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Episode 195: Ben Cohen and 'The Hot Hand'
124 Plays5 years ago
Ben Cohen, the NBA writer for The Wall Street Journal, stopped by the show to talk about The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks (Custom House, 2020).
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Transcript
Exploring Truths and Misconceptions
00:00:00
Speaker
You have something that we all thought to be true, only to be told that it wasn't, only to realize that maybe it actually was.
00:00:18
Speaker
Who do we have today?
Introduction to Ben Cohen
00:00:19
Speaker
It's Ben Cohen, an NBA writer for the Wall Street Journal. He's the author of the new book, The Hot Hand. The Mystery and Science of Streaks. It's published by Custom House before we get to that.
Host's Personal Update and Subscription Drive
00:00:35
Speaker
house things we're in shelter at home order here in Oregon still weird but we're doing okay I've got this ear infection thing but that's just dumb luck and trying to work through that of course that's why you subscribe to hear such crap like that of course you if you want to subscribe despite me talking about an ear infection you can always head over to Spotify Apple podcasts you know the jam
00:01:05
Speaker
Also, hey, did you hear last week?
Essay Submissions and Audio Magazine Announcement
00:01:08
Speaker
I put out an announcement, a call for submissions. We want your work. CNFPOD is putting out its first audio mag. I want essays on this theme, social distancing, essays from and on isolation. Submit your essay of up to 2,000 words max. That's about a 15 minute read.
00:01:29
Speaker
to Creative Non-Fiction Podcast at gmail.com. Deadline is May 1st. I'm serious, man. Gotta do it. Show me your best.
Newsletter Promotion and Reading Recommendations
00:01:41
Speaker
Also, be sure to head over to brendanamara.com. Hey!
00:01:45
Speaker
For show notes and to subscribe to my monthly newsletter where I give out reading recommendations, articles, and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. I'm also raffling off books I receive to lucky subscribers. So go subscribe so I can send you a book once a month. No spam. Can't beat it.
'The Hot Hand' and its Diverse Explorations
00:02:08
Speaker
You know, and I'm really, you know, I'm not alone in this, but I'm just super, super tired. So I'm not going to draw this out much longer. Ben Cohen at BZ Cohen on Twitter wrote a great book that is kind of Gladwellian. He takes this notion of the hot hand and overlays it over across all kinds of subjects. It's a fascinating read and Ben's a fun guy. So here's my conversation with Ben Cohen.
Pandemic's Impact on Cultural Writing
00:02:44
Speaker
Yeah, of course. Yeah, it's got to be really unmooring. I imagine for the sports writers out there, just because unprecedented situation that essentially, like, you have nothing to write about anymore. It's got to be really disorienting for you. Imagine. I think a little bit, but I don't think it's any more unmooring than anybody else. And in fact, like, I think that
00:03:08
Speaker
There was this initial shock of like, Oh, what are we going to write about? When in fact, like there's a lot to write about as, as leagues and teams try to figure out what's going to happen. But like, I don't think it's just sports. Like what are food writers going to write about for the next four months with every restaurant closed or movie writers or like, I just think everybody is we're in uncharted waters. And like, it was easy. I think sports is, it was this very glaring.
00:03:31
Speaker
This very glaring thing early on, it's like, well, there are no games anymore, but like, you know, there are no restaurants open, right? Like they're like movies are being shut down. TV shows are not being made. Like it's I think there's I think that's that that's going to await like everybody who writes about culture generally.
00:03:45
Speaker
Yeah, of course. It's fluid and something that none of us have experienced before, so everyone's just trying to get their footing. Good work is still getting
Cohen's Journey into Sports Journalism
00:03:57
Speaker
done. As a species, we're quite adaptable, so we're finding ways to generate things, to write things, to make beautiful things, and to engage in the culture in this particular moment.
00:04:11
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I've always thought of my sports writing as beautiful things that helps the culture, so.
00:04:17
Speaker
Well, I think that's I think it would be a good place to go back because I think what I when I was doing some of my research and what I found so we're really cool about about your early life is that when you're eight nine ten years old or so, you know, you're reading the star ledger and it's It connects with you on a level where this was the thing you wanted to do So what was that, you know being a kid reading the newspaper reading the sports section? What was it about the reading those stories that made you that connected with you so much
Early Writing Experiences at Star Ledger
00:04:47
Speaker
I don't know. I was a very strange kid. I mean, I think most kids like dream of becoming astronauts and flying to the moon. And I dreamed of like covering Rutgers basketball for the Star Ledger one day. And I don't exactly know. I would read like I would read the Star Ledger sports section with my lucky charms and like toasted bagel. And it just was this ritual that I fell in love with. I always was obsessed with sports as a kid. But in addition to loving sports, I just loved
00:05:17
Speaker
journalism. I mean, I had like the best American sports writing books on my shelf when I was like 10, 11, 12 years old. I just knew that I wanted to do this and what better way to do it than to read the people who were actually doing it. And the cool thing about the Star Ledger back in those days, I'm sure this was every newspaper, but, you know, I was 11 years old in New Jersey. And so the Star Ledger was the only thing I knew was that every day on the inside cover of the sports section of the paper, they would ask a question.
00:05:46
Speaker
Now, it was just like the most basic question, like, you know, they would take like the story of the day with the Yankees and they would ask some like reader prompt and they would publish anyone who wanted to write in. I mean, I think they had some.
00:06:00
Speaker
level of discerning quality. But the fact that I was eight, nine, 10 years old and getting published means that there probably wasn't much level of discerning quality. So I would see my name in the newspaper every day. I mean, not every day, but many times a week. And no one knew that I was eight, nine, 10 years old. They just knew that I was Ben Cohen from Livingston, New Jersey. And these were my first clips. I mean, they were like one, two, three sentences.
00:06:28
Speaker
with just, you know, I can imagine like the hottest takes about, you know, the Yankees and the Devils and Rutgers basketball. I mean, I would never want to read them now, but it was this very early odd experience writing about sports for people to read. I would never have thought about it that way at the time, but it was very cool for me then, as it is very cool for me now to just see my name in the newspaper. Do you remember what your very first one was?
00:06:59
Speaker
No, I wish. I mean, it was probably something stupid about Rutgers basketballers. I mean, these were not, uh, I was not exactly writing the grapes of wrath and the star ledger every day.
00:07:09
Speaker
Who is these days? And you mentioned best American sports writing,
Literary Inspirations: JR Moringer and Michael Lewis
00:07:15
Speaker
of course. And so who are some of the writers that you were reading, you know, coming up that inspired you? And you're like, yes, one day, you know, one day if I work hard enough and get that break that I can be I can be humming alongside, you know, these fill in the blank. You know, who were some of those guys? That's a great question. Well, I would read Sports Illustrated. And this was a time when I sort of
00:07:39
Speaker
I would read stories and then I would notice bylines. And I think I probably had the same progression as a lot of people, which is like, you know, read Sports Illustrated and Love Sports Illustrated, and then, you know, read New York Magazine and The New Yorker and things like that. Probably like the two, the two or three writers that I really admired and wanted to emulate once I like could figure out what exactly they were doing and why it was so good. The first was a guy named Jarrah Moringer who
00:08:08
Speaker
I published this memoir when I was in high school that's called The Tender Bar, and it's about essentially growing up in a bar in Manhasset, Long Island. JR had written a bunch of sports stories that I had loved. He wrote this really incredible sort of famous profile of Pete Carroll, the old USC football coach and now the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, that's called 23 Reasons Why a Profile of Pete Carroll Does Not Appear in This Space.
00:08:37
Speaker
It's this funky twist on the profile, but it's just like brilliantly reported and it's so fun to read. And I just think he's like the most lyrical, beautiful writer. And so he was definitely one. And then honestly, like I read Moneyball by Michael Lewis when when I was in high school, too. And then I went back and read all of his magazine stories, read all of his books. And I just think he's the master. I mean, in terms of the counterintuitive stories he finds, the oddball characters he writes about.
00:09:04
Speaker
The writing itself, I mean, he's so funny. They're hilarious sentences on every page. But the narrative scope of the book, I mean, he's just he's he's just a genius. And he's like, in my book, I write about this fifth generation sugar beet farmer named Nick Hagen. And Nick, before he was a farmer, he was a Juilliard trained trombonist. And so we were like sitting on his wheat combine on the border of Minnesota and North Dakota.
00:09:30
Speaker
And, you know, sometimes I write to classical music or I like to think that I should write to classical music. And so I asked him, like, who are the composers? Like, who are your guys? Who should I be listening to? And he said, like, you know, I know this sounds silly and maybe even cliche, but like it's Mozart and Mozart is he's the best. He's the master. And like, you know, people love Mozart, but I appreciate Mozart. Like, I know why he is so good because I've played his music and I've studied.
00:09:57
Speaker
his music and there is nothing comparable. And I sort of feel the same way about Michael Lewis. Everybody loves his books and everybody will buy his books in airports. But if you're a writer and you try to do this type of thing, I think you sort of appreciate and understand the level that he is writing about and the insanely difficult bar that he passes every time he writes a book. It's uncanny, it's extraordinary.
00:10:25
Speaker
I still go back to his books and just sort of read them when I'm feeling stuck because they're just, they're inspiring.
00:10:33
Speaker
Yeah, and you're getting to a point where, or alluding to a point where I think it's really, it's important as writers and readers to not just be inspired by the work of the people we admire, but also to take it to the next step and start to deconstruct about the work, what it is that they're doing.
Techniques for Compelling Storytelling
00:10:53
Speaker
And when you're unpacking what Mo Ringer, or in this case, Michael Lewis is doing, like what are you seeing on a mechanical level? You're like, okay, this is,
00:11:03
Speaker
If I'm reading this closely, this is how he's doing it. And maybe if I'm humming on a good cylinder, I can start to apply some of these tactics myself. Well, I like to think of it as the story itself and then the writing of the story. And so the story itself, I just think there's a very high bar to pass. I mean, that's sort of what I've learned from Michael Lewis's books is that
00:11:28
Speaker
Like that guy can write about anything. And when you have the freedom and the luxury and the power to write about anything, choosing what that something should be is really important. It has to be like a brilliant story that appeals to a lot of people. And that's actually something I've learned at the Wall Street Journal covering sports, that I have to write about sports for people who know everything about sports and also for people who know nothing about sports. And ideally, a good story will appeal to both
00:11:59
Speaker
of those groups. That's really hard. That's a hard needle to thread. And yet, I think that there's no one who does that better than Michael Lewis. He can write a book about what is essentially a bunch of baseball saber matricians that has become maybe the most influential business book of all time. He could write about credit default swaps in the big short and left tackles in the blind side and high frequency trading in flash boys. And you don't need to know finance or sports.
00:12:28
Speaker
You don't need to be a psychologist studying Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman to love and appreciate the undoing project, right? And so and yet if you are you will love that book too, and I think that It's so it's so rare and it's something to aspire to and then the other thing is just the writing like on the sentence level I just think you have to give people a reason to keep reading all of the time and so there are a bunch of writers like that who are just like
00:12:58
Speaker
Brilliant, funny, I think like humor is really underrated and is just so important and just reading sentences you haven't read before. When I was writing my book, I read this book by Sam Anderson called Boomtown that is ostensibly like a history of Oklahoma City. Now, I had never really thought much about Oklahoma City and I never really had strong feelings about Oklahoma City, but this book was just perfect. I mean, it's just so delightful and
00:13:27
Speaker
engaging and just it was actually inspiring to me because when I would get stuck writing this book, I would just open up a few pages of that book and just sort of get me in the mood of how I wanted to write because you could just see that like every sentence is crafted so perfectly. And, you know, I don't love talking about
00:13:46
Speaker
craft like it's something that like you know like it's something that you can only do if you're like slaving away at your desk at 2 a.m. after talking to like 850 people I just mean that like you could tell that that like why that book took a while to write because like there's not a word or a sentence out of place it's just it's it's and you could tell as a reader like it makes you want to keep reading and it makes you read something that you didn't know that you were interested in reading about
00:14:15
Speaker
Yeah, I love that idea of, you know, if you're feeling stuck or you just want some inspiration to put another track in your head, put another song in your head, just looking at your bookshelf and you'd be like, you know, I'm feeling a little stuck or I just like, I need a little, my moment, my creative momentum is slowed down. So you just like look over your bookcase and you're like, all right, I might pull this book down by Tracy Kidder and read.
00:14:39
Speaker
you know read a passage or two or as glen stout might say with best american sports writing he's just like pick up the volume and shotgun leads just look at the leads just keep just rip through them and see what happens not to copy them but to just draw inspiration from them and i imagine that's what it's like we're musicians maybe they're stuck and you're like you know what i'm gonna go listen to ride the lightning
00:14:59
Speaker
and just try to see, get those wrists in my head because that might unlock something within me. So I love this idea of you just like pulling down that book and be like, all right, I want to get the rhythm of this guy's sentences in my head because it's going to help unlock something in me. Yeah, it's like the cadence and the pace of it, right? It's not like the words itself. It's just like the rhythm of all of it and and the voice. I mean, you know, I am still I think I have something of a voice from
00:15:26
Speaker
I've been writing at the journal for 10 years. I've internalized the writers of the journal who I love. I learned how to write newspaper stories from this brilliant editor named Sam Walker at the Wall Street Journal, and I read Jason Gay, who I think is probably the funniest writer on the planet. Every day, I aspire to be those types of writers.
00:15:49
Speaker
Sometimes the best way to write like them, but in your own voice is just to read them and just to get them in your own mind. And so especially when I'm feeling stuck, I found that that is a good thing to do. And it's just sort of like it's like cross training a little bit. It's just it helps, you know, in an odd way, do what you are trying to do.
00:16:13
Speaker
And voice is such an elusive thing.
The Importance of Rigorous Editing
00:16:17
Speaker
How have you over the years, being a teenager obsessed with newspapers and wanting to be a sports writer and consuming these brilliant writers and of course the years of grinding over your own work, how have you cultivated what you essentially would consider your own voice on the page? I think I've been edited really hard at the Wall Street Journal for 10 years. I know
00:16:43
Speaker
what it takes to get a story into the print edition of the Wall Street Journal, especially when I was like a 22, 23 year old freelancer. It was really hard. And so the story had to be really good and the writing had to be super crisp and funny and fit the sensibility of this section that we were trying to build from scratch in 2009, 2010. And like, you know, I think the best thing that happened to me
00:17:10
Speaker
Even though it drove me crazy sometimes was that I got edited really really hard When I was just coming out of college and there are a lot of newspapers that don't do that sort of thing There are a lot of websites that don't do that sort of thing get I would file stories that would just get completely rewritten and top to bottom and my name would be at the top and there would always be
00:17:31
Speaker
Uh, or, or almost always be better and they would be, uh, the writing like would just be a quality that was much higher. And eventually when you get edited that much, you start to realize what a story should read like and what writing should sound like. And so working for the journal, um, in those days being edited by Sam Walker reading Jason gay. I mean, that made all the difference for me, because if I had gone somewhere else where, uh, I had not, I did not have the privilege of being edited so, uh,
00:18:01
Speaker
It was a hard edit every time you never quite knew what the story would come back to reading like. And yet eventually you start to internalize that and it becomes your own voice. And so I feel really lucky about that. I would never have thought of it at the time. It drove me crazy. I wanted to pull my hair out, but it was this huge advantage because I know now what I aspire to sound like when I'm writing.
00:18:23
Speaker
That's the fact that you said it when you the minute you said being edited hard, I just started scribbling down. I'm like, all right, how do you, you know, and I actually wrote down internalize and it's great to hear you that actually echo echo that word. I was just like, how do you internalize these edits, especially when you turn in something that you feel is like, all right, this is pretty good. And then it just gets absolutely hammered.
00:18:46
Speaker
by your editor, like in the best possible way, just trying to elevate the work. How did you over the course of being edited hard, as you say, use that as a way to get inspired to do better work instead of maybe get a little demoralized by the process? Yeah, it's funny because it was demoralizing when you would get a read back and you wouldn't recognize any of your sentences in there.
00:19:12
Speaker
It wasn't hard to internalize because the sentences were usually better. The editing was making my stories better and I could see that. Especially when I would go back and read them a few days later, it was easier to read them with fresh eyes. I wanted to sound like the way that my stories were reading. I think I was coming into my own a little bit and understanding what my voice sounded like. When I was in college, I would write columns for my
00:19:42
Speaker
my school newspaper and I would emulate like columnists who I grew up reading and I'm not a good columnist like I don't have strong opinions about things let alone sports it's hard for me to feign that sort of like outrage or I like writing about things that interest me and that I find curious and odd and funny and interesting and it's hard for me to pretend otherwise and so
00:20:10
Speaker
The great thing, the super lucky thing about writing for the journal and writing this book is that I generally get to write about things that interest me. I'm not good at pretending otherwise. I'm not good at, like there are certain reporters at the paper who are just brilliant investigative reporters who get to the office and call 20 people in the morning every day and just sort of kibbitz on the phone and are good schmoozers and I'm not good at that. I think I know what I'm good at and that's
00:20:40
Speaker
like finding odd, interesting stories and writing them in a way that people want to read, even if they don't know they want to read it. And so I feel really lucky to be able to do that and to be able to do it in a voice that feels natural to me. I don't know if it was natural, but after 10, 12 years of writing stories this way, it has begun to feel a little bit more natural.
00:21:04
Speaker
That's great to hear you come to this realization or come to this point where you kind of know who you are. You're not the hot take columnist or investigative reporter. You just follow your taste and your curiosity of finding those odd, interesting stories, as you say.
00:21:23
Speaker
Can you point to a particular moment where that just seemed like the guitar was in tune
A Broadly Resonant Story: Pine City Dragons
00:21:29
Speaker
for you? You're like, yes, this is who I am Following my taste and maybe that maybe that first odd interesting story. You're like, yes, this is what I want to walk into Hmm I don't remember the first one. I mean I remember one that I remember one that worked
00:21:48
Speaker
even though I didn't know that it would work. And it sort of convinced me that these types of stories would really work. And it was a story that I wrote in I think 2017. So I've been doing it for a while at that point and had a bunch of like stories that were hits for a lack of a better word. But I wanted to write about this odd phenomenon in basketball, which is that teams were starting to realize that they should focus more on their shot selection. And they had to be smarter about the types of shots that they took. And so this started
00:22:19
Speaker
really in the NBA where there was just this incredible data and there were really smart minds who were trying to figure out how to optimize their style of play. I mean, there were clearly huge incentives for them to do this. This is what they were paid to do. But eventually that trickled down to college and even to high school. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool to find a high school team that that was basically playing like the smart NBA teams? And so I asked a couple of companies that
00:22:48
Speaker
that have data on shot selection for high school teams. And they sent me a few schools that were interesting that had interesting shot profiles in their databases. And I sort of poked around and there was one team in Pine City, Minnesota, the Pine City Dragons. It's this tiny town between Minneapolis and Duluth. You sort of drive, you fly into the Minneapolis airport and you drive a few hours in one direction and then you end up in Pine City.
00:23:17
Speaker
They were taking basically only three three pointers and layups, anything in between. They had been systematically trained to not take. And so I thought this would be worth a trip. And it would be it would be kind of fascinating to talk to the coach and to some of the players there and watch a game and see how this played out in real time. And that was a really it was a risk of a story because I just did not know like to do readers for The Wall Street Journal.
00:23:44
Speaker
this national newspaper, do they really want to read about this tiny high school in Pine City, Minnesota that is doing something odd and a little bit unusual and having great success with it? But still, it's a high school in Pine City, Minnesota. And what I found was that the answer is yes, definitely. And that was one of my favorite stories that I've ever written because it was one of the first times that I was able to take
00:24:10
Speaker
this idea that I wanted to pursue and find people who embodied that idea. I was super gratified to learn that there was a really big audience for that type of story. I had some fun writing it, but it was a story that appealed, I think, to people who knew that this was happening in basketball and also had no idea that it was happening in basketball and really don't care about basketball or maybe don't even know what basketball is.
00:24:40
Speaker
That was one of the first times I remember coming back from that trip, writing that story, and the story running, and it getting this very nice response that I thought, this really works. There's nothing unique about it. I think really smart people have discovered that for a really long time before I did, but it was very nice for me to realize that I could pull off that type of story.
00:25:03
Speaker
And so as you're going through high school and of course in college I think I read that you spent an ungodly amount of hours in the newsroom of your college newspaper just getting those repetitions. So where did you go to undergrad and how did you end up locking into the newspaper and just keeping that dream going?
00:25:30
Speaker
I went to Duke, like everybody else from New Jersey, and yeah, working for the Chronicle at Duke was really the only thing I wanted to do. I kind of knew, in the same way that I knew reading the Star Ledger that I wanted to cover sports when I grew up, I knew going to Duke that I wanted to work for the school newspaper. And so from basically my first week on campus until my last week on campus four years later, I just spent a ridiculous number of hours in the newspaper office.
00:25:59
Speaker
kind of amazing time to be a Duke. I arrived on campus a few months after the lacrosse scandal. There were just these incredible student journalists in the newspaper office. I don't know if it was because we were at in the eye of this national storm or if I just happened to be there at this at this really great
00:26:19
Speaker
But there were just these they were really smart people who are still working in journalism Who worked for the Chronicle at the time and we put out a daily newspaper by ourselves I mean we it took like, you know 70 80 hours a week I mean, it was really the only thing I thought about from the second I woke up until the minute I fell asleep at like 3 a.m. Every night. It was crazy and
00:26:42
Speaker
I don't really know how any of us survived. I think most people who work for a college newspaper will tell you that, and yet it was really some of the best days of my life. It was so inspiring to be able to do this thing that I always wanted to do, and to be able to do it in a place where people read. You would walk into class. This was right before everybody had an iPhone.
00:27:06
Speaker
I would walk into class and everybody would have the print newspaper on their desk, basically, like reading it while we waited for the professor to show up, maybe reading it as a stretch. They were doing the crossword in it, but still, they had it in their hands and they could potentially see the stories that I was writing. It was so cool to write for this very small, closed community, but also write stories that reverberated far beyond
00:27:31
Speaker
that community. I mean, when you cover sports at Duke, you are competing with like national outlets. And so I just can't speak highly enough about the Chronicle. And I do think like people who want to do this and know they want to do this when they go to college. I mean, the best thing you can do is just sort of devote yourself to the school paper because, you know, my best friends to this day are people I met in that newsroom. And it really shaped what I do now. I mean, I just I wouldn't be where I am today.
00:28:01
Speaker
if I didn't spend all those hours and all those years in the student newspaper office. I was actually in Durham during that time, myself, just randomly. I had a buddy who was in grad school at Duke and I had nowhere to be having just graduated from UMass Amherst. So I was down in 2005, 2006 in that area. And I was a sports writer in Henderson, North Carolina for a small little paper called The Daily Dispatch.
00:28:28
Speaker
And so I was in and among that during that time and lived not too far away from the house. Yeah, it was probably a mile away from where I lived at the time. Yeah, it was a crazy time to be there. And so my freshman year was the year in which basically the whole case fell apart. So I had the brilliant decision to
00:28:54
Speaker
to attend Duke while literally the month when it was the biggest story in the world or it felt that way and then I saw the whole thing play out. It was a crazy time. One of the crazy things about it now is that sometimes I go back to Duke and talk to students there and they don't know about it. This event that was this seminal event in the history of the school and played such a large role in my life and the lives of my friends.
00:29:24
Speaker
They were they were like eight years old when this happened. They don't remember it and they don't like really care about it. So it's just it's one of those things about a college campus where like just history changes every four years and like something that that that happens when you are a freshman by the time you're a senior like the younger classes have no idea what you're talking about. It's one of the odd things I think about being around a college campus. Did you work with say we're Darby at all when you were there?
00:29:51
Speaker
He also say word was the say word was a senior when I was a freshman. And so she was the editor of the paper the year before I got there and was like in charge during lacrosse, which is there are I think there are probably few stories that have been more interesting to cover if you are the editor of a of a student newspaper.
00:30:10
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. She's been on been on the show and she'll come on again this year when her new, when her new book comes out. But yeah, she, we, we were talking about that at that time. And the fact that I, that you were there at that time, like, oh, maybe you guys overlapped in some capacity there. So, so at what point do you, do you start, uh, do you, um, snag that internship with wall street journal, then then freelance and then get pulled on as a staff writer? What was the sequence there that brings you to the journal?
Cohen's Career Path to Wall Street Journal
00:30:37
Speaker
So I was an intern in the summer of 2010. I interviewed for the internship and I was not hired. And then the person that my editor did hire eventually took a job elsewhere, like a week or two before the internship was supposed to start. And so I got very lucky from the very beginning. And then when my internship ran out, I kind of kept my foot in the door and wouldn't let them close it on me. And so I freelanced.
00:31:02
Speaker
for the paper for like two, three years doing writing and editing and like really anything I could to just have my name in the paper and sort of be a presence around the office sometimes. And then finally in the summer of 2013, a staff writer job became open and I was hired for it. So about like two, three years after the internship, writing mostly for the journal, but also freelancing a little bit elsewhere. And then I've been, you know, I've been on staff writing about sports for the journal ever since.
00:31:31
Speaker
seven, eight years now. And I wrote about college sports at the beginning. And then in the summer of 2014, the day before LeBron James went back to Cleveland, we did not have a national NBA reporter at the paper at the time. And my editor called me into his office and said, I think that you should cover the NBA for us. And I said, Sam, I think that's because
00:31:53
Speaker
we don't have an NBA reporter and you need someone to write the story about LeBron going back to Cleveland tomorrow and you are not thinking more than 48 hours in advance. And he was like, no, no, no, no. I mean, maybe that's true. But also, I think that we should be covering the NBA. I think it's about to be a thing again. And so ever since then, I've covered the NBA, which was a very lucky break for me because it was it was right before this sort of boom in NBA popularity and sort of this golden age of the modern NBA. I mean, I still
00:32:22
Speaker
haven't covered an NBA Finals that the Golden State Warriors weren't in. I thought this year would be different, but there might not be an NBA Finals this year, so the streak might continue.
00:32:32
Speaker
That's great.
Strengths in Storytelling and Reporting Challenges
00:32:34
Speaker
Yeah, so as you start to get your feet underneath yourself at the Wall Street Journal, what is it that you find that as you're growing, as you're developing as a writer and a reporter and even still to this day, what is something that you still feel like that you struggle with in a sense and that you're always trying to work through and be like, all right, this is a weakness I need to kind of level up to my strengths?
00:32:59
Speaker
Oh, that's a great question. I'm not I'm not good at like hard news stories. I'm not great at like calling people, you know, blanketing sources with calls and calling people. I don't know. And like and schmoozing with people and checking in with people at times when I don't need stuff from them. And so there are there are reporters who are really good at that and I'm not. And I think what I am good at is sort of reading
00:33:27
Speaker
the stuff that everybody else writes and figuring out the fascinating, revealing, interesting nuggets in their reporting that maybe I can take into mind and use as the basis for a whole story. I try to get better at it. Sometimes big news breaks and I think that I'm pretty good now at offering
00:33:51
Speaker
a smart next day story or offering analysis or framing the idea in a different way. I mean, there are lots of ways to write things that nobody has written before, but I'm not great at breaking that news myself. There are people in sports, there are lots of people in the journal who are just brilliant at getting scoops and they know how to get people to tell them things they shouldn't be saying. I'm not all that great at that.
00:34:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's always something that, yeah, I'm like you, Ben. I'm more of the, let's just sit back and let the front line beat reporters do their thing and then occasionally there's gonna be this little nugget that they're like, they can't afford to double down on because it's not totally germane, but that's like where the feature is. That's like maybe you waiting out Clay Thompson for 45 seconds to talk about a toaster.
00:34:41
Speaker
And that's something they can't do, but that's something you can double down on, because that's where your curiosity takes you, right? Yeah, I think that's true. But also, I do work for the Wall Street Journal. We are a daily newspaper. And so I do have to get better at that hard news stuff. And I think I have. I mean, there was a huge story a few months ago where the NBA basically found itself in this feud with China that sort of broke out overnight.
00:35:08
Speaker
I think I did very well on that story because I think I recognized from the very beginning what a big deal this was. I was able to say things that other people weren't saying. The other thing is that I've learned that it's important to take advantage of resources that are available to you. One of the really just phenomenal things about working for the journal is that we have incredible reporters all over the world.
00:35:37
Speaker
Usually when I write about the NBA, I am the only person from the Wall Street Journal in a locker room. ESPN and The Athletic have more people at specific games than we have in our entire sports staff. But the China story was actually one in which the opposite was true. We have bureaus in Beijing and Shanghai and Tokyo and Hong Kong and people who are familiar with Chinese politics. And I was able to work with them and collaborate with them to write really smart stories, I think, that
00:36:07
Speaker
other people weren't writing because they just didn't have the local expertise and the capacity to do it. I think it's really important to capitalize when you have advantages and recognize them. That's an example. I'm super proud of the work that we did over those two and three weeks. It's because it wasn't just me. I was able to work with people who are much better than me.
00:36:32
Speaker
Kind of piggybacking off what you said you were kind of struggling with in terms of, you know, being on, you know, get, being like those beat reporters on the phone, 20 people checking in. How do you navigate the conversations among your sources where you're just, all right, you're just kind of shooting the shit, you know, just kind of seeing what's on their minds versus, okay, this is going to be more of an on the record thing.
00:36:58
Speaker
That's always a line that I find curious to unpack with reporters.
00:37:05
Speaker
Yeah, when I figure it out, I'll let you know. I think I have relationships with certain people by now that they can trust me when they talk and they know I'm not going to burn them or I'm not out to get them. I think people around the NBA and people who have read my stories understand the type of work that I try to do and that I'm calling them for a reason. The reason is that I think that they have an interesting story to tell and I would like to be the one to write their story.
00:37:35
Speaker
Sure, there are plenty of times when people tell me things on background or off the record that I wish that they would feel comfortable bringing on the record, but they just don't. I mean, there are some people in the NBA, I mean, the best news breakers and the people who get scoops, I'm sure report like five, 10 percent of what they actually know. I think I am much higher because but that's mostly just because I don't know as much as they do. I go to my sources with very targeted specific questions. And so it's very rare for me to
00:38:04
Speaker
to have like a half hour, hour sit down with somebody that's just sort of wide ranging and broad and I'll see what they say and then figure out what to make of it. I go to people when I have stories in mind and I ask them very specific questions. And so because a lot of times like when I'm talking to NBA players, I only get 90 seconds with them. I get two or three minutes and I have to make that time count. And so I'm not asking them like what was going through your mind when you made that shot. I am
00:38:32
Speaker
asking them specific things that hopefully they haven't been asked before. How have you learned to really sharpen your focus and sharpen the saw to an extent?
The Quest for a Quote: Klay Thompson Story
00:38:43
Speaker
To just circle back to that Clay Thompson thing where you're walking with him from the locker room to the bus, essentially, for 45 seconds. You were able to synthesize something that resonated with people in that amount of time. So you've got to strike when the iron is hot. So what was that experience like?
00:39:01
Speaker
Yeah, this was a story that I wrote a few years ago. The Golden State Warriors were on like an 18 game winning streak and their fans were increasingly beginning to believe that it was because Clay Thompson had signed a fans toaster the day before this streak started. And so this toaster had become like this magical talisman.
00:39:21
Speaker
And so I talked to the guy who had the toaster and he told me the whole story of it. And yet I knew that if I'm writing this story for the Wall Street Journal and actually ran on the front page of the journal, I have to get Clay Thompson, this guy with the magic pen whose autograph started all of this. And it's not easy to get Clay Thompson during the NBA playoffs. And it's especially not easy to get him by yourself. I mean, if I had asked this question in a scrum or at a press conference,
00:39:50
Speaker
Well, I just couldn't do that because if he had said something interesting, then suddenly the entire world has it. And nobody cares about this this story that I was going to write because he has given it to everybody and it's on national TV. And and yet like I needed to find some way to get him all by myself at a time when it's really hard to get NBA superstars all by yourself. And so what I did was I flew across the country. I went to the Warriors game. I staked out the locker room.
00:40:17
Speaker
I was able to track him after he did his post game media availability until the time he walked out of the arena. So I don't know, maybe 200 feet in this back corridor of Oracle Arena. And I walked side by side with him and said, you know, I had to introduce myself, tell him the premise of the story and then get him to say something interesting in the course of like 45 seconds. And so I sort of flew through. I'm Ben Cohen from the Wall Street Journal. I'm writing about this crazy toaster.
00:40:45
Speaker
And I don't remember exactly what I asked, but I know I spent a not insignificant amount of that six hour flight trying to get the exact phrasing of that first question down. Because if he had just dismissed it or said, I don't know what you're talking about, or just sort of rolled his eyes, the story takes on a new meaning. And yet I knew what I wanted him to say, and I needed to get him to say it somehow. And so whatever formulation
00:41:12
Speaker
I was able to make on that plane, he played along with it and literally it was a 45 second interview that ended with him pushing the doors of Oracle Arena open and walking out to his car. And I remember walking back through the corridor, back to the media room, just feeling like I was floating on air because it was a really, what had just happened was so absurd if you think about it, right? I had flown six hours, 3,000 miles across the country, had a car drive me from the airport
00:41:41
Speaker
to a basketball game, watched an NBA playoff game, staked out a locker room, and then walked with one person on earth for 45 seconds to get a quote for a story in the Wall Street Journal on the front page that doesn't exist if I don't get that quote. And so the stakes were really high, and it worked out. And it was just this rush that you get. I mean, some people get it from scoops, and that's great. But I get it when all of that planning for an idea actually
00:42:11
Speaker
pans out. And that's like, that story was ridiculous, obviously, and sort of silly, not sort of silly, very silly. And, and, and yet there's still this incredible amount of reporting that goes into it. And I think that's what makes those stories work, like the the funny stories, the ones that that seem a little bit absurd, you have to take this the reporting just as seriously as like, you know, the serious stories. And that's what makes them sing.
00:42:39
Speaker
And of course, what kind of triggers that is this 18-game winning streak, which of course kind of segues nicely into your book about the hot hand. And I love that the genesis of this book was you were writing a series of articles about the hot hand for the journal, and usually you get, of course, you do enough reporting and enough research, you kind of get sick of stories. This one's stuck in your craw to the point that you wanted to write a whole book about it.
00:43:08
Speaker
So take us to that moment where this story was just so irresistible to you that you needed to take an even deeper dive than you already were.
Inspiration Behind 'The Hot Hand'
00:43:17
Speaker
Yeah. And it's because like I love these types of books. I mean, I know some of them have a bad rap now, but just this these books that take a single idea and use them to explore the rest of the world. I've always loved reading them and I read them at a very formative age and I always kind of knew I wanted to write one of them. And this idea of the hot hand
00:43:38
Speaker
was so alluring to me. So just on a pure story level, you have something that we all thought to be true, only to be told that it wasn't, only to realize that maybe it actually was. That was kind of irresistible. The characters in the story I knew were Nobel Prize winners and NBA superstars. That was also pretty irresistible to me. And yet all of these really smart people who had studied
00:44:02
Speaker
the hot hand for a really long time had done it because they were not writing about basketball. They were writing about human behavior and they understood that you could use basketball to understand things far beyond basketball and all of those things. I just knew that there was something here from the very beginning, like there was something that compelled all of us for the last 35 years to think and
00:44:29
Speaker
to get a little bit crazy about the hot hand. Now the question was whether I could take that one idea and apply it so widely that I could write a whole book about it. And I wasn't entirely sure about that until I actually did. But there was something that grabbed me. And I was told, I have a lot of friends who have written books and there are a lot of people in the journal who have written books.
00:44:54
Speaker
you know what most of them say is you need to be willing to think about this for three years. It's going to be on your mind when you wake up, and it's going to be in the back of your mind all day, and if you are just writing a book to write a book, it's not gonna work. There needs to be something that fascinates you about what you are doing. I put off writing this book for a year or two. I wrote a proposal, I put it aside, I kept coming back to it, and really what drove me here
00:45:24
Speaker
was an emotion, I think, that drives a lot of writers, which is like envy and jealousy, which is that I knew if someone else wrote this book, I would be very envious and jealous and I would never let myself, you know, feel the end of it. And so I just decided like, if someone is going to write this book, it might as well be me.
00:45:42
Speaker
Yeah, I love that that you brought up envy and jealousy. It's a lot of thing I talk about on this show too about how that can be a driver, how that toxicity is really no good in the end, but it's something that we all have to wrestle with in some manner. But it looks like for you, it was a great motivator, sort of the whip at your back to be like, you know, yeah, if someone else does this, I'm not going to be able to live with myself.
00:46:08
Speaker
No. And I mean, it's a quality of myself that I hate, but I'm super competitive. You know, I was always competitive as like an athlete growing up, but I'm very competitive as a writer. And when I get my when I have my eyes on what I think is a really good story, I tend to be fairly obsessive about it. Sometimes that means just writing it as fast as I can. Sometimes that just means like
00:46:33
Speaker
making sure that sources who have talked to me will let me know if they talk to other people. I mean, I get a little bit crazy because I just don't want to see anyone else write a story, an idea, a narrative, a character that I have found and think could make for a really great story. And I think that's sort of what happened here. I just could not imagine someone else writing an entire book about the Hot Hand. It made me sort of crazy. And so I just decided, if it makes me this crazy,
00:47:02
Speaker
Probably there is something there and it's worth pursuing. And me being kind of a geek for this kind of stuff, when I read books of this nature, I'm always fascinated to go to flip to the back of the book and look at the notes and sources, everything that when- Yeah, it's the best part of the book. Yeah. There's so much there and I'm thinking like,
00:47:23
Speaker
And I love unpacking how writers go about organizing the research and going about it and then being able to then make sense of it so you can write a book that has such a nice sort of continuity and fluidity to it and it feels very effortless though tons of effort go into it. So like how did you get your head around all that research so you could synthesize something that comes out as good as the hot hand?
00:47:50
Speaker
So so I hired a research assistant, which I've never done before. But I actually was a research assistant for for Andre Agassiz memoir, which which J.R. Moringer wrote. Right. And so what I did for them was I printed out every single story that had ever been written about Andre Agassiz using Lexus Nexus. And I basically curated them. And so I had this stack of like, you know, maybe 10,000 sheets of paper and I cut it down to maybe like
00:48:20
Speaker
500 to 1000 sheets of paper that went into this binder that they could consult as they were writing the book. And it was this very small thing. I mean, it took a lot of work and a lot of paper and a lot of time, but really what it required were those three things are required, like unlimited printing and time and access to Lexus Nexus, which when you were in college, like you have
00:48:45
Speaker
those three things. Those are like three of the only things that you have right time and printing and like access to research services. And so so I asked a Duke student named Hank Tucker to do the same thing for me. And so he printed out like every study that had ever been done about the hot hand and there are hundreds of them.
00:49:04
Speaker
And he put them all into a binder and a Google Drive folder, which I guess is like the 2020 equivalent of a binder and summarized them all. So he took the abstracts and he read them all and he put them into plain English. And so I had a pretty good sense of like the entire literature about the hot hand, not just the papers that like were specifically about the hot hand, but like the papers that cited those papers. And so I had
00:49:32
Speaker
I felt that I was on pretty good academic footing. But really, when I wrote this book, I knew the challenge or one of the big challenges would be finding the stories and the real people who could put human faces on this idea, who could sort of illuminate the phenomenon. And that's what I spent a lot of my time doing, is just reading super widely, asking everybody I knew for potential stories, and just trying to figure out when you can write about anything.
00:50:01
Speaker
What should you be writing about? And and what are the stories? Who are the characters? How do I make this work? I did not want to write an academic book. I wanted it to be rooted in the idea, but I wanted it to be interesting to like my mom. Right. Like I wanted someone who does not read these sorts of books and is not like really all that interested in academic debates and and scientific phenomena to to appreciate this book on its own. And so
00:50:31
Speaker
Once that research was done, I had to sort of do my own research and just figure out exactly what it is that I should be writing about. So it could have been easy for you probably just to make this a sports book in the hot hand. But you definitely find other ways to pull in the hot hand and this idea of streaks among other people, like intersection of
00:50:59
Speaker
the intersection of like luck and talent and circumstance. It's Rob Reiner and Rebecca Clark. It's asylum seekers. It's baseball umpires. They're NBA jammed. I mean Van Gogh, Shakespeare.
00:51:15
Speaker
you were able to fold all those in. So how did you come? How did you get all of those cross sections into into this book? So it does have this it does have this sort of very, you know, 360 degree look at what it means to have a hot hand. Yeah, I wanted it to be a big kaleidoscopic. I you know, honestly, I don't know. Like I have this like amnesia in like the 18 months that I wrote the book. I don't remember how I found
00:51:43
Speaker
a lot of these stories, which I think is actually what happens when I write just like daily newspaper stories for the Wall Street Journal. Like I don't always remember the source. I remember like taking notes and just like putting them into a Google Doc and coming back to them later. And, you know, I probably had five other ideas for every one idea that I wrote about in this book. But I knew the bar on these stories had to be really high. And I knew I wanted them to be
00:52:12
Speaker
as wide ranging as possible. I did not wanna write a sports book, and in fact, chapter one of the book is about NBA Jam, and it's about Steph Curry, and you've read the book, I think it's the most basketball that's in the book, and it just happens to be chapter one, and I didn't know any other way around that, but I didn't want that. I wanted the basketball to be even later in the book, so I wanted to signal to readers that this is not simply about basketball. And honestly, there was something selfish about that,
00:52:40
Speaker
for me too. Part of the fun of writing this book is that I got to write about things that I do not usually get to write about. And that was really thrilling. It was hard, but it was by far the most rewarding part of this process, to write about Shakespeare and World War II and Van Gogh and classical music and farming and investing, just things that I've never written about before. And maybe the people who do write about that stuff will say that it reads like that, but hopefully it does not.
00:53:08
Speaker
Right, yeah, and there was a particular line that you wrote in the book, too, that made me think about the overarching, or maybe it's what Cheryl Strayed might call the subterranean river bubbling, you know, rolling underneath the entire thing. And you wrote this one sentence, so that was, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And that struck me that this was a book about finding data and better data and how
00:53:36
Speaker
data and the data collection evolves over time to illuminate to shine new light on these timeless questions. Is that how the book ended up sort of revealing itself to you over the time over your research and reporting? I think so. I think that like this was I did not want this book to be simply about like does the hot hand exist? Because I think that like part of the fun of all of this is playing with the idea for yourself and figuring out where you land. I wanted there to be like some deeper meaning
00:54:06
Speaker
And to me, I found that meaning in this quest for data and better data and challenging our long-held assumptions and being open to data, to new data that tells us things that we've never heard before. And so the last two chapters of this book, the big narratives that sort of illuminate the idea is one is about Raul Wallenberg, the Holocaust hero, and these two men who went searching for him. And the other is about this long-lost
00:54:36
Speaker
Van Gogh painting and how a bunch of researchers were able to verify it like a century later. And those two things, they really have nothing to do with the hot hand, at least in the way that we think about it. But I think that they are illustrative of the lessons in this saga about the hot hand. And that's sort of why I wanted to write about them.
00:54:58
Speaker
I also just kind of fell in love with both of those stories and the people involved with them. And I went looking for a way to write about them any way I could. And so I think that they might seem like digressions, but they are fundamental to the larger story here. And I think that I have found that I think I have a pretty good nose for a story. And what interests me usually tends to interest
00:55:23
Speaker
readers, I think I have a good way of explaining why I'm so fascinated by these people and people will come along for the ride and I hope that like those two stories in particular are good examples of that because you know you might not know who they are or think that you have any reason to care about them but hopefully I do a good enough job in the book of like showing why you should care and like why they're fascinating stories.
00:55:47
Speaker
And maybe give us a sense of the difference between the hot hand fallacy versus the gambler's fallacy.
Hot Hand vs. Gambler's Fallacy
00:55:55
Speaker
Oh, yeah. So the hot hand fallacy has always been studied through basketball. And it's when you make one shot, and then another shot, and then another shot, and you feel more likely to make your next shot. You are in the zone. You're on fire, right? So in basketball, if you go into an arena and you see Steph Curry make three shots, everybody in the arena thinks that he is making his fourth shot. That's the hot hand.
00:56:17
Speaker
Something else happens when you walk into a casino. You go to a roulette wheel and you see the ball land on red three times in a row. What research has shown is that most people actually bet on black the next time. And that's the gambler's fallacy. And that was really intriguing to me. And there's a whole chapter in the book about the gambler's fallacy because it seems to me that it's
00:56:38
Speaker
the same circumstances and yet completely opposite outcomes. For one, we bet on the streak to continue and the other we bet on the streak to end. And yet these are two really important biases that shape the way that we think. I mean, they're both sort of about judgment and decision making and they're kind of equally powerful. And that was really the cool thing to me about writing about The Hot Hand is that I wanted to present every angle of this idea. So in the book it goes from
00:57:08
Speaker
thinking the hot hand is real to thinking it's not real to thinking that maybe it is real and there are times that we can take advantage. But that was part of that was also like, well, what's the corollary of the hot hand? And why does this matter? And why have economists and statisticians and especially psychologists studied this one like seemingly basketball phenomenon for so long. And it's really it's because it's about judgment and decision making and like
00:57:35
Speaker
It's a really complex topic and I wanted to just sort of explore it, like every nook and cranny of it that I could.
00:57:42
Speaker
Yeah, and taking the gambler's fallacy a step further is the really sobering element that judges that are hearing asylum cases will, if they grant asylum to one person, they might not do it for the next person just based on breaking the streak.
Decision Making Biases in High-Stakes Situations
00:58:05
Speaker
What was that like for you when that came up in your research to realize that these are matters of life and death in the end?
00:58:13
Speaker
Well, it was really crushing as a human being to read that, right? It's super depressing and demoralizing. And yet it shows the power of this idea. So there was a paper about the gambler's fallacy and decision making that looked at three distinct groups of people with authority, people who make decisions. One was lone officers. One was baseball umpires. And the other was asylum judges. And what they found, these Yale economists who looked at this, was that
00:58:41
Speaker
If an asylum judge has granted asylum two or three times in a row, he is much less likely to grant asylum to the next case, regardless of the merits of the case. That's crushing. And it shows the human consequences of these biases. As you said, they are dealing with life and death here. It's not whether Steph Curry makes his next shot. It's whether a refugee gets to stay in the United States.
00:59:11
Speaker
I knew I wanted to write about this study because it was just such a beautiful example of this phenomenon that I was writing about. But I wanted to put a human face to that. I wanted to show why it mattered. And so I read a lot about people who were applying for asylum. And I wrote about a guy in California who is this brilliant artist and sculptor from Iraq who was applying for asylum. And to this day, he still hasn't heard his case is still
00:59:40
Speaker
pending. So it does not have like either the happy ending or the crushing ending. But I think the uncertainty is what makes it is what makes it such an interesting story. It just sort of shows like these are not statistics or data. These are real people. And you know, it's it's it sort of goes back to like one of the fundamental ideas in the book. I learned writing for the journal that tension is what makes every good story. Right. Like
01:00:09
Speaker
The best stories, the ones we want to keep reading are the ones with the tension and we want to figure out how it resolves itself. And so I couldn't believe how much tension there was in this fight over a single idea. But even in these stories that illuminate the idea, there had to be tension too. And this particular case, this refugee applying for asylum, I mean, I just don't think there's any more tension in any story in this book.
01:00:31
Speaker
When you're vetting out stories worth pursuing, at least following your own taste, do you seek the tension first and then double down on your research and reporting? Oh, that's interesting. I just tend to I tend to just like think about if I find a story and I can't stop telling people about it. I mean, I have a few people in my life who I bother all the time with these stories and say, like, do you think that is this is this OK? Like, do you think there's something here? When I find that I can't stop thinking about it, then then I
01:01:02
Speaker
pursue it from there. And sometimes I can't stop thinking about it because the tension. I mean, maybe that's sort of natural. But I don't really know. I mean, sometimes the story just catches my eye and I can't stop thinking about it because it's just a great story. Maybe there's not a crazy amount of tension, but the character in the middle of it is so appealing and so intriguing.
01:01:24
Speaker
So I don't quite know. And listen, sometimes I pursue stories and I make a few phone calls and I just realize that it's not quite there. So let alone writing about that story in a book and devoting a couple years of thinking about it in a few thousand words. Sometimes just for a newspaper story, it doesn't quite work. I almost wrote an entire chapter in this book about beer pong. I actually went to the World Series of Beer Pong in Las Vegas.
01:01:46
Speaker
When I sat down to write it, I was just like, I just can't make this. I can't make it work. And so it was either a good idea or a terrible idea. I think it's a good idea that I did not write it. But, you know, there was something there. I just it just didn't it didn't work in the way I wanted it to. And, you know, one of the important things I think was just sort of figuring that out and not devoting a ton of time and resources to it.
01:02:08
Speaker
And my friend Greg Hanlon a couple years ago, and I think it's the 2015 edition of Best American Sports Writing, he had a piece in the main volume, which is incredible. And he also had a piece as a notable selection in the very same volume. And when I was talking to him about that, he was just like, yeah, this was like my Brady Anderson year from 1996 when he had like 50 homers or whatever that was.
01:02:34
Speaker
And it got me thinking about wanting to ask you, of course, if you've experienced in your writing a hot hand period of time and over the course of your work. I wish. I wish I had it right in this book. It would have made it a lot easier. I have felt it a few times at the Wall Street Journal. I don't remember quite what the stories were, but there were times when
01:03:02
Speaker
It just felt like things were going my way and stories were really easy to write and people were returning my calls and it made me want to work harder. And I think that's one of the effects of feeling the hot hand is that it's important to recognize when you do have it and to sort of double down and try to use those periods to elevate your career and maybe even change your life because
01:03:25
Speaker
The frustrating thing, the elusive thing about the hot hand is that it does not last forever. We know this. When it runs out, it's a terrible feeling. So in those times when you feel briefly superhuman, it's really important to take advantage. And I try to remind myself of that when I do feel hot or when I feel even like a little bit lukewarm, is that like this is the time to really go all in if you can.
01:03:49
Speaker
Yeah, there's a great passage in the book, too. I think you're quoting somebody, but it's just like he or she says, I think it's a he, says you can't know if you have the hot hand, but so you have to keep going. And so it gets a very optimistic view, maybe, maybe foolish, maybe like a little bit arrogant. But but it is true. Like, you know, if if we do all have hot hand periods in our lives,
01:04:14
Speaker
what we think of as the hot hand period now, maybe in 10 years or 20 years, it won't be our hot hand period. Maybe it will reveal itself to be something completely different. So the only way to know if you're about to get hot is to just keep going, essentially. And what do you think is the enduring legacy of the hot hand and streaks and why there is so much literature on it? You know, what is it about it that keeps enduring?
Enduring Fascination with the Hot Hand
01:04:44
Speaker
Well, I think there's something fundamental about how humans make decisions and how we behave and how our intuition can play tricks on us that is alluring to us. We all want to understand why we are the way that we are and why we behave the way we do and make the decisions that we do. But I think also, we all remember when we feel hot, we've seen the hot hand for ourselves.
01:05:11
Speaker
many of us hopefully have felt it for ourselves. And we just kind of want to understand that feeling that so many of us are convinced is true. I mean, the other thing though is that I think we love stories and we love the tension in those stories and we love ideas and stories that help explain those ideas. And so like when I wrote the book, I, you know, to me, the question of whether or not the hot hand exists, like it's, it's almost besides the point. Like I want people to sort of come along for the ride.
01:05:41
Speaker
and toy around with this compelling idea for themselves and figure out where they land. And maybe it helps understand ourselves a little bit better. I mean, there's a reason that really smart people have thought about this for a really long time and have come to opposite conclusions. There are brilliant people on both sides of this debate. And I think the intellectually honest thing is to just kind of figure out what we think about it for ourselves.
01:06:10
Speaker
I'm a reporter. I'm not a researcher. I'm not like some self-help guru. I wanted to just tell a good story here that people would want to keep reading and might help explain the world a little bit better if you read this book. I actually think
01:06:30
Speaker
The book is pretty breezy and it's fairly short and I think you can plow through it pretty quickly and I wanted that to be the case too. I wanted it to be interesting but also effortless to read. There's a lot and maybe I don't quite know what I want people to read or understand from reading the book. I think playing around with that idea for yourself is really where I land on it.
Closing Remarks and Where to Find More
01:06:57
Speaker
Well, this book was, like I say, it was a ton of fun to read. I enjoyed it from cover to cover. Bravo on a great book, man. Best of luck with it. Where can people get more familiar with you and your work than if they're not already familiar with it?
01:07:17
Speaker
They can go to my website at bzcohen.com, and there's all types of stuff about the book on there, and then a whole bunch of my favorite stories for the journal, including some that we've talked about over the last hour. That would be the best place. BZ Cohen, and I am BZ Cohen on every social media platform that we're all trying to avoid these days. Fantastic. Well, Ben, stay safe, stay healthy, and thanks for carving out the time. This is great talking to you. Thanks so much for having me. You got it, Ben. Take care.
01:07:49
Speaker
We did it. We made it CNF-ers. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure you're subscribing to the show. Of course, this crazy show is produced by me, Brendan O'Mara. I make the show for you. I hope it made something worth sharing. And if you really dig the show, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Show notes are at BrendanO'Mara.com.
01:08:09
Speaker
Follow the show on the various social media channels at cnfpod across them all. Get that newsletter at my website. Win books, win zines, hang out with your buddy BO. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. Are we done here? We must. Because if you can do Interview, see ya!