-Our next guest is a sports Emmy Award-winning journalist
who hosts "Game Theory with Bomani Jones."
New episodes premiere Friday nights on HBO and HBO Max.
Please welcome to the show Bomani Jones, everybody.
[ Cheering and applause ]
[ Rock plays ]
♪♪
Welcome to the show, Bomani! I'm so happy to you have here.
-I appreciate it. You give everybody
the dap hug like that, or am I special?
-You're special. Yeah. -Okay, just checking.
[ Laughter ] -You know what? I don't know if I gave it
to your sister when she was here because --
this is very fun -- your sister was the first
in your family to be on the show.
She's an author. She wrote an incredible
book called "An American Marriage."
-Yeah. I have to say, I was very excited
and proud of myself until I realized
I was second place in my own house
[ Laughter ] on being on this television show, okay?
-But you do have siblings who haven't been on the show
as well, right? -Yeah, I do. I do have a couple of those, so.
[ Laughter ] -Okay, great. So you can lord it over them.
-Yeah. Like my brother lives across the street from me.
I will definitely have to tell him that,
"You're going to have to figure something out."
He better start telling some jokes or dancing or something.
[ Laughter ]
-Now, you have covered sports for a long time
-Yes. -in a lot of different formats --
radio, podcasts, on TV -- but now you got your own show.
And with the world of sports being as big as it is,
it must be cool to finally be in a position
to set the agenda every time you get behind the camera.
-Yeah, like I think when you do
like a radio show and stuff like that,
you are in charge, but it's radio, right?
Like people don't take it nearly as seriously.
It's just a little bit of a zoo of sorts when you do that.
When you get into television,
it's a zillion different people that are doing this, doing that.
They got all these different departments to get into.
And I remember the first day
that we opened the office up for "Game Theory,"
we had this meeting and people were presenting the schematics
for some field piece that we had.
And it dawned on me -- I've never been in a meeting
where everybody cares about what I think
and they're all staring at me like so intently,
trying to figure out how I feel about something.
But it's COVID, so I got a mask on.
[ Laughter ] And they just lose it.
Like they just staring and they're so scared
and I got this like giant smile on my face the whole way
and they have no idea because we're trying not to die.
[ Laughter ]
-That was the right thing to try not to do.
One thing you and I have in common --
I've obviously been doing this a long time,
you're new at it, but one thing we agree on --
we do not care for teleprompter. -[ Laughs ]
-I've got a cue card guy.
I've been working on cue cards my whole career.
But how are you finding the teleprompter?
Are you getting used to it? -Yeah, man, I went in
and got a teleprompter coach
-Oh, yeah? -to help me do that
because like I could read the teleprompter.
It's just really hard to be yourself
while you're reading the teleprompter.
Every word that I'd ever said in public before, really,
was coming off of the top of my head.
And, now, all of a sudden we have to write this down
and that feels confining and everything else.
You know, I've got somebody, he's an actor and he comes in
and he basically teaches me how to read again.
[ Laughter ] -So you feel good? -I do. I do.
-Alright. I want to ask you about some of the stuff
in the world of sports right now.
First off, I mean, it does feel like maybe this
is the third offseason in a row
where this is going to be a question.
Tom Brady -- did he come back, is he going to play
another year? What do you think?
-I feel like, if you put your whole family
on the roulette wheel to go 8-9
and now, that family isn't there anymore, why not come back
[ Laughter ] -Oh, interesting. -and play again, right?
Like, "Sure, I'd love to go sit in my house by myself
and eat Hungry Man dinners.
[ Laughter ] Yeah. Who doesn't want to do that?"
No, I mean, in fairness to him, any football player I talked to,
the adjustment of no longer playing anymore
is really, really difficult for them.
And people will let Tom Brady play football
as long as he wants to play football.
I, personally, would not want
to get hit in the kidneys at age 46,
but I got different kidneys than he does.
[ Laughter ] -Yeah.
There's like less room
between the outside of you and your kidney.
-There's less room between the outside of me and my kidneys
than probably anybody else on planet Earth.
[ Laughter ] I've made peace with that.
-A cool story has been Brock Purdy,
last player drafted in the NFL draft last year.
Mr. Irrelevant is the name they give to that
and now, he's got -- the San Francisco 49ers
in the championship game. I feel like you keep waiting
for it to strike midnight and him to turn back
into, you know, regular old Cinderella,
but what's going on here? -I do hope that he has a measure
of perspective about this.
Like you mentioned me being an Emmy Award winner.
I didn't win an Emmy.
I got an Emmy.
-[ Laughs ] -I was an executive producer
on a "30 for 30" documentary and so, when they do that
and it wins Best Documentary Series,
everybody gets an Emmy.
They would've won an Emmy, no matter what I had done,
and that makes it better. -Right.
[ Laughter ] -Because I just got it, right?
Like I didn't have to really -- I did something,
but I just got it.
And I hope that Brock Purdy has the proper perspective
to understand that, while he is doing his job,
if they win a Super Bowl, he gonna get one.
Like we don't have to make it more than it actually is.
We can appreciate that. "Wow, you showed up
for work late and, the next thing you know,
everything went well and you got a win?
Great for you!" right?
[ Laughter ] But you gonna get that Emmy.
-You had a great piece about how crypto became
very tied in with professional sports,
up to and including the Miami Heat had
an FTX Arena that they were playing in.
Obviously, they're no longer playing in an FTX Arena,
due to everything that happened with FTX.
[ Laughter ] What was your original --
Obviously, I think you were very early here in saying,
"Hey, this doesn't quite smell right.
The whole world of crypto and how quickly sports
is wanting to have a partnership with it."
-Well, I had started looking into it about ten years ago.
There was this website called Silk Road
that was basically an open air drug market on the dark web.
But real drug dealers don't sell drugs on the Web,
so you knew it wasn't real drug dealers,
but they were making all their trades with Bitcoin
and then the FBI showed up
and they had all these not actual drug dealers panicked.
And I was like, "Well, tell me more about this Bitcoin."
And then I raised the question, "Why would I trade my money
for money that's not money," right?
[ Laughter ] Like when I go out of the country,
I take my money and I trade it for other money.
You're telling me that I got this money
that works perfectly well
and I'm going to trade this for some other money
because this other money might be worth more.
Well, what's going to make the value of that other money go up?
"I'm going to tweet about it," right?
[ Laughter ] And we're just going to make the value
of this other money come up.
And that was just like --
I hear about like the digital dollar and everything
and I've studied economics pretty decently and I was like,
"My dollar look pretty damn digital right now."
[ Laughter ] Like I got --
the money in my pocket is not all the money I have.
The rest of it is ones and zeros.
And I just couldn't see how other people
didn't understand the idea
of turning your real money into funny money
[ Laughter ] doesn't add up.
-And you sort of saw this very clearly
and I should give you credit.
A lot of people didn't.
In the Super Bowl ads because there were all these
crypto ads last year in the Super Bowl
and they had a very different message
than sort of the more classic financial services companies
that have Super Bowl ads. -Yeah, no, you see a commercial
for Merrill Lynch or for Charles Schwab
or any of them other dorks that
[ Laughter ] get up there and do the trading
and they're always telling you,
[ Baritone ] "Take care of your future."
It's always very serene and peaceful.
These crypto ads were like, "Fortune favors the brave!"
Why do I need to be brave about my money?
[ Laughter ] My entire life is about not being brave about my money.
The whole reason that you take your money
to somebody to invest it is because you're not brave!
[ Laughter ] It is because you are terrified of a zillion different factors
and the only people who are trying to be brave
with their money are broke!
[ Laughter ] So, I understood why, if you were broke
and somebody tells you you can turn five into ten,
you'll give it a try.
But, as our good friend Mr. Madoff showed us,
[ Laughter ] once you hear about a certain level of return,
if it were real, everybody would do it.
Like you think about this -- when has there ever been a time
that somebody has been making a lot of money off an investment
and they made commercials about it?
[ Laughter ]
It doesn't work that way!
Nobody cares that much about you!
[ Laughter ] -You mean, once they're telling me, that proves it's not real?
-That's all I'm saying. When they are coming
to offer this to you like, "Hey, guys, here's a way
that everybody can get rich," no one has ever
[ Laughter ] positioned anything to tell us how we all can get rich.
It doesn't go that way. -Well, I still think
it's pretty good and I'm putting all my money into it.
[ Laughter ]
Hey, thank you so much for being here.
-Hey, man, I appreciate it. -I really appreciate it.
[ Cheering and applause ] Bomani Jones, everybody.
New episodes of "Game Theory"
premiere Friday nights on HBO and HBO Max.
We'll be right back with Sam Morrison.