Wall Street Journal columnist Ben Cohen joins guest host Jimmy Soni, CEO of Infinite Books, to explore the hidden art of making things better. They explore the hot hand phenomenon in basketball, why Moneyball shaped a generation of journalists, the peanut butter and jelly crisis in the Warriors locker room, why ASML is the most important company you’ve never heard of, the strange story of Driscoll’s tastiest berries, and the troubled development of The Princess Bride.
We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. If you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
Links
Highlights
Finding Peanut Butter and Jelly Stories
Ben Cohen: And so that’s something else that I learned covering sports at the Journal is that I think there are two ways to tell stories. One is taking small ideas and making them really big, and one is taking big ideas and making them really small. In some ways, they’re connected. But, for example, we always used to look for funny, interesting, peculiar, clever ideas at the Wall Street Journal. So one story that I wrote was, in 2016, the Golden State Warriors started the year 24-0. They were 41-4 at one point. There was nothing that was going wrong.
And as a journalist, you’re always looking for tension. Tension is what makes a story. And when there’s no tension, it’s like, well, what do you do with that? And I remember listening to a bunch of radio interviews the Warriors were doing at the time. You know, probably the only person outside the Bay Area who was actually listening to interviews on local radio. And in one of them, the interim coach at the time, Steve Kerr was on medical leave. And the interim coach at the time was Luke Walton. And he was doing this interview as he was walking off a plane, and they were saying, “Luke, what’s going on? How are you doing?” He was like, “I’m terrible. The team trainer before the season got rid of our peanut butter and jellies on the team plane because he thought they weren’t healthy. And everyone is completely miserable about it because all NBA players famously eat, they just subsist on peanut butter and jelly. It’s just around at all hours.”
And I heard this, and I was like, “Okay, well, the story to do is that the greatest source of tension in the locker room in Golden State right now is they’re fighting to get their peanut butter and jellies back.” And so that’s a funny idea for a story. And then you take it to the extreme. And they happened to be coming through the East Coast a couple of days later. I remember I went to Philadelphia and stalked their locker room and went quietly to every player in the locker room and asked, “What do you make of the war over peanut butter and jelly in the locker room?” having sotto voce conversations with Steph Curry in the side of the room. Then the next day, they were in New York, and I went to the Garden, did the same thing. And over time, you’re reporting, that’s hours and hours of reporting to ask players off to the side to get an exclusive about peanut butter and jelly. And so you could tell sort of the story of the Golden State Warriors’ magical season through the only thing that has gone wrong for this team is peanut butter and jelly.
And so I’m always kind of looking for peanut butter and jelly stories in all sorts of industries. And one other thing I’ve learned through the course of writing this column is that if I find something interesting, the chances are that I can convey that interest and enthusiasm to readers. And if I don’t know something that it feels like everybody else knows or should know, then the chances are that they don’t know it either. And, you know, I find myself thinking a lot, “Well, does everyone know this? Or am I just an idiot and just found out for the first time?” And I think a lot of people don’t know a lot of things. And so things that you would think that everybody knows, they don’t know, and I didn’t know them.
And so I’ve learned to kind of trust my judgment and gut about that a little bit. If I think something is interesting, I can convey that interest and I can make other people interested in it as well.
Sam Walker: Evil Genius
Jimmy Soni: Can you talk a little more about Sam Walker and the effect that he’s had on your career and your life and the way you write and all of that?
Ben Cohen: Yeah. Sam Walker. There are a lot of people who came up through the Wall Street Journal sports section then, and I think they would all credit Sam for sort of being the evil genius voice in our head. And Sam is a brilliant writer himself. One of the reasons why it was okay that Sam was rewriting you was because he was just such a better writer than any of us were, that you would read it and be like, “Well, I would never say this…”
Jimmy Soni: But it’s said way better.
Ben Cohen: The fact that my name is on these words is actually great.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah.
Ben Cohen: And just a diabolical genius. He had just such smart and clever and inventive ideas and ways of reporting and writing and just making sentences sing. And his voice is constantly in my head. And so one of his rules for writing and especially finding stories was that the lead quote in any story that we wrote, which meant that the idea had to be so clever and so novel that the lead quote could have been, not that it should have been, but could have been, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” And that was what we aspired to every single time. And so we were always looking for ideas that could be, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” And the highest form of praise is when Sam would just write back in an email, “Yes,” with eight exclamation points and weird bolds and yellow highlights and that praise and affirmation is still, I should just print out those emails because they still mean so much to me.
Transcript
Jimmy Soni: Ben Cohen, thank you for coming on Infinite Loops.
Ben Cohen: Thanks for having me.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah, I’m really excited about this. This has been something I’ve been looking forward to for a while because I’ve been a fan of your work for a long time. I think you cover the widest range of things that somebody I know writes about. It is everything from the pants at Costco to sports to why the fuel indicator on your car goes a certain way. I have yet to meet somebody that covers a range of things that you write about.
Ben Cohen: All the important things in the world.
Jimmy Soni: Exactly. I’m excited to have you here and we can just dive right in and see where this all takes us. One of the reasons we’re having you on is you’re an author and you have this side hustle at the Wall Street Journal. But I’m curious, take us back to how did you get your start in writing? Thinking about it as a vocation or even as an avocation.
Ben Cohen: Some kids grow up wanting to be astronauts. And for some reason I just always wanted to be a sports journalist. I have no idea why, but I very vividly remember reading the sports section of my local newspaper every morning growing up and going through the box scores and then eventually knowing who the columnists were and reading every piece and having it dawn on me that people actually do this for a living and that I could do it too, if I wanted to. And so even when I was in middle school, I wanted to write about sports for a living. I didn’t know anyone who did it. I was randomly emailing people who wrote for the Star-Ledger in New Jersey and was starting to write into the newspaper letter section.
So every day in the Star-Ledger, they would ask a question about something happening in sports at the time. And I would just write in and I would have my name and my writing in the local newspaper. So no one knew that Ben Cohen: from Livingston, New Jersey was 10 years old weighing in with hot takes about the Yankees.
Jimmy Soni: How often did you get published in the Star-Ledger as a 10-year-old?
Ben Cohen: Frighteningly often. Yeah. Which I think may have something to do with the fact that I may have been the only person writing in. But they would ask a question and they would print between 8 and 15 responses and they would run them throughout the course of the week. There’s probably a different question every week. So I feel like if you went through the archives of the Star-Ledger, you would find my name in there dozens of times.
Jimmy Soni: Wow. And that was your first byline?
Ben Cohen: I think it was my first byline, yeah.
Jimmy Soni: Awesome.
Ben Cohen: And so I was always obsessed with it. And I was writing for my high school newspaper, and I would watch games and then go up to the computer room in our house, remember computer rooms in a house, and would try to bang out columns on deadline and they’re horrible. And then I really started writing for a newspaper for the first time when I got to college. And at that point, we had gone from growing up and wanting to be astronauts or doctors and lawyers to consultants and I-bankers. And that just never interested me. From the second I stepped on campus at college, I knew I wanted to be a journalist.
And probably that wasn’t the greatest idea financially or for my mental health or anything, but it was all that I wanted to do and kind of all that I can do. And so I feel very lucky that I’m actually able to do it now.
Jimmy Soni: That’s amazing. I didn’t know that part of your story.
Ben Cohen: You weren’t familiar with the sports archives in the 1990s?
Jimmy Soni: Yeah exactly, I should have done more homework. When you think back on that time if you can, I mean, it might be impossible, so much time has passed. But do you remember the first thing you got published? Was it a thrill from the job?
Ben Cohen: Yeah, always. I mean, at that point, getting published was not looking at my phone or something in pixels. It was literally going outside on the doorstep where the Star-Ledger was in a yellow newspaper bag, opening it up, having no idea if my response was going to be in the paper that day. It wasn’t like they emailed you and said, “Oh yeah, you’re going to be in the paper tomorrow.” So every time I wrote in, I would frantically open the newspaper and go to the second page and say, “Oh, is this a day that I’m in the newspaper?” And I sort of felt that way throughout.
I remember I played sports in high school and I would always be curious, our baseball game yesterday, who are they going to pull out and put in the paper? So that thrill of being in the paper was familiar to me from a young age. And I still feel that way. I don’t have that. I know when I’m going to be in the newspaper now, so it’s not as thrilling, but it’s still very cool to be able to open a print newspaper, a thing that still exists, and say, “Oh, my God, there’s my name.”
Jimmy Soni: Did your parents think you were a savant or did they see a child prodigy in you because you’re getting these published?
Ben Cohen: I don’t know. I think they thought it was cool. I think they saw that I was passionate about it and they pushed me towards it and did not deter me from trying to be a newspaper journalist when maybe they should have. So I don’t know what they imagined for me. I don’t know if it was astronaut or investment banker, but I landed somewhere in another galaxy.
Jimmy Soni: How did you choose? You and I share the august fact that we’re both Duke alumni.
Ben Cohen: Not supposed to tell people.
Jimmy Soni: Not supposed to tell people. All right, first rule of Fight Club. What made you choose Duke? Out of curiosity? Because it’s not the natural place for somebody who’s going to. It’s a more natural place for somebody who’s going to go become a banker or a consultant, not a journalist.
Ben Cohen: I would argue that it’s quite a natural place for a boy from New Jersey who likes basketball to end up, maybe the most natural place in the world. But no, I mean, it is a fantastic school, as we both know. And I was obsessed with the basketball team forever. I mean, I can say that I was also obsessed with the UNC basketball team from a young age. But I remember, I think like most kids who end up touring that school, I sort of went through the tour and braved the whole thing and was just sort of counting down the seconds until we could cross Tower View Road and get to Cameron. Because that was the place that I wanted to check out.
And so the idea of going to Duke and going to basketball games, much less being able to sit at center court and write about those basketball games, would have been just a total dream to 10-year-old me writing into the Star-Ledger.
Jimmy Soni: Did your work there, you were already bitten by the bug and this just made it go viral, right?
Ben Cohen: Yeah, it was full infestation when I was at Duke. So I wrote as a freshman and a sophomore. As a junior, I was the sports editor of the Chronicle, which is Duke’s newspaper. And that was my full-time job and major. I technically majored in English at Duke, but I majored in the Chronicle. The Chronicle had a program where the top editors took a reduced course load. So I think my junior fall, which was the big time when I was spending 80 hours a week in the office of the Chronicle, I took two courses and an independent study. I think I was in class for two hours a week and I was just putting the paper to bed at 3 a.m. every night, every day, a daily print newspaper. And this was at a time that you remember.
You would kill time before class by opening up the newspaper in print and reading it in the classroom. And by reading it, I mean you would do the Sudoku and crossword in the back with a pen. But we didn’t have iPhones then. We had sort of had flip phones and then Blackberries. The iPhone came in the middle of my college experience. But it wasn’t ubiquitous at the time. It was a real thrill in the same way that it was gratifying and thrilling and super exciting for me as a 10-year-old to be able to see my name in the print newspaper.
It was so cool to be in a lecture hall and see people reading the thing that I had written in a delirious state the night before that morning in class. It is the closest thing that there is to community newspaper where you are surrounded by your readers of that community. So I knew that my fellow students were reading it. I knew that professors were reading it. I knew that Coach K was reading it. It’s an awesome power and responsibility for a 19-year-old who has no idea what he’s doing to be read by everyone who is with you on campus. Which I just found super cool.
Jimmy Soni: That’s, I couldn’t have put it better myself. I did a column when I was a senior and I remember spending so much more time on that column than I ever did on actual schoolwork. I was trying to make it into something memorable. Meanwhile, these papers actually count for something.
Ben Cohen: Yeah, but when you write a paper, one person reads it.
Jimmy Soni: That’s true.
Ben Cohen: And when you write a column, you have no idea who’s going to read it or why or when or what effects will come from you having written that column. And so there’s much more pressure and responsibility, I feel, in being able to say something novel and interesting and engaging. And that’s still what I’m doing today, which is fun, but there will never be a feedback loop, I feel, the way that I had.
Jimmy Soni: Do you have standout moments from that time in your writing life? A piece or a particular thing you did that you’ll never forget?
Ben Cohen: I mean, a lot. Yeah. Covering basketball games. One of the great privileges of being the sports editor of the Chronicle is that my junior year, I covered the Duke-Carolina game. So a game that, as you know, kids will literally camp out in tents for months for attendance. I sort of waltzed in two hours before, and I feel like I made a point of getting there really early that day, before the arena opened to the public and just sort of sitting in this hallowed ground, silent. I vividly remember John Scheyer was warming up. He was the first person out there. And John was my class at school and is now the head coach of the basketball team, which is a very weird thing for me.
But just thinking about it now, I sort of have goosebumps because I’m like, when else am I going to be in Cameron Indoor Stadium before the biggest game of the year?
Jimmy Soni: That’s right.
Ben Cohen: But there are all sorts of moments like that. I remember when I was sports editor, Duke hired a new football coach named David Cutcliffe, and nobody knew anything about him. And I sort of made it my mission to profile him in a lot of interesting ways and dig up interesting moments from his past and got lots of time with him over the course of that year in a way that I’m sure he wasn’t expecting to be spending time with a student reporter over the course of that year, but these little vignettes from his past.
And it kind of reminded me, my first introduction in looking for new angles into stories that everybody else is covering, which is what I’m still doing today, and that if you put in the work, then people will respect it, even if you happen to be a student reporter and the person you’re trying to get the respect of is the head coach of a college football team.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah. You know, this is a specific question that it’s not anything I would ask any other guest, but did you ever have attention in writing objectively while also being a fan? Because you are a student and you’re there. Are you allowed to cheer? What are the rules?
Ben Cohen: Definitely not when you’re on press row.
Jimmy Soni: Right, of course.
Ben Cohen: But it’s a very, it’s one of the stranger parts of that particular job, and it’s something that I really don’t have to deal with now. I did write about Duke a little bit for the Wall Street Journal, but even then, you’re not a student at Duke. But I think that there is, I think some of the rules of objectivity in that sense have kind of loosened a little bit. And they were loosening at the time. There’s no pretending that I’m not a Duke student. And sometimes you would go all the way the other way and be more critical because you cared more deeply. I would imagine that I had much more nuanced and complex views about Mike Krzyzewski when I was a student at Duke than I would as an alumnus, because you’re just around it all the time.
You have such high standards, and you’re crazy, and you’re sleep deprived, and you think you know everything and you’re on top of the world. But I was a senior when they won the national championship, and I wanted them to win the national championship. I wasn’t objective about this fact.
Jimmy Soni: No studied objectivity in the chase for the championship.
Ben Cohen: There was not. In fact, I did not cover the national championship, and I did not go, partly because it wasn’t my turn to cover the team when they went. But I faced this choice when I was a senior of do I want to go to Indianapolis to watch them win the national championship or play for the national championship, or do I want to stay on campus? And I thought, hopefully there will be another chance to see a Duke team win a national championship or play in the Final Four. But I’ll never have an opportunity again to be on campus as a senior with my friends when they’re playing in the Final Four. And so I stayed on campus, which I still insist was the right decision.
Jimmy Soni: So fast forward. You finish up at Duke, how do you wind up doing journalism as a profession?
Ben Cohen: Blackmail. Yeah. No. I applied for an internship at the Wall Street Journal, and I didn’t get it at first, which is one of those sliding door moments, because I’m not quite sure what would have happened otherwise. So I applied.
Jimmy Soni: Are you a senior at this point?
Ben Cohen: Senior, yeah. And I had this really great conversation with the sports editor of the Journal at the time, and it turns out he had already offered the internship to somebody else. And he had seen my application at the bottom of a packet and thought it looked interesting for a whole bunch of reasons and called. We had this great conversation. He was like, “You know, this is all great, except I’ve basically offered this internship already to someone.” And I was like, “Well, that’s too bad.” And then the first week of May in my senior year of college, I got a call from the sports editor of the Wall Street Journal, who said, “The person I offered the internship to, who had taken it, just took a job at the Washington Post. So this internship is opened. Are you doing anything this summer?”
And I was like, “I’m not. I have nothing else.” I literally had nothing else lined up. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was going to stay in Durham and just sort of bum around and try to pick up clips. And he was like, “Can you start in two weeks?” And I was like, “Okay, sure.” So I moved up and got an internship at the Wall Street Journal. That was 10 weeks, and I sort of kept my foot in the door. And I’ve been there ever since.
Jimmy Soni: Wow, okay. So you’ve had one employer after graduation. What was that first? Was it a baptism by fire, or was the Chronicle harder than the internship for the Wall Street Journal?
Ben Cohen: The Chronicle is very difficult in its own way. No, the working for the Wall Street Journal for the first time, trial by fire is one way to put it. I remember the first time I filed a story to the sports editor, who is this completely brilliant editor, and really was so formative in so many ways for me. I filed this piece to the editor and a couple other people underneath him, because that’s how we filed stories back then. I remember I filed the story and a couple other editors walked over to my desk and they were like, “This looks great.” And I was like, “Oh, great.” And they were like, “Whatever happens next, don’t take it personally. It’s going to be okay.”
And I was like, “Okay.” And then two hours later, I got back a rewritten version of the piece that had, I think, my byline on top of it and no other words that I had written. And it was just a complete top-to-bottom rewrite. And I was like, “Okay, I guess this is how it’s going to be.” And that really drilled into me what the standards and quality of a Wall Street Journal piece had to be at that time.
Jimmy Soni: Interesting. And did that keep happening? Or did the rewrites get a little less substantive as you went along?
Ben Cohen: They definitely got less. But the first editor I worked for at the Journal had just insanely high standards. And at the time, we only ran one story a day in the sports section. And there were probably between eight and 12 reporters. And so everyone was battling for that print space. And so the bar to get a story into the paper was, you had to be like Mondo Duplantis to clear it. It was so high, and the reporting had to be so deep, and the idea had to be so novel and inventive. And at that time, the nice thing about really the super fortuitous thing about writing for the Wall Street Journal sports section back then, I joined it in 2010. The Journal didn’t have a sports section until 2009, which is kind of remarkable if you think about it.
If you would think, what topic would Wall Street Journal readers be interested in? You would think sports would be at the top of the list. But we launched a page for the first time in print in 2009, and what that meant was that there was no legacy or baggage of, we’ve covered sports this way for 150 years. And so there’s going to be box scores and there’s going to be game stories. And this is how we’ve always done it. And so this is how we will continue to do it. We had to invent that on the fly and think, how should we cover sports today?
And the formula or the model that the founding editor, Sam Walker, came up with, was that a story that runs in the Wall Street Journal sports section not only can’t run in any other section, but hasn’t run in any other section. So if you think about the way that a lot of journalism works now, it’s like finding, everyone sort of writes the same story over and over again. And if one person writes a story and it does well, then lots of other outlets will write that story. We were always looking for clever angles into news, and we were looking to break news. So there are lots of ways to get exclusive stories that nobody else is writing. You can have some incredible investigative piece and turn up news that nobody else has.
You can write a piece in a completely different way that makes it stand out from everything else. You can collect data, you can analyze data in a different way. You can create the data yourself. You can be funny in an industry where nobody attempts to be humorous. You could just call a million more people than anyone else is going to call. You can look for ideas in different places. And so whenever we had space in the page, which is every day, we had to fill it with something that couldn’t have run anywhere else and hasn’t run anywhere else. And that was the challenge on a daily basis.
And so when I learned what journalism is, I learned it first from the Chronicle, which was its own form of journalism, and then from the Wall Street Journal, and specifically this pirate ship off of the Titanic of the Wall Street Journal that was just trying to be creative and inventive and interesting and give people something that they didn’t know that they wanted, but that they did want every single day.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah, do you remember your first piece that ran in the Journal? The first piece where you felt you met the bar?
Ben Cohen: Well, the first piece and the first piece where I felt I met the bar, probably different. One of the pieces that ran, I started in the summer of 2010, and it was a World Cup summer. And so we had a bunch of people in South Africa, and then we had a bunch of people in the office just reporting their own things. And I remember at the time, the Journal had a feature of the sports page every day called the Count, which was a short statistical piece every single day. Sometimes it was gathering data that was out there and saying, how many times do the Dallas Mavericks high-five each other during a game?
And sometimes it was like, what if we just took an idea and pushed it to the max and gathered all this data that was available and just presented it. And so one of them, in fact, it might have been the piece that I filed. And every editor swarmed my desk and said, “This is fine, it’s going to get rewritten, but don’t worry.” Was my editor, who is insane and brilliant, came over one day and he said, “What if the World Cup was a war? Who would win? How would we go about quantifying this? Military size and GDP and just come up with all these different metrics and let’s rank them and see where we are.” And presumably that meant the U.S. was not going to win.
We needed to come up with, actually the Netherlands would win if there was… or the the round of 16. And so that was, you know, before Claude could just go out and do this for you. It was like, well, how are we going to think about this and what data are we going to get. And how are we going to confirm that it’s accurate and it’s not just something that we pulled off of Wikipedia? And is there a way that we can present this that is not completely offensive, but is actually interesting and thought-provoking and kind of funny and people will get it? So that was one that stands out from that first summer of, oh, yeah, what if the World Cup were war?
Jimmy Soni: Can you talk a little more about Sam Walker and the effect that he’s had on your career and your life and the way you write and all of that?
Ben Cohen: Yeah. Sam Walker. There are a lot of people who came up through the Wall Street Journal sports section then, and I think they would all credit Sam for sort of being the evil genius voice in our head. And Sam is a brilliant writer himself. One of the reasons why it was okay that Sam was rewriting you was because he was just such a better writer than any of us were, that you would read it and be like, “Well, I would never say this…”
Jimmy Soni: But it’s said way better.
Ben Cohen: The fact that my name is on these words is actually great.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah.
Ben Cohen: And just a diabolical genius. He had just such smart and clever and inventive ideas and ways of reporting and writing and just making sentences sing. And his voice is constantly in my head. And so one of his rules for writing and especially finding stories was that the lead quote in any story that we wrote, which meant that the idea had to be so clever and so novel that the lead quote could have been, not that it should have been, but could have been, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” And that was what we aspired to every single time. And so we were always looking for ideas that could be, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” And the highest form of praise is when Sam would just write back in an email, “Yes,” with eight exclamation points and weird bolds and yellow highlights and that praise and affirmation is still, I should just print out those emails because they still mean so much to me.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah. So fast forward a little bit. But I’m curious how you got the book writing bug at some point and you did these, you know, we’ll talk about your book, The Hot Hand and what you’re working on now, but you did a couple of e-books, short books that you did on your own with a publisher. Tell me the story about those. Because, you know, they’re close to my heart. One’s obviously about Coach K. So there’s a Duke connection. But I’m curious what prompted those projects.
Ben Cohen: So there was, I lied a little bit. There’s a slight gap in which I was freelancing for the Wall Street Journal and I was editing and writing a lot of stories but was not on staff. And so I had the freedom to do a little bit of freelance experimentation. And in 2011 it must have been, Mike Krzyzewski was going to break the all-time college basketball wins record. And I thought, you know, I’ve probably thought more about Mike Krzyzewski than most people on this planet and I’ve had some privileged access to him and feel like I could get a little bit more. There had sort of been a change in his career that coincided with the time that I was at Duke and writing about him and thinking about him a lot.
And I thought maybe there might be something interesting here. What is it like when a 23, 24-year-old writer tries to write a long magazine-ish profile of Coach K that is not written by 40 and 50-year-olds who remember what he was like when he was hired at Duke, but who was on campus as he was evolving and turning into this version of Coach K that kind of the world knows and maybe doesn’t love but or loves to hate or but it’s just familiar with. And his career had evolved in a really interesting way.
And so I wrote this e-book which is kind of like sort of a long magazine piece about how he got to this point in his career, which allowed me to flex my muscles a little bit and go beyond my comfort zone. I don’t think I’ve read it in 15 years. I have no idea if it’s any good or not. And I would probably be mortified to read it today. But it was an interesting experiment both with the form of actually writing it and in the medium in which it was presented. It was not a newspaper piece, it was not a magazine piece. It was asking people to pay 99 cents for a piece of journalism, which is still kind of a novel concept, but was very strange and interesting back then.
Jimmy Soni: Did it do what you wanted it to do? Did you get feedback? Did you, I don’t know what metrics you might have had for success, but I’m curious, other than feeling like you did something, did you measure the success of it in any other way?
Ben Cohen: You know, I don’t really remember. I remember just thinking, “Oh, this thing exists. My name is on Amazon.com now.” And which hadn’t been before. And I accomplished this thing. And I had always known that I wanted to write books, too. And this seemed like an interesting stepping stone along the way. You know, at the time, writing for a newspaper meant writing stories that were between 800 and 1,200 words. And no matter how many calls you made or how much reporting you had, the stories were between 800 and 1,200 words every time. And so this was, okay. Well, I’ve been thinking about this guy for five, six years at this point. I can call a bunch of people. I have pretty good institutional knowledge about this guy.
What would it mean to write 8,000 to 12,000 words? And, you know, when you get to a book, it’s, what would it mean to write 80,000 words? And how to keep people’s attention. But it was an interesting experiment in that form, I think.
Jimmy Soni: You said that you’d always had designs on writing books. Was that just a natural extension of kind of being around writers and word people and being in newsrooms and stuff? Or were you, is this a big part of your life? Books in general?
Ben Cohen: I think when I was a kid, I just loved being in the bookstore, and I loved seeing what was on the bookshelf and imagining, who are these writers? And where do they get these ideas and how do they go about reporting? I mean, I’m a big journalism nerd. And I still am. I’m very curious about where people get their ideas from and how they actually go about structuring their day to write books. And so I just, and it just seemed like the natural next step. You’re a journalist. And you get to write books. That is, I said get to, not have to or, you know, whatever. But it seemed like a great privilege and something that would be really fun to do.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah, when I was growing up, there were books that really stayed with me. Series that I would just devour. And I look back and I’m like, a lot can be explained by those choices. I’ll give you an example just to riff on it. But there was the Choose Your Own Adventure series. And I think I would have, the right psychiatrist would have diagnosed me as sufficiently neurotic if they had seen that at every critical juncture in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I would dog-ear the page so I could go back and make a different decision.
Ben Cohen: You choose a different adventure.
Jimmy Soni: Choose a different adventure. And so, but at every decision point I would be racked with, well, what if it doesn’t work out? And then I would dog-ear the page, come back and play out the alternative. I’m curious if there were series or series of books that when you were a kid really stayed with you.
Ben Cohen: I remember reading the Matt Christopher young adult sports books. I don’t remember, I definitely dog-eared the pages, but I don’t remember going back and choosing different endings for them. But I feel like that got me from a young age and Goosebumps. Obsessed with Goosebumps. And I think maybe it’s just because there were new books all the time. And the same way that you had to wait four years for a new Harry Potter book or whatever. But these, there was a series and you could just sort of keep banging through them. So I was a voracious reader when I was young. And I still am, not so much books. I just read the Internet all day long now.
And every newspaper and I start my day, I read the Journal and the Times on my phone. I just try to read as much as possible in part because that’s where I get my ideas now. There are reporters who are very good at calling their sources and calling 50 people a day and schmoozing and sweet-talking them and I’m surrounded by these people at the Wall Street Journal and they are on their phones and just chatting with people all day long. And I’m not good at that. And that’s not how I get ideas. I get ideas by reading everything I can and trying to find nuggets or ideas or stories that connect and haven’t been connected before.
And I feel like my competitive advantage in journalism is having a good eye for a story and seeing what is out there and being able to connect dots. But I remember the first, the book that probably made the most impact on me was Moneyball, which came out when I was in high school and I was obsessed with baseball and I love statistics and I love journalism and that book is just so brilliant in so many ways. It is, and this was before, I mean I was in ninth grade. I didn’t know that all of business was going to become Moneyball for this. But I just remember reading that story and thinking, “Oh, my God, someone wrote this.” How did this person find this story?
How is it written so compellingly and hilariously and insightfully? That story is just so brilliant from start to finish. And the fact that it was just sitting there under his nose for someone to write and to write it the way that he did, and then for that story to become the story of everything in America.
Jimmy Soni: A cultural touchstone in a kind of perverse way.
Ben Cohen: For sure. For sure. And it’s still, you’re still seeing the ripple effects of it now in every industry, including sports. It is still playing out in sports to this day. And it would completely revolutionize sports during the time when I started writing about sports myself. The statistical revolution and how players were valued is kind of what I spent 10 years writing about as a sports writer at the Journal. That idea of a bunch of numbers on a page changing the way that an entire league could value a player. And, you know, Michael Lewis has talked about this a lot, but one of the really just incredible things about that story is that, and the reason why it resonated the way that it did was that sports is probably the most quantified part of society.
We can watch all the games. We know exactly how much players are paid, we know why they’re paid that, we can put a number on every single thing that someone does on the court or on the field. And yet, despite all of that information and all of those statistical metrics, players were still being misvalued all the time. And we didn’t know what made them good or what made them bad. And if that could happen in that industry, then of course, that could happen in every industry. And so that idea of shifting value, and I wrote about it in basketball, guys who were the eighth or ninth guys on the bench, statistical metrics showing that they were insanely valuable and they would get contracts worth $200 million.
That’s just such a juicy and rich story every time, because you can tell a really human story through those numbers, which is what Moneyball did. The reason why people remember that is because they remember the characters and how they were brought to life and the numbers identified those people. But the story that it tells is an incredibly human story.
Jimmy Soni: Did you read that when it came out?
Ben Cohen: Yeah.
Jimmy Soni: You were in high school when you read that.
Ben Cohen: Yeah.
Jimmy Soni: Because that is not a book that I imagine every high schooler has in their backpack.
Ben Cohen: No, but I read it as a baseball book. And I remember because I was a Yankees fan growing up, and those, the Yankees beat those A’s teams, but I just remember. I don’t think I ever thought, I don’t know what their salary cap was or that they had the lowest payroll in baseball and they were still winning all these games. But when I read the book, I was like, who is Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon? And how are all these guys from this part of the country that I’ve never been hanging with the Big Bad Evil Empire every year, you know? And so I came away from that book not only thinking, “Oh, this changes the way I think about baseball and statistics,” but journalism. This is a story that can be told.
Jimmy Soni: Oh, that’s. There’s a great moment, I think. Michael Lewis didn’t interview. He’s done a bunch of interviews about that book, but I remember seeing one where he’s actually a little nervous to release the book, I guess. He goes to Billy Beane, and it’s like, “I’m, you know, I’m kind of giving away state secrets here” This is a methodology you have refined.”
Ben Cohen: And Billy Beane says, “You don’t think anyone’s going to read this book.”
Jimmy Soni: And part of the reason was, you don’t think anybody in baseball reads books, do you? So you had The Art of Winning, which was the Coach K book, but you had this other one that I was, An Illustrated History of Duke Basketball. Is that even, tell me the origin story of that one? How did you...
Ben Cohen: I think I wrote the epilogue to that.
Jimmy Soni: Okay.
Ben Cohen: That book existed, and I think it was 100 Years of Duke Basketball. It was written by this guy, Bill Brill, who was this legendary sports journalist in the Research Triangle in North Carolina. And the book had been written, and Duke’s basketball team was turning 100 years old, and they needed someone to write a chapter about the last few years. And those last few years were the years that I was on campus. And it ended with Duke winning a national championship in 2010. And so I think I knew Bill a little bit from when I was in school, and he very kindly and generously said, “Would you like to write this final chapter, since you lived through it?” I was like, “Oh, my God. Amazing. Yes.”
Jimmy Soni: That’s awesome.
Ben Cohen: I have a lot of thoughts about Duke basketball between 2006 and 2010. Thank you for asking.
Jimmy Soni: That’s amazing. How did you start working on The Hot Hand? And we’re going to, we’ll get to your column now, the Science of Success. But I’m curious about, you know, you’ve been doing it. You’ve been writing for the Journal how many years before you started this and kind of what was some of the stuff that was in the stew while you were working on this?
Ben Cohen: So I think I sold this book in 2017. So I’d been at the Journal for about seven years then, writing for the Journal for seven years, on staff for five years. And this book was born out of two stories that I wrote for the Journal at the time, I was vaguely familiar with the idea of the hot hand and this idea that in basketball, if you make a few shots in a row, you feel more likely to make your next shot. And I think I may have been aware of this fierce generational academic debate about whether or not the hot hand exists. I first became aware of the concept because I felt it myself as a terrible basketball player in high school.
The one time when I made three shots in a row, I still had this vivid memory of that afternoon. I could tell you where it was. It was at a Catholic school in New Jersey that no longer exists. It is defunct. And I just remember everything about that day. I have no idea why it happened. It never happened to me again. But I felt something that day that just stayed with me forever, and I had no idea. There was this long debate about whether or not that feeling exists that has looped in some of the smartest people who ever lived and applies to so many industries.
So I remember the first time I came across this concept in academic literature, because one of the things about writing for the Journal is that when you’re looking for stories that nobody else has written, you go looking in a bunch of funny places for them. And I remember seeing a couple papers about the hot hand, and I started reading them, and there was this new paper that came out that was presented at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which is kind of like, it’s called Dork-a-palooza. It is the industry convention for sports analytics. It was really born out of Moneyball. So in some ways, this book was born out of Moneyball in a very strange, roundabout way. This paper was presented at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference at MIT, had been written by a couple of Harvard undergrads.
And it used all of this data that had not existed until then, with data that came from shot-tracking cameras in every NBA arena that was able to collect attributes about shots that had never been tracked before. And these undergrads had this really clever and counterintuitive idea to take that data and say, “Well, the hot hand is this idea that has been studied by Nobel Prize winners and economists and psychologists for decades. What if we actually apply this data and search for whether there is a hot hand effect?” And they found that when you adjust for the quality of a shot and the difficulty of that shot, then there is actually something of a hot hand effect.
And the reason why the hot hand had been such a contentious topic in the academic literature for so long was because there was this seminal paper that came out in 1985, written by Amos Tversky of Kahneman and Tversky fame, that said, “Actually, the hot hand doesn’t exist. It’s just a figment of your imagination. It is this canonical example of seeing patterns in randomness.” And that bias, the hot hand bias, reflects so many other forces in society, and that is why it’s so interesting. And what these Harvard undergrads were coming along saying, that was a really, the broad takeaway of that paper was accurate, but this specific takeaway actually may not have been accurate. And you might not be crazy to think that there is such a thing as a hot hand.
So I wrote a story about that paper for the Wall Street Journal. There’s this big response to it. And then the next year, there was another paper that came out about the hot hand that was interesting in an entirely different way. I wrote a story about that paper, too.
I thought, you know, these really smart people have been thinking about this idea for a really long time, and I wonder if there is a way to take this idea and tell a whole bunch of stories through it and use this idea to explore the world of basketball and beyond basketball and take it to markets and decision-making and use the quest to figure out and solve the mystery of the hot hand as the narrative spine for this book and then go in all sorts of interesting and unexpected directions and just kind of surprise and delight the reader. So that is the challenge that I assigned myself while writing this book and thinking that I was possibly capable of pulling it off.
Jimmy Soni: What a description. And I will say this is, it’s actually made me think this morning because I was reflecting on your body of work, and I thought to myself, the thing you bring is delight. And part of delight is surprise. Why is Christmas morning interesting? Part of the reason Christmas morning is interesting is because you don’t know. If you’re a kid, you don’t know what you’re gonna get. Things are wrapped up. That’s what I love about your work, is that I actually never know what I’m gonna get with, particularly with your Science of Success on a given day.
Ben Cohen: I don’t either.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah, right. You’re like, I’m making it up as I go. But the book covers art. It covers investing. You have a thing on sugar beets in there.
Ben Cohen: I take a trip to a sugar beet farm in North Dakota. Yeah, yeah.
Jimmy Soni: Tell the story of that. That’s an interesting part of this whole...
Ben Cohen: Part of the story of the book is, should you believe in the hot hand? And more important, should you behave as if you believe in the hot hand? So if you are on a basketball team, the simple version of this question is, if someone has made a couple shots in a row, is it smart to feed the hot hand and get that person the ball? Or is that person going to miss and you’re going to think that your brain has played a trick on you? But that question is so much more interesting and important in parts of the world that are beyond a 94 by 50 piece of hardwood. So in markets, should you give your money to an investor who has beat the market a couple of years in a row? Does that make him more likely to do it? There’s a story in the book about Rob Reiner and his directing career.
And when you’re hot as a director or an actor, the world kind of opens up to you a little bit. You are able to take bigger swings and take advantage of your hotness and do stuff that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. So Rob Reiner starts his career by making This Is Spinal Tap and then Stand by Me and The Sure Thing. And he’s made three hit movies in a row, all movies that nobody else wanted him to make, oddly, which you wouldn’t think of today. You would think, “Oh, someone should have been throwing money at him to make This Is Spinal Tap.” And after he makes these three movies, he is hot in Hollywood. He is a director who can kind of get anything made that he wants to get made.
And he has this conversation with a studio executive around that time. She comes to him and says, “You’re Rob Reiner. You’re making these movies that everybody loves. What do you want to do next? We’ll do whatever you want.” And he says, “You’re not going to want to make the movie that I want to make.” And she says, “No, trust me, we’ll do whatever you want. What do you want to make?” And he says, “No, trust me. You’re not going to want to make the movie.” And she said, “Just name the movie.” And he said, “The movie I want to make is The Princess Bride.” And she says, “Well, anything but The Princess Bride.” And I was shocked to find out that The Princess Bride was this movie that the biggest names in Hollywood had tried to make for years.
Robert Redford and Norman Jewison, François Truffaut, they had all tried to make The Princess Bride. And it had been this riddle haunted by a curse that was wrapped in an enigma. Nobody could figure it out. Nobody could think out, who was this movie for? And why would anyone want to see it? Makes no sense today. It was written by William Goldman, coming off of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men. It’s just a beloved movie that has just endured for generations. But Rob Reiner used all of his capital as a director, and I remember we traded emails and he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. That movie was still impossible for me to get made, even with this hot hand.”
So anyway, the reason we go from Rob Reiner to a sugar beet farm on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota is because if you’re a farmer, do you bet the farm on patterns? How are you thinking about patterns and randomness and data from year to year? And so I met this really fascinating fifth-generation sugar beet farmer named Nick Hagen, who has to think about all of these lessons that his ancestors have taught him over centuries about how to think about data. And if one patch of his farmland has yielded a whole bunch of sugar beets the year before, does that mean he should invest more in that patch of land going forward or not? And what does it mean to be in an industry that is as random as the weather?
And can you believe in the hot hand? And if you do believe in the hot hand, even in life, can you invest in the hot hand in your business? And so there are all sorts of interesting ways of looking at the world where I might feel that the hot hand is real in basketball. Yeah. But I might still also invest in index funds because I don’t believe that someone’s going to beat the market year after year.
Jimmy Soni: Right. If you go back to the kind of pre-selling the book process, you know, you’re somebody that’s worked at the Journal but you’re still pretty young in your career. What was it like to think about the book? How did you do the mechanics of what came after the decision, like, “Hey, this should be a book-length thing.”
Ben Cohen: I remember we sold the book and I was so happy and went through the whole process of sending out the proposal and getting an offer and signing it and I woke up the next day and thought, “Oh God, what am I going to do now? How do I, I don’t know how to write a book,” and especially a book as open-ended as this one. And it’s a challenge that I actually sort of deal with on a week-to-week basis now because when you can write about anything, the bar has to be super high and you have to think, “Oh well, what I write about has to be something worth writing about.” It can’t just be like, “Oh, I happen to find this story interesting. I’m going to spend 10,000 words and three months of my life and get you to read it.” It has to be important and interesting and keep my attention, much less the reader’s attention. Then I just sort of went looking for stories and casting about for characters and they had to be stories and characters who, when I told my friends about them, I could see their faces light up. And I was eager to tell people about them because I wanted to sort of stress test and pressure test the arguments and the characters and the stories. You’ve written books, you know, when someone asks you what are you working on? You’re like, “I don’t want to talk about it.” And I still don’t want to talk about it.
But all the times that I did talk about it, I could get excited talking about it. I will say I wrote this book before I had kids and I wrote the book on mornings and weekends, which are things that now that I do have kids I no longer have. I remember waking up early in the morning, was waking up at 7:30 and banging out a thousand words before work. So it is, in some ways I was insanely green and eager and ambitious and didn’t know what I didn’t know, and was very happy and sort of inexperienced, but also had a lot of time and no responsibilities, which is a great thing.
And it’s just much harder to write a book with a full-time job and kids and life responsibilities.
Jimmy Soni: How did you go about? You have a very particular thing you do at the Journal and the pace is a certain kind of pace. Did you just stick to a word count every day to get the book done? Was that how you basically approached it?
Ben Cohen: I tried to, yeah. I feel like the advice out there to write between 500, 1,000 words a day and just get them on the page is very good advice. And it works for a reason because you don’t think you’re doing all that much. And all that work compounds over time. And after a few months you have 85,000 words and then you can start chiseling and shaping it and getting it into a place where you want. I’m, even now I’m in the process of writing a book and so I’m thinking about it and the hardest part is just getting the words on the page.
The reporting is done, I have all the material and it’s just vomiting the words onto the page and getting it into a place where I can print it out and start redlining and thinking about what comes next. But for me, that routine of just writing a thousand words and then going to work was very helpful.
Jimmy Soni: Right. Did you…
Ben Cohen: What about you, how do you think about it?
Jimmy Soni: Yeah, it’s the same thing. I mean it’s, and it’s funny because it’s a bit of a rinse and repeat process. There’s not, once I have the subject, once I have the actual thing I’m writing about, and I’ve done all the research and I’ve done all the interviewing and everything else. I mean, you just set a manageable word count number every day. I tell people it’s kind of like enough that it’s substantive but not so much that I’m going to be burned out of my own project. And I just have a little, on Scrivener, they give you this little indicator. Scrivener’s the software I choose to use when I’m doing the raw material for the book.
And it’s really funny, there’s a little indicator and it gets green when you hit to that point in your, when you hit the words. And I just try to get it to green every day and just keep going. And then, as you said, over time, you collect everything. I think the real work is in then the revising, the shaping, the trimming. But honestly, I just, I woke, I woke up, same as you. You just wake up obscenely early. You knock out the words you need to knock out, and you get back at it the next day. And then some days you kind of double or triple. And those are great days. You’re like, “Oh, I’m ahead,” but I still go back every day and just keep going.
Ben Cohen: I also found the most productive writing time for me was early in the morning. Or what I considered early in the morning back then, without checking my phone. I would check my phone to make sure the world was still spinning and nothing terrible had happened overnight. But I hadn’t checked email. I didn’t look at Twitter. I didn’t do any of the stuff that I would normally do that turns my brain into mush. And I could get more done in that first hour than I would over 12 hours over the course of the day. It was just getting the stuff out on the page was so valuable and helpful and useful to me. And now I have two young kids. That means waking up at ungodly...
Jimmy Soni: Yes. But you do get used to it. And then the other thing is, I always felt like if I did the book work, even because I’ve done now two of my books after my daughter was born, and actually three of them, and I find that if I can get something done before she’s awake, then I’m not robbing Peter to pay Paul. I don’t feel that way. I’m like, “Okay, I’ve gotten that stuff done now. Now time with her is not a tax on book time.” Right. And so for me, that’s worked really well. I would also say that the part about it that people don’t appreciate is it sounds fun and it looks fun, but as you said, it’s a real struggle to go from interviews and raw material to finished words on the page. There is still something in that that is really hard, especially if you’re doing it twice. You’re doing it once in the morning and then going to the Wall Street Journal, doing it all day. How did you manage that? Or was it just different kinds of writing? So it was okay.
Ben Cohen: I think it is different kinds of writing. So I think there is some element of cross-training to it where I think both made me better at the other one. The book writing allows me to push my limits a little bit more and stretch muscles that I don’t get when I’m writing a weekly column. And it allows you to think and make connections and just let stuff sort of marinate in your brain that you don’t get in an 800-word column when you’re on a specific cadence. And even now, I’m in the process of putting a bunch of chapters together and I’m seeing patterns and connections between the chapters that I didn’t think of when I was writing them. And clearly, they were always there and they just were waiting to be mined.
And the only way I was going to do that was with time and some distance from the material and being able to come back to it with fresher eyes. And I also find the reporting of these chapters is so fun. And you come back from a reporting trip, you’re so eager and, for this book, I’ve made the mistake of not just writing right away. And then months pass and I have to relive the interviews and go back and listen to the tape and I’m like, “What was that about again? What were those images that were floating around my head?”
And so I wish that I had just come back from a bunch of reporting trips and just written 10,000 words as soon as I got back that I would be in a much better shape now today if I had done that.
Jimmy Soni: When you think back on this particular book, the moment that, you know, it can always be an interest is either when, for me, when you get the first finished copies of the book, that box shows up. They don’t warn you. They don’t. Nobody tells you they’re on. Sometimes they’ll tell you they’re on their way. But most of the time a box just shows up and you’ve got the finished copies. And then when you start to see it out in the wild, what were those moments like for you with this particular project?
Ben Cohen: My book came out March 10, 2020.
Jimmy Soni: Oh, perfect timing.
Ben Cohen: Great timing. Yes. So the book party was on a Tuesday and the world shut down on Wednesday. And so I have very strange memories. I walked into Three Lives bookstore in the West Village, probably the day before it closed for a very long time. And I saw the book in the new nonfiction part. And I got that joy and then didn’t see other people for a very long time afterwards. So it was a peculiar experience of releasing a book into the teeth of the pandemic. Yeah.
It just means what people warned me from the beginning, even before it was clear that it was going to be a very strange time to release a book, is that books have a long tail in a way that newspaper articles do not, and that people would be reading this book and coming to it in different ways for a very long time. And I found that totally to be true because you get an email from someone who picked up the book five years later, and I wake up in the morning and I see an email about that, and I’m like, “Well, I haven’t thought about this book in seven years, but it’s living in your brain right now.” It has lived on in this really rewarding, gratifying way.
So that is something that is totally different than writing a newspaper column that appears in print and then you will get 99% of the traffic and attention the day it comes out. And then never again.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah. I’m going to ask a couple more book questions, and I want to shift to the Science of Success and your current project. When, how did you settle on the title and the cover art and that kind of stuff? I mean, I imagine some of it was intuition, but did you sell it as The Hot Hand?
Ben Cohen: We did. That was the title the whole time. Yeah. I felt that was intuitive and sticky and a little bit seductive. That if you knew what the hot hand was, you would be curious why it was the title of a book. And if you didn’t know what it was, you would also kind of want to know a little bit more about why it was the title of the book. And I liked the rhythm of it. And I actually hate alliteration in writing. If I write a piece, you will almost never see two words with the same first letter back to back, because it’s just an eyesore to me. But there was no other way of. Yeah. And I think it was a neat way of doing it.
And I didn’t have control of the cover but I do remember we were talking about potential art for the cover. And I think I did suggest, what about a fireball emoji as the O in The Hot Hand? And they sort of ran with that from there.
Jimmy Soni: That’s great. How did you transition from the work you were doing as a sports reporter at the Wall Street Journal to what I think is one of the great sections of any contemporary newspaper. It’s a thing, again, that I look forward to reading so much. How did you start and build and grow the Science of Success?
Ben Cohen: So in 2022, I had been at the Journal for 12 years. I’d been covering the NBA for almost 10 years. And it was an incredible decade to be covering basketball specifically. So the first, really, the first major season that I was covering basketball was 2014, 2015, which was the first year that Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors won a title by playing basketball in a completely new and interesting and exciting way and really revolutionizing the sport. And that idea of the three-point revolution taking over basketball was such a Wall Street Journal way of covering basketball. This idea that there is a shot on the court that is worth 50% more than a shot that is one inch closer to the basket. And it’s this incredible market inefficiency hiding in plain sight.
And it had taken teams decades to figure out that three was worth more than two. And now you have this team with the most charismatic and compelling player of his generation, who had been overlooked his entire life, taking advantage of it to incredible effect. I mean, that team in 2016 was a cultural phenomenon, the most exciting team since Michael Jordan’s Bulls, with this really iconic player taking on LeBron James, this behemoth who had conquered the sport in a completely different way. And this rivalry was taking shape, this incredibly unlikely rivalry. Nobody saw this coming. And so my first four years covering basketball, the NBA Finals every year was the Golden State Warriors versus the Cleveland Cavaliers. So I spent a lot of time in Oakland and Cleveland and felt like it was Groundhog Day.
I was like, “Yeah, it’s June. I’m going back and forth between Oakland and Cleveland.” There are all sorts of fascinating stories about ways that teams were trying to build themselves to take on the Warriors. So the Houston Rockets was a team that I wrote about ad nauseam. So I probably wrote the most about Steph and LeBron and James Harden and Daryl Morey and Mike D’Antoni and the Houston Rockets, because they were trying to dethrone the Golden State Warriors by building a team and pursuing this counterintuitive strategy to beat them. And they would talk to me about it and I would get to explain, here is why this team thinks that they can beat the unbeatable Golden State Warriors. And they came really close, and it was just really fun. Teams were taking control of data and statistics.
And you could just see all of these stories unfolding that we would have never been able to write about at any other point in basketball history. And so, but over time, I sort of felt that I had just written the same story over and over again. I think one of the great strengths of a journalist, and it’s really important to have fresh eyes and to not be jaded and to be surprised and delighted by stories when you find them and not think, “Oh, I wrote that story six years ago,” or a different version of the same story. And so I’d been looking, especially after writing The Hot Hand, I’d been looking to expand a little bit beyond basketball.
And when I was pitching this column that became the Science of Success, the whole idea was, can I take this playbook that I’ve been able to come up with and learn from writing sports at the Wall Street Journal and take that idea and apply it to the rest of the world and all sorts of industries and the rest of business? Can I find interesting people doing interesting things in important industries and other important industries and just try to write about them the way that we write about sports at the Wall Street Journal? And so also in the same way that I have found that writing a book is different with children. And covering basketball means working a lot of nights and weekends, and nights and weekends are what you kind of don’t have when you have young children.
And so I thought this was the right time to kind of look around and take the stuff that I’ve learned covering sports and basketball at the Wall Street Journal and explore the rest of the world with it.
Jimmy Soni: How do you, I mean, I have a million questions, but how did you sell it internally? I mean, to the extent you’re allowed to talk about it. It seems like a very specific thing. I’m going to cover everything, success and failure in all human endeavors.
Ben Cohen: It happened to be at a time when the Exchange section of the Wall Street Journal was looking for a couple new columns. And I had said, I’ve done this for a long time, and this is what I want to do. And I wrote a memo explaining the type of work that I wanted to do, the lens through which I saw the world and wanted to explore the business world, and came up with a bunch of sample ideas and stuff. I will, we want to be on the news. We want to be timely. We want to be a little bit timeless. We’ll see what happens every week. And can we write about people the way that we write about athletes? And maybe I was just very lucky again, that people inside the paper sort of trusted the vision that we had and said, “Let’s try it and see what happens.”
Jimmy Soni: Yeah, I have to believe that there’s some part of you and maybe you’ve just gotten so good at it. How do you wrestle with the challenge of meeting that bar every week? Because it is, it’s one of the, your consistency in your quality of subjects and topics and approaches. Do you just have a folder? Is there a big Ben Manila folder somewhere? Like, “All right, time to dust this one off.”
Ben Cohen: Yeah. It’s a Google Doc. It’s called Just Ideas. I do have, when I come across interesting people or companies or ideas, I will dump them into a Google Doc with just very basic information. Maybe copy-paste paragraphs of stories that were interesting and think, is whenever the time is right for this, or maybe something else will happen and there will be a time to pick up on this. But a lot of times it’s also just following the news very carefully and thinking, “Okay, well, there’s this one interesting nugget in this story that wasn’t fully explored, and I’m really curious about that.” And having the freedom and the luxury of following my curiosity to wherever it may lead.
Doing the full reporting, going deep into a subject, reading everything that’s been written about it, listening to every podcast that this person has been on, and trying to tell the story through that very small thing. And so that’s something else that I learned covering sports at the Journal is that I think there are two ways to tell stories. One is taking small ideas and making them really big, and one is taking big ideas and making them really small. In some ways, they’re connected. But, for example, we always used to look for funny, interesting, peculiar, clever ideas at the Wall Street Journal. So one story that I wrote was, in 2016, the Golden State Warriors started the year 24-0. They were 41-4 at one point. There was nothing that was going wrong.
And as a journalist, you’re always looking for tension. Tension is what makes a story. And when there’s no tension, it’s like, well, what do you do with that? And I remember listening to a bunch of radio interviews the Warriors were doing at the time. You know, probably the only person outside the Bay Area who was actually listening to interviews on local radio. And in one of them, the interim coach at the time, Steve Kerr was on medical leave. And the interim coach at the time was Luke Walton. And he was doing this interview as he was walking off a plane, and they were saying, “Luke, what’s going on? How are you doing?” He was like, “I’m terrible. The team trainer before the season got rid of our peanut butter and jellies on the team plane because he thought they weren’t healthy. And everyone is completely miserable about it because all NBA players famously eat, they just subsist on peanut butter and jelly. It’s just around at all hours.”
And I heard this, and I was like, “Okay, well, the story to do is that the greatest source of tension in the locker room in Golden State right now is they’re fighting to get their peanut butter and jellies back.” And so that’s a funny idea for a story. And then you take it to the extreme. And they happened to be coming through the East Coast a couple of days later. I remember I went to Philadelphia and stalked their locker room and went quietly to every player in the locker room and asked, “What do you make of the war over peanut butter and jelly in the locker room?” having sotto voce conversations with Steph Curry in the side of the room. Then the next day, they were in New York, and I went to the Garden, did the same thing. And over time, you’re reporting, that’s hours and hours of reporting to ask players off to the side to get an exclusive about peanut butter and jelly. And so you could tell sort of the story of the Golden State Warriors’ magical season through the only thing that has gone wrong for this team is peanut butter and jelly.
And so I’m always kind of looking for peanut butter and jelly stories in all sorts of industries. And one other thing I’ve learned through the course of writing this column is that if I find something interesting, the chances are that I can convey that interest and enthusiasm to readers. And if I don’t know something that it feels like everybody else knows or should know, then the chances are that they don’t know it either. And, you know, I find myself thinking a lot, “Well, does everyone know this? Or am I just an idiot and just found out for the first time?” And I think a lot of people don’t know a lot of things. And so things that you would think that everybody knows, they don’t know, and I didn’t know them.
And so I’ve learned to kind of trust my judgment and gut about that a little bit. If I think something is interesting, I can convey that interest and I can make other people interested in it as well.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah. Do you have, I mean, it’s probably like picking a favorite child or something. But let’s say from the last couple of years. Is there a story that stands out to you as a favorite of yours?
Ben Cohen: One of my favorite stories I ever did was two years ago I went to Boise, Idaho to visit the campus of Micron because Micron Technologies. Micron Technologies, yeah. In one of their chip factories in Boise, Idaho was a machine made by a company called ASML. And ASML is the most important, valuable, invaluable company that most people have ever heard of. And in the world of chips and semiconductors, which is the most important industry in the world, there are a bunch of really interesting companies. There’s Nvidia, which, you know, nobody outside of gamers had heard about five years ago. And then it became a trillion-dollar company. And I remember writing a column about it when it became a trillion-dollar company that was basically like, “What is the story of this company?
It looks like someone fell asleep on their keyboard typing it out. I’ve never heard it. This company is worth more than Berkshire Hathaway. Now, how did this happen?” There’s TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which is the most valuable, geographically important company that makes all the chips. But in every TSMC fab, and in every Micron and Samsung chip factory, there is an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine. An EUV machine is made by ASML. This is the most important machine on the planet. It is the bottleneck in the chip-making process. And only one company in the world makes these machines. This obscure Dutch company called ASML, which is one of the 20 most valuable companies in the world. And if you say ASML, most people will think you said ASMR.
And I remember thinking, “Okay, I found out about ASML. And I said, I can’t just write a story about ASML because while most people have never heard of it, even people reading the Wall Street Journal have never heard of it. I can’t just be, ‘You guys hear about this company, it’s this amazing company.’” But I remember I was reporting around ASML and someone told me that there was a job in ASML called customer support engineer. When I hear customer support, I think someone in a call center dealing with problems. Customer support engineer is a person whose job it is to make sure that machine never breaks and when it does break that they can fix it right away.
And I thought, “Okay, well this is the most important job at the most important company that nobody’s ever heard of and I can put a human face to it.” And so I talked to the company, we cast about for a few characters. We eventually settled on this woman named Brianna Hall who worked at the Micron chip fab as an ASML employee, as a customer support engineer. And I was able to tell the whole story of ASML and its importance to the global economy and everything we do all day long through this one person.
And I thought, “Oh, this is what I’m trying to do is to take this really big story about the global economy and the most invaluable company that most people have never heard of and boil it down to this one person doing this one crucial job on this one machine that is responsible for all of our lives.”
Jimmy Soni: A series of your pieces from that are becoming a book or you’re working on kind of structuring a book. How have you been thinking about this current, we’re in media res on that project so there’s only probably so much you can share. But this is your next book coming up. How are you approaching it? How are you thinking about it?
Ben Cohen: The book was really born from the column and one of the, there was a type of column that I kept running into that I really liked writing and I found that readers really liked reading. I kept talking to people who had come up with interesting startups or products or just things that I had encountered in my day-to-day life, which I find is how I find a lot of stories these days. Stuff that is just in the air or I keep running into and I think, “Oh, what’s the story here? Why am I just noticing that everybody is drinking Athletic non-alcoholic beer now? How did this happen?” And the more and more I talked to these people and they all had a lot in common. They were unlikely entrepreneurs.
They did not set out to disrupt an industry or create something new. They just thought to themselves there has to be a better way. This thing exists and I’m going to make a better version of it. And I thought, “Oh well that’s really interesting. It’s sort of this new theory of innovation. It’s not invention. It’s taking something that already exists and making it better.” And I think there are lots of different ways that companies and people do that. You could do that by recognizing unmet demand or finding a new source of supply, or redesigning a product, or failing over and over or coming up with different mechanisms of finding ideas. So the book is, it’s a bunch of chapters about people and companies over time that have figured out new and interesting and hopefully universal ways of seeking and achieving better. And so a bunch of them will be expanded versions of columns that I’ve written, and a bunch of them will be stuff that hasn’t appeared in a column yet. So I wrote a column about Athletic non-alcoholic beer during Dry January two years ago. And so that’s an example of a guy working at a hedge fund in Connecticut sort of understanding that there was a demand for a non-alcoholic beer that didn’t taste like swamp water and thinking, “Well, maybe, I had this data,” he ran all these polls and surveys that he commissioned himself that found that 55% of Americans said that they would drink non-alcoholic beer.
And at the time, non-alcoholic beer accounted for 0.3% of the market. And he thought, “Well, there’s an inefficiency here. If I can get that 0.3% to even 1%, that’s a huge business.” And of course, it’s much bigger than 1% now. But that was recognizing the demand for a better product in data. That wasn’t like, “Oh, I think they’re,” you know, he recognized it in his own life and that he went out and found this demand and he created a product to meet that demand. Another column that I wrote for the Journal that will be in the book that I found in my own life is as the father of young children, my children go through just an enormous amount of berries every week. I spend all of my money on berries.
And a couple years ago, I noticed that there was this new type of berry from Driscoll’s, which, there are different types of labels on every Driscoll’s clamshell. There’s the yellow label, which is regular. There’s the green label, which is organic. And then there were two words that were appearing on some of these blueberries and raspberries called Sweetest Batch. And I remember tasting them and thinking, “What are these berries?” Because I can’t stop eating them. And they taste so much better than the other berries. I remember reaching out to Driscoll’s and saying, “What is the story of these berries? How did they happen?”
It turns out Driscoll’s, for years and years, for as long as the company has existed, have been throwing out its best berries because its most flavorful, best-tasting berries were not reliable and resilient enough to make it through the manufacturing process. So in berry manufacturing, this is, I didn’t know anything about berries before writing this column, and this is kind of what I do on a weekly basis. Go really deep into a rabbit hole and then come back out and try to describe it. In berry-making, all of berry production is a genetic trade-off. So if something is really flavorful, that means the yield might be lower. Or the bush might be less bushy or more bushy and so you can’t actually pick them or more brittle. So they won’t make their way across the country.
And because of that, they couldn’t make enough of these berries to make the economics work. And finally a few years ago, they said, “Well, why don’t we just keep these berries in the genetic pool for longer and then charge a slight premium for them and see if people are willing to buy them and we can make the economics work like that.” And they started doing that. They were just this massive hit because you taste one next to the other, it’s just a different experience. And now because Driscoll’s is keeping those better-tasting berries in the genetic pool for longer, the flavor of their ordinary berries is getting better because it’s moving the scatter chart up into the right.
And so there’s this curious economic effect just by someone saying, “Why are we throwing out our best-tasting berries? We should try to keep these in for longer.” So there are all sorts of stories like that. So it’s going to be Athletic and Driscoll’s and the story of Birkenstock and Dyson and Waymo and Ferrari and Hermès. And so all of these companies and products that I think people are fascinated by and that kernel of better is embedded in all of them in all sorts of different ways.
Jimmy Soni: Well, we will look forward to that and have you back on to talk all about it once it’s and when you’re done writing it. Sometime in the hopefully not so distant future, every Infinite Loops episode somewhat ends the same way. We declare you emperor for a day and you have a magical microphone. You’re allowed to incept two ideas into human minds. They won’t know that it came from you, but everybody will adhere to and follow your precepts. So what are your off-the-cuff, what are your two ideas that you would, based on everything you’ve done, based on all the successes you’ve studied, based on the book, based on looking at athletes and entrepreneurs and CEOs and other visionaries, what would you want people to have as their two ideas?
Ben Cohen: I couldn’t get any heads-up about this?
Jimmy Soni: That’s the whole point.
Ben Cohen: When I sent the email. Is there anything I should be thinking about?
Jimmy Soni: That’s the whole point.
Ben Cohen: I think that idea that has been floating around my head and rattling around my brain for a while now is this idea that better is always out there for people who can find it. And I think that there are all sorts of ways of achieving better. And a lot of it just comes down to feeling. A lot of it just comes down to being willing to play around with that idea of better is out there and that I can do this better and nothing is stopping me from doing it. So I think nurturing that sentiment and that mentality I think is really important. And in some ways, I don’t think about it like this, but I have to kind of do that every week when I’m writing a column. I think about it in two ways.
One is it can be finding new angles into stories and topics that the Wall Street Journal is already writing about, which is really intimidating because I think, “Well, we’re already writing about this. The people who are writing about this know this topic better than anyone in this building and quite possibly better than anyone in the world.” If they haven’t thought of this idea, why not? Is that because they did think about it and they dismissed it? Is it because they didn’t have time to think about it? Is it because they just happened to not run into it? There are all sorts of reasons why a piece might not exist. And I have to have the confidence every time to think, “I saw this idea. I think it’s interesting. Should I write it?
Is it just I’m a rube and I’m naive and that’s why I think it’s interesting? Or is it interesting because it’s interesting?” And the second type of story that I write is charging towards open space and cracks in our coverage. So industries and people and topics and companies that we don’t write about as a newsroom and sort of having the courage of my own conviction and following my curiosity and thinking, “Well, if I think Driscoll’s berries are interesting, then I bet a lot of other people will think Driscoll’s berries are interesting too.” And Driscoll’s might not be, you know, Nvidia or Apple or Microsoft, but the Wall Street Journal should still be writing about it. And Athletic might not be Anheuser-Busch, but I bet there is a market for people who want to read these stories.
And so I have had to think every time I’m staring at the blank document and the blinking cursor, I have to convince myself, if you think this is interesting, somebody else will too. And in some ways that’s, “Oh, there’s a better way of covering this story. And this is the way.” And that doesn’t mean that our other coverage is bad. It’s amazing. And whenever I, because I’m always giving a heads-up to the beat reporter. “Hey, I’m writing about this. If you have anything...”
Jimmy Soni: Here comes Ben to steal my thunder.
Ben Cohen: It’s a nice way of putting it. And I think, “If you’re working on anything, let me know. Maybe we could do it together.” But, and if there’s any reason why this is wrong or I shouldn’t be doing this, please let me know and save me from looking like an idiot and wasting all this time. And every time I do that, my colleagues and our reporters at the Wall Street Journal are such fonts of knowledge. They just know everything there is. And every time I work with them, I’m like, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe you know all this stuff.” And I’m just sort of pulling stuff out of their brains.
And I love writing, collaborating with people who are on certain beats at the Journal because I can just tap into their brain and I can look smarter. So I did a piece a couple weeks ago with our airlines reporter about the new strategy of United Airlines and why it is that I seem to see a tweet every other day, “United is the best airline in America right now” after years and years of Delta holding the title. And she interviewed Scott Kirby, the CEO of United. And we just sort of went back and forth all week long about what happened here. And it would have taken me hours and hours of research to figure out all of the crucial points in that story.
And I could just call Alison Sider, who was the reporter, and she had written all the story. She knew all of it already, and she knew so much more in her brain that I would have never been able to get out of any archival coverage or podcast. And so being able to take those ideas and team up with people and take one plus one and make it equal three is so much fun for me. I love writing with other people at the Journal for that reason. So I’m always looking for better ways to do something. And I think if I were emperor of the world and could take this microphone and turn it into a magic wand, it would be to kind of nurture that idea in other people.
Jimmy Soni: It was brilliantly said. And I feel like that hits both, you know, because there’s better, and then there’s also, you talked about the cracks, looking at the cracks, and I feel like that’s another useful lesson from your work, finding these places that people forgot, time forgot. Just the watchful eyes of an entire newsroom might have forgotten.
Ben Cohen: Right.
Jimmy Soni: And that’s why I love your work, and that’s why hopefully many others will love the book to come. And I can’t recommend The Hot Hand strongly enough, but thank you, Ben, for taking time to do this and for coming out and talking with us.
Ben Cohen: Thank you for having me. Thanks for such nice words.
