SPEAKER_00: it's not science if it wasn't anybody could do what we're doing but they can't because they don't know what we know they don't have our experience and they don't have our intuition now there are intangibles that only baseball people understand you're discounting what scouts have done for 150

SPEAKER_06: years even yourself adapt or die yep it's really that simple adapt or die if ai is here if mobile is here if cloud computing is here pcs are here broadband is here the internet people didn't think

SPEAKER_08: the internet would take off they thought it would collapse under its own weight and they thought you

SPEAKER_06: would only have proprietary services like aol or prodigy compu serve and you know you had to adapt

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SPEAKER_14: mev.com twist all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups we have this new series we've

SPEAKER_15: been doing it's called business breakdowns what do we do on this show we talk about a great business story typically one that they've made a movie about this is our third one today we did back in 2023 blackberry that was episode 1773 of this week in startups and uh we recently discussed 2016's uh the founder about ray crock on episode 1872 you can find all of these business breakdowns at this weekend startups.com bb this weekend startups.com bb or if you type in this weekend service business breakdowns into google or youtube you'll find it today i have my bestie lon harris back to talk about

SPEAKER_19: an incredible incredible film i i think this is kind of like a perfect film for me money ball welcome

SPEAKER_23: back to harris thank you thank you we haven't talked about are we only going to do movies that are based on true stories because there are great business movies we talked about you know like wall street in the past that one's not based on a true story that's just oliver stone made it up but you know it still think lessons to impart it's just interesting uh there are enough there are enough business movies based on true stories that we could just stick to those or we could talk about the business lessons

SPEAKER_29: from breaking bad and the sopranos and that could be highly entertaining yeah yeah there's tons of business lessons in there uh starface perfect never got the godfather trilogy you need to buy wibis sticks

SPEAKER_35: you'll need to buy wibis when he throws the coffee in his face oh my god soprano's got a lot of

SPEAKER_32: business lessons in them um all right oh yeah the whole series thanks that was producer nick for

SPEAKER_15: those of you wondering all right let's get started there's so much to love about this if you are listening to this you are consenting to spoilers because we're going to break down the entire film moneyball which of course is based on the hit book by michael lewis from 2003 moneyball the art of winning an unfair game this film was directed by bennett miller a little known fact i hosted a screening for bennett miller's first film which was a documentary called the cruise uh when i was in new york doing

SPEAKER_43: my previous uh media company or two companies ago the silicon eye reporter i used to do screening so i did one for bennett miller's um the cruise that's the one it's about a guy who leads very unconventional

SPEAKER_45: quirky tours of new york right i've seen yes yeah and then i also did one for a film called pie

SPEAKER_18: the darren aronofsky so when i was in late 90s early 2000s i became friends with darren aronofsky

SPEAKER_06: um he won't remember me um and uh bennett miller who also won't remember me but big shocker there and uh you know this that was like a really cool independent film time period when people were making

SPEAKER_56: digital films he later went on to do capote he did that one fox catcher that's really good with uh

SPEAKER_15: with uh yeah steve carell yeah he does you know he does true stories really well and you know i guess now that puts it together for me because philip seymour hoffman of course is in capote

SPEAKER_19: and philip seymour hoffman is also in moneyball as art how yeah this was this was his follow-up and

SPEAKER_23: hoffman had you know gotten all that praise and quality so he showed back up did uh did another

SPEAKER_65: role in his next one also i think uh brad pitt as billy bean and jonah hill as peter brand uh which is based on a guy named paul de podesta um i'm always interested in that like why that

SPEAKER_67: guy's name i guess he didn't consent to be depicted in the movie or something so they had to change his

SPEAKER_69: name yeah you know there is a whole bunch of legal issues when you're doing true stories and i was

SPEAKER_15: thinking about this like you could do a true story without permission like we could do a story if we wanted to on steve jobs we could do a make our own fictional tale or we could do our own authorized unauthorized you know there's like people do this they did the oj simpson there's somebody who did a series on the oj simpson trial and then they did the monoclewinski trial i forgot the name of that

SPEAKER_72: series ryan murphy it's the american crime story the ryan murphy series yeah which i both were very

SPEAKER_74: good i thought they had great actors in them that oj simpson one was dynamite i loved it but you don't

SPEAKER_23: need permission right you can just go do those things right it's it if you i mean it's it they're based on on books but just like it what they didn't have to go get the permission of the public figure that the story's about they had to get the permission of the book they were adapting and if you don't

SPEAKER_45: adapt a book and you just do something based upon you did your own independent research yeah i mean

SPEAKER_23: the idea would be you can't make up slanderous things about someone and present it as fact but as long as it's clear that it's a movie and that you've made it up then sure you know like charlie kaufman wrote being john malkovich before he got in touch with john malkovich and said do you want

SPEAKER_84: to be in my movie he just wrote it and started showing it to people and then lucky enough john malkovich agreed to be in the movie but he wasn't breaking any laws by writing it actually producer

SPEAKER_15: nick uh looked this up uh this is the d podesta quote i just could never get comfortable with the idea of somebody else portraying me to the rest of the world it it's very unnerving and it's was something that wasn't going to go away that was always in my mind like any movie to make it

SPEAKER_62: interesting there has to be some conflict there in some respects a lot of the conflict is going

SPEAKER_65: to revolve around my character and that was never really the case in reality so yeah you know um

SPEAKER_45: i wonder if it was also casting jonah hill i wonder if they were like hey uh we got uh timothy chalamet

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SPEAKER_96: hundreds of founders are switching to mantle right now okay i just want to talk about the actors before

SPEAKER_98: we get into the film brad pitt jonah hill philip seymour hoffman i was thinking about this and you

SPEAKER_15: know you and i are fans of films so i just want to before we get into the business stuff i want to just talk about how great those three actors are to have them as your principals is extraordinary um but then i wanted to talk about in the corpus you know philip seymour hoffman has so many amazing films i don't think that this one is in his top three or four right you wouldn't put this as

SPEAKER_23: like better than the master he's good but this is not a particularly showy role this almost feels like a favor to bennett miller like yeah i'll come up you'll have a world-class actor in this supporting role he's got a couple great scenes but no i don't i mean this is phil seymour hoffman so amazing so many movies yeah i mean the master i think but also a great part of like he had a long career as just a character actor who would show up and nail a few scenes and then disappear like twister a lot of people forget that one of the like randy rowdy guys on bill paxton's crew and twister is a pre-fame philip seymour hoffman because he would do those are kind of the kind of roles he would take so he was used to being kind of an ensemble player where he would show up for

SPEAKER_28: a few scenes but no i wouldn't say this is up to like yeah i mean yeah or pretty great yeah he's

SPEAKER_112: always pretty gay doubt of course drunk love yeah i mean there's so many where he is the master all

SPEAKER_115: the all the pta moves i think master he's also you know has a small part in uh almost famous remember

SPEAKER_59: that that was sure and lebowski i mean he's so great in big lebowski yeah i mean what a loss i mean oh

SPEAKER_23: heartbreak track heartbreaking i mean he died so young and he was one of those guys that he it would have been a long he would have kept doing it it would have been a long career we would have watched you know he would have aged into all these other great roles like can you imagine him like what we're watching paul giamatti start to do you know like like there's all kinds of different shades that you can play as you get older and it's a shame we'll never we'll never get to see that brad pitt another good example of a guy who he's taking on different kinds of roles as he gets older you see different

SPEAKER_53: sides of it okay so and this is what i wanted to get into uh rest in peace philip seymour hoffman of

SPEAKER_98: course but looking at joanie hill looking at brad pitt i want to start with brad pitt here i was just thinking about my favorite brad pitt roles obviously he's playing billy bean here this is one

SPEAKER_14: of my favorite brad pitts ever tyler durden okay sure sure cliff booth recently yeah once upon a

SPEAKER_81: time in hollywood i i think that might be his best performance and lieutenant aldo rain yeah the tarantino team-ups are great so anyway there's four where do you put if we just take those four

SPEAKER_15: you got billy bean in moneyball we're gonna talk about today tyler durden obviously fight club cliff

SPEAKER_62: booth once upon a time in hollywood and lieutenant alder rain yeah i mean i think once what do you i

SPEAKER_23: think once upon a time in hollywood is is probably his his overall best like i i think i mean we're leaving out we're leaving out a lot too like seven he's really good at seven younger but not yeah

SPEAKER_135: california i remember that oh and 12 monkeys that was those were pretty great too but those were like

SPEAKER_15: younger i feel like he wasn't as rich of an actor you know i feel like his recent films are so much

SPEAKER_29: better but i don't know where would you put this i just named my three favorites outside of this one

SPEAKER_23: i think this one is really good it's it's good because it's small it's subtle it's little moments it's a lot of him quietly taking in information and reacting and and you're watching it all in the eyes he's processing it even in like that that very memorable final scene when he's listening to his daughter on the on the cd uh and you know as he's driving uh you know like there are there are lots of good sort of quiet moments which is the real test i think more than the big 12 monkeys such a big showy role you know everybody seems great in that kind of part when they nail it but but cliff booth is your favorite i like that i like that because so much shading that character i think people like a lot of people come away from that movie and they think i don't know if i like cliff booth and they think that's a problem with the movie like you're supposed to like him and i'm not sure how i feel about him but i don't think i don't think so i think the whole movie is kind of about this is a shady there's something i don't necessarily like or trust about this guy i don't know about this guy and like and i think that's an undercurrent that runs under the whole movie that like deep deep down rick dalton's a good a good guy who's just kind of a narcissist and an egomaniac and got caught up in the industry or whatever clip booth though not necessarily a good person and i think that's and i think i i really like pit really runs with that under the surface i think it's like a barely barely visible thing a lot of the time and then it suddenly comes out we're

SPEAKER_142: like oh i don't i don't necessarily like this guy he's tripping on the lsd joint he smokes and then he

SPEAKER_45: kills all the hippies and he's fantasizing about beating up bruce lee and where he's kind of laughing as he remembers shooting his wife with a harpoon whether it was purposeful or not yeah

SPEAKER_23: it's dark it's dark and i mean i think tarantino i think it's 100 on purpose and he's playing with that like there is kind of a darkness to brad pitt in a lot of these roles tyler durden obviously california obviously and i think and he he's he is he's teasing that out a little bit in a nice

SPEAKER_14: subtle way that's what i really like about that okay so for jonah hill as we wrap this up in terms of

SPEAKER_23: performances well this was also jonah hill this was like one of the first times where he was like you know because john hill used to be the ask me about my wiener like comedy judd apatow guy yeah

SPEAKER_81: not super bad yeah and this was one of the first times where people were like oh this guy's good

SPEAKER_43: so wolf of wall street super bad and money book well what do you like best there i mean i think this one

SPEAKER_23: and wolf of wall street are probably probably the top the jota hill top two he's been in some he's he's

SPEAKER_148: been in some clunkers lately so you got to go back a little bit he's amazing in django too as a very small role yeah a very small part in django but he's very good that's true that's wait i don't

SPEAKER_152: remember him in he's one of the kkk guys yeah oh uh he oh i didn't remember that yeah he's like

SPEAKER_159: complaining about how his like hood doesn't fit correctly his wife yeah he's like i didn't realize you guys wives put these together for you it's very funny one other one that i should mention i i think

SPEAKER_23: uh this is the end is really underrated that that one this is the end is great with apatow and like and all those guys like partying as the apocalypse happens and he's really funny in that that's one of his funnier performances and i also like the the 2122 jump street movies with him and channing tatum

SPEAKER_149: they're good yeah they're a good comic duo so lots of lots to recommend from general just not not

SPEAKER_62: recently so much so let's get into the film here why don't you set this up for us uh lon and then we'll start playing some scenes in the business lessons that we found in this yeah money ball came at

SPEAKER_49: let's see six academy awards i don't know if you wanted to mention that up front but we'll we'll

SPEAKER_23: we'll jump you a bit it was nominated for best picture best actor brett pitt supporting actor jonah hill adaptive screenplay sound mixing film editing it won nothing it won nothing at all that year uh but hey six nominations that's that's not bad and it was it was a part of that whole award season they were they were in the mix that whole time okay so let's dive into it the film opens with the 2001 american league division series in which the oakland a's lose in a devastating painful way to the new york yankees and what especially sticks in their craw about it is that the yankees have so much more money to spend on players the 2001 yankees had a payroll of 114 million the a's were spending just around 40 million that means not only do the yankees get to spend all so much more get all this better talent but they basically get to cherry pick players they like from smaller market teams and just buy them out so even if the a's do all the work to foster a guy like a player like jason giambi or johnny damon and take them from being sort of unknown underdog guys into all-stars the yankees can then just come and grab them or teams like the yankees the red sox are also sort of in that mix uh who have these huge war chests that could just go throw money around uh and buy up whoever they

SPEAKER_15: want and this is where baseball is very different than say the nba nba has got a salary cap that's very fixed very it penalizes you that that equivalent producer nick doesn't exist in baseball in the

SPEAKER_170: same way yeah no baseball is the only remain remaining major for us sports that does not have a salary cap similar to the soccer leagues in europe that don't have salary caps which is how you see like uh ronaldo getting you know 100 million dollars a year from the saudis or messy getting 70 million dollars a year from you know i do also think they can get away with

SPEAKER_23: that in part because there are so it's such a longer season there's so many more games it interjects a lot more sort of like randomness and variability so like if the lakers were so much more dominant there's just fewer games they would just crush everybody the whole season am i am i crazy with that

SPEAKER_170: nick is that part of the deal i actually don't think so i think what really it is is that the mlb's player union has had like a hard um it's a hard line for them the salary cap where they're like we never want this because it's bs and players should be paid what their what their market value is and

SPEAKER_177: there should never be a cap on what people can earn um and the players union like won't even go but do

SPEAKER_23: you feel like it hurts the sport of baseball significantly that no i don't it's unfair in

SPEAKER_170: this way that's what i'm saying i actually think every sport i think i don't think salary cap should exist in any sport i think they're stupid oh and i think putting a cap on how much someone can earn uh is ridiculous like having a max salary in the nba is insane if someone wants to pay janice 100 million dollars a year he should be able to make that it feels un-american to me

SPEAKER_101: yeah it's pretty communist right it's pretty social looking out for the like making the game more fun like the whole point of having teams the whole point of having a game is to make it competitive and

SPEAKER_185: fun but if you're a small market owner like the a's owner right therein lies the problem in

SPEAKER_170: baseball you see the a's owner in the beginning of the movie he's like listen we're a small market team i just don't have the budget listen if that's what your deal is sell the team to someone who can afford it because you shouldn't be owning a baseball team if you can't afford a salary that

SPEAKER_189: could compete that's what i think yeah it's fascinating um so there's a fascinating diversion

SPEAKER_15: of just how these leagues have evolved um but this is the setup you have a certain amount of resources other teams have three times that amount of resources four times the amount of resources and so how do you do more with less and when i you know see this setup i immediately thought alan about startups versus incumbents right you have an incumbent like google they can put a thousand engineers on their ai project they can put 10 000 engineers you know they can put unlimited number of people on a project and then you have some startup chat gpt from open ai or whatever and the startup somehow figures a way to do more with less and beat them and sometimes having a limited budget makes you look for creative ways to win and that is the central tenant is is there a better way to win

SPEAKER_45: correct yeah and i mean i think that it it opens with that mickey mantle quote the movie opens with the

SPEAKER_23: mickey middle quote it's like you you wouldn't believe how much you don't know about the game you've played your whole life and i think that's what it it forces billy bean to reconsider baseball from the ground up in a way that people don't want to do once you've learned about something and spent years working on something you're mentally resistant to rethinking it entirely you're like no no i get this i've done this i know how it works and you whether you consciously realize it or not i think you build up a lot of resistance to new outside the box kind of thinking and that that that's the real challenge is he's forced by these circumstances to throw out everything he thought he understood about how to put together a good baseball team and break it down in this completely different way and i mean then we get to all these scenes where you know he's got this room full of old guys who've been doing this for 40 years and think they know everything about baseball they've seen thousands of games thousands of players uh and they're using this very you know vibe based emotional kind of judgment where it's all subtle little things that they know to look for that they like uh like he's a hitter

SPEAKER_194: he's got a good swing or yeah let's play that clip this is like showing you how he's currently done

SPEAKER_196: yeah yeah what do you got i like geronimo yes he's an athlete big fast talented top of my list

SPEAKER_199: green cut good face yeah good job five tools guys good looking ball can he hit he's got a beautiful

SPEAKER_205: swing right barry ball explodes off his back he throws the club head at the ball and when he connects it he thrives it it pops off the bat you can hear it all over the ballpark a lot of pop coming off the

SPEAKER_211: back an ugly girlfriend what's that ugly girlfriend means no confidence okay oh no you guys are full of it arty is right this guy's got an attitude an attitude is good i mean yeah clean cut an 80 year

SPEAKER_23: old man saying a guy looks clean cut it's so cut and dry like yes that is how these decisions have long been made but we all can sort of come in and recognize like there must be a better more effective way to make these kinds of judgments using some kind of empirical database quantitative you know instead of just going by an old man thinking a young guy looks clean in his face i mean and they

SPEAKER_216: really nailed that it's an old man because he's literally got a hearing he's got to hear i mean

SPEAKER_23: they cast that scene beautifully all those guys look like and you believe it so you buy instantly this is a room full of salty old baseball experts who've been doing this their whole lives like the room looks

SPEAKER_08: old they've got stacks of paper you it's literally there's a paradigm shift waiting to happen and

SPEAKER_15: they've shown you here is the paradigm the current paradigm and then you see billy bean who's younger like half the age these people are 70 years old billy beans you know like 40 in this film or so and then you've obviously got somebody who's even younger so this is a generational shift that's occurring billy bean yeah is you know at the center of it and he has to push the paradigm shift and i also thought about technology at this moment when i came into the industry client server and then pcs happened and then cloud computing happened the internet all of these paradigm shifts i watched people fight them and this movie at its core is about a paradigm shifting and what i learned in psychology when i was a psychology major at fordham university is that one of our professors said one thing you should know about paradigms in psychology is that paradigms don't die people do

SPEAKER_08: and all the people who believed in freud or skinner or cognitive behavioral car young whatever they just

SPEAKER_19: died with their paradigm and then the next paradigm happened when we went from you know uh you know

SPEAKER_06: freud to to behaviorism to cognitive it's just and that's what's happening here it's such a great moment

SPEAKER_23: it made me think too of blackberry when the blackberry team are watching steve jobs a demo the first iphone and immediately they're like but it's got no buttons and we all know buttons are what make that the pop of the button that's what makes it satisfying that's why you know you press the button and so immediately they're just like they're they're refusing to make that shift and it's the same thing with these scouts where rather than even hearing them out they don't even hear them out what what can we do with the stats what can you determine with the data they're right away like no no no the only way to do it is to trust me looking at the guy and whether he has a attractive

SPEAKER_225: girlfriend yeah and a face he got the face you know and that's interesting the the pop of the

SPEAKER_15: blackberry keyboard the pop up the sound of the bat yeah when people are confronted with a paradigm shift it is so threatening to them because they've existed in a world where this paradigm has served them well if you're 67 years old and you're in that room and you've been in that room for 40 years scouting players the the ability to shift to the next thing it is so hard it's so threatening that you won't even consider it right and for the blackberry those people that was something that happened over a decade that wasn't something that happened over five decades yeah that was a 10 year story oh hey we had the blackberry we were king of the hill for 10 years and then the iphone became king of the hill for 10 years they couldn't make that jump paradigms are super powerful one of the things you can do uh when you see a paradigm shift is and this is something i do in my career as an investor and then also as a media executive i assume the next paradigm will win i just make that assumption so when i was doing print magazines i just assumed email newsletters would win uh and i started an email newsletter at silicon alley then i assume blogs would win then i assume podcasts would win and people are like oh my god you always figure it out and i'm like well you know what i do i just assume the next thing is going to work and if it doesn't work well okay fine what did you lose

SPEAKER_29: by assuming it would be win you know i assume podcasts would win 13 years ago sitting around you

SPEAKER_235: know whatever yeah and you know what you could make a mistake you could say crypto is going to work and

SPEAKER_08: you make the mistake who cares just move on to the next thing so it's just pessimism you know you get to be right if you're a pessimist but if you're an optimist you can get rich right so just be a little

SPEAKER_62: optimistic and you you might just hit the ball out of the park let's keep going listen a strong sales

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SPEAKER_23: off your sock too at this point uh being just you know he's made his mind up that uh he's got to change something he doesn't know what it is quite yet but he knows if we play like the yankees if we think like the yankees we keep trying to beat the yankees at their own game we're going to continually lose to them because we can't we can't outspend them so we have to get crafty we have to get clever about uh you know what we do so he goes to the cleveland indians he goes to ohio to meet with the indians to discuss possible trades just trying to mix things up a bit uh and while he's there he's about to close the deal but then he notices that the gm the indians gm is listening to this guy who he doesn't recognize this this low-level guy named peter brand played by joe nail and he notices that the deal gets thrown off because of something peter brand whispers to his boss and he doesn't understand what happened so he goes to the guy's cubicle he tracks him down in the office that's another i think little mini lesson here is billy bean just he won't he doesn't he's not deterred he doesn't take no it's that same persistence lesson from the founder a lot of people might have been like i wonder who that guy was oh well or or called the the gm of the cleveland indians the next week and be like what did that guy say to you but he just goes down tracks the guy down in the office

SPEAKER_29: sits down at his cubicle such a good callback because in uh the founder of the ray crock story about mcdonald's somebody orders all those mixers and like who in their right mind is ordering six mixers

SPEAKER_15: with six you know the ability to do six milkshakes at a time 36 milkshakes makes no sense and he he has to go investigate it when he finds out that it's not a mistake that order that's real and it's that persistence and that um what would you call it when you're curious that curiousness right i think

SPEAKER_82: almost every story like this has that moment of the person makes it's it's one thing to make the

SPEAKER_23: observation like i don't know this is interesting i don't understand quite why that's happening uh this is curious to me but it's a very different thing to then pursue the answer relentlessly until

SPEAKER_249: you find it so you you have to follow your intuition yeah and i think that that's the thing

SPEAKER_23: that that billy bean and ray crock definitely have in common is he tracks he goes immediately to jonah hill's cubicle he sits down he gets in the guy's face the guy obviously is uncomfortable doesn't want to talk to him my boss is right over there who are you i shouldn't be giving away these secrets to a guy i don't know uh but he basically pressures him into explaining himself like what did you tell your boss what am i missing what do you know that i don't know about baseball and he ends up getting getting it out of peter just peer pressuring him he ends up getting him to sort of tell him about statistics and saber metrics and this new way of thinking about organizing

SPEAKER_14: your sort of baseball team and i think this is a great moment to play the clip and after this clip

SPEAKER_251: i'm going to tell you what i took from it as a business lesson there is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening and this leads people who run major league baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams people who run ball clubs that they

SPEAKER_253: think in terms of buying players your goal shouldn't be to buy players your goal should be to buy wins and in order to buy wins you need to buy runs and there it is that is an example of what

SPEAKER_19: we call in our industry first principle thinking what exactly are we trying to accomplish here and he

SPEAKER_15: walks people through it um on in this amazingly powerful scene and you find yourself nodding okay

SPEAKER_06: your people are uh buying players but why are they buying the players oh and what you're actually buying is you're trying to buy runs etc and and and you you're not trying to buy wins or players you're trying to buy these runs and getting people on base and then they and they kind of even break that down

SPEAKER_29: more it gets a little technical in in baseball but you're looking for people who have obp on base percentage right and you can get on base a couple of different ways like you can get on base by walking and so they they talk about getting a walk a lot in the film they dip into hey how that first pitch is super important if you get a strike on that first uh pitch or you get a ball the next pitch and what you hit is super important and this is something called saber metrics uh which is a statistical

SPEAKER_96: analysis of baseball made famous by a statistician named bill james but i was super interested in this

SPEAKER_29: because there is um first principle thinking and if you think about startups lon you know and i talk to

SPEAKER_15: startups about this a lot you're building a team right okay what does the team do well they build a product and what does that product do well i like to say it delights customers but if you break down what delights customers there's a lot of different ways to do that line you could save them time you could save them money you could entertain them you can you know uh give them some kind of social acceptance like make them become part of a tribe you can allow them to find a mate there are biological things like shelter food water sacks you get the idea and there is higher level goals like purpose so what you're trying to do is fill some need that humans have through a product that's created by a team that generates revenue that is a business that is a startup but first principles thinking would be i need to get from point a to point b how do i move myself or move this book moving myself would be uber

SPEAKER_85: moving this book would be amazon you get the idea i i did have a question for nick here too it feels like peter brand's philosophy i don't know enough about baseball it feels like peter brand's philosophy

SPEAKER_23: is really undervaluing if not throwing entirely away the concept of fielding playing defense like he's only focused on hits getting on base earning runs only on like scouts scoring the other team and you don't really in the movie at least you don't really deal with the other the other side and and he's doing things like put that guy at first base because i like the way he hits even though he doesn't

SPEAKER_170: know how to play first base uh and they're the first base example is the one they use in the movie what uh the reason that they use first base is because i believe first base is actually the least valuable defensive position in baseball you need to do the least i think they say i think they say that at one they might yeah it's like actually there's three positions in baseball that are incredibly valuable on a defensive basis center field obviously you're covering the most range in the outfield shortstop you're like getting all the balls towards your way and you have to make the most decisions yeah exactly derek jeter etc etc um and then catcher uh because you're like sort of the field general those are the three most defensive defensively valuable positions in baseball um they actually don't talk about catchers or centerfielders or shortstop shortstops at all in this so i wonder if you know they were talking about whoever the shortstop was on the a's they would be i i think

SPEAKER_23: i think they have their example is hattiesburg and and so they talk about him like it's right exactly right he was a guy who was a catcher that's what he knew how to play but they like the way he hits they like the way he gets on base and so they put him in a different spot i just didn't know if it was it doesn't matter as much playing defense or if it was like it just in this particular scenario it

SPEAKER_265: didn't matter as much so they don't bring it up in the movie at all but the holy grail of sabermetric

SPEAKER_170: at least in the modern day is something called war w-a-r which stands for wins above replacement in baseball and every major sport has one of these now so the nba jason you might know has vore value over replacement player basically how much better that are you than the average player at your position baseball's addition is war the nfl has their own version hockey has their own version as well so that's really what they're looking for so depending on what position you play as long as your war is high then you're valuable on a sabermetrics basis okay that that that that

SPEAKER_06: definitely answers my that makes a lot of sense to me a lot of founders are great at going from zero to

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Chamath Palihapitiya: right so bean uh at this point basically hires brand right right well we also this is the part of the movie

SPEAKER_23: where this is our movie where we start doing flashbacks as well because we sort of set up what what makes billy bean the guy who did this and why is this his sort of you know what what makes him sort of specifically the guy that this spoke to and we kind of find out that well he was a very hot prospect coming out of high school and he had this huge decision where uh the scouts were encouraging him to go pro immediately but his parents were kind of like well you should go to stanford you can play ball at stanford and get a college education he ended up listening to the scouts and then he totally bombed out of the mlb and and did not play well in the majors ended up you know finding a new career as a scout and then a gm so it all worked out but he still got a lot of resentment about scouting and the way that the system works back then because he ended up being such a letdown and we get stuff about him feeling like he's personally cursed and he he doesn't watch the games in the stadium and he doesn't he can't even bear to listen sometimes on the radio uh but i think you know that's that's the idea that he in particular was a little bit skeptical coming in about scouting and recruiting and the way teams were assembled and so when peter brand sort of presented this idea to him that's why that was the lightning bolt moment of like this is what we've been getting wrong all along yeah and it takes somebody

SPEAKER_278: sometimes who's you know sitting between the two paradigms right these two mountains the old school

SPEAKER_14: way it's like a it's a personality based thing and then it's a metric based thing and he was able to

SPEAKER_23: cross that chasm yeah as it were uh and so you know uh so now brand uh works for being as the sort of assistant gm at the a's and we get a lot of you know scenes about how uh it's it's an it's an odd bit like he does it like the there's a lot of conflict right away and that's maybe what uh the guy who jonah hill is based on was saying like i he didn't really feel like there was a lot of conflict when he came in but the movie has to make it look good uh so we get you know he's kind of like people are having a lot of trouble adjusting to this statistical model that he's built where he's describing you know undervalued players and how they're going to go and purposefully seek out these sort of like players who other people don't understand why they're more valuable than they may initially see he calls them the he calls the team the island of misfit toys uh let's let's play

SPEAKER_286: this club this is a great scene we need to win at least 99 games in order to make it to the postseason we need to score at least 814 runs in order to win those games and allow no more than 645 months this is the code that i've written for our year-to-year projections it's about getting things down to one number using the stats the way we read them will find value in players that nobody else can see people are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws age appearance personality of the 20 000 notable players for us to consider i believe that there's a championship team of 25 people that we can afford because everyone else in baseball undervalues them

SPEAKER_62: like an island of misfit toys i mean such an inspiring scene they put that great music in the soundtrack was great um it it speaks to people because maybe we all feel at times we're undervalued right or underestimated i thought this was like a really um well and just the way that yeah the way

SPEAKER_23: that these sort of biases conscious and unconscious sort of play out in the real world and like yeah of course reducing people to a few personality traits or the things you could tell during a job interview like that that never tells the whole story and we all let's have i think we all kind of know that

SPEAKER_295: let's have a dei debate for 20 minutes now please please please god no should we put them behind a

SPEAKER_299: screen and just look at their metrics can we get sacks can somebody call sacks can we get him somebody get sacks mark cuban you know we'll all get together i'll just talk about dei no but i mean it

SPEAKER_112: does relate to we want to not be judged on our quirkiness or do we look like a baseball player

SPEAKER_302: right um is this an athletic white whatever looks like a baseball player is because you know they they have one point where they have somebody who's a little bit overweight who hits a home run in the film you know and and and they just talk about how like you know maybe you don't look the part but you are the part and they and they bring up this guy chad bradford who's a pitcher who's super undervalued because he throws this like really weird like sideways low pitch um but he's got solid

SPEAKER_15: stats and he he's worth three million dollars but they can get him for 850 and this has really spoke

SPEAKER_29: to me about resources again back to startups we're here on this week in startups and one of the things

SPEAKER_15: i'm watching startups do is as we globalize they're looking at people in san paulo who are developers and comparing to developers in toronto and develop and comparing those developers to ones in miami austin and the bay area and people are starting to say hey you know i'm managing a remote workforce is this person in india is this person in manila you know as good as this other person or are they undervalued and that globalization that's occurring in the workforce right now is

SPEAKER_08: really inspiring to watch people get opportunities to work at big companies from all around the world and then some people are overpaid because maybe they have some ivy league degree or pedigree and

SPEAKER_168: maybe that's unfair you know depending on which side of the equation you are somebody gets an

SPEAKER_23: opportunity somebody loses an opportunity yeah i mean i think that you know it turns out a lot of these sort of old rigid ways of thinking about who can do what and who's appropriate for what job

SPEAKER_67: really didn't didn't make a ton of sense it were just things that people thought that got passed down generationally that weren't necessarily true so i think you know that's one huge advantage that they have is like well when you break it down as pure numbers you're seeing things in a way you couldn't when you're looking at players on a field and you're trying to make subjective judgment calls

SPEAKER_308: about yeah and this is when philip seymour hoffman comes into the picture which is awesome yeah so

SPEAKER_48: art howe is one of these the a's coach manager i guess you'd say uh in baseball uh and he's he's one

SPEAKER_23: of these old school guys that has his old way of thinking of things and you know he's paid for his expertise so he doesn't think he should have to listen to this new way of doing things he's like you make the team you give me the team i'm gonna play them the way i know how to play uh players on the field but that that's i think this is one of the big sort of lessons of the whole movie is you can't you can't piecemeal it you can't you can't have some members of the team doing it one way and other people doing it another way everybody needs to be on the same page and running the same playbook with a this division or it doesn't work and that's that's what we see sort of happening at the at the opening uh is just he's getting even as billy bean is putting this team together and starting to execute on this new strategy his team is rejecting it and he's having a lot of trouble sort of managing them and getting everybody on the same page so he's in there's a scene where he's in a meeting with his scouts and he's trying to explain to them what peter brand's been explaining to him and we got to figure out getting guys on base and everybody's just sort of shouting him down and making all of

SPEAKER_312: these objections yeah and that's a great scene in and of itself is people wondering why though why do

SPEAKER_62: we have to have these players and you're so right uh let's play this clip and then i'll give some

SPEAKER_316: feedback billy we got 38 home runs 120 rbis guys we're still trying to replace jambi i told you we

SPEAKER_318: can't do it and we can't do it now what we might be able to do is recreate him we create him in the aggregate the what jambi's on base percentage was 477 damon's on base 324 and almatis was 291

SPEAKER_320: add that up and you get 10.92 divided by three 364 that's what we're looking for number one jason's

SPEAKER_323: little brother jeremy billy if i may uh he certainly has had his problems off the field we know that

SPEAKER_321: what he can't do on the field you get a little thicker on the waist you know and his reports about

SPEAKER_325: him on the weed and the strip clubs well his on base percentage is all we're looking at now

SPEAKER_318: and jeremy gets on base an awful lot for a guy who only costs 285 000. there you go uh and like

SPEAKER_23: weed and strip clubs i don't care yeah right that's on base it's math that's the way they're thinking about it is like i got a little punchy and he likes strip clubs no go with somebody else and it's like that's a classic example of those are are those really impacting his play or are you just sort of

SPEAKER_67: prejudice against people who act that way can i play devil's advocate here first yeah let's go

SPEAKER_170: okay so i actually thought the movie did a really good job at showing that there has to be a balance of both of these things because you see later in the movie jeremy giambi is being obnoxious in the clubhouse when they're losing he's playing music he's dancing billy bean comes in smashes the stereo and then he trades him a couple days later he's like get this guy out of here so while i do think of course you need to look at analytics and you need to understand really what you're trying to do and how you're trying to win there also is a balance where you need the right people in the clubhouse especially in a sport like baseball which comes down to just a couple of games at the end and like when he goes to david justice and he's like listen i know you're old but i need you to mentor these guys i need you to be a role model and he starts taking hatterberg under his wing etc etc so this is back to the

SPEAKER_62: qualitative nature of individuals versus the quantitative and your point lon you got to have

SPEAKER_15: people rowing in the same direction so if somebody statistically can do the job but they cause other people to not do the job well or they statistically are trailing off but they make other

SPEAKER_18: people good that's another startup lesson isn't it yeah yeah well that's i mean because like there's a

SPEAKER_23: lot of scenes that are sort of coming up in this part of the movie where art how is not playing the

SPEAKER_67: players in the right positions or in the order that they need them to play he's kind of making his own calls at the last second and putting the team back in the old order and that's you know causes this

SPEAKER_23: big losing streak and they're sort of they have all of these problems coming out of the gate because they're trying they're they're organized based on billy and peter's concept but then they're being run by arts idea and that's really where it's like you can't have that if everybody needs to be whether you know they agree if people don't agree and they can't execute the playbook they got to go everybody's got to be moving in the same direction and in business this happens in startups it happens

SPEAKER_14: all the time and the way you handle it best is to say listen there are two or three different ways to

SPEAKER_15: actually run this company we could be an enterprise company we could be a consumer company we could be a marketplace you know all different ways in which you could execute on the same business idea to solve the same business problem here's the one we've chosen here's why we've chosen it and now we're going to execute on that you may disagree if you disagree so strongly that you're not willing to do it then you can't be at the company but if you disagree and you think your idea is right well

SPEAKER_302: let's just all put our effort into choice a of how to run this business we're going to make it an enterprise business oh you want to make it a consumer thing we're going to do enterprise you know either you have to leave the company or if you're going to stay at the company just put your best effort into doing that and you can monitor the decision and always change it so this is a really

SPEAKER_84: great um i think moment in time yeah uh so in the movie uh being uh they go to scott hatterberg's house

SPEAKER_23: uh they tell him this weird plan that he's a catcher but they want to teach him how to play first base and you know he's got this injury that's preventing him from being able to do the the catcher role that he used to do so for the as far as the rest of the league is concerned he's done nobody else is interested this is really the only offer on the table for him so even though he's hesitant he's confused uh he accepts anyway that's that was an early uh chris pratt role he was mostly known for i think parks and rec still when he this was pre-marvel chris yeah uh so we get a little bit of the subplot with with uh bean and his daughter you know a little a little bit more speaking to his his lack of confidence and how he feels like maybe he's cursed uh and then he's confronted once again by his head scout this is a guy we've seen him clash before uh clash with before in the room and he he's really as strongly as it's yet been stated the baseball isn't about numbers baseball is a game that's about all these intangibles and variables and all these things that only i understand as an old school expert let's play that's just an utter rejection of billy's concept yeah you don't put a

SPEAKER_00: team together with a computer billy no no baseball isn't just numbers it's not science if it wasn't anybody could do what we're doing but they can't because they don't know what we know they don't have our experience and they don't have our intuition now there are intangibles

SPEAKER_01: that only baseball people understand you're discounting what scouts have done for 150 years

SPEAKER_06: even yourself adapt to die yep it's really that simple adapt or die if ai is here if mobile is here if cloud computing is here pcs are here broadband is here the internet people didn't think the internet

SPEAKER_08: would take off they thought it would collapse under its own weight and they thought you would only have

SPEAKER_06: proprietary services like aol or prodigy um compu serve and you know you had to adapt and die

SPEAKER_41: or die and use open standards so such a great scene and it's such an obvious business lesson when the paradigm shift happens you gotta like um adapt or die and in this case i think that scout

SPEAKER_84: um gets fired you know on the spot yeah he billy's like i'm not gonna fire you and then the guy tries to smack him and then he fires uh so that so then there we jump to spring training and there's

SPEAKER_23: a montage of you know uh look at your classic baseball movie they're not they can't get it together they're the bad news bears they're the indians at the beginning of major league i mean you know take take your pick uh and then the season itself starts slow and again we talked about this a little bit where it's the clash between bean and art how where they're sort of debating how to run the team and there's this little sort of power struggle uh going on there um being you know like everything's going bad the team's going really poorly the a's are continually losing and during this time bean is also sort of mentoring peter brand showing him what a general manager's job is all about getting him used to sort of the day-to-day of managing a team and running a team and that includes uh teaching him how to cut players when they are being dropped from the roster and i thought this is

SPEAKER_278: particularly important you know we're taping this a week in 2024 where in this era people are being

SPEAKER_18: cut uh being laid off right tragically there's a ton of riffs going on whether it's in media la times just cut 100 positions or something insane 115 i think yeah i mean just whoa that's a that's a big

SPEAKER_358: number that's a huge chunk of their total staff it's like 20 or something yeah and that's after two

SPEAKER_08: riffs before that and then uh google still cutting people uh you know youtube lost 100 people last week yeah so that you know people keep uh getting cut here and the trend has been people are recording themselves on tick tock which is also weird but putting it aside we live in this weird world where people are being cut and they're being cut on zoom right and hr people are cutting people with this like hr speak that's obviously written by lawyers and not able to answer questions and then how do you do it in a kind way how do you do it professionally because has become a big question right and there's no easy

SPEAKER_191: way to do it but billy bean says be straight no fluff just facts let's play the clip i'm a player

SPEAKER_286: and you got to cut me from the roster fine billy please have a seat i need to talk to you for a minute you've been a huge part of this team but sometimes you have to make decisions that are best for the team i'm sure you can understand that you're cutting me i'm really sorry i just bought a house

SPEAKER_320: here well in oakland oh uh well well well that's all you got to say my kid just started a new school

SPEAKER_371: well you shouldn't pull them out in the middle of the school year you you should wait what the hell

SPEAKER_253: are you talking about i don't know i don't know i shouldn't have i'm not gonna do this i don't think i think this is stupid i'm not gonna fire anybody and this is dumb they're professional ball players

SPEAKER_373: just be straight with them no fluff just facts pete i gotta let you go jack's office will handle the

SPEAKER_06: details that's it there it is um i think people appreciate that um and he tells them like would you rather a bullet to the head or five to the chest and bleed to death i'm pretty graphic but all

SPEAKER_14: right i do think being straight with people the business isn't doing well uh we have to cut 10

SPEAKER_23: we have to cut 20 because we're not profitable um yeah every time one of those clips goes viral of like person being fired in a horrible way or firing goes terribly wrong it's always because they're trying to do too much it's never just because it's like the simple clean straightforward i mean i i've only been i think fired from one one job and yeah it was very it was very matter of fact it was like we're going a different way here's your last paycheck have a have a good good luck with whatever comes

SPEAKER_08: next or whatever yeah and you felt respected uh in that moment or at least not pandered to or

SPEAKER_23: it's nice it's nice to not it's nice to not have somebody giving you a whole oh you're so important to the t because you know that that's not genuine if you were that important to the team they wouldn't

SPEAKER_85: be firing you so yes you know like it just just just just rip off the band-aid i i agree with billy

SPEAKER_302: yeah and then this is important to juxtapose with these and then some people are giving people a whole like you didn't work hard enough or it's on you it's your fault in some way it's just like whoa

SPEAKER_96: yeah definitely don't do that yeah definitely don't do that just be a matter of fact about it

SPEAKER_06: um uh so uh and dramatic foreshadowing jonah hill's got to go cut somebody later and he does it exactly

SPEAKER_65: as prescribed and it works perfectly or it goes it goes as well as it could go the lesson is learned

SPEAKER_23: yeah so again another part of the training is bean has him start traveling with the team and this is when the the issue of soda in the clubhouse comes to a head uh the a's i was reading about uh this this lovely stadium you see behind me the coliseum in oakland uh one article called it the last uh baseball's last dive bar um there you go uh but whereas a lot of professional ball teams like the yankees they stock the fridge for the players if you want a soda there's just soda there yeah the a's you a's you got to pay a buck at the vending machine if you want a soda david justice who is a veteran of much bigger market teams he's not a fan so while brand is on the plane next to him going to the next game he sort of has a hey i don't like you guys should you guys should pay for the soda uh brand is

SPEAKER_82: like billy likes to keep the money on the field and you know justice is pretty skeptical that his dr

SPEAKER_23: peppers are gonna make a huge impact in the season or whatever uh but that's important foreshadowing i

SPEAKER_170: think this comes up later the sodas can i put in here please yeah this just fuels my fire hatred in my heart so much that there are owners that legitimately cannot afford because every major sport i think i know baseball does have something called revenue share where about half the half the revenue at the end of the year is all put into a pool and then it's divvied up equally among the 30 owners in the mlb the nba has the same thing right jason you remember donald sterling on the clippers he was what was he famous for he had the lowest salary in the league every year and he just raised all the revenue share exactly and he never paid for players if you cannot afford

SPEAKER_333: a baseball team sell the team please yes if you can't afford to give your players drinks and gatorade

SPEAKER_15: get rid of the team yeah i mean it's pretty straightforward here and sterling was the reason they put in um a minimum they said basically in the nba you got to spend at least this much so forget

SPEAKER_08: about the cap floor they put a floor in because he was like yeah just you want elton brand or any of our stars any of our recruits take them all we're we're going to spend 40 million and we're going to

SPEAKER_15: rake the other 40 million in his profit they're like hey you got to get a little higher up here but

SPEAKER_302: then they go on um a terrible losing streak they've lost 14 of 17 games it's not working right nick uh right

SPEAKER_23: uh alan it's not working yeah i mean at this point and i mean you know in this sort of an environment where you're trying something very bold daring new people are just waiting for you to to fail so i think there there is a sense that this was like delicious for a lot of people in the sports world they couldn't wait for this thing to blow up and then it does in this very dramatic fashion feels very satisfying so yeah there's a lot of uh you know media sort of take taking a lot of pleasure in the a's doing terribly in this whole experiment not seeming to work uh bean and brad go talk to the owner about why the team's doing so poorly brand is like we're on the right track we just need a larger sample side just you know like this is just we're having a bad streak we'll have a good streak it's gonna work we just need to like figure out you know some of the the details um and around this time bean also tries you know he's still he's still fighting with art uh how the manager about how to organize the team who's going to play first base how keeps playing this guy carlos pena at first base instead of hattieberg the guy they picked up specifically because they like his on base percentage uh and it's it's messing up the strategy i mean from bean's perspective this is why it's not working like ever we're doing everything on our side you're not executing on the day so what he does is he decides to mix everything up and take a lot of this power out of art house hands and he does that by getting rid of carlos pena and also as as nick mentioned this is also when he gets rid of uh jeremy giambi for for partying too hard at the clubhouse uh and he also uh even this is the point where it becomes it would have been really easy to back off to say you know i was wrong mea culpa we tried this thing we're in the arena trying things this one didn't work we're gonna come back you know like i'm gonna we'll remodel it would have been much easier to do that but instead he he believes peter brand he believes his original idea and he and he sticks to his guns and he tells brand we don't need to explain ourselves we're gonna see it through for better or worse um and then the other thing i want to mention when he makes this trade to get rid of carlos pina so that how doesn't have the option

SPEAKER_101: to continue playing him that's when he figures out how to get three years of free sodas for his players as part of the trade and i uh so we'll we'll play the clip and then i'll watch okay that'll

SPEAKER_413: work great i need one more thing soda yeah i don't want my guys paying for soda i want you to stock

SPEAKER_418: my machine for three years i'm serious great it's a deal i mean totally ludicrous but great like um

SPEAKER_08: showing he's evolved a little bit right billy bean is evolved but it's a very important uh moment here we call this the burn the boats moment um if you haven't heard that expression hey you get to the new world you burn the boats you're not going home you're going forward and in business sometimes it's

SPEAKER_19: important to commit you have to commit just like skiing down a mountain you're going down certain trails you just got to go for it and that's what he does here he burns the boats we're not going

SPEAKER_302: backward we're pivoting we're shutting this down and we're going this way it's a burn the boats

SPEAKER_06: moment and you know he he basically gives art no choice and i love the moment where he's like you're not playing him on first and he's like no i'm playing him on first he's like you can't play him on first because i just traded him such a great moment and then you know art basically has to accept

SPEAKER_08: the fact and art to his credit makes the paradigm shift he decides when the boats are burned that

SPEAKER_19: he's going to make the best of it and and then of course they're right but it's such an important

SPEAKER_302: persistence and commitment if you're going to if you're going to pursue this new strategy you have to give it your all and sometimes you got to burn the boats but i love that too idea too of the the

SPEAKER_23: balance it's not just you know you've got the vision you see the the light on the horizon and and you're not listening to anybody he is listening he's just committed to the vision and he's so he's late he's hearing all the feedback he's not blocking it out he's just you know using what he can and remaining committed to his vision because he does he can't take care of the soda thing right away but he keeps it in the back of his mind and then when there is an opportunity to fix that problem he does and i think that's such a that's why that's in the movie is to bounce it out like it's not like he's not listening to anybody and he's totally single-minded it's just it there's a lot of dissent that he can't use when the feedback is useful he's still hanging on

SPEAKER_06: to it so he's evolved as a character as well he's not you know unchangeable he's going to evolve he's going to change his position on things which is just great for the storytelling as well a lot of

SPEAKER_45: managers might have just blown off david justice he's a diva who care let he could he's a millionaire

SPEAKER_82: he could pay for his freaking sodas yeah i'm paying him seven million whatever right but billy he's like it is important to keep the players happy you don't want something as simple as a coke to to throw off this guy's you know state of mind or willingness to play or whatever and this is

SPEAKER_08: critically important too when you are a leader you know what matters to the troops some and if it doesn't matter to you sometimes you got to meet them where they are right and so you want to win the war um and you know sometimes you're going to lose a battle here over sodas but you're going to win the war that everybody buys in and peter brand then starts explaining the basic baseball

SPEAKER_426: to the a's players that walks are the same as singles which is what my coach always told me when i was in the little league in brooklyn me too actually i thought of that too when i was

SPEAKER_23: when i played little league yeah they used to tell you like don't don't feel like you got to swing at everything like uh take you know walks are in my case i realized early that leaning in you could

SPEAKER_115: get hit and so i i wasn't playing i wasn't playing at this level i started leaning in

SPEAKER_302: so much i'm trying this is like second third grade that i um caused a little bit of a scene because i leaned in and purposely got hit with it and they threw me out of the game in brooklyn in bayridge brooklyn i'm not i'm kid you not and they reprimanded the coach hey of the sparrows listen what are you doing you somebody's gonna get hurt here you're telling your place i said he didn't tell me to do that i was just leaning in i was talking about the guy's like listen kid he knew i was lying through my teeth i just wanted to get on face i wanted to help the team lead into it um but you know uh

SPEAKER_08: you know longer at bats are great because they increase the pitcher's pitch count this is such a critical thing so if you can keep hitting those you know foul balls man that wears a pitcher out

SPEAKER_22: over time and then yeah i mean all of these things are just yeah like that thinking about the game on like that deeper level rather than just you know like the the way everybody sort

SPEAKER_23: of approached for a long time like a little bit more of a regimented strategic kind of approach to everything you do on the field every at bat every play and that's really what what brand i think is sort of introducing uh and you know like heat zones and and all those sort of and here's the

SPEAKER_19: thing details matter and if you want to make a service better sometimes it's easier to make five things 10 20 better than to try to make something 50 one thing 50 or 100 better as an what one example when google made their search engine a little bit faster every time they made it a little bit faster the number of searches people did increased if you look at uber when they brought weight and lift when they brought weight times down people started using the services more they became reliable and that's why liquidity in those networks was so important to them so there's little things that you can do and they add up to a better experience or more winning and that's where details matter and trying to optimize a bunch of small things is what happens to this team and it's just so so applies to product

SPEAKER_189: design is making a lot of little things better this was a product design right moment so so right so

SPEAKER_23: all of these sort of elements come together figuring things out with how running the team better you know having these kind of conversations with the players bringing everybody onto the same page finally and they start to win they they start to sort of turn things around with the season uh the trade deadline approaches and billy decides he wants uh uh ricardo rincone a relief pitcher to come join the team uh so he executes that trade and then once the trade the deadline is passed the a's go on this crazy all-time historic winning streak ultimately they they win 20 games but we kind of play it out for for maximum drama um they're you know during so we sort of follow billy during all of game 20 as i mentioned he doesn't he thinks he's a jinx ever since his failed career as a player he's convinced

SPEAKER_67: that you know he just the team will never win if he's there so he always finds other things to do elsewhere and not be in the stadium during the team but he's listening to game 20 on the radio the a's are up 11 to nothing and so he figures ah there's no chance we're gonna lose this one so he turns

SPEAKER_23: around and he goes back to the stadium he does start watching the game live and in person and they start to they start the lead starts to slip they start to lose and he feels like uh you know he's he's dooming it so he goes back into the clubhouse and listens on the radio and this is really i mean because of the way that the a season played out this year this becomes the emotional climax of the movie is their their big victory is this like they have they clinch this 20 game hitting streak or winning streak uh and it's it on scott hatterberg he he hits the walk-off home run that wins the game you know this kind of unlikely guy that the league didn't believe in and so that that's you know kind of like that's our big hero moment of they did it they they did this they set this unprecedented record they matched you know they exceeded any american league win streak in history um and then and then they go on to lose to the minnesota twins in the first round of the playoffs so it's it's a it's a bit of like a rocky kind of ending where the they win the moral victory

SPEAKER_433: but they don't actually end up winning the championship they go the distance basically

SPEAKER_436: right nick producer nick i'm curious um having not watched this or remembering it is that actually

David Friedberg: how it went down that's exactly what happened in real life i mean oh yeah you don't remember

SPEAKER_440: actually going to the game or not but yes i remember even as a non-sports fan i remember the a's

SPEAKER_106: going on that crazy winning streak and everybody obsessing about the 11 run comeback and this

SPEAKER_23: you know i didn't watch the game but i do remember yeah i do remember the oakland a's going on this

SPEAKER_170: historic unprecedented i have a movie nerd question for you yeah so the trade deadline scene where he has like three phones and he's like oh pick up for john he's like which john he's like obviously the john that we're not we're not calling that other john back yet right they're just going back and forth like crazy aaron sorkin co-wrote this movie right did you think that scene was just in there for him to flex was that just like a sorkin flex scene because there's like no payoff for it

SPEAKER_446: like it never comes the ricardo and cohen never comes back it just felt like such a sorkin like

SPEAKER_23: muscle flex you know i mean i i feel like uh it definitely there's a lot of speeches in this that have a very a very sorkin flavor it's a little social networky yeah those are the moments where you could really feel his influence i mean we should mention the other guy who wrote it is steve's alien who wrote schindler's list i mean he he's a legend in his own right so i mean like two this was real

SPEAKER_72: two heavyweights on this screenplay like he was really yeah you could tell two legends yeah

SPEAKER_135: salian also wrote fablemans for spielberg last year i mean he's great well sorkin he's known for

SPEAKER_278: really like his dialogue is a lot of action right it's like very active and i mean the walk and talk is

SPEAKER_137: the thing you always associate with circuit like p like west wing people walking down corridors and it's a

SPEAKER_23: lot of complicated ban but also with that with that banter you know it's that it's that mixture of it's everybody's talking fast it's very detail oriented but it's also like everybody's got kind of a quirky funny way of speaking and they're very very personality driven and you know sports night west wing i mean that that's the that's that classic sorkin banter but he also wrote you know like few good men so a lot of big dramatic you can't handle the truth it's it's big it's bold it's action yeah yeah and a lot of my he loves loves a monologue so there's a lot of big monologues in this movie that are like that that feels vintage newsroom right which was like monologue central

SPEAKER_456: oh yeah i mean he the man the man loves a monologue more than maybe any other hollywood writer today

SPEAKER_458: he also did molly's game a few years ago yep um i mean jessica chastain the 25 yeah really terrible

SPEAKER_115: lucy and ricky one last year the newsroom was i i loved the newsroom i thought that was a great series i don't know what happened to that it was only was that two seasons maybe two seasons i think they

SPEAKER_41: did two seasons in the newsroom yeah it was like 25 episodes um jeff daniel's amazing yeah jeff daniel's

SPEAKER_297: really good a little a little preachy a little a little super preachy a little hard on its sleeve

SPEAKER_48: for my taste but sam waterson yeah he was great olivia mum was actually good in that too she that

SPEAKER_84: was like one of her i think that the social network script is like a master i i think that's his greatest that that might be his greatest all-time achievement it's why it's so complicated and yet

SPEAKER_23: it's the same thing oppenheimer kind of does this year where you're following all these different chronologies different hearings different moments in time they're all overlapping to give you this kind of collage of everything that happened and it's thematically connected but the way that he's able to keep you you're never like confused or like when is this happening or who's that guy and there's so many moving parts it's it's a huge achievement that movie's crazy i think it's

SPEAKER_170: amazing and jesse eisenberg is like tailor-made for aaron sorkin just the way he speaks you know

SPEAKER_23: and his like frenetic kind of face i mean we're not we're not we're not supposed to praise uh army

SPEAKER_59: hammer anymore but he's also fit i mean they're they're they're just it's so good it's a great i think we can separate the artist from the cannibalism um i mean he's remembering that correctly that he

SPEAKER_473: wanted to oh yeah eat people i mean he was accused of actual oh abusive behavior but then also there

SPEAKER_67: were those text messages where he was telling women he wanted to eat them yes yeah that's crazy weird

SPEAKER_48: weird guy telling selling timeshares in the cayman islands now aren't okay um the next island aaron

SPEAKER_85: sorkin film comes moved on to his he's on his next act uh okay so let's wrap this up uh so billy

SPEAKER_23: bean courted by the boston red sox after this you know landmark amazing season uh they have the second highest uh payroll in baseball in 2002 and they'd also had recently hired bill james the creator of sabermetrics the statistical system peter brand was sort of basing his work on uh so the red sox owner is basically like you were the first one out of the gate that guy always gets beat up nobody who's the first one up the innovator always gets suffers the pushback and everything but it's obvious to those

SPEAKER_82: of us in the know that you were right and that this is where everything is going in to be soon and we all need to start doing what you did to put this season together and so i want you to come work

SPEAKER_23: for me and he slips up a piece of paper that we later find out says 12.5 million which would be the highest uh general manager salary in the history of baseball but billy bean says no he wants to stay and win he wants to win it all with the ace he doesn't want to go to one of the big teams that can buy the championship he wants to prove that he could do it for himself uh and then we find out in a card that comes at the end of the movie that two years later the red sox did go on to win their first world series in 86 years utilizing the money ball sort of philosophy that that billy

SPEAKER_315: had helped to sort of pioneer and this is where there's so many business lessons number one take

SPEAKER_278: the money just take the money uh number yeah don't be a hero um and the first first guy up the hill takes the arrows is also uh one of these things uh that happens a lot in the industry there were you know cab uh ordering services that predated uh you know uber there were devices that predated the iphone like the blackberry a lot of times like you know um people self-sabotage or they don't take

SPEAKER_19: the opportunity that's presented in front of them and you have a long history of this it's hard to know

SPEAKER_15: what you should do here but if you know that you have the right technique and then somebody offers you the bankroll to execute on that same technique and obviously 12 and a half million dollars and

SPEAKER_41: you should take that like this was a huge mistake i think on his part um don't be a hero comes to mind

SPEAKER_140: well i think also i mean to me the takeaway was also not that i just i agree with everything but i i also

SPEAKER_23: think know what success looks like when you start like when when we hear we hear a few different versions of this throughout the movie of what billy is what does he really want what is the ultimate goal and obviously to win a championship but then at one point he tells peter brand rings don't matter championships don't matter but if we win with this team we change the game and that's what i really want i want to change the game so at the end he he didn't win the season but he he succeeded in that goal the owner of the boston red sox is telling him to his face you changed the game that's you would think that would be the ultimate win that's the moment but bill he didn't win the championship so he still doesn't feel like he won he still feels like the loser the failure the guy who couldn't

SPEAKER_140: quite maybe he is get it done yeah maybe he is but to me i think like but if if he had set that as

SPEAKER_23: his goal like i want i don't want there to be teams like we were where they have no chance and they just have to try to play this this failing losing game with players who aren't good enough uh i want to change the game so that there's this alternate strategy that people use he he did that he he won so he ends up feeling like not a success even though i think you could argue that he even succeeded by his own definition of what success was so if you go into any project and you already know

SPEAKER_451: when this happens when i when i win the oscar when i make my first billion when i whatever it is

SPEAKER_23: yes have that fixed in your mind so you know when you get there because otherwise you're just endlessly chasing a something you'll never achieve yeah i think understanding what success

SPEAKER_62: looks like setting some goals hitting those goals yeah all very important yeah and you know the big takeaway for founders here in terms of the business breakdown and the lessons here i think is

SPEAKER_19: paradigms do shift you have to commit to those uh and you have to convince the team to come on that

SPEAKER_15: journey with you you need everybody rowing in the right direction and it's going to be hard to change the paradigm there's going to be pain there's going to be suffering there's going to be doubt people

SPEAKER_19: are going to try to stop you people inside the team the press outside the team the doubters the haters your competitors and you know it takes a lot of fortitude takes a lot of resilience i think as you pointed out many times during this discussion um but there is always a better way to do something there there is going to be a paradigm shift it's going to face everything right now we're facing it as an industry the whole you know ai is going to change the entire uh playing field of employment creativity etc to what extent in what jobs who knows we'll we'll see but um such a great inspiring movie

SPEAKER_96: watch it with your team and uh this is our third business breakdown you got the founder you got uh the blackberry film and now you got uh moneyball three great films watch these with your friends watching with your team and really you know you can learn a lot from the lessons out there is what i always try to tell people um you know startups and the history of startups like it may not repeat but it rhymes right as as we know about history so thisweekinstartups.com bb for me can i do one uh

SPEAKER_170: takeaway before we go yes please producer okay so my number one takeaway from this movie for baseball and for company building sample size matters yeah the reason that analytics was adopted in baseball faster and more uh seriously than any other sport they play 162 games that's twice as much as the nba twice as much as the nhl ten times as much as the nfl what does that mean that means a guy can get hot for a couple weeks or they can go super cold for a couple weeks but eventually everything progresses to the mean and if you were building a startup i would say be in it for the long haul if you have a great team if you have a great product if you have a great vision the longer you stay at it the more likely you are going to regress to the mean and if your mean is great then that means you will end up doing great things yeah wow it's a great great insight about sample size for sure and

SPEAKER_265: you hear they actually mentioned in the movie jonah hill's character is like listen we don't have a

SPEAKER_333: big enough sample size it's only may why are you getting mad at us it's only may they're so eager

SPEAKER_106: at the start of the season to be like it's not working it's not working everybody wants to panic

SPEAKER_170: whereas with the nfl it's much harder to

SPEAKER_500: people try it but you know in the nfl you can get hot and win five games in a row and all of a sudden you're in the playoffs because there's 16 games right it's just like yeah

SPEAKER_436: and you do need to know to build off what you're saying here a very important takeaway is to

SPEAKER_62: understand what metrics matter and you know in startups what metrics matter what are vanity metrics the number of downloads your app get that's not super important the number of times people open your app and use it and come back to it or the average minutes in it that's actually what matters and so you know there's there's vanity metrics and there's real metrics your valuation isn't as important as your earnings your total cumulative downloads or your ranking in app store not as important as your average listeners who come back over and over again yeah so understanding your

SPEAKER_96: north star metrics and understanding which metrics to pay attention to super important here

SPEAKER_41: everybody follow lawns l-o-n-s on twitter everybody read inside.com streaming his amazing newsletter and

SPEAKER_96: everybody this week in startups.com bb thank you producer nick thank you to the other producers we'll see you all next time on this week start