C (2:25)

So I think the UFC stands for Ultimate Fighting Championship. Yes. And it actually has like a pretty appealing origin story, which I'm going to talk about before we get to the nitty gritty kind of gross stuff. So basically it originated with like, you know, Americans like martial arts. They like martial arts.

B (2:43)

They do. I mean, this. I've lived in America for 20 years. I was utterly unaware of the fact that Americans like martial arts.

C (2:50)

My kids begged me for karate Lessons. I couldn't find the karate lessons, so I got them Taekwondo lessons. You know, like, we don't really know the difference between the different kinds of martial arts. And that's kind of part of the charm of this.

B (3:01)

I do, I do know that my favorite podcast, Mr. Cardiff Garcia of FT Alphaville is really into his Brazilian. Whatever the hell.

A (3:09)

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

C (3:09)

Jiu Jitsu is sort of a big one.

B (3:11)

No, it's not Jiu Jitsu.

A (3:12)

No, it's Aikido. I'm pretty sure it's Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

B (3:15)

No, it has a name anyway.

C (3:17)

Well, okay.

A (3:18)

Capoeira.

B (3:19)

Capoeira.

C (3:20)

That sounds almost like a dance.

A (3:22)

Yeah, that's even more traditional. Most people do that to just. Yeah, exactly. It's like a dance off. You have some old timey musicians play while people pretend to kick at each other anyway.

C (3:30)

Right. And that's kind of like some of them are kind of non violent, others are super violent. And so the basically what, what these Americans who originated this, this promotion company were trying to decide was what is the most lethal of all martial arts?

B (3:46)

Because they want the people to be dying. That doesn't seem like a good, like.

C (3:49)

Well, so the original thing is like, we're gonna pit somebody who's doing taekwondo against someone who's doing karate. And like, let's see who wins.

B (3:55)

Oh, I see. So it was a competition between the martial arts and then the capoeira person would come out and then get their.

A (4:01)

Nobody came out and did capoeira.

C (4:03)

However, their head was removed.

A (4:04)

They did come out and do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which is sort of the foundation now. It's a mixed martial arts is what they call it. And that's the kind of the foundational one for a lot of them.

C (4:12)

So basically it's soon turned into like, oh, we're going to use the best from all of these things. And it became this thing called mixed martial arts, which really just happened not that long ago.

A (4:22)

And, you know, you all listeners probably know it now from people like Ronda Rousey and, you know, Conor McGregor, fighters like that. Who.

B (4:30)

Okay, so this is the point at which, like the sports fans in the room start dropping names and saying, oh, you know, this famous person.

A (4:37)

And that famous person, Ronda Rossi is also like on the Late show. And she. I mean, she does movies now. She's a pretty, she's a pretty famous person, period. She was on the COVID of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. I mean, yeah, there's some pretty amazing.

C (4:49)

People involved with this, but so in terms of the business model. It was kind of sleazy, kind of like unknown. Not very well attended. Very, very few merchandising opportunities until 2001 when it was bought by two brothers called Lorenzo and Frank Fortita. They bought it for $2 million. The entire franchise.

A (5:08)

Yeah.

C (5:08)

It was also Dana White, and Dana White was their high school buddy from Las Vegas. They all, they all came from Las Vegas, where the sport sort of originated, and they turned it into a monster. A monster. And they did it by just promoting the shit out of it and by owning and absolutely everything.

A (5:24)

I think the easiest way to think about what UFC is now and to mixed martial arts is what WWE is to professional wrestling, sort of.

B (5:35)

So everything's rigged, so.

A (5:37)

No, no, no, but in terms of like the structure, like there are other places you can do professional wrestling, but they don't pay anything. It's, you know, WWE is the, is.

B (5:45)

The show ufc, but WWE is like an entertainment show. It's not an actual sport.

A (5:50)

No, but in terms of. Yeah, but. Well, in terms of organizing though, where. And UFC is the, you know, it is this one body that signs up all the best fighters to these very essential, you know, they, to these contracts, very restrictive contracts. And they have 90% of the revenue, apparently.

B (6:07)

It sounds like the International Federation of Competitive Eating a little bit.

A (6:11)

Yeah, that's.

C (6:11)

Yeah. I mean, look, they don't think of themselves as like, like, like team owners. You know, they're not promoting the sport per se. They are promotion owners. They own sort of the, the advertisement, the merchandising of this sport. Well, so actually.

A (6:25)

And they, I disagree with that. I think that's actually. But so that is kind of what made UFC different is instead of thinking of just kind of random, like kind of one promotion at a time, what Dana White did was he said, we're going to make mixed martial arts writ large, huge. And we're going to make UFC the brand that is mixed martial arts, which is why now this one promotions company is worth for, was worth $4 billion. Of course, what that brings us to is their whole labor model. And I think, you know, feel first.

C (6:52)

Before we do the labor model, let's just talk a little bit about their business model. Like how do they make money? And the answer is basically pay per view. They have this. They own something called Fighter Pass, which I looked into purchasing. There's a seven day free trial, turns out. But I was like. When I saw some of the outtakes of this fighting with all the blood literally splattering the audience, I was like, one Second thought, maybe I'll just learn about this on Wikipedia. But it's a $10 per month charge and just a ton of people worldwide sign up for it. They really want to see this stuff on the Internet and on their, like Androids or their iPhones. And so that's their model. They don't. They're not living. They are also on Fox, so they sometimes get shown on that. But the real moneymaker is this Fight Pass.

B (7:36)

And okay, so this is one question which I have for the sports fans among us, which is the two people who aren't me. Can you explain to me how pay per view is a really big thing in the two most violent sports in the world, which are mixed martial arts and boxing. And really an afterthought in terms of big, more popular team sports. What is it about violence and paying like $50 to see a fight which go together?

A (8:06)

It's not about the violence. Oh, it is about the violence. So I. Well, okay, you say your theory, I'll say so. First off, USC is also trying to move away, or has talked about trying to move away from the pay per view model. They want to be more mainstream than that because the really huge dollars for a league are if you can go the NBA route, et cetera. But I think part of, you know, people criticize boxing for being incredibly reliant on pay per view because it's essentially, they call it a get rich quick scheme. You know, it's essentially, it's the, it's the quickest way to make the most money off one superstar fight. And it kind of makes sense that it would work, that that boxing's business model would evolve because you don't really have a single dominant league or organizer like you do UFC or a league like the NBA. You have lots of competing promoters kind of going at it and trying to maximize their take on that one big fight that they've organized. And so something that Pay Per View is going to make a lot of sense. If, you know, everyone wants to watch Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao go at it and are going to pay 70 bucks or whatever for that privilege, it makes sense to put that on TV because you don't have a tomorrow to think about. You have that fake fight to think about.

C (9:08)

Okay, but you know what? But the point being that Fight Pass is actually a subscription service.

A (9:12)

That's true.

C (9:13)

And really what they're being, what's happened in the last 20 years since they've started making this more and more mainstream, is that ESPN and other sports television are getting closer to accepting it as mainstream. You know, like, it's not. It's super violent, but they've really cleaned it up a lot compared to what it used to be. And basically they can't get it on espn. What they can do is.

B (9:36)

Can I just ask a really stupid question? These fights still take place in a cage, am I right?

A (9:41)

Yeah, these do.

C (9:43)

Yeah, they do.

B (9:43)

Okay, so this is like, you can say that they've cleaned it up, but, like, it's still like, fights in a.

C (9:49)

Cage and with people kicking each other's heads with.

A (9:52)

With no.

C (9:52)

Like, helmets, I might add. But let me just say that one of the biggest deals, recent deals that has made this company worth so much, because there's already in, like, 150 countries, by the way. Like, it's really worldwide, but they're. They're talking with China for, like, television rights, like, mainstream television rights. So, like, we're talking about very, like, bigger than espn, right? If they can really get that deal done. So, yes, it's extremely violent. Like, I'm a sports fan. I am balking at watching football at this point because of all the head injury problems, but this stuff is way beyond that.

A (10:25)

Some people will argue, and this gets, like, into, like, kind of real fight fan kind of chauvinism. Some people argue. It's actually not quite as bad as boxing, because in boxing, you just are watching people get repetitive blows to the head over and over again. Even though it's typically not as bloody and it doesn't look as violent, it's actually more difficult, damaging.

C (10:44)

And if you listen to the commentary about. I read a lot about this in the last couple days. It's much more about entertainment than it is about, like, killing. You know, it's like, oh, you're not, you know, the highest compliment you can make to a fight, to a fighter, it turns out, is, what a entertaining fight, what an entertainment you just gave us. You know, you're not boring. It's. That's like the death knob.

B (11:03)

So let's move swiftly on before we completely run out of time, to the core of this question, which is the revenue share between labor and capital is terrible.

C (11:14)

As Jordan said, they get basically less than 20% of the overall revenue.

A (11:20)

Well, that's according to themselves. That's according to a lawsuit. We should say according to a lawsuit. Yeah.

C (11:25)

But lots of actual individual fighters have complained. If you look at an individual fighter's life, a professional fighter in ufc, they might have five or six fights a year. They typically get paid if they're not top, top. They typically get paid $8,000 per fight. So that really, it's like $45,000 a year as a professional fighter. A lot of them end up being like personal trainers. It's another job.

B (11:48)

Independent contractors, they don't have, you know, what's it called, like some kind of thing where they get paid if they get hurt so badly they can never fight again.

C (11:57)

Exactly. And the most important, I'm pretty sure.

A (11:59)

They do offer some insurance on, I.

C (12:01)

Think some health insurance. But the most important real thing that happened recently is they made a huge contract with Reebok where, where they just basically told all these so called independent contractors, the fighters themselves, you have to wear Reebok clothes and shoes and everything has to be Reebok branded. And that actually closed off a lot of their other, like extra income that they were doing.

B (12:24)

In other words, the fighters, the independent contractors, were making money by signing sponsorship deals with, I don't know, Under Armour or someone. And then they got told no, you're like, you're not even allowed to make that money anymore.

C (12:37)

Yeah.

B (12:37)

One of them reassigned an exclusive deal with Reebok.

C (12:39)

One of them had to go to a press conference barefooted because their feet, their shoes were like Nike or something.

A (12:44)

Yes, indeed. That was a really sad moment. And actually people are talking about how the Reebok sponsorship controversy might push them further in the direction of one day unionizing and challenging the idea that they're independent contractors. We're actually seeing kind of a, almost a version of what goes on with Uber.

C (13:00)

Yes.

A (13:01)

Now in ufc, the gig economy issue. Yeah. The idea that these people are actually independent contractors, but they have, they have to be told, they have to promote their fight when they, when they are told to promote it. That became a problem with Conor McGregor, one of the biggest stars. They have to show up where they are told to show up. They have to wear Reebok even if they could make money doing something else.

C (13:20)

It's like, it's like if you're an Uber driver, but you also get punched in the face a lot.

A (13:24)

No. And you can't drive for Lyft. That's, it's like if you're an Uber driver but you get punched face. And you cannot drive for Lyft and.

C (13:30)

Kicked in the face.

A (13:31)

So.

B (13:31)

So, okay, so we are going to, I'm going to take this and segue into the difference between an independent contractor and a free agent, which is a fascinating thing. Okay, so to. On its face, there doesn't seem to be a lot of difference between an independent contractor and a free agent. But in fact, it's all the difference in the world, right? It's a huge. It makes all the difference.

C (13:57)

So besides WWE and UFC, every other major professional sports team, the players get 50% or more of the overall overall revenue.

A (14:06)

Is it everyone? Every one of them now?

C (14:07)

Every one of them, huh? And like boxing sometimes gets more than 80%.

A (14:11)

That's on a draw on a given. Yeah, some, some boxers, again, the inequality in boxing is arguably even worse because you have guys like Mayweather who make God knows how much and then you do to. On his undercard, you make nothing.

B (14:23)

Yes, I, I've been looking at the NBA, which stands for the National Basketball Association.

A (14:30)

Have you've been looking.

B (14:33)

And so I have a friend of mine, Noah Bryer, who's like, Felix, I want you to write about this NBA thing. I'm like, what's an NBA? And I.

A (14:40)

It's great having Felix look at sports. Cause you're getting like an anthropologist's view of this. Or like if an alien came down and started analyzing, it's actually useful. It's because a fan doesn't always notice everything anyway.

B (14:51)

And so. Yeah, so it turns out that the NBA is basically a throwback to the halcyon days of unionization. Imagine on the Waterfront or something like that, where labor has unbelievable amounts of control over capital. And they have this bargaining agreement, which is very sensible. It's exactly the kind of thing that you'd expect if you had a powerful union. For one thing, they basically do this profit share, this revenue share, so that when the owners negotiate some multi gazillion dollar deal with a television company, and the next thing you know, they're getting billions and billions of dollars a year from television, they don't need to then sort of go through this whole negotiation and go, well, you have more money now, you should pay us more. They just, it happens automatically that they get like 51% of those billions.

C (15:50)

51%?

A (15:51)

Yeah, it's the automatic share, 50%.

B (15:53)

And the other thing about basketball, like one of the weird things about American sports is that like a football team has about 8,000 players. It's a lot of players, there's a lot of basketball teams are much smaller. And so you get all of these billions and billions of dollars and they're being showered in some distribution on a very small number of players, really. And that just means that inevitably those players are going to wind up getting huge amounts of money. And then once, once they've ascertained that they're going to be getting these huge amounts of money. They then start doing all of these other rules like putting a cap on the maximum amount that you can pay a player. So that, what that means is that it's fairer, everyone in the team gets paid in a more fair way.

C (16:42)

And there's a minimum as well.

B (16:43)

And there's a minimum as well. And then, you know, rookies get paid less because they're not, they don't have so much clout in the union. And it basically behaves exactly like you'd expect a union to behave. And it seems to work out really well for labour. And then you get these things called free agents. And they go around saying, I'll just go to whoever wants to pay me the most. And they can't really lock me up unless they really pay me for locking me up. And it's entirely up to me whether I take the highest offer or whether I, you know, want to move to San Francisco, because I think that's going to make it more likely that I'll win the championship or whatever. You know, unlike say in soccer where you can have players traded to other teams and the player has very little say in the matter.

A (17:26)

So I would say it's really good for the middle tier of labor. In the NBA. It's the, the, the way the salary cap works and the way the salary rules are, they really are, are designed. They benefit the guys who are veterans who've been there for a while, who are good, who can be relied on, but they work to the disadvantages of the LeBron James and Kevin Durant's of the world.

C (17:46)

Yeah, because they, they can, they can't make an infinite amount of money.

A (17:50)

But also, it's not like baseball where.

B (17:52)

You just command whatever someone was telling me. And this is like a number which I literally pull out of, you know, gossip on the street corner. But LeBron James is going to make a billion dollars from his shoe deal.

A (18:03)

I mean, I don't know if he's going to make a lot of money off his shoe.

B (18:07)

But the point is, though, once you become LeBron James, then at that point your salary is basically an afterthought. You would happily pay for play for free just for all of the endorsement income that they.

A (18:19)

That's a really good point.

C (18:20)

Like they have a salary cap, but they don't have a merchandising cap.

A (18:23)

There are few guys like that in the league and they're, you know, I would say they're probably.

B (18:27)

But that's why we're not feeling sad for those that there's a cap on those.

A (18:30)

I would say there are a few more guys in the league who'd be making the absolute start. I mean, yeah, if you're Kobe, if you're LeBron, if you're a once in a generation guy, you're making crazy money off endorsements. Maybe Steph Curry, if his shoes one day look a little less doofy, will also make that much money off shoes. But have you, have you seen the chef dues? Anyway, Sorry, but like, there aren't. I wouldn't say there are that many. I mean, there are guys who do well on endorsements, but it's not like I still feel like in some ways the max salary that they can be paid is. It just feels a little wrong to me that LeBron doesn't get more in the end. And plus, it also does lead to this thing where you get a lot of talent pooled in one team at a time. It kind of helps create these superstars.

C (19:13)

Let's talk about why that happens, because I think it happens for a relatively good reason. You know, people are complaining that the.

B (19:19)

Golden State Warriors, Jim Surowiecki, for example, he's.

A (19:23)

He voice, he's the voice of many on this.

C (19:25)

It seems like you agree with him that at the end of the day, once the caps are in place, superstars can't get much more than a certain amount. So then they go play with their friends, basically.

A (19:35)

Yeah. And for the titles, yeah, you get these dream teams like big three combos, or you get the, you know, the Death Star in Golden State right now.

C (19:42)

But like it does, it begs the following question. Like, when we talk about it's good for the sport, do we mean it's good for the players of the sport or do we mean it's good for.

A (19:50)

The fans of the sport or competition, things like that.

C (19:53)

Or is it good for competition? And there's all sorts of ways of looking at it. But, you know, just speaking as a sad, sad Knicks fan, I was totally rooting for the Golden State Warriors. You know, like, it's not like you can only root for your own team.

B (20:07)

And by the way, and speaking as a Crystal palace fan, when Crystal palace has won like nothing ever, what is that? It's a soccer team in the uk, which, you know, we are. We had a good run this year, which is almost unheard of. But you know, maybe, maybe this is just an English thing, but supporting a team which never wins is something which is perfectly normal in the uk. And I don't understand why people get upset about the fact that some teams never win.

A (20:35)

I mean, it's normal in the US Too. Like, I was a Red Sox fan.

C (20:38)

For a long time.

A (20:38)

Like, there was a reason why it was such a big deal when Cleveland won because they hadn't won anything in forever.

C (20:43)

That was amazing.

A (20:44)

But their fans had been waiting for a very, very long time. But actually, you know, bringing up kind of English sports, here's a question I've been wondering and is there some antitrust reason why English sports don't have the same structure that American sports do in terms of leagues and play and kind of, you know, salary caps and unionization? Or is it alternative? Do you know?

B (21:07)

So, okay, so the huge difference between soccer and American sports is that soccer is. Was what you might call professionalized, leagueified, turned into a whole sort of big money television arm of the entertainment industry long after it was a competitive sport.

A (21:29)

Okay.

B (21:30)

And so what happened is you had literally hundreds of teams around the UK and Italy and Spain and Germany and all these other countries, and they would all start competing against each other for years and decades and, you know, many, many years before it became like a big money thing. And so then the question just becomes, which teams are we going to put in the very top league? Which is going to get the most money on television lights? Right? So the Bundesliga or the Premier League or Serie A or whatever. And the only fair way of determining which teams make that cut is by having them play each other and compete. And then the best teams make the cut and go into the league. But then there are always going to be other teams, like one league down, which want to become part of the Premier League, want to become part of the top league. And so you have to have some kind of mechanism for relegation and promotion. You have to have some kind of way for the bottom teams in the top league to get relegated and the top teams in the next league down to get promoted. And so what that means is you no longer have one set of owners and one set of players and one league and one set of players. You've got players playing for all manner of teams and some of the teams are in the top league and some aren't.

A (22:45)

Yeah, that seems like. So it's the opposite of baseball where.

C (22:48)

You have a certain number of teams and then there's a certain sort of fixed way of competing against them each other every year.

B (22:55)

Yeah, If I started a baseball team tomorrow and I hired a bunch of great players and said, we have an amazing baseball team, but it wasn't part of the National Baseball association or Whatever the baseball thing is called.

C (23:09)

Yeah, that's what it's called.

A (23:11)

I can't even. I just. I can't.

C (23:13)

Major League Baseball.

A (23:14)

God.

B (23:15)

Anyway, then, like, all I would do there, I'd be sitting there waiting for a match and nothing would ever happen.

C (23:22)

Right, Exactly. Exactly.

A (23:23)

Well, and that's because, again, in the US you have these antitrust exemptions.

C (23:26)

So instead of having teams like vying to be in the top, you have individual players in baseball. They're going aaa, and then they're vying to get into a Major League Baseball team.

B (23:36)

But teams can never get relegated, no matter how crap they are.

A (23:39)

Yeah, sadly. Sadly.

B (23:43)

So, okay, so what this means is for teams is that the owners, basically, because they have a monopoly, they have. We can call it a license to print money they don't need. If you own a football team or a baseball team or a basketball team, you might earn an enormous amount of money off that. You might earn a slightly less enormous amount of money off that. But because there are all of these deals where the television contract money gets spread relatively evenly between teams and that kind of stuff, all of the owners kind of make money, whether they're trying or not.

A (24:14)

Well, so they claim otherwise. That's the interesting thing. The NBA's commissioner last year had a thing about how a substantial number of teams were still losing money despite all the revenue sharing. And we don't have access to their books, so it's hard to know what a substantial number is. But, you know, the flip side is you kind of have to take that with a grain of salt because it's like, okay, maybe you're not making money year to year, but if you ever wanted to sell this thing because you actually were hard up, you could easily make 2 billion to 4 billion.

B (24:38)

Right. I mean, this is like. You know, there was that team, what was it called? The Clippers, that. Steve Clippers. Yes. And I'm sure they never made any money, but they were worth $2 billion. So the owners made lots of money upon selling.

A (24:48)

Yeah, well, it's. I know they actually. So the Clippers were interesting because they were managed basically just to suck whatever money they could out of a terrible team for years and years. He was. The ownership was notorious for just, like, scraping by with the worst roster he could, and. But by dint of being in Los.

B (25:04)

Angeles, which you couldn't do when you're a monopolist.

A (25:06)

Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. And, you know, the NBA even has rules to try to prevent that. They have minimum. They have a minimum amount of money. You have to spend on a team.

B (25:13)

And that's. That's not even an NBA rule. That's, again, part of this collective bargaining agreement where the players are like, no, we're not going to let you underpay us. We're going to have a minimum payroll for the entire team. You can't just have a cheap team. There is no such thing as a cheap team. I love this. This is my idea of, like, labor relations.

C (25:29)

I love it, too. It's. Unions are strong and they're.

A (25:32)

Yeah, it's actually, it's interesting too, because a lot of people will argue that sports unions aren't that strong. If you get really deep into this, that when you actually watch the collective bargaining process unfold and they have to decertify and sue, that's actually, like, you occasionally see, it's kind of a sign of weakness. But even though they, you know, you don't see a lot of outright strikes, they still manage to wield a substantial amount of power. I think partly just because there is so much money at stake. In a weird way, the amount of money that's available gives them a little bit of more power just to take a part of it.

C (26:05)

And I think, I mean, like, one of the takeaways from the most recent NBA, like, drafting and all this new contract dealing is that it's just become very, very popular. It's more and more popular at the NBA. I mean, the TV deals are insane.

B (26:20)

And one of the. And so, yeah, the bit of my. I wrote about this last week and. And the bit which everyone picked up on was that there was this guy called Mike, someone who's making $150 million in five years. And I was like, I have literally never. Not only have I never heard of this Mike guy, but I've never even heard of the team that he is playing for. And everyone's like, felix, we do enjoy you, Felix.

A (26:47)

Okay, so anyway, never mind.

B (26:50)

Next up, we are going to talk about the more noble amateur arm of sports. Jordan.

A (26:56)

Yes.

B (26:57)

Once upon a time, there was a sporting competition in ancient Greece where a bunch of men got naked and wrestled.

A (27:05)

Lathered in olive oil and were certainly.

B (27:07)

Not paid for their troubles.

A (27:08)

No.

B (27:08)

Tell us a little bit about what the Olympics have become and is this year going to be a complete shit show.

A (27:15)

You know, I don't want to make predictions about how awful Rio may or may not be. I think it's just sort of a tragedy period, though it seems like I'll get into why in a second. But. So Summer Olympics are coming up In August they're going to be in Rio. There's always a little bit of panic, you know, is this host city can be ready, etc. Etc. Rio, it's just, it's evident that even if the main buildings are completed, the city is just in a lot of ways not. I mean, the harbor that people are going to be swimming in is not totally clear of sewage, things like that. I mean the, a lot of the infrastructure that they've built to kind of beautify the city has been collapsing. There are security concerns and a lot of it is all playing out in the backdrop of you know, just this massive recession. It's the worst recession Brazil's had in 100 years or so that's been ongoing. Also political instability and what's kind of.

B (28:07)

Oh, and did we mention the Zika virus?

A (28:09)

And the Zika virus, sorry, which people are athletes are using as an excuse not to go down there. Namely some golfers. But I think.

B (28:18)

Wait, is golf an Olympic sport?

C (28:20)

So they're trying it out. Yeah, it's like. And it's not looking good.

A (28:23)

No, it's not looking good.

B (28:24)

I mean this is a little bit like Olympic soccer. You know, it's like one of those things which is just a contradiction in.

C (28:30)

Somebody once convinced me that rock, paper, scissors was an Olympic sport. And I was like, yeah, no, wait.

A (28:35)

Maybe, maybe they got chess.

B (28:37)

I mean, but I feel, I feel like the Olympics, you know, I feel like every time they try to expand it to include team sports or to include like anything which isn't just, you know, faster, higher, stronger, you know, it doesn't really work.

C (28:50)

So you're basically your litmus test is like, did oiled up Greeks do this?

A (28:53)

It's not, it's not a terrible test. It's like Olympics classic now, please. So I do want to. But the thing about this that gets. I find particularly sad is that the Olympics have almost no justification, there's almost no economic justification for hosting an Olympic Games. It's typically a really bad deal for a city.

B (29:13)

Is there any economic justification for participating in an Olympic Games as an athlete?

A (29:19)

I actually, I don't, I don't know.

C (29:22)

Actually I have a, I have a really good friend whose brother went to the Olympics and let me just say that it. He was a swimmer. He was unbelievable like butterfly. The Olympics happened sort of right before he got incredibly good number one in the country. And then right after he got. Because you know, it's a very short peak for as an athlete, but he did go to the Olympics in the very Last, you know, heat before the, the actual, the actual competition, he got cut. It was like brutal on his life. I would never recommend being an athlete in the Olympics.

A (29:52)

I'm sure it's brutal.

C (29:53)

Even if you win, it's brutal. It's a brutal thing because it's. And then your life is over.

A (29:56)

Yeah, I mean, you, it's good if you're that level of a athlete, you're going to get better sponsorship, for instance, if, if you have an Olympic medal around your neck. But, and obviously there are, you know.

C (30:06)

Unless you're Michael Phelps, it's just not a win.

B (30:08)

Yeah. I mean, like, like if you are a silver medal winning weightlifter or javelin thrower or something, that's not going to get you a huge number of sponsorships.

A (30:18)

No, but it's what you want. I mean, this is what you.

C (30:19)

It's a country pride thing, really. It's not an individual benefit.

B (30:23)

And this is just to. Before we. Can we let Jordan finish my point, we're gonna, we're gonna let him get there eventually. But I mean, but this idea of playing for your country or competing for your country is a, is a noble thing, which I think is, is very common around the world. And what's fascinating to me in this world of professionalized sports and really huge money is the way that the greatest soccer player in the world, Lionel Messi, has basically said, ah, fuck that, and he has quit playing for Argentina. And he's saying, you know, I will continue to play for Barcelona and I will continue to be a great soccer player, but I have no interest in playing for my country. It just doesn't interest me. It doesn't make me money. The fans don't like me, I don't like the fans. I'm just going to stick where I'm liked, which is Barcelona.

A (31:11)

Also, just like the risk of injury is just not worth it for a lot of. If you're a basketball player. You know, right now it's starting to look less and less worthwhile.

C (31:19)

But so it's an opportunity cost too. I mean, going back to the golfers who said the Olympics, like, and they gave this the Zika virus as a reason and possibly that it has some weight. But the other thing is that there's other golf tournaments that they'd be missing if they were the Olympics and they'd be making money.

A (31:37)

So the point I was going to make before, though, so if you are a host city, there's almost no justification economically other that, I mean, they often will say, oh, it's going to increase tourism and da, da, da. But these events never really pay for themselves. What it can theoretically do is spur a city to actually develop, like, do make the infrastructure investments necessary to host a Games in terms of, you know, transportation, whatnot, cleaning up the harbor, for instance. These are. These. This is the one selling point economists will say is, okay, if you're a city that cannot get investment otherwise for just basic infrastructure, this might be a way to do it. And it's looking like in a lot of ways, just a missed opportunity for Rio. And instead of, you know, a lot of what they built is slipshod and falling apart already. They haven't managed to do all of the things that they thought they'd be able to in terms of cleaning up the city other than, you know, clear out a lot of the favelas and just move people away from some of the poorer areas. But it's so. It seems like they're not even kind of getting the ancillary benefit.

B (32:36)

So this is maybe, which confuses me is that when it became obvious that Brazil was going to host the World cup and the Olympic Games and the World cup was coming first and the Olympic Games were coming second, everyone was saying, well, it might be a bit of a shit show for the World cup, but at least they'll have another two years after having built all of that World cup infrastructure to host the Olympics. And it seems the way that things are playing out that. That, you know, the World cup kind of basically sort of maybe didn't went. Went. Went off okay. I mean, certainly we England fans weren't a big fan of the heat, but, you know, but, you know, it was. It wasn't a complete disaster. And now the Olympics look like they're somehow. Even though they've had an extra two years to prepare, even worse.

A (33:26)

Well, it's more complicated.

C (33:27)

It's like the recession has just come at the wrong time. Right? I mean, the argument you just made, Jordan, makes sense for a city that like, kind of has the funds but doesn't kind of have the political will to do the infrastructure. Brazil just got this emergency funding to pay the police officers, like your security for the Olympics, but it's not for what they're going to be doing during the Olympics. It's for the back pay that they haven't been paid for months and months and months. So, like, they're desperate. They don't have this. These funds for this extra infrastructure. The, you know, the price of oil going down so much has really fucked them.

A (34:01)

I think it's more Soybeans, but. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Commodities generally here. Yeah.

C (34:05)

So it's just, it's just like it would be a benefit for a city in some ways at a certain specific time, but that time is not now for Rio.

A (34:13)

Yeah, I mean, that's. Yeah, I think, yes, the timing was exceptionally poor. I think also just like. Yeah, I mean this really does. You know, I look at situations like this, it's just another Olympic tragedy. You think back what happened in Athens and all the money that got spent there just needlessly before Greece was on the precipice of what happened to them at Kim or Sochi. God. And just like there's this one argument I occasionally see, which is that there should be one Olympic city. There just should be one. It can be a town built out of nowhere for all anyone cares, but there should just be one place where they're held every four years.

C (34:49)

So why do all these cities, like Boston, where I'm from, embarrassingly vie for Olympic?

A (34:55)

It happened because even New York. Even New York, because here's why. Because municipal politics are driven largely by developers and construction industry. I mean, those are the big donors. Those are people who are really interested in who control municipal politics in this country. And who benefits most from an Olympic Games are construction companies. So in a lot of ways they, they push tons and you know, sometimes you see like hotel groups and things like that.

C (35:20)

Also, it's the same people that want like new stadiums.

A (35:22)

Yeah, I mean, that's, I mean.

B (35:23)

Okay, so here's the thing. As a Londoner, I can tell you, like all good Londoners, when, when London won the Olympic Games, we were like, oh my God, you know, and this is going to be, and this is going to be great for developers and it's just going to be like horrible and it's. And just like New Yorkers hate the idea that New York is going to win the Olympic Games. Londoners hated the idea that London was going to win it. And then the Olympics actually happened and we had this thing called Team gb and there were lots and they worked really well and it was one of the more successful Olympic Games. And everyone. And that was the last time anyone was proud to be British.

A (35:59)

Basically, in all fairness, they did it by kind of keeping expectations low. They were like, we're gonna build facilities that can be torn down afterwards at like very little. And we're gonna have this weird ass opening ceremony.

B (36:12)

Porter cabins and the opening ceremony.

C (36:14)

Agile Olympics.

A (36:15)

I enjoyed the opening ceremony, but it was just like, it certainly was not like a repeat of Beijing. Where they had like 4 million, you know, dancers going at once. But anyway, I'm imagining for a city.

C (36:25)

Where they want to show off their, you know, their city and people just generally don't visit that it would be good because it is an international phenomenon.

A (36:34)

I mean if you're a budding imperial, if you are a wannabe imperial power like China and you wanna show off everything you can do in Giant Dance, like great, okay, that's worth it. But at the same time they still. That famous AI Weiwei design stadium, the bird's nest is now like a giant white elephant there.

B (36:52)

Herzog and demurran actually. But yeah, what it's Herzog and Demur.

A (36:56)

No. Yeah, but AI Weiwei drew like the initial. Anyway.

C (36:58)

Oh, we'll have that fight now.

B (37:00)

Yeah.

C (37:02)

Anyway, Rio is not one of those cities that needed international notice.

A (37:06)

No, they have plenty of tourism already. Granted, things have been a little. Maybe they wouldn't have had so much with Zika. So in that way it might give them a boost.

B (37:13)

But still, I feel like the case for moving the Olympics out of Brazil just on Zika grounds alone is reasonably strong. I understand that it's wintertime and Zika's not so bad in the winter, but even so, it does seem like a.

C (37:28)

Like the, possibly the perfect plan to spread Zika throughout the world.

B (37:33)

So this is the, this is the real problem. The real problem with Zika is not that there's Zika in Brazil and so you shouldn't go to Brazil because you might catch Zika. The real problem with having the Olympics in Rio is that you're going to have people from all over planet Earth converge on Rio. Statistically speaking, some non trivial number of them are going to catch Zika and then they're going to spread back out to where they came from. And right now the world is racing against time to find a cure or someone way of treating Zika. And the more time we have, the better. And by spreading Zika around the world like this, we are basically giving ourselves much, much less time than we.

C (38:19)

So why is the World Health Organization saying the risks are very, very low?

B (38:23)

Well, because now that it has become obvious that the Olympics are going to happen in Brazil, they have to just kind of pretend it's just pr.

A (38:31)

Well, it's also, I mean, you know the thing that like Rio's mayor will say, his talking point is there's, there's more Zika infected or more people get Zika in Florida during this time of year than they do in Rio because of the seasons, because it's winter in Brazil right now, but it's still. I don't think it changes Felix's point that when you have this many people showing up, statistically, you're gonna get someone in Morocco with it eventually.

C (38:52)

Like, it's a situation which.

A (38:55)

What is the Olympic Village.

B (38:56)

But the Olympic Village, like the one thing. The Olympics. The one thing.

C (39:00)

I'm so glad we got to this.

A (39:01)

We had to do that. Yeah.

B (39:03)

And we're gonna. We're gonna. We're gon. But there is really. I mean, the Olympics are all about sport and competition and fair play and amateurism and all of these things to a various or greater or lesser extent. But really it's about a whole bunch of unbelievably hot 20 somethings having sex with each other.

A (39:21)

Yes.

C (39:21)

Let's end there.

B (39:22)

We are going to have a numbers round. I feel we should have a numbers round.

A (39:25)

Yeah.

C (39:26)

Kathy, I got one in six, so.

B (39:29)

That'S like one over six, basically.

C (39:32)

One sixth.

B (39:32)

One sixth.

A (39:33)

Yeah.

B (39:33)

Yeah. Okay.

C (39:34)

We can call that. Yeah. But it's how, like the, the fraction of biomedicine PhD students who actually have a chance of getting a tenure track job.

A (39:44)

Oh, man.

C (39:45)

It's just.

A (39:45)

Yeah.

C (39:46)

Basically there's a really interesting New York Times upshot article about how many more PhDs there are in STEM fields than there are tenure positions. This is partly because there's a lot more PhD students graduating and partly because there are way fewer faculty positions that actually have tenure nowadays.

A (40:03)

I spent, spent literally years, or I spent about two years going back forth the nsf, who tracks a lot of this data, like, or like early on in my journalism career, just like trying to make this point that, like, STEM jobs are not plentiful the way people make up.

B (40:22)

I mean, this is going to sound really stupid, but if I'm doing a PhD in biomedicine, I want to go work for Pfizer or that many Pfizer jobs either. But there's a lot of jobs out there which aren't tenure track academic jobs.

C (40:37)

No, you're right. And by the way, I would argue in mathematics, like, you can. You can do a lot of things with a math PhD. Now, part of it is that it's. That's not how you think when you're getting a PhD. You're thinking, I'm going to be a professor someday. And that's a problem. We should change. But the real problem for me is how many postdocs there are nowadays that are basically just exploiting these young PhD graduates. I have another number here, which is $44,000, which is the average annual pay for a postdoc in biomedicine. So like, so in other words, like, it'd be fine if they just were immediately shunted off into, into the world of everything else besides academia, but they're not. They're sort of held circling like vultures, waiting for a faculty choice.

B (41:16)

I can tell you, as I used to work many, many years ago for a company called Roubini Global Economics, which was, you know, a little sort of economic consultancy. And its business model was to hire newly minted economics PhDs. And I was like, wow, that seems like a crazy business model because economics PhDs are very expensive and these guys don't really know anything about the world. They just have like theoretical blah, blah, blah. Turns out economic PhDs are unbelievably cheap. You can get economics PhDs for really very almost nothing. And they're just, there's an almost inexhaustible supply of them and you can get them to do lots of very good work for nothing.

A (41:59)

Econ PhDs do a lot better. That's the thing. They do a lot better than outside of engineering, most of the STEM guys, I mean, bioscience is the worst bioscience there's. We could do a whole episode just on how federal funding has screwed up the bioscience field over the years and the kind of, the boom and bust cycle just totally warped it. But it's especially bad with these, with scientists.

B (42:22)

All right, number, I'll have a number. Why not? My number is 40 billion euros, which is the amount of extra capital that European banks are probably going to have, well, might possibly have to inject into their UK subsidiaries if Brexit happens and if, if the UK leaves the single market. Because right now, you know, you have a big European bank like Deutsche bank, say, and it has a lot of its capital markets operations in London and it's one bank in Europe and it has one amount of capital that it needs. If UK leaves, you're then going to need a UK subsidiary which is going to need to be very highly capitalized because it's doing all of the risky investment banking stuff. And this is going to cost, cost 40 billion euros in total for European banks, plus according to JP Morgan, probably an extra one and a half billion dollars a year just in the extra costs involved in like moving stuff. You know, it's the single biggest loser from Brexit in terms of all industries is undoubtedly going to be finance and banking.

C (43:31)

Don't you mean when UK leaves You just said, if UK leaves, I feel like, isn't it a done deal?

A (43:37)

We're, I don't know.

B (43:39)

So there's a very good piece by a guy called ian Dunt on politics.co.uk, which I would highly recommend you read about, basically explaining all the problems with Brexit in a very easy to understand way. And to cut a short story even shorter, basically it can't be done. What the British people voted for or think that they voted for is actually an impossibility. And what Britain needs to do in terms of trade negotiations is actually an impossibility. So it's really hard to see how Brexit is going to happen or how Brexit is going to work, seeing as how there's actually no way that it could happen or that it could work. It's kind of interesting. So right now, yeah, I mean, I've lost, you know, we've elected a Prime Minister who says Brexit is Brexit. But that's just a tautology. No one knows what that means.

C (44:35)

That's true. That's such a political rhetoric thing.

A (44:38)

I was reading the new Brexit minister's economic plan, like what they're, what they're gonna do. My favorite part of it was he was like, don't worry, we'll strike a free trade deal with China because that's going to assuage all those Middle English voters who wanted to leave because they were upset. Like, yeah, a free trade deal, China is gonna really, really pacify all the industrial areas. Regions of.

B (44:59)

The rules are basically about goods, they're really hard to negotiate. And, and Britain is a services based economy and trying to do trade deals for services is really hard. And here's my favorite bit, here's my absolute number one favorite bit, is that it is illegal for the UK to negotiate any kind of trade deal with anyone, even other European countries, until it has left the eu. Because as a member of the eu, which it still is, it's not allowed to negotiate on its own behalf, which basically means, means that it needs to leave the EU before it can even start negotiating to leave the eu.

C (45:36)

I feel like we can have like a little episode right here in the numbers round.

A (45:41)

We really could at one point. So just to go back to this economic plan, at one point he said, it's like we have too much consumption in Britain. We need to go back to export led growth, which is literally a growth strategy for like emerging economies in Asia and Latin America typically. Like, I just don't. Anyway, I Was reading it and just like writhing and frustration. But my number now is actually also about Europe. So should I share my number?

B (46:04)

Share your number.

A (46:05)

It's a lighter number. Although some Brexit fans were tweeting this around. So it's 10,958. And I'm bringing this number up because I want to hear your guys thoughts on it, which is how much the French government is paying.

B (46:17)

Oh, the hairdresser.

A (46:19)

Francois Hollande's hairdresser. Every month.

C (46:22)

Once a month.

B (46:23)

No, no, that's a year.

A (46:24)

No, that's a month. 10,900. So he's making six figures each year. He has to be on call 24 7. He cuts Hollande's hair every morning. And also because he combs it. Combs it. I thought he gave. Trimmed it. He maybe.

B (46:36)

I feel like if you trimmed Francois Hollande's hair every morning, Francois Hollande would not have any hair.

A (46:42)

So. Okay, so here's. I'm mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, actually, I think with a balding president, it's incredibly important for that guy to have very neat hair. Cause even like slightly disheveled, if you could go a little too long, it's gonna look really, really bad.

B (46:56)

Yeah, well, having disheveled hair on like a foreign minister, we can't go.

C (47:00)

I was gonna say, like, Boris Johnson wouldn't suddenly be good. Well, no, because he has not disheveled.

A (47:06)

Well, yeah, but he has a lot of disheveled hair. Whereas if he was balding and disheveled, that's like kind of a youthful thing with him. Whereas with Holland it just kind of looks sad. But the flip. And also I think about this and it's like, well, he is a socialist and showing. You know, his hairdresser makes about two thirds of the president's salary. What is a greater gesture towards solidarity with the working class?

B (47:27)

Wow. So basically what happened is that Francois Hollande, there were various sort of technical reasons why this guy had to give up his hairdressing salon in order just to be the full time hairdresser for the present. I do wonder though, couldn't he. If he's gonna be in there anyway, can't he do the hair for at least a few other civil servants?

A (47:49)

I kind of, I, I kind of figured that had to be the case. But no one brought that up. No one was like, oh, well, he actually cuts everybody's hair. Like that would have. He's like, he's got it.

C (47:58)

Listen, that guy's got it made. Let's just. I'm just happy for him.

A (48:01)

Yeah, I mean like what a deal.

C (48:02)

But anyway, I'll bring some in his honor.

A (48:05)

The fussy French.

B (48:06)

Anyway, so on which astute note, we will bring this sportif episode of Slate Money to a scrappy photo finish. Thank you for listening to Slate Money. You can email us on slatemoneyslate.com and say give us medals. Who won the gold, who won the silver and who gets the bronze? Because everyone is a winner. Yeah, everyone has won an all shall win prizes.

A (48:38)

Silver just means first loser.

B (48:43)

Actually, I don't know because like maybe the gold medal should go to Virilin Williams, who I'm assuming here is going to have created an impeccably sensible sounding podcast out of this crazy in spite of us. Despite despite the crazy that's been going.

A (48:59)

On in this will save us from ourselves.

B (49:01)

Thank you Verilyn for your for producing us the very first official Verilyn Williams production of Slate Money. Not the last. Thanks to Steve Lichti and Andy Bowers, the executive producers, the whole Paraffin network, which you can find at itunes panoply and we will talk to you next week on Slate Money.