COLLECTED & CONSIDERED
Collected & Considered
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Cancel Me if You Can

by Dave Portnoy

Biography & Memoir

Added to the collectionJuly 27, 2026

Selected Passages

Selected passages

the key to staying afloat is keeping your oars in the water at all times. In other words, as long as you are in the game and have a pulse, you never know what can happen.

But you come at one of my guys, I come at you. Shoot first, ask questions later.

You can’t make a West Coast kid run at an East Coast pace,

Bill Belichick had an old quote: “If we’re all wrong together, we can still be right.”

I had heard a rumor that ESPN literally had a meeting on how to be authentic like Barstool. Umm, buddy, you already lost the second you turned on your projector.

ESPN had been wanting to hire Barstool talent without having to attach the name Barstool long before Pat joined the scene. To this day, they still can’t find new talent like we can. They just try to poach ours and then have the audacity to stick their noses up at us. True hypocrites in every sense of the word.

For me, how I view ex-employees is all about how people leave.

While the overall character of Davey Daytrader was basically a satire of the finance industry, I will say that I believed 99 percent of the stuff I was saying about the space during those days—especially in regard to the GameStop saga. Wall Street is filled with crooks and criminals masquerading as superior businessmen. They like to pretend like they are smarter than everybody else, and that the average Joe Schmo can’t trade stocks without them. In reality, it’s a good old boys club. It’s designed to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. And when, for the first time in the history of Wall Street, the little guy was winning, the big guys just pressed pause on the entire game to reset the playing field. It was disgusting. I have no respect for people who build their fortunes through Wall Street. You should have to build something of value to get rich in this country; not just piggyback off the work of others playing a rigged game.

Trump Derangement Syndrome was more contagious than COVID ever was.

And maybe how I view Trump is shaped by my own life experiences. I’ve been dragged through the coals by the woke left media, lied about, have had things ripped out of context over and over and over again. If I read and believed all the hit pieces written about me over the years, I would think I’m Hitler. And I know these “journalists” do it on purpose. They are intentionally misleading people and leaving out context and facts. It drives me bonkers. My knee-jerk reaction whenever this happens is to attack the writer and publication. So when Trump coined the phrase “Fake News,” I could certainly appreciate it. When Trump is rude and mean to a New York Times or Washington Post reporter, I get it. That’s how I would be and act if I were him. If I think you are being fair to me, I’ll be fair to you. But when I know you have an agenda, the gloves come off.

I hate how so many people in this country proclaim to hate it. All they do is criticize it. They don’t want to celebrate the Fourth of July. They don’t want to root for America in the Olympics. When was the last time AOC or Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib said something positive about the United States? It’s always about how awful it is here. How racist, how unfair, how sexist. How bad capitalism is. Yet all anybody wants to do is come to this country. All anybody wants to do is migrate here