Ryan Resch - How Data Changed the NBA and What AI Changes Next (Ep. 327)

0:00Welcome to Infinite Loops. My name is Jimmy Sony. I am the editor-in-chief of Infinite Books, and I am guest hosting for Jim Ashanazi. My guest today is Ryan Rush. Ryan spent nearly a decade with the Phoenix Suns, where he started as an intern and left as the assistant general manager and VP of basketball operations, running everything from roster strategy and data science to scouting and in health and performance and everything in between. Ryan Rush, welcome to Infinite Loops. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Of course. So, just so listeners have a bit of context and background. You don't have any friends for a number of years, but when I met you, you were the vice president of basketball operations for the Phoenix Suns, the assistant general manager, and you reported directly to the head of the Phoenix Suns, and you kind of gave me in a number of other people you're with, like behind the scenes view of the Suns organization and how it operates. But just so people listening have context, you, first of all, you were in an NBA,

1:04you were in an NBA front office at like a ridiculously young age. You were chief of staff to the head of the organization when the Suns went to the finals and when they won 64 games. franchise record. And then, and you become this kind of, you're like one of the go-to people on sports and data and where they intersect. And now sports data and AI and where they intersect. And right now you are at 1949 capital partners and you're leading the firm's work on data and AI. So, the thing that interests me most, among other things is, you know, you're not six foot four, right? So, to walk us through kind of like your, your early life. You were, you were a military brat, but I want to go from, before you get to the NBA, let's figure out how you got to the NBA. So, you started out in life and you're a military, you're moving around a lot. So, walk us through kind of where'd you grow up, how'd you live? Sun, it's your first parents. We lived in seven places before the age of 18 years old. Wow, which I always kind of surprised

2:05myself when I say that. So, born in New Jersey, lived on effectively every coast, went to high school in Germany. So, I went overseas for high school. There was a military base on Ramstein Air Base. So, still kind of an American experience there, but we did live in a German village. And so, it was, you know, a bit of an international time. Came back and moved to Texas to go to Baylor University where I had family in Texas in Florida from my parents' sites. And Baylor was the first school to accept me. And I'm not the most patient person. And so, the fact that they did accept me so quickly did help. While I was waiting on other schools that didn't have research in Baylor, their political science program, which was my first, I would say, passion and first love growing up was political science, probably from being around the Air Force and the military and learning that side of it. And enrolled in the, man, what would that have been, the fall of 2010? Got it. And I was a campus tour guide my sophomore year. It's still very good at walking

3:07backward and talking. And I had this weird desire to go into sports journalism, which I don't use sports fan growing up. I was a huge NFL fan and I was a big basketball fan. Okay. And but it's hard when you're a military kid because you don't really have a home. So, whenever I'm asked, oh, where are you from, I have to give this whole long, real explanation around it. And when you don't have like a hometown, it's hard to like really pinpoint what you're a fan of. And I got into basketball when we lived in Florida. So, I became a Miami Heat fan at the time, right around when Dwayne Wade was drafted, which was an ironic that my future boss, James Jones, was on those Miami Heat Championship teams. Yeah. And my dad was a big Pittsburgh Steelers fan growing up. So, I grew up as a big Pittsburgh Steelers fan. And I loved watching sport. I loved the competition of it, the game of it. And I had no, as you mentioned, I'm not six four. And so, I had no, I'm deeply, I have no coordination, no hand.

4:08I have to clear, Muxie Boog's like broke the mold, right? Like every, when I was growing up, because I was short and I love basketball. So, in the, in the brief period in which I held these, you know, dashed dreams or going to basketball player, I would just turn to Muxie Boog's, Muxie made it work. There you go. That's all you need. You just need determination and grit and hope that your jump shot. Right. Exactly. And I, I, for a very, very short period, decided to double major in journalism, which I quit. And then decided one day, it's like, I am just going to cold email Scotrue, who as we had coach of Baylor Men's Basketball still to this day. Yeah. And a testament to him, that he responded right away. So, right after my summer, after my sophomore year, I sent to cold email to Scotr, said, I respect your program. I admire what you're building. If there's ever anything I can do to help let me know. And he's replied that same day, if I remember incorrectly. And he said, come be a student manager. Wow. And I said, yes, I had no idea what it meant. Right. And I show up, maybe two or three days later. And I am an equipment manager, folding towels and doing laundry for

5:13Baylor Men's Basketball. Wow. And it's very, they just story right in. And so you're in the locker room, like getting everything ready for the guys before practice, after practice for games. You're on the court, helping, you know, rebound and pass balls and those kinds of things. I was so bad at passing a basketball. When I started, oh, so bad. That Scotrue called me into his office. He probably remembers this. And he taught me how to throw a chess pass with spin on it. Like, how embarrassing is that? So, just like I have this, I have this clear. So you were there in your passing basket. Did the players say something? No, this is for something. He just installed how bad is coached true? Yeah, this is coached true. This is why he's a national championship right coach, because he sees these things and he fixes them. Right. Even in his student manager exactly, exactly. And that, I think it says a lot about him, but it also says, I guess it's like an early lesson. Yeah. Like the nature of detail. Right. Sport and winning these things, because if you throw a knuckleball, if you throw a ball without any spin, you can break someone's finger in jam their

6:15finger. Right. God forbid, it's on a shooting hand. Yeah. Wait, is that true? Sorry, is that true? And so you're saying in basket in knuckleball or baseball is a baseball term, right? But it is. Yeah. So a ball with no spin. Yeah. So like, so I wasn't putting any spin on my chess belt. I was just literally chucking the ball. I was accurate. Like accuracy was not the is actually getting spin in rotation on the ball. Which the best shooters can tell you about, because you have to put back spin on the ball in order to actually guide it to the target. That's very launching. Don't ask me about shooting. I'm not. Not the. So we just had a curiosity. You know, if we take us back in the story, you, I mean, I want to go to a bunch of different places, but let's talk about living in seven different places before the age of 18. Right. Because that, like, that, that is not an experience that that I had. I'm assuming actually most listeners are pretty, they're, they're pretty like, geographically as a kid, you know, your parents do tend to try to want to stay in one place. Right. By design, your parents can't. Right. So what,

7:20what was it like being the new kid all the time? Right. Like, was that, I mean, I'm sure this shaped your life. I'm quite, I'm asking how do you shape your life? Yeah. I think the, the most obvious is what I've already mentioned where you don't have a sense of home in the traditional way that people think about that where I'm just now learning. So we still have a house in Phoenix, love Phoenix, very actually attached to that, to that house. And that is the first kind of time that I've felt that I can call a place home. Yeah. And that has been a very kind of transformative experience for me. The other aspects of it, you become very adaptable and you become very malleable kind of you could enter any space and be comfortable. So I'm also an only child. So I have no brothers or sisters. So it's just me and my parents right around the country and then over to Germany. And you, you kind of, you're able to talk to people and you're able to introduce yourself maybe not so comfortably when you're 12. Yeah. But, you know, you, you start, you get a rep at it. Right. Is I think probably the more important thing is I was forced into situations where I

8:24had to get a rep set introducing myself and telling people and showing people who I am as I'm also trying to figure that out for the rest of my life, right, or growing up rather. And it does leave you with kind of a few things. One of them is I'm always moving like not moving homes necessarily now. But I am always constantly in a new place. So it's very hard for me to stay still. Yeah. This is why sports was so good for me. Right. Because you're on two week East Coast road trips and you're playing in Toronto and then tomorrow you have a game at Philly and you're just kind of moving around a lot. Yeah. And then it also leaves you just with this sense of confidence. If you, if you're kind of maturing into that space where you can just enter spaces, right, and be okay. Right. In a way that maybe somebody who hasn't had that experience just needs more reps at it. Yeah. So this, this ties to my next question, which connects to the time with Baylor and with Coach Drew, you know, there are a lot of people who watch sports as casual fans or as kids kind of

9:30admiring athletes from afar. And there's a certain impenetrability to the world of sports. You think, well, if I don't have that level of talent, there's no way for me to get involved in sports. Right. And so for you, you do this extraordinary thing, which is like as a sophomore, you take a gig that puts you at the very, very, very bottom rung of the organization. When you sent that email, if you take, if you can think back that or like that's a pretty extraordinary, like I'll give you an example, I'm suddenly sitting here so jealous that you did that because I went to Duke and basketball as a religion. They have a whole manager program. And I would have been like, I would have been applied if I had known that was even a possibility, right? But I never knew it was a possibility. And so my question is like, how did you, was it, was it in that moment, was it desired to be closer to sports? Or was it just kind of on a whim? Like what motivates you to do that because it really does shape the rest of your trajectory? It did. I think it's, I think it's all of those things that you're saying where it's it. The idea came to me because my boss actually

10:32at the campus tour guide center. Yeah. She had a Baylor basketball poster in her wall in her office. And we would always talk about the games and Baylor basketball is an excellent program or still excellent. And this was kind of the first period of like Scotchery's excellence was those like 2010 to 2014 really right when I was there. Yeah. Those years. And so we were, that was a nice subtle wave. And like, you know, I might have had something to do. Well, they won the National San Francisco after that. After I was passing out of the employer, everything got better. And she, we would just talk about it so much. And I think I maybe just set off hand like, how under how you even begin to get involved in that. Yeah. And she was like just email Scotchery or something like that. Right. And this was, it's so commonplace now if you want to reach someone into their company name, their first initial last name or their first name at companyname.com. Right. But it is, I think that that was still a bit of a foreign concept. I mean, whatever it was 2012. Yeah. And so I was probably very nervous to send it. Yeah. But

11:36it also, like you said, it sparked all of this. And it's why I have this rule that if someone reaches out to me and wants advice on how to get into sport, then I will lean at least like talk to them one time so that we can go through this process of, hey, you're in college. You want to figure out how to do this. You need to find the director of basketball operations for your team. They send them an email saying that you want to be a student manager and ask if they have that program. And the reason I do that is because I didn't have that guy to actually did it. Yeah. And it's cool now because there's actually a few people around the league that were undergrads that reached out that became managers. So that's Tennessee and other schools that are now in the NBA. Wow. Because of it. But that is, I mean, I, I think I'm a bit of a venture now is how I can describe it. And in order to do that well, you just have to have the agency. So I'd send the email. Right. Just send the email if they don't respond. Everything's okay. Right. Find the next thing. Right. And then keep going. That's great. Okay. So you know, you did mention this, but

12:39Baylor was a serious and it's still a serious program. I mean, you went to the, I think it was a 2021 championship. Right. Yes. It was COVID. It was the COVID tournament because I did not get to go on for a day. Okay. You know, during your tenure, they were, they were, they were really starting there. They're climbing. What, so what do you, what did you see in that culture? Like what, was it that made Baylor stand out from other comparable programs? I will say one of the things that I understand now that I did not understand then was the coaches always shouldering the blame for the players always. Interesting. And behind closed doors, you know, publicly as well, that one's more obvious. Like, yeah, how to coaches do that, but even behind closed doors, like a lot of the conversations would center around, okay, if this player is turning the ball over, how do we teach them not to do that? How do we put them in a position not to do that? And I think that that's notable because obviously sport is extremely emotional. Right. It is very volatile. You're going to lose

13:41three games in a row at some point. Yeah. And you have to really have this stability in order to ride that. And the easy thing to do there is to get all pissed off and start blaming the players, say, that you need better players, you need more talent, whatever. And maybe that is objectively true. If you are going up against a Duke that has the top five guys in the class, like whatever, like you still need to figure out how to beat them. Right. But to see a coaching staff, led by Scott Drew, Jerome Tang, a lot of the folks that are still there, like shoulder that blame, and then they would always tell them, they would tell me they would be like, it's our fault. Oh wow. And I would say, I don't understand this. We're not the ones turning the ball over, because I was so like, petulant. And then I get it now, like having gone through everything that we went through at the suns and everything that's come after, like I understand now that when you ask about the culture of that space, it is you need to create a teaching culture, or an actual learning culture where somebody can make a mistake, like turning the ball over or missing a shot, and then know that it's not going to result in punishment, it's going to result in

14:44a lesson. Maybe that lesson is hard, right. It's tough love, but there is going to be a lesson involved in it. Can I can I ask you this question? It's a bit more just personal perspective, but you know, when you're a college student, sometimes you have a, a, a, a, a, a, a too healthy sense of your own importance, right. And I got to believe, like you're a very smart guy, and you're studying political science, you know, and you're at Baylor, and you know, you have a good head about you. And now you are folding towels, right. Like how did you put your ego to the side? Like, you know, and it was it was it a rude awakening. You get in, you think student managers going to do all kinds of interesting things. And now you're folding towels and you're, you're learning how to pass better. What was that? Like, like, is there a part of this that was just, you already knew what you were getting into? Or was it now the proximity of the game was the day I off? Like it was just, you wanted to be a part of this and you figured this was the way to do it. I did not know what I was getting myself into. It's funny that you asked that because I still,

15:45like one of my, my fondest memories is on Sundays at Baylor, people are at church, in Ryan, us cleaning the gym. Yeah. I was cleaning the practice gym and I loved it. Because you had to get this big pull out, put towels on it and like drag this pole all the way across the course. I had it to clean it. And it was just a very cathartic like meditative meditative. Exactly. What it was, you had turned on a podcast or music or something and you would just do it and then you would clean the gym. And I, I don't remember having kind of an adverse reaction to any of it. All that probably did at some point, years, that when I was in, when I was head manager, my senior year, right, did I act probably some way where it was like, you know, now this is beneath me, the young manager can do it probably. Yeah. But what you learn in doing it, genuinely, when you are the person putting out the loops that have all of the jerseys and the shorts and the socks and everything on the player's chair, it's behind a locked door. So you're not doing it. Player can't get dressed, player can't practice. Okay. And so you're able to actually experience like the

16:46operational chain of how we go from this nice idea that I've let's run a basketball team to, you know, these are all of the dirty steps and the details that it takes to get it done. Yeah. And I think that that was a huge payoff for me, especially my last year at the Sons when I did run the daily operations of the franchise. Yeah. Where it was like I knew what our, excuse me, I knew what our equipment manager was going through. Okay. Where he's dragging these trunks around constantly him and his assistant. Yeah. How do we make that? How do we lighten that load for those people who are extremely important to get rid of this done? So at some point during your tenure at Baylor, you become the guy who has the data, who has the numbers. So it was chapter two. Yeah. In excruciating detail, describe like I, you know, Sparino, Sparino's story there. How do you go from towels to analytics and spreadsheets and you're helping the coach think different about the game? When does that transition start to happen? So I was head manager my senior year.

17:50And political science was my passion basketball was my hobby. Like that was kind of the differentiation that I put there that's really the only two things I had outside of friend group, obviously, but we would be at the gym till 3 a.m. scouting the next opponent and like it crazy hours. Wow. It's still an even in the NBA crazy. Yeah. And I graduated. I went to go get a PhD in political science at the University of Missouri. There was a professor there that I wanted to study under for American political development. And around, was it my sophomore? It was either my sophomore or my junior year of undergrad. I was introduced to data science and statistics through econometrics and political science. And when I kind of dug deeper into that world and I realized oh, my brain is actually extremely logical. And like coding came naturally to me data came naturally to me. I still love theory. I still love philosophy, liberal arts, all of those things. For sure. How do we blend these two things? I go to Mizzou for a year. And I, I, we're working on

18:55these papers and this research and I just have this, this feeling that's like this is just not it for me. This is not right for me. Different than when I, you know, quit campus tour guide to go to basketball. This was like, no, this is fundamentally not the place for me. Yeah. And I think what I ultimately settled on, which is kind of a principle that I now carry throughout life is I don't want to study problems. I want to actually solve the problem. Now that requires you to study them in order to solve them. Yeah. But we're not going to actually solve it if we are just kind of writing papers and going about our day. I want to actually do, I want to do all that. Yeah. And then I want to do it to see if we're right. Yeah. I heard not. Yeah. About it. And I decided that I was going to leave the program. So I quit. And I did not know what I was going to do. I had absolutely no idea. It is probably the scariest period of my life. Because I just had no concepts. What else I could be doing. Right. And I happened to go to the big 12 tournament, which is the conference that Baylor. I think they're still in. Yeah. I can't keep up with the compact. I know. I need a

20:00change on a dime. It's like, yeah, it's like wild. And I went to the big 12 tournament, spent a few days with the team again and realized, okay, I think I just missed the team environment. So I called Scotchery again. And he answered again. And I said, I don't know what I'm going to do, but do you have any advice for me? And he was like, well, I just got done talking to Tom iso at Michigan State, who's a good friend of his. Yeah. And legendary, legendary. Yeah. Yeah. And he just hired someone to do data sciences statistics for them. Can you come do it for me? I said, sure. That's amazing. And that was amazing. I probably a month leading up to, well, first we had to get me into a grad program. Because this was very late. It was like April. Yeah. It's time. Thankfully, that all worked out. And why did you get new grad program? Because he couldn't hire you unless you were a student. I was going to be a grad assistant. Yeah. I was going back as a grad assistant. Got it. So you can, there's like the student manager program for

21:00undergrad. Yeah. There are grad assistants. Typically, grad assistants are going to follow the coaching route. Okay. Although more and more common. It's video analytics and whatnot. Okay. It's part of it. And I guess GM now for these colleges. And so I go back to Baylor in whatever was that? 2015. Yeah. 2015. Spring of 2015. Yeah. And coaches like, I want line up data. Okay. And line up data did not exist at this time. Like there was no, there was no easy accessible like public form of line up data that you could also trust. You know, it was a whole kind of amorphous concept still. And just for context, like I remember, I think money ball came out in 2003. The movie is like 2011 and like that. So we're not in the, we're still, we're post money ball, but we are pre like the digitization of everything sports, especially probably at the end of the day. And it also, it started in baseball. So money ball is the baseball book, obviously.

22:00And then it kind of slowly made its way across football and soccer and, you know, obviously, lacrosse and those other ones. And then basketball was also really starting to take off. Darryl Mori popularizes, you know, threes and layups only with Mori ball. And that's kind of the launching of the analytics movement in the NBA. I had like a popular level. Yeah. And money ball kind of joins along those lines. So the mid 2010s was, I would say, really where teams and people took it more seriously in basketball. Yeah. In, yeah. And so there was just no line up data or college basketball that we could rely on. And I, to this day, I don't know how I had this idea. But in, in basketball, all sports, you have the play by play. Yep. That says, okay, you know, your point guard is subbing in, your shooting guard is subbing out, point guard made a two point shot assisted by your small forward along those lines in text. Yes. Pre-AI. Yeah. Pre-AI. Well, I early days of machine learning and Alex and that and those things. And I scraped those play

23:03by plays. Wow. And from the text, I turned it into a box score. And so we could build the, and I'll never forget this. It's all hinged on one thing being two things being true. The sub in sub outs had to be on the play by play. Yeah. Or else this wouldn't work. Right. And the starters, there had to be a connotation of who started the game. Huh. So typically that would be the first five players listed. Yeah. Not always. But thank God. There was an asterisk next to, next to the starter. Just so I have this right. So I understand this correctly. There was no box score data for Vailer, or maybe even men's college basketball at Circa, whatever year this 2015, 2015. Nobody is tabulating these and putting them on ESPN. Wow. Now individuals, yes. Yeah. Like, you can go to college basketball reference, amazing website. They have the individual box scores and whatnot. Because that comes from the scores table, the rightist sticks from the game. Yeah. This was no, okay. Now we want to know five man combinations. So for those who don't know, a lineup would be your point guard shooting guard, small forward, power forward center. Yeah.

24:05Five man combinations. How are they performing together? God, it's was, I'm not going to say it's like a brand new concept. Right. Getting that data at scale so we can have it for Vailer and our opponents. Yeah. Was a novel problem to solve. Okay. So you scraped the data and you built something that scraped the data. And then what happens after that? We converted the text into the box score. Yeah. So point guard made two point shot that becomes two points to point field, all the time two point field goal make. So each of the little traits that you can consider variables that would make up that action, you can now register and log it in your box score. And then you sum it all up and you aggregate by lineup. And then you, you know, I think, and this is what AI I think is teaching so many of us is once you have the data extracted and structured, you can do so many different cuts of it. And so now we have five man, four man, three man, two man, like what about these different combinations of guys? Like it just kind of exploded in that way. And coach was happy with it. And it started just kind of influencing

25:08rotations and substitution patterns and those kinds of things. So yeah, this is where I want to go bit deeper, right? Because I mean, famously the scenes in the movie and money ball, but then also as described in the book is there's a graph versus host problem, right? Like you have a person who's very, very smart with this kind of stuff. And there's an allergic reaction from people who believe it's going to it's going to slowly the sanctity of sports, right? You're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to add an impurity, which is like logic and reason in something that ought to be subject to, to competition and fate and individual effort and all these other kind of more, it's called more ethereal things, right? And into that you're reducing like logic and regression analyses and actually looking at data. Did you face any of that when you were starting to pull these things together? Like were you sheepish? Was the coach resistant? Was any, was there any part of the organization that was like Ryan, we love this step, but we not have to play the game and you don't, you couldn't even throw a pass until he coached you to throw the pass better. Maybe that's why I work with coach knew that I wasn't even, I wasn't trying to front as a way to do these things. I definitely have run into that resistance. Yes, but I've also

26:13been extremely fortunate that the, the principles that I have worked for so Scotcharoo, James Jones, these are people who are very rational thinkers to begin with. Yeah. And so they want this data, they want this information. And so that helps number one. But what it does teach you is this incredible lesson of like, and I think that this is important for data folks and maybe more like rationally minded folks is there is a difference between being effective and being right. And this is something that I had to learn at the Suns and it came from kind of exactly what you're describing, which is if sport is this constrained bounded game that we have all of the rules for we know exactly how it's structured, there is a very clear scoring and reward system. We can apply game theory, we can optimize it for stress, strategic and tactical choice. If that's true, then why are we not doing? Right. And the answer in my mind always came back to what I called the communication problem, which is we we are fundamentally lacking the ability to communicate why these insights matter

27:15to help you make better coaching decisions or you make better playing decisions or you make better executive level decisions like who to put on the roster and who to take off. Right. And I think there are there are hosted ways to solve that the language that you choose, the tone in which you speak to people like the more maybe a femoral concepts that are qualitative, right? Maybe more quantum driven folks don't naturally move towards. But I think also in this is this is where I hope it goes in sport is team building is a beautiful beautiful art and a beautiful science like there's really a blending of it for to do it well. Yeah. It's the cultural aspects that you asked about earlier as well as if you think about kind of a two by two grid when you're making team building decisions whether it's a roster or your staff, you know, for a job somewhere else, you have to focus on the person and you have to focus on the professional. So the instead of person for sports it'd be a player. So player and professional. You have to focus on the leagues perception. So kind of the

28:20vacuum perception. Yeah. And you have to focus on for my team. What is that going to be? So this player player X might be an excellent viewpoint shooter and the league standards absolutely excellent. But they can only get their threes off of very specific actions. Those actions are not good for our team. Why? Because we don't have the person to create those actions. Yeah. And so I objectively believe that you're an excellent three point shooter, but you're not going to help our team right now. Okay. You have to kind of hold this balance. And that's a very human thing is to hold these these conflicting and competing to use in your mind. And I do think that where data helps is like quantifying and telling that story. Yeah. Of player, professional, person, professional, how are they view kind of a vacuum within the within their entire cohort? Right. And then how are they viewed for our team specifically under our conditions? Right. And if we can get the data with the help of AI, if we can get the data more down that more human story. Yeah. Then I think it becomes more easy to apply it. Got. And once it becomes easier to apply it, it's more helpful.

29:23Right. And once it's helpful, it's valued. What's what's an example from your days at Baylor, where because you're you're really creating this stuff from whole cloth, right? And there's not anybody feeding you this. You don't have APIs. You're plugging into you're doing this larger on your own. I assume. Yeah. What's an example of something that shifted because of something you found. It can be small. It can be big. But look, what's an example of when you had an insight and you said, this is I've I've generated new knowledge here. And then something shifted in the organization as a result. It had Baylor specifically. Yeah. I think one of them, we had a forward who absolutely excellent score. Yeah. Absolutely excellent. Six, eight, six, nine, you know, very, very smooth scoring the ball. And he didn't get a ton of minutes. Part of that was because like he wasn't the hardest worker, did not kind of present as, you know, like a cultural anchor of the team, those kinds of things. And I'm not saying that that is not a deserved reputation or not. But when you looked at the numbers and you said, okay, when this player is on the floor,

30:27like per minute, the impact that this guy is having is actually extremely high. Okay. How do we fix these things that are going wrong? It's with that maybe he shows up on time. Or how do we put a better environment around him where he's playing with certain guys who are going to get the most out of him? Yeah. Because his per minute, like efficiency is so high, let's let's not turn a blind eye. But let's let's focus on fixing those things that we really disliked that we want to vent about. Yeah. So that we can unlock this for the team. Got it. So that we can unlock this scoring prowess for the team. Because it's really easy. Again, sports is extremely emotional. Right. It's really easy to be focused on. We just lost. You relate to shoot around. Right. You're one of the reasons that we lost. I'm not saying that's not true. Right. But the payoff of unlocking that, we can now see what that looks like. Got it. And that's where we talk. I think that data is a mechanism to create focus. Yeah. That helps you focus on if we can fix this set of issues. This thing we unlocked this. That's really interesting. Did was this common in college basketball at the time? Like I know,

31:29Tom, you said, Tom iso is what turned Scott drew onto it. Had it become commonplace for coaches to hire somebody on the team to do this kind of data science. I wouldn't say it was common. I think coach true was definitely ahead of his time. Tom iso ahead of his time. Ken Pomeroy, who's still a big name in college basketball data, had been around for a few years. And he was kind of the one that was known. But this was pre NIL. So this was pre all of the money. Yeah. I mean, I, you want to talk about pre NIL. I got in trouble by the NCAA for buying honey roasted peanut butter. What? Because if I had a story, I'd know I do. So the NCAA was extremely strict. Yeah. Pre NIL. Yeah. And the meals, what classified as a meal, was extremely strict as well. And so we could not provide food under certain conditions to guys. Because I know it would be considered a meal. If they get a meal, it's an impermissible benefit. Oh, it was a whole bureaucracy. I mean, it still is a bureaucracy. Right. But on a different level. And so look, according to Baylor compliance,

32:32adding honey to peanut butter, uh-huh, made it a meal at that time. Adding honey to peanut butter that a player was going to eat, yes, made what you did, impermissible science and play roles. It subsurbed. Wow. Absolutely crazy. That is bananas. And you talk about, you know, you go back to your previous question about data, logic, entering, sport, and the human component, the bureaucracy of it all is what removes the human component. Right. The player needs this. Yeah. Not like, let's put aside the fact that people would just love peanut butter. Like it's amazing. And I can't have it in the house. Players need this to recover. Yeah. They need the sugar. They need the protein. They need the fat. Right. So you are instead focused on this arbitrary definition of impermissible benefit instead of what's best for the players. Right. That's right. Yeah. I think that's what's actually removing right. You know, it's a bit of a detour, but I am curious because there are very strong opinions on what the NIL changes have done to college sports. And I'm not well

33:34versed enough. So if you could give a little bit of a brief on what has changed. But my, my own sense as a fan from afar is that today's, particularly college basketball, because that's when I follow, but today's collegiate athletic environment feels like the Wild West. Like there was just a lawsuit in Colorado that allowed an additional year of eligibility for a bunch of NCAA players. And now all of a sudden, men's college basketball for the year ahead is scrambled. You don't know what's going to happen. You don't know who's going to come back. How they can come back. How long they can stay. If you get an appeals court to say one thing, it might change the decision. This could rise to the level of the Supreme Court. What do you make as a reason been there? What do you make of contemporary college athletics? I find it very hard to keep up with for all of the reasons that you're describing, which is there are, there are institutions involved now that we would have never considered. Like at our time, we're not thinking about, okay, what is what is the Supreme Court going to decide on this case and will that affect whether my players eligible or not? Right. The rules there were very clear. And I think we appreciated the time.

34:38I think that the positive side of it is that these, these players who have this unbelievable gift and these incredible talents, both skill-wise, physically, athletically, all of it, they are now receiving compensation for these things. I think that that is like an economic benefit and a good thing as occurring, where it is gone poorly is, I think most importantly where it's gone poorly is the continuity of teams. And transfers were a problem pre-NIL. So NIL is name image likeness where you are not paid for your name, image likeness. And there's a host of rules around how you can receive your money. But it has led to NIL plus what they call the transfer portal in college, where players can now basically leave teams and schools whenever they want to, but your name are the transfer portal, sometimes in an effort to maximize your NIL. Yeah. It has led to rapid turnover teams and makes the coaches and the now college general managers,

35:39jobs harder. That job did not exist when I was in college. There was a college, yeah, there was no college beyond. I mean, just I was there. We were just scraping play-life later. Doing in the Stone Age, exactly, exactly. And the turnover of these teams is just so high now, where players are leaving going to the transfer portal, maybe trying to maximize their cash, whatever, whatever they deem the most important. And you lose, like Duke does lose this period of where you guys had Christian late-nighters, or yeah, Jolilo Kaffir and those guys only stay at high stones only stayed for one season, but you still had those faces on the team. Yeah. You recognized your over-year, over-year, Baylor was the exact same way. Right. You don't really have a lot of that anymore. And I think that that loses again back to the human side, the sport, that loses the, when everybody's kind of in the fox hole together, playing this Euro Sum game every night, it's when our lose. Yeah. That is where those bonds are really formed, where I can still call the coaching staff at Baylor, or the GAs of Managers at Baylor,

36:42or some of the players at Baylor, and we'll talk about, you know, what the, what the 20, whatever was, 16, sweet 16 at Madison Square Garden, or South Carolina, completely dismantled us. Like we still, you know, talk about that. Right. And you just don't have those memories, and that is weird. Or lose camaraderie. I do have one question on this one. It's interesting. I think about this, just as a casual fan, but also it kind of, the challenge here is, on the one hand, there was, there were always going to be people who were going to be one and done. Right. We're going to come in, like Cosbask Wall and Fire, do their year, and then go off and play in the NBA. Even before that, you could skip college altogether and go straight to the NBA, the way Kobe and others have done. At the same time, you now have money that's available to you to be paid to stay in college. Right. So isn't the argument against what you just said, well, yes, it's true. People can job hop effectively or college hop, right, and go from one school to another using a transfer portal to maximize their winnings and earnings.

37:42But on the other hand, they're actually getting paid while they're in school, and thus can stay in school longer. Right. And then it's on the program and on the coach and on the university to make that both work their well financially and make sure that they feel like it's a place where they they they want to call home for X number of years. Right. So isn't there a little bit of this actually took some of the safety valve, you created the safety valve for the pressure to leave for the league, like too early or skip school or like to be a one and done because now you could be a two or three and done, right? Or a four and done and still get paid for your time. I'm not well versed enough, but does that argument have any have any weight? I want to say yes, more so in football. Like I don't know exactly what that would look like, but anecdotally, it feels like I've seen more of those stories of someone choosing to stay in college football. Yeah. And the NIL money is larger in college football than it is college basketball, unless you are at a Duke, right, or a Kentucky. So I think it's more true in football, I could be wrong. On the basketball side of things,

38:48I don't know if it has yet reached the NBA side where like the the contracts in the NBA are fundamentally different than the NFL, then the Major League Baseball. Each of these leagues has a very different economic structure. Yeah. The NBA is extremely player friendly. Okay. Very, very strong players association, especially back in the 2010s when they were negotiating those really core CBAs. And the players will get if you're drafted in the first round, two years guaranteed to your team option, but you usually look at all four years guaranteed at some point. And then from there, if you're a good player, you're making $20 plus million a year now. So the payoff for college basketball may not be there yet. Right. Where I do think your argument has a lot of merit is that the onus is now on program building. Right. You need to you need to build a program, right, which is where the balers and the dukes and these other schools who have done it are benefiting with like these brand name institutions who have built actual programs. There's now a value on that. There's a premium on that. Right. At some point, this will all be as things always are regulated

39:49to some degree. There are any more rules in place, but how much you can pay under what conditions, like some kind of salary cap system. Yeah. So I do think that there is a premium that's now placed on building an actual program. Yeah. So if you do have one of these brands like a baler or duke, there is a lot of value there. Once we have some form of a salary cap system, where I think that that'll happen at some point in the future, yeah. Mary, those constraints with what you've described of that program culture building. Now you've got a more professional and professional sport environment there. Where how do you build an Oklahoma City Thunder at college basketball? How do you build a Pittsburgh Steelers in college basketball? Yeah. You kind of need both the economic constraints and the recognition of how valuable those programs are. Right. Ironically, these deals could lead to people like completing their degrees. Right. The great irony of this might be that extra force. The student athlete. Right. Go. Like it really could because you think about it at some point, all of the things being equal, if there is a salary cap system and you are constrained

40:52on the economic side, then you would just have, you know, you would just, all schools would probably reach like the theoretical limit of what other was caps on. Then program design and call it like student retention, matter of great deal. And if you are a coach that has a history of winning and producing NBA level talent and culture that people actually want to be a part of, and you are at a school where people want to stay to finish their degrees. You as a player, you'd have serious, if you're not a superstar, if you're not a one in dog, you'd have a serious reason to stick around for four years and earn a degree. You have incentive alignment. Yeah. That's right. Yeah, like that. And I don't know. I'm speaking about it in a total vacuum. I don't know how these decisions actually happen, but it seems to me to be one of the kind of, I know that there's been a lot of coverage on it and a lot of back and forth on it, sure. But actually, I have found this to be one of the most interesting things to be happening in college sports that is an economics question and a psychology question and a culture question, not even a, what does the law say and doesn't say because right now it's what's interesting. The law isn't clear. Congress is being petitioned

41:5420 different ways on it. It may write, it's there are already cases underway. So it is interesting to be to think about what is a player who's good, but not good enough to leave. And I kind of likes where they're at, but sees that the grass might be greener on the other side. Right? Like, I wonder how people are thinking about this. I do think that you're probably on to something there where it is incentive alignment will happen at some point. It feels like in this space. And it probably does benefit for everybody in the end. I think right now, you know, it's already so hard to recruit in college sports to begin with. Yeah. That it has made the jobs of these head coaches infinitely harder. Yeah. Only because there aren't the economic constraints that are specific right now. And because it's made it so hard, that's probably where some of the negative yeah, like publicity and whatnot covers in. It is interesting though to think like we're sitting here today and we don't bat an eye on college basketball players or football players making millions of dollars. Right. And that was. I mean, unheard of just a few years ago. We've only

42:54been seeing unheard of. We're creating visits. It's had very strict budgets and we only do certain things. Yeah. It is, it's wild. It's wild. It's also, I remember when I was a freshman at Duke, when by the time I got to my junior year senior year, they did a deal with Apple where all the freshman at Duke for a given year got iPods. And I remember being so mad that I had missed the free iPod window. If I was a college athlete who finished up at Duke after these, after these deals went into effect. So the deals weren't around when I was around. Yeah. I'd be livid. I would be livid because the size is actually significant life changing amounts of these players. It really is. Yeah. And that's why the transfer portal is so active. Right. It really is. Right. So, so now we go, you're at Baylor and you're, you're doing your grad assistant and you are furnishing analytics and insights for the team. How long are you at Baylor and then tell us how the story gets from there to the Phoenix Sons? I was, I would be at Baylor for two years in chapter two, post PhD. The summer after the first year, I got an internship with the Phoenix Sons as analytics department

43:59on the basketball operation side. So every NBA team, every professional sports team, more or less, is split between sport operation and business operations. So business operation would be ticket, sponsorship, sales, media, kind of everything you'd think under the business banner. And then the sport operation is building and managing and operating the team. Yeah. I was sent by a classmate, this analytics internship in Phoenix. I did not have a plan about what I was going to do. And I told myself probably the only path forward is in the NBA because again, it's not a huge thing in college basketball. Scott Cushure would eventually like consider bringing on this position, but he would also push me out and say you have to go to the NBA. When that opportunity presented itself, which I'm very grateful for because it would have been easy to stay. Yeah. And I got this internship. So how did that walk us through it? You know, sometimes the internships don't just happen. Did you

45:00just apply? You applied to your interview? I applied. It was it. Applied and interviewed. And I think, you know, again, it's funny. It comes back to the communications side of it, I think. Yeah. Where when I was interviewing with the individual who would hire me, the director of analytics of the Suns, there was a question around, so the Phoenix Suns were really bad at this time. So one of the worst teams in the league, there was a playoff drought. And the league was just starting to play faster. She more threes have more space. And the Suns were not doing these things. And the Suns were still playing two centers at the time. And I was asked, like, what would you look at to show the coaching staff not to play two centers? Very interesting question. Very specific question. Yeah. And I'm sitting there just thinking about it. And I said, is the transition defense really bad? In the response, so as you're the first person to answer that into this. And I said, well,

46:01we can just show them that, like, where do we rank transition defense? This combination when they're together is very poor. Yeah. But it has to come back to the Y. And well, the Y is that, you know, it's very difficult to play two centers because they're, you know, the tallest players typically on the floor, the Harris players on the floor. And they're usually not the fastest, gradually the slowest. And if you're playing both in a league that is increasing in pace and speed. Yeah. And they're just going to run you right at some point. Like that's what's going to happen. Yeah. And the data was showing that. And so my understanding is that that answer helped get that internship. And I was very grateful to get the calls. Just out of curiosity, they had not discovered this on there. They did you didn't discover it. You knew the answer because that was a very, well, I mean, it was a gas. Yeah. Because I didn't see the data. I didn't write it in front of me. I was just, I was proposed to the question. Yeah. And they had that they had the data. They knew the, I got it. I think what they were looking for, which is a very interesting data interview topic, is can this person creatively identify something? Yeah. Can you think, I guess, outside the box of

47:08whatever the, I don't know what other answer they're right, Ben. Right. But I get the internship. And I do the three months, maybe three or four months over the summer in the NBA. So the NBA calendar is July 1 to June 30 every year. So the salary cap resets on July 1. So that's when you can start signing players again. That's why the draft is at the very end of June. It's a very less thing. So finals in the draft at the very end of the NBA calendar. And I started, I believe, right before the draft. Yeah, I was right before the draft. I did a little bit of work on that. Yeah. Or it's just basic, a interpret these statistics for these draft prospects. This would have been the summer that the sun's drafted Marquis Chris and Dr. Gmbender at four and eight in the lottery. That led into summer league. I'm sorry, free agency, where we're just doing again. What would you value like this player's contract ad based on what they've done in the past? And I was just sitting in my cubicle, which was doing that work. Doing that work by myself. And went to summer league,

48:12had a good time. August is completely dead. And that was the end of the internship. And I was fortunate enough that they kept my database access on. So for whatever reason, they decided that that was worth it. And I just kept producing work when I went back to Baylor. Oh, wow. So I would, I was still working at Baylor. And I was still doing like little side projects. That's right. Or sun's analytics eventually building out the web application that they used in the war room, which is where the draft is held in Phoenix. Okay. In 2016, now 2017. And probably because I just kept doing work, they're like, we just feel bad. We know we have to hire this guy. And they hired me as the coaching analytics person, which effectively meant that I was hired to sit with the coaches sitting on the bench during games and interpret statistics and data for the coaching staff. So be that communication bridge that looks at the numbers and then is able to relay what exactly is going on. Got it. When I took your ass because this is

49:12having somebody like you in the background makes a lot of sense to me. Games done, the week is long. There's nothing happening. Your day job is looking at the analytics and helping to come up with insights. What, what is something like you do in that role when you're on the bench next to the coaches? Are they asking you specific questions? Or is it just, you know what, Ryan? Yeah, this makes you feel real good. We'll have you here. It's really just window dressing. You're going to have a clipboard. It's not going to have anything on it. But when the camera pans to you, you'll have a clipboard. There are, I mean, there are clips of me clapping on my clipboard. It's, I laugh because it's a little bit of a loaded question in that I don't, there is no purpose. You kind of realize it too when you're in the moment where it's like, all right, it's first quarter, teams taken eight shots. Yeah. Smallest sample size you can possibly imagine. Right. I can tell you where it may go. Yeah. We've probably shoot enough shots that may look like

50:13this and right, progression to mean may occur. There's a lot of qualitative maze and we're kind of theoretically thinking these things. Yes, it's not helpful in game. Like it's really not. And it goes back to, it goes back to something that I used to talk about with one of our coaches at Baylor Coach Tang where we would talk about what is the best way to prepare for a game. Yeah. Because I think maybe 538 back in the day did a study of how many decisions an NBA coach makes in a game. Yeah. Some absurd number exactly what you would think. And it's just, you can't, no human can process all of this information. Tyrial time, manage the players, manage the emotion of it all. Man pressure staff, like it's there's so much going on in the moment. And what we eventually came up with was like, you have to have plan A, which is we're going in with the style of play. We're going to do this offensively defensively. Archie knows how to do these things. And then you have to have plan B, which is if plan A fails, we're moving to plan B. Yep. And then

51:14if you get to plan C, guys, we're probably done. We're probably losing. And I mean on the data side of it, it goes back to like, whether it's qualitative or quantitative information, your preparation needs to be there pregame. Yeah. Before that ball goes up at 7 o' 7 pm, you need to be prepared. Right. Like you need to have a coach or someone behind you that taps you on the shoulder and says, Hey, our goal was, you know, a three point attempt rate of 40% dimmer only at 35%. Right. But then a good coach, their next question will be, okay, what's wrong? Right. Like why are we so low? Yeah. And you're saying this happening at halftime or well after the game is over or you're saying, adding games over before the next game to understand what we're going on. I think that you have to prepare definitely before. Yeah. No doubt. I think at halftime, you have to have a very structured process that you go through to basically have like 15 minutes. Yeah. Some percentage of those minutes must be devoted to talking to your guys. That's the most

52:14important thing. Some percentage at the beginning must be devoted to, okay, let's review our strategy and our tactics and our style of play. Yeah. That is, there's a lot of value that can be done there if you can really refine that process. Obviously, the pregame prep is extremely valuable. Right. Postgame debrief. Hit or hit or miss. Okay. Because it's so emotional. Yeah. After a game, like, you are coming off of Edadrenaline High, right? When are you lose? Everyone is. Yeah. So it's really not the best time to chat. Yeah. Right. After a game. But as evidenced by any number of press conferences that go so badly or rye. Exactly. Right. That they actually, and actually it explains the the monotone monoselavic responses that a lot of players give to questions. Right. There's no room for creativity after that kind of fact. There's not like you, you're emotionally depleted. Right. And there's just, you don't, you don't want to talk. But you certainly don't want to talk in front of the camera. Right. And it's the, it's the in the moment data assistance that I think is have literally having done the job. I don't think that there's a lot of value that is to create because

53:18what you should be focusing on instead is training your coaches and the people making decisions in game. How to think this way. Yeah. So instead of me being like, Hey, we're not shooting enough for you, your coach who is in charge. You're giving back to your keeper more right? Exactly. Instead of saying that, you have a coach who says, Hey, my job is the offense. I know what R3 should look like. I know how they're generated and know the quality looks like we are not getting enough off ball screen threes. Right. We're just not. Right. And that is useful information that helps the coach and helps the players. Whereas, Hey, we're not shooting enough threes is not useful information. That's, that's a fun fact. Right. That's a super fun fact. When you come into the organization, you know, as you mentioned, the sons were coming off about stretch. And there was a leadership change. There was also an ownership change. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like being a part of because so you finished up another year of Baylor. You're doing all the side hustle work for the side. That's what it was. They hire they hire you based on the strength of that side hustle work. And then you join them. But you're in the middle of chaos. Right. I mean, there was,

54:19it was a the GM changed and the owners changed. What was that? Right. And just constantly. Yeah. I can tell you that it was the exact opposite of what Baylor was, which I mean, Scott Drew is still the head coach. Right. A Baylor. He's been there for, I mean, my goodness, 25 years now. Wow. And Phoenix was on, I believe it was the second coach in two years. And it would go on to be the third and then the fourth. Like there was a whole host of change on a coaching side. We did go through a basketball operations executive change. So our general manager changed. When I started full time, James Jones started, who was the player that I mentioned earlier from the Miami Heat. He had just retired seven straight NBA finals appearances, played with LeBron James on all of those teams and LeBron publicly called them the greatest teammate of all time. Wow. And I can now test a why. I love James dearly. And he starts full time, the time that I start full time. Yeah. He starts in the role that I would finish in. So there's a bit of a like a book end here. Yeah. And he's coming from winning championships. I'm coming from Baylor basketball,

55:23where we're second weekend and see that play tournament teams. We didn't win the big 12. Yeah. But we were in the championship game of the tournament. Correct. And you go to losing. Right. You go to losing. Yeah. And it is culture shock. Yeah. James, I believe in his 17 year career. However, long it was, Mr. Flas once. I'm coming from spoils and riches at Baylor. Yeah. And we just kind of bond it over this, wow, this weird culture. Yeah. And there's really no other way to say it. And I give him so much credit in that he had the perspective when he took over that it's very easy. You hire a GM. You hold the press conference. We're going to compete for championships. We're going to play hard. We're going to do all these things. So easy. Like you can win a press conference. It's very easy to win a press conference. It's not easy to win the game. Right. Like, that's two very different things. And James came in in his very first strategy. Well, on day one, he did

56:27change over quite a bit of the staff. Yeah. Which I think was necessary at the time. And we became a very small lean operation. Yeah. Call this now the startup sons for the period of time. Why were you not part of the changeover? Because you came in under the old management. Yeah. So how did you manage to stick around? I mean, truthfully, I didn't have an office. I didn't have a desk. And James, being who James is told me like sit on the other side of my desk and work. Okay. So we just had a really strong relationship from that. He's also a very rational thinker. Okay. He loves data. He loves technology. But he also understands that human component to such a degree as well. And he's an unbelievable teacher. I was thinking too. And if you're willing to learn from him, then you can become one of his people. Right. But the first strategy that he implemented was raising the floor. It's not championship ceiling championship expectations. It was no guys, we're going to raise the floor. Yeah. The floor is way too low. Like the competitive floor, the talent floor. And this is not just players. And this is the beauty of having a former

57:32player as your lead executive. Yeah. Which I think is so important is the individual who has been in those championship games who has won the title, who has made the threes, who has defended the best players in the league, who understands what these players are going through. They will hold the rest of the organization to that same standard that the players will hold themselves to. God. And it's so important. And he literally, he was like, it's not sexy, but raised the floor. So how do you do that? What are some of the key, both the data and analytics components in your job, but then also just organization wide, how did that happen? You look at age first and sons were extremely young. Yeah. It's very popular in the NBA to tank. This is another huge thing in sports is if we lose, then we'll get a higher draft pick. If we get a higher draft pick, we will maximize our chances of getting an all star or franchise player. Yeah. Not incorrect. You know, if you get the number one pick in the draft, then yeah, you'll have a much higher chance of drafting in all star franchise player from that class than anyone who comes after you.

58:33They're at basic logic, right? What the tanking debate fundamentally misses because the sons were publicly tanking. Yeah. We were there at the very early days. And we went the exact opposite is they were missing the that the the tanking proponents, I should say, are missing the again, we've come back to this, the human factor. Yeah. Of sports is an extremely unique environment. It is the only publicly played zero-some game in the world. I mean, it's literally everything's public. Yeah. And there will be a winner. There will be a loser. Yeah. And it is also time bound. Yeah. So every year you get one year and then we're resetting, go again. There's no roll over effect. You know, right? It carries things over any of that. When you think about that on a macro level with games, it's true, but on a micro level as well, where these players, like we're drafting their replacements, right? It's crazy. And you think about like the cycle of this. And it's arguably like deeply unfair as well, where it's like someone who is an NBA player will get pushed out.

59:33Right. So we're bringing in this 18 year old, yeah, hot potential. Yeah. And it was when we talked about like James raising the floor, it was finding the value in the the older guy again, like finding the value in the four year player like Cam Johnson, who we drafted at 11. James first draft and we got PAN for it. Right. Cam has since gone on to have an incredible career. He's a great person. He's a great player. Like fantastic. Yeah. And it's things like, like I mentioned the age, it's also things like teaching the front office staff what the player is going through when you talk about tanking because they hear you want to draft my replace. Oh, interesting. I want to bring in the guy who's going to take my job away, right? Or the coach years, you want me to lose so that you can fire me, right? And then we can continue, right? And you just can't like it's so hard to win a championship to begin with, like your odds are so infinitesimally small to do this to begin with,

1:00:38that if you don't realize like the consequence of these strategic choices that you're making, yes, you don't have a chance. Right. And this is why like Oklahoma City, for example, I took you to the tanking process extremely well. I don't think that they ever publicly called it that by the way. Right. Of course not. I mean, this is one of the curious things about tanking is you can't say you're tanking. You're tanking. You're going to do double. Yeah. The integrity of the game. But Oklahoma City, they did an amazing job of keeping their culture so strong. And I give Sam Presley all the credit to that. Like he is fantastic executives, absolutely fantastic. And they built this, you know, this, this program where it's hey, we all know what we're going to do for the next couple of years. And then we hope that we'll be champions on the other end of it. Yeah. And I think if you do it in that deliberate manner, right, then you definitely increase your chances of success. Yeah. It's when you do it in kind of the manner that's I think we're supposed to do this because we're told that you should tank if you're not good, because you don't want to be in the

1:01:38middle, right? Like you don't need it. It comes down to like you understand the strategic consequence, the consequences of the strategic decisions that you're making interesting. So when you're when you're in the day to day of this, are you like is it how is I guess how is the sun's job different than the bail or job when you got to that grad you're in both cases you're looking at analytics, you're looking at data, how were what were those two environments were the differences between those two environments at face value. The roles were very different. Post James taking over the suns. So that was when I became a chief of staff director of strategy. He would then go on to win the 21 executive of the year, I believe it was 2021. And so the role was more expansive for sure. Helping out in operations, salary cap, if that was needed at the time traveling with the team quite a bit to basically be a front office presence for them if something happened. Whereas at you know it's funny now that I say it, it sounds a little bit closer to the

1:02:42manager role. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. The catch all suggestion and just being around to do these things that need to get done. Yeah. Whereas the the bailer data roles and even those early suns data roles were very as you would think they are behind a computer looking at numbers, looking at spreadsheets. Thankfully at that time in the NBA, well that's another difference is the NBA had a much richer data set. Yeah. So optical tracking data came online right around the time that I was an intern company called SportView, which had installed cameras and all of the arenas and they could track. I think it was 24 frames a second from six cameras at that time the XY coordinates of the players directly using the ball. And now it's XYZ coordinates with Hawkeye, which is the new camera provider. And so we were extremely data rich. And so we would spend a lot of time kind of playing in that sandbox of the XY coordinates. Right. And then as the role increased in scope, it was less of that hands-on coding and more of program building. Yeah. I think is the way to

1:03:43think about it. And I kind of bounced around. That I was very lucky that James trusted me so much. And over the course of my time at the Suns, under James, led or managed everything except players and coaches in basketball operations. So scouting at one point for a couple of years, health and performance for a year, operations, strategy, so data science, salary, cap, those things. Yeah. So you go from Baylor and doing the data stuff to the Suns, at a period of real transition for the Suns. What is different about the job that you were doing in one year? In both cases, you're working with data and you're trying to find insights that are going to help the team. What are the differences between the role in the NBA and the role in college? The kind of at the top level, the NBA is a much richer data set. So when I joined the Suns, this was right around an optical tracking was taking off. So optical tracking was introduced to the NBA through a company called SportVum, which installed, I believe it was six cameras in the arena,

1:04:46the rafters of the arena at 24 frames a second, where we could track the XY coordinates at every player, the ball and the referees. And now they can do the XYZ coordinates with the latest technology, which is pretty cool. And so we would spend just quite a bit of time in those early Suns days. Not dissimilar to what we did at Baylor where it's like, okay, we have our hands on all this data, now let's build something. And the optical tracking data could produce really cool new metrics, like, okay, let's measure how far the screen defender is from the screener. And does that matter if our center is six feet behind the screen versus two feet behind the screen? Yeah. Why does this question matter? Well, at that time, if you're trying to invite the mid-range shot and take away threes, which was the popular style of defensive play back then, as teams are shooting more threes, then you want to know, can my seven-foot center who's lay at the level of the screen? Does he need to play back? If we do play back, are they going to pull up? Is he going to contest? And there's

1:05:46a whole kind of like chain of thought that you're into that that's really interesting. The role itself, though, it grew very quickly under James. And I'm really lucky that he trusted me as much as he did. And I eventually would go on to leader manage every team within basketball operations outside of the players and the coaches directly. So health and performance for a year, which was athletic training, strength conditioning, nutrition, sports science, those kinds of things. So keeping the players healthy, getting them stronger, helping them play better from a physical athletic standpoint. Scouting, which is obvious, professional scouting, amateur scouting, so college basketball, data science, the salary cap side of things as well, which is super interesting. Kind of ran the whole gamut there. And eventually my last year ran operations, which was the true day today. You're right. Of being in it. So I want to dive in because, and we'll link to it in the show notes, but there is this really interesting interview you did about sports and analytics and AI.

1:06:52And you talk a little bit about what happened when data first arrived at the NBA, where you finally have optical tracking data. And then as I understand it, a company came around and built dashboards. And for the first time, I guess in the league's history, this data that would have had to been cobbled together and hacked together before is now easily visible to teams. Talk a little bit about that moment, what happened and kind of what you saw as that happened. Yeah. When sport view came in and they introduced optical tracking data, it delivered as all nascent forms of data deliver, which is structured to some degree. But you need to know how to write SQL and you need to know how to write Python or R at a base in order to actually interact with these numbers and make them mean anything of relevance. Yeah. And you know, around the mid 2010s, too, in the data science community, the tech community machine learning is really starting to take off. So Facebook algorithms, Alex Net mentioned

1:07:55previously, you know, it's insane to talk about it now, but like AlphaGo, like the things that would then go on to truly change the world are coming into the public conscious. And a company called Second Spectrum, and they did a great job with it. They they solved the problem of needing to have technical coding chops to interact with this optical tracking data. By building machine learning algorithms to track the actions of these coordinates. So instead of me having to now figure out, okay, a middle pick and roll occurred at seven minutes and 15 seconds in the second quarter by our players. Yeah. Second Spectrum built the algorithms and the machine learning algorithms to actually identify this. And then from there, we could split that and filter it into a host of different metrics, whether it's on the left side of the court, the right side of the court. Basically, you're able to summarize and assess the game at a much more granular level. And they tied film to it. So that was also a huge innovative side of it. That again goes towards

1:08:55solving the communication problem. So now coach sees my middle pick and roll is 1.2 zero points for possession. And then here's the 30 clips of our guys doing it. Yeah, you can reinforce, okay, why is it 1.2? Let's watch the film to find out. Right. And super helpful. Yeah. Extremely useful. Very advantageous when you are one of the few teams that has it. But as with all things, it becomes democratized and everybody has access to this data and this information. And something that started happening my last few years in the league was this constant conversation around is everyone playing the same way? Is there a homogenous style of play? Yeah. Is everyone running middle pick and roll trying to shoot threes and either switching ball screens or playing in a deep drop on ball screens? Yeah. Where is the innovation in our style of play? Right. And I think it's a fascinating conversation. Yeah. And there's been some studies that say it is happening, some studies that say it isn't happening. This is one of those topics where it's

1:09:56if people are talking about it, if the perception is that it's happening, then it's probably important to figure out why that perception exists. Yeah. And it occurs to me one day that we really did all have access to similar data in the same data. Right. And you know, you think a program would get ridiculed if they didn't shoot 30, 35, 40, freeze, your coach doesn't have good shot selection, blah, blah, blah, blah. What kind of behavior does that drive? Right. That the coach now is like, okay, what does the data say I should do? Yeah. But if you're basing it off of just what a dashboard says, right, you're looking at lagging indicators, you're looking at what others are doing to win. Yeah. You're not drilling down drilling down drilling down and saying, no, what is it for our team back to that two bites you what is right for our teams context? Yeah. Or how we win. Interesting. And so when you have this kind of democratized dashboard instead of proprietary questions for proprietary data or proprietary metrics built on publicly available data, right? Is really the way to do it with the

1:10:59optical tracking data. You do end up in this kind of path dependency. Yeah. Okay. It'll pick and roll seems to be the most efficient action. Yeah. Switching ball screens is extremely efficient as well. Yeah. And then it's kind of this race toward some kind of false optimization. Right. In a way. The opposite problem is what you would have, oh, is what many people read in the money ball book. Right. So on the one end of the spectrum, you'd be like, God, data is useless. Right. We that's over and done with most team owners at this point are going to emphasize a numbers. Right. Now you go to the other place where because the numbers are the same numbers everybody else is looking at, you get like a homogenized style of play, right? Or you're all doing the same things because the numbers suggest the same things. So that's an interesting thing to square. Whether you're a GM or a coach to say to yourself, okay, how do I make sure I'm not, I'm not captive to the metrics that everybody else has benchmarking against. How did you think about that internally? Like how did you make the most use of the dashboards that, you know, a company

1:12:01provided while not then allowing it to drive the same conclusions that everybody else is going to drive. So you're basically playing the same game of the reals. I think it, I think it follows a path of what you kind of described where the information that's readily available is great for education. It's great to tell you what is going on. It's great to tell you what happened. It's great to tell you, okay, under these conditions this existed. Yeah. It does not tell you moving forward. If we face those conditions again, will this outcome still occur? And you know, I think if I could go back, then I would probably emphasize this point stronger with the analytics team. And I would have us just spend more time asking better questions to get us back into the mindset of X, Y coordinates. How do we build the model that shows whether our center should be six feet or two feet or five feet? Can we get that on what's available? Yes, but this is different because of how

1:13:02we teach our defense. Like if we are able to define our shift to defense, our helpline defense, and we know where these guys are supposed to stand, then we should also be able to code out that logic and get those metrics that are more stuns for proprietary, a more team proprietary than just taking what is available on the dashboard, because they don't know our defense, or should they? Right. In this again, it comes back to, I think, like data is not a holy grail, like it is not a panacea for all of this stuff. It is another area where you can find competitive advantage. Yeah, if you know how to use it, just like any other tool, as cliche as that argument is, yes, it is a tool. Yeah, you know how to use it, then you can find advantage with it. And if you do talk to these these leagues where it has become kind of more pervasive, like baseball, for example, it's really hard to find the next differentiation lane of data in baseball, because there's been 20 years, tons of money, and you've had an owner class in Major League Baseball that comes from these

1:14:05more rational worlds that use data in their private equity shops, or whatever they're doing in their business life. And so they almost like optimize it to the point where if you don't have it at an A plus level to begin with, like you're just behind. Right. You're not even talking about eking out advantage at that point. You're just like we have, it's a model that I would use at the suns was like what is the negligence line? Like if we are below this negligence line, then we must focus everything on getting above it. Yeah. And if we are above it, now we can start talking about okay, what are the cool unique ways that we can differentiate ourselves from this? So you think about, let's say if we talk about basketball again, for example, style of play. So style of play is just literally how are you going to play offense? How are you going to play defense? What are you going to focus on? Basketball at the end of the day, just like all sports is a possession game. You want as many shots on goal as you can get, fuel goal attempts, plus free for attempts, you want that number to be higher than your opponent, not in a reckless way. It's like don't cross-fcorden, just throw the ball up unless you're Steph Curry, but you don't want to just maximize

1:15:07that number. Yeah. So what are the ways to do that? Well, rebounding is one of those ways, in turnovers is one of those ways as well. So either you don't turn it over, you get your opponent to turn it over, or you grab the ball offensively and defensively so your opponent cannot grab the ball. It's really that simple. If you don't have rebounding in turnovers, dialed in like if you're not top 15 in those areas, negligence line would say focus on that, focus on defensive rebounding, and how you're going to get better from a roster perspective, from a coaching perspective, from an office perspective, culturally, how are we going to become a better rebounding team? Interest. Before you try to be like, let's get cute by shooting more threes like this. Right. You have to get above the negligence line for your style of play. So it's I think that that is kind of a helpful model. Yeah. To think about all of these things being tools, when do we start making strategic choices that genuinely differentiate us instead of just having fun? Chris. Right. Fun with the data. Exactly. Yeah. And then, and did you find that in a way, what you're

1:16:12describing is, is the opposite of what the fiercest critics about data in sports would have said, which is they're like, it's going to make the game boring. It's going to get the name game over to egghead. It's going to be, you know, being counters making all the decisions. What you're actually saying is no, like the more information you have, if you're a bad team, you're going to, you're going to lapse into a home with geneticity anyway. Right. But actually, you're going to have a more information gives you an ability to tailor your particular style of play to your particular opponent or to the group you have. And there's room for a ton of innovation, even when every movement they're making has been dissected to the nines. That's what I believe. Okay. And I think that that is, you know, if humans are just modeling the behavior of other people, yeah, at the end of the day, like teams do the same thing, programs, institutions, they all do the same thing. So Golden State is going to win all these championships. How do we play more like Golden State? How do we get smaller? Because they're playing small ball. Yeah. Well, one of the most important factors of their small ball is they have Drey Montgomery, right? Who is arguably the smartest defensive player in

1:17:14India history. Yeah. Like someone who just redefined what it meant to be a small ball center. Right. And if you don't have Drey Montgomery, yeah, probably not the path for you to go down. Right. And so again, if we return to this like negligence line model, basketball is played in a vertical plane. Yeah. The scoring goal is 10 feet above the ground. Yeah. It's not like soccer where it's like a load of the ground. You can kick the ball in there. Height and size and jumping ability will always have some level of advantage. Yeah. So you can't build a small team in pursuit of playing small ball. Right. You're below the negligence line here. Right. And the less you have that defining factor Drey Montgomery and type person. Gotcha. And it is exactly what you said where it's okay. If we can get all of this information, as soon as we establish our floor and our foundation, again, it goes back to James's model of raising the floor. Yeah. If we can establish a really high floor here, where all of our fundamentals are taken care of. Yeah. The best coaches will preach fundamentals. Read any John Wooden quota. He's always been that he's only talking about fundamentals.

1:18:16And like first principles, like you see this in the best tech founders all of this. Yeah. Where it is, this like set the floor really high. Yeah. Get it there. And then you can start like branching off and doing these things. What actually? Yes, Steph Curry, who is fundamentally the greatest shooter of all time. Right. You have Dreymon, his role, Clay and his role, Andre Guadala and his role, okay, now we can start. Yeah. You know, bringing in these people who can differentiate from there. Gotcha. For these styles that can differentiate it. So you transitioned at some point from the sons to your role now in private equity. Walk us through kind of that latest iteration in your career. Like you asked earlier about in ownership change. Yeah. And I like to joke that my NBA Bingo card was full except for winning a championship, which is the worst part. You got to check. We got to the finals. I did lose, unfortunately. And I did go through an ownership change as well.

1:19:17And part of that ownership change I got to meet Justin Ispia, who is the founder of Shore Capital Partners. And I spent a lot of time with Justin and was sure from 2023 when he and his brother bought the team who brother Matt bought the team through May of 25 when I did leave Phoenix. And I came to just really appreciate how Shore was built and how Shore was operating. And extremely processed driven, very data heavy, very much a very much a sports culture. Right. In that sports are very much a part of what they're doing day to day. Yeah. And I learned so much from them in such a short period of time that nine years in the NBA is a lifetime we had done the whole, you know, start from the bottom, get to the top, the top, the line again. I think one of the three lines of my career has been like incestant problem solving. Yeah. So it is like just solve the next problem for me. And I just wanted a new problem. Like I wanted a new challenge. And I was

1:20:23very fortunate that Justin gave me an opportunity to join Shore for a year and then recently moving over into 1949 capital, which is also part of Justin's, Justin's world. And it's been a fascinating kind of, it's been a fascinating look at the difference between zero sum nature sports, right in non zero sum nature of everything else. Right. And that's exactly what I was going to ask you, which is in your prior world, there are winners and there are losers, there are wins and losses. And now you're in a world private equity where there's still winners and losers. It's not zero sum. There are partnerships to be made. There are deals to be made. How have you thought about that transition from one to the other? I would tell you that I miss the games. Yeah. In the in the sense of there's nothing quite like being a part of a winning team in sports. Like the ride of that. Yeah. The opposite is also true. It's extremely hard to be part of a losing team. Right. But what I have really enjoyed about kind of the non zero sum world is what you mentioned,

1:21:27which is like you get to finally live out what game theory would tell you, which is cooperation will oftentimes lead to the best outcome. Yeah. And it's you get to take these lessons from sport about team building about setting and raising the floor about how do different personalities work with each other in the best way and try to form those partnerships and get the most and the best out of like the unit instead of just the individual person. And I'm also very fortunate that you know, Shore and Justin are very data driven and very AI focused as well. And so the overlap has been that Shore and Justin in that environment is very data heavy. Yeah. And very AI forward, I would say for sure. Shore started an AI team very early. I think it was early 2025 that they started hiring AI-specific people to go into the portfolio companies and implement these solutions, which is incredible to know about how early that was. And it was it was having the opportunity to

1:22:32to go to an environment that is that forward looking. Yeah. That excited me. And helping them roll out a lot of their AI enterprise tools over the last year has been an unbelievable learning experience like tech deployments are one thing, but ruffling out frontier models to an entire private equity firm is a whole another beast and learn to ton there and have since gone deeper on the AI space and the art space. And if you you know, you sort of like there's a line like prediction is always hard, especially about the future. But I'm curious what you make of the the AI as it has been adopted in sports like where are we are we early innings? Is it far enough along because a lot of the things you're talking about with like Saber metrics and and all this did that pave the way for AI use is it is it still kind of where the rest of the world is, which is we're figuring ourselves out in this moment, right? Like what is what is the interaction or

1:23:33intersection between sports and AI in 2026? From what I've seen, absolutely early innings and absolutely still in this formation of where are we? Like what exactly is the impact that this is going to have? So not not dissimilar to what is going on in every other industry. And I think when you when you zoom back out and you say, okay, who is using AI the best? What can we learn from them? At least in my experience, it's been if you think about AI transformation as operations transformation. So operations being how do we take this unbelievable amount of information that we are receiving, synthesize it and then make a decision on it. Yeah. And that can happen at a very small level, such as how are you going to stock the snack bar at your office all the way up to a very very high level of where are we going to move this capital so that we can invest it? If you think about it in that way, then you can start to identify places where having this, I don't want to call it a logic machine, but this this ability to extract structure and synthesize information in pattern

1:24:40match at a scale that we have just never seen. Once you can once you can start finding like the links in your chain of operations, be like, okay, this looks like data extraction for the snack room because we need to have a better sense of how much money we're spending, around whatever, you know, yogurt or whatever, structured in that way. In the name, I can help you there. I think that sports is still trying to figure out what that operations chain looks like. Right. And do I think that there are coders out there who are using codex and cloud code of course, and they absolutely should be doing that. How do we now take that capacity and get us back to getting our hands deep in that raw optical tracking data so that we can build new novel metrics so that we can just answer more novel questions like my whole my whole thing on tanking where you know, I think that there is probably a paper waiting to be written by someone who can examine, you know, the kind of perverse incentives of tanking as well that were you, if you are only

1:25:44considering it from the perspective of the general manager trying to acquire an all-star, yeah, sure, you might have found like an equilibrium there. When you consider it from the perspective of players and coaches and owners who need to look good in the community, yeah, maybe that's a very different calculator. There's not enough time or attention within a sports team to do that because it moves so fast because we are on a clock every year it restarts. But now that you have AI, like a good ownership group should be asking, okay, you think that we should tank model that from a right like actually run through all of the different scenarios of where this could go well and where this could go wrong. Yeah. All the way down to when you think that we're going to be contending for the number one pick who you didn't that class. And are they Victor Wimbongamma? Right. The goals of generational talent. Right. Because that is a different proposition than, you know, if you're just some kind of run of the mill class. Right. But my hope is that that is where AI and sports will get back to is now that we have the the ability at a much lower cost to ask these deeper questions. Yes. That I'm just trying to win the game in front

1:26:49of us. Yeah. We can just produce more novel insights and more interesting ideas. It's one thing to be in the front office and doing this. One of the things that AI has done is it democratize the ability to ask these questions without knowing how to code in Python or or whatever. Do you think that we're going to see the first generation of players who dive into their own data or into sports data to see to understand the game? I, you know, it's funny. We had, we traded for Chris Paul. Yeah. And he was a heavy user of the second spectrum. And I was very impressed by that when I saw that in it makes sense when you think about how Chris plays and I have an immense matter of respect for him. He was incredible for us. And the some of the best players you think about James and his career, these players understand themselves. Yeah. They understand truly their strengths and their weaknesses. And they understand what to focus on and practice, what to focus on in

1:27:50warmups. It is very dialed in to a degree that it teaches you the importance of specificity and detail when you watch how these best guys work. And data can help them with that. Yeah. It absolutely can help them with that where it's not, you know, it's not so much, okay, the front office may use it against me in contract. Right. Or somebody's forcing somebody like Ryan, that kid Ryan shows up with his glasses and whatever. He's got so much. He's got his spreadsheet. He's got his clipboard that has nothing on it. But we can, we let him hang out at the game. He's telling me something about my spacing when I'm doing screens. This is like the, you know, yeah. It's more that the player could own this conversation. Exactly. And I think that that's what if we're moving toward kind of this democratization of information and intelligence, then I hope that is where it goes. Yeah. Is where the players really understand how they can benefit from that. Right. So if we take ourselves outside of the work context and we're, you know, I wonder your respect for every time, want to wrap up. When you, when you're thinking about AI right now, what are your, what have you personally been most impressed by? Right. Because you, you came of age and in a profession and,

1:28:54and in day to day work where you were taking huge amounts of data and trying to ring insights out of them. Yeah. So what is your personal like, what's most exciting to you or what tools do you use? Like how what's your day to day interaction with AI? I don't know if this will be an exciting answer. But I think the thing that I am most interested in right now is using these coding agents with my workspace. Workspace I would have previously called a working directory. Yeah. Someone can call it a repo, whatever they want to call it. But having my workspace now be designed not for me to read. Yeah. But for agents to read. Yeah. For agents to navigate. Yeah. It's been such an interesting problem to solve. Okay. Ryan is not navigating this as much as the otherwise would have been like an old drop box setup. Right. Ryan is building agents who need to read the other, the work of the other agents or what they're producing and what they're writing to this workspace. Yeah. And that is two very different things. Yeah. And I have torn it down or

1:29:59less month. I think I've torn it down four times. And then rebuilt it. I have more copies of it working directory than I ever thought I would have. But I think that that speaks to kind of the the age that we're entering also, which is you do have to change your perspective of how you used to approach work fundamentally. Right. And I think it's maybe a better manager of people to be honest because you have to be so much more specific in what you're looking for and asking for. Maybe not five years from now when these models are even better. Yeah. But again, not an exciting answer. But I think like read redesigning what your literal workspace digitally looks like. Fascinating. And then day to day, it's really becoming operating system where I love to write. So yes, I will still open up word or whatever, but I don't really type my writing anymore. I will hand writing. Yeah. And then I will build like work product writing with codex or with cloud code or

1:31:05something like that. Yeah. It's very interesting where these worlds are diverging. We're professionally. I am living very much in these tools as an operating system. Yeah. And in my personal life, I'm going back to like this. And I was the old school. Yeah. Back to the end of the long. Very interesting. I think that diverges is only going to become sharper. Right. I think it's going to be you have this world that you step into that's almost quasi like the matrix. But I'm like the matrix. You can pull the cord out of the back and you do daily because it's the only way to stay saying. Yeah. Right. I think it's the reason we talked about this a little bit earlier before recording business reason live events. Like the premium live events is going to go up. I think I think the it's it's ironically the race to the new in the in AI is going to race many people back to the old. Right. And like the things that may have been under indexed in the social media era. I think because of AI are going to be over indexed in the next wave. Because I think what's going to happen here's going to be too over there to be too digitally plugged in. And the the relief that you feel when you're not right. The relief I feel now when I read a book. Yes.

1:32:05It's unlike it. It only rivals what it felt like to read as a kid. And I think that's entirely because so much of my day is spent in different AI modes that reading a book feels like Christmas. Like it's just it's incredible to have the analog experience again. I completely agree with that. I mean, I'm sitting here wearing a $20 Casio watch from Amazon because I did not want a smart watching right. I did not want to wear it and be constantly hooked into these AI tools. Yeah. And it is it's interesting because I think I could not have vocalized this in sport, but I can vocalize it now, which is I'd love any work where you have to perform sports is that where there's a performance every night hospitality restaurants hotels you have to be on you have to perform Broadway here in New York where we are recording this you have to be on. And I think that that element of someone is going to rehearse rehearse rehearse practice practice practice in the curtain is going to go up the ball is going to go up the restaurant's going to open. What an unbelievable

1:33:08right thrill that was going to be for I mean for people to attend it to see it to see that level of talent, but then to also to do it. They do that work. Yeah. I don't think I could have explained that when I was in sports, but I feel that way now. Right. I think the premium on it goes up because because few think fewer things will become unpredictable. My theory of the case would be that because you don't know the outcome of how the night is going to go in a show or how the game's going to go. Yes. And AI can give you very good predictions about most everything else, right? Like it's going to work for the available set of human data and instructions and come back with an answer. The sheer unpredictability of some of these things is what's going to drive the the desire for them. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Randomness is good for us. Right. In terms of right. Exactly. What are some of the and I promise we'll finish here, but I go to as we do this for another three hours. This is basically like what we do anyway. I ran it out. What are some of the like the books or podcasts or kind of other media or intellectual

1:34:09influences that this year have helped you, particularly as you've made the transition from out of sports to to private equity. I read a lot. So I absolutely love to read like you whenever I am reading. I am extremely happy. From a fiction perspective, a mutual Tyler mutual friend of us recommended on his website when Dan Simmons passed away the Hyperion series. And so I did read Hyperion and then I am in the fourth book now. And it's fascinating to read that to go back and read some of the other science fiction classics and see how they talked about AI at that time. Deeply philosophical, not an accident that Silicon Valley in the tech space right now is has that slant in that bend to it as well. But I think that that has helped me in a way contextualize maybe societally. Like where not so much where it's going in like, oh no, things are going to go so poorly, but where things are like culturally with you has been really interesting.

1:35:12I am I am still a huge fan of memoirs and biographies as you know. So I gave your book out to me. People of the sons, which Jimmy came and did I didn't saw stacks of the founders. I would get out to the to the team. And I continue to find myself drawn to those stories more and more. I think I don't know. I'm kind of processing this now as we're talking about it. But I think it's like reading these stories of these people who accomplished such unbelievable things. Pre-A. Pre-A. Yeah. Like how did they think about these problems before we had the ability to like drill down or synthesize all of these random things? Like how did Steve Jobs approach them? How did you know past presidents? How did historical figures like solve their problems in an era where it was just much more difficult to get you know to see the board clearly with the information

1:36:14that you had access to? What I do really enjoy is the kind of the podcast and the media landscape that this industry has birthed with shows like TbPN. Yeah. And just how fun people how much fun people how do you have with our space or even things like the door cash podcast? Yeah. Where it's no we're going to go super deep on these kind of 10 years ago we'd have been like what are we all talking about? Right. But now that we have direct application to KVCaches in our life, I do want to watch a whiteboard session. Right. It's at the point now where I wish I had two more hours in a day. Same. So that I could read or listen to a show or any of that. Yeah. More. Yeah. Because the issue is that a whole new category of media has opened up exactly. It was so different from the media I had when I was growing up and it's so rich it's so protein rich. Yep. And I just don't have the time. I agree. And I do not know from where I will find the time. Exactly. Right. And the truth is it's like

1:37:18I don't know if you felt this way but I know people have their different opinions about AI. I have found it to be just the most exciting thing to me since I kind of like first got on a dialup internet. Yeah. To make sure my parents and take up the phone by accident interrupt the phone signal. I could interrupt the internet. It's that exciting. Okay. Because I think it's especially we were in any kind of creative space or if any kind of space where there's a lot of flux like what you're in where things can go one way or they can go another AI just it opens up the universe of possible questions you could ask and begin thinking about in a way that I have never seen. Like I find myself being what it's done for me in addition to I think making me a better manager it's also made me ask better questions now because that is just good training for the LLM is it's good training for life. I completely agree with all that. There is like a default optimism having that I have on these things recognizing the risks that exist obviously but I think the story of humanity and society is one of progress and you know when you really look back at all the technological change and the progress and the way that we spoke about those things at the time

1:38:21there are a lot of overlaps there. I just feel so lucky it to be in this I need to tell me when I was like like you said I was I mean I consider myself lucky being probably the last generation of millennial that did experience the analog to digital ships. So I did have a CD player this light how young I look I have a CD player. I also remember Napster. Yeah. Napster was the this. That was the whole wall game. I think I was the download those MP3 files. Yeah. I pod with the click wheel right. Got really dating ourselves here. This is no right. I know. I had the funny is the funniest interactions I have on these are I have an 11 year old and she doesn't realize the digital bounty that she's been getting through as she has no idea. So I remember one day we were talking and we were she was like we were watching one of our shows we like and she said oh let's go to season two episode three and I stopped in that moment I said do you know that when I was young and I wanted to watch a show like Sonic the Hedgehog. Yeah. I had to wake up like every Saturday to make sure that I was in front of the TV when I show came on otherwise I would miss it. You're done

1:39:22and you have the ability to just pick a season episode. This is extraordinary and she looks at me and perfectly seriously with like true pity in her eyes she goes that is so sad. Like felt deeply bad for me that the the challenge of my life was not being able to pick the season of the episode amazing. Next time you got to show her how to record it using a BCR but there has to be something on the DHS tape. So she has to erase that first. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Record it. Oh my god. That is too funny. So one of the ways we like to finish out even at loops is Ryan your emperor your name emperor for a day and you get to basically inspect two ideas messages themes concepts quotes into all everyone's mind and humanity. So they'll wake up and have these two ideas in their head. What two ideas or thoughts would you want people to carry carry forward into their lives? There was a quote in my office in Phoenix I don't know if

1:40:25he actually said or wrote it but it is from Boltaire. Right. Boltaire gets a lot of crap and he didn't say what you know it like go for him. Yeah. Right. Like don't hate the player. I hate the game. I mean maybe that was Boltaire that said that he is living big in the age of AI and he allegedly said no problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking and I love that because it goes kind of like a core principle of mine which is just solve the next problem. Yes. Solve the next problem and if you do that then you'll win the game or you know it's you think about basketball it's your the defense is going to change will solve for that defense because guess what they're going to change again and then you got to solve for that one and then just keep solving. Yeah. And I think that if it also goes back to the default optimism point where it is if we believe that we can solve these problems and we can get around this we can get around the risks that these you know AI tools may or may not pose for example. I think that that would be one and then the second and again it goes back to I think a realization that I've only had recently

1:41:28which is try to do work that has to face some form of reality and what I mean by that is you're an author you write a ton you have to publish at some point. Yeah. Like you have to stop editing and send that book out so that I can read it and give it to my team. Yeah. Six. That is facing reality like sports is that every single night. Right. Zero. Some someone's going to win. Someone's going to lose what we talked about earlier with the restaurant to the Broadway show like let people experience the work that you're creating. You have the confidence for that so that you can yeah you can get the feedback from it but also what you'll find is when you get when you find your work and when you find your people to do this work it is so unbelievably fulfilling to do that thing together with those people to put that thing out into the world to actually change something or to introduce something to society. I think that that's so fulfilling and it's probably why I like reading biographies in MMRS. That's a wonderful place to end it. Ryan

1:42:31thank you so much for coming out to Agent Alibz. Thank you.