The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
PTFO: Share & Halftime & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Sarah Spain
Fri, 31 Jan 2025
Remember when "In Living Color" tried to steal the Super Bowl — and changed it (seriously) forever? How do you compare boners while not dying? And why did the NWSL dare to abolish the draft? Plus: payment-processing gargoyles, Jim Carrey, mascot auditions, Winter Magic, Taylor Swift, Richard Gere's alleged gerbil intimacy... and The Turgid Place. Further content: "In Living Color": 1992 Live Super Bowl Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EY-7OuP8uE Bryan Johnson and the Birth of the Blueprint Religion (Ashlee Vance) https://www.corememory.com/p/bryan-johnson-and-the-birth-of-the A Tectonic Shift in the American Sports Landscape (Good Game with Sarah Spain) https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-good-game-with-sarah-spai-185664375/episode/a-tectonic-shift-in-the-american-209236895/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre. Today's episode is brought to you by DraftKings. DraftKings, the crown is yours. And today we're going to find out what this sound is. Just real quick, back to the boners. Right after this ad.
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By the way, nice to meet you, Wyatt.
It's very nice to meet you. I'm not a good host. I'm not introducing people.
I'm a very big fan of yours, and my husband and I really loved your show, Problem Areas, because I thought the vibe was just excellent.
Thank you so much. That really means a lot. No, I'm a fan of yours as well. I was wondering if we had met before. But yeah, I've always been a big fan of you. And I miss seeing you on Around the Horn because you were so much fun on that show. Yeah.
I was going to say.
Yeah, Pablo was never fun on that show except for as the whipping boy.
I was going to say, I'm also, and I'm here too on the show. Yeah, you're fine on it.
Yeah, you're okay.
I'm getting a vibe that I did not ask for actually here.
I mean, this show is just what you find out. It's not about what you ask for.
What I found out is that you guys are already better friends with each other than you are with me, which is a hard thing to learn three seconds into a program. Yeah.
We've already started three different text threads.
Yeah. We actually started some group chats with multiple other people too, but didn't invite you.
Yeah. Sarah, it's good to see you.
You too.
The last time you were on the show, you were super horny for mascots, and I presume that's still the case.
Still am.
When I was in college, I auditioned to be the mascot and I didn't get it. At Carolina? At North Carolina, yeah. What's the Rams name? Ramses. They put a lot of thought into it. What was that audition like? They put you in the costume and then you got to like dance around and do stuff. And I didn't really know what to do. I just thought it would be fun.
And so I put it on and I think I just did a bunch of like... hip thrusts and crotch grabs, and they were like, that's enough, and told me I had done things in that costume that had never been done before and should never be done again. Somehow you were too horny for the Ram mascot.
I was going to say, I feel like we view mascots the same then.
Yeah, yeah.
The immediate urge was the crotch grab.
Yeah. Those mascots are here for our sexual pleasure.
Clearly. Have you seen Benny the Bull?
Yeah. He's a smoke show.
Yep. You can get it.
Wyatt, what did you bring us today on this edition of Share and Tell?
So today I brought, we do have a Super Bowl coming up. There's a lot of talk about. Not familiar. Oh, well, there's a Super Bowl. There's a sport called footsball. Are you aware of that? Go on. It's different from the English footsball. but it's still with people, not with feet. But Super Bowl halftime show, Kendrick Lamar is performing. A lot of big conversation around that.
Now that Taylor Swift will be in attendance at the Super Bowl, maybe Taylor Swift will be leaving the skybox to make a surprise appearance. Who knows?
They do have a tune together. Yep.
They do. That's relevant. Yeah, exactly. Or maybe Taylor Swift just sings it from the skybox. They just hand her a microphone and she slides the glass open and is like, I'll do my part. Sure.
Or she could Tom Cruise it and like fly down on a wire from the suite to the field like he did at the Olympics.
Yeah.
The beginning of this topic.
The biggest show on turf. And it wasn't always recognized as that. But there was a time when the halftime show, it would be like Up With People or a high school marching band. And it was just kind of filler while everyone went to the bathroom and no one really saw it.
Smoked a couple cigs in the locker room.
Exactly, yeah. Those were the good old days. You could just smoke in the locker room.
Did a bunch of drugs that made your body still function but completely unfeeling.
Yeah, get drunk a little bit. So just in thinking about that, That's what the halftime show was, and then something had to change it.
Right.
There was some moment that was that sort of catalyst moment that said, your tube is not good enough. And the thing that changed it was the sketch show in living color.
So I didn't know anything about this. Neither did I. And I've thought a lot about the Halftime Show as a cultural institution before. I didn't know about this until you brought it to us and we actually looked into it.
Right. Yeah. You didn't believe me at first when I just told you this. I did not. And then you said we had to look into it.
I mean, it actually does like demand a further explanation because it does not make sense the sentence that you have said.
I don't know. It makes pretty good sense to me. Roll the credits. Show's over. This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.
All right, we don't need to do just a straight-up impersonation parody of me.
I don't know that that wasn't a good impression of you. Mildly disrespectful. No, this is my impression of you.
This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production, and we'll see you next time.
Why, Wyatt, did you even discover that In Living Color was involved at all in this?
I grew up watching In Living Color. It's a show that I enjoyed as a kid. It was one that inspired me to do what I do. But then also, a few years ago, I had been having some preliminary conversations to make a documentary about In Living Color. No way!
Yeah. Are you still doing that? I would love to watch that.
Unfortunately, it fell through. There, I think, were just too many things, one of which being Disney owns the IP. And so there's a lot of stuff there to navigate. And then with all the cast, they are all giant megastars.
And so... Well, to remind people, right? This is, I mean, I don't want to lead with Jim Carrey, but Jim Carrey was on In Living Color. Sure. You had Damon Wayans, you had Jim Carrey, you had David Alan Grier. Jennifer Lopez was a fly girl.
Jennifer Lopez, yeah. Rosie Perez was the choreographer. Right, this was a sketch comedy show on Fox. It ran for five seasons. And in that time, in that short amount of time, has done so much as far as, like, given us so much entertainment, both the show itself, but then the people who came from that show, that there's no real story about it. Like, I remember when...
the show had had, like, its 10-year anniversary and its 15-year anniversary, and nobody would write about it. Like, there was never, like, the Vulture article that was, -"Hey, here's a--" -"The oral history that we've seen for so many other things."
Yeah, and so in doing the research for it, to kind of pitch the idea, one of the things that I got really into was at the time that CBS at that moment had the Super Bowl, that Fox, as this kind of upstart network, had decided... we want to do something outrageous. What if we could steal some of the Super Bowl audience?
Yes.
And what could we do to do that? And initially they said, what if we got MC Hammer to perform and then we could get, like, In Living Color is our big show. What if we got them to do some live sketches? Right. This is 1992. Right.
And to your point, they were not winning halftime. It was dead time to go get your snacks or you'd turn away and watch something else. So they were trying to keep people around in a way that you never have to do anymore because it's part of the show.
And every network at that time had just ceded that to the NFL, that whatever network it was on, if it was on CBS, then we're never even thinking that halftime could be a thing or even counter-programming. against the Super Bowl.
It's the least thinkable thing now to go head-to-head against the Super Bowl halftime show. But at this point in 1992, Fox sees this opportunity when CBS has a Super Bowl and they say, let's create a distraction that's going to steal audience and bring it over to us just for the period of halftime.
Right. Yes. And so that's what they started talking about. And they said, yeah, what if we get MC Hammer and then we'll have the In Living Color folks just do a couple sketches. And then when it was presented to Kenan and the folks at In Living Color, they said, f*** that. What if we do a show and MC Hammer can be our musical guest? And so the network was like, all right.
They started going for it. They got some corporate sponsors. It was taking too long. MC Hammer eventually dropped out and was replaced by, if you can't get MC Hammer, who do you get? You get Color Me Bad.
So they got Color Me Bad to close things out. I presume I want to sex you up.
Yeah. I mean, when you got mascots, what else are you going to do? That's the theme song for every mascot, as I learned it. That was the music I asked to play when I auditioned for Ramsey's. That's Ramsey's. I was like, I brought my own music here. Here you go.
And now we have wet ass pussy. The times have changed.
So yeah, they get Color Me Bad and they do this.
I know what you guys are thinking. You're thinking, hey, are these bozos going to make us miss any part of the second half?
That's where this comes in. Our Super Bowl countdown clock. It'll be coming on later in the show to let you know when to switch back to the second half. You won't miss any of the senseless brutality. But check this out. The Bad Boys of Comedy got a lot of action for you right here. Fire Marshal Bill. Men on and Color Me Bad performing here live.
I love why they have a clock in the bottom left corner. They're very clear about what they're trying to do. It's like they're playing a prank on CBS specifically.
Because CBS had planned their Super Bowl halftime show would be a promo for the upcoming Winter Olympics, which would be a salute to the Winter Olympics that would feature two small ice rings.
I just like the idea of, on one channel is the In Living Color Super Bowl halftime party, And then in the Metrodome in Minneapolis is what is being hailed as this.
The 1992 Super Bowl XXVI Halftime Spectacular. Winter Magic. Winter Magic.
Hi, everybody. Come on and feel the cold. Come to Minnesota where winter is the hottest time of the year. It's winter magic.
Who says feel the cold? It's winter magic, Wyatt. You know.
I'm not going to lie. Brian Boitano was big in our family. Brian Boitano and Dorothy Hamill getting excited for some Winter Olympic figure skating. We would have been in.
I mean, were you a big enough fan to continue watching this? No. Nope. Like the visuals on this, their umbrellas with snowflakes painted on.
It does sort of, I mean, in a way, though, it does resemble Super Bowl halftimes in the sense of, you know, taking over the field with all these dancers and visual elements. It's just so, like, corny.
They go on to do like Christmas songs. Right, yeah.
It's February. It's a Super Bowl. They're like doing, it's kind of mind-blowing. It's like, again, Brian Boitano, Dorothy Hamill, the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. Right, yeah. Shows up at one point.
Yeah. They also have jet skis, but the jet skis are on wheels. So they're like, they're being like held up on wheels and so they can drive around everywhere.
They do the dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy at one point. And meanwhile, over on Fox, this is happening.
Jewelry, jewelry, jewelry. Check it out. Super Bowl rings and things. I know some of y'all sitting out there saying, oh, boys, these rings are a little big for me. That's why with every purchase, we're going to give you absolutely free this jar of NFL vitamins. That's right. Within six months, you'll be wearing these bad boys like pinky rings.
Oh, so good. I can't believe I've never seen that before.
Holding a giant plastic, like, cheeseball jug just full of steroids. Right. They were, like, poking fingers in all of the eyes available to them.
All the bears were getting poked that day. Yeah. And the whole show, I mean, everything was just sh**ting all over football, and people loved it. They drew... a huge portion of the audience away. Yes. And even kept some of it. And so the gambit worked. And it was successful. And after that, the decision was made, we have to do something different.
And we can't, there became a fear that now this is like, we have shown a weakness. We have to come back with the most strength possible.
What's also fascinating, and for the youngsters watching, they might not realize this, but Fox Network did not launch until 1986. So this is four years after the network launched. And if you remember, the beginning of the network was all about being disruptive to the traditional ABC, NBC, CBS. It was Tracy Ullman, The Simpsons, In Living Color, Married with Children.
It was all these things that were a little bit edgier. And the idea that Fox now... couldn't do those sketches because they want the rights and own the rights. Like, everyone's in bed with the NFL now or everyone feels like they have a chance to be in bed because you can even have games as Netflix and streaming services.
Back then, Fox was like the little kid, the little brother that was never going to win
rights to have the games so they felt perfectly comfortable skewering them like you just don't see that these days from major networks because they all have to be playing nice just in case they have a deal with them the same way like espn had to stop running that playmaker show and and the nfl was like yeah sorry you can't do that they have so much power now that to watch that is something to think about here where it's like oh you could just do that then because they didn't think they had a shot and now of course fox is is in bed with the giant
Well, and also what's wild too is thinking about just how cautious those networks get because at that time, so they had two sponsors that were interested in being the corporate sponsor for the In Living Color halftime show. One was Frito-Lay and the other was Pepsi. And at the time, Pepsi was really excited about this idea and they started talking about
hey, if this works, then maybe we could also take the characters from In Living Color and put them in the Pepsi challenge. And so we'll take like Homie the Clown and do some Pepsi challenge spots with Homie the Clown.
And we'll take, you know, the Men On guys and put them in some Pepsi challenge things, which now is a thing that you see more commonly where you do see like sketch characters from SNL. All the time. being used in commercials. This was the proto of that. But the live in living color, they were so disruptive and so like- It's insane to watch it.
They pushed the boundary so far, one of which making a joke about Richard Gere that there was- Oh my God, yes. There at the time had, there had been a- We all grew up with the gerbil story.
We all knew the gerbil story.
Sure, yes. But there might be younger audience members who are not familiar with this, but there was a time where it had been intimated that Richard Gere had gotten intimate with a gerbil.
Well, the gerbil had gotten into Richard Gere, I think.
Into, yeah. Just to be more specific, to put a finer point on it, Richard Gere allegedly put a gerbil in his ass.
Yes. Yeah. As one might. Allegedly. Yeah. And so they make a joke about that, which they got past the censors. They made a second joke that got past the censors. And both of those things were the bridge too far for Pepsi, which... where they then said, you know what? Never mind. We're going to cancel this deal.
And so the NFL and rather the networks that have the rights to the most important piece of cultural real estate that we have now, they decide to change gears.
Yeah, to sort of silence tiny little Fox at the time. And they went and they got Michael Jackson, the biggest pop star of the moment.
And this now, this Michael Jackson halftime show is the thing that all of us know.
Yes, and it sets the precedent.
Literally, American culture was never the same because In Living Color threatened those dancing children in the Metrodome.
To your point about going hard, once you pull out your Michael Jackson, so to speak, no one's really going to lay what they've got on the table to try to compete. So once you've established that this is what the halftime show looks like from here on out, it's no longer about trying to counter-program. It's about understanding that you're not winning.
The war was over. Yes. Right. Nuclear deterrence had prevailed.
Yes.
But it also then set the precedent and set the standard for the NFL that, well, we got to do this every year now. And so then every year it became, all right, who's a giant sponsor we can get? So Pepsi, even though they initially were going to be in bed with Fox and In Living Color, They were like, ah, we're good. Oh, Michael Jackson?
Yeah.
The Super Bowl? Yeah, you can have our money. There's nothing controversial about this.
No, I was going to say, we want nothing to do with controversy, so we're backing Michael Jackson.
In no way will this age poorly to be laughed at later by podcasters revisiting the history of this program.
But also age poorly... seven months later because the first Michael Jackson child abuse allegations came out that summer. So that Super Bowl, Michael Jackson performs, and not just performs, does a whole section about kids and wanting to love and protect the kids. We are the world with a children's choir.
And then does a thing where the audience participation is holding up little stick figures of children while he goes and stands among children and picks them up and is like doing a whole thing. That summer is when... Those allegations come out.
Luckily, though, this year, there is thankfully zero subtext when it comes to such a topic with the current performer we're about to watch together.
Yeah, nothing to do with minors whatsoever.
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I did want to talk about... The curious case of tech mogul, Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson is a guy who may have come to your attention recently because he posted a tweet about his boner as it compares to his son's boner. And in case you are wondering, why am I using these words? This feels gross. Here's the tweet. Quote, nighttime erection data from my 19-year-old son at Talmadge Johnson and me.
His duration is two minutes longer than mine. Raise children to stand tall, be firm, and be upright. Followed by all of these biometric boner charts. So, you know. This is the guy, in case you weren't familiar, also in the documentary, Don't Die. He's the guy. You guys, I mean, hold on. Before I go any further.
You guys had heard of Brian Johnson before I said we got to learn about the boner data? Yeah.
I had only remembered seeing the photo of him where he got a bunch of fat injected in his face and he looked like that lady who got more and more progressively like a cat due to her plastic surgery.
Jocelyn Wildenstein.
That's the only reference point I had to this guy.
You know that lady's name.
I can't believe you know the cat lady's name.
Yeah, Jocelyn Wildenstein lives rent-free in my brain. Also, hashtag rest in peace, Jocelyn. She just passed away.
Wow.
We lost her in 2024.
I guess I should say, meow.
Catnap in peace. You sweet, sweet Sheba.
This is what Brian Johnson looks like in the photo Sarah was alluding to as he was engaged in Project Babyface. So Brian Johnson, Sarah, is the guy who is basically on a mission to reverse aging. And he has done this in a way that has been startling and has a sports context. LeBron James famously has been spending $1 million a year on his body.
But Brian Johnson, in comparison, spends about $2 million a year on his body. And so that's according to reporting from Ashley Vance, formerly of Bloomberg, who chronicled this, was involved with the documentary. He's now running a great publication called Core Memory, in which he talked about interviewing Brian Johnson.
This is a very rich tech guy who's like, I'm going to be the face and the leader of a movement in which I'm going to basically discover where people have been too afraid to go when it comes to living forever. And in case you were wondering, wanted to find out, how does one measure such boner data? You do it this way.
Oh, yeah.
And what is this other contraption? That is how you can measure your nighttime erections.
I mean, where am I going to put that?
Yeah, so you put it on your shaft. And just gently, yeah, there you go. Gently pull that. And so you put, there you go.
I'm sorry. I just go to sleep hard and I wake up hard.
Don't have to get ready if you stay ready. You know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah, Brian, you need to work on that endurance, my man. Get your numbers up, Brian. His phallus turgid.
Turgid. Turgid.
What a good word.
When else is turgid used if not for erection description?
You can't say flaccid without thinking of a dick.
Exactly. Flaccid and turgid are the yin and yang of boner adjectives. Yeah.
That would be a good rap duo. then who ends up with Flaccid, I guess?
A real goofus and gallon situation. Turgeon and Flaccid. The highlights magazine of sexual health. What Brian Johnson is trying to say, though, about his erection and his son's erection is that they are... They're nighttime erections. Just clarifying. They're nighttime erections. Nocturnal. His nocturnal... Separate, not put together.
Well, separate and unequal, it turns out, is what he's making the case. His son, Brian Johnson is trying to assert that his nighttime nocturnal turgidity is to be reckoned with. And Sarah, I just want to explain who Brian Johnson is because he is the star of this doc called Don't Die on Netflix.
I want to just give a clip from the trailer just to give a sense for people to catch up real quick on what kind of an archetype we're dealing with. You don't, though. So it stops on a clip of them in a photo shoot. It's Brian, his dad, and Brian's son, who is the aforementioned... Talmadge. Talmadge. Turgid Talmadge. Turgid Talmadge.
They basically made a sort of just... Yeah, they gave plasma to each other, youngest to next oldest, in a way that feels... Like exactly what we were joking that Peter Thiel was doing with his blood boy in Silicon Valley. Brian Johnson is saying this is part of his very detailed and now public plan for how you can live forever. Right, yeah. Vampire your children.
And then test each other's boners. I'm trying to piece together how we went from getting plasma to boner data. Yeah.
I mean, you get three to five guys in a room and there's nothing on TV. It's at some point. I think just naturally the conversation is going to wind its way to boner data.
Right. What's that, you know, you talk long enough and Hitler comes up? It's that for men with d**ks.
Yeah, it's however many monkeys in a room eventually typing out boner data, I believe is how that old saying goes. Brian Johnson, by the way, it's just interesting how, like I mentioned Peter Thiel, who was, again, from the PayPal mafia famously with Elon and David Sachs and all these gargoyles that we know now.
But Brian Johnson, he had built an online payment processing company himself called Braintree, which bought Venmo. And then he sold Braintree, it turns out, to PayPal in 2013 for $800 million, which is to say that somehow like online payment processing is a real through line in the dystopian future we have entered.
Just real quick, back to the boners. His name is Johnson. It's a little on the nose or I guess on the dick, but the point is he's testing his boners next to his sons in order to prove that that part of the aging process that isn't affecting him is sexual virility.
I mean, what he's saying is that one of the indicators of the way in which he has slowed the rate of aging is nighttime erections. And so Brian Johnson, at age 47, is on par with his 19-year-old.
Couldn't you compare it to other 47-year-olds instead? Or couldn't you compare it to anonymous data from many people in their early 20s instead of, weirdly— posting about your son's boners, tagging him in those posts, and then saying, raise your kids to stand firm and upright.
This part to me is like a departure from the already weird obsession with not dying is also this desire to be connected to his son, both in terms of like injecting his plasma into him, but then also having boner offs. Like, is this weird to you guys? Or am I just a woman?
No, that's, I mean, there's a very weird part of like... Just skimming over it. I mean, well, even as you said it, it is like... When you put it like that, I mean... He's sharing his son's medical data, which also feels like a violation.
And everything about it, what you've shown me, what I've read about it, what I see in that dynamic with the son, if there's anyone I am horribly worried for, it is Talmadge Johnson. Because at some point, Brian is going to realize... Maybe there's science where I could just put my brain in Talmadge's body. Like he's saying, oh, I want us all to live forever.
Or clone him or, you know, any number of weird sci-fi rich person weird things to take the next step.
Like he wants to get out his own son.
Yeah. Yeah.
Or Talmadge might already be in the sunken place.
He's in the cult.
He did quote tweet the tweet from his dad saying, quote, I'm grateful for the way my dad has raised me, period.
Yeah, he's already, that sounds like something you'd write with a gun to your head.
He's in the turgid place.
He's in the turgid place. He can't think straight. He's constantly erect. His dad won't let him stop getting boners. Also, not the point of the clip, but isn't he rich enough to get a more believable hair dye? That doesn't occur in nature.
Like, if the point is to look younger, like, a real easy just boxed hair dye is not going to cost you much, and it's going to do wonders for selling people on your age.
Right. I do feel like for all the sincerity and for all the pills and for all of the, you know, 4.30 a.m. wake-ups he has, like, it must suck when someone's like, it kind of looked like you're in your mid-40s. Right. You guys are familiar with ESPN announcer Mark Jones, right?
Yeah, Mark Jones is on The Substance.
Well, I just want to know what program Mark Jones is on. Mark Jones is 63 years old.
Yeah.
Mark Jones looks younger than Brian Johnson, and it's not close.
I'm 85. What the f*** are you talking about? Yeah. It's called melanin, my friend.
Yeah, exactly.
Get you some. Yeah. He doesn't need 130 pills. Just get some melanin.
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I don't want to bring the party to a flaccid point, but I brought a sports topic. I forgot which show I was on, I guess. But I did want to bring it because I think you're both brilliant dudes, and I'm kind of interested to see where your brain takes what could happen next. So I don't know how familiar you are with the NWSL having a new CBA that they signed a couple months ago.
And part of it that we're now seeing manifest is they got rid of the draft altogether. They got rid of the college draft. They got rid of the expansion draft. There's no restrictions on movement for players at all. If you're out of a contract, you get to decide where you go. If you want to get traded, you have to agree to it. A team cannot trade you anywhere without you agreeing to it.
And free agents can sign whenever they want. There's not even restricted free agency where the team that originally had their rights has a chance to match. It is entirely players' rights now. And this is in part because the NWSL is having trouble competing with World Soccer and FIFA that operated in an entirely different way, right?
So if a global team was trying to get you to play for them, you might choose them purely because you don't want to get drafted to somewhere that you have no choice. And... you know, that was a disadvantage to the NWSL.
So this is the first real offseason where we're seeing not only collegiate and younger players just sign with whatever team they choose, but also seeing all these free agents potentially choose NWSL, WSL, which is the European Women's League in England, Naomi Germa, who's a superstar for the U.S.
national team and was playing for the San Diego Wave, just left and went to Chelsea out in England, had the biggest transfer fee of over a million dollars for a female player ever, and signed a four-year deal with them. And because of the way they restructured their rules, that was able to happen during a transfer window.
Yeah, that's right. Naomi Gurma is a Chelsea player, which means Naomi Gurma is now the world's most expensive player. Naomi, welcome to Chelsea. How does it feel to be here? It doesn't feel real.
I'm just so excited to be here in person now. Yeah, it doesn't feel real.
I actually just want to jump in to say that it's amazing that the NWSL, the National Women's Soccer League, did the thing that every Think PC analyst in sports has been musing about, which is abolish the draft. No league in America has done that of this stature. And so the experiment, which I have been, I'm one of those people in that choir, by the way, of just like,
Look, there are two levels, Wyatt. One is the level of fairness, obviously. It's insane always that in this industry, in sports, you have zero control despite having all of this value over what you are and where you are going to actually use your talents to... mis-paraphrase LeBron James.
But then the second level is like, well, doesn't that also, as much as I love the draft, raise new opportunities for like what to do in replacement of it? The television show of the draft, you abolish that too. And that's always, John Skipper says it all the time. Like the reason he would never want to do it is because the TV show.
But now you're actually forced to be creative about the entertainment of a world that is more fair. And now, again, far more open in terms of like how you're going to go around both making decisions and then portraying them to your audience.
Yeah, I mean, there's the spectacle and the entertainment side of it, but then there's also how it serves a league. So, for instance, in the past, there was a Supreme Court ruling, this Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in Brown v. Football, 1996,
clubs that make up a professional sports league are not completely independent economic competitors as they depend on a degree of cooperation for economic survival. So in the past, basically, antitrust laws and things that people felt like a draft were in violation of were able to be saved around the idea that each individual part of a professional league is really just one company, sort of.
And in the NWSL, that argument really wouldn't have worked because it didn't help the health of the league to have a draft when the rest of global football didn't. So it benefits the health of the NWSL to operate in the same system as FIFA football and global football. The NFL would have different rules. The NBA would have different rules.
So yes, it's very interesting to think about, for player rights purposes, how you might replace the draft and do something else. But also, it would be harder to get rid of it in the professional men's leagues in the U.S. because of the fact that they aren't really operating in a global system the same way the NWSL wants to.
With the NWSL and the things that they've put forward, is that also something that exists in the European League? Yeah. Are there things that the NWSL are doing that aren't just the same as what you're seeing in the European League, but maybe even a step further?
No, this is a very essentially American thing. to take away an individual's rights and put them instead with a league or a team. In global football, with like, let's say, Naomi Gurma and transfer fees. Naomi Gurma is headed to Chelsea because she wanted to go there and they wanted her. She was under contract with the San Diego wave of the NWSL through the end of 2026.
So first, San Diego and Chelsea have to agree on a transfer fee, which is the amount of money Chelsea is going to pay San Diego to have the rights to Naomi Gurma. That's over a million dollars. And then they also have to convince Naomi Gurma to go there and sign there. Even if they agreed on the trade and the transfer fee, she would not have to go there unless she agreed to it.
So at every turn, there is both a negotiation between clubs on a transfer fee and a negotiation between player and club. An interesting element that is potentially going to come up and is already being discussed in the MLS is should a player get a percentage of that transfer fee? Because ultimately, it's their value that's dictating how much is being paid and why.
So soccer is basically operating now in terms of global rules because we're behind. America is the one catching up. Whereas all the other leagues, we're sort of setting the precedent. And so I think it'd be harder to unravel. But if I were a men's professional athlete in the U.S. looking over at the NWSL...
Would I have a lot of thoughts about how much better it would be to be able to pick where I got to go instead of getting sent to fill in the blank where allegedly parody is what's driving things. But you know that it's a bad team that's poorly run with bad facilities, bad owners, everything else. And you have no choice. You're stuck there.
It's an amazing thing, right? Like the argument for the draft is inescapably socialist. And we have all of these capitalists who are saying we must have this because that is parody, right? Like otherwise, small markets will lose out to big markets.
The most marquee teams will always get the best players because why would they want to go to fill in the blank, you know, Cincinnati slash whatever, like just also ran market.
But it's corporate socialism, which capitalists have never had a problem with corporate socialism. It's not socialism for the individual, the player, the collective in that way. Capitalists love corporate socialism.
And again, I am somebody who... Like, my whole thing on tanking, right, is that the problem with tanking is that it works. It makes sense to do it because you're following incentives. Like, it's an amazing thing to have the number one overall pick because you suck. Right. But in a world in which there is no draft... How have these decisions been made?
Like, what's happening, I guess, is my question. Now, the experiment for the first time is finally being run in America.
You just made me think of something that I want to add, which is another way that women's leagues are saying what we've always done doesn't have to be the way we keep doing it. The Professional Women's Hockey League, the PWHL, uses a draft order point system so that the team with the most points after they've been eliminated gets a better pick.
Oh, right.
So once you know you're not making it, you have to try hard instead of getting worse. So there's a lot of ways that I think women's professional sports are trying to look at what we've complained about for decades on the men's side. Unrivaled, for instance, uses an Elam ending for the fourth quarter of every single game. If people aren't familiar with that, it means you've got a target score.
You've got a game winner every single game instead of let's have 8,000 free throws and drag out the finish. So women's sports are looking at the things that aren't working in men's and trying out new things because they're not beholden to nostalgia and tradition and people who will be mad about, you know, mixing things up.
As far as the NWSL goes, we are right in the midst of seeing the first handful of college players getting signed to teams. It's missing a bit of the pageantry in terms of draft day night.
But I had the executive director of the NWSLPA, Megan Burkhan, and the Players Association president, Tori Huster, on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain, plug there, to talk about this right after the CBA went through. And one of the things they talked about is that was an artificial pageantry. The real moment where you feel like a pro is when you sign your contract.
not when you put the hat on. So can you make that my pro moment? Can you find a way to put some pageantry behind the contract signing and that decision? Or in high school, for instance, we've got the people who line up the hats on the table and then tell you where they're going on decision day.
You could do that sort of thing the same way for players that are getting to decide their team as opposed to being drafted.
Make it so that instead of the employer saying, having all of these suitors, you flip, turn the tables. Right.
The dating game. The dating game. You've got the player, and then behind the wall, you've got four teams.
Yes.
Who are saying, here's our facilities. Here's our record of winning. Here's where you'll live if you live here. Here's our tax situation. Exactly. The thing is, like, there are some legitimate questions about this in terms of how do you make sure teams are able to keep up, especially smaller markets? How do you ensure that there is a little bit of parity and it's not super lopsided?
How do you keep fans interested in an also-ran team if they don't have the hope of a draft, the hope of that savior that's coming in?
Sure.
On the other hand, you force every team to have better resources and investment and good coaches and a plan to win because they can't get by on luck and the idea that if they fail, they're still going to get a shot at a star.
There's loyalty and respect going both ways where a player wants to be there and you want to have them that might result in better relationships and conversations when you have to choose where you want to go and stay there if you want to stay there. I mean...
I think there's a lot of doomsday scenarios to keep a system in place the same way that we had doomsday scenarios about NIL and paying players in college solely so that we could keep the billionaires rich and keep the player without any rights.
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At the end of every episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out, we talk about what we found out today on a show about finding out stuff. And I found out just now that Sarah Spain has been holding a banana as not a prop, but actual food and has been restraining herself from using it as a metaphor made real, which I must applaud.
Pablo, I found out that you need to do an episode where you take 130 vitamins a day and find out what happens to you. Will you get younger? Will you become more virile? Yes.
At this rate, I don't think I want anybody to ever see the data that is inside of me. I don't think that's going to go well.
I found out that I really want to see a Wyatt Cenac documentary about In Living Color. So I want that to happen somehow, some way. I also found out that being a billionaire is not as fun as it looks for the millionth time. I don't know how many stories we need to hear about miserable billionaire men before we finally stop in any way idolizing that lifestyle or them.
But this is just like the latest in a long, long list of just deeply upsetting results of being too rich.
Yeah, I feel like it's a health crisis. We need to perhaps look at it as a health crisis that we need to save these men from themselves and tax them fairly.
This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production, and we'll see you next time.