The novel futility is about the maiden voyage of a fabulous ocean liner,

a ship far larger than any previously built and labeled unsinkable.

The vessel sets sail for New York from Southampton with a cargo of complacent passengers,

strikes an iceberg in route, goes down.

The ship was called the Titan. So why didn't author Morgan Robertson come out and say it? His

Titan is obviously the Titanic. Both liners were touted as the biggest, most

luxurious, and foolproof. Both were inadequately stocked with lifeboats resulting in heavy casualties,

and both sank at exactly the same spot in the North Atlantic each on a cold April night.

How did the author get away with it?

Because the novel that so accurately described history, in reality, foretold it.

In 1898, 14 years before the real-life Titanic set sail.

So we're walking here down a more narrow hallway here at the convention center.

This is the Hall of Research Papers.

In early 2025, Rich and I attended the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston.

Since 2006, the conference has been bringing together some of the greatest and geekiest minds in sports data.

Let's go this way and come back.

Yeah.

The event was held in the Heinz Convention Center in the city's Back Bay. It's a gray, cavernous building that feels like someone put an old train station on the moon.

It swallowed the thousands of stat heads in attendance, people who had traveled from all over the world to be there.

We went to Sloan to learn about the future of basketball, a future that might look very different

from the present.

That's because ever since Steph Curry started routinely hitting threes from arena parking

...