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better is always out there for people who can find it.
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And I think that there are all sorts of ways of achieving better.
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Nurturing that [music] sentiment um and that mentality I think is really important.
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When I'm writing a column, I've had to think every time I'm staring at the blank document and the blinking cursor, I have to convince myself [music] like if you think this is interesting, somebody else will too.
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And in some ways, that's like, oh, there's a better way of covering this story and this is the way.
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It's not making something new.
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It's taking something that already exists and making it better.
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[music] Welcome to this week's episode of Infinite Loops. My name is Jimmy Sony.
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I'm the editor-in chief of Infinite Books and I'm filling in for Jim Oanisy.
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This week's guest is Wall Street Journal's [music] Ben Cohen.
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Ben is best known for his science of success column.
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We cover all kinds of ground in this conversation.
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Please enjoy this week's episode of Infinite Loops.
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Ben Cohen, thank you for coming on Infinite Loops. >> Thanks for having me.
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>> Yeah, I'm really excited about this.
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Um, this has been something I've been looking forward to for a while because I've been a fan of your work for a long time because I think you cover the widest range of things that somebody I know writes about like out there like it it is it is everything from like the pants at Costco to sports to why the fuel indicator on your car goes a certain way.
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Like I have I have yet to meet somebody that covers a range of things that you write about.
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So >> all the important things in the world. >> Exactly.
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I'm excited to have you here and you know we can just dive right in and see where this all takes us.
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One of the reasons we're having you on is you're you're an author and you have this side hustle at the Wall Street Journal.
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Uh but I'm I'm curious kind of take us back to how did you get your start in writing?
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Again thinking about it as a vocation or even as an avocation.
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I feel like some kids like grow up wanting to be astronauts and for some reason I just always wanted to be a sports journalist.
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I have no idea why, but I very vividly remember just like reading the sports section on my local newspaper every morning growing up and like going through the box scores and then eventually like knowing who the columnists were and reading every piece.
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Um, and like having it dawn on me that people actually do this for a living and that I could do it too if I wanted to.
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And so even when I was like in middle school, like I wanted to write about sports for a living.
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Um I didn't know anyone who did it.
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Um I like was randomly emailing people who like wrote for the Star Ledger in New Jersey and like was starting to write into the newspaper letter section.
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So every day in the Star Ledger um they would like ask a question about something happening in sports at the time and I would just write in and I would have my name and my writing in the local newspaper.
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So, no one knew that like Ben Cohen from Livingston, New Jersey was like 10 years old, like weighing in with like hot takes about the Yankees, you know.
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Um, >> how how often did you get published in the Star Lecture as a as a 10-year-old? >> Frighteningly often. [laughter] Yeah.
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>> Which I think may have something to do with the fact that like I may have been the only person writing in, but like they would ask a question and they would print like between eight and 15 responses and they would like run them throughout the course of the week.
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There's probably a different question every week.
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So, I feel like I I I feel like if you went through the the the archives of the Star Ledger, you would find my name in there dozens of times. >> Wow. Yeah.
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And that was your first by >> I think it was my first by line. Yeah. Newspaper. That's awesome.
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Um and so I was always obsessed with it and I was writing for my high school newspaper and I would like watch games and then like go up to the computer room in our house.
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Remember computer rooms in our house?
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And would try to like bang out columns on deadline and they're horrible, right?
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Um and then uh I I really started writing for a newspaper for the first time when I got to college.
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And that um you know at that point like we had gone from like growing up and wanting to be astronauts or like doctors and lawyers to like consultants and eye bankers and that just never interested me.
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Like from the second I stepped on campus at college, I knew I wanted to be a journalist and probably that like wasn't the greatest idea like financially for my mental health or anything.
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Um, but it was like all that I wanted to do and kind of all that I can do.
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And so I'm I feel very lucky that I'm actually able to do it now. >> That's amazing.
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I I didn't know that part of your story.
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The >> you weren't familiar with the the sports archives in the >> 19. Yeah, exactly.
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I should have done more homework.
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Um the was when you think back on that time just if you can I mean it might be impossible.
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So much time has passed but do you did you get like do you remember the first thing you got published like was it like a thrill from the jump? >> Yeah, always.
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I mean, at that point, like getting published was not like looking at my phone or like something in pixels.
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It was like literally going outside on the doorstep was the Star Ledger in like yellow newspaper bag, opening it up, having no idea like if my response was going to be in the paper that day, right?
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Like it wasn't like they emailed you and said, "Oh yeah, you're going to be in the paper tomorrow."
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So every time I wrote in, I would like frantically open the newspaper and go to the second page and say, "Oh, is this a day that I'm in the newspaper?"
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Um and I sort of felt that way um you know throughout like I remember um I played sports in high school and I would always be curious like oh am I like it our baseball game yesterday like who are they going to pull out and like put in the paper.
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So that thrill of like of being in the paper was like familiar to me from a young age and I still feel that way.
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I don't it it it um I don't have that I I know when I'm going to be in the newspaper now, so it's like not as thrilling, but it's still very cool to like be able to open a print newspaper, a thing that still exists and say, "Oh my god, there's my name in it.
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>> There's your name in it." Yeah.
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>> Did your parents think you were like a savant or like did they do they see like a child prodigy in you because you're getting these these?
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I think they thought it was cool.
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I think they um they saw that I was passionate about it and they they pushed me towards it and did not deter me from trying to be a newspaper journalist when um maybe they should have.
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So I don't know what they imagined for me.
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I don't know if it was astronaut or investment banker, but I landed somewhere like in another galaxy.
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>> In another galaxy, right? How did you choose?
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You and I share the the the August fact that we were both Duke alumni.
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[snorts] >> Not supposed to tell people.
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>> Not supposed to tell people, right? Um first of Fight Club.
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Uh, what made you choose Duke out of curiosity?
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Cuz it's not the natural place for somebody who's going to it's it's a more natural place for somebody who's going to go become a banker or a consultant, not a journalist.
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>> I would argue that it's quite a natural place for a boy from New Jersey who likes basketball to end up.
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Maybe the most natural place in the world, but no.
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Um, uh, I mean, it it it is a fantastic school as we both know.
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Um, and I was obsessed with the basketball team forever.
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I mean, I I can say that like I was also obsessed with the UNCC basketball team from a young age, but um I remember um I think like most kids who end up touring that school, like I sort of um went through the tour and like braved the whole thing and was like just sort of counting down the seconds until we could cross Tower View Road and like get to Cameron because that was like the place that I wanted to check out, right?
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And so, um, the idea of like going to Duke and going to basketball games, much less like being able to sit at center court and write about those basketball games would have been just like a total dream to 10-year-old me writing into the Star Ledger, >> right?
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Um, did uh did that did your work there like you were already bitten by the bug and this just I mean this just made it go viral, right? Like >> Yeah. Yeah.
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It was like full infestation when I was at Duke. Yeah.
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So, I was the um I was the I I wrote as a freshman and a sophomore.
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As a junior, I was the sports editor of The Chronicle, which is Duke's newspaper.
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And that was like my full-time job and major.
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Like, I technically majored in English at Duke, but I majored in The Chronicle.
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Like, I spent we The Chronicle had a program where the top editors um took a reduced course load.
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So, I think um my junior fall, which was like the big time when I was spending 80 hours a week in the office of the Chronicle, I took two courses in an independent study.
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I think I was in class for like 2 hours a week and I was just like putting the paper to bed at 3:00 a. m.
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every night every day like daily print newspaper.
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Um, and this was at a time that you remember like you would kill time before class by like opening up the newspaper in print and read it in in the classroom.
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And by read it, I mean like you would do the Sudoku and the crossword in the back with a pen, right?
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But we didn't have iPhones then.
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Like we had sort of had flip phones and then like Blackberries.
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The iPhone came out like in the middle of my college experience, but it wasn't ubiquitous at the time.
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It was like a real thrill in the same way that it was like gratifying and thrilling and super exciting for me as a 10-year-old to be able to see my name in the print newspaper.
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It was so cool to like be in a lecture hall and see people like reading the thing that I had written in a delirious state the night before that morning in class, right?
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Like it is the closest thing that there is to like a community newspaper where you are surrounded by the your readers of that community, right?
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Um, so I knew that like my fellow students were reading it.
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I knew that professors were reading it.
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I knew that like Code K was reading it.
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You know, it's like an awesome power and responsibility for like a 19-year-old who has no idea what he's doing to be read by like everyone who is with you on campus, which I just found super cool.
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>> Oh, that's that's uh I couldn't have put it better myself.
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I did a column when I was a senior >> and I remember spending so much more time on that column than I ever did on actual school work.
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like I was like like trying to make it into something memorable and meanwhile these papers actually count for something, right? >> Well, yeah.
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But when you write a paper, one person reads it, right?
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And when you write a column, like you have no idea who's going to read it or why or when or like what um effects will come from you having written that column, right?
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And so there's like much more pressure and like responsibility I feel in like being able to say something novel and interesting and engaging.
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And like that's still what I'm doing today, which is fun.
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But like I there will I will never have like a feedback loop I feel like the way that I did back then. Yeah.
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>> Do you have standout moments from that time in your writing life like that like a piece or a particular thing you did that you you'll never forget? >> I mean a lot. Yeah.
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Like covering basketball games.
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One of the great privileges of being the sports editor of the Chronicle is that my junior year I covered the Duke Carolina game.
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like um a game that as you know kids will like literally camp out in tents for months for attendance.
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I sort of walted in like you know 2 hours before and I feel like I made a point of getting there really early that day like before the arena opened to the public and just sort of like sitting in this hallowed ground like silent.
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I vividly remember John Shire was um warming up.
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Shire was um warming up. He was like the first person out there and John is now John was my class at school and is now the head coach of the basketball team which is a very weird thing for me but like just thinking about it now I sort
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of have goosebumps because I'm like when when else am I going to be in Cameron Indoor Stadium before the biggest game of the year um but but there are all sorts of moments like that like I remember um when I was the sports editor
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Duke hired a new football coach named David Cutcliffe and nobody knew anything about him and um I like sort of made it my mission to like profile him in a lot of interesting ways and like dig up interesting moments from his past and like got lots of time with him um over
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the course of that year um in a way that like I'm sure he wasn't expecting to be spending time with a student reporter over the course of that year, but like these little vignettes from his past. And it kind of reminded me like my first
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And it kind of reminded me like my first introduction in looking for new angles into stories that everybody else is covering, which is what I'm still doing today.
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And that if you put in the work, then people will respect it.
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Even if you happen to be a student reporter and the person you're trying to get the respect of is like the head coach of a of a college football team. >> Yeah.
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I had, you know, this is a a specific question that it's not not anything I would ask any other guest, but did you did you ever have attention in writing objectively while also being a fan because you are a student, right?
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And you are you're by like you're there.
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Are you allowed to cheer?
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[laughter] Like what what are the what are the rules?
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>> Definitely not when you're on press row.
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Um but uh like it's a it's a very it's one of the stranger parts of that particular job and it's um something that I really don't have to deal with now.
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Um you know I I did write about Duke a little bit for the Wall Street Journal.
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Um but even then like you're not a student at Duke, right?
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And so um but I think that there is I think some of the rules of objectivity in that sense have kind of loosened a little bit and they were loosening at the time.
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Like there's no pretending that I'm not a Duke student, right?
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And sometimes you would go like all the way the other way and be more critical because you cared like more deeply, right?
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Like I would imagine that I like had much more nuanced and complex views about Mike Shasheesky when I was the a student at Duke than I than like I would as an alumnest, right?
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Because you're just around it all the time.
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You have such high standards and like you're crazy and like you're sleepd deprived and you think you know everything and you're on top of the world.
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Um but you know I was a senior when they won the national championship and like >> oh man >> I wanted them to win the national championship.
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I wasn't objective about this fact. Right. [laughter] >> Right. Right.
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No studied objectivity in the the chase for the >> there was not in fact I like um I did not cover >> the national championship.
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Um and I did not go partly because like it wasn't my turn to cover the team when um they went.
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went. But I I um I faced this choice um when I was a senior of do I want to go to Indianapolis to watch them win the national championship or play for the national championship or do I want to stay on campus and I thought you know hopefully there will be like another
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chance to see a Duke team win a national championship or play in the final four but I'll like never have an opportunity again to be on campus as a senior with my friends when they're playing in the final four and so I stay on campus which I still like insist was the right decision. >> Right. Right. Fast forward, you finish >> Right. Right.
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Fast forward, you finish up at Duke.
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How do you wind up doing prof journalism as a profession? >> Blackmail. Yeah. No.
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[laughter] Um, I applied for an internship at the Wall Street Journal and I didn't get it at first.
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Um, which is one of those sliding door moments because I'm not quite sure what would have happened otherwise. So, um, I applied.
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>> Are you a senior at this point? >> I was a senior. Yeah.
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And, and I had this really great conversation with the sports editor of the journal at the time.
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Um, and it turns out he had like already offered the internship to somebody else and he had seen my application at the bottom of a packet and thought it looked interesting for a whole bunch of reasons and called.
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We had this great conversation.
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He was like, you know, I this is all great except I've I've basically offered this internship already to someone and I was like, well, that's too bad.
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And then um the first week of May in my senior year of college, I got a call from um the sports editor of the Wall Street Journal who said um the person I offered the internship to who had taken it.
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Just took a job at the Washington Post.
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So this internship is open.
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Are you doing anything this summer?
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And I was like I'm I'm not I have nothing else.
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I literally had nothing else lined up.
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I didn't know what I was going to do.
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I was going to stay in Durham and just sort of like bum around and try to pick up clips.
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And he was like, can you start in 2 weeks?
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And I was like, >> okay, sure.
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So, I moved up and um got an internship at the Wall Street Journal.
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That was 10 weeks and I sort of kept my foot in the door and I've been there ever since. >> Wow. Okay.
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So, you've had one employer after graduation.
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>> Um what was that first?
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Was it a baptism by fire or was the Chronicle harder than the internship at the Wall Street Journal?
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>> Um [laughter] the Chronicle was very difficult in its own way.
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No, the the >> working for the Wall Street Journal for the first time it a trial by fire is one way to put it.
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I remember um the first time I filed a story um to the sports editor who is this like completely brilliant editor and I'm sure we'll talk about him later, but and and really was like so formative in so many ways for me.
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Um I filed this piece um to the editor and like a couple other people underneath him because that's how we filed stories back then.
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I remember I filed a story and a couple other editors walked over to my desk and they were like, "This looks great."
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And I was like, "Oh, great."
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And they were like, "Whatever happens next, like don't take it personally. it's going to be okay. And I was like, "Okay."
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And then like 2 hours later, um, I got back a a rewritten version of the piece that had, I think, my by line on top of it and no other words that I had written.
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And it was just a complete top tobottom rewrite.
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>> And I was like, "Okay, that I guess this is how it's going to be."
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And that really like drilled into me like what the standards and quality of a Wall Street Journal piece had to be at that time. >> Interesting.
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And did that keep happening?
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like did you keep going through the or did the rewrites get get a little less substantive as you went along?
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They definitely got less, but um but the first editor I worked for at the journal had just insanely high standards.
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And um at the time we only ran one story a day in the sports section.
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And there were probably, you know, between 8 and 12 reporters.
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And so everyone was battling for that print space.
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And so like the bar to get a story into the paper was like you had to be like Mondo Duplontes to clear it. It was so high.
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was so high. and the reporting had to be so deep and the idea had to be so novel and inventive and at that time the nice thing about really like the the super fortuitous thing about writing for the Wall Street Journal sports section back then um I joined in 2010
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the journal didn't have a sports section until 2009 um which is kind of remarkable if you think about it if you would think like what topic would Wall Street Journal readers be interested in you would think sports would be at the top of the list but we launched a page for the first time in print in 2009. And
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And what that meant was that >> there was no legacy or baggage um of like we've covered sports for this way for 150 years and so there's going to be box scores and there's going to be game stories and this is how we've always done it and so this is how we will continue to do it.
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We had to invent that on the fly and think how should we cover sports today.
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And the formula or the model that the the founding editor Sam Walker came up with was that a story that runs in the Wall Street Journal sports section not only can't run in any other section but hasn't run in any other section.
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So if you think about the way that a lot of journalism works now, it's like finding like everyone sort of writes the same story over and over again.
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And if one person writes a story and it does well, then lots of other outlets will write that story.
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We were always looking for like clever angles um into news and we were looking to break news.
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So like there are lots of ways to get exclusive stories that nobody else is writing there.
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You can have like some incredible investigative piece and like turn up news that nobody else has.
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You can write a piece in a completely different way that like makes it stand out from everything else. You can collect data.
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You can you can analyze data in a different way.
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You can um create the data yourself.
18:55
You can be funny in an industry where like nobody like attempts to be humorous, right?
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You could just call a million more people than anyone else is going to call.
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You can look for ideas in different places.
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And so like whenever we had like space in the page, which is every day we had to fill it with something that couldn't have run anywhere else and hasn't run anywhere else.
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And that was the challenge like on a daily basis.
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And so when I learned like what journalism is, I learned it first from the Chronicle, which was like its own form of journalism, and then from the Wall Street Journal and specifically this like pirate ship off of the Titanic of the Wall Street Journal that was just trying to be creative and inventive and interesting and give people something that they didn't know that they wanted, but that they did want every single day. >> Yeah.
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Did uh do you remember your first piece that ran in the journal?
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Like the first piece where you met that bar?
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the first piece and the first piece where I like felt I met the bar probably different.
19:48
One of the pieces um that ran I started in the summer of 2010 and it was a World Cup summer and so um we had a bunch of people in South Africa and then we had a bunch of people like in the office just like reporting their own things and I remember at the time the journal had uh a feature of the uh sports page every day called the count um which was like a short statistical piece every single day.
20:09
Sometimes it was like gathering data that was out there and like saying like how many times do the Dallas Mavericks high-five each other during a game and sometimes it was like what if we just like took an idea and like pushed it to the max and like gathered all this data that was available and just presented it.
20:27
And so um one of them in fact it might have been the piece that um I filed and every editor sworn my desk and said this is fine.
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it's going to get rewritten, but don't worry.
20:36
Was um my editor who is insane and brilliant came over one day and um he said, "What if the World Cup was a war? Who would win?"
20:44
Like how would we go about quantifying this like military size and GDP and like just come up with all these different metrics and let's rank them and see like where we are.
20:56
And um and presumably that meant like the US was not going to win.
20:59
we didn't have to come up with like actually the Netherlands would win if there or it was like the round of 16.
21:05
And so that was like you know before like Claude could just go out and do this for you.
21:09
It was like, well, how are we going to think about this and what data are we going to get and how are we going to like confirm that it's um accurate and like that this is reliable and it's not just like something that we pulled off Wikipedia and is there a way that we can present this in like that is not completely offensive but is actually interesting and thoughtprovoking and kind of funny and people will like get it.
21:30
Um so that was one that stands out from that first summer of like oh yeah what if the World Cup were war?
21:35
Did you can you talk a little bit more about Sam Walker and like kind of the effect that he's had on your career and your life and the way you write and all of that?
21:43
>> Yeah, I Sam Walker um there are a lot of um people who came up through the Wall Street Journal sports section then and I think they would all credit Sam for sort of being like the evil genius voice in our head.
21:56
And Sam is like a brilliant writer himself.
21:58
Like one of the reasons why it was okay that Sam was rewriting you was because he was just such a better writer than any of us were that like you would read it and be like well I would never say this but like said way better. >> Yeah.
22:10
Like I the the fact that like my name is on these words is actually great and just like a diabolical genius.
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Like he has just such smart and clever and like inventive ideas and ways of reporting and writing and like just making sentences sing and like He's his voice is like constantly in my head.
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And so he one of his rules for writing and especially like finding stories was that the lead quote in any story that we wrote which meant that like what this meant was that the idea had to the idea of for every story that we wrote had to be like so clever and so novel that the lead quote could have been not that it should have been but could have been I've never seen anything like this before. [laughter] Right?
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And that was like what we aspire to every single time.
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And so we always looking for ideas that could be I've never seen anything like this before.
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And like the highest form of praise is when Sam would just write back in an email like >> yes with like eight exclamation points and like weird like bolds and yellow highlights and like that praise and affirmation is like still I should just print out those emails because like they still mean so much to me.
23:20
So, fast forward a little bit, but I'm curious how, you know, you you got the bookw writing bug at some point and you did these, you know, we'll talk about your your book, The Hot Hand, and what you're working on now, but you did a couple of ebooks like like short books that you did on your own with a publisher.
23:38
Tell me the story about those because, you know, they're close to my heart.
23:41
One's obviously about Coach K.
23:42
Um, so there's a Duke connection, but I'm curious like what prompted those projects >> that was um, so there was I I lied a little bit.
23:50
There's like a slight gap in which I was freelancing for the Wall Street Journal.
23:54
Um, and I was like editing and writing a lot of stories but was not on staff and so I had the freedom to do a little bit of freelance experimentation.
24:02
And in 2011, it must have been, um, Mike Shashesky was going to break the all-time college basketball wins record.
24:10
And I thought, you know, I've probably thought more about Mike Shasheesky than most people on this planet.
24:15
Um, and have had some privileged access to him and feel like I could get a little bit more.
24:19
There had sort of been a change in his career that coincided with the time that I was at Duke and writing about him and thinking about him like a lot.
24:28
about him like a lot. And I thought maybe there might be something interesting here like what is it like when a 23 24 year old writer tries to write like a long magazineish profile of coach K that is not like written by 40
24:44
and 50 year olds who remember what he was like when he was hired at Duke but like who was on campus as he was evolving and turning into this version of Coach K that kind of the world knows and maybe doesn't love but or or or or loves to hate or but but is just familiar with, right? And um his career
25:02
And um his career had evolved in like a really interesting way.
25:05
And so um so I wrote this like ebook which is kind of like sort of like a long magazine piece about like how he got to this point in his career which allowed me to flex my muscles a little bit and go beyond my comfort zone.
25:18
I don't think I've read it in 15 years.
25:20
I have no idea if it's any good or not and I would probably be mortified to read it today.
25:25
Um, but it was like an interesting experiment both with like the form of actually writing it and in like the medium in which it was presented, right?
25:33
It was not a newspaper piece.
25:35
It was not a magazine piece.
25:35
It was like asking people to pay 99 cents for a piece of journalism, which is like still kind of a novel concept, but was like very strange and interesting back then.
25:46
>> Did Did it Did it do what you wanted it to do?
25:48
Like did you get feedback?
25:48
Did you like I don't know what metrics you might have had for it success, but I'm curious like other than feeling like you did something.
25:55
Did you did you measure the success of it in any other way?
25:59
>> You know, I don't really remember.
25:59
I remember just like thinking, oh, this thing exists. My name is on Amazon.
26:03
com now and like which is it hadn't been before and like I accomplished this thing and like I had always known that I wanted to write books too and this seemed like an interesting stepping stone along the way.
26:15
You know, at the time, writing for a newspaper meant like writing, you know, stories that were between 800 and,200 words, right?
26:22
And no matter how many calls you made or how much reporting you had, those the stories were between 800 and,200 words every time.
26:31
And so this was, okay, well, I've been thinking about this guy for five, six years at this point, right?
26:34
I can call a bunch of people.
26:36
I have pretty good institutional knowledge about this guy.
26:39
Like, what would it mean to write 8,000 to 12,000 words?
26:41
Um, and you know, when you get to a book, it's what would it mean to write 80,000 words and how to keep people's attention.
26:48
But it was an interesting experiment in that form, I think. >> Got it.
26:52
You said that you had always had designs on writing books.
26:54
Was that just a natural extension of kind of being around writers and word people and being in news rooms and stuff or did you were you like is this a big part of your life like books in general?
27:03
When I was a kid, I just loved being in the bookstore and I loved like seeing what was on the bookshelf and imagining like who are these writers and like where do they get these ideas and how do they go about reporting?
27:14
reporting? I mean, it's like a big journalism nerd and like I still am like I still like I'm very curious about like where people get their ideas from and um and how they actually go about structuring their day to write books and
27:27
um so I I just and it just seemed like the natural next step of you're a journalist and you get to write books like that is I said get to not have to or like you know whatever but um uh it seemed like a great like privilege and like something that would be really fun to do. >> Yeah. Do you were there when I was >> Yeah.
27:40
>> Yeah. Do you were there when I was growing up there were books that like really stayed with me like series that I would just devour and I look back and I'm like a lot can be explained by those choices like I'll give you an example just to like to riff on it but there was
27:55
the choose your own adventure series and and I think I would have like the right psychiatrist would have diagnosed me as sufficiently neurotic if they had seen that at every critical juncture in a choose your own adventure book I would doggeear the page so I could go back and make a different decision. Right? Right?
28:13
>> Choose a different like but at every decision I would like dog.
28:21
I'm curious if there were like series or series of books that when you were a kid like really stayed with you.
28:26
>> I remember reading like the Matt Christopher like young adult sports books.
28:30
Um I don't remember like I I definitely do doggeeared the pages but I don't remember going back and like choosing different endings for them.
28:36
Um, but I feel like that um got me from a young age and um uh Goosebumps like obsessed with Goosebumps >> and I think maybe just because there were like new books all the time, right?
28:49
And the same way that like you know you had to wait like four years for a new Harry Potter book or whatever, but like these there was there was a series and you could just sort of keep banging through them.
28:57
So I was like a voracious reader when I was young and I still am. Not so much books.
29:01
I just read like the internet all day long now, right?
29:04
in every newspaper and I start my day and I read the journal and the times like on my phone like I'm sort of a completist.
29:12
I just try to read as much as possible in part because like that's where I get my ideas now.
29:15
Like there are reporters who are very good at like calling their sources and calling 50 people a day and like smoozing and sweetalking them and like I'm surrounded by these people at the Wall Street Journal and like they are on their phones and like just like chatting with people all day long and I'm not good at that and that's not how I get ideas.
29:34
I get ideas by like reading everything I can and trying to find nuggets or ideas or stories that connect and like haven't been connected before.
29:44
And I feel like my competitive advantage in journalism is having a good eye for a story and like seeing what is out there and being able to connect dots.
29:51
Um, but I remember like the first the book that probably made the most impact on me was Moneyball which came out um when I was in high school and I was obsessed with baseball and I love statistics and I love journalism and that book is just so brilliant in so many ways.
30:07
It is like and and this was before I mean I was in nth grade.
30:12
I didn't know that like all of business was going to become like Moneyball for this, right?
30:16
Um, but I just remember reading that story and thinking, "Oh my god, someone wrote this, right?"
30:22
Like, "How did this person like find this story?
30:24
How is it like written so compellingly and like hilariously and insightfully like there that story is just so brilliant from start to finish and the fact that it was just sitting there under his nose for for someone to write and to write it the way that he did and then for that story like to become the story of everything in America, right?
30:44
a cultural touchstone in a kind of perverse way, right? >> For sure. For sure.
30:48
And it's still like you're still seeing the ripple effects of it now in every industry um including sports, right?
30:54
It is still like playing out in sports to this day and um it would completely revolutionize sports like during the time when I started writing about sports myself, right?
31:05
Like the statistical revolution and how players were valued um is kind of what I spent 10 years writing about um as a sports writer at the journal.
31:13
that idea of like a bunch of numbers on a page changing the way that an entire league could value a player.
31:20
Um, and you know, Michael Lewis has talked about this a lot, but like one of the really just incredible things about that story is that and the reason why it resonated the way that it did was that sports is probably like the most quantified part of society, right?
31:35
Like we can watch all the games.
31:38
Um, we know exactly how much players are paid.
31:42
we know why they're paid that.
31:44
We can like we can put a number on every single thing that someone does on the court or on the field.
31:51
And yet, despite all of that information and all of those statistical metrics, players were still being misvalued all the time.
31:58
And we didn't know what made them good or what made them bad.
32:02
And if that could happen in that industry, then of course it could happen in every industry, right?
32:06
And so that idea of like shifting value and you know I wrote about it in basketball like guys who you know were you know the eighth or ninth guys on the bench um statistical metric showing that they were insanely valuable and that and they would get contracts worth $200 million.
32:26
Like that's just an such a juicy and rich story every time because you can tell a really human story through those numbers which is what Moneyball did, right?
32:33
The reason why people remember that is because they remember the characters and like how they were brought to life and the numbers identified those people.
32:40
But the story that it tells is like an incredibly human story.
32:44
>> Did you read that when it came out? You were in high school. You read that. >> Yeah.
32:48
>> Cuz that is not a a book that I imagine every high schooler has in their backpack.
32:51
Like >> No, but it's a I read it as a baseball book, right?
32:54
Um, and I remember because I because I was a Yankees fan growing up and like those the Yankees beat those A's teams, but I just remember I I don't think I ever thought I didn't know what their salary cap was or that they had like the lowest payroll in baseball and they were still winning all these games.
33:08
But when I read the book, I was like, who is Jason Giani and Johnny Damon and like how are all these guys like from this part of the country that I've never been like hanging with the the big bad like evil empire every year, you know?
33:20
And so I came away from that book like not only thinking, "Oh, this like changes the way I think about baseball and statistics, but like journalism, right?
33:27
Like this is a story that can be told."
33:30
>> There's a great moment, I think Michael Lewis did an interview.
33:31
He's done a bunch of interviews about that book, but I remember seeing one where he he's actually a little nervous to to release the book, I guess, like he goes to Billy Bean and it's like, I'm, you know, I'm kind of giving away state secrets here, right?
33:44
Like this is a methodology you have refined.
33:46
And Billy Bean says, "You don't think anyone's going to read this book."
33:49
>> And and the and the part of the reason was like you don't think anybody in baseball reads books, do you?
33:52
That's You had The Art of Winning, which was the Coach K book, but you had this other one that I was an illustrated history of Duke basketball.
33:59
Oh, is that even is that is what was tell me the origin story of that one like how did you >> I think I wrote the epilogue to that.
34:04
Um that book existed and I think it was like a hundred years of Duke basketball.
34:09
It was written by this guy Bill Bril who was like this legendary sports journalist in the research triangle in North Carolina.
34:14
North Carolina. and they um the book had been written and Duke's basketball team was turning a hundred years old and they needed someone to write a chapter about like the last few years and those last few years were the years that I was on campus and it ended with like Duke winning a national championship in 2010
34:29
and so um I think I I knew Bill a little bit from when I was in school and he like very kindly and generously said like would you like to write this final chapter since you live through it and I was like oh my god amazing yes I have a lot of thoughts about Duke basketball between 2006 and 2010 Thank you for asking. >> How did you start working on the hot
34:45
>> How did you start working on the hot hand?
34:48
And we're we'll get to your your column now, The Science of Success, but I'm I'm curious about, you know, you've been doing it.
34:54
You've been writing for the journal how many years before you started this?
34:57
And kind of like what was the what was some of the stuff that was in the stew while you were working on this?
35:03
>> So, I think I sold this book in 2017.
35:05
So, I've been in the journal for about seven years then, writing for the journal for seven years, on staff for like 5 years.
35:09
And this book was born out of two stories that I wrote for the journal at the time.
35:14
I was like vaguely familiar with the idea of the hot hand and this idea that in basketball if you make a few shots in a row, you feel more likely to make your next shot.
35:23
And I think I may have been aware of this like fierce generational academic debate about whether or not the hot hand exists.
35:31
I first became aware of the concept because I felt it myself as a terrible basketball player in high school.
35:37
The one time when I made three shots in a row, I like still have this vivid memory of that afternoon.
35:43
I could tell you where it was.
35:45
It was at a Catholic school in New Jersey that no longer exists. It is defunct.
35:49
Um, and I just remember everything about that day.
35:51
I I have no idea why it happened.
35:53
Um, it never happened to me again.
35:55
Um, but I felt something that day that like just stayed with me forever.
35:59
And I had no idea there was this like long debate about whether or not that feeling exists that has looped in like some of the smartest people who ever lived um and applies to so many industries.
36:11
So I remember the first time I came across this concept in like academic literature because one of the things about writing for the journal is that when you're looking for stories that nobody else has written, you go looking in a bunch of funny places for them.
36:26
And I remember seeing a couple papers about the hot hand and I started reading them and there was this new paper that came out um that was presented at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference which is kind of like the like it's called Dorca Palooa.
36:38
It is like the industry convention for sports analytics.
36:43
It was really born out of moneyball.
36:44
So in some ways like this book was born out of Moneyball in like a very strange roundabout way.
36:48
Um this paper was presented at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference at MIT.
36:53
It had been written by a couple of Harvard undergrads and it it used all this data that had not existed until then with data that came from shot tracking cameras in every MBA arena that like was able to collect attributes about shots that had never been tracked before.
37:09
And um these undergrads had this really clever and counterintuitive idea to take that data and say well um the hot hand is this idea that has been studied by Nobel Prize winners and economists and psychologists for decades.
37:22
psychologists for decades. what if we actually apply this data um and search for whether there is a hot hand effect and they found that when you adjust for the quality of a shot um and the difficulty of that shot then there is actually something of a hot hand effect
37:37
and the reason why the hot hand had been such a contentious topic in the academic literature for so long was because there was this seminal paper that came out in 1985 written by Tverki of Conorman Tverki fame um that said actually the hot hand doesn't exist it's just a figment of your imagination. It is this
37:53
It is this canonical example of seeing patterns and randomness.
37:57
And that bias, the hot hand bias, like reflect so many other forces in society and that is why it's so interesting.
38:05
And what these Harvard undergrads were coming along saying that was like a really like um the the broad takeaway of that paper was accurate, but like the specific takeaway actually may not have been accurate and you might not be crazy to think that there is such a thing as a hot hand.
38:18
So I wrote a story about that paper for the Wall Street Journal.
38:22
There's this big response to it.
38:23
And then the next year there was another paper that came out about the hot hand that was interesting in like an entirely different way.
38:28
I wrote a story about that paper too.
38:30
And I thought, you know, these really smart people have been thinking about this idea for a really long time.
38:36
And I wonder if there is a way to take this idea and tell a whole bunch of stories through it and use this idea to explore the world of basketball and beyond basketball and take it to um uh markets and decision-m and like use the quest to figure out and solve the mystery of the hot hand as like the narrative spine for this book and then go in all sorts of interesting and unexpected directions and just kind of like surprise and delight the reader.
39:05
That is the challenge that I assigned myself while writing this book and thinking that I was possibly capable of pulling it off. Yeah. >> Yeah.
39:12
That's what a what a description.
39:14
And I will say this is like it's actually made me think this morning because I was reflecting on your body of work and I thought to myself, the thing you bring is delight, right?
39:21
And part of delight is surprise.
39:24
Why is Christmas morning interesting?
39:26
Part of reason Christmas morning is interesting is because you don't know what if you're a kid, you don't know what you're going to get, right? Things are wrapped up.
39:30
It's what I love about your work is that I actually never know what I'm going to get with particularly your science of success on a given day. >> I don't either. Yeah. [laughter] >> Right.
39:41
You're like, I'm making it up as I go along.
39:42
But um but the book covers art. It covers investing.
39:44
You a thing on sugar beats in there.
39:48
>> I take a trip to a sugar beat farm in North Dakota. Yeah. >> Yeah. Tell the story of that.
39:51
>> Yeah. Tell the story of that. That's like an interesting part of this whole >> So part of the story of the book is should you believe in the hot hand and more important should you behave as if you believe in the hot hand right so if you are on a basketball team the like
40:06
the simple version of this question is if someone has made a couple shots in a row is it smart to feed the hot hand and get that person the ball right um or like is is that person going to miss and you're going to um think that your brain has played a trick on you but that
40:22
question is like so much more interesting and important in you know parts that are of the world that are beyond a 94 by 50 piece of hardwood right so in in markets like should you give your money to an investor who has beat the market a couple years in a row does that make him more likely to do it
40:37
um there's a story in the book about um Rob Reiner and his directing career and um like when you're hot as a director or an actor kind of opens up to you a little bit right you are able to take bigger swings and take advantage of your hotness and do stuff that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. So Rob Reiner
40:56
So Rob Reiner starts his career by making This Is Spinal Tap and then Stand by Me and The Sure Thing, right?
41:03
And he's made three hit movies in a row.
41:06
All movies that nobody else wanted him to make, oddly um which you wouldn't think of today.
41:11
Like you would think, oh, someone should have just thrown money at him to make This is Final Tap, right?
41:16
And after he makes these three movies, um, he is hot in Hollywood, right?
41:21
Like he is a director who can kind of get anything made that he wants to get made.
41:24
And he has this conversation with a studio executive around that time.
41:27
She comes to him and says, "You're Rob Reiner.
41:29
Like you're making these movies that everybody loves.
41:32
Um, what do you want to do next?
41:34
We'll do whatever you want."
41:34
And he says, "You're not going to want to make the movie that I want to make."
41:38
And she says, "No, trust me.
41:39
Like, we'll do whatever you want.
41:41
What do you want to make?"
41:42
And he says, "No, trust me.
41:42
Like, you're not going to want to make the movie."
41:46
And she said, "Just name the movie."
41:47
And he said, "The movie I want to make is The Princess Bride."
41:49
And she says, "Well, anything but The Princess Bride."
41:53
And that I was shocked to find out that The Princess Bride was this movie that like the biggest names in Hollywood had tried to make for years.
42:01
Um, Robert Redford and um Norman Jison, Francois Trufo, they had all tried to make The Princess Bride.
42:08
And it had been this like it had been this riddle like haunted by a curse that was like wrapped in an enigma.
42:16
Like [laughter] nobody could figure it out.
42:19
Nobody could think out like who was this movie for and like why would anyone want to see it, >> right? >> Makes no sense today.
42:24
It was written by William Goldman coming off of Butch Cassing and Sundance Kid and all the Prince Dance men.
42:29
It's this like beloved movie that like it has just endured for generations.
42:33
But Rob Riner like used all of his capital as um a director.
42:35
And I remember um we traded emails and he said, "I don't know what you're talking about."
42:41
Like that I that movie was still impossible for me to get made even with this hot hand.
42:45
So anyway, the reason we're um we we go from Rob Reiner to a sugarbeat farm on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota is because if you're a farmer, like do you bet the farm on patterns?
42:55
Like how are you thinking about patterns and randomness and data from year to year?
42:59
And so, um, I met this really fascinating, um, fifth generation sugar beat farmer named Nick Hagen who has to think about all of these lessons that his ancestors have taught him over centuries about like how to think about data and like if one patch of his farmland um, has yielded a whole bunch of sugar beats the year before, does that mean he should like invest more in that patch of land going forward or not?
43:24
And like what does it mean to be in an industry that is as random as the weather, right?
43:29
and like can you believe in the hot hand and if you do believe in the hot hand even in life like can you invest in the hot hand in your business?
43:38
Um and so there are all sorts of interesting ways of looking at the world where I might feel that like the hot hand is real in basketball but I might still also invest in index funds because I don't believe that someone's going to beat the market year after year. >> Right?
43:51
If you go back to the kind of pre-elling the book process, like you know, you're somebody that's worked at the journal, but you're still pretty young in your career, right?
44:01
What was it like to think about the book?
44:04
Like, how did you do the mechanics of what came after the decision?
44:09
Like, hey, this could be a booklength thing.
44:10
I remember we sold the book and I was so happy and um we went through the whole process of um of of sending out the proposal and getting an offer and signing it and I woke up the next day and thought, "Oh god, what am I going to do now?
44:24
How do I I don't know how to write a book?"
44:26
Um and especially a book as open-ended as this one.
44:30
And it's it it's a challenge that I actually sort of deal with on a week- toeek basis now because when you can write about anything, [clears throat] >> the bar has to be super high and you have to think, oh well, what I write about has to be something worth writing about, right?
44:44
Um it can't just be like, oh, I happen to find this story interesting.
44:48
I'm going to spend 10,000 words and 3 months of my life and get you to read it.
44:53
Um it has to be important and interesting um and keep my attention, much less the reader's attention.
44:59
Then I just sort of went looking for stories and casting about for characters.
45:02
Um, and they had to be stories and characters who when I told my friends about them, I could like see their faces light up, right?
45:10
And I was like eager to tell people about them because I wanted to like sort of stress test and pressure test the arguments and the characters and the stories.
45:19
Um, you've written books.
45:21
You know, when someone asks you, "What are you working on?"
45:23
You're like, "I don't want to talk about."
45:24
And I still don't want to talk about it.
45:26
But like on the times when I did talk about it, I could like get excited talking about it.
45:30
Um I will say I wrote this book before I had kids and um I wrote the book on uh mornings and weekends which are things that um now that I do have kids I no longer have. Yes.
45:44
I remember like waking up early in the morning.
45:46
I was waking up at like 7:30 and like banging out a thousand words before work.
45:49
Um, so it is in some ways I was like I was insanely green um and eager and ambitious and like didn't know what I didn't know and was like very happy and sort of um inexperienced but also had a lot of time and like no responsibilities which is a great thing and it's it's like it's just much harder to write a book with like a a full-time job and kids and like life responsibilities.
46:14
>> You have a very particular thing you do at the journal and the pace is a certain kind of pace.
46:17
Did you just stick to a word count every day to get the book done?
46:21
Was that how you basically approach it? >> I tried to. Yeah.
46:22
Um I feel like the the the advice out there to like write between 500 and a thousand words a day and just get them on the page is like very good advice and um it works for a reason because you don't think you're doing all that much and all that work compounds over time and after a few months you have 85,000 words and then you can start chiseling and shaping it and getting it into a place where you want.
46:46
I'm even now I'm in the process of writing a book and so I'm thinking about it and like the hardest part is just getting the words on the page.
46:51
Like the reporting is done.
46:53
I have all the material and it's just like vomiting the words onto the page and getting it into a place where I can print it out and start redlining and thinking about like what comes next.
47:03
But for me that routine of like just writing a thousand words and then going to work was like very helpful. >> Right.
47:11
>> Did you um >> What about you?
47:12
How do you think about it?
47:13
>> Yeah, it's it's the same thing.
47:13
I mean, it's it's and it's funny because it's a bit of like a rinse and repeat process.
47:19
There's not like there's not I I once I have the subject, like once I have the the actual thing I'm writing about and I've done all the research and I've done all the interviewing and everything else.
47:27
I mean, you just set a manageable word count number every day.
47:30
I I tell people it's kind of like enough that it's like substantive, but not so much that I'm going to be burned out of my own project.
47:37
And I just have a little like on Scrier, they give you this little indicator.
47:41
describ like the software I choose to use when I'm doing the raw material for the book.
47:44
And it's it's really funny.
47:46
There's like a little indicator and it it gets green when you hit to that point in your when you hit the words and I just try to get it to green every day and just keep going.
47:53
And then as you said over time you collect everything.
47:57
I think the real work is in then the the revising, the shaping, the trimming.
48:01
Um but honestly it it I just I woke I woke up at same as you.
48:06
You just wake up obscenely early.
48:08
You knock out the words you need to knock out and you get back at it the next day.
48:12
And then some days you kind of double or triple, right?
48:15
And those are great days.
48:15
You're like, "Oh, I like I'm ahead."
48:16
But I still go back every day for sure.
48:18
And I I also found like the most productive writing time for me was like early in the morning or what I considered early in the morning back then, like without checking my phone.
48:28
Like I would check my phone to make sure the world was like still spinning and like nothing terrible had happened overnight.
48:34
But I hadn't checked email.
48:35
I didn't look at Twitter.
48:37
I didn't do any of the stuff that like I would normally do that turns my brain into mush.
48:41
And like I could get more done in that first hour than I would like over 12 hours over the course of the day.
48:47
It was just like getting the stuff out on the page was so valuable and helpful and useful to me.
48:51
And now I have like two young kids that means like waking up like at ungodly hours, right? >> Yeah.
48:58
But you get you do get used to it.
48:59
And then the other thing is I always feel felt like if I did the book work even because I've done now two of my books after my daughter was born and actually three of them and I find that if I can get something done before she's awake then I'm not robbing Peter to pay Paul.
49:13
I don't I don't feel that way.
49:13
I'm like okay I've gotten that stuff done now now time with her is not like a tax on book time right.
49:18
Um and so for me that's that's that's worked really well.
49:22
I would also say that the the part about it that people don't appreciate is it's it sounds fun and it looks fun, but as you said, it's a real struggle to go from interviews and raw material to finished words on the page like that.
49:38
There is still something in that that is really hard, especially if you're doing it twice.
49:42
For you, you're doing it once in the morning and then going to the Wall Street Journal and doing it all day.
49:46
How did you manage that or was it just different kinds of writing? So, it was okay.
49:50
>> I think it is different kinds of writing.
49:51
So I think there there is some element of cross trainining to it.
49:54
Um where I think both made me better at the other one, right?
49:58
Like the book writing allows me to like push my limits a little bit more and stretch muscles that I don't get when I'm writing a weekly column.
50:07
and it allows you to like think and make connections and just let stuff sort of marinate in your brain that um you don't get in an 800word column when you're like on a specific cadence.
50:19
Um and even now like I'm I'm in the process of of putting a bunch of chapters together and I'm seeing patterns and connections between the chapters that like I didn't think of when I was writing them.
50:33
And clearly like there they were always there and they just were waiting to be mined.
50:37
And the only way I was going to do that was with time and like some distance from the material and being able to come back to it with fresher eyes.
50:45
And I I I also find like like the reporting of these chapters is so fun, right?
50:50
and you come back from a reporting trip and you're like so eager and like I for this book I've made the mistake of not just like writing right away and then months pass and I have to like relive the interviews and go back and listen to the tape and I'm like what was that about again?
51:05
Like what were those images that were like floating around my head and so I wish that I uh had just like come back from a bunch of reporting trips and just like written 10,000 words as soon as I got back that I would be like in a much better shape now today if I if I had done that.
51:17
When you think back on this particular book, the moment that you know it it can always be an is either when for me when you get the first finished copies of the book like that box shows up, they don't warn you.
51:30
They don't nobody tells you they're on.
51:32
Sometimes they'll tell you they're on their way, but most of the time a box just shows up and you've got the finished copies and then when you start to see it out in the wild.
51:37
What were those moments like for you with this particular project?
51:41
>> My book came out um March 10th, 2020. >> Oh, perfect timing.
51:46
>> Great [laughter] timing. Yes.
51:46
Um, so the book party was on a Tuesday.
51:49
Um, and the world shut down on Wednesday.
51:53
>> Um, and so I have um like very strange memories.
51:57
I I I walked into Three Lives bookstore in the West Village probably like the day before it closed for a very long time and I saw the book like in the new non-fiction part and I like got that joy and then like didn't see other people for a very long time afterwards.
52:13
Um so it was a peculiar experience of like releasing a book like into the teeth of the [snorts] pandemic. Yeah.
52:19
It just means what people warned me from the beginning um even before it was like clear that it was going to be a very strange time to release a book is that books have a long tale in a way that newspaper articles do not and that people would be reading this book and coming to it in different ways for a very long time.
52:39
And I found that totally to be true because like you get an email from someone who picked up the book 5 years later and like I wake up in the morning and I see an email about that and I'm like well I haven't thought about this book in 7 years but it's living in your brain right now and it has lived on um in this really rewarding like gratifying way.
52:59
So that is something that is like totally different than writing a a newspaper column that like appears in print and then like you will get 99% of the traffic and attention the day it comes out and then like never again. >> Yeah.
53:14
I'm I'm going to ask a couple more book questions and I want to shift to the science of success and your current project.
53:21
Um did you when how did you settle on like the title and the cover art and that kind of stuff?
53:26
I mean, I imagine some of it was intuition, but did you sell it as the hot hand? >> We did.
53:31
That was that was the title the whole time. Yeah.
53:32
I felt that was like intuitive and sticky and um a little bit seductive that if you knew what the hot hand was, you would be curious why it was the title of a book.
53:42
And if you didn't know what it was, you would also kind of want to know a little bit more about why it was the title of the book.
53:48
Um and I liked the rhythm of it.
53:48
And I I actually like hate alliteration in writing.
53:54
like if I write a piece um you will almost never see two words with the same first letter back to back because it's just like an eyes sore to me.
54:02
Um but there was no other way of um yeah and I think it was like a neat way of doing it.
54:10
Um, and I didn't have control of the cover, but I do remember we were talking about potential art for the cover.
54:18
And I think I did suggest, what about a fireball emoji as the O and the hot hand?
54:23
[laughter] And they sort of ran with that from there. >> That's great.
54:26
>> How did you transition from the work you were doing as as a sports reporter at the Wall Street Journal to what I think is like one of the great sections of of any contemporary newspaper?
54:35
Like it's a thing again that I look forward to reading so much.
54:38
How did you start and build and grow the science of success?
54:42
>> So, uh, in 2022, um, I had been at the journal for 12 years.
54:46
I've been covering the NBA for almost 10 years.
54:48
And, um, it was an incredible decade to be covering basketball specifically.
54:54
So, the first um, really like the first major season that I was covering basketball, it's 2014, 2015, um, which was the first year that Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors won a title.
55:05
um it by playing basketball in like a completely new and interesting and exciting way and like really revolutionizing the sport.
55:15
Um and that idea of like the three-point revolution taking over basketball was such a Wall Street Journal way of covering basketball.
55:24
This idea that like there is a shot on the court that is worth 50% more than a shot that is one inch closer to the basket.
55:32
And it's this incredible market inefficiency hiding in plain sight.
55:37
And it had taken teams decades to figure out that three was worth more than two.
55:41
And now you have this team with like the most charismatic and compelling player of his generation who have been overlooked his entire life taking advantage of it to like incredible effect, right?
55:52
I mean that team in 2016 was >> a cultural phenomenon like the most exciting team since Michael Jordan's bowls, right?
56:01
um with this really iconic player taking on LeBron James, like this behemoth who had conquered the sport in a completely different way and this rivalry was taking shape.
56:11
This like incredibly unlikely rivalry, like nobody saw this coming.
56:16
And so my first four years covering basketball, the NBA finals every year was the Golden State Warriors versus the Cleveland Cavaliers.
56:24
So I spent a lot of time in Oakland and Cleveland and felt like it was Groundhog Day.
56:27
I was like, "Oh, yeah, it's June.
56:29
I'm going back and forth between Oakland and Cleveland."
56:30
There were all sorts of fascinating stories about ways that teams were trying to build themselves to take on the Warriors, right?
56:38
So, the Houston Rockets was like a team that I wrote about ad nauseium.
56:42
So, I probably wrote the most about Steph and LeBron and James Harden and Daryl my Danton and the Houston Rockets because they were trying to like dethrone the Golden State Warriors by like building a team and pursuing this counterintuitive strategy to beat them.
56:58
and they would talk to me about it and I would get to explain here is why this team thinks that they can beat the unbeatable Golden State Warriors and they came really close.
57:08
Um and it was just really so it was really fun.
57:11
Um teams were like taking control of data and statistics and you could just see like all of these stories unfolding that like you would we would have never been able to write about at any other point in basketball history.
57:27
And uh so but but but but over time um I sort of felt that I had just written the same story over and over again.
57:33
And I think one of like the great um strengths of a journalist and um it's really important to have fresh eyes and to like not be jaded and to be surprised and delighted by stories when you find them and not think oh I wrote that story six years ago or a different version of the same story.
57:51
And so I've been looking especially after writing the hot hand I've been looking to expand a little bit beyond basketball.
57:56
And um I you know when I was pitching this column that became the science of success the whole idea was can I take this playbook that I've um been able to come up with and and learn from from writing sports at the Wall Street Journal and um take that idea and like apply it to the rest of the world and all sorts of industries and the rest of business.
58:20
like can I find interesting people doing interesting things in important industries and other important industries and just try to write about them the way that we write about sports at the Wall Street Journal.
58:30
And so um also in in the same way that like I have found that writing a book is different with children um covering basketball means working a lot of nights and weekends and nights and weekends are what you kind of don't have when you have young children.
58:44
Um, and so I thought this was like the right time to um to kind of look around and like take the stuff that I've learned covering sports and basketball at the Wall Street Journal and explore the rest of the world with it.
58:56
>> How do you I mean I have a million questions, but how did you sell it internally?
59:00
I mean, if to the extent you're allowed to talk about it, it seems like a very very specific thing.
59:06
You're like, I'm going to cover everything.
59:09
>> Success [laughter] and failure.
59:10
>> Success and failure in all human endeavors.
59:12
It happened to be at a time when um the exchange section of the Wall Street Journal was looking for a couple new columns.
59:17
Um and I had said like I've done this for a long time and this is what I want to do.
59:23
And I wrote a memo explaining like the the type of work that I wanted to do the lens through which like I saw the world and like wanted to explore the business world and came up with a bunch of like sample ideas and stuff like I will like we want to be on the news. We want to be timely.
59:41
want to be a little bit timeless.
59:42
We'll see like what happens every week and like you know can we write about people um the way that we write about athletes and um I maybe I was just very lucky again that people inside the paper sort of trusted the vision that we had and said let's try it and see what happens. >> Yeah.
1:00:00
>> I have to believe that there's some part of you and maybe you've just gotten so good at it like how do you wrestle with the challenge of meeting that bar every week, right?
1:00:10
Because because it is it's one of the your your cons your consistency in your quality of subjects and topics and approaches like do you just have a folder like is there a big Ben manila folder somewhere like all right time to dust this one off.
1:00:25
>> Yeah it's a Google doc it's called yeah just ideas.
1:00:27
Um I do have when I come across interesting people or companies or ideas I I will like dump them into a Google doc um with just like very basic information um maybe like copy paste paragraphs of stories that were interesting and think like is whenever the time is right for this or maybe something else will happen and there will be a time to um pick up on this.
1:00:50
But a lot of times it's also like just following the news very carefully and thinking, okay, well, like there's this one interesting nugget in this story that wasn't fully explored and I'm really curious about that and like having the freedom and the luxury of like following my curiosity to wherever it may lead.
1:01:10
like doing the full reporting, like going deep into a subject, reading everything that's been written about it, listening to every podcast that this person has been on and trying to tell the story through that very small thing.
1:01:21
And so that's something else that I learned covering sports of the journal is that I think there are like two ways to tell stories.
1:01:29
One is taking small ideas and making them really big and one is um taking big ideas and making them really small.
1:01:34
In some ways they're connected, but um for example, we always used to look um for like funny, interesting, peculiar, clever ideas at the Wall Street Journal.
1:01:45
And so one story that I wrote was um in 2016, the Golden State Warriors started the year 24-0.
1:01:50
They were 41-4 at one point.
1:01:54
There was nothing that was going wrong.
1:01:55
And as a journalist, you're always looking for tension, right?
1:01:56
Like tension is what makes a story.
1:01:58
And when there's no tension, it's like, well, what do you do with that?
1:02:01
And um I remember um listening to like a bunch of radio interviews the Warriors were doing at the time.
1:02:07
Um you know, probably the only person outside the Bay Area who was actually listening to interviews on local radio.
1:02:14
And in one of them, the interim coach at the time, Steve Kerr, was on medical leave.
1:02:18
And the interim coach at the time was Luke Wallen.
1:02:20
And he was doing this interview as he was walking off a plane.
1:02:23
And um they were saying, "Luke, what's going on? Like how are you doing?"
1:02:27
He was like, "I'm terrible."
1:02:28
Like we were we like the the team trainer before the season got rid of our peanut butter and jellies on the team plane because he thought they weren't healthy and everyone is completely miserable about it because we all NBA players famously eat like they just subsist on peanut butter and jelly.
1:02:44
It's just around at all hours of the day.
1:02:46
And I heard this and I was like okay well the story to do is that like the greatest source of tension in the locker room in Golden State right now is they are fighting to get their peanut butter and jellies back.
1:02:56
And so that's like a funny idea for a story.
1:02:57
And then like you take it to the extreme and like they were happened to be coming through the East Coast a couple of days later.
1:03:04
I remember I went to Philadelphia and stalked their locker room and went quietly to every player in the locker room and like asked like what do you make of the war over peanut butter and jelly in the locker room having like sodtovoce conversations like with Steph Curry in the side of the room.
1:03:22
>> Then the next day they were in New York and I went to the garden and did the same thing.
1:03:24
And over time, like you're reporting, that's like hours and hours of reporting to ask players off to the side to get an exclusive about peanut butter and jelly.
1:03:33
And so you could tell sort of the story of the Golden State Warriors magical season through the only thing that has gone wrong for this team >> is peanut butter and jelly.
1:03:41
And so um I'm always kind of looking for peanut butter and jelly stories in all sorts of industries.
1:03:46
And um you know, one one other thing I've learned um through the course of writing this column is that if I if I find something interesting, the chances are that I can convey that interest and enthusiasm to readers.
1:03:58
Um and if I don't know something that it feels like everybody else knows or should know, then the chances are that they don't know it either, right?
1:04:08
And you know, I I find myself thinking a lot, well, does everyone know this or like am I just an idiot and just found out for the first time?
1:04:15
And um I think a lot of people don't know a lot of things.
1:04:18
And so things that you would think that everybody knows, like they don't know. And I didn't know them.
1:04:22
And so I I I've learned to kind of trust my judgment and gut about that a little bit.
1:04:27
If I if I think something is interesting, um I can convey that interest and I can I can make other people interested in it as well. >> Yeah.
1:04:34
Do you have I mean it's probably like picking like a favorite child or something, but let's say from the last like couple years, are there is there a story that stands out to you as a favorite of yours?
1:04:44
One of my favorite stories I ever did was um two years ago I went to Boise, Idaho to visit the campus of Micron um because um >> Micron Technologies >> Micron Technologies um in one of their chip factories in Boise, Idaho was a machine made by a company called ASML.
1:05:02
And ASML is like the most important, valuable, invaluable company that most people have never heard of, right?
1:05:07
And in the world of chips and semiconductors, which is like, you know, the most important industry in the world, um, there are a bunch of really interesting companies.
1:05:16
There's Nvidia, which, you know, nobody outside of gamers had heard about 5 years ago, and then it became a trillion dollar company.
1:05:23
And I remember writing a column about it when it became a trillion dollar company that was basically like, what is the story of this company?
1:05:29
Like, it looks like someone fell asleep on their keyboard like typing it out.
1:05:31
I've never heard like this company is worth more than like Bergkshire Hathway now.
1:05:37
Like, how did this happen?
1:05:37
There's TSMC, Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company, which is like the most valuable geographically important company that makes all the chips, right?
1:05:46
But in every TSMC fab um and in every Micron and Samsung chip factory, there is an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine, an EUV machine that's made by ASML.
1:05:57
This is the most important machine on the planet.
1:06:01
It is like the bottleneck in the chipm process.
1:06:04
And only one company in the world makes these machines.
1:06:07
This obscure Dutch company called ASML, which it's like one of the 20 most valuable companies in the world.
1:06:13
And if you say ASML, most people will think you said ASMR. Right. [laughter] >> Right.
1:06:20
>> And I remember thinking, okay, I I found out about ASML and I said, I can't just write a story about ASML because the while most people have never heard of it, even people reading the Wall Street Journal have never heard of it.
1:06:30
I can't just be, do you guys hear about this company?
1:06:33
It's this amazing company.
1:06:33
Um, but I remember I was reporting around ASML and and someone told me that there was a job um in ASML called customer support engineer.
1:06:42
And when I hear customer support, I think like, you know, someone in a call center like dealing with problems.
1:06:47
Customer support engineer is um a person whose job it is to make sure that that machine never breaks and when it does break that they can fix it right away.
1:06:56
And I thought, "Okay, well, this is the most important job at the most important company that nobody's ever heard of, and I can put a human face to it."
1:07:04
And so I cast I I talked to the company, we cast it about for a few characters.
1:07:09
We eventually settled on this woman named Brianna Hall, who worked at the Micron Chip Fab as an ASML employee, as a customer support engineer.
1:07:16
and I was able to tell the whole story of ASML and its importance to the global economy and everything we do all day long through this one person.
1:07:26
Um, and I thought, oh, this is like what I'm trying to do is to take this really big story about the global economy and like the most invaluable company that most people have never heard of and boil it down to this one person doing this one crucial job on this one machine that is responsible for all of our lives.
1:07:42
a series of your pieces from that are becoming a book or you're working on kind of structuring a book.
1:07:48
How do you how have you been thinking about this current?
1:07:50
We're in media res on that project.
1:07:51
So there's only probably so much you can share, but um this is your next book coming up.
1:07:54
How are you approaching it?
1:07:56
How are you thinking about it?
1:07:58
The book was really born from the column and I I one of the there was a type of column that I kept running into that I really liked writing and I found that readers really liked reading.
1:08:09
Um, I kept talking to people who had come up with interesting startups or products or just things that I had encountered in my day-to-day life, which um I find is like how I find a lot of stories these days.
1:08:23
Stuff that like is just in the air or I keep running into and I think, oh, what's the story here?
1:08:29
Why why am I just noticing that like everybody is drinking athletic non-alcoholic beer now?
1:08:34
Like what how did this happen?
1:08:36
And um the more and more I talked to these people um and they they all had a lot in common um they were unlikely entrepreneurs.
1:08:44
They did not set out to disrupt an industry or create something new.
1:08:48
They just thought to themselves there has to be a better way.
1:08:51
Like this thing exists um and I'm going to make a better version of it.
1:08:55
And I thought, oh well that's really interesting there.
1:08:57
It it's sort of like this new theory of innovation.
1:09:01
It's not invention, right?
1:09:01
It's not making something new.
1:09:03
It's taking something that already exists and making it better.
1:09:06
And I think there are lots of different ways that companies and people do that.
1:09:12
You could do that by recognizing unmet demand or finding a new source of supply or redesigning a product or failing over and over or coming up with different mechanisms of finding ideas.
1:09:24
So the book is um it's it's a bunch of chapters about people and companies over time that have figured out new and interesting and hopefully universal ways of seeking and achieving better.
1:09:36
Um and so a bunch of them will be expanded versions of columns that I've written and a bunch of them will be stuff that hasn't appeared in a column yet.
1:09:44
So, um, I wrote a column about athletic non-alcoholic beer during dry January two years ago.
1:09:49
And so, that's an example of a guy working at a hedge fund in Connecticut um, sort of understanding that there was a demand for a non-alcoholic beer that didn't taste like swamp water and thinking, well, maybe like I had this data.
1:10:10
He he ran all these polls and surveys that he commissioned himself that found that um 55% of Americans said that they would drink non-alcoholic beer.
1:10:20
Um and at the time non-alcoholic beer accounted for 0. 3% of the market.
1:10:26
And he thought, well, there's an inefficiency here, right? If I can get that 0. 3% to even 1%.
1:10:32
That's a huge business, right?
1:10:35
And of course, it's much much bigger than 1% now.
1:10:37
But that was like recognizing the demand for a better product in um in data, right?
1:10:42
That wasn't like, oh, I I think like there, you know, he he recognized it in his own life and that he went out and found this demand and he created a product to meet that demand.
1:10:53
Um, another column that I wrote for the journal that will be in the book um that I found in my own life is um as the father of young children, my children go through just an enormous amount of berries every week.
1:11:06
I spend like all of my money on on berries.
1:11:08
And um a couple years ago I noticed that there was this new type of berry um from Driscolls which you know there are different types of labels on every Driscoll clamshell.
1:11:20
There's the yellow label which is regular.
1:11:22
There's the green label which is organic.
1:11:24
And then there was um there was there were two words that were appearing on some of these blueberries and raspberries called sweetest batch.
1:11:32
And I remember tasting them and thinking what are these berries?
1:11:37
because like I can't stop eating them and they taste so much better than the other berries.
1:11:40
I remember, you know, reaching out to Driscolls and saying like you just got to what is the story of these berries?
1:11:46
Like how did they happen?
1:11:46
It turns out Driscolls for years and years, for as long as the company has existed, have been throwing out its best berries because its most flavorful, best tasting berries were not um uh reliable and resilient enough to make it through the manufacturing process.
1:12:03
So, um, in berry manufacturing, this is I didn't know anything about berries before writing this column.
1:12:09
And this is kind of what I do on a weekly basis is like go really deep into a rabbit hole and then come back out and try to describe it.
1:12:13
Um, uh, in berry making, like all of berry production is a genetic trade-off.
1:12:21
So, if something is really flavorful, that means the yield might be lower, right?
1:12:27
Or the bush might be less bushy or more bushy and so you can't actually pick them.
1:12:32
or um uh or like more brittle so they won't make their way across the uh they they won't make their way across the country. >> Yeah.
1:12:42
>> And because of that they couldn't make enough of these berries to um to make the economics work.
1:12:48
And finally, a few years ago, they said, "Well, why don't we just like keep these berries in the genetic pool for longer and then charge like a slight premium for them and see if people are willing to buy them and we can like make the economics work like that."
1:13:04
And they started doing that.
1:13:04
They were just like this massive hit because you taste one next to the the other.
1:13:10
>> It's just a different experience.
1:13:10
Um, and now because Driscolls is keeping those better tasting berries in the genetic pool for longer, the flavor of their ordinary berries is getting better because it's like moving the um the scatter chart like up and to the right.
1:13:27
And so it has this curious like economic effect just by someone saying why why are we throwing out our best tasting berries?
1:13:33
We should try to keep these in for longer.
1:13:35
So there are all sorts of stories like that.
1:13:36
So it's going to be Athletic and Driscolls and the story of Birkenstock and Dyson and Whimo and Ferrari and Hermes and so all of these companies and products that I think people are fascinated by and that kernel of better is embedded in all of them in all sorts of different ways. >> Amazing.
1:13:53
Well, we [clears throat] will look forward to that and have you back on to talk all about it once it's uh once it's when you're when you're done writing it uh sometime in the hopefully not so distant future.
1:14:02
Um, every Infinite Loops episode somewhat ends the same way.
1:14:07
Uh, we declare you emperor for a day.
1:14:10
Um, and you are you have a magical microphone.
1:14:14
You're allowed to incept two ideas into human minds.
1:14:15
They won't know that it came from you, but they will everybody will adhere to and follow your precepts.
1:14:21
So, what are your off the cuff, what are your two ideas that you would based on everything you've done, based on all the successes you've studied, based on the book, based on looking at athletes and entrepreneurs and CEOs and other visionaries, what would you want people to to have as their two ideas?
1:14:39
>> I couldn't get any heads up about this [laughter] when I when I sent the email, is there anything I should be thinking about?
1:14:45
>> That's the whole [snorts] point.
1:14:45
I think that idea of the idea that has been floating around my head and rattling around my brain um for a while now is this idea that like better is always out there for people who can find it.
1:14:56
And I think that um there are all sorts of ways of achieving better.
1:15:00
And a lot of it just comes down to feeling will a lot of it just comes down to being willing to play around with that idea of better is out there and that like I can do this better and nothing is stopping me from doing it.
1:15:16
So I think like nurturing that sentiment um and that mentality I think is really important.
1:15:22
And in some ways like I don't think about it like this but I have to kind of do that every week.
1:15:27
Like when I'm writing a column I think about it um in two ways.
1:15:30
one is like it can be it can be finding new angles into stories and topics that the Wall Street Journal is already writing about, right?
1:15:40
Um, which is really intimidating because I think well we're already writing about this.
1:15:44
The people who are writing about this know this topic better than anyone in this building and quite possibly better than anyone in the world. Right?
1:15:54
If they haven't thought of this idea, why not? Right?
1:15:56
Is that because they did think about it and they dismissed it?
1:16:01
Um, is it because they didn't have time to think about it?
1:16:02
Is it because like they just happen to not run into it?
1:16:05
Like there are all sorts of reasons why a piece might not exist.
1:16:07
And I have to have the confidence every time to think I I saw this idea.
1:16:11
I think it's interesting. Um, should I write it? Right?
1:16:16
Is it just like I'm a rube and I'm naive and that's why I think it's interesting or is it interesting because it's interesting, right?
1:16:21
Um, and the second type of story that I write is charging towards open space and like cracks in our coverage.
1:16:28
cracks in our coverage. So industries and people and topics and companies that we don't write about as a newsroom and sort of having the courage of my own conviction and like following my curiosity and thinking well if I think Driscoll's berries are interesting then I bet I bet a lot of other people will
1:16:48
think Driscoll's berries are interesting too and Driscolls might not be you know um Nvidia or Apple or Microsoft but the Wall Street Journal should still be writing about it right and Athletic might not be Annheiser Bush I bet like there is a market for people who want to read these stories. And so I like have
1:17:03
And so I like have had to think every time I'm staring at the blank document and the blinking cursor, I have to convince myself like if you think this is interesting, somebody else will too.
1:17:14
And in some ways that's like, oh, there's a better way of covering this story and this is the way.
1:17:20
And that doesn't mean that like our other coverage is bad. It's it's amazing.
1:17:23
And like when I whenever I um cuz I'm I'm always giving a heads up to like the beat reporter.
1:17:29
Hey, I'm writing about this.
1:17:30
If you have anything, >> here comes Ben to steal my thunder.
1:17:34
[laughter] >> It's a nice way of putting it.
1:17:35
And I think if you're working on anything, let me know.
1:17:38
Maybe we could do it together.
1:17:40
Um but like and and if there's any reason why this is wrong or I shouldn't be doing this, like please let me know and save me from looking like an idiot and like wasting all this time.
1:17:48
And um and every time I do that, like our my colleagues and our reporters of the Wall Street Journal are such fonts of knowledge.
1:17:58
Like they just know everything there is.
1:18:00
And every time I work with them, I'm like, "Oh my god, I can't believe you know all this stuff."
1:18:04
And I'm just sort of like pulling stuff out of their brains.
1:18:06
And I love like writing um collaborating with people who are on certain beats at the journal because like I can just tap into their brain.
1:18:16
I can look smarter, right?
1:18:16
So, like I did a piece a couple weeks ago with um uh our airlines reporter about like the new strategy of United Airlines and why it is that like I seem to see a tweet like every other day like United is the best airline in America right now after years and years of Delta holding that title.
1:18:32
And um she interviewed Scott Kirby, the CEO of United, and we just sort of went back and forth all week long about like what happened here.
1:18:39
And like it would have taken me hours and hours and hours of research to like figure out all of the crucial points in that story.
1:18:48
And I could just call Ally Cider who was a reporter and she she had written all the stories.
1:18:53
She knew of all of it already.
1:18:55
And she knew so much more in her brain that like I would have never been able to get out of any um like any archival coverage or podcast.
1:19:03
And so being able to like take those ideas and team up with people and like take two 1 plus one and make it equals three is so much fun for me.
1:19:09
I love writing with other people at the journal for that reason.
1:19:12
So, I'm always looking for better ways to do something and um I think if I were emperor of the world and could like take this microphone and turn it into a magic wand, it would be to kind of nurture that idea in other people.
1:19:25
people. that it was brilliantly said and I feel like that that hits both you know because there's there's better and then there's also you you were talked about the cracks like looking at the cracks and I feel like that's another useful lesson from your work is like finding these these places that people forgot
1:19:41
time forgot like just the watchful eyes of an entire newsroom might have forgotten right uh and that's that's why I love your work and that's why hopefully many many others will will love the book to come and I can't recommend the hot hand strongly enough um but thank Thank [music] you, Ben, for taking time to do this and for coming out and talking with us. >> Thank you for having me. Thanks for such
1:19:57
>> Thank you for having me.
1:19:57
Thanks for such nice words.