Episode 6
· 01:06:44
[Shirin Mollah] (0:11 - 0:32)
Hello, today we have Dr. Dan Rascher from the University of San Francisco. He's a professor of sports management and a director of the sports management program. He also has his own consulting company where he focuses on sports and he's worked with several teams across the United States and abroad.
Welcome, Dr. Rascher.
[Dan Rascher] (0:32 - 0:33)
Thank you for having me.
[Shirin Mollah] (0:34 - 0:41)
So I wanted to start off with what originally drew you to sports economics and how has the field evolved since you started?
[Dan Rascher] (0:41 - 2:44)
Yeah, I think that's a it is a great question. I was thinking about this the other night because I was talking to a student who thought that they might want to go into into sports economics. And I guess what drew it to me was I was a sports fan.
I also was studying economics. I was getting my PhD. I really liked economics.
I didn't really know what I wanted to do with it. And so I kept sort of finding myself being pulled into these handful of sports related economics research articles. I read a book called Sportometrics by Brian Golf and Rob Tullason.
And it was really interesting. It said, can you use sports to study economics? Right.
Can you sort of because sports has lots of data and you can and you can look at the productivity of workers from a sports angle. And so I found that really intriguing. And then I came across pay dirt by Rod Ford and baseball and billions by and he's in this.
This is all like in the early 90s when I was in the beginning of my PhD program. And then I so I reached out to one of them and said, you know, are like, is this a field I could be in? Because at Berkeley, my professors were sort of like giving me quizzical looks if I was going to study the sports industry.
But anyway, so then I went to one conference when there was about a dozen of these folks, Larry Hadley, Elizabeth Gustafson. They were at University of Dayton. They put together sort of like a session or two at the Western Economic Association.
And a few people were there. Rod Ford was there. And Tony Krautman, Anthony Krautman, and then a few other folks.
And I just sat there and listened and listened. And I was so excited to that these people were doing what I wanted to do, which was study the sports industry, you know, from an economic lens. So sort of from that moment, I got hooked.
And then I had to find a way to do that at school, with professors who were not interested. So I basically found professors outside of the university to help me to sort of be my mentors.
[Shirin Mollah] (2:44 - 3:30)
Yeah, I kind of had a similar experience, but I didn't really pursue it till later. I felt like when I was taking behavioral economics classes, obviously, the hot hand fallacy, it really drew me but it was there's so many like behavioral economics is more recent. And so there's a lot that's developed and you can apply it to sports.
And every time we apply, every time I applied it, I would apply it to either football, but the stats for baseball is, you know, it's very useful. And a lot of my classmates would always just say, this is a really good idea. But yeah, yeah, and also the sports economics, the society and the group is very good over time.
So I agree with this, the conferences says it's a good group. Yeah.
[Dan Rascher] (3:31 - 5:21)
And so so like, yeah, I guess the latter part of your question was how has it evolved? I mean, so from that little group of like a dozen people, you know, they started publishing articles here and there are book chapters. And so I started doing that as a grad student, and had a couple of publications before I was really finished up at school.
Then finally, some of the folks started the Journal of Sports Economics. And so there was all of a sudden like an outlet dedicated to sports. Prior to that, you were submitting it to mainstream economics journals, which was fine, except if the editors thought, you know, again, those quizzical looks like why would you study sports, you know, it's so important.
Now, the reality is the sports industry has been growing much faster than the rest of the economy for the last 50 years. So now it really is a big business. And then the American Economic Association finally recognized sports as a subfield.
So sort of once that happened, then it became much more legitimate. In fact, in a trial that I testified in the abandoned trial, there was a debate in trial about whether sports economics was a field or not, because I was the only sports economist testifying in this lawsuit. And the other economists on the other side were general economists, right?
You know, I mean, really well respected economists, but they didn't have a sports background. And so the judge was sort of having to answer the question, well, does it matter whether they don't understand the sports industry? And she came down on the side that sports economics is its own field.
And, you know, she sort of put that into the federal record and that there was, you know, a journal and et cetera, et cetera. And so I was really the only one who was in that trial who was qualified to testify on certain sports related economics issues. And so it really has come a long way since the late 1990s.
[Shirin Mollah] (5:22 - 5:35)
So how do you see the role of sports economists in shaping public policy, especially regarding stadium financing and major sporting events, and also how their role in shaping sports through litigation?
[Dan Rascher] (5:36 - 7:40)
Interesting. I mean, a lot of that early research and even continuing is the economic impact of stadiums on their communities because a lot of money goes into stadiums, often public dollars. And so it's a legitimate question that economists have been asking for a long time.
You know, there are books on it. There's lots of journal articles. I think originally the impact was not that large because it's hard to take research from the ivory tower, right, and bring it into the industry, bring it into the community.
But now that we have social media, you know, now that it's been it's been really powerful for at least a decade now, I think economists jump on social media and they start talking about a particular stadium deal. And I think that quickly gets coverage by the local media in a local city. And all of a sudden that becomes at least one of the talking points.
And so I think it's become, you know, economists have had more power through social media, which I think is really fascinating. For myself, I've spent more time working on these lawsuits involving college sports, involving professional sports. And, you know, I think really within the college sports space, things have changed a lot, right?
Athletes were, you know, more purely amateur back in the day, just a decade ago, and the schools could only provide them basically scholarships. And through these lawsuits, we've changed the structure of college sports, you know, starting this summer, if the judge, Judge Wilkin, this April approves this final settlement, then the schools will be allowed to pay the athletes basically for their ability to play for them, up to $20 million per school. And so that's really only occurred through litigation because all the efforts that were done through trying to do through the policy, through Congress, or sort of athletes asking, you know, the universities to change their ways didn't work.
Really, it was through litigation that sort of forced all of this to happen.
[Shirin Mollah] (7:41 - 7:55)
How big a role is our sports economist in these kinds of cases? Because, you know, we look at the finances, we look at, you know, finance is a major part of these kinds of cases, but yeah, what's, what's, how does it look like?
[Dan Rascher] (7:56 - 9:09)
A lot of these bigger cases, they're antitrust cases. So one of the first questions is, does the NCAA, does the NFL, does US Soccer Federation, you know, do they have monopolies? Or do they have market power, right?
Can they control not only from the fan side, like ticket prices, and things like that, but also from the input side, you know, from the athlete side. So a lot of these cases have really been about athletes over the years, you know, in order to establish free agency, right? There, you know, there was an arbitration, and then in other sports, there were lawsuits.
And so economists role are really around determining the nature of competition. And then, and then determining whether the harm, if there's not a lot of competition, the harm to the athletes, in some sense, is that outweighed by some sort of pro competitive justification? In other words, is there a good reason for it?
Like, oh, we need competitive balance. And so, in order to have competitive balance, we have to have all these restrictions, right? And so that, you see, you're sort of weighing the harm versus the pro competitive benefits.
And that's what economists are doing. And that's what I've been doing. And that's what other economists like, like Roger Knoll and Andy Zimbalist and others who, you know, other sports economists have been doing for decades.
[Shirin Mollah] (9:10 - 9:20)
Do you bring in, I mean, there's so much data out there, but do you ever bring in any of your, like, you know, insight from the data or research to these kinds of cases that really help provide evidence?
[Dan Rascher] (9:21 - 10:36)
Yeah, I mean, I tended to sort of take the tack of I look at the literature a lot, and I grab a ton of it. And I put it in my expert reports, and I provide it in my depositions, and I provide it in trial testimony, because that's really the scientific, you know, basically the the for an expert witness, they have to rely on the on accepted science. And so we have to find the accepted science, and it's in the literature, and it's in the stuff that you publish, and that other economists publish.
So I grab all that, and I sort of frame my analysis around that. And then I get whatever data comes through the lawsuit. So usually through subpoenas, or through discovery, we get, you know, massive data sets.
And we analyze that, that data. There was a case involving the NFL and DirecTV, where we had, I don't even know, terabytes and terabytes of data. Every 15 minutes, there's someone was watching television on DirecTV.
What were they watching? We had each person, you know, we didn't have their name, we had each person, and we had each show that they were watching. So then we could pull out the sports related information, the NFL related information to start to see what their behavior was, how much did they watch this game, when there was another game available to them, for instance.
So that that took us months and months and months, just to be able to harness that data.
[Shirin Mollah] (10:37 - 10:46)
So in terms of the economic impact, we look at, a lot of the economic impact on sports teams and events, but what are some of the biggest misconceptions?
[Dan Rascher] (10:47 - 15:39)
I think an interesting question is, if the local government puts money into a stadium, you know, $200 million, right? And the question becomes, is that money going to come back to the community? And I think sometimes one misconception is, well, does the government have to through taxes, sales tax, hotel taxes, do they have to then recoup the full $200 million, right?
Is that sort of the litmus test we should be using? Or should we be saying, if the community, if the business community, if workers, if they get that $200 million back plus more, is that sufficient? And so we just have to find a way to sort of refill the government coffers through some sort of taxes.
You know, in other words, is the government there for the people and for the local community and not for its own profit and loss statement, right? And I sort of feel it's the former. It's really that the government is there to invest in these things that benefit the community and that the community's return is sort of what we should be measuring.
And so I think sometimes people set the bar at, well, the government needs to recoup all of its taxes, but it really doesn't if the community benefits enough, then the community is going to want that to happen and they're going to look for that. So I sort of think that's one of the debates that I think still happens as I read some of the literature. And then I think one of the other ones is the models that we use, that we tend to use, are they sensitive enough to be able to detect the impact of a single event?
So I was thinking about some of the work I have done at Levi's Stadium for the San Francisco 49ers. I've measured the impact of lots of those events. And the way that I've done that is we've gone down on the ground and we survey people who are attending these events, and then we launch a survey after the event.
So we're getting 5, 6, 7,000 responses. We really have a pretty large sense of data. And what we're finding from that is that a lot of people are coming from out of town.
They're only coming because of this event, and then they're spending a certain amount of money in town, hotels, restaurants, et cetera. And yet Levi's Stadium, it's this big stadium, but within Santa Clara County, it's such a small entity. Santa Clara County's annual GDP is around $400 billion, 400 with a B.
And so even if Levi's Stadium were to add $100 million to the community, that's 1,000,000 of the local economy. So I think a lot of the models we use is not going to be able to detect that little tiny 1,000. It's going to look like nothing happened.
In fact, the annual change in GDP in Santa Clara County is tens of billions of dollars. So just that movement, just that variation from year to year is just, in my opinion, it just outweighs any small little effect by a single company, right? And so the economic research would say, oh, there's no impact from the stadium in the community because it doesn't see it in the models.
And I would really counter and say, well, yeah, there is. I talked to the people who came to town to spend money that they wouldn't have spent otherwise. And so there's new money coming into the community.
And so I just think some of the models that we use don't fit that. And so I know that a lot of the economists have tried to now shrink the footprint. They start to look at the hotels within the area, or they start to look at changes in sales tax or property tax within a smaller footprint.
There was a great study involving Staples Center down in Los Angeles, trying to look at that same thing. The problem is, in my opinion, in that study, they narrowed it down so small to such a small footprint that some people who come down to Los Angeles, and I'm one of them to go see a game at Staples Center, I don't stay inside that footprint. I'm actually staying out in Santa Monica by the beach, right?
Because I like the beach. And so all of a sudden, I'm not being captured by that sort of a study. So I just feel that there's still room for improvement on how we measure the impact of sports events and sports teams.
And I just think our models aren't quite sensitive enough, especially in big markets. And so to put a fine point on it, there is research and some of it by my colleague, Nola Aga, showing that in smaller communities, smaller cities, smaller towns, you can measure this impact. And I think a lot of that is just simply driven by the fact that the economy is so small in those towns that this single business, a sports team, their impact shows up.
And not that there's more impact necessarily in small towns versus large towns, it's just that you can see it in the small towns.
[Shirin Mollah] (15:40 - 16:31)
So this I talked to you about the economic impact. But I started thinking about something, and I know it's like behavioral economics is a combination of psychology and economics. But I always think about the idea of how sports economic or sports teams brings like happiness or well-being.
And so I'm obviously, you know, I went to the University of San Francisco, I lived there, but I'm also from the Bay Area. And there's so much sports culture there. And then now I'm in Los Angeles.
And you know, Los Angeles is known as sports capital, and there's so much going on. And I feel like it's really brings in not only well-being, but it also affects kind of like the health and fitness around there. And I'm really big on that.
And I just I always I never ask this to sports economists. But I wonder, like, what's your take on that?
[Dan Rascher] (16:31 - 18:48)
Right, we tend to measure dollars and cents, right, coming into town or leaving town? Or is it a substitution? You know, is it is it not new money being spent?
But right, the real question is, are people interested in having sports teams? And so they tend to vote yes on these stadium deals sometimes, even if the economists are sort of saying, look, this isn't a good investment, but people are like, yeah, but I want to be happy. That's that's the investment I'm trying to make.
So, you know, in some sense, governments provide quality of life aspects. You know, we up here in San Francisco, we have Golden Gate Park. It doesn't make any money directly, right?
It costs money to maintain. In fact, it's a huge opportunity cost, right? You could put housing there.
But but people want it to be there because it provides happiness. So it doesn't provide direct measures of dollars, but it provides direct measures of happiness. And so so you have the happiness aspect of having sports and teams.
And then and then you're even touching on something I think that's even more interesting, I don't think has been studied much, which is sort of the impact of having sports on not only the mental health, but maybe the physical health, maybe people get out and they play sports when they have a sport that they watch and they and they care about, and they become a fan of, they go out and they play. And I think that's true. I certainly was like that as a kid, right?
I'm watching TV, and at halftime, I'm running out playing football in the backyard with my friends and then we go back inside and watch the second half. That's a real interesting question, Sharon. I don't know that I've had anyone ask that.
Now, I know there's some recent research on sort of the health effects of sports events, right? I think Brad Humphries of West Virginia and maybe some others have sort of looked at like pollution and things like that, that are fascinating, right? When you have a sporting event, more people are there.
There's more cars, there's more pollution. Can you detect that? And I think that actually that you can detect that.
I think that's what they've found. So it's really cool that there's some new lines of research opening up, but I think your line of research is actually really fascinating. Are cities that have more sports teams, are they more active?
Are sports fans more mentally healthy, more happy than non-sports fans? That's an interesting question, right? It's really cool that you've sort of come up with that idea.
[Shirin Mollah] (18:49 - 19:38)
Yeah, or like when LA, if they have so many sports teams, do they also have a proportional youth participation? So programs, because that's a really big question. I mean, we can talk about that for a very long time because youth participation in sports, it really matters because that's who brings in the future of sports.
But being in a certain town and looking at these athletes, is it where they're from? Do they have those resources? That's also something that's interesting to look at.
But yeah, yeah, thank you. All right, so now on to some of your work, your research. You highlighted the economic impact of sports stadium.
You talked a little bit about this, but why do cities keep investing in them despite the evidence?
[Dan Rascher] (19:38 - 21:30)
And I think we sort of touched on it a little bit with, I think the residents of the communities want to have a sports team. They don't want to lose a team. In Oakland, we've lost our three major sports teams.
The Warriors moved across the bay to San Francisco. The A's are moving maybe to Las Vegas, but right now they're in Sacramento. And then the Raiders moved, the Oakland Raiders did move to Las Vegas.
And so there's definitely, and there's been a negative hit in the morale of Oakland from losing these teams. And so I think generally, even if the dollars and cents don't add up, or we don't think they add up, or we're not sure, people still often want to vote in order to keep a team. And if they think that they need to help fund the stadium, I mean, that's, I think the question a lot of economists have is like, well, why not?
Like these teams can afford to build their own stadiums. It's just a matter of, are we willing to play that game of chicken, right? Are we willing to sort of let them maybe go if we're not willing to put the money in?
And so I think that's one reason why cities invest in these stadiums is simply because they're trying to satisfy what their community wants. And I think sometimes politicians do it for personal reasons. Maybe they feel that it benefits them in terms of being reelected because they sort of brought a team to town.
They can hang their hat on that, or they saved a team from leaving. Right now at the same time, if they spent all this money on a stadium and the schools are bad and the roads have potholes, then obviously it can go against them. But so I think that the dollars and cents are not really the main reason why cities keep investing, even though that seems to be the storyline, right?
That seems to be what they say when they justify it.
[Shirin Mollah] (21:31 - 21:56)
So you brought up how politicians, if they bring in a team, it might benefit them. But when a team moves, so for example, when the Oakland A's moved, is it an advantage to them when they're moving to a new city, maybe like in the short run or the long run? I also mentioned before about the St. Louis Rams moving to Los Angeles, could you emphasize on that?
[Dan Rascher] (21:56 - 23:55)
So it's really interesting, right? So when a team moves to a new market, that new market is excited, right? They generate new fans in those markets, right?
So the happiness goes up in those markets, but then they leave a market that is unhappy, right? So there's a loss in happiness and the leagues don't generally like that. So actually the first lawsuit I worked on in the 1990s was when the Los Angeles Raiders moved to Oakland and the NFL tried to stop them.
And the reason the NFL tried to stop them was because they thought it harmed the NFL in general. It harmed the other teams, not only when teams move around, it creates a negative vibe in that city, but in this case, they were leaving Los Angeles, a larger market than the Bay Area, a larger TV market than the Bay Area. At the same time, the Rams moved from Los Angeles to St. Louis, right?
Going from a very large TV market to a medium semi below average TV market really or small TV market. Again, the reason that the Rams move was because they got a sweet stadium deal in St. Louis that they weren't getting in Los Angeles. But the league tried to stop that or they want to have control over it because they only want teams to move when they really know that it's necessary.
Like when the Expos moved from Montreal to Washington, DC, right? The Major League Baseball eventually got behind that. Major League Baseball is behind the A's leaving Oakland and moving to Las Vegas.
So I think, as I said before, I think that the city that's being left is worse off and the city that it's moving to, those folks are happier because they have a team that they can root for and rally around. But then that effect could be negative, at least from the league's perspective, because they do tend to try to stop it.
[Shirin Mollah] (23:55 - 24:16)
So I brought up an idea. I'm from the Bay Area, so Oakland A's has just been something that I was an A's fan. Would I be still rooting for the A's in another city?
How many people do actually do that?
[Dan Rascher] (24:17 - 25:40)
Yeah, that's a good question. I think there is some research on that, but I don't know exactly what it says. I do know that anecdotally, the Raiders have sort of done a good job.
Like there's lots of Los Angeles Raiders fans from Los Angeles because the team was there for a long time. And so the Raiders sort of in their mind have three markets now. They have Los Angeles, they have the East Bay, Oakland, they have Las Vegas.
Now those markets fade over time because they've been gone for a while. But certainly if you ask Southwest Airlines, they will tell you that there are fans in Oakland and there are fans in Los Angeles who fly to Las Vegas to watch Raiders games. And so in some sense, they're moving around probably as a benefit to the team, not only that they're enlarging their fan base, but they also, of course, are getting lots of money from the place that they're moving to.
In Nevada, they got about $700 million from the state of Nevada. And Oakland wasn't quite sure what it was going to provide to the Raiders, so the Raiders moved. But it's a really interesting question.
You're right. Does it turn the fans against them? Yes, it turns some fans against them, but some fans still want to root for a team.
And that's their team that they grew up with, just like you said. And so they're going to root for them. I mean, you should ask yourself the question, are you going to root for the A's in Las Vegas, right?
[Shirin Mollah] (25:42 - 26:37)
I mean, I'm not much of an A's fan, but I just like know about A's. I mean, we have Giants also, so that's something I grew up with. And then now being in LA, I'm very conflicted on the Dodgers and the Giants.
I have another question. I always talk about college sports in my classes. In colleges like Ohio State and University of Oklahoma, there's other schools as well, like University of Texas.
And it's a generational kind of culture where they pass it on. So I wonder, is there work on this where their parents like a team, even if they move, is that kind of something that's shared or passed down? Obviously, not genetics, but just environment.
I just wonder, it's something I think about.
[Dan Rascher] (26:37 - 28:04)
Yeah, I think that's certainly true. If you're a kid, you're influenced by your family a lot, and that's going to be in everything, even the food you like and the sort of things you like to spend your time doing. And that includes watching sports.
And so I think that's very true, that there's fans within a family that are all fans of the same team. But there's also the opposite. I have friends who are brothers who are fans of different teams.
One's a Dodgers fan, one's a Pirates fan. And they had no connection to Los Angeles or as much even to Pittsburgh. I was raised, and I'll say it this way, I was raised a St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan because my dad is from St. Louis, and he was a fan, and my mom was a fan. And so I sort of had no choice, and I didn't want to have a choice. I mean, I became a fan, and I love the St. Louis Cardinals, and they're still my favorite team. And yet, I hardly ever spend any time in St. Louis. And so you sort of end up with these multiple, and I think there is research on sort of having multiple teams. I'm also a fan of the Giants and the A's because I live in the Bay Area. But I certainly think that that is true, that people pass that on to their kids.
And that's wild, right? I mean, we know that's true. I know that's true in Premier League Soccer.
There is some research that talks about the whole entire family are fans of a particular soccer team, and other people they know are fans of another team, and it becomes rivalrous. It's pretty wild.
[Shirin Mollah] (28:04 - 28:10)
Are there any cases where publicly funded stadiums actually benefited from the local economies?
[Dan Rascher] (28:11 - 28:15)
You mean the stadiums benefit the economies, or are the other way around?
[Shirin Mollah] (28:15 - 28:19)
The local economies benefited from the publicly funded stadiums.
[Dan Rascher] (28:21 - 30:36)
Yeah, I mean, again, even though this has been studied for decades, I still feel like we don't really know that answer. So if you look at Coors Field, in Denver, they built Coors Field fairly inexpensively, and it sort of spawned this whole shopping district that moves down, and then you've got the sports arena sort of at the other end. It's this whole district.
Or Petco Park, not too far from you down in San Diego, that was built that sort of turned, because I used to live down there, it turned sort of a seedy downtown area into lots of people are living there now. And part of that was done on purpose. So the city basically of San Diego told the owner John Moores, like, hey, not only are we going to give you some money to help you build your stadium fine, but you have to invest money in real estate around the area to help grow that so we can sort of force that economic impact on top of the stadium.
And so I think Petco is a good example of that. But if you try to measure the numbers, I think some economists would say, look, no one's proven that it's been positive, because we throw a model at it. And the model says that there's been no impact.
Again, I sort of counter that with, well, wait a minute. If you look at the tourism models, you look at the survey based models, people are coming to town watching games, spending money, right? It's just that the Padres are too small relative to the San Diego economy that you don't notice it anyway.
And I think it's true with sort of any business. Like, what's the impact of any business in town in a big market like, let's say, the Los Angeles economy, no single business probably shows up. And so it's like, is the argument that we shouldn't have any of these businesses?
I mean, that doesn't make any sense, right? So should we subsidize them or not? That's another question.
But I still don't think that we have a conclusion on the effect of stadiums on the local economy. I know I'm sort of in the minority on that as far as academic economists are concerned. Now, I'm not in the minority on that as far as people in the industry who are watching fans come from out of town coming to their sporting events.
[Shirin Mollah] (30:37 - 30:54)
So now I'm going to transition to what's going to be happening in California for the next few years. We have a lot of mega events going on, the Olympics and the World Cup. How do you think that's going to be an economic impact of just hosting both of these events?
[Dan Rascher] (30:55 - 34:16)
Yeah, it's super great time to be in California if you're a sports fan. And also for my students who work in sports and our alumni, there's great opportunities for them to work in sports. And so those are two different types of events, right?
So the World Cup is hosted by the country. And in fact, it's hosted by Canada, Mexico, United States, and it's going to be next year. And so there's matches that are in all these different cities, right?
Up here in the Bay Area, Levi Stadium is hosting, I think, around six matches. I think down by you, I think SoFi is hosting at least that many. And I think is SoFi hosting the...
I guess SoFi is not hosting the final game. I think they were going to, right? But I think they're not.
But SoFi is hosting some matches, I think. But anyway, and so these matches occur over a long period of time. They include teams that come from different countries.
We will see fans from other countries come into these towns, into these cities, they will stay for days and days and weeks and weeks at a time, they will spend a lot of money. And yet the stadiums already exist. So the investment by the local community, sure, there's going to be millions of dollars that have to be invested to, you know, to sort of finalize things.
But there's going to be tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by people coming from other countries, coming into these towns and spending money, coming to California and spending money, not just say in the San Jose area where the stadium is, but they're going to go down to Carmel and up to Napa and down to Los Angeles and to the beaches. And, you know, there's going to be really an impact on on the city of California. And so to me, the World Cup in the US, we already have most of the facilities.
And so there's not a big cost side to it. The Olympics, in many situations, right, people have to build, the countries have to build lots of new, lots of new facilities. And that's happening in Los Angeles.
A lot of facilities are there already because of the major professional and intercollegiate sports in Los Angeles, but there's still going to have to be some construction. And so there's still going to have to be some investment. And so I do think that there is a positive impact, certainly from the World Cup.
The Olympics, I think the answer is it really depends on how much the city of Los Angeles has to put into hosting the Olympics. And I think there's sort of a paradox that's related to the Olympics in that the cities around the world who are sort of capable of hosting the Olympics without spending too much money because they already have lots of facilities, right? They don't really need to host the Olympics.
They already have a lot of business. They already have a lot of tourism. You know, is Los Angeles going to get more tourism?
Yes. But how much more than it would normally get? Are some people going to stay away because, you know, they don't want to get caught up in the crowd?
That's probably going to happen somewhat too. And the cities around the world who would have to build facilities from scratch to host the Olympics, right? They're the ones who probably don't get as much of an economic impact or it's a negative impact because they have to spend so much money building all those facilities, which then tend to become not that useful after the games are over.
[Shirin Mollah] (34:17 - 35:06)
I think only a few of the host cities actually use their stadiums after that they were built. I think London, but the other ones in the past have kind of been just abandoned and it was just, you know, a loss. But on the positive side, in 1984, the Los Angeles Olympics experienced a surplus and they were like the first city to experience that.
But before then, no other cities wanted to host. And then we started to get more countries, more developing countries, kind of getting these host cities. You know, you brought up a little bit about how we have infrastructure already, but do you think we might experience a surplus or even more on the positive side?
[Dan Rascher] (35:07 - 37:07)
Yeah, it's interesting. In 1984, right, Peter Yubaroff, who then later became the commissioner of Major League Baseball, he was sort of the head of the LA 84 committee and he was able to do two things that hadn't really been done in Olympic hosting was he got, he utilized thousands and I think tens of thousands of volunteers to basically do jobs that you might normally have to pay people to do. And so he was able to keep his labor costs down, which was really fascinating.
And at the same time, then he was also able to generate revenue from sponsorships and things like that, that the International Olympic Committee allowed them to sort of use. And so yeah, you're right, they produced basically a surplus and they used some of that to build this really, really great library in Los Angeles. I forget the name of it, but it's basically a sports library and do other things.
And they funded some community youth sports and things like that. Most cities aren't as successful at doing that. I have high hopes for LA 28, the host committee.
I will say I've seen a fair amount of turnover in their staffing and that always worries me. Are people going in there and they're struggling to sort of be able to generate the revenue because I know that the bar that they've set for themselves is really high. Lots of money they expect to come in from sponsorships and things like that.
And so we're still a few years out, but I worry about that. But yet in the end, it's the people that have been sort of commissioned to put this on, the folks at Wasserman. They're really talented.
They have a ton of experience. I do think that Los Angeles is going to produce a surplus again.
[Shirin Mollah] (37:08 - 37:49)
I went to the previous Olympics in Paris and I noticed that a lot of the residents leave during that time. And me being a resident in Los Angeles, I would love to stay here. But do you think that the expected attendance to these games are always reached or do you think they kind of fall below?
And I mean, this is a kind of a hard question because after the pandemic, a lot of things have changed in terms of travel and sporting events in general. But now that we're kind of like five years after the pandemic, do you ever think that we reach our expectations with the attendance? Is it lower, especially in the Olympics?
[Dan Rascher] (37:50 - 38:49)
That's a great question. I don't know. Because I know there's so many more events now at the Olympics than there used to be.
That is, is there too much supply? Are there too many things going on at the same time that you might have found yourself at an event that was half full? I'm not sure if you did.
But so that's sort of an interesting concern. I don't think that's going to be an issue in Los Angeles. I think LA 28 is going to be a huge draw, not only for Americans who will travel for sports, but I also think people from other countries supporting their countries are going to come to Los Angeles.
So I'm not really worried about the attendance at LA 28. But obviously, the Winter Olympics sometimes have a harder time, especially because the Winter Olympics have to be hosted in places that don't always have a lot of infrastructure and hotels because they have to be near a mountain where it snows. I think the Summer Olympics are a lot easier to host from that perspective.
So I'm not that worried about the attendance aspect of, of say LA 28.
[Shirin Mollah] (38:50 - 39:20)
Before moving on, I kind of wanted to discuss or just touch on the topic of the Olympics. They're really focused on sustainability and environment, which I've noticed. And, you know, being in California, we're, we're, we're really honed in on that priority.
But I have seen a lot of movements for LA trying to do that, especially, you know, with all of the traffic that's going to, you know, be caused. But yeah, I just, do you have anything that you wanted to add? Or have you seen any trends on that?
[Dan Rascher] (39:21 - 40:20)
I mean, I think it's a, there's definitely a negative impact on the environment from hosting the Olympics. And no matter how hard anyone tries, maybe there's some future world in which, you know, everything is, is public transportation and it's all electric and, you know, and there's not as much of an impact and the construction of the facilities and the materials used, you know, are sustainable. I think that's the goal.
I don't think we're close to that at all. There has been an improvement, but I think a lot of it is not because the Olympics, the Olympic movement is building things differently. I think a lot of the improvement is just through general technology to improve environments in general, right?
We have more electric cars now. So even though there's going to be a lot of traffic in LA, right, there'll be more electric cars than say there was in 1984, which there probably were no electric cars in 1984. Yeah, I think that's a problem.
And I think it's good that the Olympics sort of points to that and they, and they want to achieve that, but I think it's very difficult.
[Shirin Mollah] (40:20 - 40:57)
Yeah, there's a trade off, right? If we have more, if we have a train system, we're still, we're still having this negative impact on environmental to build it. But then it's also helping the environment.
That's something that's a trade off in economics that we look at. So onto team economics and competitive balance. Competitive balance is just one of my favorite topics, just because it brings in a lot of, you know, competition and sports and you like to look at the teams.
But how do you think that the revenue and salary caps impact competitive balance in leagues like the NFL, NBA, and MLB?
[Dan Rascher] (41:00 - 45:00)
Yeah. Unlike you, competitive balance is fascinating because it's fairly unique to sports. You know, it's a part of economics that if you're not studying sports, you're probably not, there's not many situations where something like that is sort of part of the calculation, right?
But in sports, leagues and teams, part of what they sell is the competition between the two teams, between the teams in the league, you know, all fighting to get into the playoffs and win a championship, whatever that is. And so the nature of competition of the team sort of comes into play. And there's some sort of demand that comes from, from competitive balance.
I don't know that the leagues know exactly what the optimal balance is. This question has come up in multiple cases that I've testified in. And these questions have, you know, fact witnesses from the NFL, from the NCAA have been asked, their economists on their side have been asked.
They don't have an answer. They don't know what the right amount of balance is. They just know that they need to, there needs to be some level of balance and they need to pay attention to it.
And so they've instituted these rules, like you mentioned, salary caps and revenue sharing. I think the salary caps and then I think what's more important or just as important are the team salary minimums that have now occurred in say in the NFL and the NBA, for instance, right? So not only is there a cap where you basically take the average revenue across the league for each team and you, you know, roughly 50% of that now is the cap that an NFL team can spend, but they need to spend on the bottom up.
They need to spend about 40, 45% of that in order to reach the team salary minimum. So you have this tight band that sort of keeps the teams, you know, fairly equal. And without that, without the salary cap and the minimums, I think teams would, would, would spend more or less.
So Jerry Jones, even in this NFL Sunday ticket trial last summer, he said on the stand, he's like, look, if there was no salary cap, I would be winning super bowl rings. I would be spending all the money I could find to try to win because that's all I care about. And he's like the salary cap is keeping me from winning, you know, championships.
And at the same time, I've done some research showing that some teams in sports leagues do what we call a free ride where they basically don't want to spend as much money and they'd rather just share in the, in the sort of shared revenues. And so the team salary minimums forces those teams. And one of the ones that I studied with the Cincinnati Bengals, it forces them to spend up to a certain amount.
So I think that the, that the caps and the minimums do play a role in, in enforcing competitive balance, but they're not perfect because teams can spend money outside of the cap. That's not directly on players, but it's on facilities. Like we see this in college sports, right?
Where we always, where the most the players could earn in the past was just a scholarship. And so the big schools, like Ohio State, you mentioned Oklahoma, Alabama, University of Texas, they would spend more money on facilities in order to sort of go around the cap in order to get athletes to, to come to their schools. So the salary caps and minimums, I think help with competitive balance.
They're not perfect. The revenue sharing, I don't think, and I think the academic research tends to support this. The revenue sharing in general, unless it's organized in a certain way, doesn't really affect competitive balance.
I mean, it's, you know, it provides revenue to certain teams, but unless the team has an incentive to spend that revenue on players, they're just going to, you know, they're just going to pocket it as profit. And so what forces them to spend it is having that team salary minimum. So the revenue sharing keeps teams from, you know, going bankrupt, let's say, but, but right now in today's NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball, the media revenues are so high that, that we're not really at risk of teams, you know, going bankrupt.
So the revenue sharing is not that important.
[Shirin Mollah] (45:01 - 45:10)
So what about the MLB? Because MLB doesn't have a player's salary cap. How is the competitive balance there in any sense?
[Dan Rascher] (45:11 - 46:49)
I mean, you see, you see it yourself. You're in Los Angeles, the Dodgers spend hundreds of millions of dollars on their payroll and they have these great players, right? And I'm up here in Oakland or near Oakland and the AAs now they've moved to Sacramento, but you know, the Oakland athletics would spend, you know, 20%, 15% of what the Dodgers were spending, you know, 30%, whatever the number is, right?
It's really hard to compete in situations like that. You know, the NBA and the NFL don't allow that to happen. So Major League Baseball, you end up with some of the same teams that are making the playoffs each year.
And the teams with low, low budgets, they tend to be in smaller markets. They tend not to make the playoffs. And so I really do think that's a problem.
And so Major League Baseball, instead of having a cap and a minimum, they have, they have luxury taxes. So they do sort of try to put, put the brakes on, on excess spending. But again, because the media dollars have grown so fast in sports, and we can talk about why that is, but because they've grown so fast in sports, teams are willing just to go right into the, into the luxury tax and just spend that money anyway.
And even though they get taxed at a very high rate. And so I do think that Major League Baseball struggles a bit from, from having these, these teams are from having a lack of competitive balance. Now, maybe having these, maybe having dynasties like the Dodgers and Yankees actually turn out to be good for, for the leagues, you know, overall.
So I think that's a really interesting question.
[Shirin Mollah] (46:49 - 47:08)
So player salaries, when we look at player salary cap, it's actually the concepts of price floor and price ceiling and economics. If player salaries continue to skyrocket, do you think that there's a point where leagues or teams might hit a financial ceiling or will revenues just keep growing a match?
[Dan Rascher] (47:09 - 49:02)
As I was saying, media revenues have been growing. There's new lines of revenue, gambling, social media is a fairly new, new source of revenue for, for teams through, you know, through advertising. And so every time I think, wow, it just can't grow, salaries are so high, they keep growing.
And one reason for that, the reason the media revenues have grown is that you all of a sudden have new competition from, you know, Amazon and Netflix. And remember, Twitter had Thursday Night Football on at one point. So all these streaming companies, you know, and YouTube, all these streaming companies and Apple with Major League Soccer, right?
All these streaming companies have many more resources. They have a much larger view of what they're trying to do. They're trying to bring customers to their streaming services, not just to watch a sporting event, but then to basically be subscribers to watch their other content.
So now they're all of a sudden competing with the traditional linear channels, you know, Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC. And so there's just more competition. And so the beneficiaries of that competition are the sports leagues and the teams.
And so the media revenues keep growing. And what's really great about media revenues is that there's not, there doesn't tend to be a cost to the team associated with them, right? If you double your media deal and you're the Los Angeles Dodgers, you don't really have to invest much differently in sort of supporting that media infrastructure, right?
You already have spaces for the announcers and for the cameras, right? Now you're just going to get twice as much money as you were before. So those dollars flow all the way to the bottom line for these teams, and then they end up spending some of them on the players, right?
[Shirin Mollah] (49:02 - 49:36)
It's kind of like the question of basic economics, should the salaries, are the salaries keeping up with the economy, especially for like the cost of living, what's happening in the businesses, the whole entire. Yeah. And also now we talked about teams, professional leagues, but what about college athletes?
Now there's this new NIL, this is just most recently in the past few years. Do you think that they should be paid beyond NIL deals and what would be the best economic model for college sports?
[Dan Rascher] (49:37 - 53:09)
Yeah, it's a fascinating question. So if Judge Claudia Wilkin rules this April, so April 7th, there's a final hearing in the settlement on these cases. It's the House case, the Carter case, the Hubbard case, they've all been lumped together.
And I've been working on the settlement to try to figure out sort of how to do the money out in the past, you know, past damages for athletes, 2.8 billion dollars. It's really been a fascinating process. In fact, it's been, I've been using a lot of the academic literature that's out there to sort of help frame it.
But going forward is the real question. So if she approves the settlement starting in July of this year, all of a sudden each school, each Division I school can spend up to basically 20 million dollars more than they spend now on their athletes. So it's sort of like a cap, not by sport, but sort of across the athletic department.
And not every school is going to spend that much, obviously, and not every school even has to opt into this settlement. But the major schools in the Power Four conferences, right, they have to opt into this, and they're allowed to spend more money. And so this money, even though the NCAA calls it payments to the athletes for the use of their NIL, there's no requirement that the schools have to prove that it's NIL payments.
They're just allowed to make these payments. So really, we're going to start seeing schools this summer paying college athletes to play for them. And we haven't really seen that other than under the table payments in the past.
So we're going to start seeing that happen. We'll see how it plays out. As I said, there's sort of a cap across athletic departments and not by sport.
So that would be interesting because different schools can choose to invest in different ways. And so I think the latter part of your question is sort of what is the economic model that should be put in place. And I've been arguing, based on research that I did in late 1990s, is that we should just create a competitive market.
Each conference in college sports is its own sort of league, its own little joint venture, and it competes with other conferences. And so if you have enough of these conferences competing, they could actually come up with their own models of pay. And we see some of them doing that now where I think the American conference is requiring its schools to pay at least a certain amount of money to athletes coming in because they want that conference to compete with other conferences.
So it's sort of like a team salary minimum that's occurring within a conference. So I think the optimal model is a simple model of competition. Doesn't have to be each school deciding on its own roles.
It could be each conference as a league, as a joint venture, deciding on its own rules about how it's going to pay athletes or whether it's going to at all. It's up to them. And competition will sort of lead to an outcome.
And you'll probably have an outcome that's similar to today where the SEC schools, Southeastern Conference, they're going to spend lots of money and they're going to try to dominate. The Big 10 is going to be trying to keep up with them. The ACC and the Big 12 are going to be right behind.
And so that's what we've sort of seen anyway. And so I think we're going to continue to see sort of the same type of balance and the same type of investment. It's just more of the money now is going to go to the athletes.
[Shirin Mollah] (53:10 - 53:56)
Yes, there's a lot of ongoing news with the College of Sports. So it's a very interesting topic. Moving on to something else that's very important is we just saw in the news yesterday about the promotion and relegation in the US cell.
How do you think that's going to change soccer in the United States? So other countries, especially Europe, I can tell you, it was a very big culture shock of how interested they are in soccer and how dedicated they are. They're watching a game, like a soccer game, at a Wimbledon match where it's all quiet.
And it's way different than the United States with soccer, but do you think it might be that kind of culture in a few years, maybe 10 years? A lot of people are interested in soccer too.
[Dan Rascher] (53:56 - 56:38)
Yeah, European soccer and soccer globally is fascinating. I'm with you. I am my oldest son.
It's his favorite sport by far. He played it. He watches European soccer all the time.
He was lucky that he has a phone. I grew up with, we didn't have phones, right? So he's watching soccer on his phone constantly.
And he and I were able to go over to England basically a year ago and watch a bunch of soccer matches. And it was so exciting. And the first thing I know is exactly what you said.
Everyone is sitting still. They're watching the match. There's obviously seeing and chanting going on, but like everyone's watching the match.
No one's eating food. No one's talking to each other about what's going on in their life and their job and stuff. Everyone was dedicated to watching the soccer match.
And it was so great because that's how I am as a sports fan. I just want to watch the sport. I don't want to talk about what's going on in the world.
I just want to watch it. And it was really fascinating. And so a big driver of the, I think, of soccer fandom over there is promotion and relegation, right?
Some of the most watched games are the games at the end of the season where the bottom teams in a particular division are playing each other to see who's going to get knocked down to a lower division and the top teams of that lower division are playing each other. So who's going to get to go up? Those are some of the most watched games in any given season.
And so when United Soccer League decided we want to do promotion and relegation because that's how soccer is done around the world. I think that's a huge move for them. I think it's very smart.
I think Major League Soccer has chosen not to do that because the owners invest so much money in building the stadiums that they don't want to all of a sudden be relegated to some smaller division. And there's not enough money in the whole system to sort of allow that landing in the lower division to be sort of soft. So in Europe, in the Premier League in England, if you get relegated down to the next division, you don't immediately drop down fully in revenues.
Like you still get to share in some of those upper division revenues. So they sort of make the landings a bit softer and then you fight your way to get back in the next year. Major League Soccer has never done that.
It's followed the American system of a closed league, right, where you have this a certain number of teams and you can't just play your way into that. I think fans, my students certainly, because I ask them this question every year about promotion and relegation, they all would rather have, they all raised their hand, yes, we would rather have promotion and relegation. So I think it's a great move by United Soccer League.
It'll be interesting to see if Major League Soccer reacts to it in any fashion, tries to get in and push the USLs, the division below it, that would be interesting. Or do they compete alongside of it? I think it's a really exciting move.
[Shirin Mollah] (56:38 - 57:25)
I feel like we're always taught in economics, there's the idea of competition. So not just in sports, but competition in business as well. So if there's two companies, they're competing, their product is meant to be better.
And then in sports also, we see Steph Curry and LeBron and they're, you see them at one game, if one shoots, then one has to shoot two more. And it kind of helps them with their talent. And we teach that.
So I wonder how it's going to be as the US team, playing globally as well, if they're trying to be better and trying to have this kind of different type of competition just within the USL, how is it going to change soccer overall? That's going to be interesting to just watch over time.
[Dan Rascher] (57:26 - 59:14)
Yeah, I agree that the US soccer players are continuing to try to improve through MLS and maybe now through USL, but obviously a lot of them play overseas. That's where sort of the best US soccer players play. It's not typically in major league soccer right now, but MLS has been climbing its way up the ladder in terms of the quality of play.
It's still not there, but they've been trying and there's some great players like Messi now play in major league soccer. But MLS has had a monopoly this whole time. And so they haven't really had to put as good of a product on the field.
Now, maybe they will now that the USL is competing with them. But we see that. There's one NFL, there's one major league baseball, right?
They don't have a lot of competition. At least MLS has competition somewhat with other leagues around the world for talent, right? But basically baseball has no competition for talent.
So teams don't have to play well because they don't fear being relegated. So the Oakland A's can have a tiny budget and that's what they can do. And their fans are just going to be sad for years to come because they're not going to put a competitive product on the field.
With promotion, relegation, you would be sure that they would want to make sure that they don't get relegated. I think it would just really improve many sports. It's just, it's not practical yet.
And I think it is with USL, but not with say major league baseball, for instance, because the investment that they build in the stadiums versus a minor league team doesn't even have the infrastructure. Now, again, we see that in the Premier League, we see small teams work their way up and then they have to sort of expand their stadium as they climb up the ladder.
[Shirin Mollah] (59:15 - 59:31)
So what trends in sports, business and economics do you think we should be paying attention to over the next decade? We talked about a little bit about the concepts and the current news, but is there anything else that you might think that we should look into?
[Dan Rascher] (59:32 - 1:02:24)
Yeah, I think a big area is just media. All the changes taking place in media, right? We're transitioning from linear television, advertising driven media where you watch content live and then you're forced to watch ads.
And then that sort of drives half the revenues in the industry. We're moving away from that. We're moving to streaming.
Now, the streaming services have started to put ads on. I think we all noticed that all of a sudden I'm watching Amazon and there's an ad when there wasn't a couple of years ago. So the advertising model is still there, but we're moving from linear TV to streaming and streaming these Fox and ABC and CBS, they don't have any competitive advantage in that space like they did in linear television.
So it's much more competitive now and teams are starting to move. We see the failures of the regional sports networks, right? They're going bankrupt.
They're being taken over by teams. Teams are starting to put their games on streaming. I think just yesterday, a few of the major league baseball teams announced that they were going to launch their own streaming services where you could just watch all their games and pay a certain fee.
I think that's something to watch. Will the revenues be the same as they are now? The cable TV model is so interesting because each of the channels get paid a certain fee every month just if there's someone who has that on their television package, not whether they actually watch those channels, right?
Those folks are not, when they go to streaming, they're not going to sign up for channels that they don't watch. So you're getting skinnier bundles, right? Where you're going to have sports bundles that are just going to be lumped together with other sports.
Disney almost launched that in the fall and then it sort of got blocked by a lawsuit. But I think that's the thing to be watching is are the revenues going to be the same? Are they going to be higher?
Are they going to be winners and losers? Are some teams and some sports going to have a harder time generating media revenues? So I think that's one of them.
Another really interesting one is the advent of new sports like pickleball. I'm playing pickleball now all the time. I'm so addicted to it.
It's so funny because when I first heard about it, I was like, it seems sort of lame. I'd rather play tennis. But now that I play it, it's super fun.
And so now you're starting to see it on TV. I have an alum who launched a pickleball league. It's been really fascinating to see new sports that are sort of meant for television that are in short digestible 20 minute matches.
That's maybe super important. So you can watch a match or two and move on to something else. You can watch it on your phone.
I think that's a fascinating part of the sports industry to watch too.
[Shirin Mollah] (1:02:26 - 1:02:47)
So this probably comes to you naturally. But when you go to a sporting event or you play sports, do you ever think about the economics behind it? Just sitting in the seat or just playing pickleball?
Is it something that you think about? Because that's something I definitely think about when I'm watching the stands or like the game itself, sometimes game theory. Yeah.
[Dan Rascher] (1:02:48 - 1:04:24)
Yeah. I, you know, I used to think more about the game itself aspect of it. Yeah.
Like, like, like the game, you know, like should a team still, I always think that usually baseball teams don't steal enough because I was a Cardinals fan in the 1980s, the Cardinals would steal tons of bases and they were very successful. So I used to think about those sort of issues, like the on the field game theory and stuff. Now I tend to, I think mostly because my students are working on the business side of sports.
I sit in a game and I look around at the sponsorship, right? And I'm trying to see which ones are coming alive and activating very well, which ones are sort of tired. It's just sort of a banner, you know what I mean?
You don't pay much attention to it. I started looking at the different seating arrangements, right? Are there club seats with special access to a bar, restaurant, you know, and they're paying a lot more money than someone who's sitting close to them, but higher up and doesn't have access.
So I think about the revenue streams that flow through the building at the concession stand, right? Can we go faster? Now they're starting to have facial technology where you, they have this down in Los Angeles at the new LA Clippers Arena, right?
Where once they know your face and it's attached to a credit card, basically, you can walk up, grab the concessions and you just look and it tracks your face and charges your card and you walk off. Can we improve the productivity and the speed of the concession stands, for instance? So that's what I look at now is sort of the overall business of the arena or the stadium.
[Shirin Mollah] (1:04:25 - 1:04:37)
I think we also had a discussion earlier about how sports has kind of changed over time with the experience part and how the generation also really likes experience.
[Dan Rascher] (1:04:38 - 1:06:13)
Yeah. And so the shape of stadiums have changed, right? And when I was a young person, you sat in the seat and you watched the game.
And so stadiums were just basically seating arrangements, right? Now people want to go to games and they want to mingle and they want to talk and they want to have a drink at this cool bar that's in the outfield that has palm trees or a hot tub, sort of crazy stuff, right? But that's what people want.
That's what my students want. They're all in their 20s. They want to sort of engage with each other at the game, watch the game, sure, but also move around and do other things.
And so that's been fascinating to sort of watch how that changes. And so the whole technology business is also focused on, the sports technology business is focused on fan engagement, right? There's a company that I've been talking to who have this cool technology where if you take a picture, if you're at a sporting event and you just take a picture, and so it's got like the court with some of the players, it's got sponsorships behind it, all of a sudden those players sort of glow and you can tap on the players or the sponsors and then their information comes to life.
So how they're playing in the game, something about their career, something about their endorsement companies, you could click on a sponsor and all of a sudden you're going to get a coupon, you know what I mean? Like that, like the technology of engaging fans in the game or in the future you're going to click and you're going to bet on something, you know, like you're going to have in-game betting, right? All of that's sort of happening.
We're moving in that direction to sort of increase the engagement with fans. I'm just sitting in a chair, sitting in a seat watching a game for three hours, you know?
[Shirin Mollah] (1:06:14 - 1:06:31)
With all of the new stuff that's going on in sports, as an economist, I feel like there's a lot that, you know, to look at and it's exciting. It's an exciting time to study sports economics. Thank you so much, Dr. Asher, and I enjoyed having you on my podcast and see you next time.
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