June 9, 2020 • 34 mins
Back when coaching didn’t do very much, it didn’t matter who got it and who didn’t. But coaching is clearly getting better and better, and spreading into more areas of life, which means it matters a great deal who gets it and who does not. And the people who don’t get it are often the ones who need it most.
- A professor attempts to teach the art of landing a joke to America’s next generation of business leaders, but will she tip the scales of privilege even more along the way?
- We see the other darker side of data coaching in sports, when the weaponization of information enables a cheating scandal that puts an end to a promising pitching career.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin chariots of fire. So where does the power come
from to see the race to its hand from? If
you're into watching white guys run, the movie never gets old.
(00:36):
Even if you're not into that. It has one of
the best coaching scenes ever filmed. Harold Abraham's a British
sprinter is about to run thee hundred meter final in
the nineteen twenty four Olympics. His coach gazes out of
his hotel room window at the stadium next door. The
pistol sounds. The coach watches the sky over the stadium.
(00:58):
Then he spies the British flag rising. That's how the
coach learns that his runner has won the gold. There's
a reason the coach isn't inside the stadium watching the race.
He's been banned because he's a coach. In nineteen twenty four,
(01:21):
professional coaches are taboo. They're considered a form of cheating
the steroids of the age. It's aught to do with
this idea of this emerging gentleman amateur. So you were
considered a gentleman if you were like upper class born
into money. Tigan Carpenter George is the co author of
a book on the history of coaching. It's one of
(01:41):
those subjects you don't really imagine there being a history
of what would have been the sports being played in
the early nineteenth century. So, I mean, the upper classes
would have been the typical cricket, fencing, rowing was quite
a good one, Tennis, probably not tennis as we recognize
it now. So there's a sport called pedestrianism which emerged
(02:03):
sort of the early eighteen hundreds, basically walking races. They
were very lower class sports because there was lots of
wagering and lots of gambling going on in there, and
the upper classes weren't interested in that. Let me can
let me stop you for a secon. Yeah, so you're
saying the lower class sport was pedestrianism. Yeah. So, And actually,
if you go back to the eighteen hundreds, they had
(02:25):
stables of pedestrians, which was basically a group of men
that would travel around the pubs of Britain and they
would race against each other. Now some of the things
were ridiculous, so it would be like five day races.
It would be who can walk a thousand miles in
the fastest time, and they would get people to wager
(02:47):
and bet on this there's something really funny about the
idea of a walking race being pub based. Oh yeah,
so do they have to walk in a straight line?
Oh no, No, they had like I mean, there was
arenas made for this. You know, this was big money.
(03:07):
She doesn't even notice my attempting a joke to an
estorian of coaching pedestrians or no, laughing matter. Because they
were the first athletes to employ coaches. So they had
specific diets, they had specific routines they were experimenting. They
were getting their athletes to take god knows what because
they thought that these concoctions would make them faster, and
(03:27):
it would be people would come to esteem to watch
people walk around the track. Yeah, I mean, there was
all different stuff. So when I say there was walking races,
but there was ridiculous things like backwards races, like jumping races.
So coaching begins as an effort to get working class
people to backpedal faster, but in the middle and upper classes,
(03:49):
coaching just wasn't done. There was a belief, kind of
in the early nineteen hundreds that the middle and upper
class body was superior to the lower class body. Therefore,
if it was superior, it didn't require any sort of
coaching or training because it was superior, so they could
achieve what they wanted to achieve. But without this sort
(04:10):
of interference. I think it was seen as interference from
coaching because that was what the lower classes did. By
the time the British elite finally started to embrace coaching,
it was less a change of sentiment than an act
of desperation. We did alright at the nineteen o eight
Olympics because we created the program. So when you've got
(04:31):
things like tug of war a model boat racing, you
know we did all right because we created that program.
But once we started to compete against other nations, so
particularly sort of nineteen fifty two, after Helsinki nineteen forty eight,
the other London Olympics, there's a real cool for something
(04:52):
used to change. The British were basically losing it everything
by the nineteen fifties. They hired coaches to fix the problem.
One coach was appointed to improve the training of athletes
in the entire country. Part of his contract was that
for ten pound a week, so probably about seven dollars
a week, he could be rented out to Cambridge University. However,
(05:14):
if he was rented out to Cambridge University. He was
told that he had to use the service entrance to
enter the university because he was not considered a member
of staff, and that he could only speak to the
athletes if they spoke to him first. This was the
British idea about coaches, that there were a form of
cheating or a sign of natural inferiority. The notion was
(05:38):
so highly transmissible that it in effected Harold Abrahams himself,
the same runner who in Chariots of Fire had hired
a coach to help him win the gold medal. After
Abraham's running career ended, he was put in charge of
all of British amateur sports. So he was happy to
employ a coach and use a coach all the time.
It got him further in sport. But when he was
(06:00):
on the other side of it, he then kind of
reverted to his amateur principles in the sense of we
don't like coaches, We control coach, which they know the
place the administrators are in charge, the coaches are their servants.
That's what they used to refer to them as. Now
I can see why some aristocrat might find coaching distasteful.
(06:22):
People born on top always want for everyone else to
just stay in their places. One way to do it
is to make fun of people who try too hard
and ban any edge that might help them to compete.
But the old aristocracy is dead. Now everybody thinks it's
good to try. Everybody competes, and the people who take
(06:43):
their coaching most seriously the aristocrats. I'm Michael Lewis, and
this is Against the Rules, a show about various authority
figures in American life. This season's about the rise of coaches.
This episode is about what happens when the edge that
(07:04):
coaching gives you starts to feel a bit more like cheating.
(07:29):
Earlier this season, we heard about the way science had
transformed the coaching of pro baseball players, and not just them,
but athletes of all kinds. Baseball was just the cleanest
case study of how good players could be transformed into
great ones. It's all described in a book called The
MVP Machine, which talks about the teams that led the way.
(07:50):
The Astros were really the first team that fully embraced it,
that invested more heavily in the technology. And we're really
pretty ruthless when it came to cleaning house and saying
we're going to bring in people who are receptive to
these new ideas, and we're not going to give undue
doubt friends to tradition and experience. This is Ben Lindbergh.
(08:13):
He's the co author of the MVP machine, at the
center of which sits the Houston Astros. The Astros have
been really cutthroat in all kinds of ways. They've looked
for advantages that other teams were wary of. Back in
twenty twelve, the Astros hired a new general manager named
(08:36):
Jeff Lunow. He was one of the new wave of
moneyball guys changing baseball, and maybe even more fanatical about
data than the original moneyball guys. He had been a
data geek and consultant in Mackenzie but went on to
help run the Saint Louis Cardinals, and when lu Now
came to the Astros, he brought science and technology with him.
(08:58):
The astros new coaches could do things like turn a tiny,
light hitting second baseman named Jose Altuve into a home
run hitting league MVP. They turned several average pitchers into stars.
In May twenty seventeen, the Astro's bench coach Alex Cora
(09:20):
was working with the Astro's most famous player, Carlos Beltran.
Beltran was in decline. He was forty years old and
had been in the big leagues for twenty years now.
He was struggling to hit. Desperate for help, any kind
of edge, The Astros coach suggests, how about we use
(09:42):
this technology we already have, but to steal the opposing
catcher's signs, so you know what's coming. Fastball, curveball, slider.
One thing leads to another, and soon the Astros coaching
staff has installed a TV monitor beside the dugout. It
displays nothing but the feed from the center field camera.
(10:04):
The Astros management has written a software program to decode
the opposing catchers signs, which they give to the coach.
The coach helps the players set up a signaling program
that's an old technology. The Astros in the dugout bang
on a trash can. No bangs means fastball, one bang
means curveball, two bangs means slider, and so on. Unlike
(10:30):
the other hitters in professional baseball, the Astros hitters now
know what's coming. That year they won the World Series,
people were calling them one of the greatest teams in
history and It's a difficult thing to separate because the
Astros are a very talented team who succeeded in legitimate ways,
but we're also cheating. It's funny because if you have
(10:51):
an organization that is succeeding because of its informational advantages,
because if it's always looking for the informational edge, it
is just a hop, skip and a jump to let's
get their signs. Yes, you know, let's use technology to
actually infiltrate the other organization. Yes. And the camera that
(11:12):
they were using to relay the signs in real time,
a camera that was placed in the outfield was actually
a camera that was installed legally for player development purposes.
We might never have known how the Astros were using
their center field camera, but in the fall of two
thousand and nineteen, a former Astros pitcher told a reporter
(11:32):
what had been going on. The commissioner of Major League
Baseball opened an investigation and published its findings. Then all
hell broke loose. In the words of Major League Baseball
Commissioner Rob Manfred, the Houston Astros are currently undergoing a
quote really really thorough investigation into the reports that the
(11:52):
team used cameras and other technology to steal pitching signs
from the opposing teams. Now the story, the ESPN was
on it, Sports Illustrated was on it, The world was
on it. The Houston Astros went from being the most
envied team in baseball to social pariahs, booed wherever they went.
But this was about much more than a team's reputation.
(12:15):
Could you just describe what happened on August the fourth,
twenty seventeen. Yeah, In August four, twenty seventeen, Mike was
brought in in the fourth inning. The first pitcher had struggled.
This is a guy named Ben Macellis. He's the lawyer
for former Major League pitcher Mike Bolsinger who's suing the
Houston Astros. So Mike at that point was a middle reliever.
(12:40):
He threw twenty nine pitches. Of the twenty nine pitches,
there were bangs, which indicated that it was going to
be a breaking ball. The bang was sent from the
dugout of the Astros by banging on a trash can
to the batter to signify what pitch was going to
be thrown. And so there were forty percent of his
pitches there were bangs on if you're wondering whether a
(13:02):
big league pitcher has ever before hired a lawyer to
sue an opposing team for the behavior of their coaches. Well, no,
this is a first, But then the coaches have never
been able to generate this kind of edge. It was
a disastrous outing, and after a performance that was so
embarrassing like that, the team lost confidence him. Frankly, all
scouts in the major's lost confidence in him. He was
(13:25):
demoted to the minor leagues. Played well right after that
in the miners, but then couldn't find work in the
majors because he was viewed as having lost his last
shot that game. And for all Mike knew until recently,
he just thought he couldn't perform that day. So he
did in the moment, did he have any sense that
anything peculiar was going on. He believed that they were
(13:46):
the greatest team he's ever played against. He was just,
you know, shocked that day. He would say that it
seemed that they knew the pitches that he was throwing,
but he attributed it to their great skill and their
great determination and being a great team, and that he
just didn't have what it takes anymore. Mike Bolsinger was,
(14:11):
in baseball terms, a nobody. The astros were the elites.
When you're a nobody and you go up against a
member of the elite and you lose, well, it just
confirms you're not good enough. You assume you can't compete.
You never even know that the coach basically rigged the
game with some software, a camera and a trash candleid.
(14:35):
The question then is just how many games in life
can be rigged? So thus the study of how people
(14:55):
talk is of course, you know, it's as old as
people basically. Mike Norton, psychologist, professor at the Harvard Business School,
he's been studying the way people talk and thinking about
how they might do it better. A lot of the
research on conversation is kind of about like underlying grammar,
you know, so it's sort of what are the rules
(15:16):
of language on how it works and which words come
where and why in German are they over here? Which
is totally fascinating. But you could read all of that
and still have absolutely no idea what you're supposed to
say to someone when you're meeting them for the first time.
Like there's no guidance, there's no help for us in
any of the things that we're trying to get done,
(15:38):
which is crazy because we talk all day, every day.
It's the number one thing that we do. We talk,
but we don't know how to do it effectively. But
now there are new piles of data, truly massive numbers
of sales calls, speed dates, Twitter fights, and so on,
(15:59):
all recorded. I talked about this a little in the
last episode about social scientists who have new computing tools
that make it easy for them to see patterns analyze them.
When you study people's conversation, you discover a funny thing.
People who are just trying to be liked and respected
have no clue how to do it. They make all
(16:22):
kinds of mistakes. Humble bragging, for instance. There's two kinds. Actually,
there's complaint brags and humble brags. Complaint brags are this
whenever a celebrity on Twitter or Instagram writes ug dot
dot dot whatever comes after that as a humble bragg
to search for it. So they wrote they wrote something
like ug dot dot dot my hand is so sore
(16:45):
from signing so many autographs. It was just the best,
the best. So that's the complaint brag, right, Oh, all,
I want to do is tell you my hand hurts,
and then the other thing. And the humble brag is
the one which is almost more common with celebrities, which
is the um so honored to be on stage with
(17:05):
Bono to receive this award. So that's a humble brag.
Mike Norton set out two years ago to study it scientifically.
He worked with two other psychologists, Oval Sayser and Francesca Gino.
They conducted weird experiments, like having a person in a
coffee shop try to get other people to sign a petition,
(17:27):
but in some cases sprinkling into her chitchat a humble brag.
Other times she just bragged. It turned out people were
more likely to sign the petition if she just bragged.
Mike and his colleagues call their paper humble bragging a
distinct and ineffective self presentation strategy. Their case was airtight.
(17:50):
If you want people to like or respect, you, don't
humble brag. We don't love people who bragg, but we
like them more because at least they're being honest, right,
at least they're just saying I'm awesome. It's these humble
braggers that are these kind of phony and sincere people
that really bother us. It's a given how much conversation
(18:12):
happens that people are pursuing this wily, inefficient strategy. It's
extraordinary how common bad strategies are. It really is, because
you'd think if we practice this from the time where two,
you know, all day every day, we would have figured
out what works and what doesn't. But part of the
reason we don't is because people tend to be pretty polite.
(18:35):
So if you humble brag, I'm very unlikely to call
you out on it. So you think it worked now.
Later on, I'm going to go make fun of you
to other people, but you're not going to know that
I did that. And that's why we're bad at talking.
In spite of how important it is and how much
we do it, we don't get enough direct feedback. A
handful of researchers now study how people talk and the
(18:58):
strategies they use to be liked and respected. They've uncovered
good strategies and some bad ones, and it was probably
only a matter of time before somebody real all this
insight could be used to coach people how to talk.
(19:19):
Most of social life, we're better at perceiving strengths and
weaknesses and others than executing those same things ourselves. We
give different advice to other people than we would enact
ourselves in that same situation. That's why coaches and third
party observers are so helpful. This is Alison Brooks, another
psychologist at the Harvard Business School. You heard her at
(19:40):
the end of the last episode. She just created a
new class to coach her students. It's called how to
Talk Good. Her we're not good at taking our own
observations and applying them to ourselves observations and judgments. Alison
knew how she wanted to open her class with one
powerful tool she could hand students to improve their conversational ability,
(20:01):
topic selection. So we have this paper about that's the
framework of how people choose topics, and the main empirical
finding in that paper is that we we have no
idea what other people want to be talking about. We're
really bad at reading them and what they're saying. Machines
are better at it, and we probably think it's basically unknowable.
That's right. I don't know what's inside there. I don't
care to know. I don't even if I try it,
(20:22):
I probably wouldn't know. M all default to what I
want to talk about. But if you use people's words
and feed it to a machine, the machine knows way better,
so it is knowable. It's funny you when you watch
dinner party conversation. Yeah, average dinner party conversation, the way
it ends up defaulting to less than optimal topics. Yes,
if you empower people to switch topics more frequently, the
(20:43):
conversation is much more interesting. It's just you need to
feel empowered, like it's okay to switch, and we're all
on the same page about that, right, Because there are
very obvious cues when a topic stagnates. There's much more
mutual silence, there's uncomfortable laughter. Is we capture this in
the data, That bad dinner party moment has become a
subject of scientific inquiry, just like humble bragging. What we
(21:04):
have found in our data is that people who are
more aware of what the topic is any given moment,
and some people come into every conversation sort of with
ideas already about what they might talk about with any
given person, and those people tend to be more interesting
and engaging conversationalist. So topic selection is your first subject,
(21:24):
that's right, So it's the t of talk t a
L Kase Allison was explaining to me, which you had planned.
I found myself thinking, like some old British aristocrat, you
mean to tell me that we're now not only going
to coach people, but coach them how to talk. So
I initially signed up for the class because at times
(21:48):
I can be a very anxious conversationalist. I am great
with my friends, but I get really nervous about meeting
new people, and that kind of leads to a lot
of nervous ticks when I talk to new folks. Meet
Bridget Taylor, a student at the Harvard Business School, enrolled
in the class how to Talk Good, heer like I
(22:10):
tend to talk way too much. I don't ask enough questions,
and that just and also knowing that about myself makes
me even more anxious when I enter new conversations. Let
me let me stop you. You don't sound like an
anxious conversationalist. Yeah, sometimes I think maybe it's in my
head a little bit, But I mean I've definitely gotten
(22:31):
a lot better at HBS, just by brute force. It's
such a social school, and you have to meet new
people all the time, and you're here to get a job,
so you have to network all the time. But it
was a really big issue for me before school. Um
and I used to have to take beta blockers sometimes
before big meetings or even just a meeting with my
(22:52):
boss because I would get so nervous. But here, just
you know, if I would be popping like ten beta
blockers a day, if I, you know, need needed that outlet.
So I've just become I've just become more accustom accustomed
to it. But it's still in my head that I'm nervous.
Do you think if I came in and a sort
(23:12):
of objectively evaluated your conversational abilities and compare them to
other people around you, that I would notice you were deficient?
Probably not, your conversational abilities might be something you can
improve upon, I'd be I'm highly dubious of the idea
that Harvard Business School students aren't already at like the
(23:35):
top five percent of social skills and conversational skills. They
wouldn't be at the Harvard Business School if they weren't, yeh.
I talked to a bunch of students and they all
said they were taking the course because they felt in
some way inadequate. When it came to conversation. I mean,
one student in the class is a native Chinese speaker
who was troubled that she was funnier in Chinese than
(23:57):
she was in English. She was striving to become funnier
in a second language. And if that didn't work out,
there were other tricks on offer in the class we're
learning about be interested rather than interesting. You can be
a good listener and ask questions and have a genuine
curiosity about who you're talking to, and that still makes
(24:18):
you a really excellent conversationalist. You don't have to have
the spotlight and be the most interesting person in the room,
which has kind of been mind blowing for me personally. Now,
is this a scandal? It's students at the Harvard Business
School or the first to learn these new data driven
tricks of conversation. Of course not. That's what Harvard Business
(24:38):
School does amplify the advantages of people who are already winning.
I asked Alison Brooks if the course could eventually do
more than that, if the market didn't matter at all,
what would be the fantasy about where you would take it? Oh,
so many directions, I think A few answers. One younger
so to kids and development right, younger children, particularly underserved populations,
(25:04):
racially diverse, socioeconomic, gender diverse. These are the skills that
are would potentially propel people to success in their lives.
Really right, because the Harvard Business School student does not
need to figure out how to make his status greater.
Exactly right. They want to, but they don't need to.
That's right. Just now, we're living in a moment that
(25:48):
highlights the power of advantages. If you're young and strong,
you're more likely to live than if you're old and weak.
If your company's big and rich, it's more likely to survive.
And if it's lean and small, if you have a great,
big home with lots of places to work and play,
you're less likely to go insane. And if you're jammed
(26:08):
into some tiny apartment. Whatever advantages you had before the pandemic,
well those advantages are now amplified. People who get a BA,
on average, make more money, have more stable lives. Paul
Tough is the author of a book called The Years
That Matter Most. It's about college and class mobility in America.
(26:31):
But there's also increasing evidence that where you go to
school matters too, and it matters especially for low income students,
first generation students, if you're the first in your family
to go to college, where you go actually has a
really huge effect on your future earnings. But it also
gives them often their first entree into rich American life
(26:52):
and to sort of the culture of upper middle class
and affluent American society. Gives them connections, gives them sort
of the social capital to understand how the world works.
Elite colleges, of course know this. They say they want
more low income students, but Paul found that the most
selective colleges had more students from the richest one percent
(27:13):
of Americans than from the entire bottom sixty percent. So
he went looking for an explanation and found it from
an SAT coach. It's man named Ned Johnson who runs
his own company, a very successful company in the Washington,
DC area called Prep Matters. And what Ned says, and
I think what a lot of them say, is that
the test measures your ability to take the test. They
(27:37):
no longer believe if they ever did that the SAT
really measures your academic ability or anything deep about you.
It measures how well you've been trained to take that test,
and how much does it cost to get that training well?
It depends. There's a wide variation. Ned is pretty close
to the top of the financial scale. I think he
charges four hundred dollars an hour for his students, so
(27:59):
it's like hiring a lawyer. Yeah, it's huge, it's huge.
The sat N ACT are the biggest obstacles that poor
kids have to overcome to get into the elite schools.
Their grades are as good as the grades of rich kids,
but their test scores are systematically worse than the scores
of rich kids. I mean, you know, I've had people
(28:19):
go up hundreds of points in just a couple of weeks.
Sometimes that's Ben Paris, who's coached these tests for twenty
six years, hundreds of points. I've never actually had anybody
investigated for this, but there are some students where actually
they did so much better on the second one where
I was afraid they were going to get called in
because this school special fishy. Yeah, yes, I mean, you know,
(28:42):
there there is a couple that I took that were
that were pro bono cases, and these are just great kids.
And one of them was coming in at like seven hundred,
and she was working a part time job, had family responsibilities,
but she just fundamentally didn't know how the test was
put together and what they expected. You know, she could
study all of math, but guess what, not all of
(29:02):
math is on the test. So by really focusing her
on what she needed to what was going to get
her points, and understanding how the questions worked, she went
up over a thousand and so she went from not
getting into college or being stuck in remedial classes to
getting in and then never having to take a remedial class.
And you know, if I had had more than a
month with her, who knows how well she could have done.
(29:27):
That's a thought that Ben Paris had whenever he coached
poor kids, but it didn't happen often. It was a
rich kids market. To be a lucrative market, it kind
of had to be, because if everyone could afford SAT coaching,
SAT coaching would cease to offer an edge. Everyone would
just game the test in the same way. That's what
(29:48):
Paul Tough found too. While it wasn't totally true that
you can just buy a test score, it wasn't totally
false either, but he found something else, a sort of
moral vacuum at the heart of American education. It gets
noticed mainly when someone from the outside walks in. There
was this one one young man named Ben Dormus and
(30:11):
be he was this amazing guy, a senior in high
school in Washington. This Ben was also from a less
affluent home. A series of lucky accidents had landed him
in the office of Ned Johnson, crack test prep coach,
who agreed to give him SAT coaching for free. So
he got all of these advantages, and he worked incredibly hard,
(30:32):
and Ned helped him improve his SAT score on the
math side by one hundred and something points, and he
got into Yale. But Yale things got complicated because this
poor kid couldn't shake the sense that getting into Yale
involved some underhanded trick. Ben really felt this sense that
he had been given something that was unfair, and that
(30:55):
while he appreciated it, he could not stop thinking about
the people who had been left behind, because he knew
that he was actually no different than the person that
he was a few months earlier before he'd gotten all
this coaching, and that that guy would never have gotten
to Yale. But this guy who got all this coaching
did get into Yale. He just keeps thinking about, like,
what how does that system work? That system that he
(31:16):
suddenly kind of magically got entree into and how can
it be more fair? How can it be made to
be more fair? I'm interested in this story because it
gets at the great unspoken question. Most of the kids
who get test coaching never asked the question. They don't
even think of what they have as an edge, since
all the other kids they know also have it. But
coaching is the great force keeping them in the station
(31:38):
to which they were born and keeping less fortunate kids
out of it. Arrest warrants issued for forty six people
around the country, including coaches and wealthy parents like Felicity Huffman,
we now know that some rich American parents were taking
the college testing game to its logical conclusion. The star
(31:59):
of Desperate Housewives so desperate to land her daughter in
a top school, prosecutors say she paid fifteen thousand dollars
to Singer to bribe a proctor who would secretly correct
her answers. If a test isn't measuring much except your
ability to take it, and you can pay some coach
(32:20):
to teach you to do that, why not just avoid
all the bother and pay the coach to take the
test for you. That kid who got the SAT coaching
and went to Yale was right to feel uneasy. He'd
used a coach to help him climb to the top
of America's Steekas Slope. The only difference between him and
all the other people on top was that he could
(32:41):
feel that it was slippery. I'm Michael Lewis. Thanks for
listening to Against the Rules. Against the Rules is brought
to you by Pushkin Industries. The show's produced by Audrey
Dilling and Catherine Girodo, with research assistance from Lydia Jane
(33:03):
Cott and Zooe Wynn. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mia
Lobell is our executive producer. Our theme was composed by
Nick Brittell, with additional scoring by Stellwagen Symphonette. We got
fact checked by Beth Johnson. Our show was recorded by
tofur Ruth and Trey Schultz at Northgate Studios in Berkeley,
as always thanks to Pushkin's founders, Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell.
(33:46):
So my name is Tan Carpin to George, my book
is Overcoming Amateurism. Amateurism coaching traditions in British spoort. Do
that one more time so we have it clean I've
really just forgotten the name of my book, okay, A
History of Coaching in a History of Sports Coaching in Britain,
(34:07):
Overcoming Amateurism. Yes, that's very British of you, you that
you see that you're you spent so little time talking
about yourself. You can't even remember the name of your book.
I know, I know the first bit. I know the
first bit because that was the name of my PhD.
But the end bit it was, yeah, M so overcoming
your amateurism. History of Now I forgot naked. Why I
(34:28):
feel like I just walked into faulty towers? All right?
Can you let's just just introduce yourself.
Pushkin chariots of fire. So where does the power come
from to see the race to its hand from? If
you're into watching white guys run, the movie never gets old.
(00:36):
Even if you're not into that. It has one of
the best coaching scenes ever filmed. Harold Abraham's a British
sprinter is about to run thee hundred meter final in
the nineteen twenty four Olympics. His coach gazes out of
his hotel room window at the stadium next door. The
pistol sounds. The coach watches the sky over the stadium.
(00:58):
Then he spies the British flag rising. That's how the
coach learns that his runner has won the gold. There's
a reason the coach isn't inside the stadium watching the race.
He's been banned because he's a coach. In nineteen twenty four,
(01:21):
professional coaches are taboo. They're considered a form of cheating
the steroids of the age. It's aught to do with
this idea of this emerging gentleman amateur. So you were
considered a gentleman if you were like upper class born
into money. Tigan Carpenter George is the co author of
a book on the history of coaching. It's one of
(01:41):
those subjects you don't really imagine there being a history
of what would have been the sports being played in
the early nineteenth century. So, I mean, the upper classes
would have been the typical cricket, fencing, rowing was quite
a good one, Tennis, probably not tennis as we recognize
it now. So there's a sport called pedestrianism which emerged
(02:03):
sort of the early eighteen hundreds, basically walking races. They
were very lower class sports because there was lots of
wagering and lots of gambling going on in there, and
the upper classes weren't interested in that. Let me can
let me stop you for a secon. Yeah, so you're
saying the lower class sport was pedestrianism. Yeah. So, And actually,
if you go back to the eighteen hundreds, they had
(02:25):
stables of pedestrians, which was basically a group of men
that would travel around the pubs of Britain and they
would race against each other. Now some of the things
were ridiculous, so it would be like five day races.
It would be who can walk a thousand miles in
the fastest time, and they would get people to wager
(02:47):
and bet on this there's something really funny about the
idea of a walking race being pub based. Oh yeah,
so do they have to walk in a straight line?
Oh no, No, they had like I mean, there was
arenas made for this. You know, this was big money.
(03:07):
She doesn't even notice my attempting a joke to an
estorian of coaching pedestrians or no, laughing matter. Because they
were the first athletes to employ coaches. So they had
specific diets, they had specific routines they were experimenting. They
were getting their athletes to take god knows what because
they thought that these concoctions would make them faster, and
(03:27):
it would be people would come to esteem to watch
people walk around the track. Yeah, I mean, there was
all different stuff. So when I say there was walking races,
but there was ridiculous things like backwards races, like jumping races.
So coaching begins as an effort to get working class
people to backpedal faster, but in the middle and upper classes,
(03:49):
coaching just wasn't done. There was a belief, kind of
in the early nineteen hundreds that the middle and upper
class body was superior to the lower class body. Therefore,
if it was superior, it didn't require any sort of
coaching or training because it was superior, so they could
achieve what they wanted to achieve. But without this sort
(04:10):
of interference. I think it was seen as interference from
coaching because that was what the lower classes did. By
the time the British elite finally started to embrace coaching,
it was less a change of sentiment than an act
of desperation. We did alright at the nineteen o eight
Olympics because we created the program. So when you've got
(04:31):
things like tug of war a model boat racing, you
know we did all right because we created that program.
But once we started to compete against other nations, so
particularly sort of nineteen fifty two, after Helsinki nineteen forty eight,
the other London Olympics, there's a real cool for something
(04:52):
used to change. The British were basically losing it everything
by the nineteen fifties. They hired coaches to fix the problem.
One coach was appointed to improve the training of athletes
in the entire country. Part of his contract was that
for ten pound a week, so probably about seven dollars
a week, he could be rented out to Cambridge University. However,
(05:14):
if he was rented out to Cambridge University. He was
told that he had to use the service entrance to
enter the university because he was not considered a member
of staff, and that he could only speak to the
athletes if they spoke to him first. This was the
British idea about coaches, that there were a form of
cheating or a sign of natural inferiority. The notion was
(05:38):
so highly transmissible that it in effected Harold Abrahams himself,
the same runner who in Chariots of Fire had hired
a coach to help him win the gold medal. After
Abraham's running career ended, he was put in charge of
all of British amateur sports. So he was happy to
employ a coach and use a coach all the time.
It got him further in sport. But when he was
(06:00):
on the other side of it, he then kind of
reverted to his amateur principles in the sense of we
don't like coaches, We control coach, which they know the
place the administrators are in charge, the coaches are their servants.
That's what they used to refer to them as. Now
I can see why some aristocrat might find coaching distasteful.
(06:22):
People born on top always want for everyone else to
just stay in their places. One way to do it
is to make fun of people who try too hard
and ban any edge that might help them to compete.
But the old aristocracy is dead. Now everybody thinks it's
good to try. Everybody competes, and the people who take
(06:43):
their coaching most seriously the aristocrats. I'm Michael Lewis, and
this is Against the Rules, a show about various authority
figures in American life. This season's about the rise of coaches.
This episode is about what happens when the edge that
(07:04):
coaching gives you starts to feel a bit more like cheating.
(07:29):
Earlier this season, we heard about the way science had
transformed the coaching of pro baseball players, and not just them,
but athletes of all kinds. Baseball was just the cleanest
case study of how good players could be transformed into
great ones. It's all described in a book called The
MVP Machine, which talks about the teams that led the way.
(07:50):
The Astros were really the first team that fully embraced it,
that invested more heavily in the technology. And we're really
pretty ruthless when it came to cleaning house and saying
we're going to bring in people who are receptive to
these new ideas, and we're not going to give undue
doubt friends to tradition and experience. This is Ben Lindbergh.
(08:13):
He's the co author of the MVP machine, at the
center of which sits the Houston Astros. The Astros have
been really cutthroat in all kinds of ways. They've looked
for advantages that other teams were wary of. Back in
twenty twelve, the Astros hired a new general manager named
(08:36):
Jeff Lunow. He was one of the new wave of
moneyball guys changing baseball, and maybe even more fanatical about
data than the original moneyball guys. He had been a
data geek and consultant in Mackenzie but went on to
help run the Saint Louis Cardinals, and when lu Now
came to the Astros, he brought science and technology with him.
(08:58):
The astros new coaches could do things like turn a tiny,
light hitting second baseman named Jose Altuve into a home
run hitting league MVP. They turned several average pitchers into stars.
In May twenty seventeen, the Astro's bench coach Alex Cora
(09:20):
was working with the Astro's most famous player, Carlos Beltran.
Beltran was in decline. He was forty years old and
had been in the big leagues for twenty years now.
He was struggling to hit. Desperate for help, any kind
of edge, The Astros coach suggests, how about we use
(09:42):
this technology we already have, but to steal the opposing
catcher's signs, so you know what's coming. Fastball, curveball, slider.
One thing leads to another, and soon the Astros coaching
staff has installed a TV monitor beside the dugout. It
displays nothing but the feed from the center field camera.
(10:04):
The Astros management has written a software program to decode
the opposing catchers signs, which they give to the coach.
The coach helps the players set up a signaling program
that's an old technology. The Astros in the dugout bang
on a trash can. No bangs means fastball, one bang
means curveball, two bangs means slider, and so on. Unlike
(10:30):
the other hitters in professional baseball, the Astros hitters now
know what's coming. That year they won the World Series,
people were calling them one of the greatest teams in
history and It's a difficult thing to separate because the
Astros are a very talented team who succeeded in legitimate ways,
but we're also cheating. It's funny because if you have
(10:51):
an organization that is succeeding because of its informational advantages,
because if it's always looking for the informational edge, it
is just a hop, skip and a jump to let's
get their signs. Yes, you know, let's use technology to
actually infiltrate the other organization. Yes. And the camera that
(11:12):
they were using to relay the signs in real time,
a camera that was placed in the outfield was actually
a camera that was installed legally for player development purposes.
We might never have known how the Astros were using
their center field camera, but in the fall of two
thousand and nineteen, a former Astros pitcher told a reporter
(11:32):
what had been going on. The commissioner of Major League
Baseball opened an investigation and published its findings. Then all
hell broke loose. In the words of Major League Baseball
Commissioner Rob Manfred, the Houston Astros are currently undergoing a
quote really really thorough investigation into the reports that the
(11:52):
team used cameras and other technology to steal pitching signs
from the opposing teams. Now the story, the ESPN was
on it, Sports Illustrated was on it, The world was
on it. The Houston Astros went from being the most
envied team in baseball to social pariahs, booed wherever they went.
But this was about much more than a team's reputation.
(12:15):
Could you just describe what happened on August the fourth,
twenty seventeen. Yeah, In August four, twenty seventeen, Mike was
brought in in the fourth inning. The first pitcher had struggled.
This is a guy named Ben Macellis. He's the lawyer
for former Major League pitcher Mike Bolsinger who's suing the
Houston Astros. So Mike at that point was a middle reliever.
(12:40):
He threw twenty nine pitches. Of the twenty nine pitches,
there were bangs, which indicated that it was going to
be a breaking ball. The bang was sent from the
dugout of the Astros by banging on a trash can
to the batter to signify what pitch was going to
be thrown. And so there were forty percent of his
pitches there were bangs on if you're wondering whether a
(13:02):
big league pitcher has ever before hired a lawyer to
sue an opposing team for the behavior of their coaches. Well, no,
this is a first, But then the coaches have never
been able to generate this kind of edge. It was
a disastrous outing, and after a performance that was so
embarrassing like that, the team lost confidence him. Frankly, all
scouts in the major's lost confidence in him. He was
(13:25):
demoted to the minor leagues. Played well right after that
in the miners, but then couldn't find work in the
majors because he was viewed as having lost his last
shot that game. And for all Mike knew until recently,
he just thought he couldn't perform that day. So he
did in the moment, did he have any sense that
anything peculiar was going on. He believed that they were
(13:46):
the greatest team he's ever played against. He was just,
you know, shocked that day. He would say that it
seemed that they knew the pitches that he was throwing,
but he attributed it to their great skill and their
great determination and being a great team, and that he
just didn't have what it takes anymore. Mike Bolsinger was,
(14:11):
in baseball terms, a nobody. The astros were the elites.
When you're a nobody and you go up against a
member of the elite and you lose, well, it just
confirms you're not good enough. You assume you can't compete.
You never even know that the coach basically rigged the
game with some software, a camera and a trash candleid.
(14:35):
The question then is just how many games in life
can be rigged? So thus the study of how people
(14:55):
talk is of course, you know, it's as old as
people basically. Mike Norton, psychologist, professor at the Harvard Business School,
he's been studying the way people talk and thinking about
how they might do it better. A lot of the
research on conversation is kind of about like underlying grammar,
you know, so it's sort of what are the rules
(15:16):
of language on how it works and which words come
where and why in German are they over here? Which
is totally fascinating. But you could read all of that
and still have absolutely no idea what you're supposed to
say to someone when you're meeting them for the first time.
Like there's no guidance, there's no help for us in
any of the things that we're trying to get done,
(15:38):
which is crazy because we talk all day, every day.
It's the number one thing that we do. We talk,
but we don't know how to do it effectively. But
now there are new piles of data, truly massive numbers
of sales calls, speed dates, Twitter fights, and so on,
(15:59):
all recorded. I talked about this a little in the
last episode about social scientists who have new computing tools
that make it easy for them to see patterns analyze them.
When you study people's conversation, you discover a funny thing.
People who are just trying to be liked and respected
have no clue how to do it. They make all
(16:22):
kinds of mistakes. Humble bragging, for instance. There's two kinds. Actually,
there's complaint brags and humble brags. Complaint brags are this
whenever a celebrity on Twitter or Instagram writes ug dot
dot dot whatever comes after that as a humble bragg
to search for it. So they wrote they wrote something
like ug dot dot dot my hand is so sore
(16:45):
from signing so many autographs. It was just the best,
the best. So that's the complaint brag, right, Oh, all,
I want to do is tell you my hand hurts,
and then the other thing. And the humble brag is
the one which is almost more common with celebrities, which
is the um so honored to be on stage with
(17:05):
Bono to receive this award. So that's a humble brag.
Mike Norton set out two years ago to study it scientifically.
He worked with two other psychologists, Oval Sayser and Francesca Gino.
They conducted weird experiments, like having a person in a
coffee shop try to get other people to sign a petition,
(17:27):
but in some cases sprinkling into her chitchat a humble brag.
Other times she just bragged. It turned out people were
more likely to sign the petition if she just bragged.
Mike and his colleagues call their paper humble bragging a
distinct and ineffective self presentation strategy. Their case was airtight.
(17:50):
If you want people to like or respect, you, don't
humble brag. We don't love people who bragg, but we
like them more because at least they're being honest, right,
at least they're just saying I'm awesome. It's these humble
braggers that are these kind of phony and sincere people
that really bother us. It's a given how much conversation
(18:12):
happens that people are pursuing this wily, inefficient strategy. It's
extraordinary how common bad strategies are. It really is, because
you'd think if we practice this from the time where two,
you know, all day every day, we would have figured
out what works and what doesn't. But part of the
reason we don't is because people tend to be pretty polite.
(18:35):
So if you humble brag, I'm very unlikely to call
you out on it. So you think it worked now.
Later on, I'm going to go make fun of you
to other people, but you're not going to know that
I did that. And that's why we're bad at talking.
In spite of how important it is and how much
we do it, we don't get enough direct feedback. A
handful of researchers now study how people talk and the
(18:58):
strategies they use to be liked and respected. They've uncovered
good strategies and some bad ones, and it was probably
only a matter of time before somebody real all this
insight could be used to coach people how to talk.
(19:19):
Most of social life, we're better at perceiving strengths and
weaknesses and others than executing those same things ourselves. We
give different advice to other people than we would enact
ourselves in that same situation. That's why coaches and third
party observers are so helpful. This is Alison Brooks, another
psychologist at the Harvard Business School. You heard her at
(19:40):
the end of the last episode. She just created a
new class to coach her students. It's called how to
Talk Good. Her we're not good at taking our own
observations and applying them to ourselves observations and judgments. Alison
knew how she wanted to open her class with one
powerful tool she could hand students to improve their conversational ability,
(20:01):
topic selection. So we have this paper about that's the
framework of how people choose topics, and the main empirical
finding in that paper is that we we have no
idea what other people want to be talking about. We're
really bad at reading them and what they're saying. Machines
are better at it, and we probably think it's basically unknowable.
That's right. I don't know what's inside there. I don't
care to know. I don't even if I try it,
(20:22):
I probably wouldn't know. M all default to what I
want to talk about. But if you use people's words
and feed it to a machine, the machine knows way better,
so it is knowable. It's funny you when you watch
dinner party conversation. Yeah, average dinner party conversation, the way
it ends up defaulting to less than optimal topics. Yes,
if you empower people to switch topics more frequently, the
(20:43):
conversation is much more interesting. It's just you need to
feel empowered, like it's okay to switch, and we're all
on the same page about that, right, Because there are
very obvious cues when a topic stagnates. There's much more
mutual silence, there's uncomfortable laughter. Is we capture this in
the data, That bad dinner party moment has become a
subject of scientific inquiry, just like humble bragging. What we
(21:04):
have found in our data is that people who are
more aware of what the topic is any given moment,
and some people come into every conversation sort of with
ideas already about what they might talk about with any
given person, and those people tend to be more interesting
and engaging conversationalist. So topic selection is your first subject,
(21:24):
that's right, So it's the t of talk t a
L Kase Allison was explaining to me, which you had planned.
I found myself thinking, like some old British aristocrat, you
mean to tell me that we're now not only going
to coach people, but coach them how to talk. So
I initially signed up for the class because at times
(21:48):
I can be a very anxious conversationalist. I am great
with my friends, but I get really nervous about meeting
new people, and that kind of leads to a lot
of nervous ticks when I talk to new folks. Meet
Bridget Taylor, a student at the Harvard Business School, enrolled
in the class how to Talk Good, heer like I
(22:10):
tend to talk way too much. I don't ask enough questions,
and that just and also knowing that about myself makes
me even more anxious when I enter new conversations. Let
me let me stop you. You don't sound like an
anxious conversationalist. Yeah, sometimes I think maybe it's in my
head a little bit, But I mean I've definitely gotten
(22:31):
a lot better at HBS, just by brute force. It's
such a social school, and you have to meet new
people all the time, and you're here to get a job,
so you have to network all the time. But it
was a really big issue for me before school. Um
and I used to have to take beta blockers sometimes
before big meetings or even just a meeting with my
(22:52):
boss because I would get so nervous. But here, just
you know, if I would be popping like ten beta
blockers a day, if I, you know, need needed that outlet.
So I've just become I've just become more accustom accustomed
to it. But it's still in my head that I'm nervous.
Do you think if I came in and a sort
(23:12):
of objectively evaluated your conversational abilities and compare them to
other people around you, that I would notice you were deficient?
Probably not, your conversational abilities might be something you can
improve upon, I'd be I'm highly dubious of the idea
that Harvard Business School students aren't already at like the
(23:35):
top five percent of social skills and conversational skills. They
wouldn't be at the Harvard Business School if they weren't, yeh.
I talked to a bunch of students and they all
said they were taking the course because they felt in
some way inadequate. When it came to conversation. I mean,
one student in the class is a native Chinese speaker
who was troubled that she was funnier in Chinese than
(23:57):
she was in English. She was striving to become funnier
in a second language. And if that didn't work out,
there were other tricks on offer in the class we're
learning about be interested rather than interesting. You can be
a good listener and ask questions and have a genuine
curiosity about who you're talking to, and that still makes
(24:18):
you a really excellent conversationalist. You don't have to have
the spotlight and be the most interesting person in the room,
which has kind of been mind blowing for me personally. Now,
is this a scandal? It's students at the Harvard Business
School or the first to learn these new data driven
tricks of conversation. Of course not. That's what Harvard Business
(24:38):
School does amplify the advantages of people who are already winning.
I asked Alison Brooks if the course could eventually do
more than that, if the market didn't matter at all,
what would be the fantasy about where you would take it? Oh,
so many directions, I think A few answers. One younger
so to kids and development right, younger children, particularly underserved populations,
(25:04):
racially diverse, socioeconomic, gender diverse. These are the skills that
are would potentially propel people to success in their lives.
Really right, because the Harvard Business School student does not
need to figure out how to make his status greater.
Exactly right. They want to, but they don't need to.
That's right. Just now, we're living in a moment that
(25:48):
highlights the power of advantages. If you're young and strong,
you're more likely to live than if you're old and weak.
If your company's big and rich, it's more likely to survive.
And if it's lean and small, if you have a great,
big home with lots of places to work and play,
you're less likely to go insane. And if you're jammed
(26:08):
into some tiny apartment. Whatever advantages you had before the pandemic,
well those advantages are now amplified. People who get a BA,
on average, make more money, have more stable lives. Paul
Tough is the author of a book called The Years
That Matter Most. It's about college and class mobility in America.
(26:31):
But there's also increasing evidence that where you go to
school matters too, and it matters especially for low income students,
first generation students, if you're the first in your family
to go to college, where you go actually has a
really huge effect on your future earnings. But it also
gives them often their first entree into rich American life
(26:52):
and to sort of the culture of upper middle class
and affluent American society. Gives them connections, gives them sort
of the social capital to understand how the world works.
Elite colleges, of course know this. They say they want
more low income students, but Paul found that the most
selective colleges had more students from the richest one percent
(27:13):
of Americans than from the entire bottom sixty percent. So
he went looking for an explanation and found it from
an SAT coach. It's man named Ned Johnson who runs
his own company, a very successful company in the Washington,
DC area called Prep Matters. And what Ned says, and
I think what a lot of them say, is that
the test measures your ability to take the test. They
(27:37):
no longer believe if they ever did that the SAT
really measures your academic ability or anything deep about you.
It measures how well you've been trained to take that test,
and how much does it cost to get that training well?
It depends. There's a wide variation. Ned is pretty close
to the top of the financial scale. I think he
charges four hundred dollars an hour for his students, so
(27:59):
it's like hiring a lawyer. Yeah, it's huge, it's huge.
The sat N ACT are the biggest obstacles that poor
kids have to overcome to get into the elite schools.
Their grades are as good as the grades of rich kids,
but their test scores are systematically worse than the scores
of rich kids. I mean, you know, I've had people
(28:19):
go up hundreds of points in just a couple of weeks.
Sometimes that's Ben Paris, who's coached these tests for twenty
six years, hundreds of points. I've never actually had anybody
investigated for this, but there are some students where actually
they did so much better on the second one where
I was afraid they were going to get called in
because this school special fishy. Yeah, yes, I mean, you know,
(28:42):
there there is a couple that I took that were
that were pro bono cases, and these are just great kids.
And one of them was coming in at like seven hundred,
and she was working a part time job, had family responsibilities,
but she just fundamentally didn't know how the test was
put together and what they expected. You know, she could
study all of math, but guess what, not all of
(29:02):
math is on the test. So by really focusing her
on what she needed to what was going to get
her points, and understanding how the questions worked, she went
up over a thousand and so she went from not
getting into college or being stuck in remedial classes to
getting in and then never having to take a remedial class.
And you know, if I had had more than a
month with her, who knows how well she could have done.
(29:27):
That's a thought that Ben Paris had whenever he coached
poor kids, but it didn't happen often. It was a
rich kids market. To be a lucrative market, it kind
of had to be, because if everyone could afford SAT coaching,
SAT coaching would cease to offer an edge. Everyone would
just game the test in the same way. That's what
(29:48):
Paul Tough found too. While it wasn't totally true that
you can just buy a test score, it wasn't totally
false either, but he found something else, a sort of
moral vacuum at the heart of American education. It gets
noticed mainly when someone from the outside walks in. There
was this one one young man named Ben Dormus and
(30:11):
be he was this amazing guy, a senior in high
school in Washington. This Ben was also from a less
affluent home. A series of lucky accidents had landed him
in the office of Ned Johnson, crack test prep coach,
who agreed to give him SAT coaching for free. So
he got all of these advantages, and he worked incredibly hard,
(30:32):
and Ned helped him improve his SAT score on the
math side by one hundred and something points, and he
got into Yale. But Yale things got complicated because this
poor kid couldn't shake the sense that getting into Yale
involved some underhanded trick. Ben really felt this sense that
he had been given something that was unfair, and that
(30:55):
while he appreciated it, he could not stop thinking about
the people who had been left behind, because he knew
that he was actually no different than the person that
he was a few months earlier before he'd gotten all
this coaching, and that that guy would never have gotten
to Yale. But this guy who got all this coaching
did get into Yale. He just keeps thinking about, like,
what how does that system work? That system that he
(31:16):
suddenly kind of magically got entree into and how can
it be more fair? How can it be made to
be more fair? I'm interested in this story because it
gets at the great unspoken question. Most of the kids
who get test coaching never asked the question. They don't
even think of what they have as an edge, since
all the other kids they know also have it. But
coaching is the great force keeping them in the station
(31:38):
to which they were born and keeping less fortunate kids
out of it. Arrest warrants issued for forty six people
around the country, including coaches and wealthy parents like Felicity Huffman,
we now know that some rich American parents were taking
the college testing game to its logical conclusion. The star
(31:59):
of Desperate Housewives so desperate to land her daughter in
a top school, prosecutors say she paid fifteen thousand dollars
to Singer to bribe a proctor who would secretly correct
her answers. If a test isn't measuring much except your
ability to take it, and you can pay some coach
(32:20):
to teach you to do that, why not just avoid
all the bother and pay the coach to take the
test for you. That kid who got the SAT coaching
and went to Yale was right to feel uneasy. He'd
used a coach to help him climb to the top
of America's Steekas Slope. The only difference between him and
all the other people on top was that he could
(32:41):
feel that it was slippery. I'm Michael Lewis. Thanks for
listening to Against the Rules. Against the Rules is brought
to you by Pushkin Industries. The show's produced by Audrey
Dilling and Catherine Girodo, with research assistance from Lydia Jane
(33:03):
Cott and Zooe Wynn. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mia
Lobell is our executive producer. Our theme was composed by
Nick Brittell, with additional scoring by Stellwagen Symphonette. We got
fact checked by Beth Johnson. Our show was recorded by
tofur Ruth and Trey Schultz at Northgate Studios in Berkeley,
as always thanks to Pushkin's founders, Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell.
(33:46):
So my name is Tan Carpin to George, my book
is Overcoming Amateurism. Amateurism coaching traditions in British spoort. Do
that one more time so we have it clean I've
really just forgotten the name of my book, okay, A
History of Coaching in a History of Sports Coaching in Britain,
(34:07):
Overcoming Amateurism. Yes, that's very British of you, you that
you see that you're you spent so little time talking
about yourself. You can't even remember the name of your book.
I know, I know the first bit. I know the
first bit because that was the name of my PhD.
But the end bit it was, yeah, M so overcoming
your amateurism. History of Now I forgot naked. Why I
(34:28):
feel like I just walked into faulty towers? All right?
Can you let's just just introduce yourself.
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