Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks

If you're interested in things like statistics and analytics of sports, how the bastball game is changing, who is driving these changes, what is happening in the world of sports, and why the old days of just hiring a superstar and hoping he can drag a team over over the line is pretty much over. I really found his book to be quite fascinating, and I think it's something that if you're either a math or a sports geek, you're gonna find

really intriguing. So, with no further ado, my conversation with Ben Cohn. This is Master's in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest this week is Ben Cohen. He is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he was the first person to exclusively cover the NBA nationally for the Journal. In he was named a News Media Alliance Rising Star. He has a new book out and it's called The Hot Hands, The Mystery and Science

of Streaks. Ben Cowen, Welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure to be on the show. Because so much of this book is actually based on past episodes of your show, so it treats for me. I have to tell I have to reveal this. I'm reading the book on vacation in Puerto Rico, and because I'm an information junkie, I go to the sources and acknowledgements. At the end, nobody reads that, and lo and behold, there's my name and masters in business because of the

Tom Gilovich um reference. But what I thought was so hilarious this was as I'm reading the book, I'm like, guest Guest had him, had him. It's just cracked. Oh that's an interesting name. I should get him. It was really fun going through all these people who I feel like, you know, you spend ninety minutes or longer in a room with someone, you kind of get to know them a little bit. So let's get to know you a little bit. You're an undergraded duke. How do you end

up at the Wall Street Journal. Bribery. Bribery is always a good thing. Now, I I worked really hard at Duke. I I've always known that I wanted to be a journalist, and specifically a sports journalist. There it's a deeply uncool thing to say, right, Like, there's some people who grow up dreaming to be astronauts and flying to the moon. And I wanted to like cover Rutgers for the Star

Ledger New Jersey, right. Um. So I went to Duke like most kids who like sports in New Jersey, and I was the sports editor of the Chronicle, which was the student newspaper at Duke. And and and a Duke that's a real position. It's not like most schools. It's it's a real position. And and the paper itself is a real newspaper. I mean it's a daily paper. I I definitely spent more time in the newspaper office than I did in any classroom. I mean we were working the

top editors of the paper. Their work like sixty seventy hours a week. It's a crazy job. And so um, when you're covering Duke basketball, you're really competing with like everybody on the planet, right um. And so that really gave me great grounding, and UM, I got lucky a few times along the way with some internships and some other opportunities, and um, when I graduated, a couple of weeks before graduation, the journal was looking for a sports intern.

They had just started a sports page and the person they had hired to be the intern had taken a job elsewhere, And so literally two weeks before graduation, the sports editor of the paper emailed me. We had talked in the past about a potential internship, and he offered me an internship, and I kind of kept my foot in the door and didn't let it close them and didn't let them close it on me. And I've sort of been there ever since. The role you now have

is NBA reporter for the Journal. That was not a role before you got there. It was it. We did not really have any rules in sports before I got there. We started a sports page around the same time that I was hired. So two thousand nine, Murdoch buys the paper in like oh seven, and we get that kid

Cohen and here to start a sports page. Fort Rupert and I go way back, and uh so, for the first few years I was at the Journal, I covered college sports, and we didn't have a national full time NBA reporter, And I still think one of the reasons why I did get this job was that it was like July and our sports editor, this brilliant guy named Sam Walker, looked around and said, oh my god, Lebron James is about to choose his next team, and we

don't have someone to write the story. And he sort of pulled me into his office and said, I think that you should cover the NBA for us. And I said, Sam, you're just saying this because we you need someone to write about Lebron going back to Cleveland and loan Behold, the next day he goes back to Cleveland. I write this story. But it turned out to be this incredible stroke of fortune because at the time, the NBA was

about to enter this like real Golden Age. So I still have never covered an NBA finals that the Golden State Warriors were not playing in. So it's been five years in a row. Perhaps this is the year. I have a feeling that this will be the year that the Warriors don't make the finals. So now let's talk a little bit about how I first found you, which was the article about Josh Miller and Adam said, Joe's paper on the hot hand tell us what the hot

hand is. So the hot hand, there's really no singular definition, but I like to think of it as when success leads to more success. Now, in basketball, for example, the hotting has always been studied through basketball, which is one of the things I sort of found irresistible about the whole phenomenon in basketball. It's when you make one shot and then another shot, and then another shot, and you feel more likely to make your next shot. He's on fire.

You're on fire, but it's not he's unconscious. But it's really not just about basketball. I I think of this as about human behavior. I think we are all familiar with this feeling of the hot hand, and what I've learned is that if we take advantage, it can really change our lives. So this book really started with two stories in the Wall Street Journal, in both calling it to question this seminal classic paper about the hot hand.

One was by this team of Harvard undergraduates, so not grad students or PhD students or professors, but kids in their college dorm. And one was by Josh Miller and Adam san Hero, who who did this thing where they looked at this very old problem in a new way and they found something that nobody had seen before. And usually what happens, I have to say after I spend a lot of time thinking about a story and writing a story, is that I don't want to think about

that story anymore. I'm sick of it. The opposite really happened here. I couldn't get the hot Hand out of my head, and I just thought that there was something bigger here that I wanted to explore. And that's how you know, I end up spending three years writing a book about it. So let's let's step back a second, and um, Tom Gilovich is now professor Cornell. At the time, I believe was at Stanford on the ground or Berkeley

on the ground. There were grad students. Tom Gilovich and Bob Balone were grad students at Stanford, and a professor Tversky the Great Amostversek was a brilliant professor there, and they looked at the hot Hand because they thought that it was this beautiful way to illustrate this phenomenon of seeing patterns in randomness. And it still is right. Like I do want to stress that, like I find that

paper hugely admirable. It's a brilliant paper, right, because it uses this thing that we all know, this very accessible, digestible example of a cognitive bias. Um. They end up publishing this paper. It's in the canon of behavioral economics. Right, it's one of the most famous papers ever written. It's really easy to understand, like, there's nothing really obtuse about it.

It's a great paper. It really holds up um with one small exception, sure if yeah, exactly, But Um, something amazing happened when this paper came out, which is that it was so unbelievable that people just simply refused to believe it. We had all felt the hot hand and seeing the hot hand, and now these professors were coming along telling us there was no such thing, and that was really hard for us to wrap our minds around, in the same way that it's very hard for us

to wrap our minds around randomness. So I love the image of red or back cigar unlit cigar kind of hanging out of his mouth. I don't care what these professors say. Of course, it's a hot hand, and there's nothing that could have delighted professors more. Right, like this just believing in the hot hand doesn't make it anymore true. And Amos Tversky used to love to tell this story

when he taught the Hot hand. He would tell the story of right hour Back because he loved the Boston Celtics, And like, what better way to illustrate this idea that people refused to believe than Red hour back saying that it was all a bunch of blowney. And as much as the conclusion maybe mathematically inaccurate, the underlying premise that people see patterns where there are none, that we're all

subject to our cognitive biases, that still holds up. And that's still a key part of that paper completely, uh. And not only that, even if you do believe in the hot hand, like I don't think it is this exaggerated fireball of our imagination, right like you can miss when you feel hot. And also like, there are plenty of times when you are in an environment that does not allow for a hot hand, and believing in the hot hand can be disastrous, costly, it could really backfire

and burn you. And so I do think, um, that paper is still really important and we should all read it. I mean, part of the whole fun of This concept, I think is figuring out what you think about it for yourself, right, and toying around with the idea and seeing where you land. And and as a long suffering Knicks fan, going back to the John Stark's era, where he would just you know, a streaky player, and whether the shots were sinking or not, he would still reel

off seven, eight nine shots in a row. Whether they fell or not didn't matter. He would when he felt it, he heave did regardless of outcome. The Knicks are familiar with streaks, They're just not the kind that Knicks fans actually would enjoy, to say the least. So what I found so intriguing about the original paper about the hot hand,

it was incredibly controversial. What was behind all the pushback? Well, it defides something that we all thought to be true, right, and we are not very good when people tell us something we are convinced of isn't true. So my one of my favorite examples of how easily we're fooled is you give the example in the book, but we've all

seen this from personal life experience. A professor assigns a class flip a coin a hundred times and write it down and I want some of you to do it, and some of you make it up and immediately identifies these are real, these are fake, and the classes always astonished by this. What does that have to do with streaking this and our tendency to see patterns where none

are there? So this is an incredible statistician at Columbia named Andrew Gilman who runs this very popular blog which sounds kind of like an oxymoron, like a popular statistics blog for a little wonky, yes, but but it's a brilliant website. And um, you know, I talked to Andrew Gelman about this and what he told me about how

he is able to tell his classroom to uh. He splits his classroom into two and he tells them like, you know, one group flip a coin, the other group, imagine what it looks like when you flip a coin, and then right the sequences on a chalkboard, and I will walk in and I will be able to tell you which one is real and which one is fake. And so he leaves the classroom and he does essentially this magic trick first for a statistician. Right, he comes in and he always knows, and it's because the real

one is the one that looks fake. It has a run of stp of heads in a row that you're not comfortable. You'll do heads tails, heads, heads tails, but you won't do seven heads in a row. That just seems wrong. But we all know sometimes when you flip a coin, you get seven tales in a row, right, But you would never do that if you were imagining

what a string of coin flips actually looks like. And now you've ruined that trick for him in his first class, and well hopefully everybody at Columbia will read this book so he will not be able to pull off that

trick anymore. Let's talk about the Miller sanjor Joe paper on why the Hot Hands Is Real first, and I think you may have been the first popular press to cover that, because that's how Not only is that how I found you, but when I was preparing for the interview with Joshua Miller and reading all the all the coverage, yours was the piece I found them, like, oh, this does a really nice job on the reason I remember this is not because I'm bragging, but because I was

terrified when that story came out. It was very nerve racking because uh, the math had been rubber stamped by mathematicians by Andrew Gellman himself, like the math accurate. However, the journal is really not in the position to be writing full stories about pre prints, right, papers that have not been more published by like journals that you can trust.

And so this paper was floating around the internet. It had been uploaded to ssr N, and Andrew Galman had written a blog post about it, and people were talking about it. But like if if this paper had been published in Econometrico, which it has been, now, it's very easy for the Wall Street Journal to write a story about that, right, But when it hasn't, suddenly it's it's just these two guys, these two young American economists in Europe and a statistician with a blog saying that it's right.

Is that enough for the Wall Street Journal to write a story about that? It was? We decided that it was, So let me tell you why you were right. Because the worst case scenario is that Econometrical does the math and says this is wrong. But at the time, not only is this a really interesting thesis that identifies a fundamental floor flaw in the traverse ky Gilovich paper but it's really a whole new area of analytics for data sets.

It's not just the hot hands. These guys figured out something really really interesting and lots of people were buzzing about it. And it's not just a blogger, it's Andrew Gilman of Columbia, who is a widely respected mathematician and statisticians. Is their peer review, right, he's peer review before peer review. So so I don't think you were that far out

on a ledge. And the worst case scenario is some of the smartest people in math would have gotten it wrong also, and I have to say, the funny thing about this is that I let alone, Josh and Adam got the same reaction that Gilovich, Valon and Tversky did,

which is, there's no way this is true. Over the course of thirty five years, that paper, which was so counterintuitive at the time, became conventional wizard It was was the way we thought about the hot hand, and so now here was this paper threatening to overturn that result in this uh strange mathematical that takes a lot of thinking to write about, Like there was a reason that

nobody has seen this right. This this very subtle statistical bias that some of the world's brightest statisticians had missed for many years. It was this bias hiding in plain sight, and if it had been obvious, we would have seen it many years earlier. So let's talk about that bias, because it is very intriguing, it's very trippy. It's also intriguing. Explain why. So Normally, if you're gonna flip a coin, hold the gambler's fallacy aside, every flip of that coin

should be fifty fifty heads or tails. But it's not. But but you're not just flipping a coin, you're looking at it after the fact ex post and and saying of the flips that followed two heads in a row, it's not fifty fifty. Explain why, well, I will say the one thing I've learned in thinking about this book and writing this book and talking about this book is that I'm not great at talking about this part of

the book. It's very it's it's hard even for me, as like the best thing I could do is like say, actually go back and listen to your episode with Josh Miller, because he does a better job of explaining it than anybody. But what I will say is that it has to do with um, with sequences, and and and sampling without

replacement right, and and figuring out um. When you look at a sequence of even three coin flips, if you look at the the average chance that you will get a heads after the heads, it's not as our brains are conditioned to believe, it's actually lower. It's it's biased in a negative direction. So you start with the you flip a coin a million times, and now you have a data set. And if you pull out all of the heads and heads in a row, you're not just

pulling out half the heads. You're pulling out more than half the heads relative to what's left over. So what's left over is going to be a little tail heavy. Is that? Is that a fair way to describe it? Yes, And then the next obvious question is like, well, what

does that mean for the hot hand? And really what it means is that for many years, for thirty five years to be precise, we thought that if a fifty percent shooter was shooting when he had the hot hand, when he felt like he couldn't miss, that was evidence against the hot hand. Right, there was no difference. He

wasn't any more likely to make his next shot. What it actually was was evidence for the hot hand all along, because when you are shooting fifty and you take out those heads and tails and you look at what happens heads after heads, you should be shooting lower than like

roughly right. And I believe somewhere in either your book or the Miller paper is the advantage of the hot hand is something like yeah, I mean if you look at the difference, like if you look at the difference of what we thought to what we think now or what some people think now, it's like twelve percentage points, and the difference is huge, like in the n b A, the difference between in the NBA, the difference of twelve points is the difference between Steph Curry and a league

average shooter. So so we now, you know how reason to think that, you know, not only can we believe in the hot hand, but it actually might be a pretty sizeable effect. Now you know this is I think there are reasonable people on both sides of this debate, and that is what was so intriguing to me is that we have very smart people, brilliant minds, who have

been thinking about this for a very long time. And you know, you could come out to to to thinking about this in different ways, and I think we still are, like I think we are still trying to think about what we should think about the hot Hand. So I spent a lot of intellectual energy thinking gil Vitch and Seversky, we're right. And then when Josh and Adams paper came out,

I was skeptical. And then I read as much as I could up until the formulas, which is incomprehensible, and then had a conversation with him and then had him on the show, and suddenly it's like, you know what, he convinced me, The hot hand is reel. And now that I've spent so much mental energy on this and I'm committed to this at this point, my cognitive dissonances. I don't want it's crazy, and I don't want to I don't want to flip. I can't flip again. I'm

locked in. If you could prove that it's not real, best of luck to you. But I'm tapped out of the debate. While imagine writing a book about it. But but but that was actually what was so intriguing to me about all this, because you know, at the Wall Street Journal, what I've learned is that every great story needs tension, right, Tension is really what makes stories. And I just couldn't believe how much tension there was in

this fight over an idea. Right here was something that we all thought to be true, a belief, only to be told that it wasn't, only to be told that actually maybe it was, and that that was just so irresistible to me. And so the narrative itself is great. And then what I tried to do in this book is apply the lessons of that narrative very widely, right, because that's why these people have been studying the hot

hand for so long. It's not because they wanted to argue about whether or not the hot hand is real. It's because it has these implications far beyond academia, farther beyond basketball, right, like they sort of apply everywhere. It's quite fascinating. So I mentioned to you I read this book on vacation. I plowed through it in a day and a half. I really enjoyed it. It fits in well in the sequence of sort of related to moneyball and related to some other things that are about sports.

The first chapter of the Undoing Project about Darryl Moore. So I gotta ask you some questions about the book, because there's some really really interesting things in here. Please And also you called it wonky beach reading, which I think is the best description of the book I've heard so far. It really tickles me to hear that. I mean, that's what it was to me. I was sitting on the beach. I'm like, this is good, wonky fun and

I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be something that like anybody could read right, like you don't exactly, and you could read it on a beach, which which I love reading books on the beach. So so first question is the first of all, I like the arc that you tell. This is told as a story throughout time where there's this belief and then uh, an academic research channel olenges a belief, and then subsequent research challenges

the challenge. Why in the beginning did it seem like they were the academics on one side and everybody else on the other, Because the academics were the only people who were saying that everybody else was wrong, right, um, And you know that was the beauty of their paper was that it challenged something that is so universal. There's this fundamental belief in the hot hand. That's in the

original paper. They pulled basketball fans and NBA players and like something like them said, of course that there is such a thing as the hot hand, right, like if you had asked me. The one time in my life that I was not completely terrible at basketball was in high school, and I scored more points in one quarter of one game than I had in my entire career combined.

There was something magical about that day that I still remember now, And it would never have even crossed my mind that this thing didn't exist, because I thought that I knew what I felt, and not until reading you know, hundreds of papers over the course of like four deck aids, that I realized that, like everything I thought I knew, might be wrong. So so let's talk about some real specific examples from the book that are fascinating. Uh, And

let's start with Spotify and Apple iTunes. Their random shuffle is much better when it's less random. Explain that that's right. So a few years ago Spotify had this problem, which is that they kept hearing from users that the shuffle

function was broken. The problem is that it wasn't actually shuffling their music, so sometimes you would hear the same artist twice in a row, or you would hear the same song twice in a row sometimes, And people got so mad about this that they accused Spotify of almost being corrupt, of like trying to curry favor with record labels by playing their artists more. And the very curious thing about this is that Apple actually had the same

problem a few years before that. And there's this clip of one of Steve Jobs's keynote speeches when he is introducing a feature called smart Shuffle, and like, what they had to do essentially was change the randomness algorithm. People thought that it simply couldn't be random when it was. The fact is, though, that pure randomness is hard to understand, and sometimes pure randomness means you hear the same artist twice in a row or the same song twice in row.

That's like like getting six heads in a row flipping a coin. It's the same thing. It's actually not what we want out of our playlist, right, And so what Spotify did was they tweaked their code. They evenly distribute songs and artists over the course of a playlist so that it's random the way that we think about random. So really, what they did was to make it feel

more random. They actually had to make it less random, make it less technically random, but as a listener, randomness means that after and you use the Billy Joel example, but after a Billy Joel song, instead of hearing another Billy Joel song, I want to hear YouTube or Push Stars or Prefect Sprout or Elvis Costello or non revealing Maya playlist. But you don't want to hear the same

artist twice in a row. And what the companies had to do was wrap their minds around the way that humans really think, right Like, there was no amount of money or engineering talent that could solve this problem. There was something about the way that randomness paralyzes the human mind that the companies had to come to grips with. And so they could have been stubborn and said, no, of course, this is random, this is how randomness works. But what they did was they gave their users what

they wanted. Right, People don't want randomness, they want variety, and whether it's random or not is almost irrelevant. Let's talk about the NBA Jam. The people who created that game took advantage of the hot hand and streaks tell us a little bit about that. So NBA Jam was developed by this game designer named Mark Trammel. And when Mark Trammel was a kid, there were three things that he loved. He loved basketball, and he loved video games,

and he loved fire. He was actually a bit of a pyromaniac, and he was able to combine these three childhood loves into the biggest hit of his life. So I grew up playing NBA Jam. I am right around the same ages Steph Curry, and so I know that NBA Jam machines were sort of ubiquitous in our childhood. They were everywhere. And what I did not know while we were both playing NBA Jam is that NBA Jam was one of the most lucrative successful arcade games ever made.

In the first year of its existence, it made a billion dollars in quarters. And this is but orders of magnitude bigger than anything else before, ginormous to the point that, like the people who were running the company, when they saw the numbers in the test arcade, they just refused to believe them. They thought this has to be a type of like, there's no way that these kids are

playing NBA Jam so much, and yet they were. And part of that is because it was a basketball game and it was fun and you could do crazy things like somersault over the basket and throw down breathtaking slam dunks and foul anybody you wanted. But really what we wanted to do was catch fire. So in NBA jam, if you make a few shots in a row, you hear the announcer for the game say he's heating up. And then if you make your next shot, you hear he's on fire, and the ball turns into a fireball.

And what happens when you're on fire is that you cannot miss. And that was compelling to so many people like it was this amazing example of Mark Trammel, the childhood pyromaniac, still playing with fire. And to me, I think he's sort of single handedly brainwashed this generation of impressionable young minds into believing the concept of the hot hand. Because when you were heating up, when you were on fire,

you can't miss. That that's really quite fascinating. Let me go over a couple of other issues of the hot hand. I have to ask you about Shakespeare capitalized on the Plague. You have to explain that, well, this is oddly timely now, right, yes, which is kind of terrifying. Um. Shakespeare was never a metronomic writer, so scholars for a very long time were

not exactly statisticians, believe it or not. And when when they would look at like twenty four shakespeare plays, if he wrote them over the course of twelve years, they said, okay, Shakespeare wrote two plays a year. In fact, that's not

remotely true. Shakespeare ran hot and cold. He wrote in streaks, and one of the great hot streaks of his career was when he wrote King Lear Macbeth and Anthony and Cleopatra in this very concentrated amount of time some scholars believe as short as two months, which is crazy, right, Um. And the reason he was able to write those plays, and the reason those plays were such a success, was that it happened to be a plague gear and the plague actually worked to his advantage in very odd ways.

But the plague was this force that shaped Shakespeare's life from the very beginning, Like he probably should have died when he was a kid of the plague. Um. It was. It was just always around in London, and to me that it spoke so neatly of the hot hand, because the hot hand is not this random occurrence. It's this collision of talent and circumstance and a little bit of luck. And sometimes circumstance appears when you least expect it. Sometimes

it's the plague. So let's talk about that luck, creativity, and circumstance collision. Some people have put forth the theory that even human careers, you will have creativity and bunches, and most people or many people's most productive work over the course of their lifetime comes in a very narrow sort of era. Explain that, and not only their most productive work, their most memorable work. There's a statistical physicist at Northwestern named Dash and Wang who tried to look

at this idea, like, is creativity cluster? Do our hits come in bunches? And that's really hard to do in a lot of industries because there's just not great data, right, And so what he tried to do was try to put some objective numbers to subjective issues of taste. Right, So for movie directors, that's IMDb ratings, For scientists that's Google scholar citations. For artists it's auction prices. Now, these are not perfect metrics, but they're like about as good

as we could do given what we have. And what he found was that, uh, if you tell him what your best work is, what your highest rated movie, or what your paper that was cited the most by other academics, was he can find the second and third best work. And it's because those works come to get other, like they build on top of each other. And we have these hot hand periods in our careers, and in those periods, we tend to produce the work that indoors and that

other people remember. So let's talk about movies. Use the example of Rob Briner, who has written or directed some of my favorite films. He had a streak that was really quite astonishing, didn't he. The first few movies he made were Spinal Tap and The Shore Thing and Stand By Me, and those were all successes in their own way, whether it was critically or commercially, and it sort of

earned him the runway to make a fourth movie. Now, all three of those movies were in movies that nobody wanted him to make, and they were huge hits regardless. They were these delightful contradictions. And he had this conversation with the studio executive around this time when he's trying to figure out what he wants to make next, and the studio executive says, we want to do anything you want to do, right, basically, like you're hot, we want to be in business with you. Clart Blanche, what is

it that you want to do? And he says, you don't want to do what I want to do and she says, no, really, just tell us what movie do you want to make next? And he says, no, really, I'm telling you you're not going to want to make this movie. And she says, just name the movie and he says, the movie I want to make is The Princess Bride. And she says, anything but The Princess Pride. And that sounds crazy now, because The Princess Bride is this cult classic and one of the most beloved movies

ever made. Right. It was written by William Goldman, who had written Butch Cassidy, He had written All the President's Men, like you could take his grocery lists and and win an Academy Award, and Marathon Man all he's just he's got like the run of and and if you've never read m his screenwriting books, The screen Confessions of a screenwriter or the screen trade. He's the guy who has

popularized the phrase. He's no longer with us, but he popularized the phrase nobody knows anything, which is a good thing to think about when you're trying to write a book about people who think they know everything. So, following those three movies, The Princess Bride does really well, and then what was next, Harry Met Sally a John and smash Um Misery and a Few Good Men. Misery was a Stephen King book that nobody expected that to be a great movie, absolutely, and then A Few Good Men

is just a nut. And he still continued to make movies that are still well liked. Beyond that, he was able to elevate his career to another level. Right, And I have to say, like I have runned this theory by Rob Reiner. He doesn't exactly agree. What he remembers from this period is it was still so hard to

get The Princess Bride made. But to me, that's actually a proof of the hot hand that was shaping everything, because if he remembers, he was still so hard, and it was that hard, it simply would never have been made if he weren't hot. The Princess Bride had been attached to a number of other producers and directors, including some really giant names in Hollywood, and it was almost a cursed screenplay. It just couldn't get done. It was the great White Whale. Rollywood, I mean Trufaux tried to

make it. Norman Jewis and Robert Redford tried to direct it and star in it, and still nobody could get it made. Goldman like to tell this wordy that one studio had bought the movie and was fired the next weekend, Like nobody could get this movie made. And you could argue that, like if Rob Ryner knew about this, maybe he wouldn't have And even when he went to Goldman to try to get his permission to make the Princess Pride,

he was terrified. And Bill Goleman opens the door and says, the Princess Bride is my favorite thing I've ever written, Like, don't screw it up. And he was able to get permission, and he was able to make the movie, and I think we're all luckier for it. Quite amazing. Let's talk about how the NBA is adapting to the idea of behavioral economics. You wrote a really interesting column about quote the renegade executives of Houston who shook up sports management.

Tell us about those guys, well, they haven't had a great few months since that story came out. But um, a couple of months ago, my colleague at the Journal, Jared Diamond, and I Jared covers baseball, I cover basketball, We went down to Houston to have lunch with two really smart executives there. One his name Darryl Morey, and he the general manager of the Houston Rockets. The other is Jeff lu Now, who was the general manager of

the Houston Astros. And we just thought it would be fun to get them together and just talk about how much their sports have changed. And it was fun and it made for a really interesting story. And about a week later, Darryl became the most interesting man in geopolitics. He was already the most interesting man in sports, and I love Darryl, but um, he set off this feud between the NBA and China with this tweet supporting Hong Kong.

And back up a little bit. So he got his graduate degree from m I T and M I T has a really deep relationship with Hong Kong, including lots of students. And I think they have a satellite school there as well well. And also the NBA has this long running financial relationship with China, right, I mean, China is the engine that is powering the future growth of the league. It's global growth outside of the U s

Oh yeah, it's the most important foreign market. And like the league has always cultivated China, like over the course of three decades or so, and like the one tweet imperiled that relationship overnight. I mean to this day. I mean the NBA is still not on CCTV. UM, so a lot has changed. Um, But was it really a two or three hundred million dollar tweet? It was a

lot of money. I mean, this the sal you know, Adam, they canceled the Precision Games, right, they played the games, but they weren't broadcast, right And and and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said that he thought the loss could be about like four hundred million dollars. So, um, there's a lot of money. But like you know that it was a very fascinating issue because, um, it pitted like American democratic norms of free speech against like trying to do

business in China. And I think this is something that like every company is going to have to be dealing with at some point, and um, it was just sort of this like dry forest, And I think Darryl's tweet turned out to be the kindling that nobody really thought would blow everything up, but it kind of did. So

we were talking about film earlier. I think a lot of people don't realize how much of American film is now one did by foreign investors, including China, especially China, And so what what happens is you end up with the bad guy being the Russians, never the Chinese. And that's a direct function of who's writing the check. It's and and to me it was just it was it was of course Darryll was involved, because Darrell is. I

love the guy. I've written about him as much as ever written about anybody in the n b A. He's so smart and so interesting and he's this real renaissance man of the n b A. If you were to ask me, like, which NBA executive would unwittingly start something like this, like, of course it would be Daryl, because Darrel is in the middle of everything, and he was twice NBA Executive of the Year. I don't think he's going to win that this year. Well he might, I

mean it, it depends. I mean it's voted on by other executives, and I'll take the other side of that that. I'll give you two to one odds. The interesting thing about Daryl winning that award is that that's an award voted on by your peers. And for a very long time, I think there was resistance among NBA general managers to acknowledge that Darrel is a really smart guy and he was using statistics and analytics and information in really interesting ways.

Can't argue with success. Speaking of success, let's talk about Steph Curry. I love the story in the book. It's pretty good at not bad. And I understand he's taking more shots from behind the line. So that's the thing, the story about how he lights the Knicks up. Um, do you remember that game? No? No, I don't, And if I saw that game, I have suppressed the memory, like so many other losses the Knicks have suffered over the years. But he's a guy who's essentially on the

bench or half the time, half the game. He doesn't have the green light to just toss up three pointers. What happened in that one game with the Knicks. Yeah, the through line of Steph Curry's career until a certain point of his life was that nobody really thought that he could be as good as we now know him to be. Um. He was lightly recruited out of high school. He went to tiny Davidson College. Even after coming out of Davidson, where he had this incredible, unforgettable run in

the n c A Tournament in two thousand eight. You know, he was the seventh pick in the NBA Draft. There were lots of questions about whether someone who was as small as him and shot three pointers as much as him could really be like a force in the NBA. And those questions kind of lingered until this one night in February. Let me interrupt you before we get into that night. So, as a Knicks fan, watching Jordan and

the Bulls dismantled him. Season after season, the Bulls always had Um somebody Steve kerr Hodges, somebody who was an assassin from behind the three point line, and it forced the floor to be spread, so they couldn't if you're gonna collapse on Michael Jordan's He's going to find the open man and it might be a three pointer. So I think twice about it. That was a very specific tactical decision. Now tell us what happened with Uh Curry and the next that night, so so Steve Kerry with

the three point shooter around Michael Jordan's. What if Michael Jordan's were the three point shooter right? That's sort of the question that has become prevalent in the NBA over the last few years. This was a night that nobody thought would be Steph Curry's breakthrough, his coming out party. The night before the Golden State Warriors had played in Indiana,

they had gotten into a fight. Steph Curry was actually involved in the fight, and if you watch the clip now, it's kind of amazing because he charges this guy named Roy Hibbert seven ft two and ways two of Steph Curry's right, and what happened is exactly what you might think happened, which is Ray Hibbert just sort of brushed him aside. For his entire life, Steph Curry's great disadvantage was had been his size, right, but for this one night,

it was his improbable advantage. He was too small to do any real damage in a fight of NBA players, So they fled to New York that night, so no suspension for him. He's not suspended. Other players on his team are. However, Steph Curry is fined thirty five thousand dollars and nobody has ever been so fortunate to lose so much money. The Warriors get to New York and they just don't have their full team right they they're

there are only a certain number of guys who can play. Now, something else happens before they get to Madison Square Garden, which is very funny in retrospect. Steph Curry during Warriors road games always takes the second of three buses from the team hotel to the arena. There are three buses. Steps always on the side of superstition or timing, so like, he wants to be at the arena a certain time and he wants to warm up at a certain time and getting there on the first bus is too early,

and the third bus is probably too late. This day, for some reason he can't remember, he misses the second bus, takes the third bus. What happens when the third bus leads the team hotel gets pulled over by New York City cops on the way to Madison Square Garden. So now he's missed his normal bus, his now bus, He's missed his normal bus. His third bus gets pulled over on the way to the garden. He's rushed, he's late, he's gotten into a fight the night before, He's down

thirty dollars. And what happens at night is that he has the single greatest shooting night of his career. He scores fifty four points, plays all forty eight minutes, He doesn't come out of the game. He makes eleven of his thirteen three pointers. Nobody in the history of the NBA, let alone him, had ever taken so many threes and

made so many of them in the same game. And this was really an epiphany for Steph Curry and for the Warriors generally, and actually for the whole NBA, because what they were able to do after that night is build a team around Steph Curry's remarkable ability to shoot a basketball, and he's only gotten better behind the behind the line. Before that game, he averaged like eighteen points and took five threes a game. Since then, he averages

twenty six points and he takes ten threes. He's won two m vps, the Warriors have won three championships, and the most remarkable thing about all of this, um is that it took the NBA so long to figure this out. Like three is worth more than two. It's in the name of the shot, right, It's it's not just a little it's worth one and a half times a regular shot. But it's not one and a half times as difficult, or is it. There is a huge incentive to shooting

three pointers. Now it is more difficult, but not if you're Steph Curry, right. Steph Curry is a shooter from three, and the name of the game now is shoot as many three pointers as possible. And the game was sort of going there anyway. But whether or not the Warriors would have built around Steph Curry, I'm not sure they would have. Without this game, we're going to have to move the three point line. We might, you know, I think that there there is talk about like a potential

four point line. Um, there's talk about the three point line. But we're getting to a point now where about ten years ago, the number of three pointers in the NBA game accounted for about of shots. Now we're at about thirty five percent of shots. The number of threes per game has doubled over the course of fifteen years. I was at the m I. T. S. Slowan sports analytics conference recently and asked someone with a team, like, what is the upper limit here? Like when when do you

get to returns? Well, the Houston Rockets are taking their shots now, so like for a single team, how high could you get? And this person, really smart, wonky analytical mathematical says that he has studied the numbers and he thinks that it's the team shots as three. So like by those standards, where nowhere even close to the end of this, I'm trying to think of how you would move the lineback with without Unless you make the line, you give up the corner shot, which is the best

location shot. The corner three pointers the most efficient shot in the closest and it's the most it's still worth three points, right, I mean, there are some funky things that you could do, Like you could make an arc. You could make an arc. You could you could add a four point line but move the three point line in so that you actually make every shot worth the

same amount of points. Right now, there is this huge incentive against shooting mid range shots because there worth two points and you generally at the same rate as three pointers, right, no sense, How could you sort of um incentivize people to take those shots? Is that you change the value

of them? Now, I think there are people in the NBA who are encouraged that even though teams are shooting a whole bunch of threes now and all the good teams are shooting threes, there's not really a homogeneous style of play. They're getting those three pointers in different ways, so there is some variety, um, but the end result is the same. Like the name of the game now is how many three pointers can you take? And how

many of them can you make? So let's talk about somebody that you've you wrote about after Kobe Bryant's passing, but I'm familiar with from Michael Lewis's book The Undoing Project, and that's Shane Batty. He's a guy that would be assigned to cover the best score on the other team, and if you look at his stats, that really nothing. What does a guy like Shane Batty a mean to

the new version? And of course he was on the Houston Rockets under Darryl Moury, But what does the player like that mean to the new version of Basketball's equivalent? Of money ball, just about everything. Really. To me, the beauty of Shane Battier is that, um, he was someone who the NBA did not value properly because he did not have great stats. Right, He didn't score a lot of points, he didn't grab a lot of rebounds, he

didn't shodow a lot of assists. But when he played, his team was better when he was on the floor, right. And there was no relationship that embodied this better than Shane Battier when he tried to guard Kobe Bryant. And so I talked to Shane after, you know, the tragic death of Kobe Bryant a few weeks ago, because I wanted to know, like, what did he remember from those

games when they played each other? And you know what he What Shane says is that when they played, he always felt like he was Captain Ahab and Kobe Bryant was his Moby Dick and he was always chasing him, and they had this strange cat and mouse game where it was not only physical, it was not only on the court, it was psychological. Shane Battier knew that like trying to trash talk Kobe was the worst thing that

you could do because it would get him. So he would like purposefully be modest when he walked on the court with Kobe. He would like basically say, like I don't even belong on the same court as you man, Like I'm this unathletic plots like you're gonna kill me tonight. What Kobe knew was exactly what Shane Battier was doing. So, like Kobe wrote in his book, like yeah, I knew Shane was like being modest because he thought that that

wouldn't fire me up. And so they were going back and forth, and they were so deep into each other's minds and so their matchups were just these classic matchups. I mean what Shane says that nobody challenged him more than Kobe. He was like the pinnacle of challenge in his profession. The great thing about their relationship, the thing that I loved was that they had no relationship. They

never talked outside the arena. There was nobody who each of them respected more in terms of offense and defense, and yet it was all on the basketball court, like they never got a chance to like have that beer and just reminisce about all of these incredible matchups that they had. So the plus and minus measurement is is your team scoring more points when you're on the court and as the other team scoring less points, what is

your contribution? Daddy A turned Kobe Bryant into a negative for the Lakers, sometimes right and sometimes so um so plus minus is estab that like over the course of one game, maybe a little bit noisy, sometimes like sometimes it's not sometimes exactly shows a lot, but of the course of a season and over the course of a career, it's like hugely informative and so like for the last few years, who has had the best plus minus in the NBA. It's Steph Curry and that sort of shows

his impact on the game quite quite interesting. So one of the person I have to ask about the number one draft last years Zion Williamson. How was he turning out? He was supposed to have a huge impact on the n b A he got hurt uh in the beginning of the season and now he's back. Is this guy gonna be worthy of a number one pick? Or is it another topic that goes bust? He's fantastic, he uh.

There There are not many rookies in the NBA who changed the fortunes of their team immediately, Like you could probably list them on one hand over the course of the last few decades. Lebron James of course, um, maybe Kevin Durant, maybe Anthony Davis. Was Zion Williamson has done after missing the first few months of his rookie season with an injury, is that he's turned New Orleans Pelicans into like a real player. So like if you look at the numbers, even the plus minus numbers, when he's

on the court, they're destroying other teams and so destroying. Yeah, like they are, Uh, they're going to be excellent building around him over the next few years. And so, um, he sort of lost some of his momentum because he didn't play for a few months and everybody sort of forgot about him. And yet we see him now and it's like you are like you're seeing a superstar in the making. Like there, he's gonna lose weight, his body's going to change, he's going to learn how to play

the game. Like you watch him on defense. He doesn't know what he's doing yet. Right, he's a rookie. He's nineteen years quick, and he can jump, and he has brilliant vision, he can pass. He everyone knew that he was this incredible dunker, but like, his game is so well rounded, he is like going to be a sublime basketball. So so let's violate one of Darryl Morey's rules and compare him to somebody else. Who is Zion more like? Is he Gianni or is he going to be more

like a little Bron? It's interesting? Uh, and you wrote to column Giannice is now hitting from the outside, which makes him even more dangerous of a player. So he's probably been compared more to Lebron. I'm pronouncing his name wrong. Is he going to be more liking Honest or Lebron? Well, he's always been compared with Lebron because their body types are kind of similar. Lebron's a little bigger, though, isn't it. Oh yeah, what? But but like cooler, bigger, thick, Oh

my god, he's like girthy. Right. The thing I think that makes him like Janice is that they're closer to the same age and they belong to similar generations. So the amazing thing about Jannice this year is that he's probably going to win the MVP Award for the second year in a row, and he's averaging about thirty minutes per game. There forty eight minutes in an NBA game, which means that he's only playing thirty minutes and he's putting up stats that he's going to win the m

v p UH. In his first few years, Lebron played like forty two minutes. And I think what makes Zion more like Janice than Lebron is that his minutes are always going to be monitored for his career, because of his body type, because of his age, because of the way the NBA has played today, He's gonna play like thirty two thirty three minutes, and that means that, like in the playoffs, hopefully he will be fresher, so fresher. You also want to maintain the A c L as

a problem, maintain the Achilles. Like when you look at the injuries that people in the NBA tend to get, they seem to come in different waves. Is the game changes there overuse injuries. We're not used to seven footers jumping out and trying to guard three pointers and having to be as mobile as you do now. So um,

I think we're still learning a lot about that. Like I think even the smartest teams know that they don't know all that much about injuries and injury prevention and like wearables and biometrics like this in some ways is the next frontier of all of this stuff. So who do you think is the most interesting person in the league? And I'm gonna ask you that for players and for coaches or executives. Interesting in what sense? In any sense you choose Interesting in terms of their impact on the game,

interesting in their potential. Well, you know, the real answer is Steph Curry because I just love watching him. I still find him just thrilling to watch. But but I actually the most interesting guys in the league are the ones who were misvalued for some reason, and the evolution of the game um has changed their value in the league and the premium that teams put on them, and so that tends to be like three point shooters and so not the step Curry types, almost like the like

the Steve Kerr player types. So I've written a lot about these guys. I've written about Duncan Robinson with the Miami Heat, who went to a small high school in New Hampshire. He went to Exeter Academy. He went to Williams College D three Williams College in the nest Gag transferred to Michigan when undrafted, played in the G League, and now is the single best three point shooter in the NBA. And it's a guy who, like, you know, basically the whole sport changed and he adapted, and suddenly

he becomes this really valuable player. Did he adapt? Did the sports change to exactly what he was? The sport evolved into his favor right, and so um, you know, it's it's his story is really a fairy tale, right. But to me, what made it so interesting was that it's a case study in economics, right, and how we think about how we value players. Not too long ago, Duncan Robinson was not valued all that highly. Now like

every team needs to Duncan Robinson. And that's the same sort of um progression that took place in the NFL with that Michael Lewis wrote about with the blind Side, where there was an off tackle that was never an important UM role and then suddenly protecting the quarterback becomes so much more important following some rule changes and some just generally the way the game changed, same sort of thing. Suddenly what was you know, a league minimum salary role

becomes a three four or five million dollar role. He got really lucky that this evolved right into his sweet spot. So so that's a player well, and the team's got lucky too, because the only way to win in professional sports now is to find the nf agiencies in the market, right,

Sometimes that's the valuable role players. If if there's a um cap, if there's a salary correct, and you know, the greatest inefficiency are the superstars, right because in an open market, Lebron James is worth a whole lot more money than he's paid right now, right because his salary is capped. Of course, Like that's why you want superstars is because like you know, you don't you can't throw

enough money at them. It doesn't matter Lebron James makes what thirty five million dollars a year, he's really a bargain, right because relative to what it means to the l A Lakers revenues no like relative to when you are building a team in the NBA, because there are a lot of other players who make thirty five million dollars a year because it's the most that you can pay, Like in an open market, what a team would give Lebron seventy five million dollars a hundred million dollars right,

even if it were an open market in a cap system where the team had a salary cap but the players didn't and you could offer them whatever you want. You can make a case that, like, if there were a hundred million dollars salary cap, you should give Lebron ninety million dollars, right and just filling in with everybody else, and so like million dollars up stars are the great inefficiency and and that's what basketball teams believe. But there are other ways to find value. And it's to find

value on the margins. It's to get those guys like Duncan Robinson and Shane Daddier, like guys who are not valued the way the markets suggests they should be. So there was another reference in the book that cracked me up. Um, George Steinbrenner and the Harlem Globe Trotters changed the NBA. You're gonna have to explain that because listeners are going to think they misheard that. It has to do with the formation of the three point line, Like the three

point line did not always exist in basketball. It seems so fundamental to how the game is played today. But somebody dropped somebody dropped a line on the court, this little strip of tape and decided shots from inside will be worth two points and shots from outside will be worth three points. And I misremembered this when I had my conversation with Daryl Maury. I thought it was in college first, but it wasn't. It started in the NBA first.

It actually started in a basketball league called the American Basketball League, which predated the America Basketball Association, which then merged with the m b A, and so in the a b L in the nineteen sixties, this short lived Doomed Basketball League that was run by the founder of the Harlem Globe Trotters. They were the first to experiment with the three point line in a professional league. And

there were eight teams in this league. And who was one of the owners of this doomed Basketball league but George Steinbrenner before he bought the New York Yankees. And which team did he own? He owned the Cleveland Pipers, And there was this discussion in one of their meetings.

A couple of weeks ago, I went down and found these papers in this archive at the University of Texas that sort of showed how this league was formed, and the guy who started the league was this guy named Abe Sapperstein, who was this visionary marketing whiz behind the Harlem Globe Trotters. He also started the A B L and uh he had so much power that one day he missed one of their meetings where all of the

owners came to be and Uh. They decided that they would try to strike back at some of his power by eliminating the three point line. So they took a vote, do we think like we should have a three point line? And if we do, like, where should it be? Should it be at twenty three ft? Should it be at twenty ft? Like? Where exactly? And they decided to move the three point line in, so three ft they move it in. They have this vote. Steinbrunner votes against it.

He says keep it where Sapristein wants it to be. But it passes by a fourth three margin. Sapperstein comes back to the next meeting just completely ignores what happened in his absence and set the line at three ft nine inches away from the center of the basket. And where is the three point line in the NBA today? Twenty three ft and nine inches away from the basket. It's exactly where A sa Perstein decided it should be

sixty years ago. That that that's quite fascinating. You would never guess that Stone Brenner has impacted not just Major League Baseball, but the NBA as well. There was a stat in your book that I found completely and totally insane, and I have to ask you about this, which one the Warriors have outscored their opponents by more than four thousand points in curries minutes, in other words, when Steph Curry is on the floor over the past five years.

Talking about plus minus that has generated an advantage for the Golden State Warriors of plus four thousand points. That can't possibly be right. That's just are you questioning my math? Absolutely insane, It is insane. And the most insane thing about it is that I believe they are being outscored by the other team when Steph Curry is not on the court, right, So they're negative when he's not on

the court. There their plus four thousand when he's on the court, and the other team beats them when he's off the court. And so that just shows it shows like this incredible force that Steph Curry has become so his plus minus has to be just crazy. If that's the case. Yeah, and that it's it speaks to um why it was so brilliant to build a team around him, Like nobody thought that you could or that you should,

and the Warriors have proved everybody wrong. So so let's talk about some you mentioned going down to Texas and doing some research. Who was the most interesting post and you spoke to when you were recently researching this? And by interesting, I mean who is the most surprising person that you came away from the conversation with m I really didn't expect that. I talked to a lot of

interesting people. I talked to Steph Curry. I talked to Eugene Fama, I talked to David booth Um, Tom Gilovich, these all of these So I haven't had stuff Curry on. But that's my that's my list right there. That's your bucket list. One bucket list that's checked off staff is on the bucket list. I have to say, one of the most interesting people I talked to is a guy named Nick Hagan, who I don't think you've had on

this show. I have not. Nick Hagan is a fifth generation sugar Beet farmer on the border of Minnesota and North Dakota, and I took a trip out to his farm because um I wanted to know, like, do farmers believe in the hot hand? Like this is one of the reasons why this is one of the reasons why people have studied the hot hand, is because it applies to all these different industries. And so um I went

out there during wheat harvest. And Nick is this fascinating guy because his family has been in the farming business for five generations, right going back to his great great grandfather in the middle of the d and yet he didn't think that he would enter the family business. He was a trombonist. He came to Juilliard to play music before he finally decided, actually, I do want to go back into the family business and moved back to this farm. And what he told me was like music and farming

and basketball couldn't be any more different. Like music is more like basketball than it is like farming. So in basketball the court is always the same, right, like you know the parameters, and farming it's always moving. So like if the basketball court is a rectangle, farming is like one day it could be a rhombus, and the next day it could be a trapezoid, and the next day it could be a triangle. Is that a function of whether the market for the crops? Everything you do not

have control. And so what he has learned is that basketball is about playing offense, right, farming is about playing defense and trying to play the long game. And keep in mind like all of these lessons that you've learned for all of these years. So like he doesn't chase patterns. He doesn't believe in the hot hand, even though he does believe in the hot and he doesn't behave as if he believes in the hot hand. Um, what he

does is he trusts principles instead of chasing patterns. And to me, like, you know, I could talk to academics like I've been in NBA locker rooms, I've never been on a sugar beet farm before. And that was one of like the most thrilling parts of this book for me. So last question before we get to our favorite questions. You're simultaneously writing a book and working for the journal full time writing a column. Lots of folks have said that's impossible to do. You have to take time off.

How are you able to balance both of those. It's not easy to write a book while you're also writing columns that are, if not on the same topics, certainly similar topics to what you're covering in the book. A lot of early mornings and long weekends and not taking vacation. And I realized not too long ago that I haven't watched much television over the course of the last two or third Yeah, and so, um so there was that I gave myself a lot of time to write the book.

It was like eighteen months from start to finish of of writing. Um So, it was just sort of trying to find time whenever I could. But I have to say, like I think that writing a book made me better at writing stories for the wallstre Journal. It was sort of like cross training in a sentence, like it just accessed a different part of my brain that was fun to play with that I never really get to exercise

all that much. Quite interesting. I have to tell you, I approached this book in with great trepidation for a couple of reasons. First, I had already had Kanaman and Gilovich and Miller and whole run of people on and second, I really enjoyed the story you wrote about um Adam and Josh about their paper, and I'm like, oh, I hope this book doesn't suck, because every now and then I'll start a book and I'm like, yeah, I can't

finish this. But I really liked it, and I plowed through it, and you did a really nice job taking what's essentially this narrow, wonky academic theory and turned it into a compelling two pages worth of a discussion. It's a great narrative. Well, thank you, thank you for overcoming your trepidation, and I'm glad that it didn't suck. Um, it really didn't suck it. First of all, I did say it's it's good wonky beach Rena because because it was. I'm like, it's interesting enough, and it's told in a

sort of the inherent tention. Um, I think the tension resolves itself towards the ends. Well, it's funny. I think writing for the wall Stree Journal actually gives me good training for this, because when I write about sports for the journal, I write for people who know everything about sports and nothing about which is not easy to do. Yeah, and so you have to thread that needle. And that's

what I wanted to do with this book. I wanted it to be entertaining to people who knew the saga of the hot hand, and also people who don't even know what the hot hand is. UM, And so that meant like trying to reach as broad of an audience as possible without alien aiding that core audience. And if you describe the hothhand simply as streaks, everybody understands what a streak is. It's not it's not that difficult to grasp.

But I thought you did a nice book. And I'll repeat on the air what I what I told you earlier. So you know, I always sift through the sources just to see um who they used. And I don't know a lot of people read the acknowledgements, but it's another version of the sources. Well, the best part of the book. You should read the dast that's the secret of any book. And I was shocked to actually find that you mentioned the Masters in Business episode with Gilovich, and that set

me back looking through the book. And I just went through, go down the list. They'll are konom and Miller. Um. I think I'm a few years into like a PhD in business from listening to this podcast. Because like, the beautiful thing is that not only have you had all of these luminaries come in here and be really open, but there are transcripts right like you can read these interviews as if their essays almost their biographies of these really brilliant minds. What what's the only problem with the

transcripts is we we don't clean them up. They just get cut and paste uff like that. And very often what sounds normal in a spoken sentence reads terribly And but there are some people who speak in paragraphs, and those people just blow my mind because I don't know how they do that. I had a buddy in grad school who would write when we would have UM some some final exams were essays and some were multiple choice. And his first draft of an essay is better than

everybody else's third draft. His the way he thought and constructed something was shout out to Jeff um was so just beautifully done. But just like, listen, the fact is that every draft makes a column better, and you don't have an infinite amount of time to do draft nine seven. It's all right, here's the research, cheers, the rough outline, here's the first pass. Now I'm going back and changing

the structure and adding more stuff. And now I'm on the second pass and then usually there's a third or a fourth pass after that. But that's it. You don't have time to do. And I know if you do five more, it just gets that much better, tighter's faster, smarter. But who you You can't do a month for a weekly column. It's a weekly and so that's really the challenge. UM. And and I found that that sort of thing really, uh,

really kind of interesting. So if you could speak fluidly the way we write, that would be a great thing. I have a pet theory which Barbara Taverski told me isn't true, or at least she says there's no data that supports it. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. I think the part of your brain responsible for writing is different, perhaps adjacent to the part of your brain responsible for speaking. I mean, I will say that I think Barbara Tverski knows more about the brain than I know about anything,

so I trust her judgment on that. But I do think, um, there is just something about like sometimes I will just sort of dictate things and go back to them later. And what I've learned actually is that, UM, sometimes the easiest way for me to write a story. I can be staring at a screen all day long writing and if I look at that document on my phone on the subway leaving work, it looks totally different and something clicks.

It's sort of like that thing where you stare across word for like fifteen minutes and you can't get a few boxes, and you come back to it a few hours later and it's just staring you right in the face, and like you're like, how did I not see this already? Have you ever seen the word jumbles where there's a reset button and it just changes the order of the letters. So so that's on on a phone or on a computer.

I have friends who, when they're writing stories, will just change the font of the story as they're writing because it makes them look at it in a completely different So I don't know if you've so you go through an editor when you publish. When I publish ship Bloomberg, I have an editor who does that. When I throw something up on the blog, I'm just completely blind to my own typos, So sometimes I'll ask someone else to give it a quick through and catch some things that

I miss. But the technique that's other people have talked about is take what you've written, cut and pasted into a different word document or whatever you're document were, you know, word processor of choices and change the size and the choice of funds, and now you're looking at it with fresh eyes. You're not on different lines, yes, and it's just order. It just changes your ability to see typos and spelling and grammar issues that you completely missed the

first time. What some editors that the journal have taught me, like, we fact checked all of our own stories, right, we don't have magazine fact checkers, but you have your own bias there. Well. Sometimes what we do is if I have looked at a story a lot, I will fact

check from the bottom up. And so when you just read the story in a different way and you're checking things off as you go, your eyes don't glide over things in the order in which you know they're coming right, because it's flipped completely the opposite way that that's really interesting. So eighteen months in the writing is that? Is that how long you're working on this for the draft? Yeah?

I mean what about the research part? Oh yeah, I worked on the proposal for a long time before that, and the research part I hired a research assistant who downloaded every paper ever written about the hot hand and sifted through them and like summarized all of them, so you didn't actually read every page. I read the summaries of all of them, but I read all the major ones.

So I have I have in my apartment to like five page binders with double sided printing of like every scholarly paper ever written about the hot hand, because I wanted to like be really fluent in the literature and not miss anything. So when when you talk about first we believe this, and then we believe that, now we believe this, is it really more of sort of a

pendulum swing. It goes from one extreme, then it goes to the other, and then when it comes back, it doesn't quite come back as far, and maybe it settles, and eventually we come up with some understanding and neither. So the initial paper clearly we see patterns where there are none, even if the math is wrong about the basketball. And then the pushback, Hey, but the math is wrong

doesn't mean the underlying thesis is wrong. But there is a hot hand, um, And then it kind of comes back, well, there's a hot hand, but we weren't looking at how difficult the shot was. We weren't looking at the defense of intensity, and that changes the number. And then a few years later, oh, now we have the ability to look at that and the pendulum swinging because of forces

beyond our control. So the first meaning technology or the data that we have right, I mean, the first paper was written using the best data that was available back then, which was terrible. Statis looks primitive now, but at the time it was cutting edge. Like the reason they were able to write this paper that the Philadelphia has seventy sixers had a statistician. He was the only person who took note of the chronology of shots, so he knew like what you would do after you made a shot,

or you made two shots or three shots. Nobody else was doing at the time. That seems crazy now because we know everything there is to know about any given shot in the NBA, right and we can look back many years and figure out anything we might want to know. But that wasn't available back then. The data that we have now was not available to the researchers in like their nerdiest wonkiest, wildest dreams or else they would have used it because they did so the seventy sixers had

a statistician and no other team did. Was that was that close to dr J? What? Why? You know? I don't know. I think this guy named Harvey Pollock was just sort of, uh, you know, one of his own. He was like a man before his time, and he was nicknamed superstat like everybody knew. He was like the towering figure in analytics before analytics was like this buzzword in sports, and yet it took decades to catch on.

That's right, quite quite shocking. So I could keep you all day, but I know I have to get to some of my favorite questions before we let you go. And I'm not going to ask you what you're streaming you're listening, because I know you're not watching t V and I know some of the podcasts you've listened to. So instead, can I even ask you what your first car was? Did you ever own a car? I drove a nineties seven four Runner in high school and college that used to be my dad's solid Toyota Truit. But

I know nothing to kills. I'm not a car guy. I absolutely no interests generational is it I like driving cars? Like I like I like when I'm on the road, like renting a car and I take Zip cars. I just I have no interest in like old Porsches or Ferraris or anything. And in the first couple of years of doing this, I started asking that question as a as a would you have for breakfast? What was your

first car? Just to do a voice check, And then the answers became so interesting that I started weaving into these questions. And then as I interview younger people, they're like, why would I ever need a car? Between Zip car and Uber? Who needs that in a car? Tell you what I'm streaming? Go ahead, big Taylor Swift fan? Oh really? Um, have you seen the Netflix documentary How Is How? Is That? Pretty great? Oh? Really? Yeah, it's in my list. I

haven't gotten to it. There is a scene in there and you will know what scene it is when you see it. That's like really arresting. It's like one of the best things you'll see on TV all year. Okay, I will definitely, I will definitely check that out. What is so? Now? I'm gonna ask you what else are you listening to and watching on on on streaming services? My streaming services? Um, my choices are strange. I I

fall asleep every night watching Netflix on my phone. Usually what I do when I travel, I do that with the iPad, do you So? Now I put in. My wife is sleeping next to me, and I have like an air pod in and I fall asleep, and um, the show I've been watching over and over is this old, not old, but old ish um show called Gilmore Girls, which I can't believe you said that. Why, I'm gonna

out myself you're a Gilmar Girls. So last summer, so my my wife and her sister have a house out in the Hampton, saying it from their parents, and um, there's always an argument about what were if we're out there, what we're gonna watch? And my my problem with them is that we'll argue over something I'll give into them and then they'll fall asleep. And I'm watching something of theirs. And one day we were prepping to go out and I'm flipping through Netflix and I'm just Gilmer Girls. What's this?

And my sister in law says, I love that show. She goes in fact, that's the show that had Melissa McCarthy in it before anyone knew who she was. So we start watching an episode and two seasons through it. I still have like a dozen seasons to go. The beautiful thing about that show is that it gives you material to fall asleep to whenever you want. So it doesn't seem like a good show to fall asleep too, because it's very fast paced. It's very like orkan Ash

a little bit. The dialogue is very like that snappy and it moves along quickly, and you would think, like, you don't want those voices in your ear before you fall asleep. But what I found is that it just sort of I've seen them so many times that like they're sort of background noise, and by the time I get to the end of the series, it's been so long since I saw the pilot and the first season that I just go back to it and started again. So so I do that with two shows, one to

watch and one to fall asleep with. I think Seinfeld's Comedians and Cars getting Coffee. I have that to just roll over to the next show. But they're too short, is the problem. But you can't watch him every day. You have to, Like that's a little bit. You watch one or two a week, and you go through the whole series, and by the time you finish the whole series. A new season comes out right, and when that's done,

you could start over. But the other show that you can have two shows to full sleep to one is The Big Bang, which I've seen a million times. Another guest, former writer, producer of the show. And and then second and I find this hilarious. My wife finds this annoying. There is a show on the Sci Fi Channel called How the Universe Works that'll put you right this so

so I'm but those shows work on two levels. If you're watching them while you're awake in a well lit room, it really is a very accessible way to reach some really interesting, cutting edge astrophysics things that are changing. That like all sorts of fascinating discoveries that you just never will see in the New York Times of Wall Street. Jenneral, it's way out there, both literally and physically. But second

you put that in a darkened room. The uh the guy who does the voice overs, he's got it's just so horrific. His voice is so deep and soothing. It's almost the real TV equivalent of ambient recommend This is food shows from other countries that are subtitled so they're slow. There's classical music like Chef's Table France will crunch it right out like that. One season will last you like a year of falling. So my I always have this to agreement with my wife. She watches shows like UM

Love It, or Listed or or Property Brothers. They engage your that's anytime there's an inherent tension and a conclusion, your brain wants to stay away till the end. So to me, deep space. What is more relaxing than a dark and screen and just the universe. It's just it's like sleeping under the stars. But what's your take on Gilmore Girls? Pretty great, right, It's really well written. I really like the characters. I haven't gotten as deep into

the show as you have. Um, So it's you know, as as you watch the show progress, there are there are always the opportunity to go the wrong way and derail a show. And I'll cause a little controversy right now. So I've watched all of the marvelous Mismaysel from the beginning. It's wonderful, except except when you watch the initial season.

The initial season is essentially what is it like for a housewife in the late fifties early sixties to break into stand up comedy in an era of very repressed speech. That's a fascinating topic. And unfortunately the show has been too successful because it kind of abandoned that theme and it's I don't care about going to the Cat Skills in the summer, even though I spent summers there as a kid. I don't like there was a whole run of the the in Laws moving to Queen's and that

that whole thing was just the the the B storylines. Um. And you could take a show like Seinfeld that would have four equal storylines and have them all go off and they would interweave and all reach a conclusion at the end. I found the B storyline invested in. Like Midge's husband, I don't care about him. Shows feel similar to you Mazel and Gilmore Girls. There are elements that are very similar. Sure well they're written by the same person.

That would that would make sense that you know I've noticed. Um. There was a British show I used to love called Coupling, which is basically Friends with some teeth. Like Friends was a milk toast lazy no, I mean, I mean with a bite. But I don't know if that's really true about the British dentistry anymore. But it was a serbic and nasty and funny, and it was written by guy whose last name is Moffett, who later goes on to write a bunch of Doctor Who and a bunch of

other stuff. And it's amazing how smart a writer, how entertaining a writer. But I think I kind of knew that some of the people associated with gilmal Girls were also associated with with Miss maysl. What what's so interesting about the show is Melissa McCarthy's character is just so like you see the glimmers, Because I came to the show after she' earlyer already was a giant star and

you could see glimmers. But even back then, like, oh, she's gonna be hindsight biased, She's going to be fantastic. Is it worth watching the rest of the show? Am I going to be? Not only do you get to watch the whole thing, you get to see Rory go to college and come out of college. But you know, Netflix did a revival I saw, so I haven't seen it, but I read about those four episodes there about an hour and a half each, and so you can kind of catch up with them about it. Is it worth it?

Because the every it's good. As an arrested development fan, I was warned off of the Netflix version. It will it will satisfy an itch. Okay, alright, that works. Wow, that was a long answer to that long Gilmore girls thought. And you thought asking about streaming would be boring, Well, you told me you weren't watching anything, So that's that's why I was watching old things I watched. There you go,

so you're not there's nothing you're watching currently. I Once I was done with the book, I I caught up on Succession in like a weekend and loved right. Um, so I watched the first two episodes. I don't matter. I don't like any of the characters and I can't. I can't and you know there's nobody I relate to. And it's like, wait, if I don't like any of these characters, if I'm not invested in any of them, if they can all get hit by a bus, that

I don't care, why am I watching this? I want to feel And I know some people have said, well, I feel the same way about Seinfeld. There was a lovable, obnoxious nous about them. It's not and the same thing with Curb your enthusiasm. Right aside from all the cringe worthiness, there's a certain appeal to the characters, and everybody wishes everybody has a bit of Larry David. Well, well you wish,

so Larry David is nothing like Larry David. Larry that is his kid right blown up, And we all wish there are times when we could give voice, like I come into the city on the seven, all right, go from the true because I don't want to go to Penn Station, so I'll come in that way. And I am still after years and years and years, astonished that this is literally the busiest subway stop in all of the New York City subway system and people haven't figured out to get the hell out of the way of

the door. Really are you just paying? So? And I wanna There was a great um Seth Myers before the new season came out where they have Larry David on and basically set Larry David loose on all the writers to be Larry David and throughout the day. So one of the writers invites people to his home for dinner and Larry, no, no, you have to work with these people. They don't want to waste their Thursday night having dinner, and it's just great to have Larry David there as

a foil for your deepest dark secrets. I have that sort of running internal narrative constantly. The best thing that I've streamed recently probably is that, UM, I am a huge John Laney dork, and UM, I just think he's a genius. So many there's so many like I I

watched his talk show appearances because they're hilarious. The funniest thing on the internet is, Uh, he did and in review at the Street Why with Nick roll in their oh hello characters with and they're right, they are old old colleagues from way back when, and it's an interview with John Oliver and it's about ninety minutes. Um, John Oliver interviews them, they take Q and a's and I cannot describe how just outrageously funny this thing is. It is like it's it's I think he is the funniest

stand up on the planet. It's funnier than any of his stand ups because the way that he can embody these characters is it's it's incredible. I would watch it like I have watched it so many times, and I like happily watch it any time it comes out, all right, So I'm gonna put that on my list. Let me let me run through some of my favorite questions that otherwise uh people will yell email me and and complain. So who your early mentors, What journalists influenced the way

you approach covering sports? There were a lot before I got to the Wall Street Journal, But there was one guy at the Wall Street Journal named Sam Walker, who was the founding sports editor of the journal, who is this brilliant and insane and insanely brilliant and brilliantly insane person who sort of set the bar really really high.

And so when I was an intern, when I freelanced for the paper for a while, even when I was a staff writer, it felt like every time you got a story into the paper, you were like pole vault thing basically, like you were trying to get above a certain point. And um, I think that's why we used to hear a lot of the journal like we didn't know that you covered sports because we didn't. But now I think people understand that we try to do something

a little bit different, and that's because of Sam. I think he sort of taught me what a good story was and like to not be precious with my own writing and to just like let other people make it better. So Sam hired me and had this huge influence on my life. Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorite books? What do you like to read when you're not writing books? Yeah, I mean it's I'm a

sucker for the Michael Lewis books. I like, I think money Ball Is is still brilliant and um, when I went to visit Nick Hagan on the farm, we were talking as we boarded, like his weak combine. I asked him sometimes I write to classical music, and I asked him,

like who should I be listening to? Like who who is your favorite composer since you was at Juilliard and he played trombone and he said, um, you know, I know this is going to sound silly, but like the best guy is Mozart and he's like and I know, like you know, other people know Mozart, but like I

know Mozart and like I appreciate him. And I sort of feel the same way about Michael Lewis, like everybody loves his books, but like, you know, as someone who has tried to write a book along the same lines, like the stories that he finds like on a sentence level, like everything about them they're they're just brilliant, like they

just they hold up. And whenever I feel stuck, I might sometimes go back and and read some just a few pages from his books because like that voice, like it just gets in your head and it's I love it. I I anxiously await all so money will get you wanna mention another one of his or and then other books you you like, well, I mean The blind Side, the Undoing Project. Um, now I don't know, I I M I read these types of books. I mean part of this book is like it is like using a

social stych. It is like using an idea from so psychology to explore the world. And there are a lot of books along those lines. And I think I read them at an impressionable age. They really like they really became popular when I was like in middle school, high school, and like they were just sort of intoxicating to me. And so um, there are a lot of books like that, I mean novels too, Like you know, I loved the Salary Rooney book Normal People when it came out, like

like everybody else in New York City, it seems. And but but those that you know Moneyball and like the Michael Lewis Cannon, that's that's that's what really does it for me. Tell us about a time you failed and what you learned from the experience. It was, Well, I feel like I fail every time I write a story because, like you know, you're writing a newspaper story that's a thousand words words, like you've talked to a lot of people, you know, all this nuance that you can't possibly pack

into the story. And so, like you know, every time the story comes out, like I, I feel like it's not good enough, right. But but one time I really failed. It was actually not too long ago. Um. I wrote one of my like bajillion stories about the Golden State Warriors last year, and it was right before the finals, and you know, I needed something new to say about this team that I've been I about for five or six years. Um And we have a daily newspaper, and like,

you know, give me a break. Not every story is perfect. And um, I was trying to express this thought that I had that the Golden State Warriors were the Golden State Warriors because there were like five Um, really valuable players on that team, and you take out any one of them and the whole thing falls apart. It's a bit like a Jenga tower, right. Um. And the way I phreeze this in the story was like, the Warriors are this dynasty because of Steph Curry, Clay Thompson, Kevin Durant,

Draymond Green, and Andrea Gudala. And the end was italicized right because it was meant to say that, like, if you take out any one of their contributions, they're not the Warriors. That's not always the case with basketball teams. Like basketball teams were built around one or two guys. The ninety s Bulls are the Bulls. With Jordan's you could sort of substitute a lot of other guys, right,

can't do that with the Warriors. Um. The problem was that, Um, I forgot that like on Twitter and on social media, you can't italicize words, right, and so UM when this stuff ran on social media, when I wrote tweets that we could share from like you know, wha, Um, it appears as like the Golden State Warriors are good because of Steph Curry, Clay Thompson, Kevin Durantraymond Grand and Andrea Guadala.

And this turned into one day last year, like the entire internet dunking on the Wall Street Journal because it read like the Beatles are good because of Paul, George, John and Ringo. You know, like it that's a fair statement. Yeah, but it just sure it's Paul and John. But you know they're not the Beatles necessarily without George and Ringo. But it made for it. It looked like this very

silly sentiment, and I just felt terrible. I felt like, when you have the entire internet like making fun of you for a day, you're just like god right, um and so um. What it taught me was like you kind of have to be careful and like every word actually matters. And also that like people forget about things on Twitter after a few hours, life is really short, future reference and well capitalize the equivalent in stars. Yes,

that would make you to know a couple of months ago. Alright, Well, I'll share my other uh secret Twitter secret with you later. You'll you'll appreciate this. Um, what do you do for fun? What do you do when you're not banging out columns for the journal? Well? I can't watch sports because sports is work, right, and my brand is always working. Um. I just wrote a book in my spare time, so

I don't know all that much about fun. But one thing, one thing that I love lately is that, um, um, this is gonna sound silly, but um there's this YouTube channel from Bone Appetite and I don't know if you're familiar with it, and I'm not a great home cook, but um this these videos are like so magical and I'm reeling and like, um, there there are the editors in the test kitchen and the recipe developers. Um, they're just really charming and like you sort of fall in

love with that. I'm a new episodes like almost every day, and my wife and I they're like fifteen minutes, will just put it on and like it really like soothes me before I go to sleep. Okay, So I'm gonna give you marriage advice that I wish someone had given

me many decades ago. My wife and I both like to cook, and it's only fairly recently that we started on a Sunday night pulling a cookbook out and making a recipe from scratch and not just like a simple you know, boil water throw pasta, like a full blown Bobby Flay recipe. And we've developed over just a couple of years a few favorite things. We have a dinner party. We know exactly what we're gonna make, and I you're married,

how long now? Like three years? Okay, had we been doing this twenty five years ago, we would be fantastic chefs. We don't do it over the summer because that's always barbecue. But through especially from like the late fall to early spring, was it a new recipe every time? Just about just every now and then we'll go back to something and so right, and very often it's like, wow, that's a lot of work, and this isn't that good. Most of the time it's this was really good. And every now

and then it's like, oh my goodness, your favorite. Um. I have to say, I love the Bobby Flay cookbook. Uh. And we have like a whole shelf of a dozen different cookbooks. There are a handful of people that try and work on on basics and I'm I'm embarrassed. Um what is her name? She has a restaurant I really like out in Hampton's called the Canal Cafe. There's something

Gourmam drown a blanket. Had I prepped for this question. Um, absolutely, But but play with that and see if that does anything for you, Because we've just had a fun it's actually, um, not only useful, but like fun, it makes you actually want to do it right and you start to look forward to because usually Sunday night as I'm prepping for the beginning of work. Now you go shopping sometime over the weekend and then you do this and of course you have a bottle of wine open um, and sometimes

you're drinking a bit throughout. It doesn't have to be Sunday nights. It just worked out for us. But it's a lot of fun. Um. And our final two questions, Uh, what sort of advice would you give a college grad who was interested in any of the sports or journalism? Um, to take advantage of their place in the world. So sometimes when the journal has interns, I always tell them this, that what they know, what their world is is actually very different from the world of the people like running

the Wall Street Journal. So like just by virtue of being twenty one years old, you are on TikTok, right, and you talk to other twenty one year olds, and you know what, like this very interesting um subset of people are interested in and so like you almost think of your world as like this subculture to mine, like you are an anthropologist, and so by the very first frontage story I wrote for the Wall Street Journal was a few months after I graduated from college, and it

was about this dance craze known as the Dougie, which you might remember this song like you know, teach Me how to Dougie, and everybody in sports was doing it. Was this was this an ahead kind of wise, it was an ahead and so um, and I tell them specifically, like you know, the ahead does not have to be about like you know, birding or something or something that, like you think, like it can just be something funny

about something in your life. And so like, you know, the people running the Wall Street Journal did not know what the duck you was. But I was twenty one. Of course I knew what the duck you was, right, And like you can take advantage of that, Like what you know is actually pretty interesting, huh, quite quite interesting? And what is it about the world of sports that you know today that you wish you knew? No, normally I would say years ago, but a couple of years

ago when you got started in in your career. Um that I should have taken a single course in economics or psychology or statistics or computer science when I was in college. I graduated from school and like immediately recognized that what I wanted to do, I really needed more of, like a quantitative background that I don't think I have

to this day. And I wish I knew how to write code, and I wish I knew how to like really understand um statistics because it has become like essential in sports now and really writing about sports, like writing about sports fluently and finding interesting stories, like you can really use numbers and then try to build stories around them, which is something I hope I did in this book. Well, quite fascinating. I really enjoyed the book. Thank you, Ben

for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Ben Cohen. He is the NBA reporter for The Wall Street Journal and author of the new book The Hot Hands, The Mystery and Science of Streaks. If you enjoy this conversation well, be sure to look Up an Inch or Down an Inch on Apple iTunes, where you can see any of the previous three hundred plus conversations we've had over the past five plus years. We love your comments, feedback, and suggestions. Be sure and give

us a review on Apple iTunes. Check out my weekly column on Bloomberg dot com. Sign up from my daily reads on Ridholtz dot com. I would be remiss if I did not thank the Crack staff who helps put these conversations together each week. Nick Falco is my recording engineer. Sam Shivraj is my booker. Slash producer. Michael Batnick is our head of research. I'm Barry Retults. You've been listening to Master's Business on Bloomberg Radio