That's what was so great about working with Serb at Wargaming. He was a nuclear physicist before he designed World of Tanks. So he had a long line of people bullshitting him until I showed up and he just threw those other people under the bus and gave me full authority over many and almost most of WG's projects.

That made me some enemies, but it definitely paid off for WG. If you have execs with no science background, they are super easy to catfish, deceive, and manipulate. When the whole data thing blew up after Moneyball came out, and I was writing papers on Moneyball, I got a lot of calls from industry execs asking me how they should set up their data teams. I gave them great advice but ultimately they would get catfished into going into non productive directions and paying crazy salaries who were not ultimately very helpful.

Then the creatives got laid off because they were not needed now that they had "data". And that data was super expensive because everyone was trying to hire data people. Then the courses popped up all over teaching data science in 6 to 10 weeks. Which kind of made my original point that these execs were getting scammed.