Book of the Week: "Everything Is F*cked" by Mark Manson - BARSTOOL IS A DRUG

It's strange, I was reading the second to final chapter in "Everything is F*cked" the same day the Bruins marketing team, partnered with the Barstool Sports to promote its rally towels. Of course this move by the Bruins sparked a huge outcry since the highly visible sports blog has had a less than stellar reputation.

I won't be bring up past incidents Barstool was involved in because 1. they're in the past and 2. those things have little to do with how it relates to "Everything is F*cked." 

As Mark Manson explains in his latest book, there are two types of value in the marketplace innovations and diversions. Innovations are things that replaced one type of pain for a more tolerable type of pain. In the book, Mark uses the example of the polio vaccine. Instead of experiencing a lifetime, a short one, of debilitating pain, one exchanges it for seconds of pain from a needle stick. There's still pain, but it is brief and short-lived. 

Compare this to diversions, which are things to numb the pain. This is where Barstool comes in. The value it created in the marketplace was for the adult male population that loves two things: sports and the opposite sex. It gave them a place to go for both. Barstool followers eat this stuff up, but none of the content is of any true value. 

It is like alcohol (which is also a vice of many Barstool followers). Alcohol has calories, but they are empty calories. As people are ingesting the cold, frothy adult beverage, they are taking in empty calories, but those calories are about as useful as a winter jacket in the Sahara desert - making them gain weight without adding any nutritional substance. 

Barstool founder and content strategist, Dave Portnoy, is not very different than Edward Bernays, who essentially coined the idea of marketing towards peoples feelings. Bernays was the guy that pushed cigarettes onto women when smoking was seen as a taboo for a woman to do back in the early part of the 1900s. These two guys made a living giving people things they don't need. Seriously, do you really need see El Presidente eat a slice a pizza from a random pizza shop in New York City? No, it's pure voyeurism. 

Diversions in society are very dangerous. All they do is mask the pain and that ends up making it worse, because you're going to want to keep consuming more and more of these diversions to continue numbing the pain. And that, my friend, is the story of all drug addicts.