Modern Wisdom - #749 - Seth Stephens-Davidowitz - The Hidden Statistics That Control The NBA

Episode Date: February 24, 2024

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a data scientist, economist and author. Basketball is one of the most popular sports on the planet. Seth has used advanced AI to statistically analyse everything about the players, their backgrounds, hand-span, height, first names and more to uncover some of the wildest trends in the game. Expect to learn what percentage of American men over 7 feet tall are in the NBA, why there is a huge outlier of the most common name of all NBA players, who the best height-adjusted player of all time is, just how important genetics are in basketball, whether the Draft is effective and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 5.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get an exclusive discount from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show my guest today is Seth Stevens-Dividwitz. He's a data scientist, economist and an author. Basketball is one of the most popular sports on the planet. Seth has used advanced AI to statistically analyse everything about the players, their backgrounds, handspan, height, first names and more to uncover some of the wildest trends in the game. Expect to learn what percentage of American men over seven feet tall are in the NBA, why there is a huge outlier in the most common name of all NBA players, who the best height-adjusted player of all time is, just how important

genetics are in basketball, whether the draft is actually effective, and much more. Even if you're not a basketball fan, this is so fascinating. Someone that has used AI and chat GPT and a bunch of other advanced tools to just do the moneyball of basketball. It's really, really cool. Seth's been on the show a bunch of times before. And this is a bunch of stats I actually dropped on Rogan's show last week. So if you enjoyed that, you're going to enjoy this. So get ready. It's got a cutting edge ceramic blade to reduce grooming accidents, a 90 minute battery so that you can take a longer shave, waterproof technology, which allows you to groom in the shower, and an LED light, which illuminates grooming areas for a closer and more precise trim, or if you just wanted to do it in the dark. They've also upgraded to a 7000 RPM motor

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That's surfshark.deals slash modern wisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Seth Stevens Davidowitz. What percentage of 7-footers are in the NBA? To the best of our knowledge, it's about 1 in 7, which is enormous. Pablo Torres, the first guy who calculated this, I've done a similar calculation and everyone seems to unite around this number around 1 in 7, which is just insane. Is there any other pursuit, glamorous pursuit, where one trait gives you a one in seven chance of reaching the absolute pinnacle of that field? I don't

think so. Think about all the six in seven people that could have been on an NBA players wage. Yeah, they must feel terrible. Dude, you blew it. I guess they can, a lot of them are probably playing abroad. They're probably our basketball players regardless and having fun and making a living abroad. You know, they're probably our basketball players, regardless, and making and having fun and, you know, making a living playing a game, but they're not getting the NBA wage for sure.

How rare is seven foot height? Being seven foot or above is one in 650,000 height. Wow, that is such a genetic lottery. Yeah, I mean, it's yeah, you're basically, I don't think there's any other gene that gives you such a chance of being a famous multi-millionaire. Yeah, that's a good point. What else do you learn about height? So one of the things interesting about height is, and basketball is each inch roughly doubles your chances of making the NBA like throughout the height distribution. So if you're six foot tall, you have basically twice the chances of becoming an NBA player than if you're five foot 11. If you're six one, twice the chances than if you're

six feet all the way out to if you're seven two, you have twice the chance than you're seven one like throughout the height distribution. What that means is just there's this enormous difference in probability of reaching the NBA. We said one in seven chance if you're a seven footer, if you're under 5'10", which is the average height of an American male, you have a 1 in 3.8 million chance of reaching the NBA. It's basically impossible. I mean, there are exceptions. You know, I talk a lot in the book about one of my favorite players, Mugsy Bogues, 5'3", and played 14 seasons in the NBA. So it's not impossible, but it's pretty close to impossible.

It's probably not worth putting much energy into trying. What are the disadvantages of being tall from a player perspective? Well, there are. There is. If you look at the tallest humans in history, many of them are over eight feet tall. And just about all of them, it's due to a thyroid disease. You literally, there's a growth hormone that just overproduces, the growth hormone is overproduced. There have been, there has been at least one NBA player who got to his height through a thyroid disease

That's George Murison. Some people might remember him. He was he also was an actor for a little bit And he was literally it was a disease that gave him that height his parents were average height and if you're that Tall just from a disease you're gonna have all kinds of problems a lot of the tallest people in history very few of the tallest People in history even make it past the age of 40. But I think one of the other things that's interesting is that seven footers are just taller NBA players in general are just way worse athletes. Anyway, we can measure it. They jump much less high. They're much slower. They're worse shooters. They are

this kind of surprise. I don't think anybody showed this before. They're worse shooters. They are this kind of surprise man. I don't think anybody showed this before they're worse in the clutch They can't handle pressure to the same degree shorter NBA players can and I think the reason for this is just because The select the advantage of being tall is so enormous That you kind of don't have to be as good at anything else So, you know if you're six feet tall and you're competing against millions of other people for that point guard spot You better be an insane athlete You know the six-foot NBA players they run as fast as a sprinter. They jump as high as a high jumper They shoot as well as anybody in the world can shoot. They can handle pressure

Incredibly, they're just so good to beat out millions of other people to that spot If you're seven feet tall and you're competing with dozens of other men for your spot, you don't be that good You just have to be one in seven good So, you know the average seven footer his vertical leap is only a little bit higher than the average person could it could achieve with Enormous practice. He's slower than most than an average runner on a high school track team. He shoots worse than an average high school basketball player. He handles pressure worse than an average high school basketball player. He's just not that great, but he is really, really tall. Well, it begs the question, why are tall players so prioritized? If they're less good psychologically,

cardiovascularly, physically, whatever, why do they keep getting selected? Well, because they are, it is an advantage. They grab more rebounds, they block more shots. I mean, the basket is up there. Or maybe, yeah, the basket is up there. The basket is not in the ground. The basket is in the sky, 10 feet above the ground. And I think when that's the case, it's a huge advantage to be really tall, to be able to reach higher, to be able to get higher, to block shots, to grab rebounds, to do all these things, to be able to get your shot off without it being blocked. I wondered whether you were going to have some sort of an insight,

moneyball style insight, where you were going to say, all of the NBA teams need to start drafting more six foot two people, because the trade-off that you get for athleticism, from a wider pool of potential people, is greater than the advantage you get from being seven-one or whatever. No, I don't think that's true. I mean, it is legitimately true that 7, you know, Shaquille O'Neal dominated the NBA for many seasons, even though, you know, I'm a better free throw shooter than Shaquille O'Neal. That's one of the core skills of basketball, and I, who am not particularly good and never play, can hit

a higher percent of my free throws than Shaquille O'Neal can. But he legitimately, I wouldn't say, you know, to the Lakers, hey, have you thought of picking up Seth? He shoots free throws better than Shaq. Like I legitimately think Shaq dominated basketball, but it is kind of a weird, unfair advantage. It does feel almost like a little, I don't know, as a fan of the game,

it feels like it's almost a bug in the game that height is such an advantage. Like if they, like the ideal sport, you know, you shouldn't be able to reach the top of a sport the way George Amir-san did through a growth hormone disorder. Like that shouldn't, you know, it feels like off in, in how, you know, an athletic pursuit, what it should take to reach the top of that athletic pursuit. But yeah, I'm not telling players don't cut Joe LM Bede because he can't jump as high as a six-foot player. He still does help the team, but it definitely is true that they are worse athletes. Yes.

Laugh in thyroid disorder. All right. So what about, are you able to compare like for like different players of different heights and say what if Mugsy Bogues had been six, seven? What, how good would he have been? Yeah. I was able to mathematically figure this out, which was the most fun I've ever had on any study I've ever done. As a shorter man, I'm about five-nine, I think, on a good day. So I think I kind of did this calculation. I ranked people, I called it Muggsys, which stands for metric for understanding game given sporting individuals effectiveness and size.

And I've ranked every player. The math is in an appendix for those who are really curious, how good they would be if they were at the same height, how many mugsies they'd have. And number one is Mugsie Bogues, who's just achievement is so ridiculously insane to be an NBA player for 14 seasons. Even if he wasn't the greatest NBA player, he was a decent NBA player for 14 seasons, even if he wasn't the greatest NBA player, he was a decent NBA player for 14 seasons at 5 foot 3 inches tall. It's insane. You know, other players, Earl Boykins and Spud Webrank really high. Michael Jordan, interestingly, still ranks number nine on a height-adjusted metric. Despite being like 6'6 or something. Yeah, because he was so, so good. So he is legitimately one of the greatest at his craft we've ever seen.

But if Muggsy and Michael were the same height, I think Muggsy, I think it's unambiguous in the data, the way I've cut the data, that Muggsy would be the more dominant player. Muggsy would be the one who would be making the documentaries about who we think is the quintessential at mastering his crafts, at mastering his craft, at determination, determination at work ethic and all these other things that we now associate with Michael Michael had enormous talent enormous drive enormous work ethic enormous anything and he also had enormous height which you know some of these other guys didn't have What do like why is it that players come from the countries that they do?

Obviously basketball wildly over represented by the USA, but if one in seven people over seven feet tall, why are Scandinavian countries that I think have got the tallest average height in the world? Why have we not seen loads of Danes or Norwegians or something? Yeah. So a big thing is popularity of basketball. Obviously, it plays into how many basketball players the country produces. And there are really only three regions of the world where basketball is extraordinarily popular. United States where it was invented. The Baltic States, former Yugoslavia. So if you're growing up playing basketball, the average person, I'm sure there are countless people around the world who, if they started practicing when they were

five, could shoot a ball like Steph Curry or could do everything with a basketball like James Harden, but they never even think to do that. They're playing soccer or they're playing some other sport. So that's really important. There are some subtle things that go into how many basketball players in the country produces. One that I found, which I found very, very interesting. And after you say it, it's extremely obvious that predicts how many basketball players it contributes is volleyball popularity. Because there's only one other sport that uses height the same way basketball does. And that's volleyball.

So the average volleyball player has basically the same body type as the average small forward in the NBA, about six foot eight on average, uh, you know, recently thin, uh, enormous leaper. And I didn't know this. I'm such a You know an American that I'm like who the hell cares about volleyball So I excuse my naivete, but in writing this book. I found that You know in Iran volleyball is five times more popular than basketball

And there are numerous countries around the world where volleyball is more popular than basketball than basketball. And there are numerous countries around the world where volleyball is more popular than basketball. It's more popular basketball in Brazil, in Bulgaria, in Russia, and Italy, in Puerto Rico. And what you see is in these countries where volleyball is more popular than basketball, you see fewer NBA players than you'd otherwise expect. And particularly fewer forward than you'd otherwise expect. Because a lot of these taller people, these six foot eight, six foot nine people are playing volleyball instead. You know, in the United States, Carmelo Anthony and LeBron James, when they grew their enormous height, I don't think anybody was like, Hey, have you thought of spiking a ball? You know, that's, that's the dream.

But the guys who grow to be six, eight, six, nine, six, 10 in Bulgaria, the dream is to spike a volleyball, which is a horrible financial decision. You know, like I think I talk about this player from Bulgaria who leaps higher than anybody has ever measured in the NBA. And he makes 300,000 euros a year, which is a great salary. That's not that's not terrible, but that is so far below the NBA minimum salary. Like someone's shoe allowance for one week in the NBA. Yeah, you I thought, you know, if any if any enormous men in Bulgaria or Brazil or Iran are listening to this podcast right now, I want to tell you practice your free throws, not your spiking.

That's where the money is in the in the world. That's that's the real win, I would say. Just how genetically predisposed or predetermined is basketball success? Enormously. Basketball is enormously genetic. More genetic than pretty much any other sport we can measure.

The way to see this is the prevalence of identical twins in basketball. There have been an enormous number of pairs of identical twins who have reached the NBA. 11 pairs of twins have reached the NBA. All 11 of them have been identical. This is not true in other sports. More than 10% of pairs of brothers in the NBA have been identical twins way higher than other sports. That's a dead giveaway that genetics are driving basketball ability because identical twins, fraternal twins, or unlike other brothers, share 100% of their genes, not 50% of their genes.

So if one happens to get a really good draw of genetics, the other is going to get that same draw. And I did a calculation that probably more than half of I, if a player is in the NBA and he has an identical twin, he has a more than 50% chance of also being in the NBA. Like if you get that same draw of genetics, you're like destined to be an amazing player as well.

Now a huge reason for this, of course, is because height is so important and height is very genetic, about 80% genetic. But a lot of other skills that are important, a lot of other traits that are important in basketball, hand size, arm length, wingspan, vertical leap, sprinting speed, also really really genetic. Basketball seems like the sport designed in a lab to rely on genetics. Like just it heavily uses the skills that are 70, 80, 90 percent genetics and doesn't really use the skills that are 20, 30, 40 percent genetic that some other sports do. What are the skills that are 20 30 40% so

reaction time Handedness whether you're lefty or righty is much less genetic Hand-eye coordination much less genetic so something like shooting in the Olympic sport, which is really hand-eye coordination That's not going to be but how can you say that basketball isn't hand-eye coordination? Yeah, no, there is definitely important importance of hand-eye coordination But just relative to the other sport, you know relative to baseball for example, which is all hand-eye coordination to hit a bet you know all of baseball is being able to you know hit get the swing to hit the ball which is hand-eye coordination or Reaction time reflexes.

That's not as genetic. That baseball is just so dependent on that. Whereas basketball, the skills that are more important, height, wingspan, vertical leap, wide-bead-handsize, so important. Yeah, that actually I hadn't realized until I wrote this book Basically the ability to palm a ball is I always got to get my hand in the screen the ability of to palm a ball Now I reveal I do not have Why Leonard hands

Another reason I could never go hands that you're waving around the Donald Trump hands. But I. Being able to palm a ball, hugely valuable to grab a rebound with one hand to be able to dribble better with the Billy and Pop my hand, palm a ball. Really, really valuable. Phil Jackson coached, famously coached both Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. And he was asked if you could pick one player, who would you pick? And he said Michael Jordan because Jordan had enormous hands and Kobe Bryant didn't. And Kobe Bryant admitted the one thing he'd changed about his body as he wished he had bigger hands.

So it's kind of known in the basketball world that hands are valuable and a lot of all-time greats had enormous hands even for their height, you know, whether it's Yanis or Wilt or Shaq. How big do these hands get? 12 inch, 12 inch hand width. You know, the average is about eight inches. So just very, very, you know, a foot. Yeah, like this is like a foot long. Yeah. That's insane. That's insane. Yeah, the hands and you could look at pictures of you know Kauai Leonard is another player with legendarily large hands, you know, look at pictures of his hands. They're freakish hands and it turns out that as NBA teams have known that hand size is really important

But it doesn't seem like they quite knew just how important it was that if you look at the draft, you know at the NBA kind-bind they measure players hands how the hand with the players and Players with wide hands historically have done better You know by by advanced metrics then you'd predict based on their based on their draft spot and players with you know Tiny hands the Donald Trump hands, they're just awful players. I think 17 of 19 players who had hands below eight inches, below average, performed below their draft spot.

And most of them just couldn't even be NBA players. So I think it's known that hand size is important. I don't think it's been appreciated just how important it is that it is up there with the height and the wingspan, the skills, the traits that we know are really, really important with the vertical leap. Are there any of the sports that you know of that are highly genetically influenced in the same way that volleyball and basketball are? Track and field seems to be very genetically influenced, also dominated by identical twins.

If you look at track and field, the Olympic track and field athletes, the percent of same-sex siblings that are identical twins is up there with basketball. And I think sprinting speed particularly seems also very genetic. You're saying Bolt or whatever. I want to bet on his son to be a tremendous runner. That is another sport that is highly genetic. How important are your parents beyond the genetics thing? The average American male has a 1 in 36,000 chance of reaching the NBA. The average son of an NBA player has a one in 43 chance of reaching the NBA. So one in 36. Are you able to one in 36 to one in 41 and 36,000 to one in 43.

Are you able to control for the physical inheritance like the height and all the rest of it? Yeah, a little bit. It's a little hard to do, but it clearly... So that's a 744 times higher chance of reaching the NBA than a son of an NBA player. Now, a lot of that is genetics, but it's pretty clear it's not all genetics. And if you have a father who was a professional player, was an NBA player, you're going to get really good coaching from an early age. And one of the things I saw in the data is sons of NBA players on many dimensions, they look very similar to other NBA players. You know, they have similar heights, they have similar weights, their stats are pretty similar, mostly, but they shoot free throws extraordinarily well.

So the average NBA player shoots free throws at a 75% clip. Sons of NBA players shoot free throws at an 80% clip. And that's a 5% point. It's a very big difference in free throw shooting. And 8% of the top 50 free throw shooters of all time have been sons of NBA players, whereas only 2% of NBA players more generally are sons of NBA players. The greatest free throw shooter of all time, Steph Curry, son of an NBA player, Del Curry. And you see just, you know, Devin Booker, many, many NBA player, player clay Thompson many NBA players

Extraordinary free throw shooters one of the things that's interesting and okay. So why is that? well form is so important in shooting and If you have an NBA player for a father, they're gonna be helping you on a form your form for very from a very young age They're gonna be helping you on a form your form for very from a very young age And and that's a huge advantage in working working your shot from a very young age It's just a huge advantage one thing you see among NBA players. It's very interesting NBA players their sons they tend to be shorter than they were because there's regression to the mean. Yeah, so You know Clay Thompson's father was a number one pick as a center. He was six foot 10 and he was about a 60% free throw shooter, not extraordinary free

throw shooter. Clay Thompson's only six foot six, but he's an 80% plus free throw shooter. So what you see is the physical traits, they regress to the mean, but the shooting, which requires that early training, the form, they're just much better at that. So, you know, there have been many examples of NBA players who are power forward centers themselves, and they have sons who are shooting guards. So they don't get quite as much of the height, you know height as they had, but they get that early training to improve the shooting.

Yeah, very interesting. I feel like I missed my shot because I also read that Chris is the most common name for black NBA players. So if only I could have fixed the problem of not being black. Yeah, that was your first mistake. Yeah, well, I guess I guess I was not black before I was called Chris. Yeah. So, yeah, maybe.

So, Chris is the most common name among NBA players. Now, why is that? That seems just like a random piece of trivia. It gets to a bigger question of what's the socioeconomics of NBA players. of what's the socioeconomics of NBA players. And for a long time, conventional wisdom was that NBA was disproportionately sampling from people from rough backgrounds, tough backgrounds, the ghetto, impoverished single parents. And the idea behind that was, if you're, let's say, a black boy impoverished in the ghetto and you're pretty good at basketball,

that is your one chance of getting out, escaping your hardship, escaping your circumstance, you know, to become an NBA great. And you will do whatever it takes, work as hard as it is required to reach the top of basketball. Whereas if you're the son of a lawyer and a doctor in the suburbs, and yeah, you're pretty good at basketball, well, you have so many options that you're not going to spend day and night practicing basketball, devoting yourself to this pursuit. That has never been true. There was initially a study by Josh DeBrow and Jimmy Adams that showed that both among Caucasians and African Americans, being from an upper middle class or above family is a

huge advantage in reaching the NBA. And I've done my own study at NBA players much less likely than the population at large and the black NBA players much less likely than black population at large to be born to a single mother, to be born to a teenage mother. On any way, you can look at the data. Being from a two-parent home, upper middle class or middle class or above huge advantage to reaching the NBA. The most maybe interesting data point for that is the names of NBA players. There was a paper by Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt that found that among the African-American population, you can tell the demographics of someone pretty well just based on their

name and that African- Americans from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to be given common names, names that are very popular in the population at large. African Americans from lower socioeconomics, from poverty, from the ghetto, more likely to be given rare unique names, names that nobody else is given that year. So an example of that, I'm pretty sure, is LeBron. Now, LeBron is probably a common name because, you know, everybody wants to name their kid after LeBron. But when LeBron was born and he was born to a more difficult background,

a single 16-year-old mother in Akron, Ohio, LeBron was a unique name. It wasn't given to other people that year. And it wasn't given to, it wasn't a name that other people had as well. If you look at NBA players, black NBA players are half as likely as the black population writ large to have unique names. They're much more likely to have names Chris, Michael, Marcus. In the book, I have a whole word cloud of the names of NBA players and the most common name by pretty wide margin is Chris. So you think of Chris Paul or Chris Bosch, many other examples. And Chris Paul is a great example of a player from two-parent home, middle class, the family joined him on an episode of Family Feud. That's kind of where

the NBA is getting their players much more than conventional wisdom told us. Michael Jordan, another example, grew up a middle class two-parent family born in Brooklyn, raised in North Carolina, very stable upbringing. That's where the NBA is getting their talent by and large. Now, of course, not always, which means we have to give that much more credit to LeBron James of the world because they really did overcome a lot. If only he'd been 5'3 as well. Yeah. At 7-inch hands. Yeah. Then we'd really have to give him foot three as well. Yeah. It's seven inch hands. Yeah. Then we'd really have to give him a lot of credit. Exactly.

Yeah. Just how dominated is the NBA by black players or African American heritage? Yeah, it's about 80% of American born players are African American, which I didn't get into. You know, some of that, I don't go into the reasons for that, which is probably beyond the scope of my study. Some of it is legitimately cultural. The black advantage, I didn't actually put this in the book, but the black advantage in basketball is smaller among Americans than it is larger among Americans than it is among Europeans or people

from the Caribbean. So other regions of the world, there isn't such a big advantage for black people. And I think part of the reason is that basketball is just so popular in the black community in the United States that if you surveys that ask whether you're a huge basketball fan, African Americans are about twice as likely as other Americans to say they're huge basketball fans. So it is, again, being a big fan of the sport is a huge advantage to reach the top of the sport. That's why there are so many more players from the United States than there are from Great Britain, for example. You know, I don't think, you know, most people, you'd probably be more of an expert on this topic than I am, but I don't think most people growing up in London are dreaming of being a basketball player. They're dreaming of being, you know, they're not dreaming of being Chicago Bowl. They're dreaming to be an Arsenal player. And I think at any time, any community, whether it's a country

or a race or anything else, where basketball is really popular is going to produce more than their fair share of NBA talent. What determines who chokes under pressure. Yeah, so this is, so one of the things very interesting is people choke in basketball, I think more than a lot of other sports. So you look at the average NBA player, you compare free throws, kind of, how they shoot free throws normally. Free throws is a great test of choking because it's the exact same situation throughout the game.

You're shooting from the same spot, no defenders, and the average NBA player shoots free throws more than one percentage point lower in clutch moments, five minutes or less on the clock, game within five points than in other times. So the average NBA player is a choker. This is kind of surprising, because in a lot of sports, we found that players don't choke. And the reason for that is a choker. It's kind of surprising because in a lot of sports,

we found that players don't choke. And the reason for that is to reach the top of a sport, you have to be so mentally tough. The average person, of course, is going to choke under a pressure moment, but they're just going to be knocked out way before they reach the top of their sport. So if you can't handle a pressure penalty kick, your problems are going to reveal themselves in high school. Log before you're playing in the World Cup or whatever. And similarly, studies have shown that baseball players had not to choke. So why do basketball players so consistently choke?

And I think this gets the point. Again, I don't love hammering the seven footers in large part because I feel like when a five nine person is attacking people taller than him, he seems like he has a horrible Napoleon complex. So I hesitate to use my book as just seven footers to secretly all suck and tall people suck because there's a dangerous pattern of shorter men

doing things like this out of their own insecurity and resentments But I can't lie in the data The only thing I could find that predict choking was height that taller players just choke more And I think the reason for that is there's just not much selective pressure on taller NBA players if you have to only have to be If one in seven seven footers reach the NBA, you only have to be have one in seven basketball ability to reach the NBA. You don't have to be that great at everything. You don't have to be the world's most mentally tough person because

there just aren't enough seven footers to choose from. And so the average six footer in the NBA shoots free throws exactly the same in the non clutch moments and clutch moments. But the average seven footer shoots free throws more than six percentage points worse in clutch moments. So just an enormous tendency to choke among

the tallest NBA players. But didn't you say that you wanted the NBA to have a height cutoff because you thought it would make the game more exciting? That was another one where I'm like, God, if I say this, first of all, people are going to call me a hide-est or something. But also, I don't know whether you can be a hide-est around the people that have got it, that got like the advantage.

Yeah. I just, I know, I made clear in the book that I don't think there actually should be a height advantage I think if there were a height cutoff if there were a cut high cutoff cutoff I think it's audio ambiguous that There would be more talent in the game that the shooting would be better the clutch shooting would be better the athleticism will be better all these factors would be better if there were a height cutoff, but no, I'm not a heightist or an anti-heightist or a reverse heightist. A tallest, whatever it is. A tallest, tallest, shortest. And, you know, I am a huge basketball fan and my favorite

player growing up was Patrick Ewing, who is seven, you know, seven feet tall. So I do, they do enrich the game. Hey, put your tall supporting bona f fides out front of the center in case anyone's going to try and say something mean about you. So it's at the very end of the book, but it seems related to this, about childhood difficulty. Oh yeah. So one of the things I was interested in was whether child difficulty predicts your tendency to choke. It's an interesting theory.

I've heard a lot. Jimmy Butler is a classic great clutch shooter. He's completely unaffected by pressure moments, just so good in the clutch. Jimmy Butler had such a rough childhood. His father abandoned the family. His mother kicked him out of the house because she didn't like the look of him. Like it was just a horrible childhood. And there is a theory that Jimmy Butler is so good in clutch moments because he's so tough because he's been through

so much and compare his background to, you know, someone who grew up in the suburbs, you know, you know, a soccer mom and soccer, you know, an NBA dad or something, you know, they can't handle what Jimmy Butler can handle. So, I actually tested this in the data in a fun way, in the book in a fun way. There isn't a measure, an objective measure of how difficult was your background. So, one of the things we might get into about this book is I heavily relied on chat GPT in the creation of this book. And I thought chat GPT would do a great job

of giving me an objective measure of how difficult someone's childhood was. Because it has in its data set all this information about all the NBA players, what they went through in childhood. So I asked ChatGbt to rank the background of NBA players, and it gave such sensible answers. Jimmy Butler was ranked a nine. Kawhi Leonard grew up in a tough neighborhood in Compton, was ranked similarly a nine.

Alu Al-Dang ranked very high because he grew up in a civil war in Sudan. All these different measures, they'll be hard to objectively rank. ChatGPT gives a very sensible ranking. Then some players, Dwight Howard, his dad was a state trooper. He ranks very low. The Sons of NBA players rank very low. Steve Nash, a suburban family in Canada, ranks very low in difficulty of upbringing. He's had this great measure of difficulty of upbringing and then I tested does this predict one's tendency to choke and It doesn't it does not go on at all So it was a little bit of a letdown because it would have been a cool theory if you saw it in the data The other thing is it made me realize

How dangerous it is to use chatGPT for research. Because if I really wanted to cheat, I could have just kept on asking chatGPT to give me a new ranking, until I had a ranking that did predict choking. So there is a definitely not chatGPT as amazing as it is as a objective coder of information, does allow for a great deal of cherry picking

if you don't feel like being too honest. Fuckery can occur. It does, yeah, for sure. Warren Buffett and Paul Millsap, what did they have in common? Yeah, so one of my chapters is called, Warren Buffett and Paul Millsap having common. Paul Millsap's a great NBA player, many multi-time All-Star. Warren Buffett, as everyone knows, one of the greatest investors of all time. What they have in common, well, besides being great at their craft, was they both turned

down the opportunity to go to an elite college, to go to a college that was less elite, but they felt more comfortable in. So Warren Buffett started his collegiate career at Wharton, one of the great business schools in the world. And you'd think someone who dreamed of being a businessman since he was the age of five would relish the opportunity to go to Wharten to learn from the greatest business professors, to have all the great business peers. Buffett left Warden and went to University of Nebraska because he wanted to be close

to his family. He thought the libraries were just as good anyway. Paul Nilsap was a top-ranked recruit, got offers from Arizona, Louisville, LSU, but he decided to go to Louisiana Tech because he felt comfortable there was close to his family. And the chapter basically looks at the data on whether it matters, whether you go to a good college. So it doesn't matter, both for a career, the great colleges that tend to, that people go, there are some colleges

in which people who go to them have way higher earnings. So Harvard, Stanford, Warden, is it a big advantage? Does it cause you to do better to go to one of these schools? And then in basketball, there are certain universities, they're different universities, but North Carolina, Kentucky, Duke, UCLA, where players who go there are way more likely

to become NBA players. So is it really important to go to one of these colleges? And I think the evidence is, my really evidence on both the real world and the NBA, is that going to one of these elite colleges gives you an early edge. So if you go to Harvard undergrad, Stanford undergrad, Ivy League, another Ivy League undergrad, you're more likely to get into an elite graduate school, more likely to get that first job at McKinsey or a prestigious firm, a Google.

And in basketball, if you go to Duke, if you go to North Carolina, if you go to Kentucky, you're more likely to be drafted. But if you look at the long-term outcome, how good you are as an NBA player, eventually how much you earn over your career, they don't seem to do that much. Eventually things kind of even out.

So, they kind of trick people early on. They give a shine to you if you have that gold-plated resume that you went to this elite school. You can trick the world early in your career, but eventually everything's going to even out. That kind of happened to both Buffett and Millsap, where Warren Buffett got rejected from Harvard Business School, because probably because they're looking at this guy from Nebraska, and like, well, we don't want someone from Nebraska.

We can get someone from Warden or one of these other elite schools. But I think it's pretty clear in the long run he wasn't hurt by his Nebraska education, became one of the wealthiest men in human history. And similarly, Paul Millsap fell to the second round, perhaps because teams are like, well, we don't trust a guy from Louisiana Tech. But in the long run, he became, you know, a great NBA player, an all-star NBA player. So it's interesting that the real world and the NBA seem to, colleges

seem to serve a similar function. They give you that early shine, but then they don't seem to do a similar function. They give you that early shine, but then they don't seem to do much beyond that. How important is going to college at all? Well, one of the things that's very interesting in the data is historically, NBA players who didn't go to college, you know, who went straight out of high school, massively overperformed their draft spot.

You know, it was a great bet. Now, you have to go to college for a year so you can't take advantage of this inefficiency anymore. But for many years, it was an extraordinary idea to draft a player straight out of high school. So Colby Bryant, Kevin Garnett, Rashard Lewis, numerous players, Amari Stottemeier just massively outperformed their draft spot. I think one of the reasons for this, my hypothesis, there are many hypotheses for these, but my hypothesis is if you skipped college and went straight to the draft, It was such a bold move. It was saying something about yourself and you do yourself so well and your capabilities that you do something about yourself that the rest of the world missed.

That is a huge advantage in being a basketball player. And I think I compare that to the great entrepreneurs. You know, if you look at the very greatest entrepreneurs, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, what many of them have in common, they dropped out of school very quickly. I think if you looked at these great entrepreneurs on paper, if you looked at Zuckerberg and Gates, you'd say, okay, they went to a good school, they maybe had high test scores, they were interested in computers, but so are lots of people. But the fact that they dropped out of school to follow their entrepreneurial spirit, I think was another clue that they

had something else about themselves that was so remarkable that another person who had a similar background but wanted to stay in school didn't have. And I think the same among NBA players, that Colby Bryant knew something about himself. Amir Johnson, Rashard Lewis, they all knew something about themselves in making that decision to go straight to the NBA that the rest of the world didn't know. And there was just extraordinary inefficiency

where a straight out of high school players massively overperformed their draft spot. Yeah, it's so interesting, the, I guess straight out of high school players massively overperform their draft spot. Yeah, it's so interesting the, I guess, kind of selection effect of what's going on here, like how much of this is just, there's a smaller pool that we're moving from, or somebody has a particular outlier, which is, it's a commonality between all of these different people, right? There's a common thread that goes between them all. And yeah, just ridiculous self-belief, I suppose probably correlates with the turn of others. Honestly, self-belief might correlate with VO2 max. I would totally be open to hearing

that, yeah, yeah, yeah, zone two threshold and lactate management ability are strongly correlated with self-belief. I totally believe it. I think one of the frustrating things is of writing a book about NBA basketball when you're an NBA basketball fan as I am, an enormous NBA basketball fan as I am, is it's almost impossible for the book to be finished. Because, you know, there are a hundred more questions I want to look at based on these these findings like that. That would be fascinating to look at. You know, I don't know if there's a way to measure it, but I'd love to see, you know, to look at that and to really understand why hand size has been undervalued and, you know, why high school players have overperformed and all these questions are just like, you answer one question and if you're a fan of the game,

you have 10 more questions you wanna answer based on that question. So I had to remind myself many times in the process of writing this book that perfect is the enemy of the good and that I had to finish the project at some point. You mentioned there about the NBA draft and coming from a anglicized colonial British imperialist background, the idea of a draft for us, we don't have it in rugby, we don't have it in cricket, we don't have it in football.

And yet it's so common in American sports, you know. What, how effective is it? Is it good? Is it a good idea for basketball at least? I mean, I think it evens the playing field for sure. You know, there are some sports where the best teams are just the richest teams. You know, the whatever team can spend the most money on the best players is going to be the best team is going to be the best team and That's not really true in basketball. You know San Antonio was a great team for many decades Even though they're in one of the smallest markets and I'm a huge Knicks fan We're in the biggest market. You know, we should be able to Spend the most on players. We have the biggest TV deal and we're finally good again

this year, but we were terrible for so long. And I think the draft does serve as an equalizer, where if you do get that number one pick and you are able to, you know, draft a Tim Duncan, or, you know, you are going to potentially have a great team for 10, 15 years. So it definitely does serve the purpose of equalizing things, I would say. And it also is fun to try to, you know, predict who's gonna be a good player. You know, the NBA is one of the best leagues

at predicting who's gonna be a great player. You know, if you look at the top 10 NBA players of all time, 60% of them, I think were number one picks, number one overall, it's very predictive then. It's very predictive. It's not true in baseball It's not true in football the numbers are much lower in those sports now, of course there are outliers so Nicola Jokic on Denver was a second round pick and he's you know, one of the best if not the best NBA player

so there are exceptions but You know and there are these inefficiencies as I discussed about in the book, you know, hand sizes improperly taken to account and, you hand width. The teams want to see how high they can jump, and they give them two tests. The first one is a standing leap. You stand in place and just, without any head start, see how high you can jump. And then the second one is a vertical leap. You get a running head start. It's not a full on, you know, the whole court running head start, but you get some head start and then see how high you can jump. And of course, with a running head start, everybody can jump higher. And one thing that's very interesting is if you see what predicts block shots or rebounds among basketball players, it's not

the vertical leap, the running head start leap. It's the standing leap because a lot of basketball, you don't get a running head start. You're boxing out a player. Yeah, you're boxing out a player and the ball just comes and you jump or a guy's going through the lane and you just maybe get half a step and leap. So if you actually look at the draft, there's an inefficiency where players who have a great standing leap relative to their vertical leap are undervalued.

And the players who have a great vertical leap relative to their standing leap are overvalued. And I think the reason for that is it's such a sexy shiny trait, that running head start leap. If you can run the length of the court and leap from the free throw line and dunk the ball, like that is such an impressive athletic feat that I think people are blinded. I was just like, oh my God, this person has to be amazing at basketball. It's much sexier than someone who can leap not as high, but higher relative to what you'd expect without a running head start. That's an inefficiency in the draft. But there needs to be a

like coolness modifier for the exercises Yeah, I you know I again once you write a book like this just your minds and you're a sports fan I'm just a fan of all sports my mind just starts racing. Yeah, does this play out in other sports? I you know our cool traits It's racing. Yeah. Does this play out in other sports? You know, are cool traits overvalued in both sports?

But I guess it's probably a yes. I absolutely bet that pitch speed, like average pitch speed in baseball is something that is very, very highly prioritized. You know, if you're regularly able to hit three figures throughout multiple innings. It's just the whole crowd when they see that one zero zero dot zero zero like, oh, like the whole crowd makes noise, right? So it's like. But is that is that the best? I mean, this is. Yeah, I believe it and yeah, I believe it and you know in football our football American football

You know the the speed of a player Relative let's say a wide receiver relative to running good routes, you know a player who just has an incredible 40-yard dash, you know 425 43, you know, it's so impressive, so exciting. I think they tend to be drafted maybe higher than they should be relative to someone who runs a four, four, five, a four, five, but, you know, really precise on those routes. Like, it's just not that exciting, but it is more important. You know, you could probably go through lots of sports where the sexy traits are overvalued There's a really cool YouTube video by Total Running Productions about Sue Bing Chan

So here's the 14th fastest sprinter in the world, but he's the only He might be the only non-black sprinter in the top The top quite a lot, but he's the only Asian sprinter in the top 200 or something and the guys 5.8. I think 5.8 or 5.9 and 9.81 or something, but he broke the world record for the 40 meter and the 60 meter in the 100 meter. So this guy is like an, it's the video that I'm talking about, I'll send it to you once we're done. It's so good dude. And you see this dude who can't get below 10 seconds, he can't get below 10 seconds, he's just, is this the theoretical limit for Asian sprinters? He changes his starting foot and rebuilds his running rhythm from the ground up when he's been doing it for two decades or something. It's awesome. He's like my favorite. He's one of my favorite track and field guys now is this short Chinese dude who's just the mode the acceleration of him is so insane.

Crazy. I think one of the things you see in all sports are these players. That just are so good at making themselves better throughout their career and you you know, you can talk about wide receivers, Jerry Rice, the greatest wide receiver of all time. He didn't have the greatest natural gifts. You know, he wasn't the fastest, he's not the tallest, but he just would improve every year and just so such dedication to his craft,

you know, tiny improvement, such a focus on the routes he was running. And and you know if you think of basketball Kawhi Leonard I think fits that profile as well. Maybe not the most naturally gifted Player but just year after year Improving certain paying attention to every subtle little thing, you know that how to rebound better put play the angles off the off the rim better. And I think it is fun to watch these players, even in many ways more fun than watching the naturally gifted, you know, the most naturally gifted players who maybe don't have to put

in quite the effort and they can frustrate you. Shaquille O'Neal, he was interviewed and they said, Phil Jackson, your coach, said that if you just practiced hard, you could have been MVP 10 years straight. And you'd think Shaquille O'Neal would be outraged at this statement. How could someone say that? And he basically admitted that this was true. Shaquille O'Neill would be outraged at this statement. How could someone say that? He basically admitted that this was true. He's like, yeah, I didn't love practicing. I liked my cheeseburgers in the off-season, but he was just so gifted. You combine that height with that,

you know, that foot speed and that athleticism. It just didn't matter, but a shack is a little frustrating. You know, if I were a Lakers fan, I'd be so frustrated. Like, why can't you just learn how to shoot free throws for God? Like, whereas, you know, some of these players, the real craftsmen who just constantly are improving and upping their game year after year, working at it can be really, really fun to watch. What have you come to believe or what are the insights about the role of hard work in achieving goals?

I think it depends so much on the pursuit. Everything that isn't basketball or volleyball. Yeah, I mean, if you're five", and you have small hands and you're slow and you can't jump, like, there's nothing, you got no chance. You know, you can work as hard as you want, it's not going to help. I would say basketball, because it's so dependent on so many traits that are so genetic, such as height, I think hard work, it moves the needle a little bit. And I think, you know, there's a difference to you know, Michael Jordan is considered the greatest of all time and Shaq isn't probably in large part because Michael Jordan outworked Shaq. And you know, if Shaq had

outworked Michael, I think Shaq would be the player that is number one on everyone's mind as the quintessential basketball player. So I think hard work can take you from Shaq to MJ, but it's not going to take you from Seth to Shaq. to shack or you know, it's not, there's, there's, you're moving the needle a little bit, but not that much in basketball. But there's other pursuits where hard work maybe matters more than, and I always suggest if you're not genetically gifted, you know, there's some sports, equestrian riding or skiing or, you know, there's certain sports where I think you really can improve your craft. You know, you can move the needle a lot more through hard work

than you can in a sport like basketball or sprinting or something. All right. So we kind of flooded around it. And some of the people who don't know or didn't listen to our previous episodes and realize that you're an ex-data scientist from Google, and then you've written all of these phenomenal books, which I love, Why you know so much about basketball? Like, why? Who are you to write this book? And how do you happen to have this like encyclopedic x-ray vision to be able to see what's going on inside of the world of basketball? So, well, first of all, I'm an enormous basketball fan. I have been since I was a little boy. Uh, you know, I don't think I could have written a book of, you know, a book like this of who becomes the best figure skater in the world or who becomes the best opera singer.

Uh, because I definitely was relying pretty heavily on knowledge I have from three decades as a passionate fandom of basketball. But this book, I used a new tool that I have become obsessed with. It was initially called Code Interpreter. It's now called Data Analysis. It's from ChatGPT. And it's basically a way to do data analysis that has just completely revolutionized my work stream.

Like it's, I say it's the most amazing product I've ever seen. I always need to offer the caveat. I have zero affiliation with open AI. I feel like when I say this, I sound like I'm a spokesman for their, a pitchman for their product. I'm not associated with OpenAI at all.

But it basically, a data analysis, what was originally called Code Interpreter, it writes all your data analysis, your data science code for you and runs it. And it is just such a game changer that things that used to take me four months, now literally take me four hours or sometimes less. It is just such a game changer that things that used to take me four months now literally take me four hours or sometimes less. It is just so wild. Scraping data sets, cleaning data sets, merging data sets, running regressions, making charts. It is the most insane product I've ever seen. And so this book was just like written in like an explosion of just data analysis

in like a shockingly short time of just all day running code interpreter analyses of basketball. And I was having the time of my life and just like just so quickly producing these charts, producing these analyses. You know, I think this book would have been a project of many, many years without Code Interpreter. With Code Interpreter, it was a project that took basically 30 days, which initially I was really proud of. Now people are like, well, do I want

to read a book that only took you 30 days. There's a really famous lecture, I guess, this guy, it's a clip from what looks like a marketing class or a sales class, perhaps, or something. And he says, how much would you pay me if you wanted me to design your new logo? And the guy says, I'd pay you $1,000. He goes, okay. And how much would you pay me

if I was able to design it in 30 minutes? He said, what? I'd pay you like $500. He's like, hang on a second. So you're getting the service more quickly. But you want to pay less because you think that the amount of time is indicative of the amount of effort, which is indicative of the amount of quality. Yeah. It was interesting. So initially, the first version of who makes the NBA, one of the marketing hooks, I'm like, look, I wrote this book in 30 days

and I also show at the end, this is how I did it. This is how I used a chat GBT to do all the analysis, not to do the writing, the writing I did all myself, but to do the analysis, to make the art, all the art is AI generated from mid-journey or dolly. You know, here's what I learned along the way in, in writing this book. And a few people were like, exactly like this guy said, like, well, we don't, I don't want to read a book in your 30 day vanity project.

So now I've toned that down. I've said more that, you know, I, I, I also show you how to use AI. I, I'm deemphasizing the actual time that I use. But I think that's just unfair to just how revolutionary chat GBT is that prior to the existence of Code Interpreter, if I said, I wrote a book on NBA basketball in 30 days, I think people would correctly say, this is a piece of crap and a Seth Vanity project. I don't want anything to do with this. But I think because of Code Interpreter, because of Mid Journey, because of Dolly, because of ChatGPT, you can write a book in 30 days that is a real treatise on

basketball with new insights on the game, many answers to previously unanswered questions. I think people don't realize just how revolutionary AI is for the creative process, that the rules of how long something should take over the last year have completely changed. It's very interesting. It's very interesting to think that you've got this like arbitrary link between time spent and quality. It would be like if you said, here's some butter, but I churned it myself, like with my feet or something. Oh, I very much appreciate the fact that you went through all of that effort to

give me this butter. You're OK. And then that that book that you see that's in front of you, it was actually written by hand. It's a handwritten book and then all of the pages kind of stitch and sewn together but you know like technological progress people are very typically there's a lot of inertia to. People being dragged along and yeah interesting man very very interesting i suppose what we're seeing here is just like leverage at such an insane level of magnitude that your ability to manipulate chat GPT and data analyzer and to be able to spit out what you needed

and then to be able to put it together and then to be able to use chat GPT to be able to proofread the words so that there wasn't any errors in it. Like that is it's taking a skill set but leveraging it so much way more than even something like Wikipedia or a word processor could do. So yeah, people are just not not ready for this level of exponential. Dude, I appreciate you. I think you've smashed it with the book. I'm really impressed. You say

at the beginning you make a joke that you're going to try and write a hundred books. That is a joke, right? You're not going to try and do a hundred books. I don't know. I might. I'll see. I'm trying to work on the monetization of this book. I'm trying to figure out like, yeah, exactly how to... If I get the monetization right, because I also self-published this book. Yeah.

Because all the publishers are just like, we don't know what to do with your weird 30-day projects. Like that's not, publishers move very, very slowly. So no publisher would really touch this. So I'm kind of trying to figure out the, if I got the monetization right, I would, I would just keep doing it. Because the other thing is this was the best month of my life bar none. It was so fun. In part, because I was writing about, you know, the NBA, I'm a huge basketball fan, of course, that's going to be fun for someone like me. But in part, because one thing I found is AI just does so many of the things I freaking hate doing. So, I'm a data scientist, data analyst. A lot of data science data analysis is not particularly fun. For me, writing code, debugging code, looking up code, figuring out exactly how to add something to a chart in this way.

It's just, you know, mind-numbing a lot of it. And in this project, that was all gone. Like all I did was come up with ideas that I'm just like here, data analyst, do it for me. And it was just awesome. It was so fun. So it was just like, it was the most fun month I've had in my life. So if I can get the modernization right on the book on this, then I'm just, yeah, I'm going.

Bring those together. No, I've got a decade of the most fun months of your life back to back to back. Yeah, no, I said I'd have a baseball book out by opening day. Then I'd have an Olympics book for the, you know, by the summer. Then I have an NFL book for the start you know, by the summer, then I have an NFL book for for the start of that season. I just keep on going. It would just be the most fun. Yeah, the most fun months of my life. So hell yeah, Seth, I appreciate you. I look forward to seeing what you do next. I'll bring you back on. Let's have this, let's have this chat one more time. Chris, thanks so much for having me. I congrats on the success of this podcast. It's been,

you read, I remember when you first reached out to me to talk about my first book, Everybody Lies. I think I looked you up and you're like a two-bit podcaster. But I'm like, yeah, it seems like a nice guy. I'll do this little podcast. And to see you go into the stratosphere has been a true joy and very well deserved because you have worked really hard for it. Thank you man, I really appreciate that. I really, really do. Until next time mate, I'll catch you later on. Thanks, see you Chris.