Dan Le Batard acknowledges the fact that The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz hasn’t been the same show fans have come to know and love the last couple of years. But as he and his team at Meadowlark try and re-shape and re-tool the podcast to meet the expectations of the staff and fans, the show’s namesake needs to take a step back.
Le Batard and executive producer Mike Ruiz hosted an abbreviated version of the show last Thursday, and spoke about his brother David, who passed away earlier this year after a bout with brain cancer.
He explained how the cancer initially made David act erratically and affected his behavior. He recalled multiple instances where he had to follow his brother around the streets of Miami Beach at 2 in the morning and even had him involuntarily committed under the Baker Act.
But Le Batard broke down talking about his father, Gonzalo, who during that time was taking a medication that changed his behavior too.
“I was headed to go pick him up to take him to a psychiatrist, and I get a call from my mother that they were at the hospital,” he said through tears. “The firefighters found a 78-year-old man hanging from a balcony, an eighth-floor balcony. If they hadn’t helped him, then I would have been pulling up to go help my father and he would have been on the pavement.”
“I wanted to explain to the audience why we’re coming to Hollywood and meeting with these creative people so that we can build something that is difference and that satisfies us creatively and that honors all the things that my parents were trying to build of a life for me,” he added.
Le Batard continued that the situation with his family over the last couple of years affected him to the point where he started to tune out fan feedback as a means to implement his own improvements to the show. He felt like it was a necessary step given the circumstances.
“I had to check out, because of what my last two years are, I’ve always found criticism hugely constructive, hugely helpful,” he said. “Yeah, our audience knows what’s good and when we’re not meeting that standard. But all of that has gotten so cruel. And because I’m in a diminished confidence, because my temperament isn’t right day to day to do this, I have had to totally check out on criticism that used to be helpful just because it was hurting me for the first time.”
Dan Le Batard went on to say that while cruel with some of the feedback, he appreciated his audience for their loyalty and dedication to the show even when he was at his hardest times and pushed through to remain loyal to the show.
“The loyalty is at least in part because they believe that they know what this thing is and they expect this thing to not disappoint them wherever it is on issues of the day, on how strong the product is, they expect us not to mail it in and go Hollywood and stop caring,” he said. “The loyalty of our audience has buoyed me there because I think it’s unusual the amount of times we get from the people listening to this right now who say, thank you for dragging me through that bad time in a way that brought me something that felt less bad.”
