Take down the ‘Gone Fishing’ sign, Dan Bernstein is back … in podcast form

When Dan Bernstein lost his job this spring, it was difficult for him to accept. He had to earn back the trust of his family. It required a reassessment of his life and his mental health.

He also wondered if he would ever fish again.

“Don’t laugh,” he said. “It’s really important to me. The fact that for the first couple of days, I didn’t want to go fishing felt awful. That’s the lowest I felt.”

Bernstein was famously fired in March for blowing up at someone on social media in a back-and-forth that began with the person questioning whether Bernstein killed a fish that he proudly held up in a photo. Bernstein took it up a few notches for “questioning my sportsmanship and conservation awareness.” He threatened to expose the interrogator’s identity and, for good measure, tweeted something that could be interpreted as a threat about getting his kids involved.

Eagerly awaiting a response from @670TheScore about their employee @dan_bernstein threatening the safety of another man’s children. People pay with their freedom for “moments of weakness” like this one. How will this employer reprimand this type of behavior? @stoolpresidente pic.twitter.com/aYErQgl76l

— Just Another Chicago Sports Fan (@itsobvious2me) March 15, 2025

Other instigators screenshotted the exchange, and the meltdown turned into an inflection point in his life. Bernstein, who had been in hot water before for his comments, was fired by Audacy, the parent company of 670 The Score, the radio station he had worked at since the mid-1990s.

Thirty years down the drain because of a confrontation over fishing ethics.

Five months later, I wanted to know what Dan Bernstein, the acerbic, judgmental radio host, would have said on the air about a 56-year-old man who lost his well-paying job over an argument about a fish?

“I don’t know, that’s a good essay question,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you how dumb the whole thing was.”

But …

“But maybe it’s appropriate, maybe it was just right,” he said. “I don’t know how we’ll look back on it. I don’t know. It crossed my mind for the first time the other day, I wouldn’t undo it. I wouldn’t undo it. I’m extremely happy right now, both professionally and personally. And this has given me a freedom, a professional freedom, and exposure to a new company with a different culture and new people. And I needed it. I need it.”

Bernstein was talking to me Tuesday afternoon in the Prudential Building, not far from where he toiled for The Score all those years. His new podcasts are taped there, too, in the Hubbard Radio Chicago studios. He’s back working with Matt Abbatacola, his old “Boers and Bernstein” producer. The first two episodes of “Dan Bernstein Unfiltered” were released Monday and Tuesday, along with the first episode of their Bears podcast, “Forward Progress.”

Abbatacola and Bernstein’s banter was familiar and likely, for a certain section of their fan base, soothing. The “Unfiltered” podcast is going to be a daily show during the week, and the Bears podcast will start with two episodes during the week and a postgame show. Bernstein had a Bulls podcast with his college-aged son, Jason, on Audacy, and maybe that returns, too.

What will the “unfiltered” Dan Bernstein sound like? His on-air personality shifted over the years, and he became less intense and, well, mean. But he can still light up a coach or a general manager with the best of them.

In the first episode, it took him 11 minutes and 30 seconds to mention an old Dick Jauron sound bite, 34 minutes for a Joe Sheehan nod, 38 minutes for a Mike Murphy impression, 50 minutes for an extended “Pope Bob” riff, and 52 minutes for an ad for a window company.

It took him just over a minute into his new podcast to take full responsibility for his firing.

“Everything that happened since it first started into the bloodstream and everything started rolling the way it did is my fault entirely,” he said on the podcast. “Everything that was coming to me, I earned. I am facing, still facing, the consequences of my actions. It’s because of what I chose to do. There’s nobody ganged up against me. There’s no vast conspiracy here. It’s my fault because of my shortcomings, and I’ve learned a lot about those shortcomings, and none of what I’m about to tell you about what I’ve learned is meant to sound like an excuse in any way. Let me say that explicitly. Explanations are not excuses. Everything that happened to me I earned, and that’s OK.”

So about that explanation … why did he go nuts on that guy who was trying to pick a fight over something so inconsequential? People were going after him all the time on social media or on the text line. He has the kind of personality that brings it on.

Bernstein thinks his therapist found a reason that specific insult ticked him off — an old fishing memory — and he’s now hyperaware of how social media sets off his “dopamine outrage cycle,” which is a real thing.

Still, he can’t explain why it went so haywire. It just happened.

“It’s hard for me to get back in that mindset because I’ve worked so hard to try to figure out what that was,” he told me. “I can’t answer for that guy. I can’t answer for, and I shouldn’t abstract it by saying ‘that guy’ because I did it. I’m at fault. It was my action, it was my decision. I’m a grown adult. And the consequences are the consequences.”

Bernstein described this incident as the “culmination of a slow-rolling mental health crisis,” and yes, he said the way he awkwardly responded to “Barstool Eddie” on the radio in September 2024 was probably a sign he needed help. His impulse control was becoming an issue.

“I should be getting pissed off when the Bears do something stupid,” he said. “I shouldn’t be getting pissed off to a similar level when I come home from the grocery store and I forgot shallots.”

Now, after months of taking it easy, he’s back working but trying to break old habits.

Though Bernstein did return to social media to advertise his new podcast — which is why he made the joke about Jauron once saying, “It’s not my show, but I’m on that show” — he said he’s not going to interact publicly on there anymore. The days of him posting about sports minutiae and making snarky jokes are over.

“I can’t have a relationship with Twitter,” he said. “Twitter’s bad for me. Twitter’s terrible for me, and I’m not wired for Twitter. Twitter is not wired for me. The through line for missteps in my career goes right through Twitter, and it has a way of bringing out the worst in me.”

In his months away from a microphone, he said he repaired his relationship with his family, he went to daily therapy … and he fished. A lot. He wasn’t hiding on some far-off pond either. He was fishing downtown along the lake, just like always.

“A lot of it wasn’t just the fact that I was fishing so many hours, it was that I replaced social media interaction with human interaction,” he said. “Because where I fish is really touristy. It’s basically from the Shedd to the top of DuSable (Drive). So it’s always full of tourists. I’m not looking at my phone. I didn’t even wear a watch. I see the sun is setting and it’s time to go home. But just actually having these random social interactions was so cathartic and energizing.”

Some of the people who did recognize him would ask when he was launching a podcast.

Within a few weeks of his firing, he and Abbatacola were talking to Hubbard Broadcasting, which is based in the Twin Cities, about doing a Chicago-centric pod. He said he had long discussions with executives in Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul and the company’s CEO, Ginny Hubbard.

“I think anybody hiring me would think, ‘Am I hiring a maniac? Am I hiring somebody who’s going to get us in trouble? Am I hiring somebody who is going to make a bad name for us and our sponsors?’” Bernstein said. “Those are completely reasonable questions that I would be asking me. And we were open and transparent from the start; absolutely put everything out there, just like I’m doing right now.”

The early returns support the risk. As of Tuesday evening, his two podcasts were ranked Nos. 8 and 9 on Apple’s list for all sports. The new podcast bump goes away quickly, and local shows never rank that highly on Apple’s algorithm, but it’s clear that people are still interested in what he has to say. Last I checked, his first show had nearly 20,000 views on YouTube.

“I’m not using that as a measuring stick,” he said. “We are looking at this as a multiyear process and commitment. A great start is a great start, because in podcasting, it is the hardest thing because your audience starts from zero.”

After three decades in the same job — give or take — Bernstein said he has “more and better energy.” He doesn’t have a program director, so he’s helping with the sales and marketing, along with the daily shows. He and Abbatacola will start booking guests and getting into the routine of doing Chicago sports radio on a podcast.

The way it has worked out, it almost made Bernstein believe in fate. Almost.

“It’s tested my cynicism, my skepticism,” he said on his podcast. “Anybody who says, ‘Oh, you know things happen for a reason.’ They don’t. That’s not true. Things happen because they happen. We have free will in whatever this constantly shaking snow globe of a universe is. It’s all it is. Nothing happens for a reason. But the circumstances here have tested my skepticism. That’s as far as I’ll go. Which is a big step for me!”

© 2025 The Athletic Media Company. All Rights Reserved. Distributed by New York Times Licensing.