Speaker 1: Pushkin. I spend a lot of my life walking into
Speaker 1: complicated situations and trying to figure out who really knows
Speaker 1: what's going on, who the expert is. It's not always
Speaker 1: easy to tell. But there was one time when it
Speaker 1: was easy. This was back in two thousand and two.
Speaker 1: I just decided to write a book about something truly
Speaker 1: weird happening in professional baseball. People with a talent for
Speaker 1: analyzing data were proving that people who ran baseball teams
Speaker 1: didn't really know what they were doing. What was happening
Speaker 1: in baseball was the first shot in an expert revolution.
Speaker 1: We're still living in it. It goes by different names,
Speaker 1: big data, analytics, moneyball. You may not look like a
Speaker 1: winning team, but you are one. Back in two thousand
Speaker 1: and two, it was instantly clear who the expert was.
Speaker 1: His name was Bill James. He lived in Lawrence, Kansas,
Speaker 1: and so to Lawrence, Kansas I flew, and I remember
Speaker 1: two things about that encounter. The first was his manner.
Speaker 1: How unlike a revolutionary he seemed. He was big, with
Speaker 1: a beard like a bear, but a slow moving one
Speaker 1: that only ate plants. He was slow, and deliberate and unassuming.
Speaker 1: He had every reason to see himself as the world's
Speaker 1: greatest expert in baseball. But that's not how he saw himself.
Speaker 1: The other thing I remember was the picture on the
Speaker 1: wall by his desk, a picture of a baseball diamond.
Speaker 1: He pointed to it and said, that's a field of ignorance.
Speaker 1: Bill James could have bassed in what he knew about baseball,
Speaker 1: but he made a point to remind himself of what
Speaker 1: he didn't know. I'm Michael Lewis. Welcome back to Against
Speaker 1: the Rules, where we explore unfairness in American life by
Speaker 1: looking at what's happened to various characters in American life.
Speaker 1: This season is all about experts. Our first episodes looked
Speaker 1: into the ways that people do or do not understand experts.
Speaker 1: Now we're going to talk about how experts do and
Speaker 1: do not understand themselves. Our entire society is like baseball
Speaker 1: was when I wandered in to write a book about it.
Speaker 1: We have this talent for generating new knowledge, which we
Speaker 1: proceed to ignore. This was Bill James's experience for much
Speaker 1: of his life. How and why did you get interested
Speaker 1: in the game of baseball? I suppose I got interested
Speaker 1: in baseball in the same way that many other people do.
Speaker 1: The nineteen sixty one season was a fascinating season. And
Speaker 1: I was eleven years old and discovered baseball cards that
Speaker 1: spring and just got instantly hooked on them and never
Speaker 1: quite grew out of it. Did you a play, Yes,
Speaker 1: but not well enough to talk about I'm a very
Speaker 1: I'm a very bad athlete. I'm not highly competitive. So
Speaker 1: it was always your interest in baseball was always from
Speaker 1: the point of view of a fan. Yes, the score
Speaker 1: at the end of private Yankees too. He wasn't like
Speaker 1: most kids. He didn't dream of playing baseball, of having
Speaker 1: the experience, and he didn't grow out of his childhood obsession.
Speaker 1: He grew into it. If I'd have grabbed you and said, Bill,
Speaker 1: please explain to me, like why you're interested in this
Speaker 1: to the extent you are, what would you have said
Speaker 1: as to why I was interested in it? It filled
Speaker 1: a hole in my soul somewhere. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: push you too hard on this, but the hole in
Speaker 1: the soul. What was the hole in the soul that
Speaker 1: this stuff filled. I had a difficult childhood. My father
Speaker 1: was a small town school janitor. I had no mother. Anyway,
Speaker 1: it was very, very hard. Bill was the youngest of
Speaker 1: six children. Their mother died of cancer when Bill was
Speaker 1: four years old. Right after that, their father had a
Speaker 1: nasty accident. It left him for a time paralyzed. Baseball. Well,
Speaker 1: two things got me through it. What is baseball? And
Speaker 1: the other is that I had a sister a year
Speaker 1: older than me named Nell, and Nell and I really
Speaker 1: thought of ourselves as one person. We weren't loners exactly,
Speaker 1: but we disliked me in together, just the two of us,
Speaker 1: we did everything together. Bill's sister Nell Ritchie. I remember
Speaker 1: we didn't have kindergarten in our little town. We went
Speaker 1: straight into first grade. So when I went into first grade,
Speaker 1: I took him with me. I remember just dragging him
Speaker 1: along to school with me, and he said on my
Speaker 1: desk and he left it. At any point, did it
Speaker 1: occur to you that he had an unusual view of
Speaker 1: the world around him. Yes, you know, in the evenings
Speaker 1: we didn't have television, so in the evenings we had
Speaker 1: to amuse ourselves. And the way he amused himselfless. He
Speaker 1: just had a big chief tablet and three two boxes
Speaker 1: full of baseball cards, and he would des rite columns
Speaker 1: of a player's name and then all these numbers out
Speaker 1: to the side, and another name, and all these numbers
Speaker 1: out to the side. And he did it night after
Speaker 1: night after night. He'd have pages and pages of columns
Speaker 1: of numbers and names. It was never just about numbers
Speaker 1: for Bill James. He was a search for meaning. The
Speaker 1: James family didn't have a religion, but now went out
Speaker 1: and got one. And so in a way did Bill.
Speaker 1: I don't know. You find one day, just the one day,
Speaker 1: and the one thing for me is is Jesus, and
Speaker 1: the one thing for Bill is baseball. You get the
Speaker 1: idea to a young, effectively orphaned Bill James, Baseball was
Speaker 1: never just baseball. When I was eleven, I was massively
Speaker 1: confused about the nature of the universe and why it
Speaker 1: hated me, and it became very important to me to
Speaker 1: create an order to the universe. Baseball was the starting point.
Speaker 1: It was It was the steak in the ground that
Speaker 1: I used to try to make what sense I could
Speaker 1: out of an overwhelmingly complicated universe. Why is it such
Speaker 1: a particularly good place to do the kind of thinking
Speaker 1: you did? Baseball is very very orderly. In baseball, the
Speaker 1: players take turns, they stop at marked off points, point
Speaker 1: one or point two point three, or they come home.
Speaker 1: There are a number of outs. It's an extremely orderly
Speaker 1: universe gaming the ball and just pushing a toy to
Speaker 1: play with that bad arm throw the first not in time,
Speaker 1: Johnny Law staving back, life could feel senseless, but baseball
Speaker 1: could be fully understood and seemed to be understood. To
Speaker 1: hear the insiders talk, you think the big things worth
Speaker 1: knowing were already known. Year before last the nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: three Sleeves and Washburn won five in a roll at
Speaker 1: the start of the year. At what point in your
Speaker 1: life do you first recall having thoughts about the game
Speaker 1: that might be different from the thoughts that are coming
Speaker 1: out of the mouths of announcers and sports writers and
Speaker 1: the kind of people who talk publicly about the game.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty six, there was an article in the
Speaker 1: Sporting News saying that the Dodgers were thinking about whether
Speaker 1: they could keep West Parker and the lineup. I don't
Speaker 1: know who West Parker is either, but that's okay. West
Speaker 1: Parker isn't the point here. The point is the young
Speaker 1: Bill James and the way he mulled over what everyone
Speaker 1: else was saying. West Parker was a very fine defense
Speaker 1: first basement, but he didn't hit, and they were thinking
Speaker 1: about whether they could afford to keep him in the lineup,
Speaker 1: although they said he probably saved the Dodgers a hit
Speaker 1: per game with his glove. It struck him that the
Speaker 1: value of taking a hit away from the other team
Speaker 1: was the same as getting a hit for your team.
Speaker 1: If West Parker, in every game took a hit away
Speaker 1: from the other team, then West Parker was in effect
Speaker 1: a four seventy hitter. That would make him the best
Speaker 1: hitter who ever lived. And if West Parker was the
Speaker 1: best hitter who ever lived, you'd better keep him in
Speaker 1: the lineup, no matter how bad he was it everything else.
Speaker 1: I wrote a twelve to fifteen page letter and sent
Speaker 1: it to the Sporting News, which you can imagine what
Speaker 1: their reaction to that was. Anyway, let us say they
Speaker 1: did not publish it. So by nineteen sixty six I
Speaker 1: was quite certainly having chains of thought about the game
Speaker 1: that were different than what I was being told. You
Speaker 1: you were already thinking this is worth arguing about. Yes.
Speaker 1: Bill was only sixteen at the time. His sister Nell
Speaker 1: soon left home and got married. Bill went to college
Speaker 1: at the University of Kansas. He took classes in economics,
Speaker 1: but only because he saw that he could apply economics
Speaker 1: to baseball. From a distance, his life seemed almost normal.
Speaker 1: Only his sister was close enough to see that. It
Speaker 1: wasn't if I'd asked you as he gets a bit older, like,
Speaker 1: what do you think is going to happen to your
Speaker 1: brother when he grows up? What do you think you
Speaker 1: might have said? What's he going to be? They went
Speaker 1: to college, he got his degrees, and then he didn't
Speaker 1: do anything with him. And I remember that, you know,
Speaker 1: I was thrown obviously by then, and I was just
Speaker 1: puzzled in the head because he you know, he spent
Speaker 1: all that time and energy and money getting these degrees
Speaker 1: and he's working as a night watchman in a working
Speaker 1: bean factory. What is a heads going on? Bill James
Speaker 1: guarded pork and beans, and not just any pork and beans,
Speaker 1: Stokely Van Camp's pork and beans. They've been a part
Speaker 1: of the family for over a century. I used to
Speaker 1: eat those beans when I was a little kid, So
Speaker 1: it's possible Bill James was guarding my beans. One of them.
Speaker 1: Are those great simple pleasures? Anyway, guarding these beans gave
Speaker 1: him time and space to do what he really wanted
Speaker 1: to do, think even more about baseball. I was not
Speaker 1: a self confident person. I was not a polite person,
Speaker 1: to be blunt, and I was not the kind of
Speaker 1: person who could put on a suit and go do
Speaker 1: a job interview and get a good job. I just
Speaker 1: wasn't made that way. You know. One of the things
Speaker 1: that kind of was just there in our lives was
Speaker 1: that you just accept people the way they are, and
Speaker 1: that was the way he was. So as long as
Speaker 1: they don't get in any trouble and they don't borrow
Speaker 1: money from you, you're you know, and just leave him alone.
Speaker 1: And so we just colleged him alone. The pork and
Speaker 1: beans must have guarded themselves, because inside Stokely Van Camp's factory,
Speaker 1: Bill James got busy cutting and pasting baseball statistics gleaned
Speaker 1: from newspapers. Doing with computers and spreadsheets in the cloud
Speaker 1: would one day make far easier, but doing it, of
Speaker 1: course without those tools, Searching for patterns in the numbers,
Speaker 1: digging for a better understanding of his small, orderly universe
Speaker 1: so he could write a book. There was a community
Speaker 1: of people here who played this local product called ballpark baseball.
Speaker 1: But that community of people who were very much like me.
Speaker 1: That community people was maybe seventy five or one hundred people. Right, Well,
Speaker 1: if there are seventy five or one hundred people in
Speaker 1: Laura's Kansas who have that interest, how aboudy are there
Speaker 1: in the country. It was a very Bill James thing
Speaker 1: to do. Look to data to measure his potential audience.
Speaker 1: Do the math, you know, you come up with an
Speaker 1: answer that's around what, yeah, two three millions something I
Speaker 1: don't know, and I suppose, well, probably it isn't that large,
Speaker 1: but it's got to be large enough. He never imagined
Speaker 1: a real publisher would publish his book because there was
Speaker 1: nothing like his book, and so he need to make
Speaker 1: a photocopy for each and every reader. He was twenty
Speaker 1: seven years old when he finished it. Nineteen seventy seven
Speaker 1: Baseball Abstract, not even the nineteen seventy seven baseball abstract,
Speaker 1: just nineteen seventy seven baseball Abstract. You opened the first
Speaker 1: page of the nineteen seventy seven abstract, which I have
Speaker 1: in my hands right now, and it's just it's like
Speaker 1: it's month by month batting statistics of every of all
Speaker 1: Major leaguers who appeared in one hundred and more games
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy six, And it goes on to thirty pages.
Speaker 1: It's it's just bought, it's just stats, right. But in
Speaker 1: my mind, when I started writing the book, it was
Speaker 1: most something much greater than that. But when I started writing,
Speaker 1: I had no idea how difficult was to write a book.
Speaker 1: When you're thinking someone's going to pick up this book
Speaker 1: and be interested in it, what makes you think that
Speaker 1: the first thirty pages, the numbers in these first thirty
Speaker 1: pages are going to get it going. The fact that
Speaker 1: I was slow to find my voice and my confidence
Speaker 1: is critical to my having been successful, because I felt
Speaker 1: strongly that no one is going to listen to me.
Speaker 1: I always felt like in order for anyone to pay
Speaker 1: attention to me, I had to have a specific fact
Speaker 1: that I could point to. So you led with these facts,
Speaker 1: which don't make for the most thrilling reading unless you're
Speaker 1: really interested in those facts and they're your anchor. They,
Speaker 1: I mean, they keep you honest. Yes, it took Bill
Speaker 1: James thirty one pages of his first book before he
Speaker 1: finally used some words, but once he did, you could
Speaker 1: see him planting the seeds of a revolution that would
Speaker 1: grow and upend all of baseball. Bill James baseball abstract
Speaker 1: was not just about baseball. He was talking about the
Speaker 1: way human beings valued other human beings. He thought the
Speaker 1: experts of baseball were using the wrong statistics to judge
Speaker 1: the players errors. For example, the statistic assigned to players
Speaker 1: who made obvious mistakes on defense? What is an error?
Speaker 1: That's Bill reading what he wrote. It is, without exception,
Speaker 1: the only major statistic in sports, which is a record
Speaker 1: of what an observer thinks should have been accomplished. Some
Speaker 1: moral judgment, really in the peculiar, a quasi morality of
Speaker 1: the locker room. That judgment was made by the official scorekeeper,
Speaker 1: high up in some booth. That alone filled Bill James
Speaker 1: with a righteous indignation. One has a play on a
Speaker 1: baseball field whenever one has the anticipation, reflexes, and the
Speaker 1: speed to get to where the play is. If one
Speaker 1: does not have the in short talent to get to
Speaker 1: the play, then one doesn't have a play and can't
Speaker 1: be charged with an error. The official score doesn't charge
Speaker 1: anybody with a lack of talent. You have to do
Speaker 1: something right to get an error, even if the ball
Speaker 1: is hit right to you and you were standing in
Speaker 1: the right place to begin with. There was a lot
Speaker 1: more of this sort of thing in Bill's first book,
Speaker 1: a lot of its seemingly obvious yet original and startling.
Speaker 1: But to let people know of his book's existence, Bill
Speaker 1: could afford only a small ad in the Sporting News.
Speaker 1: The ad even promised readers that they could have their
Speaker 1: money back if they didn't like it. I mean by
Speaker 1: a second edition of the book sold three hundred copies,
Speaker 1: and I was like, wow, three hundred copies. I had
Speaker 1: very low expectations that I was surprised that there were
Speaker 1: so many people who were interested in this. And at
Speaker 1: what point do you realize that, like, the key to
Speaker 1: having to thinking about baseball in a new and interesting
Speaker 1: way is going to involve a more sophisticated use of
Speaker 1: statistics than most sports writers and broadcasters and so on
Speaker 1: use them. What I realized was that a lot of
Speaker 1: what people said to be true about baseball was mathematically impossible.
Speaker 1: And by the way, this is still true today that
Speaker 1: people in broadcasting baseball games will routinely make statements which
Speaker 1: are mathematically impossible. I always saw those again, not by
Speaker 1: discipline or work, but just instinctively. Every year, for the
Speaker 1: next five years, Bill wrote his baseball abstract and took
Speaker 1: orders for it. He and his wife Susie, photocopy it
Speaker 1: and mail it out, and his audience grew. A movement
Speaker 1: of like minded souls gathered around him. He gave the
Speaker 1: movement a name, saber Metrics. Saber was an acronym for
Speaker 1: the Society for American Baseball Research. Metrics was well metrics.
Speaker 1: Fans of saber Metrics all had one thing in common.
Speaker 1: They were baseball outsiders. Baseball insiders. The players and managers
Speaker 1: took zero interest in what Bill James had to say.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, baseball fans applied what they learned
Speaker 1: from Bill to build teams in their fantasy leagues, and
Speaker 1: they were killing it. Then one day Bill James got
Speaker 1: a phone call from the agent of a major league
Speaker 1: player entering arbitration. Arbitration is a bizarre process in baseball.
Speaker 1: The player and the team appear before a panel of
Speaker 1: three judges to argue about his next year's salary. You
Speaker 1: get into him arbitration case. What's the arbitrator want to know?
Speaker 1: This side says his player is really good, and the
Speaker 1: side says he's not so good. The side says he's
Speaker 1: comparable to the set of players, But what are the
Speaker 1: facts here? The player in this case, a pitcher, needed
Speaker 1: an expert to help him counteract his team's argument that
Speaker 1: he was worse than he claimed. His one loss record
Speaker 1: was nine and sixteen, but his offense's support had been
Speaker 1: very poor. In other words, my pitcher only seems to
Speaker 1: suck because your team sucks, And we introduced an exhibit
Speaker 1: showing that his offense suport had been normal. Is one
Speaker 1: loss record probably been about fourteen and eleven. It wasn't
Speaker 1: necessarily the pitcher's fault that his team had lost, anymore
Speaker 1: than it was necessarily a mother's fault that her kids
Speaker 1: had turned out badly. To evaluate any pitcher or any mom,
Speaker 1: you had to think some more about it. Bill James.
Speaker 1: Next exhibit in the pitcher's defense made the argument that
Speaker 1: his one loss record was simply a byproduct of the
Speaker 1: number of runs his team scored while he was pitching
Speaker 1: and the number of runs they allowed. It's basic now, right,
Speaker 1: something everybody knows. But at the time there's like, oh,
Speaker 1: so that they had no response to that at all.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of great. It's kind of great that
Speaker 1: their ignorance is actually honest. That there is they actually
Speaker 1: they aren't thinking the other side the end, the people
Speaker 1: who are running the baseball team actually aren't thinking. That's right,
Speaker 1: they weren't. But why were Why weren't they thinking? Michael?
Speaker 1: They weren't thinking because they thought they knew. And that's
Speaker 1: that's what destroys me and all of us keeps this
Speaker 1: from doing the things we could do. Is they thinking
Speaker 1: that we know things that we don't actually know. This
Speaker 1: total outsider who was just trying to understand some little
Speaker 1: corner of the universe was creating smarter ways to value
Speaker 1: athletes just as athletes were becoming seriously valuable, just as
Speaker 1: baseball salaries were going from tens of thousands of dollars
Speaker 1: to millions of dollars. The insiders still ignored Bill James,
Speaker 1: but the outsiders loved it, and in nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 1: a real publisher offered him a book contract. Baseball is
Speaker 1: drowning in records, and people think about them and talk
Speaker 1: about them and write about them a great deal. Why
Speaker 1: doesn't anybody use them? I really don't know, but that,
Speaker 1: in essence is what I am about. Here Bill was
Speaker 1: now publishing without a photocopy or staples. His audience grew
Speaker 1: from thousands to hundreds of thousands, all baseball outsiders. He
Speaker 1: saw no sign that anyone inside a major league front
Speaker 1: office was listening to what he was saying until these
Speaker 1: guys came along. Why have all this by dood, Bill odious,
Speaker 1: by what he's Andretten start the celebration. The athleticscept on
Speaker 1: my worst, the Oakland a people inside their front office
Speaker 1: had been reading Bill James without telling anyone. They didn't
Speaker 1: have as much money as the other teams, yet they
Speaker 1: won more games. I went to see the team to
Speaker 1: try to figure out how they did it. The answer
Speaker 1: was simply that they were taking Bill James's thinking out
Speaker 1: onto the field. The book I wrote about the Moneyball
Speaker 1: wasn't just about baseball. It was about expertise. How this
Speaker 1: new knowledge enabled you to run circles around the rest
Speaker 1: of baseball. He gets on base alone, Rocco, Do I
Speaker 1: care if it's a walk or hit? Pete? I do not.
Speaker 1: My book popularized what Bill James had led the Oakland
Speaker 1: A's to do. Then Brad Pitt popularized the book by
Speaker 1: making a movie out of it. In that version, Bill
Speaker 1: James wound up on the cutting room floor. In the movie,
Speaker 1: he shows up in just a single photo and a
Speaker 1: few lines. People are overlooked for a variety of biased
Speaker 1: reasons and perceived flaws age, years, personality, Bill James and
Speaker 1: Mathmax cut straight through that it wasn't that Bill James
Speaker 1: was completely unknown. I mean a lot of people knew
Speaker 1: who he was even before the movie came out. He'd
Speaker 1: had a cameo on The Simpsons. I made baseball as
Speaker 1: much fun as doing your Texans funny not true, opposite
Speaker 1: of true. But like a lot of people who fire
Speaker 1: the first shot, Bill was sort of left behind by
Speaker 1: the revolution. He was eventually hired by the Boston Red Sox,
Speaker 1: and he became woven into the game, and Moneyball became
Speaker 1: a shorthand for a new way of doing things in
Speaker 1: every corner of American life. It's being called moneyball for
Speaker 1: the restaurant industry. Will show you how big data analytics
Speaker 1: is transforming the way you experienced fine dining. Florida Senator
Speaker 1: Marco Rubio announced his campaign yesterday, and fundraisers are already
Speaker 1: calling him the Moneyball candidate. Tracking serial killers using math
Speaker 1: and statistics. It's kind of like Moneyball from there we
Speaker 1: got after you wrote Moneyball, then there was a Bill
Speaker 1: James of everything there was. I mean, there was somebody
Speaker 1: trying to apply my ways of thinking to every subject
Speaker 1: on earth. Did you find some of that interesting or
Speaker 1: did you think that it was a false analogy, that
Speaker 1: there really wasn't a way to do what you did
Speaker 1: with baseball, well, lots of other things. A lot of
Speaker 1: it seemed interesting, but I was always frustrated that I
Speaker 1: couldn't help with it. A lot of people would ask
Speaker 1: me to help with serious problems about things, and I
Speaker 1: know people people would ask what I thought about some
Speaker 1: cancer research they were doing, literally, and it's very you know,
Speaker 1: my parents die of cancer. I wish I could help here,
Speaker 1: but I don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Speaker 1: People wanted you to be an all purpose expert. Yes,
Speaker 1: they figure you crack baseball, you can crack cancer, well right,
Speaker 1: but he I didn't even crack baseball, at least to
Speaker 1: his way of thinking. Even an orderly universe alluded perfect understanding.
Speaker 1: For some reason, people couldn't accept that Bill's growing band
Speaker 1: of followers wanted to believe that he'd settled more questions
Speaker 1: than he actually had. I almost want to read you
Speaker 1: some of it, but I assume you kind of remember it.
Speaker 1: I sort of have to remember it. You sort of
Speaker 1: have to remember it. But I'm gonna read a paragraph
Speaker 1: just to get you back in the spirit. Okay, that's
Speaker 1: me thumbing through nineteen eighty eight Baseball Abstract. The Bill
Speaker 1: James of nineteen eighty eight is at his peak. He's
Speaker 1: got a publisher and sells lots of books. He's become
Speaker 1: a kind of guru, and he's about to tell his
Speaker 1: readers to piss off. He's done writing for them. And
Speaker 1: I only read one little passage because it's pretty great.
Speaker 1: But whereas I used to write one year jackass letter
Speaker 1: a year, I now write maybe thirty. I hate to
Speaker 1: say it, and I hope you're not one of them.
Speaker 1: But I am encountering more and more of my own
Speaker 1: readers that I don't even like, nitwits, who gloam onto
Speaker 1: something superficial in the book and misunderstand its underlying message.
Speaker 1: And I don't remember writing that at all, but I
Speaker 1: haven't read it since I wrote it, Breaking the wand
Speaker 1: he called this long forgotten essay in it, Bill James
Speaker 1: announced that he was retiring from magic. He hadn't lost
Speaker 1: his interest in baseball. He lost his interest in the revolution.
Speaker 1: And I don't want to steer the witness, but the
Speaker 1: thing that I'm just interested in the way you might
Speaker 1: have felt misused, misunderstood, like this thing that you started
Speaker 1: had metastasized into something that you didn't quite like. Yes,
Speaker 1: that was true at the time, and it still is.
Speaker 1: A lot of modern sabord metrics is stuff that I
Speaker 1: don't like and wish people would stop doing. Stop saying
Speaker 1: that's quite true. What kind of saber metrics do you
Speaker 1: wish people would stop doing? Okay, actually, I'll spare you
Speaker 1: the details of the saber metrics. The gist of Bill's
Speaker 1: complaint about his own followers was that they were using
Speaker 1: numbers to persuade themselves and others that they knew more
Speaker 1: than they actually knew, especially when it came to valuing
Speaker 1: human beings. Very early in his career, he himself had
Speaker 1: hinted at the problem the baseball abstract. For three years
Speaker 1: has reverentially avoided rating people. It has been almost a
Speaker 1: point of honor for a rating is a form of
Speaker 1: an opinion. If it has growned out of a formula,
Speaker 1: it becomes an opinion expressed in numbers. Bill himself had
Speaker 1: planted the seeds for an idea of summing up a
Speaker 1: player's value in a single number, but while he had
Speaker 1: serious reservations about it, his followers did not. They ran
Speaker 1: with it, creating a stat called war or wins above
Speaker 1: replacement values. You and Bill James, she could break down
Speaker 1: your little numbers. Take I'll take Bill James. Hey, let
Speaker 1: me give you something dog. All right, objective methodology wins
Speaker 1: above replacement. But never mind what that means. Forget about
Speaker 1: baseball instead, think of all those numbers that substitute for
Speaker 1: understanding all sorts of things, wines, universities, podcasts. We now
Speaker 1: quantify and then move on as if there's nothing more
Speaker 1: to say, when there's often a lot more to say.
Speaker 1: Baseball has war, Wall Street has VAR. VAR or value
Speaker 1: at risk, was a single number dreamed up by financial
Speaker 1: quants in the late nineteen eighties so that a Wall
Speaker 1: Street CEO could supposedly see how much money his traders
Speaker 1: might make or lose in a single day. CEOs began
Speaker 1: to trust VAR over the advice of their own traders.
Speaker 1: After all, VAR was a number that claimed ninety nine
Speaker 1: percent accuracy, a low VAR number met you were doing fine.
Speaker 1: Var numbers were low for Wall Street firms right up
Speaker 1: to two thousand and eight, and then the risks that
Speaker 1: the traders took blew up the global financial system. The
Speaker 1: problems nothing numbers, obviously, it's how people use them. The
Speaker 1: numbers start out as tools for thinking, they wind up
Speaker 1: replacing thought. What I was always trying to do is
Speaker 1: open up the discussion to more ways of looking at
Speaker 1: the problem, and war or any other absolute measure has
Speaker 1: the opposite effect. It's not opening up the discussion. It's saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're done. We're done. Bill watched as his followers found
Speaker 1: what they supposed were the final answers to some question,
Speaker 1: rather than the start of a new question, as they
Speaker 1: forgot all over again how hard it is to really
Speaker 1: know anything, even in a small, orderly universe like baseball.
Speaker 1: When I came to see you in Lawrence, when I
Speaker 1: was working on Moneyball, you had that picture on your
Speaker 1: wall of a baseball field, and you said, that's a
Speaker 1: field of ignorance. We think we know so much, but
Speaker 1: actually what we know is about the size of the infield.
Speaker 1: Do you still feel that way. Do you feel like
Speaker 1: most of what there is to know about what goes
Speaker 1: on in a baseball field and the people who play
Speaker 1: the game is sort of known? I feel that way
Speaker 1: more than now that I did. That baseball had been
Speaker 1: a small part of the world in which Bill James
Speaker 1: might seek understanding. It was that for him when he
Speaker 1: was eleven years old. It was still that for him
Speaker 1: after seventy. Every human being on earth is trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how the world works all the time, and
Speaker 1: that the moment you're born, you're pitched into this search
Speaker 1: for understanding of the world, and that effort to understand
Speaker 1: the world dominates your life every day. It's more pervasive
Speaker 1: than the need for food, because once you eat, you
Speaker 1: don't care about that. It's more pervasive than the desire
Speaker 1: for sex. It's there all the time. You're always trying
Speaker 1: to figure out the world. But the world is vastly
Speaker 1: more complicated than the human mind, so you can never
Speaker 1: do it. So in that environment where everybody is trying
Speaker 1: all the time to figure out the world, but you
Speaker 1: can't do it, what happens people latch on to explanations
Speaker 1: for things that seem to work. Bill James created a movement.
Speaker 1: That movement has replaced one expert with another. But the
Speaker 1: point of the movement wasn't simply to replace the expert.
Speaker 1: The point was to change the spirit in which the
Speaker 1: expert operates, to unsettle their explanations. Whenever I've asked what's
Speaker 1: going to happen? I always want to answer, although sometimes
Speaker 1: I now remember not to, I always want to answer.
Speaker 1: How can you possibly be stupid enough to ask that question?
Speaker 1: I don't know what's going to happen? Idea It's just
Speaker 1: not the nature of the world, but is the nature
Speaker 1: of people that most of them will answer the question
Speaker 1: even if they don't know the answer. Yes, A boy
Speaker 1: wanders into a small and seemingly orderly universe, a universe
Speaker 1: that can be understood, a universe in which no one's
Speaker 1: mother has to die, a universe in which the experts
Speaker 1: seem to know everything there is to know. The young
Speaker 1: man teaches us that much of what the experts think
Speaker 1: they know is wrong. That lesson is hard enough to absorb,
Speaker 1: but there was a bigger one behind it, one that
Speaker 1: we failed thus far to learn. Against the Rules is
Speaker 1: written and hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by
Speaker 1: Catherine Gerardo and Lydia Jeanecott. Julia Barton is our editor,
Speaker 1: with additional editing by Audrey Dilling. Beth Johnson is our
Speaker 1: fact checker, and Mia Lobell executive produces. Our music is
Speaker 1: created by John Evans and Matthias boss A Stellwagon Symphonette.
Speaker 1: We record our show at Berkeley Advanced Media Studios, expertly
Speaker 1: helmed by Tofa Ruth. Thanks also to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame,
Speaker 1: John Snars, Carly Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Nicole Morrano, Royston Deserve, Daniella Lacan, Mary Beth Smith, and
Speaker 1: Jason Gambrel. Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: Keep in touch, sign up for Pushkin's newsletter at pushkin
Speaker 1: dot Fm, or follow at Pushkin Pods. To find more
Speaker 1: Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to podcasts. Don't you think, Michael, Don't
Speaker 1: you think that young people always vastly underestimated how easy
Speaker 1: it is to change the world. I think young people
Speaker 1: will assume that the world is just what it is,
Speaker 1: and they don't actually realize how easy it is to
Speaker 1: change many things. It's almost the opposite of what most
Speaker 1: people would say, because young people seem to be the
Speaker 1: ones who are agitating to change the world. But I
Speaker 1: think you might be right. I think so. What you're
Speaker 1: saying is you underestimated the effect on the world you
Speaker 1: might have very much. Yes,