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

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Episode Summary Episode Title: Acquired Podcast on the NFL (with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal)
Release Date: February 5, 2025
Guests: Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, Hosts of Acquired Podcast

---

1. Introduction to the Episode

In this special episode of Armchair Expert, Dax Shepard and co-host Monica Padman welcome Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, the masterminds behind the renowned Acquired Podcast. The focus of their discussion centers around the Acquired deep dive into the National Football League (NFL), coinciding with the Super Bowl season.

Dax Shepard [04:10]: "This was 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."

2. The Genesis of Acquired Podcast

Ben and David recount the origins of Acquired, highlighting their serendipitous meeting at a Passover Seder, which blossomed into a collaborative partnership. Initially conceived as a side project, the podcast evolved organically, driven by their passion for dissecting the histories and business models of major companies.

Ben Gilbert [06:54]: "David and I met at a Passover Seder, and we sort of instantly hit it off."

3. Deep Dive into the NFL’s History and Business Model

The conversation delves into the intricate history of the NFL, tracing its evolution from a loosely organized collection of teams in the early 20th century to the powerhouse sports league it is today. Key milestones discussed include:

• Formation and Early Years: The NFL’s inception in 1920 in Canton, Ohio, and the challenges faced by regional teams.

• World War II Impact: How the war influenced the league’s dynamics, leading to mergers and the eventual dominance of the NFL over rival leagues like the All-American Football Conference (AAFC).

• Pete Rozelle’s Influence: Rozelle’s tenure as commissioner was pivotal in centralizing television deals, ensuring revenue distribution across all teams, and maintaining competitive parity.

David Rosenthal [21:00]: "The Packers are still in the league. They're not making any money. It’s like Costco. It’s making me feel Costco feelings."

4. The Revolution of NFL Broadcasting

A significant portion of the discussion is dedicated to the transformation of NFL broadcasting, spearheaded by innovations introduced during Pete Rozelle’s leadership:

• Monday Night Football (MNF): Introduction of MNF in 1968 revolutionized live sports broadcasting with enhanced camera work, real-time graphics, and engaging commentary.

• Television Deals: The strategic consolidation of TV rights under the NFL’s umbrella, leading to the lucrative multi-billion-dollar contracts that sustain the league’s financial stability.

• Technological Innovations: The development of advanced camera systems like the Steadicam and the Super Fly Cam, which enriched the viewing experience and set new standards for sports broadcasting.

Ben Gilbert [63:28]: "Every team should go eight and eight. They have so many things they do to make this happen behind the scenes again."

5. Centralized Revenue and Competitive Parity

Ben and David explain the NFL’s unique revenue-sharing model, where approximately 70% of each team’s revenue is centralized through league-wide TV deals. This model ensures financial parity, allowing smaller market teams to compete effectively against larger market counterparts.

• Revenue Distribution: Collective bargaining agreements ensure that revenue from broadcasting is equitably distributed, preventing any single team from monopolizing profits.

• Draft System: Instituted to maintain competitive balance by granting higher draft picks to teams with poorer records, enabling them to acquire top talent.

• Salary Cap and Merchandising: The NFL employs a salary cap system, allocating a fixed portion of revenue to player salaries, and centralizes merchandising to maintain brand consistency.

David Rosenthal [37:04]: "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."

6. Player Economics and Collective Bargaining

The episode sheds light on the symbiotic relationship between players and the league:

• Salary Cap: Nearly half of the league’s revenue is dedicated to player salaries, ensuring that players benefit proportionally as the league grows.

• Jersey Sales: Players receive royalties from group licensing deals, providing additional income streams based on merchandise sales.

• Free Agency and Contracts: Discussion on how collective bargaining has evolved, granting players more freedom and financial opportunities within the league.

Ben Gilbert [75:31]: "Players actually have it pretty great. It took a long time to get here."

7. Current Challenges and Future Outlook

Ben and David address contemporary issues facing the NFL, including:

• Media Consumption Shifts: The rise of streaming platforms has altered traditional TV dynamics, prompting the NFL to innovate with packages like NFL Sunday Ticket and Red Zone.

• Gambling Integration: The league’s strategic partnership with betting platforms has unlocked significant revenue streams, though it raises concerns about integrity and game outcomes.

• Competitive Integrity: Ongoing efforts to maintain parity through scheduling and draft systems are critical to the league’s sustained popularity.

Ben Gilbert [84:02]: "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."

8. Conclusion

The episode culminates with reflections on the NFL's resilience and adaptability, underscoring its sophisticated business model that balances competitive fairness with expansive revenue growth. Ben and David commend the NFL’s strategic decisions that have cemented its status as America’s premier sports league.

Dax Shepard [45:28]: "This is so much more interesting than I was expecting, to be honest."

---

Notable Quotes

• Dax Shepard [14:55]: "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."
• Ben Gilbert [19:17]: "It's like the Friends deal. Going it all together, which rarely works."
• David Rosenthal [57:11]: "The Packers are still in the league. They're not making any money. It’s like Costco."
• Monica Padman [47:48]: "I'm so shocked that the team named the Redskins."

---

Key Insights

• Strategic Revenue Sharing: The NFL’s centralized TV deals have been pivotal in ensuring financial stability and competitive balance across all teams.

• Technological Innovation in Broadcasting: Advances such as multiple camera angles and real-time graphics have transformed the viewing experience, keeping NFL broadcasts engaging and dynamic.

• Evolution Through Leadership: Leaders like Pete Rozelle and Al Davis played crucial roles in shaping the NFL’s business strategies, fostering growth and maintaining its dominance in the sports landscape.

• Symbiotic Player-League Relationship: The NFL’s collective bargaining and salary cap systems have fostered a mutually beneficial relationship between players and the league, ensuring fair compensation and competitive play.

---

Concluding Remarks

This episode of Armchair Expert provides a comprehensive exploration of the NFL’s intricate history and business mechanics, as elucidated by the experts from Acquired Podcast. For listeners interested in the confluence of sports, business, and media, this conversation offers valuable perspectives and a deep appreciation for the NFL’s enduring legacy.

---

**Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. To delve deeper into the insightful discussions from Acquired Podcast, visit Acquired Podcast and explore Thomas Friedman’s latest works on venture capitalism and risk-taking.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. Experts on Expert. Hi, Monica.

[Monica Padman]

Hi. Hi.

[Dax Shepard]

Aaron Weekley. 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.

[Monica Padman]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

And so I thought it was your idea. I was about to say you had a great idea.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I had the idea to bring them in to do this.

[Dax Shepard]

You did. And then they had the idea. What about the NFL? Which. What timing. So we are 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?

[Monica Padman]

It's so interesting. I don't care about NFL. When they suggested it, I thought that's a good idea for timing, but I don't. I'm. Not that I wanted the row, sure. But you know what? It was so fantastic and I was talking about it all night at your party.

[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.

[Monica Padman]

Everyone should listen to the Costco episode and be reminded what a beautifully run business. Very ethical, lots of integrity, and it's such a good company. And now I'm obsessed with it.

[Dax Shepard]

I've. I've been in the Costco religion for years. Shot two movies in Costco. Yeah. Please enjoy Ben and David on the NFL. We are supported by the Lenovo Yoga Aura Edition imagined with Intel. You know, we love chatting and learning about AI here on the show. With the incredible advances in tech and AI over the last couple years, you need a laptop that can keep up. Great news. Lenovo and intel have joined forces to engineer the best laptops in the industry. The Lenovo Yoga Aura Edition is an impossibly thin, light laptop. It can go wherever you do. Plus, the battery automatically optimizes for efficiency so you can go longer without a charge. No more hunting for outlets at a coffee shop. It also has a fully equipped touchscreen with bold popping visuals that retain accuracy across your projects. Perfect for digital artists, designers, amateur photographers and more. Even movie lovers will love watching this because you don't just want your technology to work. You want it to help elevate your work to places you never expected. It's possible on your Intel AI PC. Learn more about Lenovo Aura Edition AI [e-mail] Aura we are supported by Allstate. Some people just know they could save hundreds on car insurance by checking Allstate first. Like, you know to check your sunroof first before driving through the car wash. Like, you know to put the leash on your dog first before you open the door to go for a walk. Not that I've ever made that mistake and had my dog run outside without me. Or scream his name repeatedly over and over and over again until I found him. Or, you know, to check that the guy who asked you out is an armchair first before you agree to go on a date with him. Sage advice Essential Checking first is smart, so check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. This content is intended for audiences in the US Only. Savings vary terms apply Allstate Fire and Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates Northbrook, Illinois.

[Monica Padman]

Cheers.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, gentlemen, we are so tickled that you came.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[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?

[Ben Gilbert]

Yes, it does.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, good. Good, good, good. We never know if we're in a vacuum or not.

[Monica Padman]

I know. Even my Hermes hiccup seemed to have made its way back because you liked.

[Dax Shepard]

It so much and you wanted to buy one of the old bags.

[Monica Padman]

And I stand by it.

[David Rosenthal]

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

[Monica Padman]

Thank you.

[David Rosenthal]

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

[Ben Gilbert]

Wait, why'd you get in trouble?

[Monica Padman]

I was unrelatable.

[Dax Shepard]

Ah, too rich. I get it. When I was poor, I hated people like mine. But now I love people like mine.

[Monica Padman]

I don't have one. That's the whole point. I just want one.

[Dax Shepard]

There's something interesting about what we file offensive or gratuitous, but we don't. Because a piece of art mad at Picasso's worth $150 million. So like, well, that's kind of rad. But for some reason, this is very triggering for people.

[Ben Gilbert]

You're mad at the person who owns it.

[David Rosenthal]

What? 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 Hermes is somewhere along that spectrum. Whereas stuff you buy from Amazon is about the product you're buying, history and brand, when you're buying Hermes as much as you are the product. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I'll tell you, I think it was your Hermes episode that got me interested, because our friend Eric, who has interest, he was a lawyer who quit, and now he just trades stocks. And he called Monk. He's like, I've gotta get some more medicine.

[Monica Padman]

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. Cause he had just listened to your episode, and he got all of us totally in.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. All he knows about is the stock market. He vaguely knows law, and he knows peptides.

[Monica Padman]

He doesn't know who Natalie Portman is.

[Ben Gilbert]

Soccer team owner, I think.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly. You've heard of her.

[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 is phenomenal.

[David Rosenthal]

Thank you.

[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.

[Ben Gilbert]

David and I met at a Passover Seder, and we sort of instantly hit it off. You know those friends where you keep thinking, we should do drinks more often? And you try, and then it's like every two or three months, you're like, why don't we see each other more often? Well, at one of these scheduled drinks that actually happened, I gave David two pitches. One was acquired and the other was a podcast that was a much worse Idea.

[Dax Shepard]

Ooh, I would love to know the worst idea.

[David Rosenthal]

It was companies that had successfully innovated more than once. And it would have been a very short list.

[Dax Shepard]

I was gonna say, I can't imagine you get a ton of episodes.

[Monica Padman]

You might run out.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. But you went to Ohio State.

[Ben Gilbert]

I did.

[Dax Shepard]

Congratulations.

[Ben Gilbert]

Did you guys just win national champ?

[Monica Padman]

Well, I went to uga, so I also have a national championship background. Just throwing that out there.

[Ben Gilbert]

You and I did a lot during this.

[Monica Padman]

I see you another fisherman now.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Why did you end up at Ohio State?

[Ben Gilbert]

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 stand. So 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. I think there's a specialness to being in a place like that and looking around at what your future could be.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I'm going to 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?

[Ben Gilbert]

Cedar Point. Yeah, of course.

[Dax Shepard]

That's an easy question. You got that right.

[Ben Gilbert]

Halfway between Cleveland and Detroit.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Sandusky, Ohio. Every time we have any guest on within the tri state area, we'll do 20 minutes on Cedar Point. And she cannot stand there.

[Monica Padman]

I hate Cedar Point. Now I'll never go. We should have done it on Cedar Point.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Millennium Forest, Top thrill, dragst, magnum, xj220, the gemini, the Demon Drop, the Corkscrew.

[Ben Gilbert]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. They were just acquired by Six Flags. We really could do an episode on them.

[Ben Gilbert]

We actually should.

[David Rosenthal]

You just turned me on to defunct land. This YouTube channel. What's that, Ben? You can tell it better than me, but it's like acquired episodes of old defunct amusement park.

[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, I would.

[Ben Gilbert]

I was successful to do it all. Have you ever heard of Action Park? They just made a documentary about it in New Jersey.

[David Rosenthal]

Yes, yes.

[Ben Gilbert]

This was the YouTube channel that popularized people. Looking back and being like that was completely insane that Action park existed.

[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, that party. Nope.

[Ben Gilbert]

It's like a badge of honor.

[Dax Shepard]

And I think Adventureland, that movie is based on that.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, no way.

[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 out with lacerations and. Yeah, okay, so you graduate with a computer science degree and then you end up moving to Silicon Valley.

[Ben Gilbert]

Seattle. I was going for a job at Mike 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.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, God.

[David Rosenthal]

That was your first lesson in negotiating?

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That's a rookie mistake.

[Ben Gilbert]

So I have no idea if I would have gotten a job at Google or not.

[Monica Padman]

You just took Microsoft.

[Ben Gilbert]

I wanted to go to the west Coast. I wanted to be in tech. I grew up in Ohio and that was my ticket.

[Dax Shepard]

In retrospect, do you wish you had worked at Google or not?

[Ben Gilbert]

No, it worked out great. I live in Seattle. I've been there 13 years now.

[David Rosenthal]

Now, great.

[Ben Gilbert]

I met David there.

[David Rosenthal]

No, acquired, no Microsoft.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Now, David, you go kind of a fancier route if we could say.

[David Rosenthal]

I don't have any national championships.

[Dax Shepard]

Undergrad at Princeton and then Stanford graduate school. You have an mba and what's your undergrad degree in?

[David Rosenthal]

French literature.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you romantic son of a. The long hair, the angular features.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you want to mix?

[Dax Shepard]

You're a babe. You must know this, right?

[David Rosenthal]

I appreciate that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. What a study. Ben, you're hot too. I don't want to leave you out.

[Ben Gilbert]

I grew my hair long during COVID It didn't play as well as.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's an enviable head of hair. So, okay, how do you end up.

[David Rosenthal]

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 then was like, I would do anything to do this. Sounds like the coolest thing in the world. I got an opportunity a couple years later to join the biggest venture firm in Seattle. I didn't know anybody in Seattle. A headhunter called me and I was like, hell yeah, I will move to Seattle.

[Dax Shepard]

Am I not wrong in that? Headquarters of venture capital is generally, though, Silicon Valley. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Have you read Nate Silver's new book by chance? No. It's about gambling and it's about venture capitalists and it's about risk taking. Friedman.

[David Rosenthal]

Oh, Thomas Friedman.

[Dax Shepard]

No. Is that. No.

[Monica Padman]

Sam.

[Dax Shepard]

Sam Altman. Friedman.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[David Rosenthal]

Sam Altman.

[Monica Padman]

Friedman.

[Dax Shepard]

Sam Friedman. Altman. Right. Sam Altman, which is also in the book is OpenAI. Sam B. Something.

[Ben Gilbert]

Sam Bankman. Friedman.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God.

[David Rosenthal]

This is where they're going.

[Monica Padman]

We're gonna keep that in cause of you. Coming through.

[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 are employed in that capacity that.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

This is great. How many years ago was that?

[David Rosenthal]

10 that we started acquired. 11 that we met.

[Ben Gilbert]

So Dave and I were just in Taiwan doing this crazy interview with Dr. 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. 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.

[Monica Padman]

That's awesome.

[Dax Shepard]

Isn't it crazy where these podcasts can take you?

[David Rosenthal]

We're in the hotel in Taipei. You texted me, getting ready to go over to his office to interview. And what a way to spend our 10 year anniversary together halfway around the world.

[Dax Shepard]

Ye. We're interviewing you on our seven year anniversary. And I feel equally.

[Ben Gilbert]

Is it really?

[David Rosenthal]

Is it?

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it'll come out probably the 14th.

[Monica Padman]

Is our actual anniversary of the first episode out, our first recording. I don't know.

[David Rosenthal]

Okay, I should know this. What gave you guys the idea to do this crazy thing?

[Ben Gilbert]

Ooh, wait, I think I know this.

[Dax Shepard]

Please.

[Ben Gilbert]

If Wikipedia is accurate, you wanted the opportunity for people to experience what an AA meeting is without necessarily having to become an alcoholic.

[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. And there's not one, but probably more accurately is cereal the podcast? Cause Monica and I were both consuming it at the time. Monica was babysitting and we would fight for hours in the kitchen about whether Adnan was guilty or not. I'm like, you're not a dude. You don't understand. Dudes do.

[Monica Padman]

Fucking weird.

[Dax Shepard]

I know. Kids like, yeah, it's not shocking. You know, we would fight non stop. So we had a hobby of arguing.

[Monica Padman]

With one another, which turned into arguing about just everything.

[Dax Shepard]

And we thought, that's a good engine for a show.

[David Rosenthal]

Good. Grist for the mill.

[Dax Shepard]

They're gonna know a lot of venture.

[Monica Padman]

Capitalist terms is grist for the mill.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah, sure.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I love that. Good.

[David Rosenthal]

Grist for the Mill cereal paved the way for this whole industry.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[David Rosenthal]

I'm imagining it's our whole thing now.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you're completely retired from all that.

[Ben Gilbert]

We are full time podcasters.

[David Rosenthal]

We do some investing as part of acquired our previous careers. We have Sunset.

[Dax Shepard]

What year did you guys make that decision? And did you guys get together and be like, I think I'm ready?

[David Rosenthal]

We did it at different times, actually.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah. David did it three, four years ago.

[Dax Shepard]

Five years ago, and Ben U.

[Ben Gilbert]

Last year.

[Monica Padman]

How does it feel?

[Ben Gilbert]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

That's a good answer.

[Ben Gilbert]

We're entrepreneurs who took the least risk out of any founders I've ever worked with.

[David Rosenthal]

Well, we're doing a different thing.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[David Rosenthal]

We accidentally built it on the side.

[Dax Shepard]

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. 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 nonstop about it.

[Ben Gilbert]

Thank you for doing it.

[David Rosenthal]

In any given month, a third of all consumption of Acquired is episodes older than six months.

[Dax Shepard]

I believe that for sure. Cause you get brought in for a certain topic you're interested in and you.

[Monica Padman]

Go, oh, I gotta listen to every single one of these.

[Dax Shepard]

You start shopping as I did.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So because the. 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?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, no, 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 with.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, it sounded too smart to be honest for you. Yeah, it really did. It always was a little suspicious.

[Ben Gilbert]

No, we workshopped six or seven different ideas.

[Monica Padman]

We did. Of course, I threw out the whole.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my gosh, Taylor Swift's car collection. This candle company I can't get the candle of.

[David Rosenthal]

Is Taylor Swift a car collect?

[Dax Shepard]

No, no, no.

[Monica Padman]

But you know, they have a great episode on Taylor Swift.

[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.

[David Rosenthal]

Something we didn't find.

[Dax Shepard]

I bet she has a collection of SUVs. She gets driven in is my guess.

[Monica Padman]

That's probably right. As she should.

[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.

[Ben Gilbert]

I was wondering if you were actually going to do this or not. I had this feeling it's not actually going to get handed over to us to do like, prepare 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.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, we will be interjecting, but we can't help ourselves.

[David Rosenthal]

This is like a live studio audience for an acquired episode.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Ben Gilbert]

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 youo, which I think is three or four pages.

[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.

[Ben Gilbert]

So our recording day is an 8 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.

[Monica Padman]

Of course.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[David Rosenthal]

And your voices sound different.

[Ben Gilbert]

So that eight to ten hour day turns into a three to four hour episode when we cut. Cause 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.

[Dax Shepard]

You're co piloting one another.

[Monica Padman]

You guys probably have little Ego that if you're able to take that from.

[David Rosenthal]

One another, we have large trust with one another.

[Monica Padman]

That's lovely.

[Ben Gilbert]

And we've had good, hard conversations. Okay, so the NFL.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, the NFL. Here we go.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, Seth Green, he's a geek. Admittedly, he loves the super bowl because he goes to Six Flags. Cause nobody's there. He's like. He's basically, like, hunting out the place.

[Ben Gilbert]

Sunday afternoons when in Seattle, there's a seat. It's actually a great time to go to Costco.

[David Rosenthal]

Oh, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Another fantastic episode of yours that really turned me onto Costco.

[Dax Shepard]

That's my favorite company.

[Monica Padman]

My favorite company, too. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I've shot two movies inside of Costco, and I loved it. One was just nights for six weeks. I had a bicycle. I rode around.

[David Rosenthal]

What movies?

[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. Two of them were NFL football games.

[Monica Padman]

Holy shit.

[Ben Gilbert]

And in previous years, it's been higher. It's been closer to 82 to 85. Last year, because of the election, there was things that people watched en masse. But basically, America watches NFL games, college football games, the Thanksgiving parade, and presidential debates. And other than that, nothing cracks.

[David Rosenthal]

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 of, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And it has the most coveted audience, which is. They're watching it live and they're gonna sit through the commercials.

[David Rosenthal]

Exactly.

[Monica Padman]

So award shows are not making the most.

[Ben Gilbert]

Oh, award shows do that. Is one of the 20 that are not the episode.

[Dax Shepard]

Got it.

[Monica Padman]

Interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

Also interesting. ESPN was responsible for some enormous percentage overall of Disney as a corporation.

[Ben Gilbert]

Historically, every year it's a little bit wor. It's getting eroded.

[Dax Shepard]

But there were moments, right, where that was just the crown jewel in this thing.

[David Rosenthal]

With all the ip, Sports really in America means the NFL. It's not baseball anymore. Basketball is a complicated thing, but it's basically just the NFL.

[Ben Gilbert]

The fact that the NFL is the thing that America watches is extremely intentional and has been finely tuned every year for 100 years.

[David Rosenthal]

Really World War II, the NFL more than anybody else, the teams and the players are different, but the NFL as a collective embraced. This is a entertainment product and we need to put the best entertainment product on the field. But really on the television screens of.

[Dax Shepard]

America, it is the most incredibly produced content you see.

[Ben Gilbert]

I mean the 17 camera production, the whole director, producer, you kind of forget that it's a show while you're watching it.

[Monica Padman]

I don't think of it like that.

[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, hun. Isn't that incredible that they have these real time graphic packages that just emerge?

[David Rosenthal]

We take all this for granted. The NFL invented that. That didn't exist before Pete Rozelle and then the NFL collectively realized that television is this incredibly powerful thing.

[Ben Gilbert]

There's basically two chapters to the rise of the NFL. There's riding the television wave, and then there's riding the fantasy and betting wave. One sort of tapers off right as the other one picks up. So it's this classic stacking S curves in business parlance.

[Monica Padman]

Interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

So when is it invented and when does the NFL form.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, let's get back to acquired.

[Ben Gilbert]

Take us to Princeton.

[David Rosenthal]

Okay. Princeton was gonna be relevant here. So American football was invented, quote unquote. I think it was 1868 between Rutgers and Princeton.

[Ben Gilbert]

60.

[David Rosenthal]

No, I was close. But football really, until World War II was a college thing. It got very popular around the turn of the 20th century. But it was like an elite Ivy League. This was where the future government and military leaders of America proved their mettle was on the gridiron of college football. It was amateur. It was sacred to the extent professional football existed at all. It was like a dirty thing and.

[Ben Gilbert]

Shameful that people would be paid to do it.

[David Rosenthal]

It was profaning this sacred American elite.

[Ben Gilbert]

Collegiate of passage for young men.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[David Rosenthal]

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 age men died playing.

[Ben Gilbert]

This game from head injury before leather helmets. And there was a thing called the wedge formation.

[David Rosenthal]

There's no forward pass, so this was basically rugby.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, interesting.

[Ben Gilbert]

And people would try to just line up behind one person and all pile on. It was like the extreme.

[David Rosenthal]

And nobody's wearing helmets. It was the touch push.

[Dax Shepard]

Without helmets, they would just make one human, the vanguard.

[Ben Gilbert]

And people are getting trampled.

[David Rosenthal]

I 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.

[Ben Gilbert]

1905. I'm gonna keep fat. Can I have real time fact check?

[David Rosenthal]

Your job. 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 response. The Ivy League presidents instituted the ncaa.

[Dax Shepard]

So it was kind of organized around safety initially.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah. By the president of the United States. Wow. Which is wild. Yeah. That made the game safer. They started introducing some padding. That's when they introduced the forward pass.

[Ben Gilbert]

Neutral zone. Wedge formation gets banned. It starts to resemble football like we know it today.

[Monica Padman]

Was it hard to get this done? Because I'm thinking about now. People are talking now about trying to put more restrictions on some of these things because of cte. Obviously that had to come up and wait.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm proud you waited that long.

[Monica Padman]

I bring it up a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

Old Debbie Downer.

[Ben Gilbert]

Here I am conflicted watching football because it's one of the most entertaining things in the world to watch. Amazing storylines, ways to communicate with your family, reasons to get community together. And it's extremely dangerous. And the NFL knew it for a long time.

[Monica Padman]

Right. It's just weird to hear that they all came together and they're like, yes, let's do this. And they were able to do it. And now that feels impossible.

[Dax Shepard]

But Mani, it was in the wake of many, many deaths.

[Monica Padman]

There are many, many deaths.

[David Rosenthal]

It was a different time.

[Ben Gilbert]

Instant deaths. Not like I would even argue if.

[Dax Shepard]

We had watched two dozen NFL players drop dead.

[David Rosenthal]

Remember demar Hamlin a couple years ago.

[Dax Shepard]

When he laid there?

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah.

[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. Maybe a bunch of people died already.

[Ben Gilbert]

And keep in mind, there's no money on the line at this point in history.

[Monica Padman]

Right. That's the big difference.

[Dax Shepard]

Good point.

[David Rosenthal]

We're not even talking Ohio State, Michigan here. This is an institution of the elite.

[Ben Gilbert]

It's almost like cosplaying European. It's the Ivy League's trying to be as cool as the English colleges they.

[David Rosenthal]

Were trying to emulate.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah. In the late 1800s, America still had this little brother syndrome to England.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a shame Ben's taken.

[Monica Padman]

I talk about little brother syndrome.

[Ben Gilbert]

Oh, really?

[Monica Padman]

Little brother energy.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm a little brother. I've done okay.

[Ben Gilbert]

Seems like it.

[Monica Padman]

You can be a little brother and not have a little energy. It's very specific. But yes, this is what it sounds like America was doing.

[David Rosenthal]

So that's the origin of football. The NFL started in bank. In fact, chicken here. 1920, Canton, Ohio. Jordan and Hupp automobile. Hup.

[Ben Gilbert]

Mobile showroom. First of all, it was called the American Professional Football Conference. Has a nice ring to it.

[Dax Shepard]

The American Professional Football apfl.

[David Rosenthal]

I think you could probably say thinly veiled marketing attempt for mostly automobile dealerships. Yep.

[Ben Gilbert]

And it was these individual local teams in small markets that were. Until the apfc.

[Monica Padman]

Apfc. I messed that up.

[Ben Gilbert]

Then NFL, it was not an organized league. People would start their own team, call around and say, anybody else want to play some games against us? And maybe some people could come watch. It was very loosely organized.

[Dax Shepard]

The local car dealership will sponsor the whole thing.

[Ben Gilbert]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ben Gilbert]

In fact, the Chicago Bears were.

[David Rosenthal]

The Decatur Staleys.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yes. Because it was in Decatur, Illinois. The Staley. What company?

[Dax Shepard]

Staley Steel. No, but it has a ring to it.

[Monica Padman]

Staley. Dale.

[Ben Gilbert]

They should have done that if they did.

[Dax Shepard]

Cornstarch.

[David Rosenthal]

Corn starch.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Ben Gilbert]

This is why you have a producer.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, he. Real times. It's nice.

[Ben Gilbert]

We're like flashing forward a little bit to the Decatur Staleys. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Like a company softball team.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Ben Gilbert]

So there's a Canton team. Team. There's the Columbus Panhandles. There's the Akan Pros. This is the original.

[David Rosenthal]

This grew into.

[Ben Gilbert]

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 Cardinal and the Packers.

[David Rosenthal]

The Packers. The only legacy of this era like, why is there an NFL team in Green Bay Packers?

[Dax Shepard]

Was that a nod to meat packing? Why was it the Packers? Do we know?

[Ben Gilbert]

Can we get a real time fact check?

[David Rosenthal]

The Indian Packing Company.

[Ben Gilbert]

Meat packaging.

[Dax Shepard]

Meat packaging. Okay.

[David Rosenthal]

I assume it was probably like the Staley's, like whatever the company was that.

[Ben Gilbert]

Was sponsoring and the other reason they needed a sponsor was because it didn't make any money. And so everyone was doing it sort of for the love of the game. I think they're paying players, but at the very least they're employees of the company. Right. There's operational stuff to do to market the team and to get people to come to the game. And so every single team is loss making.

[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?

[Ben Gilbert]

I think in this time it was sub 10,000, maybe sub 5,000.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[David Rosenthal]

So this is state of play till World War II. Nobody has ambitions. There's no vision of the NFL as we know it today.

[Dax Shepard]

So 38 years of that.

[David Rosenthal]

1920 was when the.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, 1920.

[David Rosenthal]

So 25 years.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great.

[David Rosenthal]

Then World War II happens. And that leads to a couple things. One, the whole west coast of America happens.

[Ben Gilbert]

Television, small market teams can't really survive because there's so many people that are going to fight in the war. This is when the Staleys 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 Steagalls.

[David Rosenthal]

Ooh, yeah, that's cool.

[Ben Gilbert]

Because they could not field a full roster. It's kind of amazing. They eventually decoupled and went back to their original teams.

[David Rosenthal]

So then post war, all these GIs come back. They won 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.

[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 mind.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah. Even before everything the NFL has done to make it an entertainment product. You just go see a high school football game. It's entertaining.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

[David Rosenthal]

So after the war, an upstart rival league to the NFL gets started.

[Ben Gilbert]

And that's the AFC All American Football Conference.

[David Rosenthal]

And the centerpiece of that is Paul Brown. Folks may know that name. The legacy of the Browns, the founder.

[Ben Gilbert]

Of the Cleveland Browns.

[Dax Shepard]

I didn't And I've always wondered why a team would be named the Browns. So finally, that's.

[Monica Padman]

It's a great color.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, it's a great color, but also it does have poop connotations. The Browns.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it does. But now we know it's a human name.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah, not the first thing I'd probably pick. Blank.

[Monica Padman]

I prefer Steagalls.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, weird.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. And what was his background? He's, I imagine, a business owner. Got some money.

[David Rosenthal]

He's a football coach.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Ben Gilbert]

He's like the first modern football coach. So he coached the Massillon Tigers high.

[David Rosenthal]

School football, eventually goes to Ohio State and then Navy, right?

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[David Rosenthal]

Let's have a full time built out coaching staff.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Ben Gilbert]

We need a quarterback coach, we need a defensive coordinator, we need an offensive coordinator. We need to employ these people year round because we need to do recruiting, we need to plan in the off season.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, God. Yeah.

[Ben Gilbert]

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 what are the metrics that we care about to do better in each game.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you think he is just observing baseball and recognizing the power of them, having kept all these stats?

[David Rosenthal]

Well, that's the other part of the background here is baseball was the national pastime. It was not like professional sports writ large weren't big. It's like no professional sports was baseball.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, right, right. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare.

[Monica Padman]

Hey everyone, it's your girl, Keke Palmer.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you know I host a podcast called Baby this is Keke Palmer and.

[Monica Padman]

You'Re not going to believe the conversations I've had. Like is onlyfans only bad? How has dating changed in the digital digital age? What's the deal with Disney adults.

[Dax Shepard]

I talked to John Stamos, the vp.

[Monica Padman]

Kamala Hearst, to Jordan Peele, Raven Simone, and yes, the one and only Jamila Jamil.

[David Rosenthal]

And just wait until you hear our conversation.

[Monica Padman]

We talk Twitter drama, bad dates, and dance time. How the hell do you actually get sexy? Like, what the hell does that mean? Like, I know how to be funny. I know how to be like. You know what I'm saying?

[Dax Shepard]

Exactly.

[Ben Gilbert]

Like, I don't really know how to be like.

[Monica Padman]

And take your clothes. I'm not robbing fucking givens. You know, it's like, how do people do that? I've been in this situation too many times and. And not felt any of those things.

[David Rosenthal]

The dull eyes, the quiet.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, I've never been quiet a moment in my fucking life. Yes, I'm Baby, this is Keke Palmer.

[David Rosenthal]

No topic is off limits. Follow Baby, this is Keke Palmer.

[Dax Shepard]

On the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast, you can listen early.

[Monica Padman]

And ad free right now by joining Wondery.

[Dax Shepard]

Behind the closed doors of government offices and military compounds, there are hidden stories and buried secrets from the darkest corners of history. From COVID experiments pushing the boundaries of science to operations so secretive they were barely whispered about. Each week on Redacted Declassified Mysteries, we pull back the curtain on these hidden histories. 100% true and verifiable stories that expose the shadowy underbelly of power. Consider Operation Paperclip, where former Nazi scientists were brought to America after World War II not as prisoners, but as assets to advance US intelligence during the Cold War. These aren't just old conspiracy theories theories. They're thoroughly investigated accounts that reveal the uncomfortable truths still shaping our world today. The stories are real. The secrets are shocking. Follow Declassified Mysteries on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to redacted early and ad free right now on Wondery. What's up everybody? It's Jason Kelsey and I'm here with my slightly famous little brother, Travis, AKA Big Yeti Kills. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we're here to bring you a new next.

[David Rosenthal]

Level entertainment experience with our show New Heights, where the lum baby reigns supreme.

[Dax Shepard]

We're covering all the hardest hitting topics in order of importance. UFO sightings, the ideal PB&J combo and Trav becoming a big time acting star. Big time is a big stretch. We've got can't miss a list interviews though. That's right. And of course, next level access to life inside the NFL and in the booth. Just because I retired, it doesn't mean I'm out of the game.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah, I mean, the.

[Dax Shepard]

The old dad shoes suggest otherwise, but those are the I'm out the game shoes right there. Listen to watch New Heights wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to listen to us first without any interruptions and get bonus content, join One3Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or SP.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

There's some interesting parallels here with wrestling.

[David Rosenthal]

Very much like wrestling.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, all these regional divisions they chopped up would have TV rights, and McMahon was smart enough to start trying to accumulate.

[David Rosenthal]

This is where the McMahon characters start to emerge. And Paul Brown, he goes and fights in the war, and then when he comes back, he was well known enough as a college coach, I think, particularly from his time at Navy, that a group of entrepreneurs 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Our product's going to be significantly better because this person is innovating.

[Ben Gilbert]

And they were so confident. There was already a Cleveland team. The Rams.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah, the Rams.

[Ben Gilbert]

Cleveland Rams.

[David Rosenthal]

The Rams are now the same team.

[Ben Gilbert]

Now, the LA Rams, they start with the new league. They have a Cleveland team for that league, too. That's how common confident they are that Paul Brown is like a big deal. They're like, that's great. You already have the Rams in the NFL. AAFC is going to have the Cleveland Browns. They build this league, but they haven't discovered all the stuff that we talked about about making the NFL a show and keeping it really competitive and trying to make sure that the best teams play the best teams and the worst teams play the worst teams. So what happens is Paul Brown goes 474 over the first four seasons of.

[David Rosenthal]

The AAA, wins all four championships, loses four games in four years.

[Monica Padman]

What is he just saying? I want to play this team now.

[David Rosenthal]

He's just so better. So they blow the Rams out of the water in Cleveland. They're getting 10x the attendance and the money's all in the ticket sales. TV's not a big thing yet, right? The Rams in Cleveland, they're like, we just got to get out of Here, that's when they moved to LA.

[Dax Shepard]

They get run out of town.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah, but LA is all these GIs coming back from the war. It's the beginning of the television industry.

[Ben Gilbert]

It's automobile glitz, glamour, people that understand marketing. Meanwhile, the AFC is actually a failure because it's not interesting to just watch the Browns run the table over and over again.

[David Rosenthal]

So the Browns sell out all their homes, 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.

[Ben Gilbert]

So the league actually folds. 1950, they had only played four seasons. The Browns 49ers and Colts joined the NFL. There's now two Cleveland teams. It's a big problem. And The San Francisco 49ers are sort of established. So there's now this real west coast presence for the NFL. And it's funny that it wasn't even as if there was a merger or some consideration.

[Monica Padman]

Lucky.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

That's nuts.

[Dax Shepard]

They got to basically buy a company in bankruptcy. Right.

[Ben Gilbert]

The AFC had no better option.

[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.

[Ben Gilbert]

I had no idea.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[David Rosenthal]

If you were the Browns and you were selling 60, 70,000 tickets, they weren't that big yet. The first Browns game sold 60,000. So I don't know if every game was. But they were crushing it.

[Dax Shepard]

And were they playing 12 games a year?

[David Rosenthal]

I don't know. There were eight teams in the league. Maybe they played each other twice. So that would have been 14 games, I guess.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So, I mean, you got an arena, you got a staff, you got a lot of players.

[Monica Padman]

So some money, but not some money.

[Dax Shepard]

I just can't imagine anyone at that point owning the team because they have any sense that it'll be worth Billions of dollars or that it's some cash cow.

[Ben Gilbert]

That's still the case at this point in time.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[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 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?

[David Rosenthal]

So until a couple years ago, the NFL was a nonprofit organization. It then switched, but it doesn't matter. It's a thin layer on top of the teams.

[Ben Gilbert]

It's not like the commissioner is the boss of the teams. No, he commissioner works for the owners. So the league exists. Exists at the pleasure of the owners. Exactly. The real power is the 32 team owners. The NFL is this agreement that they've created with each other that governs how the game is played.

[David Rosenthal]

And then they hire the commissioner to represent their interests.

[Ben Gilbert]

But what really matters is I don't think it's a democracy. I was gonna say what the majority of the owners want. What the most powerful owners think is good for the sport.

[Dax Shepard]

Those early years of the NFL. My assumption then would be that they are just given a budget that they're gonna net zero from these team owners. It's not like that organization itself is going to try to generate money.

[David Rosenthal]

And it still doesn't. It gets distributed out to the teams.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, how's Goodell have a 70 million a year contract?

[David Rosenthal]

He's paid by.

[Dax Shepard]

By the team owners.

[David Rosenthal]

The top level NFL entity. Its mission is not to aggregate profits. Let's flash forward to today. Why is the NFL so fricking awesome? On average, 70% of all the revenue for each team comes centralized from the league. The bulk of that is the television deals. So the NFL uniquely, and this is what we're going to get into, centralizes and collectivizes the television. When you watch football and you're watching it on Fox or you're watching Monday Night Football on ABC or YouTube TV, any streaming network, all 32 teams collectively as the NFL do those deals and then share that money out to each team. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not like the Rams are striking their own TV rights with anybody.

[David Rosenthal]

Until recently with the NBA has now moved to the NFL model. Baseball, like the Yankees have their own broadcast. All the other sports. It's all each team for themselves.

[Ben Gilbert]

And that's what the Early NFL was the queue. You asked this about the perfect point in history. Cause 1960, the appointment of Pete Rozelle as commissioner is what changes everything.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[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 gonna have to presumably make a little less to give these bozo teams some money. It's like actors negotiating together.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I was just about to say it's like the Friends deal.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Going it all together, which rarely works.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. People start saying, well, I'm the guy who does.

[David Rosenthal]

This is Pete Roselle. The Rams get run outta town of Cleveland by the Browns. They land here in la. Pete Rozelle, he's a PR intern. PR intern. Compton Colle, alumnus, joins the Rams when they come to LA as a intern doing PR and media relations, which meant like, newspaper relations.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[David Rosenthal]

Well, he does it himself at first. He's like, I'm going to write the stories for you and just give them to the journalists. I'm just going to give them to you.

[Dax Shepard]

He's trying to get it in the spotlight.

[David Rosenthal]

He rises through the ranks here at the Rams, becomes GM of the Rams, and then ultimately, at age 33, gets elected commissioner of the NFL, which also.

[Ben Gilbert]

Only happens because of a weird standstill.

[David Rosenthal]

The existing commissioner died unexpectedly.

[Ben Gilbert]

And there's these factions of owners. This faction has their guy, this faction has their guy. They can't agree.

[Dax Shepard]

This is like the beginning of our country.

[David Rosenthal]

Yes, totally.

[Ben Gilbert]

Pete Roselle is the least disagreeable candidate.

[David Rosenthal]

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 a band together.

[Dax Shepard]

And then even Washington. He was the only guy who wasn't outspoken. He said the least. I kind of trust him.

[David Rosenthal]

Yes, that's exactly what happened.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[David Rosenthal]

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 parody. The phrase any given Sunday. You guys probably know this.

[Dax Shepard]

There's a movie, but I don't know what it means neither.

[David Rosenthal]

This is the origin.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh. And then any given Sunday, the team could win. Anything could happen.

[David Rosenthal]

Any team could beat any other team.

[Ben Gilbert]

The NFL's dream is for every team to go eight and eight.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[David Rosenthal]

And there's so many things they do to make this happen behind the scenes again.

[Dax Shepard]

It's amazing they got the dominant teams to go along with this strategy. It's like. Seems impossible.

[Ben Gilbert]

So just like last 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.

[Dax Shepard]

It becomes a conference within the NFL.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yes. When they eventually merge, they sign one collective TV deal as their way of coming on the scene with abc, which.

[Dax Shepard]

Again they're in a very vulnerable situation where they probably only have any appeal if they're all one thing. Probably doing it out of desperation originally.

[David Rosenthal]

And they need money to sign players. So they go to abc, NBC and cbs. They're the legacy came out of the radio era. ABC was a new television network and.

[Ben Gilbert]

The AFL has eight teams. They secure a five year, $8.5 million deal that is league wide with the profits from the deal shared equally.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Monica Padman]

No way.

[David Rosenthal]

Bob Iger came up under Roon Arledge at abc.

[Dax Shepard]

Interesting.

[David Rosenthal]

And then took over Cap City's the Disney merger.

[Dax Shepard]

So he's a visionary.

[David Rosenthal]

No Runarledge, no Bob Iger.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

No Frozen.

[Ben Gilbert]

Don't even froze.

[Dax Shepard]

But.

[David Rosenthal]

So this was Roon Arledge's big career defining thing was signing this deal in national football.

[Dax Shepard]

And NFL is already being televised on those other networks at the this point.

[Ben Gilbert]

One off local deals. So the owner is going to the local affiliate and saying Detroit wkbd. Exactly.

[David Rosenthal]

So the Giants had like a great deal in New York. I think they're making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in TV Money that was just theirs.

[Ben Gilbert]

And so this is the bargaining chip that Roselle 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.

[David Rosenthal]

And we're now starting to talk about real money from this, like, $8.5 million in 1960. Ish.

[Dax Shepard]

That seems like an unsellable proposition.

[Monica Padman]

Well, depending on who.

[Dax Shepard]

It's so impressive that they did it.

[Monica Padman]

It's just like the old adage we hear all the time. The rising tide lifts all boats. It's real.

[Dax Shepard]

It is. But I imagine the delta between some of these franchises, I'm sure some teams were like, 8x.

[David Rosenthal]

The Green Bay packers are still in the league. They're not making any money.

[Monica Padman]

Right, Exactly. It's like Costco. It's making me feel Costco feelings.

[Ben Gilbert]

I want a shirt that says Costco feelings.

[Dax Shepard]

Exactly.

[Monica Padman]

We can make that happen.

[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.

[David Rosenthal]

Pete Rosel was like the king of soft power. You look up soft power in the dictionary, it should have his photo there.

[Dax Shepard]

This is so much more interesting than I was expecting, to be honest.

[Monica Padman]

It always is.

[Dax Shepard]

I thought I just would like the money because I'm a greedy pig, but that's absolutely, absolutely fascinating.

[Ben Gilbert]

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 Starbuck, the NFL, they always start sort of in obscurity with these passionate visionaries who are trying to will the future into existence.

[David Rosenthal]

And big money is true, too. I think that $8.5 million deal that the AFL had done. The jets signed Joe Namath, and the.

[Ben Gilbert]

Jets are the afl.

[David Rosenthal]

He was the first athlete, celebrity in the original episode. You were like, I know him because he was on the Brady Bunch.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah, he was killing it.

[David Rosenthal]

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, eight and a half million dollars, that's a boatload of money. And look at the publicity that Broadway Joe is bringing to our rival league here.

[Dax Shepard]

When you think All American, he was.

[Monica Padman]

Born to be on a Wheaties first celebrity athlete. That's wild.

[David Rosenthal]

Well, football, I don't know, it might be out of my depth here, but I think it'd be like if Bob Dylan played football.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[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.

[David Rosenthal]

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 was actually the Redskins. It was the Washington team.

[Ben Gilbert]

They had a big Southern fan base. There was some racism at the highest levels of the Redskins.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm so shocked that the team named the Redskins.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah, right, right, right.

[Ben Gilbert]

It's on brand and from the monetary perspective, they were incentivized not to change.

[David Rosenthal]

I think they were the southernmost NFL team. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

If they had a black player, there would have been people protesting.

[David Rosenthal]

It was the LA Coliseum where the Rams played in la when they moved out here, said we won't 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Boy, it's interesting how many different forces can work on one thing. How dynamic that is, that, oh, they're going to play in a publicly held facility and there is the leverage by which that could be proclaimed. Otherwise. Not.

[David Rosenthal]

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 changed at this point.

[Dax Shepard]

Name the list of famous players and it's some of the most loved.

[David Rosenthal]

O.J. simpson.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, yeah, sure, for a minute.

[David Rosenthal]

Well, for more than a minute.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, I think mostly we know the quarterbacks, and then outside of that, we don't know many white players.

[Monica Padman]

But O.J. wasn't black. He was O.J.

[Dax Shepard]

That'S right. Did you watch the documentary? Yeah.

[David Rosenthal]

Yo, that was so good.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so afl, how do they absorb them?

[David Rosenthal]

Do you guys know Al Davis, owner, GM and head coach of the Raiders for many years?

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[David Rosenthal]

Oh, he's such a gangster. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that's interesting, because that's carries to this day. If you want to bet on someone getting knifed in a parking lot, there's only one bet to make. It's a Raiders game. It's gonna be obvious.

[David Rosenthal]

Totally.

[Dax Shepard]

So it starts with the original owner.

[David Rosenthal]

But the original owner, they were in the afl. It was clear that the AFL wasn't going away. They had this big TV deal. Then the NFL got their tv. TV deals with CBS and NBC.

[Ben Gilbert]

Interestingly, the CBS deal, the NFL is granted an antitrust exemption. I think that JFK signed into law because what you had is all these teams with their individual TV deals, and then they get together, they collude, and they say, we're going to sign one TV deal. And if you're the TV networks, you're like, what happened?

[Dax Shepard]

Where's the competition?

[Ben Gilbert]

This is illegal. But JFK deemed it in the good of the nation to have this.

[David Rosenthal]

This is also back to Roselle and soft power. He cultivated the Kennedys relationship. He put a lot of effort into.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[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.

[David Rosenthal]

I think it's part of the collective bargaining with the players association. It's essentially a unionized trade.

[Dax Shepard]

It's still interesting contraction.

[Ben Gilbert]

It's really 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.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Monica Padman]

And it's because of that to keep the competition.

[David Rosenthal]

To keep the competition. The other thing they do that still exists to this day that very, very few people know is they. Jimmy, the schedule used to be explicit. I'm now implicit goal is that every team should be 500 at the midway point in the season.

[Ben Gilbert]

So the first half of the schedule, bad teams play bad teams and good teams play good teams.

[Dax Shepard]

That's orchestrate.

[David Rosenthal]

So the Lions are going to have a really tough first half of the year scheduled next year.

[Monica Padman]

Interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

I didn't know that part.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah. Most audience has no idea.

[Monica Padman]

That's not the same with college.

[Ben Gilbert]

No, that's exactly where I was going to go with this. It's fascinating watching this whole playoff transfer portal and all these sort of NFL like things that they're putting into place 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.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. You're a fan. And it is near impossible for an NFL team to get a perfect season.

[David Rosenthal]

It's happened once.

[Ben Gilbert]

Is it just Brady?

[David Rosenthal]

Did Brady have a perfect season? Dan Marino had a perfect season.

[Dax Shepard]

He's my Taylor Swift. You shouldn't even bring him up cuz I will not be able to get off of him.

[David Rosenthal]

We got him on the show.

[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. The Patriots almost, almost did it, but.

[Ben Gilbert]

Lost the Super Bowl.

[David Rosenthal]

There you go. There it is. So yeah. Even Tom Brady can't have a perfect season.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

God, it's heartbreaking.

[Ben Gilbert]

That's so poetic that the season they went undefeated in the regular season, they lost in the Super Bowl.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, I know. Yes.

[Ben Gilbert]

See the NFL storylines, they're so good. He's wrestling and not scripting.

[Monica Padman]

Well, they kind of are scripting it, in a way, with the NFL. They're planning it for that outcome.

[Dax Shepard]

They're levers in place and they're pulling all the ones they can.

[Ben Gilbert]

And after the season, I don't know if it's. Every year, every other year, there's something called a competition coming 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow. Like Formula One that way. Yes.

[Monica Padman]

It's a business. We forget because we just think of it as sport, but it's a real business.

[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 implied, which is every year we must improve our manufacturing process and we must improve. Yes. Oh, God. You just earned a paycheck. Yes. Good job.

[Monica Padman]

Wait, what's it called?

[Ben Gilbert]

Kaizen.

[David Rosenthal]

Kaizen.

[Dax Shepard]

Kaizen.

[Ben Gilbert]

And the other half of that is.

[Dax Shepard]

Reduced waste time to do a little more Kaizen.

[David Rosenthal]

I think you guys are doing just fine. You got to know your business. You're not in an optimization business.

[Dax Shepard]

We're trying to ride that line between jazz and classical. You don't know how much you're supposed to impress often be loose and how much you're supposed to be classical.

[Ben Gilbert]

Tell us about it.

[Dax Shepard]

I know you guys are very classical. You're an orchestra.

[Ben Gilbert]

And we've gotten more so over time. I think when we started, because we had nothing.

[David Rosenthal]

We're more jazz.

[Dax Shepard]

And what have you gained and what have you lost from that evolution?

[Ben Gilbert]

We're right more often, but we have less fun.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[David Rosenthal]

Well, we have fun in different ways. We get to go to Taiwan.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, the person I have felt most guilty interviewing, which we've now done four times, five times, is Malcolm Glasgow. I was gonna say revisionist history is the most perfectly produced product in the marketplace. And the amount of effort that's put into it. We finish an episode and we're friendly. And I'm like, does that not annoy the fuck out of you. Like, we just created two hours of content and it's almost minute for minute, real content. That's it. There's no more work to be done.

[Monica Padman]

That's not true.

[Ben Gilbert]

You know, I had to say Monica's like, you have no idea what I do.

[Monica Padman]

It's not like revisionist history, but we.

[Ben Gilbert]

Actually put at the top of the script right before we start now, have fun. You need a reminder of just because the stakes are higher and just because all these people are going to listen. The reason people like it is we're having fun. We're doing the thing we love.

[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 where I was like, remember, you love talking to people and somehow you guys have figured out how to get the most interesting people in the world to swing by your house and talk. Fucking stop thinking about anything else.

[Ben Gilbert]

I didn't realize this was your house, by the way. I kind of walked up and I was like, I'm pretty sure we're just at Dax's house.

[Dax Shepard]

Indeed you are.

[David Rosenthal]

By the way, you asked us about our careers earlier. Do you guys consider this your career now? Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Especially we do 152 episodes a year now.

[Monica Padman]

We have three episodes a week and we had five episodes a week up until September. So it's more than a full time.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, I in general don't want to 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.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

I'll admit this out loud. I remember Joe Rogan stating that years ago, like he's done with acting and host. And I was like, I don't buy it. I don't think you're having the opportunities you want. I think this is bullshit. And I was completely wrong. He definitely was just in the position we are now in much earlier. And yeah, it's much more fun to me than acting or anything else. So now the NFL absorbs the afl.

[David Rosenthal]

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 team's 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.

[Ben Gilbert]

And they had just signed a new big TV deal. So AFL got NBC to pay them 37.5 million over five years. And they're like, guess what we're going to do with the cats? Go take that to the NFL and.

[David Rosenthal]

Go steal all their quarterbacks.

[Dax Shepard]

This is The Ted Turner McMahon War Section of the story.

[David Rosenthal]

Now, basically, as soon as he does that, it's all over. And then they merge.

[Dax Shepard]

It's so crazy. Crazy. They got outperformed twice.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

And still remain the NFL.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly, yes.

[Ben Gilbert]

So here's the terms of the merger, which is so fascinating. The NFL absorbs all the AFL teams. They're also gonna 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?

[Dax Shepard]

Cut off a future uprising.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah. Make sure this doesn't happen again.

[Ben Gilbert]

We're gonna pool the TV deals. So there's now one national TV deal. We're gonna do a common draft between both of us. And 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 Roselle maintains the commissionership. At first, the AFL was supposed to pay a ton of money, $50 million per team.

[David Rosenthal]

That was where negotiations started before Al Davis kidnapped the quarterbacks.

[Ben Gilbert]

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 eight, spread over 20 years total. Total. Oh, wow.

[Dax Shepard]

900 grand a year for however many teams.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, interesting. So they didn't do that evenly.

[Ben Gilbert]

No.

[David Rosenthal]

Basically, Al Davis is a gangster.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow. Wow.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

That starts in 68, right around there.

[David Rosenthal]

One of the other just incredible inventions of the NFL was they invent more.

[Dax Shepard]

Football prior to that, are they only playing on Friday and Sunday, they only.

[Ben Gilbert]

Playing on Sundays, which is a bad spot. When they originally conceived of this, it was no one watches TV on Sundays, so where can we get airtime?

[Dax Shepard]

Cheap real estate.

[David Rosenthal]

Monday Night Football is the first time there's only one game happening at a time. So there's one nationally televised game. Before it was, oh, there would be like a game of the week that maybe more markets would see than others, but they're all happening at the same time. They do the deal with Rune Arledge and ABC to create Monday Night Football that basically invents the modern football telecast.

[Ben Gilbert]

$8.5 million per year that ABC pays the league for one game per week. So it's 500,000 per game, which today seems like tiny. It's very large relative to the other TV contract. They're basically saying because it's one game, because it's prime time, this is a really expensive slot. Oh, and by the way, when you pay us a lot of money for the rights to broadcast this, we're going to make it a spectacle. Football before this on TV had been referred to as football in a cathedral because it was one camera at the 50 yard line up top of just.

[David Rosenthal]

Panning back and forth, no field, and.

[Ben Gilbert]

Commentators that would just chime in every once in a while.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that one hurt. Yes, exactly. They weren't experts.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm going to interject movie stuff. So a couple of technical innovations that helped it greatly is the Superfly Cam, which is invented by John Brown, the DP of Without a Paddle's father, who had also invented the Steadicam. So the Steadicam allows them to run along the side and keep your vision nice, stable. And then the Super Fly Cam is a four point system that'll allow it to go anywhere. So those are huge tech innovations that.

[Ben Gilbert]

Help the three person booth. So you've got three commentators instead of two. The booth guys have personality. This is when Howard Cosell becomes a character in the arc.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

In the booth talk about filling. You're going to talk for two and a half hours without a screw.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, they got to be interesting improv geniuses, really.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah, they've got theme music.

[David Rosenthal]

Hank Williams Remember, Are you ready for some football?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Rosenthal]

Remember that before you got canceled?

[Dax Shepard]

Are you ready for some football?

[David Rosenthal]

It's the best.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that was a good one.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, for sure.

[David Rosenthal]

Okay, so think this through. You now got this Monday night game for the first time before everything else was happening. Real time in Sunday. All the other games.

[Ben Gilbert]

You don't have the technology to show something from another game.

[David Rosenthal]

What do you do during halftime of Monday night? All the other games are done. You can't update what's going on real time with the other games. You gotta fill half an hour in halftime. You show highlights from Sunday.

[Dax Shepard]

Great. And build anticipation about next week.

[David Rosenthal]

ESPN yet? Yeah, this leads to ESPN and sports.

[Dax Shepard]

And if you are in a market that didn't show these other games, there was no way, there's no way to see it.

[David Rosenthal]

You read about it in the newspaper.

[Dax Shepard]

But that's what a powerful aspect to build interest in the whole league.

[David Rosenthal]

Totally.

[Ben Gilbert]

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 or it was in film.

[Dax Shepard]

16 millimeter that needs to go get printed.

[Ben Gilbert]

So they start NFL Films. There's a whole long backstory that we.

[David Rosenthal]

Don'T find is amazing.

[Ben Gilbert]

But they've got these people shooting, I assume 16 millimeter on the sidelines real Sunday at every game in parallel to the broadcast.

[David Rosenthal]

This is not the broadcast. They send teams out to all the games for the Monday night halftime show.

[Ben Gilbert]

So then They've got a 24 hour turnaround to make a 20 minute highlight.

[David Rosenthal]

Re to a central editing facility.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my.

[David Rosenthal]

Put a highlight package together, get that back out to wherever the Monday night game is happening.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, those people all got to work at 8pm on Sunday night and they did not leave till Monday.

[David Rosenthal]

Howard Cosell is Essentially the first Sports center anchor. He's narrating the highlight reel, but the highlight reel's sliding into the tape deck as it's happening. He's never seen it before, so he's improving. I mean, it really is like the invention of SportsCenter.

[Dax Shepard]

So it sounds like they were smart and invested virtually every dollar they received from this television contract into the product.

[Ben Gilbert]

I think so. The original Monday Night Football was so expensive.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[David Rosenthal]

The owners were also like, pretty greedy. Like just a lot of money. We're talking late 60s, early 70s.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm just thinking 500 grand per game.

[David Rosenthal]

No, but that's just Monday night.

[Dax Shepard]

So the show that they're going to 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 500 grand per game.

[David Rosenthal]

In meteorites deals. The NFL says, oh, ABC, you produce it.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, NFL's not paying for this. Oh, they just want 500.

[David Rosenthal]

It's just the meteor. Yeah, yeah. ABC is investing way more than $8.5 million in this.

[Ben Gilbert]

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 of doing the deals with advertisers.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, it's entirely on the back of the network. And then they get them to compete and make the product better. Yes, because now Fox has got to have the blue line on the feedback.

[David Rosenthal]

They got to have John Madden. And Fox is paying John Madden, not the NFL.

[Dax Shepard]

That is incredible. You get your customers to make your product better for you. Stay tuned for more armchair expert. If you.

[David Rosenthal]

Fast forward a couple decades, what do you think NFL Sunday ticket is?

[Ben Gilbert]

I'll give you the whole rights packages right now. We may as well flash all the way forward to like how much money.

[Dax Shepard]

This is what I am. Yeah. Excited.

[Ben Gilbert]

So Disney, ABC, ESPN's package right now is 2.7 billion per year just for Monday Night Football.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[David Rosenthal]

So that's what, 16 games? Because there's no Monday night, the last week of the season, then 17, then whatever. It's either 16 or 17 games. That's before the cost to produce it. That's just the right.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. That's net. After they've sold advertising, that is the.

[David Rosenthal]

Cost to be able to bring Your production crew there. You then have to also invest in the production crew.

[Dax Shepard]

Are they recouping? I mean, they have to be.

[Ben Gilbert]

I'll walk through them all. 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.

[David Rosenthal]

Disney is paying more just for Monday nights than Fox and CBS are paying for all the slatestunders.

[Ben Gilbert]

You'd rather be Disney because you'd rather only have the cost of producing one game. Then NBC, they're like, how else can we slice these rights? Because there's another bidder, so we may as well let them buy something from us. To they invent Sunday Night Football. $2 billion a year.

[Monica Padman]

Wait, Sunday Night Football is different than Sunday Football?

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah. Thursday Night Football.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Ben Gilbert]

And for a while, I can't remember who had it, but now Amazon has it. Now it's just a streaming package.

[David Rosenthal]

That's what, like one six?

[Ben Gilbert]

It's a billion a year?

[Monica Padman]

Seven ish total.

[David Rosenthal]

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 at eight and a half.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Ben Gilbert]

Then they have NFL Sunday Ticket.

[Monica Padman]

What is that?

[Ben Gilbert]

What if you want to be able to watch any game?

[David Rosenthal]

You've probably seen all the YouTube TV advertising for NFL.

[Dax Shepard]

Every time I sign on to my YouTube, I got to do.

[Ben Gilbert]

Okay, you're a bar, and you want to be able to flip on whatever game your patrons want. You're a big fantasy football player, which fueled the growth of the league, and you want access to all the games. To be able to flip around, well, you got to buy NFL Sunday Ticket. The league is like, we don't want to be in the business of providing NFL Sunday Ticket. We'll just find a distribution partner, we'll sell the rights to them, and they can figure out how to make it available. That was DirecTV for a long time. Now it is YouTube for the pretty penny of 2 billion a year for that rights package for the same footage.

[David Rosenthal]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Here's the great thing. Nothing new.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, how does that not violate the rights?

[David Rosenthal]

Commercials are still the TV networks, and.

[Dax Shepard]

Then YouTube's making their money on the substitute subscription model and not the advertising model, DirecTV.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

They have skinned this cat.

[Ben Gilbert]

There's one more that they came up with five years ago. Do you know about Red Zone?

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, this is where you're playing four games at one time.

[Ben Gilbert]

So the NFL launches NFL Network 80 years in. They're like, we should have our own network. Mostly non game content, some analysis. And they realize because they're the one dictating terms on all these TV contracts, they can just keep putting in clauses. And this clause that they negotiate in is you can't watch any game at any time. But if you leave that channel on, on NFL Network on Sundays, you'll just see the most interesting current moment of football being played.

[Dax Shepard]

They're just snapping back and forth to all these different games that are happening. You're just seeing play after play after play all day.

[David Rosenthal]

It's called the Red Zone channel because it's whatever team is in the red zone at any game going on at every. At any given point in time is the theory.

[Ben Gilbert]

So the NFL doesn't have to take on the costs of filming this.

[David Rosenthal]

They have one dude in a studio who just sort of is like, now we're switching to the Lions and Commanders.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And they licensed it to them, but now they're licensing their footage for free.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yes.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

My God, this is incredible.

[Ben Gilbert]

So to your point, do the networks actually make money on this at this point?

[David Rosenthal]

It's not totally clear.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

And they're just adding more product because then you have Netflix Christmas game.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah, another 150. Then Peacock. Yes. Another 110. Madden video games. That's a lot of money. 300 million a year.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[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 about it.

[David Rosenthal]

But no, Monica, I think you're right. And doing it on Christmas. They traditionally shied away from Christmas because that was. Was the NBA's holiday. This is more speculation, but the NBA had historically operated more like baseball, with each team had their own TV deals. Baseball, still, to its great, great detriment, the NBA and Adam Silver realized, hey, the NFL's a better model. So just this past year, I think they renegotiated and centralized their TV contracts. Interestingly, now this is the first year the NFL is like, oh, well, Christmas, maybe. We're not just going to let you have that. So Christmas is now a battleground.

[Dax Shepard]

And how's the super bowl work?

[David Rosenthal]

When the merger happened, there was the NFL championship and the AFL championship, which had been sold to different networks. Of you're showing a championship game, and then they're like, well, now that we're one league, can't have two champions. So then they invent the super bowl.

[Ben Gilbert]

Made the network executives livid because they're like, I thought we had the championship game. You're putting one more game after the.

[David Rosenthal]

Game that I gotta spend money again.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, Just totally devalued this other thing we sold people.

[David Rosenthal]

Totally.

[Dax Shepard]

The right to show the super bowl is, I'm imagining, a standalone TV deal.

[Ben Gilbert]

I actually don't have that in the sum of deals.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Ben Gilbert]

The first super bowl was shown on both networks. Four networks, network rotation starting in 2024.

[Dax Shepard]

What is the rights to that cost?

[Ben Gilbert]

I think it might be built into the rest of the deals.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I kind of thought they all bid on just that one game, maybe.

[Monica Padman]

So it rotates every year.

[Dax Shepard]

NBC, cbs, Fox.

[Monica Padman]

What is this year's.

[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 and when we're airing it. This sounds like the worst.

[David Rosenthal]

Well, these days, if you're a networking executive, you're just a slave to the NFL, essentially.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[David Rosenthal]

Is like, we're going to take more of the profit pool.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[David Rosenthal]

The NFL is the only reason we.

[Ben Gilbert]

Shift it over to us. And you'll be near zero profit entities that are a part of something else.

[Dax Shepard]

But they're also not to get too in the weeds on it. They're amortizing the cost of that through some value. They assign launching television shows on the back of this audience. They have. They have 16 million viewers. They show a 30 second spot.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's almost a loss leader, which.

[David Rosenthal]

Used to work and especially cause 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.

[Dax Shepard]

But yeah, you're getting into this complicated model of new subscribers. Their only metric is new subscribers and subscribers that are staying. Why are they staying? Are they staying for the new show? Are they staying for this thing we added? Talk about a job. That's nebulous. That they're trying to figure out best roi. Who fucking knows why someone sticks around on a streamer? And I think they have good ideas on how to get new subscribers, but I'm not sure they know necessarily.

[Monica Padman]

But then there's also a cap on that.

[Dax Shepard]

Seven billion. Yeah, they've all got a lot of room to go still.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah, I guess so. Super bowl, what we're ostensibly here for, many, many people would disagree with this. I think basically the NFL, just from a business standpoint, viewed this as more in the NFL films category. Like how do we add sheen to the league through this. Yes, it's a game, but this is when they introduced Media Week and the halftime show. And famously the halftime show, the performers don't get paid. It's a great honor to be. Yeah, great honor. Yeah, right. Exactly, exactly, exactly.

[Monica Padman]

Doing someone's live podcast.

[David Rosenthal]

Right, right, right.

[Monica Padman]

It's an honor, we promise.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[David Rosenthal]

All the teams get equal shares.

[Ben Gilbert]

You should come with the bottom line. It's a $12 billion dollar a year pool of capital that comes from networks that lands in the NFL's pocket to get distributed equally. Truly to equally.

[David Rosenthal]

Packers get the same amount.

[Dax Shepard]

That is why the Niners are up there.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yes, and that is why Kansas City can win.

[David Rosenthal]

That's why Kansas City can win.

[Ben Gilbert]

We never see that in other sports leagues.

[Monica Padman]

That's so true.

[Dax Shepard]

Dead equal.

[David Rosenthal]

So if you as an individual team say, like, I only care about my business as a team. I don't care about the NFL. If you make the super bowl, let's say you don't get a bye week. So you're not a number one seed. So you're playing the wild card round, the divisional round, the champ, the super bowl, four extra games. And then especially if you're a lower seed, and those are all road games. The range and 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 Roselyn.

[Ben Gilbert]

Some merch that's not.

[David Rosenthal]

But most is jerseys, all centralized. The reason for that, Roselle, was like, we can't have all the teams having different quality levels of merch. We need to make a promise that if you buy a Packers jersey or a Lions jersey or a Rams jersey or Lions jersey, it's a quality product.

[Ben Gilbert]

When we were researching it, David texted me, this is communist capitalism.

[Dax Shepard]

Literally one example of communism working like a motherfucker.

[Monica Padman]

Working.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[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.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, think about Travis.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Monica Padman]

Taylor and Travis.

[Dax Shepard]

We gotta come back.

[Ben Gilbert]

He's fine.

[Dax Shepard]

He's not getting screwed.

[Monica Padman]

So many Kelsey jerseys on children now because of that.

[Dax Shepard]

You're right.

[David Rosenthal]

Now, I don't know if on something like a jersey where it's an individual player name, if the player gets a small cut of that, but probably the.

[Ben Gilbert]

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 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.

[Dax Shepard]

That's pretty high.

[Ben Gilbert]

It's really high.

[Monica Padman]

Everyone has an incentive.

[David Rosenthal]

Top tier quarterback contracts are 55 to 60 a year and they're by far the highest paid. Players.

[Dax Shepard]

But yeah, some of these are half a billion dollar contracts over a period of time.

[Ben Gilbert]

Now you might say, oh my God, there's so much inequality quality 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.

[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 co workers don't experience that.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Ben Gilbert]

A million. A million, Rob. 795,000.

[Monica Padman]

That's good.

[David Rosenthal]

And most are making more than that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Ben Gilbert]

And they're what, 80 player rosters? Like these are big teams.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[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.

[David Rosenthal]

People were concerned about this. People were like, cord cutting's happening. Obviously traditional linear TV is going the way of the dodo because the. The NFL screwed here.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[David Rosenthal]

Tech companies.

[Monica Padman]

Coming in.

[Ben Gilbert]

It doesn't help networks, but it is a way for the NFL to continue to extract dollars.

[David Rosenthal]

Thursday Night Football was streamed on Twitter for a year or two, Right?

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah, that was so weird.

[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 disincent, incentivized 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.

[Ben Gilbert]

They do have these published goals of wanting to grow revenue. NFL total revenue last year was $20 billion, up from 18 a couple years ago. And as you know, the lion's share of that is the 12 billion from the TV deal. But then there's all this other stuff on top. I think they want it to be 25 by 2028 or something like that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. My last question, and this one was really my agent, when he found out I was going to talk to you guys, he's obsessed with you as well. He's like, you can tell them figure out what is going on with gambling. What's their participation in this gambling because this again is some potentially huge revenue source. So what's their relationship with now this rise of these online gambling platforms?

[David Rosenthal]

When we did the episode two, two years ago, what did we say? 45 million people ish bet on the.

[Ben Gilbert]

NFL, which was illegal then. It just goes to show prohibition is a goofy concept. Everyone still bet except you legalize it. And even way more people bet.

[David Rosenthal]

A lot more people drink alcohol after.

[Ben Gilbert]

Prohibition than 75 million people bet on the NFL last year. It's growing 35% year over year.

[David Rosenthal]

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 if others sports done better? It's Internet. Nobody except Americans care.

[Monica Padman]

Have they tried.

[Dax Shepard]

They have these exhibition games.

[David Rosenthal]

American expats who go to the locals don't care.

[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, all these other things, it's an easy game to jump into really quick in love.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Like beating guys up in the street with lights and shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[Ben Gilbert]

That includes children.

[David Rosenthal]

Right. So probably a third of the country is betting on the NFL.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

So does the NFL. Are they licensing anything in that process?

[Ben Gilbert]

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 pies too. So I'm not sure if there's yet a published number on here's our gambling revenue stream.

[Dax Shepard]

They don't want to be known as having made money on this.

[Ben Gilbert]

Yeah, but how crazy is it watching football the last 30 years and there was this puritanical thing where they would never even mention the spread and now it's all over the place and it's like, this is the DraftKings post game.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Ben Gilbert]

I can't believe it.

[Dax Shepard]

They did a big old pivot on that.

[David Rosenthal]

They really did.

[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.

[Ben Gilbert]

Out, you're now convinced it wasn't real? Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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 a thousand dollars.

[Ben Gilbert]

I would have lost. It's not legal here yet.

[Dax Shepard]

I think it has a lot of.

[David Rosenthal]

Restrictions and I think this is part of why they. There's so many different things. You can bet on any state that.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Ben Gilbert]

Well, congratulations on your. Congratulations on your money.

[David Rosenthal]

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 team 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.

[Ben Gilbert]

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. League, the national revenue. And still for Most teams, about 2/3. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, they have to kick up their own ticket sales.

[David Rosenthal]

Justification is a visiting team is half the product.

[Dax Shepard]

I thought for sure that was all theirs.

[Ben Gilbert]

I think 40%.

[David Rosenthal]

I think it's about a third. And again, it's not just directly to the visiting team. It's up to the national pool, which.

[Ben Gilbert]

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 still have seat licenses.

[David Rosenthal]

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. Right to then buy the tickets. The ticket revenue is going to get shared up. But the seed license.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my odd 10x.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

And you think that could seed some kind of animosity that could start to erode.

[Ben Gilbert]

Even if not animosity, just some teams are way richer than others.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah, the salary cap still is low enough that you can, as a small market team, still have parity.

[Dax Shepard]

Are a lot of the teams not even hitting the cap would be my guess. Or do they all hit the cap?

[David Rosenthal]

I think they all hit the cap. They do, 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, you're back weighting the contract. How much is guaranteed?

[Ben Gilbert]

Your margin of safety isn't that much further. With the bottom teams making on the order of 50 million in profit a year before, let's say the next time there's a renegotiation and it goes from 48.5% of the players to, let's say it goes up north of 50, or let's say costs go up for everyone.

[David Rosenthal]

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.

[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.

[David Rosenthal]

Well, and it's already happening. Look at the Raiders, right? Going to Vegas.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Money talks.

[Dax Shepard]

What a fascinating business.

[David Rosenthal]

Okay, so the last thing is the super bowl. To put a bow on it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, please.

[David Rosenthal]

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 spend all the money you would want to win. If you win the super bowl, you gotta pay for the parade, that last line item, the parade and the parties and all that. So.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, don't players also have super bowl bonuses?

[David Rosenthal]

Probably the bigger impact is not just 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 retired. 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.

[Ben Gilbert]

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.

[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.

[Ben Gilbert]

So fun.

[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 that don't matter? It's interesting, the limits that are just inherently in place. Like, I guess the obvious choice for them would be to add games in the NFL, but it's such a violent sport that there's really kind of a limit. They can't play 82 games a year in that sport.

[David Rosenthal]

They are likely going to add another week.

[Dax Shepard]

Wednesday morning football, tea time, breakfast football.

[Ben Gilbert]

That's how they're going to finally get Europe.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. Tea time.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, well, David and Ben, this has been awesome.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Thanks for coming. How fun.

[Ben Gilbert]

Thanks for having us.

[Dax Shepard]

We love your show.

[David Rosenthal]

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 Expert.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, good. Thanks so much for coming in. I hope we get to do this again.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Another topical burble up the row. And yes, we'll be on your show. We'll be on yours, you know, today.

[Ben Gilbert]

Oh, David, were you whispering at that? Thanks so much, you guys.

[Dax Shepard]

All right, take care. Stay tuned to hear Ms. Monica correct all the facts that were wrong. That's okay, though. We all make mistakes.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, well, okay. Hello.

[Dax Shepard]

If you say so.

[Monica Padman]

Now tell me if the. If you've ever experienced this. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

You get a new scratch.

[Dax Shepard]

Scratch.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And it turns into a scar.

[Dax Shepard]

Ooh.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. You with me?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You along so far.

[Monica Padman]

And then when you look at your arm or hand, wherever the scratch, slash, scar is, you don't recognize your own self.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, no.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, you can't relate.

[Dax Shepard]

I have not had that experience.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what you're dealing with.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I have a new scar.

[Dax Shepard]

Is this the mole you try to pick out or the freckle that you try to dig out?

[Monica Padman]

I do often try to remove my own freckles. You're one to talk.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, I've not tried to remove a freckle.

[Monica Padman]

You try to do lots of Surgeries on yourself.

[Dax Shepard]

True, true. But just no freckle removal. I don't know that that's possible.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it is. I mean, I'm not advising it.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

But I've successfully completed many removals and.

[Dax Shepard]

Replace it with a scar.

[Monica Padman]

No, this is not that.

[Dax Shepard]

This.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Was a little light white color there. Is that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Do you see it? Well, it. Now it has a little makeup on it because this is where I put my makeup.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you. You put make. Oh, I thought you were covering up.

[Monica Padman]

No, I wasn't. In fact, now it's like. Now it looks like I'm lying.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. But give yourself a scar. Yeah. Oh, my God.

[Monica Padman]

I know. It's huge.

[Dax Shepard]

It's so. I can't see it.

[Monica Padman]

Really?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I'm sorry. Well, the brown spot.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah, I see the brown spot.

[Monica Padman]

That's huge.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a liver spot. I think.

[Monica Padman]

Don't. It's. That's not what happened. That is not what happened. It was a spot to enter our.

[Dax Shepard]

Liver spot phase of life.

[Monica Padman]

I'm going to try to avoid that. Although it's. Look, aging is normal and natural.

[Dax Shepard]

It's very natural. If you can do it without liver spots, you probably prefer.

[Monica Padman]

Ideally, yeah. But anywho. So now when I'm, like, typing, it's on my hand, I see it all the time, and I'm like, who. Who is she?

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Whole new hand. That's kind of fun, though, I would say.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's. It's an opportunity for reinvention.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Slowing time down. That just a ding, ding, ding. These novel things slow time down.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, they do. No one. Maybe that's why Jan's going so slow. Jam Brady, January.

[Dax Shepard]

We're calling her Jam Brady now.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You got to catch me up.

[Monica Padman]

I'm sorry.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you develop up Jan Brady?

[David Rosenthal]

That's a.

[Dax Shepard]

Sounds like a. Jess.

[Monica Padman]

Absolutely. Well, I've been calling. I've been calling her Jan.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Right.

[Monica Padman]

And then he added Brady.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, tomorrow it's over.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

One more day. We can make it through.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, maybe we can.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we can.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I started compulsively cutting my hair today. You know how I like to do that. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And it's an indicator.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But now I can't blow my nose, and I think that it's burbling up.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. I don't. I think you're going to need a new Placement. Because soon you're not going to have any hair.

[Dax Shepard]

I think I satiated my thing. It's. What happens is I. I was going to do a little trim. Trim. It got bigger and bigger and bigger. And then I thought I had finished in the bathroom, but then I went to work out. As I told you, I have reverse lighting or backlighting.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

It exposes all these things. And then the madness of. I'm just going to do a trim. I know. That's it. I keep scissors now in my gym, which is. Yeah. And then I got to vacuum it up. And then I'm like, that's it. Because we can't get the vacuum out again. And I got the vacuum out, like, five times, I think.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I was lifting weights, cutting hair, vacuuming. Lift more weights, see more hair, cut more hair, vacuum. If someone was watching.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Which someone could. It's very expensive.

[Monica Padman]

There's a lot of people in this.

[Dax Shepard]

Area, and there's just windows galore.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, true.

[Dax Shepard]

So if someone was interested, they probably watch the ramblings of a madman.

[Monica Padman]

Your hair looks nice, though.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, good.

[Monica Padman]

You did a good job.

[Dax Shepard]

Spots. I need to trim. No, I'm not too far from my scissors.

[Monica Padman]

They're always within an arm's length.

[Dax Shepard]

Had a little bit of a gusher. Caught my ear a little bit.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm just trying to be accountable.

[Monica Padman]

I know. I appreciate you.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like an AA meeting.

[Monica Padman]

It just like. Okay, so maybe with your gusher, you're going to start understanding what I'm talking about. About the scar.

[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.

[Monica Padman]

Well, when you get a glance of it, you might be like, whose ear is that?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Speaking of people watching you do weird things, yesterday I was at Sunset Tower. That's a very fancy location in this city.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow. We had overlapping days. Continue.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And I love it. It's from Sarah Hendler, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

This is a great way to meet somebody. Ask a stranger. Yeah. I'm so sorry. Sorry, sir, could you hold my Delicate risk. And help me get this.

[Monica Padman]

Do you mind helping me with this? I did think it could be a meet cute situation.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, for sure.

[Monica Padman]

And then the universe is wily, right? Because rascally. Yeah, I. I was thinking about that. And meet cutes. And guess who reached back out.

[Dax Shepard]

Who?

[Monica Padman]

The matchmaker.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Monica Padman]

People, people, remember, it didn't last time. Didn't go great. And I felt bad about yourself. Yeah. Yeah, I did. I felt bad. And this one seems more promising.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Less. Less, like, conducive to me feeling like I hate myself.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great.

[Monica Padman]

So we'll see.

[Dax Shepard]

So Sunset Tower. Did you see fancy people?

[Monica Padman]

Since I sat at the bar, I couldn't really look, but I'm sure there's fancy people there. There always are.

[Dax Shepard]

So, you know, I had this dinner with Nate and Panay that was a con. It was really a deception so that I could get to my birthday party, but then I really wanted to have dinner with them, so that was last night.

[Ben Gilbert]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

And then Penne was like, where do you. Where should we go? Like, home base, one of our standards. And I said I could go to home base or I could also go see some new hot place. I felt like I wanted to see that.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

Boy, did he deliver. We went. You. Have you heard of Navajo?

[Monica Padman]

Nava Co.

[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. Oh. But it's Navikov.

[Monica Padman]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

In Beverly Hills on Canon. And it was everything I could have hoped for. It's only been open since July, I guess.

[Monica Padman]

Mediterranean and Italian.

[Dax Shepard]

The food was outrageous.

[David Rosenthal]

Ooh.

[Dax Shepard]

You know how when you're at Cara, you can pretend you're in Italy?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I was like, we're in Miami.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, it is.

[Dax Shepard]

It was Miami.

[Monica Padman]

Where people were dressed.

[Dax Shepard]

I got to be careful. Well, I got to be careful.

[Monica Padman]

It's fine.

[Dax Shepard]

Almost all the dudes looked exactly the same.

[Monica Padman]

Uhhuh. I can picture it.

[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.

[Monica Padman]

And were they wearing chains? Maybe.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. There was a lot of jewelries. There's a lot of paddock watches. I mean, it's expensive, so. Yeah, I'm watching like.

[Monica Padman]

Like Nobu in a way.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It felt like a throwback to the 80s or 90s, which I enjoy.

[Monica Padman]

That's fun.

[Dax Shepard]

I cannot put it too fine a point how good the food was. It was outrageous, and I want that pigged out like crazy. A risotto with truffle.

[Monica Padman]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

Gluten free. Blew my yum doors off my barn. And then a great steak. A baby chicken.

[Monica Padman]

Tiny chicken.

[Dax Shepard]

They described it as a baby chicken.

[Monica Padman]

Not a Cornish hen, not a corn.

[Dax Shepard]

Cornish hen, but a oven baked tiny.

[Monica Padman]

They don't have to call it that. That is not as appetizing.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I was like, what do they mean? A chick?

[Monica Padman]

Right, Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

But that wouldn't be enough meat.

[David Rosenthal]

I don't think.

[Dax Shepard]

It was delicious and it was very entertaining. It was, it was.

[Monica Padman]

It's fun to. To do that every now and then and get in the scene.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. I loved it. What was the vibe at? I didn't know you're now working at Sunset Tower. Only that's a far ride to go.

[Monica Padman]

It is. That's why it's not a main stop for me. But I love. I love Sunset Tower.

[David Rosenthal]

You love it?

[Monica Padman]

I only go like once a year. Twice a year.

[Dax Shepard]

You love it for the food, the atmosphere.

[Monica Padman]

Atmosphere.

[Dax Shepard]

And what do you see?

[Monica Padman]

The food is very good. I had a fried chicken.

[David Rosenthal]

Oh.

[Monica Padman]

And it was really delicious. They have a great shrimp crock.

[Dax Shepard]

Was it a baby chicken? Fried baby chicken.

[Monica Padman]

It was full size, I think.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Grandpa chicken.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It's also such a vibe. It is for people. People who don't know. It's a hotel here. Sunset Tower Hotel. And then very far in a restaurant. It's a very la. Old school la. Old Hollywood vibes, if you will.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It got packed. See, I went at 2:30 so that.

[Dax Shepard]

You'Ll be still there at happy hour.

[Monica Padman]

I didn't mean to, but we left at 8.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So we were there all day. I've been craving it for a while. The energy there.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Similarly.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[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.

[Monica Padman]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

I was driving there. I was like, oh, a little drowsy for this big outing with the boys. But I did have some DCs at the place. And then the energy really did lift me up.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Oh, okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Like, I think getting a full on uninterrupted aid is. Is ideal right now. Which I did last night.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I just, I think taking away things that you like blowing my nose. Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It's like maybe now's not the time.

[Dax Shepard]

Although I've. I have the right mental attitude.

[David Rosenthal]

I'm.

[Dax Shepard]

I've decided. Decided to go, like, yeah, this is uncomfortable, but this is you being strong and not escaping and walking through, and it's fine. And it'll change. So it's been fine.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. A couple haircuts, a few naps.

[Monica Padman]

That's all right. All that's fine.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. Anything thrilling happened since I saw you last.

[Monica Padman]

I guess those were big announcements that I already.

[Dax Shepard]

We both went to restaurants. I took a bike ride.

[Monica Padman]

I took a long time to put my bracelet on.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you end up having someone help you?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. When Julia got there, she did it.

[Dax Shepard]

But not a stranger. No, I think that's the best.

[Monica Padman]

I know, but it's also so.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm so sorry. Excuse me.

[David Rosenthal]

I'm.

[Dax Shepard]

I've been trying to get this Bracelet on for 20 minutes. Would you mind? I don't have any cooties. Well, I do have cooties. Look how fun this is. Already playful. Dance, dance, dance. Before he even gets the bracelet, you've now talked for 25 minutes.

[Monica Padman]

Sure. Because he's gonna have a hard time, too. It's much harder than you'd think.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And then it's. Then he's failing and he's laughing.

[Monica Padman]

That's funny.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. I'm falling in love just thinking about this. We had a funny moment last night. Every now and then you'll feel 13, which is really, really fun. Which is. George and I went to the bathroom. There was a girl in a cowboy.

[Monica Padman]

Hat he liked, okay.

[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. Okay, so on the way in, George spotted her, and he's like, oh, my God, look at that girl in the cowboy hat. Like, okay, so when we were coming out, I'm like, oh, let's look at these. Let's look at the lobsters.

[Monica Padman]

You were wingmanning.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So now we're like. Now we're. We are looking, but we're also fake looking, of course. And we're, like, looking at the vegetables and the lobster and this and that. And then as I turn to walk. Well, they're all looking at George and I. And then I'm like, and. And now what?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, he's going to have to talk.

[Dax Shepard]

He's going to 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 going to buy something. Then we were like, you know what, I'm full. And turned around and it was like, well, that was the.

[Monica Padman]

Oh.

[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'm gonna go back. I'm gonna go back and see what's happening with the cowboy hat. But I was standing there looking at this stuff.

[Monica Padman]

It's so weird to be an adult, especially 50. Right? Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I think I was hearing the updates of a single life and I was thinking, yeah, I'm glad I'm not.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm not on the scene.

[Monica Padman]

Well, that's. Yeah. Speaking of young men, Ben and David.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. Fun. Ben and David.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, they're great.

[Dax Shepard]

Really? Really, really.

[Monica Padman]

That was a very fun time.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

And now I'm really into the NFL as an institution.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. As a corporation.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. As a business.

[Dax Shepard]

As a capitalist communism.

[Monica Padman]

Yesterday I bought some vintage, vintage clothes and bought a LA Rams. There was an LA Rams vintage shirt.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Right. So now you're a huge fan.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Of the Rams.

[Monica Padman]

And I live here.

[Dax Shepard]

You're a Ram fan.

[Monica Padman]

Well, let's see. The biggest fact to check and the most exciting fact to check is Taylor Swift's car collection.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

This is very exciting.

[Monica Padman]

Very. Does she have a car collection? I was a definite no.

[Dax Shepard]

Uh huh.

[Monica Padman]

And I felt very arrogant in my opinion because I feel like I know everything about her.

[David Rosenthal]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Only because I listened to a great podcast. Every single album, 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 the two hosts are really awesome. So I love that. And I feel. So now I feel like I know everything. Cause they do deep dive. But I don't think they've talked about her car collection. Right, they skipped that part. So she does have one.

[Dax Shepard]

This is fantastic. What are her cars?

[Monica Padman]

Okay, there are three sections of car she has.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Luxury, sports and practical.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Luxury Mercedes AMG, G63.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, what a wonderful sedan. Luxury vehicle, twin turbo. Is that a sedan or a. Yeah, four door sedan.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I thought it was a G wagon.

[Dax Shepard]

G wagon is the G63.

[Monica Padman]

That's what I said.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I thought you said S. Now G. Oh, wonderful. Love those, love those. Eric's even Thinking of getting one.

[Monica Padman]

Really?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

G Wagon.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, they're so good.

[Monica Padman]

I would like to have one in my life.

[Dax Shepard]

You would?

[Monica Padman]

At some point.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, they're great. They're. They're very expensive.

[Monica Padman]

Are they me though?

[Dax Shepard]

But kind of every time I see a gy, it's mostly rich, hot women.

[David Rosenthal]

Driving G wagons in la.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's, it's, it skews. Femme, female, really.

[Monica Padman]

She also has Mercedes Benz S class.

[David Rosenthal]

That's what I was referring to.

[Dax Shepard]

But not the AMG version.

[Monica Padman]

Right. Then she has a Mercedes Maybach S650.

[Dax Shepard]

That's like a coach built, Mercedes based, you know, like a private plane for cars. Wow. It's a rolling atelier. Wow. Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Then there's the Cadillac Escalade standard.

[Dax Shepard]

You got to have it for arriving at functions. You're up high. If you're wearing a dress, you can exit the vehicle with. Without your beaver accidentally being exposed.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Special occasions. Okay. Now we're into sports cars.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Audi R8.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Yes, yes. Very elegant design first.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Not the most performing.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, all right.

[Dax Shepard]

Of super cars.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no, objectively, but very elegant looking.

[Monica Padman]

It does say right here a high performance supercar.

[Dax Shepard]

Yep. And it is. It's got the Lambo V10 or it's got the V8, depending on which V8. Okay. I'm surprised she doesn't have the V10, but when I talk to her, I'll get her done.

[Monica Padman]

You'll get her done.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a very feminine supercar.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Okay. Now she also has a Ferrari 458 Italia.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a shocker. Yeah, yeah. That feels. That's interesting. That's when she plays Lavender Haze. I think that's her Lavender Haze car.

[Monica Padman]

Is it sexy?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it's just an Italian.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, it's so Italian Stallion.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, Very dude car. Very, very few women go out and buy a 458.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. I'm looking it up. It is. It looks fast.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm going to ask Chad if it knows what percentage of Ferrari owners are men.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's a great question.

[Dax Shepard]

I bet you it's a. 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%.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Dax Shepard]

That's. That's really quite high. So she, she can count herself in the 5%.

[Monica Padman]

That's awesome. Okay. Then she has a Porsche 911 Turbo.

[Dax Shepard]

Perfect car. Very exciting. Great taste. Should I see if Chat?

[Ben Gilbert]

What?

[Dax Shepard]

Chat thinks the percentage of Women who own Porsches.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It needs to be higher. If it's not.

[Dax Shepard]

What percentage of Porsche owners are female? 15 to 20%.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so that's 4x, the amount that tracks. I know more women with Porsches.

[Dax Shepard]

The Cayenne has female ownership estimated between 30 and 40%.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's the electric one.

[Dax Shepard]

No. Oh, here we go. The Macan. That's the small, small SUV that one's got. 50% of buyers are women.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[David Rosenthal]

All right.

[Monica Padman]

Practical vehicles.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. She has some practical vehicles.

[Monica Padman]

She has three.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

She has a Toyota Sequoia.

[Dax Shepard]

Great. She'll have that until she's dead. It'll run until she's dead.

[Monica Padman]

She has a Chevy, which we hope is of like 150. She's 100.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. It'll run that long. Don't worry.

[Monica Padman]

Chevy Silverado, her first car was. But she still keeps.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Is it pink?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's pink.

[Dax Shepard]

It's pink. It's like a Mary Kay.

[Monica Padman]

And then the Nissan Quash Quai. That's Q A, S H, Q A, I.

[Dax Shepard]

That's.

[Monica Padman]

She has that.

[Dax Shepard]

Why does she have that?

[Monica Padman]

She has it.

[Dax Shepard]

Was that given. Does she have a deal with Nissan? Does she have any kind of.

[Monica Padman]

No, she just loves it.

[Dax Shepard]

She loves it.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

The Ferrari, the Porsche, they're all on here.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, good.

[Monica Padman]

The Sequoia, the amg. The Nissan Quash Kwai. The Everyday.

[Dax Shepard]

Everyone says the Nissan Quash Kwai. If we ever interview her, I want to do 20 minutes on this, hope.

[Monica Padman]

She arrives in it. That would be great. And she probably will because it says the Everyday. Humble choice. Oh, it's her latest acquisition. She can move her discreetly.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

So in London, it says in London.

[Dax Shepard]

Specifically, this vehicle is in London. And it's so she can leave an apartment without anyone thinking it's her.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but don't go looking for. I know. Don't go looking for her Quash quies and try to find her. She's just trying to. To live. She's just trying to be.

[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.

[Monica Padman]

You can design something for her. You've been designing cars with AI?

[Dax Shepard]

I could. And then her driver could wear the UPS outfit.

[Monica Padman]

That's fun.

[Dax Shepard]

Or FedEx. I guess if she's in London, would probably be FedEx.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Do players get a cut of their jersey sales? Yes, NFL players receive a cut of their jersey sales. Players receive royalties based on how many other jerseys have sold. These royalties come from group licensing deals negotiated through the NFL. Okay, so that's cool. Action Park, I don't believe is the park based on Adventureland because it says Adventureland is based on the real life Adventureland park in Farmingdale, New York.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Action park is in New Jersey.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. And there's a doc about it called Class Action park or something.

[Monica Padman]

Oh. Five to ten victims daily.

[Dax Shepard]

Five to ten people went in an ambulance away from there.

[Monica Padman]

Emergency room.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, Emergency room. While they were keeping probably the town emergency clinic in business.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Maybe that's what it was all about.

[Dax Shepard]

I wonder if they were giving away like the woman who lost her eyelid on the slide and she got an embroidered sweatshirt or something.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

From Armchair Anonymous.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. That was a great episode.

[Dax Shepard]

They should have had a shirt that said, I was sent to the emergency room room by Adventure park and all.

[Monica Padman]

I got was this T shirt.

[Dax Shepard]

Action Park.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Well, that's it for Ben and David. They were awesome.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Really fun.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, me too.

[Dax Shepard]

Basically repeated the entire episode to my father in law. All right, love you.

[Monica Padman]

Love you.

[Dax Shepard]

Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry plus in the Wonder app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short [e-mail] survey.