BY HENRY ABBOTT

I am writing a book about movement

Wow, does that ever take me down fascinating rabbit holes. Here’s one which has my mind blown: In a nutshell, there is evidence that specializing in one sport all through childhood has drawbacks for performance and injury. (Have you read David Epstein’s incredible “Range”? If not, get on it!) Now, here’s a suggestion that thoughts and movements are intertwined enough that perhaps dedicating a whole youth to one sport might inspire rigid thinking later in life. 

Here at TrueHoop, we are listening to the Ultra podcast 

Deep breath, election day warrior. Please don’t launch into some kind of culture war-inspired reaction to Rachel Maddow’s name. (I know very little about her—and don’t watch—but I did deeply enjoy her earlier podcast Bag Man.) I have been recommending her Ultra as a model of sexy story construction; it is designed to get you powerfully addicted, and I am. Listen to the first ten minutes of Episode 1 and get back to me. 

But also: One sunny day more than a year ago I sat outside with my book agent and talked about this giant TrueHoop Epstein investigation. She listened patiently and concluded—she’s wise—that such a book would probably need a hero. Did it have one? 

The best I could come up with was a character from 70 years ago, O. John Rogge, who really tried to get to the bottom of Hitler’s ties to American business elites and lost his job for it. I am blown away that he wasn’t a major figure in, say, my U.S. history textbook. However, as of the just-released Episode 6, Rogge is a major figure in Ultra. 

“It’s very clear that Elon Musk is transmitting a message for Putin.”

Richards Heuer, Jr. wrote an incredible book called “Psychology of Intelligence Analysis.” It’s literally the training manual for CIA intelligence analysts, and it’s fascinating. 

Analysts have the very tough job of providing insight where certainty is unavailable. A classic question from the field's history: Are the Soviets placing nuclear missiles in Cuba? They’re not going to call up and tell us, and unless there are photos and wiretaps, there’s an almighty job of assessing every known fact, from Kruschev’s manner of thinking to the ship traffic in Cuban ports. 

The big trick is to defeat the bias in your own brain; to avoid emotional conclusions in favor of evidence-based ones. You’re panning the river of your brain for the gold of evidence-based probability. It’s hard, but there are tricks to making it work. 

One of them is quite simple: Essentially: make a list of all the evidence in support of a conclusion, and compare it to the list of the evidence in opposition. This lets you put far more factors into the analysis than easily fit in your head, and it’s helpful. All of which leads me to: I would love to see a rigorous intelligence analysis of the question, “Is Elon Musk beholden to Vladimir Putin?” 

Unless someone has video or intercepted communications, we won’t get to answer that with clarity. But, for 100 reasons, we have to make educated guesses, such as: Does it make sense for Ukrainian armed forces to communicate on a satellite network Musk controls? 

As we published in April, there are a number of muddy signals to consider—and in the words of one expert, some that aren’t muddy at all. 

Fiona Hill is one of the most reputable voices on the planet on the goings on in Russia, and she recently told Politico’s Maura Reynolds that “it’s very clear that Elon Musk is transmitting a message for Putin.” Her explanation focuses on something that was just too weird and specific for Musk to Tweet: “the suggestion that the Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia should be up for negotiation, because there should be guaranteed water supplies to Crimea.” Hill continues: 

He made this suggestion before Putin’s annexation of those two territories on September 30. It was a very specific reference. Kherson and Zaporizhzhia essentially control all the water supplies to Crimea. Crimea is a dry peninsula. It has aquifers, but it doesn’t have rivers. It’s dependent on water from the Dnipro River that flows through a canal from Kherson. It’s unlikely Elon Musk knows about this himself. The reference to water is so specific that this clearly is a message from Putin.

If there is a pipeline for information to travel from the Kremlin to Elon Musk’s Twitter account, how does it work, what else flows through it, and does it explain, at all, the political leanings of many of Musk’s former PayPal colleagues? 

Recently, Musk has advocated for the election of politicians who have promised to dial back support of Ukraine. He has purchased Twitter and fired many of the people who tried to stop Russian misinformation and disinformation. 

I’m suspicious of anyone with big ideas about Musk and Twitter that fail to address the platform’s biggest problem. Matt Yglesias in Slow Boring: 

The fundamental problem with uncensored, algorithmically-amplified speech is that you are de facto putting a thumb on the scale in favor of misinformation.

Does that matter to the NBA? Yes, in the general sense of billionaires and their opaque finances: Putin and Musk crisscross NBA billionaires all kinds of ways. 

But also, allow me to speculate: Putin himself, and Russian digital-meddling efforts, have aggressively attempted to portray the invasion of Ukraine in World War II terms, reinflaming fears and suspicions from all sides, including and especially about Jews and Nazis. If I were an intelligence analyst, I could present evidence to support the idea we may be catching some of that heat in the NBA presently—this being a league where a digitally-dispersed antisemitic video reached a star player, who’s now being lionized by the digital right wing, which has long been a focal point of Russian meddling efforts. 

Athletes and psychedelics

Psychedelics! Sounds trippy, right? Well, as you don’t need me to tell you, the research is showing rich potential in treating all kinds of mental health issues. 

The Microdose is a Substack newsletter published by the U.C. Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (which I learned about as a 20-year fan of contributor Michael Pollan). Today Jane C. Hu writes about psychedelics in elite sports, especially by interviewing a clinical psychologist at the University of Melbourne who co-authored a paper “exploring the possibility of using psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy as a mental health treatment for athletes.” I encourage you to read the whole thing, but note that Walton quickly steers the conversation to the idea these could be performance-enhancing drugs. Still, many of the world’s best athletes wrestle with problems psychedelics show promise in addressing.

Walton, for his sake, says it’s too soon to conclude much of anything:

My view on this is neutral; I don’t argue that it’s something sports organizations should be doing now, or that they need to do now. But as psychedelics attract more interest and attention, athletes will be doing them, whether in a structured clinical setting or just on their own. It will be important to be ready for it: how will we handle it if athletes want to take part in psychedelic trials? The view of our paper was that this is all going to come, and we should start thinking about what we’re going to do when that happens. 

While these issues are serious, in one way it’s a tad ironic: The substances, banned by most sports leagues because they were once seen as too harmful, could stay on the banned list moving forward because they are too helpful!

Josh Hart!

Portland Trail Blazers @trailblazers

🚨 HART FOR THE WIN 🚨 #RipCity | @joshhart

3:49 AM ∙ Nov 8, 2022

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