How to Make It in the NBA | Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

30:15And then like someone will add me on LinkedIn. I'm like, who is this person? It's like, oh, he was the valedictorian of Princeton and triple majored in math and like physics and biology or something. What kind of questions they ask? Just, you can tell, you know, you can tell when someone's at like really knows what they're like, just like very fast. like they see the holes in my argument. I'm just like, sometimes I was caught by surprise. I'm just like, I've given this talk a thousand times and everyone's just like, yeah, they're smiling along. They're just like, did you think of this, this, this, and this?

30:44I'm like, oh my God. Can you think of a specific instance? I'm just curious.

30:52I can, but I don't want to like, I don't know. It might be a little confidential maybe. So I don't know if I want to say that. The problem with data in the hedge fund world is there's a lot of data. And so with all data analysis, and correct me if I'm wrong, with all data analysis, you have this huge pool of data, and then you have some tools that perhaps you've developed where you basically can ask questions to the data. So you can ask like, oh, if Microsoft is down four days in a row, what are the odds it goes up on the fifth day? And is that statistically significant? And let's say you want to make a trade.

31:27you can find some statistically significant results to justify making a trade no matter what. That's the problem with a lot of this quant type of trading. That's p-hacking. That's like, you know, there's this one paper, it was written by academics, that if people, they measured the mood of Twitter posts. And they're like, if people are angry three days earlier, then the stock market's going to drop. and they start a hedge fund based on this analysis and it blew up, it was a disaster, it didn't work at all. I think that doesn't even make sense. Why should anger three days earlier not play out for those three days and only play out later?

32:08So that's an example. You're just testing too many things and just some of them are going to come up as statistically as my chance. But the best data scientists are going to keep this in mind and not allow themselves to p-hack or cherry pick and penalize themselves for how many things they tested. It was very, like I did this for 10 years and we're almost 10 years. And I had to really make sure with everything I tested that there was, and this might be the wrong approach, but it worked for me. There has to be some common sense to it. Like it can't be, oh, were people on Twitter angry three days before?

32:49It would be something like, okay, say Microsoft had a really bad earnings announcement and the stock was down for four days, the past 50 times that's happened, what's happened next? Or stocks in general, when they have a bad earnings announcement, and then they're down four days in a row, is there something that happens? Because then it sort of makes sense that all the weak holders would panic sell after a bad earnings announcement. And how long does that usually play out until it then has a rebound? and is that result statistically significant? Something like that adds some sort of common sense to it for me and would usually work.

33:28My instinct is to agree with you, except I don't know if you read the book, The Man Who Solved the Market, about Jim Simons and Renaissance technology. Yeah. And it basically was the exact opposite approach where they built machine learning models and it was a total black box. They had no idea why it worked. They just, and it was terrifying. They were terrified because they're like, we're just making these predictions based on no understanding of why these correlations exist. But they've been printing money for decades with this approach. Yeah, and he actually wanted to offer me a job once. We were in communication, and I was all set to go for an interview that looked like a formality.

34:08And then he asked me, what did you do your PhD on? And I'm like, oh, I went to graduate school, but I was thrown out. I didn't get the PhD. and he's like oh we only hire people with phds we can't we can't hire you interesting that's that's a weird that's a i would think he would be less uh less like by the book no that was his rule like phd or nothing and because i because i had written a book about data analysis basically in the financial world and uh uh you know that's how we started talking it was interesting but it was I had another strategy where Canada and the US are basically the same country, so the markets should trade the same.

34:56If Canada, though, went up a few days in a row and the US went down a few days in a row, you could go long one and short the other. It was a very, very safe strategy. It didn't make a huge amount of money, but it was extremely safe. But Canada is also correlated with Australia, like these other ex-British Empire economies. But then you have to look, Australia is correlated with some Asian economies. So you always have to see all of the correlations and how they're working together. And there was interesting data there that gave me a good system for a couple of years. I mean, yeah, most of these winning strategies work, as you said, for a couple of years.

35:37They just work for a period of time and then the market figures it out uh yeah the arbitrage always goes away on all these things but the arbitrage can't go away with basketball people just have to grow go go grow bigger or have bigger hands or have more dads who were in basketball what are some other features that uh that surprised you that the data uncovered well this one is kind of a little subtle but uh you know when you're tested to be an nba player you have a standing jump like you don't get a running head start and then you have a running head start jump. And it turns out that undervalued players in the draft, like you want to draft players who have a good, a much better standing jump than the running head start.

36:20Cause I think a big problem that NBA teams have is they get too attracted to shiny qualities. So someone could just like jump with a running head start, like really, really high. It's like, Oh my God, that's so impressive. But a lot of the game of basketball, you don't really get a running head start. You're just kind of in place or, you know, half a step. So those players have been consistently undervalued, whereas the great leap, the people who need a running head start to leap are like they tend to underperform their draft pick. And another one that's really interesting is if someone's really ranked highly in high school and then they fall in the draft, you should just draft them anyway.

36:56It's like if someone was like in high school, everyone's like, yeah, this player is like a can't miss. He's the 10th best player in the country. And then all of a sudden he plays in college for a couple of years and everyone decides that maybe he's not that good. he's still probably that good so like it's kind of like you should go with your first instinct uh there's that phenomenon in basketball too where these players who are huge you know big time recruits in high school and then they fall to the second round or whatever tend to be really good best like really good bets why do they not do good in college uh it could be just random thing they yeah we don't know for sure maybe it was just a bad system could be that could be the reason that was just a bad fit or something and they don't do as well as people are expecting and everyone's like, oh, well, maybe they suck.

37:35Well, no, they still are as good as everyone originally thought. One interesting thing you had was that people who didn't go to college tended to be better NBA players than people who went to college. And you think that college gives you four years of intense training. Like, forget about the education part, just four years of intense coaching that would help. But where do the non-college players, are they just like going straight from high school or what's their story? Yeah, well, it used to be they go straight from high school. It's not allowed anymore because they banned straight from high school.

38:06But when they were going straight from high school, there was this huge inefficiency that they were just massively undervalued. It's kind of similar to the Teal Fellowship, right, where he gets all these people who are the most talented people in the world to just skip college. And they're just massively more successful. I think, yeah, maybe it's like also inside information. If you're willing to go straight to the NBA instead of go to college, you're probably better than people realize. because you maybe know more about yourself than even they know. That could be part of it. But for years, that was like a massive inefficiency.

38:38Just take players who weren't going to college. And so I'm trying to think there was some other piece of the deal. Oh, what was the deal with coaches? So do you think there is such a thing as a good coach? And your point in there, though, is a good coach is someone who encourages, who is able to, has the ability to get players to pass more frequently between each other. But does that result in more wins? Yeah, like 100%. I'm convinced that coaches are really important. There are a lot of statisticians who have looked at very different ways. And they're all like NBA coaches are really important.

39:14I think the thing about the NBA is there's an incentive problem where basically players get rewarded for just scoring a lot of points. They get paid more and they get more fans. so like players have an incentive to just take a ton of shots particularly shots here at the end of the game like if you have a chance of being a hero like that's so valuable and if you miss a shot everyone just kind of forgets uh so it but that's bad for the team because it would better if they pass for a better percentage shot so the great coaches are able to get players to kind of overcome their incentives and pass the ball more than they naturally want to uh which is yeah that's that's i think the secret of of coaching in the nba and why it's just insanely valuable like the great coaches, I think, add about as much to a team as a great player.

39:58So, yeah, you mentioned one coach who made the players dine together more frequently and just spend more time together. So they would bond more instead of having their own little, you know, little islands for themselves. Yeah. It's funny. Cause like you think that was Greg Popovich, the Spurs, who's kind of a legendarily good coach. And you think that like, what is a great coach too? You'd imagine them like just diagramming plays all the time and just like really being in their own head and being basketball geniuses and it seems like a big part of his secret is just the social aspects of the game basically getting the players to like each other enough that they're willing to sacrifice some of their own uh you know some of their own monetary uh rewards for the good of the team

40:56What made you want to do this book? The thing we haven't talked about is I wrote this book in 30 days using AI tools. So I became obsessed with AI. I am completely obsessed with AI. I'm just like, this is changing everything. And I started playing around with these tools, this tool Code Interpreter from ChatGBT, where you just like, it just does all your data analysis for you. It's so insane. It's like the most insane product I've ever seen in my life. Do you feed it the data or does it have the data? No, you feed it the data and then you just talk to it and it does everything you ask. It runs all the code.

41:30It creates your charts, your graphs, your new data sets, everything you want. It just does it. It's so insane. It was like the most mind-blowing thing I've ever seen. So what data do you feed it? And you feed it in the format of like Excel? A CSV, yeah. You just feed it like these are all the basketball players. Yeah, this is their physical stats, their college stats, their pro stats, where they're from. and then like yeah and then you just talk to it you're like uh you know add a variable of what continent they're from and it just knows every country what continent that's in so it'll you know make france europe and china asia and canada north america or whatever and it's just like so insane so basically things that used to take me four months now took me about four hours so i'm just like wow if if i could do things that quick then i could write a book really really fast i tried to calculate how fast i could write a book and i concluded i could write like a good book in 30 days which everyone told me was totally insane i wouldn't be able to do it but that kind of like that that was fun too because it was like oh you know people don't think i can do this well i'm going to show them that i can write a good book in 30 days so that was motivation then i'm obsessed with basketball so i'm like well might as well write about basketball because uh it's such a passion of mine.

42:44So it was a combination of, it was mostly due to AI that I just wanted to like play around with these tools. And it's great because the AI, it's not like it wrote the book, right? It was like, it was like an assistant. It basically allowed you to crunch the data a hundred times faster or 700 times faster than you normally could. Well, and then all the art. So I've never had art in anything I've done because I like, you asked me to draw. It takes a long time. It's not just takes a long time. I have zero talent. Like you said, draw a horse. Like I couldn't draw anything like that at all resembled a horse.

43:17But now I have like art that I think is people have been telling me like, wow, Seth, your art is so beautiful. And I'm like, you know, but I didn't do any of that. I just told mid journey or Dali, like make, you know, make a, I have a section on genetics. I'm like, you know, be fun for that. Make a piece of DNA, like playing basketball. And then like, they have a piece of DNA playing basketball. It's like all these things. I'm like, wow, you know, that's super cool. And like, it kind of, it's kind of fun. Cause like one of the, like, I think there is a creative artistic person inside me. Absolutely.

43:52Yeah. But I can't, I can't express it because I have no talent like to draw, but then like I can express it now because Dolly or mid journey could just draw my ideas like, Oh, DNA playing basketball or, you know, whatever idea I have. I mean, when chat GPT first came out, I did a little experiment. and I wanted to see if in an afternoon I could have it write a book. So I wanted to learn more about neuroscience. So I just started with random prompts, like what makes someone smarter in terms of neuroscience? And then it would mention all these neurochemicals. And then I would say like, okay, well, what foods contain or boost these neurochemicals?

44:32And it would list some foods and then say, okay, come up with five recipes that use all of these foods. And it would come up with these recipes and format them just like in a cookbook. And yeah, you could have pictures of the food. And I think it's a real great thing where the hype equals the reality. Like AI actually is immediately improving the efficiency of the entire economy for millions and millions of people right now. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, like even you just see the uses. So if you go to Midjourney, like if you use Midjourney, it's on Discord. That's the art product. You give it a prompt.

45:15Like, you know, I have one I wanted to talk about. You know, I have this theory that the best potential basketball player is probably working as a rice farmer in India right now. Because like what's the chances that the best basketball player, LeBron James or something, happens to be born in the United States? like it's more likely that there's someone out in India or like you know the United States a tiny part of the population that just never grew enough because bad nutrition have never developed their skills so I'm like it'd be fun to draw LeBron James as a rice farmer in India so I just tell mid-journey like draw right LeBron James as a rice farm in India and it looks exactly like LeBron James as a rice farm in India it's wild but then when you're on mid-journey you see what everyone else is asking for and it's just like yeah like one of the big use cases is coloring books for example people are like i'm making a coloring book make like a elephant like coloring coloring whatever and it's so it's perfect like there's no use for a human to create a coloring book anymore like obviously you just do ai mid-journey or dolly and you have your whole coloring book you I mean, that you could do in like a day.

46:25You could come up with a coloring book or something. So yeah, it's like, yeah, I totally agree with you. The hype. And the weird thing is AI right now is the worst it's ever going to be. So it's only going to get better from here. Like this is the worst version of AI. It's only going to go improve. And it's still already revolutionary. So like how much better is it going to get? I wonder if there's a plateau though. And then now improvements may be significant, but it might not be as noticeable. Like when you buy a MacBook Air now, as opposed to two years ago, it's much better than the MacBook Air two years ago.

47:02But you can't really tell. Like it's not like it used to be 10, 15 years ago. There might be a plateau, but like I think the end game is just like an infinitely smart person who can, an infinitely smart machine who could do everything like in no time. so I think we eventually will get there so it might be like the curve, if it's been growing exponentially it may stop and then go start growing exponentially again in 10 or 15 years I don't know how it's going to play out but I think the end game, as long as it doesn't kill us all, is just a perfect intelligence Well, what other data things can you feed it?

47:44What else have you played around with? Well, I mean the last 30 days, I've been working nonstop on my book because I was trying to write a book in 30 days, which is not easy. So wait, did you have a publisher publish it in 30 days? Or did you self publish? Oh, I couldn't, I self publish. I couldn't, I couldn't convince any publisher to, uh, yeah, yeah, no, you have to sell this project. Yeah. But now you realize now that you, now you've discovered the joys of self publishing. So now you can write your next 50 books. It's so much fun. It's also like, uh, I just kind of like, uh, I don't know if you can relate to this.

48:16I just like the challenge of like being outside the system. It's like more fun. It's like, if you feel like you're a rebel a little bit and it's like, it usually I hate self-promotion, but I've been really enjoying self-promotion for this book. Cause it feels like I'm a little bit breaking the rules and like trying to convince people to have, have me on their show, even though I'm not like an official Harper Collins author anymore. I'm just like a self-published author. It's really fun. My bestselling books are self-published. I about 50. So I have over 20 books. About 50 % are mainstream published like HarperCollins and so on.

48:50And 50 % are self-published. My bestselling books by far are self-published. And it's because you can market it better because it's like, it's still fresh in your head. You probably, you don't have to wait a year and a half after you wrote it for it to be published. Like you just wrote it and now it's published. So you could still talk, you have the energy to talk about it. And you can also play around with pricing. You could do deals with email lists and marketing to like, you could market it yourself. You, I can't market my Harper Collins books. Like I can't pay for ads on Amazon that, cause they only accept the ads from the publisher.

49:25So where a self-published books, you can. I totally agree with you. And for whatever reason, it's just been really, really fun. It's like, it feels like, like, again, I hate self-promoting. I've always hated marketing. It's always felt like gimmicky or whatever. But the challenge of this has been like, I've just been leaning into it. Someone told me the book was, they couldn't get a paperback copy of my book. And I'm like, I'm sure that was just like an error of Amazon or whatever, but I'm like, it'll be really fun to make this seem like my book is in such high demand that it's sold out everywhere.

49:56So I started blasting out on all the social channels that the book is sold out due to high demand or whatever. I've just been having so much fun. That's like a classic marketing trick, right? Which I've never done before. I've always found it gimmicky. But for some reason, I think the self-publishing has just unleashed the guerrilla market. It's more of my baby, yeah. It's more my baby. And I feel like I'm not responsible to anybody. Nobody's watching me to be like, you're not allowed to say that or whatever. It's just like, it's all me. And I just love that. So here's a data thing. And a friend of mine did this data analysis in 2014 about mainstream published books versus self-published books.

50:38But first off, he did it in 2014, so that's nine years ago. I don't know if the data is different. Second, or maybe it was like 2016. Second, I don't know if you ever saw the TV show Silo. It's Hugh Howey did this. So he wrote the book, Whoa, which became the TV series, excellent TV series Silo. But his analysis years ago concluded that on average, self-published books have a higher ranking than mainstream published books. And on average, he had some other conclusions that you would think would be the reverse, but he concluded that self-publishing was better. I'm forgetting all the data now. It might be.

51:16That said, can you actually get rich, rich books? It seems, I guess you can, really? Let's take mainstream published books. Let's say you get a huge advance, all right? I don't know. What's a huge advance these days? Like, okay, a million dollars, a few people still get and so on. I had a good advance on my last mainstream published book, but the advance is spread out over many years. So it doesn't really feel like it has that big of an impact to your income in any one year. And then the agent takes out 20 % and then the IRS takes out about 50 % to 60%. And so, and then you get these payments like once every year and a half, or, you know, you get three or four payments.

52:01It just doesn't feel like you're making any money on a mainstream published book, even if you have a huge advance. I know, I know you're not getting rich from a mainstream published book. I'm saying, can you get rich from a self-published? I mean, I guess you can, like, you know, you can't get rich from books. JK Rowling is a billionaire or whatever, but I'm saying like, from my experience, yeah, from my experience like everything i've done creatively even when i thought i was making a lot of money because i had just been a grad student i'm like by my standards compared to my thirty thousand dollar stipend this is a lot of money when a business like a hedge fund called me up and they wanted to help like me to work for them i'm like oh that's another league compared to a creative pursuit but i don't know maybe i'm i i i i mean it's also obviously it's obviously a power loss.

52:47So like, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, you're right. Like, so, so John Grisham, JK Rowling, they're, they're definitely outliers and self-publishing is hard, but I just think, let's put it this way. I think you're more likely to make some money from a self-published book than a mainstream published book. No, I agree some money, but it's even hard. Like who makes the MBA? Like, although I've been lying and claiming that it's like, you know, nobody can get in the bookstore because it's so much demand. I'm refreshing the royalties on Amazon and it's not that much. I'm getting five bucks. But you can do deals though.

53:23When I had my book, Choose Yourself come out, some guy called me and said, hey, I have this huge email list. This guy had a million people on his email list. Write a few extra chapters and make it hardcover because at that time, Amazon was doing paperback and Kindle and audiobook, but not hardcover. Make it hardcover. Write a few more chapters. It's just for people on my list. And include your stock predictions. And I will sell 20 ,000 copies of this for$20 in two weeks and split it with you. And he did? And he did. He sent me a check literally for$200 ,000 two weeks later. wow okay yeah so that is and that at that time that was the most i had ever made from books a book and that was because i did this deal like you can do you can do deals that publishers can't do interesting it's just another thing with books i feel like so i love books so if someone like anytime i see like you know someone tweets hey this book was good i just order it it's you know 15 bucks it's like what do i care you know 15 bucks whatever i'm like i love books i'll learn something i'll learn a few things like yeah i buy a ton of books but i feel like the average person just doesn't like books that like i mean another thing i'm seeing like i'll tweet i'll tweet i had one tweet when i was promoting my book before it came out it got 1.1 million views and then like five people bought my book off of that tweet, which is a terrible rate.

55:00So what am I doing wrong there? Like, is that, am I doing? Because people aren't going from Twitter to Amazon, but what they will do is they'll go from Twitter to Substack. So you could do a thread. Here are five things about the NBA you definitely did not know. And then you have a new, you reply to that tweet and you have the five things and each in a new reply. And then at the end, you say, if you like this thread and thought it was interesting, I have a lot more information like this. Subscribe to my newsletter on Substack and you link to that. And then you have, then you're bringing your audience onto your own platform and let it instead of, you're getting to know your audience.

55:42So I need a Substack. I need a Substack first. Yeah, like you need a way to get to know your audience. Like right now, they're just these amorphous Twitter followers who love your stuff, but you just don't know anything about them. So you need to kind of build a community and you can do that. No, sometimes I'll also see like, you see the Twitter statistics. Like a lot of people just like click on your profile when something goes viral. They're like, who is this person? They probably just followed me like five years ago and they totally forgot who I was. And I have a tweet going viral. So they're like, oh.

56:12Or someone shared it. So they, so their friend shared it, but they don't follow you, but they follow their friend who shared it. But if you could get people onto your newsletter, then you could communicate directly to them through a newsletter and a higher percentage of newsletter readers will buy your book than Twitter followers. Twitter followers, you're lucky if you're going to get, you know, one tenth of 1 % to do anything, but they will go from digital thing to digital thing. Like if you have a free newsletter, they'll subscribe to that. So like, so yeah, so cause you said you're going to offer me tips to make more money.

56:45uh so like do you think doubling down on like creative stuff because i feel like i should i love doing it i did this one month project just because i'm like this i'm not like i'm gonna get rich off an nba book i'm just like i saved a lot of money i don't really need to think about money for a bit for a while i'm just gonna like have fun for a month and fool around with nba data and and like you know it was pure joy it was like the month of my life the highlight of my life I'd say up to this point. That's great. But yeah, but I'm kind of like, I think the creative thing is kind of like, I don't know.

57:20From what I found, like I said, anytime like a business reaches out to me, I'm like, that's where they really have the money and the creative stuff is hard, but I don't know. Don't separate out creativity from business. Like you're a real creative data analyst. Like you find things like people in India have fetishes about breastfeeding. Yeah, that one I've never been able to monetize. Maybe I should be like, yeah, there should be like some, a breastfeeding porn company, especially in India. No, but what I'm saying is look at my friend who has this car data. And like, he told me if, if, if you have a Subaru, I'll, I'll, the first question I'll ask you is what's the name of your pet?

57:57Like everybody who has a Subaru has a pet. So he has like all this data about people. Like he's obsessed with cars. So he has all this data about people based on their cars. So you know how to analyze data and you're very creative at it. Like this is like an art form too. As you said, there's bad data analysis and there's good data analysis. There's some types of data analysis that will make money and some that won't. So maybe finding things out about porn might not make money, but there are areas and stock market might be too crowded to make money. But there are areas like, again, my friend's doing it with car dealerships.

58:34By the way, he's only doing it with new car dealerships. He's not even doing it with used car dealerships. New car dealerships was enough. So this is like this brand new field. It's not a brand new field, but it is a brand new field now because of AI making things so much faster and easier that there's kind of this wide open field where you could find creative stuff that is potential to make money. For instance, insurance. There's a lot of statistics in insurance, but I bet you it's not really using the latest sophisticated data analysis techniques. Or even selling insurance also could be related to that.

59:09I know but just like thinking that makes me want to like shoot myself in the face with a shotgun like insurance markets like another problem I have is I just if I'm not interested in something it's very hard for me to do it I know like yeah yeah and like I've always I've always my entire career like I do something completely impractical and then I'm like this isn't working so I major in philosophy it's like the least practical I was in Stanford the heart of Silicon Valley ever was studying computer science. My friend in my dorm was like the eighth employee of Facebook. And I was like reading Nietzsche books.

59:46It was insane. Like there were four kids in the class. Like it was not, not. Did you get angry at the, at the tech kids who then got rich? No, no, no, no. I'm not going to admit. Yeah, probably. Yeah. Yeah, probably. I probably did. But I sent him like, okay, well, this is not going anywhere. Like I've, I haven't, again, I'm having this, I loved it. I was smoking a ton of pot. Like I was just like really enjoying my life. but I'm like you can't just read Nietzsche the rest of your life so I have to do something practical and then I'm I got an economics PhD like the total you know from zero practicality like a hundred practicality and like I was all on the path I was writing papers on like the equivalent of insurance markets and I'm like uh I'm like I'm you know and the professors were like you're you're you know liked me I was on the path towards like a good academic job a safe academic my job.

1:00:34And then I found Google trends data and like breastfeeding porn. And I'm just like, I got to look at this. Like, I just stopped completely all the practicality. And I'm just like, and then I, so I always like, I'm always on the verge of practicality. And then it's like philosophy, porn, NBA analysis. So what do you, what do you make James? I find your analyses of these situations interesting. You know, I have the same problem, right? Like, so in 2001, in 2002 when the dot-com boom was busted a lot like a lot of my friends who were in the tech business in new york they all picked up and moved to silicon valley and literally they all became billionaires they're all billionaires now and i could have done that too but i didn't want to do it because i wanted to write a novel i wanted to write books i wanted to um i mean i built other companies.

1:01:26I sold them. I did okay. I was a hedge fund manager for a while, but I always ask myself, what if I had just, it's a better life anyway in California. It's better weather. It's everybody I knew moved there. What if I had just done that and focused on money just a little bit more? Maybe I'd have like a billion dollars, but then I wouldn't have done, I mean, I did stand-up comedy for six or seven years. I've written all these books. I have some degree of notoriety. I have this podcast, which I love doing. So I wouldn't have, you only have one life. So yeah, and I kind of feel like if I spent 30 days just doing what I love, like that's even hard for a billionaire to do, right?

1:02:11To like find a passion project like that, that they're so obsessed with that, like who cares at that point? I would say their passion projects are things that, like Elon Musk is doing his passion project. He wants to go to Mars. He figured out from the ground up how rockets work. And he put it all together and made billions of dollars at it. Like he has a passion for that. So I do think a lot of billionaires are passionate about... businessy things. Well, yeah, that's like winning the lottery if your passion also has to be like connects with a get rich yeah thing so like when i was in high school i was obsessed with fantasy sports like i've just always been obsessed with sports that's the who makes the nba book and like my dad is like i was like number like i was like winning all these national competitions and fantasy sports even though i was like everyone else was like a grown person and i was just like a little kid uh and my dad's like this is very impressive like it's great theory so passionate about it but like can't you just devote all this time and energy to the stock market well it's like he gave you bad advice did he yeah because okay if you my podcast i've had on as a guest a couple times matt barry who um he was a hollywood screenwriter he wrote like one of the crocodile dundee movies he's written a whole bunch of things he was making a great living out there and he hated it he was he hated it he had the same expression i felt like i was going to shoot myself in the face.

1:03:38And, and he loved fantasy sports. So he quit all the Hollywood stuff and he got divorced. Like his whole life changed. He lived in a, he moved out of his fancy Hollywood house, I guess, and moved into a small apartment. He started writing articles for a blog about fantasy sports for a hundred dollars an article. And because he was a good writer, because he'd been a professional writer, his writing started getting noticed. And there's a lot of fantasy sports fans out there. So he created his own site and it got bigger and bigger. He sold it to ESPN and now he's the anchor for fantasy sports, uh, on ESPN.

1:04:14Like when I walk in the street with him, everyone says, Oh, thanks for those picks. I won my league last Sunday or whatever. Like he's famous guy. ESPN made money, makes a great living and all from fantasy sports because he, because he single-mindedly pursued the profession and figured out how to make money off of it. He built this platform and then he sold it. Yeah, but that's another danger in picking a career, right? There's all this selection bias. So the ones who tried that and didn't get anywhere aren't going to be on your podcast. Yeah, that's true. That's true. And so you don't know - So you don't know, yeah, I don't know what the odds are.

1:04:50What percent of people quit a lucrative job to follow their passion like it turned into anything? Well, one thing we know for sure is that the percentage of people who do that is higher now than it was 30 years ago because of the internet. So like, you know, my listeners know I'm like obsessed with chess right now. And one of the things that really intrigued me back in 2020, when we were all kind of locked in for COVID in 2020 and 2021, is that chess players who weren't necessarily the best players in the world, in fact, some of them are not very good at all, started using YouTube and Twitch to analyze games or stream their games live while they were playing the games.

1:05:31And this became a thing. And so some of these people have like hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers and are making millions a month on chess, an activity that never made anyone money ever in history, but now is making even bad players a living. And not just a few, but like quite a few. And it actually is not as big now as it was in 2021 when we were all locked in. But so that kind of amazed me that because of all these tools available to us and getting more and more available to us, you can basically do anything. And there's probably some way to make a living at it. I just think the question is the odds.

1:06:09So even chess, what percent of chess people who Twitch are making a good living on it? It's probably pretty tiny. I think it's hard to say because there's selection bias, but there's also if you weren't succeeding, like how fast did you give up? so a lot of people who just stuck with it who started maybe their twitch streams in 2016 and had 50 followers and 60 then 80 and they stuck with it and then the pandemic came and the tv show the queen's gambit came out and then suddenly it spiked and and they had developed they spent years developing their personalities on twitch and youtube and so on so they got a huge fan base basically all of the all the people who stuck with it succeeded we just don't know how many people kind of gave up before their magic time, or maybe they gave up because they didn't have a good personality or they didn't enjoy it for whatever reason.

1:06:59So it's hard to say, but I do think the odds are much higher now than they've ever been before, that you could take anything. And like, for instance, if you did a newsletter about quirky data stuff and you did this once a week or once a month, you would quickly get 100 ,000 readers and you could monetize that. You could have ads in your newsletter and it would make you a living for the rest of your life. Like I know plenty of people - Well, sub stackers, some of them are killing it right now. That is like - Yeah, and that's just persistence, consistency and having good information. And you have the good information.

1:07:37I would try to think not just for basketball, but for like any field, like the data, the quirky data of the week and just put it out there. and I bet you you'd get like quite like I know one guy um uh Joseph Pompliano uh who has a newsletter I think I follow him on Twitter yeah yeah I think I follow him on Twitter he has a newsletter called Huddle Up and he combines he was an ex-Morgan Stanley bond trader he combines uh business with with sports so he talks about basically the business of sports and all these quirky things that I never knew about like how much people who perform in the Super Bowl get paid and you know just uh you know what what does the mavericks getting sold mean for the basketball industry like uh all right how do they value the mavericks and uh all or or different salaries i don't know i haven't he's been on a bunch of times i've read a bunch of the newsletter i don't even like sports but i love reading about right data in sports and business in sports and so it's these weird intersections that are doing really well on on substack and you can you can make a lot of money and Substack, even with like really offbeat newsletters, like that's something I would definitely consider.

1:08:52Yeah, no, I think also just my work ethic tends to be very inconsistent in that I'm either all in or like I'm lying on a beach for like two months. I've never been someone who's like, you know, grinded out day in, day out, week in, week out. And I think, you know, if I'm gonna be a newsletter person, like the great thing about writing these books and like my weird consulting stuff and speaking is you just kind of like do it when you do it. And then, you know, the rest of the time you kind of just goof around. It's really hard. Like I have a hard time with that. Like I said, I've been on this quest where I'm trying to get as good a chess as I was when I was younger.

1:09:34And it's very hard because the whole, I stopped playing for 25 years and the whole world, the whole chess world's different. And so I've been doing my own data analysis, like um how often does someone my age get back to their that level that they once were it's it's it you could count it on one hand out of oh is it yeah out of millions of players so it's very very hard like i i was talking to one friend of mine who did a study on this and it's it's literally like less than five people and uh uh but also there's now there's things i i look at like okay what are the most successful opening moves like very few people have looked at this before like what can i play in the in the beginning of the game it's called the opening that leads to the highest percentage of wins and it's funny how few books or players really mention this and but but there's answers to all i read a book about a about ai chess and how it's taught people things about the game that we didn't know like i think you'll probably know more about like moving the pawn all the way from the end, like up a lot is a very successful move or something.

1:10:43Yeah. You read the book, uh, game changers by Matthew. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, Magnus Carlson specifically took that book and took those games at the computer plate and he really, really studied them and it has noticeably improved his game. Like he uses a lot of the computer strategies and he, I mean, it's very hard to improve when you're already the best player in the world. And he was, he's been the best player in the world for about 15 years or more, but he's steadily kept improving because of studying the computer. And the computer really had unusual strategies that it had sort of, I guess, perfected.

1:11:20And it's worthwhile for humans to study them. I had Gary Kasparov on the podcast. And before the podcast, we're talking, and I asked Gary Kasparov, hey, I read this great book, Game Changers, about computer chess. and I said, did you read it? And he said, read it? I wrote the forward to it. You didn't read the whole thing. So he's got the Russian Jew style of - Blunt. Yes. But yeah, I do believe that if you're really passionately interested in something, there's a way to make money at it. And I just see it in so many different fields. You're right, there is selection bias, but I'm kind of an example of where I've been able to, most things I've been, I've done, I've been able to turn into something that was worthwhile.

1:12:07And now the other question is, do, at what point do you start thinking about monetization? Cause I've also heard, like, if you think too quickly about monetization, like then you don't allow your creativity and curiosity to really drive you, but you can't like never think about it. Right. Yeah. Like, like I was writing my kind of personal development style of blog posts for about five or six years before I even thought about monetizing it. And I think, yeah, it's a good point that the quicker you monetize something, probably the less money you'll make from it. So you kind of have to let it, because it's sort of like you create this enormous goodwill with your audience when you're doing something for love and they can see it and there's no friction for them to see your stuff because they don't have to pay.

1:12:55And so you build this enormous goodwill and after a certain amount of time, they want to pay you. They want you to benefit from all this good work you're doing. And I'm not saying this in a cynical way. They legitimately generously want you to do well because you're providing so much value for them. And so they almost feel bad if you don't ask for money at some point. So it's sort of like you'll know the right point to monetize. And I've had a couple of those points depending on what industry I've been. because I've also diversified industries, which might be a bad thing because I've been a jack of all trades, master of none, but maybe a little bit of a master in some areas.

1:13:32But that was actually another question. This is actually related to your basketball data. I noticed for the seven footers, a lot of them didn't start playing the game until they were older, whereas probably the six footers played it from the age of six years old on. And I wonder if, you know, in every field, what the ages are where it's too late, given your set of characteristics, at what year is it too late for you to start doing something? And, you know, some professions, it's older than others. I think it's a really good question. I think it's an unknown question. You probably know the book Range David Epstein.

1:14:14Yeah. Everybody loves that book because it kind of says that it's good to sample things and take a while to specialize. He starts with sports. He says, Roger Federer, we think of Tiger Woods who started playing golf when he was two years old. And that's the way to master a sport. But Roger Federer played a whole bunch of sports until he turned to tennis, I think, as a teenager. And that's actually an advantage in some ways in a lot of sports. and like even some seven foot players like nicole nikola jokic uh he played water polo as a kid and you see the way he plays basketball is like a water polo player he's just like always like looking around past this i pass that way pass that way and it's like a really unique he's kind of it's kind of has a unique style that turns out to be really effective that he might not have developed if he played basketball too quickly so there's probably something that but i'm sure it just depends so much on the particular skill that are required that skills that are required so like learning a language we know that the earlier you try like the better chance you're going to have like you want to really start you know if you have a kid you want them to be bilingual you know raise them as bilinguals teach them both languages when they're kids because it's going to be way harder when you're uh 20 or 30 or yeah let alone 60 to pick up a language whereas some other skills like you know yeah like your business skill i think you could probably learn pretty late like you know almost the later the better yeah they're yeah i talked about in my last book that the most successful entrepreneurs tend to be 45 years old which surprises people everyone thinks it's like 18 year olds like zuckerberg but that's just a selection effect where the best potential entrepreneurs just like start really quickly like uh zuckerberg and gates and jobs but you know on average it's good to like bide your time and learn your your craft and learn your field and learn your industry and then start your business in your 40s, your 50s, your 60s.

1:16:02So that's an area where it's definitely, I think people think, I guess a lot of people missed opportunities because they thought it was too late in business. Like they're like, you know, they had an idea, but they're like 55. They would have a family, a mortgage. They're like, well, I'm not going to all of a sudden become an entrepreneur. And I think the data clearly shows that's a mistake. A 60-year-old has like a higher chance of succeeding than a 20-year-old. three times higher chance of succeeding than a 20-year-old. Like a 60-year-old still has a great shot of creating a successful business.

1:16:34So I think that's an area where my guess is a lot of people are missing out by thinking it's too late. Yeah, I think you're right. Because also, look, a 20-year-old still doesn't know how to manage risk. And like 90 % of entrepreneurship is how you manage risk. And this is, you know, most companies fail because people don't manage all their risks properly. And they don't know how to test things and be cautious and so on. But for you, you love data analysis. This is now your third book on quirky, weird, fun, exciting data. And is it monetizable? Probably. Again, there's this example from cars. There's tons of examples from every industry.

1:17:19But just specifically what you do, like the quirky stuff, I would try to see if on a regular basis you could come up with something interesting every week. And it doesn't have to be the most interesting thing because for every newsletter writer, some letters are good, some letters are bad. You know, not every issue is going to be, oh my God, this is the one that's going to go viral. You can't predict virality. But I would, you know, like we have a political season coming up. There's certainly lots of data about politics and so on. I mean, who's that guy? FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate, whatever. Yeah, he made a whole career out of like quirky data on politics.

1:18:00But I'm curious if like over the next week or so, you could come up with another quirky thing that you get the data on and you feed it into Code Interpreter and you get excited about it. Yeah, I think Code Interpreter could make it like really less painful for me too. Because also I like data analysis, but I've always kind of hated coding. Like coding has never been fun to me. Like that's like boring and like debugging and that's all annoying. but now i don't have to do any of that because like code interpreter just does it so now it's just really coming up with the questions uh and getting the data like where do you get your data from well another reason i did the nba is there's just so much data available like just because there's so many nerds collecting data on this so there's all kinds of data sets like kegel uh prediction contests have data sets and basketball reference is this huge site by basketball nerds that they just have tons of information on every player uh that was really useful like all kinds to play yeah so okay i have a question what if every team you like every every game you bet on the team where on average they have higher larger hand widths like i wonder if that would be a good betting strategy you know you'd have to figure out you'd have to take into account the eyes i guess yeah my guess is not because i think like by the time an individual game happens like we know that's a good player like we know so kari leonard is a player with enormous hands and he outperformed to his draft pick, but we knew he was a good player by the time, you know, a certain number of games into the season.

1:19:30So maybe it would work like the very beginning of the season, but I think eventually it would kind of be incorporated into the, but you never know because sometimes there's an arbitrage where the home team, you know, the home team, more people bet on the home team in that town. And so the line sort of adjusts. I don't know anything really about betting, but you know, sometimes there's an arbitrage because people are excited about a certain team. But what if they play a team where for whatever reason, this team on average, their hands are so much bigger than the team that everyone thinks is going to win.

1:20:02And people aren't aware of this arbitrage. There might be opportunities like that. It would definitely be an entertaining way to make money, I would say. I think in general, betting on sports could be very lucrative. Didn't you have someone on your show who's made a killing betting on sports? Billy Waters. And then I think there was another guy too recently. I forget. I know one guy, Billy Waters, made a lot of money on sports, and he's still making a lot of money on sports doing something like this. And maybe we had someone else recently. But just even – I don't even care about the betting. Like just asking the question, like do the teams with larger hand widths win more than – Yeah, no, I could have a newsletter where I just ask like a quirky question that only I would think to ask like all the time.

1:20:48Yeah, because that's where you're really, you're a creative guy and creativity is not just about like painting paintings or writing poetry. It's these questions and data. So that's why your book's like, why did no one ever write a book about using data analysis for self-improvement? Like that was a great book. Thank you. What was the title of that one again? Don't Trust Your Gut. Don't Trust Your Gut, yeah. And so yeah, just stuff like that. Even the stuff like that's in that book, there's so many things that people say on Twitter, like, oh, if you take vitamin D, you're never going to get a cold.

1:21:25Every day on Twitter, people are constantly making presumptions and saying things. Well, you could actually test the data on all of these things, write a newsletter that everyone, you know what's going viral already because somebody will say something on Twitter and it'll go viral. And you could just say, oh, well, no, that's wrong because here's the data. And then boom, that will go viral piggybacking on the first thing. Yeah, I also think just like newsletters. It's like, let's say you're charging like 100 bucks a year. Like I have a pretty big network. Like I start with like my mom would definitely subscribe.

1:21:59My dad would subscribe, my brother, my sister. I have like 28 cousins. I start doing the math just from there. I'm like, at what point do I just people who love me? I feel like I have a lot of friends. I'm like, I just start there. Then I have my base. then I expand outward to fans. I don't know. Here's what you should do. Start it free and get 10 ,000 free readers and then convert to premium. So some of the newsletters, some are still free, like half are free and half are premium. And you have to pay like, I don't know, 19 a month or$9 a month for the premium. And 10%, roughly 10 to 20 % will convert from free to premium.

1:22:43And that's the math. so just you know get 10 000 subscribers then you'll have a thousand that'll pay you 10 bucks a month so that's 10 000 a month and but and to get to 10 000 free subscribers is you know you have to have good quality stuff but it's not like with your material we'll get that fairly quickly yeah yeah i i guess just the the consistency is something i've always i've always rebelled against i don't like having like pressure to do something every week or whatever like i like my two months, like my, I like my little sabbaticals. Like I, like, uh, yeah. So that I bet if I told you, Seth, I want you to come on this podcast every Wednesday and tell me some new quirky thing.

1:23:25I'd shoot myself. Yeah. Probably every Tuesday night, you would be like yelling at your girlfriend and all this stuff. No, I'm like, I want to go to the Caribbean for three weeks or something. Like I don't have kids right now. So I'm like, I really can just, uh, I think just, I don't have the thing. I also for a long time have avoided like all things that pin me down in any sort of way. So I think on, on all dimensions of life. And I think this is another way that's just would, would, would feel like a, it's pinning me down. It's limiting my freedom. I've always been after freedom. So here's what you do.

1:23:58Don't do a newsletter every week. Do first collect like first, let's say two weeks from now you have an inspiration for a newsletter. Okay, just do it in secret. Then three weeks later, you have one. And then suddenly when you have like 20 newsletters done and you haven't released a single one, now you can start releasing every week knowing you could be consistent because all the work's done. Do you know Ramit Sethi? Oh yeah, Ramit convinced me to do a newsletter. In 2011, he convinced me to do a newsletter. Ramit and I lived in the, I think we were roommates for like a semester junior year or randomly assigned.

1:24:34Oh, wow. I'll give you a great Ramit story. I think we were roommates. Maybe a dorm mate. Yeah, I think it was roommates. And then he announces he's going to teach everyone personal finance. So he starts plastering around the whole dorm, like, Ramit safety is personal finance class. And I'm just like, Ramit, you don't know anything about personal finance. Like, what the hell are you talking about? Nobody's going to show up to your stupid class on personal finance. Like, you're not a professor. you know, people have been studying this for 30 years, whatever. And then he, so he puts on his class.

1:25:11I think two people showed up. I think one of them had a big crush on him. And I felt so bad. I'm like, this poor guy has no sense of like, what's what the world wants from him. He's making a fool of himself. Like what a loser. And we didn't really talk for a while. And I just like, I'm in my PhD program. I like, just wake up one day and look up, like I see Ramit somewhere. I'm like, I look him up and he's like the world's great personal finance guru. He's got a Netflix show. Oh, it gets bigger and bigger. And then he's the number one show and Netflix and this and that. And I'm just like, if I have kids, I'm telling them the Ramit Sethi story.

1:25:47That's how you start. You got to plaster it. You got to have that chutzpah before, you know, fake it till you make it. You got to put, go around, put it, put all the stuff on the world. Don't care that your roommate's going to think you're an idiot. You know, you're a loser you're pathetic you don't know what you're talking about he just he had pure confidence hustle chutzpah from day one and then it's but you everybody starts nobody starts like uh you know everyone knows everyone's super impressed by you and like now it's easy for him uh but yeah you're totally right by the way like that's why degrees and experience it's not like experience is not necessary, but it's overvalued.

1:26:30You got chutzpah is the most important value. Like I had a friend, I just want to tell you the story. I had a friend who, he was rejected. He wanted to be a professor of computer science at Cornell University. He was rejected. He had a PhD in physics. They didn't want him to teach computer science. So he did the same thing Ramit did. He started putting up science in Cornell's computer science department at 7 p.m. Thursday night. I'm going to teach this thing about computer science. And he was a good, very talented teacher. More and more people started showing up for a class. Now he's a tenured professor at McGill, like for computer science.

1:27:05And he taught at Cornell for many years. Wow. Yeah, no. But the reason I brought up Ramit is he, I, I'm, I, I, he apparently now is living a life where it's all automated. A lot of it's automated. He can just go on vacation for like two months and his team or whatever just does all the posts. and he has the post in waiting and kind of what you're suggesting. And then, so he can live this free life that seems appealing while still having a massive audience and everything. Yeah, think about it. Like, let's say for a year, you decided to just explore whatever you wanted and you would just format it into a newsletter or even get a virtual assistant to format it into a newsletter when you had enough interesting things.

1:27:46And let's say on average, every two weeks you came up with something. Well, after you have 26 things, after 10 years you have 260 so like at some point there's enough where you could be consistent with a newsletter without really giving you too much stress so like that that happened that happened that still happens for me because i i wrote every day for like 20 years so and a lot of things i wouldn't publish some things i would publish but then people would forget it so it's possible to just reuse stuff or rewrite stuff all the time because i have thousands and thousands of articles that I have ready to go.

1:28:22Well, yeah, and I can also just use stuff for my books. A lot of people wouldn't have read them. Yeah, right. Because you want 100 ,000 subscribers on Substack. Okay, probably 100 ,000 people didn't buy your book. I mean, maybe they did, but you're going to hit a new 100 ,000 anyway. And of the 100 ,000 who read your book, they're going to forget anyway. Most people forget 95 % of what they've read. And you could update things. So it doesn't have to be the same. You could provide a little bit more insight on each thing. So you already have like a ton of material. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or you could just, you know, you could slice the material in a different way.

1:29:02So, you know, you have like an enormous – you already put a lot of work into this data analysis and you have this very quirky style and this very creative style in data analysis. I would form something around that. Like, it's just a fact. I love that stuff. So I would subscribe to your newsletter. So that's why I want you to do one. And then you could come on this podcast. We'll talk about all the things that will promote your newsletter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's definitely, I've been thinking a lot of things. I think I emailed you about a podcast. I'm like, I, I feel like I should be doing more things.

1:29:37I kind of just got, I also just like, when I get in a situation where things like I got in a situation, a couple of my books did well and a combination of consulting and speaking and like some of the book stuff, I was just like making a good living and just like really like able to take a lot of vacation and stuff. And I was really kind of phoning it in a bit. And now I'm like, well, maybe I should work harder, do more stuff. We'll see. Yeah. Or again, try to do more of the stuff you enjoy. And then, and there's so many different ways to monetize things now. Like I mentioned about chess with Twitch or we had on this couple that they're obsessed with dinosaurs.

1:30:15And now they make a living from a YouTube channel about dinosaurs. Or, uh, we had on someone recently who really is good at buying small businesses. So she made a newsletter and courses about buying small businesses and she's killing it. So, well, I think actually one newsletter post I'd like to write is analyzing this very question. Cause when you say this, like my data analysis brain is, is skeptical in the sense that I I just think you're getting such a selected sample of like the people who succeed in this are the only ones you're seeing. And I just have no idea what the numbers are of someone who goes all in.

1:30:51And I would be very interested in seeing that. I believe you're right. But but two and there's no way to really know. Maybe there is a way to know. And that would be great to find out. But two things have happened, though. One is the platforms by which you could monetize knowledge has increased. So it used to be just, let's say, books and three television stations. So there were six publishers and three television stations. And that was the only way to monetize something. And it may be infomercials also. And that was it. And this was as recently as like the 90s or the 00s. Now there's like 100 different platforms and ways to monetize things.

1:31:33So that number has increased. And then I just see from the inside, like in the chess world, people I knew who were not good players, but for years had like good, decent YouTube channels and they just loved it. Now they're actually like making a living and they will for the rest of their lives because they have the right number of subscribers. And I just saw that happen internally. And so I know people who tried and failed, but they also didn't really try hard enough. So again, I don't know what trying and failing means. Sometimes you try and you're not that good at it and you don't enjoy it. And you don't like having a small audience for a while, so you give up.

1:32:12So it's hard to say. It's hard to really get data on that. But I saw how that industry grew from the ground up. I do agree with you that persistence goes a long way. If you go out, people I know who are painters, and they were broke until their late 30s, making no money, but kept at it, kept at it, kept at it, kept at it. Then they get their big break. Like it's a combination of you got to just keep putting work into the world to allow your break to, you know, allow the break to happen. And then once you get that break, you got to just like capitalize on it like crazy. And I think if you're willing to do that, the odds are probably are pretty good, even on something as seemingly long shot as like a painter.

1:32:57Although I think there are some things where it's just like the odds are too far against you, like being an actor or actress in Hollywood or something like that. I think like you could be really persistent and, you know, keep going for it and do everything right. And I just think the odds are just so low that. Yeah, I think that's right. But, you know, also you have to be able to withstand backlash. So when, whenever you monetize something, some people are going to hate you for it. Some people who loved you, quote unquote, are not going to hate you no matter what, as soon as you turn on every switch to make money or any switch to make money, some people will hate that you did that.

1:33:32Like if you didn't have ads on your podcast and now you have ads, there will be a group of people who will hate you because now you have ads. If you never were charging for something and now you're charging for something, there's a group of people who will hate you and say you sold out. And you feel really bad that these people hate you because you thought they loved you, but you confused their love for real love. And I'm more talking to myself that I was always very disappointed at the people who would be disappointed in me whenever I charged for something. And I felt guilty about it. But over time, you deal with it.

1:34:09I do think in general, like as a creative person, you have to be really, you have to like almost lean into the haters. You got to kind of get off on the haters. Yeah. Which becomes, like I remember, like my first book came out and everyone loved it. Everyone's like, this is great, it's great, great. second book like yeah again some people are expecting it to be like my first books then they're just like you know i got attacked initially i was like i like i don't know how i'm gonna deal with a bad review but then like you just kind of lean into it and you're like it's kind of funny that they like what they attack you for too and you're just like you start laughing it off and then like that kind of energizes you and you're like well now i don't care because i can handle like someone like one person just said that i'm like the most self-absorbed person they've ever seen or something i'm like yeah i get to be unfair i am probably pretty cool i am i can't be pretty self-absorbed so they did kind of nail me so i'm like i just thought it was kind of funny like that they thought that and like particularly when you get someone like a bad review from someone who's like very like by the book and like uh you know plays by the rules and more like you know presentable and official and stuff and they like hammer you, then I kind of get off on that.

1:35:21Like, you know, I feel like it's kind of cool. That's a good attribute. Like, yeah, I used to think I didn't care, but you know, I've been doing this, you know, I've been writing or doing things for the public or either podcasts or going on TV or writing since about 2002, maybe even a little earlier. So 20, over 20 years. And every time there's a, a, a backlash, it gets more and more heightened. So at first, if it's just one person wrote me and said, Oh, you, you know, you ugly Jew, what's up? Like I would get offended. That was like in 2003, then that stopped defending me, but then it just gets the, the hate, the trolls or haters keep upping the ante every few years.

1:36:05and at some point they find your buttons and and it it does get a little painful yeah well it's just interesting what your button is so like you know you know someone says like my teeth are yellow or yeah you're ugly or whatever i'm just like yeah okay fine like i don't care like it doesn't really bother me but like if they have uh like if if they say like he's a pretty good data analyst or something like that that would just like drive me insane like that pretty good yeah no i i somebody told me i don't know if it's true that i think it was like chevy chase punched like steve martin in the face or something they were getting this huge fight and someone said what happened and it was that uh chevy chase had uh steve martin said to chevy chase that he's a pretty good comedian yeah like you're you're pretty good you're you're a pretty good comedian and like if he had said you're the worst comedian i've ever heard you'd be like oh he's just in a bad mood or he's just jealous or whatever but like pretty good is like fuck he like looked at me closely and concluded that i was pretty good and that that kind of like uh can uh i think i can relate to that like if that i think that was probably more than someone really attacked me i think that was on the set of snl when that happened was it yeah i'm not sure if it was steve martin it might have been bill murray i'm not sure yeah it might have been yeah but i forget Like all, all those guys had big personalities.

1:37:26Um, but, uh, yeah. And similarly, I got a review on one of my books. It was one out of five stars. And they're like, this is the most unintentionally like hilarious book of the year. And like, it reads like a set, like a parody of a Ted talk or something. And like, that didn't bother me at all. If it was like three stars or four stars, like that would have really driven me. Three stars are the worst. Yeah. Like, yeah, it's pretty good. you know not quite at the level of an adam grant or like this or that but like the worst book i've ever read i'm just like yeah that's kind of fun like that didn't bother me it'd be interesting to study what makes the adam grants of the world because i feel like there are some writers who have this very sort of narrative but academic style that do get blessed by the media and become larger than life when okay i love adam grant stuff and he's been on this podcast a billion times but I'm just curious like Adam Grant, Malcolm Gladwell, some other people, all their stuff's good but just there's also a lot of good stuff out there that never gets noticed.

1:38:31I'm just curious what makes the difference. Is it the academic credentials? I think Adam, well Malcolm Gladwell doesn't have academic credentials. I think Adam Grant has a combination of a real talent. I think his storytelling is great and I think he's really, really hardworking. yeah like he is you talk about like the consistency that i struggle with like he's tweeting and you know he has a new new thing every day like so consistent it's it's hard to keep that up though like i can't i did that for 20 years and i just can't do it anymore i'm too old yeah yeah i think he has he's got a real talent i think he's just got incredible uh work ethic and discipline and consistency and then uh yeah there is something probably like he is uh presentable to like the world in some way that people like or something like i think that's where you're getting at like yeah that he's blessed like that uh people are happy for him to be like the next malcolm bladwell or something in a way that some other people wouldn't get that same blessing yeah it's interesting.

1:39:33See, lots of interesting data out there. So Seth, I always love talking to you. I'm actually experiencing severe COVID related pain at the moment. And so I think I have to go, unfortunately, but come on, seriously, come on the podcast. Anytime you find out any interesting data at all, no pressure, no stress. We don't even have to schedule. You could just call us up and you come on the next day. And happy to have you on anytime. Always interesting stuff. And meanwhile, what's it? Why NBA players get picked? Who makes the NBA? Oh, who makes the NBA? Yeah. It was such a fun read because I like having these questions answered.

1:40:23And you don't realize you like having them answered until you read what the questions are. like let me actually was your list of well i'm going to read the list of questions in the when i do the intro that you mentioned in your intro um but great book once again and and and thanks again for coming on the podcast always fun james thanks for having me thanks seth

1:40:58Thank you.