The Exchanges

Q Did you have a moment or an example where you got something out of a conversation just by being brief?

A I did an interview a few years ago for 60 Minutes Sports Show, which is how I started here at 60 Minutes, with Marshawn Lynch, and I was sort of warned in advance that this guy's a little bit different, and he doesn't like to give interviews, and I went through the transcript when I was done, and I realized that, again, when I just sort of sat there, It yielded the best material, and it was a TV interview, so you don't want to interrupt the other person. You really want them to speak and say what you want them to say and sort of let it be their interview. That interview and reading that transcript was really, I mean, again, this came 20 years into my career. I mean, these interviews are tricky, and it's much trickier when you're doing it with two cameras, and You can interrupt me, and I can interrupt you, and we have a great conversation. If we're doing this for TV, and we're talking over each other, that's not good TV.

AI assessment note: “I did an interview a few years ago for 60 Minutes Sports Show... with Marshawn Lynch”

Q Well, why don't you just start with your background and how you got started in this business and go from there?

A Oh, man. We got to define our terms. I don't even know what business I'm in anymore. Well, you and I knew each other in college. I went to law school. I took a year off, went to law school, which was sort of a path of least resistance move. You know, you're 22 years old. You're not quite sure what to do. Well, Law school is always safe. I loved law school. I met my wife in law school. I was in, at Penn in Philly, and Elizabeth Warren was on the faculty. It was a great time. I just had no interest in being a lawyer, and I worked one summer in a law firm and have never looked at my watch. Clock watching is not just a metaphorical term, and I just said, boy, I got to figure out another game plan. I can't do this for the next 40 years, and I lucked into an internship at Sports Illustrated. They needed someone who had a Legal background. This was after Mike Tyson, and this was, I guess, 1996. I think they had come to this realization that sports and the law was going to be a increasingly busy intersection. Wouldn't it be cool if we had someone who knew the difference between a charge and a conviction and knew how to get papers at a courthouse? So I started sort of as a legal intern, and this was the tail end of the golden age of magazines. Sports Illustrated was this high-flying entity that Took the staff to Atlanta on private planes and had these crazy retreats, and Sports Illustra…

AI assessment note: “I lucked into an internship at Sports Illustrated. They needed someone who had a Legal background.”

Q In the books that you've written, are there a couple of either stories and research that you've done or lessons that really stick in your mind as kind of the most interesting ones that you've found?

A Yeah, I mean, I guess it varies from book to book. Some books I've done for different reasons, and sometimes, you know, I wrote a book about pool hustling, which is probably has fewer lessons, or at least practically speaking, than scorecasting. The Federer Nadal book you mentioned has always stuck with me, especially now. I think it's especially resonant that these guys, Roger Federer and Raffendall, probably greatest rivalry in the history of men's tennis. They'll probably, if they retired tomorrow, it would probably be Rank one, two is the best players of all time. They're completely different. They came to tennis differently. They play differently. It's lefty. It's righty. It's Western Europe and Mallorca. I mean, there are a hundred contrasts, but at the end of the day, they're really a lot of similarities. And one of the rare rivalries where it seems totally normal is To root for both of them. You, you wouldn't say I like Harvard and Yale, or I think Macs and PCs are both awesome. You pick your tribe, and it says something about you, and you don't budge, and you build a case for you, and against the other guy. With Federer and Nadal, it's completely normal to like both of them, and I think one of the reasons is that very early on, they recognized that rivalry ultimately benefits both of them, and Nadal may deprive me of a few titles, and Federer may deprive Deprive me of …

AI assessment note: “The Federer Nadal book you mentioned has always stuck with me, especially now.”

Q How much of data analytics have come into the way that professional tennis players sort of think about those decisions?

A This is not a, uh, a strong sport for that, you know, and, and I suspect we'll talk about the book I wrote about scorecasting that's very much grounded in analytics. And in some sports, I mean, the NBA, the analytics are unreal. I feel like there's been a little bit of blowback recently, where there's a sense that people have become too dependent on analytics. And it's a balance. I mean, at some level, the information is always going to help you, but can also help too much. And part of sports is that it's unscripted and unpredictable. And you don't want to really stifle creative impulses, uh, And you have to balance that with making sound decisions, which I think, again, that's a parallel to investing, I suspect. Tennis does not do very well on the analytics front, and I don't know if that is just It hasn't thought creatively. I don't know if it's the fact that it's not like you can rig up an NBA arena and you're good for 40 days, right? I mean, this is a circuit, so it's in Barcelona this week as we're recording this, and next week they'll be in Madrid and then Rome, and it's very hard to sort of standardize data, but I also think a lot of tennis is really hard to capture. If you serve 90% of your first serves, Well, that's an extraordinarily high number. Ted must have been having a tremendous serving day. Or was Ted playing too conservatively and hitting the ball into the mid…

AI assessment note: “This is not a, uh, a strong sport for that”

Q Do you have any hypotheses of what's going to happen?

A I think people are going to lose a lot of money based, I mean, this will be very familiar to you. People that place bets based on emotion are going to get burned. I think we're going to have a lot of conspiracy theories. I think there are going to be very few winners, and I think like Investing in general. I think there are going to be winners that are going to emerge, and there are going to be models that are going to prove successful over the long term, and I think this is going to be divided into a very, very small subset of people that are doing this with discipline and research and responsibly, and the Floyd Mayweathers who wake up feeling like Duke's going to win the NCAA tournament, so I'm just going to throw money on Duke, but it's going to be fascinating to watch.

AI assessment note: “I think people are going to lose a lot of money”

Q What have you learned about interviewing in all the years you've been interviewing people both live and doing research for stories?

A It's an ongoing process. No one has mastered the art. Terry Gross perhaps being an exception. I mean, no one's really mastered the art of interviews. Everyone is different, but I think sometimes the most brief questions and the longest listening yield the best answers. Notice I'm allowing the space to fill. No, sometimes allowing space to fill and let the person you're interviewing fill that vacuum. I think there's a temptation, not just with interviewing, but you want to sort of go in there and build rapport and connect with the subject and show them how much research you've done and how smart you are. Sometimes the simplest questions and then just listening to the answer and not jumping into your next bit of dialogue. Yields the best, the best responses. But one thing that's been interesting to me that I've realized is that there's a big difference between a print interview and a TV interview. And that for print, a lot of times you want good quotes, you want to be able to paint a portrait of the subject you're interviewing, but no one's listening to your interview, right? So you could have a horrible conversation for 29 minutes And if the 30th minute, the subject opens up or gives you a couple of nuggets that are interesting, you're smiling when you walk away. With TV, where the interview is at least at 60 minutes, the interview is part of the package. It's a different rhythm…

AI assessment note: “the most brief questions and the longest listening yield the best answers.”

Q What have you learned in following and covering the business of sports?

A It's exploded in the 20 years or so I've done this. A lot of that is based on technology and media, and the fact that there's still an appetite for live unscripted programming, and there are TV shows that I love and watch, and I can't even tell you what network they're on. I'll watch it when I watch it. I'll watch it on the treadmill. I'll binge it with my kids. I mean, nobody, sports conversely, you want to be there. I mean, the experience, the beauty of it was watching this unscripted act play out live. It's going to be interesting to see, I mean, sports has been propped up to a great degree by these media rights and these media contracts when that model changes and we're not all paying for cable, and when ESPN doesn't necessarily make the billions it does from subscriber fees and therefore doesn't have the billions of dollars to throw at the leagues who therefore don't have The 51% they're going to have to pay for the players or whatever the revenue split is in this sport. I think that's going to change, but sports have really exploded. I mean, I did a story for 60 minutes last week on the Warriors, and this is a franchise, and the Golden State Warriors, not that long ago, was just a brutal, just a dogshit franchise. Golden State Warriors are now worth probably in excess of four billion dollars. That's 10 X what the owners paid for it not that long ago. Some of that is a suc…

AI assessment note: “It's exploded in the 20 years or so I've done this.”

Q Yeah. I have to dive right into this question of, you mentioned decision-making, and And behavior. And there's obviously parallels with everything in decision making. So what is it about decision making on the tennis court?

A It's just so situational. I think a lot of times, and there's some real parallels to investing and ideas of momentum and there's ideas of risk reward. And why don't you serve two first serves? Why are you hitting the ball so safely? And do you play differently at 40 15 than you would at 1540? And when you're the favorite and you're expected to win, how does that impact your shot selection? And when you're facing an adverse set of circumstance, I mean, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff about momentum and the players risk appetite and their, uh, reward threshold and how that changes based on the score of the match. I think a lot of it is not necessarily something that conforms to analytics. I mean, a lot of times you can just see a player, uh, Choking and making bad decisions, making bad investment decisions, panicking when the market is turned. And sometimes there's a pattern and sometimes you can see it. Other times you just see it with your eyes and it's very much intuitive. But again, I see a lot of life encapsulated in a tennis match.

AI assessment note: “It's just so situational. I think a lot of times, and there's some real parallels”

Q All right, John, I think I could go on and on, but I know you're a little time constrained, so I want to leave a little time to turn to some closing questions. First one, what's your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family?

A One thing about media today is that it really doesn't stop. I really love writing. I guess I'd say writing. I mean, I'm working on a book now, and it's almost like my friends that'll play golf or Do crossword puzzles. This doesn't seem like a job. I mean, it's just something I enjoy. I would do it on a beach. I would do it, you know, when I have an hour on Sunday morning and the kids are still asleep. I still really enjoy writing. The notion of doing something you don't like is just baffling and horrifying to me. So honestly, I come to work, and I rather enjoy it, and I go home, and I deal with work stuff, and it never really seems like work.

AI assessment note: “I really love writing. I guess I'd say writing.”

Q of sports and business. I thought of reaching out after watching the documentary of Strokes of Genius. And I know you've been writing about tennis forever, and the one question I wanted to start with was, what nuances do you understand about tennis, having followed it and traveled with it for a long time as you have, that someone who enjoys it and watches it on television wouldn't quite understand?

A Tennis is sort of, I always say it's my guilty pleasure, but I really have a fondness for tennis. I cover a number of sports. I mean, obviously, tennis is not covering the NFL. It's not going to get you the biggest following. It's not going to draw the ratings of the NBA or the NFL or college football, but I think tennis is just an extraordinary sport. I'm really drawn to individual sports. I also like Cage fighting, UFC. Don't tell my wife. But people say, how can you like tennis, which is this, at least notionally, image-wise, this elegant upper crust sport, and how can you like cage fighting? And to me, the similarities, the Venn diagram is significant, that there are a lot of similarities. So I think the individual nature of tennis is really special. Even in boxing, every three minutes, you get someone to give you instructions and give you encouragement and give you water. I mean, tennis, you're totally out there by yourself. It's men, it's women, it's teenagers, it's, you know, Roger Federer is a thirty-seven-year-old father of four, and he'll very easily be playing against an eighteen-year-old, and Serena Williams' upbringing is completely different from Rafael Nadal's upbringing, and everyone approaches the sport differently. It is known as this country club sport, but really, at least at the professional level, very few players come up that way, and You have this intern…

AI assessment note: “tennis, you're totally out there by yourself. It's men, it's women, it's teenagers”

Q Yeah. At what point in time, as you're covering sports, did you start diving into behavior and analytics?

A I always liked sports. I was never a hard, hardcore sports fan. I mean, people are always disappointed when they come up to me, and they hear what I do, and they say, who should I draft in my rotisserie league, or who should I, my fantasy picks, and Were you surprised that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers picked so-and-so in the second round, and I sort of have to either fake it or just confess that I like sports, I don't live sports. I mean, to me, always, what's interesting is sports is, I think I told a boss, I like sports and, so sports and economics, sports and the law, sports and psychology. So I think from the beginning, I never had to really cover a beat, so I was never the guy who went to a hundred baseball games a year, Or only did the NFL. I always was sort of a generalist, and I always sort of tried to write and watch sports with a plus one, and it was always more about the game and more than the athlete. I think I had the good fortune that I never had to be the NFL guy or the college football guy, so I think pretty early the games are interesting, and sometimes they're very dramatic, and sometimes they're not, and the athletes can be very interesting, and sometimes they can be very boring, but Really from the beginning, again, especially since I was sort of hired under this guise of covering sports and the law, it was always about more than the game. That sounds really tri…

AI assessment note: “So I think from the beginning, I never had to really cover a beat”

Q Basketball, you mentioned earlier, the way the game of basketball has changed through, I guess, data is amazing. Like, you're watching the playoffs, and these guys are taking three-point shots from who knows how far behind the arc. What's your sense of where basketball is going?

A You know, what's interesting to me is sort of the chicken and egg of it. I mean, when we were kids, what did everybody do? You go, you try to be Michael Jordan, and you try to dunk, and if the guy was six-six and athletic, inevitably he was the next Jordan, and those were the players that got drafted. Then it became more about the centers, and now we're back to this era of shooting, and I think this era is driven by analytics, by, yeah, a three-point shot that you shoot at 38% is a better shot than the two-pointer you shot at 44%, and I mean, what we see in the NBA now between James Harden's shot statistics in between Curry, and exactly, a guy takes a step-back, thirty-seven-footer at the buzzer, who's a point guard, by the way. I mean, this is a guy who's in another generation. What does he do? He penetrates, and then he either dishes or takes it himself. But no, I, I never thought we would be debating on whether a, uh, a step-back, thirty-seven-foot shot at the buzzer when you've got 10 seconds left to set up a play would be considered good or bad. My question, I don't know the answer. Have people said, listen, the data says more and more threes These mid-raise jump shots are worthless. It's a dunk or a three-pointer. We need more perimeter game. Has that led to this value we put on the three and Steph Curry and Harden and having no problem? I mean, I'm doing a story next wee…

AI assessment note: “now we're back to this era of shooting, and I think this era is driven by analytics”