During a recent conversation with Kenny Wallace on his show, Dale Earnhardt Jr. revealed how his podcasting venture came into being. Today, Dirty Mo Media is inarguably the biggest podcasting base in all of NASCAR.
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But Earnhardt Jr. confessed he didn’t have much confidence or interest in the whole thing to begin with. In fact, if not for one person, motorsports fans wouldn’t have the variety of quality podcasts that Junior’s company puts out weekly. That man is Mike Davis.
Junior revealed how back during the days when he was driving the Budweiser car in the Cup, Davis was hired as his PR person and later he was elevated to the role of a brand manager. This meant everything Earnhardt had a connection to, Davis would manage those with an aim of building it further in recognition and value.
But one day, Davis came to him and proposed that they need to get into podcasting. Junior was immediately dismissive of it, claiming he had never listened to a podcast in his life, that he only listens to the radio, and music and watches TV. Yet Davis insisted, claiming “‘Trust me, podcasts are gonna get popular and you’re gonna wanna be in this space.'”
Junior agreed. All he really had to do was record a brief synopsis of his race day on his phone every Sunday and slowly but surely, “it grew and grew.” “It was very popular with our core hardcore fans. Here was this neat little piece of great content that they could get in this one space,” the Hall of Famer added.
What Dale Earnhardt Jr. loves about podcasting
While every medium of media has its pros and cons, what drew Earnhardt to podcasting was the fact that he could tell the story he wanted to tell. “You get out of a racecar and run your mouth or you get to the racetrack on Friday and go in the media center and run your mouth and be all smart-assy because racecar drivers have massive egos and we’re all smart-assy people, people who know everything,” he described. “Then they write the story and then when people read the story they go, ‘Damn, blew that out of proportion.'”
“So the podcast was great because you controlled the narrative. Your message is your message and you are in control of it. Whatever you want to put out there, you put in that show, in that podcast.”
Junior claimed he began “dialing it back a little bit” on his interviews outside of the podcast, growing slightly more reserved, to the point where when he wanted to say something important, something that mattered, he’d do it through his podcast show.
“Then eventually I told Mike, I think it’s time for me to host or co-host, so we’ve been doing that a while,” he said, adding that he never thought it would become what it has now.
