Who Influences me? Part 1

Mark Brown

November 23, 2021

Influence is everywhere. It is inescapable. The best that we can do is vet then choose who we allow to influence the decisions we make. This influence on me comes from many different tiers. I have very little influencers in my personal life but have gotten a few more in the media space. For the bulk of the last decade, the influencers came from television shows I watched, which were mostly cooking shows. The last 2-3 years have brought fitness influencers from Youtube into my life. Sports stars have mostly very little influence on me because I prefer to follow things that I actively do but there is some there. This will just be a brief piece about who influences me and why they do.

Let’s start with the last group. It’s the smallest of the group by far. No one who plays the 4 major North American professional sports (basketball, football, baseball, and hockey) or soccer has any real influence on me because they play sports I am barely interested in actually doing myself. I have golfed for 13-14 years now so there is definitely some influence there from professional golfers I have watched over the years. I have taken parts of what various people have said on air for improving my game but I can’t narrow that down to names. The best example I can think of lately is when Trevor Immelman was doing analysis for the first Tiger vs Phil and advised when chipping to be sure to bring the shoulders all the way through the swing. I started doing it and it really helped. However, the only professional golfer who has had any real influence on me is Phil Mickelson. The first putter I bought was a direct result of my being a fan of his. He’s also genuinely entertaining, whether winning or losing. He’s the golfer I connected with the most because I feel he’s a little more everyman, despite my knowing otherwise. He didn’t win as much as Tiger, but I feel he is closer to the rest of than Tiger is. Still, it’s hard for Phil to have a lot of influence on me because I can’t golf like him. Ultimately, influence has its limits.

I have watched less television lately but a large chunk of the last decade was spent watching Food Network, HGTV, the History Channel and smattering of sports. I have watched probably more programming relating to food, cooking and the preparation of food than any other subject outside of movies on television. This dates back to days at home on Saturday mornings on a Des Moines area PBS station. That was too early for me to truly be influenced by Jacques Pepin or Julia Child and even Emeril Lagasse before I had access to his cable show. I just didn’t have the cooking reps under my belt to really learn from those shows. After I started cooking more often and really developing my own style and palette, everything about food media changed for me. I could then pick on smaller nuances in regular cooking shows, “road” food shows, and competition shows. Cooking is best learned through experience. Timing, knife skills and all the other things are the backbone of an important life task: Learning how to feed oneself. Information picked up by watching or reading becomes helpful after the skill has been acquired.

The show and host that has ultimately had the most influence on me in the kitchen is Good Eats with Alton Brown. Good Eats was a different kind of cooking show. A lot of cooking shows seek to help viewers develop a recipe book of their own and the techniques necessary to make them by doing them on screen. Bobby Flay, Guy Fieri, Giada De Laurentiis, Rachael Ray all populated shows like that over my time watching over the last decade. I liked some of those shows and they are genuinely helpful but they were ultimately too much slave to recipes for me to fully get into them. That’s largely because I’m not much of a recipe chef at heart. I own 4 recipe books. Two of them are baking based and 2 are reference books about fruits and vegetables with some recipes thrown in. I rely on a base of information to cook and plan. Brown’s show brought just enough of the science of cooking into the base of it that it managed to be a show about food and cooking without becoming a textbook. The way he presented information really helped draw me in because learning about failed attempts to solve problems is every bit as important as the ones that do solve them. I changed to using kosher salt instead of table salt, using hardwood chunk charcoal instead of briquettes and a few other changes that have unequivocally made my cooking better and helped me better understand. The biggest influence on me is seen in my skill set as a cook. Understanding what to do when is where his influence on me is best seen.

Mass media has always been a mental stay away for me in terms of influence for the most part. A lot of that is that most of what I see being discussed is stuff I genuinely have no interest in. That lack of interest was a driving factor in me switching majors in college from journalism and mass communication to history. If I am not interested in a subject, then I don’t have much drive to ask questions about it and that is a requirement for a reporter or news person. ESPN has always been a part of my media watching life because it is covers a stupefying amount of sports. It is though them that I was introduced to the 3 people who have the most influence in the mass media market: Bill Simmons, Ryen Russillo, and Colin Cowherd. I will take those in order of influence.

Simmons is a full on media mogul whose podcast is the most downloaded podcast in the sports category. When I first got on the train around 2004-5, he wrote for Page 2 on ESPN’s website and his writing style was very readable, fun and full of pop culture references that work to describe what he was going after but still very informative. His “fingers stopped working” around the mid-2010s and fully invested his time in the upcoming podcast market. It’s one he helped establish at ESPN by creating his first podcast “Eye of the Sports Guy” then the one that really got it all off the ground “The BS Report.” Friend and former NBA player Jalen Rose calls him the “Podfather” for good reason. The BS Report I listened to from probably 2008 until he left the company, and I have listened to him on a site he created a few years ago now call The Ringer. He’ll talk about all manners of subjects in the podcast but main features of it are the NFL, the NBA and gambling. He is very knowledgable about the NBA, its history and is a Hall of Fame voter. His book “The Book of Basketball” is a must read if one likes the NBA and explains its development over time, which is exceedingly fascinating. The first influence for me comes in the form of that informative, easy-reading style that helps lighten what would be a heavy subject. The second part is that I invested in podcasts from a very early part in their development. I listen to a handful of them a week. He’s at the center of all of that.

Ryen Russillo currently has a podcast at The Ringer that I have subscribed to since its inception. I got introduced to him by his time on ESPN Radio in the afternoons with co-host Scott Van Pelt. Like Simmons, he’s well versed in all of the major North American sports but centered around college football, the NFL and the NBA. Russillo and Simmons are quite similar in that vein but there is far, far less gambling content involved with the former. His style is direct and very light on the bullshit. He doesn’t hide a lot in his perspective and thoughts. What really sticks out is his willingness and ability to handle talking about business sides of sports without becoming a depressing cynic. The business side of professional, collegiate and amateur sports is something I have heavy, heavy interest in. He’s one of the few guys out there who go in depth on collective bargaining agreements, a topic that I could listen to endlessly about. He’s got good pick up basketball and gym stories. He’s fair, firm and genuinely entertaining. There are a lot of people who can do the first two but the last one can be lost in a variety of ways.

Colin Cowherd, currently working at Fox Sports, first hit my screen and radio about 2009-10 on ESPN. His radio show is dominated my national topics so there is a lot of NFL, NBA and talk about major sports stars. Occasionally, big stories will his and he’ll talk about them but regular season baseball or hockey in general aren’t in the cards. His podcast he gets into more subjects because the long form format of discussions permits it more there than radio, with its rigid commercial breaks. He’s always relatively loud, both in terms of vocal quality and directness. I don’t always agree with him but his takes and theories are almost always logical. The two I mentioned above and Cowherd all share the qualities of being firm, fair and entertaining. They have all also made significant changes in their lives, which are quite public because of what they do. Cowherd has talked about those changes and the positive effect it has had on him. It helps me question things about my lift and how best to answer those things.

I will be back next week with the the second part of this entry about those that influence me. I feel it’s important to help everyone reading this understands who helps really drive decision making.