Hey now, what you are about to hear is a free preview of one of this week's premium episodes of The Dumb Zone.

If you would like to hear this program in full, along with the full archive, ah, shit.

If you would like to hear this program in full with the archive of all of our past episodes,

you can subscribe at DumbZone.com.

The big reality in all of this is that athletes are not actually being paid for their

name, image, and likeness. They're being paid to play on the field. They are being paid a salary

when the NIL collectives came in. So the women, like in women's basketball is probably the best

example of actually leveraging name image and likeness.

They're being paid for their social following, for their personalities, they can do fun TikToks, they engage with their audience.

They're not being paid millions of dollars to just play the sport on the field.

In football, which is what most people care about, it's the religion

in our country, players are being paid to play on the field. Like Brendan Sorsby is the one,

you know, we'll probably talk about, $5 million rumored NIL deal at tech. None of that.

I think I have a bigger social media following than Brendan Sourge.

No, he played a Cincinnati. He's not that big of a... He's not a person. No one is paying him for his name, Imogen, like this. And that's the big bad secret. And that's what makes all of this so confusing is because people talk about NIA. It's not NIO. We've figured out a workaround so that they can be paid salaries to do their sport on the field.

And so that's where be paid salaries to do their

sport on the field. And so that's where a lot of this gets convoluted. But yeah. And is that because,

is that because that would make them employees, they could unionize, collect, that's the whole thing.

That's the thing. They, they avoid that. Yeah, the NCAA wants it both ways and the schools want it both ways. So, Dan, the reason I started getting interested in this is when you started actually seeing numbers for players, like, oh, that's not wide receiver won money. And I'm like, what are we talking about? I'm going to have to update, you know, the software. So just like the NFL. Now. Yeah, and the thing, I'm a big, I'm a fan of that part of following sports.

You know, in the NBA, it's a bit of a headache.

But you like the roster management and the asset allocation and trading and all the sort of thing.

And that's part of it.

...