Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood | Michael Lewis | Talks at Google

thank you for coming I'm thrilled to introduce Michael Lewis he doesn't know it but I've been a fan of his for about 20 years when he first wrote liars poker which if you haven't read it is sort of a scathing account of life on Wall Street which of course isn't what I chose to do when I graduated about the same time as he did I came here and we'd love to make fun of everyone on Wall Street so he's very googley and fits right in one of my favorite books that he wrote was Moneyball and that too was very googley it basically talks about applying data to decisions in baseball he then later wrote an article about applying data to the NBA and has some anecdotes about this year's Laker Houston series which he can talk about I think you could actually make an argument that his book had more influence on baseball than any book in history because some of the management and coaches are actually paying attention to his book so if you haven't read it you should get a look at that his latest book is called home game and I'm interested to see if he actually figures out how to use data to make decisions there because I haven't read it but I understand it's about fatherhood so Michael thank you for joining us I've got this right I'm going to talk for about five or ten minutes and then we're gonna it's a open it up in it's up to them right okay so I thought you know what I would do this book that I just published came out last week and it's um it's a bastard child of a book it was never really meant to exist and just what kind of that was gonna read a little passage from it but I was going to sort of explain how it came about it it's a it treats fatherhood much as I treated Wall Street and and it this is what happened I impregnated my wife 11 years ago and and and had and had it really the only model in my head of fatherhood was the one I was raised with I'm very close to my own father but but he wouldn't eat my own father had a real gift for not doing any of the dirty work and he once watched me change a diaper with the kind of this kind of perplexity and after I was finished he looked at me he said he said I didn't even talk to you - you were 21 and and so I had no role model for for for the new fatherhood and where it falls were supposed to be involved and so on and so forth and now I had a very diligent wife who would pile up the books about fatherhood beside my bed that I was meant to read before we had our first child and I went through them all and felt rather prepared but then found that when I got into the actual experience there was nothing no one had described to me and much as no one had described Wall Street to me and this is the seeds of literary material when you have an experience and it feels so different from how you've been prepared to feel there's something that needs to be made sense of and I didn't the first thing I was going to write about it for public consumption what I did in the beginning was kind of four or five months into it I I realized that when I encounter people who were about to have babies I was already starting to lie about what it had been like when the baby came out and I was sanitizing it and making it much more pleasant than it actually was and I thought so I have a record of what I actually thought and felt I wanted to start keeping a journal of the experience and so that's what I did and then I started showing it bits and pieces of it to my wife and some of the things I was writing was that we were kind of truly appalling and and but nevertheless they were what I felt and I was surprised how relieved she was when she read these things because she come bare view her husband is this black box and couldn't understand completely the signals that were coming out of it and here I was finally explaining it to her and so she started look forward to getting these pages at the end of a week and kind of reading through cut to a few months later and I'm having a conversation with the editor of slate B on Slate the online magazine Jacob Weisberg and Jacob has just become a father and he and I start to commiserate about how our lives have been destroyed by these little things that have been introduced to them and Jacob wasn't a self-pitying as me but he was he recognized that this was material and so he said you know you will run some of this journal and and so what I did over the last night ten years nine and a half years I have three children now they're aged 10 7 & 2 the first year after the child was born I was diligent about if something if something happened that seemed relevant to the experience I would go and write it down and Jacob published some of these things but I never thought that this was going to go anywhere further than that and the things that I published in Slate generated quite a big controversy I mean people are they're funny but then some people were upset with them and but I didn't begin it was just a little web articles I didn't pay much attention to it a year ago my my my literary agents wife got sent by a friend basically the stack of things I written online over the nine years and she read that read them through and was laughing in bed when she was reading them and there are a husband my agent said what are you reading and she said well you know your client does written this thing he had no idea had done this and he started reading and he called me he said you know there's a book in this I said you got to be kidding me he said no read it and so he sent me my own stuff I of course forgotten all of it because you forget everything that happens the first year if you have a child and it was reading and I was reading like it was like reading about a different person but it was interesting to me but for a couple of reasons one was the material was very rich and it was even richer than I had imagined as I went up put it down the page and to Manhattan a chiral narrative to it you could see this character who starts out a perfect Neanderthal learning a bit about how to do this thing called fatherhood and developing and it didn't take that much to glue them together to pick the best ones and writing a long introduction and a long ending to it and and have something that looked that that actually was kind of fun and the the so that's how I came about I found when I was going through it that one of the things that emerged from the material that I hadn't been completely conscious of as I was writing the journal was that I was constantly being surprised by my own feelings right from the beginning not being carefully attached to the baby when the baby was born was a shock to me and it took a while to get over that shock and alert and to realize that paternal love was something in my case that was going to be learned rather than something I was born with and it came through the the caring of the child but over and over I found myself feeling kind of inappropriate things and part of why I was riding that thing obviously journal obviously was to rationalize my own my own feelings to myself and the little passage I were read before we have our conversation was a passage I wrote when I realized for the first time in my life as a father I had had that bursting with pride feeling you're supposed to feel when your child says their first word or walks for the first time but I didn't have it until my eldest child was six and it wasn't about my eldest child and it was we were on vacation we're at a fancy hotel in Bermuda like fancy hotels everywhere the place is paying no attention to the whims of small children the baby pool is vast nearly as big as the pool for the grown-ups to which it is connected by a slender canal in the middle of the baby pool is a hot tub just for little kids my two daughters now ages 6 and 3 leap from the hot tub into the baby pool and back again the pleasure they take in this could not be more innocent or pure then out of nowhere come four older boys 10 maybe 11 years old as anyone knows who hasn't as anyone who has only girls knows boys add nothing to any social situation but trouble these four sat on proving the point seeing my little girls they grabbed the pool noodles intended to keep three-year-olds afloat and wheel them as weapons they descend upon Quin my six year old lacking the water on either side of her until she's almost in tears I'm hovering in the canal between the baby pool and the grown-up pool wondering if I should intervene Dixie beats me to it Dixie's the three-year-old she jumps out in front of her older sister and thrusts out her three-year-old chest teasing boys she hollers so loudly that the grown-ups around the pool peer over there Daniel steal novels even the boys are taken aback Dixie now on stage raises her voice up a notch you just shut up your stupid mother to the extent that all hell can break loose around a baby pool in a Bermuda resort it does a Jonathan grishin Grisham novel is lowered several of Danielle Steel's vanished into beach bags I remain hovering in the shallows of the grown-up pool where it enters the baby pool with my entire head above water my fart my first thought oh my god my second thought no one knows I'm her father I sink lower like a crocodile so that just my eyes and forehead are above the waterline but in my heart a new feeling Rises pride behind me a lady on a beach chair shouts Kevin Kevin get over here Kevin appears to be one of the noodle wielding 11 year old boys but mom he says Kevin now the little monster sulks over to his mother's side while his fellow orcs await the higher judgment I'm close enough to hear her ream him out it's delicious Kevin did you teach that little girl those words yes mom no then where did she learn them as it happens I know the answer to that one carpool months ago I was driving them home from school my two girls plus two other kids a seven-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl they were crammed in the back seat of the Volkswagen Passat jabbering away I was alone in the front seat not not especially listening but then the ten-year-old said Dina said a bad word today which one asked Quinn the S word said the ten-year-old who they all said what's the S word I asked we can't say it without getting into trouble said the ten-year-old knowingly you're safe here I said she thought it over for a second then said stupid I said smiling Wally said the D word said Quinn what's the D word I asked dumb she shouted and they all giggle at the sheer illicit pleasure of it then the 7 year old boy chimed in I know a bad word - I know - he said what's the bad word I asked brightly I didn't see why he should be left out shut up you stupid I swerved off the roads stop the car and hit the emergency lights I began to deliver a lecture on the difference between bad words and seriously bad words but the audience was full it fully consumed with laughter Dixie especially wanted to know the secret of making daddy stop the car shut up mother stupid she said Dixie I said daddy said Quin thoughtfully how come you say a bad word when we spill something and when you spill something you just say oops stupid scream Dixie and they all laughed Dixie I said she stopped they all did for the rest of the drive they just whispered so here we are months later in this Bermuda pool Dixie with her chest thrust out in defiance me floating like a crocodile and feeling very much different than I should I should be embarrassed and concerned I should be sweeping her out of the pool and washing her mouth out with soap but I don't feel that way actually I'm impressed more than impressed odd it's just incredibly heroic taking act out after this Rat Pack of boys plus she's sticking up for her big sister which isn't something you see every day I don't want to get in her way I just want to see what happens next behind me kevin has just finished being torn what appears to be a new by his mother and is relaunching himself into the baby pool with a real malice he's as indignant as a serial killer who just got put away on a speeding ticket he's guilty of many things but not of teaching a three-year-old girl they are cursing now he intends to get even gathering his fellow orcs in the hot tub he and his companions once again threatened quinn dixie once again leaps into the fray teasing boys she shouts now she has the attention of an entire Bermuda Resort you watch out teasing boys because I peed in this pool two times once in the hot pool and once in the cold pool the teasing boys flee grossed out and defeated various grown-ups say various things to each other but no one seeks to remove Dixie from the baby pool Dixie returns to playing with her sister who appears far less grateful than she should be and a crocodile drops below the water line swivels and vanishes into the depths of the grown-up pool but he makes a mental note to buy that little girl in ice cream cone even if her mother disapproves so why don't I stop stop with that that gives you a flavor but and we don't have to talk about this book we can talk about magazine articles or the books or whatever you'd like to talk about but you're gonna have to leave the conversation no I didn't think so so the last time you were here I asked a question about who you would rather or if you had the choice whether you would rather be you or Billy Beane in reference I remember this so with the advent of I guess what is the Moneyball movie coming out I suppose the question this time is given the choice who would you want to be you would you know the bunny ball movie is doesn't have me in it the money part the Moneyball movie has gone through many iterations in the last five years and there was an unfortunate draft of the script where I was close to the main character and it was so bad though that there was not any risk if it was gonna be made what they've done instead is much closer to the book and I'm not really in the book except to listen and they don't before they didn't they don't really need me for the movie in many ways they don't need me for the movie but as a character they don't need me so they don't have me what's interesting about what they've done with the movie is with the exception of Billy Beane who's being played by Brad Pitt and Paul DePodesta his right-hand man who's being played by Demetri Martin much of the rest of the cast is the hour the actual people Steven Soderbergh is directing it and he's decided that he rather that he's gonna push the boundaries between fiction fact and fiction to the point that the movie is set in the Oakland A's 2002 season just like the book he has hired and reassembled the entire 2002 Oakland A's team and got them back in their old uniforms I was supposed to go from here to Seattle and have dinner tonight with Scott Hatteberg the former first baseman and I got an email from her saying I'm even shooting my scenes down in Hollywood I said your scenes he says you know I've got these scenes in this movie and he said this guy is supposed to be a DeSoto bird guy supposed to be a genius but he's hiring all of us to acumen how smart can he be you know but it's gonna be it's gonna be very interesting to see how he does it because because he is he really is pushing envelopes here with it with the way he's cast it but so there's no answer your question because I'm not in it I had a shot I thought on last weekend of actually being in the movie of the blindside you know the book I'm the football book that's being filmed too right now in Atlanta it's a little ahead it's ahead of Moneyball it comes out in November and it's mostly filled and I was there on the set but actually getting yourself into one of your movies is a huge pain in the ass you just sit around what actors do it's so tedious you have to sit for hours and hours and wait for the moment where you know you're in the stands and the camera pans over you kind of thing and so we I just abandoned it like I stayed for an hour and left so the movie me and the movies not gonna happen I'm afraid okay thank you hi there thanks for coming tonight I'm interested in your reaction to the Amazon Kindle as a distribution device for books and particularly the pricing model that Amazon is using to price them at $9.99 for the most part the books what that means to you as an author well in the short term nothing the author's get exactly the same cut of the book the same amount for a Kindle sale as a actual book sale I can't believe in the long run there is not going to be some negotiation that takes place but in the short room run amazon's been very careful not to offend the off the kid I was given one of those Kindles by Amazon as it when it was being demoed and I I don't assimilate new technology well it usually takes me a long to like new kids takes me a long time before I get my mind around the fact this thing is supposed to be in my life and I'm supposed to make doom you know accommodate it the Kindle was a huge exception when I when I got it I was instantly reading and now could go anywhere without it books and newspapers on it and it's really clear that this is the future of my publishing life I mean I the books will still exist and as objects but increasingly the sales are going to be going through the Kindle I really like that they're paying me as much for my Kindle sales is for the real sales but but but it has you know we don't the authors don't see this right now they haven't been cut out yet either so you've written about the finance industry and I'm wondering if you feel that you have any insights or expertise you've developed there that allows you to comment on kind of economic policy and what's going on right now and just kind of the macroeconomic forces in play that we're that we're seeing right now you got people in the room we do that much better than I could but the idea the financial crisis interests me greatly and I have a lot to say about that I'm writing a book about it my first book was was set on Wall Street and it was liars poker and it was at the I thought going to be this little message in the bottle to future generations who would never believe how outrageous Wall Street got in the 1980s I really thought that it was good it was the end of an era when I wrote it and I thought that in part because I just couldn't believe any system that paid me to dispense financial advice could sustain itself and I really didn't and and there were many people around me who were even less qualified for the job than I was so it just seemed preposterous at the time and that it not only continued but but got to the point where where the kind of what happened in the 1980s seem quaint in retrospect caused me to re-engage you know I mean it all finally came collapsing down so I've spent a lot of time in the last six months wandering around talking to people figure out how to tell this story and I think I've figured out how to do that I haven't finished it kind of in it but but and there there's several angles of attack to the your question if you're asking me broadly what I think is gonna have in the economy I don't know I don't think anybody knows intrigues me actually generally you probably get this all the time isn't becoming how much people want you to predict things that are essentially unpredictable this happens you know in book tours you do after do things like go on CNBC's Power Lunch and they want you to tell them what you think the price of oil is going to do eight people who are willing to tell you what the price of oils can do and come on with a total certainty and say it's going to be in a hundred one hundred dollars a barrel in six months but they say and and if they thought that why they on CNBC you know they should go make their fortune buying barrels of oil I mean it's it's I don't know what's I don't know what's going to happen I do think there's a lot to be said about what has happened it hasn't been said there's a lot of really interesting narrative journalism to do about about how we got to where we are one aspect of it that really intrigues me is there is a you notice this if you want pay very close attention to the public statements in the public posture of the people who who ran the big Wall Street firms people who have been fingered as sort of culprits one way or another you see that they think of themselves often as victims they think of themselves as people who got washed away by a tsunami that no one saw coming and that they they really shouldn't be held accountable for this because because nobody saw it coming why should they why should why should they be expected to see it coming and this is clearly not true people did see it coming and not just people who go on CNBC and talk about it they're people who they're investors a handful of investors who reposition themselves looking at hard facts to to make a lot of money off off the collapse of the financial markets especially the collapse of the subprime mortgage market and if you which intriguing is that it's how upside down the financial world became the the only people there was a point where mid 2006 to mid 2007 we're the only people who were doing serious credit analysis of the loans that were being made in the mortgage market were the people who were doing it so they could find the best ones to sell short and that is bizarre the people who are making the loans we're not paying nearly as much attention to what they were doing as the people who were going to bet against them you've got to think about that another anger sort of angle of attack to your question is so how the government has approached the problem of dealing with these the wreckage and I'm one of the people who was a little appalled by it I mean I really had hoped that the Obama administration would take a different tack than the Bush administration did and I don't understand in particular why the starting point when faced with a failed financial institution is to assume that one it can't be nationalized and to its creditors can't take any sort of hit at all and because once you make those assumptions you're left with only one option and that's what they're doing gifting money to banks until they are solvent again and since there's no political will to actually write this check of the size that needs to be written which is trillions it has to be done surreptitiously it's been sneakily which is seems to be an unsustainable way of doing it I might be wrong about this but so it's because it's essentially a sneaky process the flow of information from the people who might be in a position to know about what actually is going on inside these institutions is very poor I've been working on a big piece about AIG AIG is at the center is one of is it's it's one of the institution's it's most intriguing to explore I have been spending a lot of time interviewing people in the little unit inside AIG called AIG FP which is supposedly responsible for depending on which account you read fifty billion one hundred billion one hundred eighty billion dollars of losses talking about a handful of traders in London in Connecticut I've talked to not all of them but a lot of them and invariably when I sit down and talk to them they tell me you're the first person who's asked me a question the Treasury hasn't been here the Fed hasn't been here our new CEO hasn't been here nobody's asking us any question oh wait nobody is actually wants to know what happened now that's shocking I mean that just tells you so that tells you a lot so so you know there's a you asked a broad question those are right that's a attempt to know it so I really like and admire the spirit of the book because it it punctures the myth of fatherhood and this pseudo archetype that's transformed since the time of your father so thank you for that because I found as a new father a lot of those books is just totally empty rhetoric and you're supposed to hold the hand of your wife as she's giving birth and give her a lavender pillow and all of that stuff which is just totally where do you think that comes from well I was gonna ask you that but grab a beer in but ya know it's an interesting question right yeah where all these instructions come from because they're kind of their new yeah you know my father didn't read those things the world's changed is that the question you realize well I I did want to get your perspective on that but the other part was it's it's taking private thoughts public yeah and you're representing you know sharing your feelings disclosing your feelings and your on Natalie your well no you're representing your your kids in here so I'm curious if you and your wife had to reconcile that of making their lives either not so much public but your feelings of that and being like you know is my son gonna be in therapy for the rest of you know of XY and Z yeah did you have to reconcile that or is that just a lot of your your occupation that you think now you know I the there's several answers that question the the truth is that when I started doing this we had a six month old or five month old and it was so much more about me then this thing that had come into our alive it was a it was it was gonna be her prehistory she was not gonna have any memory of it or really any kind of ownership of it it was just going to be this this period that would have gone undocumented and it was hard to imagine how writing about her as a five month old was gonna scar her the this the second answer is that in his pay just tell you something about my relationship with my children and what I imagined it would be when I was even when I was writing about it is that the men of the galley of this thing came in the first person to grab it was the that child who's now ten who took it into her room came out five minutes later we got to talk all right so about what just yeah there's some really bad words in here you got to take those out and she'd read that first then you can't write those words and I said well you know sometimes it's okay so so it but then she took it back into the room that was okay she took it back in the room and all that came out of that room were a howls of laughter and then she grabbed her sister and they would read parts of it to her sister they it's been a delight for them to have this part of their lives documented I said on the daily show the other night it seemed to appalled Jon Stewart we need kind of candidate this question I said I wasn't so worried about the effect I was gonna have on my children writing about them I was more worried about what would happen when I stopped writing about him because when they cease to be material I had no interest in them and it was it was a joke right but but but it was true absolutely true absolutely true that this was an incentive structure that was very useful to me in those early days they gave me an excuse not to pay attention to but to pay attention we're the kind of acuteness and and it really enriched our relationship before they knew we had a relationship so it always felt okay having said that I'm done no Matt this is my wife it's um when the the book has when it first started getting reviews and you know I was on the TV talking about it ten days ago she at one point she turned to me we're on The Today Show together and at when we left she turned to me said you're not going to turn our life into a reality TV show are you I said no promise you know that's The Closer they've had their discussion about it now the part that was a little sensitive was her the parts about her because she was incredibly indulgent about almost all of it but the part that hit a nerve was interesting childbirth is an unbelievably traumatic experience you've been through it now modern medicine can make it seem not so traumatic but even so if you just think for a minute when you're watching the doctors do what they do what would have happened if they weren't there you realize the body is going through something that would might well kill it my wife would have died in the first with our first child if she had not had medical care the second child would have died in childbirth had she not had the doctors not been there the third time through it went the way it goes in the books everything was fine we get left the hospital early he thought the baby was sleeping we thought oh my god this is how it works for this is this is why nobody talked about it this I was supposed to go we get home it's 2:00 in the morning we have the other girls downstairs we've sent the neighbors back home we're back at home in our bed I'm sleeping baby's sleeping and my wife's fingernails go into my arm and I wake up and she has this look on her face it's described in his book in the book I've never seen anything like it she was absolutely terrified she thought we were all gonna die she thought she opened right now he was like a character she looked like a character in a horror movie who was about to be the victim she and she had this she couldn't be alone I had to stay awake we had weather we couldn't close her eyes we don't have any things so we went down and googled actually we went in her computer opened up typed in panic and postpartum and sure enough pop up pops an academic paper postpartum panic attacks and it is it's riveting if you're not going through it but but it's it's a that she became she went insane for this last eight weeks and the aftershocks of this chemical this hormonal response lasted a year and when I went to write about that she was sensitive because she she was still feeling a little crazy and she didn't want me to be talking about it but she then took a deep breath and she said why didn't we know about this we've been through this three times now and nobody may mention this and it is and it happens to us you know a meaningful number of women and it just falls in the category of many things they don't tell you that they're just so there's such a variety of experience out there to be had and it is such a traumatic experience she but she that was the one time we had a conversation where yeah I'm not sure I want you right by there she said no I would have done it obviously but she the conclusion that would be useful for someone that you know to have a description of what this is like because it's so bizarre so you're easy about it but I might as I'm not doing this anymore this is this was it so the Steven Strasberg situation where yeah it's basically prepared to throw up fifty million dollars at a completely untested kid yes a lot of people are talking about how that sort of highlights the issues you wrote about in Moneyball like the gap between high income and lower income teams right do you think that that's finally going to be some kind of catalyst for change in the way that the stephen strasburg is going to be a catalyst that no I think that this has happened so often based baseball become inured to this sort of situation where where a a superstar comes along in the draft and the and Scott Boras negotiate a deal for him and the team gets well the team is just taking all the risk is basically this transfer of risk and there's a huge amount of risk there was a piece Allen Schwartz did in the New York Times a few days ago listing the the Stephen Strasburg the great pitchers that he can't miss college or high school pitchers that have come into the draft in previous years and none of them worked out they all get hurt so what I think it's going to drive baseball now I think that that that baseball is approaching and slowly a point of crisis money became a bigger and bigger issue with free agency the gaps between rich and poor are permanent the Yankees are always gonna have more money than the Tampa Bay Rays as long as there were inefficiencies in the market it didn't matter as much in that that you could a team like the Oakland A's could find a better way of doing things and reduce the importance of money eliminate the importance of money be my other money gap the inefficiencies are quickly being removed from the market once those are gone the rich teams will have a shocking advantage and I think eventually what's going to happen is they're going to have the the there's gonna have to be a restructuring of the game along the lines the NBA and the NFL or else is just going to be it is just going to be the rich team wins every year or the rich team one of the rich teams wins every year and I that will happen but I also assume it won't happen until there's a crisis now that that they that there's some noticeable decline in fan interest and it gets attributed to this to these imbalances and the owners get together and said we've got that we need parody parody is it is what keeps people interested but I think it's can be in a ways I were talking a decade off yes so I really enjoyed your recent basketball article on vadia in Daryl Morey Jonathan mentioned you had a few tidbits on the Lakers rocket series maybe you could share a few oh sure now also could you maybe compare Billy Beane and Daryl Morey just curious okay the piece is talking about was a New York Times Magazine piece about Shane Battier who plays for Houston Rockets and it came about mainly because I kept waiting for someone else to write it and they didn't do it but when Moneyball when Moneyball came out it was seized on first not by baseball front offices but by first Wall Street and then the front offices in other sports and one of the people who was really interested in it was Daryl Morey who's now the general manager of the Houston Rockets and more he was already you know trying to find new and better statistics to measure what happened on a basketball court and basketball is particularly challenging baseball is such a clean statistical environment it's so easy to isolate and assign credit and blame on a baseball field compared to the other sports and in basketball it's very difficult and basketballs got this problem that it's got these these historic statistics that don't tell you very much points and rebounds and assists this don't tell very much about the players contribution to the team's success and Daryl Morey told me I don't know three years ago we need big whenever he became the GM of the Rockets I guess was almost three years ago that the first move he had made was to trade for Shane Battier and he'd done it because when he was in the front office of the Celtics where Maury had been before he had you know they had developed pretty crude statistics but more useful statistics where they're trying to measure a player is a fact not a player's points rebounds and assists but his effect on everyone else on the court what he did for his team's scoring and rebounds and assists and what he did how he affected the other teams the opponent's scoring and rebounds and assists and what he found was that that some players popped up who didn't actually have very impressive conventional statistics but they had a huge effect on their fellow players so they were they were the great team player and basket you know people always say it's a team sport but actually if you watch the NBA it doesn't mean it's not run like as a team sport it run like a sport of superstars and everybody subordinates themselves to the wishes of the team superstar well here was a guy who was finding a way to behave like a team player even though he wasn't the market wasn't encouraging him to be a team player nobody was perceiving what he was doing and but more he had and he traded for him and it was regard at the time as a scandalous trade houston they thought everybody said was a bad trade but the Rockets have become extremely successful and Daryl Morey will tell you that Shane Battier is a right at the center of the reason they're successful even though you you don't see it it was hard to see it so so I wrote about I Battier let me into his life a bit and I wrote about his experience and I used as a frame for the peace and encounter between daddy and Kobe Bryant daddy had been Darren Millar you'd with statistics that Battier had been more effective guarding Kobe Bryant than anybody in the NBA even a body is not much of a natural athlete and nobody really had really thought of him as much of a it was okay defensive player he's now gotten a lot more credit very recently and Kobe Bryant is the superstar and nobody stops Kobe Bryant kind of thing and and so I I went to built a piece around the next game they played each other and showed how bad EA thought about guarding Kobe Bryant I thought about was driven in part was instinctive the part of it we had been informed by the analysis done in the Rockets front office that the Rockets gave him a grid of the court and they showed the probability of Bryant making a shot from here versus here versus here versus here and in different circumstances off the dribble off a pass off a pick-and-roll so on and so forth and badias our whole approach was to drive Kobe Bryant to the to the place where he was relatively the weakest he was always going to get his shots he was always gonna get his points you just tried to make him inefficient and in making him inefficient he was actually able to make cold but because we brought a liability to LA Lakers and so I write this article and it's very funny when you write about professional athletes none of them want to admit they read none of them were in the period it's like a bat it's a bad thing to read if you're a professional athlete and they never want to admit there been any unless it's grotesque I grow some grotesque personal insult the salt has entered their life but Phil Jackson before the Rockets played the Lakers in their playoffs apparently gave Kobe Bryant a copy of the article to goad him to show him what the Rockets were doing to making him a liability and and he read it and he was hollering about a about this thing through the series and you could see it you know it was hysterical what he was doing you know you you say you can guard me but you can't guard me it was everything but on page 46 of the New York Times Magazine you said this and that's not true and he was like a fact she was fact-checking the article on the court and and so it was I got a couple of funny emails from da da during the series was the first really add much I had heard from him I heard him once after the piece came out but and and you know one of them said that you know it's articles following me around the court kind of thing and so it was a funny experience but down more averse Billy Beane Billy Beane is different from almost everybody who has sought to emulate him Billy Beane was the innovator in baseball he wasn't someone who generated new baseball knowledge he was someone who took a sledgehammer and forced a baseball organization to use new baseball new knowledge and who was very receptive to new ways of doing things he was a he was he was a transformative figure nobody else is that because of Billy Beane Daryl Morey can be who he is baseball is now littered with GM's and assistant GM's who are essentially stats geeks I mean that's their what their relative strength is their intelligence their analytical abilities and it isn't that they've played baseball Billy Beane is not the only reason that they've got where they are but Billy Beane is a big reason why they got where they are so they all owe Billy Beane a thank-you note down having some of that Daryl Moore there are a lot of really interesting characters who are geeks you know geeks by the standards of the sporting world a geek by by the way a geek in professional sports is someone who only played at Harvard you know it is not a lot of these people are athletes too but they didn't ever play professionally and and there is there's still room for bravery especially intellectual bravery in in these various sports and Morrie's gotten a lot of it you know he he what I love about him is that he doesn't try to hide who he is he doesn't you do find there's this tendency that when somebody who is essentially a brain for the operation gets in a position of authority in a sports franchise they want to seem like they're a jock or they want to cozy up to the athletes they want to be they want to be kind of one of the boys and Darryl does not try to do that he is he is who he is doesn't try to minimize the umbrella t'v importance of his brain versus his body and and he he he's gonna get grief the more that you know I can already see what's coming down the pike for him until he wins a championship he will be regarded as a colorful eccentric in in the NBA he'll be regarded as someone who yeah he's funny he's interesting he's smart but no he doesn't really understand what Championships are made of because then a basketball guy that's the rap on a lot of the new baseball people and but then of course eventually they win a championship you know Theo Epstein wins a championship in Boston and he's acceptable all of a sudden so we would Darryl I think there's going to be that battle will be waged in other sports as it's been waged in baseball but I don't think it'll be nearly as ferocious because baseball a lot of the a lot of a lot of the issues have been sorted out in baseball first thank you for having me

Channel: Talks at Google

Views: 12,223

Rating: 4.7419353 out of 5

Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, Michael Lewis, raising children, fatherhood, having kids, being a parent, author talks

Id: E_XWuIeuN1c

Length: 47min 5sec (2825 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2009