The Hidden Statistics That Control The NBA - Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

What percentage of seven-footers are in the NBA? To the best of our knowledge, it's about one in seven, 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 one in seven, 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 fields? I don't think so. Think about all of the the six in seven people that could have been on an NBA player's wage. Yeah, they must feel terrible. Dude, you blew it. I guess they can a lot of them are probably playing abroad. You know, they're they're probably our basketball players regardless and make and having fun and you know, make 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 yeah, 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 that's 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 till 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 five-ten, which is the average height of an American male, you have a one in 3.8 million chance of reaching the NBA. Like it's basically impossible. I mean, there are exceptions. You know, I talk a lot in the book about one of my favorite players, Muggsy Bogues, five-foot-three and played 14 seasons in the NBA. So, it's not impossible, but it's pretty close to impossible, probably not worth putting much energy even trying. What are the disadvantages of being tall from a player perspective? 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 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 Gheorghe Mureșan. Some people might remember him. He was he was also 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 going to 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 or just taller NBA players in general are just way worse athletes any way we can measure it. They jump much less high, they're much slower, they're worse shooters, they are this kind of surprised me. I don't think anybody's shown 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 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 to beat out millions of other people for that spot. If you're seven feet tall and you're competing with dozens of other men for your spot, you don't have to 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 have 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 it begs the question, why are tall players so prioritized if if they're less good psychologically, cardiovasculary, physically, whatever, why 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 the basket is up there. Or maybe I'm yeah. The basket is up there. The basket's not on the ground, the basket's in the sky. You know, 10 feet above 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 being blocked 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, you know, 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 seven, 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. One of the that's one of the core skills of basketball, and I who am not particularly good and never play can hit a higher percentage 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 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 Gheorghe Mureșan 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 what what did it take to reach the top of that athletic pursuit? But yeah, I'm not telling players, you know, don't you know, cut Joel Embiid because he can't jump as high as you know, a six-foot player. Like he still does help the team, but he definitely it definitely is true that they are worse athletes. Yes. Laughs in thyroid disorder. Like that. All right. So, what about are you able to compare like for like different players of different heights and say what if Muggsy Bogues had been six-seven, what how good would have he 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. You know, 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 Muggsy's, which stands for metric for understanding game given sporting individuals effectiveness and size. And I ranked every player, you know, the the math is in an appendix for those who are really curious, how good they would be if they were the same height, how many Muggsy's they'd have. And number one is Muggsy Bogues, whose 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 at five-foot-three inches tall. It's insane. You know, other players, Earl Boykins and Spud Webb ranked really high. Michael Jordan, interestingly, still ranks number nine on a height-adjusted Despite being like six-six or something. Yeah, cuz he was so, so good. So, he is legitimately one of the greatest at his craft you'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 make be making the documentaries about who we think is the quintessential at mastering his crafts at at mastering his craft, at determination, at work ethic, at 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 overrepresented 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 obviously plays into how many basketball players a country produces. And there really only three regions of the world where basketball is extraordinarily popular. Uh United States where it was invented, the Baltic states, former Yugoslavia. So, if you're growing up playing basketball, you know, 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, you know, everything with a basketball like James Harden, but they never even think to do that. They're playing soccer, they're playing some other sports. So that's really important. There are some subtle things that go into how how many basketball players a 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 a country produces is volleyball popularity. Because there's only one other sport that uses height the same way basketball does, and that's all. So the average volleyball player has basically the same body type as the average small forward in the NBA, about 6'8" on average, you know, reasonably thin, 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 I excuse my naivete, but 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. It's more popular in basketball in Brazil, in Bulgaria, in Russia, in 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 forwards than you'd otherwise expect, because a lot of these taller people, these 6'8", 6'9" 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 6'8", 6'9", 6'10" in Bulgaria, the dream is to spike a volleyball, which is a horrible financial decision. You know, like I I think I talked about this player from Bulgaria who leaps higher than anybody has ever been 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 shoe allowance for one week in the NBA. Yeah. You I I 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 in the world. That's that's the 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 others any other sport we can measure. The way to see this is the prevalence of identical twins in basketball. There've 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. And this is not true in other sports. More than 10% of brother 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, unlike 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 if a 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% genetics, and doesn't really use the skills that that are 20, 30, 40% genetic that some other sports do. What 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 the Olympic sport, which is really hand-eye coordination, that's not going to be super genetic. 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 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 that's not as genetic. That baseball is just so dependent on that. Whereas basketball, the skills that are more important, height, wingspan you know, vertical leap Why is why is hand size so important? Yeah, that actually I hadn't realized until I wrote this book. Basically, the ability to palm a ball is I've always got to get my hand in the screen. The to palm a ball. Now I reveal I did not have Giannis or Kawhi Leonard hands. Another reason I could never be in the NBA. that you're waving around there. The Donald Trump hands. But I uh being able to palm a ball hugely valuable, to grab a rebound with one hand, to be able to dribble better with the ability to palm a hand palm a ball, really really valuable. Uh 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 changed about his body is 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 Giannis or Wilt or Shaq. big do these hands get? 12-in 12-in hand width. You know, the average is about 8 in. So just very very, you know, a foot. Yeah, like this is like a foot long. Uh yeah. That's insane. That's insane. Yeah, the hands. And you can look at pictures of you know, Kawhi 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 combine, they measure players' hands, how hand width of players. And players with wide hands historically have done better, you know, by by advanced metrics, than 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 8 in, 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, or 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. You know, 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 seem particularly seems also very genetic. That you know, Usain Bolt or whatever, you know, I I I'd want to bet on his son to be a tremendous runner. So that is another sport that is highly highly genetic. Uh How important are your parents beyond the genetics thing? Yeah, so the average American male has a one 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 in 36,000 to one in 43? Are you able to control for the physical inheritance, like the height and all the rest of it? 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 you know, 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 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 75% at a 75% clip. Sons of NBA players shoot free throws at an 80% clip. And that's a five percentage points, a very big difference in free throw shooting. And 8% of the top 8% of the a black boy uh 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 it as as is required uh to reach the top of basketball. Whereas if you're, you know, the son of a lawyer and a doctor in the suburbs, and yeah, you're pretty good at basketball, uh well, you have so many options that you're not going to spend day and night, you know, practicing basketball, devoting yourself to this pursuit. Uh that has never been true. Uh there was initially a study by Josh DeBro and Jimmy Adams that showed that uh both among Caucasians and African Americans, uh being from a upper middle class or above family is a huge advantage in reaching the NBA. And I've done my own study at at NBA players much less likely than the population at large in the black pop black NBA players much less likely in 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, uh being from a you know, two-parent home, uh upper middle class or middle class or above, huge advantage to reaching the NBA. And the most uh maybe interesting uh data point for that is the names of NBA players. Uh there was a paper by Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt that found that among the African American population, uh you can tell the demographics of someone pretty well just based on their name, and that uh uh African Americans from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to be given common names, uh 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. Uh 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, uh single 16-year-old mother in Akron, Ohio, uh LeBron was a unique name. It wasn't given to other people uh that year. Uh it wasn't given to it wasn't a name that other people had as well. And if you look at NBA players, they're half as likely a black NBA players are half as likely as the pop the black population uh writ large to have unique names. They're much more likely to have names Chris, Michael, Marcus. So, in the book, I have a whole word cloud of the names of NBA players, and the most common name uh by pretty wide margin is Chris. Uh you know, yeah. So, you think of Chris Paul, a Chris Bosh, many other examples. And uh Chris Paul's a great example of a player from uh two-parent home, uh middle class. The family joined him on an episode of Family Feud. Uh you know, that's kind of where the NBA is getting their players uh much more than conventional wisdom told us. Uh Michael Jordan, another example. Uh uh grew up a middle class uh two-parent family in North in born in Brooklyn, raised in North Carolina, very stable upbringing. Uh that's uh that that's where the NBA is is is is getting their their talent by and la by by and large. Now, of course, not always, which means we have to give that much more credit to the LeBron Jameses of the world cuz they really did overcome a lot uh to If only he'd been 5'3 as well. Yeah. And 7-in hands. Yeah. Then he 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 uh 80% of American uh uh born players are African American, uh which I didn't get into, you know, some of that I I I I don't go into the reasons for that, which is probably beyond the scope of of my study. And uh you know, 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 is larger among Americans than it is among Europeans or people from the Caribbean or uh so, other regions of the world, there isn't such a big advantage uh for black people. And I think part of the reason is that uh basketball is just so popular in the black community in the United States that uh you know, if you surveys that ask whether you're a huge basketball fan, uh African Americans are about twice as likely as other Americans to say they're huge basketball fans. Uh so, it is, you know, any again, being a big fan of the sport uh is a huge advantage to reaching 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. Uh you know, I I don't think, you know, most people uh you'd probably be more of an expert on this topic than I than I am, but uh I 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 a Chicago Bull. They're dreaming of being an Arsenal player. Yeah. Uh and I think you know, uh any any time any community, whether it's a country or a race or, you know, anything else, uh that uh where where basketball is really popular is going to produce more than their uh fair share of NBA talent. What determines who chokes under pressure? Yeah, so this is uh so, one thing that's 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 nor how they shoot free throws normally. And 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 uh free throws more than one percentage point lower in clutch moments, uh 5 minutes or less on the clock, game within five points, than in other times. So, the average NBA player is a choker. This kind of surprising cuz 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. You know, 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, right? So, you know, if you can't handle a pressure penalty kick, uh your problems are going to reveal themselves in high school uh long before, you know, you're playing in the World Cup or you know, or whatever. And similarly, you know, studies have shown that baseball players tend not to choke. So, why do basketball players so consistently choke? And I think this gets to a point again, I don't love hammering the 7-footers, in large part because I feel like when a 5'9 person is attacking people taller than him, he seems like he has a horrible Napoleon complex. So, I you know, I I I hesitate to use my book as just, you know, seven-footers secretly all suck and tall people suck cuz there's a dangerous pattern of of shorter men doing things like this out of their own insecurity and resentments. Uh 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 uh 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 uh 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. Well, didn't you say that you wanted the NBA to have a height cut off cuz 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 heightist or something like but also I I don't know whether you can be a heightist around the people that have got it that got like the advantage. Yeah. Uh I just I know I I make clear in the book that I don't think there actually should be a height advantage. I think if there were a height cut off if there were a cut height cut off cut off, I think it's unambiguous that there would be more talent in the game. That the shooting would be better, the clutch shooting would be better, the athleticism would be better. All these factors would be better if there were a height cut off. But no, I'm not a heightist or an anti-heightist or a reverse heightist or a a tallest whatever it is. tallest shortest And you know, I am a huge basketball fan and my favorite player growing up was Patrick Ewing who was seven you know, seven feet tall. So, I I do they do enrich the game. He's an enormous man. tall supporting bonafides out front and center in case anyone's going to try and say something mean about you. Wasn't that So, it's at the very end of the it's the very end of the book, but it seems related to this about childhood difficulty. Oh, yeah. Uh so one of the things I was interested in was whether child difficulty uh predicts your tendency to choke. Uh it's it's an interesting theory. I've heard a lot, you know, Jimmy Butler is a classic great clutch shooter. Uh he's completely unaffected by pressure moments. Just so good in the clutch. And 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, uh you know, a soccer mom and soccer you know, an you know, an NBA dad dad or something. You know, they they can't handle what Jimmy Butler can handle. So, I actually tested this in the data in a fun way in in the book in a fun way. Uh I 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 to 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 cuz it has in its data set all this information about all the NBA players, what they went through in childhood. So, I asked chat GPT to rank the background of NBA players and it gave such sensible answers. Uh you know, Jimmy Butler was ranked a nine. Kawhi Leonard grew up in a tough neighborhood in Compton was ranked similarly a nine. Luol Deng ranked very high because he grew up in a civil war in Sudan. Like all these different measures that would be hard to objectively, you know, rank, chat GPT gives a very sensible ranking. And then some players, Dwight Howard, uh a state his dad was a state trooper, he ranks very low. Uh the sons of NBA players rank very low. Steve Nash, uh suburban family in Canada, ranks very low in difficulty of upbringing. So, I 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 God damn it. at all. So, it was a little bit of a letdown cuz it would have been a cool theory if you saw it in the data. Uh the other thing is that it made me realize how dangerous it is to use chat GPT for research cuz if I really wanted to cheat, I could have just kept on asking chat GPT to give me a new ranking until I had a ranking that did predict uh choking. So, there is a a definite chat GPT as amazing as it is as a coder objective coder of information does allow for a great deal of cherry-picking if you're if you don't feel like being honest. can occur. It does, yeah, for sure. Warren Buffett and Paul Millsap, what do they have in common? Yeah, so one of my chapters called what do uh Warren Buffett and Paul Millsap have in common. Paul Millsap's a great NBA player many many multi all multi-time all-star. And Warren Buffett, as everyone knows, uh one of the greatest investors of all time. Uh what they have in common uh well, besides being great at their craft, uh 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, uh Warren Buffett started his uh collegiate career at Wharton, you know, 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, you know, relish the opportunity to uh go to Wharton to learn from the greatest business professors, to have the all the the great business peers. And Buffett left uh Wharton and went to University of Nebraska cuz he wanted to be closer to his family and he thought the libraries were just as good anyway. Uh and Paul Millsap was a top-ranked recruit, got offers from Arizona, uh Louisville, LSU, but he decided to go to Louisiana Tech because he felt comfortable there. It was close to his family. And the chapter uh basically looks at the data on whether it matters whether you go to a good college. So, what So, does it matter? Both of you for for a career, the great the great colleges that, you know, tend to that people go So, there are some colleges in which people go to to them have way higher uh earnings. So, Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, you know, is it a big advantage? Uh does it cause you to do better to go to one of these schools? And then in basketball, there are certain uh universities there are different universities, but North Carolina, Kentucky, Duke, UCLA, where uh 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 reading of the evidence on both the real world and uh 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. And if you, you know, 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 know, you can trick the world early in your career, but eventually everything's going to even out. And that kind of happened to both Buffett and Millsap where Warren Buffett got rejected from Harvard Business School cuz probably because they're looking at this guy from Nebraska and like, you know, well, we don't want someone from Nebraska. We can get someone from Wharton 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. You know, he 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, uh 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 much beyond that. How important is going to college at all? Well, one thing that's very interesting uh in the data is historically uh NBA players who didn't go to college, you know, who went straight out of high school, massively overperformed their draft spot. Uh 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 uh inefficiency anymore. But for many years, it was an extraordinary idea to draft uh a player straight out of high school. So, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, uh Rashard Lewis, you know, numerous players, Amar'e Stoudemire, just massively outperformed their draft spot. I think one of the reasons for this, my hypothesis, you know, there are many hypotheses for these, but my hypothesis is if you skipped college and go went straight to the draft, it was such a bold move. It was saying something about yourself and you knew yourself so well and your capabilities that you do something about yourself that the rest of the world missed. Uh that uh what is a huge advantage in being a basketball player. And I think I compare that to the great entrepreneurs. Uh you know, if you look at the very greatest entrepreneurs, uh Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, what do many of them have in common? They dropped out of school very quickly. And I think if you looked at these great entrepreneurs on paper, if you looked at Zuckerberg and Gates, you know, 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 the another person who had a similar background but wanted to stay in school didn't have. And I think the same in among NBA players. That Kobe Bryant knew something about himself, Amar'e Stoudemire, Richard Lewis, they all knew something about himself themselves uh in making that decision to go straight to the NBA uh that the rest of the world didn't know. And they they're just there was just just extraordinary inefficiency where high straight out of high school players massively overperformed 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 a particular outlier which is is it's a commonality between all of these different people, right? There's a common thread that goes between them all. And yeah, it's just ridiculous self-belief, I suppose. Probably correlates with the turn of others. I mean Honestly, self-belief might correlate with VO2 max. Like you I would totally be open to hearing that yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, zone two threshold and lactate management ability are strongly correlated with self-belief. Like I I 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 cuz 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 I'd love to see, you know, to 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, they're just like you answer one question and if you're a fan of the game, you have 10 more questions you want to answer based on that question. Uh so I had to remind myself uh many times in the process of writing this book that uh perfect is the enemy of the 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 Is it good? Is it a good idea for basketball at least? I mean, I think it evens the playing field for sure. Uh you know, there there are some sports where the best teams are just the richest teams. Uh you know, the the you know, the whatever team can uh spend the most money on the best players is going to be the best team is going to be the best team and uh that's not really true in basketball, you know, San Antonio was a great team for many decades uh even though they're in one of the smallest markets. And I'm a huge Knicks fan. Uh we're in the biggest market, you know, we should be able to uh spend the most on players. We have the biggest you know, TV deal and uh and we can't we've been we're finally good again this year, but uh we were terrible for so long. And I think the draft does uh you know, serve as a as a as an equalizer uh where you know, if you do get that number one pick and you are able to uh you know, draft a Tim Duncan, uh or you know, uh you are going to potentially have a great team for 10, 15 years. Uh so it definitely does serve the purpose of equalizing things, I I would say. And it also is fun uh to try to you know, predict uh who's going to be a good player. You know, the NBA is one of the best leagues at predicting who's going to be a great player. You know, if you look at uh the top 10 NBA players of all time, uh 60% of them, I think, were number one picks. Uh the number one overall in the entire number one predictive then. It's it's 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 uh Nikola Jokic on Denver was a second round pick and he's you know, one of the best if not the best NBA player. Uh so there are exceptions, but uh you know, and and there are these inefficiencies as I discussed in the book, you know, hand size isn't properly taken into account and uh you know, I another one I talk about is standing leap versus vertical leap, uh which is very interesting. Uh If you look at what when NBA players are uh participate in the combine where they're measured on all these traits, how tall they are, their wingspan, their hand width, uh they have they have to they uh the teams want to see how high they can jump. And they give them two tests. Uh the first one is a a standing leap. You stand in place and just, you know, 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. Mhm. 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 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 you know, the people there if you can run the length of the court and you know, leap from the free throw line and dunk the ball, like that is so such an impressive athletic feat that I think people are blinded are 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. So that's an inefficiency uh in the draft. Yeah, there there needs to be a uh 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, uh it's just it the whole crowd when they see that 100.00 like, "Oh!" like the whole crowd makes noise, right? So it's like But is that is that the best I mean, does even the I believe it. And yeah, I I I believe it. And you know, in in football, our our football, American football, uh you know, the the speed of a player relative of let's say a wide receiver relative to running good routes, you know, a player is just has an incredible 40-yard dash, you know, 425, 43, you know, it's so impressive, so exciting. Uh I think they tend to be drafted maybe higher than they should be relative to someone who runs a 445, a 45, but you know, really precise on those routes. Like it's just not that exciting. Uh but it is more important you know, I yeah, you could probably go through lots of sports uh where the sexy traits are overvalued. There's a really cool YouTube video by Total Running Productions about Su Bingtian. So he is 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 guy is 5 8, I think. 5 8 or 5 9. Uh and when he ran at the Tokyo 21 semi-finals, his 100 meter time, which I think came in at like 9.8, 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 you I'll send it to you once we're done. It's so good, dude. And you see this 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? And he changes his starting foot and rebuilds his running rhythm from the ground up, you know, when he's been doing it for two decades or something. And it's just so it's it's awesome. He's like my favorite He's one of my favorite track and field guys now. He's a short Chinese dude who's just the most The acceleration of him is so insane. It's crazy. I think I think one of the things you see in all sports are that these players that just are so good at making themselves better throughout their career and you know, you 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 improvements, such a focus on you know, the routes he was running 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 so paying attention to every subtle little thing. You know, the how to rebound better, 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 the most naturally gifted players who maybe don't have to put in quite the effort and they're they can frustrate you. You know, Shaquille O'Neal he was 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 think Shaquille O'Neal would be outraged at this statement. You know, how could someone say that? And he basically admitted that this was true. He's like, yeah, I you know, I didn't love practicing. You know, I liked my cheeseburgers in the off season and 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 you know, a Shaq 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's Like whereas you know, some of these players, the 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 5'9 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 as you want. It's not going to help. I 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 you know, Michael There's a difference between 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 you know, is number one in everyone's mind as the quintessential basketball player. But so I think hard work can take you you know, from Shaq to MJ. But it's not going to take you from Seth to Shaq. Or you know, it's it's not There's there's you're moving the needle a little bit, but not that much in basketball. But there is other pursuits where hard work maybe matters more. And 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 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've kind of flirted around it and some of the people who don't know or didn't listen to our previous episodes and realize that you're a next 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. 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 cuz 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 chat GPT. And it's basically a way to do data analysis that has just completely revolutionized my work stream. Like it's I I say it's the most amazing product I've ever seen. I always need to offer the caveat. I have zero affiliation with chat with open AI. I feel like when I say this, I sound like I'm a spokesman for their you know, pitchman for their product. I I I'm not associated with open AI at all. But it basically data analysis 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. The things that used to take me four months now literally take me four hours or sometimes less. Like it's 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 analysis of basketball. 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. And with code interpreter, it was a project that took basically 30 days. Which I Initially I was really proud of, but now people are like, well, do I want to read a book that only took you 30 days? Like There's a really There's a really famous lecture, I guess. This guy It's a clip from a 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, well, I'd pay you, you know, like $500. He's like, hang on a second. So you're getting the service more quickly. But you're 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 it was interesting. So initially the first version of who makes the NBA, I one of the marketing hooks, I'm like, look, I wrote this book in 30 days. And I also show at the end I This is how I did it. This is how I used chat GPT to do all the analysis. Not to do the writing. The writing I did all myself, but to do the analysis or to make the art. All the art is AI generated from midjourney 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 I don't want to read a book in your 30-day vanity project. So now I've toned that down and I've said more that you know, I've I'm I also show you how to use AI. I'm I'm deemphasizing the actual time that I used. But I think that's just unfair to just how revolutionary chat GPT 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 and I don't want anything to do with this. But I think because of code interpreter, because of midjourney, because of Dolly, because of chat GPT, you can write a book in 30 days that is a real treatise on basketball with new insights on the game, you know, 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, you know, over the last year have completely changed. Mhm. It's very interesting. It's very interesting to think that you've got this like arbitrary link between time spent and and quality. It would be like if you said, um, 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. Yeah, okay. Yeah, and then that that book that you see that's in front of you, it was actually written by hand. Uh, but it's it's a handwritten book and then all of the pages are kind of stitched 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, uh, 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. Um, 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 100 books. Is that a joke, right? You're not going to try and do 100 books. Uh, I don't know. I might. I I'll see. I'm trying to work on the monetization of this book. Like I'm trying to figure out, uh, like, uh, yeah, exactly how to if I get the monetization right, cuz I also self-published this book. Cuz like all the publishers are just like, "We don't know, uh, what to do with your weird 30-day projects." Like that's not Publishers move very, very, uh, slowly. Yeah. So no publisher would really touch this. So I'm kind of trying to figure out the money. If I got the monetization right, I would write I would just keep doing it cuz the other thing is this was the best month of my life bar none. It was so fun, uh, in part cuz I was writing about, uh, 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, you know, I'm a I'm a data scientist, data analyst. Like a lot of data science, data analysis is not particularly fun. Uh, you know, uh, for me writing code, clean debugging code, you know, looking up code, uh, you know, 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 and I'm just like, here, data analyst, do it for me. And it was just awesome. It was so fun. So it's just like it was the most fun month I've had in my life. So, you know, if I can get the monetization right on the book on the on this, then I'm just, yeah, I'm going I'm like String those together and you'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'd have an NFL book for, for the start of that season. I just keep on going and 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. Congrats on the success of this podcast. It's been, you I remember when you first reached out to me to talk about my first book, Everybody Lies, and I I think I looked you up and you're like a two-bit podcaster. I'm like, but I'm like, yeah, he seems like a nice guy. I'll do this 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. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe.