Pod Insights Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard Acquired Podcast on the NFL (with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal) About this episode Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal (Acquired) are hosts of the critically acclaimed podcast covering business history and strategy. Ben and David join the Armchair Expert on this special Super Bowl episode to discuss the metric of being right more often but having less fun, how the Super Bowl is the best weekend for a wedding, Disneyland, and Costco, and how LA refused to participate in early games due to segregation. David, Ben, and Dax talk about Teddy Roosevelt starting the NCAA in 1905 to prevent football fatalities, JFK passing antitrust legislation for televising football, and how the NFL uniquely collectivizes resources so all teams get equally distributed resources from league-wide television deals. Ben and David explain the breakdown of the gentleman’s agreement between the AFL and NFL to not poach players, how the formation of the NFL compares to the founding of the United States, and why Monday Night Football revolutionized modern television.
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Transcript 22,284 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dax Shepard? Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. Hi, Monica.
0:04 Speaker 01 Hi.
0:04 Dax Shepard? 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.
0:25 Speaker 01 That's right.
0:25 Dax Shepard? And so I thought it was your idea. I was about to say you had a great idea.
0:29 Speaker 01 Well, I had the idea to bring them in to do this.
0:30 Dax Shepard? You did. And then they had the idea, what about the NFL, which, what timing? So we're going to learn the history and the finances of the NFL. And it's, would you, I need you to give me a testimonial. It's so much more interesting than probably anyone would expect, right?
0:43 Speaker 01 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.
0:54 Dax Shepard? Sure.
0:55 Speaker 01 But you know what? It was so fantastic. And I was talking about it all night at your party.
1:01 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:10 Speaker 01 Everyone should listen to the Costco episode and be reminded what a beautifully run business.
1:17 Dax Shepard? Ethical.
1:18 Speaker 01 Very ethical, lots of integrity, and it's such a good company, and I'm obsessed with it.
1:25 Dax Shepard? I've, I've been in the Costco religion.
1:27 Speaker 01 I know. I'm lazy.
1:28 Dax Shepard? Shot two movies in Costco. Yeah. Please enjoy Ben and David on the NFL. We get support from Quince.
1:37 Speaker 01 Okay. Can we talk about the fact that the holidays are already here? It's crazy. I feel like I blinked and now we're in gifting season, which I'm not really mad about because I do love giving gifts. And Quince is making it so easy to find something great for everyone on my list, including myself. Because let's be honest, self-gifting is a love language.
1:56 Dax Shepard? Quince is seriously the gift that keeps on giving. Their high-quality staples are made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14-karat gold, and Italian leather. Full-on luxury quality at prices that won't wreck your holiday budget.
2:12 Speaker 01 It's the dream. The cashmere sweater is starting at $60. Down jackets, wool outerwear, cashmere accessories. You and everyone on your list are staying cozy and looking incredible all season long.
2:23 Dax Shepard? Well, I'm gonna tell you this. It just got chilly for the first time this year in California, and I'm so excited. And I'm wearing my Quince cashmere right now.
2:30 Speaker 01 It's great.
2:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and I am going to gift this to some of my friends. I hope they're not listening.
2:35 Speaker 01 Quince is also more than clothing. They've got fine jewelry for your significant other, leather bags for your bestie, hotel-quality bedding to set up your guest rooms, chef-grade cookware. That's an amazing thing they offer here. And it's such a good gift because people don't like buying cookware for themselves, but it's very important. And they also have five-star luggage, another good gift that people don't like buying for themselves.
2:58 Dax Shepard? Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. We get support from Skims. Okay, I have a confession. I genuinely love matching pajamas. It's the best part of Christmas morning, really. Everyone in the same matching set, looking ridiculously cute in front of the tree.
3:33 Speaker 01 I love matching pajamas. I'm literally gonna be in coordinating sets with all my friends this holiday season because I got them, spoiler to my friends who are listening, the same Skims pajama set I've been living in. Are so soft and cozy and they look cute. So you can leave the house and go get a late night hot chocolate.
3:52 Dax Shepard? Ooh.
3:53 Speaker 01 Cozy.
3:54 Dax Shepard? Hmm. It's so great how Skims has sets for everyone too. Women's, men's, kids, even your pets. So nobody in your life has to be left out this year.
4:04 Speaker 01 I have a bunch of different pajama sets. One of my favorite is the organic cotton sleep long sleeve set.
4:11 Dax Shepard? Okay.
4:11 Speaker 01 It is so comfortable, very chic too. The top is a button down, but very, very soft, easy to sleep in. But as I said before, you can multi-purpose this.
4:22 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
4:23 Speaker 01 And look super cute.
4:24 Dax Shepard? Hot chocolate runs. It's like the pajamas we grew up in, except without the scratchy polyester that made opening presents feel more like a hot yoga class that nobody signed up for.
4:33 Speaker 01 All the nostalgia, none of the discomfort. Shop my favorite loungewear and pajamas at skims.com. After you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you. Select podcasts in the survey and be sure to select Armchair Expert in the dropdown menu that follows. If you're looking for the perfect gifts for everyone on your list, the Skims Holiday Shop is now open at skims.com.
5:10 Dax Shepard? Okay, gentlemen, we are so tickled that you came.
5:12 Speaker 01 Yes.
5:13 Dax Shepard? 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?
5:24 Speaker 02 Yes.
5:25 Dax Shepard? Oh, good. Good, good, good. We never know if we're in a vacuum or not.
5:29 Speaker 01 I know. Even my Hermes hiccup seemed to have made its way back.
5:33 Dax Shepard? Because you liked it so much and you wanted to buy one of the old bags.
5:36 Speaker 01 And I stand by it.
5:37 Speaker 02 I don't think there's anything wrong with liking Hermes.
5:39 Speaker 01 Thank you.
5:40 Speaker 02 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?
5:46 Speaker 01 I was unrelatable.
5:48 Dax Shepard? Ah, too rich. I get it. When I was poor, I hated people like Monica.
5:51 Speaker 01 But I don't have one.
5:52 Dax Shepard? But now I love people like Monica.
5:54 Speaker 01 I don't have one. That's the whole point. I just want one.
5:56 Dax Shepard? There's something interesting about what we file offensive or gratuitous, but we don't because a piece of art, no one's mad at Picasso's worth 150 million dollars. They're like, oh, that's kind of rad. But for some reason, this is very triggering for people.
6:08 Speaker 03 You're mad at the person who owns it.
6:09 Speaker 02 Well, I think the counterintuitive thing that I didn't realize till we did the episode on them is there is this spectrum between a functional object and art. And Hermès is somewhere along that spectrum, where stuff you buy from Amazon is about the product. You're buying history and brand when you're buying Hermès as much as you are the product.
6:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:29 Dax Shepard? Well, I'll tell you, I think it was your Hermès 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 Monica, he's like, I've gotta get some Hermès stuff.
6:41 Speaker 01 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.
7:05 Dax Shepard? Yeah, all he knows about is the stock market. He vaguely knows law and he knows peptides.
7:09 Speaker 01 He doesn't know who Natalie Portman is.
7:11 Speaker 03 Soccer team owner, I think.
7:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. You remember.
7:15 Dax Shepard? 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.
7:30 Speaker 02 Thank you.
7:30 Dax Shepard? 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.
7:56 Speaker 03 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.
8:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:07 Speaker 03 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.
8:18 Dax Shepard? Ooh, I would love to know the worst idea.
8:20 Speaker 02 It was companies that had successfully innovated more than once.
8:24 Speaker 03 Like incredibly rare.
8:25 Dax Shepard? I was gonna say, I can't imagine you get a ton of episodes.
8:27 Speaker 01 You might run out.
8:28 Dax Shepard? Okay, but you went to Ohio State?
8:31 Speaker 03 I did.
8:31 Dax Shepard? Congratulations. Did you guys just win?
8:33 Speaker 03 National champions.
8:34 Speaker 01 Well, I went to UGA, so I also have a national championship background. Just throwing that out there.
8:40 Speaker 03 You and I did a lot to earn this.
8:42 Speaker 01 We've done so much. I see you, another fisherman.
8:44 Dax Shepard? Now, okay, why did you end up at Ohio State?
8:46 Speaker 03 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 Sands. 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.
9:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah. I'm gonna keep this really brief because Monica will kill me, but just off the top of your head, what's the greatest amusement park in the history of the world?
9:16 Speaker 03 Cedar Point.
9:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah, of course. That's an easy question. You got that right.
9:19 Speaker 03 Halfway between Cleveland and Detroit.
9:21 Dax Shepard? 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.
9:29 Speaker 01 I hate Cedar Point now. I'll never go. We should have done it on Cedar Point.
9:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, Millennium Forest, Top Thrill Dragster.
9:36 Dax Shepard? Magnum XJ220s, the Gemini, the Demon Drop, the Corkscrew.
9:41 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
9:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah. They were just acquired by Six Flags. You really could do an episode on them.
9:46 Speaker 03 We actually should.
9:46 Speaker 02 You just turn me on to Defunct Land, this YouTube channel?
9:49 Dax Shepard? What's that?
9:49 Speaker 02 Ben, you can tell it better than me, but it's like acquired episodes of old defunct amusement parks.
9:53 Dax Shepard? 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.
9:59 Speaker 01 I would.
10:00 Speaker 03 It's too successful to do it on. Have you ever heard of Action Park? They just made a documentary about it.
10:04 Speaker 01 No.
10:04 Dax Shepard? In New Jersey?
10:05 Speaker 03 Yes.
10:05 Dax Shepard? Yes.
10:06 Speaker 03 This was the YouTube channel that popularized people looking. Back and being like, that was completely insane that Action Park existed.
10:12 Dax Shepard? 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.
10:19 Speaker 01 No, no, thank you.
10:20 Speaker 03 It's like a badge of honor.
10:21 Dax Shepard? And I think Adventureland, that movie is based on that.
10:24 Speaker 01 Oh, no way.
10:24 Dax Shepard? 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 and yeah. Okay, so you graduate with a computer science degree and then you end up moving to Silicon Valley?
10:39 Speaker 03 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.
10:54 Speaker 01 Oh, God.
10:55 Dax Shepard? And that was your first lesson in negotiating?
10:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a rookie mistake.
10:58 Speaker 03 So I have no idea if I would have gotten a job at Google or not.
11:01 Speaker 01 You just took Microsoft.
11:02 Speaker 03 I wanted to go to the West Coast. I wanted to be in tech. I grew up in Ohio and that was my ticket.
11:06 Dax Shepard? In retrospect, do you wish you had worked at Google?
11:09 Speaker 03 No, it worked out great. I live in Seattle. I've been there 13 years now. I met David there.
11:13 Dax Shepard? No acquired, no Microsoft. Okay, now David, you go kind of a fancier route, if we could say.
11:19 Speaker 02 I don't have any national championships.
11:20 Dax Shepard? Undergrad at Princeton and then Stanford. Graduate school, you have an MBA. And what's your undergrad degree in?
11:26 Speaker 02 French literature.
11:27 Dax Shepard? Oh, you romantic son of a bitch. The long hair, the angular features.
11:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, you want to mix.
11:34 Dax Shepard? You're a babe. You must know this, right?
11:37 Speaker 02 I appreciate that.
11:37 Dax Shepard? 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?
11:47 Speaker 02 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 of 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.
12:09 Dax Shepard? Am I not wrong in that headquarters of venture capitalists generally though Silicon Valley?
12:14 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, yeah.
12:14 Dax Shepard? Have you read Nate Silver's new book by chance?
12:16 Speaker 03 No.
12:17 Dax Shepard? It's about gambling and it's about venture capitalists and it's about.
12:20 Speaker 01 Risk taking.
12:21 Dax Shepard? Friedman.
12:22 Speaker 01 Oh.
12:22 Speaker 02 Thomas Friedman?
12:23 Dax Shepard? No, is that, no.
12:24 Speaker 01 Sam.
12:25 Dax Shepard? Sam Altman Friedman.
12:26 Speaker 01 No.
12:26 Speaker 02 Sam Altman.
12:27 Speaker 01 Oh, that's true people.
12:29 Dax Shepard? Sam Friedman Altman, right, Sam Altman, which is also in the book, is OpenAI.
12:32 Speaker 01 Sam.
12:32 Dax Shepard? Sam B something. Sam Bankman Freed.
12:35 Speaker 01 Oh my god. Ohio State. We're gonna keep that in because of you coming through.
12:40 Dax Shepard? He just blew Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, and Georgia out of the water. Ohio State knew it. Okay, so you end up there and you're employed in that capacity.
12:48 Speaker 02 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.
12:59 Dax Shepard? This is great. How many years ago was that?
13:00 Speaker 02 10 that we started Acquired, 11 that we met.
13:02 Speaker 03 So Dave and I were just in Taiwan doing this crazy interview with Dr. Morris Chang, who started TSMC, one 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.
13:15 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
13:15 Speaker 03 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.
13:27 Speaker 01 That's awesome.
13:28 Dax Shepard? Isn't it crazy where these podcasts can take you?
13:30 Speaker 02 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.
13:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah, we're interviewing you on our seven year anniversary and I feel equally.
13:41 Speaker 03 Is it really?
13:42 Speaker 02 Is it?
13:42 Speaker 01 No.
13:43 Dax Shepard? Well, it'll come out probably.
13:44 Speaker 01 The 14th is our actual anniversary of the first episode out. Our first recording, I don't know.
13:50 Dax Shepard? Okay.
13:50 Speaker 02 I should know this. What gave you guys the idea to do this crazy thing?
13:53 Speaker 03 Ooh, wait, I think I know this.
13:55 Dax Shepard? Please, please.
13:55 Speaker 03 If Wikipedia is accurate, you wanted the opportunity for people to experience what an AA meeting is without necessarily having to become an alcoholic.
14:04 Dax Shepard? 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 too fucking weird.
14:27 Speaker 01 I'm like, yeah, you're not a woman, maybe you don't understand.
14:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's not shocking, you know, we would fight nonstop. So we had a hobby of arguing with one another.
14:34 Speaker 01 Which turned into arguing about just everything.
14:36 Speaker 02 We thought that's a good engine for a show.
14:38 Dax Shepard? Good grist for the mill. They're gonna know a lot of venture capitalist terms.
14:42 Speaker 03 Is grist for the mill?
14:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, sure.
14:45 Dax Shepard? Well, 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't 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?
15:02 Speaker 03 We are full-time podcasters.
15:03 Dax Shepard? 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.
15:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, David did it three, four years ago, five years ago.
15:15 Dax Shepard? And Ben, you?
15:16 Speaker 03 Last year.
15:17 Speaker 01 How does it feel?
15:18 Speaker 03 Right?
15:18 Speaker 01 That's a good answer.
15:19 Speaker 03 We're entrepreneurs who took the least risk out of any founders I've ever worked with.
15:23 Dax Shepard? Well, we're doing a different thing.
15:24 Speaker 03 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.
15:32 Dax Shepard? 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 gonna 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 and that. You know, I think you have such a solid foundation of a listenership that will only grow as people like us talk non-stop about it.
15:57 Speaker 03 Thank you for doing it.
15:58 Dax Shepard? 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.
16:09 Speaker 01 I gotta listen to every single one of these.
16:11 Dax Shepard? You start shopping, as I did.
16:12 Speaker 01 Exactly.
16:13 Dax Shepard? 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.
16:23 Speaker 01 I'm not gonna take credit for that. It was my idea to bring them in to do an episode for us and then they brilliantly came up.
16:29 Dax Shepard? Oh, it sounded too smart, to be honest, for you.
16:32 Speaker 01 How dare you?
16:33 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it really did. It always was a little suspicious.
16:35 Speaker 03 We workshopped six or seven different ideas before.
16:37 Speaker 01 Of course, I threw out the row.
16:38 Dax Shepard? Let me guess, Taylor Swift's car collection.
16:40 Speaker 01 The row!
16:42 Dax Shepard? This candle company, I can't get the candle up. Is Taylor Swift a car collector? No, no, no.
16:48 Speaker 01 No, but you know, they have a great episode on Taylor Swift.
16:51 Dax Shepard? 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.
16:56 Speaker 02 That's why I was like, is there something we didn't find?
16:59 Dax Shepard? I bet she has a collection of SUVs she gets driven in, is my guess.
17:02 Speaker 01 That's probably right. She should.
17:03 Dax Shepard? 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.
17:12 Speaker 03 I was wondering if you were actually gonna do this or not. I had this feeling, it's not actually gonna get handed over to us to do. I like 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.
17:24 Speaker 01 I mean, we will be interjecting because we can't help ourselves.
17:28 Speaker 02 This is like a live studio audience for an acquired episode.
17:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:30 Speaker 03 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.
17:39 Dax Shepard? What is obvious to me is each bullet point is like, the Browns win for a decade ruining the thing. You're not gonna say that sentence, we're not gonna hear more about that. This is a very concise bullet pointed outline.
17:49 Speaker 03 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.
17:56 Speaker 01 Of course.
17:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and your voices sound different.
17:58 Speaker 03 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 both saying like, do that again, but shorter. Do that again, but punch up this part, that part's actually not very interesting.
18:12 Dax Shepard? You're co-piloting one another.
18:13 Speaker 01 You guys probably have little ego that if you're able to take that from one another.
18:18 Speaker 02 We have a large trust with one another.
18:19 Speaker 01 That's lovely.
18:20 Speaker 03 And we've had good, hard conversations.
18:22 Dax Shepard? Okay, so.
18:22 Speaker 03 The NFL.
18:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
18:23 Speaker 01 The NFL.
18:24 Dax Shepard? Here we go.
18:25 Speaker 03 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.
18:41 Dax Shepard? 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 is basically like setting out the place.
18:51 Speaker 03 Sunday afternoons, when in Seattle, there's a Seahawks game, is actually a great time to go to Costco.
18:55 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. Another fantastic episode of yours that really turned me on to Costco.
19:01 Dax Shepard? That's my favorite company.
19:02 Speaker 01 My favorite company too.
19:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I've shot two movies inside a Costco and I loved it. One was just nights for six weeks. I had a bicycle. I rode around.
19:09 Speaker 01 What movies?
19:10 Dax Shepard? 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. Seventy-two of them were NFL football games.
19:28 Speaker 01 Holy shit.
19:29 Speaker 03 And in previous years, it's been higher. It's been closer to eighty-two to eighty-five. 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.
19:46 Dax Shepard? Nothing cracks.
19:47 Speaker 02 I mean, kind of the punchline of this episode is the NFL props up the media industry. Excepting the streamers, which that's a whole nother conversation, like 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.
20:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and it has the most coveted audience, which is they're watching it live and they're going to sit through the commercials.
20:13 Speaker 02 Exactly.
20:14 Speaker 01 So award shows are not making the list there?
20:16 Speaker 03 Oh, award shows do. That is one of the twenty that are not the NFL.
20:19 Speaker 01 Got it. Interesting.
20:20 Dax Shepard? Also interesting, ESPN was responsible for some enormous percentage overall of Disney as a corporation.
20:27 Speaker 03 Historically, every year it's a little bit worse. It's getting eroded.
20:30 Dax Shepard? But there were moments, right, where that was just the crown jewel in this thing with all the IP.
20:35 Speaker 02 Sports really in America means the NFL. It's not baseball anymore. Basketball's a complicated thing, but it's basically just the NFL.
20:41 Speaker 03 The fact that the NFL is the thing that America watches is extremely intentional and has been finely tuned every year for a hundred years.
20:51 Speaker 02 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 is a entertainment product. And we need to put the best entertainment product on the field, but really on the television screens of America.
21:07 Dax Shepard? It is the most incredibly produced content you see.
21:10 Speaker 03 I mean, the 17 camera production, the whole director, producer, you kind of forget that it's a show while you're watching it.
21:17 Speaker 01 I don't think of it like that.
21:18 Dax Shepard? My 10 year old was watching the Lions game with me a few weeks ago, and she goes, how did they know that was gonna 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.
21:40 Speaker 02 We take all this for granted. The NFL invented that. That didn't exist before Pete Rozell and then the NFL collectively realized that television is this incredibly powerful thing.
21:53 Speaker 03 There's basically two chapters to the rise of the NFL. There's riding the television wave, and then there's riding the fantasy embedding wave. One sort of tapers off right as the other one picks up. So it's this classic stacking S-curves in business parlance.
22:07 Dax Shepard? So when is it invented? And when does the NFL form?
22:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, let's get back to quiet.
22:11 Speaker 03 Take us to Princeton.
22:12 Speaker 02 Okay, Princeton was gonna be relevant here. So, American football was invented, quote unquote, I think it was 1868, between Rutgers and Princeton.
22:22 Speaker 03 69.
22:23 Speaker 02 Ah, 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.
22:47 Speaker 03 And shameful that people would be paid to do it.
22:49 Speaker 02 It was profaning this sacred, American, elite.
22:54 Speaker 03 Collegiate rite of passage for young men.
22:56 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow.
22:57 Speaker 02 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.
23:08 Dax Shepard? From head injury?
23:10 Speaker 03 Before leather helmets. And there was a thing called the wedge formation.
23:13 Speaker 02 There's no forward pass. So this was basically rugby.
23:16 Speaker 03 Oh, interesting. And people would try to just line up behind one person and all pile on. It was like the extreme.
23:21 Speaker 02 And nobody's wearing helmets. It was the tush push without helmets.
23:24 Dax Shepard? They would just make one human the vanguard of the sphere.
23:27 Speaker 03 And people were getting trampled.
23:28 Speaker 02 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.
23:40 Speaker 03 1905. I'm gonna keep that. Can I have a real time fact?
23:46 Speaker 02 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.
24:01 Dax Shepard? So it was kind of organized around safety initially.
24:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, by the President of the United States. Wow. Which is wild.
24:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
24:08 Speaker 02 That made the game safer. They started introducing some padding. That's when they introduced the forward pass.
24:13 Speaker 03 Neutral zone, wedge formation gets banned. It starts to resemble football like we know it today.
24:19 Speaker 01 Was it hard to get this done? Cause 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.
24:27 Dax Shepard? And wait, I'm proud you waited that long to say CTE.
24:30 Speaker 01 I bring it up a lot.
24:31 Dax Shepard? Old Debbie Downer here.
24:32 Speaker 03 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.
24:44 Speaker 01 Right. It's just weird to hear that they all came together and they were like, yes, let's do this. And they were able to do it. And now that feels impossible.
24:51 Dax Shepard? But Monty, it was in the wake of many, many deaths.
24:53 Speaker 01 There are many, many deaths.
24:54 Speaker 03 It was a different time. Instant deaths, not like 30 years later.
24:57 Dax Shepard? I would even argue if we had watched two dozen NFL players drop dead.
25:02 Speaker 02 Remember with Damar Hamlin a couple of years ago?
25:04 Dax Shepard? When he laid there.
25:04 Speaker 02 Yeah.
25:05 Dax Shepard? Very scary. That was a really profound moment, I think. You could also make a case that they were even less safety oriented.
25:11 Speaker 01 Maybe.
25:12 Dax Shepard? A bunch of people died already.
25:13 Speaker 03 And keep in mind, there's no money on the line at this point in history.
25:17 Speaker 01 That's the big difference.
25:18 Dax Shepard? Good point.
25:18 Speaker 02 We're not even talking Ohio State, Michigan here. This is an institution of the elite.
25:22 Speaker 03 It's almost like cosplaying European. It's the Ivy League's trying to be. As cool as the English colleges.
25:30 Speaker 02 They were trying to emulate.
25:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, in the Lady 1000s, America still had this little brother syndrome to England.
25:36 Dax Shepard? It's a shame Ben's taken.
25:37 Speaker 01 I talk about little brother syndrome.
25:38 Speaker 03 Oh, really?
25:39 Speaker 01 Little brother energy.
25:40 Dax Shepard? I'm a little brother.
25:41 Speaker 03 No.
25:41 Dax Shepard? Okay.
25:42 Speaker 03 Seems like it.
25:43 Speaker 01 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.
25:49 Speaker 02 So that's the origin of football. The NFL started in, Ben can fact check me here, 1920 Canton, Ohio. Jordan and Hup automobile.
25:56 Speaker 03 Hup mobile showroom. First of all, it was called the American Professional Football Conference.
26:01 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
26:01 Speaker 03 Has a nice ring to it.
26:02 Dax Shepard? The American Professional Football Conference.
26:04 Speaker 01 APFL.
26:05 Speaker 02 I think you could probably say thinly veiled marketing attempt for mostly automobile dealerships.
26:12 Speaker 03 Yep, and it was these individual local teams in small markets that were until the APFC.
26:18 Speaker 01 APFC, I messed that up.
26:20 Speaker 03 Then NFL. It wasn't 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.
26:30 Dax Shepard? Car dealership will sponsor the whole thing.
26:32 Speaker 03 Exactly, yeah. In fact, the Chicago Bears.
26:35 Speaker 02 Were the Decatur Staley's.
26:36 Speaker 03 Yes, because it was in Decatur, Illinois, the Staley what company?
26:40 Dax Shepard? Staley Steel. No, but it has a ring to it.
26:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
26:43 Speaker 01 Staley Band.
26:44 Speaker 03 They should have done that. Cornstarch. Cornstarch. Wow, this is why you have a producer.
26:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, he real times. It's nice.
26:51 Speaker 03 We're like flashing forward a little bit to the Decatur Staley's, 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.
27:02 Dax Shepard? Like a company softball team.
27:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:03 Speaker 03 So there's the Canton team, there's the Columbus Panhandles, there's the Akron Pros. This is the original.
27:10 Speaker 02 This grew into the NFL.
27:11 Speaker 03 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.
27:32 Speaker 02 The Packers, the only legacy of this era. Like, why is there an NFL team in Green Bay?
27:37 Dax Shepard? Packers, was that a nod to meat packing? Why was it the Packers? Do we know?
27:42 Speaker 03 Can we get a real time fact check? The Indian Packing Company, meat packaging.
27:46 Dax Shepard? Meat packaging, okay.
27:48 Speaker 02 I assume it was probably like the Staley's, like whatever the company was that was sponsoring.
27:52 Speaker 03 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.
28:01 Speaker 02 Well, they're employees of the company.
28:02 Speaker 03 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.
28:10 Dax Shepard? 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?
28:18 Speaker 03 I think in this time it was sub 10,000, maybe sub 5,000.
28:21 Speaker 02 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.
28:27 Dax Shepard? So 38 years of that.
28:28 Speaker 02 1920 was when the NFL started, so 25 years.
28:31 Dax Shepard? Okay, great.
28:31 Speaker 02 Then World War II happens, and that leads to a couple of things. One, the whole west coast of America happens, television.
28:39 Speaker 03 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.
28:54 Dax Shepard? Ooh, yeah, that's awesome.
28:55 Speaker 03 Because they could not field a full roster. It's kind of amazing they eventually decoupled and went back to their original teams.
29:00 Speaker 02 So then post where all these GIs come back, they want an entertainment product. Importantly, though, the 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.
29:17 Dax Shepard? 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 minds.
29:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, even before everything the NFL has done to make it an entertainment product. Can you just go see a high school football game? It's entertaining.
29:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
29:32 Speaker 02 So after the war, an upstart rival league to the NFL gets started, and that's the AFC.
29:39 Speaker 03 All American Football Conference.
29:41 Speaker 02 And the centerpiece of that is Paul Brown. Folks may know that name, the legacy of the Browns.
29:46 Speaker 03 The founder of the Cleveland Browns.
29:47 Dax Shepard? I didn't, and I've always wondered why a team would be named the Browns. So finally, that's answered.
29:51 Speaker 01 It's a great color.
29:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, it is a great color.
29:53 Dax Shepard? But also it does have poop connotations. The Browns?
29:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, it does, but now we know, it's a human name.
29:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's not the first thing I would probably pick. Blank slate. I prefer Stiegl.
30:06 Speaker 03 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.
30:16 Dax Shepard? Wow. And what was his background? He's, I imagine, a business owner, got some money?
30:20 Speaker 02 He's a football coach.
30:21 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
30:22 Speaker 03 He's like the first modern football coach. So he coached the Massillon Tigers high school football.
30:28 Speaker 02 Eventually goes to Ohio State and then Navy, right?
30:31 Speaker 03 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.
30:39 Speaker 02 Let's have a full-time, built-out coaching staff.
30:41 Speaker 03 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 offseason.
30:51 Speaker 02 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.
31:00 Dax Shepard? Oh, God, yeah.
31:01 Speaker 03 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 didn'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.
31:17 Dax Shepard? Do you think he is just observing baseball and recognizing the power of them having kept all these stats?
31:24 Speaker 02 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.
31:32 Dax Shepard? Yes, right, right.
31:35 Speaker 04 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
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33:11 Speaker 03 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."
33:27 Dax Shepard? There's some interesting parallels here with wrestling.
33:30 Speaker 03 Very much like wrestling.
33:31 Dax Shepard? You know, all these regional divisions, they chopped up.
33:34 Speaker 03 Exactly.
33:34 Dax Shepard? Who'd have TV rights?
33:35 Speaker 03 Yes.
33:35 Dax Shepard? And McMahon was smart enough to start trying to accumulate.
33:38 Speaker 02 This is where the McMahon character 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 in Navy, that a group of entrepreneurs that 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."
33:59 Dax Shepard? Our product's going to be significantly better.
34:01 Speaker 03 Yes.
34:01 Dax Shepard? Because this person is innovative.
34:02 Speaker 03 And they were so confident, there was already a Cleveland team, the Rams.
34:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, the Rams.
34:06 Speaker 03 The Cleveland Rams.
34:07 Speaker 02 The Rams.
34:07 Speaker 03 Are now the L.A. 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."
34:17 Speaker 03 The NFL, A A F C 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 forty seven and four over the first four seasons of the A A F C.
34:39 Speaker 02 Wins all four championships, loses four games in four years.
34:42 Speaker 01 Well, because is he just saying, I want to play this team now?
34:45 Speaker 02 He's just so much better.
34:46 Dax Shepard? He's so advanced.
34:47 Speaker 02 So they blow the Rams out of the water in Cleveland. They're getting ten X the attendance and the money's all in the ticket sales. TV is not a big thing.
34:54 Dax Shepard? Right.
34:55 Speaker 02 The Rams in Cleveland, they're like, we just got to get out of here. That's when they moved to L A.
34:58 Dax Shepard? They get run out of town.
34:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, but L A is all these G I is coming back from the war. It's the beginning of the television industry. It's automobile.
35:05 Speaker 03 Glitz glamour, people that understand marketing. Meanwhile, the A A F C is actually a failure because it's not interesting to just watch the Browns run the table over and over again.
35:14 Speaker 02 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 like they don't want to see their team get decimated. And then the other teams aren't that good.
35:26 Speaker 03 So the league actually folds nineteen fifty. They had only played four seasons. The Browns, forty Niners and Colts join the NFL. There's now two Cleveland teams. It's a big problem and the San Francisco forty Niners are sort of established. 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.
35:46 Speaker 01 Lucky.
35:47 Speaker 03 Yes.
35:48 Speaker 01 That's nuts.
35:49 Dax Shepard? They got to basically buy a company and bankruptcy.
35:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:52 Speaker 03 Right. The A A F C had no better option.
35:54 Dax Shepard? I keep going back to, we had Kate Mara on. She and her sister Rooney Mara, they are the grandchildren of the Steelers owner.
36:02 Speaker 03 I know.
36:03 Dax Shepard? And the Giants owner. My assumption is they grew up incredibly wealthy and she's like, yeah, we were 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.
36:16 Speaker 03 Wow.
36:17 Dax Shepard? So back in the day, if you were just like a Wheeler Dealer bookie, you could own a.
36:20 Speaker 01 Buy a team.
36:21 Dax Shepard? 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 ticket. I can't imagine they were terribly profitable.
36:30 Speaker 02 If you were the Browns and you were selling sixty, seventy thousand tickets.
36:35 Speaker 03 They weren't that big yet.
36:36 Speaker 02 The first Browns game sold sixty thousand. So I don't know if every game was, but they were crushing it.
36:40 Dax Shepard? And were they playing twelve games a year?
36:42 Speaker 02 I don't know. There were eight teams in the league. Maybe they played each other twice. So that would have been fourteen games, I guess.
36:48 Dax Shepard? Okay. So, I mean, you got an arena, you got a staff, you got a lot of players.
36:53 Speaker 01 So some money, but not.
36:55 Dax Shepard? Some money. I just can't imagine anyone at that point's owning the team because they have any sense that it'll be worth billions of dollars or that it's some cash cow.
37:02 Speaker 03 That's still the case at this point in time.
37:04 Speaker 02 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.
37:14 Dax Shepard? 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?
37:29 Speaker 02 So until a couple of 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.
37:37 Speaker 03 It's not like the commissioner is the boss of the teams.
37:41 Speaker 02 No.
37:41 Speaker 03 The commissioner works for the owners. So the league exists at the.
37:48 Speaker 02 Pleasure of the owners.
37:48 Speaker 03 Exactly. The real power is the thirty-two team owners. The NFL is this agreement that they've created with each other that governs how the game is played.
37:59 Speaker 02 And then they hire the commissioner to represent their interests.
38:03 Speaker 03 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.
38:11 Dax Shepard? 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.
38:23 Speaker 02 And it still doesn't. It gets distributed out to the teams.
38:26 Dax Shepard? Well, how's Goodell have a seventy million a year contract?
38:29 Speaker 02 He's paid by.
38:30 Dax Shepard? By the team owners.
38:32 Speaker 02 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.
39:05 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it's not like the Rams are striking their own TV rights with anybody.
39:09 Speaker 02 Until recently with the NBA, has now moved to the NFL model. Baseball, like the Yankees have their own broadcast network. All the other sports, it's all each team for themselves.
39:19 Speaker 03 And that's what the early NFL was too. You asked this, the perfect point in history, because 1960, the appointment of Pete Rozell as commissioner is what changes everything.
39:28 Speaker 02 What they learned from the Browns is it actually fricking sucks for the product on the field when one team has more resources and gets this positive cycle and wins everything.
39:36 Dax Shepard? 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 these bozo teams some money. It's like actors negotiating together.
39:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was just about to say, it's like the Friends deal.
39:54 Dax Shepard? Yes.
39:54 Speaker 01 We're going it all together.
39:56 Dax Shepard? Which rarely works.
39:57 Speaker 03 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.
40:04 Speaker 01 People start, exactly, people start saying, well, I'm.
40:06 Speaker 02 The guy who does this is Pete Rozell. The Rams get run out of town in Cleveland by the Browns. They land here in LA. Pete Rozell.
40:15 Speaker 03 He's a PR intern?
40:16 Speaker 02 PR intern, Compton College alumnus.
40:18 Speaker 03 Wow.
40:19 Speaker 02 Joins the Rams when they come to LA as an intern doing PR and media relations, which meant like newspaper relations.
40:27 Speaker 03 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's still the dominant sport and so he's hiring writers.
40:37 Speaker 02 Well, he does it himself at first. He's like, I'm going to write the stories for you.
40:40 Speaker 03 And just give them to the journalists.
40:41 Speaker 02 And I'm just going to give them to you.
40:42 Dax Shepard? He's trying to get it in the spotlight.
40:43 Speaker 02 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.
40:52 Speaker 03 Which also only happens because of a weird standstill.
40:55 Speaker 02 The existing commissioner died unexpectedly.
40:57 Speaker 03 And there's these factions of owners. This faction has their guy. This faction has their guy. They can't agree.
41:03 Dax Shepard? It was like the beginning of our country.
41:04 Speaker 03 Yes, totally. Pete Rozelle is the least disagreeable candidate.
41:08 Speaker 02 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 it banned together.
41:16 Dax Shepard? And then even Washington, he was the only guy who wasn't outspoken. He said the least. I kind of trust him.
41:21 Speaker 03 Yes.
41:22 Speaker 02 Exactly what happened.
41:23 Speaker 03 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.
41:33 Speaker 02 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.
41:47 Dax Shepard? Of course I know, but I don't know what it means. Neither.
41:49 Speaker 02 This is the origin.
41:50 Dax Shepard? Oh, and then any given Sunday, the team could win. Anything could happen.
41:53 Speaker 02 Any team could be any other team.
41:55 Speaker 03 The NFL's dream is for every team to go 8-8.
41:57 Dax Shepard? Right.
41:58 Speaker 02 And there's so many things they do to make this happen behind the scenes.
42:01 Dax Shepard? Again, it's amazing they got the dominant teams to go along with this strategy. It's like, seems impossible.
42:07 Speaker 03 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.
42:21 Dax Shepard? It becomes a conference within the NFL.
42:23 Speaker 03 Yes, when they eventually merge. They sign one collective TV deal as their way of coming on the scene.
42:31 Speaker 02 With ABC.
42:33 Dax Shepard? 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.
42:42 Speaker 02 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.
42:54 Speaker 03 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.
43:03 Speaker 02 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.
43:14 Speaker 01 No way.
43:14 Speaker 02 Bob Iger came up under Rune Arledge at ABC.
43:18 Dax Shepard? Interesting.
43:19 Speaker 02 And then took over Cap Cities, the Disney merger.
43:22 Dax Shepard? So he's a visionary.
43:23 Speaker 02 No Rune Arledge, no Bob Iger.
43:25 Speaker 01 Wow.
43:26 Dax Shepard? No Frozen.
43:30 Speaker 02 But so this was Rune Arledge's big career defining thing was signing this deal in national football.
43:36 Dax Shepard? And NFL is already being televised on those other networks at this point?
43:39 Speaker 03 One off local deals. So the owner is going to the local affiliate and saying.
43:44 Dax Shepard? Detroit WKBD.
43:45 Speaker 03 Exactly.
43:45 Speaker 02 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. There was just theirs.
43:52 Speaker 03 And so this is the bargaining chip that Rizel 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.
44:07 Speaker 02 And we're now starting to talk about real money from this TV, like eight and a half million dollars in 1960 ish.
44:11 Dax Shepard? That seems like an unsellable proposition.
44:14 Speaker 01 Well, depending on.
44:15 Dax Shepard? It's so impressive that they did it.
44:17 Speaker 01 It's just like the old adage we hear all the time. The rising tide lifts all boats. It's real.
44:22 Dax Shepard? It is, but I imagine the delta between some of these franchises, I'm sure some teams were like eight X.
44:29 Speaker 02 The Green Bay Packers are still in the league. They're not making any money.
44:32 Speaker 01 Right. Exactly. It's like Costco. It's making me feel Costco feelings.
44:35 Speaker 03 I want a shirt that says Costco feelings.
44:39 Speaker 01 We can make that happen.
44:40 Dax Shepard? 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.
44:53 Speaker 02 Pete Rizel was like the king of soft power. You look up soft power in the dictionary, it should have his photo there.
44:59 Dax Shepard? This is so much more interesting than I was expecting to be honest.
45:01 Speaker 01 It always is.
45:02 Dax Shepard? I thought it just would like the money because I'm a greedy pig, but that's absolutely fascinating.
45:06 Speaker 03 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.
45:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
45:40 Speaker 03 With these passionate visionaries who are trying to will the future into existence.
45:44 Speaker 02 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.
45:50 Speaker 03 And the Jets are the AFL.
45:52 Speaker 02 He was the first athlete celebrity. In the original episode, you were like, I know him because he was on the Brady Bunch.
45:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, I watched the Brady Bunch episode to prep for this show. But yeah, he like comes on and throws a football in the backyard. But he's like stylish and he's photographed at clubs in New York City.
46:07 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, he was killing it. Well, 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, you know, a million dollars. It's a boatload of money. And look at the publicity that Broadway Joe is bringing to our rival league here.
46:26 Dax Shepard? When you think All-American, he was born to be on a release.
46:29 Speaker 01 First celebrity athlete, that's wild.
46:31 Dax Shepard? Well, football.
46:33 Speaker 02 I don't know, it might be out of my depth here, but I think it'd be like if Bob Dylan played football.
46:40 Dax Shepard? 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.
46:55 Speaker 02 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.
47:06 Speaker 03 They had a big Southern fan base. There was some racism at the highest levels of the Redskins.
47:11 Dax Shepard? I'm so shocked that the team name the Redskins isn't.
47:13 Speaker 01 I know.
47:14 Speaker 03 Right, right, right.
47:14 Speaker 01 It's no secret.
47:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's on brand.
47:17 Speaker 03 And from the monetary perspective, they were incentivized not to change.
47:20 Speaker 02 I think they were the southernmost NFL team.
47:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, they had a black player, there would have been people protesting.
47:26 Speaker 02 It was the LA Coliseum where the Rams played in LA 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.
47:39 Speaker 01 Let's go LA.
47:40 Dax Shepard? Boy, it's interesting how many different forces can work on one thing, how dynamic that is. That, "Oh, they're gonna play in a publicly held facility, and there is the leverage by which that could be proclaimed otherwise not."
47:51 Speaker 02 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.
47:58 Dax Shepard? Name the list of famous players, and it's some of the most loved.
48:02 Speaker 02 OJ Simpson.
48:03 Dax Shepard? Well, sure, for a minute.
48:05 Speaker 02 Well, for more than a minute.
48:06 Dax Shepard? I mean, I think mostly we know the quarterbacks, and then outside of that, we don't know many white players.
48:11 Speaker 01 But OJ wasn't black, he was OJ.
48:13 Dax Shepard? That's right.
48:14 Speaker 02 Did you watch the documentary? Yeah, that was so good.
48:16 Dax Shepard? Okay, so AFL, how do they absorb them?
48:20 Speaker 02 Do you guys know Al Davis? Owner, GM, and head coach of the Raiders for many years.
48:25 Dax Shepard? No.
48:25 Speaker 02 Oh, he's such a gangster.
48:26 Speaker 01 Oh.
48:27 Speaker 02 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.
48:33 Dax Shepard? Oh, that's interesting, because that's carries to this day. If you wanna bet on someone getting knifed in a parking lot, there's only one bet to make. It's a Raiders game. It's gonna be obvious. So it starts with the original owner.
48:43 Speaker 02 With 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.
48:51 Speaker 03 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 gonna 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.
49:17 Speaker 02 This is also back to Rozell and Soft Power, he cultivated the Kennedys.
49:20 Speaker 03 Relationship.
49:21 Speaker 02 He put a lot of effort into it.
49:23 Speaker 03 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.
49:38 Dax Shepard? 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.
49:50 Speaker 02 I think it's part of the collective bargaining with the Players Association. It's essentially a unionized trade.
49:55 Dax Shepard? It's still interesting.
49:56 Speaker 03 It's totally interesting. 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.
50:04 Speaker 02 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.
50:17 Speaker 01 And it's because of that to keep the competition.
50:19 Speaker 02 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, I'm now implicit. Goal is that every team should be 500 at the midway point in the season.
50:32 Speaker 03 So the first half of the schedule, bad teams play bad teams and good teams play good teams.
50:37 Dax Shepard? That's orchestrated.
50:38 Speaker 02 So the Lions are going to have a really tough first half of the year schedule.
50:42 Speaker 01 Interesting.
50:42 Dax Shepard? I didn't know that part.
50:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, most audience has no idea.
50:46 Speaker 01 That's not the same with college.
50:47 Speaker 03 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.
50:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:56 Speaker 03 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.
51:17 Speaker 01 Wow.
51:18 Dax Shepard? You're right. And it is near impossible for an NFL team to get a perfect season.
51:22 Speaker 02 It's happened once.
51:24 Speaker 03 Just Brady?
51:25 Speaker 02 Did Brady have a perfect season? Dan Marino had a perfect season.
51:27 Dax Shepard? He's Mike Taylor, so you shouldn't even bring him up because I will not be able to get off of him.
51:31 Speaker 02 We got him on the show?
51:32 Dax Shepard? 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.
51:43 Speaker 04 Patriots almost did it, but lost the Super Bowl.
51:45 Speaker 02 There you go. Yeah, it is. So even Tom Brady can't have a perfect season.
51:50 Dax Shepard? God, it's heartbreaking.
51:51 Speaker 03 That's so poetic that the season they went undefeated in the regular season, they lost in the Super Bowl.
51:55 Dax Shepard? Yes.
51:56 Speaker 01 I know.
51:57 Dax Shepard? Yes.
51:57 Speaker 03 See, the NFL storylines, they're so good.
52:00 Dax Shepard? It's wrestling.
52:00 Speaker 03 And not scripted.
52:01 Speaker 01 They kind of are scripting it in a way with the NFL. They're planning it for that outcome.
52:07 Dax Shepard? There are levers in place and they're pulling all the ones they can.
52:11 Speaker 03 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 did people find? How can we make it even more competitive and tweak, tweak, tweak every year?
52:23 Speaker 01 Wow.
52:24 Dax Shepard? Sort of like Formula One that way. It's just endless.
52:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's just a business. We forget because we just think of it as sport, but it's a real business.
52:30 Dax Shepard? I'm really mad. I just learned this term in Bill Gates's new book. It's a Japanese manufacturing principle. It's what Toyota imply, which is every year we must improve our manufacturing process and we must improve. Yes. Whoa, God, you just earned your paycheck.
52:47 Speaker 01 This Ohio's gay.
52:48 Dax Shepard? Yes, good job.
52:50 Speaker 01 Wait, what's it called?
52:51 Speaker 03 Kaizen.
52:51 Speaker 02 Kaizen.
52:51 Dax Shepard? Kaizen.
52:52 Speaker 01 Kaizen.
52:53 Speaker 03 And the other half of that is reduced waste, right?
52:55 Dax Shepard? We could try to do a little more kaizen.
52:57 Speaker 01 Hey, I'm trying.
52:58 Speaker 02 I think you guys are doing just fine. You gotta know your business. You're not in an optimization business.
53:03 Dax Shepard? 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.
53:09 Speaker 03 Tell us about it.
53:10 Dax Shepard? I know, you guys are very classical. You're an orchestra.
53:13 Speaker 03 And we've gotten more so over time. I think when we started, because we had nothing to lose.
53:17 Dax Shepard? And what have you gained and what have you lost from that evolution?
53:20 Speaker 03 We're right more often, but we have less fun.
53:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
53:24 Speaker 02 Well, we have fun in different ways. We get to go to Taiwan.
53:27 Speaker 01 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.
53:37 Speaker 02 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.
53:48 Dax Shepard? 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 finished. 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.
54:09 Speaker 01 That's not true. You know.
54:11 Speaker 03 Monica's like, you have no idea what I do.
54:14 Speaker 01 It's not like revisionist history.
54:15 Speaker 03 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 gonna listen. The reason people like it is we're having fun. We're doing the thing we love.
54:27 Dax Shepard? 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, 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. Fucking stop thinking about anything else.
54:44 Speaker 03 I didn't realize this was your house, by the way. I kinda walked up and I was like, I'm pretty sure we're just at Dax's house.
54:49 Dax Shepard? Indeed, you are.
54:51 Speaker 02 By the way, you asked us about our careers earlier. Do you guys consider this your career now?
54:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
54:57 Speaker 01 Hundred percent.
54:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah, especially we do 152 episodes a year now.
55:01 Speaker 01 We have three episodes a week and we had five episodes a week up until September, so it's more than a full time.
55:09 Dax Shepard? Like, in general, don't wanna act, but if Tarantino for his 10th movie calls me, I'm gonna figure it out. But how do we do it at this point? It would be very hard.
55:17 Speaker 02 I don't know anything else that could speak to the power of podcasting and the rise over the last 10 years. Clearly, you've made the decision that this is a better trade for you.
55:25 Dax Shepard? 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 a 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.
55:46 Speaker 02 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.
56:03 Speaker 03 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 gonna do with the cash?
56:12 Speaker 02 Let's go take that money and go steal all their quarterbacks.
56:16 Dax Shepard? This is the Ted Turner McMahon war section of the story now.
56:19 Speaker 02 Basically, as soon as he does that, it's all over and then they merge.
56:22 Dax Shepard? It's so crazy they got outperformed twice and still remain the NFL.
56:28 Speaker 03 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?
56:42 Dax Shepard? Cut off a future uprising.
56:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, make sure this doesn't happen again.
56:45 Speaker 03 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 Rozell maintains the commissionership. At first, the AFL was supposed to pay a ton of money.
57:07 Speaker 02 $50 million per team. That was where negotiations started before Al Davis kidnapped the quarterbacks.
57:12 Speaker 03 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.
57:25 Speaker 02 Total.
57:25 Speaker 03 Total.
57:25 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
57:26 Dax Shepard? It was a 900 grand a year for however many teams.
57:29 Speaker 03 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.
57:41 Speaker 01 Oh, interesting. So they didn't do that evenly?
57:45 Speaker 03 No.
57:46 Speaker 02 Basically, Al Davis is a gangster.
57:47 Speaker 03 Yeah.
57:47 Speaker 01 Wow.
57:49 Speaker 03 So this is where 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.
57:56 Speaker 02 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.
58:03 Dax Shepard? That starts in 68?
58:05 Speaker 03 Right around there.
58:06 Speaker 02 One of the other just incredible inventions of the NFL was they invent more football.
58:10 Dax Shepard? Prior to that, are they only playing on Friday and Sunday?
58:12 Speaker 02 They're only playing on Sundays.
58:12 Speaker 03 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?
58:19 Dax Shepard? Cheap real estate.
58:20 Speaker 02 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 Roone Arledge and ABC to create Monday Night Football. Basically invents the modern football telecast.
58:40 Speaker 03 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.
59:13 Speaker 02 Off top, just panning back and forth.
59:15 Speaker 03 No field mics and commentators that would just chime in every once in a while.
59:18 Dax Shepard? Oh, that one hurt.
59:20 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly.
59:21 Dax Shepard? They weren't experts.
59:22 Speaker 03 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.
59:32 Dax Shepard? I'm going to interject movie stuff. So a couple of technical innovations that helped it greatly is the Superfly Cam, which was 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 helped.
59:55 Speaker 03 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.
1:00:06 Speaker 02 In a lot of ways, it's the precursor to podcasts. It's like, oh, Monday night with my friends. Howard and, you know, the dudes in the booth.
1:00:12 Dax Shepard? And talk about filling time. You're going to talk for two and a half hours without a script.
1:00:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, they gotta be interesting.
1:00:17 Dax Shepard? Improv geniuses, really.
1:00:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:00:19 Speaker 03 They've got theme music.
1:00:20 Speaker 02 Hank Williams, remember, are you ready for some football?
1:00:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:00:24 Speaker 02 Remember that before he got canceled?
1:00:25 Dax Shepard? Are you ready for some football?
1:00:28 Speaker 02 It's the best.
1:00:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that was a good one.
1:00:30 Speaker 03 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.
1:01:04 Dax Shepard? Oh, for sure.
1:01:06 Speaker 02 Okay, so think this through. You now got this Monday night game for the first time. Before, everything else was happening in real time in Sunday, all the other games.
1:01:12 Speaker 03 You don't have the technology to show something from another game.
1:01:16 Speaker 02 What do you do during halftime of Monday night? All the other games are done. You can't update what's going on in real time with the other games. You gotta fill half an hour in halftime. You show highlights from Sunday.
1:01:27 Dax Shepard? Grade and build anticipation about next week.
1:01:29 Speaker 02 There's no ESPN yet.
1:01:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:01:31 Speaker 02 This leads to ESPN and SportsCenter.
1:01:34 Dax Shepard? And if you're in a market that didn't show these other games, there was no way.
1:01:37 Speaker 02 There's no way to see it. You can read about it in the newspaper, but that sucks.
1:01:40 Dax Shepard? What a powerful aspect to build interest in the whole league.
1:01:44 Speaker 03 Yes. The crazy, crazy thing that is 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.
1:01:58 Dax Shepard? Or it was in film, 16 millimeter that needs to go get printed.
1:02:02 Speaker 03 So they start NFL Films. There's a whole long backstory that we don't have time for. But they've got these people shooting, I assume 16 millimeter on the sidelines.
1:02:10 Speaker 02 Real film.
1:02:11 Speaker 03 All Sunday at every game.
1:02:12 Speaker 02 In parallel to the broadcast. This is not the broadcast. They send teams out to all the games for the Monday night halftime show.
1:02:18 Speaker 03 So then they've got a 24-hour turnaround to make a 20-minute highlight reel.
1:02:23 Speaker 02 To a central editing facility.
1:02:24 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God.
1:02:25 Speaker 02 Put a highlight package together. Wow. Get that back out to wherever the Monday night game is happening.
1:02:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah, those people all got to work at 8:00 PM on Sunday night and they did not leave until Monday.
1:02:34 Speaker 02 Howard Cosell 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, really, it's like the invention of SportsCenter.
1:02:46 Dax Shepard? So it sounds like they were smart and invested virtually every dollar they received from this television contract into the product.
1:02:53 Speaker 03 I think so. The original Monday Night Football was so expensive.
1:02:56 Speaker 02 The owners were also, like, pretty greedy. They're like, this is a lot of money. We're talking late 60s, early 70s.
1:03:01 Dax Shepard? I'm just saying, 500 grand per game.
1:03:03 Speaker 02 No, but that's just Monday night.
1:03:04 Dax Shepard? So the show that they're gonna put on now with all the extra cameras and all these bells and whistles, I mean, this is now becoming a bit more expensive to produce.
1:03:11 Speaker 02 500 grand per game in meteorite steals. The NFL. says, oh, ABC, you produce it.
1:03:15 Dax Shepard? Oh, they have to pay for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, they just want 500.
1:03:19 Speaker 02 It's just the meteor. Yeah, yeah.
1:03:21 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:03:22 Speaker 02 ABC is investing way more than $8.5 million in this.
1:03:25 Speaker 03 So this is why the NFL collectively team ownership in aggregate is one of the best businesses ever. They sell the rights, but then they don't have to incur any of the costs.
1:03:34 Speaker 01 Right.
1:03:34 Speaker 03 Of doing the deals with advertisers.
1:03:36 Dax Shepard? Oh, it's entirely on the back of the network. And then they get them to compete and make the product better.
1:03:42 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:03:42 Dax Shepard? Because now Fox has got to have the blue line on the field.
1:03:45 Speaker 02 They got to have John Madden and Fox is paying John Madden, not the NFL.
1:03:48 Dax Shepard? That is incredible. You get your customers to make your product better for you.
1:03:53 Speaker 04 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
1:04:06 Speaker 02 Fast forward a couple of decades, what do you think NFL Sunday Ticket is?
1:04:10 Speaker 03 I'll give you the whole rights packages right now. We may as well flash all the way forward to like how much money.
1:04:14 Dax Shepard? This is what I want.
1:04:16 Speaker 03 So Disney slash ABC slash ESPN's package right now is 2.7 billion per year just for Monday Night Football.
1:04:25 Speaker 01 Oh my God.
1:04:27 Speaker 02 So that's what, 16 games? Because there's no Monday night the last week of the season.
1:04:31 Speaker 03 17 then?
1:04:32 Speaker 02 Whatever. It's either 16 or 17 games. That's before the cost to produce it. That's just the right.
1:04:36 Speaker 03 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.
1:04:46 Dax Shepard? Okay, that's net after they've sold advertising.
1:04:49 Speaker 02 That is the cost to be able to bring your production crew there. You then have to also invest in the production crew.
1:04:55 Dax Shepard? Are they recouping? I mean, they have to be.
1:04:57 Speaker 03 A walk through 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.
1:05:11 Speaker 02 Disney is paying more just for Monday nights than Fox and CBS are paying for all the slate of Sunday games.
1:05:17 Speaker 03 You'd rather be Disney because you'd rather only have the cost of producing one game than 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.
1:05:32 Speaker 01 Wait, Sunday Night Football is different than Sunday Football?
1:05:35 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:05:36 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:05:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, Thursday night football.
1:05:39 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
1:05:41 Speaker 03 And for a while, I can't remember who had it, but now Amazon has it. Now it's just a streaming package.
1:05:45 Speaker 02 And that's what, like one, six?
1:05:46 Speaker 03 It's a billion a year.
1:05:47 Speaker 01 Seven-ish total.
1:05:49 Speaker 02 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.
1:05:56 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:05:57 Speaker 03 Then, they have NFL Sunday Ticket.
1:06:00 Speaker 01 What is that?
1:06:00 Speaker 03 What if, you want to be able to watch any game?
1:06:02 Speaker 02 You've probably seen all the YouTube TV advertising for NFL Sunday Ticket. Every time I sign onto my YouTube, I gotta deal with this offer.
1:06:07 Speaker 03 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 gotta buy NFL Sunday Ticket. The league is like, well, 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.
1:06:36 Speaker 02 Yes, here's the great thing.
1:06:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, nothing new.
1:06:38 Speaker 02 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's making their money on the subscription model and not the advertising model. DirecTV 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.
1:07:02 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:07:03 Speaker 02 They have skinned this cat.
1:07:05 Speaker 03 There's one more that they came up with five years ago. Do you know about Red Zone?
1:07:10 Speaker 02 Okay, this is where you're playing four games at one time.
1:07:12 Speaker 03 So the NFL launches NFL Network. Eighty 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.
1:07:38 Speaker 02 They're just snapping back and forth to all these different games that are happening. You're just seeing play after play after play.
1:07:43 Speaker 01 All day.
1:07:44 Speaker 02 It's called the Red Zone Channel because whatever team is in the red zone... Any game going on at every given point in time is the theory.
1:07:50 Speaker 03 So the NFL doesn't have to take on the costs of filming this.
1:07:53 Speaker 02 They have one dude in a studio who just sort of is like, now we're switching to the Lions and commanders.
1:07:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and they licensed it to them, but now they're licensing their footage for free.
1:08:02 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:08:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:08:03 Dax Shepard? My God, this is incredible.
1:08:05 Speaker 03 So to your point, do the networks actually make money on this?
1:08:07 Speaker 02 At this point, it's not totally clear.
1:08:09 Speaker 03 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.
1:08:20 Dax Shepard? And they're just adding more product because then you have Netflix Christmas game.
1:08:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, another 150. Then Peacock, yes, another 110. Madden, video games, that's a lot of money. 300 million a year.
1:08:30 Speaker 01 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.
1:08:36 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:08:45 Speaker 02 But no, Monica, I think you're right. Like, and doing it on Christmas, they traditionally shied away from Christmas because that was the NBA's holiday was. This is more speculation, but the NBA had historically operated more like baseball with each team had their own TV deals. Baseball's still to its great, great detriment.
1:09:02 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:09:03 Speaker 02 The NBA and Adam Silver realized, hey, the NFL is 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.
1:09:20 Dax Shepard? And how's the Super Bowl work?
1:09:21 Speaker 02 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 were like, well, now that we're one league, can't have two champions. So then they invented the Super Bowl.
1:09:35 Speaker 03 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.
1:09:40 Speaker 02 That I gotta spend money again.
1:09:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it just totally devalued this other thing we sold people.
1:09:46 Speaker 02 Totally.
1:09:46 Dax Shepard? The right to show the Super Bowl is, I'm imagining a standalone TV deal.
1:09:51 Speaker 03 I actually don't have that in the sum of deals.
1:09:54 Speaker 02 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.
1:10:07 Speaker 03 The first Super Bowl was shown on both.
1:10:09 Speaker 02 On two networks.
1:10:10 Speaker 04 Four network rotation, starting in 2024.
1:10:13 Dax Shepard? What does the rights to that cost?
1:10:15 Speaker 03 I think it might be built into the rest of the deals.
1:10:17 Dax Shepard? Okay, I kind of thought they all bid on just that one game. Maybe.
1:10:21 Speaker 01 So it rotates every year.
1:10:23 Dax Shepard? NBC, CBS. Fox.
1:10:25 Speaker 01 What is this year's?
1:10:27 Dax Shepard? 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 when we're airing it. This sounds like the worst.
1:10:38 Speaker 02 Well, these days, if you're a network executive, you're just a slave to the NFL essentially.
1:10:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:10:43 Speaker 03 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.
1:11:03 Dax Shepard? We're going to take more of the profit pool.
1:11:04 Speaker 03 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.
1:11:10 Speaker 02 The NFL is the only reason you exist.
1:11:11 Speaker 03 Slowly shift it over to us and you'll be near zero profit entities that are a part of something else.
1:11:17 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:11:17 Dax Shepard? 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. They have 16 million viewers. They show a 30 second spot on the new.
1:11:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's almost a lost leader.
1:11:33 Speaker 02 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.
1:11:43 Dax Shepard? Well, 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.
1:12:04 Speaker 01 Then there's also a cap on that ultimately.
1:12:07 Dax Shepard? Seven billion.
1:12:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:12:07 Dax Shepard? They've all got a lot of room to go still.
1:12:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:12:09 Speaker 01 I guess.
1:12:10 Speaker 02 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.
1:12:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:12:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, great honor.
1:12:35 Dax Shepard? Exactly, exactly, exactly.
1:12:37 Speaker 01 Doing someone's live podcast.
1:12:38 Speaker 02 Right, right, right.
1:12:39 Speaker 01 It's an honor. We promise.
1:12:41 Speaker 02 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.
1:13:01 Speaker 01 Right, right.
1:13:01 Speaker 02 All the teams get equal shares.
1:13:02 Speaker 03 We should come 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 the state equally.
1:13:13 Speaker 02 Packers get the same amount as the Niners.
1:13:15 Dax Shepard? That is why the Packers are still up there.
1:13:16 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:13:17 Speaker 03 And that is why Kansas City can win Super Bowls.
1:13:19 Speaker 02 That's why Kansas City can win Super Bowls.
1:13:20 Speaker 03 You would never see that in other sports leagues.
1:13:21 Speaker 01 That's so true.
1:13:23 Dax Shepard? Dead equal.
1:13:24 Speaker 02 So if you, as an individual team, so 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 wild card round, the division all around, 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 Rosell thing.
1:13:55 Speaker 03 There's some merch that's not.
1:13:56 Speaker 02 But most is. Jerseys, all centralized. The reason for that, Rosell 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, a Niners jersey, it's a quality product.
1:14:11 Speaker 01 This is the most democratized business.
1:14:13 Speaker 03 We were researching it. David texted me, this is communist capitalism.
1:14:16 Speaker 01 Literally.
1:14:16 Speaker 02 It's communist capitalism.
1:14:17 Speaker 01 Yes, it is.
1:14:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, one example of communism working like a motherfucker.
1:14:21 Speaker 02 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.
1:14:30 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:14:37 Speaker 01 Oh, think about Travis.
1:14:39 Dax Shepard? Well.
1:14:40 Speaker 01 Taylor and Travis, we gotta come back to that.
1:14:42 Speaker 02 I think he's fine.
1:14:42 Dax Shepard? He's not getting screwed.
1:14:43 Speaker 01 So many Kelsey jerseys on children now because of that.
1:14:47 Dax Shepard? You're right.
1:14:48 Speaker 02 Now, I don't know if on something like a jersey where it's an individual player name, but the player gets a small cut of that, but probably.
1:14:56 Speaker 03 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 the collective bargaining thing has been renegotiated a few times. But today, 48 and a half percent 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.
1:15:19 Speaker 01 Ha.
1:15:20 Dax Shepard? That's pretty high.
1:15:21 Speaker 03 It's really high.
1:15:22 Speaker 01 So everyone has an incentive.
1:15:23 Speaker 02 Top tier quarterback contracts are 55 to 60 a year. And they're by far the highest paid players.
1:15:28 Dax Shepard? But yeah, some of these are half a billion dollar contracts.
1:15:31 Speaker 02 Over a period of time.
1:15:32 Speaker 03 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.
1:15:43 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:15:58 Speaker 02 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.
1:16:01 Speaker 03 Half a million, a million?
1:16:02 Dax Shepard? Rob?
1:16:03 Speaker 02 795,000.
1:16:05 Speaker 01 That's good.
1:16:06 Speaker 02 And most are making more than that.
1:16:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:16:08 Speaker 03 And they're what, any player rosters? Like, these are big teams.
1:16:10 Speaker 01 Right, exactly.
1:16:11 Dax Shepard? 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?
1:16:25 Speaker 02 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?
1:16:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:16:32 Speaker 02 Tech companies.
1:16:35 Speaker 01 They're coming in.
1:16:36 Speaker 03 It doesn't help networks, but it is a way for the NFL to continue to extract dollars.
1:16:40 Speaker 02 Thursday Night Football was streamed on Twitter for a year or two, right?
1:16:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, that was so weird.
1:16:44 Dax Shepard? But again, if you look at it right now, it's the exact same situation the NFL was in 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...
1:17:10 Speaker 03 They do have these published goals of wanting to grow revenue. NFL total revenue last year was $20 billion, up from 18 a couple of 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.
1:17:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah, my last question, and this one was really my agent, when he found out I was gonna talk to you guys, he's obsessed with you as well, is like, "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?
1:17:50 Speaker 02 When we did the episode two years ago, what did we say? 45 million people-ish bet on the NFL?
1:17:56 Speaker 03 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.
1:18:04 Speaker 02 A lot more people drink alcohol after prohibition.
1:18:07 Speaker 03 Right, right. 75 million people bet on the NFL last year. It's growing 35% year over year.
1:18:12 Speaker 02 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.
1:18:21 Speaker 01 Have they tried?
1:18:22 Dax Shepard? They have these exhibition games.
1:18:24 Speaker 02 It's American expats who go to them. Locals don't care.
1:18:26 Dax Shepard? 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 and love.
1:18:41 Speaker 01 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 like build our own allegiances and stuff. And I don't think all these other countries have it, but then I think soccer.
1:18:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:18:56 Speaker 01 I'm wrong.
1:18:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:18:58 Dax Shepard? Like beating guys up in the street.
1:18:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, cricket, yeah.
1:19:01 Speaker 02 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?
1:19:12 Speaker 03 That includes children.
1:19:13 Speaker 02 Right. So probably a third of the country is betting on the NFL.
1:19:17 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:19:18 Dax Shepard? So does the NFL, are they licensing anything in that process?
1:19:23 Speaker 03 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.
1:19:47 Dax Shepard? They don't want to be known as having made money on this.
1:19:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:19:50 Speaker 03 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.
1:19:56 Speaker 02 And now it's all over the place.
1:19:58 Speaker 03 And it's like, this is the DraftKings post-game.
1:20:00 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:20:01 Speaker 03 I can't believe it.
1:20:02 Dax Shepard? They did a big old pivot on that.
1:20:04 Speaker 02 They really did.
1:20:05 Dax Shepard? 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. 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.
1:20:34 Speaker 03 You're now convinced it wasn't real?
1:20:35 Dax Shepard? 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 gonna. Knock this guy out in two seconds. I can download an app right now and make that. I was like, I gotta 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.
1:21:06 Speaker 03 It's not legal here yet?
1:21:07 Dax Shepard? I think it has a lot of restrictions.
1:21:10 Speaker 02 I think this is part of why there's so many different things you can bet on.
1:21:14 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:21:30 Speaker 03 Congratulations on your.
1:21:34 Speaker 02 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.
1:21:53 Speaker 03 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.
1:22:33 Dax Shepard? Oh, they have to kick up their own ticket sales?
1:22:35 Speaker 02 The justification is a visiting team is half the product.
1:22:38 Dax Shepard? I thought for sure that was all theirs.
1:22:40 Speaker 03 I think 40%.
1:22:42 Speaker 02 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.
1:22:46 Speaker 03 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.
1:22:56 Speaker 02 Seat licenses, if you guys have heard of that, of like, if you want season tickets, you need to buy a seat license that gives you the right to then buy the tickets. The ticket revenue is going to get shared.
1:23:04 Dax Shepard? But the seed license.
1:23:05 Speaker 03 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.
1:23:28 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God, 10x.
1:23:30 Speaker 03 And it's because, you know, 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.
1:23:43 Dax Shepard? And you think that could seed some kind of animosity that could start to erode?
1:23:47 Speaker 03 Even if not animosity, just some teams are way richer than others.
1:23:51 Speaker 02 The salary cap still is low enough that you can, as a small market team, still have parity.
1:23:57 Dax Shepard? Are a lot of the teams not even hitting the cap would be my guess? Or do they all hit the cap?
1:24:01 Speaker 02 I think they all hit the cap.
1:24:02 Dax Shepard? They do.
1:24:03 Speaker 02 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 waiting the contract? How much is guaranteed?
1:24:11 Speaker 03 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% to the players to, let's say, it goes up north of 50. Or let's say costs go up for everyone.
1:24:25 Speaker 02 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.
1:24:30 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:24:37 Speaker 02 Well, and it's already happening. Look at the Raiders, right, going to Vegas.
1:24:40 Speaker 03 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.
1:24:56 Dax Shepard? Money talks. What a fascinating business.
1:24:58 Speaker 02 Okay, so the last thing is the Super Bowl. To put a bow on it.
1:25:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, please.
1:25:01 Speaker 02 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. We go to a 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 spent all the money, you would want to win. If you win the Super Bowl, you gotta pay for the parade.
1:25:23 Dax Shepard? That last line item, the parade.
1:25:25 Speaker 02 And the parties and all that, so.
1:25:27 Dax Shepard? Well, don't players also have Super Bowl bonuses?
1:25:30 Speaker 02 Probably the bigger impact is not to Super Bowl bonuses, but what it does for contract negotiations in the coming years, players be like, well, I helped you win a Super Bowl. And it does affect their value on the market. Their skills are be hired, like, 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.
1:25:51 Speaker 03 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 till the end of the season anyway.
1:26:06 Dax Shepard? Well, nothing matters to the fourth quarter then and nothing matters to the end of the season. Yes, I was the biggest NBA fan. That was my religion for like eight years. And I was watching the Lakers during their run of complete dominance.
1:26:16 Speaker 03 So fun.
1:26:17 Dax Shepard? 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, it 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 violent sport that there's really kind of a limit. They can't play 82 games a year in that sport.
1:26:41 Speaker 02 They're likely going to add another week.
1:26:42 Dax Shepard? Wednesday morning football.
1:26:46 Dax Shepard? Breakfast football. That's how they're going to finally get Europe. Exactly.
1:26:51 Dax Shepard? Oh, well, David and Ben, this has been awesome. Yeah, thanks for coming. How fun.
1:26:56 Speaker 03 For having us.
1:26:56 Dax Shepard? We love your show so much.
1:26:58 Speaker 02 Thank you for being such fans. And there's not a day that goes by that we don't hear from someone, oh, I heard about you guys on Armchair X.
1:27:04 Dax Shepard? Oh, good. Thanks so much for coming in. I hope we get to do this again. Yeah. Maybe another topical burble up. The row. And yes, we'll be on your show. We'll be on yours.
1:27:14 Dax Shepard? Oh, David, were you whispering that?
1:27:17 Speaker 03 Thanks so much, you guys.
1:27:18 Dax Shepard? All right, take care.
1:27:20 Dax Shepard? Stay tuned to hear Miss Monica correct all the facts that were wrong. It's okay, though. We all make mistakes.
1:27:28 Speaker 01 Okay, well.
1:27:30 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:27:31 Speaker 01 Hello.
1:27:31 Dax Shepard? If you say so.
1:27:32 Speaker 01 Now, tell me if you've ever experienced this, okay?
1:27:36 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:27:37 Speaker 01 You get a new scratch.
1:27:40 Dax Shepard? Scratch?
1:27:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:27:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:27:42 Speaker 01 And it turns into a scar.
1:27:44 Dax Shepard? Ooh.
1:27:45 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:27:45 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:27:46 Speaker 01 And then...
1:27:46 Dax Shepard? You with me?
1:27:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:27:47 Dax Shepard? You're along so far?
1:27:48 Speaker 01 And then, when you look at your arm or hand, wherever the scratch slash scar is, you don't recognize your own self.
1:27:58 Dax Shepard? Oh, no.
1:27:59 Speaker 01 Oh, you can't relate.
1:28:00 Dax Shepard? I've not had that experience.
1:28:02 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:28:02 Dax Shepard? That's what you're dealing with?
1:28:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, I have a new scar.
1:28:06 Dax Shepard? Is this the mole you try to pick out? Or the freckle that you try to dig out?
1:28:11 Speaker 01 I do often try to remove my own freckles. You're one to talk, okay?
1:28:15 Dax Shepard? I've not tried to remove a freckle.
1:28:17 Speaker 01 You try to do lots of surgeries on yourself.
1:28:20 Dax Shepard? True, true, but just no freckle removal? I don't know that that's possible.
1:28:23 Speaker 01 Well, it is. I mean, I'm not advising it.
1:28:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah, okay.
1:28:27 Speaker 01 But I've successfully completed many removals.
1:28:30 Dax Shepard? And replaced it with a scar?
1:28:32 Speaker 01 No, this is not that.
1:28:33 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:28:34 Speaker 01 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.
1:28:42 Dax Shepard? Was it a little light, white color there? Is that what?
1:28:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, do you see it? Well, now it has a little makeup on it because this is where I put my makeup.
1:28:49 Dax Shepard? Oh, you put make... Oh, I thought you were covering up this.
1:28:51 Speaker 01 No, I wasn't. In fact, now it's like, now it looks like I'm lying.
1:28:56 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:28:56 Speaker 01 But...
1:28:57 Dax Shepard? Now, give yourself a scar. Yeah, oh my God.
1:29:00 Speaker 01 I know, it's huge.
1:29:01 Dax Shepard? It's so... I can't see it.
1:29:02 Speaker 01 Really?
1:29:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah. I'm sorry. Well, the brown spot?
1:29:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:29:06 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah, I see the brown spot.
1:29:07 Speaker 01 That's him.
1:29:08 Dax Shepard? There's a liver spot, I think.
1:29:09 Speaker 01 Don't. It says not what happened. That is not what happened. It was a scratch.
1:29:15 Dax Shepard? It's time to enter our liver spot phase of life.
1:29:17 Speaker 01 Um, I'm going to try to avoid that. Although it's, look, aging is normal and natural.
1:29:24 Dax Shepard? It's very natural. If you can do it without liver spots, you probably prefer it.
1:29:27 Speaker 01 Ideally, yeah. But anyhow, um, so now when I'm like typing, it's on my hand. I see it all the time. And I'm like, who, who is she?
1:29:38 Dax Shepard? Right, whole new hand. That's kind of fun, though, I would say.
1:29:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's, it's an opportunity for reinvention.
1:29:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Slowing time down, that does a ding ding ding. These novel things slow time down.
1:29:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, they do. No one, maybe that's why Jan's going so slow. Jan Brady. January.
1:29:58 Dax Shepard? We're calling her Jan Brady now?
1:29:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:30:00 Dax Shepard? You gotta catch me up.
1:30:01 Speaker 01 I'm sorry.
1:30:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah, where did you develop Jan Brady? That's, it sounds like a Jess.
1:30:05 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Well, I've been calling it, I've been calling her Jan.
1:30:09 Dax Shepard? Okay, right.
1:30:10 Speaker 01 And then he added Brady.
1:30:13 Dax Shepard? Well, tomorrow it's over.
1:30:14 Speaker 01 I know.
1:30:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:30:16 Speaker 01 One more day, we can make it through.
1:30:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, maybe.
1:30:19 Speaker 01 We can, no, we can.
1:30:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I started compulsively cutting my hair today. You know how I like to do that?
1:30:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, and it's an indicator.
1:30:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But now I can't blow my nose.
1:30:28 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:30:29 Dax Shepard? And I think that is verbaling up.
1:30:31 Speaker 01 Okay, I don't, I think you're gonna need a new replacement because soon you're not gonna have any hair.
1:30:37 Dax Shepard? I think I satiated my thing. It's, what happens is I, I was gonna 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 backlight.
1:30:51 Speaker 01 I know.
1:30:52 Dax Shepard? It exposes all these things. And then the madness of, I'm just gonna do a trim. I know that's it. I keep scissors now in my gym, which is, yeah. And then I gotta 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.
1:31:09 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:31:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I was lifting weights, cutting hair, vacuuming, lift more weights, see more hair, cut more hair, vacuum. If someone was watching.
1:31:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:31:19 Dax Shepard? Which someone could, it's very exposed.
1:31:21 Speaker 01 There's a lot of people in this area.
1:31:22 Dax Shepard? And it's just windows galore.
1:31:24 Speaker 01 Oh, true.
1:31:24 Dax Shepard? So if someone was interested, they probably watched the ramblings of a madman.
1:31:30 Speaker 01 Your hair looks nice, though.
1:31:31 Dax Shepard? Okay, good.
1:31:32 Speaker 01 You did a good job.
1:31:33 Dax Shepard? You see any spots I need to trim?
1:31:34 Speaker 01 No.
1:31:35 Dax Shepard? Okay, I'm not too far from my scissors.
1:31:38 Speaker 01 They're always within an arm's length.
1:31:41 Dax Shepard? Had a little bit of a gusher, caught my ear a little bit.
1:31:45 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:31:46 Dax Shepard? I'm just trying to be accountable.
1:31:48 Speaker 01 I know, I appreciate it.
1:31:49 Dax Shepard? It's like an AA meeting.
1:31:49 Speaker 01 It just worries me a little. Okay, so maybe with your gusher, you're gonna start understanding what I'm talking about, about the scar.
1:31:57 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:32:04 Speaker 01 Well, when you get a glance of it, you might be like, whose ear is that?
1:32:08 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:32:09 Speaker 01 Speaking of people watching you do weird things, yesterday I was at Sunset Tower. That's a very fancy location in this city.
1:32:18 Dax Shepard? Wow, we had overlapping days. Continue.
1:32:20 Speaker 01 So I went to Sunset Tower and I was working. I just bought this new bracelet. And I love it.
1:32:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:32:28 Speaker 01 It's from Sarah Handler.
1:32:30 Dax Shepard? Great.
1:32:30 Speaker 01 And she put it on me. And so then when I got to Sunset Tower, I was like, oh, I'm gonna try to tighten it a little bit, like move it up a rung.
1:32:40 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:32:40 Speaker 01 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.
1:32:52 Dax Shepard? This is a great way to meet somebody. Ask a stranger.
1:32:56 Speaker 01 I got that!
1:32:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah. I'm so sorry, sir. Could you hold my delicate wrist and help me get this?
1:33:01 Speaker 01 Do you mind helping me with this? I did think it could be a meet cute situation.
1:33:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah, for sure.
1:33:07 Speaker 01 And then the universe is wily, right?
1:33:11 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:33:12 Speaker 01 Because.
1:33:12 Dax Shepard? Brascally.
1:33:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was thinking about that, a meet cutes, and guess who reached back out?
1:33:18 Dax Shepard? Who?
1:33:20 Speaker 01 The matchmaker.
1:33:21 Dax Shepard? Oh, really?
1:33:23 Speaker 01 People remember it didn't, last time didn't go great.
1:33:27 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
1:33:27 Speaker 01 And I felt, uh.
1:33:30 Dax Shepard? Bad about yourself.
1:33:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:33:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:33:32 Speaker 01 I did. I felt bad about myself. And, um, this one seems more promising.
1:33:37 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:33:38 Speaker 01 Less, less like, uh, conducive to me feeling like I hate myself.
1:33:45 Dax Shepard? Okay, great.
1:33:45 Speaker 01 So we'll see.
1:33:47 Dax Shepard? So Sunset Tower, did you see fancy people?
1:33:49 Speaker 01 Since I sat at the bar, I couldn't really look, but I'm sure there's fancy people there. There always are.
1:33:55 Dax Shepard? So, you know, I had this dinner with Nate and Penae that was a con. It was really a deception so that I could get to my birthday party.
1:34:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:34:02 Dax Shepard? But then I really wanted to have dinner with them. So that was last night.
1:34:05 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:34:05 Dax Shepard? And then Penae was like, where do you, where should we go? Like Homebase, 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.
1:34:19 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:34:20 Dax Shepard? Boy, did he deliver. We went to, have you heard of Navaco?
1:34:25 Speaker 01 Navaco. No.
1:34:26 Dax Shepard? I thought it was Nabokov when I saw it written. I was like, oh, they named a restaurant off, after Nabokov, the writer.
1:34:32 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:34:33 Dax Shepard? But it's Nabokov.
1:34:34 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:34:35 Dax Shepard? In Beverly Hills on Canon and it was everything I could have.
1:34:41 Speaker 01 Nabokov.
1:34:43 Dax Shepard? Hope for. It's only been open since July, I guess.
1:34:45 Speaker 01 Mediterranean and Italian.
1:34:47 Dax Shepard? The food was outrageous.
1:34:48 Speaker 01 Ooh.
1:34:49 Dax Shepard? You know, when you're at Cara, you can pretend you're in Italy.
1:34:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:34:52 Dax Shepard? I was like, we're in Miami.
1:34:54 Speaker 01 Oh, shh.
1:34:55 Dax Shepard? It is, it was Miami.
1:34:57 Speaker 01 Where people were dressed.
1:34:58 Dax Shepard? I gotta be careful.
1:34:59 Speaker 01 Well.
1:35:00 Dax Shepard? I gotta be careful.
1:35:01 Speaker 01 It's fine.
1:35:02 Dax Shepard? Almost all the dudes looked exactly the same.
1:35:04 Speaker 01 Uh huh. I can picture it.
1:35:06 Dax Shepard? Five nine shaved heads, probably on a little too much testosterone, but not working out a lot. With very, very attractive younger women.
1:35:16 Speaker 01 And were they wearing chains, maybe?
1:35:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, there was a lot of jewelries. There was a lot of paddock watches. I mean, it's expensive.
1:35:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
1:35:23 Dax Shepard? I'm watching like-
1:35:24 Speaker 01 Kind of like Nobu in a way.
1:35:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah, it felt like a throwback to the eighties or nineties, which I enjoy.
1:35:31 Speaker 01 That's fun.
1:35:32 Dax Shepard? I cannot put it too fine a point how good the food was. It was outrageous.
1:35:35 Speaker 01 I want that.
1:35:35 Dax Shepard? And we pigged out like crazy. A risotto with truffle.
1:35:40 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:35:41 Dax Shepard? Gluten free blew my-
1:35:42 Speaker 01 Yum.
1:35:43 Dax Shepard? Doors off my barn. And then a great steak, a baby chicken.
1:35:47 Speaker 01 Tiny chicken?
1:35:48 Dax Shepard? They described it as a baby chicken.
1:35:50 Speaker 01 Not a Cornish hen.
1:35:51 Dax Shepard? Not a Cornish hen, but a oven baked tiny, uh, baby chicken.
1:35:54 Speaker 01 Call it that. That is not as appetizing.
1:35:58 Dax Shepard? Well, I was like, what? Do they mean a chick?
1:36:00 Speaker 01 Right, exactly.
1:36:01 Dax Shepard? But that wouldn't be enough meat, I don't think. It was delicious and it was very entertaining. It was, it was.
1:36:09 Speaker 01 It's fun to do that every now and then and get in the scene.
1:36:13 Dax Shepard? Yes, I loved it. What was the vibe at? I didn't know you're now working at Sunset Tower.
1:36:17 Speaker 01 Only-
1:36:18 Dax Shepard? That's a far ride to go-
1:36:19 Speaker 01 It is. That's why it's not a main stop for me, but I love, I love Sunset Tower.
1:36:24 Dax Shepard? You love it.
1:36:24 Speaker 01 I only go like once a year, twice a year.
1:36:27 Dax Shepard? You love it for the food, the atmosphere?
1:36:29 Speaker 01 Atmosphere.
1:36:30 Dax Shepard? And what are you seeing?
1:36:30 Speaker 01 The food is very good. I had a fried chicken.
1:36:33 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:36:34 Speaker 01 And it was really delicious. They have a great shrimp cock-
1:36:38 Dax Shepard? Was it a baby chicken? Fried baby chicken?
1:36:40 Speaker 01 It was full size, I think.
1:36:41 Dax Shepard? Okay, grandpa chicken?
1:36:43 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's also such a vibe.
1:36:46 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
1:36:46 Speaker 01 It is, for people who don't know, it's a hotel here, Sunset Tower Hotel, and then there's a bar- In a restaurant. It's a very LA, old school LA, um, old Hollywood vibe.
1:37:00 Dax Shepard? If you will.
1:37:00 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:37:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:37:01 Speaker 01 It got packed. See, I went at 2:30.
1:37:05 Dax Shepard? So that you'll be still there at happy hour?
1:37:08 Speaker 01 I didn't mean to, but we left at eight.
1:37:10 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:37:11 Speaker 01 So we were there all day. I've been craving it for a while, the energy there.
1:37:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah, similarly.
1:37:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:37:19 Dax Shepard? 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 gonna have any.
1:37:26 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:37:26 Dax Shepard? I was driving there. I was like, oh, a little drowsy for this big- Outing with the boys.
1:37:31 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:37:31 Dax Shepard? But I did have some DCs at the place and then the energy really did lift me up.
1:37:37 Speaker 01 Do you think that maybe now is not the time for you to be like cutting out caffeine?
1:37:42 Dax Shepard? Well, I think it is in, in, in service of making sure I'm getting good night's sleep.
1:37:48 Speaker 01 Oh, okay.
1:37:49 Dax Shepard? Right. Like I think getting a full uninterrupted aid is, is ideal.
1:37:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:37:55 Dax Shepard? Which I did last night.
1:37:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, I just, I think taking away things that you like.
1:38:00 Dax Shepard? Blowing my nose.
1:38:02 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:38:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:38:03 Speaker 01 Think maybe now is not the time.
1:38:05 Dax Shepard? Although I've, um, I have the right mental attitude. I'm, I've decided to go like, yeah, this is uncomfortable, but this is you being strong and not escaping and walking through.
1:38:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:38:17 Dax Shepard? It's fine and it'll change. So it's been fine.
1:38:20 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:38:20 Dax Shepard? Yeah. A couple haircuts, a few naps.
1:38:24 Speaker 01 That's all right.
1:38:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:38:25 Speaker 01 Oh, that's fine.
1:38:28 Speaker 04 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
1:38:41 Dax Shepard? Anything thrilling happen, happened since I saw you last?
1:38:44 Speaker 01 I guess those were big announcements that I already gave.
1:38:47 Dax Shepard? Went to restaurants.
1:38:50 Speaker 01 I took a long time to put my bracelet on.
1:38:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Did you end up having someone help you?
1:38:55 Speaker 01 Uh, yeah. When Julia got there, she did it.
1:38:57 Dax Shepard? But not a stranger.
1:38:58 Speaker 01 No.
1:38:58 Dax Shepard? I think that's the best move.
1:39:00 Speaker 01 I know, but it's also so.
1:39:02 Dax Shepard? I'm so sorry. Excuse me. I'm, I've been trying to get this bracelet on for 20 minutes. Would you mind? I don't have any cooties or, well, I do have cooties. Look how fun this is already.
1:39:12 Dax Shepard? Playful, dance, dance, dance. Before he even gets to the bracelet, you've, you've now talked for 25 minutes.
1:39:17 Speaker 01 Sure. Cause he's gonna have a hard time too. It's much harder than you'd think.
1:39:20 Dax Shepard? And then it's, then he's failing and he's laughing.
1:39:23 Speaker 01 Funny.
1:39:23 Dax Shepard? Oh my God. I'm falling in love just thinking about this.
1:39:30 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:39:40 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:39:41 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:39:53 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:39:54 Dax Shepard? So on the way in, George spotted her and he's like, oh my God, look at that girl in the cowboy hat. I'm like, okay. So when we were coming out, I'm like, oh, let's look at these, um, let's look at the lobsters.
1:40:04 Speaker 01 You were wing manning.
1:40:05 Dax Shepard? Yeah. So now we're like, now we're, we are looking, but we're also fake looking.
1:40:09 Speaker 01 Of course.
1:40:11 Dax Shepard? 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, and now what?
1:40:20 Speaker 01 Yeah. He's gonna have to talk.
1:40:22 Dax Shepard? He's gonna have to talk. It's so funny. 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're like, you know what? I'm full. And turned around and it was like, well, that was the.
1:40:34 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
1:40:35 Dax Shepard? And then when I left, George, well, I think we got their attention. And then I was leaving and George was like, I gotta, I gotta go back. I'm gonna go back and see what's happening with the cowboy hat.
1:40:48 Dax Shepard? With us standing there looking at this stuff.
1:40:50 Speaker 01 It's so weird to be an adult.
1:40:53 Dax Shepard? Especially 50.
1:40:54 Speaker 01 Right. Yeah.
1:41:01 Dax Shepard? I was hearing the updates of a single life and I was thinking, yeah, I'm glad I'm not.
1:41:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:41:07 Dax Shepard? I'm not on the scene.
1:41:08 Speaker 01 Well, that's, yeah. Seeing of young men, Ben and David.
1:41:12 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow. Fun. Ben and David.
1:41:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're great.
1:41:15 Dax Shepard? Really, really, really.
1:41:16 Speaker 01 That was a very fun time.
1:41:18 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:41:19 Speaker 01 And now I'm really into the NFL as an institution.
1:41:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah. As a corporation.
1:41:24 Speaker 01 Yeah. As a business.
1:41:26 Dax Shepard? As a capitalist communism.
1:41:28 Speaker 01 Yesterday I bought some vintage clothes.
1:41:31 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:41:31 Speaker 01 And bought a LA Rams, there's an LA Rams vintage shirt.
1:41:35 Dax Shepard? Oh, really?
1:41:35 Speaker 01 And I got that because now I really like the LA Rams because they were really ahead of their time. Progressively.
1:41:44 Dax Shepard? Right. So now you're a huge fan?
1:41:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:41:48 Dax Shepard? Of the Rams?
1:41:49 Speaker 01 And I live here.
1:41:50 Dax Shepard? You're a Ram fan?
1:41:51 Speaker 01 Well, let's see. The biggest fact to check and the most exciting fact to check is Taylor Swift's car collection.
1:42:00 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
1:42:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:42:02 Dax Shepard? This is very exciting.
1:42:04 Speaker 01 Very. Does she have a car collection? I was a definite no.
1:42:10 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:42:11 Speaker 01 And I felt very arrogant, in my opinion, because I feel like I know everything about her.
1:42:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:42:18 Speaker 01 Only because I listened to a great podcast, Every Single Album.
1:42:22 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:42:23 Speaker 01 Shout out, that breaks down all of her albums and they do other, other people too. And they also just do like music industry stuff and they're, the two hosts are really awesome. So I love that and I feel, 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.
1:42:40 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:42:41 Speaker 01 They skipped that part, so she does have one.
1:42:45 Dax Shepard? This is fantastic. What are her cars?
1:42:48 Speaker 01 Okay, there are three sections of cars she has.
1:42:51 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:42:51 Speaker 01 Luxury.
1:42:52 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
1:42:53 Speaker 01 Sports.
1:42:53 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
1:42:54 Speaker 01 And practical.
1:42:55 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:42:55 Speaker 01 Luxury, Mercedes AMG G sixty-three.
1:43:00 Dax Shepard? Oh, what a wonderful sedan.
1:43:01 Speaker 01 Luxury vehicle.
1:43:02 Dax Shepard? Twin turbo.
1:43:03 Speaker 01 Is that a sedan or a?
1:43:05 Dax Shepard? Yeah, four door sedan.
1:43:07 Speaker 01 Oh, I thought it was a G-Wagon.
1:43:10 Dax Shepard? G-Wagon is the G sixty-three.
1:43:12 Speaker 01 That's what I said.
1:43:13 Dax Shepard? Oh, I thought you said S.
1:43:14 Speaker 01 No, G.
1:43:15 Dax Shepard? Oh, wonderful. Love those. Love those. Eric's even thinking of getting one.
1:43:21 Speaker 01 Really?
1:43:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:43:22 Speaker 01 G-Wagon?
1:43:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, they're so good.
1:43:24 Speaker 01 I would like to have one in my life.
1:43:26 Dax Shepard? You would.
1:43:27 Speaker 01 At some point.
1:43:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah, they're, they're great. They're, they're very expensive.
1:43:30 Speaker 01 Are they me though? But kind of.
1:43:34 Dax Shepard? Every time I see a G-Wagon, it's mostly rich, hot women driving G-Wagons in LA. Yeah, it's, it's, it skews fem, female.
1:43:44 Speaker 01 Really? She also has Mercedes Benz S-Class.
1:43:49 Dax Shepard? That's what I was referring to, but not the AMG version.
1:43:51 Speaker 01 Right. Then she has a Mercedes Maybach S six fifty.
1:43:55 Dax Shepard? That's like a coach built.
1:43:59 Dax Shepard? Mercedes based, you know, like a private plane for cars.
1:44:04 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:44:05 Dax Shepard? It's a rolling atelier.
1:44:10 Speaker 01 Then there's the Cadillac Escalade.
1:44:12 Dax Shepard? Standard, you gotta 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.
1:44:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, special occasions. Okay, now we're into sports cars.
1:44:24 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:44:25 Speaker 01 Audi R8.
1:44:26 Dax Shepard? Okay, yes, yes, very elegant design first.
1:44:30 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:44:30 Dax Shepard? Not the most performing.
1:44:32 Speaker 01 Oh, all right.
1:44:33 Dax Shepard? Of super cars.
1:44:34 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:44:35 Dax Shepard? No, no, objectively, but very elegant looking.
1:44:38 Speaker 01 It does say right here, a high performance supercar.
1:44:42 Dax Shepard? Yep, and it is. It's got the Lambo V10, or it's got the V8 depending on which.
1:44:47 Speaker 01 This is V8.
1:44:47 Dax Shepard? Okay, I'm surprised she doesn't have the V10, but when I talk to her, I'll get her.
1:44:52 Speaker 01 You'll get her.
1:44:53 Dax Shepard? Again, that's a very feminine supercar.
1:44:56 Speaker 01 Okay, okay. Now, she also has a Ferrari 458 Italia.
1:45:01 Dax Shepard? That's a shocker.
1:45:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:45:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that feels, that's interesting. That's when she plays lavender haze, I think. That's her lavender haze car.
1:45:12 Speaker 01 Is it sexy?
1:45:14 Dax Shepard? Well, it's just an Italian, I mean, it's so.
1:45:17 Speaker 01 Italian stallion?
1:45:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, very dude car. Very, very few women go out and buy a 458.
1:45:25 Speaker 01 Oh, wow, yeah, yeah, I'm looking it up. It is, it looks fast.
1:45:32 Dax Shepard? I'm gonna ask Chad if it knows what percentage of Ferrari owners are men.
1:45:36 Speaker 01 Oh, that's a great question.
1:45:38 Dax Shepard? Cause 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%.
1:45:49 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
1:45:49 Dax Shepard? That's, that's really quite high.
1:45:53 Dax Shepard? So she, she can count herself in the 5%.
1:45:56 Speaker 01 That's awesome. Okay, then she has a Porsche 911 Turbo.
1:46:00 Dax Shepard? Perfect car. Very exciting. Great taste. Should I see if Chat, what Chat thinks the percentage of women who own Porsches?
1:46:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, I, it, it needs to be higher if it's not.
1:46:10 Dax Shepard? What percentage of Porsche owners are female? 15 to 20%.
1:46:15 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:46:16 Dax Shepard? So that's 4X.
1:46:17 Speaker 01 Right, and that tracks. I know more women with Porsches.
1:46:22 Dax Shepard? The Cayenne has, uh, female ownership estimated between 30 and 40%.
1:46:26 Speaker 01 Oh, that's the electric one?
1:46:29 Dax Shepard? No. Oh, here we go. The Macan, that's the small SUV. That one's got, uh, 50% of buyers are women.
1:46:37 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:46:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:46:39 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:46:39 Dax Shepard? All right.
1:46:40 Speaker 01 Practical vehicles.
1:46:41 Dax Shepard? Okay. She has some practical vehicles?
1:46:43 Speaker 01 She has three.
1:46:44 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:46:44 Speaker 01 She has a Toyota Sequoia.
1:46:47 Dax Shepard? Great. She'll have that until she's dead. It'll run until she's dead.
1:46:50 Speaker 01 She has a Chevy, which we hope is of like 150. She's 150.
1:46:55 Dax Shepard? It'll run that long. Don't worry.
1:46:57 Speaker 01 Chevy Silverado, her first car, which she still keeps.
1:47:01 Dax Shepard? Okay, is it pink?
1:47:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's pink.
1:47:03 Dax Shepard? It's pink. It's like a Mary Kay.
1:47:06 Speaker 01 And then the Nissan Quash Qai. That's Q A S H Q A I.
1:47:15 Dax Shepard? That's, um.
1:47:16 Speaker 01 She has that.
1:47:17 Dax Shepard? Why does she have that?
1:47:18 Speaker 01 She has it.
1:47:20 Dax Shepard? Was that given?
1:47:21 Speaker 01 It's cute.
1:47:22 Dax Shepard? She have a deal with Nissan? Does she have any kind of?
1:47:24 Speaker 01 No, she just loves it.
1:47:25 Dax Shepard? She loves it.
1:47:26 Speaker 01 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.
1:47:40 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:47:40 Speaker 01 The Ferrari, the Porsche, they're all on here.
1:47:42 Dax Shepard? Okay, good.
1:47:43 Speaker 01 Um, the Sequoia.
1:47:46 Speaker 01 The AMG, the Nissan Quash Quai. The everyday humble.
1:47:51 Dax Shepard? Everyone says the Nissan Quash Quai?
1:47:52 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:47:53 Dax Shepard? If we ever interview her, I want to do 20 minutes on that.
1:47:56 Speaker 01 I hope she arrives in it.
1:47:57 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
1:47:58 Speaker 01 That would be great. And she probably will because it says the everyday humble choice.
1:48:02 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:48:03 Speaker 01 It's her latest acquisition. She can move her discreetly.
1:48:07 Dax Shepard? Right, so.
1:48:07 Speaker 01 In London. It says in London specifically.
1:48:09 Dax Shepard? This vehicle is in London and it's so she can leave an apartment without anyone thinking it's her.
1:48:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, but don't, don't go looking for, I know, don't go looking for her Quash Quais and try to find her. She's just trying to live. She's just trying to be.
1:48:25 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:48:31 Speaker 01 You can design something for her. You've been designing cars with AI.
1:48:35 Dax Shepard? I could and then her driver could wear the UPS outfit.
1:48:38 Speaker 01 That's fun.
1:48:39 Dax Shepard? Or FedEx. I guess if she's in London, it would probably be FedEx.
1:48:42 Speaker 01 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 of their jerseys have sold. These royalties come from group licensing deals negotiated through the NFL.
1:48:57 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:48:58 Speaker 01 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.
1:49:13 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:49:14 Speaker 01 Action Park is in New Jersey.
1:49:16 Dax Shepard? Okay, and there's a doc about it called Class Action Park or something.
1:49:21 Speaker 01 Oh, five to 10 victims daily.
1:49:24 Dax Shepard? Five to 10 people went in an ambulance away from there.
1:49:27 Speaker 01 Emergency room, yeah.
1:49:28 Dax Shepard? Emergency room. While they were keeping probably the town emergency clinic in business.
1:49:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, maybe that's what it was all about.
1:49:37 Dax Shepard? I wonder if they were giving away like the woman who lost her eyelid on the slide. She got an embroidered sweatshirt or something.
1:49:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:49:45 Dax Shepard? From Armchair Anonymous.
1:49:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, that was a great episode.
1:49:48 Dax Shepard? They should have had a shirt that said, "I was sent to the emergency room by Adventure Park."
1:49:52 Speaker 01 And all I got was this little t-shirt.
1:49:55 Dax Shepard? Action Park.
1:49:56 Speaker 01 Action Park, yeah. Well, that's it for Ben and David. They were awesome.
1:50:00 Dax Shepard? Ah, yeah.
1:50:01 Speaker 01 Really fun.
1:50:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah, incredible. And I've been talking so much about what I learned.
1:50:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, me too.
1:50:06 Dax Shepard? Basically, I repeated the entire episode to my father-in-law on his internet. All right, love you.
1:50:10 Speaker 01 Love you.
Previous James Marsden Next Armchair Anonymous: Sports Event Page updated November 4, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated