Music, Fantasy Football, and the Liminal Space Between Data and Narrative: Adam Harstad

Adam Harstad was recently on the Raw Data with P3 Podcast with Rob Collie and Thomas LaRock in an episode titled Epistemic Path Dependency with Adam Harstad. In this excerpt from the transcript, they discuss music and how Adam came to a passion for data. Excerpt has not been reviewed by participants. For the full context, listen to the podcast.

Rob Collie: There's this, and it's a well-known human tendency that we judge experiences predominantly by the very, very end. They've done studies where they'll play people, this beautiful symphony and then right at the very end, they end on a sour note and people will say it ruined the entire symphony. There's 30 minutes of music and it ends on one note. And I just think that's the wrong way of looking at it.

Rob Collie: You had 29 minutes and 50 seconds of just the sublime transcendent experience and 10 seconds of something bad and you end your season on a loss, but the season, isn't just the last game of the season. It's all the anticipation leading up. It's everything you do during the course of the year. A lot of troubles in life are just a matter of perspective and a matter of attitude.

Thomas LaRock: I want to hear one of these now. Is it just a sad trombone at the end? Because I'd just be sitting there laughing. This is the greatest thing ever.

Rob Collie: The meta of it would immediately just like crash over me. Like, are you kidding, you designed an experiment like this?

Adam Harstad: I think it doesn't resolve, you have the progression and it's supposed to resolve on a certain note and they're probably a half step flat. And I don't know if you know that much about music, but if something doesn't resolve, it creates this very real physical tension because you're anticipating it and you're anticipating and you're waiting for it. And it's really a cruel thing to do to someone, but at the end of the day, it doesn't change the first 29 minutes of the symphony.

Thomas LaRock: Tomorrow night I'm going to Tanglewood to see John Williams in the movie night. Now he's 89. I'm pretty sure he'll still be alive for tomorrow, so that's good. But now I'm just thinking he's going to play the Star Wars theme and at the end of it, it's just a sad trombone. I'm just going to be sitting there laughing at the end of all these songs. People are going to be like, "What is wrong with that person?"

Rob Collie: All right. I don't know anything about music theory. I freaking love music. I'm always, always, always deep, deep into music and stuff that I appreciate is usually like on the more complex end and I don't know anything. Let's talk about this for a moment. I heard the Imperial March one time in the major key instead of the minor key. The minor key Imperial March is very foreboding. The major key version sounds like this upbeat, let's go have fun. It's like a clown parade. Explain it to me like I'm five minor key versus major key.

Rob Collie: Have we come to the point where I'm going to understand this in my life?

Adam Harstad: The simple version is minor key sounds sad, major key sounds happy, but that's too simplistic. There are happy songs written in minor keys. There are sad songs written in major keys. It's been a lot of years since I have last taken any music theory courses and that's unfortunately some of the knowledge I've lost during my life.

Rob Collie: Well, that's okay. Path dependency again. Right?

Adam Harstad: Right.

Rob Collie: I've also heard though that it's cultural, certain cultures will actually find the major key to be the sad one and vice versa.

Adam Harstad: Yeah. Most of our experience of music is just based on historical context and our exposure to music. What sounds normal. A lot of our enjoyment of music is actually anticipation. There's pattern recognition and there are certain patterns that are common through music and the brain really loves anticipating those patterns and then when the patterns resolve in the way that we expect them to, the brain rewards us with a jolt of pleasure like, "I knew that was going to happen. That was very enjoyable and pleasant."

Adam Harstad: Sometimes if the patterns resolve in ways, we were not expecting brain results us in a jolt of pleasure because this was fun and new and exciting. I'm eager to see where it goes next. And so, our experience in music is heavily shaped by the patterns and our experience to music prior to that. We can listen to a Western pop song and we're very familiar with the genre, we're familiar with the tropes. We're familiar with, we're going to go first course first. Maybe sometime we'll have a coda.

Adam Harstad: There's the common building blocks of music and artists will change the order of them, they'll change the way they're put together. They'll change the makeup of those blocks, but they're building with the same blocks, whereas we can listen to Eastern music and it just sounds very foreign to us because we don't have that language. We don't have that fluency in it yet.

Tom Larock: It's such an interesting topic, almost like this anticipation. I totally see that.

Rob Collie: And there are some quirky misdirections in music that you wouldn't necessarily expect, but that are incredibly fun when they spring them on you. It's not just personality that I've been drawn to that it kept me reading your stuff over the years. And in fact that wasn't at the beginning at all right. It was the quality of the insight and most of it is data-driven. Most of it is analytical. It's not just about the evidence that you collect. It's also about the way that you process it that I have found valuable over the years in trying to defeat my friends and colleagues in a silly game.

Rob Collie: How did you discover your passion for data?

Adam Harstad: It's funny. I came at it obliquely. I've got a very strong left brain, classically left brain skills, math and seeing patterns and interpolation, things like that. But I think my love of football and my love of fantasy football has actually always been more narratively driven. And I like to say first and foremost, I'm a storyteller. And it's funny you say I'm a data guy. I know data guys who think I'm one of those narrative guys, narrative guys think I'm a data guy, I'm in that liminal space between.

Adam Harstad: For me, it's all about, I have these pressing questions and I think the questions are the interesting part. And I'm looking for any insight, knowledge, any edge I can get to answer those questions. And getting back to path dependency, when I was getting into fantasy football in early, early 2000s, that was really the unexplored space. There's a website called Football Outsiders that was just launching and they were actually looking at data and they're saying, let's compare every play in this situation to every other play in the situation.

Adam Harstad: If you ran for four yards in first and 10, was that a good play? Was that a bad play? Nobody had ever really dug into it. And so, that was the edge. That was where the edge is. And over time as analytics has gotten to be a bigger and bigger part of the sport of football and the hobby of fantasy football, I find often the edge is in this, not really contrarian to analytics, because I think analytics is good and useful and right. Analytics is a way of approaching problems by looking at the data and that's a very, very useful tool.

Adam Harstad: But I think that there's some conventional wisdom that should apply to analytics that has gotten lost along the way in the rush to mine more data. So for me, it's never been specifically about the data. It's been about the questions and the answers. And for most of my career, the data has been the best way to reach those answers, but it's not the only way. It's more about finding the appropriate tool for the appropriate situation.

Rob Collie: I think I'm starting to understand why I felt this remote kinship with you asymmetric, because that's how the internet works with lurkers and publishers. Our team is growing really rapidly at our company and we're a remote team. We're all over the country, even though we're full-time employees, it's a good problem to have, but it's become difficult to keep track of who everybody is. Name, face, okay. But what about personality? It's so hard. Yesterday we started collecting information to make flashcards for everybody.

Rob Collie: Everyone had just to pick a "superpower" or something like that, but not something super professional, but like storyteller. I picked storyteller for me, folksy storytelling would be one of my, "Look out, he's going to do it." And then the football, I'm a data professional. There's no two ways about it. I worked on data tools at Microsoft, I worked on Excel, I worked on power BI, I'm CEO of a data analytics, business intelligence consulting firm. Yes, data professional. But that all started for me in the late '90s with the same sorts of things as what you're talking about.

Rob Collie: Like how do I actually approach this game, fantasy football? How do I approach it more effectively? I stumbled upon the original value-based drafting article years ago, which put the different positions into perspective in terms of relative value. And I was just like, "Ugh" It's like the holy grail. It was this magical unlocking moment and what followed was just reams of spreadsheets and coding and all kinds of things. It was the only times, even though I was a software professional already, I was already working at Microsoft.

Rob Collie: I was never really that into it. It was one of the few times that I was actually into it was when I started doing these sorts of things. Another thing that you wouldn't have the context for is that on this podcast over and over and over again, we talk about how we observe even, the value is in the hybrids of different centers of mass. In the business world of data, it's long been like these completely separate universes where IT was doing some data stuff and business was doing some data stuff and they almost never collaborated.

Rob Collie: And really the software was built to create this divide in the old days, but now there's this rise of these IT/business hybrids. And again, it comes back to all these sorts of things that you were saying conventional wisdom is a shortcut for saying all kinds of things, all kinds of developed expertise and wisdom that you can't just set aside when you're using data. You need to integrate the two. IT can come into a business situation and bring all kinds of technical skill, but they've got a complete blank slate when it comes to the business knowledge of what's actually going on.

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This is an excerpt from Adam Hardsadt’s discussion with Rob Collie and Thomas LaRock on the Raw Data with P3 Podcast. For the context, please listen to the full podcast.Transcript has not been reviewed by participants, and emphasis has been added. P3 Adaptive is a Gold Microsoft Partner. Contact us to turn your data into action in weeks not months.

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