 It's Monday, December 12th, 2011, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason, I'm DJ Grophy. For Good Reason is the radio show and the podcast produced in association with the James Randy Educational Foundation and International Non-profit, as mission is to advance critical thinking about the paranormal, about pseudoscience, and about the supernatural. Before we get to my guests this week, I want to appeal to you as a listener to the show to support the James Randy Educational Foundation during what we call the Season of Reason. Over half of our annual donations come in during this end year period and we simply couldn't continue having the impact we've had without that kind of support. Last year's Season of Reason helped us do some important things, promoting skepticism in the media. We were in the New York Times, LA Times, NPR, ABC News, AOL News all over the place. We did our psychic test on ABC's Primetime Nightline Beyond Belief program. 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So I'm asking you to support our Season of Reason campaign today. You can do so at randy.org. My guest this week is AJ Mass. He is a professional fantasy sports analyst for ESPN.com. And he's written a book, if you can imagine this, on fantasy sports and skepticism, among other things. His book is How Fantasy Sports Explains the World, AJ Mass, Welcome to For Good Reason. Oh, thank you for having me on, DJ. It's a pleasure. AJ, I loved your book. That is kind of a confession or a revelation because I'm not a fantasy sports kind of guy. I have the perfect gift to give to my two brother-in-laws for Christmas. So first question, how in the world did you come up with the idea to write a book that touches on all of these other subjects, even skepticism and critical thinking, through the lens of fantasy sports? Well, I'm very lucky to have a job doing something that I enjoy. And I've been a sports fan since I was a little kid. And luckily enough, I work for ESPN and I write about fantasy sports. It is a real job, believe it or not, it's a real job. So one of the things that I would do that I saw wasn't on any other fantasy sports site when ESPN hired me is to really talk about the ethics of fantasy sports and to discuss whether or not you should or shouldn't do certain things when you play fantasy sports. Do you ever get a kind of a chuckle when you use a phrase like the ethics of fantasy sports? That sounds like the ethics of Dungeons and Dragons or something. It is. Like I said, I'm amazed it's a real job too. When I was coming up with these ethical questions that I get from people that would write in, I would always find myself using analogy to explain it because really fantasy sports is this world that doesn't really exist except in its own little universe. It doesn't really exist outside of the realm of fantasy sports. So in order to relate it to people, I would usually use examples maybe from law or from politics or even television shows or movies, which I found were really touchstones that everyone kind of wrapped their heads around. And over the years, a lot of these analyses came up and again and again and again and I was like, there's something in this. I could actually make a book out of this because I'm a writer. I write. It's what I do. So when it came time to actually trying to fulfill that great American dream of having the great American book that a lot of people have, this came naturally to me. So let's back up. For our listeners who aren't cut of the fantasy sports cloth, how would you define what this is? You said it's a fantasy world. It's not in the real world. Is it something I joked like dungeons and dragons for sports fans? You what? You choose a team. You follow their stats for the season. You make decisions maybe like a manager would, meaning you trade players with your friends. To me, it's like a sports version of building a powerful deck in Magic the Gathering sort of. And then you see if you win against your friends or whatever, right? Yeah. In many ways it is. It's very relatable to the Magic the Gathering or the Dungeons and Dragons. As you said, when we were kids, a lot of the I noticed, I'm just turned 40. So when I was a kid, it was very common for baseball players or football players, whatever sport you were a fan of, for those players to stay on one team for their entire career. Occasionally you get trades. But generally speaking, you knew from year to year, Cal Rifkin was always going to be an Oriole, for example. He was a guy who was a lifer. Those lifers are few and far between now and when you see the roster for opening day this year for your baseball team or your football team that you follow, there may be only three or four guys left over from the year before. You're really rooting for laundry rather than players. And about 15 to 20 years ago, it really became a popular thing. That's when it really took off because fantasy sports is a way for you to draft players and put them on your team and you're in charge of whether or not they stay on your team. If you're playing in a league where you get to keep your roster year after year after year, you can keep players for their entire career that maybe the actual, in real life, you can't have that luxury, that doesn't happen. Your favorite player can suddenly... Like Pujos right now is being traded from St. Louis, it looks like. Yeah, he is a free agent and he signed with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim of California, of America, of the North America, of the planet Earth. Just pick a name and stick with it. Yeah, basically that's what happened is that if you're heartbroken that Albu Pujos has begun to another team through just the business of baseball, well, in your fantasy world, in your fantasy team, you can have Albu Pujos for his entire career. You don't have to trade him if your rules apply. You create your own rules, your own fantasy world. And yes, you compete against your friends to prove that you can pick the players that will put up the best point totals and stats. At the end of the year, you have a winner. Some leagues play for bragging rights. There are some leagues that play for cash prizes. Right, I was going to ask you about that. There are whole magazines set up for this. A lot of books published on it. There are leagues where there are, I guess, prizes or there's actually money involved, right? It's like a billion-dollar industry almost. Where does all that money come from? Or is it just players ponying up in leagues? You don't think of Dungeons and Dragons or Magic the Gathering as making the people playing the games these big fortunes? No, but with corporate sponsorships of leagues, even Magic the Gathering, there's a professional circuit that's out there where corporate sponsors have put up the money. Whether it comes from the Wizards of the Coast themselves or not, I'm not entirely familiar with who sponsors those events. But ESPN, as a company, as a corporate website, we have a fantasy section. That's what I write for. And we have a corporate sponsor who sponsors our game engine. Now, there's no prizes for actually playing on our leagues, although people can use our website and come up with their own private arrangements that everyone throws in money into a pot and the winner takes it all. But we have a corporate sponsor and it's all about advertising dollars. So that's where a lot of the money comes from is advertising dollars because people are going to go to the sites where the information is and we provide the information. So therefore, that's where the money comes in. How is this different from gambling or is it? In other words, there's a lot of skill involved, I guess, in making the decisions about who you trade and all that stuff. But there are decisions involved in gambling, too, a good poker game. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've been very fortunate. It's not just chance, in other words. It isn't just chance. There is a skill involved. The federal government actually has been actually legal cases and a recent legal decision has exempted fantasy sports from the catchall umbrella of gambling. So rest assured, we can go on. I can still be employed in the morning. But yeah, I mean, it's a game, but it's not really a game of chance. In so far as, obviously, you can't control the ultimate outcome because you're not Alper Pujols. You're not Peyton Manning. You can't actually go on the field and put up the stats. But there is a skill involved in evaluating talent that it's not like someone shuffling cards. One of the things I loved about this book and you touched on it is you allude to so many other disciplines, so many other fields of thought. It's very pro-science, which isn't something you think of when you're talking baseball or something. I mean, you talk in the book to Neil deGrasse Tyson, other science celebrities. You get into Stephen Hawking and time travel. You're into a lot of geek topics you cover in the book, Star Wars, what Star Wars, how it applies to fantasy sports. All of this sort of dispels the dumb jock myth. Is that one of your points writing this book? Yeah, I think a lot of us make assumptions about things that we're not aware of. And if we don't know a topic, we just kind of like look at it at this surface level, and there are a lot of layers to every onion, basically. I'm a sports person. I'm also a math person. I'm a science person. It's not very common for someone to have those facets, both of those facets, I don't think. I'm the type of person who not only played baseball as a kid growing up, but I would also then go home and calculate my own betting average and the betting average, everyone in the league. That floated my boat. But yeah, I do think there's something to be said for this peeling back the curtain and showing that the Wizard of Oz is actually just this old man who got lost. He was an all-powerful after all. Your point is that the dumb jock myth is pretty much a myth that people into this sort of stuff don't have to be culturally illiterate. They don't have to be couch potatoes and kind of dismissive of science and technology and math and literature and pop culture and all of that stuff. Exactly. There is the myth that the geek who plays fantasy sports can't get a date and he's the same type of geek who instead of going to his high school prom was in the basement playing the Dungeons and Dragons. No girls allowed because no girls would want to be there. And in fact, a lot of fantasy sports players are actually women. So it's not a male-dominated thing at all. I think some of the most popular leagues out there that get a lot of the media attention are these all women leagues. In other kind of geek subcultures, there are these conventions where men and women get together and celebrate their geekdom. I don't suppose there's the same thing for fantasy sports, right? You know, actually there are fantasy sports conventions and they're actually growing in popularity. It does speak to that pop culture thing where the people who are experts in fantasy sports are in some ways becoming popular themselves. There's like a celebrity status to the thought leaders in that subculture. Right, absolutely. I mean, my good friend and coworker at ESPN, Matthew Berry, the talented Mr. Roto was just a guest star on the TV show, The League, which is a TV show about a bunch of guys who play fantasy sports and he played himself. And they were so, you know, it was like this really meta thing where I actually know some of the guys who are on the league from my days as being an improv comedy in New York City. So it's like I'm seeing a guy I went to college with who also is my coworker playing himself on a show with guys who I also know who aren't playing themselves. It's just a weird thing that I could... Very meta, postmodern, have your fun with that. Okay, so let's veer back and tell me what fantasy sports can learn from Star Wars or what your leaders can learn from analogizing the two. Well, you know, Star Wars is one of the cultural touchstones, especially people of our generation. I must have seen it in the theaters five times and you know, one of the first VCR tapes, you know, George Lucas better released at Star Wars. You know, it's like, you know, who doesn't know those characters in that story. And basically, you know, Darth Vader is one of the most amazing villains of all time created for motion pictures. And Darth Vader lost for one reason and one reason alone is that Darth Vader was cocky. Darth Vader didn't think he could lose. And that kind of goes to a lot of people who are in fantasy sports leagues whose teams are in first place, who are leading. They tend to think they can't lose. So I'm in first place. I shouldn't even bother improving my team. My team's the best. And that's exactly the opposite attitude that you should take when you're leading your fantasy league is that you should actually always be seeking to improve your team. There's always room for improvement. Even if you are in a league where your points are based on your relative standing to other teams and you're in first place in every category, you may think, well, I can't possibly do any better than being first in every category, but you can, there's always a chance of an injury striking you down, some unforeseen circumstance, some small little X-wing fighter going down that one little tunnel that you didn't account for in the blueprints to suddenly blow up your Death Star. And your exploration of hubris by analogy to Star Wars here, you let it be practical application of wisdom to people's lives, not just their fantasy sports leagues. Well, exactly. And I think anyone's lot in life, I mean, you could have a high paying job, you'd be very successful in your industry and not think that any competitor, if you own the company, not think that any competitor could possibly touch you, but you know what, somewhere along the line, someone might come up with a new innovation for a product in your field that suddenly wipes you out that you didn't see coming, but you could have if you hadn't been sitting on your laurels and actually always plan for the next big step. I mean, Facebook is a perfect example. You don't think that- Versus MySpace, yeah. Versus MySpace, yeah. It came and it completely took it over. Now MySpace is going to be a footnote to history and Facebook is not content to sit there. They're always changing. They're always trying to improve their service. They're not content. Now, the people who use the service sometimes get frustrated as a result of that, like, wait a second, why is my feed suddenly different? But it speaks to the whole Zuckerberg's forward thinking thought. And I think that that's something you have to do. You can't just, no matter how successful you are now, there's always room for improve where you stand in relation to everyone else. And just from a personal growth standpoint, I mean, inertia is death to people's progress. You have to always be seeking to educate yourself and learn more. I know you'd probably hate this characterization, but the book reads to me in some places, and I think this is a good thing, as a sort of self-help book, using fantasy sports to improve your life in a way. Yeah, I do think there are aspects of self-help in there. That's not your big point, but I've noticed it a number of times throughout the book, when you talk about putting things in perspective and that your point near the end of the book, you're kind of like the Marcus Aurelius of fantasy sports about not sweating things ultimately too much, putting things in perspective. I liked that aspect of the book. What's been the reaction? Have you had any readers who say, hey, this is kind of bait and switch. This isn't a book on fantasy sports. This is like a book on practical philosophy and on science and on skepticism. We'll get to that topic in a minute, the skepticism. But what's the reaction been? Well, I think a lot of people get it, which is good, because I knew it might be a tricky sell to people, because if on the one hand you put the title, How Fantasy Sports Explains the World, a lot of people are gonna look to it and go, oh, I like fantasy sports. Let me read about it. It'll help me win my league. And instead they're reading about Sylvia Brown and Time Travel and Stephen Hawking and Shakespeare. And so that might wallop them a bit and say, hey, this is not fantasy sports, but indeed it is fantasy sports and that's your point. Yeah, it is. And I think that no matter what you're into, even if you're not into fantasy sports, I think there's something that you have passion for that you really like to vote far more attention to than you probably should and get obsessed over. And whatever that is for you, you can replace fantasy sports in the title with that. It still applies. I mean, people are people. And I think people all have these same tendencies to involve themselves and over immerse themselves in things that might be to their detriment if they take it too seriously, because really outside of family and friends, those are the things you should be focusing your time on. These should be, these are hobbies. Fantasy sports is a hobby. It's something that enhances your enjoyment of real sports. That's my take on it. I've gotten death threats from people when I've given bad advice. And I'm just like, hey, relax, calm down. It's a made-up team of people who you've never met, who you don't know, chill. Before we get to Sylvia Brown and psychics and your treatment of those topics, have you ever kind of wondered if people's focus on fantasy sports, nearly a billion-dollar industry, does it somehow show the irrelevance of real sports as a distraction or, I mean, because couldn't you just have a computer program spitting out the statistics? Do you actually need to be following those teams when some people are so rabid about, you know, their imaginary teams, right, in their heads? You said it helps you appreciate real sports more. I have exactly one friend that I know who is rabid about fantasy sports, buddy of mine from college, lives in Canada. You know, he's always posting on Facebook. You never hear him talking about real sports. It's always about his fantasy sports. It seems almost like a retreat into fantasy away from the appreciation of real sports. Well, you know, I think it can go in that direction. Certainly, it's changed the way people watch sports, but watching sports is a passive activity to begin with, you know. In a sense, fantasy sports is more what Aristotle would have called Vita Activa, the life of action as opposed to, you know, just kind of passively sitting back on the couch and watching the boob tube. Right, I mean, you know, on the one hand, you know, if you're a fan of one team, you're gonna watch that team and root for that team. When your team is in playing, well, what gives you the motivation to watch by having fantasy athletes on every team to root for it? It gives you a vested interest and gives you a little more, you know, reason to turn on that game, you know, like a Monday night game between two teams from the West Coast that if you live on the East Coast that you might not have any interest in, it gives you a reason to watch that game. But yeah, you know, it is kind of this thing where you as a passive observer have no control of the outcome events anyway. This kind of gives you the illusion that you actually do have some control because even though you might not be able to pitch to that hitter, you can decide whether to put the hitter number one in or a number two or number three, you decide who's in your lineup and there's some sort of action there. You can make a decision, it gives you some ownership and an illusion of control over events that we don't have control over and, you know, doesn't that sound like life in general? I wanna be slightly more charitable to my friend from college, his name's Jay, who's, you know, this guy I was telling you is really into fantasy sports. Seems another really important component of fantasy sports isn't just that you're sitting back with this illusion of control, but there's this big social aspect. There's a camaraderie and spending time with your fellows fantasizing that you're a manager of some team or, but the point is there's the social aspect too. Well, I think that, yeah, I think there should be a social aspect. I mean, you know, obviously, there's a difference between people who sit at home and maybe play World of Warcraft and never leave the house versus those who play World of Warcraft and then we'll go to the conventions and dress up as the characters and meet the people that they, you know, interact with online in real life. That takes it to another level and one that I think is a little bit more, you know, normal, a little bit. At least healthy who knows. Hell is healthy, yeah, hell, you know, it's, yeah, obviously. So it's the same thing with fantasy sports. You could, you know, you can join 100 leagues online with strangers, never actually meet them in real life. And there are some people out there who actually sign up as three different people and play with three different teams in the same league just so they can trade amongst themselves and win the league. Ah-ha, congratulations, you're an evil genius. You're Lex Luthor, great, wonderful. But you know, it's like, what does that accomplish? You know, I play in one league with the exception of a couple of expert leagues that I'm asked to play in. I play in one league, it's with some college buddies. I've been in this league for 20 years and it's because it's my college buddies. I, you know, we use it, you know, in the old days, you know, we didn't have families and you know, we actually would just, you know, hang out together at all, you know, like 15 of us in one room, you know, watching all the games screaming at each other. Now we do that over the phone and it's a way to keep in touch. I, you know, I feel it, I probably wouldn't be able to keep in touch or I wouldn't have kept in touch with a lot of my friends who are in this league if not for the league. For me, it's, you know, it's a social mechanism as well. Yeah, it's in that sense, it's like a poker night or something. You know, you're getting together to be together. I mean, that sounds a little gay and most straight guys don't use that language but the game, whatever the game is, is the excuse to spend time together. Okay, I get that point. Let's turn to my favorite chapter in the book, probably for obvious reasons. It's when you talk about psychics, you talk about Sylvia Brown, this gut feeling that people get when they predict the future. You talk about your own sense of being psychic and connected to fantasy sports. There's a story when I was a kid that I would go to Met Games a lot. I grew up with him walking to Sins of Shea Stadium and I would always go and, you know, when I would go to the Met Games and Darryl Strawberry would be at bat, I would just, every so often, just get this feeling just as a moment as the ball was released from the pitcher, I would get this sensation that he's gonna hit a home run now. He is going to hit a home run. And he hit a home run. And it happened every time I got this feeling. I don't remember a time where I had that feeling when he didn't hit a home run. And, you know, it was only with Darryl and it was just this feeling that the hair on my arms would stand up and it was just this momentary silence and I'd just say home run and he'd hit it. Suddenly I'm like, wow, am I psychic? Is there some sort of, what's going on here? Because it just didn't happen with anyone else and it just, and it never failed. So, you know, I just had this weird, simpatico with the universe. You know, and I just felt like everyone in the stadium must have felt it too because why else would everyone have fallen silent? And you and I, when you were writing the book, you're putting it together, you're researching it, you and I discussed this exact phenomenon and why don't you tell me how important memory is when we, I mean, you're recounting this feeling of knowing the future before it happens. How do you explain that in the book? Well, I think, and you helped walk me through it, like I said, DJ Grootie, the skeptic was skeptical. Obviously, I'm relating this story to you after many years after it has happened. Maybe I'm not remembering precisely the times when it didn't happen, when I got the feeling was wrong, maybe there's that aspect to it where my memory just could be faulty. And you know, quite frankly, Daryl Strawberry was a very good hitter. He hit a lot of home runs. I didn't get this feeling for a guy who's hitting a buck 80 and hit 10 home runs in his career and it happened to the 10 times he hit a home run. Daryl hit a lot of home runs. So odds are when he's at the plate, everyone's gonna pay attention. So the silence could just be, you know, obviously could just be a function of the fact that, hey, Daryl Strawberry might hit a home run because Daryl Strawberry hits a lot of home runs. So, you know, the memory might be faulty and it just, you know, it might not be a perfect control for this type of experiment. Right, the whole selective memory thing, we remember the hits, we forget the misses and then you tie that into psychic greetings. You talk about Sylvia Brown, some of the methods she probably uses, you recount some of her astonishing failures and you connect all of that to fantasy sports. Yeah, I mean, because as a fantasy sports expert, I'm kind of, I call myself an anti-psychic. People expect me to be right when I am predicting, you know, they'll come to me and say, which player should I start this week? You should it be this running back, that running back? And they expect me to be 100% accurate. And I'm saying, I'm not an expert in predicting the future. That's not what I do. I analyze the probabilities and I tell you what's more likely to be a successful play. But, you know, I'm fully upfront and say, I'm not gonna be right 100% of the time. If I'm right 60% of the time, that's great because that's better than half and it's better than a coin toss. I know my stuff. And if I'm wrong, people will never let me forget it. They will be angry. They'll be like, you call yourself an expert, you cost me my game, I listen to you, you're an idiot. You don't know anything. It's remarkable that there's so much ire if you're wrong, but the credulous and psychics are so forgiving when she's wrong and she's breathtakingly wrong consistently. Right, she can be wrong 99 times out of 100 and someone who wants to believe in Sylvia Brown's powers will remember the one time, talk about the one time and give her a pass on 99 times, whereas I, who make no claims about being psychic, can get one wrong out of 100 and suddenly I'm a fraud. People only remember the misses for me and it's just, it's bizarre to be that essentially we're both doing the same thing. We're guessing on future outcomes, but... Well, and the truth is you're probably making those guesses in a more educated way. Those are more educated guesses because you're big into statistics, even if you don't think they're infallible when making predictions. I mean, you use what Sabre metrics and all that stuff. Right, I mean, I'm using past histories. If you're asking me which header to draft at first base, well, I'm gonna use his past five years, seeing how he's trending, maybe what ballpark he's moved to is he'll lefty is a variety who's in the lineup with him. I'm using a factual basis based on, baseball's been around for over 100 years. You have 100 years of data to call from and see trends and if a player does this in one year, what does he do to the next year? I'm using all of that and I'm saying, look, I like this guy better because of this, this, this and this. It doesn't mean he's going to be better, but odds are this is a better pick. And if you're wrong down the line, you can make trades and blah, blah, blah. Whereas Sylvia Brown may look at someone in the audience of one of her spirit circles or psychic readings and say, you're missing loved one is dead in the woods or has been murdered or abducted or something, giving no reasons for that other than that it's being revealed to her from spirit. She's not looking at statistics. She's not looking at evidence, making educated guesses like you do about fantasy sports. No, in fact, the only educated guess is that someone like her does is perhaps say, I'm getting a John or a Jack or a Michael. And like, well, yeah, you know what? A lot of Americans have family members or friends with those names. So yeah, I guess she is using some sort of historical data there. In this book, you actually explain to your fantasy sports geeks. And I love that somehow it's in this sports book. You explained the difference between cold reading and hot reading and you really reveal the methods of these celebrity psychics. Yeah, I've watched the celebrity psychics and the ghost hunters out there. And I'm fascinated by the subject. I've always been fascinated by the subject. I had an experience when I was very, very young that could be considered paranormal and spooky. And basically, when I was like eight or nine years old when my grandfather died and I remember being at home and I was sitting down, I remember exactly where I was, I was working on a jigsaw puzzle and the phone rang. And as soon as the phone rang, I said to my mother before she answered the phone, I said, grandpa's dead. And he hadn't been sick. You know, he was elderly, he was my grandpa, but there was no reason to suspect he hadn't been in failing health. And yeah, that was what the phone call was. And you know, it's kind of creepy, it's kind of spooky. How do you account for that? I mean, to the vast majority of Americans, 70% of whom believe in the paranormal, that would be overwhelming evidence of kind of a psychic gift or the spirit world or something. Yeah, and for years, I did kind of have had that story with me. Obviously, it's an experience I have, but you know, I didn't have, you know, a visitation in the night. You know, it wasn't like I saw his spirit there or anything like that. It opened up a fascination to me for the possibility that this could happen. And it's why I'm very open-minded about it. What's your explanation of that? Are you remembering it right? Is it a numbers game? You know, I've often been impressed by this. I've often thought of someone I haven't talked to in a long time, the phone rings and that's them. That is impressive to everyone and it happens surprisingly frequently. Right, and something like that, you know, or you're humming a song in the shower and all of a sudden you turn on the radio and there it is. I don't know what the explanation is. I can say, you know, from obviously, it's a pretty big prediction to say, hey, that's grandpa. Someone on the phone telling us grandpa's dead. Obviously, that's a big prediction. That isn't just, hey, it's grandpa, because grandpa calls all the time. So obviously, there's a little higher stakes there. I don't have an explanation for it, but things happen that we don't have explanations for. I'm okay with that. You know, I've had bad feelings throughout my life that, oh, you know what, I better call my dad. I think he's not feeling well and he was fine. You know, it's just, this is one time where I happen to be right. I can't explain it because I can't get back into the head of that eight-year-old and know what I was thinking at that time. But this is one time you had a kind of bad feeling and it turned out being right. Right. You know, I travel a lot for work and I give these talks and I join myself out there and my mom has called me just a number of times over the past few years and said, I had a bad feeling. Is everything all right? And I report to her, you know, not too smugly, but yes, mom, everything is just fine. You know, everything is just fine. So that was a hit that you remember, it sounds like. Yeah, it's a hit. An unfortunate hit, the loss of your grandpa. Well, obviously it was a very unfortunate hit. I don't know what made me say that. So because I don't remember what made me say it, I remember the incident, but I don't remember, you know, the reasons for it. So I can't, you know, I don't believe I'm psychic by any means. You know, it's just one of those things that happen. You know, that's kind of, I chalk it up to that. I love that in the book, you actually teach a mind-reading trick, courtesy of someone whom we both know, the New York mind reader, Mark Salem. Ah, yes, Mark Salem, I didn't know you knew him. Yes, he's, I actually worked with Mark Salem a long time ago, I had a very short-lived office job at an office he was working at. And he came up to be one day and he was like, hey, can I show you a trick? Cause Mark Salem is a very talented mentalist. And one of the things I still, I mean, I still don't know how, I know there's a trick involved, but he can put his hand over any wristwatch and get the time to change to whatever he wants. I still don't know how he does that, but he wouldn't show me that secret. Incredibly talented performer. Now you teach, or he teaches in your book, how to read minds, at least in one example. Yeah, he does this little trick where he says, all right, I want you to be very, you know, calm and just want you to open up your mind. I want you to think very carefully of a foreign country, a foreign country anywhere, maybe in Europe, maybe, well, you know, wherever, a foreign country that starts with the letter D. Just don't tell me what it is, think of that. And when you think of that country now, I want you to take the second letter of that country, whatever it is. And now don't forget, don't forget what it is. I want you to think that second letter. I want you to think of an animal that starts with that letter, the second letter of the country. All right, don't forget it, okay? All right, maybe an animal that you've seen in a zoo, maybe just any animal you want, any animal you want. Okay, now I want you to think of the color of that animal, a normal color, don't go crazy with pink or anything like that. Just a regular, normal color for that animal. What color would they be? All right, you have all that in your head? All right, now don't be stupid. There are no gray elephants in Denmark. I would love to know for how many of our listeners that worked. And I love that for the first time in 250 interviews I've done, we have radio mentalism on for good reason with a sports writer, that I just love that mashup. You don't see that every day. So as we're finishing up with this topic of psychics, the majority of people believe in these paranormal claims, they pick up a book on fantasy sports, they're not expecting their cherished beliefs to be debunked. Have you had any true believers really stick it to you for talking about stuff that they believe they think you have no right to get into? Thankfully, no. Thankfully, the response has been pretty good. I think people who are open-minded enough to read the first few chapters of this book by the time they get to this chapter have probably figured out my game a little bit. And maybe saw the title and said, you know what, I just don't even want to go there. This chapter in particular is called, Sylvia Brown told me to bench A-rod. So it's, maybe they see the writing on the wall, but that was also a goal of mine with this book is to kind of introduce skepticism in a way that perhaps would sneak up on people, people who might not otherwise be open to hearing some of these things. And, you know, if you dress it up in a pretty dress, maybe they'll take it out for a date. Right, and as I read you doing it in the book, you're not doing it in a manipulative way, like to get them to believe things you want them to believe when they weren't planning on it. Instead, it's just kind of what a writer does. You're broadening people's horizons. Yeah, like it's kind of what I do with my job is it's I recommend players based on their stats and what the facts are, but you can have an alternative opinion, like just because I like player A over player B based on these stats, you can look at the same stats coming up with the opposite conclusion. You can decide that, you know, there are these other stats that I didn't mention to support my argument that means player B is better. I mean, is this kind of the same thing with the belief of, you know, of psychics, you know, if you want to, you know, say, well, but he didn't really bring up this point or this point or, you know, well, you know, I interpret these things differently, you know, you know, that's your prerogative. I'm not trying to force you into any beliefs. Right, you're not shoving this down anyone's throat, but you're talking about all these topics as they relate to your bailiwick fantasy sports. Sure, and certainly, and certainly I'm loading the seesaw on my side a little bit because of just that's where I'm coming from. That's my point of view, but I certainly am aware that people might be coming at it from the other side. You know, I have a chapter on the Bible too, where I was especially aware of it and I tried to be very, very careful not to step on any toes because I don't want, that's not the point of the book, is not to step on any toes. It's just to say, this is what I believe, take it if you will. Tell me the connection that you get into between pareidolia and fantasy sports. Paredolia, you know, this powerful mechanism of the brain to make sense out of noise, what's that have to do with fantasy sports? Well, I mean, that's one of the main things that people do when we're dealing with fantasy sports, especially fantasy baseball, because baseball is a game that's played on a daily basis. There's a game every day and every hitter has three or four bats a day and people start looking into smaller and smaller sample sizes and they begin to see these patterns that just really aren't there. People will say to me like, should I bench David Wright this game because he's facing Cole Hamels and the last three times he faced the Phillies at night, he went 0-for-7. So, you know, that means he's really not very good against this type of pitcher at this time of day and it's like, well, we can't thin slice it that much. You're looking for a pattern that really doesn't exist. Yes, it's possible that a baseball player might be better against left-handed pitching or right-handed pitching based on much bigger sample sizes, but when you start thin slicing it that much, you're looking for patterns that simply aren't there. So, you know, it's kind of the same thing when you're watching a show like Ghost Hunters where the tap screw comes in with an EVP and, you know, they go in and they know that the guy who lived in the house, the ghost that they're searching for his name is Rob and, you know, they listen to the sound and they go, you know, and they're asking mysteriously to this, the air, like, what is your name? What is your name? And then they hear, you know, a click or a whistle and they, you know, and blah. They're like, oh, well, that said Rob. Well, yes, of course to you it says Rob because you are expecting it to say Rob. If you ask someone who had no knowledge of anything that's going on in the house, they might not notice it at all. But if they do notice it, they might come up with a hundred different words. You know, you're looking for a pattern, you want confirmation. So of course you're going to hear what you want to hear. You know, it's like, I want you out, the ghost says. Well, you know, if you were thinking that perhaps the ghost, it was a farmer who was good at gambling, maybe you think he'd said, I won the cow. I mean, but once you hear it, you can't get it out of your head that that's once the suggestion is there, you're going to hear it every single time. It's like those backwards recordings of the Led Zeppelin song. Once you know what the lyrics are quote, unquote, supposed to say, well, of course you hear it, whereas it was just nonsense before. Right, the back masking and all of that stuff. And you see this pattern recognition going on in fantasy sports, really you're recognizing this powerful capacity of the brain to connect dots that might not be there. And that's powerfully explanatory to me in all of these areas. Tell me, does it make you appreciate the brain more or kind of be more wary of it? Like sometimes I'm in awe that the brain has this amazing ability. I mean, it's wrong, but you know, to connect the dots that aren't there all the time, but I'm impressed at how powerful that is. And I'm kind of in awe of it often. What's your take? I mean, do you step away from your experience in fantasy sports and recognizing this pattern matching thing that the brain does in your field and say wow or say be wary, Danger Will Robinson? Yeah, I think I'm a little more wary of it because I don't wanna fall into finding patterns when there aren't any there. I think that's kind of just a negative thing for expecting there to be a pattern in things when there just isn't one because I think you can fall into becoming a slave to habit in that regard and just expecting something to happen. Every time I do this, this happens. But it's the same thing. It's not just fantasy sports. I mean, sports fans in general, they'll get that lucky hat that they have to put on. And they have to put on, because I put on this hat and I win. The superstition in professional sports players, there are all these rituals and it's the same capacity of the brain. It worked once, you wore the lucky shirt once and now you'll never take it off for a game. Right, absolutely. And most of those are harmless and fun and they either work or they don't, but they don't affect you in a horribly negative way. But it's when you take it to the point of obsessing over trying to find that pattern when one isn't there. I mean, that's where it can lead you down the road to ruin when it's like these people who have these schemes to win the lottery. And then the numbers, these numbers came out and if this number comes out every three times and if they spend their all fortunes trying to win the lottery based on this obsessive scribbling and trying to find a pattern when there's absolutely no pattern to lottery numbers but they're gonna find it. And yeah, that's what scares me is that the brain has the capacity to steer us in that direction. No pattern, say, at slot machines where you've put enough quarters in and you think it's about to cash out or something. So the point here is the book, even if it's not overwrought and you're not making a big deal out of it, the book has a lot of practical advice for how to fare better in the world by looking through the lens of fantasy sports. Probably my favorite point in the book is when you tell us how fantasy sports can teach us how to feel. Yeah, you know, I was very fortunate to have gotten ahold of one of the members of the West Memphis Three while they were still on death row. And Damien Eccles was, I had read some of the things that he had written about being a baseball fan and you know, it just struck me that here's somebody who is on death row for crimes that the state had very little evidence to basically no evidence that tied him to the murder of three boys and he's on death row. And the only thing that's preventing him from being executed is the fact that there are people out there who don't really have a stake in the case other than they believe that he's innocent and they are trying their hardest to get him out, to vindicate him. And he has no control over his own fate. And the connection there between, you have no control over how your fantasy team does and yet you get so matter of life and death over it, oh, my team has to win, oh, and you live and die with it. Here's someone who's actually living and dying based on the fact that he hopes that someone who has no real stake in it is going to invest their time and try and get him off. As I said, sort of the, you're sort of the Marcus Aurelius of fantasy sports. AJ, I really appreciated the discussion. It was fun and I love how you're preaching the gospel so to speak of skepticism to new audiences through this exploration of fantasy sports and thinking and I really appreciate the discussion. Well, I appreciate you having me on and of course I want to thank you for taking part in the book that was very kind of you to lend of your time in that way as well and hopefully people out there will be able to check it out. It's a great gift for the sports fan and not sports fan alike. I'm telling you, this is the book I'm giving my brothers-in-law for Christmas. Thank you for listening to this episode of For Good Reason. To get involved with an online conversation about today's show, join the discussion at ForGoodReason.org. The views on the show aren't necessarily the J-Ref's views and you can send comments in to info at ForGoodReason.org. The show is produced by Thomas Donnelly and Brian Thompson and it's recorded from Los Angeles, California. Our music is composed for us by Emmy award-winning, Gary Stockdale. Carrie Poppy contributed to today's show. I'm your host, DJ Grophy. Thank you.