Acquired Podcast on the NFL (with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal)

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on Expert. Hi, Monica.
Hi. Hi, Aaron Weekly.
Hi. We have a really fun and special episode.
We love, and you've probably heard us talk many times about Acquired, one of our favorite podcasts. They do these incredible deep dives into different companies, the history of the companies, their finances, everything.
And the Super Bowl is upon us. That's right.
And so I thought it was your idea. I was about to say you had a great idea.
Well, I had the idea to bring them in to do this. You did.
And then they had the idea. What about the NFL? What timing? So we're going to learn the history and the finances of the NFL.
And I need you to give me a testimonial. It's so much more interesting than probably anyone would expect, right? It's so interesting.
I don't care about NFL. When they suggested it, I thought that's a good idea for timing.
But I don't, I'm not that, I wanted the row. Sure.
But you know what? It was so fantastic. And I was talking about it all night at your party.
Acquired is hosted by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. Please, if you like this, check out Acquired.
There is certainly a business that will interest you. Costco.
Everyone should listen to the Costco episode and be reminded what a beautifully run business. Very ethical, lots of integrity.
And it's such a good company. And now I'm obsessed with it.
I've been in the Costco religion for years. I know, I'm late.
Shot two movies in Costco. Yeah.
Please enjoy

Ben and David on the NFL. We are supported by Liquid IV.
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Okay, gentlemen, we are so tickled that you came. Yes.
This is kind of a freebie for us because normally I would have had to do a ton of research, and that has now fallen on both of your shoulders. So Ben and David, you guys are the hosts of Acquired.
Does it get back to you how much we talk about Acquired? Yes. Oh, good.
Good, good, good. We never know if we're in a vacuum or not.

I know.

Even my Hermes hiccup seemed to have made its way back.

Because you liked it so much and you wanted to buy one of the old bags.

And I stand by it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with liking Hermes.

Right?

Thank you.

It is a truly unique thing in the world, and they make it by hand, and it's special.

Wait, why'd you get in trouble?

I was unrelatable.

Ah, too rich. I get it.
When I was poor, I hated people like Monica, but now I love people like Monica. I don't have one.
That's the whole point. I just want one.
There's something interesting about what we file offensive or gratuitous, and what we don't, because a piece of art, no one's mad at Picasso's worth $150 million. So I'm like, well, that's kind of rad.
But for some reason, this is very triggering for people. You're mad at the person who owns it.
Well, I think the counterintuitive thing that I didn't realize until we did the episode on them is there is this spectrum between a functional object and art. And Hermes is somewhere along that spectrum, whereas stuff you buy from Amazon is about the product.
You're buying history and brand when you're buying Hermes as much as you are the product. Yes.
Well, I'll tell you, I think it was your Hermes episode that got me interested because our friend Eric, who has zero interest, he was a lawyer who quit and now he just trades stocks. And he called mine.
He's like, I've got to get some Hermes stuff. This is how it happened.
This was so funny. We were at a dinner and we both had these Goyard card case holders, me and this other person.
And one was a dupe. And so he was looking at both of them and he goes, you know, the saddle stitch is the most impressive stitch.
And I was like, excuse me, how do you know that? And it was because he had just listened to your episode and he got all of us totally in. Yeah, all he knows about is the stock market.
He vaguely knows law and he knows peptides. He doesn't know who Natalie Portman is.
Soccer team owner, I think. Yeah, exactly.
You've heard of her. So at any rate, it's really, really great to have you guys.
A little bit of background on both of you, because this was a question of mine when I started listening. I was like, why is it these guys have such a deep knowledge on all these things? And then as you cover different companies, I would say that meta episode, which was phenomenal.
Thank you. I was like, they had to be programmers or something for them to understand the tech as well as you guys both did.
I'm sure one of you was better than the other. Ben, you have a computer science degree.
That makes a little more sense. But I'm just, as I listen, as a fan of the show, trying to piece together how it is you guys ended up with this podcast.
So let's just start with, it really was just an endeavor for fun, right? You both have your own careers. You both have different disciplines.
So Ben, kick us off with how you came to the podcast. David and I met at a Passover Seder and we sort of instantly hit it off.
You know those friends where you keep thinking, we should do drinks more often and you try and then it's like every two or three months. You're like, why don't we see each other more often? Well, at one of these scheduled drinks that actually happened, I gave David two pitches.
One was acquired and the other was a podcast that was a much worse idea. I would love to know the worse idea.
It was companies that had successfully innovated more than once. It would have been a very short list.
I was going to say, I can't imagine you get a ton of episodes. You might run out.
Okay, but you went to Ohio State? I did. Congratulations.
Thank you. Did you guys just win? National champions.
Well, I went to UGA, so I also have a national championship background. I'm just throwing that out there.
You and I did a lot. We've done so much.
I see you, another fisherman. Now, okay, why did you end up at Ohio State? I grew up in the Cleveland-Akron area.
I applied to nine colleges, but my entire family went to Ohio State. We were touring, and we were opening different gates, walking around the horseshoe, and one was open.
And so my dad and I walked all the way up to the top of the South Stands. We're looking out over all of campus, and I'm looking out over the field and realizing I could go to a lot of games if I come here.
I think there's a specialness to being in a place like that and looking around at what your future could be. Yeah.
I'm going to keep this really brief because Monaco will kill me, but just off the top of your head, what's the greatest amusement park in the history of the world? Cedar Point. Yeah, of course.
That's an easy question. You got that right.
Halfway between Cleveland and Detroit. Yeah, Sandusky, Ohio.
Every time we have any guests on within the tri-state area, we'll do 20 minutes on Cedar Point and she cannot stand it. I hate Cedar Point now.
I'll never go. We should have done it on Cedar Point.
Yeah. Millennium Force, Top Thrill Dragster.
Magnum XJ 220s, the Gemini, the Demon Drop, the Corkscrew. Oh, my God.
Yeah. They were just acquired by Six Flags.
That's right. You really could do an episode on them.
We actually should. You just turned me on to Defunctland, this YouTube channel.
What's that? Ben, you can tell it better than me, but it's like acquired episodes of old defunct amusement parks. Oh, that's fun.
This could be the first thing that got you interested in Cedar Point if they actually did an acquired on it. I would.
It's too successful to do it on. Have you ever heard of Action Park? They just made a documentary about it.
No. In New Jersey? Yes.
Yes. This was the YouTube channel that popularized people looking back and being like, that was completely insane that Action Park existed.
I forget the stat, but I just read it as well. I want to say it's in the order of like six trips to the emergency room a day that it was open, that park.
It's like a badge of honor. And I think Adventureland, that movie, is based on that.
Oh, no way. Yeah.
The writer of that film or director worked there at the nuts one. And people would go upside down and they would come up with lacerations.
Yeah. Okay, so you graduate with a computer science degree and then you end up moving to Silicon Valley? Seattle.
I was going for a job at Microsoft or Google and I had an offer from Microsoft. I made the mistake of saying, I also am waiting to hear back from Google.
And they said, when are they going to tell you? And I said the date, and they said, we are not going to extend your deadline. You can tell us before you hear back from Google, or that's it.
Oh, God. That was your first lesson in negotiating.
Yeah, that's a rookie mistake. So I have no idea if I would have gotten a job at Google or not.
You just took Microsoft. I wanted to go to the West Coast.
I wanted to be in tech. I grew up in Ohio, and that was my ticket.
In retrospect, do you wish you had worked at Google? No, it worked out great. I live in Seattle.
I've been there 13 years now. Great place.
I met David there. No acquired.
No Microsoft. Okay, now, David, you go kind of a fancier route, if we could say.
I don't have any national championships. Undergrad at Princeton and then Stanford graduate school.
You have an MBA. And what's your undergrad degree in? French literature.
Oh, you romantic son of a bitch. The long hair and the angular features.
Yeah, you want to mix. You're a babe.
You must know this, right? I appreciate that. Yeah, what a stud.
Ben, you're hot too. I don't want to leave you out.
I grew my hair long during COVID. It didn't play as well as...
Yeah, that's an enviable head of hair. So, okay, how do you end up? I always wanted to work in venture capital.

Not the easiest thing to do with a French literature degree.

Just sort of randomly, I learned about the industry at Princeton, actually,

and I was like, I would do anything to do this.

Sounds like the coolest thing in the world.

I got an opportunity a couple years later to join the biggest venture firm in Seattle.

I didn't know anybody in Seattle.

A headhunter called me, and I was like, hell yeah, I will move to Seattle. Am I not wrong in that headquarters of venture capital is generally those Silicon Valley? Oh, yeah, yeah.
Have you read Nate Silver's new book by chance? No. It's about gambling and it's about venture capitalists and it's about...
Risk taking. Friedman.
Oh. Thomas Friedman? No.
Is that? No. Sam.
Sam Altman Friedman. No.
Sam Altman. Sam Friedman Altman.
Right. Sam Altman, which is also in the book, is open AI.
Sam B something. Sam Bankman Fried.
Oh my God. I think this is where they're going.
We're going to keep that in because of you coming through. He just blew Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, and Georgia out of the water.
Ohio State knew it. Okay.
So you end up there and you were employed in that capacity. That led to the Passover Seder where Ben and I intersected and then we were trying to recruit Ben to join us at Madrona at the firm and then we ended up working together and so that's how this beautiful friendship began.
This is great. How many years ago was that? 10 that we started acquired, 11 that we met.
So Dave and I were just in Taiwan doing this crazy interview with Dr. Morris Chang who started TSMC, one of of the very few trillion dollar companies in the world not on the West Coast of the United States.
The guy's 93 years old. Oh my God.
He was around at the beginning of Moore's Law, central figure in semiconductors. And we realized that we were doing that interview exactly 10 years to the day from the drinks where we decided to do Acquired.
That's awesome. Isn't it crazy where these podcasts can take you? We're in the hotel in Taipei.
You texted me. We're getting ready to go over to his office to interview.
What a way to spend our 10-year anniversary together halfway around the world. Yeah, we're interviewing you on our seven-year anniversary, and I feel equally.
Is it really? Is it? No. It'll come out, probably.
The 14th is our actual anniversary of the first episode out. Our first recording, I don't know.
Okay. I should know this.
What gave you guys the idea to do this crazy thing? Ooh, wait. I think I know this.
Please, please. If Wikipedia is accurate, you wanted the opportunity for people to experience what an AA meeting is without necessarily having to become an alcoholic.
Pretty much. Yeah.
Could we do in public what happens in an AA meeting? There's a lot of explanations. They're all kind of true and there's not one, but probably more accurately is Serial the Podcast.
Because Monica and I were both consuming it at the time Monica was babysitting and we would fight for hours in the kitchen about whether Adnan was guilty or not. I'm like, you're not a dude.
You don't understand. Dudes do fucking weird.
I know kids like, yeah kids like, yeah, that's not shocking. You know, we would fight nonstop.
So we had a hobby of arguing with one another. Which turned into arguing about just everything.
And we thought that's a good engine for a show. Good grist for the mill.
They're going to know a lot of venture capitalist terms. Is grist for the mill? Yeah, sure.
Oh, I love it. Good grist for the mill.
Cereal paved the way for this whole industry. Okay, so you guys start doing it and it's just for fun, right? You don't have any aspirations I can imagine, nor did we, that it would be a business.
And at this point, it's also a nice business that you guys have, I'm imagining. It's our whole thing now.
Oh, you're completely retired from all that. We are full-time podcasters.
We do some investing as part of Acquired. Our previous careers, we have sunset.
What year did you guys make that decision? And did you guys get together and be like, I think I'm ready. We did it different times, actually.
Yeah, David did it three, four years ago. Five years ago.
And Ben, you? Last year. How does it feel? Right.
That's a good answer. We're entrepreneurs who took the least risk out of any founders I've ever worked with.
Well, we're doing a different thing. Yeah, but by the time I went full-time on it, it was an extremely good business, very established in the world.
It's not like I plopped down my life savings. We accidentally built it on the side.
Yes. I'm not qualified to say this, but I do think you're a little bit inoculated from both a plateau and a decline because the folks that are already drawn to it, for me, it's like this American life.
I'm never going to not be interested in it. It's not a pop culture phenomenon.
You didn't have a guest on who talked about some sexual escapade with someone in that. You know, I think you have such a solid foundation of a listenership that will only grow as people like us talk nonstop about it.
Thank you for doing it. In any given month, a third of all consumption of acquired is episodes older than six months.
I believe that for sure, because you get brought in for a certain topic you're interested in and you go, oh. I got to listen to every single one of these.
You start shopping as I did. Exactly.
Okay, so because the Super Bowl is upon us, it was Monica's brilliant idea that what if we could do kind of a mini acquired episode about the NFL? Oh, no. I'm not going to take credit for that.
It was my idea to bring them in to do an episode for us and then they brilliantly came up with the NFL. Oh, it sounded too smart, to be honest, for you.
How did you? Yeah, it really did. It always was a little suspicious.
No, we workshopped six or seven different ideas before. We did.
Of course, I threw out the row. Oh, let me guess.
Taylor Swift's car collection. The row.
This candle company I can't get the candle of. Is Taylor Swift a car collector? No, no, no.
No, but you know, they have a great episode on Taylor Swift. I know that.
That's why I had to throw in car collector because they already did Taylor Swift. And it didn't make any sense.
Is there something we didn't find? I bet she has a collection of SUVs she gets driven in is my guess. That's probably right.
As she should. So what a great time to learn all about the NFL.
It'll be very fun for us and we're very appreciative to let you walk us through the history of it and the economics of it. I was wondering if you were actually going to do this or not.
I had this feeling, it's not actually going to get handed over to us to do it. I prepared the script as if it's like, okay, we're ready for an Acquired episode, but I was very ready to throw this away and be like, oh, we're just doing...
I mean, we will be interjecting because we can't help ourselves. This is like a live studio audience for an Acquired episode.
Yeah. I looked at the transcript the first time we did the NFL episode four years ago.
It's 40,000 words. David started the version to send to you, which I think is three or four pages.
But as obvious to me as each bullet point is like the Browns win for a decade ruining the thing. You're not going to say that sentence.
We're not going to hear more about that. This is a very concise bullet pointed outline.
So our recording day typically is an eight to 10 hour day. People say like, why don't you split it over multiple days? But you probably know that you lose the thread in your head.
Of course. Yeah.
And your voices sound different. So that eight to 10 hour day turns into a three to four hour episode when we cut because we sort of produce for each other too.
I'll be at home in Seattle. David's at home in San Francisco.
And we're saying, like, do that again, but shorter. Do that again, but punch up this part.

That part's actually not very interesting.

You're co-piloting one another.

You guys probably have little ego,

if you're able to take that from one another.

We have a large trust with one another.

That's lovely.

And we've had good, hard conversations.

Okay, so...

The NFL.

The NFL.

Here we go.

Football is by far America's favorite sport.

The Super Bowl is watched by over 100 million viewers every year in approximately two-thirds of America's household. My favorite Super Bowl stat is that the weekend with the fewest weddings per year happens on the Super Bowl weekend.
You know, Seth Green, he's a geek, admittedly. He loves the Super Bowl because he goes to Six Flags because nobody's there.
He's like, he's basically like sending out the place. Sunday afternoons when in Seattle there's a Seahawks game, it's actually a great time to go to Costco.
Oh, yeah. Another fantastic episode of yours that really turned me on to Costco.
That's my favorite company. My favorite company, too.
Yeah. I've shot two movies inside of Costco, and I loved it.
One was just nights for six weeks. I had a bicycle I rode around.
What movies? Employee of the month. I had a little notebook in the back of my pocket and I would find items I wanted when I got home and I just accumulated this list of wants for six weeks.
Well, my favorite thing in your deck was of the hundred most viewed broadcasts of the entire year, 72 of them were NFL football games. Holy shit.
And in previous years, it's been higher. It's been closer to 82 to 85.
Last year, because of the election, there was things that people watched en masse. But basically, America watches NFL games, college football games, the Thanksgiving parade, and presidential debates.
And other than that... Nothing cracks that.
I mean, kind of the punchline of this episode is the NFL props up the media industry. Accepting the streamers, which that's a whole other conversation about the economics of that, but linear television would be deader than a doornail at this point.
And probably all the other conglomerated media companies, again, except for the streaming part of it, there's nothing else that people watch on TV anymore. And it has the most coveted audience, which is they're watching it live and they're going to sit through the commercials.
Exactly. So award shows are not making the list there.
Oh, award shows do. That is one of the 20 that are not the NFL.
Got it. Interesting.
Also interesting, ESPN was responsible for some enormous percentage overall of Disney as a corporation. Historically, every year it's a little bit worse.
It's getting eroded. But there were moments, right, where that was just the crown jewel in this thing with all the IP.
Sports really in America means the NFL. It's not baseball anymore.
Basketball is a complicated thing, but it's basically just the NFL. The fact that the NFL is the thing that America watches is extremely intentional and has been finely tuned every year for 100 years.
Really World War II. The NFL more than anybody else, the teams and the players are different, but the NFL as a collective embrace this as a entertainment product.
And we need to put the best entertainment product on the field, but really on the television screens of America. It is the most incredibly produced content you see.
I mean, the 17 camera production, the whole director, producer, you kind of forget that it's a show while you're watching it. I don't think of it like that.
My 10-year-old was watching the Lions game with me a few weeks ago, and she goes, how did they know that was going to be the score? And I go, what do you mean? She's talking about the graphic. There's this incredible graphic package that happens instantaneously.
And she naturally is assuming, well, someone would have to design that a day or two ago. And I go, no, hon, isn't that incredible that they have these real-time graphic packages that just emerge? We take all this for granted.
The NFL invented that. That didn't exist before Pete Rozelle and then the NFL collectively realized that television is this incredibly powerful thing.
There's basically two chapters to the rise of the NFL. There's riding the television wave and then there's riding the fantasy and betting wave.
One sort of tapers off right as the other one picks up. So it's this classic stacking S-curves in business parlance.
So when is it invented and when does the NFL form? Yeah, let's get back to a choir. Take us to Princeton.
Okay. Princeton was going to be relevant here.
So American football was invented, quote unquote, I think it was 1868 between Rutgers and Princeton. 69.
Oh, it was close. But football, really until World War II, was a college thing.
It got very popular around the turn of the 20th century, but it was like an elite Ivy League. This was where the future government and military leaders of America proved their mettle, was on the gridiron of college football.
It was amateur, it was sacred. To the extent professional football existed at all, it was like a dirty thing.
And shameful that people would be paid to do it. It was profaning this sacred American elite.
Collegiate rite of passage for young men. Oh, wow.
And in fact, the formation of the NCAA happened because the game was super violent. There was no padding.
Many, many deaths. Lots of college men died playing this game.
From head injury? Before leather helmets. And there was a thing called the wedge formation.
There's no forward pass. So this was basically rugby.
Oh, interesting. And people would try to just line up behind one person and all pile on.
It was like the extreme tush push. And nobody's wearing helmets.
It was the tush push without helmets. They would just make one human the vanguard of the spear.
And people were getting trampled. I can't remember when 11 players was standardized, but for a long time it was like the student body.
Everybody who wanted to show up and play. So President Teddy Roosevelt, this was in 1911, I think.
His son was at Harvard. 1905.
I'm going to keep that. Can I have real time? I know that's your time.
His son was at Harvard, got seriously injured playing football, and so he called all the Ivy League presidents together and was like, y'all need to fix this. We can't have all these serious injuries and deaths among our country's best and brightest here.
In response, the Ivy League presidents instituted the NCAA. So it was kind of organized around safety initially.
Yeah, by the president of the United States. Wow.
Which is wild. Yeah.
That made the game safer. They started introducing some padding.
That's when they introduced the forward pass. Neutral zone, wedge formation gets banned.
It starts to resemble football like we know it today. Was it hard to get this done? Because I'm thinking about now, people are talking now about trying to put more restrictions on some of these things because of CTE.
Obviously, that had to come up. Couldn't wait.
I'm proud you waited that long to say CTE. I bring it up a lot.
Old Debbie Downer here. I am conflicted watching football because it's one of the most entertaining things in the world to watch.
Amazing storylines, ways to communicate with your family, your reasons to get community together. And it's extremely dangerous, and the NFL knew it for a long time.
Right. It's just weird to hear that they all came together and they're like, yes, let's do this.
And they were able to do it. And now that feels impossible.
But, Monty, it was in the wake of many, many deaths. There are many, many deaths.
It was a different time. Instant deaths.
Not like 30 years later. I would even argue if we had watched two dozen NFL players drop dead.
Remember with DeMar Hamlin a couple years ago? When he laid there. Yeah.
Very scary. That was a really profound moment, I think.
You could also make a case that they were even less safety-oriented. Maybe.
A bunch of people died already. And keep in mind, there's no money on the line at this point in history.
Right. That's the big difference.
Good point. We're not even talking Ohio State, Michigan here.
This is an institution of the elite. It's almost like cosplaying European.
It's the Ivy League's trying to be as cool as the English colleges. They were trying to emulate.
Yeah, in the late 1800s, America still had this little brother syndrome to England. It's a shame Ben's taken.
I talk about little brother syndrome a lot. Oh, really? Little brother energy.
I'm a little brother. I've done okay.
Seems like it. You can be a little brother and not have a brother energy.
It's very specific. But yes, this is what it sounds like America was doing.
So that's the origin of football. The NFL started in Bank and Fact Check Me Here, 1920, Canton, Ohio.
Jordan and Hupp Automobile. Huppmobile showroom.
First of all, it was called the American Professional Football Conference. It has a nice ring to it.
The American Professional Football Conference. APFL.
I think you could probably say thinly veiled marketing attempt for mostly automobile dealerships. And it was these individual local teams in small markets that were until the APFC.
APFC. I messed that up.
Then NFL. It was not an organized league.
People would start their own team, call around and say, anybody else want to play some games against us? And maybe some people could come watch. It was very loosely organized.
And the local car dealership will sponsor the whole thing. Exactly.
In fact, the Chicago Bears. Were the Decatur Staley's.
Yes, because it was in Decatur, Illinois, the Staley what company? Staley Steel. No, but it has a ring to it.
Staley Band. They should have done that.
Yeah. Cornstarch.
Cornstarch. Wow, this is why you have a producer.
Yeah, he real times. He's nice.
We're like flashing forward a little bit to the Decatur Stalys, but this idea that you couldn't really in good conscience have a proper professional football team. It had to be, oh, we all work at the same company.
Like a company softball team. Yeah.
So there's the Canton team, there's the Columbus Panhandles, there's the Akron Pros. This is the original NFL teams.
So there's 14 teams. Teams sort of came and went.
There's some great infographics on this. The modern teams have sort of been there for a long time.
The early ones are a complete mess of like this team was in one year, but not that year, constantly cycling through. And so there's a few of these original APFC teams that survived.
The Bears, the Cardinals, and the Packers. The Packers are the only legacy of this era.
Like, why is there an NFL team in Green Bay? Packers, was that a nod to meatpacking? Why was it the Packers? Do we know? Can we get a real-time fact check? The Indian Packing Company. Meatpackaging.
Meatpackaging, okay. I assume it was probably like the Staley's, like whatever the company was that was sponsoring.
And the other reason they needed a sponsor was because it didn't make any money. And so everyone was doing it sort of for the love of the game.
I think they're paying players already, but at the very least... Well, they're employees of the company.
Right, there's operational stuff to do to market the team and to get people to come to the game. And so every single team is loss making.
And do we have any sense of what the attendance was of these? Are they playing in high school stadiums? Are they playing in college venues? I think in this time it was sub 10,000, maybe sub 5,000. Right.
So this is day to play till World War II. Nobody has ambitions.
There's no vision of the NFL as we know it today. So 38 years of that.
1920 was when the

NFL started. So 25 years.
Okay, great.

Then World War II happens

and that leads to a couple things. One,

the whole west coast of America

happens. Television.
Small market

teams can't really survive

because there's so many people that are going to

fight in the war. This is when the Staley's

moved to Chicago. The Cleveland Rams

would eventually move to LA. In World War

II, the Steelers and the Eagles actually

combined to form the Steagles

Thank you. fight in the war.
This is when the Stailies moved to Chicago, the Cleveland Rams would eventually move to LA. In World War II, the Steelers and the Eagles actually

combined to form the Steagles

because they could not field

a full roster. It's kind of amazing they

eventually decoupled and went back to their original

teams. So then post-World, these GIs come

back, they want an entertainment product.

Importantly though, these GIs are

not Ivy League educated people.

They have no affiliation, they have no reverence for this sacred institution of the elite of the past. Profaning the college game means nothing to them.
I'll add the end of World War II is the birth of the Hells Angels. You also have a lot of young men who are now bored out of their fucking mind.
Yeah. Even before everything the NFL has done to make it an entertainment product, you just go see a high school football game.
It's entertaining. Yeah, exactly.
So after the war, an upstart rival league to the NFL gets started, and that's the AFC. All-American Football Conference.
And the centerpiece of that is Paul Brown. Folks may know that name, the legacy of the Browns.
The founder of the Cleveland Browns. I didn't, and I've always wondered why a team would be named the Browns.
So finally, that's answered. It's a great color.
It is, but also it does have poop connotations. The Browns.
Yeah, it does. But now we know it's a human name.
Yeah. Not the first thing I would probably pick.
Blank slate. I prefer Steagulls.
To add even more confusion to this, he would go on later in his career to coach the Bengals, and the Bengals Stadium was named after him. So Paul Brown Stadium is in Cincinnati, not Cleveland.
Oh, weird. Oh, wow.
And what was his background? He's, I imagine, a business owner, got some money. He's a football coach.
Oh, okay. He's like the first modern football coach.
So he coached the Maslin Tigers high school football. Eventually goes to Ohio State and then Navy, right? Yes.
He's Ohio State's football coach. And he's the first one who is deciding, let's watch game film and let's get everyone in a room and let's be analytical.
Let's have a full-time built out coaching staff. Yes.
Wow. We need a quarterback coach.
We need a defensive coordinator. We need an offensive coordinator.
We need to employ these people year round because we need to do recruiting. We need to plan in the off season.
He gave the players written tests. We all know now it's like, oh, football's a physical game, but it's also a mental game.
Nobody was honing that, which is arguably the more difficult part of the game. Oh God, yeah.
And he's pioneering the earliest stats. You talk to football obsessed people now and there's 30 different stat lines that they can quote you.
Other than the score

and third down conversions

or a few primitive stats,

they don't really exist pre-Paul Brown.

And he's the one coming up

with one of the metrics

that we care about

to do better in each game.

Do you think he is

just observing baseball

and recognizing the power

of them having kept all these stats?

Well, that's the other part

of the background here

is baseball was the national pastime.

It's not like professional sports

writ large weren't big. It's like no professional sports was baseball.
Yes, right, right. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
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so the NFL is resting on their laurels. They're kind of the only big football league and all the little ones that were the barnstorming teams have kind of fallen by the wayside and there's major market cities that are NFL teams now.
But they're classically not seeking to innovate. They're like, this is good enough.
There's some interesting parallels here with wrestling. Very much like wrestling.
All these regional divisions, they chopped up and would have TV rides. And McMahon was smart enough to start trying to accumulate.
This is where the McMahon characters start to emerge. And Paul Brown, he goes and fights in the war.
And then when he comes back, he was well known enough as a college coach, I think particularly from his time at Navy, that a group of entrepreneurs said like, oh, we should make another professional football league in major markets all across the country, take advantage of television. And our marquee thing is we're going to sign Paul Brown.
Our product's going to be significantly better because this person is innovative. And they were so confident there was already a Cleveland team, the Rams.
Yeah, the Rams. The Cleveland Rams.
The Rams. Same team.

Now the LA Rams.

They start with the new league.

They have a Cleveland team for that league too.

That's how confident they are

that Paul Brown is like a big deal.

They're like, that's great.

You already have the Rams in the NFL.

AAFC is going to have the Cleveland Browns.

They build this league,

but they haven't discovered all the stuff

that we talked about,

about making the NFL a show

and keeping it really competitive and trying to make sure that the best teams play the best teams and the worst teams play the worst teams. So what happens is, Paul Brown goes 47-4 over the first four seasons of the AFC.
Wins all four championships. Loses four games in four years.
Is he just saying, I want to play this team now? He's just so much better. He's so advanced.
So they blow the Rams out of the water in Cleveland. They're getting 10x the attendance.
And the money's all in the ticket sales. TV's not a big thing yet.
Right. The Rams in Cleveland, they're like, we just got to get out of here.
That's when they moved to LA. They get run out of town.
Yeah, but LA is all these GIs coming back from the war. It's the beginning of the television industry.
It's automobile. Glitz, glamour, people that understand marketing.
Meanwhile, the AAFC is actually a failure because it's not interesting to just watch the Browns run the table over and over again. So the Browns sell out all their home games.
No other games make any money. The Browns go on the road.
Sure, some people want to come see Paul Brown, but they don't want to see their team get decimated. And then the other teams aren't that good.
So the league actually folds. 1950, they had only played four seasons.
The Browns, 49ers, and Colts joined the NFL. There's now two Cleveland teams.
That's a big problem. And the San Francisco 49ers are sort of established.
So there's now this real West Coast presence for the NFL. And it's funny that it wasn't even as if there was a merger or some consideration.
Yeah, the NFL got lucky. Yes.
That's nuts.

They got to basically buy a company in bankruptcy.

Yeah.

Right.

The AFC had no better option.

I keep going back to, we had Kate Mara on.

She and her sister, Rooney Mara,

they are the grandchildren of the Steelers owner

and the Giants owner.

My assumption is they grew up incredibly wealthy.

And she's like, yeah, we obviously had a lot of money, but you have to understand. My grandparents, I'm like, yeah, where'd they get the money to buy a team? And she's like, it didn't cost anything.
Both of them were bookies. Wow.
So back in the day, if you were just like a wheeler dealer bookie, you could own a... Buy a team.
Which goes to say, and that was going to be one of my questions, when the entire income of the Endeavor is just the live audience tickets. I can't imagine they were terribly profitable.

If you were the Browns and you were selling 60, 70,000 tickets.

They weren't that big, yeah.

The first Browns game sold 60,000.

So I don't know if every game was, but they were crushing it.

And were they playing 12 games a year?

I don't know.

There were eight teams in the league.

Maybe they played each other twice, so that would have been 14 games, I guess. Okay.
So so I mean, you got an arena, you got a staff, you got a lot of players. So some money, but not, yeah.
Some money, I just can't imagine anyone at that point owning the team because they have any sense it'll be worth billions of dollars or that it's some cash cow. That's still the case at this point in time.
I think many of the entrepreneurs who started those AFC teams did it because they wanted a professional football team. Some of them probably saw television.
This might be a way to make some real money here. Yeah, and I don't want to jump ahead or behind, but I feel like this would be a good time for me to learn what the actual arrangement is between the NFL and the teams.
They're owned by individuals. They join this league.
What does that mean to join the league? So until a couple years ago, the NFL was a nonprofit organization. It then switched, but it doesn't matter.
It's a thin layer on top of the teams. It's not like the commissioner is the boss of the teams.
No, he's an employee. The commissioner works for the owners.
So the league exists at the... Pleasure of the owners.
Exactly. The real power is the 32 team owners.
The NFL is this agreement that they've created with each other that governs how the game is played. And then they hire the commissioner to represent their interests.
But what really matters is, I don't think it's a democracy. I was going to say what the majority of the owners want, what the most powerful owners think is good for the sport.
Those early years of the NFL, my assumption then would be that they are just given a budget that they're going to operate at net zero from these team owners. It's not like that organization itself is going to try to generate money.
And it still doesn't. It gets distributed out to the teams.
Well, how does Goodell have a $70 million a year contract?

He's paid by the team

owners. The top level NFL entity,

its mission is not to aggregate profits.

Let's flash forward to today. Why is the NFL so

freaking awesome? On average,

70% of all the revenue

for each team comes

centralized from the league. The bulk

of that is the television deals.

So the NFL uniquely, and this is what we're going to get into, centralizes and collectivizes the television. When you watch football and you're watching it on Fox or you're watching Monday Night Football on ABC or YouTube TV, any streaming network, all 32 teams collectively as the NFL do those deals and then share that money out to each team.
Yeah, it's not like the Rams are striking their own TV rights with anybody. Until recently with the NBA, it has now moved to the NFL model.
Baseball, the Yankees have their own broadcast network. All the other sports, it's all each team for themselves.
And that's what the early NFL was too. You asked this, but the perfect point in history, because 1960, the appointment of Pete Rozelle as commissioner is what changes everything.
What they learned from the Browns is it actually freaking sucks for the product on the field when one team has more resources and gets this positive cycle and wins everything. I mean, it's almost a miracle this would have ever been agreed to, because clearly there are people that were in huge markets that had teams.
They could have taken the lion's share of all TV revenue, and they're going to have to presumably make a little less to give this bozo team some money. It's like actors negotiating together.
Yeah, I was just about to say, it's like the Friends deal. Yes, yes, yes.
You're going in all together. Which rarely works.
And if you actually link arms and you actually hold arms, which almost never happens, at least for a long time, it starts that way and then fracturing. Exactly, people start saying, well, I'm like this.
So the guy who does this is Pete Rizelle. The Rams get run out of town in Cleveland by the Browns.
They land here in L.A. Pete Rozelle.
He's a PR intern. PR intern.
Compton College alumnus. Wow.
Joins the Rams when they come to L.A. as a intern doing PR and media relations, which meant like newspaper relations.
And he's doing stuff like realizing newspapers aren't going to write stories about the teams because no one cares about his league. Baseball is still the dominant sport.
And so he's hiring writers. Well, he does it himself at first.
He's like, I'm going to write the stories for you. And just give them to the journalists.
And I'm going to give them to you. He's trying to get it in the spotlight.
He rises through the ranks here at the Rams, becomes GM of the Rams, and then ultimately at age 33 gets elected commissioner of the NFL. Which also only happens because of a weird standstill.
The existing commissioner died unexpectedly. And there's these factions of owners.
This faction has their guy. This faction has their guy.
They can't agree. It's like the beginning of our country.
Yes. Totally.
Pete Rozelle is the least disagreeable candidate. The analogy is perfect.
It's like the founding of America. You got all these states that have their own interests.
And then there's this pressure from the outside, from Great Britain, and then they got to band together. And then even Washington, he was the only guy who wasn't outspoken.
He said the least. I kind of trust him.
Yes. Exactly what happened.
And he turns out to be exactly what the league needed at this point in time. A young person who saw the future, who got TV, who got entertainment, comes from LA.

He's able to make an argument to all these old school owners.

We've seen what happens when one team gets too dominant.

We need to put all sorts of checks and balances in place to ensure the best product on the field,

which means competitive parity.

The phrase, any given Sunday, you guys probably know this.

Of course I know it, but I don't know what it means. Me either.
This is the origin. Oh, and then any given Sunday, the team could win.
Anything could happen. Any team could beat any other team.
The NFL's dream is for every team to go 8-8. Right.
And there's so many things they do to make this happen behind the scenes. Again, it's amazing they got the dominant teams to go along with this strategy.
Totally amazing. It seems impossible.
So just like last time, the NFL, without a competitive force, couldn't actually come to the conclusion that you're stuck on DAX. There's another new upstart called the AFL, which, spoiler alert, becomes the AFC.
It becomes a conference within the NFL. Yes, when they eventually merge.
They sign one collective TV deal as their way of coming on the scene with ABC. Which, again, they're in a very vulnerable situation where they probably only have any appeal if they're all one thing.
They're probably doing it out of desperation originally. And they need money to sign players.
So they go to ABC, NBC and CBS. They're the legacy that came out of the radio era.
ABC was a new television network. And the AFL has eight teams.
They secure a five-year, eight and a half million dollar deal that is league-wide with the profits from the deal shared equally. And they do that deal with Rune Arledge.
So Rune Arledge built ABC Sports. Things like Wide World of Sports, if you guys remember that.
That was all him. He was Bob Iger's mentor.
No way! Bob Iger came up under Rune Arledge at ABC. Wow.
Interesting. And then took over Cap Cities, the Disney merger.
So he's a visionary. No Rune Arledge, no Bob Iger.
Wow. No Frozen.
Don't even. No Frozen.
But so this was Rune Arledge's big career-defining thing, was signing this deal in national football. And NFL is already being televised on those other networks at this point? One-off local deals.
So the owner is going to the local affiliate and saying, Detroit WKBD. Exactly.
So the Giants had like a great deal in New York. I think they're making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in TV money that was just theirs.
And so this is the bargaining chip that Rizal needs to then go to the owners and say, look, if we don't do the same thing, they're going to smoke us. This is the right strategy because it will ensure that all of the teams are doing well so they can be the most competitive and the most entertaining.
And we're now starting to talk about real money from this team, like eight and a half

million dollars in 1960-ish.

That seems like an unsellable proposition.

Well, depending on who-

It's so impressive that they did it.

It's just like the old adage we hear all the time.

The rising tide lifts all boats.

It's real.

It is, but I imagine the delta between some of these franchises, I'm sure some teams were

like 8X. The Green Bay Packers are still in the league.
They're not making any money. Right, exactly.
It's like Costco. It's making me feel Costco feelings.
I want a shirt that says Costco feelings. Exactly.
We can make that happen. It just seems interesting, too, that a guy that it seems like maybe was allowed to take on this position because he wasn't overtly charismatic and powerful, somehow is secretly quite visionary.
Pete Rizal was like the king of soft power. You look up soft power in the dictionary, it should have his photo there.
This is so much more interesting than I was expecting to be. It always is.
I thought I just would like the money because I'm a greedy pig, but that's absolutely fascinating. That is kind of the only way that these things get to exist in our world.
Nothing started as big money, and most of the things that try to start in a big money way don't end up becoming successful. They don't build that grassroots, durable, passionate following, and they don't follow an organic path to building something great.
Look at the birth of your show. It's not like you launched on some big network that promoted the hell out of it.
You made something that for that moment in time, people really, really wanted it and craved it. All these stories, the Costco, the Starbucks, the NFL, they always start sort of in obscurity with these passionate visionaries who are trying to will the future into existence.
And big money is true too. I think that eight and a half million dollar deal that the AFL had done, the Jets signed Joe Namath.
And the Jets are the AFL. He was the first

athlete celebrity. In the original episode, you were like, I know him because he was on the Brady

Bunch. I watched the Brady Bunch episode to prep for this show.
But yeah, he comes on and throws

a football in the backyard. But he's like stylish and he's photographed at clubs in New York City.

Oh, yeah. He was killing it.
When because of TV, he's getting broadcast all across the country. The country's falling in love with Joe Namath.
So that's what's forcing the NFL. The owners were kicking their feet all along, but they're like, all right, well, eight and a half million dollars.
That's a boatload of money. And look at the publicity that Broadway Joe is bringing to our rival league here.
When you think all American, he was born to be on a movie. First celebrity athlete.
That's wild. Well, football.
I don't know. It might be out of my depth here, but I think it'd be like if Bob Dylan played football.
I have to imagine throughout this story, we're also getting some kind of transition in who's playing the game. Whereas it was people who went to elite colleges and learned this thing.
I imagine it's getting more and more democratized as we're going along. And I imagine the racial makeup of these leagues is transitioning.
There's some dark stuff in the NFL history. They were segregated.
Nobody except white people allowed for most of the 30s. Interestingly, not in the beginning.
In the beginning, anybody could play. But then it's actually the Redskins.
It was the Washington team. They had a big Southern fan base.
There was some racism at the highest levels of the Redskins. I'm so shocked that the team named the Redskins his.
Yeah, right, right, right. It's on brand.
And from a monetary perspective, they were incentivized not to change. I think they were the Southern most NFL team.
Yeah, they had a black player. There would have been people protesting.
It was the LA Colise Rams played in L.A. when they moved out here.
Said we won't let any organization, because it's a public facility, ply their trade here, run business here, if there are segregated teams that are visiting. So that's what forced integration.
Let's go L.A. Boy, it's interesting how many different forces can work on one thing, how dynamic that is.
Oh, they're going to play in a publicly held facility and there is the leverage by which that could be proclaimed.

Otherwise not.

But yeah, to your point though

about blacks coming into the league,

that's actually good for business too.

You got Jim Brown

and the makeup of the league

is totally changing at this point.

Name the list of famous players

and it's some of the most loved.

OJ Simpson.

Well, sure, for a minute.

Well, for more than a minute.

I mean, I think mostly

we know the quarterbacks,

and then outside of that, we don't know many white players.

But OJ wasn't black.

He was OJ.

That's right.

Did you watch the documentary?

Yeah.

That was so good.

Okay, so AFL, how do they absorb them?

Do you guys know Al Davis?

Owner, GM, and head coach of the Raiders for many years.

No.

Oh, he's such a gangster.

Oh.

I don't know if it still carries any weight, but they were like the pirates. F the law type attitude.
That was Al Davis. Oh, that's interesting because that carries to this day.
If you want to bet on someone getting knifed in a parking lot, there's only one bet to make. It's a Raiders game.
It's going to be obvious. Totally.
So it starts with the original owner. But the original owner.
They were in the AFL. It was clear that the AFL wasn't going away.
They had this big TV deal. Then the NFL got their TV deals with CBS and NBC.
Interestingly, the CBS deal, the NFL is granted an antitrust exemption. I think that JFK signed into law because what you had is all these teams with their individual TV deals, and then they get together, they collude, and they say, we're going to sign one TV deal.
And if you're the TV networks, you're like, what the hell? This is illegal. But JFK deemed it in the good of the nation to have this.
This is also back to Roselle and Soft Power. He cultivated the Kennedys.
Relationship. He put a lot of effort into it.
Wow. Having the NFL in communities, being broadcast on TV, being a rallying force, loved that.
And so they passed an exemption. So there's a federal exemption to antitrust for the NFL from 1961 in order to sign the 1961 CBS TV deal.
And I'd imagine that has some collateral impact. And I'm confused.
I don't know which leagues do this, but I think most people just knowing you don't get to pick where you go is already an interesting thing contractually, right? If you're a player that gets drafted. I think it's part of the collective bargaining with the Players Association.
It's essentially a unionized trade. It's still interesting contractually.
The trade is it's a good enough deal for us to get some stuff in return that, yeah, we're open to being relocated and it's not really up to us. Back to the Paul Brown era, and it sucks when one team wins everything.
There are two things that the NFL did in response. One was the draft.
So still to this day, if you have the worst record in the league, you're getting the first draft pick. That reverse order, that was direct response.
And it's because of that to keep a competition. Yes, yes.
To keep the competition going. The other thing they do that still exists to this day that very, very few people know is they jimmy the schedule.
It used to be explicit, now implicit goal, is that

every team should be 500 at the midway

point in the season. So the first

half of the schedule, bad teams play

bad teams, and good teams play good teams.

That's orchestrated. So the Lions

are going to have a really tough first half of the year

schedule next week. I didn't know

that part. Yeah, most audience

has no idea. That's not the same with college.

No, that's exactly where I was going to go with this.

It's fascinating watching this whole playoff system

and transfer portal and all these

Thank you. Most audience has no idea.
That's not the same with college. No, that's exactly where I was going to go with this.
It's fascinating watching this whole playoff system and transfer portal and all these sort of NFL-like things that they're putting into place. Yeah.
Because this is not a goal of collegiate football at all. The goal is, for the really good teams, have a schedule that lets you win out, play just enough hard teams in your conference for people to take you seriously, and then historically have the big bowl game where you're put on a national stage against another good team.
But if you're a fan of a good team, like Ohio State, you sort of expect them to go undefeated or near undefeated. It's like the Browns of old.
Wow. You're right, and it is near impossible for an NFL team to get a perfect season.
It's happened once? Just Brady? Did Brady have a perfect season? Dan Marino had a perfect season. He's my tailor, so if you shouldn't even bring him up,

because I'll not be able to get off of him.

You got him on the show? I have, yeah, yeah.

When you're rooting for Tom Brady, you don't give a fuck how far you're down. It doesn't mean

anything. You go to that fourth quarter

like down three touches, and you're not

even worried.

Patriots almost did it, but lost the Super Bowl.

There you go. Yeah, it is.

Even Tom Brady can't have a perfect season.

God, it's heartbreaking.

That's so poetic that the season they went

Thank you. Patriots almost did it but lost the Super Bowl.
There you go. There it is.
So even Tom Brady can't have a perfect season. God, it's heartbreaking.
That's so poetic that the season they went undefeated in the regular season, they lost in the Super Bowl. Yes.
I know. Yes.
See, the NFL storylines, they're so good. It's wrestling.
You cannot script it. Well, they kind of are scripting it in a way with the NFL.
They're planning it for that outcome. There are levers in place, and they're pulling all the ones they can.
And after the season, I don't know if it's every year, every other year, there's something called a competition committee that is a set of owners that gets together to try and say, okay, what loopholes do people find? How can we make it even more competitive? And tweak, tweak, tweak every year. Wow.
It's a little bit like Formula One that way. It's just endless.
Yeah, it's just a business. We forget because we just think of it as sport, but it's a real business.
I'm really mad. I just learned this term in Bill Gates' new book.
It's a Japanese manufacturing principle. It's what Toyota implies, which is every year we must improve our manufacturing process.
And we must improve. Kaizen? Yes! Oh, God, you just earned your paycheck.
Yes, good job.

Wait, what's it called?

Kaizen.

Kaizen.

Kaizen.

And the other half of that is reduced waste, right?

We could stand to do a little more Kaizen.

Hey, I'm Kaizen!

I think you guys are doing just fine.

You got to know your business.

You're not in an optimization business.

We're trying to ride that line between jazz and classical.

You don't know how much you're supposed to improv and be loose and how much you're supposed to be classical. Tell us about it.
I know. You guys are very classical.
You're an orchestra. And we've gotten more so over time.
I think when we started, because we had nothing to lose. We were more jazz.
And what have you gained and what have you lost from that evolution? We're right more often, but we have less fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, we have fun in different ways. We get to go to Taiwan.
Well, it's that thing. We talk about it all the time.
Once you have something to lose, things get harder. They get scarier.
They get more stressful. There's a little bit less fun.
There's more rigidity. It's tricky.
Honestly, this is a breath of fresh air. If this were an acquired episode, we would have a hundred page script in front of us.
We'd be retaking everything for fear of getting anything wrong. Well, the person I have felt most guilty interviewing, which we've now done four times, five times, is Malcolm Gladwell.
Revisionist History is the most perfectly produced product in the marketplace. And the amount of effort that's put into it, we finish an episode and we're friendly and I'm like, is that not annoy the fuck out of you? Like we just created two hours of content and it's almost minute for minute real time content.
That's it. There's no more work to be done.
That's not true. You know, I had to say.
Monica's like, you have no idea what I do. It's not like revisionist history.
But we actually put at the top of the script right before we start now, have fun. You need a reminder of just because the stakes are higher and just because all these people are going to listen.
The reason people like it is we're having fun. We're doing the thing we love.
I have the same resolution, which is, yes, getting mired in these very complicated deals with humongous companies. I had to get to the point where I was like, remember you love talking to people? And somehow you guys have figured out how to get the most interesting people in order to swing by your house and talk.
Nuts. Fucking stop thinking about anything else.
I didn't realize this was your house, by the way. I kind of walked up and I was like, I'm pretty sure we're just at Dax's house.

Indeed you are.

By the way, you asked us about our careers

earlier. Do you guys consider

this your career now?

Yeah. 100%.

We do 152 episodes a year now.

We have three episodes a week

and we had five episodes a week

up until September, so

it's more than a full time.

I in general don't want to act, but if Tarantino

for his 10th movie calls me, I'm going to

Thank you. I'll admit this out loud.
I remember Joe Rogan stating that years ago, like he's done with acting and hosting. And I was like, I don't buy it.
I don't think you're having the opportunities you want. I think this is bullshit.
And I was completely wrong. He definitely was just in the position we are now in much earlier.
And yeah, it's much more fun to me than acting or anything else. So now the NFL absorbs the AFL.
Yeah, which is fast forwarding for time, but due to basically Al Davis being a gangster. He's like a mafia boss.
He directs all the AFL teams to go sign all the NFL teams quarterbacks just like as a bargaining chip because there's no free agency in either league, but not between the leagues. They could fight as much as they want.
They had a gentleman's agreement that they wouldn't poach. And they had just signed a new big TV deal.
So AFL got NBC to pay them 37 and a half million over five years. And they're like, guess what we're going to do with the cash? Let's go take that money and go steal all their quarterbacks.
This is the Ted Turner-McMahon war section of the story now. Basically, as soon as he does that, it's all over and then they merge.
It's so crazy they got outperformed twice and still remain the NFL. Exactly.
Yes. So here's the terms of the merger, which is so fascinating.
The NFL absorbs all the AFL teams. They're also going to add additional franchises.
So they're trying to cement Monopoly. They're basically saying, how do we make sure we cover all the biggest markets? Cut off a future uprising.
Yeah, make sure this doesn't happen again. We're going to pool the TV deals.
So there's now one national TV deal. We're going to do a common draft between both of us.
I think there was contracts in place, maybe TV contracts through 1970. So even though they're doing this in 66, there's like a phased plan over the next year to truly merge as one.
Pete Rizal maintains the commissionership. At first, the AFL was supposed to pay a ton of money.
to the NFL. $50 million per team.
That was where negotiations started before Al Davis kidnapped the quarterbacks.

Totally changed the NFL. $50 million per team.
That was where negotiations started before Al Davis kidnapped the quarterbacks. Totally changed the leverage position.
It was, yeah, you can all join our league. Just pay us $50 million per team as a franchise fee, and you can join the NFL.
The actual deal is $18 million spread over 20 years. Total.
Total. Oh, wow.
It was $900,000 a year for however many teams. and what actually ends up happening is all of it or at least half of it goes to the new york giants because they're the most harmed from the jets joining in the same city okay interesting so they didn't do that evenly no basically al davis is a gangster yeah wow so this is anyone with less than a 50,000-seat stadium needs to upgrade.
They're like, this is the big times now. We're signing these huge TV deals.
Once this is in place after the merger, two things happen. One is the Super Bowl, which we can get to in a sec.
Arguably, the more important one is Monday Night Football. That starts in 68? Right around there.
One of the other just incredible inventions of the NFL was they invent more football. Prior to that, are they only playing on Friday and Sunday? They only play on Sundays.
Which is a bad spot. When they originally conceived of this, it was no one watches TV on Sundays, so where can we get airtime? Cheap real estate.
Monday Night Football is the first time there's only one game happening at a time. So there's one nationally televised game.
Before it was, oh, there would be like a game of the week that maybe more markets would see than others, but they're all happening at the same time. They do the deal with Rune Arledge and ABC to create Monday Night Football.
That basically invents the modern football telecast. Eight and a half million dollars per year that ABC pays the league for one game per week.
So it's $500,000 per game, which today seems like tiny. It's very large relative to the other TV contract.
They're basically saying, because it's one game, because it's prime time, this is a really expensive slot. Oh, and by the way, when you pay us a lot of money for the rights to broadcast this, we're going to make it a spectacle.
Football before this on TV had been referred to as football in a cathedral because it was one camera at the 50 yard line. Up top, just panning back and forth.
No field mics and commentators that would just chime in every once in a while. Oh, that one hurt.
Yes, exactly. They weren't experts at all.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this is the list of things that are introduced at Monday Night Football.
They start with nine and then eventually go all the way up to 17 cameras, including handheld sideline cameras. I'm going to interject movie stuff.
So a couple of technical innovations that helped it greatly is the Superfly Cam, which is invented by John Brown, the DP of Without a Paddle's father, who had also invented the Steadicam. So the Steadicam allows them to run along the side and keep your vision nice and stable.
And then the Superfly Cam is a four-point system that'll allow it to go anywhere. So those are huge tech innovations that help.
The three-person booth, so you've got three commentators instead of two. The booth guys have personality.
This is when Howard Cosell becomes a character in the arc. In a lot of ways, it's the precursor to podcasts.
It's like, oh, Monday night with my friends. Howard and the dudes in the booth.
And talk about filling time. You're going to talk for two and a half hours without a script.
Yeah, they've got to be interesting. Improv geniuses, really.
They've got theme music. Hank Williams.
Remember, Are You Ready for Some Football? Yeah, yeah. Remember that before you got canceled? Are you ready for some football? That's the best.
Yeah, that was a good one. Whenever you're watching football, it kind of looks like somehow the camera is at or near the line of scrimmage.
Well, when it was at the 50, whenever you'd be starting in the red zone, it's really this oblique angle to be watching the play. So they put two more cameras on the 25-yard line.
So now you're always looking at or near the line of scrimmage head-on. They've got parabolic microphones.
There's 40 engineers, 20 production people, split-screen interviews. They are, for the first time, showing cheerleaders on television, so there's now some sex appeal to it.
They've got green screens, and the big, big thing, replays. Oh, for sure.
Okay, so think this through. You now got this Monday night game for the first time.
Before everything else was happening real time in Sunday, all the other games. You don't have the technology to show something from another game.
What do you do during halftime of Monday night? All the other games are done. You can't update what's going on real time with the other games.
You gotta fill half an hour in halftime. You show highlights from Sunday.
Great and build anticipation about next week. There's no ESPN yet.
Yeah. This leads to ESPN and SportsCenter.
And if you were in a market that didn't show these other games, there was no way to possibly see it. There's no way to see it.
You can read about it in the newspaper, but that sucks. What a powerful aspect to build interest in the whole league.
Totally. The crazy, crazy thing that it's hard to wrap your mind around today because everything is shot in 4K, real time, stored digitally, easily playback.
Most television that was broadcast was in poor quality and never recorded. Or it was in film, 16mm that needs to go get printed.
So they start NFL films. There's a whole long backstory that we don't have time for.
NFL films is amazing. But they've got these people shooting, I assume, 16mm on the sidelines all Sunday at every game.
In parallel to the broadcast. This is not the broadcast.
They send teams out to all the games for the Monday night halftime show. So then they've got a 24-hour turnaround to make a 20-minute highlight reel.
Get all that film to a central editing facility. Oh my god.
Put a highlight package together. Wow.
Get that back out to wherever the Monday night game is happening. Yeah, those people all got to work at 8 p.m.
on Sunday night and they did not leave till Monday. Howard Cassell is essentially the first SportsCenter anchor.
He's narrating the highlight reel, but the highlight reel is sliding into the tape deck as it's happening. He's never seen it before, so he's improv-ing.
I mean, it really is like the invention of SportsCenter. So it sounds like they were smart and invested virtually every dollar they received from this television contract into the product.

I think so.

The original Monday Night Football was so expensive.

The owners were also pretty greedy.

Just a lot of money.

We're talking late 60s, early 70s. I'm just saying 500 grand per game.

No, that's just Monday Night.

So the show that they're going to put on now with all the extra cameras and all this bells and whistles, I mean, this is now becoming a bit more expensive to produce. 500 grand per game in meteorite steals.
The NFL says, oh, ABC, you produce it. Oh, they just want 500 and profit.
It's just the meteor. Yeah, yeah.
ABC is investing way more than $8.5 million in this. So this is why the NFL collectively, team ownership and aggregate, is one of the best businesses ever.

They sell the rights, but then they don't have to incur any of the costs of doing the deals with advertisers.

Oh, it's entirely on the back of the network.

And then they get them to compete and make the product better.

Yes.

Because now Fox has got to have the blue line on the field.

They got to have John Madden.

Fox is paying John Madden, not the NFL.

That is incredible. You get your customers to make your product better for you.
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greenlight.com slash Wondery. Fast forward a couple decades.
What do you think NFL Sunday ticket is? I'll give you the whole rights packages right now. We may as well flash all the way forward to how much money.
So Disney slash ABC slash ESPN's package right now is $2.7 billion per year just for Monday night football. Oh my God.
So that's what, 16 games? Because there's no Monday night the last week of the season? 17 then? Whatever, it's either 16 or 17 games.

That's before the cost to produce it.

That's just the right.

I did the math.

I'll go through all the deals, but across all of them,

it averages out to, it costs the networks

$45 to $50 million per game

to have the rights to that game.

Okay, that's net after they've sold advertising?

That is the cost to be able to bring your production crew there.

You then have to also invest in the production crew.

Are they recouping?

I mean, they have to be. A walkthrough mall.
So then there's an NFC package and an AFC package. And of course, you should sell those to different networks.
So the NFC Sunday games go to Fox for $2.2 billion. The AFC Sunday games go to CBS for $2.1 billion.
Disney is paying more just for Monday nights than Fox and

CBS are paying for all the slate of Sunday

games. You'd rather be

Disney because you'd rather only have the cost of

producing one game. Then

NBC, they're like, how else can we

slice and dice these rights because there's another

bidder so we may as well let them buy something from us

too. They invent Sunday night football.

$2 billion a year. Wait, Sunday night football is different than Sunday football? Yeah.
Okay. Yeah, Thursday night football.
Oh my God. And for a while, I can't remember who had it, but now Amazon has it.
Now it's just a streaming package. That's what, like one six? It's a billion a year.
Seven-ish total. Call it five total for Sunday between the NFC and the AFC, Two and a half for Monday, so that's seven and a half.
Add another one for Thursday, you're at eight and a half. Then, they have NFL Sunday Ticket.
What is that? What if you want to be able to watch any game? You've probably seen all the YouTube TV advertising for NFL Sunday Ticket. Every time I sign out to my YouTube, I gotta deal with this offer.
You're a bar, and you want to be able to flip on whatever game your patrons want. You're a big fantasy football player, which fueled the growth of the league.
And you want access to all the games to be able to flip around. Well, you got to buy NFL Sunday ticket.
The league is like, we don't want to be in the business of providing NFL Sunday ticket. We'll just find a distribution partner.
We'll sell the rights to them and they can figure out how to make it available. That was DirecTV for a long time.
Now it is YouTube for the pretty penny of $2 billion a year for that rights package.

For the same footage.

Yes, here's the great thing.

Nothing new.

All the television networks are producing the games.

The camera crews, the commentators, everything.

NFL Sunday Ticket is reselling on top of what they've already sold.

Well, how does that not violate the rights?

Commercials are still the TV networks.

And then YouTube is making their money on the subscription model and not the advertising model. Direct TV when they had it and now with YouTube TV if you want NFL Sunday ticket as a consumer you have to pay an extra.
It's like what HBO used to be. Wow.
They have skinned this cat. There's one more that they came up with five years ago.
Do you know about Red Zone? Okay, this is where you're playing four games at one time. So the NFL launches NFL Network.
80 years in, they're like, we should have our own network, mostly non-game content, some analysis. And they realize because they're the one dictating terms on all these TV contracts, they can just keep putting in clauses.
And this clause that they negotiate in is, you can't watch any game at any time, but if you leave that channel on, on NFL Network, on Sundays, you'll just see the most interesting current moment of football being played. They're just snapping back and forth to all these different games that are happening.
You're just seeing play after play after play. All day.
It's called the Red Zone Channel because it's whatever team is in the Red Zone at any game going on at every given point in time is the theory. So the NFL doesn't have to take on the costs of filming this.
They have one dude in a studio who just sort of is like, now we're switching to the Lions and Commanders. Yeah, and they licensed it to them, but now they're licensing their footage for free.
Yes. My God, this is incredible.
So to your point, do the networks actually make money on this? At this point, it's not totally clear. They certainly used to, but NFL viewership has basically plateaued.
If you look at any metric first game of the year, or the Super Bowl, or the average viewership, it rose for a long time. The last 15 years has been pretty flat.
And they're just adding more product, because then you have Netflix Christmas game. Yeah, another 150, then Peacock has another 110 Madden video games.
That's a lot of money. 300 million a year.
Then also, you do think about that Christmas game and Beyonce. I'm surprised that they haven't done that more.
It's only the Super Bowl halftime show. They have to be able to top everything you've been seeing all year long and bring in people who don't generally watch football.
So they need something novel about it. But no, Monica, I think you're right.
And doing it on Christmas, they traditionally shied away from Christmas because that was the NBA's holiday. This is more speculation, but the NBA had historically operated more like baseball with each team had their own TV deals.
Baseball still to its great, great detriment. The NBA and Adam Silver realized, hey, the NFL's a better model.
So just this past year, I think, they renegotiated and centralized their TV contracts. Interestingly now, this is the first year the NFL is like, oh, well, Christmas, maybe we're not just going to let you have that.
So Christmas is now a battleground. And how's the Super Bowl work? When the merger happened, there was the NFL championship and the AFL championship, which had been sold to different networks of you're showing a championship game.
And then they're like, well, now that we're one league, can't have two champions. So then they invent the Super Bowl.
Which made the network executives livid because they're like, I thought we had the championship game. You're putting one more game after the game.
Then I got to spend money again. Yeah.
It just totally devalued this other thing we sold people. Totally.
The right to show the Super Bowl is, I'm imagining, a standalone TV deal. I actually don't have that in the sum of deals.
Well, it definitely was in the beginning because I think it was ABC and NBC that had the separate rights for the NFL championship and the AFL championship. And then they both each paid a million dollars to both show the Super Bowl.
The first Super Bowl was shown on both networks. For network rotation starting in 2024.
What is the rights to that cost? I think it might be built into the rest of the deals. Okay.
I kind of thought they all bid on just that one game. Maybe.
So it rotates every year. NBC, CBS.
Fox. What is this year's? It's on Court TV this year, which is a big win for them.
NBC gets Winter Olympic years. I'm so glad I don't have the chart in my office trying to keep track of all the shit we've bought and when we're airing it.
This sounds like the worst. Well, these days, if you're a networking executive, you're just a slave to the NFL, essentially.
Yeah. If you really follow the logic of the rights packages are getting more expensive, they're keeping basically the same number of commercials over the last 10, 15 years in any given game.
And so if the number of viewers is fixed, how do you make more money? You need to keep raising your revenue with your costs. And so I think what's happening is every time it gets renegotiated, the NFL is like, we're going to take more of the profit pool.
Yeah, there's a total profit pool here. A lot of it used to go to the networks.
You have no leverage against us. We're just going to take that profit pool and slowly shift it over to us, and you'll be near zero profit entities that are a part of something else.
But they're also, not to get too in the weeds on it, they're amortizing the cost of that through some value they assign launching television shows on the back of this audience. They have 16 million viewers.
They show a 30-second spot on the new- Yeah, it's almost a lost leader. Which used to work, especially because in the streaming era, you don't monetize through advertising.
So viewership actually doesn't matter as much. I mean, it does, but you guys would know better than me.
But yeah, you're getting into this complicated model of new subscribers. Their only metric is new subscribers.
And subscribers that are staying, why are they staying? Are they staying for the new show? Are they staying for this thing we added? Talk about a job that's nebulous, that they're trying to figure out best ROI. Who fucking knows why someone sticks around on a streamer? And I think they have good ideas on how to get new subscribers, but I'm not sure they know necessarily.
Then there's also a cap on that. Seven billion.
Yeah. They've all got a lot of room to go.
Yeah. I guess.
So Super Bowl, what we're ostensibly here for, many, many people would disagree with this. I think basically the NFL, just from a business standpoint, viewed this as more in the NFL films category.
Like how do we add Sheen to the league through this? Yes, it's a game. But this is when they introduced Media Week and the halftime show.
And famously, the halftime show, the performers don't get paid. It's a great honor.
Yeah. Great.
Exactly. Exactly.
Doing someone's live podcast. Right.
It's an honor. We promise.
Interestingly, I don't know for sure, but I believe obviously your stated goal as a athletic team is to win the Super Bowl purely from a business standpoint. winning the Super Bowl is economically suboptimal because you're playing many extra weeks for which you are not making more money.
All the revenue gets shared. All the teams get equal shares.
We should come up with the bottom line. It's a $12 billion a year pool of capital that comes from networks that lands in the NFL's pocket to get distributed equally, truly to this day, equally.
Packers get the same amount as the Niners in the Red. And that is why Kansas City can win Super Bowls.
You would never see that in other sports leagues. That's so true.
Dead equal. So if you, as an individual team, say like, I only care about my business as a team, I don't care about the NFL.
If you make the Super Bowl, let's say you don't get a bye week, so you're not a number one seed, so you're playing the wildcard round, the divisional round, the championship, the Super Bowl, four extra games. And then especially if you're a lower seed and those are all road games, the range in revenue for an NFL team, a small market team, would be 80% of their total revenue is from the centralized TV stuff from the NFL.
20% is local ticket sales, suites. Merch? Merch is centralized.
That was another Pete Rosel thing. There's some merch that's not.
But most is. Jerseys, all centralized.
The reason for that, Rosel was like, we can't have all the teams having different quality levels of merch. We need to make a promise that if you buy a Packers jersey or a Lions jersey or a Rams jersey or a Lions jersey, it's a quality product.
This is the most democratized business. When we were researching it, David texted me, this is communist capitalism.
Literally. Yes, it's communist capitalism.
Yes, it is. One example of communism working like a motherfucker.
And it's working. So there's a sub-organization of the NFL called NFL Enterprises that manages almost all the merch.
And then again, all that revenue gets shared out equally to everybody. Yeah, and if I'm a player, I'm pissed.
I'm like, bullshit, I'm fucking Tom Brady. 13% of all jersey sales this entire year were me.
Oh, think about Travis. Wow.
Taylor and Travis, we got to come back to that. He's fine.
He's not getting screwed. So many Kelsey jerseys on children now because of that.
You're right. Now, I don't know if on something like a jersey where it's an individual player name, if the player gets a small cut of that, but probably.
The players actually have it pretty great. It took a long time to get here.
There was a big deal in 93 that enabled free agency and then 2011 and that collective bargaining thing has been renegotiated a few times. But today, 48.5% of league revenue is the new salary cap.
So players are entitled as a whole to almost half the more money the NFL makes, the more money players will all make. That's pretty high.
It's really high. So everyone has an incentive.
Top tier quarterback contracts are 55 to 60 a year, and they're by far the highest paid players. But yeah, some of these are half a billion dollar contracts over a period of time.
Now you might say, oh my God, there's so much inequality among players. There is, but it's actually a narrower band than other sports.
The NFL has done a better job at making sure there's a league minimum that's sufficiently high. I'm always thinking about it when you watch that HBO show Hard Knocks training camp and you're like, this guy's making 400,000 a year and he's sitting next to a guy who's making $29,000 a year.
They're arriving in these dramatically different vehicles. It's pretty wild.
Most coworkers don't experience that. I don't know if you have it off the top of your head what the league minimum is, though, but it's pretty high.
Half a million, a million? Rob? $795,000. That's good.
And most are making more than that. Yeah.
And they're what, any player rosters? Like these are big teams. Exactly.
Okay, so here's my great question.

Is the only way for these networks

to fight back is if they themselves

formed a coalition

and they collectively said, guys,

we're not paying more than a billion

five for these rights.

People were concerned about this. People were like,

cord cutting's happening. Obviously,

traditional linear TV is going the way of the dodo.

Is the NFL screwed here? Yeah. Tech companies.
They're coming in. It doesn't help networks, but it is a way for the NFL to continue to extract dollars.
Thursday Night Football was streamed on Twitter for a year or two, right? Yeah, that was so weird. But again, if you look at it right now, it's the exact same situation the NFL was in 1960 or whatever.
because currently Netflix would be heavily disincentivized to enter into a collective buying group because they can outspend everybody. So they are currently someone who would be like fuck that.
But in the long run they might benefit more from being in bed with some of these other. They do have these published goals of wanting to grow revenue.
NFL total revenue last year was $20 billion up from 18 a couple years ago. And as you know, the lion's share of that is the $12 billion from the TV deal.
But then there's all this other stuff on top. I think they want it to be 25 by 2028 or something like that.
Yeah, my last question, and this one was really my agent when he found out I was going to talk to you guys. He's obsessed with you as well.
He's like, figure out what is going on with gambling. What's their participation in this gambling? Because this, again, is some potentially huge revenue source.
So what's their relationship with now this rise of these online gambling platforms? When we did the episode two years ago, what did we say? 45 million people-ish bet on the NFL. Which was illegal then.
It just goes to show prohibition is a goofy concept. Everyone still bet.
Except you legalize it and even way more people bet. A lot more people drink alcohol after prohibition.
75 million people bet on the NFL last year. It's growing 35% year over year.
That number's huge in and of itself. Only Americans watch football.
If you are going to analyze the NFL and say, what is its one weakness? What have other sports done better? It's internet. Nobody except Americans care.
Have they tried? They have these exhibition games. It's American expats who go to them.
Locals don't care. It is curious to me why it holds no interest.
I'm not a huge sports person, but I just do think objectively that game has a magic to it.

The results would suggest that, aside from their collective bargaining and all these other things,

it's an easy game to jump into really quick in love.

I was just about to say, I think Americans are so attached to our teams.

I think that's a little bit because we don't have a very long history.

So we have to build our own allegiances and stuff. And I don't think all these other countries have it.
But then I think soccer. Yeah.
I'm wrong. I'm wrong.
Like beating guys up in the street with pipes and shit. Yeah, yeah.
Back to betting. So 75 million people bet on the NFL.
The total population of people who care about the NFL is only Americans. So what's the denominator? I don't know, 300, 330?

That includes children.

Right, so probably a third of the country

is betting on the NFL.

Wow.

So does the NFL,

are they licensing anything in that process?

Yeah, they've started making money.

They wouldn't have let this happen

without having some sort of vig in it.

There are figures that an industry association

puts out that says they're making $2.3 billion a year from gambling. That's kind of amazing.
That's already a sixth of the TV contracts. They're taking credit and double dipping and other pies too.
So I'm not sure if there's yet a published number on here's our gambling revenue stream. They don't want to be known as having made money on this.
But how crazy is it watching football the last 30 years, and there was this puritanical thing where they would never even mention the spread. And now it's all over the place.
And it's like, this is the DraftKings postgame. Yes.
I can't believe it. They did a big old pivot on that.
They really did. There was this original fear, of course, that it would somehow corrupt the game and people would throw games.
And we did see it in baseball. baseball there's some examples so i think the ostensible threat always was it was going to change the outcomes of these games is there any proof of that having happened i'll tell you in my own personal anecdotal situation i would have never found a bookie i stupidly thought that the jake paul and tyson fight was real and so when i heard it was three to one Tyson to knock him out.
You're now convinced it wasn't real? Yeah, yeah. When a man has that much muscle memory with his Bob left everything, and we see him do the entire series and then stop just short of knocking him out, that's a little hard for me to understand.
But at any rate, I was stupid enough to believe that that was going to be a real fight. And I'm like, well, that's three to one money sitting on the fucking table.
Mike Tyson's going to knock this guy out in two seconds. I can download an app right now and make that.
I was like, I got to get to Vegas. I'm like, no, I don't anymore.
Now, it turns out I would have needed to because in California, you still can't do that. Thank you, California.
You saved me $1,000. It's not legal here yet? I think it has a lot of restrictions.
I think this is part of why there's so many different things you can bet on. Any state that you have a native gaming industry, which California has, you're going to find that we have more restrictive laws.
Every time there's an election cycle, you see all these gambling anti and pro funded by different reservations. So I think that's why I wasn't able to bet.
So thank you, reservations, as well. on keeping your money.
So yeah, raises those questions. I guess then you look through another lens of, well, the NFL always explicitly has been, this is an entertainment product.
We don't want a Paul Brown situation. They're putting their fingers on the scale in every which way.
Let's take the schedule. It's not totally innocuous having the best teams play the best teams, staying for the 500 record.
Actually, it's going to make the best teams worse in the back half of the season because they're more beat up. Here's the one thing, other than CTE, that could start the decline of the league.
We are slowly seeing the erosion of the league first mentality of the cooperative capitalism. It used to be the case that the overwhelming amount of revenue that you produce comes from the league, the national revenue, and still for most teams about two thirds.
But there are more teams finding clever ways to say, oh, that's actually not part of national revenue. That's part of my revenue.
So when you see a new stadium get built and it has an absurd number of luxury suites, luxury suites are different than admission tickets. Admission tickets have a way in which a lot of the money goes to national revenue.
Oh, they have to kick up their own ticket sales? The justification is a visiting team is half the product. Oh, I thought for sure that was all theirs.
I think 40%. I think it's about a third.
And again, it's not just directly to the visiting team, it's up to the national pool. Which then gets split evenly.
But these luxury suites, for example, that's all local revenue. You get to keep that.
Or other businesses that you start around your stadium. And then you get into games like seed licenses, if you guys have heard of that.
If you want season tickets, you need to buy a seed license that gives you the right to then buy the tickets. The ticket revenue is going to get shared up, but the seed license...
Oh, that's not mentioned in the national agreement. And so the way this nets out is you have teams like the Cowboys

that will do something like $600 million in profit

in operating income at the end of the year.

And these are Forbes estimates.

But then you've got the Bengals, the Lions, the Bills,

teams of that ilk doing $50 to $60 million a year.

Oh my god, 10x.

And it's because Jerry World,

they've managed to build a really profitable local-only revenue business. So you do have teams that are making a lot more money than other teams as more of the cleverness shifts to the local business.
And you think that could cede some kind of animosity that could start to erode? Even if not animosity, just some teams are way richer than others. The salary cap still is low enough that you can, as a small market team, still have parity.
Are a lot of the teams not even hitting the cap, would be my guess? Or do they all hit the cap? I think they all hit the cap. But there's all sorts of engineering you can do around the cap.
It's a game of chicken between the players and the individual teams and the league of like, well, are you back weighting the contract? How much is guaranteed? Your margin of safety isn't that much further with the bottom teams making on the order of 50 million in profit a year before, let's say the next time there's a renegotiation and it goes from 48.5% of the players to let's say it goes up north of 50. Or let's say costs go up for everyone.
The players, from their perspective, they're like, we just want as much money as possible. We want Jerry Jones to be able to pay us more money.
Wouldn't that then incentivize teams moving much more? Because if I'm only making $50 million, I see in Dallas you can make $600 million. Well, and it's already happening.
Look at the Raiders, right, going to Vegas. This is the thing that made the NFL, was it doesn't matter how big of a market you're in.
If you have the best team and we create this really even product, it makes for this really powerful league. They're very aware of this.
They're not dumb, but money works. Money talks.
What a fascinating business. Okay, so the last thing is the Super Bowl.
Put a bow on it. Yeah, please.
Again, I truly think every team, genuinely, their number one goal is to win the Super Bowl. If you make it to the Super Bowl, you're playing all these extra games.
You're not necessarily getting more money from that, especially if you're not the home team. When you go to the Super Bowl, nobody's the home team.
And then you might think like, okay, well, if you get to the Super Bowl, at least you're there, you spend all the money you would want to win. If you win the Super Bowl, you got to pay for the parade.
That last line item, the parade. And the parties and all that.
Well, don't players also have Super Bowl bonuses? Probably the bigger impact is not just Super Bowl bonuses, but what it does for contract negotiations in the coming years. Players will be like, well, I helped you win a Super Bowl.
And it does affect their value on the market. Their skills are entirely well, they're part of a Super Bowl team.
You know, could the NFL have a downfall? Baseball was the NFL 50, 60, 70 years ago. Nobody would have questioned national pastime.
You and I were even much more bullish when we did our NBA episode three years ago that the NBA was going to eclipse the NFL. But this 82-game season where the coaches are incentivized to sit their best players and nothing really matters until the end of the season anyway.
Well, nothing matters to the fourth quarter, then nothing matters to the end of the season, yes. I was the biggest NBA fan.
That was my religion for like eight years years and i was watching the lakers during their run of complete dominance so fun and i remember just going i should really only tune into the fourth quarter that's when they start playing doesn't matter how much they're down and then i was like do i even like this sport if i sit through three quarters that don't matter it's interesting the limits that are just inherently in place like i guess the obvious choice for them would be to add games in the nfl but it's such a It's a the limits that are just inherently in place. Like, I guess the obvious choice for them would be to add games in the NFL.
But it's such a violent sport that there's really kind of a limit. They can't play 82 games a year in that sport.
They're likely going to add another week. Wednesday morning football.
Tea time. Football.
Breakfast football. That's how they're going to finally get Europe.
Exactly. Well, David and Ben,

this has been awesome. Yeah, thanks for coming.

How fun. Thanks for having us.
We love your show so much. Thank you for being such

fans. There's not a day that goes

by that we don't hear from someone.

I heard about you guys on Armchair Express.

Oh, good. Thanks so much for coming in.

I hope we get to do this again. Yeah.

Another topical burble up. The row.

And yes, we'll be on your show.

We'll be on your show.

Yes.

Oh, David,

were you whispering

at that?

Thanks so much,

you guys.

Thanks, guys.

All right,

take care.

Stay tuned

to hear Miss Monica

correct all the facts

that were wrong.

It's okay, though.

We all make mistakes.

Okay.

Well.

Okay.

Hello.

If you say so. Now, tell me if you've ever experienced this, okay? Okay.
Well. Okay.
Hello. If you say so.

Now, tell me if you've ever experienced this, okay? Okay. You get a new scratch.
Scratch? Yeah. Yeah.
And it turns into a scar. Oh.
Okay. Okay.
You with me? Yeah. You along so far? And then when you look at your arm or hand wherever the scratch scar is you don't recognize your own self oh no oh you can't really not have that experience okay that's what you're dealing with yeah i have a new scar is this a the mole you try to pick out or the freckle that you try to dig out i do often try to to remove my own freckles.
You're one to talk, okay? I've not tried to remove a freckle. You try to do lots of surgeries on yourself.
True, true. But just no freckle removal.
I don't know that that's possible. Well, it is.
I mean, I'm not advising it. Yeah, okay.
But I've successfully completed many remover. And replaced it with a scar? No, this is not that.
Okay. This was a scratch or something.
I don't know what happened there. But I guess I must have picked at it.
And now it's a scar. Was it a little light white color there? Yeah, do you see it? Well, now it has a little makeup on it because this is where I put my makeup.
Oh, you put makeup. Oh, I thought you were covering up this.
No, I wasn't. In fact, now it's like, now it looks like I'm lying.
Right. Give yourself a scar.
Can you see it? Yeah, oh my God. I know, it's huge.
It's so, I can't see it. Really? Yeah, I'm sorry.
Well, the brown spot? Yeah. Oh yeah, I see the brown spot.
That's him. That's a liver spot I think.
Don't. That's not what happened.
That is not what happened. It was a stretch.
It's time to enter our liver spot phase of life. I'm going to try to avoid that.
Although it's, look, aging is normal and natural. It's very natural.
If you can do it without liver spots, you'd probably prefer it. Ideally, yeah.
But anywho, so now when I'm like typing, it's on my hand. I see it all the time.
And I'm like, who is she? Right, whole new hand. That's kind of fun, though, I would say.
Yeah, it's an opportunity for reinvention. Yeah.
Slowing time down. Just a ding, ding, ding.
Because novel things slow time down. Yeah, they do.
No one, maybe that's why Jan's going so slow. Jan Brady, January.
We're calling her Jan Brady now? Yeah. You got to catch me up.
I'm sorry. Yeah, where did you develop Jan Brady? That sounds like a Jess.
Absolutely. I've been calling her Jan.
Okay, right. And then he added Brady.

Well, tomorrow it's over.

I know.

Yeah.

One more day.

We can make it through.

Yeah, maybe.

We can.

Yeah, we can.

Yeah, I started compulsively cutting my hair today.

You know how I like to do that.

Yeah, and it's an indicator.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But now I can't blow my nose.

Oh, you're replacing.

And I think that it's burbling up.

Okay, I think you're going to need a new replacement because soon you're not going to have any hair. I think I satiated my thing.
What happens is I was going to do a little trim trim. It got bigger and bigger and bigger.
And then I thought I had finished in the bathroom, but then I went to work out. And as I told you, I have reverse lighting or backlighting.
I know. It exposes all these things.
And then the madness of, I'm just going to do a trim. I know that's it.
I keep scissors now in my gym, which is, yeah. And then I got to vacuum it up.
And then I'm like, that's it because we can't get the vacuum out again. And I got the vacuum out like five times, I think.
Okay. Yeah.
I was lifting weights, cutting hair, vacuuming, lift more weights, see more hair, cut more hair, vacuum. If someone was watching.
Yeah. Which someone could.
It's very exposed. There's a lot of people in this area.
And there's just windows galore. Oh, true.
So if someone was interested, they probably watched the ramblings of a madman. Your hair looks nice, though.
Okay, good.

You did a good job.

You see any spots I need to trim?

No.

Okay.

I'm not too far from my scissors.

They're always within an arm's length.

Had a little bit of a gusher.

Caught my ear a little bit.

Okay.

I'm just trying to be accountable.

I know.

I appreciate it.

It's like in an A meeting.

It just worries me a little.

Okay.

So maybe with your gusher, you're going to start understanding what I'm talking about, about the scar. I'll be blessed with the fact that it's very hard for me to see, other than when I saw blood and blood overtook my whole sideburn area.
Well, when you get a glance of it, you might be like, whose ear is that? Yeah. Speaking of people watching you do weird things, yesterday I was at Sunset

Tower. That's a very fancy location in this city.
Wow. We had overlapping days.
Continue.

So I went to Sunset Tower and I was working. I just bought this new bracelet and I love it.

It's from Sarah Hendler. Great.
And she put it on me. And so then when I got to Sunset Tower,

I was like, oh, I... And I love it.
Yeah. It's from Sarah Hendler.
Great. And she put it on me.

And so then when I got to Sunset Tower, I was like, oh, I'm going to try to tighten it a little bit, like move it up a rung.

Okay. So I took it off.

And then I spent, I think, like 20 minutes trying to get this bracelet back on my hand.

I could not do it. This is a great way to meet somebody.
Ask a stranger. I'm so sorry, sir.
Could you hold my delicate risk and help me get this? Do you mind helping me with this? I did think it could be a meet-cutes situation. Yeah, for sure.
And then the universe is wily, right? Rascallyascally. Yeah.
I was thinking about that and meet cutes. And guess who reached back out? Who? The matchmaker.
Oh, really? People remember it didn't, last time didn't go great. And I felt.
Bad about yourself. Yeah.
Yeah. I did.
I felt bad about myself. I'll cut to the chase for you.
And this one seems more promising. Okay.
Less like conducive to me feeling like I hate myself. Okay, great.
So we'll see. So Sunset Tower, did you see fancy people? Since I sat at the bar, I couldn't really look.

But I'm sure there's fancy people there. There always are.
So, you know, I had this dinner with Nate and Panay that was a con. It was really a deception so that I could get to my birthday party.
But then I really wanted to have dinner with them. So that was last night.
Oh. And then Panay was like, where should we go? Like home base, one of our standards.
and I said, I could go to Homebase

or I could also go see some new hot place. I felt like I wanted to see that.
Boy, did he deliver. We went to, have you heard of Navico? Navico.
I thought it was Nabokov when I saw it written. I was like, oh, they named a restaurant after Nabokov, the writer.
Oh. But it's Nabokov.
Oh. In Beverly Hills on Cannon.
And it was everything I could have hoped for. It's only been open since July, I guess.
Mediterranean and Italian. The food was outrageous.
Ooh. You know how when you're at Cara, you can pretend you're in Italy? Yeah.
I was like, we're in Miami. Oh, sure.
It is. It was Miami.
Where people were dressed. I got to be careful.
Well. I got to be careful.
It's not. It's fine.
Almost all the dudes looked exactly the same. Uh-huh.
I can picture it. Five, nine shaved heads, probably on a little too much testosterone, but not working out a lot.
With very, very attractive younger women. And were they wearing chains, maybe? Yeah, there was a lot of jewelry.
There was a lot of paddock watches. I mean, it's expensive.
Yeah, yeah. I'm watching like...
It's kind of like no boo in a way. Yeah.
It felt like a throwback to the 80s or 90s, which I enjoy. That's fun.
I cannot put too fine a point how good the food was. It was outrageous.
I want that. And we pigged out like crazy.
A risotto with truffle gluten-free blew my doors off my barn. And then a great steak, a baby chicken.
Tiny chicken? They described it as a baby chicken. Not a Cornish hen.
Not a Cornish hen, but an oven-baked tiny baby chicken. They don't need to call it that.
That's not as appetizing. Well, I was like, do they mean a chick? Right, exactly.
But that wouldn't be enough meat, I don't think. It was delicious and it was very entertaining.
It was, it was. It's fun to do that every now and then and get in the scene.
Yes, I loved it. What was the vibe? I didn't know you're not working at Sunset Tower.
Only. That's a far ride to go.
It is. That's why it's not a main stop for me.
But I love Sunset Tower. You love it.
I only go like once a year, twice a year. You love it for the food, the atmosphere? Atmosphere.
And what are you seeing? Also, the food is very good. I had a fried chicken.
Ooh. And it was really delicious.
They have a great shrimp crock. Was it a baby chicken? Fried baby chicken? It was full size, I think.
Okay. Grandpa chicken? Yeah.
It's also such a vibe. It is, for people who don't know, it's a hotel here, Sunset Tower Hotel.
Very historic. And then there's a bar in a restaurant.
It's very L.A., old school L.A., old Hollywood vibes. If you will.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
It got packed. See, I went at 2.30.
So that you'll be still there at happy hour? I didn't mean to, but we left at eight. Okay.
So we were there all day.

I've been craving it for a while, the energy there.

Yeah.

Similarly.

Yeah.

I was dead.

I had ridden my bicycle too far, and I hadn't had caffeine since really early in the day,

and I wasn't going to have any.

Oh.

I was driving there.

I was like, oh, a little drowsy for this big outing with the boys.

But I did have some DCs at the place.

And then the energy really did lift me up.

Do you think that maybe now is not the time for you to be like cutting out caffeine?

Well, I think it is in service of making sure I'm getting good night's sleep.

Oh, okay.

Right.

Like I think getting a full uninterrupted aid is ideal right now.

Which I did last night.

Yeah.

I just, I think taking away things that you like.

Blowing my nose.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's like maybe now is not the time.

Although I have the right mental attitude.

I've decided to go like, yeah, this is uncomfortable, but this is you being strong and not escaping and walking through and it's fine and it'll change. So it's been fine.
Okay. Yeah.
There's a couple of haircuts, a few naps. That's all right.
All that's fine. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
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Hyundai vehicles have won over 120 IIHS Top Safety Awards from 2006 to 2024 as of December 2024. Anything thrilling happened since I saw you last? I guess those were big announcements that I already gave.
We both went to restaurants. I took a bike ride.
I took a long time to put my bracelet on. Yeah.
Did you end up having someone help you? Yeah, when Julia got there she did it. But not a stranger.
No. I think that's the best move.
I know, but it's also so... I'm so sorry, excuse me.
I've been trying to get this bracelet on for 20 minutes. Would you mind? I don't have any cooties.
Well, I do have cooties. Look how fun this is already.
Playful, dance, dance, dance. Before he even gets to the bracelet, you've now talked for 25 minutes.
Sure, because he's going to have a hard time too. It's much harder than you'd think.
Yeah, and then he's failing and he's laughing. Oh my God.
I'm falling in love just thinking about this. We had a funny moment last night.
Every now and then you'll feel 13, which is really fun, which is George and I went to the bathroom. There was a girl in a cowboy hat he liked.
Okay. Sitting at a table.
And behind them was this cool little display of like the seafood they have. It was like a little mini market set up and they're grabbing stuff from there.
It felt like you were invited to peruse this little thing. Okay.
So on the way in, George spotted her and he's like, oh my God, look at the girl in the cowboy hat. I'm like, okay, so when we're coming out, I'm like, oh, let's look at these.
Let's look at the lobsters. You were wingmanning.
Yeah, so now we're like, now we're, we are looking

but we're also fake looking. Of course.

And we're like looking at the vegetables

and the lobster and this and that. And then as I

turned to walk in, well, they're all looking

at George and I. And then I'm like,

and now what?

Yeah, he's gonna have to talk. He's

gonna have to talk. It's so funny.

That part's hard. I felt like I was at the mall and we saw

some girls at Burger King and then we acted like we were gonna buy something. Then we were like, you know what? I'm full.
And turned around and it was like, well, that was the... Oh, wow.
So was a mess. Well, I think we got their attention and then I was leaving and George was like, I'm going to go back.
I'm going to go back and see what's happening with the cowboy hat. But I'm standing there looking at this stuff.
It's so weird to be an adult. Especially 50.
Right. Yeah.
I think it's... I was hearing the updates of a single life and I was thinking, yeah, I'm glad I'm not.
Yeah. I'm not on the scene.
Well, that's, yeah. Speaking of young men, Ben and David.
Oh, wow. Fun.
Ben and David. Yeah, they're great.
Really, really, really. That was a very fun time.
Yes. And now I'm really into the NFL as an institution.
Yeah, as a corporation. Yeah, as a business.
As a capitalist communism.

Yesterday, I bought some vintage clothes and bought an L.A. Rams.

There was an L.A. Rams vintage shirt.

Oh, really?

And I got that because now I really like the L.A. Rams because they were really ahead of their time progressively.

Right.

So now you're a huge fan. Yeah.
Of the Rams. And I live here.
You're a Ram fan. Well, let's see.
The biggest fact to check and the most exciting fact to check is Taylor Swift's car collection. Oh, okay.
Yeah. This is very exciting.
Very. Does she have a car collection? I was a definite no.
Uh-huh. And I felt very arrogant, in my opinion, because I feel like I know everything about her.
Yeah. Only because I listen to a great podcast, Every Single Album, shout out, that breaks down all of her albums.
And they do other people, too And they also just do like music industry stuff. The two hosts are really awesome.
So I love that. And so now I feel like I know everything because they do Deep Dive, but I don't think they've talked about her car collection.
Right. They skipped that part.
So she does have one. This is fantastic.
What are her cars? Okay. There are three sections of cars she has.
Okay. Luxury, sports, and practical.
Okay. Luxury, Mercedes AMG G63.
Oh, what a wonderful sedan. Luxury vehicle.
Twin turbo. Is that a sedan or a? Yeah, four-door sedan.

Oh, I thought it was a G-Wagon.

G-Wagon is the G63.

That's what I said.

Oh, I thought you said S.

No, G.

Oh, wonderful.

Love those.

Love those.

Eric's even thinking of getting one.

Really?

Yeah.

G-Wagon.

Yeah, they're so good.

I would like to have one in my life.

You would.

At some point. Yeah, they're great.
They're very expensive. Are they me, though? But kind of.
Every time I see a G-Wagon, it's mostly rich, hot women driving G-Wagons in LA. Yeah, it skews female.
Really? She also has Mercedes-Benz S-Class. That's what I was referring to, but not the AMG version.
Right. Then she has a Mercedes Maybach S650.
That's like a coach-built Mercedes-based, you know, like a private plane for cars. Wow.
It's a rolling atelier. Wow.
Then there's the Cadillac Escalade. Standard.
You got to have it for arriving at functions. You're up high.
If you're wearing a dress, you can exit the vehicle without your beaver accidentally being exposed. Yeah.
Special occasions. Okay.
Now we're into sports cars. Okay.
Audi R8. Okay, yes, yes.
Very elegant design first.

Okay.

Not the most performing of super cars.

Okay.

No, no, objectively, but very elegant looking.

It does say right here, a high performance super car.

Yep, and it is.

It's got the Lambo V10 or it's got the V8 depending on which.

It says V8. Okay, I'm surprised she doesn't have the V10, but when I talk to her, I'll get her.
You'll get her. Again, that's a very feminine supercar.
Okay. Okay.
Now, she also has a Ferrari 458 Italia. That's a shocker.
Yeah. Yeah, that feels, that's interesting.
That's when she plays Lavender Hayes, I think. That's her Lavender Hayes car.
Is it sexy? Well, it's just an Italian, I mean, it's so. Italian Stallion? Yeah.
Very dude car. Very, very few women go out and buy a 458.
Oh, wow, yeah. Yeah, I'm looking it up.
It looks fast. I'm going to ask Chad if it knows what percentage of Ferrari owners are men.
Oh, that's a great question. Because I bet you it's about as high as any brand.
What percentage of Ferrari owners are men? The percentage of Ferrari owners who are men is estimated to be around 90 to 95%. Oh, wow.
That's really quite high. So she can count herself in the 5%.
That's awesome. Okay.
Then she has a Porsche 911 Turbo. Perfect car.
Very exciting. Great taste.
Should I see what chat thinks the percentage of women who own Porsches? Yeah, it needs to be higher if it's not. What percentage of Porsche owners are female? 15 to 20 percent.
Okay. So that's 4x the amount that owns 4x.
Right, and that tracks. I know more women with Porsches.
The Cayenne has female ownership estimated between 30 and 40 percent. Oh, that's the electric one? No.
Oh. Oh, here we go.
The Macan, that's the small SUV. That one's got 50% of buyers are women.
Wow. Yeah.
Okay. All right.
Practical vehicles. Okay.
She has some practical vehicles? She has three. Okay.
She has a Toyota Sequoia. Great.
She'll have that until she's dead. It'll run until she's dead.
She has a Chevy, which we hope is like 150. She's 150.
Yeah. It'll run that long.
Don't worry. Chevy Silverado, her first car, which she still keeps.
Okay. Is it pink? Yeah, it's pink.
It's pink. It's like a Mary Kay.
And then the Nissan Quashquai. That's Q-A-S-H-Q-A-I.
That's... She has that.
Why does she have that? She has it. Was that given? Does she have a deal with Nissan? Does she have any kind of...
No, she just loves it. She loves it.
Okay, but actually, according to this other site, her very first car is a pink truck. That's very cute.
Another site has a little bit of a different opinion on what she has, but a lot of these are crossing over. So I feel good about that.
The Ferrari, the Porsche, they're all on here. Okay, good.
The Sequoia, the AMG, the Nissan Quashquai, the everyday humble choice. Everyone says the Nissan Quashquai? If we ever interview her, I want to do 20 minutes on this.
I hope she arrives in it. That would be great.
And she probably will because it says the everyday humble choice. Oh.
It's her latest acquisition. She can move her discreetly.
Right. In London.
It says in London specifically. This vehicle is in London, and it's so she can leave an apartment without anyone thinking it's her.
Yeah. Although too late.
I know. Don't go looking for her quashquise and try to find her.
She's just trying to live. She's just trying to be.
She should own a UPS truck and then just deck out the back like a Sprinter van and then get driven around a UPS truck. You could design something for her.
You've been designing cars with AI. I could, and then her driver could wear the UPS outfit.
That's fun. Or FedEx, I guess if she's in London.
It would probably be FedEx. Okay, do players get a cut of their jersey sales? Yes.
NFL players receive a cut of their jersey sales. Players receive royalties based on how many other jerseys have sold.
These royalties come from group licensing deals negotiated through the NFL. Okay.
So, that's cool. Action Park, I don't believe, is the park based on Adventureland because it says Adventureland is based on the real life Adventureland Park in Farmingdale, New York.
Okay. Action Park is in New Jersey.
Okay. And there's a doc about it called Class Action Park or something.
Oh, five to ten victims daily. Five to ten people went in an ambulance away from there.
Emergency room. Emergency room.
While they were keeping probably the town emergency clinic in business. Yeah.
Maybe that's what it was all about. I wonder if they were giving away like the woman who lost her eyelid on the slide and she got an embroidered sweatshirt or something from Armchair Anonymous.
Yeah, that was a great episode.

They should have had a shirt that said,

I was sent to the emergency room by Adventure Park.

And all I got was this little t-shirt.

Action Park.

No, Action Park, yeah.

Well, that's it for Ben and David.

They were awesome.

Ah, yeah.

Really fun.

Yeah, incredible.

And I've been talking so much about what I learned.

Yeah, me too.

I basically repeated the entire episode to my father-in-law. Oh, fun.
All right, love you. Love you.
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