PFT Commenter and Dan “Big Cat” Katz pride themselves on being two regular guys. Only, they’re two regular guys who have become two of the more prominent personalities on the Internet—and that growing popularity, along with the continued success of their recently released sports/comedy podcast Pardon My Take, means it's probably time to start taking two not very serious dudes at least a little seriously.
PFT Commenter (who has long been anonymous) amassed a following by lampooning the foolish opinions of NFL fans populating the comments section of football blogs, piggy-backing on their “hot takes” with his own equally preposterous ones. When they said, “Russell Wilson isn’t black enough,” he said, “Maybe Ben Roethlisberger isn’t white enough.” He has echoed their notion that none of us really know if concussions are that bad. But the genius of PFT is the same thing that makes the reality he’s mocking so very frightening: his satirical takes are outrageously ludicrous—and yet entirely something you could see a large swath of (Trump-voting) America actually believing. (Consider: “Women are simply too illogical and emotional to be A.M. sports talk radio hosts.” PFT column or not?)
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Katz, on the other hand, is a blogger from Chicago. Seemingly the #2 to Boston-based founder of Barstool Sports, Dave “El Presidente” Portnoy, Katz has always been the more measured, less inflammatory version of the character his boss plays. And though the site’s tone mirrors both the space it comes from and who it appeals to—largely, white males—and has been responsible for content like "Guess That Ass," the narrative of “Barstool as barbaric bros” often outweighs the reality: in the digital age where pace of news and volume of posts are often two of the most integral metrics of success, Barstool is a force to be reckoned with. (Most recently, Barstool caught heat for a Facebook Live video where since-fired Fox Sports reporter Emily Austen made disparaging comments about Mexican, Chinese, and Jewish people; though, if you watch it, the Barstool guys arguably handled it well.)
That’s why Peter Chernin and his investment group bought a majority stake of Barstool in early 2016, valuing them at somewhere between $10 and $15 million. Together, PFT and Big Cat—and "Handsome Hank," a producer who Big Cat says "is really the third member of the show" and runs the social media accounts and helps come up with bits—have teamed up to make Pardon My Take. Since its release in early March, the podcast has hovered in the top five sports podcasts in iTunes (it was at #1 when I interviewed them last week, and is currently #4 as of this writing). Not bad for just a couple of regular dudes.
GQ: If you are out at a bar and someone asks you what your job is, what do you say?
PFT: I would probably tell them they need to sit down and I need to buy them a meal because it’s going to take forever. But I still have trouble explaining to my friends what it is that I do. I would say we satirize the worst sports talk radio with just a look at the lighter side of it all. We don’t take ourselves very seriously, but we do take seriously making fun of other people.
Dan: I usually go with just blogger and then get weird looks and people just kind of judge me. “Okay, this guy is a f*cking loser.” And then occasionally I’ll get follow-up questions. “Actually I do more than that and it’s bigger than that.” But for the most part I say blogger, and I let people dismiss me overall.
PFT, I know you’re anonymous, but Dan, Barstool has such a big cult following, do you get noticed a lot?
Dan: In Chicago, it’s nonstop. No one really asks me what I do at a bar because they’re usually like, “Hey, Big Cat, what’s up?” There’ll be some neighborhoods that I know that are maybe not as much twenty-year-old white guys, and we won’t get recognized as much. It’s been a progressive buildup for me, probably over the last three or four years. It started as a trickle, but now I can’t really go anywhere in Chicago without people yelling out their car windows or coming up to me at a bar.
