YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Cohen

lines on the record: 120
first: 2020-03-27
most recent: 2020-03-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Ago, but a couple of years. That I should have taken a single course in economics or psychology or statistics or computer science when I was in college. I graduated from school and like immediately recognized that what I wanted to do, I really needed more of like a quantitative background that I don't think I have to this day and I wish I knew how to write code and I wish I knew how to like really understand statistics because it has become like essential in sports now and really writing about sports like writing about sports fluently and finding interesting stories like you can really use numbers and then try to build stories around them which is something I hope I did in this book.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was. It was an A head. And so, and I tell them specifically, the A head does not have to be about birding or something or something that you think esoteric. It can just be something funny about something in your life. And so the people running the Wall Street Journal did not know what the Dougie was, but I was 21. Of course I knew what the Dougie was, right? And like you can take advantage of that. Like what you know is actually pretty interesting.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because usually Sunday night is I'm prepping for the beginning of work Doesn't have to be Sunday night. That just works. To take advantage of their place in the world. So sometimes when the journal has interns, I always tell them this, that what they know, what their world is, is actually very different from the world of the people running the Wall Street Journal. So just by virtue of being 21 years old, you are on TikTok, right? And you talk to other 21 year olds and you know what this very interesting subset of people are interested in. And so you almost think of your world as this subculture to mind, like you are an anthropologist. And so the very first front page story I wrote for the Wall Street Journal was a few months after I graduated from college. And it was about this dance craze known as the Dougie, which you might remember. There was this song like, you know, teach me how to duggy. And everybody in sports was doing it.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And see if that does anything for you. Had a ton of fun with it. It is actually not only useful, but fun. It makes you actually want to do it. Right.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I can't watch sports because sports is work, right? And my brain is always working. I just wrote a book in my spare time. So I don't know all that much about fun. But one thing that I love lately is that this is going to sound silly, but there's this YouTube channel from Bon Appetite. And I don't know if you're familiar with it. And I'm not a great home cook. But these videos are so magical and absorbing. And there are the editors in the test kitchen and the recipe developers, they're just really charming. And like you sort of fall in love with that. No kidding. Oh, I'm right there. Almost every day. And my wife and I, they're like 15 minutes. We'll just put it on and it really sootes me before I go to sleep.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it made for it looked like this very silly sentiment. And I just felt terrible. I felt like when you have the entire internet like making fun of you for a day, you're just like, oh, God. And so what it taught me was you kind of have to be careful on like every word actually matters. And also that people forget about things on Twitter after a few hours”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Steph Curry, Clay Thompson, Kevin Durant, Draymond Green, and Andrea Goodala. And the end was italicized, right? Because it was meant to say that if you take out any one of their contributions, they're not the Warriors. That's not always the case with basketball teams. Basketball teams are built around one or two guys. The 96 Bulls are the Bulls with Pippin and Jordan. You could sort of substitute a lot of other guys, right? Can't do that with the Warriors. The problem was that I forgot that on Twitter and on social media, you can't italicize words, right? And so when this stuff ran on social media, when I wrote tweets that we could share from like, you know, at WSH, it appears as the Golden State Warriors are good because of Steph Curry, Clay Thompson, Kevin Durant, Raymond Green, and Andre Guidala. And this turned into one day last year, like the entire internet dunking on the Wall Street Journal because it read like the Beatles are good because of George.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I feel like I fail every time I write a story because you're writing a newspaper story that's a thousand words, 1200 words. You've talked to a lot of people, you know all this nuance that you can't possibly pack into the story. And so every time a story comes out, I feel like it's not good enough, right? But one time I really failed was actually not too long ago. I wrote one of my bajillion stories about the Golden State Warriors last year. And it was right before the finals. And I needed something new to say about this team that I'd been writing about for five or six years. And we have a daily newspaper. And like, you know, give me a break. Not every story is perfect. And I was trying to express this thought that I had that the Golden State Warriors were the Golden State Warriors because there were like five really valuable players on that team. And you take out any one of them and the whole thing falls apart. It's a bit like a Jenga Tower, right? Right. And the way I phrase this in the story was like the warriors are this dynasty because of”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, the blind side, the undoing project. No, I don't know. I read these types of books. I mean, part of this book is like, it is like using a social psychosing an idea from social psychology to explore the world. And there are a lot of books along those lines. And I think I read them at an impressionable age. They really like they really became popular when I was like in middle school, high school and they were just sort of intoxicating to me. And so there are a lot of books like that. I mean, novels too. I love the Sally Rooney book, Normal People when it came out, like everybody else in New York City, it seems. But those, you know, Moneyball and like the Michael Lewis Cannon, that's what really does it for me.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I'm a sucker for the Michael Lewis books. I think Moneyball is still brilliant. And when I went to visit Nick Hagen on the farm, we were talking as we boarded his wheat combine. I asked him, sometimes I write to classical music and I asked him, like, who should I be listening to? Like, who is your favorite composer since he was at Juilliard and he played trombone? And he said, you know, I know this is going to sound silly, but the best guy is Mozart. And he's like, and I know other people know Mozart, but like, I know Mozart. And I appreciate him. And I sort of feel the same way about Michael Lewis. Like everybody loves his books, but as someone who has tried to write a book along the same lines, like the stories that he finds on a sentence level, like everything about that, they're just brilliant. Like they just, they hold up. And whenever I feel stuck, I might sometimes go back and read some, just a few pages from his books because that voice.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were a lot before I got to the Wall Street Journal, but there was one guy at the Wall Street Journal named Sam Walker who was the founding sports editor of the journal, who was this brilliant and insane and insanely brilliant and brilliantly insane person who sort of set the bar really, really high. And so when I was an intern, when I freelance for the paper for a while, even when I was a staff writer, it felt like every time you got a story into the paper, you were like pole vaulting basically. Like you were trying to get above a certain point. And I think that's why we used to hear a lot of the journal. We didn't know that you covered sports because we didn't. But now I think people understand that we try to do something a little bit different. And that's because of Sam. I think he sort of taught me what a good story was. And like to not be precious with my own writing and to just like let other people make it better. So Sam hired me and had this huge influence on my life.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's an interview with John Oliver, and it's about 90 minutes. John Oliver interviews them. They take QAs, and I cannot describe.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best thing that I've streamed recently probably is that I am a huge John Mulaney dork. And I just think he's a genius. What is he a funny guy? There's so many. There are so many. I watch his talk show appearances because they're hilarious. The funniest thing on the internet is...”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't seen it, but I read about it. There's four episodes, they're about an hour and a half each, and so you can kind of catch up with them about it. Is it worth it?”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not only do you get to watch the whole thing, you get to see Rory go to college and come out of college, but Netflix did a revival last year.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they're slow, there's classical music like chef's table France will push you right out. Like that, one season will last you like a year of falling asleep.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say the real TV equivalent of Ambien, and I recommend this, is food shows from other countries that are subtitled.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it moves along quickly, and you would think like you don't want those voices in your ear before you fall asleep. But what I found is that it just sort of, I've seen them so many times that like their sort of background noise. And by the time I get to the end of the series, it's been so long since I saw the pilot and the first season that I just go back to it and start it again.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The beautiful thing about that show is that it gives you material to fall asleep to whenever you want. So it doesn't seem like a good show to fall asleep to because it's very fast-paced. It's very like Sorkinesh.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you? Yeah, absolutely. So now I put in my wife is sleeping next to me and I have like an airpod in and I fall asleep. And the show I've been watching over and over is this old, not old, but old-ish show called Gilmore Girls, which I can't believe.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My streaming services, my choices are strange. I fall asleep every night watching Netflix on my phone. Okay. Usually what I do is”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a scene in there, and you will know what scene it is when you see it that's really arresting. It's like one of the best things you'll see on TV all year.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it? I like driving cars. I like when I'm on the road, like renting a car and I take zip cars. I just have no interest in old Porsches or Ferraris or anything.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why? You know, I don't know. I think this guy named Harvey Pollock was just sort of one of his own. He was like a man before his time. And he was nicknamed Superstat. Like everybody knew he was like this towering figure in analytics before analytics was like this buzzword in sports.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It looks primitive now, but at the time it was cutting edge like the reason they were able to write this paper is that the Philadelphia 76ers had a statistician. He was the only person who took note of the chronology of shots. So he knew like what you would do after you made a shot or you made two shots or three shots. Nobody else was doing that at the time. That seems crazy now because we know everything there is to know about any given shot in the NBA, right? And we can look back many years and figure out anything we might want to know. But that wasn't available back then. The data that we have now was not available to the researchers in their nerdiest, wonkiest, wildest dreams or else they would have used it because they did.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the data that we have, right? I mean, the first paper was written using the best data that was available back then. Which”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read the summaries of all of them, but I read all the major ones. So I have in my apartment two 500 page binders with double-sided printing of every scholarly paper ever written about the hot hand because I wanted to be really fluent in the literature and not miss anything.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, I worked on the proposal for a long time before that. And the research part, I hired a research assistant who downloaded every paper ever written about the hot hand and sifted through them and summarized all of them. So you didn't.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, sometimes what we do is if I have looked at a story a lot, I will fact check from the bottom up. And so when you just read the story in a different way and you're checking things off as you go, your eyes don't glide over things in the order in which you know they're coming, right? Because it's flipped completely the opposite way.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But some editors at the journal have taught me, like we fact-checked all of our own stories, right? We don't have magazine fact-checkers. Yeah, but you have your own bias.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have friends who, when they're writing stories, will just change the font of the story as they're writing because it makes them look at it in a completely different light.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's funny. I mean, I will say that I think Barbara Tversky knows more about the brain than I know about anything. So I would trust her judgment on that. But I do think there is just something about sometimes I will just sort of dictate things and go back to them later. And what I've learned actually is that sometimes the easiest way for me to write a story, I can be staring at a screen all day long writing. And if I look at that document on my phone on the subway leaving work, it looks totally different and something clicks. It's sort of like that thing where you stare at a crossword for like 15 minutes and you can't get a few boxes and you come back to it a few hours later and it's just staring you right in the face and like you're like how did I not see this already”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there are some people who speak in paragraphs, and those people just blow my mind because I don't know how they do that.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'm a few years into a PhD in business from listening to this podcast because the beautiful thing is that not only have you had all of these luminaries come in here and be really open, but there are transcripts, right? Like you can read these interviews as if they're essays almost. There are biographies of these really brilliant minds.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so you have to thread that needle. And that's what I wanted to do with this book. I wanted it to be entertaining, to people who knew the saga of the hot hand and also people who don't even know what the hot hand is. And so that meant like trying to reach as broad of an audience as possible without alienating that core audience.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's funny, I think writing for the Wall Street Journal actually gives me good training for this because when I write about sports for the journal, I write for people who know everything about sports and nothing about sports. Which is”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of early mornings and long weekends. Yeah. And so there was that. I gave myself a lot of time to write the book. It was like 18 months from start to finish of writing. So it was just sort of trying to find time whenever I could. But I have to say, like, I think that writing a book made me better at writing stories for the Wall Street Journal. It was sort of like cross-training in a sense. It just accessed a different part of my brain that was fun to play with that I never really get to exercise all that much.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, you do not have control. And so what he has learned is that basketball is about playing offense, right? Farming is about playing defense and trying to play the long game and keep in mind all of these lessons that you've learned for all of these years. So like he doesn't chase patterns. He doesn't believe in the hot hand, even though he does believe in the hot hand. He doesn't behave as if he believes in the hot hand. What he does is he trusts principles instead of chasing patterns. And to me, like, you know, I could talk to academics. I've been in NBA locker rooms. I've never been on a sugar beet farm before. And that was one of the most thrilling parts of this book for me.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chord is always the same, right? Like you know the parameters. And farming is always moving. So if the basketball chord is a rectangle, farming is like one day it could be a rhombus and the next day it could be a trapezoid and the next day it could be a triangle.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nick Hagen is a fifth generation sugar beet farmer on the border of Minnesota and North Dakota, and I took a trip out to his farm because I wanted to know, do farmers believe in the hot hand? Like, this is one of the reasons why people have studied the hot hand is because it applies to all these different industries. And so I went out there during wheat harvest, and Nick is this fascinating guy because his family has been in the farming business for five generations, right? Going back to like his great, great grandfather in the middle of the 1800s. And yet he didn't think that he would enter the family business. He was a trombonist. He came to Juilliard to play music before he finally decided, actually, I do want to go back into the family business and move back to this farm. And what he told me was like music and farming and basketball couldn't be any more different. Like music is more like basketball than it is like farming. So in basketball, the”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Steph is on the bucket list. I have to say one of the most interesting people I talk to is a guy named Nick Hagen, who I don't think you've had on this show. I have not.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I talk to a lot of interesting people. I talked to Steph Curry. I talked to Eugene Fama. I talked to David Booth, Tom Gilovich. All of these.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that it speaks to why it was so brilliant to build a team around him. Like nobody thought that you could or that you should. And the Warriors have proved everybody wrong.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is insane, and the most insane thing about it is that I believe they're being outscored by the other team when Steph Curry is not on the court, right? So they're negative when he's not on the court. They're plus 4,000 when he's on the court, and the other team beats them when he's off the court. And so that just shows, it shows this incredible force that Steph Curry has become.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just completely ignores what happened in his absence and set the line at twenty three feet nine inches away from the center of the basket. And where is the three-point line in the NBA today? 23 feet and nine inches away from the basket. It's exactly where April Sapperstein decided it should be 60 years ago”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He owned the Cleveland Pipers. And there was this discussion in one of their meetings a couple weeks ago, I went down and found these papers in this archive at the University of Texas that sort of showed how this league was formed. And the guy who started the league was this guy named Abe Sapperstein, who was this visionary marketing whiz behind the Harlem Globetrotters. He also started the ABL. And he had so much power that one day he missed one of their meetings where all of the owners came to be. And they decided that they would try to strike back at some of his power by eliminating the three-point line. So they took a vote. Do we think like we should have a three-point line? And if we do, like, where should it be? Should it be at 23 feet? Should it be at 20 feet? Like, where exactly? And they decided to move the three-point line in. So three feet, they move it in. They have this vote. Steimbrunner votes against it. He says, keep it where Saerristine wants it to be. But it passes by a 4-3 margin. Saperstein comes back to the next meeting.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, started in a basketball league called the American Basketball League, which predated the American Basketball Association, which then merged with the NBA. And so in the ABL in the 1960s, this short-lived, doomed basketball league that was run by the founder of the Harlem Globetrotters, they were the first to experiment with the three-point line in a professional league. And there were eight teams in this league, and who was one of the owners of this Doom Basketball League but George Steinbrenner before he bought the New York Yankees? Which team?”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has to do with the formation of the three point line. Like the three point line did not always exist in basketball. It seems so fundamental to how the game is played today, but somebody dropped a line on the court, this little strip of tape, and decided shots from inside will be worth two points and shots from outside will be worth three points.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Superstars are the great inefficiency. And that's what basketball teams believe. But there are other ways to find value, and it's to find value on the margins. It's to get those guys like Duncan Robinson and Shane Badier, like guys who are not valued the way the markets suggest they should be”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like in an open market, a team would give LeBron $75 million, $100 million, right? Even if it were an open market in a cap system where the team had a salary cap, but the players didn't, and you could offer them whatever you want. You could make a case that like if there weren't a hundred million dollar salary cap, you should give LeBron $90 million, right?”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source