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Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · Masters in Business

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Boomberg Radio.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: This week on the podcast, I have an extra special guest.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: His name is Ben Cohen, and if that name silence
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: slightly familiar. He is the sports reporter covering the NBA
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: for the Wall Street Journal and the author of a
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: new book, The Hot Hand, The Mystery and Science of Streaks.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: If you're interested in things like statistics and analytics of sports,
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: how the bastball game is changing, who is driving these changes,
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: what is happening in the world of sports, and why
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: the old days of just hiring a superstar and hoping
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: he can drag a team over over the line is
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: pretty much over. I really found his book to be
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: quite fascinating, and I think it's something that if you're
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: either a math or a sports geek, you're gonna find
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: really intriguing. So, with no further ado, my conversation with
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Ben Cohn. This is Master's in Business with Barry Ridholts
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest this week is Ben Cohen.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: He is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: he was the first person to exclusively cover the NBA
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: nationally for the Journal. In he was named a News
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: Media Alliance Rising Star. He has a new book out
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: and it's called The Hot Hands, The Mystery and Science
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: of Streaks. Ben Cowen, Welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you for
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: having me. It's a real pleasure to be on the show.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: Because so much of this book is actually based on
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: past episodes of your show, so it treats for me.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: I have to tell I have to reveal this. I'm
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: reading the book on vacation in Puerto Rico, and because
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: I'm an information junkie, I go to the sources and acknowledgements.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: At the end, nobody reads that, and lo and behold,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: there's my name and masters in business because of the
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: Tom Gilovich um reference. But what I thought was so
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: hilarious this was as I'm reading the book, I'm like,
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: guest Guest had him, had him. It's just cracked. Oh
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: that's an interesting name. I should get him. It was
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: really fun going through all these people who I feel like,
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: you know, you spend ninety minutes or longer in a
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: room with someone, you kind of get to know them
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: a little bit. So let's get to know you a
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: little bit. You're an undergraded duke. How do you end
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: up at the Wall Street Journal. Bribery. Bribery is always
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: a good thing. Now, I I worked really hard at Duke.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: I I've always known that I wanted to be a journalist,
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: and specifically a sports journalist. There it's a deeply uncool
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: thing to say, right, Like, there's some people who grow
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: up dreaming to be astronauts and flying to the moon.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: And I wanted to like cover Rutgers for the Star
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: Ledger New Jersey, right. Um. So I went to Duke
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: like most kids who like sports in New Jersey, and
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: I was the sports editor of the Chronicle, which was
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: the student newspaper at Duke. And and and a Duke that's
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: a real position. It's not like most schools. It's it's
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: a real position. And and the paper itself is a
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: real newspaper. I mean it's a daily paper. I I
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: definitely spent more time in the newspaper office than I
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: did in any classroom. I mean we were working the
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: top editors of the paper. Their work like sixty seventy
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: hours a week. It's a crazy job. And so um,
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: when you're covering Duke basketball, you're really competing with like
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: everybody on the planet, right um. And so that really
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: gave me great grounding, and UM, I got lucky a
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: few times along the way with some internships and some
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: other opportunities, and um, when I graduated, a couple of
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: weeks before graduation, the journal was looking for a sports intern.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: They had just started a sports page and the person
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: they had hired to be the intern had taken a
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: job elsewhere, And so literally two weeks before graduation, the
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: sports editor of the paper emailed me. We had talked
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: in the past about a potential internship, and he offered
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: me an internship, and I kind of kept my foot
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: in the door and didn't let it close them and
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: didn't let them close it on me. And I've sort
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: of been there ever since. The role you now have
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: is NBA reporter for the Journal. That was not a
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: role before you got there. It was it. We did
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: not really have any rules in sports before I got there.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: We started a sports page around the same time that
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: I was hired. So two thousand nine, Murdoch buys the
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: paper in like oh seven, and we get that kid
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: Cohen and here to start a sports page. Fort Rupert
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: and I go way back, and uh so, for the
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: first few years I was at the Journal, I covered
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: college sports, and we didn't have a national full time
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: NBA reporter, And I still think one of the reasons
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: why I did get this job was that it was
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: like July and our sports editor, this brilliant guy named
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: Sam Walker, looked around and said, oh my god, Lebron
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: James is about to choose his next team, and we
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: don't have someone to write the story. And he sort
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: of pulled me into his office and said, I think
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: that you should cover the NBA for us. And I said, Sam,
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: you're just saying this because we you need someone to
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: write about Lebron going back to Cleveland and loan Behold,
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: the next day he goes back to Cleveland. I write
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: this story. But it turned out to be this incredible
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: stroke of fortune because at the time, the NBA was
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: about to enter this like real Golden Age. So I
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: still have never covered an NBA finals that the Golden
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: State Warriors were not playing in. So it's been five
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: years in a row. Perhaps this is the year. I
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: have a feeling that this will be the year that
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: the Warriors don't make the finals. So now let's talk
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: a little bit about how I first found you, which
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: was the article about Josh Miller and Adam said, Joe's
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: paper on the hot hand tell us what the hot
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: hand is. So the hot hand, there's really no singular definition,
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: but I like to think of it as when success
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: leads to more success. Now, in basketball, for example, the
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: hotting has always been studied through basketball, which is one
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: of the things I sort of found irresistible about the
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: whole phenomenon in basketball. It's when you make one shot
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: and then another shot, and then another shot, and you
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: feel more likely to make your next shot. He's on fire.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: You're on fire, but it's not he's unconscious. But it's
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: really not just about basketball. I I think of this
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: as about human behavior. I think we are all familiar
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: with this feeling of the hot hand, and what I've
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: learned is that if we take advantage, it can really
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: change our lives. So this book really started with two
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: stories in the Wall Street Journal, in both calling it
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: to question this seminal classic paper about the hot hand.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: One was by this team of Harvard undergraduates, so not
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: grad students or PhD students or professors, but kids in
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: their college dorm. And one was by Josh Miller and
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: Adam san Hero, who who did this thing where they
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: looked at this very old problem in a new way
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: and they found something that nobody had seen before. And
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: usually what happens, I have to say after I spend
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: a lot of time thinking about a story and writing
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: a story, is that I don't want to think about
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: that story anymore. I'm sick of it. The opposite really
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: happened here. I couldn't get the hot Hand out of
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: my head, and I just thought that there was something
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: bigger here that I wanted to explore. And that's how
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: you know, I end up spending three years writing a
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: book about it. So let's let's step back a second,
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: and um, Tom Gilovich is now professor Cornell. At the time,
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: I believe was at Stanford on the ground or Berkeley
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: on the ground. There were grad students. Tom Gilovich and
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: Bob Balone were grad students at Stanford, and a professor
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: Tversky the Great Amostversek was a brilliant professor there, and
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: they looked at the hot Hand because they thought that
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: it was this beautiful way to illustrate this phenomenon of
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: seeing patterns in randomness. And it still is right. Like
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: I do want to stress that, like I find that
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: paper hugely admirable. It's a brilliant paper, right, because it
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: uses this thing that we all know, this very accessible,
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: digestible example of a cognitive bias. Um. They end up
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: publishing this paper. It's in the canon of behavioral economics. Right,
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: it's one of the most famous papers ever written. It's
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: really easy to understand, like, there's nothing really obtuse about it.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: It's a great paper. It really holds up um with
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: one small exception, sure if yeah, exactly, But Um, something
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: amazing happened when this paper came out, which is that
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: it was so unbelievable that people just simply refused to
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: believe it. We had all felt the hot hand and
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: seeing the hot hand, and now these professors were coming
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: along telling us there was no such thing, and that
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: was really hard for us to wrap our minds around,
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: in the same way that it's very hard for us
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: to wrap our minds around randomness. So I love the
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: image of red or back cigar unlit cigar kind of
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: hanging out of his mouth. I don't care what these
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: professors say. Of course, it's a hot hand, and there's
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: nothing that could have delighted professors more. Right, like this
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: just believing in the hot hand doesn't make it anymore true.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: And Amos Tversky used to love to tell this story
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: when he taught the Hot hand. He would tell the
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: story of right hour Back because he loved the Boston Celtics,
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: And like, what better way to illustrate this idea that
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: people refused to believe than Red hour back saying that
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: it was all a bunch of blowney. And as much
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: as the conclusion maybe mathematically inaccurate, the underlying premise that
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: people see patterns where there are none, that we're all
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: subject to our cognitive biases, that still holds up. And
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: that's still a key part of that paper completely, uh.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: And not only that, even if you do believe in
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: the hot hand, like I don't think it is this
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: exaggerated fireball of our imagination, right like you can miss
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: when you feel hot. And also like, there are plenty
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: of times when you are in an environment that does
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: not allow for a hot hand, and believing in the
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: hot hand can be disastrous, costly, it could really backfire
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: and burn you. And so I do think, um, that
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: paper is still really important and we should all read it.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: I mean, part of the whole fun of This concept,
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: I think is figuring out what you think about it
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: for yourself, right, and toying around with the idea and
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: seeing where you land. And and as a long suffering
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Knicks fan, going back to the John Stark's era, where
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: he would just you know, a streaky player, and whether
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: the shots were sinking or not, he would still reel
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: off seven, eight nine shots in a row. Whether they
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: fell or not didn't matter. He would when he felt it,
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: he heave did regardless of outcome. The Knicks are familiar
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: with streaks, They're just not the kind that Knicks fans
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: actually would enjoy, to say the least. So what I
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: found so intriguing about the original paper about the hot hand,
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: it was incredibly controversial. What was behind all the pushback? Well,
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: it defides something that we all thought to be true, right,
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: and we are not very good when people tell us
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: something we are convinced of isn't true. So my one
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: of my favorite examples of how easily we're fooled is
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: you give the example in the book, but we've all
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: seen this from personal life experience. A professor assigns a
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: class flip a coin a hundred times and write it
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: down and I want some of you to do it,
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: and some of you make it up and immediately identifies
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: these are real, these are fake, and the classes always
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: astonished by this. What does that have to do with
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: streaking this and our tendency to see patterns where none
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: are there? So this is an incredible statistician at Columbia
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: named Andrew Gilman who runs this very popular blog which
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: sounds kind of like an oxymoron, like a popular statistics
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: blog for a little wonky, yes, but but it's a
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: brilliant website. And um, you know, I talked to Andrew
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: Gelman about this and what he told me about how
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: he is able to tell his classroom to uh. He
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: splits his classroom into two and he tells them like,
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: you know, one group flip a coin, the other group,
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: imagine what it looks like when you flip a coin,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: and then right the sequences on a chalkboard, and I
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: will walk in and I will be able to tell
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: you which one is real and which one is fake.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: And so he leaves the classroom and he does essentially
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: this magic trick first for a statistician. Right, he comes
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: in and he always knows, and it's because the real
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: one is the one that looks fake. It has a
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: run of stp of heads in a row that you're
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: not comfortable. You'll do heads tails, heads, heads tails, but
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: you won't do seven heads in a row. That just
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: seems wrong. But we all know sometimes when you flip
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: a coin, you get seven tales in a row, right,
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: But you would never do that if you were imagining
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: what a string of coin flips actually looks like. And
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: now you've ruined that trick for him in his first class,
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: and well hopefully everybody at Columbia will read this book
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: so he will not be able to pull off that
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: trick anymore. Let's talk about the Miller sanjor Joe paper
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: on why the Hot Hands Is Real first, and I
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: think you may have been the first popular press to
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: cover that, because that's how Not only is that how
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: I found you, but when I was preparing for the
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: interview with Joshua Miller and reading all the all the coverage,
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: yours was the piece I found them, like, oh, this
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: does a really nice job on the reason I remember
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: this is not because I'm bragging, but because I was
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: terrified when that story came out. It was very nerve
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: racking because uh, the math had been rubber stamped by
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: mathematicians by Andrew Gellman himself, like the math accurate. However,
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: the journal is really not in the position to be
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: writing full stories about pre prints, right, papers that have
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: not been more published by like journals that you can trust.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: And so this paper was floating around the internet. It
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: had been uploaded to ssr N, and Andrew Galman had
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: written a blog post about it, and people were talking
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: about it. But like if if this paper had been
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: published in Econometrico, which it has been, now, it's very
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: easy for the Wall Street Journal to write a story
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: about that, right, But when it hasn't, suddenly it's it's
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: just these two guys, these two young American economists in
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: Europe and a statistician with a blog saying that it's right.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: Is that enough for the Wall Street Journal to write
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: a story about that? It was? We decided that it was,
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: So let me tell you why you were right. Because
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: the worst case scenario is that Econometrical does the math
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: and says this is wrong. But at the time, not
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: only is this a really interesting thesis that identifies a
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: fundamental floor flaw in the traverse ky Gilovich paper but
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: it's really a whole new area of analytics for data sets.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: It's not just the hot hands. These guys figured out
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: something really really interesting and lots of people were buzzing
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: about it. And it's not just a blogger, it's Andrew
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: Gilman of Columbia, who is a widely respected mathematician and statisticians.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: Is their peer review, right, he's peer review before peer review.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: So so I don't think you were that far out
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: on a ledge. And the worst case scenario is some
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: of the smartest people in math would have gotten it
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: wrong also, and I have to say, the funny thing
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: about this is that I let alone, Josh and Adam
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: got the same reaction that Gilovich, Valon and Tversky did,
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: which is, there's no way this is true. Over the
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: course of thirty five years, that paper, which was so
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: counterintuitive at the time, became conventional wizard It was was
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: the way we thought about the hot hand, and so
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: now here was this paper threatening to overturn that result
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: in this uh strange mathematical that takes a lot of
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: thinking to write about, Like there was a reason that
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: nobody has seen this right. This this very subtle statistical
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: bias that some of the world's brightest statisticians had missed
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: for many years. It was this bias hiding in plain sight,
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: and if it had been obvious, we would have seen
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: it many years earlier. So let's talk about that bias,
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: because it is very intriguing, it's very trippy. It's also intriguing.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: Explain why. So Normally, if you're gonna flip a coin,
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: hold the gambler's fallacy aside, every flip of that coin
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: should be fifty fifty heads or tails. But it's not.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: But but you're not just flipping a coin, you're looking
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: at it after the fact ex post and and saying
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: of the flips that followed two heads in a row,
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: it's not fifty fifty. Explain why, well, I will say
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: the one thing I've learned in thinking about this book
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: and writing this book and talking about this book is
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: that I'm not great at talking about this part of
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: the book. It's very it's it's hard even for me,
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: as like the best thing I could do is like say,
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: actually go back and listen to your episode with Josh Miller,
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: because he does a better job of explaining it than anybody.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: But what I will say is that it has to
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: do with um, with sequences, and and and sampling without
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: replacement right, and and figuring out um. When you look
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: at a sequence of even three coin flips, if you
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: look at the the average chance that you will get
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: a heads after the heads, it's not as our brains
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: are conditioned to believe, it's actually lower. It's it's biased
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: in a negative direction. So you start with the you
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: flip a coin a million times, and now you have
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: a data set. And if you pull out all of
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: the heads and heads in a row, you're not just
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: pulling out half the heads. You're pulling out more than
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: half the heads relative to what's left over. So what's
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: left over is going to be a little tail heavy.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: Is that? Is that a fair way to describe it? Yes,
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: And then the next obvious question is like, well, what
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: does that mean for the hot hand? And really what
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: it means is that for many years, for thirty five
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: years to be precise, we thought that if a fifty
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: percent shooter was shooting when he had the hot hand,
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: when he felt like he couldn't miss, that was evidence
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: against the hot hand. Right, there was no difference. He
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: wasn't any more likely to make his next shot. What
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: it actually was was evidence for the hot hand all along,
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: because when you are shooting fifty and you take out
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: those heads and tails and you look at what happens
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: heads after heads, you should be shooting lower than like
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: roughly right. And I believe somewhere in either your book
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: or the Miller paper is the advantage of the hot
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: hand is something like yeah, I mean if you look
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: at the difference, like if you look at the difference
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: of what we thought to what we think now or
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: what some people think now, it's like twelve percentage points,
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: and the difference is huge, like in the n b A,
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: the difference between in the NBA, the difference of twelve
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: points is the difference between Steph Curry and a league
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: average shooter. So so we now, you know how reason
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: to think that, you know, not only can we believe
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: in the hot hand, but it actually might be a
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: pretty sizeable effect. Now you know this is I think
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: there are reasonable people on both sides of this debate,
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: and that is what was so intriguing to me is
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: that we have very smart people, brilliant minds, who have
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: been thinking about this for a very long time. And
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: you know, you could come out to to to thinking
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: about this in different ways, and I think we still are,
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: like I think we are still trying to think about
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: what we should think about the hot Hand. So I
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: spent a lot of intellectual energy thinking gil Vitch and Seversky,
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: we're right. And then when Josh and Adams paper came out,
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: I was skeptical. And then I read as much as
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: I could up until the formulas, which is incomprehensible, and
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: then had a conversation with him and then had him
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: on the show, and suddenly it's like, you know what,
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: he convinced me, The hot hand is reel. And now
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: that I've spent so much mental energy on this and
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: I'm committed to this at this point, my cognitive dissonances.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: I don't want it's crazy, and I don't want to
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: I don't want to flip. I can't flip again. I'm
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: locked in. If you could prove that it's not real,
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: best of luck to you. But I'm tapped out of
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: the debate. While imagine writing a book about it. But
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: but but that was actually what was so intriguing to
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: me about all this, because you know, at the Wall
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: Street Journal, what I've learned is that every great story
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: needs tension, right, Tension is really what makes stories. And
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: I just couldn't believe how much tension there was in
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: this fight over an idea. Right here was something that
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: we all thought to be true, a belief, only to
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: be told that it wasn't, only to be told that
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: actually maybe it was, and that that was just so
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: irresistible to me. And so the narrative itself is great.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: And then what I tried to do in this book
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: is apply the lessons of that narrative very widely, right,
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: because that's why these people have been studying the hot
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: hand for so long. It's not because they wanted to
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: argue about whether or not the hot hand is real.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: It's because it has these implications far beyond academia, farther
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: beyond basketball, right, like they sort of apply everywhere. It's
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: quite fascinating. So I mentioned to you I read this
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: book on vacation. I plowed through it in a day
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: and a half. I really enjoyed it. It fits in
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: well in the sequence of sort of related to moneyball
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: and related to some other things that are about sports.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: The first chapter of the Undoing Project about Darryl Moore.
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: So I gotta ask you some questions about the book,
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: because there's some really really interesting things in here. Please
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: And also you called it wonky beach reading, which I
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: think is the best description of the book I've heard
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: so far. It really tickles me to hear that. I mean,
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: that's what it was to me. I was sitting on
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: the beach. I'm like, this is good, wonky fun and
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: something that like anybody could read right, like you don't exactly,
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: and you could read it on a beach, which which
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: I love reading books on the beach. So so first
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: question is the first of all, I like the arc
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: that you tell. This is told as a story throughout
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: time where there's this belief and then uh, an academic
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: research channel olenges a belief, and then subsequent research challenges
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: the challenge. Why in the beginning did it seem like
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: they were the academics on one side and everybody else
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: on the other, Because the academics were the only people
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: who were saying that everybody else was wrong, right, um,
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: And you know that was the beauty of their paper
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: was that it challenged something that is so universal. There's
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: this fundamental belief in the hot hand. That's in the
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: original paper. They pulled basketball fans and NBA players and
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: like something like them said, of course that there is
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: such a thing as the hot hand, right, like if
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: you had asked me. The one time in my life
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: that I was not completely terrible at basketball was in
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: high school, and I scored more points in one quarter
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: of one game than I had in my entire career combined.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: There was something magical about that day that I still
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: remember now, And it would never have even crossed my
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: mind that this thing didn't exist, because I thought that
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: I knew what I felt, and not until reading you know,
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: hundreds of papers over the course of like four deck aids,
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: that I realized that, like everything I thought I knew,
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: might be wrong. So so let's talk about some real
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: specific examples from the book that are fascinating. Uh, And
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: let's start with Spotify and Apple iTunes. Their random shuffle
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: is much better when it's less random. Explain that that's right.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: So a few years ago Spotify had this problem, which
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: is that they kept hearing from users that the shuffle
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: function was broken. The problem is that it wasn't actually
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: shuffling their music, so sometimes you would hear the same
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: artist twice in a row, or you would hear the
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: same song twice in a row sometimes, And people got
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: so mad about this that they accused Spotify of almost
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: being corrupt, of like trying to curry favor with record
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: labels by playing their artists more. And the very curious
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: thing about this is that Apple actually had the same
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: problem a few years before that. And there's this clip
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: of one of Steve Jobs's keynote speeches when he is
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: introducing a feature called smart Shuffle, and like, what they
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: had to do essentially was change the randomness algorithm. People
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: thought that it simply couldn't be random when it was.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: The fact is, though, that pure randomness is hard to understand,
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: and sometimes pure randomness means you hear the same artist
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: twice in a row or the same song twice in row.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: That's like like getting six heads in a row flipping
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: a coin. It's the same thing. It's actually not what
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: we want out of our playlist, right, And so what
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Spotify did was they tweaked their code. They evenly distribute
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: songs and artists over the course of a playlist so
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: that it's random the way that we think about random.
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: So really, what they did was to make it feel
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: more random. They actually had to make it less random,
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: make it less technically random, but as a listener, randomness
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: means that after and you use the Billy Joel example,
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: but after a Billy Joel song, instead of hearing another
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: Billy Joel song, I want to hear YouTube or Push
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: Stars or Prefect Sprout or Elvis Costello or non revealing
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: Maya playlist. But you don't want to hear the same
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: artist twice in a row. And what the companies had
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: to do was wrap their minds around the way that
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: humans really think, right Like, there was no amount of
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: money or engineering talent that could solve this problem. There
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: was something about the way that randomness paralyzes the human
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: mind that the companies had to come to grips with.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: And so they could have been stubborn and said, no,
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: of course, this is random, this is how randomness works.
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: But what they did was they gave their users what
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: they wanted. Right, People don't want randomness, they want variety,
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: and whether it's random or not is almost irrelevant. Let's
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: talk about the NBA Jam. The people who created that
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: game took advantage of the hot hand and streaks tell
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: us a little bit about that. So NBA Jam was
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: developed by this game designer named Mark Trammel. And when
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: Mark Trammel was a kid, there were three things that
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: he loved. He loved basketball, and he loved video games,
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: and he loved fire. He was actually a bit of
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: a pyromaniac, and he was able to combine these three
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: childhood loves into the biggest hit of his life. So
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: I grew up playing NBA Jam. I am right around
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: the same ages Steph Curry, and so I know that
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: NBA Jam machines were sort of ubiquitous in our childhood.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: They were everywhere. And what I did not know while
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: we were both playing NBA Jam is that NBA Jam
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: was one of the most lucrative successful arcade games ever made.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: In the first year of its existence, it made a
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: billion dollars in quarters. And this is but orders of
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: magnitude bigger than anything else before, ginormous to the point that,
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: like the people who were running the company, when they
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: saw the numbers in the test arcade, they just refused
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: to believe them. They thought this has to be a
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: type of like, there's no way that these kids are
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: playing NBA Jam so much, and yet they were. And
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: part of that is because it was a basketball game
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: and it was fun and you could do crazy things
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: like somersault over the basket and throw down breathtaking slam
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: dunks and foul anybody you wanted. But really what we
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: wanted to do was catch fire. So in NBA jam,
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: if you make a few shots in a row, you
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: hear the announcer for the game say he's heating up.
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: And then if you make your next shot, you hear
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: he's on fire, and the ball turns into a fireball.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: And what happens when you're on fire is that you
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: cannot miss. And that was compelling to so many people
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: like it was this amazing example of Mark Trammel, the
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: childhood pyromaniac, still playing with fire. And to me, I
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: think he's sort of single handedly brainwashed this generation of
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: impressionable young minds into believing the concept of the hot hand.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: Because when you were heating up, when you were on fire,
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: you can't miss. That that's really quite fascinating. Let me
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: go over a couple of other issues of the hot hand.
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: I have to ask you about Shakespeare capitalized on the Plague.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: You have to explain that, well, this is oddly timely now, right, yes,
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: which is kind of terrifying. Um. Shakespeare was never a
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: metronomic writer, so scholars for a very long time were
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: not exactly statisticians, believe it or not. And when when
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: they would look at like twenty four shakespeare plays, if
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: he wrote them over the course of twelve years, they said, okay,
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: Shakespeare wrote two plays a year. In fact, that's not
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: remotely true. Shakespeare ran hot and cold. He wrote in streaks,
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: and one of the great hot streaks of his career
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: was when he wrote King Lear Macbeth and Anthony and
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: Cleopatra in this very concentrated amount of time some scholars
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: believe as short as two months, which is crazy, right, Um.
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: And the reason he was able to write those plays,
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: and the reason those plays were such a success, was
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: that it happened to be a plague gear and the
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: plague actually worked to his advantage in very odd ways.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: But the plague was this force that shaped Shakespeare's life
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: from the very beginning, Like he probably should have died
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: when he was a kid of the plague. Um. It was.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: It was just always around in London, and to me
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: that it spoke so neatly of the hot hand, because
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: the hot hand is not this random occurrence. It's this
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: collision of talent and circumstance and a little bit of luck.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: And sometimes circumstance appears when you least expect it. Sometimes
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: it's the plague. So let's talk about that luck, creativity,
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: and circumstance collision. Some people have put forth the theory
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: that even human careers, you will have creativity and bunches,
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: and most people or many people's most productive work over
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: the course of their lifetime comes in a very narrow
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: sort of era. Explain that, and not only their most
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: productive work, their most memorable work. There's a statistical physicist
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: at Northwestern named Dash and Wang who tried to look
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: at this idea, like, is creativity cluster? Do our hits
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: come in bunches? And that's really hard to do in
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: a lot of industries because there's just not great data, right,
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: And so what he tried to do was try to
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: put some objective numbers to subjective issues of taste. Right,
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: So for movie directors, that's IMDb ratings, For scientists that's
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: Google scholar citations. For artists it's auction prices. Now, these
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: are not perfect metrics, but they're like about as good
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: as we could do given what we have. And what
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: he found was that, uh, if you tell him what
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: your best work is, what your highest rated movie, or
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: what your paper that was cited the most by other academics,
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: was he can find the second and third best work.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: And it's because those works come to get other, like
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: they build on top of each other. And we have
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: these hot hand periods in our careers, and in those periods,
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: we tend to produce the work that indoors and that
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: other people remember. So let's talk about movies. Use the
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: example of Rob Briner, who has written or directed some
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: of my favorite films. He had a streak that was
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: really quite astonishing, didn't he. The first few movies he
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: made were Spinal Tap and The Shore Thing and Stand
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: By Me, and those were all successes in their own way,
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: whether it was critically or commercially, and it sort of
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: earned him the runway to make a fourth movie. Now,
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: all three of those movies were in movies that nobody
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: wanted him to make, and they were huge hits regardless.
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: They were these delightful contradictions. And he had this conversation
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: with the studio executive around this time when he's trying
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: to figure out what he wants to make next, and
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: the studio executive says, we want to do anything you
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: want to do, right, basically, like you're hot, we want
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: to be in business with you. Clart Blanche, what is
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: it that you want to do? And he says, you
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: don't want to do what I want to do and
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: she says, no, really, just tell us what movie do
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: you want to make next? And he says, no, really,
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: I'm telling you you're not going to want to make
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: this movie. And she says, just name the movie and
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: he says, the movie I want to make is The
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: Princess Bride. And she says, anything but The Princess Pride.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: And that sounds crazy now, because The Princess Bride is
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: this cult classic and one of the most beloved movies
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: ever made. Right. It was written by William Goldman, who
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: had written Butch Cassidy, He had written All the President's Men,
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: like you could take his grocery lists and and win
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: an Academy Award, and Marathon Man all he's just he's
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: got like the run of and and if you've never
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: read m his screenwriting books, The screen Confessions of a
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: screenwriter or the screen trade. He's the guy who has
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: popularized the phrase. He's no longer with us, but he
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: popularized the phrase nobody knows anything, which is a good
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: thing to think about when you're trying to write a
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: book about people who think they know everything. So, following
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: those three movies, The Princess Bride does really well, and
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: then what was next, Harry Met Sally a John and
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: smash Um Misery and a Few Good Men. Misery was
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: a Stephen King book that nobody expected that to be
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: a great movie, absolutely, and then A Few Good Men
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: is just a nut. And he still continued to make
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: movies that are still well liked. Beyond that, he was
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: able to elevate his career to another level. Right, And
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: I have to say, like I have runned this theory
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: by Rob Reiner. He doesn't exactly agree. What he remembers
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: from this period is it was still so hard to
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: get The Princess Bride made. But to me, that's actually
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: a proof of the hot hand that was shaping everything,
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: because if he remembers, he was still so hard, and
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: it was that hard, it simply would never have been
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: made if he weren't hot. The Princess Bride had been
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: attached to a number of other producers and directors, including
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: some really giant names in Hollywood, and it was almost
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: a cursed screenplay. It just couldn't get done. It was
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: the great White Whale. Rollywood, I mean Trufaux tried to
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: make it. Norman Jewis and Robert Redford tried to direct
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: it and star in it, and still nobody could get
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: it made. Goldman like to tell this wordy that one
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: studio had bought the movie and was fired the next weekend,
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: Like nobody could get this movie made. And you could
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: argue that, like if Rob Ryner knew about this, maybe
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: he wouldn't have And even when he went to Goldman
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: to try to get his permission to make the Princess Pride,
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: he was terrified. And Bill Goleman opens the door and says,
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: the Princess Bride is my favorite thing I've ever written, Like,
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: don't screw it up. And he was able to get permission,
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: and he was able to make the movie, and I
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: think we're all luckier for it. Quite amazing. Let's talk
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: about how the NBA is adapting to the idea of
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: behavioral economics. You wrote a really interesting column about quote
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: the renegade executives of Houston who shook up sports management.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: Tell us about those guys, well, they haven't had a
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: great few months since that story came out. But um,
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: a couple of months ago, my colleague at the Journal,
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: Jared Diamond, and I Jared covers baseball, I cover basketball,
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: We went down to Houston to have lunch with two
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: really smart executives there. One his name Darryl Morey, and
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: he the general manager of the Houston Rockets. The other
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: is Jeff lu Now, who was the general manager of
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: the Houston Astros. And we just thought it would be
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: fun to get them together and just talk about how
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: much their sports have changed. And it was fun and
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: it made for a really interesting story. And about a
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: week later, Darryl became the most interesting man in geopolitics.
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: He was already the most interesting man in sports, and
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: I love Darryl, but um, he set off this feud
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: between the NBA and China with this tweet supporting Hong Kong.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: And back up a little bit. So he got his
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: graduate degree from m I T and M I T
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: has a really deep relationship with Hong Kong, including lots
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: of students. And I think they have a satellite school
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: there as well well. And also the NBA has this
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: long running financial relationship with China, right, I mean, China
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: is the engine that is powering the future growth of
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: the league. It's global growth outside of the U s
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's the most important foreign market. And like
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: the league has always cultivated China, like over the course
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: of three decades or so, and like the one tweet
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: imperiled that relationship overnight. I mean to this day. I
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: mean the NBA is still not on CCTV. UM, so
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: a lot has changed. Um, But was it really a
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: two or three hundred million dollar tweet? It was a
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: lot of money. I mean, this the sal you know, Adam,
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: they canceled the Precision Games, right, they played the games,
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: but they weren't broadcast, right And and and NBA Commissioner
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: Adam Silver said that he thought the loss could be
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: about like four hundred million dollars. So, um, there's a
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: lot of money. But like you know that it was
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: a very fascinating issue because, um, it pitted like American
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: democratic norms of free speech against like trying to do
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: business in China. And I think this is something that
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: like every company is going to have to be dealing
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: with at some point, and um, it was just sort
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: of this like dry forest, And I think Darryl's tweet
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: turned out to be the kindling that nobody really thought
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: would blow everything up, but it kind of did. So
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: we were talking about film earlier. I think a lot
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: of people don't realize how much of American film is
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: now one did by foreign investors, including China, especially China,
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: And so what what happens is you end up with
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: the bad guy being the Russians, never the Chinese. And
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: that's a direct function of who's writing the check. It's
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: and and to me it was just it was it
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: was of course Darryll was involved, because Darrell is. I
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: love the guy. I've written about him as much as
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: ever written about anybody in the n b A. He's
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: so smart and so interesting and he's this real renaissance
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: man of the n b A. If you were to
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: ask me, like, which NBA executive would unwittingly start something
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: like this, like, of course it would be Daryl, because
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: Darrel is in the middle of everything, and he was
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: twice NBA Executive of the Year. I don't think he's
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: going to win that this year. Well he might, I
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: mean it, it depends. I mean it's voted on by
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: other executives, and I'll take the other side of that that.
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: I'll give you two to one odds. The interesting thing
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: about Daryl winning that award is that that's an award
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: voted on by your peers. And for a very long time,
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: I think there was resistance among NBA general managers to
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: acknowledge that Darrel is a really smart guy and he
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: was using statistics and analytics and information in really interesting ways.
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: Can't argue with success. Speaking of success, let's talk about
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: Steph Curry. I love the story in the book. It's
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: pretty good at not bad. And I understand he's taking
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: more shots from behind the line. So that's the thing,
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: the story about how he lights the Knicks up. Um,
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: do you remember that game? No? No, I don't, And
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: if I saw that game, I have suppressed the memory,
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: like so many other losses the Knicks have suffered over
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: the years. But he's a guy who's essentially on the
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: bench or half the time, half the game. He doesn't
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: have the green light to just toss up three pointers.
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: What happened in that one game with the Knicks. Yeah,
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: the through line of Steph Curry's career until a certain
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: point of his life was that nobody really thought that
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: he could be as good as we now know him
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: to be. Um. He was lightly recruited out of high school.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: He went to tiny Davidson College. Even after coming out
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: of Davidson, where he had this incredible, unforgettable run in
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: the n c A Tournament in two thousand eight. You know,
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: he was the seventh pick in the NBA Draft. There
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: were lots of questions about whether someone who was as
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: small as him and shot three pointers as much as
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: him could really be like a force in the NBA.
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: And those questions kind of lingered until this one night
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: in February. Let me interrupt you before we get into
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: that night. So, as a Knicks fan, watching Jordan and
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: the Bulls dismantled him. Season after season, the Bulls always
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: had Um somebody Steve kerr Hodges, somebody who was an
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: assassin from behind the three point line, and it forced
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: the floor to be spread, so they couldn't if you're
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: gonna collapse on Michael Jordan's He's going to find the
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: open man and it might be a three pointer. So
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: I think twice about it. That was a very specific
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: tactical decision. Now tell us what happened with Uh Curry
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: and the next that night, so so Steve Kerry with
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: the three point shooter around Michael Jordan's. What if Michael
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: Jordan's were the three point shooter right? That's sort of
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: the question that has become prevalent in the NBA over
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: the last few years. This was a night that nobody
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: thought would be Steph Curry's breakthrough, his coming out party.
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: The night before the Golden State Warriors had played in Indiana,
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: they had gotten into a fight. Steph Curry was actually
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: involved in the fight, and if you watch the clip now,
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: it's kind of amazing because he charges this guy named
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: Roy Hibbert seven ft two and ways two of Steph
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: Curry's right, and what happened is exactly what you might
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: think happened, which is Ray Hibbert just sort of brushed
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: him aside. For his entire life, Steph Curry's great disadvantage
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: was had been his size, right, but for this one night,
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: it was his improbable advantage. He was too small to
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: do any real damage in a fight of NBA players,
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: So they fled to New York that night, so no
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: suspension for him. He's not suspended. Other players on his
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: team are. However, Steph Curry is fined thirty five thousand
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: dollars and nobody has ever been so fortunate to lose
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: so much money. The Warriors get to New York and
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: they just don't have their full team right they they're
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: there are only a certain number of guys who can play. Now,
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: something else happens before they get to Madison Square Garden,
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: which is very funny in retrospect. Steph Curry during Warriors
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: road games always takes the second of three buses from
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: the team hotel to the arena. There are three buses.
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: Steps always on the side of superstition or timing, so like,
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: he wants to be at the arena a certain time
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: and he wants to warm up at a certain time
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: and getting there on the first bus is too early,
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: and the third bus is probably too late. This day,
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: for some reason he can't remember, he misses the second bus,
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: takes the third bus. What happens when the third bus
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: leads the team hotel gets pulled over by New York
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: City cops on the way to Madison Square Garden. So
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: now he's missed his normal bus, his now bus, He's
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: missed his normal bus. His third bus gets pulled over
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: on the way to the garden. He's rushed, he's late,
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: he's gotten into a fight the night before, He's down
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: thirty dollars. And what happens at night is that he
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: has the single greatest shooting night of his career. He
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: scores fifty four points, plays all forty eight minutes, He
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: doesn't come out of the game. He makes eleven of
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: his thirteen three pointers. Nobody in the history of the NBA,
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: let alone him, had ever taken so many threes and
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: made so many of them in the same game. And
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: this was really an epiphany for Steph Curry and for
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: the Warriors generally, and actually for the whole NBA, because
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: what they were able to do after that night is
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: build a team around Steph Curry's remarkable ability to shoot
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: a basketball, and he's only gotten better behind the behind
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: the line. Before that game, he averaged like eighteen points
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: and took five threes a game. Since then, he averages
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: twenty six points and he takes ten threes. He's won
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: two m vps, the Warriors have won three championships, and
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: the most remarkable thing about all of this, um is
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: that it took the NBA so long to figure this out.
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: Like three is worth more than two. It's in the
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: name of the shot, right, It's it's not just a
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: little it's worth one and a half times a regular shot.
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: But it's not one and a half times as difficult,
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: or is it. There is a huge incentive to shooting
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: three pointers. Now it is more difficult, but not if
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: you're Steph Curry, right. Steph Curry is a shooter from three,
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: and the name of the game now is shoot as
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: many three pointers as possible. And the game was sort
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: of going there anyway. But whether or not the Warriors
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: would have built around Steph Curry, I'm not sure they
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: would have. Without this game, we're going to have to
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: move the three point line. We might, you know, I
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: think that there there is talk about like a potential
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: four point line. Um, there's talk about the three point line.
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: But we're getting to a point now where about ten
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: years ago, the number of three pointers in the NBA
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: game accounted for about of shots. Now we're at about
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: thirty five percent of shots. The number of threes per
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: game has doubled over the course of fifteen years. I
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: was at the m I. T. S. Slowan sports analytics
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: conference recently and asked someone with a team, like, what
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: is the upper limit here? Like when when do you
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: get to returns? Well, the Houston Rockets are taking their
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: shots now, so like for a single team, how high
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: could you get? And this person, really smart, wonky analytical
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: mathematical says that he has studied the numbers and he
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: thinks that it's the team shots as three. So like
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: by those standards, where nowhere even close to the end
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: of this, I'm trying to think of how you would
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: move the lineback with without Unless you make the line,
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: you give up the corner shot, which is the best
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: location shot. The corner three pointers the most efficient shot
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: in the closest and it's the most it's still worth
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: three points, right, I mean, there are some funky things
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: that you could do, Like you could make an arc.
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: You could make an arc. You could you could add
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: a four point line but move the three point line
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: in so that you actually make every shot worth the
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: same amount of points. Right now, there is this huge
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: incentive against shooting mid range shots because there worth two
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: points and you generally at the same rate as three pointers, right,
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: no sense, How could you sort of um incentivize people
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: to take those shots? Is that you change the value
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: of them? Now, I think there are people in the
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: NBA who are encouraged that even though teams are shooting
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: a whole bunch of threes now and all the good
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: teams are shooting threes, there's not really a homogeneous style
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: of play. They're getting those three pointers in different ways,
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: so there is some variety, um, but the end result
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: is the same. Like the name of the game now
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: is how many three pointers can you take? And how
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: many of them can you make? So let's talk about
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: somebody that you've you wrote about after Kobe Bryant's passing,
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: but I'm familiar with from Michael Lewis's book The Undoing Project,
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: and that's Shane Batty. He's a guy that would be
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: assigned to cover the best score on the other team,
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: and if you look at his stats, that really nothing.
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: What does a guy like Shane Batty a mean to
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: the new version? And of course he was on the
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: Houston Rockets under Darryl Moury, But what does the player
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: like that mean to the new version of Basketball's equivalent?
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: Of money ball, just about everything. Really. To me, the
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: beauty of Shane Battier is that, um, he was someone
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: who the NBA did not value properly because he did
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: not have great stats. Right, He didn't score a lot
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: of points, he didn't grab a lot of rebounds, he
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: didn't shodow a lot of assists. But when he played,
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: his team was better when he was on the floor, right.
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: And there was no relationship that embodied this better than
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: Shane Battier when he tried to guard Kobe Bryant. And
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: so I talked to Shane after, you know, the tragic
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: death of Kobe Bryant a few weeks ago, because I
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: wanted to know, like, what did he remember from those
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: games when they played each other? And you know what
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: he What Shane says is that when they played, he
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: always felt like he was Captain Ahab and Kobe Bryant
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: was his Moby Dick and he was always chasing him,
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: and they had this strange cat and mouse game where
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: it was not only physical, it was not only on
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: the court, it was psychological. Shane Battier knew that like
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: trying to trash talk Kobe was the worst thing that
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: you could do because it would get him. So he
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: would like purposefully be modest when he walked on the
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: court with Kobe. He would like basically say, like I
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: don't even belong on the same court as you man,
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: Like I'm this unathletic plots like you're gonna kill me tonight.
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: What Kobe knew was exactly what Shane Battier was doing. So,
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: like Kobe wrote in his book, like yeah, I knew
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: Shane was like being modest because he thought that that
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: wouldn't fire me up. And so they were going back
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: and forth, and they were so deep into each other's
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: minds and so their matchups were just these classic matchups.
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: I mean what Shane says that nobody challenged him more
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: than Kobe. He was like the pinnacle of challenge in
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: his profession. The great thing about their relationship, the thing
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: that I loved was that they had no relationship. They
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: never talked outside the arena. There was nobody who each
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: of them respected more in terms of offense and defense,
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: and yet it was all on the basketball court, like
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: they never got a chance to like have that beer
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: and just reminisce about all of these incredible matchups that
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: they had. So the plus and minus measurement is is
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: your team scoring more points when you're on the court
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: and as the other team scoring less points, what is
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: your contribution? Daddy A turned Kobe Bryant into a negative
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: for the Lakers, sometimes right and sometimes so um so
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: plus minus is estab that like over the course of
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: one game, maybe a little bit noisy, sometimes like sometimes
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: it's not sometimes exactly shows a lot, but of the
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: course of a season and over the course of a career,
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: it's like hugely informative and so like for the last
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: few years, who has had the best plus minus in
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: the NBA. It's Steph Curry and that sort of shows
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: his impact on the game quite quite interesting. So one
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: of the person I have to ask about the number
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: one draft last years Zion Williamson. How was he turning out?
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: He was supposed to have a huge impact on the
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: n b A he got hurt uh in the beginning
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: of the season and now he's back. Is this guy
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: gonna be worthy of a number one pick? Or is
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: it another topic that goes bust? He's fantastic, he uh.
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: There There are not many rookies in the NBA who
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: changed the fortunes of their team immediately, Like you could
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: probably list them on one hand over the course of
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: the last few decades. Lebron James of course, um, maybe
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: Kevin Durant, maybe Anthony Davis. Was Zion Williamson has done
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: after missing the first few months of his rookie season
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: with an injury, is that he's turned New Orleans Pelicans
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: into like a real player. So like if you look
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: at the numbers, even the plus minus numbers, when he's
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: on the court, they're destroying other teams and so destroying. Yeah,
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: like they are, Uh, they're going to be excellent building
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: around him over the next few years. And so, um,
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: he sort of lost some of his momentum because he
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: didn't play for a few months and everybody sort of
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: forgot about him. And yet we see him now and
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: it's like you are like you're seeing a superstar in
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: the making. Like there, he's gonna lose weight, his body's
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: going to change, he's going to learn how to play
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: the game. Like you watch him on defense. He doesn't
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: know what he's doing yet. Right, he's a rookie. He's
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: nineteen years quick, and he can jump, and he has
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: brilliant vision, he can pass. He everyone knew that he
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: was this incredible dunker, but like, his game is so
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: well rounded, he is like going to be a sublime basketball.
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: So so let's violate one of Darryl Morey's rules and
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: compare him to somebody else. Who is Zion more like?
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: Is he Gianni or is he going to be more
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: like a little Bron? It's interesting? Uh, and you wrote
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: to column Giannice is now hitting from the outside, which
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: makes him even more dangerous of a player. So he's
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: probably been compared more to Lebron. I'm pronouncing his name wrong.
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: Is he going to be more liking Honest or Lebron? Well,
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: he's always been compared with Lebron because their body types
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: are kind of similar. Lebron's a little bigger, though, isn't it.
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, what? But but like cooler, bigger, thick, Oh
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: my god, he's like girthy. Right. The thing I think
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: that makes him like Janice is that they're closer to
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: the same age and they belong to similar generations. So
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: the amazing thing about Jannice this year is that he's
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: probably going to win the MVP Award for the second
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: year in a row, and he's averaging about thirty minutes
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: per game. There forty eight minutes in an NBA game,
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: which means that he's only playing thirty minutes and he's
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: putting up stats that he's going to win the m
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: v p UH. In his first few years, Lebron played
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: like forty two minutes. And I think what makes Zion
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: more like Janice than Lebron is that his minutes are
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: always going to be monitored for his career, because of
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: his body type, because of his age, because of the
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: way the NBA has played today, He's gonna play like
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: thirty two thirty three minutes, and that means that, like
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: in the playoffs, hopefully he will be fresher, so fresher.
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: You also want to maintain the A c L as
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: a problem, maintain the Achilles. Like when you look at
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: the injuries that people in the NBA tend to get,
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: they seem to come in different waves. Is the game
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: changes there overuse injuries. We're not used to seven footers
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: jumping out and trying to guard three pointers and having
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: to be as mobile as you do now. So um,
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: I think we're still learning a lot about that. Like
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: I think even the smartest teams know that they don't
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: know all that much about injuries and injury prevention and
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: like wearables and biometrics like this in some ways is
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: the next frontier of all of this stuff. So who
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: do you think is the most interesting person in the league?
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: And I'm gonna ask you that for players and for
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: coaches or executives. Interesting in what sense? In any sense
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: you choose Interesting in terms of their impact on the game,
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: interesting in their potential. Well, you know, the real answer
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: is Steph Curry because I just love watching him. I
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: still find him just thrilling to watch. But but I
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: actually the most interesting guys in the league are the
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: ones who were misvalued for some reason, and the evolution
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: of the game um has changed their value in the
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: league and the premium that teams put on them, and
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: so that tends to be like three point shooters and
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: so not the step Curry types, almost like the like
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: the Steve Kerr player types. So I've written a lot
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: about these guys. I've written about Duncan Robinson with the
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: Miami Heat, who went to a small high school in
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: New Hampshire. He went to Exeter Academy. He went to
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: Williams College D three Williams College in the nest Gag
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: transferred to Michigan when undrafted, played in the G League,
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: and now is the single best three point shooter in
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: the NBA. And it's a guy who, like, you know,
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: basically the whole sport changed and he adapted, and suddenly
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: he becomes this really valuable player. Did he adapt? Did
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: the sports change to exactly what he was? The sport
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: evolved into his favor right, and so um, you know,
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: it's it's his story is really a fairy tale, right.
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: But to me, what made it so interesting was that
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: it's a case study in economics, right, and how we
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: think about how we value players. Not too long ago,
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: Duncan Robinson was not valued all that highly. Now like
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: every team needs to Duncan Robinson. And that's the same
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: sort of um progression that took place in the NFL
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: with that Michael Lewis wrote about with the blind Side,
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: where there was an off tackle that was never an
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: important UM role and then suddenly protecting the quarterback becomes
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: so much more important following some rule changes and some
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: just generally the way the game changed, same sort of thing.
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: Suddenly what was you know, a league minimum salary role
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: becomes a three four or five million dollar role. He
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: got really lucky that this evolved right into his sweet spot.
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: So so that's a player well, and the team's got
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: lucky too, because the only way to win in professional
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: sports now is to find the nf agiencies in the market, right,
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: Sometimes that's the valuable role players. If if there's a
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: um cap, if there's a salary correct, and you know,
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: the greatest inefficiency are the superstars, right because in an
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: open market, Lebron James is worth a whole lot more
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: money than he's paid right now, right because his salary
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: is capped. Of course, Like that's why you want superstars
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: is because like you know, you don't you can't throw
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: enough money at them. It doesn't matter Lebron James makes
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: what thirty five million dollars a year, he's really a bargain,
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: right because relative to what it means to the l
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: A Lakers revenues no like relative to when you are
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: building a team in the NBA, because there are a
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: lot of other players who make thirty five million dollars
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: a year because it's the most that you can pay,
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: Like in an open market, what a team would give
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: Lebron seventy five million dollars a hundred million dollars right,
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: even if it were an open market in a cap
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: system where the team had a salary cap but the
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: players didn't and you could offer them whatever you want.
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: You can make a case that, like, if there were
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: a hundred million dollars salary cap, you should give Lebron
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: ninety million dollars, right and just filling in with everybody else,
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: and so like million dollars up stars are the great
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: inefficiency and and that's what basketball teams believe. But there
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: are other ways to find value. And it's to find
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: value on the margins. It's to get those guys like
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: Duncan Robinson and Shane Daddier, like guys who are not
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: valued the way the markets suggests they should be. So
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: there was another reference in the book that cracked me up. Um,
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: George Steinbrenner and the Harlem Globe Trotters changed the NBA.
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: You're gonna have to explain that because listeners are going
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: to think they misheard that. It has to do with
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: the formation of the three point line, Like the three
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: point line did not always exist in basketball. It seems
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: so fundamental to how the game is played today. But
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: somebody dropped somebody dropped a line on the court, this
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: little strip of tape and decided shots from inside will
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: be worth two points and shots from outside will be
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: worth three points. And I misremembered this when I had
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: my conversation with Daryl Maury. I thought it was in
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: college first, but it wasn't. It started in the NBA first.
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: It actually started in a basketball league called the American
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: Basketball League, which predated the America Basketball Association, which then
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: merged with the m b A, and so in the
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: a b L in the nineteen sixties, this short lived
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: Doomed Basketball League that was run by the founder of
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: the Harlem Globe Trotters. They were the first to experiment
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: with the three point line in a professional league. And
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: there were eight teams in this league. And who was
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: one of the owners of this doomed Basketball league but
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: George Steinbrenner before he bought the New York Yankees. And
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: which team did he own? He owned the Cleveland Pipers,
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: And there was this discussion in one of their meetings.
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: A couple of weeks ago, I went down and found
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: these papers in this archive at the University of Texas
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: that sort of showed how this league was formed, and
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: the guy who started the league was this guy named
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: Abe Sapperstein, who was this visionary marketing whiz behind the
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: Harlem Globe Trotters. He also started the A B L
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: and uh he had so much power that one day
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: he missed one of their meetings where all of the
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: owners came to be and Uh. They decided that they
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: would try to strike back at some of his power
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: by eliminating the three point line. So they took a vote,
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: do we think like we should have a three point line?
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: And if we do, like, where should it be? Should
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: it be at twenty three ft? Should it be at
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: twenty ft? Like? Where exactly? And they decided to move
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: the three point line in, so three ft they move
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: it in. They have this vote. Steinbrunner votes against it.
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: He says keep it where Sapristein wants it to be.
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: But it passes by a fourth three margin. Sapperstein comes
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: back to the next meeting just completely ignores what happened
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: in his absence and set the line at three ft
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: nine inches away from the center of the basket. And
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: where is the three point line in the NBA today?
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: Twenty three ft and nine inches away from the basket.
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: It's exactly where A sa Perstein decided it should be
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: sixty years ago. That that that's quite fascinating. You would
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: never guess that Stone Brenner has impacted not just Major
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: League Baseball, but the NBA as well. There was a
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: stat in your book that I found completely and totally insane,
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: and I have to ask you about this, which one
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: the Warriors have outscored their opponents by more than four
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: thousand points in curries minutes, in other words, when Steph
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: Curry is on the floor over the past five years.
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: Talking about plus minus that has generated an advantage for
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: the Golden State Warriors of plus four thousand points. That
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: can't possibly be right. That's just are you questioning my math?
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: Absolutely insane, It is insane. And the most insane thing
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: about it is that I believe they are being outscored
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: by the other team when Steph Curry is not on
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: the court, right, So they're negative when he's not on
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: the court. There their plus four thousand when he's on
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: the court, and the other team beats them when he's
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: off the court. And so that just shows it shows
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: like this incredible force that Steph Curry has become so
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: his plus minus has to be just crazy. If that's
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: the case. Yeah, and that it's it speaks to um
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: why it was so brilliant to build a team around him,
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: Like nobody thought that you could or that you should,
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: and the Warriors have proved everybody wrong. So so let's
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: talk about some you mentioned going down to Texas and
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: doing some research. Who was the most interesting post and
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: you spoke to when you were recently researching this? And
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: by interesting, I mean who is the most surprising person
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: that you came away from the conversation with m I
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: really didn't expect that. I talked to a lot of
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: interesting people. I talked to Steph Curry. I talked to
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: Eugene Fama, I talked to David booth Um, Tom Gilovich,
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: these all of these So I haven't had stuff Curry on.
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: But that's my that's my list right there. That's your
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: bucket list. One bucket list that's checked off staff is
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: on the bucket list. I have to say, one of
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: the most interesting people I talked to is a guy
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: named Nick Hagan, who I don't think you've had on
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: this show. I have not. Nick Hagan is a fifth
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: generation sugar Beet farmer on the border of Minnesota and
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: North Dakota, and I took a trip out to his
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: farm because um I wanted to know, like, do farmers
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: believe in the hot hand? Like this is one of
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: the reasons why this is one of the reasons why
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: people have studied the hot hand, is because it applies
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: to all these different industries. And so um I went
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: out there during wheat harvest. And Nick is this fascinating
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: guy because his family has been in the farming business
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: for five generations, right going back to his great great
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: grandfather in the middle of the d and yet he
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: didn't think that he would enter the family business. He
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: was a trombonist. He came to Juilliard to play music
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: before he finally decided, actually, I do want to go
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: back into the family business and moved back to this farm.
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: And what he told me was like music and farming
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: and basketball couldn't be any more different. Like music is
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: more like basketball than it is like farming. So in
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: basketball the court is always the same, right, like you
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: know the parameters, and farming it's always moving. So like
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: if the basketball court is a rectangle, farming is like
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: one day it could be a rhombus, and the next
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: day it could be a trapezoid, and the next day
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: it could be a triangle. Is that a function of
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: whether the market for the crops? Everything you do not
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: have control. And so what he has learned is that
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: basketball is about playing offense, right, farming is about playing
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: defense and trying to play the long game. And keep
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: in mind like all of these lessons that you've learned
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: for all of these years. So like he doesn't chase patterns.
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: He doesn't believe in the hot hand, even though he
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: does believe in the hot and he doesn't behave as
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: if he believes in the hot hand. Um, what he
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: does is he trusts principles instead of chasing patterns. And
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: to me, like, you know, I could talk to academics
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: like I've been in NBA locker rooms, I've never been
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: on a sugar beet farm before. And that was one
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: of like the most thrilling parts of this book for me.
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: So last question before we get to our favorite questions.
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: You're simultaneously writing a book and working for the journal
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: full time writing a column. Lots of folks have said
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: that's impossible to do. You have to take time off.
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: How are you able to balance both of those. It's
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: not easy to write a book while you're also writing
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: columns that are, if not on the same topics, certainly
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: similar topics to what you're covering in the book. A
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: lot of early mornings and long weekends and not taking vacation.
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: And I realized not too long ago that I haven't
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: watched much television over the course of the last two
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: or third Yeah, and so, um so there was that
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: I gave myself a lot of time to write the book.
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: It was like eighteen months from start to finish of
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: of writing. Um So, it was just sort of trying
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: to find time whenever I could. But I have to say,
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: like I think that writing a book made me better
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: at writing stories for the wallstre Journal. It was sort
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: of like cross training in a sentence, like it just
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: accessed a different part of my brain that was fun
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: to play with that I never really get to exercise
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: all that much. Quite interesting. I have to tell you,
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: I approached this book in with great trepidation for a
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: couple of reasons. First, I had already had Kanaman and
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: Gilovich and Miller and whole run of people on and second,
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: I really enjoyed the story you wrote about um Adam
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: and Josh about their paper, and I'm like, oh, I
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: hope this book doesn't suck, because every now and then
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: I'll start a book and I'm like, yeah, I can't
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: finish this. But I really liked it, and I plowed
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: through it, and you did a really nice job taking
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: what's essentially this narrow, wonky academic theory and turned it
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: into a compelling two pages worth of a discussion. It's
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: a great narrative. Well, thank you, thank you for overcoming
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: your trepidation, and I'm glad that it didn't suck. Um,
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: it really didn't suck it. First of all, I did
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: say it's it's good wonky beach Rena because because it was.
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: I'm like, it's interesting enough, and it's told in a
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: sort of the inherent tention. Um, I think the tension
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: resolves itself towards the ends. Well, it's funny. I think
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: writing for the wall Stree Journal actually gives me good
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: training for this, because when I write about sports for
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: the journal, I write for people who know everything about
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: sports and nothing about which is not easy to do. Yeah,
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: and so you have to thread that needle. And that's
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: what I wanted to do with this book. I wanted
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: it to be entertaining to people who knew the saga
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: of the hot hand, and also people who don't even
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: know what the hot hand is. UM, And so that
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: meant like trying to reach as broad of an audience
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: as possible without alien aiding that core audience. And if
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: you describe the hothhand simply as streaks, everybody understands what
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: a streak is. It's not it's not that difficult to grasp.
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: But I thought you did a nice book. And I'll
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: repeat on the air what I what I told you earlier.
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: So you know, I always sift through the sources just
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: to see um who they used. And I don't know
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: a lot of people read the acknowledgements, but it's another
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: version of the sources. Well, the best part of the book.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: You should read the dast that's the secret of any book.
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: And I was shocked to actually find that you mentioned
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: the Masters in Business episode with Gilovich, and that set
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: me back looking through the book. And I just went through,
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: go down the list. They'll are konom and Miller. Um.
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: I think I'm a few years into like a PhD
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: in business from listening to this podcast. Because like, the
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: beautiful thing is that not only have you had all
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: of these luminaries come in here and be really open,
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: but there are transcripts right like you can read these
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: interviews as if their essays almost their biographies of these
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: really brilliant minds. What what's the only problem with the
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: transcripts is we we don't clean them up. They just
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: get cut and paste uff like that. And very often
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: what sounds normal in a spoken sentence reads terribly And
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: but there are some people who speak in paragraphs, and
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: those people just blow my mind because I don't know
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: how they do that. I had a buddy in grad
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: school who would write when we would have UM some
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: some final exams were essays and some were multiple choice.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: And his first draft of an essay is better than
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: everybody else's third draft. His the way he thought and
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: constructed something was shout out to Jeff um was so
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: just beautifully done. But just like, listen, the fact is
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: that every draft makes a column better, and you don't
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: have an infinite amount of time to do draft nine seven.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: It's all right, here's the research, cheers, the rough outline,
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: here's the first pass. Now I'm going back and changing
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: the structure and adding more stuff. And now I'm on
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: the second pass and then usually there's a third or
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: a fourth pass after that. But that's it. You don't
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: have time to do. And I know if you do
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: five more, it just gets that much better, tighter's faster, smarter.
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: But who you You can't do a month for a
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: weekly column. It's a weekly and so that's really the challenge. UM.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: And and I found that that sort of thing really, uh,
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: really kind of interesting. So if you could speak fluidly
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: the way we write, that would be a great thing.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: I have a pet theory which Barbara Taverski told me
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: isn't true, or at least she says there's no data
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: that supports it. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. I
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: think the part of your brain responsible for writing is different,
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: perhaps adjacent to the part of your brain responsible for speaking.
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: I mean, I will say that I think Barbara Tverski
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: knows more about the brain than I know about anything,
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: so I trust her judgment on that. But I do think, um,
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: there is just something about like sometimes I will just
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: sort of dictate things and go back to them later.
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: And what I've learned actually is that, UM, sometimes the
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: easiest way for me to write a story. I can
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: be staring at a screen all day long writing and
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: if I look at that document on my phone on
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: the subway leaving work, it looks totally different and something clicks.
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: It's sort of like that thing where you stare across
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: word for like fifteen minutes and you can't get a
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: few boxes, and you come back to it a few
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: hours later and it's just staring you right in the face,
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: and like you're like, how did I not see this already?
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: Have you ever seen the word jumbles where there's a
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: reset button and it just changes the order of the letters.
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: So so that's on on a phone or on a computer.
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: I have friends who, when they're writing stories, will just
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: change the font of the story as they're writing because
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: it makes them look at it in a completely different
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: So I don't know if you've so you go through
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: an editor when you publish. When I publish ship Bloomberg,
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: I have an editor who does that. When I throw
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: something up on the blog, I'm just completely blind to
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: my own typos, So sometimes I'll ask someone else to
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: give it a quick through and catch some things that
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: I miss. But the technique that's other people have talked
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: about is take what you've written, cut and pasted into
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: a different word document or whatever you're document were, you know,
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: word processor of choices and change the size and the
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: choice of funds, and now you're looking at it with
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: fresh eyes. You're not on different lines, yes, and it's
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: just order. It just changes your ability to see typos
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: and spelling and grammar issues that you completely missed the
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: first time. What some editors that the journal have taught me, like,
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: we fact checked all of our own stories, right, we
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: don't have magazine fact checkers, but you have your own
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: bias there. Well. Sometimes what we do is if I
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: have looked at a story a lot, I will fact
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: check from the bottom up. And so when you just
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: read the story in a different way and you're checking
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: things off as you go, your eyes don't glide over
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: things in the order in which you know they're coming right,
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: because it's flipped completely the opposite way that that's really interesting.
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: So eighteen months in the writing is that? Is that
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: how long you're working on this for the draft? Yeah?
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: I mean what about the research part? Oh yeah, I
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: worked on the proposal for a long time before that,
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: and the research part I hired a research assistant who
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: downloaded every paper ever written about the hot hand and
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: sifted through them and like summarized all of them, so
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: you didn't actually read every page. I read the summaries
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: of all of them, but I read all the major ones.
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: So I have I have in my apartment to like
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: five page binders with double sided printing of like every
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: scholarly paper ever written about the hot hand, because I
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: wanted to like be really fluent in the literature and
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: not miss anything. So when when you talk about first
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: we believe this, and then we believe that, now we
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: believe this, is it really more of sort of a
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: pendulum swing. It goes from one extreme, then it goes
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: to the other, and then when it comes back, it
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: doesn't quite come back as far, and maybe it settles,
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: and eventually we come up with some understanding and neither.
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: So the initial paper clearly we see patterns where there
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: are none, even if the math is wrong about the basketball.
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: And then the pushback, Hey, but the math is wrong
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: doesn't mean the underlying thesis is wrong. But there is
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: a hot hand, um, And then it kind of comes back, well,
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: there's a hot hand, but we weren't looking at how
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: difficult the shot was. We weren't looking at the defense
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: of intensity, and that changes the number. And then a
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: few years later, oh, now we have the ability to
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: look at that and the pendulum swinging because of forces
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: beyond our control. So the first meaning technology or the
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: data that we have right, I mean, the first paper
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: was written using the best data that was available back then,
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: which was terrible. Statis looks primitive now, but at the
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: time it was cutting edge. Like the reason they were
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: able to write this paper that the Philadelphia has seventy
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: sixers had a statistician. He was the only person who
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: took note of the chronology of shots, so he knew
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: like what you would do after you made a shot,
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: or you made two shots or three shots. Nobody else
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: was doing at the time. That seems crazy now because
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: we know everything there is to know about any given
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: shot in the NBA, right and we can look back
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: many years and figure out anything we might want to know.
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: But that wasn't available back then. The data that we
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: have now was not available to the researchers in like
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: their nerdiest wonkiest, wildest dreams or else they would have
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: used it because they did so the seventy sixers had
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: a statistician and no other team did. Was that was
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: that close to dr J? What? Why? You know? I
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: don't know. I think this guy named Harvey Pollock was
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: just sort of, uh, you know, one of his own.
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: He was like a man before his time, and he
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: was nicknamed superstat like everybody knew. He was like the
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: towering figure in analytics before analytics was like this buzzword
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: in sports, and yet it took decades to catch on.
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: That's right, quite quite shocking. So I could keep you
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: all day, but I know I have to get to
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: some of my favorite questions before we let you go.
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: And I'm not going to ask you what you're streaming
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: you're listening, because I know you're not watching t V
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: and I know some of the podcasts you've listened to.
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: So instead, can I even ask you what your first
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: car was? Did you ever own a car? I drove
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: a nineties seven four Runner in high school and college
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: that used to be my dad's solid Toyota Truit. But
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: I know nothing to kills. I'm not a car guy.
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: I absolutely no interests generational is it I like driving cars?
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: Like I like I like when I'm on the road,
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: like renting a car and I take Zip cars. I
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: just I have no interest in like old Porsches or
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: Ferraris or anything. And in the first couple of years
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: of doing this, I started asking that question as a
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: as a would you have for breakfast? What was your
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: first car? Just to do a voice check, And then
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: the answers became so interesting that I started weaving into
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: these questions. And then as I interview younger people, they're like,
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: why would I ever need a car? Between Zip car
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: and Uber? Who needs that in a car? Tell you
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: what I'm streaming? Go ahead, big Taylor Swift fan? Oh really? Um,
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: have you seen the Netflix documentary How Is How? Is That?
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: Pretty great? Oh? Really? Yeah, it's in my list. I
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: haven't gotten to it. There is a scene in there
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: and you will know what scene it is when you
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: see it. That's like really arresting. It's like one of
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: the best things you'll see on TV all year. Okay,
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: I will definitely, I will definitely check that out. What
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: is so? Now? I'm gonna ask you what else are
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: you listening to and watching on on on streaming services?
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: My streaming services? Um, my choices are strange. I I
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: fall asleep every night watching Netflix on my phone. Usually
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: what I do when I travel, I do that with
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: the iPad, do you So? Now I put in. My
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: wife is sleeping next to me, and I have like
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: an air pod in and I fall asleep, and um,
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: the show I've been watching over and over is this old,
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: not old, but old ish um show called Gilmore Girls,
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: which I can't believe you said that. Why, I'm gonna
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: out myself you're a Gilmar Girls. So last summer, so
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: my my wife and her sister have a house out
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: in the Hampton, saying it from their parents, and um,
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: there's always an argument about what were if we're out there,
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: what we're gonna watch? And my my problem with them
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: is that we'll argue over something I'll give into them
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: and then they'll fall asleep. And I'm watching something of theirs.
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: And one day we were prepping to go out and
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: I'm flipping through Netflix and I'm just Gilmer Girls. What's this?
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: And my sister in law says, I love that show.
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: She goes in fact, that's the show that had Melissa
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: McCarthy in it before anyone knew who she was. So
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: we start watching an episode and two seasons through it.
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: I still have like a dozen seasons to go. The
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: beautiful thing about that show is that it gives you
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: material to fall asleep to whenever you want. So it
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: doesn't seem like a good show to fall asleep too,
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: because it's very fast paced. It's very like orkan Ash
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: a little bit. The dialogue is very like that snappy
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: and it moves along quickly, and you would think, like,
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: you don't want those voices in your ear before you
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: fall asleep. But what I found is that it just
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: sort of I've seen them so many times that like
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: they're sort of background noise, and by the time I
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: get to the end of the series, it's been so
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: long since I saw the pilot and the first season
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: that I just go back to it and started again.
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: So so I do that with two shows, one to
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: watch and one to fall asleep with. I think Seinfeld's
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: Comedians and Cars getting Coffee. I have that to just
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: roll over to the next show. But they're too short,
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: is the problem. But you can't watch him every day.
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: You have to, Like that's a little bit. You watch
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: one or two a week, and you go through the
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: whole series, and by the time you finish the whole series.
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: A new season comes out right, and when that's done,
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: you could start over. But the other show that you
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: can have two shows to full sleep to one is
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: The Big Bang, which I've seen a million times. Another guest,
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: former writer, producer of the show. And and then second
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: and I find this hilarious. My wife finds this annoying.
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: There is a show on the Sci Fi Channel called
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: How the Universe Works that'll put you right this so
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: so I'm but those shows work on two levels. If
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: you're watching them while you're awake in a well lit room,
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: it really is a very accessible way to reach some
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: really interesting, cutting edge astrophysics things that are changing. That
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: like all sorts of fascinating discoveries that you just never
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: will see in the New York Times of Wall Street. Jenneral,
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: it's way out there, both literally and physically. But second
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: you put that in a darkened room. The uh the
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: guy who does the voice overs, he's got it's just
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: so horrific. His voice is so deep and soothing. It's
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: almost the real TV equivalent of ambient recommend This is
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: food shows from other countries that are subtitled so they're slow.
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: There's classical music like Chef's Table France will crunch it
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: right out like that. One season will last you like
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: a year of falling. So my I always have this
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: to agreement with my wife. She watches shows like UM
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: Love It, or Listed or or Property Brothers. They engage
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: your that's anytime there's an inherent tension and a conclusion,
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: your brain wants to stay away till the end. So
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: to me, deep space. What is more relaxing than a
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: dark and screen and just the universe. It's just it's
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: like sleeping under the stars. But what's your take on
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: Gilmore Girls? Pretty great, right, It's really well written. I
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: really like the characters. I haven't gotten as deep into
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: the show as you have. Um, So it's you know,
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: as as you watch the show progress, there are there
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: are always the opportunity to go the wrong way and
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: derail a show. And I'll cause a little controversy right now.
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: So I've watched all of the marvelous Mismaysel from the beginning.
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: It's wonderful, except except when you watch the initial season.
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: The initial season is essentially what is it like for
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: a housewife in the late fifties early sixties to break
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: into stand up comedy in an era of very repressed speech.
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: That's a fascinating topic. And unfortunately the show has been
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: too successful because it kind of abandoned that theme and
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: it's I don't care about going to the Cat Skills
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: in the summer, even though I spent summers there as
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: a kid. I don't like there was a whole run
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: of the the in Laws moving to Queen's and that
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: that whole thing was just the the the B storylines. Um.
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: And you could take a show like Seinfeld that would
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: have four equal storylines and have them all go off
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: and they would interweave and all reach a conclusion at
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: the end. I found the B storyline invested in. Like
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: Midge's husband, I don't care about him. Shows feel similar
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: to you Mazel and Gilmore Girls. There are elements that
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: are very similar. Sure well they're written by the same person.
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: That would that would make sense that you know I've noticed. Um.
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: There was a British show I used to love called Coupling,
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: which is basically Friends with some teeth. Like Friends was
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: a milk toast lazy no, I mean, I mean with
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: a bite. But I don't know if that's really true
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: about the British dentistry anymore. But it was a serbic
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: and nasty and funny, and it was written by guy
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: whose last name is Moffett, who later goes on to
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: write a bunch of Doctor Who and a bunch of
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: other stuff. And it's amazing how smart a writer, how
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: entertaining a writer. But I think I kind of knew
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: that some of the people associated with gilmal Girls were
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: also associated with with Miss maysl. What what's so interesting
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: about the show is Melissa McCarthy's character is just so
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: like you see the glimmers, Because I came to the
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: show after she' earlyer already was a giant star and
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: you could see glimmers. But even back then, like, oh,
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: she's gonna be hindsight biased, She's going to be fantastic.
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: Is it worth watching the rest of the show? Am
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: I going to be? Not only do you get to
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: watch the whole thing, you get to see Rory go
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: to college and come out of college. But you know,
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 1: Netflix did a revival I saw, so I haven't seen it,
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: but I read about those four episodes there about an
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: hour and a half each, and so you can kind
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: of catch up with them about it. Is it worth it?
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: Because the every it's good. As an arrested development fan,
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: I was warned off of the Netflix version. It will
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: it will satisfy an itch. Okay, alright, that works. Wow,
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: that was a long answer to that long Gilmore girls thought.
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: And you thought asking about streaming would be boring, Well,
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: you told me you weren't watching anything, So that's that's
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: why I was watching old things I watched. There you go,
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: so you're not there's nothing you're watching currently. I Once
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 1: I was done with the book, I I caught up
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: on Succession in like a weekend and loved right. Um,
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: so I watched the first two episodes. I don't matter.
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: I don't like any of the characters and I can't.
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: I can't and you know there's nobody I relate to.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: And it's like, wait, if I don't like any of
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: these characters, if I'm not invested in any of them,
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: if they can all get hit by a bus, that
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: I don't care, why am I watching this? I want
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: to feel And I know some people have said, well,
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: I feel the same way about Seinfeld. There was a lovable,
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: obnoxious nous about them. It's not and the same thing
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: with Curb your enthusiasm. Right aside from all the cringe worthiness,
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: there's a certain appeal to the characters, and everybody wishes
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: everybody has a bit of Larry David. Well, well you wish,
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: so Larry David is nothing like Larry David. Larry that
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: is his kid right blown up, And we all wish
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: there are times when we could give voice, like I
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: come into the city on the seven, all right, go
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: from the true because I don't want to go to
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 1: Penn Station, so I'll come in that way. And I
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: am still after years and years and years, astonished that
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: this is literally the busiest subway stop in all of
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: the New York City subway system and people haven't figured
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: out to get the hell out of the way of
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: the door. Really are you just paying? So? And I
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: wanna There was a great um Seth Myers before the
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: new season came out where they have Larry David on
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: and basically set Larry David loose on all the writers
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: to be Larry David and throughout the day. So one
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: of the writers invites people to his home for dinner
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: and Larry, no, no, you have to work with these people.
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: They don't want to waste their Thursday night having dinner,
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: and it's just great to have Larry David there as
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: a foil for your deepest dark secrets. I have that
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: sort of running internal narrative constantly. The best thing that
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: I've streamed recently probably is that, UM, I am a
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: huge John Laney dork, and UM, I just think he's
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: a genius. So many there's so many like I I
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: watched his talk show appearances because they're hilarious. The funniest
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: thing on the internet is, Uh, he did and in
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: review at the Street Why with Nick roll in their
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: oh hello characters with and they're right, they are old
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: old colleagues from way back when, and it's an interview
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: with John Oliver and it's about ninety minutes. Um, John
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 1: Oliver interviews them, they take Q and a's and I
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: cannot describe how just outrageously funny this thing is. It
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: is like it's it's I think he is the funniest
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: stand up on the planet. It's funnier than any of
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: his stand ups because the way that he can embody
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: these characters is it's it's incredible. I would watch it
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: like I have watched it so many times, and I
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: like happily watch it any time it comes out, all right,
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: So I'm gonna put that on my list. Let me
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: let me run through some of my favorite questions that
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: otherwise uh people will yell email me and and complain.
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: So who your early mentors, What journalists influenced the way
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: you approach covering sports? There were a lot before I
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: got to the Wall Street Journal, But there was one
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 1: guy at the Wall Street Journal named Sam Walker, who
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: was the founding sports editor of the journal, who is
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: this brilliant and insane and insanely brilliant and brilliantly insane
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: person who sort of set the bar really really high.
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: And so when I was an intern, when I freelanced
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: for the paper for a while, even when I was
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: a staff writer, it felt like every time you got
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: a story into the paper, you were like pole vault
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: thing basically, like you were trying to get above a
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: certain point. And um, I think that's why we used
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: to hear a lot of the journal like we didn't
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: know that you covered sports because we didn't. But now
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: I think people understand that we try to do something
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: a little bit different, and that's because of Sam. I
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: think he sort of taught me what a good story
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: was and like to not be precious with my own
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: writing and to just like let other people make it better.
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: So Sam hired me and had this huge influence on
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: my life. Let's talk about books. What are some of
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: your favorite books? What do you like to read when
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: you're not writing books? Yeah, I mean it's I'm a
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: sucker for the Michael Lewis books. I like, I think
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: money Ball Is is still brilliant and um, when I
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: went to visit Nick Hagan on the farm, we were
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: talking as we boarded, like his weak combine. I asked
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: him sometimes I write to classical music, and I asked him,
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: like who should I be listening to? Like who who
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: is your favorite composer since you was at Juilliard and
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: he played trombone and he said, um, you know, I
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: know this is going to sound silly, but like the
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: best guy is Mozart and he's like and I know,
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: like you know, other people know Mozart, but like I
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: know Mozart and like I appreciate him. And I sort
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: of feel the same way about Michael Lewis, like everybody
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: loves his books, but like, you know, as someone who
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: has tried to write a book along the same lines,
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: like the stories that he finds like on a sentence level,
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: like everything about them they're they're just brilliant, like they
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: just they hold up. And whenever I feel stuck, I
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: might sometimes go back and and read some just a
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: few pages from his books because like that voice, like
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: it just gets in your head and it's I love it.
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: I I anxiously await all so money will get you
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: wanna mention another one of his or and then other
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: books you you like, well, I mean The blind Side,
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: the Undoing Project. Um, now I don't know, I I
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: M I read these types of books. I mean part
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: of this book is like it is like using a
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: social stych. It is like using an idea from so
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: psychology to explore the world. And there are a lot
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: of books along those lines. And I think I read
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: them at an impressionable age. They really like they really
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 1: became popular when I was like in middle school, high school,
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: and like they were just sort of intoxicating to me.
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: And so um, there are a lot of books like that,
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: I mean novels too, Like you know, I loved the
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: Salary Rooney book Normal People when it came out, like
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: like everybody else in New York City, it seems. And
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: but but those that you know Moneyball and like the
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: Michael Lewis Cannon, that's that's that's what really does it
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 1: for me. Tell us about a time you failed and
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: what you learned from the experience. It was, Well, I
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: feel like I fail every time I write a story because,
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: like you know, you're writing a newspaper story that's a
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: thousand words words, like you've talked to a lot of people,
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: you know, all this nuance that you can't possibly pack
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: into the story. And so, like you know, every time
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: the story comes out, like I, I feel like it's
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: not good enough, right. But but one time I really failed.
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: It was actually not too long ago. Um. I wrote
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: one of my like bajillion stories about the Golden State
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: Warriors last year, and it was right before the finals,
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: and you know, I needed something new to say about
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: this team that I've been I about for five or
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: six years. Um And we have a daily newspaper, and like,
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 1: you know, give me a break. Not every story is perfect.
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: And um, I was trying to express this thought that
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: I had that the Golden State Warriors were the Golden
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: State Warriors because there were like five Um, really valuable
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: players on that team, and you take out any one
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: of them and the whole thing falls apart. It's a
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: bit like a Jenga tower, right. Um. And the way
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: I phreeze this in the story was like, the Warriors
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: are this dynasty because of Steph Curry, Clay Thompson, Kevin Durant,
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: Draymond Green, and Andrea Gudala. And the end was italicized
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: right because it was meant to say that, like, if
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: you take out any one of their contributions, they're not
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: the Warriors. That's not always the case with basketball teams.
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: Like basketball teams were built around one or two guys.
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: The ninety s Bulls are the Bulls. With Jordan's you
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 1: could sort of substitute a lot of other guys, right,
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: can't do that with the Warriors. Um. The problem was that, Um,
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 1: I forgot that like on Twitter and on social media,
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: you can't italicize words, right, and so UM when this
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: stuff ran on social media, when I wrote tweets that
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: we could share from like you know, wha, Um, it
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: appears as like the Golden State Warriors are good because
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: of Steph Curry, Clay Thompson, Kevin Durantraymond Grand and Andrea Guadala.
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: And this turned into one day last year, like the
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: entire internet dunking on the Wall Street Journal because it
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: read like the Beatles are good because of Paul, George,
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: John and Ringo. You know, like it that's a fair statement. Yeah,
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: but it just sure it's Paul and John. But you
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: know they're not the Beatles necessarily without George and Ringo.
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: But it made for it. It looked like this very
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: silly sentiment, and I just felt terrible. I felt like,
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: when you have the entire internet like making fun of
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: you for a day, you're just like god right, um
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: and so um. What it taught me was like you
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: kind of have to be careful and like every word
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: actually matters. And also that like people forget about things
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: on Twitter after a few hours, life is really short,
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: future reference and well capitalize the equivalent in stars. Yes,
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: that would make you to know a couple of months ago. Alright, Well,
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: I'll share my other uh secret Twitter secret with you later.
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: You'll you'll appreciate this. Um, what do you do for fun?
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: What do you do when you're not banging out columns
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: for the journal? Well? I can't watch sports because sports
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: is work, right, and my brand is always working. Um.
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: I just wrote a book in my spare time, so
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: I don't know all that much about fun. But one thing,
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: one thing that I love lately is that, um, um,
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: this is gonna sound silly, but um there's this YouTube
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: channel from Bone Appetite and I don't know if you're
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: familiar with it, and I'm not a great home cook,
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: but um this these videos are like so magical and
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: I'm reeling and like, um, there there are the editors
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: in the test kitchen and the recipe developers. Um, they're
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: just really charming and like you sort of fall in
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: love with that. I'm a new episodes like almost every day,
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: and my wife and I they're like fifteen minutes, will
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 1: just put it on and like it really like soothes
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: me before I go to sleep. Okay, So I'm gonna
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: give you marriage advice that I wish someone had given
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: me many decades ago. My wife and I both like
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: to cook, and it's only fairly recently that we started
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: on a Sunday night pulling a cookbook out and making
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: a recipe from scratch and not just like a simple
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: you know, boil water throw pasta, like a full blown
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: Bobby Flay recipe. And we've developed over just a couple
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: of years a few favorite things. We have a dinner party.
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: We know exactly what we're gonna make, and I you're married,
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: how long now? Like three years? Okay, had we been
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: doing this twenty five years ago, we would be fantastic chefs.
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: We don't do it over the summer because that's always barbecue.
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: But through especially from like the late fall to early spring,
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: was it a new recipe every time? Just about just
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: every now and then we'll go back to something and
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 1: so right, and very often it's like, wow, that's a
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: lot of work, and this isn't that good. Most of
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 1: the time it's this was really good. And every now
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: and then it's like, oh my goodness, your favorite. Um.
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: I have to say, I love the Bobby Flay cookbook. Uh.
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: And we have like a whole shelf of a dozen
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: different cookbooks. There are a handful of people that try
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: and work on on basics and I'm I'm embarrassed. Um
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: what is her name? She has a restaurant I really
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: like out in Hampton's called the Canal Cafe. There's something
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: Gourmam drown a blanket. Had I prepped for this question. Um, absolutely,
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 1: But but play with that and see if that does
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: anything for you, Because we've just had a fun it's actually, um,
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: not only useful, but like fun, it makes you actually
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: want to do it right and you start to look
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: forward to because usually Sunday night as I'm prepping for
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: the beginning of work. Now you go shopping sometime over
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: the weekend and then you do this and of course
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: you have a bottle of wine open um, and sometimes
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: you're drinking a bit throughout. It doesn't have to be
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 1: Sunday nights. It just worked out for us. But it's
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: a lot of fun. Um. And our final two questions, Uh,
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: what sort of advice would you give a college grad
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: who was interested in any of the sports or journalism? Um,
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: to take advantage of their place in the world. So
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: sometimes when the journal has interns, I always tell them this,
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: that what they know, what their world is is actually
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: very different from the world of the people like running
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal. So like just by virtue of
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: being twenty one years old, you are on TikTok, right,
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: and you talk to other twenty one year olds, and
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: you know what, like this very interesting um subset of
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: people are interested in and so like you almost think
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: of your world as like this subculture to mine, like
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: you are an anthropologist, and so by the very first
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: frontage story I wrote for the Wall Street Journal was
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: a few months after I graduated from college, and it
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: was about this dance craze known as the Dougie, which
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: you might remember this song like you know, teach Me
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: how to Dougie, and everybody in sports was doing it.
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: Was this was this an ahead kind of wise, it
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: was an ahead and so um, and I tell them specifically,
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: like you know, the ahead does not have to be
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: about like you know, birding or something or something that,
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: like you think, like it can just be something funny
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: about something in your life. And so like, you know,
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 1: the people running the Wall Street Journal did not know
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: what the duck you was. But I was twenty one.
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: Of course I knew what the duck you was, right,
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: And like you can take advantage of that, Like what
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: you know is actually pretty interesting, huh, quite quite interesting?
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: And what is it about the world of sports that
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: you know today that you wish you knew? No, normally
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: I would say years ago, but a couple of years
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: ago when you got started in in your career. Um
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: that I should have taken a single course in economics
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: or psychology or statistics or computer science when I was
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: in college. I graduated from school and like immediately recognized
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: that what I wanted to do, I really needed more of,
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: like a quantitative background that I don't think I have
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: to this day. And I wish I knew how to
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: write code, and I wish I knew how to like
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: really understand um statistics because it has become like essential
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: in sports now and really writing about sports, like writing
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: about sports fluently and finding interesting stories, like you can
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: really use numbers and then try to build stories around them,
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: which is something I hope I did in this book. Well,
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: quite fascinating. I really enjoyed the book. Thank you, Ben
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: for being so generous with your time. We have been
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: speaking with Ben Cohen. He is the NBA reporter for
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: The Wall Street Journal and author of the new book
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: The Hot Hands, The Mystery and Science of Streaks. If
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: you enjoy this conversation well, be sure to look Up
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: an Inch or Down an Inch on Apple iTunes, where
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: you can see any of the previous three hundred plus
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 1: conversations we've had over the past five plus years. We
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: love your comments, feedback, and suggestions. Be sure and give
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: us a review on Apple iTunes. Check out my weekly
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: column on Bloomberg dot com. Sign up from my daily
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: reads on Ridholtz dot com. I would be remiss if
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: I did not thank the Crack staff who helps put
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: these conversations together each week. Nick Falco is my recording engineer.
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: Sam Shivraj is my booker. Slash producer. Michael Batnick is
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: our head of research. I'm Barry Retults. You've been listening
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 1: to Master's Business on Bloomberg Radio