Andy Johnson: Founder, Fried Egg Golf

ANDY JOHNSON: I think golf is really an interesting game in the sense of whoever's the best at 14 is rarely the best at 18. And whoever's the best at 18 is rarely the best at 22. And whoever's the best at 22 is not the best at 30. 

MASON REED: I'm Mason Reed, and this is Invested in the Game, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each episode, we tell the stories of remarkable people from the world of golf who have committed their time, resources, and emotional energy into making golf the wonderful and sometimes maddening game that it is.

Before we jump into our interview with Andy Johnson of Fried Egg Golf, you're probably asking yourself, "Why is Charles Schwab doing a golf podcast?" You might already be listening to one of our other five podcasts, which, not surprisingly, cover investing and the markets. Quick plug, check them all out at schwab.com/podcasts. And we want to add one more to the family that' stretched outside of investing and into our clients' personal interests. Yes, despite being highly engaged investors, our clients do have lives and interests outside of the financial markets.

Golf has and continues to be a top hobby of theirs. And because of that, we've invested our time and money into supporting the game for decades through events, promotions, and sponsorship of the professional and collegiate game, and more. Our goal with this podcast is to bring you stories from around the world of golf that highlight the people who have invested their time, resources, and emotions into the great game. Whether you're a diehard golf fanatic like me—I've been told not to call myself a golf nerd—or you just love a good human-interest story, we've got you covered. We're going to try to keep these digestible, something you can listen to on your commute or maybe while you're walking the dog.

And great news, like all Schwab podcasts, Invested in the Game will be delivered to you ad-free—just an occasional public service announcement like, well, the one I'm doing right now.

Let's jump into our first guest. Someone I've known for many years—I've enjoyed his content and his friendship—there's no one better to help kick off a golf podcast than Andy Johnson. Andy started Fried Egg Golf as a newsletter to a handful of friends 10 years ago. Today, Fried Egg Golf is one of the leading voices in the world of golf.

Their thoughts on golf course architecture, professional golf, recreational golf, and the history of the game carry tremendous weight in the golf industry. Andy and his team's common sense, call-it-as-you-see-it approach to golf has created a very tight follow-ship with his listeners. And it's grown Fried Egg from that humble newsletter to a legitimate media company that produces golf events, podcasts, including the beloved Shotgun Start, golf course reviews, merchandise, and yes, an email newsletter that still goes out all these years later and reaches a few more than 10 people. In our conversation, Andy talks about how he got hooked on golf, how he founded and runs Fried Egg Golf, and what he sees in his crystal ball for the game moving forward. Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

Andy Johnson, guest number one on Invested in the Game. 

ANDY: It's an honor. 

MASON: Before we jump in and hear a little bit about your background, about the Fried Egg, how does it feel to be on the other side of the microphone? You spend a lot of time being the interviewer and maybe a little less time being the interviewee. How does it feel?

ANDY: Yeah, I occasionally go on other pods. I kind of love it. I love not having to do the pressure of the prep. I also like not having to worry about keeping things on time. You know, there's an art to hosting a podcast, and I don't think everybody understands it. There's a lot of anxiety while the podcast is going, before the podcast. And I love being a guest. It's like anything when you're a guest, you just kind of show up.

And you know, I don't have to get ready. You didn't give me a long list of things to prep. One of my pet peeves is when somebody asks you on their podcast and then gives you like a giant project … 

MASON: Gives you homework?

ANDY: Yeah, it's like well, "So I need to do like ten hours of work, and I'm going on your podcast."

MASON: Pick one. You get one. Well, you basically just described everything I've been doing, trying to prep. And I'm assuming I did more prep than you did for this.

We're going to spend some time talking about Fried Egg, but we can't do that unless we understand a little bit of your relationship with golf and how you got started. And my best understanding, speaking of prep work, is that your introduction to golf, or at least your love, started by watching the U.S. Amateur. Is that true? Or like a lot of people get introduced by a family member that takes them out to the golf course. Is that where it started for you?

ANDY: Yeah, I think that it's kind of a mixture of both. My dad played golf, and then my grandpa was like so golf deranged, played like every single day once he retired, was just so into it, and so when we would go on family vacations, my dad, my uncle, and my grandpa would go play golf, and we had on that side of the family, very small family, whereas just my sister and I have another cousin. And I wanted to go with them to the golf course really bad when I was young. I remember like being 6 and being like, "Why can't I go?" And so I started to like kind of hit balls. 

Like we'd be on vacation. We might stay at a place that's on a golf course, and I would like sneak out sometimes. And then I remember at my 10th birthday, which was 1996, I got a set of clubs. And then I vividly remember watching the U.S. Am and then obviously the Masters happened shortly after that. And it was just, you know, this moment with Tiger Woods.

Tiger Woods was just such a … I think for people my age, which I'm 38 years old right now, Tiger Woods was just the coolest athlete around outside of Michael Jordan. He, you know, he kind of hit this sweet spot where Jordan retired, and I was a Chicago kid. So I was like a huge Michael Jordan fan. Jordan retired. And I think for me and maybe for other people, Tiger Woods was like … kind of replaced him, even though he was in like this other sport. He was like this superstar that you wanted to be like. I remember when the commercial with Tiger Woods came out with him bouncing the ball on his wedge. 

MASON: Yeah, bouncing the … yeah.

ANDY: I mean, all of us at the at the local muni I grew up playing at, like we all had this junior pass. They had this great deal. It was like $185 for the entire year for a junior pass. And a buddy of mine who is a fellow golf entrepreneur now, we grew up on the same street.

He has a golf bag company. We grew up riding our bike to the golf course. I mean, we would sit on the chipping green, just practicing, trying to do the Tiger Woods commercial. I mean, like, think about that, like in the context of, like today, I don't know if there is anybody that people would try and emulate from a commercial. And that also goes to like how well Nike did the whole branding and launch of Tiger Woods. That's the other thing. Like when you're 38, and you look back on it now from like a business standpoint, you're like, "God, they like had just some brilliant campaigns with him."

MASON: Absolutely, what a cultural force that is. I don't think that none of us really can fully wrap our heads around the impact that a person like that at that moment in time with the force of a marketing like Nike has, all of it, I mean it all worked and he was extremely good, which always helps like Michael Jordan on the Bulls.

ANDY: Yeah, I think the dominance and then also bringing just a whole different energy, a whole different gravitational pull, to a game in golf that had been, I don't think it was necessarily stale, but it had been so one way, and you know, who a pro golfer was, was like so characterized as one thing, and he was just so radically different.

And I covered the 2019 Masters when he won, and I think back to that all the time about how insane it is and how special the game of golf is that like this guy that like guided my entire life. There is like a roughly like six-year period where golf wasn't the focal point of my life. And like this guy who really inspired me to get into the game and deepened my love, appreciation of the game was then winning a major championship that I was covering as …

MASON: Right. Yeah, that's your job, basically. Yeah.

ANDY: It's wild. Like that just doesn't happen in other sports. It's one of the beauties of golf is like the lifelong aspect of it and the potential for longevity of the star players. I think that's one of the things that is scary that might be going away a little bit with golf, with just the money, the youth movement, and kind of the speed orientation of the game that you might lose some of that. But that's, you know, the game thrives on generational stars, players that are around … if you could get those rare players that are around for three decades. That's something that like, you know, until Tom Brady and LeBron have really pushed the limits in their sports that other sports just don't have. And that's what makes golf so special from a professional angle.

MASON: Hopefully with these extremely fast golf swings, we won't see bodies falling apart here at the professional level. Certainly not a problem, I don't think, that you and I have playing recreational golf, but it's crazy. You were talking about the family vacations and Tiger coming on the scene, and then your uncle and your grandfather and your dad. Did you start to take your interest in the game? Did it go on hyper drive after that? Did all of a sudden you go from this thing that you saw on vacation and then to, "I need to spend more time either caddying or with your buddy?" What happened from that moment on?

ANDY: Yeah, absolutely. So I think like what's different is like I look today and like all these kids are starting to play golf at like 5, you know? Back then, our public golf course, they had this junior pass. They weren't really like friendly to kids. It was still like the times of, like, kids, you know, you need to be … you should be supervised by an adult. We had like specific times that we could play and that we couldn't play. A lot of times we just were milling around the putting green.

MASON: So you were allowed, but you weren't really allowed. It was like, you're allowed, but not really welcome there. 

ANDY: Exactly. It was like a completely different game then. But I think I was like under the age that you're allowed to work. But like so I started caddying. One of the things that's great—I grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago—they have exceptional caddy programs. It's young kids. I was a young kid. And I'll tell you what, like getting dropped off at a caddy shack every day when you're 12, 13 years old is maybe the greatest thing for developing street smarts you can get because … 

MASON: For mostly good habits is for learning most good things …

ANDY: Well, you, just … the wide range of personalities and people that you encounter in a caddy shack. I'm sad like the caddy shack I grew up going to is now … like, it's been closed. They don't even do it. They do like appointments for caddies. It's if kids have appointments for caddies, you're missing the whole, like the whole point of caddying is you go sit and wait and hope your name gets called sometime before noon, like you get …

MASON: There's a rite of passage to that, right?

ANDY: There's a rite of passage. You get to noon, and you're starting to think "Should I go home? I've been here since 5:30. Should I go home? If I get this loop, I'm still, I'm not going to get home till 5 p.m." Like, there's this whole psychological aspect of caddying and sitting in a caddy shack and waiting with nothing to do. Nothing to do, no control of the TV. That is beautiful, but I just got so into the game. I played all sorts of sports. I played basketball, baseball, everything growing up. But my buddy who lived on this same block, we would play wiffle ball golf up and down our neighborhood. God bless our neighbors. We would just be hacking divots out of these people's yards.

The road was water. Any pavement was a water hazard. OK. And we would play from tree to tree. And we had this intricate courses that we would play around the neighborhood, and we play wiffleball golf like all the way up and down the block, like I'm talking like a half a mile up the block and back. And we would just … no neighbor ever … we never heard about it. I don't know if my parents ever heard about it, but we would be taking practice swings in people's yards. And I think about it … 

MASON: Hacking up their yards. 

ANDY: Once I had a yard, I was like, "I cannot believe what we did to these peoples' yards."

MASON: Very loving neighbors you had. So you clearly got good at golf. You were, you played in high school. I think you played a little bit in college. What was the journey from wiffleball to, college-ish? 

ANDY: Yeah, I just. I played junior golf. I played tournaments. I played on our high school team. I went to Illinois. I wasn't good enough to play at Illinois. I could have played at a lot of smaller schools. I went there, and I won the walk-on tryout, but didn't make the team. I did do a year of D-III golf in my college journey, which was a year off from Illinois. And I played D-III golf, and I decided to go back to Illinois to finish college. But along the way, it was a mixture. I worked at a golf course. I think about this all the time. Like I worked at a golf course. The golf course I worked at was really good to me: Knollwood Club in Lake Forest. And once I got to a certain level—like, I was in high school and playing on the high school team—they let me teach junior golf.

And by letting me teach junior golf, the pro gave me playing privileges. So I had my pass at Lake Bluff Golf Club, which was, it's a great little muni to grow up at, nothing special, just like big putting green, big chipping area … 

MASON: But you had golf access at this point. The days of being frowned upon as a child were gone.

ANDY: Yeah. I would say that like one of the things, my parents joined a club when I got really serious about golf in the northern 'burbs. It wasn't anything fancy, but like being able to play at Knollwood and practice at Knollwood because I could like work and then just practice, and like that seamless transition of being around a golf course, I would play at night. I think like one of the things, and I think about this with golf all the time, our high school team was really good. We had a kid that was an all-state player and then another kid that got a scholarship to USC in California. And I played between 3 and 5 on our high school team.

And the year before, I didn't make the state team, and we had two other kids that played college golf on that team. So it was a very competitive high school team. And I think the thing that I've found is that it rings personally true is like I've gotten better at golf, I think, all the way into like my late thirties. What I always think about golf is like the improvement isn't linear like other sports necessarily, where like if you have the athletic traits, you just keep getting better. 

I think golf is really an interesting game in the sense of whoever's the best at 14 is rarely the best at 18. And whoever's the best at 18 is rarely the best at 22. And whoever's the best at 22 is not the best at 30. And I think you can see this throughout, like Seve Ballesteros. Everyone around him always said like he was the best he ever was at golf was when he was like 16. 

MASON: Wow. 

ANDY: And you think about a player like Jordan Spieth. Jordan Spieth's an interesting character because it's like he might have played his best golf at age 21, and that's just the nature of the sport. And I think that's the interesting thing about golf is like you don't know. It's like the mixture of it being a physical endeavor, like your body being able to move well and being able to move right, but then also the mental side and like your ability to process situations, your ability to let go of things.

Like the mental maturity aspect of it is where, I know physically I can't do some of the stuff I could do 10 years ago, but mentally, I'm like worlds in a better place than I was then. So I just think golf's like … I grew a couple of inches when I was a freshman in college, and that completely changed my golf game. Like I started hitting it. I came back from my freshman year of college, and I hit the ball 30 yards further, you know?

MASON: Changes everything. 

ANDY: Yeah, I think that's like the fascinating thing about golf. And it's what I tell a lot of younger kids when I talk with like junior golfers is, "Listen, like just because you're not the best now, it doesn't mean you're not going to be the best in a couple of years," you know?

MASON: I want to jump into the Fried Egg a little bit, but before I do, you're bringing back all these amazing memories and even listening to them reminds us all of the love of the game. When you think back to all these years, what moment in there brings back the most positive memories or the place where you say, "I had unadulterated love for this game at this moment" in your life? 

ANDY: That's a great question. I talked about this already, but the wiffle ball golf. We spent hours doing this as kids. Before I started caddying, my summer was just, I would just ride my bike to the golf course and be there all day long. More recently, I think I play a lot of business golf, and I play a lot of golf for my job. And I think people don't realize I replaced my hobby with my profession.

MASON: Right. 

ANDY: Last summer, I went up, and there's a course near me called the Meadow Club. And I know a lot of people over there that work and belong there, but it was a Monday, and I said to my wife, "I really need to just go play golf." And I went up on this beautiful Monday afternoon, the club was closed, and I was like the only one out there.

And I played in two and a half hours. And it was just this beautiful night. There was like this misty nature in the air, and the sun was going down. It's up in the mountains. And like the idea of walking in nature, being just alone with your thoughts. And it's I played for score. I don't really play for score very much anymore. But I really like I was out there grinding myself. 

MASON: By yourself. Yeah. 

ANDY: Yeah, and I was just like, I played great, and I had this great afternoon. One of the things I love about that place, my cell phone doesn't work there. It like just doesn't work. I don't get service. So it's nobody could get a hold of me. I was up there for two and a half hours, and I played all 18 holes by myself, walking in this beautiful place on this beautiful night. And like it was just me against the golf course. And I think that's one of the things that I've grown to appreciate is just the nature of golf and how it prepares you for other difficult things that you encounter in life.

Years ago, I qualified for a U.S. Mid Am, and the year before I had made a mess the last couple holes, like everybody, I choked and missed. I was qualifying in Indianapolis. I lived in Chicago at the time, and I had this just three-hour drive where I was just like … 

MASON: To think about that?

ANDY: Yeah, replaying the double-double finish to miss by one or two. And the next year, I was playing OK. I was not playing nearly as well as the year before, but I just finished. I finished the round. I got it done. I fought through like some scrappy ball striking. I found something on the back nine and I birdied three out of my last four holes.

I was in, and my buddy, my good buddy who I've played a ton of amateur golf with and ton of golf, personal golf, with, he goes, "You know, Andy, you have to relish this moment because this is the 1%—the 1% of this game that brings you joy. 99% of the time, it kicks your ass, and it makes you wonder what you're doing, but 1% of the time, it just … everything falls into place, and you have to just sit back and enjoy it."

And I think about that a lot is like it's a great moniker for life. Like, life is hard. It's not easy. It only gets harder as you get older, and, in the moment, when really good things happen, you have to take the time to really enjoy those really good things because the way life is, the way golf is, you might play it once a week, once a month, twice a month, whatever it is, the frequency.

So it doesn't happen. Life is a similar percentage basis, right? It might be like a little bit different, but for … 

MASON: It's in the general vicinity, yeah.

ANDY: For the most part, like you're just like, you have to get over stuff. And I think that's the thing that I love the most about golf, and I think there's a lot of things like I took away from caddying from like understanding people and relating with people, but what I love about golf so much is like it builds so much personal character because it's unfair.

It's like unequivocally unfair. The whole premise of the game is unfair. When you think about the founding of the game. It's so silly. It's so insanely stupid. They made this game in Scotland where they played in the sand dunes next to the beach. They had sticks and a ball and they said, "There's the hole over there. Just go get it."

It's an unequivocally unfair game. The whole premise of it is unfair. And we are so crazed by it, and it just lets us down all the time and it's like … 

MASON: We just keep going back for more. Yeah. 

ANDY: The love of golf is building this like human spirit within yourself to continue to go back, even though the game constantly lets you down.

MASON: Wow. I wonder what that resilience and grit comes from in all of us that we just keep going back to that. Everybody … 

ANDY: We're all deranged. 

MASON: I think … like your grandfather. So speaking of a challenge, you about 10 years ago or so, if my math is correct, decided … you were working in the corporate world. You had a white-collar job in the corporate world, and you decided that you were going to send a newsletter to a handful of people, which of course, we'll talk about has become what the Fried Egg is today, but what was going on with you, and what was happening in golf at that moment, when you sent 10 people a newsletter, what were the circumstances that might've been successful? That maybe the time was right, that something you were saying or something that was going on was ready for that? 

ANDY: I think back about this all the time. I think I was in like the perfect life position to start a company, and a lot of people think it was like a hobby. I intended to start a business. I believed I could start a business. I had worked in the tech startup world for a couple years, and I was part of a company that was like the toast of the town. Great venture capital firms were backing it. There were these case studies written about our growth, and I saw the meteoric rise to the … then it became not the darling, and the fall.

And then I moved over to another startup that was in media. And that was where I learned a ton about media. And this one was like tech media. So it was all about tech startups. And I met a ton of founders. And like, all the founders in Chicago and some other cities, you get to know these people, and you're like they're just normal people. Like, they just had an idea, and they started something. And I just began to think like I could start a business. And I was working in media. I understood how to run a media business, how a media business worked, and I started to think about what kind of media business what I run.

And I had two things that I was very passionate about, both sports, I was very passionate about basketball, and I was very passionate about golf. And thank God I didn't choose basketball, because I know way more about golf. And then basketball, like, the task of writing like every night was very daunting.

But I was a huge consumer of sports media in general. Sports media, I worked in tech media, and I felt like I looked at the landscape, and I looked at what was going on in other sports and other industries. And I thought golf is very far behind these other industries in terms of like how people communicate with audiences and like the types of content that were being read. Like, I was a consumer of the golf media, and I found myself constantly disappointed in what I was consuming. So that kind of started the idea of the newsletter. 

I'm sure you're familiar with The Skimm and The Hustle. These newsletters, they were in their earlier days then, but they were very popular. And I looked at golf and I was like, "There isn't like a newsletter like that for …." And when you think about the golf demographic, it's busy professionals. It's people that are older that don't have a ton of time. What if I just deliver them what they need in a newsletter form? 

MASON: Do you feel like the media companies at the time were behind? 

ANDY: Very behind.

MASON: I was going to ask you about this being a hobby, but it sounds from the earliest days, you thought there's a business opportunity here. This was not like two years of a hobby that you then said I could monetize. So were the traditional outlets behind the ball? And you said, "I can catch them sleeping"? 

ANDY: Absolutely. I say this to people all the time. I hope we haven't fallen in this bucket, which we might have, but golf businesses are typically, to me, 10 to 15 years behind the trends of normal businesses. So if you look at what's a cutting-edge idea in another industry, you usually could just applicably apply it to golf, and there's not somebody thinking that way.

And I think that was like my, one of my huge advantages was that I came from the tech world. I understood what it was like to be in a startup. My previous experience in startup world, I spent three months in LA without a car selling to small businesses, like gritty stuff. You have to do stuff you don't want to do.

And I think that's one of the things that's hard with growing the company is, we have a staff now, and I'll have employees sometimes tell me, "You can't do that." And I'll be like, "You forget that I've done every job at this company. You can do that."

MASON: Yeah, I know the company pretty well. We're still small enough. 

ANDY: But yeah I just … in general, I think like golf is typically 10 years behind trends. Like SEO writing for golf like became popular like five years ago. SEO writing for other industries have been around for years. Golf podcasts like … No Laying Up and us were really like the first two golf podcasts. No Laying Up was a little ahead of us, but like Bill Simmons had a podcast in 2009. It's kind of like insane when you think about, if you look at the arc, it's fragmented, it's slow to adopt technology, and if you do something innovative with a little bit less bloat, you are going to stand out if it's good. 

MASON: You're starting to see that now with apparel and other things where people are realizing that there's these little cracks that they can expose because of exactly what you're describing. So you're the media … the content and media version of that, and you could start to see where it's happening across the industry, it seems like. 

ANDY: Exactly. And this is the thing is like the barriers to entry for a business have never been lower because of the internet. The internet's like the most amazing thing. I curse social media all the time. I hate that I have to be on it. I don't necessarily want to be on it all the time, but like at the same time, I wouldn't have a business without social media. It provides a free opportunity to grow and expose your brand to millions of people, billions of people. That's like the incredible thing, like without social media, none of these brands are possible. Without the discovery that Instagram or Twitter or YouTube provides. That's what's allowed so many of these consumer brands to take hold.

And just if you think about golf 10 years ago, your options for apparel were Adidas, Nike, FootJoy, Cutter & Buck …

MASON: Yeah, it's the big three or four. 

ANDY: Yeah, and now you go into a pro shop, and it's B. Draddy, Holderness & Bourne, Grayson, like Peter Millar.

MASON: And if you go on Instagram, you can probably find some even smaller and more niche than that. 

ANDY: Exactly. And it's just a matter of time before they get up there because I remember, I … like Holderness started, I think, the same year I started. It's … they're everywhere. B. Draddy was a couple of years old.

You just think about like how much rapid change has happened. And it's just, that's the beauty of the internet now. You could get into a deep discussion about what social media does once you have followers, and you've built your business on it, but that's like the risk of building a business.

And that was one of the other things to me that was really appealing about email, and like the core of our business being through that email newsletter was, like, it is a very intimate relationship with your readers. So with that, like one of my big things … I think like probably the thing that set me apart from a lot of people that have tried: I had no monetization plan. I said two years from the start, I'm not going to try and make a dollar 

MASON: Another thing you learn from the tech world, it sounds like. 

ANDY: Yeah. We aren't going try to make any money. Like all I wanted to focus on was building a strong voice and a loyal following because, like, to me, you need to be in a place where you know your voice, you know what you're doing before you have people that might want to influence your voice. So I think we went like three years without making any money. We might've had some merch between year two and three. But I think that was like the best thing was just the patience of … and we're still being patient. And I think like setting a tone of being patient and making sure that you have the right partners, and they aren't partners that are trying to steer you in different directions that really influence how your audience views you. 

Because that to me is the most sacred bond we have, is between us and our audience. And we can never, ever disrupt that or really offend them. Because if you don't have a relationship with your audience, a good one, then you're not going to be a good media company.

MASON: I wanted to ask you about that. And I'm actually going to combine two things because you've touched on both of them, it may be into one thought. One was just about how you maintain honesty. I think that you're known for being very blunt, respectfully blunt, or transparent about things. And that's probably builds the bond with your audience. But the other related question was how much of it is being a journalist versus being in the entertainment business? Do you have to fact check things, and do you feel a responsibility to accuracy? How does that work in this newer space versus really traditional journalism or traditional entertainment?

ANDY: I am not a trained journalist. I think my biggest influence in sports media was Zach Lowe. I think the way he breaks down basketball is incredible, and he relies on nobody. It's just like "I'm gonna tell you what I think about this." We've broken a few news stories over the years, but really what we do is analyze.

And to me that's my duty to my audience, right? It makes it a lot easier. I really don't get called by anybody, ever, about what I say about certain things because most part, I'm just telling people what I think about certain situations. I've heard from certain people that I've been critical of, "Like listen. I've listened. You're fair. You call balls and strikes, and it's not like you're going out of your way to try and swerve into criticizing. You are just taking the news and telling people what you think about the news." If you want to break news, especially now, you're going to be a puppet for the people you're breaking the news for. That's just the reality. You see it across every industry. With access, you lose your voice. To me one of the big things that I've always tried to steer away from is I don't, you know, it's really hard … I've become friends with players, but I do not try to be friends with players.

I don't want to be friends with players because I want to be able to talk with them talk about what's going on. With golf courses that's the same thing: I want to be able to speak freely, speak my mind. And I think one of the things that I learned throughout this process was, like, when I play golf with somebody at a golf course that's a member, I have to tell them exactly what I'm thinking, as uncomfortable as it might be, because I cannot be the person that tells somebody one thing while I'm at their golf course and then goes and writes something completely different. I played golf at a club once. It was funny. It was like this full-circle moment. They're doing a renovation. They came back.

But I played golf with this guy who was a really nice guy, great guy. And I was like, "I don't think the golf course is very good." And I told him all the reasons I didn't think it was very good. And the golf course now has undergone a renovation. The committee was, like, reaching out about, like, would we be interested in covering the renovation?

And they're like, "We talked to so-and-so, and he told us exactly what you said on the golf course." And it's like, that is important. Like, you can't be two-faced, right? That's the other thing is like you have to be consistent, and it's hard. It's really … 

MASON: It seems like the truth is your friend, but it means that you're going to find yourself in some awkward situations where you have to work through that. That sounds like that's your gravitational center that keeps you safe from being seen as hypocritical or ruining the bond with your audience as you were talking about. That's the North Star. 

ANDY: That to me is one of the things that golf media has struggled with the most, over the years, is being honest. You could go so many directions as to why there are a lot of very influential parties in the game that can push people away, and some of that is just personal relationships. Like it's very hard to have a personal relationship with a player and cover the PGA Tour if they are a star player. That is a challenging situation. 

MASON: Right.

ANDY: It is also very difficult to talk about some of the core issues in the golf world if you're sponsored by an equipment company. So what I've tried to do throughout my career is avoid those situations. Some of them are avoidable. Some are unavoidable. I haven't done a perfect job. I have friends, but the day I stop telling the truth, or what I think is my opinion of things to my audience, is the day that I'm going to stop doing what I'm doing.

MASON: Makes sense. You're talking about social media. You're talking about playing golf for two and a half hours where your phone doesn't work, and I've had the opportunity to be around you in person. And it seems like the job never ends. And certainly I would assume if you allow it to, but even if you don't quote-unquote, "allow" it to, it seems like the job never ends.

And the podcast is Invested in the Game. Like you have invested pretty much your entire life. And with that, you bring your family into it, and it really becomes something that defines you almost. How do you handle that? And how do you feel about that? How do you handle that? That it's difficult to escape it.

ANDY: I don't handle it as well as I wish I did handle it. It's definitely … it's an area of improvement. I have a young family. It's definitely something that's like difficult. Anybody in media understands that your job like never shuts down because you're always anxious about "Is something happening that I don't know?" Your job is to know what's going on.

MASON: Right.

ANDY: And be ready to talk about what's going on. So by nature is like not a job you can just turn off. One of the things that has helped, I moved to the west coast. The golf world kind of shuts down around 10 p.m. Eastern. Like you aren't going to see anything come out generally. Now the issue is it starts really early. So I wake up with a lot of anxiety. 

MASON: You wake up with … 3:00 in the morning filled with anxiety and looking at your phone. 

ANDY: So I've got my nights back, but I have … my morning is, it's a work in progress. Like I think like I'm getting to the point where it's easier and easier as we've grown. I know that there are people that are awake, but when I was like social media manager and podcaster and … like when I was out doing everything, it was impossible. And it was … I think this is the thing about … that people don't talk about with entrepreneurship is like, you know, listen, like I've chosen this life. I'm living my dream. I don't ever feel like I work, which is like the most amazing thing in the world. I'd be lying to you if I didn't think about if I never started it. And I just had a normal job. I think about that because there are things that appeal to me about having a job that like you leave at the office. And I haven't felt that way for 10 years. 

MASON: When did it start to feel that way? Your first newsletter goes out to 10 people. When did you feel like, "Oh man, this might be what I do all day, every day." And you're talking to your fiancé about that. When did you say, "Holy moly, I might be all in on this."

ANDY: We're welcoming risk. At the time, my girlfriend—now my wife—we were dating. We lived together. The stars aligned. We lived together. We had no kids. We both had good jobs. Because we lived together, I was a domestic partner for insurance purposes, like these little things. And I went out, I raised a small amount of capital to give it a go.

A guy I used to work with that was a client of mine. He got the newsletter, and I originally said, "No, it's nowhere near ready for me to go full time," and then a couple weeks later I called him back after a night of drinking with my wife where she gave like incredibly profound career advice. I was about to take a new job, and my wife said, "You cannot take this new job." And I go, "Why?" She goes, "You're already miserable, and you haven't even started." 

MASON: Wow.

ANDY: She's like, "Take the money and go." 

MASON: So you took the capital investment to jump into the deep end of really now you're in it. 

ANDY: So this was probably about six months after it started. And I think back to those moments. I was making nothing. I made like a very small amount of money last a very long time.

I didn't leave the house, like I was just I was like, it's the perfect time to do it. You were grinding. You were grinding. I wouldn't, yeah, and I think about I wouldn't have done it four years later. If I was married, and we were thinking about planning for a family, I wouldn't have done it.

Also the, maybe the greatest superpower for an entrepreneur is being naïve, being extraordinarily naive to how hard it's going to be. Because like I thought, "Oh, this is going to be easy!" This is like really freaking hard. Every day is hard. It's still hard. Like it's still very, very hard. 

MASON: You're still waiting for the easy part.

ANDY: Yeah, it's a new type of hard now. It's just like it's like the same thing as parenting. What they say is like young kids, lots of small problems. Like when you have a young business, lots of small problems. When you're a more mature business, they just become bigger problems. 

MASON: You have a team of people now relying on you for their well-being. So you were, we were talking about last thing on this was playing recreationally. I guess one of the sad paradoxes of working in the golf industry is you actually don't get to play a lot of golf that you would enjoy. Is that true? 

ANDY: I got to pump the brakes. I enjoy the golf I play. I play some of the best golf that like if somebody just looked at my GHIN[1] or whatever, it's a very nice golf lifestyle. I just think like the thing that's hard is like you … I've lost my hobby. My hobby was playing golf. 

MASON: You're now a work golfer mostly.

ANDY: Yes. Like 95% of my golf or maybe 99% of my golf on an annual basis is work golf. It's work. And like I think that's like something that the guys at No Laying Up have done really well. I think it's something that we've done really well is like understanding that "Yeah, this is … it's a privilege that we get to do what we get to do."

And people will look at it like, that's freaking awesome. I've had some friends, some relatives that have come along with my golf trips. And one day in, they're like, "Whoa this is a lot." I don't … cause it's you're up a couple hours, like an hour before sunrise. You're getting the morning light. You're conducting interviews. You're then playing golf. Like golf is not, you're just like hitting the ball around, and you're observing the golf course, and then you're getting done. You're, you might be doing more interviews. You're shooting again at sundown. Like it is a full day. It is not like … this is not like I roll out of bed. I go to the golf course. I play at 11:00 a.m. I have a few beers after the round. And that's my day. 

MASON: So it's not that you don't like it. It's that it is work. So it just has to be looked at through the lens that I'm doing this as part of all the things I do to run a company and to run a successful company.

ANDY: Yeah. And I'd love it. I, and part of coming with it, where it's work is you have to say no to certain things that you really want to do personally. But you might have to do something else that you still want to do. It's not like I don't want to … there's no parts of my job that I don't like doing, but I want to do that less than this, but this is what I have to do for the betterment of my business, right? 

MASON: Love it. All right, we're going to look into the future a little bit. So as we sit here today, you have a successful company that we just talked about. You have a subscription service. You do events. You do podcasts, plural. You still are doing newsletters. You have merch. The list goes on. Across a few different dimensions, I want to know what are you optimistic about as you look into the future about the Fried Egg? And then we'll talk about a couple other things I want to hear that you're excited about. When you think about your own business, what's exciting as you look into the future?

ANDY: I think that we've hired some great people. I think that's what I'm most excited about. I think like one of the hardest things about scaling a company is culture as you grow. And I think like right now we've got like just a great group of people that work really hard. I think so many people come up to me and tell me how great something is, and I think in the back of my head, "I had nothing to do with that." And it's like great. That's like my favorite … 

MASON: High compliment.

ANDY: Favorite thing in the world is when you see stuff going on as someone, you know, when you literally go from doing every single aspect of whether it be shipping out hats to producing a podcast to rebuilding a website and writing newsletters, that's what I used to do every day, all of those things, to now where I just see stuff happen.

And it's, I had nothing to do with the idea, the creation, or the execution. It's just … it's my favorite thing in the world. And I think we've got just the best people. They care. They work hard, and overall, they're like … I think they're all like wonderful people, and that's like what I'm probably most excited about with the future is just having a great staff that we're growing.

And I think like everybody's doing different stuff, but whether it goes from like Garrett, who is my first hire ever, or Will, who worked for free for a number of years and now has been a full-time employee for five years, which is crazy, to our newest hires. Like we have a great team who get along and really do awesome work.

MASON: What a great testament to you and also to what you've built. If we zoom out just a little bit and say, when you think about golf, and you can take this however you want professionally, recreationally, however you want, across any dimension that gets you excited looking forward, what would you say you're optimistic about? 

ANDY: I'm so excited about the state that recreation golf is in. When I was a kid, like I remember in college, like I said I played golf, and people were like, "You guys are dorks" to like the four people in my fraternity that played golf. And now all my friends play, all of them. And I think they all wish, but like golf now is so much cooler than golf was 20 years ago, from just a cultural standpoint. 

I don't cover the latest drop by some brand, but I do think the aspect of golf that's so neat is everybody has their different passion points with golf, whether it's "I'm really into golf courses and golf architecture" and "I'm into professional game and competition," right? That's the stuff that like I don't care really about equipment. I don't care about wardrobe that much, but what I do care about is that like golf is such a beautiful game because of like how many interests, sub-interests there are within the greater game.

You could be really into score. You could be really into golf fashion. You could be really into golf equipment. You could be really into just being out in nature and conducting like physical activity. It is a beautiful game, and I think what's so exciting is like just when I think about from where I started in the game of golf and the perception of golf and the wider public to where it is today is just really awesome. And it's like the most famous people are golf nuts. Like some of the most famous people are like huge golf nuts and very like open about being huge golf nuts versus like the way the game used to be where it was just this like old stodgy sport, you know?

MASON: Yeah, the tent has gotten huge. And I think even just the concept of it being 18 holes on grass is changing. There's lots of entry points to the tent now. And I think you're exactly right. So hopefully people, no matter which door they come through, whether that's apparel, equipment, or hitting on a simulator, will find the wiffleball joy that it sounds like you had from early on. 

ANDY: Both of our parents still live on that same block.

MASON: Do they really? 

ANDY: We have to go back and play a wiffleball match one of these days. 

MASON: I think, I feel like that should be a content piece where you go relive the golf course that was a half mile stretch of people's yard. They might not be as amenable to your divots. 

ANDY: That's the biggest issue. A lot of the houses have gotten bigger on the block. It was a lot of small houses with big front yards. 

MASON: Now they're like, "You know what? I've treated this grass. I put a remodel on my kitchen. Get, you could go over to the street." Yeah. Things have changed. 

ANDY: It might be harder too. There's a lot less space. It's gone. It's a much smaller ballpark now. 'Cause of uh … 

MASON: It still could be a great trip down memory lane, just saying, "This is where I used to …"

ANDY: Oh, some of the core holes are still there. 

MASON: I love it. Andy, thank you so much. Appreciate it. And we hope you'll come back another time, but you will forever be guest number one.

So thank you so much. 

ANDY: Thank you, Mason. Good luck with this this podcast journey. It's fun. And you're going to, you're going to look back on episode one always with disdain and ire as I do. So …

MASON: I'd be lying if I didn't say all of it's in my head already of the things we can do better, but that's part of the journey.

And we'll listen to people like you and our listeners to figure out how we can …

ANDY: The good news is you won't have the glaring production issues that I had on episode one. You got a good team. 

MASON: That is not what I'm worried about, but there are other, there's whack-a-mole, that one I'm not worried about. Thanks, Andy. Appreciate it. 

ANDY: All right. Thanks, Mason. 

MASON: Take care. So that's it for us today. Thanks for listening. You can hear more from Andy and his co-hosts on The Fried Egg and Shotgun Start podcasts by taking any one of these simple steps. Search your podcast app or YouTube for "Fried Egg Golf" or check out their website at thefriedegg.com. For all of Schwab's golf content, including our films, tournament news, and promotions, check out SchwabGolf.com. If you've enjoyed the show, which we hope you did, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, a rating on Spotify, or feedback wherever you listen.

We'll be back with a new episode in two weeks, where I'll be speaking with golf legend Dottie Pepper. 

For important disclosures, see the show notes or schwab.com/TheGame.

[1] Golf Handicap Information Network