Another Eric Bolling Interview…

Benzinga interviews Eric Bolling…who says a lot…

Q: Prior to Fast Money, were you doing any TV work on CNBC?

A: Just for them. CNBC would come down to the trading floor and say what’s going on in oil? I’d do an oil hit here or there, drilling policy, White House policy. What’s going on in gold?

So I’m doing that and they say we’re thinking about putting together a brand new TV show about traders, about Wall Street, would you be interested? I said sure, let’s do it. I go in, I interview, they say “you’re in, let’s figure out what the rest of this show is gonna look like.”

We bring in 300 different traders to try out for the three remaining trader seats. We ended up picking Adami, Tim Strazzini, and Jeff Macke, and myself, we were the four original panelists. Then we went through the host. Melissa Francis was the first one who tried out, they weren’t thrilled. Then it was Erin Burnett, they loved her, but she couldn’t deal with the time commitment. And then Dylan [Ratigan] came along, and it was boom, this is it. This is the right show. We got an aggressive, kind of arrogant, four guys from the trading floor, it was like a locker room.

Q: And it was very successful, people loved it, and were addicted.

A: It was, it was. I think they blew it, but at first it was very successful, something new, something no one had ever seen before. It was five guys, we ribbed each other a lot. They changed the structure and I think they dropped the ball.

Q: Do you know why that show wasn’t able to hold its talent?

I don’t know. They lost Bolling? I don’t know. You know, maybe it was because it was very heavy, kind of trader-esque, in the market. The financial downturn kind of turned people off. Don’t forget that when we started in ’05 everybody was trading, everybody. The guy down the street was trading.

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