John Amaechi is a former NBA forward/center who became a chartered scientist, professor of leadership at Exeter Business School, and New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, It’s Not Magic: The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders, argues that leadership isn’t bestowed or innate, it’s earned through deliberate skill development.
Tyler and John discuss whether business culture is defined by the worst behavior tolerated, what rituals leadership requires, the quality of leadership in universities and consulting, why Doc Rivers started some practices at midnight, his childhood identification with the Hunchback of Notre Dame and retreat into science fiction, whether Yoda was actually a terrible leader, why he turned down $17 million from the Lakers, how mental blocks destroyed his shooting and how he overcame them, what he learned from Jerry Sloan’s cruelty versus Karl Malone’s commitment, what percentage of NBA players truly love the game, the experience of being gay in the NBA and why so few male athletes come out, when London peaked, why he loved Scottsdale but had to leave, the physical toll of professional play, the career prospects for 2nd tier players, what distinguishes him from other psychologists, why personality testing is “absolute bollocks,” what he plans to do next, and more.
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Recorded September 15th, 2025.
Read the full transcript
TYLER COWEN: Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I’m happy to be chatting with John Amaechi. He is a fellow and chartered scientist of the Institute of Science and Technology. He is a professor of leadership at the University of Exeter Business School, a New York Times and Sunday Times best-selling author.
He has written several books on leadership psychology, management, and a memoir. His newest book is, It’s Not Magic: The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders. And John is also well known for having played seven years in the NBA as a center for the Orlando Magic and Utah Jazz, and also for having played overseas in Europe. John, welcome.
JOHN AMAECHI: Thank you. It’s a lovely introduction. I’d better be good now.
COWEN: Some questions on leadership. You wrote, and I quote, “Culture is defined by the worst behavior tolerated.” What does that mean?
AMAECHI: That is, as glib as it sounds, it is the reality that when you go into a space, if you can observe poor behaviors that nobody challenges, then that is the thing that’s defining the culture, even the small weird things that people do.
So I worked in a company recently, I was brought into a company recently, where some senior leader at 10 years ago must have brought in the habit of emphasizing what you say by banging on the table as you talk. All aspiring senior people, mostly men and all aspiring junior people, mostly men, bang on the table.
And they talked about their benefits and they talked about their pension packages and whatever else. The thing that defined that place was the kind of discursive violence of every meeting being punctuated by fists thudding on desks. So that’s what I mean by it.
COWEN: But institutions or teams or companies that appear dysfunctional, they’re often highly functional in other ways. So if you think how Michael Jordan treated his fellow Chicago Bulls, well, that defined one part of the culture, but the team did incredibly well, right? Cooperated on the court, high level of discipline. They knew not to pass the ball to Bill Cartwright too much. Why is that the thing that defines the culture?
AMAECHI: So, it is the thing that defines the culture, especially because the people listening to you and I talk aren’t going to pay their aging center $5 million a year. They aren’t going to pay the vast majority of their players over a million dollars a year, and they aren’t going to have a player, even one of the caliber anywhere near of a Michael Jordan.
So we can take the example that is as rare as, I don’t know, Adamantium and have it be the thing we go by, or we can say that most companies have extraordinarily average people within it, and so they don’t get to play by the same rules.
Plus, I would point out all those people who loved watching, I’ve never seen it, the program that they did about Michael Jordan and his years in that, look at the number of people who didn’t show up, the number of people who wouldn’t appear in that program despite having perhaps made their mark, earned their stripes and certainly earned championships with him, they wouldn’t even show up on his testimonial show.
COWEN: But say Paul McCartney and the Beatles, a fine British band, George Harrison ended up hating him, Steve Jobs and Apple, those might be exceptions, but they seem to be exceptions that account for a large part of the GDP or the cultural impact of a sector.
AMAECHI: Yeah, they might well be. I would say to anybody who wants to model themselves after Steve Jobs, be that brilliant and that compelling, and that insightful and that prescient, and you can get away with it.
But I would also say anyone whose idea of being a great leader is that their superpower is somehow intrinsically linked with their ability to be an asshole, has misunderstood the human condition, because nobody performs at their best when they’re frightened, nobody. It’s physically impossible.
COWEN: What are the kinds of rituals that leadership needs?
AMAECHI: The kinds of rituals it needs? Connective rituals. Rituals that let people know that you aren’t just a transaction to them. Those types of things are important. What other rituals? Rituals that give direction in times of trouble and strife now when so many things are going wrong. And not just inside work with transformations, but outside of work with wars and social, political upheaval. So giving people direction and whatever rituals you can have around that.
Rituals that show you care and that you’re slightly human I think are important, too. I know that that’s not popular with certainly some of the leaders you’ve modeled and talked about. They weren’t interested in being seen as human. But as a 6’ 9” person of some size, I can tell you it’s actually quite useful for people to know you’re not just a frightening monster all the time.
COWEN: You are a leader. What’s a specific ritual you use?
AMAECHI: We have Yorkshire Golden Hour. So, there’s a tea in Britain called Yorkshire Gold and it’s my favorite tea. And so we have this meeting where all the team comes together where we explicitly do not talk about work, but it’s just a time to catch up. We’re a mostly virtual organization. It’s one of the few times we get to catch up, and it’s a place where we get access to each other’s lives if we are civil and courteous and kind enough.
COWEN: When you were in college, and I do not mean your time spent playing basketball, but what was a leadership mistake you observed there?
AMAECHI: Well, I’ve railed against the impact of college sports on the athletes themselves. I witnessed, and I will say this, not at Penn State, not to be protective of Penn State, I’ve been vocally critical of Penn State over the years, but not at Penn State, but other places where I got to know players, it was very clear that no responsibility was being taken for them as people outside of their athletics.
They weren’t going to graduate, they weren’t attending classes. They were protected from doing that as long as they performed on the court. To me, it was one of the most obvious abdications of leadership I saw at a very early age.
COWEN: How about the Jesuit high school you went to in Toledo? Although you’re British, you went in Toledo. Right? Our Toledo. How were they at leadership?
AMAECHI: I don’t know that my mind was oriented towards it to notice it. What I did notice was if there’s something that they had, it was this constant rhetoric towards the tenets of leadership. I know they were Jesuit tenets, but they were talking about things like, “Being a man for others.”
We were an all-boys school. That was the constant mantra being repeated, and it did seem like many of the people there, teachers, educators, believed that mantra to be true. I think there’s a selflessness part of being a leader that’s important if you want to be sustainably high performing, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever used the man for others terminology myself.
COWEN: There’s a stereotype that overall people who work in consulting are not very good at leadership, that they’re a bit bureaucratized. Do you think that’s true? And if so, why did that happen?
AMAECHI: I think it’s easy to hide behind bureaucracy. If you’re not interested in the work, the graft, the effort, the skill-gaining that’s required to be a positive leader, then bureaucracy is very useful to you. And so I can imagine how some people who aren’t interested in the craft of leadership would gather around themselves as much bureaucracy as possible to hide the fact that they were uninterested in leadership.
I can see how that would develop. I have seen consultants who are minded towards leadership. I will say that they all seem to have come from, like I’m thinking in my head of somebody who used to work in the NHS, so they used to be an actual doctor, and somebody else who used to be a physics teacher in university. So they all seem to have different orientations before they became consultants.
COWEN: Putting aside political figures, whose leadership impresses you today?
AMAECHI: That is a very, very thin sheet. That’s not true. I work with a group of chairs, of FTSE companies in the United Kingdom, and there are a couple of them who are notably remarkably interested in learning leadership. That’s probably the thing I noticed most about them as people who are extraordinarily experienced.
If there’s a name for American people, it would be a sports figure. It’s probably Doc Rivers, somebody whose leadership was very evident to me while I was in Orlando, really obvious that he was doing things that I hadn’t seen before from other coaches.
COWEN: Why did Doc make your practice start at midnight, at least one of your practices?
AMAECHI: Well, yeah, the beginning of the season, I think you talked about rituals at the beginning. There was a ritual that we did, everybody, we started practice at midnight. And we did in that practice at midnight, the ritual of this sprinting exercise, we had to sprint across the width of the court in a certain number of seconds. Everybody had to make it, and if you didn’t make it, you couldn’t start practice.
And it was just this ritual that kept us focused, even in the off season knowing that we were going to do that. And it set a tone, I don’t think maybe now more than back in my day, but people think basketball was they kind of worked their way into shape, so they weren’t really minded to be in shape in the pre-season. And Doc set a precedent with that ritual that we would be in shape on day one. In fact, day zero.
COWEN: Do you agree with the stereotype that the nonstar players have a better chance of being great coaches? Because Doc was a good player but not a true star. Right?
AMAECHI: I’m not sure. Wasn’t he an All-Star?
COWEN: I think so, but he’s not thought of as a player. He’s thought of mainly as a coach.
AMAECHI: See, the scientist to me just says there’s 1,000 confounding factors in that, right? So, if you are so remarkable as a player, then you don’t have to go into coaching. Your life doesn’t have to revolve around sport because you could do any number of things other than that. You could just sit on your laurels and play golf if you wanted to.
So there’s part of me that thinks that if you’re an excellent superstar, maybe you have 1,000 other things that you can be interested in because you’re sitting on a pile of gold.
COWEN: How were you influenced by Victor Hugo?
AMAECHI: Victor Hugo? Oh my goodness, I haven’t thought about that for ages. So I vibed, if you like, with the The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I’m trying to think, is that the story?
COWEN: That’s the one you discuss in your memoir.
AMAECHI: That is so long ago. As I mentioned to your colleague before, I have forgotten half of the book that I’ve written now, nevermind the one I wrote in 2007.
But there was a description of the Hunchback in that book that when I was a child was a description that I thought was me. I still have this experience today, and it’s part of the reason I don’t leave my house very much unless I have to for work, and it’s that wherever I go, the first look I get from people is usually one of terror and of fear because I’m 6’ 9”, 150 kilo — that’s very large in American pounds — Black person. So essentially our society’s version of a super predator.
And everywhere I looked, people thought I was stupid. They thought I was dangerous, and they thought I was emotionally illiterate, too. And that was the description that was given in passing of the hunchback. So yeah, that was my introduction to seeing myself reflected in literature.
COWEN: But you read that and then what happened? You think like, “Oh, it’s okay to be this way,” or you think, “My goodness, they all consider me a hunchback. This is terrible”?
AMAECHI: No. Well, at the time, I just retreated. I retreated into books. It’s why I read so much as a child, science fiction. I retreated into worlds that were distant in time and space from my own and I hid there. That was what happened. That and Hardy Boys books for some reason, which although I knew they would always be the same, I somehow liked them. And that’s what I did instead.
Nowadays, it’s different. Now I accommodate for the fact that I know most people will look at me and not see professor of leadership. They will see something else. And so I now contrive my surroundings to help people feel safe.
COWEN: What did you like best in science fiction?
AMAECHI: Future history is what I liked best in science fiction. It is so immensely cool. I use this all the time in my work today. The future history is the idea that science fiction writers with such clarity, with such vividness that you can imagine that they’re not just writing about something they’re making up, that they’ve visited the place that they’re writing about and are coming back to report it to you.
It’s such a powerful tool in trying to change people’s minds. It’s the same technique that is commonly called the “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King, is a future history. It’s not a list of grievances. “Could you stop biting my people with Alsatians? Could you let us drink at the same water fountain?” It is, “I have a dream that white boys and Black boys will play together.” It’s a vision of the future articulated in such a way that everybody involved can feel safe.
COWEN: Are Yoda and Obi-Wan good leaders or do they just screw everything up and manipulate Luke Skywalker, by your standards?
AMAECHI: I am deeply entrenched in it. I have a lightsaber on my desk behind me, but Jedi made so many mistakes, so many mistakes. At the height of their power in the Old Republic, they had an opportunity to evolve and to not be such a monastic and pointless, ritually driven group of people. And instead, they doubled down and they essentially became the galaxy’s police, which was never going to lead to ingratiation.
It’s a really difficult one for me because very much I feel like I would be a Jedi in the mold of, I don’t know, Mace Windu or Jolee Bindoo or something like that, what people mistakenly call the gray Jedi. But I don’t know, they made mistakes and Yoda certainly made mistakes. I hope that he made up for them with the most recent actions as a ghost.
COWEN: And you like the prequels, don’t you?
AMAECHI: I do like some parts of the prequels. So A New Hope, that will always be my stone. But I think some of the prequels suffer from the attacks of men who like science fiction, but lack imagination. And what they really like about science fiction is that it was always about some bloke who got the scantily clad woman at the end of the story, the 1950s type of robot pal, helpless damsel to rescue type of thing. And I think if you look at the prequels through a slightly different lens, it actually helps the story evolve and helps the Jedi seem slightly less hapless at times.
COWEN: What is it you learn about mentorship and menteeship from those stories?
AMAECHI: Ooh, that it’s very often mostly useful for one party and not the other, and often the party it’s supposed to help most, it doesn’t. That’s just the truth of mentorship. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about reverse mentoring in organizations or Padawan and Master Jedi relationships in Star Wars, the party that’s supposed to be learning doesn’t always do the learning, and the party that should be teaching is often the one that gets taught.
COWEN: Now, as you know, you once had a six-year $17 million offer from the Los Angeles Lakers and you turned it down to stay with the Orlando Magic for what I think was $600,000 for one year and not a guarantee. What did your mentors tell you at the time?
AMAECHI: That it was stupid and that I should take the money, and that Los Angeles is nice to live in, and the weather is hot there, but I lived in Orlando so it was hot there, too. Yeah, most of the advice I had was that I should take the money and run. And people should understand, I don’t believe in loyalty, so I think it’s a ridiculous concept. It feels very quid pro quo to me and I’m not interested in that.
But I am interested in principle and to me, Doc and the team had made a very strong decision to keep me when they need not have kept me. It happened that I played very well for them, but there was no reason for that. And I know that they kept me in part because I was cheaper than the veterans they cut. But they made a decision that it gave me a chance to do what I’d always said I wanted to do, which is to play a key part and play and start in an NBA team.
And at the end of that year, I had an opportunity to be a person of principle and reward those who had rewarded me. And I knew that it would likely lead to my ejection from the team a year later when more sexy players came along. But in terms of Doc, I felt I had a principle to repay with that.
COWEN: Looking back, do you feel your mentors were correct? At the Lakers, you would’ve been behind Shaquille O’Neal. Right? To be clear.
AMAECHI: True. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I also would’ve had four championships without lifting a finger, which would’ve been great, right? But I think the reality is that, again, if it’s about principle, I had a principled idea in my head that I should stay, and I knew that it would not necessarily be reciprocated.
And nowadays, I work with very influential people in business and large organizations and they often ask me if I can be trusted. They often ask me how much my word is worth. And there’s very few people in this world who can say about $17 million.
COWEN: If you had taken the Lakers offer, how do you think your current views on management, leadership, psychology would be different? Do you have any sense of that?
AMAECHI: That’s an excellent question.
COWEN: You’d have four rings, you would’ve had to lift some number of fingers, but you would not have been starting.
AMAECHI: No, I think one of the things that Doc taught me was that there’s a role to play in the locker room and on the practice floor, even if it’s not manifest on the court. And I think that I would’ve had to take that role incredibly seriously in order to feel a sense of my contribution on a team like that.
But I’m not sure that it would change me fundamentally, because in fairness, it is my studies and my experiences outside of sport that most inform my philosophical and psychological approach. It’s just that sport gives me better stories to illustrate my philosophy, I suppose.
COWEN: Did Jerry West not do a good enough job recruiting?
AMAECHI: He did an excellent job recruiting me. I had an excellent dinner at an Italian restaurant with him and Phil Jackson. They laid out the next seven years for me in vivid detail. I went to their practice facility and their arena. They showed me a house.
I remember distinctly them showing me a house on the seaside because they knew that I loved the sea, and I said to them, “I can’t afford this house.” And they said, “You will be able to.” I remember how intoxicating it felt, but I am always slightly wary of intoxicants.
COWEN: But if Jerry West and Phil Jackson thought you were so good, and they were, as you know, incredible judges of talent, why didn’t Orlando want to keep you?
AMAECHI: I think they had a different plan. And also, I didn’t respond to the anguish of my experience as well as I might. So, by the time I left Orlando, I wasn’t starting and I wasn’t playing a huge number of minutes, and I almost had a mental block on some of my skills. I remember it distinctly and painfully.
COWEN: You mean like free throw shooting, or?
AMAECHI: Listen, free throw shooting, shooting jump shots. It was amazing. There were days when I just couldn’t hit the side of a barn, and that’s going from a person who was really efficient in my early year with Orlando. And again, the team dynamic had shifted and changed, too.
But yeah, I wasn’t a great player at the end of that season. I was a very average, average player at the end of that season. And I’m not surprised that they went with younger, better talent. I don’t obviate them of their part in why I felt that anguish. But yeah, I probably would’ve dropped me, too.
COWEN: How do those mental blocks work? Can you get rid of them by sheer acts of will or you need rituals, you need mentor, or what happens?
AMAECHI: You need therapy, you need people to talk to, or coaching in a kind of mental performance and mental health sense. You need somebody you can talk to about the nature of your feelings. Imagine knowing the exact number that is your annual salary spreading out over seven years and watching it disappear in front of you, despite the fact that you knew it was a principled decision.
And that’s where I sat with it, and I sat very much alone with it. The team did not have therapists and psychologists as they do now. And I sat alone with that. By the way, I was studying for my doctorate as I played, but it didn’t make any difference. The stuff I was learning theoretically just didn’t seem to help me personally.
COWEN: So later, you’re on the Utah Jazz. What is it you learned from Jerry Sloan?
AMAECHI: That being a dick is not the synonymous with being a leader.
COWEN: And he was one of those and not the other?
AMAECHI: Yeah. I know that he’s beloved, right? I know that he’s beloved in Utah, and I am certainly not, but that man called me names that would make your toes curl. I was called uppity on regular occasions. I was treated as if my studying for a doctorate was a betrayal of basketball.
This coming from the man who had not touched a basketball until he was 17, and in six years from not touching a basketball was starting in the NBA. No other player has done that. And I came to America while my mom was dying of cancer in Britain. And then this man is calling me the C-word and questioning my commitment?
COWEN: About life, not playing basketball, but you feel you learned anything from John Stockton and Karl Malone?
AMAECHI: Yes, huge amounts. Huge amounts, especially from Karl. He was a surprisingly funny, kind, driven, ambitious athlete. I didn’t know him off the floor, but around the game, that’s who he was. We were often punished for our performance if it was not optimal. And because John and Karl were older in the context of athletes, Jerry would punish us to run endless sprints. And these two guys say, “You guys just sit out,” and they would sit out.
But Karl, I remember looking up during sprints once and seeing John Stockton reading USA Today as we were just slugging up and down the court, and I looked over and Karl had demanded that one of the trainers bring him a bike. And he wasn’t just kind of keeping warm, he was leathering it on the sidelines. And I just thought, “How remarkable, best player on the team, best player perhaps in the history of Utah basketball. And there he is at 30 odd years old,” which was old for a basketball player, “At 30-odd years old, leathering it on the side while we slog on the court.”
COWEN: Of NBA players as a whole, what percentage do you think truly love the game?
AMAECHI: It’s a hard que stion to answer. Well, let me give a number first, otherwise, it’s just frustrating. 40%. And a further 30% like the game, and 20% of them are really good at the game and they have other things they want to do with the opportunities that playing well in the NBA grants them.
But make no mistake, even that 30% that likes the game and the 40% that love the game, they also know that they like what the game can give them and the opportunities that can grow for them, their families and generation, they can make a generational change in their family’s life and opportunities. It’s not just about love. Love doesn’t make you good at something. And this is a mistake that people make all the time. Loving something doesn’t make you better, it just makes the hard stuff easier.
COWEN: Are there any of the true greats who did not love playing?
AMAECHI: Yeah. So I know all former players are called legends, whether you are crap like me or brilliant like Hakeem Olajuwon, right? And so I’m part of this group of legends and I’m an NBA Ambassador as well. So I go around all the time with real proper legends. And a number of them I know, and so I’m not going to throw them under the bus, but it’s the way we talk candidly in the van going between events. It’s like, “Yeah, this is a job now and it was a job then, and it was a job that wrecked our knees, destroyed our backs, made it so it’s hard for us to pick up our children.”
And so it’s a job. And we were commodities for teams who often, at least back in those days, treated you like commodities. So yeah, there’s a lot of superstars, really, really excellent players. But that’s the problem, don’t conflate not loving the game. And also, don’t be fooled. In Britain there’s this habit of athletes kissing the badge. In football, they’ve got the badge on their shirt and they go, “Mwah, yeah.” If that fools you into thinking that this person loves the game, if them jumping into the stands and hugging you fools you into thinking that they love the game, more fool you.
COWEN: Michael Cage, he loved the game. Right?
AMAECHI: Michael Cage, I don’t know if he loved the game, I just know he’s awesome. Shoulders is awesome. That man, oh my goodness. He was what they used to call a veteran’s veteran. If you needed sage advice, he had it. And not just about sport. I remember me and Bobby Sura were rookies at the same time in Cleveland. Bobby Sura was very, very good. I was not. And Bobby came in with a new car, and then the next day came in with another new car.
Michael Cage followed us in. I was in a green Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo that I’d had for years and years and years, and he followed us into the underground car park. This is before practice. And he just said, “Is that a new car?” He said, “Give me the keys.” That man took Bobby and the car back to the car sales place and made them take it back. I was like, “That’s what you do as a veteran.” I remember him giving me advice about not buying too many clothes, not too many suits because you have to pay tax and you need to keep hold of some money. He was a good man. He was a good man.
COWEN: Man. What was Vernon Maxwell like, referring to your Houston days?
AMAECHI: I didn’t play with Vernon. I knew him then or I knew of him then. People called him crazy. I’m a psychologist. I’m not much into people calling people crazy, but people called him crazy.
And I think sometimes people mistake intensity for crazy. And he was incredibly intense and not always as self-regulated as I might think is appropriate. But you couldn’t fault him as a person who wanted to win. I mean just must win.
COWEN: Why do you think so few NBA players, and indeed from many other professional sports, but so few have come out as gay? If you look at the women’s league, a large number, whether lesbian or bisexual or other things, it’s very common, but not for the men.
AMAECHI: So the women’s league, the W is not a good comparison because I don’t believe this myself, but we must be honest and say that many men do not care about women. And I don’t mean men don’t care about women’s sports. I meant what I said. Many men don’t care about women. And so what women do, bisexual, lesbian, whatever else, is immaterial to them. There are men there who couldn’t play in a rec league who think they can beat WNBA players. And so they don’t care about it. So what they do is inconsequential.
What men do is important to other men. And indeed, my understanding of straight men is that most of what straight men do is in order to attract the attention of other straight men. And so when they look at the league, they’re really interested in making sure that everybody there is appropriately heterosexual. It must be confusing for them now because the league is still very heterosexual, but fashion and other things mean that the league slips in its queerness every once in a while.
Why are there not more? Because the consequences of being queer in American society are still profound. They’re profound in a small town in Texas, and they’re profound if you’re on national television and half the sponsors of your team and certainly the owners are homophobic. So, there’s really practical reasons not to be out in America in a country that seems to want queer people to go the way of the dodo.
COWEN: And how was it for you back then?
AMAECHI: Lonely.
COWEN: How did the other players treat you overall, without naming names?
AMAECHI: Really well. There were a number players who knew because I told them, because they asked. Because for the most part, with one exception, when people asked me, I told them. And so a number of them knew and it was very much a shrug and not a big deal, and they treated me with kindness.
But I also had experiences of people I cared about deeply as colleagues, as teammates, saying offhand comments that I knew they didn’t mean because I’d talked to them in the locker room, but were part of the ritual of masculinity, which is diminishing women, diminishing gay people, making fun of, I don’t know, that those gay characters off In Living Color and things like that, that were hurtful even as I knew they weren’t aimed at me.
COWEN: And you think today there are many male NBA players in the closet for similar reasons?
AMAECHI: I would encourage people to have a more nuanced view of being in the closet. So, just because you don’t know doesn’t mean that they’re in the closet. So, I’m in an interesting position now where I’m at once incredibly well known to be gay by certain people, but there’s a whole generation of people who’ve no idea of it, and there’s a whole context with my work who don’t necessarily know either.
But just because there’s some people who don’t know doesn’t mean I’m not out. I have a partner, we go out, and so it’s a known thing. There are players right now who are out in the same way I am. Some of their colleagues, some of their teammates, some of their administrative staff, and some of their friends and some of their family will know that they’re gay, but they simply haven’t announced it on the Jumbotron.
COWEN: How was it for you in college? So you’re in a small college town in Pennsylvania, you’re quite tall, as you’ve mentioned, large frame, prominent, easily recognized, people would go to the basketball games. And do people see you in ways where they start figuring out you might be gay or is it somehow all still invisible?
AMAECHI: So I had the ultimate advantage, I didn’t realize this early on, but I had the ultimate advantage in that Americans at that time didn’t seem to be able to distinguish between somebody being British and somebody being gay. And so they looked at me and anything that I did, I remember I wore this T-shirt, which is from a famous advert in the United Kingdom, Wallace & Gromit.
COWEN: Sure.
AMAECHI: Right? Yeah, you’ve got the program here now, but Wallace & Gromit. And I wore this Gromit T-shirt and it had some ridiculous words on it, but it’s very cutesy and definitely not what athletes wore at the time. And I heard people like, “Yeah, yeah, well, he’s British.” And that happened all the time for stuff.
So, I think part of the reason I skated through my college experience, although many people now tell me they knew I was gay, I can’t tell whether they knew or they’re just saying it now, but I think it was that confusion for people because they heard my voice and saw my face and that didn’t make sense anyway. I had people who were like, “All British people are white.” And so it was central Pennsylvania in the ’90s, what can I say?
COWEN: And was any of this different in your non-American, non-NBA teams overseas?
AMAECHI: Well, there was plenty of vociferous homophobia, but our lives were less connected in Europe. This is not to say I didn’t really like my teammates, but in the NBA you are just with each other relentlessly. And yet, in Europe there are national team breaks, and there’s only one or two games a week, so there’s just more time to be away from your team and away from each other’s company.
And so, you get to know your team much less well. Unless you are overtly invited to someone else’s house, you live separate lives and then you come together twice a week for games and three times a week for practice. But other than that, you don’t see each other.
COWEN: And the stereotype of African American male communities being especially homophobic, do you think that’s true?
AMAECHI: No, it is not true. What is true is that the connector there, or when you look at the data, the factor that is most predictive of homophobia is religiosity. And because many African American communities are also more highly religious, it is the religious element of that, not the skin color or ethnicity that determines the homophobia.
It is also true to say that when you look at it in the United Kingdom and you look at Black Caribbean, Black African communities, very often their homophobia comes from imperial colonialism. It comes from the fact that the British brought homophobic rules to those lands, and ironically, we now then criticize those places for holding onto the same rules that we imposed on them 300, 400 years ago.
COWEN: Now, where in England were you born?
AMAECHI: Stockport. It’s near Manchester.
COWEN: And now you live in or near Exeter. Right?
AMAECHI: Now I live in London and I travel to Exeter for teaching. It’s only an hour and a half on the train.
COWEN: So you’ve seen London through quite a few different decades. In your view, just for you personally, when was peak London?
AMAECHI: I think I missed it.
COWEN: Maybe it’s yet to come.
AMAECHI: Well, it could be that too, in which case I’ll probably miss it because I’ll be in my house. But it strikes me that peak London was like the ’60s. Prior to the vociferous racism of the ’70s and just after the kind of introduction of mind-altering drugs that expanded people’s horizons a little bit. I think there was something about that time in terms of music and art that was really fascinating. It’s not my era and I don’t know it well, but it just strikes me that that was an era.
COWEN: Do you have a sense that right now there’s this huge nostalgia boom for the music of Oasis in England, and it has to do in part with the sense that the 1990s, at least in perceptions were a better, happier era than today?
AMAECHI: Yeah. Well, that is a fundamental delusion of our time right now. Everybody hearkens back to a period of time that they believe is somehow better in numerous, if not all ways. There’s really good research on this. Every generation has a sense that there was a period of time that was right. Every generation has a sense that there has been a moral and substantively principled decline in society, and it’s never borne out in reality. It’s never borne out in reality.
All of this make America great stuff, all of this make Britain great again, all of this give me my country back, as we are experiencing in Britain at the moment, who’s us that wants our country back and what era do you want? Do you want the era when men died at 36 of black lung? Do you want the era when men had no internal and emotional life and were loneliest, because certainly they were as lonely as they are now? Do you want the time when women couldn’t vote? And if you do, what does that say about you as a human being?
There’s no time in the past that was good, it wasn’t better. And if you do think it’s better, the only way that’s true is if you’re part of the aristocracy. And I don’t mean if you are rich now, I mean you’re part of the aristocracy. Because if you aren’t part of the aristocracy now, you go back a couple of generations and you are working for somebody in the most abhorrent conditions imaginable.
COWEN: But just subjectively, why does the feeling of failure and also nostalgia seem so strong in the England of right now? Because my sense in the 1990s, people were more forward-looking and it’s like, “Oh, we’re turning over a new leaf. This is so exciting. Cool Britannia.” I never hear that now. It’s all about how things are going to hell.
AMAECHI: Well, we are being told that they’re going to hell.
COWEN: But what has changed? Why is the perception different?
AMAECHI: Well, our politicians are grifters who don’t have a decent policy idea to rub together. But what they do know is that they can tell you that the reason for your pain is not your fault. The reason for your loss is not your fault. The reason for your condition is not your fault. It’s the fault of that person over there.
And that’s what leads to a society that people think is crumbling. The selective use of video. Right now, you go online and you can see these examples of London is almost burning, right? But London isn’t burning, crime has been dropping in London for the last decade. So the reality of the situation doesn’t match the fervor of people’s rhetoric. So no wonder people think the place is falling to pieces because powerful people with vested interests love to tell you that it is.
COWEN: What is most underrated about London for you?
AMAECHI: Food. Food. It always quite annoys me. I go to America and people are like, “Oh, your food is just stodgy, terrible.” And listen, there is stodgy food that I would consider terrible, right? I live in just the city, not quite the east end of London, and there’s food here like eels in what they call liquor, which is this green sauce. It’s not my cup of tea, right?
So this food I think is bad, but this place is a product of our colonial past, and as such, there is unbelievably good food from everywhere in the world on your doorstep. I ate vegan Korean food yesterday and it was amazing. And the day before, it was Malay, and the day before it was fish and chips. I have that option every day.
COWEN: Which part of the United States did you find the most interesting?
AMAECHI: I lived in Arizona. I lived in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I loved it there for so many reasons, but found it confusing because it was the first place that I realized that you could hate people that you couldn’t live without.
It was the first place that I went when I realized that this swathe of the population that might be undocumented or might be first-generation immigrants from Spanish-speaking Latin places could both be derided as the cause of all pain and yet be the backbone of an economy.
It was a remarkable experience to watch it happening. I left Arizona because of SB 1070, the state law that said, “If you look brown, they can stop and ask you for your papers.” I left the state, I left the States then.
COWEN: What year was that?
AMAECHI: Oh, God, I don’t remember. I just remember seeing the law passed and thinking, “How can I be in a place where the people who do everything for us can’t get to work without being intimidated by the authorities?”
COWEN: Do you still follow the NBA and basketball?
AMAECHI: I do. I’m an NBA Ambassador, so I don’t have any choice. And again, it’s not because I hate basketball, it’s just I could eat cake and read a book instead, and that’s my preference nowadays.
So I’ve got access, all the former players have got access to the NBA League Pass. So, what I tend to do is watch the condensed games to keep me up to date. I haven’t watched any of the Summer League except for some clips on TikTok.
COWEN: Are there parts of the game or rules or practices that you would change?
AMAECHI: I definitely couldn’t have been a coach because I never had any leanings when it came to that either way. It always felt to me like at the beginning of the year when officials explain the new rule changes, I was like, “I don’t know what problem you’re trying to solve, but okay.” That tended to be my approach.
And so even now, I look at the game and I respect it for its evolution. I know that there are some and they are better players than I who talk about how the games changed and it’s no good anymore because people just shoot threes and whatever else.
But I do remember similar critique of the grind days when people would just mash the crap out of each other and the scores would be in the 70s. So, I do feel like the league simply tries to respond to what people want, and then people change their mind about what they want.
COWEN: Some people say in the last few years, there’ve been too many injuries for whatever reason, Tyrese Haliburton, Jayson Tatum, and these are injuries that really have mattered for championship titles. Is that just random noise or there’s something in the structure of how people are playing that has actually led to more injuries?
AMAECHI: I’ve had two back surgical procedures this year. You cannot be 350 pounds and play three or four times a week for an entire season and imagine that it’s anything than dumb luck that you don’t get seriously hurt. And the consequences for your body, I can tell you, are profound.
I have had two, what are they called that women have when they are pregnant? It’s the injection that’s anesthetic. I forget what it’s called now, but people listening will know if their partners have had children or they’ve had children. And I’ve had two of those this year, which is unbelievable, just so I can walk. So yeah, people get hurt because you play three or four games a week. And if you care about the players so much, then demand less games a week.
COWEN: Do you ever try to talk young players out of an NBA career?
AMAECHI: No.
COWEN: I don’t mean the untalented, but those who might plausibly do it? No, never. Why not?
AMAECHI: Absolutely not.
COWEN: It’s worth it?
AMAECHI: Yeah. What I try and do is to help them to understand that any role, any job, anywhere where your occupation is your definition will lead you to harm. And basketball is one of the most intoxicating things for that. You don’t just play basketball, you’re a basket baller. You don’t just do the sport and shoot the shots, you’re a shooter. And my thing is I never was a basketball player. I just played basketball.
And that distinction helped give me distance enough to know that there was a life when I was 35 years old that would have to be lived for some time hopefully, where basketball wouldn’t be a feature in it, at least not playing. And that’s what I did. That’s what I tell the young people now I talk to, “Go for it, commit to it, make a plan, drive your body, recuperate sensibly, and go for it. But remember, you are not what you do.”
COWEN: Let’s say we take a player, maybe they’re drafted number 22 in the second year of college. They play for a team for three years. They show some promise, but it doesn’t take off. They get injured, they play a year in Europe, a year in Israel, and then somehow their career’s over. Pretty typical story, right? People like that, what do they end up doing? They’re not so wealthy that they don’t have to worry about earning a living.
AMAECHI: So, if you’ve driven yourself to be in the NBA, and you’ve managed the disappointment and you’ve played in Europe as well, because that’s not chopped liver either, then the chances are you’ve got the grind and the planning skills and the kind of stick-to-it-iveness to find yourself another role. It may not be the sexiest role in the world, but not everybody is going to end up on their knees, which I think is the implication lots of people think that athletes like that will.
I think it helps if you graduate. I think it helps if you’ve got a basic bachelor’s in something. But all of these players can find themselves gainfully employed somewhere because they’re willing to work and learn, which is the watchwords of playing professional sport.
Also, more importantly than that, I should have said this first, more importantly than that, if you played professional sport, you’ve learned to embrace and even love mundanity, the boring, the repetitive. And if you can embrace the boring and the repetitive, there is no job you can’t be good at.
COWEN: Is there a happiness cliff when you leave? So there’s all this adulation, women chase after you, maybe you’re on television, you’re flown now in private planes, and then that ends. Do people become miserable until they adjust, or it’s like a relief, “Phew, I’m out of there”?
AMAECHI: So, the things you miss are some of the logistical things, right? The idea of driving up to the side of a plane, leaving your keys in the car, somebody grabs your bags and put it into the back of the plane and then they drive your car off. And then when you land, it’s there again, heated up, heated seats on, that’s great and can’t be replaced. Private planes can’t be replaced.
But for the most part, there’s a sense of relief with an opportunity to switch yourself from this one-dimensional being who’s at the behest of the fat man in row 2C. And now, you get an opportunity to reinvent yourself using all the skills that made you brilliant in basketball. And I mean in the mechanisms of becoming brilliant. It’s not shooting and passing, but the idea of how you got so good at those things, there’s an opportunity for you reinvent it. And more than that, for most players, if you’ve had a decent career, five years or so, there’s an opportunity to just rest.
I laughed when I retired. I remember when I was told that I was traded to New York, I was in a car, I was in Houston. My family had come to visit me for Christmas and I got a call from Jeff Van Gundy, JVG, and he had said, “I’m sorry, you’ve been traded to New York, and they’ll be in touch in a couple of days and let you know what’s what.”
I didn’t say it to him, but I hung up. It was on speakerphone, my family could hear it and they just sat in silence and I was like, “I’m done.” And I remember just laughing, laughing for a car journey, “I’m done.” It was great. I’m fat now, which is less fun, and my knees hurt, but I’ve got a job that I’m an all-star in instead of being a bench player.
COWEN: And your decision to become a professor at Exeter or just to become a professor more generally, what led you to want to do exactly that?
AMAECHI: Credibility. Credibility. I think there is just a part of it. You mentioned before, the monster kind of analogy. I do everything I can to help people see that I have something to offer them in this new context, and being a professor is part of that. Teaching students who know more than you.
And I know lots of people say that and think it’s bollocks, but it’s not. They are closer to the data, graduate students are closer to the science than I am. I often get informed by them newest things that are happening.
My value entirely to graduate students is, “How do you apply what you now know theoretically to this pragmatic ever-changing world to the practicalities of all of these different businesses?” And that’s my value to them. So yeah, it’s credibility and it’s joy.
COWEN: Do many of your students know who you are?
AMAECHI: No. It’s brilliant. It’s really, really fun. Obviously, they are subjected to my books, so they’re assigned my books to read, they have no choice. And one of them, when they were reading my last book, The Promises of Giants, they were like, “Oh, I didn’t know you played sport.”
But it was just like that. They had no concept of, even though I’m sure they must’ve known what the NBA is, they’re just like, “Oh, I didn’t know you played some sport.” I was like, “Yeah, I played some sport.” And even now, I’ve got clients, commercial clients, no idea, no idea at all. Especially in Europe and the UK, just no idea at all that I played. I find it gratifying, actually.
COWEN: I knew you played, in fact, I saw you, I think one time Orlando came to play in Washington D.C., if my memory serves correctly.
AMAECHI: Oh, boy. One of my early memorable games happened against Washington in Washington, D.C. I scored 12 points in the third and fourth quarter, and we beat Washington coming off the bench. And it was one of the first games and I was like, “Oh, shit, I might be quite good at this.” Yeah.
COWEN: That may be why I remember you. Does Dwight Howard deserve to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer?
AMAECHI: Oof.
COWEN: Because he has, what, these nine incredible years, but then quite a long career that’s entirely nonexceptional?
AMAECHI: Yeah. You can’t criticize people for continuing to be paid at the highest level by people who rate you just — but most people won’t respect what he brings off the court, I would imagine. I can’t imagine he’s managed to stick around on these teams being less than his kind of former self and not bringing anything else to the table. So yeah.
COWEN: What did he bring off the court?
AMAECHI: I don’t know. I didn’t know the man, right? But it’s just, if he’s coming back, there are cheaper ways to have veteran talent on your team. And there are cheaper ways to have a former All-Star on your team. There are just cheaper ways of having that slot filled.
And I can’t imagine, if he was problematic, if he wasn’t delivering anything in terms of wisdom, shared wisdom, shared cultural insights, something else in terms of the performance of the team. I just can’t imagine they’d keep bringing him back. I could be wrong. Maybe they’re dumb and they don’t mind spending millions of pounds on people who don’t bring anything to the table, but I doubt it.
COWEN: When you look back on your different careers, do you have any major regrets?
AMAECHI: Oh, God, yeah. Thousands.
COWEN: But it’s worked out great for you. So why have so many regrets?
AMAECHI: I have regrets that do not anchor me, right? So if you ask me, and the moment you said it, my mind did this thing where it was like on rails and I flipped all the way back. And lots of tiny incidents where it’s like, “Oh, almost like little wince moments come to me.”
The difference is I’m not living in any of those spots. I’m not anchored in those places. I am here now with you, broadly content with where I am. Although I’m an incredibly ambitious person and probably won’t be content until I am a household name for my psychology, but I’ll keep working on that in the background.
COWEN: How do you think you are different as a psychologist from, say, a median psychologist with broadly a similar demographic background?
AMAECHI: Whilst I’m an incredibly robust scientist, I’m interested in the evidence-based process and using the best possible research, I am not interested in appearing clever to people. I’m interested in people understanding. And I think many psychologists, especially those who make them their names in academia, they want to write in a way that makes what they know seem completely inaccessible, if not magic. And I want to write in a way that makes everybody know that what I know is ordinary and easily gainable if you’re willing to engage in the process. That is one of the reasons.
One of the other reasons is that I am a practical psychologist. I’m interested in what psychology can do to make people’s lives better. I want to help people thrive. And so for me, psychology is not theoretical; it’s pragmatic. And I do have lots of colleagues who think that way too, but a lot of the very famous ones, it appears that they write for a theoretical audience rather than an audience living in a very real and rather challenging world.
COWEN: What do you think is an overrated idea in current psychology?
AMAECHI: An overrated idea in current psychology? Ooh, oh, oh, God, I don’t know. This is ridiculous that it didn’t come to me early. So personality testing, it’s absolute bollocks. You might as well throw leaves into a pond and then interpret the reality from the shape they make.
COWEN: So even the Five-Factor Model, you want it thrown out?
AMAECHI: Oh, my God, nonsense, utter nonsense. It is not that these factors don’t exist, it’s just that the constellations of these factors don’t tell you who you are. Your personality is mutable. It changes moment to moment, nevermind under stress versus not. Anybody listening to this, you are not a bloody primary color. The complexity of the human condition cannot be captured in red. It’s not who we are.
I love taking those Jedi tests, quizzes. What kind of Jedi are you? And I managed to contrive it so I’m always my favorite Jedi. And that’s what personality tests are. Hogan and the rest of them contrive. And all they do is gatekeep, because you end up with people who read these things and think, “Oh, extroversion is important. If you’re not an extrovert, how will you speak in front of people? How are you speak in front of shareholders?”
That’s nonsense. I’m an extreme introvert. I find human beings extraordinarily energy-expensive, but worth it. And personality tests have been holding down the same groups of people for the last 50 years. We need to bin them and throw them out.
COWEN: I think introverts, on average, are better speakers than extroverts. They get less nervous.
AMAECHI: Again, my mind immediately went, citation, please. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m an introvert, so it appeals to me. But I definitely think that if you’re an introvert, speaking is so energy-expensive, that if you’re going to do it, speaking especially in front of an audience or in front of somebody consequential is so energy-expensive, if you’re going to do it, you tend to plan and think it through more carefully, which can mean that your words are more carefully chosen, more carefully tonally placed. Whereas if you’re an extrovert, you just like to talk, and so you might just say anything. I don’t know, I haven’t seen the evidence behind that, but it appeals to me.
COWEN: And in your new book, It’s Not Magic: The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders, if you were to distinguish what makes your approach to leadership different or special, what would you say?
AMAECHI: It’s not innate and it’s not bestowed. Leadership is earned. It’s not something that you need to understand what combination of personalities or cognitive styles you have. It’s a set of skills that you need to choose to develop. Either the people around you, the people that you might lead, whether it’s that two people in your family or that 10 people in your community or in your team, or whether that be a sports team or a business, it’s just are these people consequential enough for you to want to have the optimal possible impact on them or aren’t they?
And if they are, then there are some behaviors that you can choose about your presence and about your eloquence, that you can choose these things to make you a better leader. And the thing I love about my approach is simply that there’s no gatekeeping here. There’s not a certain school or a certain accent or a certain language. You can choose to be an excellent leader of people, to be the kind of person people wish to follow if you’re willing to put in the work and earn some new skills. And none of them are complex. They’re just energy-expensive.
COWEN: Very last question. What will you do next?
AMAECHI: That’s an excellent question. I used to say that I wanted to be in the House of Lords. I think politics is beneath me now. I think I want to find a way to have a broader impact than I have, a broader, positive impact than I currently have. I’m not quite sure how that will happen. I’ve been using social media and that’s only so effective. So that’s my goal. If what I’m saying is not nonsense and people engage with it, and they like what I write and read, I must find a way to reach more people.
COWEN: John Amaechi, thank you very much.
AMAECHI: It’s a pleasure. Thank you.