Freakonomics Radio - How to Be a Double Unicorn, with John Urschel | Better in Person

0:00This episode of Better in Person is presented by ChatGPT. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Download the new ChatGPT desktop app today. Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. And this is a bonus episode that we are calling How to Be a Double Unicorn. It comes from our new video talk show, which is called Better in Person. And the guest is John Urschel, a former NFL lineman who now teaches math at MIT.

0:29John is one of my very favorite people, and I think you will like him too. To watch this episode, go to the Freakonomics YouTube channel or search for Better In Person on Apple Podcasts. The entire first season of the show has now been published, so go ahead, binge. As always, thanks for listening. So you'd never open a math book on the Ravens facility? No, no, never. And because you're busy doing football? Well, I'm busy doing football.

1:03This is Better in Person with Steven Dovner and John Urschel. A lot of us spend our lives trying to find the one big thing we're really good at. John Urschel had a slightly different problem. He turned out to be world-class at two things, two very different things, football and math. One path led to the NFL, the other to MIT. Eventually, he had to make a choice. I am the son of a...

1:31pretty good college football player. Is this your dad? Yes, my dad. Who also became a thoracic surgeon? Yes, and not only did he become a thoracic surgeon, he, while in college, playing college football, was in medical school. Some of these universities have these programs where they really accelerate people to med school. You do two years and then straight into med school. He did exactly this. Where did he play football? University of Alberta. Oh. So he's Canadian, I'm Canadian.

1:59So my mom and dad have me, I was born in Canada, they move to Buffalo for my dad's work and then eventually my dad moves back to Canada. And you stay in Buffalo with your mom? I stay in Buffalo, but I would visit my dad all the time and he's working as a thoracic surgeon, he's a really busy person. He would pick me up, he would take me to the hospital, he would do his rounds, he would let me look around on his computer and then after he would do his rounds, he would take me to the local chapters.

2:27And he would be in the cafe. He would just be working. We're how old at this point? Eight or nine. What are you reading? What are you doing? I'm looking at all different types of books. I'm just sitting and reading books, exploring. And I find myself just mostly hanging out in the math section. And I'm just opening up things and picking up things that I have no business picking up. Did that strike you as unusual? No, it was fun.

2:50I don't know. I'm here four or five hours every second Saturday, like I am in elementary school, but this is fun. And I know you liked puzzles from the time you were very young. Right, so this is the other section I would spend a lot of time in is the puzzle section. You know, we asked you to bring something for show and tell. Yes. You brought this book. The big book of Tell Me Why. So this is something my mom bought for me. Yeah.

3:15I noticed there's like a big a child print here and coffee stains there. Yes your mom or your dad or you think that's you No, so this is because this would go in the trunk and so just so that you'd always have it with you when you're well around Let's say third grade. Okay, so my mom is working as an attorney Yeah, she has a lot of night court. She went to law school very late in life Yeah, and my grandmother had died the year before so we're without childcare So now she's taking me places. So she has night court and she doesn't think I'm quite old enough to stay at home. Well, she did leave me at home a bit, but I don't think it went too well. I mean, were you lighting fires, things like that? No, just like a little bit of chaos, like maybe like the bathtub, you know, gets too full, you know, things like this. And so she would always have this in the trunk and then she would just sit me in the last room of the courtroom. Yeah.

4:07And she would just give me the book. There for hours, I would look at this. Sometimes I would do puzzle books, but this was like the stalwart. Maybe look through the book and tell me a couple things that you recall being intriguing to you. Right, yes. So chapter five, how things are made. Yeah. And that was when I really liked a striking one. It must be in here somewhere.

4:25How does a mirror work? And I mean, I'm sure. How does a mirror work? So it's all about light and reflections and angle of reflection and angle of incidence. And did that feel like math to you as a kid? No, it just felt really cool. I never viewed the things I really liked. This is going to sound very strange as explicitly math until I got to college. But you love football. I love football. And when I was a kid, my dream was to be an offensive lineman in the Big Ten. Wow.

4:55Like I grew up watching like Jake Long and I, you know, I want to do the left tackle for Michigan again. Because, okay, I played tackle in high school and, you know, there's a star system coming out of high school. I was a two star recruit. The scale was out of five. And so I'm like two out of five. So somehow being like a all big 10, all American offense lineman at Penn State.

5:17this is just like the dream come true. But you chose to go to a football school rather than like you were you had a chance to go to Stanford but you'd already committed to Penn State. Yeah, exactly. And at the time. And your mom wanted that. My mom wanted me to go to Stanford. And at the time I had like this very strong sense of honor, which you don't have it anymore. I mean, I think it was probably misplaced.

5:40Like, I'm not sure it was deserved, but at the time I had this really strong sense of, you know, like... Meaning I have committed to Penn State. I have committed to Penn State. I'm sorry, you know, you know, John Harbaugh calls me to come visit Stanford. And, you know, for me, and I say, you know, I'm sorry, Coach.

5:56I have already committed to Penn State. And he says, oh, that's okay. You can still just come and, you know, see how things are. And I say, no coach, you know, I've really, I've already committed. I've given my word, like, you know. Paterno was your coach for your first year or two? My first three. First three years, okay. And then he's gone. And then what's the program like in your fourth year as your senior there? Very different. Who's your coach? Bill O'Brien.

6:19Right, okay, yeah. Turned out to be a really good coach. Turned out to be a really good coach, although he's suffering quite badly at Boston College right now, although I think it's hard to win there, especially in the current NIL. So NIL is name image likeness, which is the way for college athletes now to get paid, essentially, right? Yes. I remember when I played, you could not make a dime. You couldn't take a free hamburger. You couldn't take a free hamburger. And really at Penn State, they were they were really honest about this. I mean, Paterno was very, very serious about this, and so this was legitimate. And so when you're in that environment where you can't take it, does it feel like you're in a, not like a religious order in the military, but like, what does it feel like to be that constricted? I mean, it's a tough, it's a touch strict, and I think it was too strict before. I mean, for instance, you know, I was at Penn State, and not that I have any complaints about it.

7:17But I remember like you know my face is on like banners downtown I'm doing all these things. There's other players whose jerseys I mean my jersey didn't sell so well when offensive linemen there are other players whose jerseys are just you know, yeah everywhere and You know, we are not you're not making a single set out not even like Some money towards a 401k or something. You know what I mean? So name image and likeness objectively a good thing that Players can make a little bit of money off of their or a lot of money or a lot of money When you started playing at Penn State, let's say where did you think you had a pretty decent chance to make the NFL? No, I thought I had no chance. No chance. Yeah, when did you start to think you had a chance? My junior year. Yeah, I'm playing well I'm an all-big-ten offensive lineman at the time as a junior and my coach, you know sort of meets me after the season my position coach and sort of you know

8:14says, you know, you're coming back another year. Like, please. Not please, but sort of like, I don't want you thinking any crazy stuff. You're coming back another year. Crazy stuff like declaring for the year. Declaring early as a joke. Like, I don't want you thinking about anything crazy. And to be honest, I wasn't really thinking about the NFL at all. And so it wasn't until like, you know, this conversation, which was kind of a joke in passing. That's interesting. Like right at the end of the season. Did that give you more confidence then for your final year?

8:40the fact that he assumed that you were bound for the NFL? Not confidence, but I would say like this idea that this is something that is about to happen if I want it to happen. Okay. And then he would say things in practice like, you know, oh, they're going to, you know, they're, you know, I do something and you say, oh, they're going to love that in the league. Okay. During his last year at Penn State, Urschel interviewed with nearly all of the NFL's 32 teams. Some teams knew he was a math major and a serious student.

9:10Some didn't. His math talent gave him options outside of football, but when the Baltimore Ravens chose Urschel in the fifth round of the NFL Draft, Urschel chose football. Can I just say, I think most people don't understand that most linemen, offensive and defensive, it's an arms race. It's a weight race. You have to put on a lot, a lot, a lot of pounds in order to succeed. So what was your peak weight in the NFL? My heaviest?

9:38Period there was a time where I was 320 and how are you expected to do that? Just by eating and and working out or no working out doesn't help you Well, I mean that what the what us amateurs are told is that muscle? Yeah, that's true, but somehow you know things in the NFL are already so optimized You know, so there's a diminishing return to it Yes, exactly. So the point is already, you know, let's say in the offseason I'm already working out, you know one to two times a day, okay?

10:08an hour to two maybe. Let's say two to three. And how intense is the workout? I'm doing deadlifts, I'm doing squats, I'm doing bench, I'm doing, you know. What could you bench? I don't know, I usually don't max out, like so somehow in college, this is something that happens a lot, you try to see like how much weight you can lift. In the league, there's just no point in this. Like there's no point to do like a one rep max. So I think in college, You know, like I've lifted four or five before. Oh, you could lift like two and a half of me. Well, to be clear, so this will give you a good sense. When I was at the combine, everyone tries to bench press 225 pounds as many times as they can. And I did it 30 times. Oh my goodness. So that's the sense. Wow. I think I've conflated your intelligence with your athleticism a little bit. So my job is hitting people. Right.

11:05so you're supposed to be very big. Is the hitting really fun when you're that big? Yeah, it was fun. I had a lot of fun. Yeah. I mean, was that the funnest part of football for you, is getting to legally... I mean, it's the only part of football for me. Well, no, but if you're a wide receiver... No, but for me it's the only part. What do you love about hitting? It's sort of nice. Like, you know, you imagine you're... No, you're out on a field and imagine it's us in this sort of like controlled environment together and we line up next to each other and my goal is...

11:35I want to move you. I want to dominate you. I want to impose my will on you. Not hurt. Not hurt. I want to impose my will on you. And you want to do the same to me. Blocking is more complicated than it looks on TV. So I asked John to give me a demo, but I was not interested in having him impose his will on me, so I offered up our producer, Theo Jacobs. I would get in a stance. So I would step.

12:03And then I'm just moving like this. I'm moving. And that's the idea. And the idea is I want my hat right here. I'm being kind. My hands are out here. Don't be kind. Do you want to see one that involves two people? Sure. Sit. What's up? So much fun. You all right? Yeah. We do have really good health insurance. So if you broke anything, I think we'll be all right.

12:35This episode of Better In Person is presented by ChatGPT. Chat GPT work moves beyond answers into getting real work done. It's a new experience in chat GPT for bigger multi-step projects across web mobile and desktop. You can give chat GPT work a goal and have it gather context, choose an approach, create the output and continue iterating all while you stay in control. It can help turn messy inputs into useful outputs like briefs, spreadsheets, dashboards, presentations, prototypes, landing pages and workflows. You can even Ask ChatGPT work to take on entire workflows with a single request. Here's an example. It can turn customer research into a campaign brief, use that brief to create marketing assets, and adapt those assets for different markets, carrying context through every step. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Download the new ChatGPT desktop app today.

13:38While you're playing for the NFL where they want a hundred and ten percent of your physical and mental devotion Yes, you're also getting your PhD in math at MIT Yes, although I am not cheating I would say because I asked for permission first from whom from the team from the Ravens Yeah, John Harbaugh. I reached out to the coach. Yeah, and I asked if it was okay. I said, you know coach I want to go back to school to get my degree. Well, you had two degrees already, right? Yeah. But it's true. I want to go back to school to get my degree. Okay. And he said, absolutely, this is something we completely support. We support people like finishing school and getting their degrees. Cool. So I say, okay, great. Thanks, coach. So he texts me back maybe like a minute later. He says, but wait, but I thought you had your degree and your master's. And so then I sort of say,

14:27but that's true, but I don't have my PhD and he texted me back something like, oh, okay. And then that was it. Okay, so that's permission. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not attending any lectures and I'm carefully choosing courses that I can get by on by reading the textbook and courses that do not have exams. Okay. So I read the textbook.

14:53and I do the problem. That sounds like a PhD slate or something though. Was MIT concerned that you were getting, that you were taking a. Oh no, so I had to take a full course load, which was three PhD courses in the fall. While you're playing football. While I'm playing football. In the NFL. Yeah, and I would choose, I chose my three courses to make sure they were courses that did not have exams so I could pass the class without being there. Okay.

15:23I get that, but still, let's just talk about workload. When you're playing in the NFL, how many hours a week would you say you're working on football? A lot. I mean, you know, every day I'm devoting just about all my time to football. Mm-hmm. Yeah. All but... What about the evening? All about end the evening. You're watching film. Film study? Yeah, you're preparing. So when are you doing your math? Also, you aren't leaving the building until quite late, actually. You leave after dinner. But let's suppose it's a time where people are winding down. Mm-hmm.

15:49Like a time where you might wind down is you're flying for an away game and everyone's relaxing. People are watching movies. If I was reading a chessbook, this is totally okay. If I'm reading a math book, it's maybe a touch dodgy. If I'm reading a math book, it's a little dodgy. It's dodgy because they might think that you're devoting too much time to your... Maybe I'm reading and someone would say, Is that a math book? I say, no, it's a chess book. And I show them and they say, oh, OK. So I'm doing football all day every day. Then how am I doing MIT? Players get a day off from Sunday afternoon all the way until Tuesday morning. I am full math, and I am scrambling to finish my problem sets. And the way that I am able to do this is that I have already read the books for the courses.

16:43before the semester even starts. Otherwise, how could I possibly do this? I see. So in the off-season of the course you're reading, which is the off-season of... So, but did that mean you were doubling up with spring courses? Yeah, so in the summer I'm reading books. I see. But in the summer you have time, in the spring I'm reading. Okay. I mean, I'm doing some work, and so this is one thing where, you know, I say this all the time, if I was an English major, I don't see how I...

17:09could have ever succeeded in college, let alone while doing this in the NFL, because you take some class, you have to read all these pages, you have to write a certain page report. In math, the way that you're sort of tested is usually you're given very few problems, but the problems are really hard. And so how long it takes you, the time you invest is mostly invested in increasing your sort of skill and ability.

17:37But if you already know the material pretty well, then the problem sets don't take us long. Were you ever thinking about a problem set while you were in the weight room? No, no, no. Really. Mentalized. You are a massive compartmentalizer, though, it seems. Yeah. Do you think that's a trait that has helped you succeed? My wife would say so. OK, you're succeeding in the NFL.

18:00you're getting a PhD in math from MIT at the same time. And then there's a variable that comes in, which is a huge amount of attention paid to CTE. It's brain trauma, let's call it, from repeated blows to the head. And this for several years was really the headline in the NFL, which is brain damage far and wide. Although, to be fair, the evidence for this is very difficult to assess. Yeah, exactly. It's a difficult thing to exactly nail down, but You can't diagnose it while someone's living. Exactly. The brains that are donated for research predominantly come from people who died young or tragically. Yes. There's a bit of a strange thing that, you know, this thing comes out and this thing that happens around the time that I'm like really thinking about retiring. So you're saying it gave you cover? It gave me very good cover.

18:50I mean, of course, it was like... Because until then you weren't concerned about it particularly, were you? Before then I was concerned about it. There's a couple things going on. You can focus exclusively on CTE. Yeah. Or you can talk more broadly about the wear and tear that your body suffers. And what I was concerned about, like that off-season, was I was sort of thinking, is this going to be my last season or do I even want to do another season?

19:14You're playing off your rookie contract still, I see, right? Yes. So this is the last year of my rookie contract. And your next contract had you gotten one, which you probably would have. You were on a trajectory to get one. That would have been a lot more money, correct? Yeah. I mean, a decent amount. I mean, at least a million a year. But like my base salary, I think the first year in the league was 420. OK. And so, you know, I'm thinking, maybe I do one more, maybe I don't. And, you know, I'm going back and forth.

19:40And I'm just saying, no, I'm not going to, like, come on, I need to. And then I say, no, I should. Sort of going back to high school me, just like, I have a year left on my contract, I need to see my contract out. So this is similar to when you committed to Penn State and even if Stanford might have been a nice choice for you. But when you were talking about having committed to Penn State, you said, at the time, I had a lot of moral whatever about that. Yeah, so at the time, again, I was really struggling. These days, I don't even know why I was, I mean, I get it.

20:09but they could have fired me whenever they wanted. That's a good point. And these contracts are not guaranteed. And they're not guaranteed. If you're hurt, you're done. And in hindsight, why is this such a hard decision? I needed to retire and focus on math and go hang out with my kid. And the more time I spent at MIT, math really went above. And then this idea of being a parent, this is also going above. And so now, in hindsight, Like, if football's the third most important thing to me, and it's a legitimate liability for the first two, you know, for, you know, a long massacre, not to mention all the hours it's taking away, and the toll it takes on your body, you know, not even your head, but, you know, your entire body, to walk when I'm 50, to, you know, be able to pick up my grandkids, or, you know, even pick up my daughter when, you know. Okay.

21:08Let's say 100 people in America, what share of them would you say probably like math? A truly honest answer. I'm going to say if we define math based off what they think math is, it's 4% too low. Oh wow. That's, okay, so that's a shockingly low and slightly sad number. Because I find that some people say I really like math, but it's very rare. Even among quantitative people, I find something. Well, back up a minute, you said it depends what you think of math as. So why don't we figure out what you think of math as? I would say my sort of view of math is math is some quantitative language that we all collectively have that we use to reason about problems. And so when I think of an engineer, I think that's math. When I think of someone

22:06doing physics in some sort of theoretical way that's using quantitative information. I think this is math. I think of statistics as math. I think of theoretical computer science as math. And so I have a very broad view. And I really think about it as not so far apart from doing puzzles, not so far apart from just this goal of understanding something. Last semester at MIT, John taught matrix analysis and computations.

22:32I thought it might be fun to have a private math lesson with him, so we picked a bunch of problems from a textbook and we used a big spinning wheel, the kind you'd use on a game show, to let gravity decide which one to solve. So I thought maybe if you could walk us through a proof of some kind, is that what you would call it, typically? Yeah. So it's a beautiful spinning wheel. OK. With a lot of math problems that I'm told are not that hard. I see. So you picked.

22:59Some very hard things you think they are I see I see a lot of Millennium problem. What is the Millennium problem John? You solve it. You get a million dollars. Yeah Okay, I guess it isn't fair to give John a problem that has never been solved But can't blame me for trying we'll give the wheel another spin Okay, let's see what we get So what can you show us about Cantor's diagonal? Yeah, so Cantor's diagonal argument is about something that's really hard to think about, but is pretty cool. And the idea is that there's levels of infinity. So it's about infinity, and it's about levels of infinity. Wait, stop right there. What does that mean? OK, so first let's think about something infinite we know. If I just started counting numbers, you know, one, two, three, four, five.

23:52I do happen to like math, but I have a sense that John Urschel math is well beyond my comprehension. So we'll just do our best. There are infinitely many numbers in the set, every, you know, whole number. But some infinities are bigger than others. Okay. So for instance. It's just like when you're a kid and you say infinity plus one. Yeah, yeah. So let's say, okay, this has infinitely many things. Okay. And also if I looked at This set, which I'll denote with an R, this contains all of these numbers. Right? Sure, I guess. Now let me bring in a third player. A third player? I'm still processing the first two. This is starting to make football seem simple. You might say this feels bigger than that. But I could define some pairing of them where for every number here, I pair it to a unique number here.

24:48Okay, are you following this? Each one of these boxes, I get a number. So I say, this is my first number. And I say, this is my second number. This is my third one. This is my fourth one, my fifth one, my sixth one. Though they're both infinite, the sort of size of the infinities are the same. Because I can associate with every number in this one, a unique number in this one. One hundred plus one times one times two squared, which is Got it. And so if it can't be in the list, then it means that all the numbers between zero and one, I can't count them. They're what we call uncountable. So that means there are more than one infinity. There's more than one infinity, and this is countable infinity, and this is uncountable infinity. I have to say, I feel like I understood a solid, like, 4% of what you just taught me. Well, I mean, to be clear, it blew my mind the first time I saw it. Like, infinity is really a hard thing to get your hands on.

25:47It dawns on me that, for John Urschel, doing math is to a large degree playing. The same way that football is also, to some large degree, playing. And he loved it, especially the hitting part. But over time, he came to love other things. Meeting my wife really taught me, I would say, about some of the softer things in life. For instance...

26:08You know, my wife is a writer, an amazing writer. Really good. I'll vouch for that. She's a really good writer. You know, she majored in English and college. Her name is Louisa Thomas, let's say, for the record. Yeah, of course. You met your wife when she came to write an article about you. When she came to write an article about me, you know, she thought she was going to be a poet originally. And she writes about sports in a very, very interesting way. In a very sort of like... Holistic and thoughtful.

26:33And I would say even like in a beautiful way. She really, you know, she really like paints these pictures of, you know, of these scenes. And so I sort of started to gain an appreciation of just like the nicer things in life. Like we go on vacation, you know, in upstate New York, we stay in a little cottage and things are nice and quiet. And, you know, she's reading things and, you know.

26:59There's a softness. You have a daughter and a son now. How would you feel about either of them playing football? I hope it's okay for me to say. The daughter I don't think should be playing football. I think that's a level of danger and risk. I wouldn't want my daughter. So that's your daughter. What about your son? My son, I think I would let him if it really seemed like something he needed to do. And what I mean by needed to do Football is a great sport if you're a young person who really craves and really feels like you could benefit from consensual violence, from controlled consensual aggression. Some place where you're following rules, you're not trying to hurt anyone.

27:50I mean, it's a proxy for war if you think about it. You're just going out on the field and you're, you know, you're just running into people, hitting people. Right, right. And I think that was really good for me as an aggressive high school kid. Yeah. And so, you know, if that was the case, I would say, oh, maybe we try wrestling, maybe we try judo. Yeah. But if he really wanted to, I would. But he's like three years old, so you got a little time. But he's three years old. But if he just says, oh, I want to because you did or oh, I want to because my friends did, I think.

28:19No, you really, I really wanna make sure you're ready for that. That you have like, you really have the right. I get it. You have the disposition that's really meant for that. I get it. What's your relationship like with football now? So these days I don't do so much. You watch? I watch. So my best friend is a coach. He's the tight ends coach for Penn State right now. And so I watch Penn State when he was, you know, the offensive coordinator for Western Illinois. I would watch Western Illinois every time I could.

28:49So I watch a lot. NFL? You watching? Not so much. I just don't have time. Okay. I mean, I don't even have time to watch enough college football. I just sort of watch, you know, I watch whatever team my best friends coaching. I have to say, I'm just like so taken by you because you're very, very good at a few difficult things, which, you know, I just admire people who accomplish things like that because they're hard to do. Now I might subtract a little bit because, you know, talent.

29:15plays a role in that, and you're plainly talented both athletically and mathematically. I mean... No, you're not that good. In terms of athletically, I mean, I've sort of come around to the fact that I do have some athletic talent, like I have broad shoulders. But if you compare me, let's say, to NFL players, I am not talented. So how did you succeed? Hard work.

29:41just an incredible amount of hard work. Where did the ability and desire to work that hard come from? Wanting to do better. So, you know, for instance. Is that a talent or is that a, like when you look back at the totality of your life to date, when you 34, 35? 34. 34. When you look back at your life thus far. Yeah. And you look at, you know, let's just take the top two, math professor and, NFL player and parent let's say right those are all nice nice accomplishments Yeah, and you had to create a little pie chart for you know genetics environment Will luck how do you assess your route a lot of luck obviously

30:22I think most people don't think when they succeeded, obviously. Yeah, but okay, let me put it like this. No, I'm a math professor at MIT. How many people, there's not that many of us. A lot of people actually do dream of that. A lot of really strong people do. And so, how does luck not play? Like yes, you need to be good. Did your football reputation help you get that job?

30:51I don't know. I hope not. Yeah. I hope not. It's just so great to talk with you, to learn from you. I feel like you're the little brother I never had. I appreciate that. And also the math teacher I never had. OK. So thanks for coming by. It was great to talk to you, man. Thanks for having me. Thanks again for checking out this audio version of our new TV talk show, Better in Person. If you would like to see the whole conversation go to the Freakonomics YouTube channel, or search for Better in Person on Apple Podcasts. And that is a wrap on this 10 episode pilot season of the show. I'd love to know what you think of it. Our email is radio at Freakonomics.com. We will be back soon right here with more Freakonomics Radio. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too. I thought it would be really fun to show some footage of you playing and go over it. Yes. But do you know how expensive it is to license NFL footage?

31:55Like I'm making a TV show in my living room, so I'm not the money to do you know how expensive it is Yeah, we looked into it. Okay for 60 seconds. I'm going to guess 5,000 John Urschel you're bad at math man

32:16Thanks again to ChatGPT for sponsoring today's episode of Better In Person. ChatGPT can help teams move from goals to real outcomes. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Download the new ChatGPT desktop app today.