Business Breakdowns: Moneyball's first-principles, paradigm shifts, and ‘burn the boats’ | E1909

0:00It's not science. If it wasn't anybody could do what we're doing, but they can't because they don't know what we know. they don't have our experience and they don't have our intuition now there are intangibles that only baseball people understand you're discounting what scouts have done for 150 years even yourself adapt or die yep it's really that simple adapt or die if ai is here if mobile is here if cloud computing is here pcs are here broadband is here the internet people didn't think the internet would take off they thought it would collapse under its own weight and they thought you would only have proprietary services like AOL or Prodigy, CompuServe, and you had to adapt or die and use open standards.

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1:31Tired of the dev shop roller coaster? Mev is your reliable technical partner offering a well-established software development process designed to consistently deliver unparalleled value to their clients. Get$30 ,000 off your first three months at mev.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. We have this new series we've been doing. It's called Business Breakdowns. What do we do on this show? We talk about a great business story, typically one that they've made a movie about. This is our third one today. We did back in 2023, BlackBerry. That was episode 1773 of This Week in Startups.

2:13and uh we recently discussed 2016's uh the founder about ray crock on episode 1872 you can find all of these business breakdowns at thisweekinstartups.com slash bb thisweekinstartups.com slash bb or if you type in this week in startups business breakdowns into google or youtube you'll find it today i have my bestie lon harris back to talk about an incredible incredible film i think this is kind of like a perfect film for me money ball welcome to harris thank you thank you we haven't talked about are we only going to do movies that are based on true stories because there are great business movies we talked about you know like wall street in the past that one's not based on a true story that's just oliver stone made up but you know it's still think lessons to impart it's just interesting uh there are enough there are enough business movies based on true stories that we could just stick to those or we could talk about the business lessons from breaking bad and the sopranos and that could be highly entertaining yeah yeah there's tons of business lessons in there starface perfect never get high on the godfather trilogy you need to buy wibis sticks you need to buy wibis when he throws the coffee in his face oh my god sopranos got a lot of business lessons in them um all right oh yeah you did the whole series thanks that was producer nick for those of you wondering all right let's get started there's so much to love about this if you are listening to this you are consenting to spoilers because we're going to break down the entire film money ball which of course is based on the hit book by michael lewis from 2003 money ball the art of winning an unfair game this film was directed by bennett miller a little known fact i hosted a screening for bennett miller's first film which was a documentary called the cruise when i was in new york doing my previous media company or two companies ago the silicon i reporter i used to do screening so i did one for bennett miller's um the cruise that's the one it's about a guy who leads very unconventional quirky tours of new york right i've seen yes yeah and then i also did one for a film called pie which i'm not asking the darren aronofsky so when i was in late 90s early 2000s i became friends with darren aronofsky um he won't remember me um and uh bennett miller who also won't remember me but big shocker there and uh you know this that was like a really cool independent film time period when people were making digital films he later went on to do capote he did that one fox catcher that's really good with uh with uh yeah steve carell yeah he does you know he does true stories really well and you know i guess now that puts it together for me because philip seymour hoffman of course is in capote and philip seymour hoffen is also in money ball as art how yeah this was this was his follow up and good hoffman had you know gotten all that praise and pony so he showed back up did a did another role in his next one also i think uh brad pett as billy bean and jonah hill as peter brand uh which is based on a guy named paul to podesta um i'm always interested in that like why that guy's name i guess he didn't consent to be depicted in the movie or something so they had to change his name yeah you know there is a whole bunch of legal issues when you're doing true stories and i was thinking about this like you could do a true story without permission like we could do a story if we wanted to on steve jobs we could do a make our own fictional tale or we could do our own authorized unauthorized you know there's like people do this they did the oj simpson there's somebody who did a series on the oj simpson trial and then they did the monica lowinski trial i forgot the name of that series ryan murphy it's the american crime story the ryan murphy series yeah which i both were very good i thought they had great actors in them that oj simpson one was dynamite i love dynamite but you don't need permission right you can just go do those things right it it's if you i mean it's if they're based on books but just like it what they didn't have to go get the permission of the public figure that the story's about they had to get the permission of the book they were adapting but if you don't adapt a book and you just do something based upon your own independent research yeah i mean the idea would be you can't make up slanderous things about someone and present it as fact but as long as it's clear that it's a movie and that you've made it up then sure you know like charlie kaufman wrote being john malkovich before he got in touch with john malkovich and said do you want to be in my movie he just wrote it and started showing it to people and then lucky enough john malkovich agreed to be in the movie but he wasn't breaking any laws by writing it actually producer nick uh look this up uh this is the d podesta quote i just could never get comfortable with the idea of somebody else portraying me to the rest of the world it it's very unnerving and it's was something that wasn't going to go away that was always in my mind like any movie to make it interesting there has to be some conflict there in some respects a lot of the conflict is going to revolve around my character and that was never really the case in reality.

7:23So yeah, you know, I wonder if it was also casting Jonah Hill. I wonder if they were like, Hey, we got Timothy Chalamet to play you whether he would have felt better. Exactly. Look, business leaders face a maze of tasks today. We all know that creating and managing your company's ownership shouldn't add to your stress. Well, meet Mantle. This is the AI powered equity management platform for modern founders and operators. It's going to simplify your strategy and save you a ton of time. Mantle has been built from the ground up by founders for founders, and they've spent 12 years building and scaling successful companies themselves.

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That's with mantle.com slash twist for your first 12 months free see why hundreds of founders are switching to mantle right now okay i just want to talk about the actors before we get into the film brad pitt jonah hill philip seymour hoffman i was thinking about this and you know you and i are fans of films i just want to before we get into the business stuff i want to talk about how great those three actors are to have them as your principals is extraordinary um but then i wanted to talk about in the corpus now philip seymour hoffman has so many amazing films i don't think that this one is in his top three or four right you wouldn't put this as a master he's good but this is not a particularly showy role this almost feels like a favor to bennett miller like yeah i'll come up you'll have a world-class actor in this supporting role he's got a couple great scenes but no i don't i mean this is phil seymour hoffman so amazing so many movies yeah i mean the master but also a great part of like he had a long career as just a character actor who would show up and nail a few scenes and then disappear like twister a lot of people forget that one of the like randy rowdy guys on bill paxton's crew and twister is a pre-fame philip seymour often because he would do those are kind of the kind of roles he would take so he was used to being kind of an ensemble player where he would show up for a few scenes but no i wouldn't say this is up to like i mean yeah and talented mr ripley pretty great he's amazing pretty gay doubt of course drunk love yeah i mean there's so many where he is the master all the all the pta moves i think master he's also you know has a small part in uh almost famous remember that that was sure and lebowski i mean he's so great in big lebowski yeah i mean what a loss i mean oh it's right yeah heartbreak track heartbreaking i mean he died so young and he was one of those guys that he it would have been a long he would have kept doing it it would have been a long career we would have watched you know he would have aged into all these other great roles like what we're watching you imagine him like what we're watching paul giamatti start to do you know like like there's all kinds of different shades that you can play as you get older and it's a shame we'll never we'll never get to see that brad pitt another good example of a guy who he's taking on different kinds of roles as he gets older you see different sides of it okay so and this is what i wanted to get into uh rest in peace philip seymour hoffman of course but looking at joey hill looking at brad pitt i want to start with brad pitt here i was just thinking about my favorite brad pitt roles obviously he's playing billy bean here this is one of my favorite brad pitts ever tyler durden okay sure sure cliff booth recently yeah once upon a time in hollywood i i think that might be his best performance and lieutenant aldo rain yeah the tarantino team-ups are great so anyway there's four where do you put if we just take those four you got billy bean in money ball we're going to talk about today tyler durden obviously fight club cliff booth once upon a time in hollywood and lieutenant aldo rain yeah i mean i think what do you i think once upon a time in hollywood is is probably his his overall best like i i think i mean we're leaving out we're leaving out a lot too like seven he's really good at seven younger but not yeah california i remember that oh and 12 monkeys that was those first monkeys pretty great too but those were like younger i feel like he wasn't as rich of an actor you know i feel like his recent films are so much better but i don't know where would you put this i just named my three favorites outside of this one i think this one is really good it's it's good because it's small it's subtle it's little moments it's a lot of him quietly taking in information and reacting and and you're watching it all in the eyes he's processing it even in like that that very memorable final scene when he's listening to his daughter on the on the cd uh and he you know as he's driving uh you know like there there are lots of good sort of quiet moments which is the real test i think more than the big 12 monkeys such a big showy role you know everybody seems great in that kind of part when they nail it but but cliff booth is your favorite i like that i like cliff booth i think because so much shading that character i think people like a lot of people come away from that movie and they think i don't know if i like cliff booth and they think that's a problem with the movie like you're supposed to like him and i'm not sure how i feel about him but i don't think i don't think so i think the whole movie is kind of about this is a shady there's something i don't necessarily like or trust about this guy i don't know about this guy and like and i think that's an undercurrent that runs under the whole movie that like deep deep down rick dalton's a good a good guy who's just kind of a narcissist and an egomaniac and got caught up in the industry or whatever clip booth though not necessarily a good person and i think that's and i think i i really like pit really runs with that under the surface i think it's like a barely barely visible thing a lot of the time and then it suddenly comes out we're like oh i don't i don't necessarily like scott he's tripping on the lsd joint he smokes and then he kills all the hippies and he's fantasizing about beating up bruce lee and where he's kind of laughing as he remembers shooting his wife with a harpoon whether it was purposeful or not yeah it's dark it's dark and i mean i think tarantino i think it's 100 on purpose and he's playing with that like there is kind of a darkness to brad pitt in a lot of these roles tyler durden obviously california obviously and i think and he's he is he's teasing that out a little bit in a nice subtle way that's what i really like okay so for jonah hill as we wrap this up in terms of performances this was also jonah hill this was like one of the first times where he was like you know because john hill used to be the ask me about my wiener like comedy judd apatow guy yeah not super bad yeah and this was one of the first times where people were like oh this guy's good so wolf of wall street super bad and money ball well what do you like best there i mean i think this one and wolf of wall street to probably probably the top the joda hill top two he's been in some he's he's been in some clunkers lately so you got to go back a little bit he's amazing in jango too as a very small role yeah very small part in jango but he's very good that's true that's wait i don't remember him in he's one of the kkk guys yeah oh uh he oh i didn't remember that yeah he's like complaining about how his like hood doesn't fit correctly his wife yeah he's like i didn't realize you guys put these together for you it's very funny one other one that i should mention i i think uh this is the end is really underrated that that one is great with apatow and like and all those guys like partying as the apocalypse happens and he's really funny in that that's one of his funnier performances and i also like the the 21 22 jump street movies with him and channing tatum they're a good yeah they're a good comic duo so lots of lots to recommend from jenny just not not recently so much so let's get into the film here why don't you set this up for us uh lon and then we'll start playing some scenes in the business lessons that we found in this yeah money ball came at let's see six academy awards i don't know if you wanted to mention that up front but we'll we'll we'll jump you a bit it was nominated for best picture best actor brett supporting actor jonah hill adaptive screenplay sound mixing film editing it won nothing it won nothing at all that year uh but hey six nominations that's that's not bad and it was it was a part of that whole award season they were they were in the mix that whole time okay so let's dive into it the film opens with the 2001 american league division series in which the oakland a's lose in a devastating painful way to the new york yankees and what especially sticks in their craw about it is that the Yankees have so much more money to spend on players.

16:22The 2001 Yankees had a payroll of$114 million. The A's were spending just around$40 million. That means not only do the Yankees get to spend so much more, get all this better talent, but they basically get to cherry pick players they like from smaller market teams and just buy them out. So even if the A's do all the work to foster a guy like a player like Jason Giambi or Johnny Damon and take them from being sort of unknown underdog guys into all-stars, the Yankees can then just come and grab them or teams like the Yankees, the Red Sox are also sort of in that mix, who have these huge war chests and can just go throw money around and buy up whoever they want.

17:02And this is where baseball is very different than, say, the NBA. NBA has got a salary cap that's very fixed, very, it penalizes you. That equivalent, producer Nick, doesn't exist in baseball in the same way yeah no baseball is the only remain remaining major for u.s sports that does not have a salary cap similar to the soccer leagues in europe that don't have salary caps which is how you see like uh ronaldo getting you know 100 million dollars a year from the saudis or messy getting 70 million dollars a year from you know they can get away with that in part because there are so it's such a longer season there's so many more games it interjects a lot more sort of like randomness and variability so like if the lakers were so much more dominant there's just fewer games they would just crush everybody the whole season am i am i crazy with that nick is that part of the deal i actually don't think so i think what really it is is that the mlb's player union has had like a hard um it's a hard line for them the salary cap where they're like we never want this because it's bs and players should be paid what their what their market value is and there should never be a cap on what people can earn um and the players union like won't even go but do you feel like it hurts the sport of baseball significantly that no i don't it's unfair in this way that's what i'm saying i actually think every sport i think i don't think salary cap should exist in any sport i think they're stupid oh and i think putting a cap on how much someone can earn uh is ridiculous like having a max salary in the nba is insane if someone wants to pay janice 100 million dollars a year he should be able to make that it feels un-american to me yeah it's pretty communist right it's pretty they're looking out for the like making the game more fun like the whole point of having teams the whole point of having a game is to make it competitive and fun but if you're a small market owner like the a's owner right therein lies the problem in baseball you see the a's owner in the beginning of the movie he's like listen i we're a small market team i just don't have the budget listen if that's what your deal is sell the team to someone who can afford it because you shouldn't be owning a baseball team if you can't afford a salary that could compete that's what i think yeah it's fascinating um so this is a fascinating diversion of just how these leagues have evolved um but this is the setup you have a certain amount of resources other teams have three times that amount of resources four times the amount of resources and so how do you do more with less and when i you know see this setup i immediately thought a lot about startups versus incumbents right you have an incumbent like google they can put a thousand engineers on their ai project they can put 10 000 engineers you know they can put unlimited number of people on a project and then you have some startup chat gpt from open ai or whatever and the startup somehow figures a way to do more with less and beat them and sometimes having a limited budget makes you look for creative ways to win and that is the central tenant is is there a better way to win correct yeah and i mean i think that it opens with that mickey mantle quote the movie opens with the mickey mantle quote it's like you you wouldn't believe how much you don't know about the game you've played your whole life and i think that's So it forces Billy Bean to reconsider baseball from the ground up in a way that people don't want to do.

20:21Once you've learned about something and spent years working on something, you're mentally resistant to rethinking it entirely. You're like, no, no, I get this. I've done this. I know how it works. And you whether you consciously realize it or not, I think you build up a lot of resistance to new outside the box kind of thinking. And that that that's the real challenge is he's forced by these circumstances to throw out everything he thought he understood about how to put together a good baseball team and break it down in this completely different way. And I mean, then we get to all these scenes where, you know, he's got this room full of old guys who've been doing this for 40 years and think they know everything about baseball.

21:00They've seen thousands of games, thousands of players. And they're using this very, you know, vibe based, emotional kind of judgment where it's all subtle little things that they know to look for that they like. Like he's a hitter. He's got a good swing or. Yeah, let's play that clip. This is like showing you how it's currently done. Yeah. What do you got? I like Geronimo. Yes. He's an athlete. Good player. Big, fast, talented. Top of my list. Green cut. Good face. Yeah, good job. Five tools guy. Good looking ball player. Can he hit? He's got a beautiful swing, right, Barry? The ball explodes off his back.

21:39He throws the club head at the ball, and when he connects, he drives it. It pops off the bat. You can hear it all over the ballpark. A lot of pop coming off the bat. I've got an ugly girlfriend. What's that name? Ugly girlfriend means no confidence. Okay. Oh, no, you guys are full of it. Artie is right. This guy's got an attitude. An attitude is good. I mean, clean cut. An 80-year-old man saying a guy looks clean cut. It's so cut and dry. Like, that is how these decisions have long been made. But we all can sort of come in and recognize, like, there must be a better, more effective way to make these kinds of judgments.

22:15instruments using some kind of empirical database quantitative you know instead of just going by an old man thinking a young guy looks clean in his face i mean and they really nail that it's an old man because he's literally got a hearing he's got to hear i mean they cast that scene beautifully all those guys look like and you believe it to you buy instantly this is a room full of salty old baseball experts who've been doing this their whole lives like the room looks old they've got stacks of paper you it's literally there's a paradigm shift waiting to happen and they've shown you here's the paradigm the current paradigm and then you see billy bean who's younger like half the age these people are 70 years old billy beans you know like 40 in this film or so and then you've obviously got somebody who's even younger so this is a generational shift that's occurring billy bean yeah is you know at the center of it and he has to push the paradigm shift and i also thought about technology at this moment when i came into the industry client server and then pcs happened and then cloud computing happened the internet all of these paradigm shifts i watched people fight them and this movie at its core is about a paradigm shifting and what i learned in psychology when i was a psychology major at fordham university is that one of our professors said one thing you should know about paradigms in psychology is that paradigms don't die people do and all the people who believed in freud or skinner or cognitive behavioral car young whatever they just died with their paradigm and then the next paradigm happened when we went from you know uh you know freud to to behaviorism to cognitive it's just and that's what's happening here as such a great moment it made me think too of blackberry when the blackberry team are watching steve jobs uh demo the first iphone and immediately they're like but it's got no but say we all know buttons are what make that the pop of the button that's what makes it satisfying that's why you know you press the button and so immediately they're just like they're they're refusing to make that shift and it's the same thing with these scouts where rather than even hearing them out they don't even hear them out what what can we do with the stats what can you determine the data they're right away like no no no the only way to do it is to trust me looking at the guy and whether he has an attractive girlfriend yeah and a face he got the face you know and that's interesting the the pop of the blackberry keyboard the pop of the sound of the bat yeah when people are confronted with a paradigm shift it is so threatening to them because they've existed in a world where this paradigm has served them well if you're 67 years old and you're in that room and you've been in that room for 40 years scouting players the ability to shift to the next thing is so hard it's so threatening that you won't even consider it right and for the blackberry those people that was something that happened over a decade that wasn't something that happened over five decades yeah that was a 10-year story oh hey we had the blackberry we were king of the hill for 10 years and then the iphone became king of the hill for 10 years they couldn't make that jump paradigms are super powerful one of the things you can do when you see a paradigm shift is and this is something I do in my career as an investor and then also as a media executive I assume the next paradigm will win I just make that assumption so when I was doing print magazines I just assumed email newsletters would win and I started an email newsletter at Silicon Valley then I assumed blogs would win then I assume podcasts would win and people are like oh my god you always figure it out and I'm like well you know what i do i just assume the next thing is going to work and if it doesn't work well okay fine what did you lose by assuming it would be win you know i assume podcasts would win 13 years sitting around you know whatever yeah and you know what you could make a mistake you could say crypto is going to work and you make the mistake who cares just move on to the next thing so it's just pessimism you know you get to be right if you're a pessimist but if you're an optimist you can get rich, right?

26:18So just be a little optimistic. And you might just hit the ball out of the park. Let's keep going. Listen, a strong sales team can make all the difference for a B2B startup. But if you're going to hire sharks, you need to let them hunt and you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles like SOC 2. What is SOC 2? Well, any company that stores customer data in the cloud needs to be SOC 2 compliant. If you don't have your SOC 2 tight, your sales team can't close major deals. It's that simple. But thankfully, Vanta makes it really easy to get and renew your SOC 2 compliance. On average, Vanta customers are compliant in just two to four weeks.

26:53Without Vanta, it takes three to five months. Vanta can save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85 % on compliance costs. And Vanta does more than just SOC 2. They also automate up to 90 % compliance for GDPR, HIPAA, and more. So here's your call to action. Stop slowing your sales team down and use Vanta. Get a thousand dollars off at vanta.com slash twist that's vanta.com slash twist for one thousand dollars off your sock too at this point uh being just you know he's made his mind up that uh he's got to change something he doesn't know what it is quite yet but he knows if we play like the yankees if we think like the yankees we keep trying to beat the yankees at their own game we're going to continually lose to them because we can't we can't outspend them so we have to get crafty we have to get clever about uh you know what we do so he goes to the cleveland indians He goes to Ohio to meet with the Indians to discuss possible trades, just trying to mix things up a bit.

27:44And while he's there, he's about to close the deal. But then he notices that the GM, the Indians GM, is listening to this guy who he doesn't recognize. This low-level guy named Peter Brand, played by Joe Nail. And he notices that the deal gets thrown off because of something Peter Brand whispers to his boss. And he doesn't understand what happened. So he goes to the guy's cubicle. He tracks him down in the office. that's another i think little mini lesson here is billy bean just he won't he doesn't he's not deterred he doesn't take no it's that same persistence lesson from the founder a lot of people might have been like i wonder who that guy was oh well or or called the the gm of the cleveland indians the next week and be like what did that guy say to you but he just goes down tracks the guy down in the office sits down at his cubicle such a good callback because in uh the founder of the ray crock story about mcdonald's somebody orders all those mixers and they're like who in their right mind is ordering six mixers with six you know the ability to do six milkshakes at a time 36 milkshakes makes no sense and he he has to go investigate it when he finds out that it's not a mistake that order that's real and it's that persistence and that um what would you call it when you're curious that curiousness right i think almost every story like this has that moment of the person makes it's it's one thing to make the observation like i don't know this is interesting i don't understand quite why that's happening uh this is curious to me but it's a very different thing to then pursue the answer relentlessly until you find it so you have to follow your intuition yeah and i think that that's the thing that billy bean and ray crock definitely have in common is he tracks he goes immediately to jonah hill's cubicle he sits down he gets in the guy's face the guy obviously is uncomfortable doesn't want to talk to him my boss is right over there who are you i shouldn't be giving away these secrets to a guy i don't know uh but he basically pressures him into explaining himself like what did you tell your boss what am i missing what do you know that i don't know about baseball and he ends up getting getting it out of peter just peer pressuring him he ends up getting him to sort of tell him about statistics and sabermetrics and this new way of thinking about organizing your sort of baseball team and i think this is a great moment to play the clip.

29:59And after this clip, I'm going to tell you what I took from it as a business lesson. There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening. And this leads people who run major league baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams. People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. your goal shouldn't be to buy players your goal should be to buy wins and in order to buy wins you need to buy runs and there it is that is an example of what we call in our industry first principle thinking what exactly are we trying to accomplish here and he walks people through it um on in this amazingly powerful scene and you find yourself nodding okay your people are uh buying players but why are they buying the players oh and what you're actually buying is you're trying to buy runs etc and and and you you're not trying to buy wins or players you're trying to buy these runs and getting people on base and then they and they kind of even break that down more it gets a little technical in in baseball but you're looking for people who have obp on base percentage right and you can get on base a couple of different ways like you can get on base by walking and so they talk about getting a walk a lot in the film they dip into hey how that first pitch is super important if you get a strike on that first uh pitch or you get a ball the next pitch and what you hit is super important and this is something called sabermetrics uh which is a statistical analysis of baseball made famous by a statistician named bill james but i was super interested in this because there is um first principle thinking and if you think about startups lon you know and i talk to startups about this a lot you're building a team right okay what does the team do well they build a product and what does that product do well i like to say it delights customers but if you break down what delights customers there's a lot of different ways to do that lon you could save them time you could save the money you could entertain them you can you know give them some kind of social acceptance like make them become part of a tribe you can allow them to find a mate there are biological things like shelter food what are sex you get the idea and there is higher level goals like purpose so what you're trying to do is fill some need that humans have through a product that's created by a team that generates revenue that is a business that is a startup but first principles thinking would be i need to get from point A to point B, how do I move myself or move this book?

32:38Moving myself would be Uber, moving this book would be Amazon. You get the idea. I did have a question for Nick here too. It feels like Peter Brand's philosophy, I don't know enough about baseball. It feels like Peter Brand's philosophy is really undervaluing, if not throwing entirely away, the concept of fielding, playing defense like he's only focused on hits getting on base earning runs only on like out scoring the other team and you don't really in the movie at least you don't really deal with the other the other side and and he's doing things like put that guy at first base because i like the way he hits even though he doesn't know how to play first base uh and they're the first base example is the one they use in the movie what uh the reason that they use first base is because i I believe first base is actually the least valuable defensive position in baseball.

33:29You need to do the least. I think they say that at one point, but it's like, actually there's three positions in baseball that are incredibly valuable on a defensive basis. Center field. Obviously you're covering the most range in the outfield shortstop. You're like getting all the balls towards your way and you have to make the most decisions. Yeah, exactly. Derek Jeter, et cetera, et cetera. And then catcher because you're like sort of the field general. Those are the three most defensively valuable positions in baseball. They actually don't talk about catchers or center fielders or shortstop shortstops at all in this.

34:00So I wonder if, you know, they were talking about whoever the shortstop was on the A's. They would be. I think, I think they have their example is Hattiesburg. And so they talk about him. Like, right. Exactly. He was a guy who was a catcher. That's what he knew how to play, but they liked the way he hits. They liked the way he gets on base. And so they put him in a different spot. I just didn't know if it was, it doesn't matter as much playing defense or if it was like it just in this particular scenario, it didn't matter as much. Yeah, so they don't bring it up in the movie at all. But the holy grail of sabermetrics, at least in the modern day, is something called WAR, W-A-R, which stands for wins above replacement in baseball.

34:37And every major sport has one of these now. So the NBA, Jason, you might know, has VORP, value over replacement player. Basically, how much better are you than the average player at your position? Baseball's edition is WAR. the NFL has their own version, hockey has their own version as well. So that's really what they're looking for. So depending on what position you play, as long as your war is high, then you're valuable on a sabermetrics basis. Okay, that definitely answers my question. That makes a lot of sense to me. A lot of founders are great at going from zero to one. This takes vision, it takes creativity, and most of all, it takes a bit of hustle.

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35:53Mev has been in business for 17 years, and they've helped the following companies build spectacular products, Cartier, Intuit, and the Ozempic maker, Novo Nordisk. Shout out to Ozempic. So let Mev help you increase product velocity and make product engineering more sustainable. Here's your call to action. Mev is going to give you$30 ,000 off your first three months. that's right get 10 000 off per month right now at mev.com slash twist that's mev.com slash twist for 30 000 off your first three months all right so being uh at this point basically hires brand right right well we also this is the point of the movie where this is our movie where we start doing flashbacks as well because we sort of set up what what makes billy bean the guy who did this and why is this his sort of he you know what what makes him sort of specifically the guy that this spoke to and we kind of find out that well he was a very hot prospect coming out of high school and he had this huge decision where uh the scouts were encouraging him to go pro immediately but his parents were kind of like well you should go to stanford you can play ball at stanford and get a college education he ended up listening to the scouts and then he totally bombed out of the mlb and did not play well in the majors ended up you know finding a new career as a scout and then a gm so it all worked out but he still got a lot of resentment about scouting and the way that the system works back then because he ended up being such a letdown and we get stuff about him feeling like he's personally cursed and he he doesn't watch the games in the stadium and he doesn't he can't even bear to listen sometimes on the radio uh but i think you know that's that's the idea that he in particular was a little bit skeptical coming in about scouting and recruiting and the way teams were assembled and so when peter brand sort of presented this idea to him that's why that was the lightning bolt moment of like this is what we've been getting wrong all along yeah and it takes somebody sometimes who's you know sitting between the two paradigms right these two mountains the old school way it's a like a it's a personality based thing and then it's a metric based thing and he was able to cross that chasm yeah as it were uh and so you know uh so now brand uh works for being as the sort of assistant gm at the a's and we get a lot of you know scenes about how uh it's it's an it's an odd bit like he does it like the there's a lot of conflict right away and that's maybe what uh the guy who jonah hill is based on was saying like i he didn't really feel like there was a lot of conflict when he came in but the movie has to make it look good uh so we get you know he's kind of like people are having a lot of trouble adjusting to this statistical model that he's built where he's describing you know undervalued players and how they're going to go at purposefully seek out these sort of like players who other people don't understand why they're more valuable than they may initially see he calls them the he calls the team the island of misfit toys uh let's let's play this but this is a great scene.

38:55We need to win at least 99 games in order to make it to the postseason. We need to score at least 814 runs in order to win those games and allow no more than 645 runs. This is the code that I've written for our year-to-year projections. It's about getting things down to one number. Using stats the way we read them will find value in players that nobody else can see. People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws age appearance personality of the 20 000 notable players for us to consider i believe that there is a championship team of 25 people that we could afford because everyone else in baseball undervalues them like an island of misfit toys i mean such an inspiring scene they put that great music in the soundtrack was great um it it speaks to people because maybe we all feel at times we're undervalued right or underestimated i thought this was like a really um well and just the way that yeah the way that these sort of biases conscious and unconscious sort of play out in the real world and like yeah of course reducing people to a few personality traits or the things you could tell during a job interview like that that never tells the whole story and we all let's have a dei debate let's have a dei debate for 20 minutes now please please please god no should we put them behind a screen and just look at their metrics can we get sacks can somebody call sacks can we get him in here sacks mark cuban you know we'll all get together i'll just talk about dei no but i mean it does relate to we want to not be judged on our quirkiness or do we look like a baseball player right um is this an athletic white whatever looks like a baseball player is because you know they they have one point where they have somebody who's a little bit overweight who hits a home run in the film you know and and and they just talk about how like you know maybe you don't look the part but you are the part and they and they bring up this guy chad bradford who's a pitcher who's super undervalued because he throws this like really weird like sideways low pitch um but he's got solid stats and he he's worth three million dollars but they can get him for 850 and this is really spoke to me about resources again back to startups we're here on this week in startups and one of the things i'm watching startups do is as we globalize they're looking at people in san paulo who are developers and comparing to developers in toronto and develop and comparing those developers to ones in miami austin and the bay area and people are starting to say hey you know i'm managing a remote workforce is this person in india is this person in manila you know as good as this other person or are they undervalued and that globalization that's occurring in the workforce right now is really inspiring to watch uh people get opportunities to work at big companies from all around the world and then some people are overpaid because maybe they have some ivy league degree or pedigree and maybe that's unfair you know depending on which side of the equation you are somebody gets an opportunity somebody loses an opportunity yeah i mean i think that you know turns out a lot of these sort of old rigid ways of thinking about who can do what and who's appropriate for what job really didn't didn't make a ton of sense it were just things that people thought that got passed down generationally that weren't necessarily true so i think you know that's one huge advantage that they have is like well when you break it down as pure numbers you're seeing things in a way you couldn't when you're looking at players on a field and you're trying to make subjective judgment calls about yeah and this is when philip seymour hoffman comes into the picture which is awesome yeah so art how is one of these the a's coach uh manager i guess you'd say uh in baseball uh and he's he's one of these old school guys that has his old way of thinking of things and you know he's paid for his expertise so he doesn't think he should have to listen to this new way of doing things he's like you make the team you give me the team i'm gonna play them the way i know how to play uh players on the field but that that's i think this is one of the big sort of lessons of the whole movie is you can't you can't piecemeal it you can't you can't have some members of the team doing it one way and other people doing it another way everybody needs to be on the same page and running the same playbook with a consistent vision or it doesn't work and that's that's what we see sort of happening at the at the opening uh is just he's getting even as billy bean is putting this team together and starting to execute on this new strategy his team is rejecting it and he's having a lot of trouble sort of managing them and getting everybody on the same page so he's in there's a scene where he's in a meeting with his scouts and he's trying to explain to them what peter brand's been explaining to him and we got to figure out getting guys on base and everybody's just sort of shouting him down and making all of these objections yeah and that's a great scene in and of itself is people wondering why why do we have to have these players and you're so right let's play this clip and then I'll give some feedback.

43:54Billy, we got 38 home runs at 120 RBIs. Guys, we're still trying to replace Giambi. I told you we can't do it, and we can't do it. Now, what we might be able to do is recreate him. Recreate him in the aggregate. The what? Giambi's on-base percentage was.477. Damon's on-base,.324. And Almedes was.291. Add that up, and you get... .1092. Divided by three. 364. That's what we're looking for. Number one, Jason's little brother, Jeremy. Tell me if I may, he certainly has had his problems off the field. We know what he can't do on the field. He's getting a little thicker on the waist. And his reports about him on the weed and the strip clubs.

44:40Well, his on-base percentage is all we're looking at now. And Jeremy gets on base an awful lot for a guy who only costs$285 ,000. There you go. uh and like weed and strip clubs i don't care yeah right that's on base it's math that's the way they're thinking about it is like i got a little punchy and he likes strip clubs no go with somebody else and it's like that's a classic example of those are those really impacting his play or are you just sort of prejudiced against people who act that way can i play devil's advocate here for a second okay so i actually thought the movie did a really good job at showing that there has to be a balance of both of these things because you see later in the movie jeremy giambi is being obnoxious in the clubhouse when they're losing he's playing music he's dancing billy comes in smashes the stereo and then he trades him a couple days later he's like get this guy out of here so while i do think of course you need to look at analytics and you need to understand really what you're trying to do and how you're trying to win there also is a balance where you need the right people in the clubhouse especially in a sport like baseball which comes down to just a couple of games at the end and like when he goes to david justice and he's like listen i know you're old but i need you to mentor these guys i need you to be a role model and he starts taking hadaberg under his wing etc etc so this is back to the qualitative nature of individuals versus the quantitative and your point lon you got to have people rowing in the same direction so if somebody statistically can do the job but they cause other people to not do the job well or they statistically are trailing off but they make other people good that's another startup lesson isn't it yeah yeah well that's i mean because like there's a lot of scenes that are sort of coming up in this part of the movie where art how is not playing the players in the right positions or in the order that they need them to play he's kind of making his own calls at the last second and putting the team back in the old order and that's you know causes this big losing streak and they're sort of they have all of these problems coming out of the gate because they're trying they're they're organized based on billy and peter's concept but then they're being run by arts idea and that's really where it's like you can't have that if everybody needs to be whether you know they agree if people don't agree and they can't execute the playbook they got to go everybody's got to be moving in the same direction and in business this happens in startups it happens all the time and the way you handle it best is to say listen there are two or three different ways to actually run this company we could be an enterprise company we could be a consumer company we could be a marketplace you know all different ways in which you could execute on the same business idea to solve the same business problem here's the one we've chosen here's why we've chosen it and now we're going to execute on that you may disagree if you disagree so strongly that you're not willing to do it then you can't be at the company but if you disagree and you think your idea is right well let's just all put our effort into choice a of how to run this business we're going to make it an enterprise business oh you want to make it a consumer thing we're going to do enterprise you know either you have to leave the company or if you're going to stay at the company just put your best effort into doing that and you can monitor the decision and always change it so this is a really great um i think moment in time yeah uh so in the movie uh being uh they go to scott haddenberg's house uh they tell him this weird plan that he's a catcher but they want to teach him how to play first base and you know he's got this injury that's preventing him from being able to do the the catcher role that he used to do so ever for them as far as the rest of the league is concerned he's done nobody else is interested this is really the only offer on the table for him so even though he's hesitant he's confused uh he accepts anyway that's that was an early uh chris pratt role he was mostly known for i think parks and rec still when he this was pre marvel chris pratt yeah uh so we get a little bit of the subplot with with uh being and his daughter you know a little bit more speaking to his his lack of confidence and how he feels like maybe he's cursed uh and then he's confronted once again by his head scout this is a guy we've seen him clash before uh clash with before in the room and he he's really as strongly as it's yet been stated the baseball isn't about numbers baseball is a game that's about all these intangibles and variables and all these things that only i understand as an old school expert let's play So it's just an utter rejection of Billy's concept.

48:57You don't put a team together with a computer, Billy. No? No. Baseball isn't just numbers. It's not science. If it was, then anybody could do what we're doing, but they can't because they don't know what we know. They don't have our experience and they don't have our intuition. Now, there are intangibles that only baseball people understand. You're discounting what scouts have done for 150 years, even yourself. adapt or die yep it's really that simple adapt or die if ai is here if mobile is here if cloud computing is here pcs are here broadband is here the internet people didn't think the internet would take off they thought it would collapse under its own weight and they thought you would only have proprietary services like aol or prodigy um compu serve and you know you had to adapt and die or die and use open standards so such a great scene and such an obvious business lesson when the paradigm shift happens you gotta like um adapt or die and in this case i think that scout um gets fired you know on the spot yeah he billy's like i'm not gonna fire you and then the guy tries to smack him and then he fires uh so that so then there we jump to spring training and there's a montage of you know uh look at your classic baseball movie they're not they can't get it together they're the bad news bears they're the indians at the beginning of major league i mean you know take take your pick uh and then the season itself starts slow and again we talked about this a little bit where it's the clash between bean and art how where they're sort of debating how to run the team and there's this little sort of power struggle uh going on there um being you know like everything's going bad the team's going really poorly the a's are continually losing and during this time bean is also sort of mentoring peter brand showing him what a general manager's job is all about getting him used to sort of the day-to-day of managing a team and running a team and that includes uh teaching him how to cut players when they are being dropped from the roster and i thought this is particularly important you know we're taping this a week in 2024 where in this era people are being cut uh being laid off right tragically there's a ton of riffs going on whether it's in media la times just cut 100 positions or something insane 115 i think yeah i mean just whoa that's a that's a big number that's a huge chunk of their total staff it's like 20 or something yeah and that's after two riffs before that and then google still cutting people uh you know youtube lost 100 people last week yeah so that you know people keep getting cut here and the trend has been people are recording themselves on tiktok which is also weird but putting it aside we live in this weird world where people are being cut and they're being cut on zoom right and hr people are cutting people with this like hr speak that's obviously written by lawyers and not able to answer questions and then how do you do it in a kind way how do you do it professionally because has become a big question right and there's no easy way to do it but Billy Bean says be straight no flaw just facts let's play the clip I'm a player and you got to cut me from the roster fine Billy please have a seat I need to talk to you for a minute you've been a huge part of this team but sometimes you have to make decisions that are best for the team I'm sure you can understand that you're cutting me I'm really sorry I just bought a house here well in Oakland oh uh well well well that's all you got to say my kid just started a new school well you shouldn't pull him out in the middle of the school year you should wait what the hell are you talking about i don't know i don't know i shouldn't i'm not gonna do this i don't think i think this is stupid i'm not gonna fire anybody and this is dumb they're professional ball players just be straight with them no fluff just facts pete i gotta let you go jack's office will handle the details that's it there it is um i think people appreciate that um and he tells them like would you rather a bullet to the head or five to the chest and bleed to death i'm pretty graphic but all right i do think being straight with people the business isn't doing well uh we have to cut 10 we have to cut 20 because we're not profitable um here's every time one of those yeah every time one of those clips goes viral of like person being fired in a horrible way or firing goes terribly wrong it's always because they're trying to do too much it's never just because it's like the simple clean straightforward i mean i i've only been i think fired from one one job and yeah it was very it was very matter of fact it was like we're going a different way here's your last paycheck have a have a good good luck with whatever comes next or whatever yeah and you felt respected in that moment or at least not pandered to or it's nice to not it's nice to not have somebody giving you a whole oh you're so important to the team because you know that that's not genuine if you were that important to the team they wouldn't be firing you so yes you know like it just just just just rip off the band-aid i i agree with billy pete yeah and then this is important to juxtapose with these and then some people are giving people a whole like you didn't work hard enough or it's on you it's your fault in some way it's like whoa yeah definitely don't do yeah definitely don't do that just be a matter of fact about it um uh so uh and and dramatic foreshadowing jonah hill's got to go cut somebody later and he does it exactly as prescribed and it works perfectly or it goes it goes as well as it could go the lesson is learned yeah so another part of the training is bean has him start traveling with the team and this is when the the issue of soda in the clubhouse comes to a head uh the a's i was reading about uh this this lovely stadium you see behind me the coliseum in oakland uh one article called it the last uh baseball's last dive bar um there you go but whereas a lot of professional ball teams like the yankees they stock the fridge for the players if you want a soda there's just soda there uh the a's you got to pay a buck at the vending machine if you want a soda david justice who is a veteran of much bigger market teams he's not a fan so while brand is on the plane next to him going to the next game he sort of has hey i don't like you guys should you guys should pay for the soda uh brand is like billy likes to keep the money on the field and you know justice is pretty skeptical that his dr peppers are gonna make a huge impact in the season or whatever.

55:42But that's important foreshadowing. I think this comes up later, the sodas. Can I bump in here, please? Yeah, please. This just fuels my fire, hatred in my heart so much that there are owners that legitimately cannot afford because every major sport, I think, I know baseball does, have something called revenue share where about half the revenue at the end of the year is all put into a pool and then it's divvied up equally among the 30 owners in the MLB. The NBA has the same thing, right? Jason, you remember Donald Sterling on the Clippers. he was what was he famous for he had the lowest salary in the league every year and he just raised all the revenue share exactly and he never paid for players if you cannot afford a baseball team sell the team please yes you can't afford to give your players drinks and gatorade get rid of the team yeah i mean it's pretty straightforward here and sterling was the reason they put in um a minimum they said basically in the nba you got to spend at least this much so forgive they put a floor in because he was like yeah just you want elton brand or any of our stars any of our recruits take them all we're gonna spend 40 million and we're gonna rake the other 40 million in his profit and they're like hey you got to get a little higher up here but then they go on um a terrible losing streak they've lost 14 of 17 games it's not working right nick right uh it's not working yeah i mean at this point and i mean you know in this sort of an environment where you're trying something very bold, daring, new, people are just waiting for you to fail.

57:11So I think there is a sense that this was like delicious for a lot of people in the sports world. They couldn't wait for this thing to blow up. And then it does in this very dramatic fashion, feels very satisfying. So yeah, there's a lot of media sort of taking a lot of pleasure in the A's doing terribly in this whole experiment, not seeming to work. Bean and Brad go talk to the owner about why the team's doing so poorly brand is like we're on the right track we just need a larger sample side just it's you know like this is just we're having a bad streak we'll have a good streak it's going to work we just need to like figure out you know some of the the details um and around this time bean also tries you know he's still he's still fighting with art uh how the manager about how to organize the team who's going to play first base how keeps playing this guy carlos pain yet first base instead of hattieberg the guy they picked up specifically because they like his on base percentage uh and it's it's messing up the strategy i mean from bean's perspective this is why it's not working like ever we're doing everything on our side you're not executing on the day so what he does is he decides to mix everything up and take a lot of this power out of art house hands and he does that by getting rid of carlos pena and also as as nick mentioned this is also when he gets rid of uh jeremy giambi for for partying too hard at the clubhouse uh and he also uh even this is the point where it becomes it would have been really easy to back off to say you know i was wrong mea culpa we tried this thing we're in the arena trying things this one didn't work we're gonna come back you know like i'm gonna we'll re remodel it would have been much easier to do that but instead he he believes peter brand he believes his original idea and he sticks to his guns and he tells brand we don't need to explain ourselves we're going to see it through for better or worse um and then the other thing i want to mention when he makes this trade to get rid of carlos pina so that how doesn't have the option to continue playing him that's when he figures out how to get three years of free sodas for his players as part of the trade and i uh so we'll play the clip and i'll watch okay that'll work great i need one more thing soda yeah i don't want my guys paying for soda i want you to stock my machine for three years i'm serious great it's a deal i mean totally ludicrous but great like um showing he's evolved a little bit right billy bean is evolved but it's a very important uh moment here we call this the burn the boats moment um if you haven't heard that expression hey you get to the new world you burn the boats you're not going home you're going forward and in business sometimes it's important to commit you have to commit just like skiing down a mountain you're going down certain trails you just got to go for it and that's what he does here he burns the boats we're not going backward we're pivoting we're shutting this down and we're going this way it's a burn the boats moment and you know he basically gives art no choice and i love the moment where he's like you're not playing him on first and he's like no i'm playing him on first he's like you can't play him on first because i just traded him such a great moment and then you know art basically has to accept the fact and art to his credit makes the paradigm shift he decides when the boats are burned that he's going to make the best of it and and then of course they're right but it's such an important persistence and commitment if you're going to if you're going to pursue this new strategy you have to give it your all and sometimes you got to burn the boats but i love that too at the two of the the balance it's not just you know you've got the vision you see the the light on the horizon and you're not listening to anybody he is listening he's just committed to the vision and he's so he's late he's hearing all the feedback he's not blocking it out he's just you know using what he can and remaining committed to his vision because he does he can't take care of the soda thing right away but he keeps it in the back of his mind and then when there is an opportunity to fix that problem he does and i think that's such a that's why that's in the movie is to bounce it out like it's not like he's not listening to anybody and he's totally single-minded it's just there's a lot of dissent that he can't use when the feedback is useful he's still hanging on to it so he's evolved as a character as well he's not you know unchangeable he's going to evolve he's going to change his position on things which is just great for the storytelling as well a lot of managers might have just blown off david justice he's a diva who cares he could he's a millionaire he could pay for his freaking sodas yeah i'm paying him seven million whatever but billy v's like it is important to keep the players happy you don't want something as simple as a coke to to throw off this guy's you know state of mind or willingness to play or whatever and this is critically important too when you are a leader you know what matters to the troops and if it doesn't matter to you sometimes you got to meet them where they are right and so you want to win the war um and you know sometimes you're going to lose a battle here over sodas but you're going to win the war that everybody buys in and peter brand then starts explaining the basic baseball to the a's players that walks are the same as singles which is what my coach always told me when i was in the little league in brooklyn me too actually i thought of that too when i was when i played little league yeah they used to tell you like don't don't feel like you got to swing at everything like a take you know walks are as good as in my case i realized early that leaning in you could get hit and so i i wasn't playing i wasn't playing at this level i started leaning in so much i'm talking this is like second third grade that i um caused a little bit of a scene because i leaned in and purposely got hit with it and they threw me out of the game in Brooklyn in Bay Ridge Brooklyn I'm not I'm kidding you not and they reprimanded the coach hey of the Sparrows listen what are you doing you somebody's gonna get hurt here you're telling your place to leave I said he didn't tell me to do that I was just leaning in I was talking about the guy's like listen kid he knew I was lying through my teeth I just wanted to get off base I wanted to help the team lead into it um but you know uh you know longer at bats are great because they increase the pitcher's pitch count this is such a critical thing so if you can keep hitting those you know foul balls man that wears a pitcher out over time and then i mean all of these things are just yeah like that thinking about the game on like that deeper level of rather than just you know like the the way everybody sort of approached for a long time like a little bit more of a regimented strategic kind of approach to everything you do on the field every at bat every play and that's really what what brand i think is sort of introducing uh and you know like heat zones and and all those sort of and here's the thing details matter and if you want to make a service better sometimes it's easier to make five things 10 20 better than to try to make something 50 percent one thing 50 or 100 better as in what one example when google made their search engine a little bit faster every time they made it a little bit faster the number of searches people did increased if you look at uber when they brought weight and lift when they brought wait times down people started using the services more they became reliable and that's why liquidity in those networks was so important to them so there's little things that you can do and they add up to a better experience or more winning and that's where details matter and trying to optimize a bunch of small things is what happens to this team and it's just so so applies to product design is making a lot of little things better this was a product design right moment so so right so all all of these sort of elements come together, figuring things out with how running the team better, you know, having these kinds of conversations with the players, bringing everybody onto the same page finally.

1:05:03And they start to wit. They, they, they start to sort of turn things around with the season. Uh, the trade deadline approaches and Billy decides he wants, uh, uh, Ricardo Rincon, a relief pitcher to come join the team. Uh, so he executes that trade. And then once the trade, the deadline is passed, the A's go on this crazy all time, historic winning streak ultimately they they win 20 games but we kind of play it out for for maximum drama um they're you know during so we sort of follow billy during all of game 20 as i mentioned he doesn't he thinks he's a jinx ever since his failed career as a player he's convinced that you know he just the team will never win if he's there so he always finds other things to do elsewhere and not be in the stadium during the team but he's listening to game 20 on the radio the A's are up 11 to nothing and so he figures ah there's no chance we're gonna lose this one so he turns around and he goes back to the stadium he does start watching the game live and in person and they start to lose they start the lead starts to slip they start to lose and he feels like uh you know he's he's dooming it so he goes back into the clubhouse and listens on the radio and this is really I mean because of the way that the A's season played out this year this becomes the emotional climax of the movie is their their big victory is this like they have they clinch this 20 game hitting streak or winning streak uh and it's on scott haddenberg he he hits the walk-off home run that wins the game you know this kind of unlikely guy that the league didn't believe in and so that that's you know kind of like that's our big hero moment of they did it they they did this they set this unprecedented record they matched you know they exceeded any american league win streak in history um and then and then they go on to lose to the minnesota twins in the first round of the playoff so it's it's a it's a bit of like a rocky kind of ending where the they win the moral victory but they don't actually end up winning the championship basically right nick producer nick i'm curious um having not watched this or remembering it is that actually how it went down that's exactly what happened in real life i mean i'm not sure about you don't remember actually going to the game or not but yes i remember non-sports fan i remember the a's going on that crazy winning streak and everybody obsessing about the 11 run comeback in this you know i didn't watch the game but i do i do remember the yeah i do remember the oakland a's going on this historic unprecedented i have a movie nerd question for you yeah so the trade deadline scene where he has like three phones and he's like oh pick up for john he's like which john he's like obviously the john that we're not we're not calling that other john back yet right they're just going back and forth like crazy aaron sorkin co-wrote this movie right he didn't think that scene was just in there for him to flex was that just like a sorkin flex scene because there's like no payoff for it like it never comes the ricardo rincone never comes back it just felt like such a sorkin like muscle flex you know i mean i i feel like uh definitely there's a lot of speeches in this that have a very a very sorkin flavor it's a little social networky yeah those are the moments where you could really feel his influence i mean we should mention the other guy who wrote it is steve zalian who wrote schindler's list i mean he's a legend in his own right so i mean like two this was real two heavyweights on this screenplay like it was really yeah you could tell two legends zalian also wrote fablemans for spielberg last year i mean he's great well sorkin he's known for really like his dialogue is a lot of action right it's like very active and i mean the walk and talk is the thing people always associate with sorkin like p like west wing people walking down corridors and it's a lot of complicated ban but also with that with that banter you know it's that it's that mixture of it's everybody's talking fast it's very detail oriented but it's also like everybody's got kind of a quirky funny way of speaking and they're very very personality driven and you know sports night west wing i mean that that's the that's that classic sorkin banter but he also wrote you know like few good men so a lot of big dramatic it's it's big it's bold it's action yeah yeah and a lot of my he loves loves a monologue so there's a lot of big monologues in this movie that are like that that feels vintage newsroom right which was like monologue central oh yeah i mean he the man the man loves a monologue more than maybe any other hollywood writer today he also did molly's game a few years ago yeah um i mean jessica chastain the 25 yeah really terrible lucy and ricky one last year i didn't like the newsroom was i i love the newsroom i thought that was a great series i don't know what happened to that it was only was that two seasons maybe i think they did two seasons in the newsroom yeah it's like 25 episodes um jeff daniel's amazing yeah jeff daniel's really good a little a little preachy a little a little super preachy a little hard on its sleeve for my taste but sam watterson yeah he was great olivia mum was actually good in that too she that was like one of her i think that the social network script is like a master i think that's his greatest that that might be his greatest all-time achievement it's why it's so complicated and yet it's the same thing oppenheimer kind of does this year where you're following all these different chronologies different hearings different moments in time they're all overlapping to give you this kind of collage of everything that happened and it's thematically connected but the way that he's able to keep you you're never like confused or like when is this happening or who's that guy and there's so many moving parts it's a it's a huge achievement that movie's crazy i think it's amazing and jesse eisenberg is like tailor-made for aaron sorkin just the way he speaks you know and his like frenetic kind of i mean we're not we're not we're not supposed to praise uh army hammer anymore but he's also fit i mean they're they're just it's so good it's a great movie i think we can separate the artist from the cannibalism um i mean he's remembering that correctly that he wanted to oh yeah eat people i mean he was accused of actual oh abusive behavior but then also there were those text messages where he was telling women he wanted to eat them yes yeah that's crazy weird weird guy telling selling timeshares in the cayman islands now okay um the next island aaron sorkin film comes moved on to his he's on his next act uh okay so let's wrap this up uh so billy bean courted by the boston red sox after this you know landmark amazing season uh they have the second highest uh payroll in baseball in 2002 and they'd also had recently hired bill james the creator of sabermetrics the statistical system peter brand was sort of basing his work on uh so the red sucks owner is basically like you were the first one out of the gate that guy always gets beat up nobody who's the first one up the innovator always gets suppers the pushback and everything but it's obvious to those of us in the know that you were right and that this is where everything is going in to be soon and we all need to start doing what you did to put this season together and so i want you to come work for me and he slips him a piece of paper that we later find out says 12.5 million which would be the highest uh general manager salary in the history of baseball but billy bean says no he wants to stay and win he wants to win it all with the ace he doesn't want to go to one of the big teams that can buy the championship he wants to prove that he could do it for himself uh and then we find out in a card that comes at the end of the movie that two years later the red sox did go on to win their first world series in 86 years utilizing the money ball sort of philosophy that that billy had helped to sort of pioneer and this is where there's so many business lessons number one take the money just take the money uh number yeah don't be a hero um and the first first guy up the hill takes the arrows is also uh one of these things uh that happens a lot in the industry there were you know cab uh ordering services that predated uh you know uber there were devices that predated the iphone like the blackberry a lot of times like you know um people self-sabotage or they don't take the opportunity that's presented in front of them and you have the long history of this it's hard to know what you should do here but if you know that you have the right technique and then somebody offers you the bankroll to execute on that same technique and offers you 12 and a half million dollars and you should take that like this was a huge mistake i think on his part um don't be a hero comes to mind well i think also i mean to me the takeaway was also not that i just i agree with everything but i also think know what success looks like when you start like when when we hear we hear a few different versions of this throughout the movie of what billy is what does he really want what is the ultimate goal and obviously to win a championship but then at one point he tells Peter Brand rings don't matter championships don't matter but if we win with this team we change the game and that's what I really want I want to change the game so at the end he he didn't win the season but he he succeeded in that goal the owner of the Boston Red Sox is telling him to his face you changed the game that's you would think that would be the ultimate win that's the moment but Bill he didn't win the championship so he still doesn't feel like he won he still feels like the loser the failure the guy who couldn't quite maybe he is get it done yeah maybe he isn't cursed but to me i think like but if if he had set that as his goal like i want i don't want there to be teams like we were where they have no chance and they just have to try to play this this failing losing game with players who aren't good enough uh i want to change the game so that there's this alternate strategy that people use he he did that he he won so he ends up feeling like not a success even though i think you could argue that he even succeeded by his own definition of what success was so if you go into any project and you already know when this happens when i when i win the oscar when i make my first billion when i whatever it is yes have that fixed in your mind so you know when you get there because otherwise you're just endlessly chasing a something you'll never achieve yeah i think understanding what success looks like setting some goals hitting those goals yeah all very important yeah and you know the big takeaway for founders here in terms of the business breakdown and the lessons here i think is paradigms do shift you have to commit to those uh and you have to convince the team to come on that journey with you you need everybody rowing in the right direction and it's going to be hard to change the paradigm there's going to be pain there's going to be suffering there's going to be doubt people are going to try to stop you people inside the team, the press outside the team, the doubters, the haters, your competitors.

1:15:59And, you know, it takes a lot of fortitude, takes a lot of resilience, I think, as you pointed out many times during this discussion. But there is always a better way to do something there, there is going to be a paradigm shift, it's going to face everything right now, we're facing it as an industry. The whole, you know, AI is going to change the entire playing field of employment, creativity, etc to what extent in what jobs who knows we'll see but um such a great inspiring movie watch it with your team and uh this is our third business breakdown you got the founder you got uh the blackberry film and now you got uh moneyball three great films watch these with your friends watch them with your team and really you know you can learn a lot from the lessons out there is what I always try to tell people, you know, startups and the history of startups, like it may not repeat, but it rhymes, right?

1:16:53As we know about history. So thisweekinsartups.com slash BB. Can I do one takeaway before we go? Yes, please, producer. Okay. So my number one takeaway from this movie for baseball and for company building, sample size matters. The reason that analytics was adopted in baseball faster and more seriously than any other sport, they play 162 games. That's twice as much as the NBA, twice as much as the NHL, 10 times as much as the NFL. What does that mean? That means a guy can get hot for a couple of weeks or they can go super cold for a couple of weeks, but eventually everything progresses to the mean.

1:17:31And if you were building a startup, I would say be in it for the long haul. If you have a great team, if you have a great product, if you have a great vision, the longer you stay at it, the more likely you are going to regress to the mean. And if your mean is great, then that means you will end up doing great things. Yeah. Wow. It's a great, great insight about sample size for sure. And you hear it actually mentioned in the movie, Jonah Hill's character is like, listen, we don't have a big enough sample size. It's only May. Why are you getting mad at us? It's only May. They're so eager at the start of the season to be like, it's not working.

1:17:58It's not working. Everybody wants to panic after 10 games, 15 games. Right. Whereas with the NFL, it's much harder to, people try it, but in the NFL, you can get hot and win five games in a row and all of a sudden you're in the playoffs because there's 16 games. It's just like, yeah, it's such a small sample size. And you do need to know, to build off what you're saying here, a very important takeaway is to understand what metrics matter. And in startups, what metrics matter, what are vanity metrics. The number of downloads your app get, that's not super important. the number of times people open your app and use it and come back to it or the average minutes in it that's actually what matters and so you know there's there's vanity metrics and there's real metrics your valuation isn't as important as your earnings your total cumulative downloads or your ranking in app store not as important as your average listeners who come back over and over again yeah so understanding your north star metrics and understanding which metrics to pay to super important here everybody follow lawns l-o-n-s on twitter everybody read inside.com streaming his amazing newsletter and everybody this week in startups.com bb thank you producer nick thank you to the other producers we'll see you all next time on this week start