0:00:05 [Music]
0:00:12 Life is funny. I think we all know that. And it’s unpredictable, but just how unpredictable?
0:00:17 Once in a while, something happens that is so outlandish that you never even considered it
0:00:23 possible. Nasim Talib calls this a black swan event. In my case, I’m going to call it,
0:00:29 actually, I don’t know what to call it yet. Maybe you can help me name it. Let me explain.
0:00:35 Last Thursday, on February 13th, we were scheduled to do a live Freakonomics radio show
0:00:42 at the Wilshire E. Bell Theater in Los Angeles. Now, a live show for us is both rare and atypical,
0:00:48 because the episodes we put out here every week are very much not live. They are the product of
0:00:53 many hours of research and recorded interviews and editing and mixing and so on. And that’s the way
0:00:58 we like it. That’s the kind of show I like to make. But every now and again, we decide to put on a
0:01:04 live show in a theater with an audience and we record that show to make a podcast episode for
0:01:09 later. It’s not going to have the depth or the flow of a regular episode, but there is something
0:01:14 thrilling about the live setting. The interviews that you’re not really sure where they’re going to go,
0:01:20 the response from the audience that you can’t predict, and of course, any number of strange
0:01:24 things that might happen when you try to do something that resembles show business.
0:01:29 Coming into this LA show, we felt pretty good. We had two excellent guests lined up,
0:01:35 Ari Emanuel, the Super Agent and CEO of Endeavor, who was also the model for Ari Gold from the TV
0:01:41 show Entourage. And we had the award-winning filmmaker, RJ Cutler, who got his start on the
0:01:45 Clinton campaign documentary, The War Room, and who’s been making excellent documentaries ever
0:01:51 since, including a recent one about Martha Stewart. We also had Luis Guerra, who composes and performs
0:01:56 a lot of the music you hear on this show. He had put together a live band for the evening,
0:02:02 which I was definitely looking forward to. I love Luis and his music, and he has a network of
0:02:09 musicians that is amazing. Now, I’m not going to say the mood before the show was buoyant exactly.
0:02:15 Los Angeles had, of course, been hit by those terrible fatal wildfires, and now it was cold
0:02:21 and raining hard. When I got to the theater around 4 p.m. for soundcheck, the wind was whipping.
0:02:28 It felt like a monsoon outside. Plus, there are jitters, always, with a live show. But we were
0:02:34 excited, and we were excited to have a sellout crowd. The soundcheck went fine, and then I rehearsed
0:02:42 some cues with the band. They sounded great, no problems whatsoever. I started my final prep,
0:02:47 which mostly consists of sitting somewhere alone, going over my notes. For a show like this,
0:02:53 I write a short monologue. In this case, it was about how LA and New York may look like such
0:02:58 different places, but how they have a lot in common. They’re both places where people come to
0:03:03 invent themselves or reinvent themselves. I always think the great line from E.B. White,
0:03:08 “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” I would argue the
0:03:15 same is very much true for Los Angeles. I’m going over my monologue notes, going over my notes for
0:03:22 the Ari and RJ interviews, and then Ari arrives early. He is always early. I recently heard a
0:03:26 story about a Zoom meeting that someone had with him that was supposed to start at 2.30.
0:03:34 By the time they joined at 2.30, Ari had come and gone. The meeting was over. For tonight,
0:03:39 he had promised us 40 minutes on stage, but with a heart out, he had a plane waiting to
0:03:44 take him to New York for the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary celebrations. So anyway,
0:03:50 Ari gets to the theater early. He’s backstage. He is incredibly fun and interesting to talk to,
0:03:56 a total live wire. It is true that some people are intimidated by him. He was recently voted the
0:04:04 most feared agent in Hollywood. Big surprise. Anyway, then RJ Cutler shows up. Totally different
0:04:10 energy from Ari, less ratatap, but obviously lovely. The two of them are getting along nicely,
0:04:18 which is not a bad thing for me. So I’m feeling good. Then I notice something strange. The theater
0:04:23 is quiet. By now, the doors should be open. The audience should be settling in.
0:04:28 Our pre-show playlist should be playing. I’d put this one together myself. There was some
0:04:34 Thelonious Monks and Arcade Fire, a piece from Handel’s Messiah, long story,
0:04:41 and also some music specific to tonight’s guests. For RJ, we’re playing Young Gravies Martha Stewart
0:04:47 and Ocean Eyes by Billy Eilish. RJ made a great film about Billy called The World a Little Blurry.
0:04:53 And for Ari, we’re playing Superhero by Jane’s Addiction. That was the theme song from Entourage.
0:04:59 At least we’re supposed to be playing all those songs. Instead, there is no sound coming out of
0:05:03 the speakers. And then when I look out from behind the curtain, I see there are no people in the
0:05:11 seats either. So what’s happening? It turns out that the theater’s PA system had crashed. We had
0:05:17 been told earlier that it was a new system, state of the art, but, well, I don’t know what happened.
0:05:22 The next hour was pretty chaotic. The microphones aren’t working, speakers aren’t working,
0:05:28 keyboard player can’t get any sound out of his keyboard setup. There’s a grand piano backstage.
0:05:32 We start trying to wheel it out onto the stage, but it’s missing a wheel, so that doesn’t work.
0:05:39 Meanwhile, Ari Emanuel, the most famous agent in show business, is waiting backstage.
0:05:44 What the f*** are these people doing? He’s saying. We’re getting close to showtime.
0:05:49 The theater is still empty. It turns out they didn’t want to let anyone in while they’re trying
0:05:55 to fix the PA system. As I later learned, some ticket holders were left standing outside
0:06:02 in the cold rain. Finally, they opened the doors, and people started filling the seats.
0:06:08 We still didn’t have a PA system. At some point, I take the stage to speak with the crowd, and
0:06:13 people see me. They start clapping. They think the show is starting, and I announce as loudly as
0:06:19 I can that no, the show is not starting yet. We don’t have a sound system. And then I ask people
0:06:24 in the back rows of the balcony, if they can hear me without mics, and they shout, “Yes,
0:06:30 they can.” So that’s a good sign. I mean, these old theaters were built before amplification,
0:06:36 so maybe we can pull it off without mics. Ari, meanwhile, is getting even ansier backstage.
0:06:39 He says, “Let’s just f***ing do it without mics. I can f***ing shout.”
0:06:46 So that’s the new plan. We’re going to do the show as best as we can without a PA system.
0:06:53 The band is getting ready, still no mics, still no keyboards, and I have no idea if the video clips
0:06:58 we had planned to play during the show were going to work. And then suddenly, the system
0:07:05 starts working again, at least partially. By now, it’s way past the scheduled start time. So
0:07:12 we hustle up, we wish each other good luck, and we start the show. The monologue goes pretty well.
0:07:18 And then I introduce Ari. He comes out, and we have a pretty sassy conversation. Covers everything
0:07:27 from Donald Trump to Elon Musk to open AI to the Blake Lively Justin Baldoni mess and a lot more.
0:07:35 He stays for nearly an hour. He’s a real pro and a good sport. And then I do a quick AMA and ask
0:07:40 me anything with a member of the audience named Christina. She asks me how I came up with the
0:07:48 sign off for this show. Take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too. It is a question I
0:07:54 wasn’t expecting, and I tear up as I tell the story because I started using that sign off pretty
0:08:00 early in the pandemic. My wife had been very sick with COVID, and we hadn’t been sure that she would
0:08:06 recover. But she did, and that line just came to me like when you’re writing a line to a song,
0:08:14 and it stuck. After the AMA, we bring out RJ Cutler, and he’s just great thoughtful and
0:08:19 personal. He’s telling great stories about himself and all the people he is embedded himself with
0:08:26 over the years. We play some clips from his films, and even that works out okay. So I finish up with
0:08:32 RJ. We say some thank yous, and then we say good night. The audience claps. They seem to enjoy it,
0:08:36 although I couldn’t really tell how good the show was. Live shows are always a bit of a blur,
0:08:42 but this one even more so because of the circumstances. It struck me as a bit of a miracle
0:08:47 that the show ended up happening at all. So we hang out for a little bit more at the theater,
0:08:53 and then we go to a little after party. Mostly friends and family, maybe 40, 50 folks,
0:09:00 including my daughter who just moved to LA last year after college. Honestly, she was a big reason
0:09:05 I wanted to do a show out here in the first place. So we’re eating, we’re drinking, we’re
0:09:12 laughing now about how close we came to having no show at all. And that’s when our excellent
0:09:17 editor, Ellen Frankman, comes up to me with a look on her face that I couldn’t quite figure out.
0:09:24 In retrospect, she looked really ill. She was shaky, her face was pale. So I ask her what’s wrong,
0:09:31 and she tells me that in addition to the audio failures we had earlier, there was
0:09:40 another even bigger failure. The show had not been recorded. She says, and I didn’t understand. I
0:09:47 asked her to repeat herself. She said they didn’t record the show. And I still didn’t quite understand.
0:09:54 I mean, I’ve been recording stuff for many years now. I was a musician and I used to work in all
0:10:00 kinds of studios. I was a reporter and used to record all kinds of interviews. I’ve been doing
0:10:06 this show now for 15 years. We’ve recorded thousands of studio and live interviews,
0:10:12 many other things. And not once have the people responsible for recording just failed to record it.
0:10:19 But tonight, that’s apparently what happened. I am pretty sure we did do a live show with Ari
0:10:24 Manuel and RJ Cutler and Luis Guerra’s band and Christina from the audience. But there’s no
0:10:32 recording of it. So I’m not really sure. The next several hours were even more of a blur than the
0:10:37 hour before the show. We thought about trying to partner with RJ Cutler to make a forensic
0:10:44 documentary of the show, trying to recreate it as best as we could. Some friends who had been in
0:10:49 the audience had already started sending in bits of video and audio they had recorded. At least
0:10:56 one journalist had recorded the entire Ari Emmanuel interview, but it’s iPhone on the lap
0:11:05 quality, not radio quality. So we ditched that recreation idea. For some reason, I wasn’t angry.
0:11:12 I was just flabbergasted. It was a new feeling, a new experience. I woke up the next morning,
0:11:18 still more confused than anything. I went out to Brentwood to have breakfast with my daughter.
0:11:26 We saw Don Cheadle, whom I recognized, and Tom Holland, whom I didn’t. A friend dropped by,
0:11:31 a college friend of my daughter. He grew up in LA and he still lives there. He’s one of the people
0:11:38 who had sent us some audio files when he heard about our recording catastrophe. He’s a really
0:11:44 nice kid and the three of us had a nice breakfast. I asked him how his work was going and also where
0:11:50 he’s living now. He grew up in Pacific Palisades and his family’s house burned to the ground last
0:11:56 month. When we said goodbye to him after breakfast, he was shivering outside in a t-shirt. He hadn’t
0:12:03 even been able to get a new coat yet. As a writer, I’ve always been petrified about losing
0:12:09 anything I’ve written. I panic if the computer glitches and I lose even a sentence or two.
0:12:17 And now here, we had lost an entire show. But how does losing a show compare to losing your
0:12:24 childhood home? Thousands of homes burned to the ground during those LA fires. At least 29 people
0:12:30 died. It’ll cost billions of dollars to replace what can be replaced and a lot of it can’t. So
0:12:38 I guess I’m the lucky one. I thought back to this passage from a book called Genius and Anxiety,
0:12:45 How Jews Changed the World, 1847 and 1947 by Norman Lebrecht. The passage goes like this.
0:12:54 Moses said the law is everything. Jesus said love is everything. Marx said money is everything.
0:13:04 Freud said sex is everything. And Einstein said everything is relative. To the 900 people who
0:13:10 came out to our show that rainy night, thank you. It’s nice to know there were some witnesses.
0:13:16 And to everyone else who will never hear the show that never happened, well,
0:13:28 take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too.
0:13:40 The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything.
0:13:45 Stitcher.
0:13:48 [MUSIC PLAYING]

0:00:08 Hey there, it’s Steven Dovner with one last reminder to come see Freakonomics Radio live
0:00:11 in Los Angeles on February 13th.
0:00:17 I will be joined on stage by Ari Emanuel, the CEO of Endeavor, and RJ Cutler, the documentary
0:00:23 filmmaker who made the recent Martha Stewart doc, as well as films on Billy Eilish, Elton
0:00:27 John, and coming soon, the Dodgers Yankees World Series.
0:00:30 I think it’s going to be an amazing night, at least on paper it is, you never know what
0:00:34 happens with a live show, and that’s part of the fun.
0:00:35 So I hope you’ll join us.
0:00:41 Tickets at Freakonomics.com/LiveShows, one word, get them fast, only a few left.
0:00:46 February 13th in LA, produced in partnership with LAist and SiriusXM.
0:00:54 I’ll see you there.
0:00:58 What does a hairdresser have in common with a lawyer?
0:01:06 How about an interior designer, and a doctor, an auctioneer, and a funeral director?
0:01:10 These are not jokes, I’m sorry, I wish they were.
0:01:14 What these jobs all have in common is that they require a professional license, which
0:01:19 is administered by a licensing board that is often made up of other doctors and funeral
0:01:22 directors and hairdressers.
0:01:26 This may not be something you’ve ever thought about, and I wouldn’t blame you.
0:01:30 It’s one of those things a friend of mine calls a meagotopic, meagot standing for it,
0:01:32 my eyes glaze over.
0:01:39 But when you think about how our economy works, these labor licensing rules are pretty important.
0:01:44 It is the most important regulatory institution we have in labor.
0:01:48 Rebecca Allensworth is a law professor at Vanderbilt University, and she’s written a
0:01:51 book about professional licensing.
0:01:56 The Americans like to think of our economy as open and dynamic.
0:02:02 Allensworth shows that in many ways it’s not, and that these licensing boards help too many
0:02:07 bad actors stay in their professions and keep too many good ones out.
0:02:11 And that’s why she called her book The Licensing Racket.
0:02:16 Professional licensing is too onerous for certain professions, and it just makes the barriers
0:02:22 too high, it keeps people out, and the investment in what you’re getting for that regulation
0:02:24 is not worth it.
0:02:30 And then, for the professions that are left, medicine, nursing, law, now we need something
0:02:31 like a licensing board.
0:02:34 Only what we have is terrible.
0:02:37 By the way, a working title for the book was “Board to Death.”
0:02:38 [laughter]
0:02:39 BOARD, presumably.
0:02:40 Yeah.
0:02:42 So, it had three problems.
0:02:44 One, it was dorky word play.
0:02:49 Two, there was this problem that maybe I was over-claiming by talking about death in the
0:02:51 title of a book about licensing.
0:02:54 And then the other one, of course, being that it sounded like the book was going to be boring.
0:03:00 But the over-claiming point, you know, I do think that it’s dangerous, literally, in
0:03:05 the sense that there’s a lot of doctors and lawyers out there who are just plain dangerous.
0:03:12 And we give them a lot of trust and a lot of power as professionals.
0:03:16 And 20 percent of the American workforce is subject to professional licensing.
0:03:21 The system is sanctioned by state governments across the country, and it has been expanding
0:03:22 like crazy.
0:03:28 Today, in an episode of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, how much licensing is too much?
0:03:32 And where has this system gone especially wrong?
0:03:39 80 percent have a history of major discipline, often for over-prescribing, for malpractice,
0:03:41 for sex with patients.
0:03:43 The racket is real.
0:04:00 The solution, that’s the hard part, but we’ll get into all that starting now.
0:04:06 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with
0:04:17 your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:04:22 At Vanderbilt Law School, Rebecca Allensworth teaches contracts and antitrust law.
0:04:27 Those are pretty standard law school topics, but when she was starting out, she got obsessed
0:04:33 with a topic that very few legal scholars, really few scholars from any discipline, have
0:04:34 studied closely.
0:04:36 Professional licensing boards.
0:04:39 Let’s start by defining some terms.
0:04:44 A licensing board is a regulatory body that’s ostensibly part of the state that decides
0:04:49 who can enter a profession, what qualifications they’re supposed to have, and then also whether
0:04:54 somebody has done something that deserves a revocation of their license or a restriction
0:04:55 on their license.
0:05:01 It’s created by a state statute, but these boards are mostly made up of members of the
0:05:02 profession.
0:05:07 People who are working full-time as doctors, respiratory therapists, hairdressers, take
0:05:12 a couple days off a year to serve on this board and moonlight as their own regulators.
0:05:13 Okay.
0:05:15 So that’s what a licensing board is.
0:05:16 What is it not?
0:05:19 Well, it’s not really a governmental agency.
0:05:24 I don’t think that it’s made up of people who have the public good in mind.
0:05:30 They may think they do, but it really is more like a professional association, a group of
0:05:35 like-minded professionals who are looking out for the interests of the profession.
0:05:39 Early on in her research, Allensworth did what you would expect a legal scholar to do.
0:05:43 She read everything she could find about professional licensing.
0:05:47 She sifted through legal databases to try to understand first the broad strokes of the
0:05:50 system and then the nuances.
0:05:55 She checked out the economics literature on licensing, and she worked all of this into
0:05:58 a critique that she was starting to build.
0:06:00 Before long, her work was being cited by the Supreme Court.
0:06:05 She was invited to speak in Congress and in the Obama White House.
0:06:09 At this point, her critique was legalistic and theoretical.
0:06:14 She’d never actually attended a meeting of a licensing board, but when she did that,
0:06:16 the obsession deepened.
0:06:18 I went to the first licensing board and I was so shocked.
0:06:22 I have a friend who’s a journalist, and I was like, “Someone should write an investigative
0:06:24 journalism piece about this.”
0:06:29 I kind of meant her, and then as I was saying it out loud, I was like, “Yes, someone.
0:06:31 Maybe like me.”
0:06:35 Allensworth wound up embedding herself for four years in the licensing system of Tennessee
0:06:37 where she lives.
0:06:39 She attended many board meetings.
0:06:44 She interviewed more than 180 people covering 28 professions.
0:06:48 She started writing some journalism on the subject, and now she has published her book,
0:06:54 The Licensing Racket, How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work and Why It Goes Wrong.
0:06:58 The minute you start reading, you can see why she wanted to call the book “Board to
0:06:59 Death.”
0:07:01 It’s so time-consuming.
0:07:02 Sitting there, you don’t know what you’re going to find.
0:07:04 You have to sift through all of it.
0:07:05 You have to make these relationships.
0:07:09 You have to spend enough hours in that room that the people on the board know who you
0:07:10 are.
0:07:14 They know you’re going to put in the time to understand what they do, and then you have
0:07:17 to say yes to everything.
0:07:19 You have to talk to everyone.
0:07:23 And that’s how Rebecca Allensworth came to understand how the licensing system works.
0:07:27 As she describes it, the path to licensing usually starts small.
0:07:32 Members of a profession, often backed by a professional association, will approach a
0:07:36 state legislature with a proposal for licensure.
0:07:42 These proposals, known as practice acts, set the scope and entry requirements and ethics
0:07:44 rules for a given profession.
0:07:50 Once a profession secures its initial licensing law, it gains control of the regulatory board
0:07:51 that oversees it.
0:07:59 Today, there are around 300 licensed professions in the U.S. regulated by around 2,000 licensing
0:08:00 boards across the country.
0:08:03 How did all this get started?
0:08:06 Some of the first licensees were physicians.
0:08:11 Licensing started out with medicine in the late 19th century, and it was limited to the
0:08:14 learned professions so-called.
0:08:19 Until about the ’70s, since then it’s just been a straight line up the number of licensed
0:08:23 professions and the people covered by professional licenses.
0:08:28 This idea of belonging and meaning and prestige plays a big role because people started to
0:08:31 look around and say, “Our work matters.
0:08:34 Our work is just as important as this licensed profession.
0:08:38 Therefore, we need to make sure that we get a licensing law for ourselves.”
0:08:42 I’ll give you an example, right about the time that people were starting to confront
0:08:48 the idea of alcoholism in the ’70s and ’80s, there became a shortage of therapists that
0:08:53 could help you overcome your addiction, and so AA became a big thing.
0:08:58 Then these AA group leaders wanted to have a little bit more training and professionalism.
0:09:02 They wanted to become therapists themselves, and so there was a new profession called alcohol
0:09:04 and drug abuse counselors.
0:09:07 The idea was that it was going to be a relatively easy license to get, and it was going to increase
0:09:10 access to care.
0:09:14 Over the years, this profession looks around and says, “What we do is just as important
0:09:15 as any other therapist.
0:09:17 In some ways, it’s even more important.
0:09:18 Overdose risk is really high.
0:09:20 This is life or death.
0:09:22 We need the same level of licensure.”
0:09:28 It just got ratcheted up to now to where it takes more hours of practice to be an alcohol
0:09:34 and drug abuse counselor, like internship type hours, than it does to become a physician.
0:09:35 Okay.
0:09:39 All the licensed professions you write about have boards, and earlier you said that the
0:09:41 board situation is terrible.
0:09:43 Why is it terrible?
0:09:48 Because of self-regulation because it’s dominated by members of the profession that may want
0:09:53 to look out for the public, but are much more seasoned in looking out for the profession.
0:09:57 The policing and disciplinary functions are just not performed well.
0:10:00 Yes, but also the red tape.
0:10:04 These boards are responsible not only for disciplining and policing their professions,
0:10:08 but also deciding how high are those barriers to entry, who’s going to get over it, whose
0:10:12 criminal record is too bad, and they take it too far.
0:10:16 And then in the disciplinary side, they abandon public protection.
0:10:19 Here’s a sentence from the book “Jacket” that I particularly love.
0:10:24 “When Rebecca Allensworth began attending board meetings, she discovered a thicket of
0:10:27 self-dealing and ineptitude.”
0:10:29 The self-dealing we can get to later.
0:10:31 Let me hear a favorite example of ineptitude.
0:10:37 The failure of medical boards to be able to tell when somebody is lying to them may be
0:10:40 one of the most inept things I had to watch.
0:10:44 So it’s really interesting reading about all the reasons for that and all the ways in which
0:10:48 a licensing board, even if well-intentioned, is underpowered.
0:10:52 That would seem to be most prominent in medical boards, right?
0:10:54 It’s also a problem in law.
0:10:57 The argument is you have to know the profession, you have to know everything about it to regulate
0:10:59 it, and that’s the expertise they’re looking for.
0:11:03 But then they miss what I would say is even more important expertise, which is the regulatory
0:11:05 expertise.
0:11:10 You write that licensing boards, quote, “combine the most dangerous features of a professional
0:11:14 association,” and I have to say, I’d never really thought about professional associations
0:11:15 as dangerous before.
0:11:20 And the government agency, boards have all the interests and incentives of a private
0:11:24 club and the police power of the state to back them up.
0:11:27 When I first read that, I was sure that you were overstating your case.
0:11:30 By the time I finished your book, I was pretty certain that you weren’t.
0:11:38 But if I read that out of context, I might take you for some kind of deep state conspiracist.
0:11:43 Maybe you are, but can you give me a sense of why you’ve got such a harsh indictment
0:11:44 in that sentence?
0:11:48 First of all, I actually love the deep state, and that’s what I want to bring to licensing.
0:11:51 I want the bureaucrats doing this.
0:11:56 The problem with the way licensing is done is that full-time employees of the state are
0:11:57 given no power.
0:12:02 A lot of the forehead slapping that I saw when I watched these boards regulate was done
0:12:06 by lawyers and staff of the board who knew better than the members of the board.
0:12:12 And as far as it being dangerous, what I mean there is nobody’s watching, nobody’s sitting
0:12:16 in on these board meetings, nobody really knows what’s going on, and everyone assumes,
0:12:20 “Hey, my doctor has a license, my real estate agent has a license.
0:12:22 There must be something going on there.”
0:12:23 There’s more than that.
0:12:27 You may have a license, but there’s a lot that can be buried within a valid license
0:12:30 that is still not very good for consumers.
0:12:31 Exactly.
0:12:36 The very first board meeting I went to was about a doctor who had traded drugs for sex
0:12:38 with 11 of his patients.
0:12:42 And most of that hearing, which was the hearing in which he got his license back, was about
0:12:49 how they could impose this chaperone requirement, but not alert the patients, not tip them off
0:12:52 to the idea that there was anything wrong.
0:12:58 So there’s a lot of cover-up power that a license can give, which makes it really dangerous.
0:13:01 And in that case, who were the members of the board?
0:13:06 Did they have any relationship with the person whose license was being considered?
0:13:10 Well, no, and that’s part of why I resist the word “corruption” when I talk about
0:13:11 this problem.
0:13:16 None of the members of the board knew him personally, had any connection to him, had
0:13:19 any stake, really, in him getting his license back.
0:13:26 On the other hand, most of them were physicians, and most of them saw this person as having
0:13:27 started out somewhat like them.
0:13:30 Sure, he definitely made some very different choices.
0:13:32 He lost his way.
0:13:38 He had three different kinds of addiction, and that is something that especially physicians
0:13:45 are likely to see as having a lot of explanatory power, as capable of being rehabilitated.
0:13:47 And it’s all about second chances.
0:13:53 You cite many examples of professionals who face discipline from their licensing board,
0:13:57 but then they encounter, as you put it, a system full of second, third, and even fifth
0:13:58 chances.
0:14:05 And you write that a lot of these regulatory failures come from the most legitimate professions,
0:14:07 you call them, like medicine.
0:14:09 Talk about the Michael Lopalia story.
0:14:12 His was a story of many, many chances.
0:14:17 Lopalia was using his license to deal drugs and to make money.
0:14:21 He got in the crosshairs of the licensing board over that first incident.
0:14:24 They came to his house and they found a whole bunch of drugs that he wasn’t supposed to
0:14:28 have, some for fun, some maybe he’s selling.
0:14:29 So they put him on probation.
0:14:34 But then while he was on probation, because he had lost his DEA number, which allows him
0:14:42 to prescribe these more high dose opioids, he starts trading in Suboxone, which Suboxone,
0:14:46 even though it’s used to treat addiction, can also be abused and also has a large street
0:14:48 value.
0:14:54 So he does this, he gets caught for it while he’s already on probation with the board.
0:14:55 And then he gets another chance.
0:14:59 He gets his license back, the restrictions that they put him on after that hearing were
0:15:03 basically the same as what they had on the first one.
0:15:04 What does he do after that?
0:15:11 Well, now his prescribing is even more limited, in part because he’s facing a federal indictment
0:15:13 for this same conduct.
0:15:16 So he goes door to door doing COVID tests.
0:15:17 This is high COVID, right?
0:15:20 So he finds people who want a second opinion.
0:15:25 They want a doctor’s note that says, “I don’t have COVID” even after a positive test.
0:15:27 He does that for $50 a piece.
0:15:33 This is just somebody who has used their license not to treat patients, not in the best interest
0:15:35 of patients, but really for their own gain.
0:15:38 His license was ultimately revoked, yes?
0:15:39 That’s right.
0:15:45 So after all this, and after he was sentenced in his federal case to 18 months in prison,
0:15:50 they did revoke his license in an order that gives him another path back to licensure.
0:15:54 Would the revocation have happened if not for the federal criminal charge?
0:15:58 I am sure that it would not have.
0:16:02 And even with the federal criminal charge, it wouldn’t have happened if his story hadn’t
0:16:04 become so public.
0:16:06 And how did the story become so public?
0:16:10 I wrote about it in the New York Review of Books, and it also was featured on an episode
0:16:12 of This American Life.
0:16:16 I think there was a lot of pressure on the board to pull his license at that time.
0:16:22 In a case like that, how much evidence does a board have or seek out?
0:16:28 They’re essentially acting as a court, but in an actual court, the judge and the prosecutors
0:16:33 have a lot more opportunity, it seems, to gather evidence than these licensing boards
0:16:38 do, or maybe not more opportunity, but maybe more incentive, I hate to say.
0:16:40 That’s the big word there, incentive.
0:16:45 I don’t think there’s much legally constraining the evidence that a board could gather and
0:16:46 consider.
0:16:51 The real constraint is resources and incentives.
0:16:56 Resources meaning this is typically a volunteer board where they don’t have all these investigators
0:17:00 going out to look through all these files and talk to witnesses and so on, yes?
0:17:04 Well, they do have investigators, and these would be, in most cases, full-time employees
0:17:06 of the state.
0:17:12 But their salaries are paid through the board, and that’s all through licensing fees.
0:17:16 There’s this conflict of interest where the doctors on the board want to keep fees low
0:17:18 for the rest of the doctors.
0:17:22 Their revealed preferences are that they’re happy with minimalist regulation.
0:17:24 They don’t feel like there’s a real problem here.
0:17:30 It becomes very low information trials, and in some cases, not very adversarial.
0:17:36 What happens when misconduct is bad enough that the criminal justice system gets involved?
0:17:38 What do the licensing boards do then?
0:17:40 Do they feel chastised?
0:17:44 Are they themselves ever subject to penalty?
0:17:46 They’re not subject to penalty.
0:17:52 What I found is that the presence of some sort of criminal proceeding almost froze the
0:17:54 board in its tracks.
0:17:57 I was watching the medical board and the other prescribing boards in Tennessee because doctors
0:17:59 aren’t the only ones that can prescribe.
0:18:01 Who else can prescribe in Tennessee?
0:18:06 Nurse practitioners, physician assistants, some dentists.
0:18:09 So in this one day, there was this big, splashy arrest.
0:18:15 I think they arrested 30 Tennessee professionals for dealing opioids.
0:18:19 This is the federal government, and most of them didn’t have board discipline.
0:18:23 I had been hearing all along that the real problem with discipline is that they just
0:18:24 don’t have the information.
0:18:28 They don’t know who’s screwing up, and they don’t have resources to figure it out.
0:18:33 Well here we have a sudden, very public set of information.
0:18:37 These 30 providers might be ones that you’re going to want to at the very least temporarily
0:18:41 suspend their licenses, which you can do without much process.
0:18:45 And just meeting after meeting, nothing’s happening.
0:18:46 Nothing’s happening.
0:18:47 Meaning they were not called up to the board?
0:18:49 They were not called up.
0:18:50 It was like it never happened.
0:18:52 It was just silence.
0:18:57 So you’re saying if I’m a doctor and I’m selling opioids out of my car trunk and I get charged
0:19:02 and whether I’m convicted or not, you’re saying that then my medical licensing board,
0:19:06 which you would suspect would call me in for discipline or a hearing or something.
0:19:08 They just don’t even call them.
0:19:11 They do eventually, but it didn’t happen for a long time.
0:19:16 I asked about this, and it was like, well, we can’t really proceed against their license
0:19:18 because there’s this Fifth Amendment problem.
0:19:23 If they say anything in their licensing proceeding that’s self-incriminatory, that’ll go in their
0:19:24 criminal thing.
0:19:25 So that’s one problem.
0:19:29 Now, that doesn’t answer the question of why you don’t summarily suspend it on an emergency
0:19:30 basis.
0:19:31 You can do that without their testimony.
0:19:36 And then they’re saying, well, also it’s just an accusation.
0:19:39 And we’re about to have a whole lot more information.
0:19:44 Like there’ll be either a trial or a plea, and then we can act.
0:19:49 We’re talking now a year or two before these cases get resolved.
0:19:51 During which time they’re still seeing patients?
0:19:57 Yes, although the criminal system knows all of this and doesn’t want that to happen.
0:20:01 So the criminal judge is in the position of basically restricting their license, which
0:20:04 is what the board was supposed to be doing.
0:20:11 So now you have a totally inexpert criminal judge or federal judge saying, you can prescribe
0:20:14 this, you can’t prescribe that, which is goofy.
0:20:20 And then in the end, there was a lot more forgiveness even after the conviction than
0:20:21 I expected.
0:20:24 The idea there was, well, let’s not pile on.
0:20:26 Obviously, this doctor’s been through a lot.
0:20:30 They have a criminal conviction, a huge ding on their record.
0:20:36 And they also see how devastating a federal criminal conviction can be on your career.
0:20:37 They don’t want that for themselves.
0:20:40 They think this is punishment enough.
0:20:44 And then there’s this heartbreaking part of it that’s like, and they’ll never practice
0:20:46 on you and me anyway.
0:20:47 What does that mean?
0:20:48 Spell that out.
0:20:54 For board members, I’m giving them the most credit possible without fully realizing they’re
0:20:56 saying they’re not going to be able to take private insurance.
0:20:59 They’re not going to be able to work in the highest end hospitals.
0:21:04 They’re going to be doing things like working in prisons, working for the VA.
0:21:09 And that’s not really the set of patients that I’m super worried about protecting.
0:21:11 Those patients are lucky to get care.
0:21:14 You write about what you call these fallen professionals.
0:21:19 Louisiana is one state you looked at to see what share of physicians working in prisons
0:21:21 have a history of board discipline.
0:21:23 What are the numbers there?
0:21:24 80%.
0:21:25 80%.
0:21:31 Have a history of major discipline, often for overprescribing, for malpractice, for sex
0:21:39 with patients, the lower down in the market you go, the rate of discipline goes up.
0:21:44 In the legal profession, which is your profession, should I assume as with medicine that the
0:21:52 lower you are on the income chain, the more likely you are to have a lawyer who has been
0:21:54 disciplined and you may not even know about it?
0:21:56 We really need more data here.
0:22:00 I would love if my book could inspire more kind of empirical work here.
0:22:06 But what I do know is that as you receive discipline from your bar association, your
0:22:10 likelihood of working at a firm goes down.
0:22:16 And your likelihood of working for yourself and in particular in working in immigration,
0:22:22 injury law, and indigent defense goes up as you receive discipline from your bar.
0:22:26 Those are the three categories of clients that are particularly vulnerable.
0:22:32 You explain in the book how complaints against professional licensees can come from a variety
0:22:33 of sources.
0:22:34 They might come from law enforcement.
0:22:37 They might come from the licensing board’s own investigators.
0:22:42 But one thing that surprised me is that boards rarely hear complaints brought by consumers
0:22:43 or customers.
0:22:44 Why is that?
0:22:51 Why do licensing boards rarely hear directly from the patients of doctors, the clients
0:22:56 of lawyers, I don’t know, maybe someone whose haircut went terribly wrong?
0:23:00 The whole point of a license on a licensing board is the idea that consumers don’t really
0:23:02 know what they’re getting.
0:23:04 Let’s take restaurant food.
0:23:08 Maybe it’s contaminated and not handled properly and you might get sick.
0:23:10 And so we have some regulation for that.
0:23:14 But as far as like what’s tasty, what’s hot, what arrives on time, consumers know what
0:23:16 they’re getting.
0:23:18 Licensing exists because we don’t know what we’re getting from our professionals.
0:23:21 We don’t know what the right legal advice is.
0:23:22 We don’t know if we have cancer.
0:23:23 That’s why we go to the doctor.
0:23:29 But then when it comes to complaints, we rely on customers complaining about their professionals.
0:23:35 And then there’s this other problem, which is that sometimes the bad conduct is stuff
0:23:36 that the customers want.
0:23:38 Like selling opioids.
0:23:43 Selling opioids or getting your lawyer to help you commit a crime.
0:23:48 So it’s a very bad way of figuring out where is the misconduct.
0:23:53 And then the licensing boards figure, well, consumers don’t know what’s good practice,
0:23:55 what’s good medicine, what’s good law.
0:24:00 I think the place where you see this the most is in allegations about sex abuse.
0:24:04 All professionals are very concerned, somebody could make up a story.
0:24:08 And the boards do act as kind of a gatekeeper for complaints like that.
0:24:13 None of this should stop a regulator from actually investigating and seeing whether it’s true.
0:24:18 Or if you get two or three very similar complaints, you might think that that’s a little bit easier
0:24:19 to believe.
0:24:26 Can anyone look up licensing board disciplinary action or investigative action on their lawyer,
0:24:28 doctor, et cetera, et cetera?
0:24:32 In Tennessee, you can look them up and you can see if they’ve had discipline.
0:24:33 You can’t do it nationally.
0:24:37 So somebody could have discipline in another state and you don’t know it.
0:24:41 There’s something called the National Practitioner Data Bank that keeps information about board
0:24:43 actions and malpractice.
0:24:45 That can’t be accessed by the public.
0:24:49 So it’s pretty opaque and it’s especially opaque for lawyers.
0:24:53 Lawyers really don’t want clients finding out about their business.
0:24:56 And how do you feel about that as a lawyer yourself?
0:24:59 As a non-practicing lawyer, I disapprove.
0:25:03 Maybe if I asked my husband, he would say no, no.
0:25:04 Is he a practicing lawyer?
0:25:05 He is.
0:25:06 He is.
0:25:10 He has shared with me the professional perspective sometimes of like, well, you know, a lot of
0:25:14 people complain about a lot of BS and, you know, I don’t know if I want people knowing
0:25:17 about every complaint against me.
0:25:18 That’s an understandable perspective.
0:25:24 If I just don’t know that we want to have that perspective, have the final say in regulation.
0:25:29 Remember, Rebecca Allensworth believes that the licensing racket, as she calls it, has
0:25:31 two main flaws.
0:25:35 It protects bad actors, which is what we’ve been hearing about so far, but also that it
0:25:40 keeps too many good people out of the occupations they would like to join.
0:25:41 So what does this do?
0:25:44 It kind of gives a leg up to people who already have a leg up in life.
0:25:46 That’s coming up after the break.
0:25:47 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:25:48 This is Free Economics Radio.
0:26:00 We’ll be right back.
0:26:05 The legal scholar Rebecca Allensworth spent years investigating the power, reach, and
0:26:07 shortcomings of professional licensing boards.
0:26:11 Here’s how she puts it in her book, The Licensing Racket.
0:26:16 When it came to barriers to entry and restrictions on practice, boards went too far.
0:26:21 And it came to disciplining dangerous providers that didn’t go nearly far enough.
0:26:25 Before the break, Allensworth told us about the disciplining problem.
0:26:30 But she argues that the lockout effect of professional licensing is also damaging.
0:26:35 We license way too many professions, so we need to just get rid of licensing for many
0:26:36 professions.
0:26:41 When you look across the labor force in the US, you say that roughly one in five workers
0:26:44 in America do a job that requires a license.
0:26:48 What do you think is the appropriate share of workers?
0:26:50 Should it be a third of that?
0:26:51 Should it be a tenth of that?
0:26:54 I would say a third to a half.
0:26:56 The beauty professions are quite big.
0:27:02 A lot of the housing and trade ones, plumbing and electricians, I think are bigger.
0:27:07 The medical and legal professions, how big are they as a part of the whole workforce?
0:27:08 Really big.
0:27:13 About two thirds of the 20% are in the healthcare professions.
0:27:17 Nurses are totally dwarfed by nurses.
0:27:22 And I think that there’s a significant number of professionals that have to have some sort
0:27:26 of license as a nurse that maybe don’t need to be licensed.
0:27:27 So you’ve got Allens.
0:27:29 I think they should be licensed.
0:27:31 Nurse practitioners, they should be licensed.
0:27:36 But licensed practical nurses is a lot of professions within professions that we lump
0:27:37 in there.
0:27:39 They’d have to change their name, though, wouldn’t they?
0:27:41 They really would, yeah.
0:27:43 Unlicensed practical nurses.
0:27:45 Everybody wants to see that, nurse.
0:27:49 My goal here is not to write a book that says this is what should be licensed.
0:27:50 This is what shouldn’t be.
0:27:55 But I did want to provide some guideposts for how you would make that determination.
0:28:00 You write that professional licensing is, quote, an especially onerous form of regulation
0:28:06 erecting high financial and educational barriers and that it therefore has a big effect on,
0:28:10 quote, equality, public health, the economy and the American dream.
0:28:11 So that’s a lot.
0:28:13 Oh, I can defend it all.
0:28:16 Let’s start with the American dream.
0:28:18 Home ownership used to be the American dream.
0:28:20 That used to be the way that you knew you’d made it.
0:28:24 I think there’s a way in which a professional license has taken over that role.
0:28:29 That’s how you know you really are accepted in the society if you have the state imprimatur
0:28:31 on the work that you do.
0:28:35 You see this a lot in the discourse of people who are trying to get new licenses.
0:28:37 They say, our work is important.
0:28:39 Our work is dangerous.
0:28:40 Our work is valuable.
0:28:42 And we don’t have a license.
0:28:44 We should have that kind of status.
0:28:45 Okay.
0:28:48 So that’s how licensing hurts the American dream.
0:28:52 How about the other categories, the economy, public health, equality?
0:28:57 It impacts the economy because it is the most important regulatory institution we have in
0:28:58 labor.
0:29:04 There’s more people who are subject to professional licensing than are in unions and are affected
0:29:10 by the minimum wage combined, 20% of the American workforce, tens of millions of workers.
0:29:14 So we know that it raises prices and creates scarcity.
0:29:17 We spend more on health care than any other country.
0:29:22 I don’t want to oversimplify health care economics, but there is an element of a supply
0:29:27 and demand problem where prices go up because supply is so low.
0:29:31 Another way of saying the same thing is that it is very expensive to go to medical school.
0:29:36 It’s such a huge investment to get into the profession, and that creates a small number
0:29:39 of practitioners and then prices go up.
0:29:45 It’s a big problem for equality because you have to have typically a clean criminal record
0:29:46 to get over this barrier.
0:29:50 You have to have money to pay for a school.
0:29:55 You also have to be able to take a year or three out of the labor force to go to school.
0:29:56 So what does this do?
0:30:00 It kind of gives a leg up to people who already have a leg up in life.
0:30:03 So it exacerbates inequality, essentially.
0:30:04 Exactly.
0:30:09 I think the place you see this most is with people with criminal histories because the
0:30:12 one thing you need when you get out of prison is a job.
0:30:16 That is probably the single most important determinant for how the rest of your life
0:30:17 will go.
0:30:24 In a system where a huge chunk of jobs are licensed, you have to overcome the idea that
0:30:26 you’ve got a ding on your criminal record.
0:30:31 There’s no real nexus between the idea that you committed a crime and this licensed profession
0:30:32 that you’re doing.
0:30:37 I saw a dental assistant get a really hard time about her criminal record in front of
0:30:38 the dental board.
0:30:42 It’s very unclear to me what her driver’s license charges had to do with being a dental
0:30:43 assistant.
0:30:51 But advocates of licensing argue that licensing can help raise wages for lower education or
0:30:57 low income workers, especially minorities, by providing a better path to economic sustainability
0:31:00 because they are in a licensed profession.
0:31:02 How much sympathy do you have for that argument?
0:31:03 Not a lot.
0:31:07 The reason why those wages are higher and the reason why there’s this path is because
0:31:10 of the people who are left out of it.
0:31:13 That’s the source of the benefit.
0:31:18 It’s not enough to say that this particular minority group or this particular disadvantaged
0:31:22 set of people get a particular benefit out of licensing if the way that they’re getting
0:31:26 that benefit is by excluding other members from that same group.
0:31:31 Taking all licensed professions in the US, which ones do you think clearly don’t need
0:31:32 licensing?
0:31:39 Well, I think the hair professions are not right for professional licensing.
0:31:44 I’m laughing only because there aren’t that many people in the world making the arguments
0:31:48 that you’re making today about the licensing racket, but it seems that every person that
0:31:52 does make the argument uses hair cutting and hair styling as an example.
0:31:53 Why is that?
0:31:58 The reason why hair is such an attractive example is because it’s just so extreme.
0:32:01 It takes more classroom hours than to go to law school.
0:32:02 No.
0:32:03 Come on.
0:32:04 Yeah, 1,500 hours.
0:32:05 I’ve done the math.
0:32:06 My students, I teach at a law school.
0:32:09 My students have to be in class for 1,200 hours.
0:32:13 What happens during 1,500 hours of hair styling training?
0:32:15 What happens during that time?
0:32:16 Is it just an apprenticeship, essentially?
0:32:20 There’s a fair amount of books studying, which is actually a big problem because a lot of
0:32:27 people who want to cut hair aren’t capable of or interested in the book-based exam studying
0:32:29 that comes along with the professional system.
0:32:34 A lot of people don’t go to hair school because they think that they won’t succeed, even though
0:32:42 they could be perfectly capable hair cutters.
0:32:46 In many of the occupations that Ellen’sworth looked into, there were English-only written
0:32:50 tests that worked to exclude non-native speakers.
0:32:55 And while tests and training are designed to improve the quality of services offered
0:33:01 by a profession, the evidence is mixed to put it generously.
0:33:06 During her research, Ellen’sworth found that licensing boards put far more energy into enforcing
0:33:10 their own requirements than protecting the public.
0:33:14 Consider the board in Tennessee that licenses alarm systems contractors.
0:33:19 Ellen’sworth found them, quote, “ten times more likely to take action in a case alleging
0:33:25 unlicensed practice than one complaining about service quality or safety.”
0:33:27 And then there are the licensing turf wars.
0:33:30 This is a major source of power for the boards.
0:33:35 In many states, including in Tennessee, nurse practitioners, for example, must be supervised
0:33:37 by physicians.
0:33:42 And the terms of that supervision are set by the boards, and they decide how many nurses
0:33:47 you can supervise, what kind of intensity the supervision is.
0:33:50 This is a huge problem for access to care.
0:33:55 Nurse practitioners can do a ton of medical care that we really desperately need in this
0:33:58 country, especially primary care.
0:34:03 And if we were to allow them to practice to the full extent of their training, we would
0:34:06 have a lot more provision of that care.
0:34:09 Doctors take the attitude that if you want to practice medicine, go to medical school.
0:34:13 What’s a little funny about this is they will say, “It’s really important that the public
0:34:15 get the highest possible quality care.
0:34:17 We don’t want to cut any corners.
0:34:21 We don’t want to send anyone to a nurse practitioner if a doctor could have done a better job.”
0:34:26 They’ll say that in that instance, and then turn around in the disciplinary side and say,
0:34:30 “Well, any doctor is better than no doctor, and so I’m going to let this guy keep his
0:34:33 license so he can go on to work at a prison.”
0:34:38 Let this guy keep his license in part because there just aren’t enough doctors to go around.
0:34:39 Exactly.
0:34:44 But isn’t the licensing board or the AMA responsible for the supply of doctors?
0:34:45 Exactly.
0:34:50 So on the one side, it’s like we need to have the highest possible standards, which of course
0:34:52 create shortages.
0:34:56 Turf wars are a big part of that, and the failure to use nurse practitioners and physician
0:34:59 assistants to their maximum level is a big part of that.
0:35:02 Then they turn around with the scarcity and say, “Well, now we have scarcity, so we have
0:35:06 to let this doctor that’s at best questionable stay in the profession.”
0:35:07 Yeah.
0:35:10 It’s a little bit like being the firefighters who set the fire in order to put the fire out
0:35:12 to prove your value.
0:35:13 Yes.
0:35:14 Yes, it is.
0:35:18 Talk about how licensing affected the medical response to COVID.
0:35:24 Early in COVID, we had this severe shortage, especially of nurses, but of all medical professionals.
0:35:27 That made for a higher death rate.
0:35:31 It brought the whole system to its knees and burnt out a lot of medical professionals who
0:35:34 then left the profession.
0:35:39 I think that’s a big part of the story because licensing holds down the number of practitioners.
0:35:44 Part of the solution was, “Okay, well, we got here because we have state by state licensure.
0:35:46 Let’s just get rid of that for now.
0:35:47 If you have a license anywhere, you can travel.”
0:35:49 Let’s seem to work at first.
0:35:51 All these people signed up for it.
0:35:55 They tried to come to New York, but the regulatory apparatus of these boards is so small and so
0:35:59 underfunded that they just couldn’t actually process all these people.
0:36:05 The more we talk, the more it seems that states are ceding a lot of regulatory power to these
0:36:06 boards.
0:36:11 It reminds me of an argument made by a political scientist I know about how Congress has ceded
0:36:16 a lot of its legislative authority to the executive branch because it’s so time-consuming
0:36:18 to make legislation.
0:36:22 They pass on things and let the president sign an executive order, then it might get
0:36:26 turned over after the next election, but at least they got something done.
0:36:33 It feels here like states and state regulators would like these professions to be capably
0:36:38 regulated, but because it’s so difficult, time-consuming, confusing, etc., they delegate
0:36:41 that responsibility to these boards.
0:36:42 Is that unfair?
0:36:43 Is that about right?
0:36:45 That’s exactly right.
0:36:50 It’s even worse than the delegation between legislature and the executive because all
0:36:53 the regulation by these boards is paid for by the licensing fee.
0:36:56 It’s actually kind of free to the legislature.
0:36:59 For example, art therapists are now licensed in Tennessee.
0:37:02 The fiscal report on it is going to come back zero, which they love.
0:37:08 My point is you kind of get what you pay for, but it is a huge capitulation to the profession.
0:37:13 You might call it a dereliction of duty.
0:37:17 As I said earlier, Allen’sworth is one of a relatively small number of academics who
0:37:21 have looked into occupational and professional licensing.
0:37:25 One of the most prominent is Morris Kleiner, an economist at the University of Minnesota,
0:37:29 whose work has inspired and influenced Allen’sworth.
0:37:33 Kleiner found that professional licensing adds a 10 percent premium to the price of
0:37:39 these services, representing an estimated $250 billion in annual cost to consumers.
0:37:44 The economists Peter Blair and Bobby Chung found that licensing reduces the number of
0:37:49 providers in a given profession by 17 to 27 percent.
0:37:54 And none of this is taking into account the immeasurable but massive costs of mishandled
0:37:59 allegations of sexual abuse, improper prescribing and so on.
0:38:02 After the break, how about some solutions?
0:38:03 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:38:18 This is Freakonomics Radio, we’ll be right back.
0:38:23 Rebecca Allen’sworth’s main argument is that occupational licensing inflicts all sorts of
0:38:27 costs on the American workforce and on consumers.
0:38:31 She thinks that many occupations should not require licensing at all.
0:38:36 But how about medicine and law and the other professions where she thinks licensing does
0:38:37 make sense?
0:38:41 I asked her in those cases, how should it be done differently?
0:38:45 It should be bureaucratic, it should actually be governmental, it should be overseen better
0:38:50 by the legislature and it should be made up of deciders that are not on Monday working
0:38:55 at a licensing board and then on Tuesday through Friday working in that profession where they
0:38:58 stand to gain the most from this bad regulation.
0:39:04 You do talk about federal licensing or eliminating boards entirely in favor of state agencies.
0:39:06 What do you see as the trade-offs involved?
0:39:10 I want to see more governmental involvement in these boards.
0:39:12 There’s two ways you could do this.
0:39:15 One would be to have the board be advisory to a decision maker.
0:39:22 This is basically how we do burial services, which is people who can cremate bodies and
0:39:24 who operate graveyards.
0:39:29 There’s a bureaucrat who’s in charge of that program and you see much more reasonable regulation
0:39:35 there than you do for funeral directors, which has a board dominated by funeral directors.
0:39:39 You could vest the decision-making power in a full-time regulator or you could make the
0:39:44 boards more or less the way they are now but change their composition so that only a minority
0:39:47 of members of the board are from that profession.
0:39:51 If we did that, I’d like to see the other seats go not to randos, which is the way we
0:39:57 do it now, but rather people who have a stake in that profession from some other perspective,
0:40:03 you know, patient advocates or even I daresay a professor who has some academic understanding
0:40:04 of the problem.
0:40:07 But what about the upsides of licensing?
0:40:12 I know that you say that the priorities of licensing boards should be protecting the consumer
0:40:14 and you argue that they just don’t do a very good job of that.
0:40:20 On the other hand, if I hire, let’s say, an electrician, don’t I take a lot of comfort
0:40:25 in knowing that they’ve spent a fair amount of time on education and training and compliance?
0:40:30 That’s the argument for licensure and there’s a lot of work where we can’t reduce it to
0:40:31 a code, right?
0:40:35 We can’t say that this is how you diagnose cancer.
0:40:39 You can’t put it in a rule that you can easily apply and that’s where we need a license.
0:40:43 We say you have to go to school, you have to pass this test, you have to stay up to date
0:40:47 and we just hope that if you do all those things that you’ll develop the professional
0:40:51 judgment where you can make those difficult decisions.
0:40:53 Electrician, I don’t know, it’s kind of on the line.
0:40:57 We do have building codes, we do have rules about what goes where and I’m open to the
0:41:02 idea that those are sufficient, that there’s things you can and can’t do with electricity
0:41:07 and maybe you don’t have to have elaborate education and judgment or maybe you do and
0:41:11 I’m wrong about electricians but that’s the point, going to childcare.
0:41:16 At my kid’s daycare, the people working there were not licensed but of course they had background
0:41:21 checks and they were subject to rules like you put babies to sleep on their back.
0:41:24 When you feed them, they have to be sitting in a high chair to avoid asphyxiation.
0:41:29 Those are reasonable, good rules that we should make people follow when they’re taking care
0:41:35 of children that protect the public without that real expense of the license.
0:41:42 You mentioned so many cases of sexual abuse in the medical sphere as a reason for discipline.
0:41:47 It makes me wonder if a lot of these occupations, you are essentially putting yourself in a position
0:41:50 of trust or vulnerability with another person.
0:41:56 I wonder if a lot of the licensing is meant to just prevent or to diminish the possibility
0:42:02 of that kind of sexual abuse or bad power dynamics or am I being too generous toward
0:42:05 these licensing bodies?
0:42:08 Too generous, these arguments are made.
0:42:13 On the other hand, I have something in my basement, I believe some critter, so I called
0:42:15 a trapper, which apparently is a thing.
0:42:19 He came to my house and we were alone and he’s not licensed.
0:42:20 He was lovely.
0:42:23 That’s just one way of saying that there’s all kinds of strangers that I led into my
0:42:27 house to help me take care of stuff all the time.
0:42:28 Some subset of them are licensed.
0:42:32 Now that I know what boards are doing, I know that they’re not taking care to make sure that
0:42:37 that person isn’t scummy or scary, and then the big example is babysitters.
0:42:43 You could not imagine a more vulnerable job as somebody who’s going to wash your child.
0:42:48 It is a job for which we want to hire somebody we trust and we do, but it is not necessary
0:42:52 for the government to say you can or cannot be alone with a child.
0:42:55 It’s something that we handle through other means.
0:42:57 You’re in favor of babysitters not being licensed.
0:42:58 Of course.
0:42:59 It would never work.
0:43:04 It would raise prices so high for something that already is a crippling expense.
0:43:08 It would also exclude a big part of the labor force because it’d be hard to get a license
0:43:09 if you’re 13.
0:43:10 Yeah.
0:43:13 I don’t know what the cutoff would be for the babysitter license.
0:43:17 When you mention babysitters, it makes me wonder, what about having children becoming
0:43:18 a parent?
0:43:21 Does it strike you as odd that cutting hair requires a license in all that training, but
0:43:26 that becoming a parent, you just need a set of reproductive organs that are working.
0:43:27 There’s no barriers.
0:43:31 There’s no exhibit of competence or financial soundness or anything.
0:43:35 I’ve only thought about this in my personal life, not in my professional life.
0:43:41 I do often feel unqualified for the job that I have of raising my two kids.
0:43:43 Would a licensing procedure have helped?
0:43:46 Would a mandatory training session have helped?
0:43:51 If everyone of us is really honest, we know that we would not get a parenting license and
0:43:53 we would have it taken away if we did.
0:43:55 Screw ups are just too frequent.
0:44:00 Maybe the point here is like, there’s other ways to protect people from bad things happening
0:44:06 than licenses, but you can always make some kind of theoretical argument that this license
0:44:11 is going to help one patient or this license is going to help prevent this one problem
0:44:12 that happened once.
0:44:16 When there isn’t a good organized argument on the other side, which often there isn’t
0:44:21 in these state debates, they just figure it’s a win-win.
0:44:25 The public gets something, the profession gets something, and it costs the state nothing.
0:44:29 Where do you see this kind of professional licensing and regulation done well?
0:44:32 Not in any single state.
0:44:37 The most positive example is the way that medicine is regulated in the UK, where they
0:44:42 have more of a separation between the regulatory side and the disciplinary side.
0:44:46 Both bodies are not dominated by physicians.
0:44:48 There’s physician input, but it’s not dominated.
0:44:50 Other voices at the table.
0:44:54 They have something there called the medical professional tribunal service, and how does
0:44:55 that work?
0:44:59 Typically, when you get a panel to hear your case, you have three people, usually one of
0:45:01 them is a physician.
0:45:05 One’s a lawyer, and then the third, the statute doesn’t say what they have to be doing, but
0:45:13 all of them are paid a salary to actually do this regulating work and have training,
0:45:17 guidelines, and expertise that American boards don’t have.
0:45:23 There’s no plea bargaining, so everything is all out in the open, and there’s more oversight
0:45:26 within the legislative body.
0:45:27 That sounds promising.
0:45:29 It also sounds like it could take forever.
0:45:36 I did, with a colleague, look at about five years worth of cases from the UK and Tennessee,
0:45:39 and I don’t remember thinking that the UK ones go any slower.
0:45:41 The American system is quite slow.
0:45:42 What about outcomes?
0:45:49 Is that system more likely to produce effective monitoring of professionals, including discipline?
0:45:55 Yeah. We did a head-to-head comparison between doctors in America and in the UK engaged in
0:46:02 inappropriate sex with patients and overprescribing, and we found a really big difference in how
0:46:07 many were struck from the registry, which is the term in the UK for losing your license
0:46:08 than in Tennessee.
0:46:10 It would seem that, yes, the outcomes are different.
0:46:15 However, remember, they have socialized medicine, they have the NHS, it’s really apples and
0:46:17 oranges.
0:46:22 We can’t say confidently that the process is what leads to this different outcome, but
0:46:25 we see a better process and we see more reasonable outcomes.
0:46:28 You can connect those dots.
0:46:35 Telemedicine spiked during COVID, but there was also a state-based medical licensing issue
0:46:42 there, which is you could only treat a patient, even electronically, in your own state.
0:46:46 This is something we talked about recently on the show with Zika Manual.
0:46:51 He said we just need to get to the next level, to national licensure, but states are jealous
0:46:52 of their turf.
0:46:57 Do you see that as a viable solution in a case like that, national licensure?
0:46:58 In theory, yes, of course.
0:47:02 There’s not materially different needs of a patient in one state versus another state.
0:47:08 It would make moving between states and not just electronically but physically much easier.
0:47:13 It would also create a single thing for us to study so that we could understand how this
0:47:16 system works rather than doing it state by state.
0:47:18 In practice, there’s two problems with it.
0:47:22 One, if we did that, it would be a race to the bottom.
0:47:27 We would get the requirements of the most onerous state because, as you said, no state is going
0:47:29 to give up what they’ve got.
0:47:33 There’s a physician’s compact, which is like an agreement among states to recognize each
0:47:35 other’s licenses.
0:47:41 The terms of that compact are essentially the most onerous state.
0:47:44 I worry if we did a national license that it would be particularly onerous.
0:47:49 The other reason why it won’t happen is because of the AMA or the ABA or whatever profession
0:47:55 we’re talking about is going to fight tooth and nail to maintain the state by state system.
0:47:56 Because why?
0:47:57 What’s in it for them?
0:48:01 It’s easier for them to capture these smaller boards.
0:48:07 I think also the full ability to practice between states increases competition.
0:48:12 If you can just phone a doctor in Ohio from Tennessee, that’s going to create a lot more
0:48:15 competition for physicians in Tennessee.
0:48:17 What’s wrong with competition?
0:48:18 Economists love competition.
0:48:21 Some governments proclaim to love competition.
0:48:26 It creates better quality and cost for most consumers.
0:48:29 In what way am I totally wrong when I say that?
0:48:32 Well, I’m an antitrust professor, so I also love competition.
0:48:35 But competition doesn’t solve all problems.
0:48:39 That’s where I think the licensing board really has a role to play and regulation has a role
0:48:41 to play in many professions.
0:48:45 It’s not all about just what the customer wants when it comes to the professions.
0:48:47 It’s also not clear what they’re getting.
0:48:50 There’s an information asymmetry for which a license can really help.
0:48:56 The other point is competition is not going to solve problems like opioid over prescribing.
0:48:59 That’s a case of giving the patient what they want.
0:49:04 How do you think your argument intersects with the new Trump administration?
0:49:10 Especially Trump himself, but mostly Elon Musk, vowed to shrink the federal government.
0:49:14 Is it possible that a so-called department of government efficiency will start pushing
0:49:17 things in the direction that you would like on the state level?
0:49:22 Well, you spent six years writing a book about this example of governmental inefficiency.
0:49:23 You get excited.
0:49:26 It’s like, “Finally, my time is coming.”
0:49:31 And it turns out that what’s underneath that is just more self-dealing.
0:49:36 It’s almost the opposite message that I’m trying to give, which is that it’s the bureaucrats
0:49:37 who know what they’re doing.
0:49:41 Yes, we need to cut through the red tape, but it’s the self-dealers and the members of the
0:49:44 profession that have created that red tape.
0:49:50 So you’re saying that the Musk-Trump version of efficiency just means unregulated versus
0:49:51 capable regulation?
0:49:57 Maybe or maybe it means unregulated when it suits Musk and regulated when it suits Musk.
0:49:59 That’s what I saw at the boards.
0:50:02 When you give somebody power over their own regulation, they’re going to be hands-off
0:50:05 when it suits them and they’re going to be hands-on when it suits them.
0:50:08 So I’m all for cutting red tape.
0:50:10 The question is, how do we cut it?
0:50:16 And I think we cannot trust people who have their own self-interest.
0:50:20 So my profession, journalism, does not require a license?
0:50:21 Oh, yes.
0:50:23 This is one of my favorite examples.
0:50:26 The legal case, obviously, is slam dunk, right?
0:50:30 You could not have a license for a journalist because of the First Amendment.
0:50:33 Maybe there are some people who are calling themselves journalists out there that we don’t
0:50:34 want doing it.
0:50:35 Oh, there are.
0:50:36 I can vouch for that.
0:50:42 At the same time, there’s systems for figuring out who are the most qualified journalists.
0:50:49 There’s journalism school, obviously who you’re employed by is a big signal of how qualified
0:50:50 you are.
0:50:54 I’m not here to defend the marketplace of ideas that we have right now in a full-throated
0:50:55 way.
0:51:01 But it’s an example of a profession that is prestigious, important, and has its own kind
0:51:06 of regulatory or at least sorting mechanism without licensing.
0:51:10 I do not think we want the government coming in and saying, “This is journalism and this
0:51:11 is not.”
0:51:14 By the way, I myself have benefited from this.
0:51:18 I’m not a journalist, but I acted like a journalist.
0:51:26 Okay, so for all the reporting you did, all the board meetings you sat in on, the conversations
0:51:32 you had, and the legal scholarship you added on top of all that, and then writing the book
0:51:37 itself, do you think your work will have any significant effect?
0:51:39 I do.
0:51:44 There’s state legislation that can maybe not solve this problem, but that can help.
0:51:46 I think that there’s some interest in that.
0:51:51 There’s a lot of headwinds from the professions, obviously, but I’m hopeful that maybe something
0:51:52 can shake loose.
0:51:56 At the very least, I think people should know what they’re up against when they’re trying
0:51:59 to get a license or when they feel locked out of a profession, or just when they’re
0:52:04 a consumer of professional services, assuming that the license is on the wall, then this
0:52:05 is fine.
0:52:10 I think that it’ll have an impact, hopefully, on everyday people who maybe think about their
0:52:15 licensed professionals a little bit differently.
0:52:19 I’d like to thank Rebecca Allensworth for helping me think about licensed professionals
0:52:21 a little bit differently.
0:52:24 This is a subject I’ve been interested in for a long time, but I was always looking
0:52:28 for the right opportunity, the right person, really, to explain it.
0:52:32 I appreciate how much legwork and brainwork Allensworth put into it.
0:52:35 Again, her book is called The Licensing Racket.
0:52:38 I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
0:52:42 Our email is radio@freakonomics.com.
0:52:45 Coming up next time on the show…
0:52:53 Rats do something to traumatize you, and I hate rats.
0:52:59 The brown rat, also known as ratus nervegicus, is one of the most reviled animals in the
0:53:00 world.
0:53:01 Why?
0:53:08 Rats are known for their ability to exploit and thrive where humans are densest.
0:53:12 It doesn’t help that they supposedly killed off half of Europe in the Black Death, so
0:53:17 most people respond to rats with disgust, fear, even anger.
0:53:22 But not everyone, they’re, in some sense, our natural city partner.
0:53:24 I certainly have a reverence for them.
0:53:26 They’re sweet and they’re smart.
0:53:29 They make great pets, honestly.
0:53:31 And that thing about the Black Death?
0:53:34 That’s the one that most people think are the right one.
0:53:35 They are wrong.
0:53:37 Very clearly, they are wrong.
0:53:41 And just wait until you hear the backstory of the film, Ratatouille.
0:53:45 Can I just say, Ratatouille is an idea, as a story, it’s an allegory.
0:53:51 We have made a three-part series that we’re thinking about calling “Sympathy for the Rat.”
0:53:53 That starts next time on the show.
0:53:55 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:53:57 And if you can, someone else too.
0:54:00 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:54:03 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app.
0:54:08 It’s also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes.
0:54:11 This episode was produced by Theo Jacobs.
0:54:15 The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouaji,
0:54:20 Eleanor Osborn, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmine Klinger,
0:54:25 Jeremy Johnston, John Schnarrs, Morgan Levy, Neil Coruth, Sarah Lilly, and Zach Lipinski.
0:54:31 Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune” by the Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:54:34 As always, thank you for listening.
0:54:35 Say the name of your book.
0:54:37 The Licensing Racket?
0:54:38 How we regulate…
0:54:39 Sorry, okay.
0:54:40 It’s a long subtitle.
0:54:41 I’m gonna have to do that one again.
0:54:42 Okay.
0:54:43 The Licensing Racket?
0:54:44 All right.
0:54:45 One more time.
0:54:46 The Licensing Racket?
0:54:49 How we decide who is allowed to work and how it goes wrong.
0:54:51 I’ve got it as why it goes wrong.
0:54:52 I know.
0:54:53 I know.
0:54:54 Yep.
0:54:55 Take four.
0:54:58 You would think that I would come here prepared to say the name of my book.
0:55:11 The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.
0:55:13 (upbeat music)
0:55:16 you

0:00:04 [MUSIC]
0:00:08 Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner, and I thought you might need a bonus episode of
0:00:10 Freakonomics Radio for the upcoming Super Bowl.
0:00:14 We recently put out a new episode about the economics of the running back
0:00:15 position in the NFL.
0:00:19 This episode, which we first published in 2023,
0:00:23 looked at NFL teams as employers.
0:00:27 We’ve updated facts and figures as necessary, although the team rankings we
0:00:30 discussed are from the 2023 report card.
0:00:34 So stick around to the end to hear what changed in 2024.
0:00:36 As always, thanks for listening.
0:00:43 [MUSIC]
0:00:47 When I say the words workplace environment, where does your mind go?
0:00:51 If you’re like most people, you might think about an environment like this.
0:00:54 Or like this.
0:00:58 Maybe even something like this.
0:01:01 Stand clear of the closing doors, please.
0:01:08 What you probably don’t think about when I say workplace environment is this.
0:01:12 [MUSIC]
0:01:18 But if you are one of the roughly 2000 men who play in the National Football League,
0:01:20 that’s your office.
0:01:23 I mean, it’s business, let’s not get it wrong, it’s business.
0:01:29 The NFL Players Association, or NFLPA, is the union that represents the players.
0:01:35 And in 2023, they conducted their first ever employee survey about workplace
0:01:36 conditions.
0:01:39 I would never have thought to ask, are there rats in your locker room?
0:01:43 And they gave letter grades to each of the league’s 32 teams.
0:01:47 This is really about, are we giving you the inputs you need to be as productive
0:01:49 as possible?
0:01:53 The NFL is the richest and most successful sports league in history.
0:01:57 Each team is worth at least $4 billion.
0:01:59 Nobody wants to be known as the cheapskate.
0:02:03 Before, when it was rumored you were the cheapskate, it was harder to prove.
0:02:05 Now there’s data.
0:02:09 And what does the data have to say?
0:02:13 Among US employees in general, job satisfaction is higher than it’s been
0:02:14 in decades.
0:02:18 How satisfied are NFL players?
0:02:22 Now, you may be saying to yourself, who cares about the workplace environment
0:02:23 of NFL players?
0:02:26 They make so much money, the environment shouldn’t matter.
0:02:31 Or you may say, pro football is so different from what I do for a living,
0:02:35 there’s no way I’m going to learn anything worthwhile from this.
0:02:40 Well, if we have done our job in making this episode, you will.
0:02:45 At the very least, with another NFL season in the books, you will learn which teams
0:02:48 got the best grades and the worst.
0:02:50 Never really heard of an F minus before.
0:03:08 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side
0:03:11 of everything with your host, Steven Dubner.
0:03:20 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:03:24 Imagine that you have just graduated from college with a degree in, say,
0:03:25 mechanical engineering.
0:03:29 And you know exactly what kind of company you want to work for.
0:03:34 And let’s say there are 32 such companies within a 100-mile radius
0:03:35 of where you want to live.
0:03:39 So which company will you end up at?
0:03:41 To a large degree, that is up to you.
0:03:43 You can apply wherever you’d like.
0:03:47 And if that company thinks you are qualified and they make you an offer,
0:03:51 you can decide whether to accept or reject the job.
0:03:55 This is not how it works in professional sports.
0:03:59 Imagine now that instead of studying mechanical engineering,
0:04:01 you went to college to play football.
0:04:04 If you are good enough to play in the National Football League,
0:04:08 or if you’re an athlete good enough to play in any of the other major American
0:04:12 sports leagues, you don’t get to choose which team you play for.
0:04:16 It’s the teams that choose the players in an annual draft.
0:04:20 Teams with the worst records the previous season typically get to pick earlier
0:04:23 in the draft and the best teams pick later.
0:04:28 In the NFL, most rookie contracts will bind you to that team for four years.
0:04:34 The top ranked players may sign huge rookie contracts with millions of dollars guaranteed.
0:04:36 But that’s just the top of the pyramid.
0:04:40 Around 50 percent of NFL players make the league minimum.
0:04:44 This year, that was a base salary of $840,000 for a rookie
0:04:47 with gradual increases for each year of service.
0:04:51 So yes, that’s a big paycheck compared to most first jobs.
0:04:56 But the average NFL career is barely three years long.
0:05:00 So a lot of players are out of the league before their rookie contract expires.
0:05:04 They are replaced by someone even younger and cheaper.
0:05:07 If you are good enough to stick around, pass that rookie contract.
0:05:11 And if you’re lucky enough to have remained healthy, those are two big ifs.
0:05:14 Then you become what is called an unrestricted free agent.
0:05:18 And you can sell your services to whichever team wants you.
0:05:23 Finally, after four years in the NFL, you have achieved the workforce freedom
0:05:26 of a newly graduated mechanical engineer.
0:05:33 At this point, you may be in for big money, five or 10, even $50 million a year.
0:05:37 And how does a free agent decide which team to play for?
0:05:43 Your agent will speak to all the interested teams, try to drive up your price
0:05:45 and help you sort through the offers.
0:05:48 There’s a lot to consider how the payout will be structured,
0:05:52 what kind of incentives and bonus clauses you can get in the contract,
0:05:56 even the occasional restrictive clause like in the recent contract,
0:06:01 the Arizona Cardinals offered to resign their star quarterback, Kyler Murray.
0:06:04 They wanted Murray to, here, I’ll read from the contract.
0:06:10 They wanted him to complete at least four hours of independent study each week.
0:06:13 In other words, they wanted to make sure he’s doing his homework,
0:06:17 studying the playbook, watching film at night, things like that.
0:06:22 Arizona was criticized for adding this clause and they ultimately removed it.
0:06:26 And Murray did sign the contract, a five-year deal that could pay out more
0:06:29 than $230 million.
0:06:34 When players get to choose their team, they usually go with the highest dollar offer.
0:06:37 But there are other factors to consider.
0:06:39 How good is the team?
0:06:41 Most players want to play for winners.
0:06:46 How good is the coaching staff and how secure if they’re in danger of getting fired?
0:06:48 You may be too.
0:06:50 You might consider the weather.
0:06:53 Are you a Miami guy or a Minnesota guy?
0:06:59 And maybe you will also consider the workplace conditions at your new club.
0:07:02 How good is the locker room and the weight room?
0:07:04 What about the food?
0:07:08 How does the team treat your family members on game day?
0:07:11 Those are the kind of questions most of us wouldn’t think to ask.
0:07:16 But Joseph Carl Treader, Jr. isn’t most people.
0:07:21 When we interviewed Treader for this episode, he was president of the NFL Players Association.
0:07:28 His tenure ended in 2024, and he was succeeded by Detroit Lions linebacker Jalen Reeves-Maven.
0:07:31 You’ll hear from him a little later in this episode.
0:07:34 I asked Treader to start with his college background.
0:07:40 I went to Cornell University and studied industrial labor relations.
0:07:44 That’s a pretty typical college and major for an NFL prospect, yes?
0:07:45 Yeah.
0:07:49 It’s not the normal pipeline to the pros and I think leading into my election, it probably
0:07:57 helped substantially because there’s not many Cornell ILR grads walking around the NFL.
0:08:01 The election, Treader mentioned, was for the union presidency.
0:08:07 He had a long successful career in the NFL, nine seasons as an offensive lineman for the
0:08:13 Green Bay Packers and the Cleveland Browns with around $45 million in career earnings.
0:08:20 He retired in 2022 at age 31 and he had two years left on his term as union president.
0:08:25 I was looking for some new projects to do, so I had a ton of time on my hands and it
0:08:27 was like, I’m going to take a stab at this.
0:08:33 This being the workplace survey of all current NFL players, which the union had been talking
0:08:34 about for years.
0:08:39 As we saw the responses start pouring in, this is a proof of concept.
0:08:40 Yeah.
0:08:41 I was shocked at the response rate.
0:08:44 I don’t know how many players got the survey and how many responded.
0:08:49 We have 2,200 active players and we had 1,300 fill out the survey, which is about 60%.
0:08:53 As we saw the numbers start pouring in, it was like, oh man, we have to do something
0:08:54 here.
0:08:58 It’s going to be like report cards, you had to ask somewhat qualitative but also quantitative
0:09:02 questions to try to figure out how to compare these franchises.
0:09:04 Give an example or two.
0:09:08 Rate your locker room one to five, but then also what would you change about your locker
0:09:09 room?
0:09:10 What’s missing in your locker room?
0:09:15 What would be in a five rated locker room and what would be in or maybe missing from
0:09:16 a one rated locker room?
0:09:19 I would never have thought to ask, are there rats in your locker room?
0:09:21 Are there physical rats in your locker room?
0:09:24 And yet that comes out in the survey because there were.
0:09:26 In Jacksonville, we should say.
0:09:27 Not everywhere.
0:09:28 Right.
0:09:32 You have to allow the players to fill you in with what’s bothering them.
0:09:36 There’s one team that doesn’t have outlets in their lockers where they can’t charge their
0:09:37 devices.
0:09:38 Who is that?
0:09:39 Cincinnati.
0:09:47 The survey was conducted online with guaranteed anonymity.
0:09:52 In our business, you’re so on razor’s edge of being cut and losing your job.
0:09:57 The idea that these owners actually think players can walk into their office and tell
0:10:00 them like, Hey, I think you’re being cheap and you’re not spending enough money on us
0:10:04 and there wouldn’t be any retribution is a little crazy to me.
0:10:08 There are some players that do and a lot of it’s the star quarterbacks who are untouchable
0:10:12 or players that have guaranteed money and feel like they’re safe and they can go in there
0:10:16 and they can try to drive change for their teammates because they’re a little more protective
0:10:17 than the average player.
0:10:20 But that was one of the reasons about making it anonymous.
0:10:27 It was allowing everybody to voice what they’ve seen without fear of retribution.
0:10:32 The survey covered eight categories, three were about the physical facilities, the locker
0:10:35 room, weight room and training room.
0:10:39 That’s where a player goes for a massage or the hot tub or to get an injury treated.
0:10:42 There was one question about nutrition.
0:10:46 How well does each team feed and hydrate the players also travel?
0:10:49 How comfortable are the airplane seats?
0:10:52 How about the hotel rooms and do you have to have a roommate?
0:10:58 The survey also asked how well the team takes care of the players families during the games.
0:11:03 Is there, for instance, a place for your mom or maybe your wife and young kids to watch
0:11:06 where they won’t get pelted by beers?
0:11:12 And finally, the survey asked about the training staff and the strength staff, but interestingly,
0:11:14 not the coaching staff.
0:11:20 I didn’t want a category that I felt could be too tracked to wins and losses.
0:11:23 I really wanted to stick to standard of care like, “Hey, where do you spend most of your
0:11:24 time?
0:11:27 The locker room, the training room, the weight room, the cafeteria, like what staff is around
0:11:28 you most of the time?
0:11:31 The training staff, the strength staff, how do you travel?
0:11:32 How do they treat your families?
0:11:36 Those are the core issues that impact their daily life.
0:11:38 And I didn’t want it to become like, “Hey, this is a good coach because we win a bunch
0:11:39 of games.”
0:11:40 That’s not telling us anything.
0:11:44 There are some coaches that have a leadership council of older players that meet once a
0:11:47 week and then acts on those recommendations.
0:11:50 And I think that’s what a good workplace looks like.
0:11:53 That was something probably 15 years ago in the NFL.
0:11:54 There wasn’t any of that.
0:11:58 It was very much, “We’re doing this because I’m the coach and I’m the boss and I say we’re
0:11:59 doing it.”
0:12:05 And now I think more and more of the younger coaches are coming in, being much more receptive
0:12:08 to hearing feedback and acting on that feedback.
0:12:12 Trader says the players union had two primary goals in running the survey and giving each
0:12:14 team letter grades.
0:12:18 The first was to give players information that could help them decide where to work if they
0:12:20 ever got that choice.
0:12:25 The second goal was to help raise the standards across each club by bringing problems out
0:12:26 into the open.
0:12:29 That’s why the union published the results.
0:12:33 We will put the link in our show notes if you want to take a look and why they graded
0:12:40 each club in all eight categories because in the NFL, turnabout is fair play.
0:12:41 We’re always measured.
0:12:43 We’re always graded.
0:12:45 They can use letter grades, number grades.
0:12:51 You play 60 plays and they’re like, “All right, you did your job on 80% of plays.”
0:12:53 That is Jalen Reeves-Maban.
0:12:58 He is a linebacker with the Detroit Lions and president of the NFL Players Association.
0:13:03 We’re judged at every step and I don’t think there’s ever really been a time where accountability
0:13:10 has gone to the teams or the ownership of like, “Hey, are you being excellent here?
0:13:12 Like, where’s your grade in this area?”
0:13:15 Reeves-Maban has been in the league since 2017.
0:13:20 He started his career with Detroit, then went to Houston for one season and when we spoke
0:13:27 with him, he was back with Detroit on a one-year contract with a base salary of $1.25 million.
0:13:34 He played well and last year he signed a two-year extension with the Lions for $7.5 million.
0:13:36 What does Detroit get in return for that salary?
0:13:42 It’s the combination of the mental aspect where every week I have to learn a new opponent,
0:13:46 I have to learn what they’re trying to do to attack me, but I also have this physical
0:13:49 aspect of I’m playing a violent game.
0:13:53 If I’m not violent, I’m probably going to get hurt, but I can’t be scared.
0:13:56 I can’t be scared to get hurt because then that’s going to show in your performance.
0:14:02 So you kind of got to have a recklessness in the sense or just a willingness to take
0:14:03 that pain.
0:14:08 That combined with the physical, the conditioning, the stamina, the energy, the persistence you
0:14:10 have to have, it’s a lot.
0:14:14 So I think it’s extremely hard, but I know that in all walks of life, people are working
0:14:15 extremely hard.
0:14:20 I have to add, too, just the media scrutiny and the fact that you’re basically on public
0:14:22 display all the time.
0:14:28 I don’t think the average person knows how heavy that feels on your shoulders.
0:14:33 You can basically determine a mood for a whole city or a whole state based off what you did
0:14:35 on Sunday in a three-hour period.
0:14:38 So there’s a lot that comes with it.
0:14:41 The NFL is a commercial juggernaut.
0:14:46 If you look at Variety’s list of the top 25 primetime TV broadcasts from last year,
0:14:50 you’ll see that 18 of those 25 were NFL games.
0:14:55 The exceptions were the Oscars, the Summer Olympics, the Grammys, the Presidential Debate,
0:14:58 the World Series, and a college football semifinal.
0:15:01 I mean, there’s so much money involved.
0:15:06 And with so much money, the league has TV deals worth more than $100 billion over roughly
0:15:07 a decade.
0:15:11 Reeves Maven says the survey findings were pretty surprising.
0:15:17 Well, there was reports of teams having a rat infestation in the locker room.
0:15:21 There’s guys who don’t get fed after practices.
0:15:23 The team was charging them for food.
0:15:28 I know sometimes these things might seem like, oh, you got enough money to pay for it, but
0:15:31 we are operating at the highest level possible.
0:15:36 They demand excellence from us, and I think that we should be demanding excellence from
0:15:37 the teams.
0:15:42 Jaycee Tredder was also surprised to learn that some players were being charged for food
0:15:44 at team facilities.
0:15:48 That was one where I had to reach out to several people to make sure I was hearing it correctly
0:15:52 of, wait, I just want to make sure for the fourth time, is this true?
0:15:58 Because that is so preposterous, and a job where what you fuel your body with is so important
0:16:02 to almost push them out of the building, to push them to fast food, to push them to poor
0:16:06 nutrition is such like a backwards way of looking at our industry.
0:16:07 It was crazy.
0:16:09 And why do you think those teams do it?
0:16:11 Is it just, it’s the way it was always done?
0:16:13 Are they really trying to save money?
0:16:14 I don’t know.
0:16:15 It was one team.
0:16:18 It was the Arizona Cardinals who made people pay.
0:16:22 There are three other teams that didn’t provide it, and I don’t think the cost they were charging
0:16:27 would pay for the meals anyways is almost like the control factor of it of, hey, just
0:16:28 know your place.
0:16:32 Can you talk about what you mean with that know your place sentiment?
0:16:38 Because I think the public sees football players as superstars, not as employees coming into
0:16:42 a workplace with bosses and needing to know their place.
0:16:43 Yeah.
0:16:46 From a union perspective, we’re negotiating for the same things that any union is, better
0:16:53 wages, better benefits, better working conditions, but there is a level of control that’s always
0:16:59 being fought after and the league, there’s a piece of them that just wants to make sure
0:17:03 that we know that they have control of us.
0:17:09 From individual teams, like you said, we are just workers and some coaches and some bosses
0:17:15 are better at working with their employees about different changes that need to be made,
0:17:20 whether it’s scheduling, whether it’s technique, whether it’s how they operate.
0:17:25 And some aren’t good, I sometimes get frustrated when we’re defined too much as just players
0:17:29 because I think it takes us away out of the real world and puts us into football world
0:17:31 and we are workers and we’re fighting for the same things.
0:17:36 And I think that’s one of our struggles as a union because of our short lifespan where
0:17:44 somebody comes into a union job and they can make sacrifices and bargain a certain way because
0:17:47 they have the opportunity to be in that job for 30, 40 years.
0:17:50 So sacrificing for today, they’re going to see the fruits of that labor and that’s not
0:17:51 always true for us.
0:17:56 So the sacrifices one group makes, they’re probably never seeing the benefits of those
0:17:57 sacrifices.
0:18:01 But when it comes to the negotiating, there is a pie out there and I think your job as
0:18:05 an individual or as a union is to get the biggest share if possible.
0:18:09 I have to say, you can really sound like an old fashioned union agitator when you need
0:18:12 to.
0:18:16 When you look at the overall results of your survey, especially the team rankings, the teams
0:18:24 that come in ranked high and the teams that come in ranked low, among the top ranked teams,
0:18:25 what do they have in common?
0:18:28 Whether it’s ownership, whether it’s an attitude.
0:18:31 The top three teams all have brand new facilities.
0:18:37 When we talk about facilities, I think sometimes the fans don’t understand how different franchises
0:18:38 work.
0:18:39 So everybody thinks of their stadiums.
0:18:43 So like the Rams and the Chargers were poorly ranked and you heard a lot of questions of
0:18:46 like, whoa, SoFi stadiums brand new, they put billions of dollars into it.
0:18:47 How is it poorly ranked?
0:18:49 That’s not where players spend their days.
0:18:51 That’s where they play for one day a week.
0:18:54 But their facilities are usually located elsewhere.
0:18:56 So some of that is just random when the survey is done.
0:18:59 So in 10 years, those facilities will be getting a little radion.
0:19:02 Whoever else has new facilities, they’ll probably rank a little bit higher because of that.
0:19:03 Yeah.
0:19:04 If teams do get new facilities, right?
0:19:10 Like some of these teams have had old facilities forever.
0:19:14 So who are the top three teams in the players union survey?
0:19:15 Not their teams.
0:19:19 Our Minnesota was number one, Miami was number two and Las Vegas was number three.
0:19:24 The owners of the Minnesota Vikings and the Miami Dolphins both made their money in real
0:19:25 estate development.
0:19:29 So it probably shouldn’t surprise us that they brought their real estate shops to their
0:19:31 football investments.
0:19:37 The big surprise, to me at least, is that some of the best teams in football rank toward
0:19:38 the bottom.
0:19:42 If you look at the winners of the past six Super Bowls, the New England Patriots, the
0:19:47 LA Rams, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the Kansas City Chiefs who won it three times,
0:19:52 none of them ranked higher than 24th out of 32 teams in 2023.
0:19:58 I asked JC Tredder if he was surprised to see so many top performing teams at the bottom
0:19:59 of his list.
0:20:00 No.
0:20:01 And that’s the thing.
0:20:05 Like having a star quarterback like Patrick Mahomes is the ultimate deodorant.
0:20:10 Whether it’s telling around them or facilities or coaching, he’s going to make everybody
0:20:13 look good because he is that freaking good as a quarterback.
0:20:17 But that doesn’t mean the offerings shouldn’t be up to snuff.
0:20:22 It shouldn’t be, hey, come here to play with Patrick Mahomes and potentially win a Super
0:20:26 Bowl, but also the facilities are going to be old and dilapidated and you have to deal
0:20:27 with that.
0:20:28 That shouldn’t be the trade-off.
0:20:29 Just pay for better facilities.
0:20:34 If you’re making so much money, the idea of making it a choice of one or the other when
0:20:37 you could just provide both doesn’t make much sense to me.
0:20:40 What do the teams at the bottom have in common?
0:20:44 Is it something as simple as they typically have older practice facilities?
0:20:49 We asked the players, do they think their owner is willing to invest money to make the
0:20:50 facilities better?
0:20:55 And I think the teams at the bottom, that number tracked being down there.
0:21:00 You don’t have to knock down walls, but are you willing to invest the money necessary
0:21:04 to make the changes necessary to fix the issues you have?
0:21:09 Like for Cincinnati, to rewire the locker room to make sure there’s outlets there is
0:21:11 not that costly.
0:21:17 For Washington, there was complaints that there’s poor drainage in the showers.
0:21:24 So the guys are literally standing in the water that’s been run off from the guy next
0:21:28 to him who’s showering the dirt and the blood and the sweat.
0:21:31 These aren’t knock the walls down and build a new facility.
0:21:35 Let’s get a plumber in there and fix it.
0:21:40 The Washington commanders with their backed up showers ranked dead last in the NFL report
0:21:41 card.
0:21:43 But that wasn’t their biggest problem.
0:21:48 The team was plagued with a variety of scandals concerning workplace harassment and financial
0:21:49 impropriety.
0:21:56 Finally, the wildly unpopular owner, Dan Snyder, gave in to pressure from the league and agreed
0:21:57 to sell the team.
0:22:02 This season, with new owners and a new head coach and general manager, the commanders
0:22:06 had a remarkable turnaround, making the NFC championship game for the first time since
0:22:08 1991.
0:22:14 Washington’s problems during the Snyder era got a lot of press, but at most clubs, routine
0:22:17 problems don’t get much coverage.
0:22:18 And J.C.
0:22:22 Tredder says that when players change teams, they often don’t have much information until
0:22:25 they show up at their new workplace.
0:22:29 And when they’re making these decisions about where they’re going to spend potentially the
0:22:32 rest of their career, they should know what they’re getting into.
0:22:38 I talked to a lot of guys as we did the survey and I said, “Hey, your team’s one of the worst
0:22:39 graded teams.
0:22:41 Did you know that before you signed?”
0:22:42 And they’re like, “No.”
0:22:44 And I got here and now I feel trapped.
0:22:49 The quality of care is poor and the facilities are poor and I’m stuck here.
0:22:53 So even if I’m making $8, $10, $15 million a year and the facilities are poor, it’s enough
0:22:55 to have buyers remorse, you’re saying?
0:22:56 Yeah.
0:22:58 And again, most of our guys aren’t making that.
0:23:00 So you start looking for differentiators.
0:23:04 And those guys, the minimum seller guys are the lunch pail hard hat guys of your team,
0:23:10 the special teams guys, the offensive linemen, the backups that make the team work.
0:23:14 Those guys are looking at and saying, “Hold on, I’m going to get the same dollar amount
0:23:15 from every team.”
0:23:17 What are the other variables I can look at?
0:23:21 And before it was, what do I think of the area, like the city, like how close it is to
0:23:22 my family.
0:23:26 And now it’s like, “Hold on, I’m not going to go to a team that has weight room floors
0:23:28 peeling up and charges me for dinner.
0:23:32 I’m going to go someplace else.”
0:23:36 So is this NFL team report card working?
0:23:42 Coming up, we’ll hear from an agent, an economist, and later the people who run the teams.
0:23:43 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:23:47 I love making Freakonomics Radio and I love that you’re listening to him.
0:23:48 We will be right back.
0:24:04 Jim Eibler has worked for more than 25 years as an agent for NFL players, although he isn’t
0:24:06 an agent technically.
0:24:09 Technically we are called certified contract advisors.
0:24:15 Eibler’s job, as the name implies, is to advise players on their contracts.
0:24:20 For players coming into the NFL from college via the draft, remember they don’t choose
0:24:26 where they’ll play and their salary is predetermined by how high they were picked in the draft.
0:24:30 We’re also accustomed to the draft and that’s how talent is dispersed throughout the league.
0:24:34 But when you think about it in more of a macro level, it’s a pretty incredible process.
0:24:40 I mean, you’re told as a recent person coming out of college where you’re going to work.
0:24:44 I know when I graduated law school, if someone had called me up and said, “You’ve just been
0:24:48 drafted by a law firm in Green Bay, Wisconsin,” and that’s where you’re going to go, I would
0:24:50 have said, “You want a bet?”
0:24:55 But obviously these guys go, most of them very happily, to whatever team drafts them.
0:25:00 The process though really is we’re trying to achieve generational wealth for our clients
0:25:04 and I know it’s a buzzword and a cliche, but it’s really true.
0:25:08 The goal needs to be that when the player is done playing in the NFL, whether they play
0:25:12 four years or 14 years, that they can retire with enough money in the bank so they can
0:25:16 do whatever it is they want to do with the rest of their life because it’s a passion,
0:25:18 not because they need the paycheck.
0:25:23 And so unless you’re a, I’m going to call it a top 20 or 25 pick, you’re really not getting
0:25:26 that generational wealth from your first contract.
0:25:30 So we’re really all in this game to help our clients achieve a second contract and if they’re
0:25:33 really blessed, maybe a third and a fourth contract.
0:25:36 If you can get that bite at the apple where you’ve performed well enough, where there’s
0:25:40 multiple teams interested in you, that’s where the leverage maybe flips and it’s on
0:25:42 the player’s side.
0:25:46 It doesn’t happen to a lot of guys and I’m sure you’ve heard the average career span
0:25:49 of an NFL player is 3.3 years.
0:25:53 And it’s probably not a total coincidence that that’s just before the unrestricted free
0:25:54 agency kicks in.
0:25:55 Do the math.
0:25:59 If you can’t become unrestricted until four years and the average player is 3.3 years,
0:26:01 that means the average player is never getting that bite at the apple.
0:26:06 Okay, let’s say you represent a player who has just become a free agent and you do your
0:26:10 thing and you get offers from three teams.
0:26:15 What are the primary factors that will go into the decision of where your client will
0:26:22 want to go and I especially want to know if workplace conditions are at all a major factor.
0:26:26 Certainly compensation, anybody that says that’s not number one is probably lying.
0:26:31 Even if the player has made that sort of money over the course of his career to achieve that
0:26:36 generational wealth, the compensation is still going to be the primary factor.
0:26:41 And then the team itself, the talent that the player is surrounded with, teammate-wise,
0:26:45 the coaching staff, whether or not the team has anticipated to be a playoff, Super Bowl
0:26:49 team, these are all things that I would say are a little bit more important to players
0:26:51 than the workplace conditions.
0:26:54 But something that players are talking about, but I wouldn’t put it in the top few factors
0:26:57 of making free agent decisions.
0:27:02 Another thing you need to realize about unrestricted free agency, this happens really fast.
0:27:06 In terms of player has to make a life-altering decision in five minutes because if the player
0:27:10 is not ready to commit, that team is going to go on to the next guy on their list at
0:27:11 that position.
0:27:15 And when you have to make those quick decisions, the size of the locker room is really not
0:27:16 coming up.
0:27:20 One of the factors that a player and agent will absolutely consider is whether or not
0:27:24 there’s a state tax that’s levied against the player with the team that he is signing
0:27:29 with and eight of the 32 NFL teams play in states where there is no state tax and that
0:27:34 could be a pretty big difference monetarily if you’re talking about 0% taken out as opposed
0:27:38 to 8, 9, 10, 11% in some of the higher states.
0:27:43 List for me the no-tax places, I guess it’s all the teams in Texas and Florida.
0:27:47 The two teams in Texas, it’s the three teams in Florida, it’s Vegas, it’s Seattle and
0:27:49 it’s Tennessee.
0:27:55 So it sounds like you put a lot less stock into the impact of the survey than someone
0:27:56 like J.C.
0:28:01 So I’m trying to get a read on how much this survey really matters in the end.
0:28:02 What do you think?
0:28:08 I think it was a great idea for him to commission this survey and get responses from players.
0:28:11 He should be holding teams feet to the fire because I can guarantee you there are some
0:28:16 owners that are upset from what I’ve read Arthur Blank down in Atlanta was disappointed
0:28:21 that his team ranked where it did and these guys are competitive regardless of whether
0:28:23 or not it’s really having an impact in free agent decisions.
0:28:28 It doesn’t mean that the survey is not going to affect change in a lot of these facilities
0:28:32 with these team owners because if they perceive that it could be a problem in free agency,
0:28:34 that’s really the most important thing.
0:28:40 So the Washington commanders got an F or lower, they actually got an F minus in a few categories
0:28:47 in 1, 2, 3, 4 of the categories and then a couple of D’s, C and an A plus in strength
0:28:52 coaches so the players loved the strength coaches but in terms of the things the team
0:29:00 does otherwise, locker room, F minus, team travel, F minus, treatment of families, F.
0:29:05 Can you talk about why those things matter so much to a player that they’re going to
0:29:07 give their own team an F minus?
0:29:12 For sure and I’ve never really heard of an F minus before.
0:29:16 But it is important and certainly I think as a player ages throughout his career it
0:29:21 becomes more important because presumably they have a wife, they have children and how
0:29:24 the family is treated on game day for instance is a big deal.
0:29:29 I remember about 15 years ago speaking to the front office of the Jets and they were
0:29:33 asking well what could we do better and we brought up the concept of a family room on
0:29:37 game day and they didn’t even understand what we were saying and we said hey listen you
0:29:42 have players whose wives are coming with little kids and they’re sitting in the stands and
0:29:45 the beer is flowing and there’s things that are said.
0:29:51 The concept of having a daycare in an NFL stadium not too long ago was unheard of.
0:29:54 Now I think it’s close to half maybe half them.
0:30:00 Same thing with a family room where the players, families can go and shelter from bad weather,
0:30:02 shelter from crazed fans.
0:30:09 Are you surprised that so many, I mean these are billion dollar franchises and they could
0:30:14 pretty easily fix some of these problems if they cared with a little bit of money.
0:30:18 Like the family room is going to cost some money plainly but not a ton.
0:30:22 Are you surprised that there’s this sort of penny-wise, pound foolish approach?
0:30:24 Yes, I’m surprised.
0:30:27 These are multi-billion dollar organizations.
0:30:32 Their most important asset of course is the talent that they’re putting out on the field.
0:30:38 So to read some of the things in the survey, uneven floors in the weight room where players
0:30:43 feel afraid walking around, slippery floors in the pool area where players are falling
0:30:48 when you invest so much in your assets to have a workplace injury potentially happen,
0:30:51 it would not be a good look and it is very surprising.
0:30:57 But on the other hand, some of these teams are run by old school owners.
0:31:01 You look at some of the teams that are low on the list, I don’t think it’s an accident
0:31:05 that the owners made their money from the team.
0:31:07 They didn’t come from a different industry.
0:31:11 They came from where their grandfathers paid $500 and a bottle of whiskey for the team
0:31:19 back in 1942 and they are kind of mired in old school ways or maybe a little bit slow
0:31:24 to come around and no matter how much the front office wants to be progressive and implore
0:31:33 them to change certain things, it still starts at the top and the owner has final say.
0:31:39 One problem for family-run firms is it can be hard to innovate.
0:31:42 How do you think outside the box when you’ve never left the box?
0:31:44 That is Betsy Stevenson.
0:31:52 I am an economist and professor at the University of Michigan and I study labor markets.
0:31:53 Are you a football fan, Betsy?
0:31:57 I teach at the University of Michigan so I have to just plead the fifth and refuse to
0:31:59 answer this question.
0:32:01 So that’s a big fat no plainly.
0:32:03 Yeah, it’s really awkward.
0:32:07 Stevenson may not know football, but she does know labor economics.
0:32:14 I served as the chief economist at the Department of Labor and I served as a member of the Council
0:32:19 of Economic Advisers giving advice to President Obama.
0:32:24 Can I have an example of some labor economics advice you may have given?
0:32:29 One big thing we talked a lot about was whether we should require forms of compensation outside
0:32:30 of wages.
0:32:34 Like should people be required to get paid sick days?
0:32:40 Should we require that people get paid maternity or paternity leave?
0:32:45 What makes a good job and what’s the role of government in shaping the conditions?
0:32:47 So what makes a good job?
0:32:48 That’s an easy answer, yeah?
0:32:56 Yeah, it’s hard because we all have different preferences and I think the hope of economists
0:33:01 who believe in market forces is everybody wants different things and they’ll just be
0:33:09 able to sort around the labor market till they find the thing that works for them.
0:33:14 So when a company does provide what economists like Stevenson call compensation outside of
0:33:18 wages, why do they provide that?
0:33:21 Economists have come up with two buckets of reasons.
0:33:25 So the first bucket is the benefits might be a compliment to hard work.
0:33:30 We actually see higher productivity because it induces more effort from workers.
0:33:36 The second bucket is that employees might value the benefits more than it costs the
0:33:39 employer to provide those benefits.
0:33:43 So let’s start with the first bucket, compliment to hard work.
0:33:49 That’s why every company going back to the 50s that has office workers has coffee in
0:33:51 the break room, right?
0:33:54 You got to caffeinate your workers to get them to work hard.
0:34:00 The tech sector went a little crazy with this like, “Hey, let’s have ping-pong tables.”
0:34:04 But it really was the same idea, “Well, if you’re socializing at work, you’ll have less
0:34:06 of a reason to leave.”
0:34:10 One of the more extreme examples was some of the tech companies started providing a benefit
0:34:13 which is, “We will pay for you to freeze your eggs.”
0:34:19 Oh no, we have these hard-working female employees wringing their hands in their early 30s thinking
0:34:20 they better have a baby.
0:34:23 I know what we’ll do, we’ll pay to freeze their eggs and then they’ll be able to keep
0:34:25 working hard for a few more years.
0:34:29 Betsy, I know you took a look at the NFL Players Survey.
0:34:34 How do you think about their non-wage compensation in terms of this first bucket?
0:34:38 Yeah, it’s great because you can actually see the categories here which are clearly
0:34:40 a compliment to high productivity.
0:34:41 Nutrition.
0:34:46 They’re like, “What you eat is going to affect how you play, so we’re going to feed you.”
0:34:50 The weight room, how you train up is going to affect how you play.
0:34:52 We’re going to give you a weight room.
0:34:57 This is really about, “Are we giving you the inputs you need to be as productive as possible?”
0:35:01 When we think about things like the treatment of families.
0:35:03 That’s bucket two, I assume.
0:35:07 Yeah, this is something that’s going to have a cost to them, but the question is what’s
0:35:17 the value to the person receiving it, and that value might be quite high.
0:35:24 My wife, my mom, my sister, my dad, they didn’t come to games to tailgate and booze it up and
0:35:26 cheer for the Cleveland Browns.
0:35:30 They came to the game to make sure I walked off the field at the end.
0:35:35 That again is JC Tredder, former president of the NFL Players Union.
0:35:37 I understand the guys on the field are making a lot of money.
0:35:40 Even the guys making minimum salary are making a lot of money.
0:35:45 The risk they are taking, though, is substantial, and the damage they are receiving is substantial,
0:35:53 and parents and kids and wives and siblings are there worried about their well-being.
0:35:59 The idea that the guys out there making the owner hundreds of millions to billions of
0:36:04 dollars for what they’re doing on the field, well taking all of the risk physically, the
0:36:09 idea that their wife and newborn baby are sitting on the grimy floor of a public restroom
0:36:12 breastfeeding is just preposterous to me.
0:36:16 18 of the teams offer family rooms, 14 don’t, and the teams that don’t, like, where is
0:36:18 that wife supposed to go?
0:36:20 What’s your prediction for, let’s say, two years from now?
0:36:22 How many of those 14 will offer it?
0:36:25 We’ve heard from some teams being like, “Hey, you know, we have an older stadium.
0:36:26 There’s no room for it.”
0:36:30 But everybody has suites, you know, like, in the end, it comes down to a choice.
0:36:34 So how many games did your family attend when you were playing for Cleveland?
0:36:40 Yeah, they would be at almost every home game, and in the end, once I got my third contract,
0:36:44 me and two other teammates went in on a suite, like, we bought our own suite.
0:36:49 We all had young kids from two and under, and we didn’t want them out in the cold.
0:36:52 So we said, like, “We’ll pay the money and buy a suite.”
0:36:54 How much did you have to pay?
0:36:55 $150,000.
0:36:56 Okay.
0:37:00 Split by three players with, let’s call it, eight home games a season.
0:37:04 So a little over $6,000 a game, you’re paying out of pocket.
0:37:06 I’ll trust your math.
0:37:10 Looks like a lot of teams are doing a really bad job.
0:37:13 I mean, I saw a lot of Fs.
0:37:16 That, again, is the economist Betsy Stevenson.
0:37:21 Like, maybe they’re not getting the great inflation that our university students get
0:37:24 these days, but a lot of Fs.
0:37:30 And I think what that says is this is a job where there’s a lot of cash thrown at these
0:37:33 players and they don’t think about anything else.
0:37:38 Betsy, are you surprised that firms that are paying their key employees a relatively
0:37:44 very high salary, that at least some of them on some dimensions are apparently so cheap
0:37:47 when it comes to perks and benefits?
0:37:55 I am surprised that any team is messing up when it comes to perks and benefits that would
0:37:58 actually increase the productivity of the players.
0:38:06 I think that’s a clear mistake because those perks and benefits are probably quite cheap
0:38:12 compared to not just pay, but compared to the benefits they yield on the playing field.
0:38:15 Like one more victory would be worth quite a bit of money.
0:38:16 One more victory is worth a lot of money, right?
0:38:21 You could probably do a full renovation of your weight room.
0:38:25 Do you think the issue here is that they’re not connecting it necessarily or not believing
0:38:29 the connection to productivity because otherwise it’s hard for me to understand why they would
0:38:31 cheap out?
0:38:38 I’m pausing only because sometimes people do stupid things, Stephen.
0:38:44 So I think that’s one answer is they’re just being dumb.
0:38:51 Now another answer is what’s necessary in the weight room or the training room or nutrition
0:38:57 in order to get the best out of your players on the field is being given, but players are
0:39:04 looking for little aspects of that that don’t actually have any impact on their productivity.
0:39:08 Maybe they want a brighter, sunnier room.
0:39:10 It can be hard to measure these things.
0:39:14 Maybe if you had the brighter, sunnier room, they’d work harder in training and if they
0:39:16 worked harder in training, they’d do better on the playing field.
0:39:21 So you should figure out how to make it brighter or sunnier.
0:39:26 I painted little poppies on the wall in my gym and I swear I pellet on faster because
0:39:28 I love my field of poppies.
0:39:32 Can I just say if this economist thing doesn’t work out for you, maybe NFL training room
0:39:35 decorator would be a lovely second career.
0:39:41 That would be fun, yeah.
0:39:46 Are NFL team owners and bosses really just doing stupid things?
0:39:48 We’ll find out after the break.
0:39:53 If you like this episode of Freakonomics Radio, there are three things you can do.
0:39:56 Number one, listen every week.
0:39:57 We’re here.
0:39:58 You should be too.
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0:40:04 That’s the gift that keeps giving.
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0:40:10 app.
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0:40:12 We’ll be right back.
0:40:29 So according to a recent survey conducted by the NFL Players Union, many pro football
0:40:32 teams are not such great places to work.
0:40:38 We reached out to all 32 teams asking for an interview with their owner or president.
0:40:44 The line never responded, 21 declined with one communications director asking why we
0:40:49 thought he would ever let us speak with his boss about this topic.
0:40:52 In the end, two teams did agree to speak.
0:40:57 Not surprisingly, they were the top two teams in the player survey.
0:41:01 This is Mark Wilf, owner, president of the Minnesota Vikings.
0:41:06 So Mark, congratulations on acing the NFL PA’s reporter card.
0:41:09 I’m just curious how much did that matter to you?
0:41:11 Well, it matters a lot.
0:41:17 I mean, from day one of our ownership, 2005, it’s our highest goal to make our organization
0:41:20 a world-class organization.
0:41:24 And of course, that’s winning Super Bowls, which is paramount, but facilities, staff
0:41:26 and community involvement as well.
0:41:29 So here’s a choice for you, Mark.
0:41:35 You can keep an A grade, the number one ranking on this report card for, let’s say, 10 years,
0:41:37 not win a Super Bowl.
0:41:38 Would that be worth it?
0:41:40 I mean, maybe winning isn’t everything.
0:41:44 Maybe treating people well is, in the long run, more important.
0:41:49 Well, I strongly believe that culture in a building is critical, and I think it’s critical
0:41:51 to building championships.
0:41:55 So I want to be greedy and say we want both.
0:41:56 Okay.
0:42:00 And let’s hear from the team that came in second.
0:42:06 Tom Garfinkel, vice chairman, CEO and president, Miami Dolphins and Hard Rock Stadium.
0:42:11 Garfinkel is the top lieutenant to Stephen Ross, the real estate developer who is majority
0:42:13 owner of the Dolphins.
0:42:17 Steve is very focused on being best in class and being willing to invest in being best
0:42:18 in class.
0:42:22 So congratulations on doing so well on this NFL team report card.
0:42:26 What was your first response when you saw your grades?
0:42:29 Well, my first reaction was, I don’t like being second.
0:42:30 So we’re going to fix the family area.
0:42:36 I could promise you that we will have the best family area in football next year.
0:42:42 The Dolphins got an A or A plus in every one of the eight categories except for the treatment
0:42:43 of families.
0:42:47 That grade was a C plus with some players saying they didn’t get enough passes to the
0:42:49 post game area.
0:42:52 But otherwise, great reviews.
0:42:59 Not coincidentally, the Dolphins recently opened a new $135 million practice facility.
0:43:05 Long before they broke ground, Garfinkel says he and Ross toured a bunch of other football
0:43:11 facilities, including college facilities, which tend to be extra deluxe since colleges
0:43:14 can’t use actual money to recruit players.
0:43:19 One of the things that really struck us was at Clemson University, the locker room was
0:43:22 really at the center of the facility.
0:43:26 From a layout standpoint, we really thought that’s the right idea.
0:43:28 We want this to be player-centric.
0:43:31 We want the players to be at the heart of everything we do here.
0:43:35 So to put the locker room at the center of the activity was really paramount.
0:43:40 Then designing around that literally sat down with the architect with a pen and pencil and
0:43:45 drew out where the different functions would be adjacent to the locker room for players
0:43:50 so that they could easily and quickly get to all the different areas that they needed
0:43:51 to.
0:43:54 So during the course of the day, players are going from where to where to where.
0:43:56 So it could be the meal room, the cafeteria.
0:43:59 It could be the team meeting rooms, which are where they spend a lot of time.
0:44:04 There’s everything from the sauna and steam room to the cold and the hot plunge and the
0:44:05 underwater treadmill.
0:44:08 And then the training rooms next to that where the doctors and the therapists are.
0:44:11 And then next to that is the weight room.
0:44:12 Is the locker room kind of where you come in?
0:44:14 You drop your stuff.
0:44:18 You get ready to do your day and then are you cycling back through the locker room during
0:44:21 the day because in part that’s where your stuff is?
0:44:22 Yes.
0:44:24 I think the locker room is really home base for them.
0:44:26 There’s an area for them to charge their phone.
0:44:28 There’s a comfortable seat.
0:44:31 It’s not a locker, you know, talking to Dan Marino and those guys.
0:44:32 They literally had a nail.
0:44:34 They used to hang their helmet on.
0:44:37 These are very bespoke custom environments.
0:44:43 We try to design the environment to be almost more four seasons like without the mahogany.
0:44:46 I think you’ll find that the dolphin’s logos are subtle.
0:44:50 The only aqua you see in the locker room is the name plate above the locker.
0:44:53 Is that a test admission that people get sick of aqua?
0:44:54 Because I would make that argument.
0:44:59 I think you might get sick of whatever the color is if it’s all you see everywhere, right?
0:45:07 So we did a rough analysis with the NFLPA report card, the grades versus win/loss records,
0:45:08 basically.
0:45:10 And it turns out there’s very little correlation.
0:45:12 In fact, it might be a little bit negative.
0:45:18 A lot of teams that do really well on the report card have not had great seasons lately.
0:45:20 I haven’t won a Super Bowl in a long time.
0:45:25 Dolphins haven’t won a Super Bowl in a long time, whereas a lot of the teams who’ve won
0:45:28 Super Bowls lately rank really low.
0:45:29 That surprised me.
0:45:32 I’m curious what you make of that back of the envelope correlation.
0:45:36 Well, I would say is that causation or correlation?
0:45:38 This is the first year that survey has been conducted.
0:45:42 To my knowledge, if you’re winning over a long period of time, maybe you don’t feel
0:45:46 the need to put the resources in, and if you’re not winning, you feel the need to create some
0:45:47 competitive advantage.
0:45:51 So I’m not sure maybe over 10 years or something that’ll play itself out.
0:45:54 I’m not sure it’s relevant in the short term.
0:45:58 For a lot of reasons, including especially the pandemic, there’s been a realignment of
0:46:02 the relationship between firms and their employees.
0:46:04 The pendulum kind of swings.
0:46:07 It’ll go really strong one side, then it’ll come back.
0:46:13 I’m just curious what the last several years, including the pandemic, has taught you about
0:46:17 what it means to be an employer in the modern era.
0:46:20 Well, I certainly think employees are more empowered than in the past.
0:46:23 Their voice matters more.
0:46:24 It’s really about listening.
0:46:30 There’s a tradition in football where a lot of things in the NFL are done the same way
0:46:35 across teams in terms of how schedules are set, how coaching is applied, how scouting
0:46:36 processes work.
0:46:40 And one of the things I love about Mike, even in the interview process, was he really has
0:46:41 an innovative mind.
0:46:44 He really wants to do things differently.
0:46:47 Garfinkel is talking about Mike McDaniel, the Dolphins’ head coach.
0:46:52 And one of those things is that players are really different today than they were even
0:46:54 five years ago.
0:46:56 They want to understand the why of things.
0:47:00 And instead of just saying, shut up and get in line and do what I tell you to do, Mike
0:47:04 will sit down with a player and say, well, listen, wide receiver, here’s why I need you
0:47:06 to block corners and safeties in the run game.
0:47:08 Well, I get paid to catch touchdowns.
0:47:09 Okay.
0:47:12 So then I’ll show them the film and say, okay, here’s a three yard run and where the wide
0:47:14 receiver didn’t block the corner of safety.
0:47:19 Here’s the wide receiver blocking the corner of safety and here’s a 35 yard explosive run.
0:47:21 But watch what happens in the next play.
0:47:23 Now the defense moves up into the box.
0:47:25 Now you can run past them and score a touchdown.
0:47:27 So you see how it’s good for you.
0:47:30 So he explains it to them and they’re like, oh, okay, coach, you know, I was down in the
0:47:36 weight room today and the energy, the positive energy, the camaraderie, the excitement is
0:47:38 palpable.
0:47:43 I was at the Miami Dolphins training facilities last year and it’s pretty state of the art.
0:47:44 That is Jason Kelsey.
0:47:49 When we spoke with him in 2023, Kelsey was a longtime member of the Philadelphia Eagles.
0:47:53 He played center, the anchor of the offensive line, and he was considered one of the best
0:47:56 players that position in years.
0:48:00 In March of last year, Kelsey announced his retirement.
0:48:04 He’s also the brother of Travis Kelsey, who plays tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs
0:48:09 and who may wind up being the best player at his position in history.
0:48:14 The brothers played against each other in the 2023 Super Bowl, the Kelsey Bowl, some people
0:48:15 called it.
0:48:17 Travis’s Chiefs won.
0:48:21 Since we spoke with Jason Kelsey for this episode, the brother’s public profile has
0:48:22 only increased.
0:48:28 They signed a huge podcast deal, they appear in what seems to be pretty much every commercial
0:48:35 you see on TV, and Travis continued his very public romance with Taylor Swift.
0:48:41 And the Chiefs won another Super Bowl and are going for their third in a row this week.
0:48:44 Once again, they’re playing the Eagles.
0:48:48 Back then, I asked Jason about his Super Bowl experiences.
0:48:53 He was a key part of the Eagles team that won Super Bowl 52 in 2018, and then there
0:48:57 was his second one against the Chiefs a few years later.
0:49:02 The intensity and emotions of it are very, very high, but obviously, this being my second
0:49:04 one, I had some familiarity with it.
0:49:06 The game is the exact same.
0:49:12 The emotion and intensity and all of that is going to enhance what’s happening in your
0:49:13 head.
0:49:16 For better or worse, or it could be either.
0:49:18 It can be both.
0:49:25 I think it’s worse when you try to do things outside of either your job or the things that
0:49:27 you’ve done to get there.
0:49:32 Chris Long, who had won a Super Bowl in New England right before we played in Super Bowl
0:49:38 52 with the Eagles, his biggest advice was don’t let the moment dictate things to you.
0:49:42 Do everything that got us here, and when the play is there, you’ll be ready to make the
0:49:43 play.
0:49:46 Did you feel you were able to do that in this past year, Super Bowl?
0:49:48 For the most part, I mean, you always have plays you want back.
0:49:51 You’re never going to go out there and play a perfect game.
0:49:56 And unfortunately, I’ve found when you lose, you definitely remember the plays that you
0:49:57 could have had back.
0:50:01 Did losing a Super Bowl add to your wanting to come back or subtract to wanting to come
0:50:02 back?
0:50:05 Unequivocally added to it, and I don’t think it should have.
0:50:09 It’s so hard to get there, and there’s so many things that need to happen right after
0:50:15 the game I wanted to play another season, and I had to really step away and figure out,
0:50:16 is this the right thing?
0:50:17 Is this the right thing for your body?
0:50:19 Is this the right thing for the family?
0:50:20 And can you do it?
0:50:26 My biggest thing is, I want to do it the way it needs to be done, being who you are in
0:50:31 the meeting room on the field around your teammates, investing in that, as well as practicing
0:50:36 hard, as well as lifting weights.
0:50:42 On the 2023 team report card, Jason Kelsey’s Eagles came out middle of the pack, 14th out
0:50:48 of 32 teams, with A’s for food and the weight room, but a C minus for the training room and
0:50:50 a D for travel.
0:50:54 I asked Kelsey if those grades reflected his own views.
0:50:55 I thought it was spot on.
0:51:03 I’d be curious to see what the standard deviation on each one of these was, because when I saw
0:51:05 the results, it was almost to the T.
0:51:07 You felt like you were looking at your answers.
0:51:11 Yeah, but I know that a lot of guys filled it out.
0:51:14 So for the Eagles, I’m looking at your report card.
0:51:24 Both coaches A plus, training staff A plus, but training room C minus, locker room C plus.
0:51:26 Explain why there’s such a split there.
0:51:32 I think that both of those rooms are led really well.
0:51:34 They do forward innovative things.
0:51:37 They’re open to discussing things with the players.
0:51:40 Give me an example if you don’t mind of the forward innovative things.
0:51:46 So there’s a whole discrepancy right now in the NFL of do you practice on Wednesdays or
0:51:49 how many hard days in a row?
0:51:55 The strength staff is very involved with the training staff at one, trying to help players
0:51:59 get better, but also to mitigate injuries.
0:52:06 Training camp used to be two days, hard every single day, three hour practices.
0:52:07 Pads and helmets.
0:52:08 That’s right.
0:52:16 And now it is much more of a tiered system where one day is a yellow day and that goes
0:52:20 into one, the intensity practice, but also the length at which you’re out there.
0:52:22 Green is a, we’re getting geared up.
0:52:28 This is going to be a barn burner, but it’s done in a calculated way that the coaches understand,
0:52:34 that the players understand, and that is done in scientifically the optimal way for
0:52:39 a player to one, stay healthy, but also improve.
0:52:47 Those changes were the result, I assume, almost entirely of NFLPA, the player’s union requests
0:52:50 and negotiations over the years, not from the teams, but tell me if I’m wrong there.
0:52:52 I would say you’re wrong.
0:52:57 The two days for sure was a big negotiating factor by the PA before I got into the league,
0:53:01 but there is a very large gray area in terms of how long practices are.
0:53:06 They can’t be over a certain amount of time on the field, but we are, quite frankly, way
0:53:09 underneath that threshold.
0:53:16 But I think I would be very much remiss if I didn’t give credit to the Eagles organization,
0:53:24 our strength staff and our training staff at going beyond what the collective NFL mindset
0:53:25 is on that.
0:53:30 Your team got an A in food service and nutrition.
0:53:34 Let me tell you, it’s so good, Steven.
0:53:35 Why have you not invited me for lunch yet?
0:53:36 Come on over.
0:53:37 All right.
0:53:43 The Eagles, to their credit, have taken that feedback from players since I’ve been there.
0:53:48 It is remarkable how much the cafeteria has changed for the better, and one, the quality
0:53:53 of food that’s there, and two, the wide range of what you can get.
0:53:58 During the season, are there days where you eat three meals a day at the facility or no?
0:53:59 Yes.
0:54:02 On Wednesdays and Thursdays, I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner there.
0:54:03 Okay.
0:54:04 So, walk me through those meals.
0:54:07 I’m not asking you to name everything you eat, but give me a typical breakfast, typical
0:54:09 lunch, typical dinner.
0:54:17 My breakfast is usually the, if not the exact same, one item different off, and it used
0:54:18 to be Chef Tim.
0:54:19 Shout out to Chef Tim.
0:54:25 He’s no longer with the Eagles, but I usually go in, I get three eggs over easy with three
0:54:30 sausage links and breakfast potatoes, and then I go get a bagel with cream cheese on
0:54:34 it and honey, and then a cup of blueberries.
0:54:35 Lunch, so we have a few stations.
0:54:40 We have a station right when you come in, which is really for your clean eating, right?
0:54:49 It’s going to be some type of rice or grain, maybe a noodle, and some veggies that have
0:54:50 been cooked.
0:54:57 And then to the left of that, there’s going to be a pretty clean, low-fat added type of
0:54:58 meat, right?
0:55:04 And then the more you go left, you’ll get a little bit of fried stuff, right?
0:55:09 So if you’re in the mood for some french fries or like a sausage, sandwich, hoagie, and then
0:55:15 if you go even left of that, this is probably my favorite station, they’ve gone to a like
0:55:17 regional dish.
0:55:21 A lot of times in season, it’s based on a player’s favorite food or where they’re from.
0:55:23 Give me a for instance.
0:55:30 Well for me, I went to Thailand one year, so I had them do Penang Curry with non-bread,
0:55:33 just absolutely one of my favorite dishes.
0:55:38 Another day, it might be, I think it was either Fletcher Cox or Brandon Graham was smothered
0:55:39 pork chops.
0:55:40 Okay.
0:55:44 So I can see why that gets an A. The D grade that Eagles got for team travel, would you
0:55:47 agree with that assessment?
0:55:51 That might have been lower than what I ranked it, but I did not rank it high.
0:55:52 If I was any higher, it was a C.
0:55:56 I’m reading here, it says only half of the players feel they have enough room to spread
0:55:57 out.
0:55:58 I guess that’s on the plane.
0:56:03 You don’t have roommates in a hotel at least, which some teams do, but you’re one of only
0:56:06 seven teams that don’t offer first class seats to their players.
0:56:09 And I did not know that before this study.
0:56:12 When Chip Kelly was the head coach, he did allow, obviously everybody can sit in first
0:56:18 class, but he did allow starters and players who are extremely large to sit in the first
0:56:20 class seats instead of the coaches.
0:56:21 It’s a nice perk.
0:56:24 Anybody who sat first class knows that those seats are pretty nice.
0:56:31 We have a player, Jordan Malata, who’s north of six, six and 400 pounds almost.
0:56:36 He’s going to struggle to fit any situation in the back of the plane.
0:56:42 I will say there was one point we were coming back on a short flight and they didn’t turn
0:56:45 the TVs on on the back of the seats.
0:56:48 And I remember just flipping out, we’re a billion dollar organization and we can’t
0:56:50 even get free movies on these flights.
0:56:52 Like, what’s going on here, guys?
0:56:53 Who’d you say that to?
0:56:59 I said that to one of the stewardesses and then one of the guys that runs everything for
0:57:03 logistics with the team kind of came back and he’s a guy we’re going to turn the TVs
0:57:04 on Jason.
0:57:10 So now what about being charged for food in Arizona, let’s say, did that surprise you?
0:57:11 It didn’t.
0:57:15 I was in Philly my first few years in the off season, at least, you know, we went to
0:57:21 Arizona and we used the Arizona Cardinals facilities and I can say first hand, they are not investing
0:57:22 in this place.
0:57:27 The weight room had, I’m not kidding you, the mats of the weight room were like, I don’t
0:57:31 know if they had water moisture that was getting in there, but the rubber mat that was on top
0:57:36 of the concrete floor was like peeling up on the corners of it.
0:57:38 You’re like walking on an uneven surface the whole time.
0:57:40 I was like, how are people not just getting hurt in here?
0:57:43 It was eye-openingly bad, in my opinion.
0:57:46 What about the rats in Jacksonville, did that surprise you?
0:57:47 Not one bit.
0:57:48 I mean, come on, man.
0:57:54 I’ve gotten trouble for talking trash on Jacksonville one time so I got to calm it down, but yeah,
0:57:55 that’s stadium.
0:57:58 I have not been too much and I’m very thankful of that.
0:58:01 Do you think this report card will lead to any change?
0:58:02 I do.
0:58:04 It’s already led to change.
0:58:09 They installed a much larger cold pool in the actual training room.
0:58:14 We used to have two above ground pools out back, which I always, you know, we’re a billion-dollar
0:58:16 organization with above ground pools.
0:58:19 I think we can maybe do better than this.
0:58:21 Above ground outdoors, like in the winter?
0:58:25 So they would have to shut them down in the winter and that was a big issue with it.
0:58:26 So they’ve already made corrections on that.
0:58:30 I believe they’re addressing some of the family issues at games.
0:58:37 The weight room is adding another tier that’s going to add more footprint for more bikes
0:58:40 and other workout equipment.
0:58:43 I do think teams are going to respond to it just like players are competitive.
0:58:48 I think owners are competitive and I think that owners are certainly a good portion of
0:58:53 owners are not going to like seeing their organization viewed in a negative light and
0:58:57 I think that they’re going to try and correct these things.
0:59:05 What can the rest of us learn from this process of a union representing the workers goes in,
0:59:12 asks everybody a lot of questions, and then produces a report and it lands and now we’re
0:59:14 going to see what happens.
0:59:15 What should we be learning from this?
0:59:19 What would you say to a CEO who might be listening to this and saying, “Holy cow, yeah, like
0:59:21 this is low hanging fruit.
0:59:26 I fixed the mats in the weight room and I don’t have Jason Kelsey trashing me.”
0:59:27 That’s right.
0:59:32 I think unequivocally that more unions should be doing this.
0:59:37 It’s different when one person comes to you with an anecdote or a one-off as opposed to
0:59:43 a literal survey of your entire workforce saying, “This is what we think of the place
0:59:45 that you have us operate in.”
0:59:53 For CEOs and owners, I think that seeing it this way gives you a much more realistic idea
0:59:56 of what your workplace environment is.
1:00:03 I would want this information and as a worker, I would want my boss to know this, but to
1:00:07 also not be punished if I tell him to his face.
1:00:09 I’m a big fan of this survey.
1:00:14 I think that it will lead to a lot of change in some of these NFL organizations, especially
1:00:17 if it’s done on an annual basis.
1:00:24 I see no reason why other fields or places of business would not follow suit and try
1:00:26 to make changes as well.
1:00:32 What he wants to be known as the cheapskate, I think that as before, when it was rumored
1:00:43 you were the cheapskate, it was harder to prove now there’s data.
1:00:49 We want to live in a world where we’re giving out 32A pluses for all the teams.
1:00:51 That again is JC Treader.
1:00:56 When we went into this year one, I told the staff when we started it, “If all
1:01:01 that comes from this is four teams start giving dinner to those players, it’s a win.”
1:01:06 Now, I’m curious to know what you’ve heard from teams about the survey.
1:01:08 Have you heard anything directly from the teams?
1:01:13 Yeah, we’ve heard from about 12 to 15 teams who have reached out to us just to say, “What
1:01:14 can we do better?
1:01:15 Can you give us more information?
1:01:17 What changes would make us better?”
1:01:21 I give credit to Arthur Blank who’s the owner for the Atlanta Falcons.
1:01:25 There was an article written where he said he pulled his president and GM and head coach
1:01:31 aside and told them, “One, if this comes out again, they absolutely cannot be graded as
1:01:33 low as they were before.
1:01:37 Also that they need to start being more proactive and it shouldn’t take this type of thing to
1:01:38 create the change.
1:01:42 They should be, as leaders of the organization, be looking around corners and realizing where
1:01:44 they’re weak and where they need to improve.”
1:01:47 I don’t know Arthur well from people who do.
1:01:52 It seems like it’s not just lip service and that he’s going to act on those words.
1:01:57 After the report cards were released, the Falcons announced a $30 million upgrade to
1:01:59 their locker room, weight room, and cafeteria.
1:02:03 Although they also said the renovations had already been planned and they were not done
1:02:09 in response to the report card where they came in 23rd out of 32 teams.
1:02:10 Those are the things you want to see.
1:02:12 Don’t get defensive about this.
1:02:13 That’s not what we’re hoping for.
1:02:18 We’re hoping that people see like, “Okay, this team is providing this, this, and this.
1:02:19 Maybe we should provide that too.”
1:02:23 Because in the end, as adversarial, sometimes we are, the teams need the players and the
1:02:25 players need the franchises.
1:02:27 Do you plan to do the survey every year?
1:02:28 Yes.
1:02:32 And year two is going to be more important than year one because year one, owners could
1:02:33 claim ignorance.
1:02:36 I think more will claim ignorance than should claim ignorance.
1:02:38 For some of it, I’m sure they didn’t know.
1:02:41 I don’t think many owners are hanging out in the hot tubs with the guys.
1:02:44 And if they do, that’s a story of itself that we should be diving into of why are they
1:02:47 hanging out in the hot tubs with the guys.
1:02:53 But year two, now that this is out there, if some things aren’t changed, you can’t claim
1:02:54 ignorance anymore.
1:03:01 Considering that an NFL workplace is substantially different in many ways from a typical workplace,
1:03:07 what’s there to be learned from this survey for workers and employers who have nothing
1:03:10 to do with pro sports, et cetera?
1:03:14 The teams are called franchises, and I think that’s a connector outside of our industry.
1:03:18 I think there is an expectation that everything is equal in the NFL, and I think everybody
1:03:22 would think it’s equal at Starbucks and equal at Chick-fil-A and equal at McDonald’s.
1:03:27 And if you go to a franchise, the rules and the treatment of the workers are the same.
1:03:28 And I think we know that’s not true.
1:03:33 And if you’re a worker, I think it would be valuable to know the treatment you will receive
1:03:36 if you decide to work at one franchise versus another.
1:03:42 And I also think if you’re the overall company, it would be interesting to see how your franchises
1:03:48 who are carrying your name and dictating your brand image, how they treat their workers
1:03:58 and how they treat their customers and how that varies across different franchise operators.
1:04:05 I went back to Tom Garfinkel, the Miami Dolphins CEO and president, with a similar question.
1:04:09 What kind of lessons are there to be drawn from this report card for the companies that
1:04:11 aren’t NFL teams?
1:04:15 Are there things that are applicable, or is the NFL work environment just too different
1:04:17 to be useful for comparison?
1:04:19 I think it’s definitely useful for comparison.
1:04:25 I think it comes down to culture, values and standards, investment into your people.
1:04:31 I’m a believer that people need to work together physically, certain jobs, if you’re coding,
1:04:34 sitting at your computer all day, and that’s all you do.
1:04:38 You could probably do that as easily from home as from an office, but most environments
1:04:39 are still very human.
1:04:44 They rely on human interaction and investing in those environments and investing in that
1:04:49 organic interaction enhances creativity, it enhances productivity.
1:04:53 It enhances people want meaning, right?
1:04:56 It goes back to Victor Frankel and everything.
1:04:57 Meaning matters.
1:05:01 And I think what we do, it’s more than sports, it’s more than football.
1:05:02 It’s about meaning.
1:05:03 It’s about social interaction.
1:05:07 We bring people together to experience life together.
1:05:13 It’s still better to be in a stadium when someone catches that pass in the fourth quarter
1:05:16 to win a football game than to watch it on television by yourself at home because you’re
1:05:19 experiencing it with other people.
1:05:24 And whether it’s that as a fan or whether it’s employees interacting together in the
1:05:29 workplace, particularly in environments like this one and many are like this where people
1:05:30 work very hard.
1:05:36 They work long hours and you’re with your coworkers a lot and you want it to be inspiring.
1:05:41 You want it to inspire creativity, productivity, happiness, positivity.
1:05:45 And I think that’s the bigger lesson in all this than anything football related.
1:05:52 I have to say, when we started working on this episode about workplace conditions in
1:05:58 the NFL, I never thought we’d end up at Victor Frankel, but I’m glad we did.
1:06:05 Frankel was an Austrian psychologist, a Holocaust survivor, best known for writing man’s search
1:06:06 for meaning.
1:06:08 If you haven’t read it, I’d suggest you do.
1:06:12 It will make you think as it made Tom Garfinkel think.
1:06:16 Thanks to him as well as all the other guests on today’s show.
1:06:22 Also, let me share an update on the 2024 NFL Players Association report card.
1:06:28 The Philadelphia Eagles jumped from 14th out of 32 teams all the way up to fourth.
1:06:32 Too bad Jason Kelsey had retired and wasn’t around to enjoy that.
1:06:37 The Eagles opponent in the upcoming Super Bowl, the Kansas City Chiefs, still get lousy
1:06:44 marks on their report card, ranking 31st due to poor facilities and low grades for team
1:06:46 owner Clark Hunt.
1:06:51 The biggest jump on the ratings list was the Jacksonville Jaguars, who went from 28th
1:06:57 to fifth thanks to upgrades in their facilities, which are now rat free.
1:07:04 And the very best team to work for, according to the 2024 report card, was the Miami Dolphins,
1:07:10 in part because Tom Garfinkel kept the promise he told us about to fix the family room.
1:07:14 Second and third this year were the Minnesota Vikings and the Green Bay Packers.
1:07:16 That’s it for this update.
1:07:18 We will be back soon with another new episode.
1:07:20 Until then, take care of yourself.
1:07:23 And if you can, someone else too.
1:07:26 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
1:07:32 This episode was produced by Ryan Kelly and updated by Dalvin Abouaji and Theo Jacobs.
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1:08:15 Oh, come on, come on, come on.
1:08:16 It wasn’t ideal.
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1:08:18 That’s fair.
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