The Ringer NFL Show - How a Book About Tennis Changed Everything, and How ‘Moneyball’ and ‘The Blind Side’ Influenced Sports With Michael Lewis

Episode Date: May 15, 2020

Steve and Pete are joined by author Michael Lewis ('Moneyball,' 'The Blind Side,' and 'The Big Short') to talk about how he gets the ideas for his books, and the background story of ‘The Blind Side��� and how it influenced the NFL’s view on the left tackle position. They discuss how advancements in technology are affecting sports and whether or not a coach can change a player's natural ability. Finally they discuss the extraordinary influence of Timothy Gallwey‘s book ‘The Inner Game of Tennis.’ Hosts: Steve Kerr and Pete Carroll Guest: Michael Lewis This show is raising money for COVID-19 relief. You can help! Donate here! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of Flying Coach on the Ringer podcast network brought to you by World Central Kitchen, help the heroes in hospitals and clinics we're fighting for us and help keep your local restaurants alive. Go to the ringer.com slash WCK to donate, please. If you have the means, it's an unbelievably great and useful cause that helps our hospital heroes, emergency workers, and local restaurants. Give whatever you can. The money goes directly to World Central Kitchen. It's a charitable donation. Once again, that is the ringer.com slash WCK. we started flying coach to raise money for the Warriors Community Foundation and the Seahawks Charitable Foundation.

But as a thank you to all the frontline workers for COVID-19, Pete Carroll and his company Compete to Create are offering a free online course and a high-performance mindset coincidentally called Warriors Edge. You can find it by going to his website at compete to create.net backslash Warriors Edge who will be available for free for anyone working with COVID-19

through the end of 2020 in general. The course is an incredible insider look into Pete's philosophy culture and leadership. A lot of the stuff we talk about on this podcast. Coming up, Steve Kerr, Pete Carroll, Flying Coach. Welcome to the Flying Coach podcast, Steve Kerr, Pete Carroll. And Pete, we've got a fantastic guest on today. Author, fellow podcaster, father,

and I believe maybe even a basketball coach to his son? I don't know. I'm going to have to find that one out. Michael Lewis is joining us. Michael, thanks for coming on. Oh, it's nice you to have me. So, Michael. Hey, Pete. Are you a coach? Do you coach your son? So I coached all the kids. My kids are now 21, 18, and 13. And all of them basically rebelled at the idea of me coaching them at about the age of 12. And the better they were, the less they wanted me in their coaching.

their coaching. They all sense like it was like going to a doctor and you know he doesn't actually have a degree. They all they all they all had that feeling like they were in the wrong place. They knew it. Was it basketball or were you coached your basketball or what's sports? I coached both my daughters were serious softball players. So I coached I coached them and actually helped run the softball league for years. So I did I don't know how many of those things. I was actually I was the commissioner of the competitive all the competitors. softball in the East Bay when I was when my kids were coming up and so I got right in the middle of youth sports in a big way and my son so my son played briefly on a on a Japanese Buddhist

temple based basketball team wow I'd like to hear about that one now and in order to be the coach you had to be a Japanese Buddhist so I was I was the I was the assistant coach and but he's just He's now moved on to a more serious like AAU team. And I'm nowhere near it. I can't believe you didn't take that challenge to become a Japanese Buddhist. You could have done it. You know, maybe I could have become a Buddhist. I think it would have been hard to become a Japanese Buddhist.

I never know. Yeah, that would have been tough. So Pete, Michael and I both lived in Berkeley for many. You still live in Berkeley, right? Michael. I'm up in the hills in North Berkeley. Yeah. Great.

Yep, which is where I was for five years until the Warriors moved across the Bay to San Francisco, and we'd run into each other occasionally. And Michael came in and addressed our team. Do you remember what season that was, Michael? It was right after you won. Actually, I'm trying to think. I don't think you had Durant yet. Yeah, 16, I think. I think it was 2016.

That sounds right. Yeah. That sounds right. I think we actually brought some of the Japanese. Buddhist basketball team with us. You did. You did. There you go.

And they sat on the balcony and watched practice. And you addressed the team. And this is something that I watched when I visited Pete in Seattle, how powerful it is to bring an accomplished person from a totally different field in to share thoughts on their own process of how they go about their own business. And so it's really fun for us. You know, we just kind of picked Michael's brain on the process of writing a book and just the artistic process, but also, you know, how do you kind of start a project like that? And our players were mesmerized and it was really a great visit.

And I think almost picking up on that theme, I think it would be a great place to start. You know, one of the things that I've noticed about you, Michael, is that you always kind of seem to have a sense of. what's coming. So, for example, the A's are good for a few years. And it's like, how are the A's any good? They don't have any money. It's like, oh, here comes money ball. You know, and, and then what's going on with the 2008, the disaster, the financial crisis? And all of a sudden, there's big short, and there's big short. And Blindside, I'm sure you read Pete. Sure. You know, why are left tackles so suddenly important? But there's your book. Like, you always seem to be kind of, ahead of the curve. So can you tell us about your process of how you decide what to write on?

Sure. It's funny. When I came in to talk to your team, I remember coming away with a couple of funny impressions. One was the thing that interested them most by far was my interactions with Obama, that they were actually really interested in Obama. With one exception, Andre I Godala, I felt like he was shorting the stock market while I was talking. And at the end, and at the end, Andy asked for my business card. I don't even have a business card. You could just tell that guy is going in a completely different direction. After basketball, he's going to hit the ground running.

But the process, you know, it's not, I don't have a formula. It's a funny thing because I have found in my career that my interest, if it's sincere, can create its own momentum. Now, there are times when I'm on subjects, which seem they're pretty obvious. subjects like the financial crisis was a no-brainer. And I had some special access to that story because I worked on Wall Street once upon a time and I even knew some of the people who were in the middle of the crisis. But there was an actually interesting way to go at it that got me kind of obsessed with it. And I found just generally that, I mean, it doesn't always happen,

but it often happens that if I find, if I myself generate sufficient interest in the thing, it can feel like I'm ahead of a curve because the book generates enough noise that it feels like it is the moment, right? That's what will happen. That's cool. Yeah, that's really cool. When they work, so you don't really, I don't worry too much about, like, I certainly don't think like I have any ability to predict the future.

Nothing like that. And it's much more, wow, that's a really interesting thing that nobody's really talking about. I mean, look, like, the most recent book was about the way that Trump's indifference to the federal government when he took it home. hold of it. And I was like, well, where is that going to leave? And at the time, it didn't seem like much of a story, right? Who wants to read about the federal government? Now people all of a sudden kind of interested in. Yeah. Well, there it is. But the money and the money, all right, let's

talk about the money ball story. Like that. I can tell you this, about every single one of my books. I think this is true. With the possible exception of the big short, because the financial crisis was on everybody's mind. But if you asked, if we were at dinner together and you said, Michael, what you're working on? And I started to tell you what I was working on. your eyes would glaze over. You'd be saying, you'd be saying, oh, really? Really? Is anybody going to want to really read about that?

I promise you almost every case that that would be true. But what happens is, if the writer is sufficiently interested in it and sees a real importance to it and can convey to a reader the importance of these things, all of a sudden it becomes important to the reader. And if you do that with a million people, then all of a sudden it's important to a lot. It's important to more than just the reader. Sure. It's in the air. It's in the air.

So let's talk about Blindside for a second. Pete, I'm assuming you read Blindside. Yep. He's lying. He saw the movie. Yeah. No, I saw the movie. For sure, I saw the movie. No, this was the one that I got to. That one in Fifth Risk. Now, fifth risk is pretty cool, too. But, no, like, I'm interested. What was, Pete, what was the NFL's reaction to the book? I'm about the NFL as much as college football. You know, I think.

college football was was maybe taking a little bit more by it because you know you're getting in behind the scenes of recruiting and families and coaches and all that kind of stuff you know there was a lot of cool stuff in there you know when Eddie Ogeron shows up on the on in the movie now that you got to tell you that was it became a real moment for me because we you know we go way back so that I loved all that but um you know I just think the the insights of the relationship of of a young man who just has his world just totally out there would he he He had no control of anything that was going on. And then all of a sudden, these factors start to weigh in on him,

and a life starts to take a format. And I just think it was great insights from all of the recruiting stories and all of the background and all of the family work that we do and all of that nurturing is, I thought that was fascinating that you dug into that. I couldn't believe somebody even wrote a book about that kind of stuff. So it was from a commercial point of view, probably a mistake to write a book about that kind of stuff. I tell you, it's funny. Moneyball.

It's kind of true that any book about baseball as a built-in readership of tens of thousands of people, baseball is a literary sport. I think you could throw the best book ever written about football into a football stadium filled with people, and it could remain unread. It's sort of like it's just, it's very hard to reach a football audience. And this book, that book had this big problem as a book. The movie saved the book. I mean, I'm very proud of the book, but the book did not do that way.

well when it came out. Oh, no. And it didn't, Moneyball generated an enormous controversy inside of baseball. The blind side, there wasn't, you know, there's no reason people would remember any kind of response inside the NFL because the NFL didn't have to respond to it.

Nor would there have been any real reason to respond to it. Let me jump in real quick, because I remember reading it, and it was almost like two books in one. And I don't know if that sounds accurate, but the real interesting part was, it was an incredible family story and a triumph, you know, this young man who was facing all these odds and, you know, getting together with the family, which is why it was a great

movie. But then there was this other story that was more moneyball-like, which was, why is the left tackle so important in football? Right. And why is he so well paid? You know, that was, so what had happened was, it was funny, what it happened was I had written money ball and the front office of the 49ers had a brain trust that was already very moneyball like and I got together with some of them and and started talking about like what should what is

the money ball story in football it's different right because you're spending basically the same amounts of money so you don't have a New York Yankees versus Oakland A's situation in football there's not a team that's got five times more money to spend on players and so so they were saying you know the kind of the equivalent is how you distribute the money across the payroll, across the roster. And they started to pull out historical data. And it was just riveting that if you started at the moment of kind of free agency way back when and looked at the relative value assigned by the marketplace to the different positions, the left tackle had gone from almost the lowest paid player on the field, along with the other offensive line, to the second highest paid player. And now I know it's like

maybe cornerbacks paid more, but he's still way up there. And that was like that that was interesting to me and I didn't know what to do. And what happened was at the same time bubbling along was this family story that I found myself in the middle of for, you know, complicated reasons. But where they adopted this white family in Memphis, this white Christian Republican family in Memphis had adopted this 15-year-old homeless black kid and were in the process of turning. him into a white evangelical Christian. And he was, the family were friends of mine. And I was just following it. And all of a sudden, Sean, the dad, calls me up and says, Nick Saban just came through our school. And he saw Michael, the kid, on a basketball court and said, Sean, that's a future NFL

left tackle. And Michael, whose value had been increasing pretty steadily because all of a sudden he had a stable environment. He had a mom. All of a sudden, he's like the most valuable kid on the planet. And the story to me was, what are the forces in the world that take this kid who's like, the society's about to throw away and make him so valuable? One of those forces was having a mom, was having a family. And the other force was this stuff that had happened to football that made this thing he was supposedly uniquely suited to do, land on him and identify him and make him make him so prize. So I love that story so much,

but I knew when I was writing it. I knew when I was right, it's sort of like you do it for the doing the thing. I knew when I was writing it, that what I was doing was going to cause all kinds of marketing problems because you had essentially a chick flick glued together with a football game.

And the people who came for the chick flick would be pissed off by the football and the football people would be pissed off by the chick flick. And I just fall between those stools. And that's what happened. But then the movie came out and it's so like, three million copies. So it got out there finally. But it was a fun story to tell. So your end was that you knew Sean Tui, the father? So the father had been a wonderful basketball player. He was he and I

had grown up together. We were in kindergarten through 12th grade and we played sports together. He was the catcher on the baseball team and I was a pitcher and he was but he was I had not laid eyes on him since we graduated from high school and I'd gone through Memphis where he was and was thinking about writing something at the time about our high school baseball coach, who is a subject, one of the subjects in our podcast right now. And I thought, I better go talk to some other players to see if my view of this guy is a firm, if they're seeing, they had the same kind of experience. So I just called him up out of the blue.

And he said, you're landing in Memphis. I'll come pick you up. And he picked me up at the airport. I mean, I hadn't seen him, whatever, 25 years. And he took me to his house. And he'd been a poor boy growing up, and he kind of wanted to show me just how well he had done, and he'd done very well. And I got to his house and Michael Orr was sitting in the living room, and he never introduced him.

I mean, the kid's 6-5, 6-5-350, totally silent. And on the way back to my hotel, I said, Sean, all right, that was great, but who's the kid? And he said, oh, that's Michael. He's Leanne's project. And I said, what do you mean Leanne's project? She said, she found him on the street in shorts and, the snow and took him in. And so I started following the story then. And then it was like a year later when Nick Saban walks into the gym and says that kid's an NFL left tackle. And that all the

football stuff, I mean, Pete, you must, this football stuff, I don't know how the money ball kind of story percolates through the NFL, whether you've seen a rise in the analytics or whether you would have even been thinking, oh, the left tackle is a valuable player. But to me, it was a shocking to find that that value was assigned to that person. Let me give you a little bit of thought about that. I'm not sure what year this happened, but the conversation started to shift about left tackles because of the big-time rushers that were, you know,

Lawrence Taylor. Yeah, Lawrence Taylor, Bruce Smith, you know, Reggie, all those guys that were just famous rushers and the backside of the quarterback and all that kind of stuff, the blindside thing, the whole thing. But we started to talk about left tackles as a skill player. And that was really, that was kind of the phrase. And when we started talking that that position has become a skill play,

and you could see that the value started to elevate, and you could see that the numbers were going up. And really, we considered it like that was like the quarterback or like the receiver or the tailback, you know, the really fancy players in the game, all of a sudden you're going to name a left tackle as a skill player. Well, that's really, that just happened. That was just part of the reality that because of the talent they had to match up against.

was the whole question of it all. And so that truly happened just like that. So Pete, let me ask you a nerdy football question. Sure. If you have a lefty quarterback. Actually, you had Matt Leiner at SC, right? Sure. Do you then take that left tackle and move them over to the right side because that's the

blind side? You would think that that is a nerdy question in a sense because you would think that that might be the case. But we never really thought of it that way. I can't tell you that we did. We always said maybe maybe I should have been on your staff, Pete. I could have helped you out with that stuff. We should have done that.

Maybe I don't know where they got banged up so much. But that is the right thinking. And I think it was much more of a drop-back scheme concept. You know, it wasn't in college football. You know, we pounded the football and we did everything. But if you had a real, you know, live left-hander and you were living it in the NFL, Jim Zorn, you know, something, you know, that I would think that that was the way they thought you would apply it there. Because you'd put your best rushers.

on his blind side. Kind of, yeah. I think that got kind of romanticized, really. But it was because of Lawrence Taylor as much as anybody. Like you said, Stephen, he was the most profoundly unique athlete that played, you know, back in the day. And then there was Bruce Smith and some other guys that came along, Derek Thomas, all kinds of guys. But so anyway, yeah.

So, Michael, I remember reading Moneyball. And Pete and I are both baseball guys. We had Dave Roberts on the podcast last week. We both grew up playing baseball, loving it. And I remember reading Money Bowl, and it was fascinating to understand, you know, where teams were finding value, where maybe other teams weren't. But at the end of all that, I thought, okay, once everybody figures this out, what's next? And I just read a really interesting book called The MVP Machine.

So this is a part of our podcast, too, in fact. It's very funny you stumbled onto this. Yeah. Okay. So it was, for me, it was the answer to my question. What comes after, you know, analytically finding players who are undervalued? Well, the answer is using analytics to help players develop and player development. And the whole book is about, and it's really fascinating.

I know you've read it. It centers around Trevor Bauer, the pitcher from UCLA, who has kind of been a scientist and a pious. in terms of all kinds of pitching strategy and using technology and finding ways to create pitches. But it was incredible for me because, you know, as a basketball coach, you know, I'm trying to figure out ways to get better. I don't think that in football and basketball, we can come close to finding the answers analytically that baseball can.

It's just the nature of the sport. baseball provides so many more possibilities for analytics to be used. But I keep thinking to myself, you know, we've got to keep pushing the envelope. We've got to consider all this stuff as we try to continue to help players get better. So it was a really cool example that we stumble on and built part of the podcast episode around. There was a pitching. Actually, he wasn't a pitching coach. He was a little league.

coach in Seattle, who progressed to being an assistant high school baseball coach and then got fired there because the coaches thought what he was doing was crazy. His name was Kyle Bodie. And he was focused on finding better data about the throwing motion to keep arms healthy. Like, how should you throw if you're going to keep your arm healthy? And he was thinking about kids at the time. This evolves into a science project. And he finds that nobody's really thought about it much or thought about it well.

And there's all these tools for like measuring your arm position, for measuring your arm speed, for measuring your relationship with your arm and the rest of your body. And he figures out that the constraining fact about a guy throwing a baseball is arm speed. And that if a person has a certain arm speed, you could kind of predict what the velocity of the fastball should be. and you can find people who have great arm speed, but the fastball's not there. And those are the people who can be developed. If you figure out what the problem is, you can kind of fix the problem. And he takes it, we talked to, there's a pitcher named Matt Boy, now in the rotation at the Detroit Tigers.

But he was like a whatever, 18th round draft pick, and he was in a ball and wasn't going anywhere, and he got an 88 mile in a fastball. He goes in to see Kyle Bodie, and Kyle Bodie hooks him up all these sensors. And Kyle sees, this guy, his arm speed is there. And he starts to work with him. And what he does is he gives him extremely heavy balls to throw. On that theory that the body will naturally try to figure out with the efficient way to throw them is because it's so uncomfortable throwing. Three months later, he's throwing 96.

And he goes from a ball into the big leagues. And it's a really good example of, you're right, the first place that the data revolution sort of hit in baseball, because it was a low-hanging fruit and because there's so much value in it, was trying to figure out how to value the people as they were. And the next thing really is, like, how you change them, how you make them better. And it's also true that for whatever reason, in the evaluation of the players, it's easy to see why because baseball is such a static station-to-station sport. You can really easily assign credit and blame on a baseball field.

It's harder on a football field or a basketball court. But with a player development, it's not as obvious why this should just be confined to baseball. I mean, I wonder, I mean, I just think this is something you might think about, shooting for. Like, there's got to be some provable best way to shoot a basketball. Yeah, so we do have technology that we use that I think probably every team in the league has now in their facilities. It's called Noah. It basically measures, it films and measures a player's arc on his shot. And between the film and the data, you really get a good idea of how consistent a player is with a shot.

And if you combine the film with the data and you can see maybe if a player needs a little more loft on it, that's where you can make the adjustment to possibly make his release higher. Right. And so we're really at the early stages in the NBA of figuring out how to best make use of this technology. So I look around and I ask, like, and I wonder, you guys think about this. Is anybody already kind of figured this out or starting to figure out? Like, who came into the NBA and all of a sudden, you know, a year later, they can shoot? And Kauai Leonard comes to mind, right?

Like coming out of college, he wasn't really supposed to be there, but that was a rap on him. He couldn't shoot very well. And that changed at the Spurs. And you know those people at the Spurs. Do they know something? Have they figured something out there that other people don't know? I just don't know. I'm not sure if they've used the technology or not.

They happen to have a guy named Chip England, who is one of the best shooting coaches in the league. And I know that they studied Kauai really carefully and determined through film work that his shot could be easily fixed. I know from talking with him that they felt like, you know, some guys you can watch shoot and you go, man, that's going to be a tough project. With Kauai, it was a pretty simple project. but something that was clearly missed by everybody in the league.

Otherwise, he would have been one of the top few picks, and I think he dropped to 14 or 15. But there's no question that we are all trying to build better shooters because you think about an NBA game now. It's all spacing. We're trying to get people to space out to 25 feet all over the floor to open up the driving lanes. The thing I want to mention about this shooting thing, because it's always been something really fascinating to me.

And you've got, you know, Steph is one of the great shooters that will ever, you know, shoot a basketball. It isn't about the physical part of it. To me, it's the part that I'm so always fascinated, have been for a long time on this, is the mentality that it takes to replicate that which it takes to make the next hoop. You know, everybody can go hit some. bunch of swishes. You could shoot switch, but how do you just keep doing it play after play, shot after shot? Where is that science? Where is that science that you can, like I think you said a couple weeks ago, and we understood it about step, he could play basketball, he could play golf,

he could hit a baseball, he could probably throw the, you know, he said he throws a football. Where does the skill makeup come that you can develop and nurture and really, really maybe even create that allows you to replicate, you know, like to keep doing the same thing? Like there's some guy who, you guys know the guy that shot like 1,300 straight free throws, some 50-year-old guy. You know, how does a guy get to that part where he can recreate so consistently that makes him that special? That, to me, is where the real science could be really exciting.

And to me, it goes back to mental game stuff, really, and which maybe we get to that a little bit later. I'm curious. I'm curious. Steve, I'm curious your answer to this, too. But when you all are getting new players, either through the draft or in free agency, how often, how much are you thinking I can change them? And how much are you thinking they are who they are? Like, can you, do you think that you can, there's a kind of player you can say, ah, there's stuff there that hasn't been brought out?

And I can bring stuff out of it. I'm a real victim to that now. I'm such an optimist. I kind of think that, you know, I see something that really excites me about a guy and, and I want to, you know, I don't have to see like him play great all the time. If I can see enough stuff, then I think I can tap into it. And I'm a little bit of a victim of that, you know, recruiting and all that because I'm maybe too, too optimistic about that. Basically, they pretty much are what they are. And then you develop them, you know, and you try to add too.

But I kind of, I falter there. Who on your, if I were to walk into your life and say, give me the place. player on your current roster who you think and who might think himself has come along the most since he got to you. Who would it be? There's a couple of guys that come to mind. One was Doug Baldwin, the receiver that was, you know, from Stanford had a great, great career until, you know, he called it off last year. And there's another guy named K.J. Wright. He's a linebacker from down Mississippi. And he was, he was an extraordinarily different athlete, real long. and tall and big stride guy and and uh but man he's had a great career for us but not the most

heralded player you know in our program but a guy who really did some great stuff and and uh that you kind of i was really excited about him as a player i mean i've got all kinds of stories about those guys but that's that's a couple of come to mind yeah i think it's it's trickier than ever in basketball now because uh you just don't get to see these players enough so many guys are coming out after one year or even without any college experience. There's several of the top guys in the coming draft did not play college basketball or maybe played a handful of games. And so you ask, you know, how much better can a guy get? It's the unknown. It's the great unknown. So, you know, you take the data, you take the measurements, you watch the athleticism, and then you try to

match it with the modern game, what can this player do to help us win a game? And you think about today's game. Everybody needs shooters. You need versatile defenders. You know, you need guys who can guard multiple spots. And so you're looking for those qualities, but you're looking for them instead of somebody who've watched for three years, like we did, you know, 20 years ago, you're seeing them for maybe a handful of games. And so, the potential for growth is tremendous, but the potential for failure is also really high up there. They're just, they're riskier assets because you have less, you have less information about. No doubt.

Steve, could we take this to, we have a real common interest in Tim Galway and what he does because he is a guy to me taught stuff way back when, I learned about him in the, back in the 70s that was talking so much about the inner game. And the aspects of the makeup of an athlete, a performer, where you could find ways to tap into your, you know, your purest abilities and really the truest potential that you had. And I know that I know that we have a common friend here because I know Michael, you just interviewed him for your podcast or something like that, Michael. Is that right? I did. I built an episode kind of around you. Yeah.

Oh, great. It's a fascinating guy. So this is Pete referring to Tim Galway, author of The Inner Game of Tennis. Pete, you actually wrote the forward for the updated version of the book. What was that about maybe 10 years ago? Yeah, probably over 10, yeah. And this book for me was a book that I read twice every season while I played in the NBA. I thought it was, you know, when somebody first gave it to me, I thought, why do I want a book about tennis?

But you quickly realize it's not about tennis. it's a book about the mind-body connection. Yes, that's right. Trying to connect the mind and the body. We're all looking for the zone, the confidence that flow. And so Tim Galway, the author, really examines that whole concept in this book, and it's fascinating. Pete, you know the story of the book, because you wrote the, I almost came and interviewed you, but then I decided I didn't want to bother you.

But I went into it. interview Tim. And I think so that my favorite, my, and I think my favorite story that he told me was, you know, his publisher thought it's just a tennis book and it was going to sell 20,000 copies. And then, you know, it sells 2 million copies. And he's, and he hears from all these people who have nothing to do with tennis because it applies to everything. But, but, but the story that I thought was so cool is he gets this call from the Houston Philharmonic. And he goes down to meet with them, you know, and he knows, and he knows nothing about music. Like he doesn't know notes. He's never sung. He's never played anything. And he talks, he goes and gives them a little talk about the inner game of tennis.

And they politely clap. But the conductor is a skeptic. And he said, like, this doesn't really, how would you even apply this here? Does anybody, kind of jokingly says, does anybody want to get coached by Tim? And the tuba player raises his hand. And Tim does like the tuba, he doesn't know anything about anything, but you really don't know anything about the tuba. And the tuba, he goes to the tuba play goes, okay, well, what's like, what's the problem? And the guy says, well, I strain to hear my own notes because it's so far away from my ear. And I could tell it's off. And he has musical language for how it's off. And Tim asks him, he says, right, so like when it's off, what do you think's going on in your body? And he says, you know, what happens is my tongue gets dry. And when it gets

dry, it feels a little swollen. And Tim says, okay, forget about the sounds. Don't even try to listen to the sounds, just play and focus only on the tongue. Keep your tongue, don't worry about how it sounds. Just play with, and keep your tongue moist. So the guy goes, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom on his tuba. And the whole orchestra gets up and gives him a standing ovation. Now, Tim has no idea whether it's good or bad, but the conductor says that, that was a miracle.

It was a miracle. You got him focusing on the thing he should be focusing on rather than the thing he shouldn't be focusing on. And I don't know. I kind of, I mean, how do you apply, do you all apply that kind of stuff in your coaching life? Michael, I can't tell you how much of influence he's had on my life. Just quickly, I'll tell you that back in the 70s when I was in graduate school, one of my master's teacher knew something about this guy named, this guy who wrote a tennis book,

and we went into San Francisco from UOP where I was going to school and had dinner with Michael, excuse me, with Tim. And at the time, you know, nobody knew who was at all. Well, it happened to be that we had the like early editions of the book. And so we were, you know, that became something. At that time, the mentality that he stood for in the quieting of your mind to allow yourself to perform like you're capable of became something that it just, it's been in my life and my teaching and my world ever since. I was just captured by the thought of it. And so it's been, matter of fact, I had Tim come to USC after we were in the middle of our

years, whatever. And we had a seminar one night, and I wanted him to evaluate whether we were coaching an entire team in terms of trying to quiet the team's mind, like they were of one mind. And so we went through a bunch of questions and answers and stuff like that. And he, I was, fortunately, he concluded that, yeah, we were coaching in really the inner game mentality to an entire group and try to connect the ability to quiet your mind so that you could accelerate your ability to perform at your best and all that. It's been great stuff. And to this day, I still, I still operate with the whole aspect of letting yourself perform, quieting your mind so the discursive thoughts that can get in the way, you can allow them to go elsewhere. That illustration

you gave about the tuba player, he shows you how. how to focus on what that, what you should focus on, rather than the things that you're drawn to focus on, exactly what that's how he does it. And he plays a little game with you. And he'll give you, he has a bounce hit thing, is the most fundamental thing he has. You know, Steve, you know all that stuff.

And he shows you how, if you focus on the proper things, you'll allow yourself to function like you're capable. It's not like he makes you better. He just kind of lets you play. And it's just an incredible, incredible approach that he has developed. both of you have very inner game styles of coaching in that criticism isn't at the top of your list of things you're doing especially during the games right you're both kind of if anything you're just kind you're building players up at least during the performance i don't know what you're doing backstage but it's so it's interesting that you're both drawn to this kind of thing yeah so it's just a coincidence really steve i didn't remember that until you know i didn't know that about you i didn't realize it is that You were reading it a couple times a year. I always passed the book around to certain guys at certain times during seasons because

it was just that time to introduce them to the thoughts of it. Yeah, I've given it to some of my players. Some of them don't need it. Some of them do. Yeah. I needed it. I was a thinker. And being a thinker as an athlete or really in a lot of different endeavors can be harmful.

You know, you just want to do instead of overthinking. Yeah. Yeah. And so what I loved about the book was it, as you said, Pete, it sort of taught how to just act instead of think about the results. You know, I kind of teach you to to act upon, you know, whatever skill you were trying to perform. So it has all kinds of different suggestions. And my favorite was he, he, Galway talks about a tennis player that was really struggling with confidence. And he thought about it. He said, you know what? today, I just want you to pretend like you're the best player in the world. You know, pretend like you're the number one player in the world and go out on the court. You're not, you know, Joe Jenkins anymore. You're Bjorn Borg or whoever was the number one player at the time. And just get that in your mind.

And he said that this guy went out there and was just dramatically better. And I thought, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to do this in practice today. So I go to practice and I'd been struggling. And like I said, I was a thinker. I thought way too much. And I always tried to pick guys in the NBA who I could emulate, guys who I could, you know, I wasn't going to try to be Michael Jordan.

I can't be Michael Jordan. But I always loved guys who I thought, okay, I could be that guy, you know. And so I thought, I really like Jeff Hornacek. You know, Jeff was kind of my size, but way better player than I was. All-Star, great shooter, but he just had more flare. He had more stuff to his game. He had more imagination. It was like nothing got in his way. And I was always getting in my way. So I go out and I go, I'm going to be Jeff Hornacek for practice today. I don't think I've ever told Jeff this story. That's a great story. So I go out and I'm Jeff for the day. I'm not kidding. I had my best practice

of the year. I'm on fire. I'm like totally aggressive. I'm like, you know, making these shot. everybody's coming up like, great practice, Steve. I'm like, thanks. And at the end of practice, I stop and I think, how pathetic is that? I had to act like somebody else in order to perform my best, like, makes no sense. Well, so I got it, I have an obvious follow-up question. Why didn't you, why didn't you keep doing it? I did. I did. I did it all the time. And that's why, you know, I carried that book around. And if I fell into a rut, if I had a few people, bad games. There were other exercises in that book that I would, I would remember and be like, yeah, there's, there's another one. You guys, but you guys probably know that the, the word that

has been so powerful through his teachings is about trust. You know, you allow yourself to trust your ability. You build your mind to the point where you're, you're, you establishes a level of confidence that you know that you're going to get the job done. And that's, that's when you give yourself to Jeff Hornacek, in a sense, you alleviated all of the normal concerns. When that tennis player went out and played like Bjorn Borg, he let all those other things go, and he just, I'm just that. And he trusted that that would work for you. And it takes you to a whole other level of, you know, of effectiveness and performance and all that. That's awesome. Michael, what was your, what was your takeaway after interviewing him? He's going to be the subject of your podcast. What is it

next week? So the one that is released on Tuesday. So I had two takeaways. One was, so my daughter Dixie, then 17, was playing on a big time travel softball team, like one of the better teams in the country. And I thought it would be fun to essentially inflict Tim Galway upon her. And so we had a disciple of Tim Galway who works with like New York Giants football players and New York Mets baseball players and Goldman Sachs traders and CEOs and New York City firefighters. He's like taking the Galway method. to all these different things. They better leave him. I hired him to work with Dixon. And so I watched, and I didn't sit there and watch it. I just taped it all,

but then listened to it after. And you watch him kind of retrain her brain. She's very hard on herself, right? She's like a lot of kids. Like, you know, if she strikes out, it takes a while to bounce back. You know, lots of this kind of negative thoughts going through her head,

even though she's very good. And he got her to start thinking differently. Like don't even, it's not whether you got a hit or whether you hit the, you got a double or anything. It's about, did you do your process? You have this approach to the going and hitting. Did you follow through on it? And it was the most amazing. I'm going to tell you a little anecdote that I couldn't, I couldn't, what I couldn't believe. She found herself facing a pitcher who was thrown kind of high 60s. And that's like, that's like a high 90 mile an hour fastball with a distance to it. And her whole career when she's seen something like that. She can hit it, but like she's always, it's always opposite field. You can't get

around on it fast enough. First pitch, double down the left field line. And it was, and it was just a shot. And I just thought, I never, the bat looked like someone, a different person. And it was just no question that what she'd done is she just stopped thinking. She just started, she, all she was thinking is the little words in her head, loose and aggressive, loose and aggressive, boom. And, and I see a different, you know, and this is, this is, this is where, you know, this is it gets really interesting. So that's just softball. When someone, you know people who are very hard on themselves and they're incredibly successful, partly as a result of that. And that's how they get to the NFL of the NBA. It is not entirely, it's a double-edged personality trait. You're hard on yourself.

You're usually hard on people around you too. Now, this child of mine has not been the easiest child to have in some ways. She is hard on me. The minute they, the minute they started working with and she's started to buy into this process, all of a sudden, my wife, Tabitha, said, who is this child? She's sweet. She's like, all of a sudden become kind. She's like, because she was starting to be kind to herself. It has transformed her. It's been, I mean, she was great.

She was great. She was going to be a success in life. She's a good softball player. But it has taken her to a level that it was just quite moving to see. And there was no question. There was a connection between Tim Galway's book and the whole school of thought and what had happened to her. So it was cool.

It's fantastic. So is this, you think, the next frontier? I mean, we talked earlier about, you know, you just sort of, you're interested in the world. You see things. You start researching them. You talk to people. And then you come up with, hey, I, you know, maybe I'll write about this or maybe I'll write about that.

Where are sports going? Like, what's the next frontier in sports? Well, I sort of think we're in, I think this is true that it's not just in sports, the appreciation of the power of. a really good coach, a really good coach can have big, big effects. And I think when you start to port that idea out of sports into the society, I look at our country right now, it feels like a kind of craftily coached team, like a lot of talent, not well coached. I think that the combination of the Galway kind of insights and the analytics movement moving into coaching, the coach has

already come a long way in this status in the world. But I think he's, I think he's going to go places. So you all are in the right lot of work. Just don't screw it up. That's one of the greatest analogies. That's one of the greatest analogies I've ever heard. Our country is really talented, but not well coached. It's so true. We have so much more potential. We can be so much better. Oh, no question. We need coaches out there. We need better coaches in key places. I'll leave it at that. You can leave it in there. There's a lot to be said there. We better leave it where it is.

There's a bunch. Michael, what about during the quarantine, during this whole COVID-19 crisis, what is gaining your interest right now? What do you look at? I mean, there's so much going on. And it's obviously devastating to the economy for people's health, for just general well-being, what are you looking at? What are you seeing that's of interest to you now? So the big thing is, this is apropos of the absence of good coaching at the top.

The way a society compensates when the leadership is not coordinating the society. And their characters are out there and kind of figured out, okay, the federal government is not going to be helping us. We've got to figure this out on our own. and those people have become very interesting to me. I mean, I'll give you one little example. So there's a big problem with, there's been a big problem in this country with both the nature of the testing

and the availability of testing. And you can't really fight the virus if you don't know where it is. It's like it's hidden. And especially got all these people wanting around and they don't even know they have it. And so there was an infectious disease guy at the University of UCSF

who I met years ago because I didn't know what I was going to do with him, but he knew he was such a good character. His name is Joe DeRisi. And he's the guy who, if you one day have like a third year growing on the side of your head and nobody can explain why, you eventually end up in his office. Any weird disease, and he is the guy, and he has been able to isolate and find and describe viruses that other people don't understand. This guy who he runs Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan,

gave 600 million bucks a few years ago to create something called the biohub. And the biohub is a, it's a research facility run by this guy. And its mission was to eradicate disease by the end of the 21st century. You know, why not try? But this guy pivoted because he saw what the problem was, and he turned the whole place into a coronavirus testing lab. Not only testing, but also when they get positive, people who have been positive, they can sequence the genome. And they can start to do detective work about how it moved through the society. So it's people like this that are really interesting to me who's just said, okay, this isn't going to be done in the normal way.

This isn't going to be solved the way the South Koreans solved it or the way the Germans have solved it. We're going to have to attack it. And it started kind of jump into the battle. Those people really interest me. And so I've been spending time with those kind of people. Interesting. And do you think these people are joining forces

or is it more individual battles kind of all over the country? No, no. I think that I think what we're seeing is our society trying to figure out a different solution to the problem that there was a plan A and it never got executed and it were now in plan B and it's messy. But it's such a resourceful society. It's such a talented society. Yeah. That, you know, we're going to figure it out. You're just going to figure out in a wholly original way. And it's it's that. So those people who are who are kind of like aren't just bitching and moaning and people said, all right, this is a challenge. I'm going to go, I'm going to go do this. I find those people energizing.

So that's where I'm kind of spending my time and energy. That's fascinating. Yeah. Are you writing about that? I am. I just started a little, I'm going to write a book. I'm kind of working out what it is, but there's a book in it. And the truth is, I'm not, I just, the podcast, I just finishing, like tomorrow,

I'm going to record the last episode because I've been doing, I've been spending an awful lot of time on that. But there is a really kind of interesting book to be done about what's happened. You know, what's really a shame is that this time around, this challenge that we've just, that we're going through, we really didn't get the chance to see all of this extraordinary expertise. It kind of got squelched. You know, I mean, all of the talent that's, that's there has not been brought to the front. It's kind of been pushed aside. And it's so obviously pushed aside that it's really a shame because there's a lot of people that have spent their entire lives to get to this point. If it happens, here's where we go, here's what we do.

And it just wasn't allowed to happen, you know, and it's really unfortunate because I think you're seeing it with all of the things that are happening even like just today again, the expertise that's been squelched and been, you know, restricted. It's unfortunate because we might have had a chance. Maybe this might have been that time when really the extraordinary ability. that we have in the buildup and the preparation could have been brought to brought to the front and it just wasn't right but it's possible that we could end up in a different situation that's actually more productive and more positive in terms of our ability to to deal with the next pandemic or the next you know great health scare and I don't know I find that incredibly inspiring and hopeful Michael so thanks for sharing

that. That's awesome stuff. Yeah, you know, I had a character. This will resonate with Pete. And I bet you, Pete, if you remember this, you can use it whenever anybody accused you of being stupidly optimistic. Because I get accused of, I get accused of this all the time. But, but, but I had a character, a psychologist named, wonderful character in a book I wrote called the Undoing Project. Amos Tversky was his name, who everybody actually thought was the smartest, who everybody knew him, he's dead, thought was the smartest man they had ever met. He would say to people, people, pessimism is stupid because if you're a pessimist, you live it twice. Once you and you're worried about the bad thing happening and then when the bad thing

happens. So I don't really think there's much point to pessimism. I think it just it leads you the wrong way. And so the thing is sort of like be the intelligent optimist, figure out the smart, the smart optimistic path. And the smart optimistic path for me as a writer through this period is to find those people who are actually figuring the problem out and attacking it. That's great.

Yeah. The pain is inevitable. The suffering is optional. Something like that. Yeah. I heard that somewhere. Yeah, that's good. So your podcast is called Against the Rules.

Where can our listeners find it? Anywhere you get podcasts. Spotify, Apple, any of it. Look for the one with the worst cover art. And that's me. Great. Well, thanks so much for coming on today with us. That was awesome.

Thanks, Mike. That's great. Good luck with everything. All right, Pete. See you. All right. Take care. You too.