2-10-25 - *FULL SHOW* Super Bowl Stats & Ads; Bad Labor Sec Nominee; Coffeeland

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I've got plenty of energy today because look, first of all,
even going into the game, I did not care about either.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Of these teams.

Speaker 1 (00:10):
I wanted the Chiefs to lose because there's the Chiefs.
I wanted the Eagles to lose because of Eagles fans,
who are the American equivalent of British soccer hooligans. And
I guess I was maybe tepidly rooting for the Chiefs,
but mostly what I was rooting for.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Was my bets.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
I and I didn't do very well betting, but I
didn't lose much. I mean I probably lost five bucks.
I won a few small bets, like would there be
a touchdown in the first quarter? I won that bet
and a couple other small things. But anyway, it was
just it was a boring game.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
It was.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Forty to six at some point, I think, right, and
then the Chiefs scored a couple of times, so it
made the ending score look, I mean like a blowout,
but not as much of a blowut as it just
it sucked.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
And the halftime show, Look.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Kendrick Lamar is not you know, the kind of music
I normally go for. But my younger kid says, I
would really enjoy it, and I should listen to it
more and I will, But just as halftime shows go,
kind of the pageantry and the lights and the and
the correography and the costumes and all of it just
sort of let me down, and I just thought it

(01:25):
was kind of a subpar, a subpar thing, even putting
aside the fact that it's not normally the kind of
music I go for.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
I thought the commercials were pretty good.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
I'm not one of these people who spends a ton
of time looking at the commercials.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
I do have a lot of stuff on my blog
where you.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
Can go check out some of the best commercials and
a bunch of other a bunch of other stuff. Now
I would like to actually somebody switched chairs here.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
It's not right.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
It's not the right chair, Shannon, It says, like, all right.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
So I walked into the.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Control room this morning where producer Shannon is sitting behind
the class and there's a container from a bakery, kind
of container like you'd get at a supermarket if you
bought a cake or a bunch of whatever's sitting on
the little black plastic tray with the clear plastic top.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
Going over it. And it is a very colorful.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
Thing that looked something like a cinnamon roll, but it
had colorful frosting on top. And I said to producer Shannon,
you know what's this and he said, well, it's left
over from the weekend, maybe even from Friday. So I
don't suggest that you try it. But that's a king cake.
And I'm like, what I thought? I heard him wrong?

Speaker 4 (02:40):
A what?

Speaker 2 (02:41):
And Shannon said, a king cake.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
And so in the last ten minutes I have learned
for the first time in my life what a king
cake is. Gina already knew about it because when when
Shannon asked, Gina, you know about king cakes or is there?
She said, is that what's in there? And he said yeah,
and she said did you find the baby? And so
she knew what that what that was. Let's see as

(03:06):
I looked at the AI overview on Google. A king
cake is a ring shaped pastry typically associated with Marti Gras,
that is decorated with purple, green and gold icing and
traditionally hides a small plastic baby inside, signifying the Baby Jesus,
where the person who finds it in there slice is
considered king for the day.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Now, Shannon, you said.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
That often there's another tradition. When you're the one who
finds the baby, you got to.

Speaker 5 (03:32):
Buy the next king cake for the office.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Or your fridge. When did you learn about kincake? In
my teens, my mom lived in New Orleans.

Speaker 5 (03:42):
I still have a sister down there, so I learned
all about it from now.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
Okay, let's start Monday. You know I like to warm
up on Mondays. I want to start by asking you
to text me at five six six nine zero, and
I need a one word answer, and I.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Know, listen, I want you.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
Sometimes people self select and the only text in yes.
The people whose answer is no think it's not very useful.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
I want you to text me whether your answer is
yes or no.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
Text me at five six six nine zero, and the
question is had you ever heard of a king cake?
Have you ever heard of a king cake? Text me
at five sixty six nine zero. You are welcome to
add extra context if you have a king cake story
that you want to share, but really all I need
from you is yes or no at five six six
nine zero.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
Have you ever heard of a king Cake?

Speaker 6 (04:34):
So?

Speaker 1 (04:34):
What else do I want to mention? Oh, this is
the one cool story from the super Bowl.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
Other than the fact that.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
The Chiefs did not three pete, which is a benefit
of the Super Bowl. I was actually kind of happy
for a player on the Eagles, which is not something
I probably have ever said in my life.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
But a young man named Cooper Dejene.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
Dee last name is Dee Capitol j an all as
one word he'd be.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
So he's, uh, what is he a safety?

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Maybe I think he's a safety, could be a could
be a cornerback.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
But anyway, he he had an interception and ran it
back thirty eight yards for a touchdown. And he became
with that the first player in the Super Bowl era,

(05:31):
because there was one other player who did this, like
in the nineteen forties in an NFL in what was
a football championship game at the time. But he became
the first player in the Super Bowl era to score
a touchdown on his birthday.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
And I like that.

Speaker 1 (05:48):
I like that statistic, even though it happened to a
Philadelphia Eagle. I like that statistic. So congratulations to Cooper
Dejene for having an excellent season and becoming the first
person in the Super Bowl ear to score a touchdown
on your birthday. I'm gonna just mention a headline, and
then we're gonna talk about it more a little bit

(06:09):
later in the show. But I just want to make
sure you're aware of this. President Trump announced yesterday that
today he will announce I don't know how that works,
but that's how it's working, twenty.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
Five percent tariffs on steel.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
And aluminum, on all steel and aluminum coming into the
United States of America. And you can guess what I'm
gonna say about it. And it's always about trying to
protect the steel the steel producers in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
But I want to ask yourself this well, and you
can think about it for a while and we'll talk
about it. As I said a little bit later, what

(06:45):
do you think raising the price of steel coming into
this country by twenty five percent will do to the
cost of the next car you have to buy, or
the next home you have to build, or the next
bridge or road that the government has to build. We'll

(07:05):
be right back on KOA Okay, Yeah, I got a
lot of yeses, got a lot of yeses from people
who already knew what a king cake was and I didn't.
I'll come back to your texts in a minute. But oh,
my gosh, what did.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
You say, Shannon did?

Speaker 5 (07:20):
What did you say to me when when you learned
I didn't know what a king cake was? Lots of
people know lots of different things. Not everybody knows the
same stuff. You know, lots of stuff that I don't know,
and vice versa.

Speaker 1 (07:32):
Yeah, that's a very kind way of putting it. That
was Shannon's very polite way of saying that I'm just
ignorant whatever for not knowing what a king cake was.
And now almost all of my listeners know, yes, yes, yes, sir,
oh no, that was a recreation point on that. Yes. Indeed,

(07:52):
it was Saquon Barkley's birthday yesterday, as a listener just noted,
and he could have also scored a touchdown on his birthday.
And yet the guy who was by far the player
most favored to score a touchdown in the Super Bowl
did not score one.

Speaker 2 (08:10):
In fact, it was only like a little over.

Speaker 1 (08:14):
Two to one odds against him scoring two touchdowns and
the Eagles had forty points and he didn't get a touchdown.
Like I said, I didn't do very well betting yesterday.
But the one mistake I didn't make I did not
bet on Saquon Barkley to have a good gamegured I
figured that the Chiefs would focus on him. But in
any case, Patrick Mahomes ended up having one of the

(08:35):
worst games of his life. Probably we still have we
have a ton of stuff to talk about today. I've
only got a few minutes right here, so let me
actually mention this really interesting story, at least to me,
it's interesting. I hope you find it interesting. So you recall,
maybe two weeks ago, there was this whole hubbub over

(08:55):
the Chinese AI company Deep Seek, and they announced that
they had that they had developed this AI model and
the experts did use it. Actual experts did use it,
and they say, yeah, it's as good as chat GPT.
But they announced that they had only spent six million
dollars on it, and that they didn't use very many chips,
and so and so Nvidia stock lost something like five

(09:20):
hundred billion dollars with a.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
B okay of value in one day.

Speaker 1 (09:25):
The next business day when the stock market was opened
after the announcement, and a bunch of other chip companies
that provide hardware into the AI sector got destroyed as well,
and some people were wondering did they really do it
that cheap. And I had an expert on the show
and he said, you know, they they might have that

(09:47):
might that might be real. He said he was inclined
to believe them. Well, I found this story and it's actually,
you know, from a week or so ago, but I
missed this and I just wanted to I wanted to share.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
It with you now.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
So remember the concept and the thing that people were
thinking after the deep Seek story is that these guys
showed that AI could be democratized and that a relatively
small company or a few rich people getting together, you know,
with some you know, a few million dollars, which is
a lot for you and me, but for a business
getting into AI. You know, if you could really build

(10:23):
something for six million dollars, you know, then suddenly AI
is open to the world, and not just to the
big boys. But over at semianalysis dot com, I want
to share with you a couple of things.

Speaker 7 (10:36):
So they say that this company that eventually became deep
Seek bought ten thousand in Nvidia GPUs in twenty twenty
one before any export restrictions.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
Okay, so they bought ten thousand of.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
Those and they're still buying other chips that are not
subject to to export restriction, and so they believe that
at this point, between the chips and all the servers,
the actual hardware needed to develop the the AI model

(11:17):
that now that they announced as having spent six million
dollars on. They now believe that total server capex for
deep Seek is wait for this, now, one point six
billion dollars, with a considerable cost of nine hundred and
forty four million associated with operating clusters of servers. They

(11:42):
also say that the six million dollar number that was
that was given to the public is likely just the
very last step of training that doesn't here.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
Let me, let me read this.

Speaker 1 (12:01):
The six million dollar cost in the papers attributed to
just the GPU cost of the pre training run, which
is only a portion of the total cost in the model.
Excluded are important pieces of the puzzle like R and
D and tco of the hardware itself.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
So anyway, it seems like that.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
Six million dollar number was exceptionally misleading, right, Like, you're
gonna go build a two million dollars supercar and you
have to do years of R and D, and you
have to design the brakes, and you have to design
the interior, and you have to design everything, you have
to put together the systems and the electronics. And the

(12:43):
very last thing you do after all that R and
D and all these other parts, is you drop in
a sixty thousand dollars engine into the million dollar supercar
and tell the world that you only spend sixty thousand
dollars on the car and that you're some kind of
automotive wizard.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
It appears that that's what Deep Seak did.

Speaker 1 (13:04):
We're having a lot more fun here, producer Shannon, I
would like you to tell listeners what's on the hat
you just showed me and.

Speaker 5 (13:12):
Why, Well, not to be confused with iHeartRadio. This hat
says I heart Wieners. I heart Wieners. And where did
it come from? Der Wiener Schnitzel in what Colorado Springs?

Speaker 1 (13:25):
Colorado Springs? And you went to Der Wiener Schnitzel in
Colorado Springs for what reason.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
They were advertising?

Speaker 5 (13:32):
And did deliver a fantastic seven chili dogs for seven dollars?

Speaker 2 (13:36):
Are these the regular size hot dogs or the footlongs?

Speaker 7 (13:39):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (13:39):
Regular sizes? And so seven of them? How many? How
many of the how many.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
Folks were with you to share seven chili dogs?

Speaker 5 (13:48):
We were all strangers in the restaurant, but there were
a few other people in there.

Speaker 1 (13:52):
You know. What I meant was, how many people did
you share the seven hot dogs, the seven chili dogs with?

Speaker 2 (13:57):
Oh? They were all mine, they were all yours. You
ate all seven, as the hat implies that had them.
Did you win the hat for eating all seven? No,
it was twice as much as that.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
Oh you bought the hat just you love the I
Love Wiener's hat. Okay, I get that. How long did
it take you to eat all seven? All seven chili dogs?
And was there cheese on them? Is there cheese on them?

Speaker 2 (14:19):
Was there cheese on the chili dogs? No cheese? No cheese? No.

Speaker 5 (14:22):
I didn't have any other extras a coke zero. Of course,
I got to watch my diet.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
Right, So how long did it take you to eat
seven chili dogs?

Speaker 5 (14:31):
Maybe about twenty minutes, but I was doing a lot
of social media, so it was slow.

Speaker 1 (14:36):
Okay, And you felt just fine afterwards. Super speaking of
Super Bowl blowouts, and that's why, for at least today,
producer Shannon is my hero. That's a remarkable story. And
you may see him walking around with a hat that

(14:56):
says I love Wieners.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
All right, let's talk a little bit about out Trump
trade stuff.

Speaker 1 (15:03):
I'm gonna do one story and then i'm gonna come
back to the steel and aluminum terwifts that we'll probably
hear more about today. So I missed this story actually
late last week.

Speaker 2 (15:16):
I had told you late last week that.

Speaker 1 (15:19):
The President eliminated something called the Deminimus exception to tariffs.
And what it is is each American basically is allowed
to import up to eight hundred dollars. I actually think
it's eight hundred dollars a day, which is actually kind
of a big number in a way, but eight hundred
dollars of stuff, you know, in small packages you close, electronics, appliance,

(15:46):
as tools, whatever you might buy from Timu or Sian,
which I pronounced wrong last week when I never heard
of she In until this came up. But apparently it's
an absolutely enormous Chinese of quote unquote fast fashion, so inexpensive,
decent looking clothing. Right and by the way, Timu, which

(16:09):
I've also never shopped at.

Speaker 2 (16:10):
Timu and Sheian.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
Together those I think I mentioned this on the air already,
but I'm just so stunned by it. I'm gonna say
it again. Those two companies Shannon are responsible for about
one third of all small packages coming in under this
deminimus rule into the whole country, and not just from China,
from the whole world. And we're talking about something on

(16:35):
the order of the whole world like a billion with
a b packages a year. So those two companies alone
apparently comprise a few hundred million packages a year that
currently come in without tariff because they're under that eight
hundred dollars limit. Right, somebody's buying a T shirt or two.

(16:57):
So I just ordered literally two dollars worth of resistors
for an electronics project I'm working on.

Speaker 2 (17:04):
So let's stick with my example.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
So Trump eliminated with an executive order to the deminimus exception.
So that means that the postal service, which is the
organization that's responsible for handling this, would have to take
my package, ascertain that it's worth two dollars, and then
add a twenty cent charge to collect from me. Now

(17:30):
is that even logistically possible to do with a billion
packages a year? And maybe more importantly, because I guess
theoretically you could hire people to do it.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
Does it pay for itself?

Speaker 1 (17:48):
How much would it cost the government to individually handle
my little envelope that's going to have ten resistors in it.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
Determine what's in it. Determine I mean, it'll have.

Speaker 1 (18:00):
A label on it that'll say what's in it, and
it'll say it's worth two dollars.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
And then the or they could not trust it.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
Maybe somebody would lie on a label and they got
to figure out and determine what the value is, and
they're gonna say, Okay, this is worth two dollars. And
now we need to go get twenty cents from Ross.
So we need to create an invoice. We need to
tell Ross that he oweses twenty cents. Then when Ross
somehow sends US twenty cents, we need to deposit that
check or account for the electronic payment or whatever. And

(18:30):
I doubt that the government could do that, even if
it's operating at scale for less than a few dollars
a package in terms of the government's cost. And so
this is and again logistically impossible right now. So this
is why, and this is the part of the story
I shared with you last week. When Trump eliminated the

(18:53):
dominimus rule of the initial reaction by the US Postal
Service was a.

Speaker 2 (18:58):
Press release saying they were no longer going to.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
Accept small packages from China. Within a few hours they
overturned that and said they will. And I think what happened,
even though I missed this part, I think what happened
was somebody went to Trump and said, this thing you're
trying to do cannot be done without a lot of

(19:23):
advanced planning, and maybe not even then. So the so
that so with, President Trump issued an executive order some
at some point last week, at some point last week
to reinstate the Dominimus exception.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
So there you go. So for now, those.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
Packages are still coming in, and I just wanted to
be aware of that if you order from places like that,
and clearly a lot.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Of Americans do, with a third.

Speaker 1 (19:59):
Of all Minimus packages from around the world coming from
just Timu and Shia. So now let's move on to
the bigger story. Let's move on to the bigger story,
and that is after the Super Bowl yesterday, President Trump
announced that he's going to impose twenty five percent tariffs
on steel and aluminum coming from everywhere in the world,
and that includes Canada and Mexico and China. Now there's

(20:24):
a couple different aspects of this to talk about, and
I'll I'll do the smaller one. I'll do the smaller
one first, and that is China. So China makes a
lot of steel, and China started making an immense amount
of steel to support their huge push to develop real estate,
to build apartment buildings and roads for the infrastructure to

(20:47):
connect all the real estate and all this stuff. And
the real estate market in China has collapsed, absolutely collapsed,
and so they don't need as much steel as they
develop the capacity to produce, so they have exit capacity,
and they could potentially sell steel into.

Speaker 2 (21:04):
The United States.

Speaker 1 (21:05):
I don't know that they would sell it below their cost,
but they would sell it at likely very low prices,
probably not much above their marginal cost to produce it. Okay,
not much above their marginal cost to produce it. And
that certainly would put pressure on not only American steel producers,

(21:26):
but on Canadian and Mexican steel producers who also sell
us a lot of steel. So there is a specific
issue there with China, in addition to the fact that
China is clearly our major global competitor right now.

Speaker 2 (21:42):
So it would be one thing if.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
The President said we're going to impose a tariff on
Chinese steel. But what he's done instead is he said
he's going to impose a tariff on all steel, and
we get quite a lot of steel from Canada and Mexico.
There's a reason, there's there's the reason that. In fact,
let me, let's see if I can get a stock

(22:08):
quote here. Okay, so this is this is stock I
used to trade options on when I was on the
options exchange in Chicago, so I knew the I knew
the ticker symbol. It's new Core and u Cor is
the name of the company, and the ticker symbol is
in Ue. Standing the trading pit, we called it NUI.
So anyway, New Core is up five point seven eight
percent today, five point seven eight percent. US Steel is

(22:32):
only up about four percent because it's not a very
good company. Cleveland Cliffs, which is trying to buy or
was trying to buy, US Steel, is up almost fourteen
percent today. So let's just talk about this for a second.
What does this mean? What does this mean? Oh, listener
says ross, and the importer pays the tariff, not the

(22:54):
post office.

Speaker 2 (22:55):
Dude.

Speaker 1 (22:56):
I didn't say the post office pays the tariff.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
I said the Post Office has the response ability.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
Of taking the packages from the Chinese delivery system into
our delivery system and then and then collecting the tariff from.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
The importer on on that.

Speaker 1 (23:12):
So anyway, why would I say the Post Office pays
the tariff? Come on, all right, So look now, let's
let's think about this. Why would the prices, the stock
the per share price of American steelmakers be up today
on the America on the tariffs that Trump is talking
about imposing. It's because they're likely to become more profitable.

(23:37):
Now you may say, you know, excellent, an American company
being more profitable. That's the wrong answer. You got to
remember the purpose of the economy is to benefit consumers,
and to the extent that by satisfying consumers you create
jobs and profits, then that's excellent. But the purpose of

(23:58):
the of the economy is to say, satisfy the consumer.
The purpose of the government is to make sure that
the economy runs smoothly as possible and hopefully with as
little interference as possible. So for the government, they should
be doing things like preventing monopoly and preventing fraud, but
not much else.

Speaker 2 (24:15):
I know they do a lot more, but it's not
what they should be doing.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
So now, why would these steel companies be more profitable
because they have less competition. So let's imagine that an
American manufacturer of something I don't care what we'll get
to that in a minute that uses steel or aluminum,
pays one hundred dollars for a certain amount. I don't

(24:40):
care what the amount is either, just an X amount
of steel costs you one hundred dollars. And let's say
you use X amount of steel in this thing you're making,
and it costs you one hundred dollars. If you were
to buy it from an American steel maker, it would
be one hundred and ten dollars. Okay, it would be

(25:01):
one hundred and ten dollars right now. So now Trump
put and you're buying the imported steel for one hundred dollars.
The American steal is one hundred and ten dollars. You're
not interested in increasing your cost by ten percent. You
do like to buy American, and you might be willing
to do it for one percent, but not ten percent,
because you know, you've got a business to run, you've
got employees to hire, you've got expansion to do. Maybe

(25:24):
you have shareholders to take care of. You're not going
to spend an extra ten percent. So now Trump puts
the twenty five percent tariff on the imported steel.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
So now and.

Speaker 1 (25:33):
Maybe let's just say, for example, that the that the
steel cut, that the foreign steel company reduces their prices
somewhat to absorb some of the tariff. And let's say
instead of the price now being one hundred and twenty five,

(25:54):
let's say the exporter reduces their cost by what is
effectively five dollars after tariff. And so now the imported
steel costs one hundred and twenty, right, So maybe it's
you know, it's it's ninety five dollars in change plus
twenty five percent gets to one.

Speaker 2 (26:13):
Hundred and twenty dollars per whatever unit. So now you're
gonna go buy the American one. So now your.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
Costs have gone up ten percent, but it's actually gonna
be worse than that, because the American company now does
not have price competition until they get to one hundred
and twenty. They're not gonna stay at one hundred and ten.
They're gonna go to one hundred and fifteen or one
hundred and eighteen. But let's just say they go only

(26:45):
to one hundred and fifteen. Now your costs have gone
up fifteen percent. Now let's talk specifically about steel and
aluminum and why, separate from the related conversation about China.
Why this is as dumb an economic policy as you
can possibly imagine. Right, it would be harder to think

(27:08):
of something more stupid than tariffs on aluminium steel. I
want you to just think about what comes into your
mind that is made with aluminium steel. I mentioned a
few before, cars and trucks, homes, condos, office buildings, roads, bridges, appliances, hammers, wrenches,

(27:33):
all kinds of tools.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
There's a little.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Bit of it in electronic stuff, all the machine tools
that you then use to make other things, on and
on and on, Like I don't need to do anymore.
Just you can imagine the things made out of steel
and aluminum, and the price of all of it is

(27:58):
going to go up, you think. I mean? Donald Trump
actually campaigned a little bit. It wasn't his top issue,
but on increasing the supply of housing and making housing
more affordable. These tariffs will reduce the supply of house
or prevent the increase in the supply of housing, and
make housing less affordable. You think a car got expensive

(28:22):
in the Biden years and it did well, It's gonna
get much more expensive now, at least American made cars,
well imported cars. Imported cars won't go up as much.
So this will also tend to have the effect of
pushing people out of American cars and into European and

(28:43):
Japanese cars. And I don't mean who owns them, because
Mercedes does make cars in America and Toyota does make
cars in America, but I'm talking about Mercedes made in
Germany and Toyota made in Japan, and you're gonna be
pushing manufacture.

Speaker 2 (28:57):
Back out to those places. Now. Trump is gonna try
to make up for that.

Speaker 1 (29:00):
With his plan to tax to give tax breaks to
manufacturers who make things here, and he's going to try
to sort of clude it that way. Rube Goldberg it
that way. But it is hard to describe just how
destructive this particular tariff is. Aluminum steel go into so

(29:20):
many things that you need, and that our inputs into
things that you need. And I'm telling you, if Trump
doesn't back off of this, he will cause a recession
or stagflation, and it will be bad for the country.

(29:42):
It will be bad for Republicans running for office. It'll
be bad for you as a consumer. It'll just be bad.
And one other thing on the political side of this
that I want to mention, I am so so tired
of people not so much in listeners, just a little
bit in listeners, but more on x formerly Twitter saying

(30:06):
Trump just uses tariffs for negotiating leverage, and that's the
just part of that is not right. Trump definitely likes
tariffs for negotiating leverage, and it's potentially a good negotiating tool.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
Like the analogy I gave a week or two ago.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
You know, there's somebody you're threatening, and you threaten you're
gonna shoot him, but when you shoot him, you're gonna
put your hand in front of the barrel, so your
hand gets shot first, and then the other guy gets shot.
So maybe the other guy get is hurt worse than
you are, but you're still pretty uncomfortable, and you still
have a hole in your hand.

Speaker 2 (30:44):
That's what tariffs are.

Speaker 1 (30:45):
And you can't play that game forever either, right, it's
all big game theory thing.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
But here's the thing.

Speaker 1 (30:51):
Trump has said over and over and over that he
likes tariffs, and I believe him. He has said it's
his favorite word in the English language, and I will
leave him.

Speaker 2 (31:00):
He has said that.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
Foreigners pay the tariffs, which he must know is not true.
He's either an idiot or a liar when it comes
to that, because it is literally impossible for the foreigners
to remit the money, for the exporter to remit the
money to the US Postal Service, where ends up whoever
ends up collecting the tariff is always paid by the
American importer. And by the way, just in terms of

(31:25):
basic economics, if the foreigner were paying the tariff, they
would raise their prices to cover at least much of
the tariff, if not all of it. So your costs
would go up anyway. So we need to keep a
close eye on this. I have to say, Look, I
could be wrong, and markets are very complicated, and there

(31:45):
are a lot of other things going on in the economy,
not just this, And we haven't yet seen what the
Trump tax cut will be or the growth part of
the plan. And we got to see what the Senate
comes up with and what the House comes up with,
and maybe I'll come up with something that offsets some
of this. And the stock market is up a little
bit today, which kind of surprises me. But I have

(32:09):
to say this makes me really really concerned, not.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
Because of politics and not because of.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
What I think of Trump, but because it is as
bad an economic policy as you can imagine. One last
quick comment on the tariff thing, and then I'm gonna
and then I'm gonna move on. I said very specifically
at the beginning of that last conversation that there is
a there's a legit discussion to be had about Chinese steel,
especially with their overcapacity and their potential for something that's

(32:39):
at least close to dumping steel into America. Now, of
course that would benefit consumers, and nobody seems.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
To care about that.

Speaker 1 (32:47):
But I understand, I understand the issue of wanting to
prevent dumping of a product into America. I said, very clearly,
that's a legitimate conversation to have. It doesn't explain why
the president is also threatening tariffs on China and Mexico's
steal and aluminum, because we don't have that problem with them.

(33:11):
And then I had like five different listeners texting in
saying saying, but China this and China that, and I
just look, I said it already, like there is a
legitimate discussion to be had about China, and that does
not explain tariffs on Canada or Mexico. And I was, yeah,

(33:33):
I'm not even gonna say that. The listener knows he's listening.
He knows what I'm gonna say about him. All Right,
I'm gonna move on. So last night during the Super Bowl,
I think it was the Super Bowl pregame. I don't
think this aired on television during the game, but maybe
on the big screen at the game before the game
is how I read it was gonna play out.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
There was a.

Speaker 1 (33:56):
Recruiting commercial for the United States Secret Service and it
was done by famed director Michael Bay, who does all
kinds of action stuff, transformers at Dank right.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
I don't know what else, but.

Speaker 1 (34:10):
If you've seen a movie with an explosion in it, yeah,
it was probably done by Michael. It's probably done by
Michael Bay, so he was involved in making this. And
I just want to share with you just like ten
or fifteen seconds of it. It's only a minute long,
and it's up on the blog, but I just wanted
to give you a sense of it. Just share a
few seconds. So throughout that they're showing pictures of Secret

(34:31):
Service agents. Actually, at the very beginning, they show that
iconic image of Donald Trump before he was elected president
again with blood running down his head from where he
was shot in the ear, and the Secret Service agents
around him. And then they show other Secret Service agents
standing next to Air Force one, and then they show,

(34:55):
you know, kind of a line of Secret Service agents
and then a badge, a Secret Service badge, And I
think it's kind of interesting, you know, if they had
if they had, as I said, I don't think it
ran on TV during the game, And I think there
would have been probably some significant pushback if it had
run on TV during the game, because it was a

(35:18):
minute long ad in a minute during the Super Bowl
was somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen or sixteen million dollars,
and I think a lot of people would have said,
especially now with this government, like is that really the
way you want to be spending our money.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
But if they spent.

Speaker 1 (35:31):
Much much less than that and played it on the
big screen at the Super Bowl, I realized that immediately,
it's only.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
Those fifty thousand and sixty thousand, However.

Speaker 1 (35:41):
Many people fit in the Super Bowl in the Superdome
seeing it, But a lot of people will talk about it,
and we'll get around the interwebs and people will.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
Have a look at it.

Speaker 1 (35:49):
And I actually think it's kind of an interesting idea.
The way for many years, i'ven't seen this in a while,
but actually, I think most of the military services and
the army very aggressively would do television comercials too to
recruit people. So I think that's actually, I think that's
kind of cool. And we'll see if it works. We'll
see if it works. Here's a quick sports story for you.

(36:10):
This happened late last week. This on on Thursday night,
the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Golden State Warriors one
twenty to one to twelve, and Lebron James became the
oldest player in the history of the NBA to score
forty points in a game. It's forty years old. He

(36:31):
scored forty points in a game. That's pretty good. That's
pretty good. He actually, I think he actually had forty
two points in the in the game, but he was
he was the oldest player to score at least forty
in a game at the age of forty.

Speaker 2 (36:46):
So yeah, yeah, good for.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
Him, and I hope I'm i hope, I'm that athletic
and useful or whatever when when I turned forty, Right
you too, dragon, Right you too?

Speaker 2 (37:00):
Oh yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 (37:01):
So we spent a little time on the show this
is some months ago now talking about famous breweries and
historic breweries in Colorado, and I believe that we learned
that the oldest one is the Tivoli Brewing Company from
eighteen sixty four, and it did close for a while
and opened again. And you know, it's it's over in

(37:23):
this beautiful building that's across a Area Street or whatever
it's called from from ball Arena, by the by all
those colleges right there, all right by the by Metro
and all that stuff, and it's it's actually the Tivoli
Student Union building and the Tivoli Brewing Company tap houses

(37:46):
in there. And the reason I wanted to mention the
story to you is that they've been closed. The brewery
and the bar whatever you want to call it, has
been closed for about three months and they're in discussion
right now regarding extending the brewery's lease. And the challenge
for them is one that you can understand, right. So

(38:09):
they're they're on a college campus or multiple college campus,
so many people who are there much of the time
are not old enough to drink. Now, at some of
those colleges you do have some maybe slightly older average
student body than at you know, SeeU for example, So
there will be plenty of twenty two, twenty three, twenty

(38:31):
four to twenty five year olds there. But still you
got a college that's also got lots of eighteen and
nineteen and twenty year olds who can't who can't drink yet.
And and the other thing then is you know a
lot of people will come over there and have a
beer when the Nuggets are playing, or when the Avs
are playing, or maybe when there's a concert at ball Arena,

(38:52):
but you just really don't have the mass you need
to run a play like that on other nights. So
they're trying to figure out a way where the economics
work for everybody. Imagine imagine when you're on college vacation
for the summer or winter or spring and there are

(39:16):
very few people on campus. And then imagine the days
when there's nothing going on at ball Arena. I mean,
you don't have you don't have hockey and basketball for
much of that time, right, So it's hard to see
how the place stays open. So they're trying to sort
that out. And I just, you know, wanted you to
be aware of that. If you're into classic breweries and

(39:39):
tap houses in Denver, Tivilly is trying to find a
way to stay open. All right, what are we gonna
do when we come back?

Speaker 2 (39:48):
Oh? All right?

Speaker 1 (39:50):
This is a story that I've been thinking about for
a long time. I've had it on the show sheet
for weeks and haven't gotten to it. And now it
seems like Donald Trump is actually making a move regarding
the penny. So I have been thinking about talking about
this next thing for a long time, and.

Speaker 2 (40:12):
I just waited and waited and waited it up.

Speaker 1 (40:14):
I'm not even exactly sure why I waited, but I did.
Now there's a brilliant article that was posted at the
New York Times. This must be September of last year.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
So I've been thinking about it.

Speaker 1 (40:30):
Well, I've been thinking about this for years, and so
I have lots of other people.

Speaker 2 (40:33):
The headline of the New York Times.

Speaker 1 (40:36):
Article I got to scroll way down here America must
free itself from the tyranny of the penny. And this
is one of those articles that has lots of graphics
at the top, and you got to kind of scroll through,
and it shows just a few words at a time,
but I'll start at the top.

Speaker 2 (40:49):
The penny may seem like a harmless coin, but.

Speaker 1 (40:52):
Few things symbolize our national dysfunction more than the inability
to stop minting this worthless currency. And it is a
really long piece by a writer named Katie Weaver, as
she writes for the New York Times magazine, and she says,
I was disappointed to learn recently that the United States
has created for itself a logistical problem so stupendously stupid.

(41:16):
One cannot help wondering if it is wise to continue
to allow this nation to supervise the design of its
own holiday postage stamps, let alone preside over the administration
of an extensive interstate highway system more nuclear arsenal.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
It's the dumbest thing I ever heard.

Speaker 1 (41:29):
I've come to think of it as the perpetual penny paradox.
Most pennies produced by the US Mint are given.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
Out as changed but never spent.

Speaker 1 (41:36):
This creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them,
so that a cash transaction that necessitates pennies, i e.
Any concluding with a sum whose final digit is one, two, three, four, six, seven, eight.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
Or nine can be settled again in cash.

Speaker 1 (41:52):
But these replacement pennies will themselves not be spent. They
will need to be replaced with new pennies that will
also not be spent, and so will have to be
replaced with new pennies that will not be spent, which
will have to be replaced by new pennies.

Speaker 2 (42:04):
And so on.

Speaker 1 (42:05):
In other words, we must keep minting pennies because no
one uses the pennies we mint. A conservative estimate holds
it there are two hundred and forty billion pennies lying
around the United States, or about seven hundred and twenty
four pennies for every man, woman, and child residing in
the United States, and enough to hand two pennies to

(42:27):
every bewildered human born since the dawn of man. To
distribute them all, in fact, we'd have to double back
to the beginning and give our first six billion ancestors
a third American penny.

Speaker 2 (42:40):
There are but a fraction of.

Speaker 1 (42:42):
The seven hundreds of billions of pennies issued. Since these
are but a fraction of several hundreds of billions of
pennies issued, since seventeen ninety three, most of which have
suffered a mysterious fate described in government records with a
hint of supernatural, super naturality, general undesirable and bookkeeping as disappearance.

(43:03):
As far as anyone knows, the American scent is the
most produced coin in the history of civilization. It's portrait
of Lincoln the most reproduced piece of art on earth.
Although pennies are almost never used for their ostensible purpose,
which is to buy something right now, one out of
every two circulating coins minted in the United States has
a value of one cent.

Speaker 2 (43:25):
Got it.

Speaker 1 (43:26):
Half of all the existing coins in America not in
coin collections but circulating coins, is a penny. A majority
of the ones that haven't disappeared yet are, according to
a report, sitting in consumers coin jars in their homes
now five years ago. Mint officials conceded that if even
a modest portion of these dormant pennies were suddenly to

(43:47):
returned to circulation, the resulting backflow to the treasury.

Speaker 2 (43:50):
Would be logistically unmanageable.

Speaker 1 (43:52):
There would be so unbelievably many pennies that there would
most likely not be enough room to contain them.

Speaker 2 (43:59):
Inside government vaults.

Speaker 1 (44:02):
Moving them from place to place would be time consuming, cumbersome,
and costly. Just one hundred dollars worth of pennies weighs
over fifty five pounds. With each new penny minted, the
problem becomes slightly more of a problem. And it goes
on from there. But one of the other points that
it makes, and there's different estimates on this, but a
penny costs somewhere around two and a half or three

(44:25):
cents to make.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
By the way, it's not copper, it's zinc.

Speaker 1 (44:29):
I guess there's a thin coating of copper on the outside,
but at zinc because copper got too expensive. But zinc
is expensive now too. Why in twenty twenty four, when
this was written, does our nation still spew out pennies
like a two liter in eternal agitation, gushing undrinkable fizz.
The people I asked assigned blame widely to an uninterested congress,

(44:55):
highly interested lobbyists, to the sentimental, to people bad at math,
to what pop willing to provide in perpetuity free private
storage for pointless compreplated tokens. But the truth about why
Americans are doomed to trudge eternally through a blood scented
bog of pennies's currency may simultaneously be the most dispiriting
and encouraging reason imaginable.

Speaker 2 (45:16):
We may have forgotten that we don't have to. So
it goes on from there.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
It's actually quite a long article, and it's really really interesting.
And the reason that I'm bringing up to you this
up to you is that yesterday Donald Trump announced Last night,
Donald Trump announced that he ordered the Secretary of the Treasuries,
got Bessn't, to stop producing new pennies.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
He Trump said, let's rip the waste.

Speaker 1 (45:49):
Out of our great nation's budget, even if it's a
penny at a time, adding that pennies literally cost us
more than two cents. Now, it is not clear whether
the President has the authority to order this.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
He might or.

Speaker 1 (46:04):
Might not, because Congress authorizes the manufacturer of the nation's
coins according to the Mint.

Speaker 2 (46:10):
But he's absolutely right. The pennies cost more than their worth.

Speaker 1 (46:14):
And in fact, if you add in the cost of
the government distributing the pennies out to the bank so
that they can get into circulation, it costs three point
six y nine cents to produce and distribute a penny
according to the US Mint's annual report. That's pretty nuts.
So we will see what happens. I'm sure they can
slow the manufacturer of pennies. Can they actually stop it

(46:37):
without passing a law? I don't know, But finally, with
the President paying attention to it, maybe we can pass
a law.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
You may know Rick as a guy who does.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
Stats for Broncos road games, and now for the second
year in a row, did stats for the Kansas City
Chiefs Spanish language broadcast of the Super Bowl, which seems
like a pretty cool gig. And we talked about it
last time, and I just thought it would be fun
to have Rick on the day after the game, just

(47:09):
from a really nerdy perspective to talk about, you know
what he found interesting in terms of football stats in
yesterday's game. And Rick, I'll just mention one to start
because I mentioned it earlier in the show. It was
was actually quite surprising that the first player in the

(47:31):
Super Bowl era to score a touchdown on his birthday
was not Saquon Barkley, whose birthday was yesterday, but was
Cooper dejene of the of the Eagles. I thought that
was a pretty cool stat.

Speaker 4 (47:49):
I agree with you, especially, he's only twenty two years
old on top of it all, and you know, his
first super Bowl and to have a pick six, and
pick sixes aren't all that And that was a sixteenth
pick six in Super Bowl history and kind of a
nerdy sort of thing. Every player but one who has
had a pick six in the Super Bowl his team

(48:10):
is won.

Speaker 1 (48:12):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (48:12):
So only once has it not worked that way, and
that was Robert Alfred of the Falcons back in Super
Bowl fifty one. So it was a great birthday clearly
for Cooper to achieve it. You're right, people would have
expected if anybody would have had a birthday super Bowl
touchdown safe one, Barkley would have been the guy.

Speaker 2 (48:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:30):
The odds of him scoring two touchdowns were not much
worse than the odds of almost anybody else scoring one touchdown.
And yet and yet he scored none. The other thing
that I want to mention to you yesterday, to you
is when we spent some time talking about score agami's, which,
for those who who missed that conversation, a score agami

(48:50):
is when an NFL game ends in a score that
has never happened in the NFL before. And you had
said and This makes perfect sense that score gamis are
more likely in very high scoring games, right, especially when
one team gets an immense number of points, because it
just doesn't happen that often. So when I saw the
Eagles had forty, you know, I thought to myself, this

(49:13):
has this has some potential. So I'm wondering if you
actually went to look it up, yesterday was not a
score of gami. But do you know how many other
forty to twenty two games there have been in NFL history?

Speaker 8 (49:26):
I do, and I was actually at that game.

Speaker 4 (49:28):
It's only happened one other time before, and that was
back in two thousand and four when the Patriots defeated
the Rams in Saint Louis forty to twenty two in
a regular season game. That's the only time it's happened,
So I was wondering that as well. This was the
first time, by the way, that a team had scored
forty points.

Speaker 8 (49:47):
Even in a Super Bowl.

Speaker 4 (49:49):
Now, last year, twenty two was also the losing score
when the Chiefs won twenty five to twenty two in overtime,
So it was very close to being a score of gomy,
but not quite.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
Folks.

Speaker 1 (50:00):
If you have any questions for Rick just text us
at five six, six, nine zero.

Speaker 2 (50:05):
Why were you at that game?

Speaker 4 (50:08):
Well, back then, I was doing the Rams games for
their radio network back in two thousand and four and
just happened to be there in Saint Louis for that
particular game. And it was sort of noteworthy because, if
I remember correctly, the Patriots scored on a fake field
goal with Adam Vincieri I think involved in throwing a
touchdown pass of all things.

Speaker 2 (50:31):
I think I remember that one, all.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
Right, So let's just talk about what you found most
interesting from the perspective of what you do about yesterday's game.

Speaker 4 (50:42):
Well, one thing that certainly jumped into my mind is
the fact that it was such a blowout. Again, you know,
to have the Eagles up thirty four to nothing at
one point was shocking enough. It tied the most unanswered
points they'd had all season. Actually, the chief given up
more than thirty four unanswered points when they played the

(51:03):
Broncos in the final game of the regular season. But
one of the things that we now have found out
in fifty nine Super Bowls, when the AFC West team
goes to the Super Bowl, they've won ten, they've lost eleven.
But in all eleven losses, the AFC West team has
lost by at least seventeen points. Wow, which is like staggering. Yeah,

(51:27):
averages twenty five point six points in defeat for an
AFC West team, and all four teams have been there,
the Chargers only once, the Broncos quite a few times, certainly,
but it's just amazing that there hasn't been a close
defeat for an AFC West team. When they win, they

(51:47):
might win a close one, but when it's a loss,
my goodness, they know how to lose, let's put it
that way. So that one really kind of jumped out
at me as the game was unfolding.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
You know, I heard a lot of people before the
game say something that I thought made sense then and
it did play out that way, which is if if
the Eagles win, it's probably not going to be a
very close game, despite the betting line being one or
one and a half, But if it's very close near
the end, it's hard to bet against Mahomes in a

(52:19):
tight game where you know someone's got to drive down
the field to kick a field goal or score a touchdown,
it's hard to be be against him in that circumstance.

Speaker 4 (52:27):
Yeah, and even last night in a blowout situation. You know,
the Chiefs in their first nine drives had no drive
of more than five plays. And that's great if you're
moving the ball down the field and you have big plays.
But the Chiefs had no more than seventeen yards in
any of the first nine drives. But you still had
Mahomes ending up throwing three touchdown passes. And you know,

(52:49):
even in the late stages of the fourth quarter, when
the game was clearly out of hand, there he was
actually coming alive and drawing some touchdown passes and making
it not really interesting. But the score looked better than
it really was in reality.

Speaker 1 (53:06):
Yeah, yeah, that game was not as close as the
final score showed. A listener wants to know how many
times have there been How many times have there been
a Super Bowl where two players on the winning team
had a birthday on the day of the game.

Speaker 4 (53:22):
Well, I suppose there might have been a game with one,
but I had not heard of anything like that where
we had two players, yeah, on the same team with
their birthday on the Super Bowl Day itself, because let's
face it, the Super Bowl moves around.

Speaker 8 (53:37):
I mean this year it was on the ninth and
last year.

Speaker 4 (53:41):
It wasn't know it was on the tenth or something,
so it does move around, so it's interesting.

Speaker 8 (53:46):
But I don't think that's happened before.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
So were you bored yesterday or do you never get
it was? From a football fans perspective, it was a
boring game. But based on what you do your there's
always new statistics being generated.

Speaker 8 (54:03):
No question.

Speaker 4 (54:04):
I mean, at least we had one good one for
the Eagles as the game went along with Barkley broke
Terrell Davis's record played most rushing yards in the season,
counting postseason play, So I mean that was kind of
a nice positive one, but so many of the stats
were pretty negative in nature. I mean, the Chiefs had
a first down on their first play of the game,

(54:25):
they didn't have another first down the entire first half,
and you'd have to go back to Super Bowl twenty
when the Bears the Bears in nineteen eighty five defeated
New England, when New England was held at one first
down in the first half, and they had negative yardage
in that game in the first half.

Speaker 8 (54:45):
The Chiefs.

Speaker 4 (54:46):
The Chiefs also, they didn't have more first downs than
punts until about six forty five left in the game. Well,
I mean, that's just bizarre and to have, but to
have twenty plays and twenty three yards in the first half.
The Eagles had twenty four points at the half and

(55:07):
the Chiefs had twenty three yards total offense. So I'm
still looking for things like that as the game goes along.
And obviously the stats were not looking good for the
Chiefs that they were great for the Eagles, that's for sure.

Speaker 2 (55:22):
We're talking with Rick Winer.

Speaker 1 (55:23):
He does Broncos road game statistics for the Broncos when
they travel and now for the second year in a row,
he handled Super Bowl stats for the Chiefs Spanish language broadcast.

Speaker 2 (55:37):
Where were you sitting?

Speaker 4 (55:39):
Actually, our location wasn't too bad. We were about at
the ten yard line, located at the top of the
lower bowl of seating, so all things considered, not so bad.
Last year in Vegas, we were in the end zone,
and it's really hard to do a game from the
end zone.

Speaker 8 (55:55):
Because the perspective, it's so hard to tell.

Speaker 4 (55:57):
The yard lines when you're looking at at it straight
down the field from an end zone. So this was
a better advantage point. The only problem is we had
a lot of Eagles fans in front of us who
stood pretty much the whole night during the game, so
we had to kind of stand up in order to
see what was going on out there as well.

Speaker 1 (56:14):
When you're doing your job, do you get to enjoy
the game or are you so hyper focused on this
is happening and that's happening that you're barely even taking
it in the way an ordinary spectator might.

Speaker 4 (56:31):
It's a question I get asked frequently, and I think
I've sort of trained myself over the years to appreciate
the game as it unfolds so that I'm not just
crunching numbers the whole time. I'm really trying to appreciate
what's going on. Plus I'm trying to look for trends
of the game. So I really want to watch the
game and see what's happening, and certainly I want to

(56:51):
listen to what the announcers are saying so that I
can come up with information that hopefully backs up what
they're saying.

Speaker 8 (56:57):
As well.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
I'm curious.

Speaker 1 (57:01):
What it was like to have the President of the
United States there for the first time that a sitting
president has ever been to a Super Bowl, and what
did you see.

Speaker 4 (57:12):
Actually? Once I got into the stadium. I really didn't
see anything that felt that different than other times. The
Super Bowl is always a really tightly secured event anyway,
so I'm kind.

Speaker 8 (57:24):
Of used to that.

Speaker 4 (57:25):
But I did notice that there seem to be more
secret service and more TSA folks when it came to
checking in going through security itself just to get inside
the perimeter of the Superdome. I thought that was a
little bit more noticeable this time around than other times,
but it's always been that way ever since.

Speaker 8 (57:46):
Nine to eleven.

Speaker 1 (57:48):
Listener Andy says, and I hadn't thought about this, but
he's probably right that yesterday was the first time that
the Chiefs have lost when Taylor Swift was at the game?
Is that right?

Speaker 2 (57:59):
Do you know?

Speaker 8 (58:01):
I think that is probably right.

Speaker 4 (58:03):
She's she had been a real good luck charm for them,
and of course you got to remember that she's hadn't
lost that many games since you know, she and.

Speaker 8 (58:11):
Travis Kelsey started seeing each other.

Speaker 4 (58:13):
So I think that's probably correct, And you know, it
just goes to show, you know, you can be a
good luck charm, but that can only take you so far.

Speaker 8 (58:22):
The Eagles just you know, totally outplayed the Chiefs. Yesterday.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
Yeah, I've never especially in the first half.

Speaker 8 (58:28):
You know, that was unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (58:30):
It was unbelievable.

Speaker 8 (58:31):
You know, those numbers were just staggering me.

Speaker 4 (58:34):
Mahome's quarterback passer rating at halftime was ten point seven.
Now if you, if you or I went out there
and threw one incomplete path in the first half, our
rating would be thirty nine point six. And this was
ten point seven because he had two interceptions. He had
only completed six passes for thirty three yards, and on

(58:56):
top of that, he got sacked three times in the
first half. So the the net passing yard age was
twenty wow, amazing, and they only ran the ball three
times in the first half and game three yards. So Pacheco,
who had been the leading rusher for the Chiefs when
they beat the Eagles two years ago, ended up with
seven yards on three carries in this game. And Harrison Becker,

(59:21):
who was the leading scorer last year's Super Bowl, or
the kicker, he had no points last night because the
Chiefs went for two points after all three touchdowns.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
Right, and they didn't attempt a field goal, pretty right,
So has when's when's the last time that a Super
Bowl kicker had zero points in a game.

Speaker 4 (59:42):
Well, well, I certainly would think going back to when
the Broncos lost to Seattle forty three to eight, the
Broncos scored a touchdown with a two point conversion, So
that probably is the last time, if I'm not mistaken
that that's happened.

Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
I didn't think it had never happened before. But it's
probably not the most common thing because normally very few
teams get shut out, and.

Speaker 8 (01:00:08):
Especially hasn't had. That's right, No shutouts in the Super Bowl.

Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
Nose shoutouts in the Super Bowl, and normally, at least
on your first touchdown, unless you're way behind already by
some unusual score, normally on your first touchdown you would
kick the extra point rather than go for two.

Speaker 8 (01:00:24):
That's correct. That's right.

Speaker 4 (01:00:26):
I'm thinking back Super Bowl nine that was played also
in New Orleans, the Steelers first Super Bowl win against Minnesota.
The final score was sixteen to six, and the Vikings
scored a touchdown but missed the extra point. So that
would be another time. If there were any in between,
they're not coming to my mind right at the top.
It those two come to mind, all right.

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
Last question for you, Rick, other than the dude scoring
a touchdown on his birthday. Did you catch anything that
happened in yesterday's Super Bowl that had never before happened
in a Super Bowl?

Speaker 4 (01:01:03):
Well, yes, Xavier Worthy of the Chiefs who had one,
he had like one catch for one yard in the
first half. He ended up with two fifty yard receptions
in the second half, ended up with one hundred and
fifty seven yards receiving, and he became the first that
was the most yardage for a receiver in a losing

(01:01:25):
effort ever in a Super Bowl. And the other thing too,
is in yesterday's game was the first time in Super
Bowl history that both quarterbacks were the leading rushers for
their respective teams.

Speaker 2 (01:01:36):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:01:37):
Wow, you know there was a there was a bet
yesterday and I didn't even look how it came out.
It probably came out pretty pretty close. There was a
bet and it was like even money. You could go
either way with even even money or you know, minus
one ten on either who will have more rushing yards
sake one Barkley or the entire Chiefs team.

Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
And I actually don't know the result.

Speaker 4 (01:02:01):
Well, Barkley, although he did not have a big game,
he still had more rushing yards than the Chiefs, but
just rushing.

Speaker 1 (01:02:10):
Didn't he only have like forty yards rushing or something?

Speaker 4 (01:02:13):
Had he had fifty nine I believe, Okay, fifty seven
fifty seven, twenty five carries for fifty seven yards. Yeah,
the Chiefs had eleven carries for forty nine yards and
Mahomes led the way with a whopping twenty five yards total.

Speaker 1 (01:02:31):
Unbelievable, unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
All right, last question for you. Did you have fun?

Speaker 8 (01:02:37):
Absolutely?

Speaker 4 (01:02:37):
It never gets old, thankfully, and that's a good thing
because I've been so fortunate to be in so many
of them. But it is still fun regardless of you know,
if your team wins or loses. It's such a spectacle.
It's a little bit of a circus, but it is
still great fun.

Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
Rick Weiner is a practicing psychiatrist and the Denver Broncos
road statistician who hand the chief Spanish language broadcast statistics
this year for second year in a row. Rick, god
willing you won't be doing this for the Chiefs next year?
Maybe for the Broncos, though with a little bit of.

Speaker 8 (01:03:13):
Luck, wouldn't hurt my feelings what that'd be great?

Speaker 1 (01:03:17):
Thanks for your time, Rick, great conversation, really appreciate.

Speaker 8 (01:03:20):
It, my pleasure. Thanks for having me on again.

Speaker 1 (01:03:22):
All right, Safe drive home, safe drive home. All right.
So yeah, Rick's driving home from the super Bowl.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
That was cool. That was that was.

Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
That was good.

Speaker 2 (01:03:31):
So all right, lots of stuff still to do on
the show.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
Actually, let me stick with a football thing for just
two minutes, but a local football thing. There was a
story over at Axios and it's not really new information,
but it's sort of a good reminder for those of
us who are Broncos fans that five years from now,
in twenty thirty, right.

Speaker 2 (01:03:52):
Is when the current lease, the Broncos lease.

Speaker 1 (01:03:57):
At empower Field at Mile High will will end and
the Broncos are going to have to figure out what
to do then. And over at Axios, they talked to
Demani Leach, who's the Broncos president, and he said that
the Broncos are still in research mode.

Speaker 2 (01:04:13):
He said that.

Speaker 1 (01:04:15):
Options for the Broncos include massive renovations to empower Field.
And by the way, one of the reasons they might
go down, well, one of the reasons they probably need
to do something is they really want to host a
Super Bowl, right, and so there's that anyway, big big
renovations in empower Field, a new stadium where Empower Field

(01:04:37):
is just tear it all down and build a new.

Speaker 2 (01:04:39):
One, or a new stadium somewhere else.

Speaker 1 (01:04:42):
These are all under consideration, and Demani Leach says all
options are on the table. He said he doesn't have
a preference on an option. I don't know if that's true,
but I think I would say that even if I
were he. And one of the things that I noticed
in the Axios piece is that there's some chatter about

(01:05:04):
a potential new site for a stadium in Loan Tree, right,
So what is that? Ten miles south of Denver, maybe
a little less on, you know, south side of Denver.
So that's not very far from the UH the team's

(01:05:25):
future headquarters.

Speaker 2 (01:05:26):
I guess they're moving out of dub Valley.

Speaker 1 (01:05:28):
I haven't really followed that story closely, but they're they're
moving out of apparently some new headquarters location. So if
they went down there, Yeah, it's a new new facility
somewhere in in UH in Englewood. Let's say, hold on,
let me just check this building. A state of the
art training facility and team headquarters. Okay, so no, it's

(01:05:48):
it's gonna be in the same place. They're just rebuilding
in the same place. So sorry, I said moving out
of dub value.

Speaker 2 (01:05:54):
That's wrong. They're rebuilding a new headquarters.

Speaker 1 (01:05:56):
In that same spot. But uh, that spot isn't all
that far from a potential stadium location in Lounetry. Will see.
We'll be right back on Kowa Charles Lane, who's deputy
editor over at the Free Press. And I gotta say,
I just absolutely loved this note enough that I'm going
to share the whole thing with you. And the headline

(01:06:20):
is things worth remembering quote A game most like life.
And I just love this piece in the context of
being in Super Bowl season here and let me just
share this with you, and if you enjoy it, it's
up on my blog at Rosskominsky dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (01:06:41):
I sometimes wonder whether those of us who love football
fully appreciate it's great lessons, said Vince Lombardi in what
friends and family called the speech the greatest football coach,
or at least the greatest professional football coach of the
twentieth century. Lombardi tried and tested various versions of this
talk as an in demand public speaker during the late

(01:07:02):
nineteen sixties. The text quoted here is from a representative
version of the speech, which his son Vince Junior, compiled
and published in two thousand and one. Lombardi's words are
undeniably magnificent, even to those who might have no interests
in the Super Bowl. Lombardi acknowledged that his was a
violent game, suggesting that it would be imbecilic to play

(01:07:26):
it otherwise.

Speaker 2 (01:07:28):
But this game, like war, he.

Speaker 1 (01:07:31):
Believed, was also a game most like life, for it
teaches that work, sacrificed, perseverance, competitive drive, selflessness, and respect
for authority are the price one pays to achieve worthwhile goals.
That's quote from his speech. Lombardi is not quite the
household name it was time does that to fame to

(01:07:53):
the extent he is remembered today and as often as
the originator of a ruthless coaching doctrine, winning isn't everything.
It's the only thing that someone else actually coined. Still,
every year, the Super Bowl restores him, at least for
a moment to popular awareness. The winning team takes home

(01:08:13):
the Vince Lombardi Trophy, a brilliant twenty point seventy five
inch high, seven pound prize made out of pure sterling
by Tiffany silversmiths.

Speaker 2 (01:08:24):
The team's individual.

Speaker 1 (01:08:25):
Players each get one hundred and seventy eight thousand dollars
bonus as well. Losers get ninety six thousand dollars, but
the trophy embodies what's really at stake, not money, but pride.
Then known simply as the World Professional Football Championship Trophy,
it was first awarded in nineteen sixty seven to Lombardy's

(01:08:47):
Green Bay Packers, who defeated the Kansas City Chiefs thirty
five to ten in Super Bowl One. By that point,
Lombardi had been the Packers head coach for nine years,
having built a losing team into one of the greatest
dynasty dynasties in sports history.

Speaker 2 (01:09:01):
Let me just interject here.

Speaker 1 (01:09:02):
By the way, the Kansas City Chiefs were attempting to
three pete yesterday, to win three Super Bowls in a row.

Speaker 2 (01:09:09):
No team has ever done that.

Speaker 1 (01:09:11):
I will note that the Green Bay Packers won the
final professional football championship before moving to the Super Bowl era,
where they called it a super Bowl.

Speaker 2 (01:09:25):
Well, actually the first two they.

Speaker 1 (01:09:26):
Didn't call Super Bowl only, but we still consider them
super Bowls because just because because they put the leagues together,
and so the Green Bay Packers won the last championship
in their league, and then the first two championships in
the combined league, which then became known as Super Bowl.

(01:09:46):
So they kind of did three pete kind of sort of. Anyway,
I just want to share that tidbit with you. So
back to this piece. It was around this time, around
nineteen sixty seven, that Lombardi started delivering the speech, which
he worked on for a handful of years, that would
turn out to be the last of his life.

Speaker 2 (01:10:03):
A week after he gave it for the final time.

Speaker 1 (01:10:05):
In Dayton, Ohio, on June twenty second, nineteen seventy, he
was taken to the hospital and a few months later
he was dead of cancer at the age of fifty seven.
I did not know that Vince Lombardi died that young.
I did not know that. And so in nineteen seventy one,
to honor the man, pro football put his name on
the highest award in the sport. According to his biographer

(01:10:25):
David Marinis, Lombardi acquired his sense that football is a
kind of war requiring military style discipline when he served
as an assistant coach under Colonel Earl Red Blake Blaik
at Army, but he learned to appreciate the value of
order to a community even earlier in life, growing up
in Brooklyn in a deeply Roman Catholic Italian American family. Indeed,

(01:10:49):
he had originally planned to become a priest. Only five
foot eight and one hundred and eighty pounds, Lombardi overachieved
on the gridiron himself, playing right guard on a nineteen
thirty s Mordham University line known as the Seven Blocks
of Granite. Though he eventually turned to teaching and coaching
when he couldn't make it in the pros, these experiences
produced a mature coach who could be a tyrant on

(01:11:11):
the practice field, but also a genuinely thoughtful man who
believed the leader quote must be sensitive to the emotional
needs and expectation of others.

Speaker 2 (01:11:20):
As the Civil Rights Revolution.

Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
Gained momentum, Lombardi acted on his deep seated opposition to
racism and prejudice, recruiting a dozen black players to the
Packers and insisting they be treated equally. One of the
great lessons from football that Lombardi would mention in his
speech was that quote, it is a game played by
more than a million Americans, and yet a game uninhabited,

(01:11:43):
No uninhibited, sorry uninhibited.

Speaker 2 (01:11:46):
It's really both by racial or social barriers.

Speaker 1 (01:11:49):
Football, he believed it epitomizes what's special about America. It
is quote a game that's become a symbol of this
country's best attributes, namely courage, stamina, and co ordinated efficiency.
Yet he worried that our country was losing these attributes
in a revolutionary decade. Maybe we have too much freedom,
he used in the speech. Maybe we have so long

(01:12:11):
ridiculed authority in the family, discipline and education, decency and conduct,
and law in the state, that our freedom has brought
us close to chaos. Then that sound like something somebody
would or should say right now. Lombardi spoke in an
era of political assassinations, of senseless war abroad, a violent
protest at home. Yet what he said next resounds in
our own time. Quote, we live in an age fit

(01:12:34):
for heroes. No time has ever offered such perils or
such prizes. Man can provide a full life for humanity,
or he can destroy himself with the problems he has created.
The test of this century will be whether man confuses
the growth of wealth and power with the growth of
spirit and character. If he does, it will be like
some infant playing with matches who destroys the very house

(01:12:57):
he would have inherited. In this str there are no spectators,
only players. Lombardi had no patience for the notion that
the individual American occupies a place on the sidelines, watching
as generals wage war and politicians make deals and sportsmen
achieve extraordinary feats. Quote, you are the leaders of this country,

(01:13:18):
he told his audiences. Contrary to the opinion of many,
leaders are not born. They are made, and they are.

Speaker 2 (01:13:23):
Made by hard effort.

Speaker 1 (01:13:27):
It's not fashionable these days to speak of character, to
demand excellence, to encourage sacrifice, to value strength. But those
were the terms Lombardi employed as he encouraged Americans to
work and build and grow and improve. Here is a
paragraph worth remembering, and this will be the end of
the note. Here we go. Our society at the present

(01:13:49):
time seems to have sympathy only for the misfit, the
ne'er do well, the maladjusted, the criminal, the loser. It's
time to stand up for the doer, the achiever, the
one who sets out to do something and does it,
the one who recognizes the problems and opportunities at hand
and deals with them and is successful and is not

(01:14:12):
worrying about the feelings of others. The one who was
constantly looking for more to do, the one who carries
the work of the world on his shoulders, the leader.

Speaker 2 (01:14:23):
We will never create a.

Speaker 1 (01:14:24):
Good society, much less a great one until individual excellence
is respected and encouraged. That is a lesson that at
least was temporarily lost during the Biden years, and maybe
before that as well, but exceptionally during the Biden years.

Speaker 2 (01:14:41):
This and me talking now, not the writer.

Speaker 1 (01:14:44):
And whatever you think of Donald Trump, something of the
resurgence of Donald Trump and something of the mindset of
his supporters is about this.

Speaker 2 (01:14:57):
About this, We will.

Speaker 1 (01:14:59):
Never create a good society, much less a great one
unless individual excellence is respected and encouraged.

Speaker 2 (01:15:06):
But before I do the.

Speaker 1 (01:15:07):
Chicken related thing that Dragon played that music for, I
want to share with you a text I just got
from listener Tom. When I was a high school freshman
in Tiny Meeker, Colorado, I.

Speaker 2 (01:15:18):
Was on the football team that year.

Speaker 1 (01:15:19):
We were very good and we went all the way
to the Double A state championship, where we got trounced
by huge Sheridan High School.

Speaker 2 (01:15:28):
But that's another story. A couple days before the semi
final game.

Speaker 1 (01:15:32):
Our coach gathered us in the chemistry lab, the only
place in the school that had the ability to conference
phone calls in the early nineteen seventies. The coach announced
we had a guest on the phone who was going
to talk to us about becoming a champion. It was
Vince Lombardi. I wish I had a recording.

Speaker 2 (01:15:53):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:15:54):
Yeah, so it must have been very early seventies, because,
as we as we learned a moment ago, Vince Lombardi
passed away in the very early seventies. All right, So
this is kind of a funny story, and it's not
even it's not even an American story, but I but
I just wanted to share it with you because it's
such a wonderful example of how ridiculous government can get.

(01:16:19):
And given what happened for the last several years in
the United States of America regarding immigration, I wouldn't be
surprised if there are actually stories this dumb in the
United States too that we haven't heard, but maybe we will.
So there is a guy, an Albanian criminal. Okay, I

(01:16:40):
don't I don't know what he was. I don't know
what he was convicted of But he was a criminal
in England who was at a trial, a hearing regarding
his deportation. And he has and he has a kid.
He has he has a ten year old kid. And

(01:17:00):
let me just share this with you from the UK Telegraph,
which is a somewhat conservative leaning website. An Albanian criminal
was allowed to stay in Britain partly because his son
will not eat foreign chicken nuggets. The Telegraph can reveal.
An immigration tribunal ruled that it would be unduly harsh,
that's their words, for the ten year old boy to
be forced to move to Albania with his father, owing

(01:17:23):
to his sensitivity around food.

Speaker 2 (01:17:26):
The only example provided.

Speaker 1 (01:17:28):
To the court was his distaste for quote, the type
of chicken nuggets that are available abroad and quote. As
a result, the judge allowed the father's appeal against deportation
as a breach of his right to a family life
under the European Convention of Human Rights, citing the impact
his removal might have on his son. Oh my gosh,

(01:17:53):
that can't be the only story like that in England,
and it can't be the only story like that in
the US.

Speaker 2 (01:17:59):
And one wonder now with.

Speaker 1 (01:18:00):
The Trump administration kind of unmasking things like USAID and
showing us what's been going on, whether we will learn
about more.

Speaker 2 (01:18:10):
In fact, let me give you one here. I'll do
just thirty seconds on this.

Speaker 1 (01:18:13):
So you know doze elon Musk's team of young computer
wonder kids who are applying algorithms and AI to government
computer systems to try to figure out duplicative programs and fraud.

Speaker 2 (01:18:28):
And waste and abuse and all this.

Speaker 1 (01:18:29):
And look, I'm not getting in right now to the
conversation about whether they should have this access or all that.
I'm just telling you what they're doing. Right So those
just apparently revealed that last week. Okay, so now in
the Trump presidency, doze Is revealed that FEMA sent payments

(01:18:52):
of fifty nine million dollars to hotels in New York
City to house illegal immigrants. And FEMA's already kind of
on the hot seat, in part because it is perceived
that they did a bad job following the hurricane damage
in North Carolina. And for the record, I have no

(01:19:12):
idea whether they've actually done a bad job, but certainly
a lot of the news reporting has.

Speaker 2 (01:19:18):
Been that way.

Speaker 1 (01:19:19):
And so now you've got all this talk from Christy Nome,
who is the new Secretary of DHS, and when she
is asked about FEMA, she said, I would get rid
of FEMA the way it exists today.

Speaker 2 (01:19:31):
She said, we still need the.

Speaker 1 (01:19:32):
Resources and the funds to go to people that have
these types of disasters, but you need to let the
local officials make the decisions on how that's deployed, so
it can be deployed quicker. We don't need this bureaucracy
that's picking and choosing winners. Can you imagine under the
Trump administration, FEMA spending fifty nine million dollars on hotel

(01:19:53):
rooms in New York for illegal aliens. By the way,
one of the biggest hotels there, the Roosevelt, that is
doing this, I believe, is owned by the Pakistan government.
So American taxpayers are giving money to the Pakistani government
to house illegal aliens. Somebody's head's going to roll on this,
and in any case, FEMA is in the crosshairs.

Speaker 2 (01:20:15):
When we come back. I just read an amazing book.

Speaker 1 (01:20:18):
We're going to talk with the author next, all right, unbelievable, Okay,
So listeners know that I am constantly getting pitched books.
I probably have publishers emailing me about three or four
book suggestions every day, and I say no to the
vast majority of them. I'm very very picky about what

(01:20:40):
I read, partly because I don't want to recommend anything
bad to you, and partly because my time is valuable
because I am pitched a new books so often. I
rarely read a book that's not new. But my wife
read a book called Coffee Land, and the subtitle of

(01:21:00):
the book One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of
Our Favorite Drug. And my wife knows what I like
and what I don't like. And my wife recommends a
book to me maybe once.

Speaker 2 (01:21:13):
Maybe twice a year, very very selective.

Speaker 1 (01:21:16):
She said, you got to read Coffee Land, and so
I did, and it is just a remarkable book.

Speaker 2 (01:21:24):
And joining us to talk about his book.

Speaker 1 (01:21:26):
Is Augustine Sedgwick. And you got another book coming out soon.
We're gonna talk about this one first and then that one.
Thanks so much for being here, Augustine. I appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (01:21:34):
Russ, thanks for having me. And it sounds like thanks
to you, especially to your wife. I mean credit credit
where credits to.

Speaker 1 (01:21:40):
Indeed, and she she just loved it, and she's a
big coffee drinker, I'm not, but the whole the history,
the business, the everything of it is fascinating. And I'm
going to ask you a question that I usually don't
ask because it's a little bit trite sometimes, But what
made you think to write about the history of coffee
in the Western Hemisphere?

Speaker 3 (01:22:01):
A great question. I mean, you're asking where the book started.
And the book started with me wanting to write about
the history of migration. Actually, I wanted to write something
about why we hate the people we depend on economically
is one version of the question that I was interested
in investigating. And as soon as I started to write
about the deep history of migration, like when did people

(01:22:24):
start to move from Central and South America into the
United States, it became clear to me that the story
wasn't fully about migration, or wasn't only about migration, but
also about the other things that had moved across those
territories over time, especially commodities. And when you're writing about
Central America and the deep history of the connections between

(01:22:44):
Central America and the United States, you have to write
about coffee. Coffee is the big one that shaped the
relationship between the United States and Central America, going all
the way back to the beginning of those very nation states.

Speaker 2 (01:22:59):
I don't think many people know that, right.

Speaker 1 (01:23:02):
I think everybody knows coffee is an enormous commodity, and
everybody knows you get this coffee and that coffee and
the Brazilian thing. And I was just in Colombia and
in the Wan Valdez shop and all this stuff. But
I don't think I didn't know, and I'll project I
didn't know, and therefore I suspect not very many people knew.
Very egotistical of me not think that sound just just

(01:23:25):
what a big deal coffee was. Can you talk about
the the economic and then we'll get to culture. But
let's talk about the economic importance of coffee in the
nineteen twenties and thirties and maybe forties.

Speaker 3 (01:23:36):
Well, you're absolutely right, I think, I guess not a story.
It's not a story that most people know. But if
you want to understand why people leave their homes in
rural Central America, Royal Salvador, Guatemala, in places like that
and come to the United States, you have to understand
the economic history of those places, and the economic history
of those places going back to the very beginning of
those nations is coffee. When those places began to be

(01:24:00):
their own countries, when they gained independence from Spain, they
were desperate for a way to make money and build
their states and governments and societies. The way that they
did that was to adopt the production of export commodities
for the wider world market. The experimented with different commodities,
some de like indigo, dye, sugar, all these other commodities

(01:24:23):
that could be produced readily in those places. But the
one that they landed on and the one that worked
most of all, was coffee. And the reason coffee worked
more than the others is a story about how the
world was changing in the nineteenth twentieth century, how the
world was very much becoming what it is today. And
the truth is, if you want to understand the contemporary
history of the America's Central America, the United States, even

(01:24:44):
the most recent agreement for l Salvator's offer to house
prisoners from the United States, if you want to understand that,
you have to understand the history of the coffee trade
and the way that those countries have always turned themselves
out to be in the favor of richer ones.

Speaker 1 (01:25:00):
So I'm a bit like a goldfish. So I'm just
going to kind of wander here and just do a
stream of consciousness thing rather than flip through the book
where I've marked pages, which probably should be doing. By
the way, I did read the whole thing. I think
that was clear already. A lot of radio hosts have
authors on and the hosts haven't actually read the books.
But I read the entire thing. So who is James

(01:25:23):
Hill and why is he so important?

Speaker 3 (01:25:28):
James Hill is in some ways the main character of
my story. He's a representative character for the history of
the nineteenth century in Central America. James Hill was born
poor as poor can be in Manchester, England, in the
second half of the nineteenth century. His family were mill workers.
They lived in the slums of Manchester, England, which were
arguably the worst slums in all the world at that time. They,

(01:25:53):
you know, he had, Hill had ten brothers and sisters
and barely enough money for food and CARDI afford anything,
but what they did have because of the time and
place he was born in, was public school. Public school
in England in the second half of the nineteenth century
trained poor kids to go out into the world and
work as representatives of the British Empire, selling and buying

(01:26:13):
stuff abroad that could then be sent back profitably to England.
James Hill left home after school. James Hill left home
at age eighteen and went to Central America to sell textiles,
to sell goods that were made in Manchester.

Speaker 1 (01:26:27):
In Central America.

Speaker 3 (01:26:28):
He quickly when he got there, he quickly saw that
selling textiles was a bit of a bad deal for him,
but there was another opportunity that could be taken in coffee.
He transformed himself from a poor kid from the slums
of Manchester into arguably the most important coffee producer in
El Salvador, which in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was
the place in the world most dominated by coffee. James

(01:26:51):
Hill was arguably the most important coffee grower in making
El Salvador into the world's most important coffee economy.

Speaker 8 (01:26:58):
And he was an Englishman.

Speaker 2 (01:27:00):
We're talking with.

Speaker 1 (01:27:00):
Augustine Sedgwick's book is called Coffee Land.

Speaker 2 (01:27:03):
Buy it and read it.

Speaker 1 (01:27:05):
Augustine got his PhD at Harvard, and we won't hold
that against him. And he researches the global history of capitalism, work, food, family,
and masculinity.

Speaker 2 (01:27:17):
A big topic in his next book that we will get.

Speaker 1 (01:27:18):
To in a minute.

Speaker 2 (01:27:20):
So times were.

Speaker 1 (01:27:22):
Very different nineteenth century, early twentieth century.

Speaker 2 (01:27:26):
A lot of.

Speaker 1 (01:27:29):
Sensibilities that exist now didn't exist then. And I think
it's difficult even for somewhat experienced readers of history to
not apply a modern filter and modern judgments on what
happened in the past. And we really shouldn't, which doesn't
mean we should say everything was great, but we need

(01:27:49):
to be careful with that.

Speaker 2 (01:27:50):
And that was going through my mind as I.

Speaker 1 (01:27:53):
Was reading the parts of the story about how James
Hill and others you used hunger.

Speaker 2 (01:28:01):
Can you talk about that?

Speaker 3 (01:28:03):
This is a really important point, Ross, Thanks for bringing
it up, because the way that James Hill worked in
El Salvador, the thing that made him successful as a
coffee grower and made it possible for him to transform
himself from a poor British kid into the most important
coffee grower in all of l Salvador, was that he
applied a very specific framework to coffee production. In effect,

(01:28:26):
he took the logic, the economic logic of Manchester, England,
the place he had been born, and transplanted it onto
the side of a volcano in El Salvador to grow coffee.
He made Salvador and volcanoes into coffee factories, just like
there were textile factories in Manchester. And the way that
he did it was to work perfectly within the laws

(01:28:49):
and norms of modern capitalism. He just said what he
put in place in El Salvador was exactly the system
that was already in place in Manchester. What James Hill
said was, if you want to eat, you have to work, right.
It's no on my plantations, It's no longer going to
be possible just to take food out of the forest,

(01:29:12):
just to kill animals and eat them at your homes
that you find around the countryside. He said, that's no
longer going to be possible. It's not only that land
and properties privatized, it's also that the products of the
land and earth are privatized. So there was no alternative
for those who needed to eat, which is to say everyone,

(01:29:33):
other than to go to work for James Hill. And
that's just how it worked in Manchester. And that's just
what Hill did in El Salvador. But in order to
do so, he obviously had to go to much greater
lengths than Manchester mill owners did. Manchester mill owners, it
wasn't hard for them to make the mill workers hungry.
There weren't bananas growing on trees everywhere. There weren't, you know,

(01:29:56):
animals are running around the jungle that could be killed
and eaten for dinner. In Manchester, it was simple to
impose this deal of work for food onto mill workers.
In al Salvador, James Hill had to in effect privatize
the entire ecosystem to make it possible to compel Salvadorans
to work for him in order to meet their most

(01:30:17):
basic needs, for example eating.

Speaker 1 (01:30:20):
Yeah, and as you describe in the book, he actively
took out fruit trees and things like that that the
people could eat, so that the only way they would
eat is when they came in for lunch, to get
their tortillas and beans that they earned as part of
their compensation for working. So let me ask you a
question that borders on a philosophical or ethical question. So

(01:30:43):
James Hill's workers were not technically slaves, but when you
think about how they worked and how they were managed
and so on, how different was that from slavery.

Speaker 3 (01:31:02):
Here's the amazing thing about that question, because the situation
that you and I have been talking about in El Salvador.
The situation that James Hill created in El Salvador is
the situation that created that was had been created in Manchester, England,
is the situation moreover, under which you and I are
currently existing, right, This in its basic foundational norms and principles,

(01:31:25):
like if you want to eat, you have to work,
This is exactly the situation under which you and I
both live and and and you know, every day and
and on some days we things are going so well
that we don't even notice that we're engaged in making
that deal, right, But some days things are going so
poorly and work just is so terrible and unpleasant that

(01:31:47):
we were really aware that we have no other option
but to keep doing the thing that we're hating so much.

Speaker 1 (01:31:53):
All right, let me let me push back on that
a little bit. So, there are not very many Americans
who are hungry all the time. They're probably more than
there should be. But we also have these safety nets
systems where people can get food stamps, Medicaid and so on,

(01:32:16):
these safety nets, and most people who don't need the
safety nets. Yes, they work to eat, but they also
work to go on vacation, right, and they work to
you know, eat out at a restaurant instead of at
home and save for retirement and pay for their kids'
education and all this stuff. So I would suggest you're

(01:32:40):
going a little far.

Speaker 3 (01:32:44):
I would suggest as a father, I absolutely think this
is a fascinating conversation that also definitely leads into my
book about fatherhood and family life, I would suggest that
as a father, a single father of a child, going
on vacation and going out to eat, sending my child
to school and camp and the hospital, these are also

(01:33:08):
basic basic necessities, right, Like, let's let's emphasize even especially
going on vacation.

Speaker 8 (01:33:16):
I mean this is these are.

Speaker 1 (01:33:18):
Things that.

Speaker 3 (01:33:22):
If we had a broader conception of human needs and requirements,
I think we could also fit under the rubric of necessities.
And the truth is that well.

Speaker 1 (01:33:35):
Good, No, I was going to say, I'd like to
have more of this conversation over a bourbon, absolutely because
I love this stuff. All right, Let's let's do just
another minute on coffee Land, and then I want to
talk briefly about your next book, which is coming out
in a in a few months, and we'll get you back. Uh,
we'll get you back for that. One of the things

(01:33:57):
that I really enjoyed about this book.

Speaker 2 (01:33:59):
There were a lot, but.

Speaker 1 (01:34:02):
As the references to all of these famous coffee brands.
I'm not a coffee drinker, but I heard of them all,
like Folgers and Hills Brothers not related to James Hill,
apparently from El Salvador. But just tell us a little
about like writing about this wacky history of all these

(01:34:22):
coffee brands that are one hundred years old, but a
lot of people still know them.

Speaker 3 (01:34:28):
Yeah, you know, it was like these The interesting thing
about these brands is like Hills Brothers, Folgers, Maxwell House
right right now, to us, to you and me, to
these appear to be outdated. These are dinosaurs, right, These
are old dead institutions that are relics of the past.
The truth is that the relationships that those brands created

(01:34:50):
to Central America are absolutely the forerunners of today's specialty
coffee culture, not only the Starbucks of the world was
it's fancy drinks, but also the coffee shops that have
gone one step beyond Starbucks and celebrating like the origins
of things and the ability to taste the ecological conditions

(01:35:12):
under which the coffee itself was produced. Like this idea
which people sometimes call like a third wave coffee was
exactly what Hill's brothers and folgers were doing back at
the beginning of the twentieth century. So while it seems
new to us, there's this long history of celebrating certain
parts of the world, Central America in this case, as

(01:35:33):
the source of specific qualities and properties in coffee, and
consumer experiences that appreciate that are made meant to appreciate
those qualities and properties.

Speaker 1 (01:35:45):
Yeah, if you if you're a coffee drinks first of all,
even if you're not a coffee drinker, and I'm not,
this book Coffee Land is an incredible read. And if
you are a coffee drinker, be even more so. With
all of the the detail about out choosing qualities of
coffee and consumer taste, it is just it's really quite remarkable.

(01:36:08):
Let's take let's take a minute or so here on
your upcoming book. We won't spend too long because the
book isn't out and I haven't read it yet, but
it'll be out in a few months and and we'll
get you back when it is. But it's called Fatherhood,
A History of Love and Power.

Speaker 2 (01:36:21):
And before you and I went on.

Speaker 1 (01:36:23):
The air, I made a comment to you off the
air about how through reading Coffee Land, I could not.

Speaker 2 (01:36:30):
Tell what your politics are.

Speaker 1 (01:36:32):
And you said, thank you, And that's also important for
my next book.

Speaker 2 (01:36:37):
So can you talk about that a little bit.

Speaker 1 (01:36:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:36:42):
We hear from from all across the political spectrum a
lot of discussion about the crisis of men and boys.

Speaker 8 (01:36:49):
This is a really.

Speaker 3 (01:36:52):
Kind of powerful topic that can be approached and interpreted
a lot of different ways. I think that in many
cases there's justification for talking about how men and boys
are struggling. I wrote this book in order to address
one way that I was struggling in my own life
at around the time of my son.

Speaker 8 (01:37:11):
My son was born.

Speaker 3 (01:37:13):
I also I also had a changed relationship with my
father because he had a stroke that really changed his personality,
and that, plus stuff that was going on in the
world around the Me Too movement, made me wonder like, well,
what does it mean to be a father now? It
felt like the old ideas of fatherhood I had had

(01:37:34):
collapsed at the very moment that I had become one myself.
And so I wrote this book not only to try
to figure out what's happening in the world, but also
try to figure out my own relationship with my father
and son, and I wrote this book about the history
of fatherhood to try to understood where it had come from,
what it really meant, how it had changed over time,
and why and when where we are currently with it.

Speaker 1 (01:37:55):
It really.

Speaker 3 (01:37:57):
In order to address these very personal questions that are
political but are also so profoundly personal and meaningful to
me individually. And my hope is that you know, in
this context of this kind of high pitched discussion of
the crisis of boys and men and masculinity, everything like that,
I hope we can kind of exist exist in the

(01:38:21):
world of that conversation, while also saying, wouldn't it be
nice to be able to use this book to connect
with the people in your life who you love and
are trying to figure out how to love in a
more rewarding way. That's why I wrote it, and that's
my secret hope for the way people use it.

Speaker 1 (01:38:41):
Augustine Sedgwick's prior book that I just finished is called
Coffee Land. His upcoming book, which will be released in
about three months, is called Fatherhood, A History of Love
and Power.

Speaker 2 (01:38:52):
You can pre order it now. Links to all of this.

Speaker 1 (01:38:54):
Are on my blog at Roskaminsky dot com If you
go to the guest section you can find all of
this stuff and again the direct links to the book. Augustine,
thanks for making time as a fabulous conversation. Well let's
keep in touch off the air about maybe seeing if
I can host you for an event here when your
next book comes out.

Speaker 2 (01:39:13):
That would be really cool.

Speaker 8 (01:39:15):
Russell, it was my pleasure.

Speaker 3 (01:39:16):
Thank you so much, and thanks to the person who
for whom you know, who's really responsible for this?

Speaker 1 (01:39:20):
Also, Yeah, that's right, Well we'll both thank my wife,
all right, See, all right, that was a lot of
fun him Mandy, Hello, did you watch the super Bowl?

Speaker 6 (01:39:30):
They did?

Speaker 2 (01:39:31):
And they did.

Speaker 6 (01:39:32):
That's not what I was expecting.

Speaker 2 (01:39:36):
The game?

Speaker 9 (01:39:37):
What are colossal disappointment? Good for Philly fans? Yeah, that's exciting.
I see they burned the city down last night. In response,
ask Philly fans.

Speaker 2 (01:39:45):
Too, as they do, as they do.

Speaker 9 (01:39:47):
Yeah, I gotta tell you underwhelming. The commercials were underwhelming.

Speaker 2 (01:39:53):
What about the halftime show?

Speaker 9 (01:39:56):
I'm old, I admit it, but underwhelming. I'm sure Kendrick
Lamar is a lyrical genius, but as I couldn't understand
anything he was saying, it was completely lost on me.

Speaker 6 (01:40:08):
It just was not didn't love it the game, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:40:13):
I think that's like, I mean, I didn't care about
either of these teams to begin with.

Speaker 2 (01:40:16):
I wanted him both to lose. You know.

Speaker 9 (01:40:19):
The thing with thought myself rooting a little bit for
Jalen hurts, like, I like that kid, Yeah, twenty six
years old. I mean, he's got a lot of career
in front of him and he's already doing He's more
mature than that.

Speaker 2 (01:40:29):
Yeah, I didn't know his age.

Speaker 6 (01:40:30):
I would guessed.

Speaker 2 (01:40:31):
I would have guessed, you know, thirty one.

Speaker 1 (01:40:33):
The other thing, so, my younger kid likes rap music
and hip hop and stuff, and he says he thinks
I'd like Kendrick Lamar and I should just and I
should listen to it a little more.

Speaker 2 (01:40:43):
And I and I will.

Speaker 1 (01:40:44):
But just like, the whole spectacle of the halftime show
was so much less than I would have expected that
the sets and the costumes and the lighting and the
fireworks or whatever it was, it just seemed like a
half hearted effort. It.

Speaker 2 (01:40:57):
Lackluster is a great word.

Speaker 6 (01:40:59):
Underwhelming, under delivered, underdelivered.

Speaker 2 (01:41:01):
What do you got coming up?

Speaker 6 (01:41:03):
I got jen Z coming up? She's said quite the week.

Speaker 9 (01:41:06):
She's stood behind Donald Trump last week while he signed
the executive order about girl sports. We're gonna talk about
her most excellent commercial versus the really freaking horrible and
insulting Nike ad that ran last night.

Speaker 6 (01:41:18):
So it's gonna be that kind of show.

Speaker 1 (01:41:20):
Uh huh. Yeah, that Nike ad was definitely an interesting one.
All right, folks, keep it around for Mandy's fabulous show.

Speaker 2 (01:41:26):
Have a great rest of your Monday. Talk to you tomorrow.