Speaker 1: On this episode of Sports Illustrated Weekly, s I senior
Speaker 1: writer Michael Rosenberg reads his essay on how authoritarian regimes
Speaker 1: like China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia use sports for their
Speaker 1: political benefit. And later, you probably have a coffee fanatic
Speaker 1: in your life. You might even be that fanatic. But
Speaker 1: whether or not you drink coffee, you're probably not nearly
Speaker 1: as into it as Jimmy Butler. SI staffer Rohan not
Speaker 1: Crinny tells us just how much the Heat Star really
Speaker 1: loves coffee. But first, our conversation with best selling author
Speaker 1: Michael Lewis, some twenty years after he began the reporting
Speaker 1: on Moneyball. It's April. I'm your host, John Gonzalez from
Speaker 1: Sports Illustrated and I Heart Radio. This is Sports Illustrated Weekly.
Speaker 1: You're not going to bring in one but three defective
Speaker 1: players to replace job this bill James book. I am.
Speaker 1: This is the new direction of the open heads. We
Speaker 1: are card counts at the Black Jet take. We're gonna
Speaker 1: turn the odds on the casino. It's been two decades
Speaker 1: since Michael Lewis started the reporting that would lead to
Speaker 1: his best selling book, Moneyball. Lewis joins me to discuss
Speaker 1: the reception and pushback he got from sports executives back then,
Speaker 1: how analytics have taken over sports as a result, and
Speaker 1: why the man at the center of Moneyball isn't as
Speaker 1: thrilled as you might think with the revolution he helped create.
Speaker 1: Michael Lewis, Welcome to Sports Illustrated Weekly. That's an honor
Speaker 1: to be here, honor to have you. It has been,
Speaker 1: as we were discussing before the show, twenty years since
Speaker 1: you called up Billy Bean and started working on Moneyball.
Speaker 1: And I would imagine that you knew about Bill James
Speaker 1: ahead of time. You figured this would make a perfect
Speaker 1: intersection for your book. Tell us about Bill James and
Speaker 1: how you found him and why you wanted to write
Speaker 1: about his particular area of expertise. So, actually, I've never
Speaker 1: heard of Bill James when I called up Billy Bean.
Speaker 1: I call up Billy Bean because I really had the question, like,
Speaker 1: how are you winning games if you have no money?
Speaker 1: Like why isn't this market more efficient? Like why if
Speaker 1: the Yankees have four times more money than you, they
Speaker 1: should buy all the best players and just beat you
Speaker 1: all the time. I just didn't understand the answer to
Speaker 1: that question. And when I got to him. He was
Speaker 1: the one who told me about Bill James and his existence,
Speaker 1: and in fact, he had all of Bill james early
Speaker 1: abstracts on his bookshelf. And when he come out of
Speaker 1: being a player, he had been introduced by Sandy Alderson
Speaker 1: now runs METS. I think to the work of Bill
Speaker 1: James and an idea of kind of rethinking baseball from
Speaker 1: the ground up. So that's how I discovered Bill James,
Speaker 1: and he Bill James got me through Moneyball. He was
Speaker 1: the intellectual heart of the thing. He was this guy who,
Speaker 1: well before he had a personal computer, well before there
Speaker 1: was a data geek anything anybody was even thinking about data.
Speaker 1: He was cutting box scores out of new papers and
Speaker 1: trying to assemble, you know, better statistics for baseball players,
Speaker 1: and was kind of rethinking the game and started self
Speaker 1: publishing this book in what nineteen seventies seven, I think
Speaker 1: it was called The abstruct And you had to mail
Speaker 1: him a check and he would staple together his mimeograph
Speaker 1: copy and send it back out. And it's really an
Speaker 1: interesting moment in intellectual history because you have this this thing, baseball.
Speaker 1: It's been played the same way forever, and you've got
Speaker 1: these baseball experts supposedly who were running the teams. And
Speaker 1: then you've got this guy. He's actually in a He
Speaker 1: was guarding a stokely Van Camp's pork and bean factory
Speaker 1: at night, working on this thing in in the middle
Speaker 1: of Kansas, questioning things like is the stolen base worth it?
Speaker 1: Or does the runner steal off the picture of the catcher?
Speaker 1: Or is this guy's batting statistics actually more valuable than
Speaker 1: this guy's batting statistics? Or where do runs come from?
Speaker 1: And he was it nord by the inside forever fifteen years,
Speaker 1: and the inside kept running itself the way it always
Speaker 1: ran itself until the wall fell down, and his insights
Speaker 1: in the hands of the next generation data geeks with
Speaker 1: computers end up overrunning the game. So he he was
Speaker 1: the intellectual heart of moneyball. But when I wrote the book,
Speaker 1: I was interested in what he had written, but I
Speaker 1: didn't really dig too deeply into him personally. And when
Speaker 1: I came back to this podcast this season, the podcast
Speaker 1: of Against Rules is about experts, I did think that,
Speaker 1: like this was an important moment in the history of
Speaker 1: experts when the person who who was the expert wasn't
Speaker 1: the person who played the game, who had the experience
Speaker 1: of the thing. It was this intellectual who was thinking
Speaker 1: about it from the outside, and I want to go
Speaker 1: back and find just talk to him about how it
Speaker 1: had happened in the first place. So that's how he
Speaker 1: walks into the podcast. But in many ways he's more
Speaker 1: interesting than the people came that came after him. He
Speaker 1: sees the world in a messier way than the data
Speaker 1: geeks who now run the sports world, and he is
Speaker 1: someone ambivalent about the revolution that he that he created. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm really interested in that part. And you know it's
Speaker 1: amazing to me, first just as a journalist that you know,
Speaker 1: you call it Billy Bean and you talked to him,
Speaker 1: and he goes, oh, yeah, you should talk to this guy,
Speaker 1: Bill James, because how fortuitous, Like that's what we all
Speaker 1: dream about. You had him, as you mentioned on your
Speaker 1: podcast Against the Rules, and he said to you that
Speaker 1: he once looked at a baseball diamond and what he
Speaker 1: saw was a field of ignorance. And he was talking
Speaker 1: about baseball, but he could have been talking about football
Speaker 1: or soccer or basketball, and that kind of language. That
Speaker 1: kind of I look at this in a different way
Speaker 1: than the way that you look at this because you're
Speaker 1: not really thinking about it, I would imagine creates some
Speaker 1: enemies for him. No. Yes, though he's a hard person
Speaker 1: to dislike because his basic pose is I don't know.
Speaker 1: You don't know either, and I don't know that I'm
Speaker 1: open to the possibility there are things I don't know.
Speaker 1: There's a deep humility about him, even though it feels
Speaker 1: like an arrogance to come at the game that you
Speaker 1: didn't ever play and tell everybody that how they're thinking
Speaker 1: about it is wrong. He was identifying logical inconsistencies, but
Speaker 1: always open to the possibility that, like, he's not right,
Speaker 1: he's not sure. The movement he created, oh my god,
Speaker 1: it was a war when the book came out. There's
Speaker 1: only I think one other book in my career that
Speaker 1: triggered a firestorm the way Moneyball triggered a firestorm, and
Speaker 1: that was Flashboys. And that was because Flashboys was trying
Speaker 1: to take billions of dollars away from Wall Street people,
Speaker 1: and you don't take money away from Ball Street people
Speaker 1: without a huge fight. But Moneyball, I didn't completely anticipate
Speaker 1: this being the kind of the vehicle for popularizing Bill
Speaker 1: James type thinking and said and It was effectively saying
Speaker 1: to the rest of baseball that these guys kind of
Speaker 1: know what they're doing and you kind of don't, because
Speaker 1: they're actually paying attention to this thinking that's been going
Speaker 1: on outside the game for the last fifteen years. Deeply
Speaker 1: offended a lot of people in baseball. I mean, I
Speaker 1: can remember when the book came out, there was an
Speaker 1: emergency meeting of baseball scouts in New Orleans devoted to
Speaker 1: the book and how they were going to argue back
Speaker 1: against the book because their jobs were risking. They weren't wrong,
Speaker 1: I mean, there really was a changing of the guard
Speaker 1: and the people. The big thing that happened and the
Speaker 1: only reason the book kind of gained real traction in
Speaker 1: the game, I think is that my reader base. Before that,
Speaker 1: a lot of Wall Street people read Red Liars Poker,
Speaker 1: and this thing landed in the lapse of either the
Speaker 1: kind of people who own baseball teams or the kind
Speaker 1: of people who were friends and financial advisors of the
Speaker 1: people who own baseball teams. And I know there were
Speaker 1: several cases where someone handed it an owner of the
Speaker 1: book and said, your guys who are running your team
Speaker 1: are wasting your money. Read this and it was at
Speaker 1: the owner level when they came down into the organization
Speaker 1: and said, what are you doing? This makes total sense,
Speaker 1: and what these guys in Oakland are doing makes total sense,
Speaker 1: and I want to do that. I don't want to
Speaker 1: do whatever you've been doing is it doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: And um, that infuriated the management class in baseball, and
Speaker 1: there was it was a war. I mean because the
Speaker 1: management class and the scouting class they're the sources for
Speaker 1: sports journalists. I mean, their friends are the daily baseball writers.
Speaker 1: So the baseball writers were by extension not terribly happy.
Speaker 1: And there was this other thing. There was other undercurrent
Speaker 1: of the response. When I first went in to see
Speaker 1: Billy Bean and I said, asked him this question, how
Speaker 1: are you competing? Like what's going on here? If the
Speaker 1: market's efficient, you should not be able to win. He said, well,
Speaker 1: the market is not efficient, and he said, no one's
Speaker 1: asked me the question you just asked me. And I
Speaker 1: spend my life thinking of in those terms, like a
Speaker 1: Wall Street trader, like how do I find value? How
Speaker 1: do I measure the value of the players. I'm spending
Speaker 1: all my time thinking about money and the value of
Speaker 1: the players. But sports journalism isn't all that interested in
Speaker 1: the subject. So there was this feeling that there was
Speaker 1: this wonderful material that had gone neglected by traditional sports journalists,
Speaker 1: and it was offensive that this person who was an
Speaker 1: outsider walked in and sort of plucked the material. So
Speaker 1: there was I got some grief for that reason. But
Speaker 1: it did trigger this war, and the war was the
Speaker 1: battle lines was that. You know, it was a little overstated.
Speaker 1: But on the one hand, you had these data geeks
Speaker 1: with computers who never played the game, and another hand,
Speaker 1: you had the former minor leaguer who thought that he
Speaker 1: was working his way up through the scouting department to
Speaker 1: being an assistant GM to hoping run a team one day.
Speaker 1: And those two people did not always see eye to eye. Okay,
Speaker 1: people who run ball clubs that they think in terms
Speaker 1: of buying players, your goal shouldn't be to buy players.
Speaker 1: Your goal should be to buy winds, and in order
Speaker 1: to buy wins, you need to buy runs. Baseball thinking
Speaker 1: is medieval. They are asking all the wrong questions. And
Speaker 1: if I say it to anybody, I'm I'm ostracized. I'm
Speaker 1: I'm a leverer. So on your podcast when you had
Speaker 1: Bill James on you guys had this great exchange that
Speaker 1: perfectly framed that where you said to him people running
Speaker 1: baseball at the time weren't thinking, and Bill James replied, well,
Speaker 1: why weren't they thinking because they thought they knew right,
Speaker 1: which was just I thought that was so perfect. And
Speaker 1: now twenty years on, math is one out, Michael. I mean,
Speaker 1: the math is here to say it's not going anywhere,
Speaker 1: but that war that you mentioned is still being even
Speaker 1: though it's been fought and one by the people who
Speaker 1: have adopted and embraced the math, there's still that stuck
Speaker 1: dug in recalcitrant faction to think that they can still
Speaker 1: fight and win this war even though the war is over.
Speaker 1: And it's that jocks and nerds culture are line like
Speaker 1: you have the inside the NBA guys right like Shack
Speaker 1: and Charles Barkley, Shacks saying that there needs to be
Speaker 1: more post ops or Charles Barkley saying things like jump
Speaker 1: shooting teams can't win the NBA title back before the
Speaker 1: Golden State Warriors did it, which makes them look like
Speaker 1: what they are like. They haven't paid attention to this movement,
Speaker 1: But I'm wondering what you and also Bill James thinks
Speaker 1: about this that we've got this era of sports now
Speaker 1: that is hyper reliant on the numbers. It's gone very
Speaker 1: much the other way. Yeah, in a way that really
Speaker 1: irritates Bill James, I think, because of course, well partly
Speaker 1: because I mean, it irritated him back in the day.
Speaker 1: He walks away from his self published book after it's
Speaker 1: exploded and become a real published, best selling phenomenon in
Speaker 1: the mid eighties or late eighties, because he said people
Speaker 1: were fetishizing the numbers. The numbers were never the point.
Speaker 1: The point was understanding, and people started throwing around numbers
Speaker 1: without a whole lot of meaning attached. And you see,
Speaker 1: you know you do here now, announcers. It's just like
Speaker 1: a blizzard of numbers. And some of the means something
Speaker 1: and some of them don't. And it's like numbers are
Speaker 1: a smart way to talk about sports, and that's not
Speaker 1: necessarily true. So James himself, he says, it's kind of funny.
Speaker 1: In his last book, his Last Abstract, he writes a
Speaker 1: long letter to the reader that basically says, I hate you.
Speaker 1: I'm stopping writing this book because I found increasingly that
Speaker 1: I don't like my readers and the letters I'm getting
Speaker 1: causing me to dislike you even more, so I don't
Speaker 1: want to write for you anymore. And what he was
Speaker 1: objecting to was people thinking that he had all the
Speaker 1: answers and they had all the answers, when really what
Speaker 1: he had his questions, and he wanted to preserve the
Speaker 1: space of uncertainty of like, you know, let's figure more
Speaker 1: stuff out. And he felt like he was increasingly surrounded
Speaker 1: by kind of smart asses who thought they knew everything,
Speaker 1: and so he's not a really good example of one
Speaker 1: side of this war. And in fact, when he goes
Speaker 1: to work, he ends up being hired by the Boston
Speaker 1: Red Sox after the Boston Socks geekify themselves, and he
Speaker 1: finds the people he gets along with the most naturally
Speaker 1: are the Scouts, the old Scouts, And he took him
Speaker 1: a while to figure out why that was. But part
Speaker 1: of it was that, he says, a lot of those
Speaker 1: Scouts do they didn't know they themselves had a kind
Speaker 1: of humility about them because they made They had so
Speaker 1: many examples of like the betting on a guy and
Speaker 1: he didn't work out, or missing a guy who did
Speaker 1: work out. But the current state of things is curious
Speaker 1: because before when the experts were the people who played
Speaker 1: were insiders. The wall they created between themselves and the
Speaker 1: rest of the world the outsiders was you never played.
Speaker 1: The wall that the insiders create now is you're not smart.
Speaker 1: It's more complicated than you would understand, and the wall
Speaker 1: is sort of offensive. Um, there was a war the
Speaker 1: math people won. There's still these holdouts, but the holdout
Speaker 1: sirt in baseball. They're not a lot holdouts. There's not
Speaker 1: a lot of people will say, oh, yeah, the dad.
Speaker 1: But what people will say that they've made the game boring,
Speaker 1: and that's not a false charge. But there a lot
Speaker 1: of people on TV who go on TV and say
Speaker 1: that teams would be better off if they just got
Speaker 1: rid of all this sophisticated data analysis. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1: The holdouts tend to be sort of the older players
Speaker 1: who did play, who still rely on that I played,
Speaker 1: you didn't. I know you don't, which is comical now,
Speaker 1: and you know, I would guess an aging section of
Speaker 1: fans of different sports. I'm wondering when you started writing
Speaker 1: this book if you ever thought we'd get to this
Speaker 1: spot where not only did the math went out, but
Speaker 1: it's so radically altered, not just baseball but basketball. I
Speaker 1: mean basketball now is you're getting to the rim, or
Speaker 1: you're shooting threes, and everything in between is verboten. So
Speaker 1: I'm wondering if you expected it to go to this
Speaker 1: kind of extreme. I thought the book was going to
Speaker 1: have a different effect. I thought the book was going
Speaker 1: to cause people to rethink how they valued people in
Speaker 1: some places that it I wasn't really thinking of, like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is going to have a big effect on baseball.
Speaker 1: I guess I did think that, look, this is so
Speaker 1: obviously a superior way to run a baseball team that
Speaker 1: other people are certainly going to adopt it. But I
Speaker 1: didn't follow through it through to its natural conclusion where
Speaker 1: that would leave the game and then it would slow
Speaker 1: down the game and make it a game of strikeouts,
Speaker 1: walks and home runs. And and it's not necessarily true
Speaker 1: that the geekification, the intellectualization are the smarter playing of
Speaker 1: the games is necessarily more boring. True, and baseball, it
Speaker 1: just turns out the efficient strategy given the game is
Speaker 1: a duller strategy. Basketball, I think is much more exciting
Speaker 1: because people figured out the value of the three porch shot.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just a much more fun game to watch.
Speaker 1: Mid rain Jumper is a sort of the most boring
Speaker 1: thing on the court and and football. It's led to
Speaker 1: the opening up of the game, you know, the passing
Speaker 1: game over the running game. The passing game is much
Speaker 1: more fun to watch. So it isn't that the intellectuals
Speaker 1: necessarily make the game more boring and based. It's just
Speaker 1: in baseball it so happens, that is true. But I
Speaker 1: know the answer to your question. I did not see
Speaker 1: coming great changes in the way the game was played.
Speaker 1: Especially I didn't find myself wondering what the frontiers were
Speaker 1: because way back then it was also I mean, it
Speaker 1: was pretty rude metry stuff. They were like people thought
Speaker 1: r B I s were a really valuable statists, and
Speaker 1: people weren't paying attention on base percentage and that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. I did wonder once the inefficiency got beaten
Speaker 1: out of the game by if everybody was kind of
Speaker 1: doing what the Oakland a's were doing, where an Oakland
Speaker 1: is like outfit would get an edge And still find
Speaker 1: myself wondering a bit because I was wondering, I didn't
Speaker 1: the only guilty sensation I felt when I was writing
Speaker 1: the book was after I published this. Billy Bean's done that,
Speaker 1: as I probably says, he's no longer going to have
Speaker 1: an edge, where is he going to find the edge?
Speaker 1: So anyway then answers, I didn't really see the game
Speaker 1: changing the way it's changed. I was also struck in
Speaker 1: your conversation with Bill James, when you guys were talking
Speaker 1: about I mean again, he's one of the godfathers of
Speaker 1: this movement, and yet there are considerable parts of it
Speaker 1: that he does not like. Where you had brought up
Speaker 1: to him different statistics like war wins above replacement, and
Speaker 1: he's not on board with that particular stat And I'm
Speaker 1: wondering if this is, you know, Frankenstein looking at his
Speaker 1: monster and wondering what have I done. I think there
Speaker 1: is a little bit of that. I think there's a
Speaker 1: little bit of that, and there's a little bit of
Speaker 1: another thing. And the other thing is where all this
Speaker 1: comes from. Why you're a college graduate. Why you're not
Speaker 1: getting a job or proper job that you could yet
Speaker 1: pays you a living wage. Why are you guarding pork
Speaker 1: and beans at night and trying to write about baseball.
Speaker 1: He's pretty clear about the psychological origins of his obsession
Speaker 1: with it, and it really is an obsession. His mother
Speaker 1: died when he was four, his father was badly injured
Speaker 1: in an accident. He he was basically kind of orphaned
Speaker 1: and left to defend for himself with an older sister
Speaker 1: who was just a couple of years older. He was
Speaker 1: pretty socially isolated. He felt like he just had this
Speaker 1: sister and they were together all the time, hi and
Speaker 1: there each other's other half. And he felt a need
Speaker 1: to control and understand the world because the world seems
Speaker 1: senseless to him, and he turned to baseball as a
Speaker 1: environment that was simple enough that you could completely understand
Speaker 1: it and makes sense of it. So that's the original
Speaker 1: impulse that gets him into kind of making a new
Speaker 1: kind of sense of this old game. And I think
Speaker 1: what bothers him is not just like the individual statistics
Speaker 1: or the quantification of everything, though those things do bother him.
Speaker 1: I think the real thing that bothers him is the
Speaker 1: sense that the false sense that other people have that
Speaker 1: in this environment has been fully understood and there's nothing
Speaker 1: left there that it's been deforested. Because I think he
Speaker 1: gets a great deal of solace just from the exercise
Speaker 1: of making new sense of the thing, and he's decided.
Speaker 1: You know, it's really a curious predisposition of personality trait
Speaker 1: that up until the age of I don't know, forty,
Speaker 1: he's really interested in almost nothing but baseball. Everything he's
Speaker 1: done in his life is directed towards making more sense
Speaker 1: of baseball. The idea that's sort of like, all right,
Speaker 1: people with spreadsheets of advanced abilities to analyze data have
Speaker 1: come through and completely eliminated the mystery and the the
Speaker 1: ability to order this world. Further, I think leaves him cold.
Speaker 1: He doesn't like it. So you do find he's this
Speaker 1: revolutionary who doesn't really like the revolution he created, which
Speaker 1: is not that unusual little thing. Revolution is often don't
Speaker 1: like it with the revolution creates not unusual. Still fascinating though,
Speaker 1: and that's why I was curious when I had asked
Speaker 1: you about the blowback for him, and we had spent
Speaker 1: some time talking about the culture war and the jocks
Speaker 1: versus nerds component. I'm also interested, though, in any potential
Speaker 1: blowback for you, because you did help literally author this movement, right,
Speaker 1: and so I'm wondering what kind of feedback you've got
Speaker 1: in the last twenty years since you called up Billy
Speaker 1: Being the first time, and he put you onto this
Speaker 1: story that has become this phenomenon. You know, it was
Speaker 1: pretty funny in the beginning because sports people generally don't
Speaker 1: really acknowledge the existence of the author. Their relationship to
Speaker 1: books is usually, oh, that's a Charles Barklay's memoir. That
Speaker 1: that that that they they assumed that the book is
Speaker 1: basically the point of view someone else. If there's someone
Speaker 1: putting the words on the page, they're not significant. It's
Speaker 1: the it's the significant thing is the sports figure who
Speaker 1: it's about. So in the very beginning and for a while,
Speaker 1: I had this lovely situation where all the people in
Speaker 1: baseball who were piste about the book assumed Billy Being
Speaker 1: had basically written it, and so they were pissed at him.
Speaker 1: So Billy got directly. Mostly I wasn't worth attacking. I
Speaker 1: was this gnat from this other world, right, so that
Speaker 1: I was not an obvious target except for from a
Speaker 1: couple of journalists, but from the people in baseball, and
Speaker 1: they were like angry at Billy, and I am eternally
Speaker 1: grateful Libility Being did not throw me under the bus,
Speaker 1: because he really could have. He could have just said
Speaker 1: like I didn't have any control over that. The guy
Speaker 1: didn't know what he was talking about. I didn't say
Speaker 1: any of that. He could said that, he didn't say
Speaker 1: anything like that, and so he took the heat. So
Speaker 1: I didn't get it directly. What I got instead was
Speaker 1: really gratifying. I got essentially a hall pass to wander
Speaker 1: around which I still have to wander around professional sports
Speaker 1: and ask people questions because people who weren't immediately threatened
Speaker 1: were interested in the thing. So it led to I mean,
Speaker 1: it led to the blindside. It led to long pieces
Speaker 1: about basketball. It will still lead to other things. I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about doing something on Indian cricket now. So it's
Speaker 1: given me a pass to go and learn about other sports,
Speaker 1: and people will take the time with me to teach
Speaker 1: me because they were interested in the book. And I
Speaker 1: got very little in the way of obnoxious blowback from
Speaker 1: insiders directed at me personally. It's been twenty years since
Speaker 1: you talked to Billy Bean about this. It was a
Speaker 1: remarkable book then it continues to have an impact on
Speaker 1: sports at large two decades later. Always read him and
Speaker 1: listen to him and check out his podcast on experts
Speaker 1: called Against the rules he leads the league and podcast
Speaker 1: guests above replacement Michael Lewis, thank you for this, Thanks
Speaker 1: for having me after a break. How sports are often
Speaker 1: used for political benefit. When the Winter Olympics were recently
Speaker 1: held in Beijing, a lot of people spoke out against
Speaker 1: the oppressive Chinese government's human rights abuses. We did an
Speaker 1: entire segment about it on this very show, And when
Speaker 1: the World Cup is held in Qatar later this year,
Speaker 1: you'll hear the same sentiments expressed about that government's terrible violations.
Speaker 1: But despite the vocal opposite and too certain authoritarian regimes,
Speaker 1: sports events are still held in those countries, which is
Speaker 1: exactly what those governments want in the first place. Sports
Speaker 1: can be manipulated for their political benefit, and that's nothing
Speaker 1: new either. Here's SI senior writer Michael Rosenberg with his
Speaker 1: essay on sports washing. Sports washing is everywhere, but it's
Speaker 1: not new. Regimes have been using sports to burnish their
Speaker 1: images or distract from their problematic behavior for centuries. Competitive
Speaker 1: sports are built on the concept of fair play, which
Speaker 1: helps explain why so many oppressive regimes see value in games.
Speaker 1: Any form of good, wholesome fund can seem like it
Speaker 1: is presented by good, wholesome people, even when the facts
Speaker 1: say otherwise. China, with its appalling human rights record, in
Speaker 1: opposition to an independent Taiwan, hosted the recent Winter Olympics
Speaker 1: with the strategically peaceful slogan Together for a Shared Future.
Speaker 1: One of the stars of those games was Eileen Goo,
Speaker 1: a Kelly, Alifornia born skier who chose to compete for
Speaker 1: her mother's homeland of China, implicitly embracing the government of
Speaker 1: China rather than the United States. Whether or not that
Speaker 1: was her intent, Good declined to say whether she renounced
Speaker 1: her US citizenship to gain a Chinese passport, as Chinese
Speaker 1: law requires, but she did gush about quote the ability
Speaker 1: of sport to bridge the gap and to be a
Speaker 1: force for unity. That was music to the ears of
Speaker 1: the Chinese government and those of the Saudi government as well.
Speaker 1: Saudi Arabia has long attempted to lowre star golfers two
Speaker 1: events there with large financial guarantees, using the players and
Speaker 1: sports to present a benign image of the country, and
Speaker 1: they've succeeded. Two time Master's champion Bubba Watson recently praised
Speaker 1: their efforts to support women's golf completely ignoring the fact
Speaker 1: that until last summer, woman needed permission from a male
Speaker 1: guardian to live alone. The saudiast to use Phil Michelson's
Speaker 1: words are scary to get involved with, Yet he is
Speaker 1: involved anyway. Michelson, the famous golfer, his spearhead of the
Speaker 1: Saudi funded effort to create a world golf tour for
Speaker 1: the game's elite, a much larger effort to cleanse the
Speaker 1: country's image. Most disturbing is that Michelson knows exactly why
Speaker 1: and how he is being used sports washing. Michelson called
Speaker 1: it in an interview with writer Alan Shipnik of The
Speaker 1: fire Pit Collective for ship Nick's upcoming book Phil, The
Speaker 1: Rip Roaring and Unauthorized Biography of Golf's most colorful superstar.
Speaker 1: Sports washing sports washing sports washing. Sports washing is the
Speaker 1: use of sports to present a sanitized, friendlier version of
Speaker 1: a political regime or operation. Michelson later apologized for using
Speaker 1: words that did not reflect quote his true feelings, but
Speaker 1: that apology was just another form of sports washing. He
Speaker 1: should think people funding the new tour are scary because
Speaker 1: they are. They are determined to succeed too. They just
Speaker 1: announced the schedule that includes events in the United states
Speaker 1: the term sportswashing is relatively new, but the practice is
Speaker 1: almost as old as sports. Paul Christensen, a professor of
Speaker 1: ancient Greek history at Dartmouth, says it goes all the
Speaker 1: way back to the original Olympics. Christensen tells this story
Speaker 1: there's a long war between Athens and Sparta, and Athens
Speaker 1: looks like it's getting its ass handed to it. They're
Speaker 1: getting the crap beating out of them, and everyone thinks
Speaker 1: they're down and out. And so an Athenian politician named
Speaker 1: Alcibiades comes to the Olympic Games and four sixteen BC,
Speaker 1: right in the middle of the war, when things are
Speaker 1: going bad for Athens, and Alcibiades enters several chariot teams
Speaker 1: into the four horse chariot race and wins first, second,
Speaker 1: and either third or fourth place. And that's like an
Speaker 1: F one racing team. It was insanely expensive, and they
Speaker 1: all said to him at home, you're crazy. We don't
Speaker 1: have those kinds of resources. And he's like, listen, everyone
Speaker 1: thought we were down and out. I win all these
Speaker 1: events at Olympia, and now everyone in the Greek world
Speaker 1: thinks that we're just fine, and they're terrified of US.
Speaker 1: It was a straight up geopolitical maneuver. Modern sports. Washington
Speaker 1: can take many forms. Counter wants the world to see
Speaker 1: it as the host of the two men's World Cup,
Speaker 1: not a country where migrant workers are exploited, including for
Speaker 1: that competition. Thousands of workers have died over the last
Speaker 1: decade building the World Cup infrastructure. Former Chinese Communist Party
Speaker 1: leader Maud s Tong once banned golf, calling it quote
Speaker 1: a sport for millionaires, but the game has since become
Speaker 1: both legal and popular in China, leading to propaganda that
Speaker 1: golf was actually invented there instead of in Scotland. If
Speaker 1: you were to listen to the Chinese Communist Party, you'd
Speaker 1: believe that everything that happens in China started in China
Speaker 1: and belongs to China. If you think that kind of
Speaker 1: silly nationalistic table would never fly in the US, I
Speaker 1: have two words for you, Abner double Day. Millions of
Speaker 1: American kids have grown up believing Double Day invented baseball,
Speaker 1: a myth that was created a century ago to distance
Speaker 1: the national pastime from its foreign antecedents cricket and rounders.
Speaker 1: It's a proven fact that the game now designated baseball
Speaker 1: is of modern and purely American origin, insisted one of
Speaker 1: the game's first power brokers, Albert G. Spalding, in his
Speaker 1: nineteen eleven books America's National Game. There is a hint
Speaker 1: of sportswashing every time a US president throws out a
Speaker 1: first pitch or a college president talks about football as
Speaker 1: the quote front porch of a university. Sports seem like
Speaker 1: they aren't political, which is precisely why they are so
Speaker 1: often used for political purposes. The drama seduces us, and
Speaker 1: our passions distract us, and so we swallow whatever government
Speaker 1: officials feed us without even realizing it. After Russian invaded Ukraine,
Speaker 1: the International Olympic Committee in FIFA move to ban both
Speaker 1: Russia and its ally Belarus from competition. That might not
Speaker 1: seem like much of a penalty for Russia's atrocities in Ukraine,
Speaker 1: but don't think of it as a punishment. Think of
Speaker 1: it as taking away a weapon. Russian President of Vladimir
Speaker 1: Putin has long used sports to shape Russia's image as
Speaker 1: both powerful and reasonable. Shortly after delivering a famously blistering
Speaker 1: anti West speech in Munich in two thousand seven, Putin
Speaker 1: successfully lobby the IOC to award the two thousand fourteen
Speaker 1: Winter Olympics to sociate a one two punch that made
Speaker 1: Russia seem like it and its leaders views belonged on
Speaker 1: the world stage. Russia kept using sports to look strong,
Speaker 1: instituting a state sponsored doping program to increase the country's
Speaker 1: metal count and friendly. Putin opened the two thousand eighteen
Speaker 1: Men's World Cup by welcoming spectators and journalists to quote open, hospitable,
Speaker 1: friendly Russia. Earlier this year, Putin attended the Winter Olympics
Speaker 1: opening ceremony and appeared to fake falling asleep as the
Speaker 1: Ukrainian delegation entered the stadium. Then Putin invaded Ukraine shortly
Speaker 1: after the games ended. The modern Olympics, like the ancient ones,
Speaker 1: have often been a political tool. When Nazi Germany hosted
Speaker 1: the ninety six Summer Olympics, it saw the event as
Speaker 1: a pep rally for the Aryan race. The game's slogan
Speaker 1: was quote, I call the youth of the world. Adolf
Speaker 1: Hitler built the Olympius Stadion in Berlin, which supposedly seated
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand people, and the Nazis paid for propaganda's
Speaker 1: film maker Lenny reef install to make a documentary about
Speaker 1: the Olympics. The Nazis also took down signs banning Jews
Speaker 1: from public places in an effort to seem well, open, hospitable,
Speaker 1: and friendly. People take sports super seriously. Christisen says, and
Speaker 1: as soon as people do that, you can leverage it
Speaker 1: for geopolitical purposes. My students are like, everyone's too cynical
Speaker 1: for it to work now. Of course it works. It
Speaker 1: always works. In some ways, it works better now because
Speaker 1: you're so bombarded by it all the time that you
Speaker 1: can't escape from it. A pr tactic that has been
Speaker 1: successful for more than two thousand years is probably not
Speaker 1: going away anytime soon. But sports fans and journalists can
Speaker 1: at least call sports washing what it is, and athletes
Speaker 1: should show some self respect when tyrants come calling. There
Speaker 1: are plenty of ways to host games without being part
Speaker 1: of such a dirty one. That was Michael Rosenberg reading
Speaker 1: his piece. Sports washing is everywhere, but it's not new.
Speaker 1: We'll link to it in our show notes. After a
Speaker 1: break we tell you just how much Jimmy Butler really
Speaker 1: loves coffee. I love coffee. I make a pot first
Speaker 1: thing in the morning after walking the dogs. And then
Speaker 1: I drink another cup or a mid afternoon pick me up.
Speaker 1: There's hardly a day that goes by that I don't
Speaker 1: have some. But as much as I love coffee, I'm
Speaker 1: not consumed by it, at least not to the same
Speaker 1: degree as Heat star Jimmy Butler. During the Bubble playoffs,
Speaker 1: Butler turned his obsession with coffee into a side hustle
Speaker 1: that's grown into a pretty impressive business. SI staffer Rohan
Speaker 1: not Karney joins me to explain how Butler drinks an
Speaker 1: outrageous amount of coffee every day and how that side
Speaker 1: hustle began by him overcharging his NBA peers. All right, Rohan,
Speaker 1: when I saw this story, I couldn't wait to read it.
Speaker 1: It was fun, it was unexpected, it was dumb and
Speaker 1: ways that I also loved. How did you come up
Speaker 1: with this idea? So I have developed somewhat of a
Speaker 1: relationship with people close to Jimmy Butler, and for the
Speaker 1: longest time they're like, you know, Jimmy wants to do
Speaker 1: coffee stuff. Jimmy always wants to coffee stuff. They frankly
Speaker 1: don't really like if I pitched something really basketball heavy
Speaker 1: to them. This was just a perfect confluence of events.
Speaker 1: Jimmy Butler was doing a coffee pop up at the
Speaker 1: Miami Open in Miami. I got invited to go, but
Speaker 1: I was in Los Angeles, so I missed it, and
Speaker 1: I was really bummed. They're like, do you still want
Speaker 1: to talk to him about coffee? I've been talking about
Speaker 1: to me, it's fun to do an interview that's just
Speaker 1: really narrow as opposed to broad and scope. I don't
Speaker 1: want to ask him about oh like, tell me about
Speaker 1: how you feel about the heats, chances? This here? What's
Speaker 1: he gonna You know? I wanted to do something that
Speaker 1: was really narrow and scope, and it just happened that
Speaker 1: he loves talking about coffee. He really wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about this pop up. But I was like, I'm going
Speaker 1: to get all the coffee questions that I've been wanting
Speaker 1: to ask him off my chest. This thing really mushroomed
Speaker 1: for him, right, I mean, because it's one thing to
Speaker 1: love coffee, and it's another to become known outside of
Speaker 1: basketball for coffee. Where you're doing this pop up at
Speaker 1: the Miami Open and you know you've got your own
Speaker 1: brand of coffee. Give us the backstory, the origin, story
Speaker 1: for Jimmy's coffee career. Yeah, I think as many people know,
Speaker 1: and if you don't, it kind of started when he
Speaker 1: was in the NBA bubble. His trainer actually asked him.
Speaker 1: I was like, when did you first get into coffee?
Speaker 1: His trainer suggested it to him as something that could
Speaker 1: maybe help performance wise, and I think that piques Jimmy's interest.
Speaker 1: You know, even before the bubble, He's someone who would
Speaker 1: love to travel, and he told me my favorite thing
Speaker 1: to do in traveling go to local coffee shops, talk
Speaker 1: to Barissa's, talk to people there. I'm just going there
Speaker 1: and learn. He just got really really really good pe
Speaker 1: We're trying to make the best coffee, but there is
Speaker 1: I want to support everybody. I think he genuinely enjoys
Speaker 1: talking to strangers in coffee shops, as kind of goofy
Speaker 1: as that sounds. When he got to the bubble, there
Speaker 1: weren't good coffee options. He started bringing himself selling it
Speaker 1: for a lot of money. You know, Big Face money
Speaker 1: comes from the idea that he was going to collect
Speaker 1: big bills for a hundred dollar bills. Right. Big Face
Speaker 1: Coffee is the name of his coffee company. Correct, correct
Speaker 1: one of the things I love in your story is
Speaker 1: when you say that he was going to collect big
Speaker 1: face money. He's basically price gouging his captive audience, right
Speaker 1: is capolutely yes, he I mean he knows what their
Speaker 1: per deems are, he knows what everyone's contracts is. Like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: when he was in the bubble, is absolutely a price
Speaker 1: gouging skime. I believe the small medium in large sizes
Speaker 1: all costs twenty dollars, no matter the drinking cosmylls. I
Speaker 1: interview Jimmy Butther coming right out of the bubble even then,
Speaker 1: he was like, I've been working on my latte are
Speaker 1: all summer. He's like, I wish I could take a
Speaker 1: year off just to open up a coffee shop, Like
Speaker 1: this has been something that's been in his mind for years.
Speaker 1: Are you a coffee aficionado because I love coffee. I
Speaker 1: don't know if i'd say full blown aficionado, because there's
Speaker 1: definitely people who are more knowledgeable than me. I love coffee.
Speaker 1: I I probably even love learning about coffee even more
Speaker 1: so than drinking it. Like I will have a cup
Speaker 1: of cold brew a day, but I love learning how
Speaker 1: to make different espresso drinks. I've been considering buying an
Speaker 1: espresso machine, so I was. I think I was knowledgeable
Speaker 1: enough that I could go back and forth with Jimmy
Speaker 1: on it a bit. All right, So you're conversed in coffee,
Speaker 1: you're talking to him about this. I'm curious about the
Speaker 1: beans that he uses, where he say, get them? What
Speaker 1: kind of selection is he going through? I would imagine
Speaker 1: that that's an extensive process for him. I mean, so
Speaker 1: he's selling beans now, he's in fact a coffee bean purveyor.
Speaker 1: And if you go on I don't want to plug it,
Speaker 1: but honestly, if you go in Big Face Coffee dot com,
Speaker 1: which I've been curious, his beans are expensive. I think
Speaker 1: it's up to seventy dollars for a five ounce can
Speaker 1: of beans. I mean we're talking single origins stuff. It's
Speaker 1: clearly you know he's sourcing things from Brazil, South America.
Speaker 1: I asked his trainer what Jimmy's favorite coffee bean is.
Speaker 1: He mentioned Brazil. I mean, another reason he loves Brazil
Speaker 1: is because of his good buddy, neymar and so he's
Speaker 1: grown to like Brazilian coffee as well. But he's definitely
Speaker 1: very serious about sourcing his beans. I assume that s
Speaker 1: I will let us expense that. So we're gonna just
Speaker 1: go ahead and order some of that seventy coffee. It's research.
Speaker 1: It's important. Can I perform like Jimmy Butler if I
Speaker 1: drink his coffee? There's only one way to find out, Right,
Speaker 1: We're gonna find out. But I'm I'm curious as well.
Speaker 1: So he he starts this in the bubble. You know,
Speaker 1: he's charging his teammates and other people exorbitant amounts, and
Speaker 1: it blows up into big Face Coffee Company, and I'm wondering,
Speaker 1: did he expect his side hustle to get this big
Speaker 1: to the point where as you said, he's charging seventy
Speaker 1: dollars for tiny cans of coffee beans. You know, that's
Speaker 1: actually a really good question, John, because there's a fine
Speaker 1: line between commitment to the bit and passion, I guess,
Speaker 1: and Jimmy Butler is incredible at kind of straddling that
Speaker 1: line in my opinion, where you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: if you're about coffee, like he just he just like
Speaker 1: keeps folding in jokes and it's just kind of keeping
Speaker 1: you off balance. He told me about his his morning
Speaker 1: coffee routine. He mentioned he doesn't make any coffee for
Speaker 1: his daughter, but he's like, but I am trying to
Speaker 1: find a way to get coffee to kids, because at home,
Speaker 1: the first thing you do when we wake up is
Speaker 1: have coffee with whoever else is up in the household.
Speaker 1: Besides my daughter, she can't have coffee. She's own too,
Speaker 1: But we're finding out a way to bring coffee two
Speaker 1: kids as well. Um, and it's just entirely too much
Speaker 1: coffee throughout the day if I'm at home, just because
Speaker 1: that's what we really like to do, you know. I
Speaker 1: asked him about if he likes other coffee flavored things.
Speaker 1: He's like, I love everything coffee flavored. I want coffee
Speaker 1: colored shoelaces. I think coffee anything is great. Coffee colored clothing,
Speaker 1: coffee colored shoelaces, coffee flavoring dog for ever. In the
Speaker 1: case when it be coffee is just phenomenally every way
Speaker 1: you can do. I think that there's a part of
Speaker 1: him that's just kind of thinks it's funny maybe how
Speaker 1: big this can get. But I also think he is
Speaker 1: a very genuine passion for coffee. He's leading into it.
Speaker 1: I love that about Jimmy Butler. I I also loved
Speaker 1: something that you tweeted in conjunction with your story where
Speaker 1: you said that after learning about Jimmy Butler's coffee intake,
Speaker 1: you were worried about Jimmy Butler's coffee intake. So tell
Speaker 1: us about his daily coffee routine. Okay, this was like humbling,
Speaker 1: because you know, I've been told all he drinks seven
Speaker 1: to ten cups a day, and I'm like, that's not
Speaker 1: even possible, Like how does he find the time to
Speaker 1: do that? And he laid it out all for me,
Speaker 1: step by step. If I want the road always, UM,
Speaker 1: go have breakfast with my physical performance guy named Almando. Um,
Speaker 1: we'll have breakfast, will have coffee over breakfast, and then
Speaker 1: immediately after breakfast, UM, we go sit down and just
Speaker 1: talk about life over a cup of coffee at some
Speaker 1: coffee shop wherever we're at. And then I'll go back
Speaker 1: to the room. I have my big face travel kid.
Speaker 1: I'll make a cup there, have lunch team meeting, come
Speaker 1: back another cup, YadA, YadA, YadA, do something else, and
Speaker 1: then UM, me and Armando leave early for the game.
Speaker 1: We'll go get some food and then we'll have another
Speaker 1: cup and we'll find another cafe to go, grab call
Speaker 1: for to go, and then go hoop. The two things
Speaker 1: we know about Jimmy Butler He likes to wake up
Speaker 1: really early in the morning for his workouts, and he
Speaker 1: drinks a ton of coffee. I kind of like wanted
Speaker 1: to very lightly suggest to him, like, hey, man, have
Speaker 1: you thought about sleeping nine hours a day? Maybe that
Speaker 1: would be really good for your performance as well. He
Speaker 1: also claims I need to Texas trainer and get the
Speaker 1: exact quote. He was like, I don't want to Butcher,
Speaker 1: so I'm not gonna tell it to you. But my
Speaker 1: trainer is some kind of word play, and he's like,
Speaker 1: coffee doesn't actually wake you up. I don't know about
Speaker 1: the science behind that. That's what he's claiming. So apparently
Speaker 1: he's able to leap well, but his coffee intake is
Speaker 1: off the chart. Yeah, you mentioned nap and sleep and
Speaker 1: you say he sleeps well. How much does he sleep?
Speaker 1: So I think during the season he's actually getting a
Speaker 1: decent amount of sleep. It sounds study like he probably
Speaker 1: takes a nap. I don't think he does the early
Speaker 1: morning workouts as often during the season, so I think
Speaker 1: he's getting an appropriate amount of sleep. I also think
Speaker 1: that the heats sports science team probably has something to
Speaker 1: say about how much sleep he should get, So I
Speaker 1: think during the season it does seem like a normal amount.
Speaker 1: I just want to know how. I want to know
Speaker 1: physically how he told me he's able to fall asleep
Speaker 1: five minutes after his head it's a pillow. I just
Speaker 1: don't know how he does. Jimmy Butler is famously intense,
Speaker 1: and he got into an argument this season that we
Speaker 1: all saw with his teammate Udonis Haslem and his coach
Speaker 1: Eric Spoelstra, and I'm wondering, are we sure that he
Speaker 1: needs extra caffeine? Listen, immediately after the story him out,
Speaker 1: people were like, hey, the most have in the caffeine rage. Um,
Speaker 1: he's in deep now too. I mean, he told him
Speaker 1: he doesn't remember the last time he didn't have a
Speaker 1: cup of coffee. I think he's had a cup of
Speaker 1: at least one cup of coffee every single day for
Speaker 1: at least three or four years now, if not longer.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think a lot of people understand that
Speaker 1: level of dependence. But I don't know that he needs
Speaker 1: it because of how in since he is. But I
Speaker 1: know that that he can't do without it at this
Speaker 1: he can't do it without it. And you asked him
Speaker 1: about that and whether or not he could kick the
Speaker 1: caffeine habit and stop drinking coffee, and he gave you
Speaker 1: a very Jimmy reply, Could I do it? Yes? Do
Speaker 1: I want to do it? No? Do I want to
Speaker 1: try to do it? No? Do I think about doing it? No?
Speaker 1: But could I do it? Yes? But I'm not, so
Speaker 1: we can skip that work. He was, like he was
Speaker 1: ready to get past that question for sure. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: could totally stop drinking if I wanted to, but I
Speaker 1: don't want to. Yeah. He also told you that what
Speaker 1: he loves most about coffee is the conversation he has
Speaker 1: with people over coffee, and you asked him, I thought
Speaker 1: a fantastic question, nicely done by you and your reporting
Speaker 1: instincts about his dream coffee shop, Hay. This to me
Speaker 1: was a very good example of just how eclectic this
Speaker 1: man is. Like I said, commitment to the bit at
Speaker 1: all times just leaves you wondering what this man's true
Speaker 1: in Tenson's were. But I believe he told me that
Speaker 1: three people he'd like to copy with our neymar I
Speaker 1: would pick name Army. Each fan of Nenymore, I would
Speaker 1: pick Barack Obama. I think he was just like I
Speaker 1: want Obama. Yeah, I gotta have a rockets, I mean
Speaker 1: hard to Hercule. And then lastly, who is the tennis
Speaker 1: prodigy who was at the Miami Open And I believe
Speaker 1: he was like just he was behind the you know bench,
Speaker 1: so to speak, whipping up coffees. I think she was there.
Speaker 1: He was making coffees for her other players at the tournament.
Speaker 1: So yeah, an odd mix that I think is representative
Speaker 1: of just how goofy this man is. How many cups
Speaker 1: of coffee did you have before this interview? I think
Speaker 1: I had not had my coffee yet. During the interview,
Speaker 1: I think I was like excited to go get it,
Speaker 1: and so excited to go tell you about are at
Speaker 1: the coffee I got that. I just somehow got too
Speaker 1: worked up and forgotten. It was kind of sad because
Speaker 1: I wanted to be like, hey, I'm drinking this right
Speaker 1: now and remember regretting I didn't have that moment. Well,
Speaker 1: now you and I are going to have to go
Speaker 1: get coffee year on my dream coffee shop. Han, this
Speaker 1: was precisely the pickup we needed. How delightful. Thank you
Speaker 1: for this. Thank you so much. I listen. I've been
Speaker 1: waiting to get my call up on SI weekly. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is it, this is the big leagues. Uh, this
Speaker 1: is it for me. So thank you so much for
Speaker 1: having me on. You can read Rohan's piece about Jimmy
Speaker 1: Butler and his coffee obsession on SI dot com well
Speaker 1: link to it in our show notes. Sports Illustrated Weekly
Speaker 1: is a production of Sports Illustrated and I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
Speaker 1: favorite shows. And for more of Sports Illustrated's best stories
Speaker 1: and pot tests, visit SI dot com. This episode of
Speaker 1: Sports Illustrated Weekly was produced by Cooper McKim, Jessica your Moski,
Speaker 1: and Isaac Lee, who was also our sound engineer. Our
Speaker 1: senior producer is Dan Blue. Our executive producers are Scott
Speaker 1: Brody and me John Consults. Our theme song is by
Speaker 1: Nolan Schneider. Thanks for listening, and if you've stuck around
Speaker 1: this long, we leave you with this. Put me on
Speaker 1: a little bit. What should I be doing at home
Speaker 1: so I can be drinking coffee like Jimmy but Um.
Speaker 1: First of all, you uhould pay me to come make
Speaker 1: your coffee. Let's get it out of the way. I
Speaker 1: can do that for you. Um. The ratio that I
Speaker 1: like to use is sixteen and one, but it's different
Speaker 1: for everybody. So whatever post about wherever gets you happy,
Speaker 1: I just know, for a million dollars a second, I
Speaker 1: will come and make your make your coffee.