the reason why I do most things. By the way, people like I don't know why you keep saying who you're talking to. If we've listened for an hour, we already know it's so I can make money, asshole, all right, So that's why I introduce and say this is wins and Losses. I'm Clay Travis. You're listening to Todd Ferman because when I do that, they can more easily put in ads. All right, so stop tweeting me about that. I don't know what you have to tell us who were listening to do so I can make money, is the answer? All right? Uh? And so uh so what in terms of making money? Where do we go from here? Uh? So that that's kind of the broad question. I'll let you finish with because it's twenty and it's February, and people might be listening to this in six months, they might be listening to this in a year. But if you had to predict bar stool is sold to pen National, Uh, there's a just a I would say a rush on sports media content in general in terms of the value Fox bet has launched and they're obviously embedded deeply with with our show. You have CBS doing a deal with Will m Hill. Uh. You have Caesar's with a relationship with the ESPN Bleacher Report I believe has a relationship with Caesar's. To Turner, there's all these different moving parts. Where are we headed? What's next? You know what? I think that every one of these sports betting entities is going to quickly realize that the fastest driver to create brand awareness is to create that unique, original, branded content. Because you look at what's going on in the space right now, and I think a lot of the major sports book players in Jersey, in Pennsylvania and the other states that are student to come online, the acquisition costs are through the roof. And the unfortunate part is when you come up with match plays or you're offering a variety of different things, you can't really create that brand loyalty with the actual customer unless they're returning to your first your site for something other than a bet. And I joke about it all the time in sports betting because I think it's even more apparent now in this current landscape where people have so many different options right at their thing, your tips on their mobile device then they did years ago with brick and mortar. I was always taught in sports betting you want to sell the right product to the right customer at the right price. And ideally every sports book wants to try and create a relationship with players that aren't price sensitive. And what do I mean there that they want to try and find someone that's not going to shop around for the best of the number that doesn't care on an SEC football game that the number is minus three at one book and minus two and a half somewhere else. They want to try and keep their dollars in the same sports book and perpetuity. They want to try and create a loyalty program or something along those lines, and in my opinion, branded content is going to do that faster than anything else. I mean, there's a reason that Penn spent what they did on bar stool because they know bar stool can mobilize. The maths is about as fast as any content platform out there. And you've seen that without kick. I mean, you know your listeners will follow you through thick and thin, the folks that pay for v i P, that read you on a daily basis that if you begin to work with a sports book or our podcast does I mean, we had a strong relationship up with an offshore book and there was a ton of business and brand awareness that was created because the two are always connected hand in hand. And I think a lot of the sports book players out there are going to figure out that, hey, look, you know content is great, but if we can identify content with people that are going to push our product, that have a consistent brand message to get to that year old male male demo with discretionary income and I don't want to sell the women out there in sports betting, because it is a growing segment of the population that they're going to find a relationship and the first sports book that they deposited in their state, whether it's Colorado, whether it's Michigan, whether it's Tennessee, more often than not, that's where they're going to continue to bet their games for the next eighteen months, for the next year and a half, for the next you know, four years, five years, and on into the future. So I think it's such an important vehicle to have content that branded accordingly and identify with the right personalities they can push out your message. We're talking to Todd Ferman. It's interesting. In and Fox, I would say has been super uh. I would say progressive and also aggressive, which is oftentimes a good combo in the world of business. Eric Shanks who runs Fox Sports, Mark Silverman, who was obviously the number two there. I mentioned, Charlie Dixon who who got our show running, and I would say Mike Mulvehill and a lot of other people Jacob Aleman recognized that have been mentioned throughout the course of this program, recognized what sports gambling could be and how transformative it could be for someone who is in the sports content business. Uh. One question I'd like to ask people on the show, Todd as we kind of go out, is there are a lot of young people who are gonna end up listening to this right Uh. There are people who want to be the next you know, they're eighteen years old and they want to be Todd Ferman when they're approaching forty years old. Or there's people, believe it or not, Furman, who are seventeen or eighteen or or older who listen to this and they're like, man, I'd like to do what Clay Travis does one day. Um. I give people a lot of advice, uh, and try to and some of it's hopefully helpful or what I do. But I'm not firmly in sports gambling in the same way that you don't. You are. I love it, but this is your lifeblood. This has been your industry since you were a kid and on up through your career. If you were talking to those kids right now and they are eighteen years old, Todd Furman, they are twenty two year old, Todd Ferman, and they want to get a job in the sports gambling industry. Media or otherwise what would you tell them they should be doing right now. So the biggest thing is you're gonna want to spend plenty of time learning the mass behind its statistics and probability. Take whatever classes that your university or high school offers in that particular realm, because it's going to give you a leg up potentially on the competition that's out there. You're gonna want to read voraciously. But I think that holds true regardless of the field you ultimately want to go into to to learn opinions of people that have been there and done that before. But I think one of the biggest things for me was that every path isn't always a two B. Sometimes you have to try and figure out how can I develop a skill set in one job that's ultimately going to take me where I want to go in a different field. So while I knew I wanted to work in sports and gambling, I thought in some capacity it was getting my foot into the door for the casino business and then figuring out, all right, once I'm in the house, how do I find the room which just happened to be the sports book to be able to make my dream ultimately become a reality. And I think a lot of that stuff holds true for like you said, in media, where people have to get their start doing you know, early morning radio or late at night where nobody might be listening. But you always want to try and take advantage of every opportunity that's there to hone your craft. I mean my podcast a perfect example. We started doing it four or five years ago, before podcast had really taken off. We had listeners to show and we were recording it on a platform called go to Meeting. Now here we are with one of the larger unaffiliated sports betting podcast that's out there. We've never had distribution. We've had great sponsors. Fox bet Um was kind enough to kind of take over that leading role on our podcast this year, but just to kind of grow that foot for it little by little. But I think it's always about specializing and that was one of the best professional lessons that I was given. Be willing to do things that others aren't. As far as sports gambling is concerned, everybody wants to cover the NFL and college football. If you're gonna do that, you're gonna get lost in the shuffle. So make yourself a sports gambling expert in a field that other people haven't even thought about. For me, it was NASCAR that allowed me to keep my foot in the door with Fox and stay very much on their radar for when lock it In kind of came to fruition for somebody listening at home out there now, with the sports continuing to grow, maybe it's figuring out how they can take their love of e sports and learn the sports gambling side of that particular market. The w n B, A, MLS docker sports betting isn't going away. We've seen more and more coverage of it. But try and find those sports that people don't want to try and dive into that same passion, that same fervor, and you're gonna be able to distance yourself from the competition. Because better to be the best in a small field of other talented individuals than just be middling in mediocre. If you're gonna make yourself a college book fault or NFL expert, where everybody wants to try and be there, and the unfortunate reality of it is established personalities are always going to get a leg up. It's not as easy to get to the top of the heap and then ultimately pivot until you have that platform to be able to make those choices. Yeah, and you mentioned earlier your social media platforms. If you're a young person out there, you're gonna be found for everything that you have said or done, So be cognizant of that, both good or bad. Because you and I met because you said you like Dixie Land to Light and I happen to be scrolling through and see your profile and be like, Oh, he's at Caesar sports Book. I'd like to meet somebody who works in a sports book because I'm curious how that business is put in place. And that's just me being intellectually curious about something that honestly I wasn't involved in at the time, but I thought might be an area that I was going to be spending more time in in the future. And I've tried to learn the process of what we do now along the way, as I think a lot of people out there are learning and listening now. All right, I know I said last question a couple of times. This is the real last question. I don't know if Rachel or sal have actually listened to this program, but if they have, they've listened for a long time now. Would you like to take a shot at them as a as a basically a test to see whether or not they actually paid any attention to what you said, because I don't know if they lied or not. But sal was like, yeah, I listened to Rachel's wins and lost his podcast, And Rachel was like, yeah, I listened to Sal's. Will either of them actually listen to this and if they do well, they listen long enough to hear themselves ridiculed open forum for you Todd Ferman to see off on them to finish the program. I mean, if I'm sitting on here, my feeling is this that what's gonna happen, Clay, is that Rachel listened to this and a lot more extended format that cousin salwell, she'll hear some of this, and you know, I take jabs that Salve shall then relay it to him so he'll jump on there. So if we're gonna take shots at our colleagues and coast on the show, in the grand scheme of things, the biggest thing is that Rachel's got to make sure that she finds a replacement. You know, as we continue to do this, we know that Rachel is probably what what do you figure, Clay, she's with us, you know what's our contract runs out or maybe she decided to sign a short Rachel is and I said this on the podcast with Rachel when she was on she is so incredibly talented, right that she will not continue to do I don't and I don't mean this like she will not continue. I don't think to do sports for more than I would set the over under, since we're a gambling show, at most at two and a half years that she will even do sports. And that's not because she's not gonna have a ton of opportunities in sports. It's that she's so good if you just watch the stupid skits that we do, like, she's a legitimately good actress. So I think in living in l a and being as young and talented as she is, she's gonna have a ton of options to spiral off in different directions. So I'm not even just on our show. I'm putting the over under Rachel Bonetta is primarily in the world of sports. At two and a half years, would you take the over the under? I think that's a fair number because I think there'll always be a place for her in sports. But she has bigger aspirations than dealing with us three knuckleheads for as long as they elect to keep our show on the airwaves. So we know she move on a bigger and better things. So I guess this is probably better opportunity, maybe not take shots at Rachel, but more sell. You actually were trying to take a shot at Rachel, and you ended up praising her mentally by saying that she's so that she's thinking to continue to do our show. Well, I mean that's you know, out of sight, out of mind, and you know, people don't want to do our show, they essentially become dead dust clay that that's not works. So you know, once Rachel moves on to bigger things and forgets about the three of us, you know, we forget about her. We don't mention her name, and you know, we pretend she never existed. But it was more about kind of learning the space than anything else. I can tell folks that watch our show, cousin sells money line parlay strategy that he's tried to employ and that you've kind of taken a liking to and actually has record this on February four. Teams. The fact that you want a leg on a money line parley where your team never let a basketball game for the entire forty minutes. Is the kind of bullshit that I've dealt with. All people want to read. That's the Pepper die Baby, Pepper You don't You don't bet in favor of San Diego with Pepper I did in San Diego. Roll it out in the dub CC you gotta be on Pepperdine absolute garbage. They had didn't have a lead for the entire bat at the Buzzer Baby as time expired. So the strategy that you and cousin Sal is employed is money line parlates that couldn't be further five just occasionally, I only occasionally jump into the money line parlay play that couldn't be further from a long term money making strategy in this particular space. So if you're gonna watch our show and try and learn, and I can't really take shots because I didn't come down about ten million dollars, can you go dollars against you too so far this season? That is not the approach you want to try and employ. And despite what cousin Sal will try and tell everybody, you don't go through the betting board on a Saturday during the fall and try and find the biggest favorite, pair them together and be willing to put up four dollars to make a dollar coming back. But you know those are about the best shots. You're a lot better shot taker than that. And most of these things that I'll say about everyone, we'll stay right to their face on air, So one aoble to tune into the show. But all kidding aside, I mean, it's been such a great experience to be part of a daily show. First off, which is a ton of goddamn work. I never realized how much it was. How much. Well, yeah, we've seen the preparation you do. You pretty much mail it in Monday through Friday. So maybe your radio show is where you put in all your heart and hustle. Um. But to do a daily show has been such an outstanding experience. I have to be the only person in America who could be accused of mailing it in when I do a three hour daily radio show, a one hour daily television show, an additional podcast, and run a website. I didn't say you mailed in your radio show. I know you put just a TV show. I said you mailed in the TV show. So there's a difference I have to distinguish between the two supremely talented a television it comes easy to me, Oh my god, I can't believe I gotta listen to this, especially at my own time. And now all those add dollars, I'm gonna try and take a percentage of the action. But to honestly say that we have one of the greatest opportunities with the four of us, to continue doing this show on a day to day basis where we feel like it's the family, to have the support of the network, to have such a talented team behind the scenes, and you obviously can't rattle off every producer that's involved in making us look like stars and put folks out there who go, well, you guys, don't take it all that seriously. Sports gambling is meant to be fun. The people that are out there are going to treat sports gambling as a form of recreation. They want to have a sweat on games, they want to be involved. And while we'll try and teach them different lessons, there's a form and a vehicle for all of that. If you're serious sports better, you're not tuning in to lock it in to watch us, to try and hear us sound like the smartest guys in the room. You guys ridicule me NonStop when I try and break out offensive efficiency ratings or talk about any semblance of analytics. There are other platforms to try and get that information, so I think it's important for people to understand what our show is. I'm on the bet the Board podcast, which is a lot more in depth dive typically at NFL and college football throughout the fall, UH, to try and get behind that. But there's so many different vehicles to get your sports betting information. But I tell people out there that haven't been exposed to all of it right now, just identify the people understand a lot of this is for entertainment, and take some of the things that go on as a grain as salt more so as an active god. And for those folks that are there eight nineteen years old, they're just trying to figure things out. Once the gambling stops being fun, or you're betting with money that should be earmarked for rent or to put food on the table, make sure you reach out to somebody, because we joke about it, and I know you do with your beach house and the real estate portfolio and everything else you've built. Gambling should be best enjoyed as a form of recreation, not where it's negatively impact in your life, the same way that anything else, whether it's excessive drinking or things along those lines. And I always feel as an ambassador for sports betting that has to be said because we joke about things regularly. But there is a percentage of the population that can't handle it. And if you see those people, whether do you or people that are involved in your daily life seek out help because there's no worse feeling and having gambling being the driver to take away some of the opportunities that you otherwise would have at your disposal. Yeah. Look, if you're doing anything that is in your leisure time and it isn't fun for you, you shouldn't be doing it. Like the reason why I gamble on sports is because it's more fun than not gambling on sports. It's the same reason that I occasionally drink, right, But if you are unable to restrict your enjoyment of that in moderation, then you need to get help. And I think that's true regardless of what that substance or activity is. That you find yourself unable to escape Todd Ferman outstanding stuff. Appreciate you coming on the Wins and Losses podcast again the show on television. Lock it in uh four thirty one thirty as you move from right to left across the country east to the west coast. If people want to hear more from you, your podcast is called again that's the Board podcast. They can follow me on Twitter, of course, that's Tod firm in our podcast. A little bit of sabbatical. I we'll be back with some March Madness episodes, but yeah, I mean we do a little bit deeper dive on some of the games. It's not exactly for everyone, but for those folks looking to learn a little bit more about how professional editors view the sports betting space, it'll be a deep deeper dive than what you've grown accustomed to. Unlock it in and Clay. Because TV comes to you so naturally, I know, you get to take a week off and spend it down with your fans. I'm headed to Mexico, Yeah, where ironically enough, Sal is also going. The real grinders on the show will be at home making sure that they can continue to take our TV show in a forward thinking manner in direction, breaking down baseball and everything else there as I try and create the greatest comeback that we've ever seen in locket in history. And I'll allow you to knuckleheads to sit atop the throne when season two comes to an end. What sometime we think in July, but we're not quite sure. Yeah, that's exactly right. I am Clay Travisy is Todd Furman. This has been the Wins and Losses podcast. If you enjoyed this one, there's twenty some odd more, Kirk curb Street, Paul fine bomb or h ol Bonetta, as we just mentioned, Todd Ferman, cousin sal who were on the show with me. Coaches, Mike Leach the new head coaches we said beginning, Mel Tucker of Washington of Michigan State. So many different people you can check out, Shannon Terry, the founder of seven Sports. Lots of different cool stories. Make sure you don't miss them. Wins and Losses. I'm Clay Travis. This is the podcast.