Taylor Lewan and Will Compton went to sleep on election night in November at ease. They were supporters of Donald J. Trump, interviewing him weeks earlier on their podcast “Bussin’ With the Boys,” and incoming vote tallies projected an easy win.
They were still startled when they woke up.
Onstage during Trump’s televised acceptance speech, Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, had thanked “Bussin’ With the Boys” and other entertainers — the podcaster Joe Rogan, the comedian Theo Von, the streamer Adin Ross — for lending the president-elect their audiences.
“Centuries from now, if there’s a museum and clips are playing, ‘Bussin’ With the Boys’ was mentioned in a presidential victory speech,” Compton said. “How crazy is that?”
Unlike many athletes turned successful podcasters, Lewan and Compton were not household names when they began their show in 2019. Compton was a backup linebacker most recently for the N.F.L.’s Tennessee Titans, and Lewan, one of the team’s starting offensive linemen, was perhaps best known for downing beer at hockey games. But through testosterone-laced conversations with podcast guests — their N.F.L. coach said he would “probably” cut off his genitals in exchange for a Super Bowl victory — they have cultivated a following of young male listeners.
In addition to Trump, their guests — almost always men — have included the rapper turned country star Jelly Roll and the quarterback Josh Allen. Tight end Travis Kelce discussed how paparazzi have changed his life since he began dating Taylor Swift. The comedian Shane Gillis spoke about his casting on “Saturday Night Live” being rescinded after it was discovered he had used racial slurs.
Compton and Lewan have been lumped into the so-called manosphere, a realm of male-oriented podcasts and alternative media credited with increasing Trump’s appeal among that demographic. Similarly styled creators have also taken over sports media: Pat McAfee, a former N.F.L. punter, is one of ESPN’s biggest stars, and Fox Sports is integrating Barstool Sports, the media company founded by Dave Portnoy, into its programming.
Compton and Lewan say they sought to emulate the success of McAfee and Rogan but are not interested in labels. They just want their platform to resemble the unfiltered banter among athletes.
“We have so many good, awesome conversations — whether in the locker room, the sauna, the cold tub, the cafeteria,” Compton said during an interview in their Nashville studio, a converted red bus plastered with stickers. “It’s like, ‘How do we highlight these conversations and just be ourselves?’”
From their round leather chairs, Lewan added, “The whole idea was to make this bus turn into a locker room where you can have organic conversations, you can have editorial freedom.”
Their guests display that comfort regularly. On a recent episode, the retired tight end Rob Gronkowski acknowledged rumors that a teammate had masturbated in meeting rooms at the New England Patriots facility.
“I may or may have not seen it live,” Gronkowski said to laughter from background producers.
The red bus was parked in a garage-like building about five miles from Broadway, the city’s downtown bar district and the center of the country music business. Cans of Bud Light and NUTRL, a vodka-seltzer product made by Anheuser-Busch, one of the podcast’s sponsors, were spread throughout the building. A deer head was mounted near their recording stage.
Compton and Lewan proudly lean into their vision of masculinity. Over guitar strums in a video intro to “Bussin’ With the Boys,” a male singer muses about drinking beer, gambling on sports and “hanging with the fellas.” At various points, each host makes sexual gestures. “No woman’s going to tell us what to do,” warbles the singer.
“Bussin’ With the Boys” is the 11th-ranked sports podcast on Spotify, although its 640,000 YouTube subscribers are dwarfed by the audiences of the Kelce brothers and Shannon Sharpe. It was one of the first podcasts helmed by active professional athletes (the hosts have not played in the N.F.L. in several years), when coaches and team executives broadly viewed such endeavors as a distraction.
During off-season training, Lewan said, the Titans coach, Mike Vrabel, publicly scolded him at a team meeting for a podcast episode during which a teammate discussed a medical procedure.
“There’s over 100 people in this room, and it’s solely focused on Taylor Lewan and how I was hurting the team, essentially,” Lewan said. “It was a horrible feeling.”
Even so, Vrabel accepted an invitation for the podcast weeks later, where he described the bodily sacrifice he would make to coach an N.F.L. champion. In another early notable interview, the cornerback Jalen Ramsey explained that while playing at Florida State, he would message the girlfriends of opposing college players before games to annoy them.
The social media buzz attracted Barstool Sports, which signed the podcast to a distribution deal and provided additional production resources.
About five years later, “Bussin’ With the Boys” is now an independent operation after the sports gambling website FanDuel outbid Barstool to become the podcast’s presenting sponsor. FanDuel, Lewan and Compton declined to comment about the financial details, and Portnoy did not respond to a request for comment.
Compton and Lewan, who is fresh off a stint as host of the Netflix reality series “Battle Camp,” said they now have about eight employees working for them, plus an inaugural class of five interns. They are diversifying their content by adding shows, including a podcast on which Compton discusses his experiences as the father of two young children.
Early on, Lewan said, he and Compton relied on “low-hanging fruit that we knew people would laugh at,” such as, “When did you lose your virginity?” He added, “We’re still doing all those jokes, but I think we’re more curious because we understand more about how this game works.”
The most scrutinized episode of “Bussin’ With the Boys,” with its hourlong conversation with Trump, required some outside assistance.
Lewan and Compton had met White, the U.F.C. chief executive, in 2023 when he was a podcast guest during the Super Bowl festivities in Arizona. They bonded over motorcycles and wellness and are now regular attendees of U.F.C. events; at one that year, White introduced them to Trump in a brief conversation next to the caged octagon.
As the presidential campaign progressed, White said, he encouraged Trump to diversify his presence beyond Fox News.
“I said to him one night, ‘If you keep doing Fox, you’re going to lose,’” White said. “‘Those people are already voting for you. And then you’ve got the left that are calling you a Nazi, a racist and basically a horrible human being. You can’t win an election like this. You got to get out.’”
That is why Compton and Lewan found themselves speaking to the presidential candidate at the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago — he had just landed after a Detroit rally — weeks before the election.
“They’re really talented when it comes to speaking with people,” White said. “And the president is a big sports guy. I just knew it’d be a good fit.”
In the conversation, Trump spoke of his goals for the country, how he was different from Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, and current events in the N.F.L. But one answer in particular generated headlines. When asked about his high school athletic career, Trump said he was not fond of football and playing against “some guy that was lifting weights all day long and came from a bad neighborhood,” a comment some viewed as racist.
Shortly after the interview, The Washington Post asked “Bussin’ With the Boys” why Compton and Lewan had chuckled at Trump’s response. In a video posted to social media, Compton responded to the journalist’s request by farting into the phone.
They might have reacted differently earlier in their careers, the hosts said, but decided to tackle the controversy directly using a tactic they had picked up from Portnoy.
“We know we didn’t do anything wrong,” Lewan said. “We know Trump didn’t mean it that way. So let’s just be who we are.”
Emmanuel Morgan reports on sports, pop culture and entertainment.
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