Erika Ayers Badan will share lessons from her seven-plus-year tenure as CEO of Barstool Sports — which she’s affectionately called a “pirate ship” — and other insights gleaned from her career in a new podcast series.
Titled simply “Work,” Ayers Badan’s podcast premieres Monday, Feb. 3, with new episodes releasing weekly on Mondays. It’s available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music (via this link). The show is produced by indie podcast network Lemonada Media.
Fair warning: “I’m gonna use the word ‘work’ a thousand times in this thing, because I love to work, and I love to think about work, and be at work and help people at work, and talk about work,” Ayers Badan says in the show’s trailer (listen below). She will talk through topics like “what to do when your coworkers are idiots, what happens when you hate your boss and what do you do when you’re stuck in a rut.”
“Work” also will cover a variety of topics including current events — like major corporations ending DEI programs, companies ordering workers back to the office five days per week, and “revenge quitting” — plus real-world work challenges she has struggled with in the past as well as those she currently faces. Ayers Badan’s guests on the podcast will include Lindsey Metselaar, host of dating podcast “We Met at Acme,” and Benjamin Kraim, founder of cannabis media and lifestyle brand WeedFeed.
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In addition, Ayers Badan will discuss the backstories of sundry corporate jargon, like “circle back,” “bandwidth” and “EBITDA” (which, for the record, stands for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization”).
“This is an unfiltered, vulnerable look at work and what it takes to make it at work,” Ayers Badan says. “Work isn’t perfect and neither are people but they both can be great. This show looks at what’s happening in and around the topic of work and offers perspective, advice and knowledge to those seeking to do more or be more at work.”
It’s not her first podcast rodeo: At Barstool, she hosted “Token CEO,” a series that provided an “inside look on what’s going on at Barstool HQ.” Ayers Badan left Barstool, the bro-focused media company, in January 2024. That came after Barstool founder Dave Portnoy bought the site back from casino and gambling operator Penn Entertainment for $1 (following Penn’s $550 million acquisition). Running Barstool under Penn’s ownership, Ayers Badan wrote in a memo to staff, “was a balancing act and kind of an exercise in futility — trying to generate bets at the same time as protecting a pirate ship while also subtly contorting it to be something more predictable, pacifiable and projectable to match with a casino company.”
In April 2024, Ayers Badan was named CEO of Food52, a food-centered media and commerce company, after serving as a board member and adviser since 2019. “I have a brand-spanking-new job and what I wanted to do was to create a podcast for people who want to be better at work and want to make work a way to change and make their life great,” she says in the “Work” podcast trailer. She currently serves on the boards of the Premier Lacrosse League and public safety technology company Axon Enterprise (the maker of Taser weapons).
Ayers Badan is the author of “Nobody Cares About Your Career: Why Failure Is Good, the Great Ones Play Hurt, and Other Hard Truths,” published in June 2024. Prior to Barstool, Ayers Badan held several senior roles at media and tech companies, including president of Bkstg, chief marketing officer of AOL, VP of Branding at Yahoo and senior director of MSN branded experiences at Microsoft.
Lemonada Media is an independent podcast network founded in 2019 by Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Wittels Wachs. The company’s original shows include “Wiser Than Me With Julia Louis-Dreyfus”; “Fail Better With David Duchovny”; “Choice Words With Samantha Bee”; and “The Sarah Silverman Podcast.” It also recently announced Lemonada Books, a new imprint and co-development partnership with Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.
Listen to the trailer for Ayers Badan’s “Work” podcast:
Erika Ayers Badan ‘Work’ Podcast Launched by Ex-CEO of Barstool Sports
