#96 - David Epstein: How a range of experience leads to better performance in a highly specialized world

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, at the end of this episode I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com subscribe Now without further delay, here's today's episode. I guess this week is David Epstein. David is the author of the best selling book the Sports Gene and more recently why Generalists Traditionally Triumph in a Specialized World, which ironically makes him a specialist of generalists. He was previously a science and investigative reporter at ProPublica and prior to that a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. I have followed David's work for some time, have enjoyed his articles, his books, and reached out to him several months ago asking to interview him. Even though I had already heard him on a couple of other podcasts that frankly I thought did a great job. But I just knew there was more I wanted to explore with him. So of course, if you've heard David I other podcasts, I wouldn't let that discourage you from listening to him. Here we go into, in my opinion, sort of a broader, deeper discussion that's sort of enabled by our long format. We talk about a lot of things, but I think at the root of it, it's basically trying to get a better understanding of how we can improve our own performance. And perhaps you can see we get into a lot of stuff around kids, but you know, as parents, how do we manage the exposure of our kids to various things? I think anyone listening to this who is a parent obviously feels pretty strongly about giving their kids their best chance at finding something they love and doing well at it. There are so many things we go into in this podcast that are just fascinating beyond belief, including a really good explanation of why the 10,000 hour rule that most people take for granted is essentially an axiom or dogma, I. E. That you know, 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is what is required for mastery and greatness. And I think David goes into a great explanation of why that's probably completely nonsense. Which is not to say that deliberate practice is not incredibly important, but to break it down to something as simple as 10,000 hours. Hours is almost assuredly incorrect. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with David Epstein. Thank you so much for coming.

It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Your work has been something I followed for quite a long time now. And even before your most recent book came out. Just on the basis of the book you wrote, was it in 2013? That's right, yeah. Just on the basis of that book, people had always said you got to interview him. And I was always like, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I know, I know. And then the new book comes out and it's like, well, now there's no excuse not to, so. And I guess it's tough for you because you have this new book and everybody wants to talk about it, but I kind of want to talk about the old one too, if that's okay.

Whatever you want. We can talk about something other than my books if you want. Whatever you want.

We have a lot to talk about actually, because I learned a number of things about you in getting ready to sit down today. But somehow it escaped me that you were a fan of Aira Tensena.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, one of the all time great sports documentaries if people have seen Senna. But I used to follow racing and just I loved racing in general. Like if you put two paper boats on a pond, you know, I was interested basically. And then as I learned about him and his start in karting and the different types of racing he did, the fact that he was a good gymnast as a young guy, that he basically tried to retire from racing at one point, you know, and that he was also very quiet, quietly charitable and I think kind of a sensitive soul in a lot of ways and obviously a very dramatic story and I think the greatest F1 driver ever. And so just a lot of, I don't know nearly as much as you, so I'm kind of cautious about saying anything, but yeah, I think all of.

Those things are really interesting and resonant. And so last week I went to the beach and was with my kids and the two older kids were in the water. So just me and the toddler who's 2, who's actually named after Senna, his name is Arathan. And then these other two boys came up and started playing and. And so then I'm sort of overseeing a playgroup, basically one of mine and two others. And for like 20 minutes this is going on and then the mother of these two other boys comes up and she's thanking me or whatever for Playing with them. And I can sense a Brazilian accent. I said, oh, are you Brazilian? She says, yeah. And I said, oh great. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we get chatting and I can't talk to somebody who's Brazilian for more than five minutes without of course asking them, do you remember when Senna died? And blah, blah, blah. And I'm still waiting for the exception to this to happen. It's never happened yet where that person doesn't immediately transform into oh my God. Senna is the greatest manifestation and representation of Brazil. It was the saddest day of my life when he died. And this woman would have been seven when he died. And our nanny, also Brazilian. Same thing, was like four when Senna died. But it seared in her mind. So I'm talking Uber driver person at rest. It doesn't matter. Anytime I meet someone from Brazil, we talk about Senna. And it is without exception they speak of him with a reverence that I don't think Americans can relate to. There is no athlete we talk about, there's no politician, there's no scientist we can speak about in the way a Brazilian talks about Senna.

That's amazing. So it sounds like what people here of certain generation might think of where they were when Kennedy or Martin Luther King were assassinated or something like that.

It's absolutely that way because of course everybody in Brazil was watching F1, so the world stopped every Sunday to watch the race. So now you take everybody is there stopping to watch your guy doing this thing and then you see this person die. But unlike maybe with say jfk, where yes, anybody who was old enough at that moment would remember it, I don't even think that they can speak about JFK the way with as much love or reverence as they do Sena. So it's kind of amazing to me and humbling.

That's interesting because obviously we have Ali as the first person who would come to mind. But in his day a lot of people hated him. It's a lot of athletes like him. I think they become beloved once they're sort of older and non threatening feeling. And so a lot of people who love them don't actually really know what it was like for them at the time. But that's fascinating. And I think his reputation, I think a lot of the. It turned out after Senna died that he had been doing like a lot of charity that people didn't even know about with no, no fanfare whatsoever. And so I think his legacy was. That's amazing. That's not very, very Common, that's right.

Very few people know about how much he did for the people in Brazil and how seriously he took his position of he came from privilege, came from a wealthy family, achieved this unbelievable success. And people loved this humility that he had that. Because remember, it's not like he was the first Brazilian F1 champion. Fittipaldi was a two time champion, Nelson Piquet a three time champion, who by the way, Senec won his first championship the year after Piquet won his last. So it's like a complete overlap with another, but they don't even belong in the same sentence for most Brazilians. In fact, I asked this question of almost everybody as well, which is how does he compare to Pele? And they're like, oh, Pele was great, but.

Oh, really? Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah, yeah, it's really kind of amazing.

Yeah, I guess that's the most telling question you could ask in Brazil. Probably.

Yeah. I'll be going for my first time actually to Sao Paulo soon to watch an F1 race and to go. And I want to be able to visit the memorial where he was buried and go to the foundation and stuff like that.

And how did you get so interested in him?

I don't do anything in moderation, I think, is what it kind of comes down to. And I've always loved and been attracted to people that are incredibly passionate and great at what they do. And I do think that his perfectionism, well, I'll take a step back and say I was probably attracted to things about him that I didn't appreciate the pathology in at the time. So I do think that his desire to win probably also killed him. And I think that the sharpness of that edge I probably found incredibly appealing in a way that almost maybe speaks to my own demons. And I think that's probably true of a lot of people. I don't think I'm unique in that. So I just remember one of the things I remember loving about him during his career was how much he cared about the engine and what was going on with the car and the setup and the time he would spend with the mechanics. I mean, it was always telling to me that the Honda mechanics loved him. I mean, just loved him. You'd have some guys that would show up, they would drive and they would leave, but not Senna. Like he could spend the entire night in the garage machinating over every minute detail of the car. So it was just this sort of incredible degree of perfectionism. Also, I do think that there was just a certain. There were Just things that he did that to this day can't be explained. I think his qualifying session in 1988 at Monaco, there is no explanation for what he did that day. I'm sure you're familiar with it. Just for the listener, Monaco is a very short circuit. So in a short circuit, the difference between qualifying times should be tenths of seconds, hundredths of seconds. His teammate that year, meaning someone driving the exact same car, which they had. The best car in the field was Alain Prost, who was himself a three time world champion at the time. Unbelievable driver. Some would argue one of the more underrated drivers ever. Senna out qualified him by a second and a half. A second and a half on Monaco in a quali. Might as well be a day.

It's like winning the 100 meters of the Olympics by a second and a half.

That's exactly right. It's like even Usain Bolt at his most dominant couldn't win a race race by a second. Even though there's no actual onboard footage of Senna during that quali lap, because he was already on pole. So I don't think the networks were even paying attention to his very last quali lap, which why would he try to go any faster? He'd already secured pole. But when you watch Senna at Monaco over and over again, which is one of the most demanding circuits because of how tight it is, I have my kids watch these videos because I'm like, I don't think you guys understand you. You think daddy drives a race car and that's fun. Cause he can go fast. But I want you to see what the best in the world is seeing in real time. Because we can't do this. Humans can't do what he's doing. The other sort of extension to that story that speaks to this sort of love I have is the tormented nature of this, which is what most people don't realize is he qualifies first in Monaco. Or what most people I think have forgotten is he qualifies first from Monaco in 1988 by literally a second and a half. As the race is going on and on and on, he has built up such a lead, he almost has a lap lead over the field with a very short duration to go in the race. I don't remember how many laps. I think like maybe six to ten laps to go. He could basically stop, get out of his car, get back in it and still win the race. But he's pushing very hard. He's pushing so hard that he actually crashed. He is disgusted with himself. He gets out of the car, literally leaves, goes straight to his home in Monaco, doesn't speak with anybody for days. And to me, this is a guy for whom it's not about winning.

Yeah, yeah. This actually gets to something. You said I could be digressive. So I'm gonna make a multi, multi jump.

Let's do it.

Something I've been thinking about that I used to think about a lot and then came up recently was at a certain point when I was at Sports Illustrated and I was doing reporting on doping, and I would get a lot of reader feedback of, why are you reporting on this? You sort of a killjoy, that kind of stuff. I took it seriously and started thinking about, should I be doing this? What's the value that comes out of sport? And somehow I landed on this book called the Grasshopper by a Canadian philosopher named Bernard Suits. And it's called the Grasshopper because it's sort of a inversion of this Aesop fable where there's a grasshopper who's playing games all summer. And while the ant is storing up food in the summer, and then come winter, the grasshopper doesn't have any food. And the ant does. And the grasshopper goes to the ant and asks for some food. And the ant says, no, you were playing while you should have been collecting food. And so moral is kind of obvious. But in Suits, there had been this philosophical debate that was supposed to be settled by Wittgenstein about, is there any necessary and sufficient core of sports and games? And he said, no. He said, no, absolutely there's not. And Suits, in writing this book, the Grasshopper. The grasshopper is a character who's playing these games, and his disciples are coming, saying, you should be storing food. You're going to die. And he says, no, this is who I am. I understand what's coming, but this is the best thing I can be doing this endeavor for the love of what he was doing. And Suits says, there is a core to all sports and games, and it's the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles, which I thought was kind of amazing. And he talks about what he calls the lusory attitude, which is the attitude you adopt when you get involved in these things, which I think is kind of a love of difficulty, essentially. And I think he sort of united something. Aristotle had these two. He put actions into two categories. One was kinesis, which is like, build a house, you're doing it for the end. And the other was energia, which is something like philosophical contemplation. You're Doing it for the doing, not for the end. And he said these two things have to be separate. And I think one of the things Suits was saying was in sports and games, these things are united. There is an end that you're going for, but the love of difficulty in the middle is what's really important. And you're always doing something. You're intentionally doing something inefficient, right? Like you could walk a ball and put it into a goal. That would be the most efficient way to do it. Or you could cut across the track and get there faster. But you're intentionally engineering an inefficiency in order to facilitate a certain experience. I'm sure Senna had that level of difficulty. And one of the things, not to tie it to my own stuff, but one of the reasons I think about it is to me, I don't know that readers would say this, but to me, one of the major themes of my new book is that sometimes the things you can do to cause the most rapid apparent short term progress can undermine long term development. And that actually you don't always want to be as efficient as possible. And I think that's very much embodied in this love of difficulty in sports and games where you are intentionally engineering in inefficiency in order to facilitate an experience that you hope has some value and some learning. So sorry, that was my multi jump.

No, that is so true. I think that actually in one sort of story captures the essence of the greatness we see in sports, which is, as you said, it has to have a struggle in it. It's not interesting if there's no struggle, but it's in service of some destination. That can be quite arbitrary, by the way. I mean, race car driving happens to be one of the less arbitrary ones. Going fast seems somewhat understandable and innate. Mountaineering seems somewhat understandable and innate. Get to the top. But many sports like basketball and football are kind of arbitrary in what we're asking people to do.

Think of baseball, it's like banana. Like if you were just watching it with no sense of the conceptual structure, it would look ridiculous. Like why doesn't the guy just stay at home plate? They're already there.

Yeah, that's so funny. Well, before we get to your new book, because there are so many questions I have on that theme, both personally and then with respect to my profession. And then even more broadly, I do want to go back to the gene because I remember when the book came out, I think it came out on the heels of an article you had written. In Sports Illustrated. Correct.

Wow. I'm surprised you remember that. Yeah. The sports gene. Yeah. Yeah, it did. Yeah. I want to confess something really quick. This that nobody really calls me on is I wrote that article in Sports Illustrated. It passed fact checking at Sports Illustrated because when the fact checkers called back the scientists, they said, oh, this is true. This is true. But then after a year of, before my books, the first year I tried to just read 10 journal articles a day, every day for the first year, no writing. And having done that for the year researching the sports gene, I realized that while I had quoted these scientists appropriately, some of them had told me things that could not be concluded from their data. And so I cited my own article as one that was mistaken, but nobody really called me on that. But that's. I think if you're writing about science, something you're writing about is going to be wrong. So you have to kind of be ready for that.

Well, it's so funny you bring this up. So, Bob Kaplan, who's my head of research, we are in the process now of going through the fact checking for this book that I've been painfully and slowly working on for more time than I care to admit. And what we've realized is he can't be the fact checker, nor can I, because it's not just facts we're checking, it's interpretation. And we are already so biased by our view on this. So we actually have another one of our analysts doing the fact checking. But we specifically refer to it as fact plus interpretation. Fact plus interpretation, which turns out to be really a long process and a very challenging process. Because you do. I mean, I've done this a handful of times where you pull up one of the citation classics in medicine or science that people have referenced so many times. It's been triply referenced internally to the point where I don't think the people referencing it anymore even know what the paper says, let alone what it's citing.

Telephone game of citations.

It's unbelievable. And the few times I've had our team extract from those papers, I've been mortified at how wrong they are, which again, they're not necessarily orthogonally wrong, but they've missed so many things. Like, it's like, oh, well, of course this so and so does such and such and such and such. Well, let's go back and look. Wait a minute. You realize that was in one really, really, really bad experiment in mice in which you could never make that inference into another mammal, and now yet it's taken as Sort of a fact, I have to say.

Not that that's good, but I have noticed that that sort of thing provides opportunities for people like me where I'll go and read the original research of things that have just been at the core of other bestselling books. It's kind of a great. If you're willing to do it. It's sort of a competitive advantage, you know, it gives an opportunity. Not that I want people to be citing things wrongly, but I think you're totally right. I started as a fact checker at Sports Illustrated and that's where you realize how many ways there are to go wrong.

Are you looking for any more work right now?

No, no, no. I was happy to get out of my fact checking days. I'm in my post book never again phase, which I was in before, but that's where I am right now. No, but yeah, I hired independent fact checkers also. And that doesn't mean there aren't things that are wrong or interpretations that are wrong. But it's certainly, certainly cuts it down compared to. I think most books probably have no fact checking at all.

Yeah, I'm super paranoid about it because I also realize that we can't catch them all. That's the difference between a blog post and a book is. And I've written more blog posts than I'll ever be able to count. And the good news is the week it comes out, someone smarter than you is going to catch something that you did wrong and you're like, oh my God. Yeah, totally right. Thank you for that. Boom. I can change it. I can't do that with a book. And that is crippling me.

Yeah, I mean, you can do small stuff for second printings and things like that, but it's not as easy. Right. It doesn't happen right away. And if it.

Well, especially if it's the interpretation. It's one thing if you get a fact wrong. When you start to interpret something incorrectly and you come around, it's very difficult to unwind that.

Definitely. And if you're gonna change. Yeah. As I learned this time, the both of my books, there are 352 pages, I guess, if you count the front and back. And because they get printed in sets of 16, so everything has to fit to a multiple of 16, including the index and the citations and everything. So if you have to change something major, like an interpretation where it's not one sentence, if you're going to mess up the page flow, it's not so doable.

You're making some unhappy Folks, you alluded to something there, which is the opportunity to go back and look at something that people have sort of taken as dogma and questioning it. And in many ways, that's a big part of what the gene does and what your current book does. I'll share with you sort of my bias coming into this discussion. Not this discussion with us per se, but sort of this theme, which is. So Daniel Coyle wrote a book in 2009 called the Talent Code. And before that, there were a number of other books and pieces of literature on that subject matter. And I was obsessed with this. I was obsessed with this idea of how can one be great? Obsessed with this. Even as a child, and certainly when I was doing my surgical training, I really remember spending lots of time reading literature on technically achieving mastery, like, what does it mean to be a great musician or a great surgeon or a great athlete? Things where there's some sort of dexterity and skill required that goes beyond just thinking and cognitive prowess. And so I would say I completely bought this idea that deliberate practice is the only thing that matters. And I think a lot of people sort of have taken that to be the case. What made you question that in the first place? Or did you not question that and instead stumbled organically into questioning that?

I did not question it in the first place. And I should say, Dan's a friend, and I'm a big fan of his writing also. And, yeah, I did not question it. In fact, if you saw my book proposal for the sports gene, the Talent Code, in the book proposal, sometimes you do a section that. I don't know if you had to do this or not, but other books that you.

Other books like. Yes, yes, yes.

I skipped that part for my second proposal, but in the first one, I had to do it. And Talent Code was one of the ones that I said it was going to be like. And obviously, I would say for the casual reader, it looks like they're actually diametrically opposed in many ways. And I don't see them as diametrically opposed, but there are certainly some differences. And it was probably when I went back and started looking at some of the original literature, the 10,000 hours rule was, who was I to question that? I mean, the one good thing is I was in my past training to be a scientist, and I was, like, living in a tent in the Arctic when I decided for sure to become a writer. So I knew I should leverage. Leverage that background of I was in the geological sciences, which are pretty methodologically rigorous, I would say, as the sciences go. And so I decided to go look at these original papers if I'm going to study them. And I come across the first, the so called 10,000 hours study that the scientists who wrote it wouldn't call it.

That, but this was with violinists.

Violinists, yeah. 30 violinists. Famous music academy in Berlin split into three groups. The top 10 who were deemed to potentially be international soloists practiced in deliberate practice, highly focused error correction, focused practice, on average, 10,000 hours by the age of 20. The first thing I noticed was that there were no measures of variance reported in the study, which is not something, when I was a grad student, that one could have gotten away with reporting no measures of variance.

So I was explained some folks might not even know what that means. So, like, there's an example. So if you look at a table and it says, this person practiced this many hours. This many hours. This many hours. What was missing in that description?

First of all, no range. So several of the books and the paper wrote that there was complete correspondence between the number of hours of practice and what group someone fell into. And I said, well, I can't tell that from this data. Like, maybe someone in the lowest group actually practiced more than someone in the highest group. But you haven't included the range of practice hours or the standard deviations of practice hours. What is the individual variation? Anytime you take an average, it could be that nobody practiced 10,000 hours. It could be that somebody practiced 100,000 hours and a bunch of people were much less.

So sort of like, what's my average, your average and Bill Gates average wealth.

Sure. Right.

Sometimes averages can be wildly misleading.

That's right. I mean, so for example, in the chess literature, it takes 11,053 hours on average to reach international master status. So 10,000 hours would be low. That's one level down from Grand Master. But some people have made it in 3,000 hours, and some people finished a study at 25,000. They still hadn't made it. So we don't really know where their endpoint is. So you can tell someone, well, it takes 11,053 hours on average to reach International Master status, but it doesn't tell you anything about the breadth of actual skill acquisition.

So how is that possible, by the way? I mean, I can't imagine looking at a paper that wouldn't, at a minimum, include a standard deviation for that type of calculation.

Don't know. Okay. So eventually I organized. I noticed that the most famous researcher on that paper, who I think has done some very interesting work, especially in the area of memory. Some work that I myself have tried to incorporate into things I do. But I noticed that he was in a lot of his work saying, there's no such thing as talent. It doesn't matter. Just pick any random thing and you'll be great at it, provided you put the work right. Right, exactly that. It doesn't matter what you match with. And I noticed he was citing a lot of physiology papers that I knew something about, like sports physiology papers. And not like you said, not in the way the interpretation. It was kind of like these secondary interpretations, telephone game stuff that. And so I organized a panel at the American College of Sports Medicine and invited him because. And this was, I thought, a problem. He was citing a lot of their papers, his work. Anders Ericsson was super influential in expertise. I think that 10,000 hours paper is clearly the most influential paper ever in the development of expertise. But they weren't talking to each other. So we organized this panel, and in that, a researcher stood up, named Tim Lightfoot, and asked, what's the variance around that 10,000 hours? And he said, well, that doesn't really matter because the people were actually inconsistent on multiple retrospective recalls, because what they did is they just asked for retrospective recall and then had the performers keep a diary for a week and then extrapolated it, basically.

Which, by the way, don't even get me started on the noise that's introduced by both of those decisions.

Right. There was just a replication attempt, by the way, last month it published in. It failed, but we can talk about that if you want. But in that, there was actually, in the new replication attempt, there was someone at 4000 hours who got to the highest group and someone at 11,000 hours who was still in the lowest group. But anyway, so he asked, what's the variance around that 10,000 hours? And Erickson says he said, first of all, there was inconsistent recall. And so Tim says, yeah, a lot of us struggle with imperfect data, but we still put measures of variance. And so Anders says, well, that'll be, like, more valid when we have video diaries and we can really track it because we're not being that precise anyway. And he says, again, we all struggle with imperfect data, but we include measures of variance. Was it. And then he asked, so what was it? And he says, I don't know. I'd have to go look back. And so Lightfoot says, definitely more than 500. And that's where we leave it. And then I think two years ago, something a couple years ago, Erickson did publish Measures of Variance, and it turns out there was enormous variance. Not only was there enormous variance in the original paper, the papers from 1993, and it was three or four years ago that he finally published the variants, made clear that their conclusions were wrong, that there was not complete correspondence between the number of practice hours and the group that someone was in.

Well, I think that's sort of where I'm going with this question, which is you can't even make an observation of statistical significance without variance. So I don't really understand what the paper is saying.

This is the first thing where I was reading it and saying, something's not right here. And so then I started asking these very basic questions. Because I'd been an athlete, I'd gone from being like the worst walk on. On my college team to being like a university record holder. So I'm like, yeah, maybe if I had trained even more, I would have been even better. And that probably is true, but. But I was. I was like, oh, okay, so there is no such thing as talent. I was convinced for a while. And then when I started seeing this, I started asking the very basic questions, like, okay, in my third year of training, I could break the women's world record. So there has to be at least some basic genetic difference because I haven't worked harder than the women who are pros by any stretch of the imagination. And so I said, okay, let's start with that basic question. I'd contact sort of some of the. I shouldn't call them the 10,000 hours researchers, because they kind of disavow that, but the deliberate practice framework. And I remember contacting one and saying, wouldn't you agree that a man and a woman who practice the same like the man, has advantages, which is why we separate sexes in sports. And she sort of hedged and said, maybe not if they all trained the same. And I said, really? And so she sent me a paper saying, in fact, we think this applies to other organisms. If you look at this paper about racing dogs, you'll see that they practice the best ones in the highest class practice about the equivalent to their lifespan of 10,000 hours. And so I'm reading this, and I start reading all the citations, and one of them notes that, like, half of these dogs have what is otherwise an incredibly rare myostatin mutation.

Let me pause for a moment, explain to the listener what myostatin mutations are. So if you knock out the myostatin gene, you look like a bodybuilder. Myostatin is a gene that inhibits muscle growth, and there are Lots of myostatin mutants out there that all have hypo functioning myostatin and therefore are super muscular.

Yeah. And so racing breeders had been. They didn't know about the gene, but they were breeding for fast.

They were clearly selecting for this trait.

Yeah, yeah. And what they wanted was a single myostatin. If you get two, then you have a Bully Whippet. Google that. It's pretty cool to see Bully Whippet.

That thing probably can't even move, it's so big.

Right. So they want the single mutation. And so I'm like, okay, most of.

These dogs, it doesn't even mean anything.

So I wasn't gonna like use this study or anything, but I just started saying these people aren't reading the primary stuff that they're citing or they're not tracking the references back. And so I started to have doubts.

Is this a broader problem with non experimental science? I think so, because we do the same dumb thing in medicine, by the way, people sort of think of medicine, which we're gonna get to in spades as it's so rigorous. And yeah, sometimes medicine does get to leverage the scientific method and actually get to do what Francis Bacon talked about. But a lot of times you don't. I mean, when you think of some of the most important public health measures that are out there, oftentimes they are based on exactly the type of inference you're being appropriately critical of, which is observational, heavily selected, range restricted, which I can't wait. You talk about this so eloquently that I cannot wait to have you go off on your tangent, soapbox, whatever, rant on that problem. But. But these are huge issues.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was the other thing. I don't know if I should skip to range restriction. Well, let's start with medicine. So I wrote this one article when I was at ProPublica called when evidence says no and Doctors say Yes. And I should say I love the medical profession. I think it's filled with variety of people, like any profession, but a lot of people who really care and got into the profession because they want to do something that is challenging and useful. But also there's like a lot of poor science. And there are a lot of things that continue to be done even once evidence shows they don't work anymore. What Mike Joiner at the Mayo Clinic always calls bioplausible. Something that clearly makes sense. It definitely should work. It's just that when somebody does like a randomized controlled trial, it doesn't. You probably saw the Finnish study of Partial arthroscopic meniscus repair. I think there's a lot of devils in the details. That said it was interesting, they gave some people sham surgery where they basically made an incision, banged around like they performed surgery and sent them to physical therapy. And they did as well as the people who were getting the surgery, which is mind boggling because everyone's doing something that seems like it has to work. Someone's got knee pain, you bring them in, you give them imaging, they've got a tear, fix it. How could that not work? But then I guess it turns out that some huge number of people have incidental tear that doesn't have anything to do with the knee pain.

The meniscal tear is a huge thorn in the side of the orthopedic specialty. Because frankly, I don't know the answer. I mean, my intuition is that that's a procedure that has probably done far too much. But it's also probably a procedure that if you knew how to select the right patients, you could probably make a difference. But because we don't, we end up applying the tool far too broadly and we dilute the outcome. I'll give you a much more specific example that is so nerdy. But there's a drug called Ezetimibe or Zetia, which blocks cholesterol reabsorption. So the body makes a ton of cholesterol. Virtually all the cholesterol in the body is made by the body and it gets recirculated throughout the body. Well, part of this recirculation pathway requires that cholesterol be dumped into, along with bile, into the gut. And then in your gut you can reabsorb it. And the body has a way to regulate how much of that's happening. But it turns out there's a drug that blocks this thing called the Niemann Pixi one, like one transporter that drags cholesterol back in. Now when that drug is given in monotherapy, it lowers cholesterol, but not that much and it doesn't save lives. So it's not a drug that's really. In fact, it's absolutely therefore not considered a first line agent. And it's never considered something that should be used in isolation. Now when you give it with a statin, turns out it lowers cholesterol and it reduces events. So the things that you care about, the actual heart outcomes change.

And it's not just the statin.

Correct, that's right, because you can compare it to statin versus statin alone. So I have probably kind of A contrarian view on this, which is I actually think this drug alone would work if you actually only gave it to people who were hyper absorbers. But that's never been done because we can measure how much absorption capacity a person has, but that's a kind of advanced measurement. You wouldn't normally do that in a clinical setting. But if you select for patients who have mega amounts of absorption, it's certainly possible that those patients. So I don't know the answer to this and only if a trial was done testing that way could you get it. But I do think that this problem exists in medicine, which is you dilute by taking such a heterogeneous population to test an intervention on. And you're therefore not really powered to detect an effect because in your power calculation you're using the entire population as your denominator. And really it probably needs to be a subset. And so my intuition is that's probably the case with some of these procedures like meniscal repairs, which still offers no help to you or I right now. If we're having knee pain with an MRI that shows a meniscal tear, I actually don't know the answer in that setting.

That's interesting on so many levels. The first is what you're talking about with absorption is this sort of lesson that there's huge individual variation in that stuff.

Staggering variation. By the way, I measure absorption synthesis in every single patient, non negotiable, no questions asked. And I am constantly amazed at how much variation exists. Basically three variables are determining this, right? It's sort of how much do you make, how much do you absorb, and how much do you clear out of circulation with the LDL receptor? And the variation is. It's overwhelming. And yet it's amazing to me that our profession looks at just one metric, which is how much LDL cholesterol is there. And that's going to be the basis for treatment. It strikes me as flying without instruments and deciding you only get to look at the horizon.

That's interesting. That gets at two things I want to remember first, this idea of the McNamara fallacy, you've heard of, named after the Secretary of Defense during Vietnam, which is, he said, are we winning the war or are we losing? Let's use something measurable, our bodies versus their bodies. And since we're always winning by that metric, said, okay, we're winning, obviously ignoring.

A lot of other important what's the collateral damage? And yeah, yeah.

So it's like we often deem things important because they're easily measuring Them because they're important. But that individual variation gets to another thing that got me interested. That sort of caused the sports team to be very different from my proposal, which was underlying the 10,000 hours, which is actually called the deliberate practice framework. See, an Ericsson would not call it the 10,000 hours rule. And there's something called the monotonic benefits assumption. And essentially, if you have two people who've never done something, for every equal unit of practice, they should progress exactly the same amount. So everyone's practice response is the same is one of the assumptions underlying it. And I started.

How can that be? It's not to say it's not would be an interesting conclusion or observation. But how could that even be the null hypothesis? It seems so counterintuitive.

I don't know, does it? It might be if people started from zero, I'm not sure what I would think if they would progress exactly the same or not. But then people have done those studies, you know, meaning if we took 100.

People who have never spoken, spoke in Spanish and we gave them Spanish lessons, give me the evidence that, that if that were the case, wouldn't we see much more homogeneity in schools?

I would think. I mean, Erickson would make the argument that, well, some of those kids are engaged and some of them aren't, or maybe some of them had more practice before. So I think to really evaluate this, you have to get some skill that nobody else has tried before that these people haven't done at all, because who knows what they bring to school, all sorts of other stuff. But there are studies like that where people who are sedentary do the exact same exercise. One of the famous ones called the Heritage Family. Every member of two generations of 98 families, it's totally sedentary, put on six months of identical cycling training and the range of variation was like a thousand percent. Doing identical training. Identical training. And you can see things like the military does this in people learning sort of perceptual motor skills for air traffic controller simulations and at very simple simulations. Actually it's kind of like that. Like they converge. If it's very simple, you just have to see the one planes coming, move one off the Runway, and then it becomes about like, how fast can you basically just move the mouse when you're doing simulation? But as it gets more complex, people start diverging with more practice. And so that monotonic benefits assumption, I could find no evidence of it. It's like never shown up in a study of anything unless it's an extremely simple Task that everyone masters very, very quickly. And so again, I was sort of saying that average is just obscuring individual variation.

So I keep preventing you from talking about this because I can't stop asking all these other questions. But when you look at the title, the Sports Gene, the assumption would be, oh, this is a book that explores the notion that a great athlete is genetically gifted. Michael Jordan is Michael Jordan because he clearly has a set of genes that separate him from the rest of us. And that's probably a bad example because it's so extreme. But talk to me about some of the things that you found in that book that surprised you. And there were certain elements of that book that didn't get that much attention, by the way, that I in retrospect thought, I'm surprised more people didn't fixate on that thing. Like, I don't know, did it surprise you what people drew out of that book as the most important insights?

Yeah, yeah. I didn't think the thing that people were going to find the most Controversial was the 10,000 hour rule, to be quite honest. I guess I didn't realize how, how.

Ingrained that is in our psyche.

Yeah. And that people were actually planning certain training plans, soccer teams, two 10,000 hours on the dot. And the thing that was the most important to me, I tried to write a book about one of my closest friends and former training partner dropped dead at the end of a mile race. He was like one of the top ranked guys in his age group in the country. Young Jamaican guy was going to be the first in his family to go to colle all these things. And that kind of threw me for a loop. And anyway, I got his family to sign a waiver allowing me to gather up his medical records. And turned out he had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Textbook case. Misdiagnosed because not easy to diagnose. If he'd had a good family history, it turned out he probably clearly had a relative who. It's like, I started going to meetings for families that think they have HCM in their family. And they'd say, well, we're not really sure, but cousin Jimmy died in the pool and he was a varsity swimmer. And like Uncle Fred was in a one car accident. You're like, all right, these might be cardiac arrest. And I wanted to write a book. One of the main reasons I got off the science tracks, I wanted to write about sudden cardiac death in athletes. And that's what I tried to pitch a first book on. But I didn't have the professional Capital at the time and couldn't sell it. But there's a section of that that I smuggled into one of the chapters in the Sports Gene, which is the most personally important thing to me that I don't think I got asked about one time ever. So I don't know if that's surprising or not. It just is. The most surprising findings of the book to me were things like. I still don't know how to summarize the book, but that things that I assumed were genetic, like the reflexes it takes to hit 100 mile per hour fastball turn out not to be the fact that Major League baseball players don't have faster reflexes, that was a surprise to me. I'd assumed they did.

The same is true, by the way, for Formula one drivers.

Is it?

Yeah. So it turns out that.

Oh, that makes sense. Perceptual motor skill. Right. They're probably using cues like the changing size of something in their.

One of my favorite exercises that you can see when you compare. So if you put a novice next to Lewis Hamilton in a simulator, even adjusting for the speed at which things are moving, you will be blown away at where Lewis's eyes are at every moment that he is driving, how far ahead he is able to see what's happening. So a few weeks ago I was on the track and in an effort to really force this type of learning, we have one camera that is actually looking directly at me, one camera that is looking directly at the road and capturing all of the telemetry. And then I sit with my coach and we review these two side by side. Because what I'm working very hard to overcome is the desire to narrow my field to where I'm driving. And when you're going fast, that's innate. You don't want to be looking somewhere way down the road. You're worried about falling off the road right now, but you can't do that. So that's the thing that they've been able to train to do. It's not that they're going faster. Sorry, that's not that they have faster reflexes, which again, when I first was shown these data, I was like, wow, looking at Senna, you'd think he has the fastest reflexes on the planet.

Right? Right. Once you start reading about perceptual motor skills, it makes perfect sense because any activity that's happening too fast, I mean, the things they have to do are too fast for any human. Even if they did have were the top 0.001% of human reflexes, it wouldn't be fast enough. So in boxing, there was this study I came across doing the sports gene, where these. Someone, I don't even know if they were doctors or scientists, did some test of Muhammad Ali. I think that what they were trying to show was that even this brilliant black man has slower than normal processing speed in his brain or something. And so they reported his. They would have him like throwing a punch in response to a light or something like that. And they were saying, like, look, it's lower than average. And then someone said that they were testing it wrong. And if you subtract the delay for whatever cue they were giving, he actually, from first perceptible motion to full extension, it was like 150 milliseconds, which is extremely fast. But that means when he's throwing a punch also, I think other people throw punches that fast. I don't think he was like an alone outlier for that. That it's faster than the minimum human reaction time, which is a fifth of a second, just to see that something's in front of you. And for that message to get your muscles not to dodge. And so you literally have to be seeing things before they happen or else you'd get hit by every punch. Of course, his genius at disguising what he was doing was an attempt to confound people's ability to see the future. And so anything, I think that's happening at that speed, those aren't skills that anyone comes with. There might be things that facilitate you downloading that software, but it doesn't, doesn't come with the machine.

You talk about kind versus wic and I'm jumping between these books, I think we're just going to end up doing that. By the way, I really wanted to talk about the gene, but now I can't stop but help moving. So maybe use that example in boxing as an example. Is boxing a kind sport or is it a wicked sport? And explain what those two distinctions mean.

Yeah, kind and wicked are so those are terms coined by the psychologist Robin Hogarth in a kind learning environment. He was trying to reconcile this issue in psychology and the study of expertise about why some people who studied experts saw them get better and better and better with very narrow experience. And some people saw them not get better, sometimes get worse, or get more confident and not get better. Like, what was the difference? And it turns out that the difference often has a lot to do with one, the way they're training, but also the environment that they are training in and a kind learning environment. Is one where all your information is clear. The next steps and goals are totally clear. Work tomorrow will look like work yesterday. Patterns recur. And whenever you do something, you get feedback that is immediate and fully accurate. On the other end of the spectrum.

So golf. Golf is a really kind learning environment because the ball is never actually moving towards you. You're always starting with a static ball. And there are almost a finite number of things that you can see in that position. And there's no rush.

And you get automatic and real time feedback. Feedback every time something happens. So I think some of the people who study golf characterize it as like almost an industrial task in the sense that part of what you're doing is trying to do similar things over and over with as little deviation as possible.

Archery, which is my obsession, a very kind learning environment. Totally kind, absolutely.

And a wicked learning environment, on the other hand, is you might not know exactly what you're supposed to do next. You might not even know the goal. Human behavior might be involved, There may be time pressure and work next year might not look like work last year. And importantly, you don't always get automatic feedback. And sometimes when you get feedback, it's delayed and sometimes it's inaccurate. One of the. There's actually a medical example that I.

Know the story you're going to tell.

Yeah. Which is this doctor, this New York doctor who got wealthy and famous because he could miraculously, by palpating patients tongues or feeling around their tongue with his hands before they showed any symptoms he could predict they would get typhoid. And he was right. Over and over and over again. And one of his colleagues later observed, using only his hands, he was a more productive carrier of typhoid than even Typhoid Mary. So he was giving people typhoid by touching their tongues and getting the feedback that he was an amazing predictor and so would do it over. So. So he was. The feedback was reinforcing the wrong lesson. So I wouldn't say most of us are in that wicked of a situation either. But what Hogarth was doing was setting up this spectrum of learning.

What do you think is a bigger wickedness within the wicked environment? Because there are really at least two variables that I think make that type of learning environment challenging. The first is the number of scenarios you can face and the unpredictability of them. So in archery, the goal of archery actually is to make every single shot identical, non negotiable. So everything from the way you stand to the way your shoulder sits to the way the release sits, we Pay tremendous attention to the feeling of the string on the nose and the feeling of the string on the corner of the mouth. I mean, you're trying to reproduce the same thing over and over. So part of it is, well, in tennis, for example, there are an infinite number of ways that you could be standing and your opponent could be standing and the ball could be coming with this spin versus that spin. Or maybe not infinite, but there are so many more variables. The second piece is this delay between feedback and reality, which anybody who's ever tried to talk when they can't hear themselves or when there's a delay realizes how much feedback matters. Which of those two do you think is more important in creating that environment?

I think delayed feedback is usually a killer. I think that the changing scenarios is easier to accommodate with broader training in some ways. So this classic psychology finding that can be summarized as breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. Transfer is. And by the way, I'd say tennis is definitely more on the wicked end than golf, but I would still.

It's still not. Yeah.

As Tolgarth said, most of us in the knowledge economy are playing Martian tennis. You see some people playing. Nobody's told you the rules. You have to deduce them. And by the way, they can change without notice. And so breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. Transfer is the term psychologists use to mean your ability to take skills and knowledge and apply them to a situation you haven't quite seen before. It might be similar, but something's a little different. And what predicts your ability to do that is how broad your training was. If your training is broad, it forces you, instead of expecting the same thing over and over, to build these sort of flexible conceptual frameworks that you can bend when you see a new problem instead of just doing the same thing over and over. So I think you can mitigate that with the right kind of training, the delayed feedback that really screws people up. In studies where people have to sort of drive remote controlled things, if they build in a delay between what they do in the movement, it completely screws them up all the way to. There's some interesting studies of software project managers. There's this famous essay. I had to cut like 20 or 30,000 words from the book. This was something I had in there called the Mythical Man Month. And it's an essay by this guy, Fred Brooks, who was like head of research at Microsoft, and he went on to found the computer science department at the University of North Carolina. And what he meant by the Mythical Man Month Was he had noticed that when project managers, when their projects got behind in software, if they were complicated, they would start adding more person power, adding more man or woman power to the team. And that would cause the project to become more late. And so Brooks's law is if you add people to an already late software project, it will become more late in proportion to like how many people you add. And that's because there was a delay between those people adding to the team. They needed to be assimilated. And the managers never learned that lesson because of the delay. And so they keep doing the same thing over and over and over. And a couple of researchers sort of followed up on that more recently and called this the experience trap, where these project managers, they come up with simpler projects where adding people does help it get done faster because they can right away figure out what to do. And then they get promoted and promoted and end up with more complicated projects. And in those cases they do the same thing and bring people on. And they never learn about the assimilation delay that it takes. So these researchers were saying we need to start telling them this is the time between you bringing someone on and them making a positive impact. But they never learned that lesson because of the feedback delay. So I think that's from the motor skills up to these much more sort of management kind of softer skills. The feedback delay is really difficult.

That concept. Ever since I read about it in your writing, I sort of look at the world a bit differently now. I actually think of that question specifically. I'm like, how kind is this? How wicked is this right now?

Me too. That's what happened when I was reading this. I was like, oh, this is going to be the frame that I'm going to think through. I bet for everything in this book.

Well, I think about it a lot with kids. You have a kid, right? You've got one.

17 months.

Yeah. So I mean, think about the learning that's taking place and think about the neuroplasticity of a seven month old. And for example, it's why sort of going back to the example before, if a child is deaf, it's going to delay speaking, not because they can't speak, but because they can't get that real time assimilation and feedback. And watching it almost makes you think about how much do you want to intervene when they're doing something wrong too. I don't know if you've found that, but it's like, okay, as long as they can't really hurt themselves, I should probably let them do that thing that is going to hurt, but hopefully not irreversibly hurt.

Yeah, yeah. I mean that's a huge question. Again, like I said, what I think of as this would make a terrible subtitle. So it's not the subtitle of my book. Range is the things that you can do that seem the best in the moment maybe are not the best for long term development. And I think that applies to like parenting. Maybe we should talk about the college admissions scandal or something. The snowplow parent isn't the new. But clearly that's not the best for long term development in many cases.

There's a story you write about. I think it's at the Air Force Academy. Yeah, that illustrates that point. Yeah, explain that insight.

This was one of my favorite studies in range, partly because the experimental setup is so cool. You could only do this at the US Air Force Academy.

It's a true experiment. It has randomization, it's prospective and there's blinding. Check all the boxes.

Yeah, yeah. So at the U.S. air Force Academy, about a thousand students come in every year and they have to take a sequence of three math courses, Calculus one, two and third course. And they are randomized to professors in year one, re randomized in year two and re randomized in year three. And the characteristics they come in with are spread evenly across classes. And so parascientists wanted to see, okay, this is a great experimental setup for looking at what is the impact of different math teachers. So they followed about 100 professors and 10,000 students over a decade. And one of their main findings was that the better a professor was. Oh, and everyone takes the same test in every class also when it's graded by committee. So there's no, no one can make their own students do better. What they found was the better a professor was at getting their students to over perform in calculus one, the more those students then underperformed in the next two follow on courses. So there's an inverse relationship between how well students with a certain professor did in the first course and how well they did in the second and third. So for example, and how they rated their teachers. So I think the professor who was rated the sixth best by his students in calculus one and his students got the seventh best scores overall. I think out of 100 professors his students did the seventh best was dead last in how his students then did in the next two courses. And essentially it turned out.

And just to be clear, were they dead last or were they dead last in improvement?

So there was a value added score which said here are the characteristics these kids come in with, and here's how we'd expect them to do. Are they over or underperforming?

Yeah. So it's not that they were the worst in Calc 2, it's that they underperformed relative to where they came in.

That's right.

So they grew the least, maybe, is the right way to think of this.

That's right, yeah, absolutely. Compared to other people who came, other students who came in with the exact same characteristics, they did worse than them in the following courses. And what these scientists found was that the way to get students to do the best in Calculus one was to teach a very narrow curriculum that was tailored to the test, where they learn a lot of what's called using procedures knowledge, where they just learn how to execute algorithms and things like that over and over. Whereas the professors who got rated worse by their students and their students did worse on the calculus one test, they learned more. It's called making connections knowledge, where you have to draw together concepts, essentially, and you're facing different types of problems instead of repeating the same type over and over, which is another thing we should talk about after this. But. But then when they go to the next courses, they have this more conceptual, flexible knowledge. They're learning how to match a strategy to a type of problem instead of just how to execute procedures so they do better later on. And so there's this real conflict between how they feel they're doing early and how they rate their professors and how they're really being set up for later success, which is kind of wild.

And that spoke to me on many levels, but one of which being is I loved mathematics. And I think we spoke before, and maybe we'll tell the story, get into that, get into the issue later about. I've always wondered about the transition I made when I decided to take school seriously. But that teacher who I think sort of turned my life around would go on to teach me calculus as well. And he had a very unique style of teaching, which was, you approach every problem through the lens of understanding what is being asked physically and seeing if in the end the question says, okay, Johnny throws a ball at this speed and this angle, where does it land? That might be the question. I mean, that's a very simple calculus question, but that's an example. But as the problems get more and more challenging, he would still really insist that you try to understand graphically using sort of functional calculus, like, graphically, what is happening algebraically what is happening, and numerically, what is happening and how can you Converge the numerical solution with the algebraic solution with the graphical solution. He said, in calculus, you should almost always be able to come up with an estimate of where the answer is based on graphing the functions and looking at how they behave hard. I mean, a lot of kids didn't do very well in calculus. And yet those lessons took me all the way through honors math and engineering. And another sort of example on that path that really spoke to me was in my freshman year of calculus, I met this guy studying in the stacks. His name was JP and he became a legend to me because he had simultaneously, he couldn't decide if he wanted to be a mechanical engineer or electrical engineer. So he did both. And he literally got both degrees in four years. It's not impossible to get both of those degrees in five or six years, but to do both in four years is crazy. And he said the only way he was able to do it was he never wanted to memorize how a type of problem was solved. He wanted to derive everything from first principles. At the time, I think we were learning about Coriolis acceleration, which is basically the acceleration of a body in rotation where the radius is changing. So named after a guy who failed to figure this out when miners in a shaft were moving down. So now you actually had a shrinking radius relative to the center of the earth, and that changes the forces on the elevator shaft. And he said, you realize you could derive that all from Newton's first law. And I was like, I never thought of it that way. And he goes, yeah, let's go through it. And it's about a one page derivation, but you can do it. And that lesson stuck with me for the remainder of my life, which was, oh, my God. If you just think of it in these broader, initially more painful ways, it yields huge dividends.

This gets at so many things. I'm not even sure where to start in range. But first thing popped my head was, I just saw somebody tweeting research on Twitter today about how active learning students actually learn more, but they rate themselves as having learned less, and they also rate their teachers worse. It turns out we're early on. We're not actually that good evaluators of how we're doing, because the feeling of fluency and learning makes us think we're doing well, but we're actually not. This is what I wrote about called desirable difficulties, but what you were talking about, I mean, that's serious. Making connections, knowledge. In Japan, they actually have a term called bansho that means the type of writing on the blackboard that tracks all these different approaches to the same problem. Sort of what it sounds like your teacher was doing. But I want to get to the derivation point, because there was some research I wrote only a little bit about in range, but that I read a lot more about, that was about what college students understand about math, essentially. And there were some really startling examples where one of the problems was like, I can't remember what the exact numbers were, but let's say it was 500 plus 200 equals 700. And the students were asked, how can you check if this was right? And so he'd say, okay, 700 minus 200 equals 500. What's another way you can check if it's right? And they wouldn't come up with 700 minus 500 equals 200, because they were taught to subtract the number on the right of the addition sign. And when their professors were shown this sort of stuff. So this is wicked feedback. So you get the feedback that the student understands because they know one way to do it, but they actually don't understand at all. And the professors would say, oh, my gosh. And the students would. In interviews, they'd say, like, math is a system of rules and executed procedures. Professors would say, like, I went into math because I didn't have to memorize stuff because you could derive it, and it makes sense. It's just concepts. And so they were just in a totally different place than the students were. And sounds like you had some opportunity to avoid that. But I think that's the norm of how math teaching works.

Yeah. And it's hard because my daughter, who's in sixth grade, I'm doing this thing, and it's really hard. I mean, I can't imagine I'm the only parent that struggles with this. But I want her to love math. I don't want her to view it as a subject. I want her to view it as, math is more fun than playing video games. Math is the most beautiful thing in the world. I want her to look out the window and see math and see that math is a beautiful tool that we have to explain the world around us through this thing. And yet every time as a parent, I try to ask her a question, to ask her to think a certain way, I end up sort of putting her on the spot. And so I'm struggling with this thing of one, is it just that I'm a bad parent and I don't know how to do this correctly, or you're a bad parent.

I didn't want to say anything but since you brought it up, or is.

It that a child needs a certain base of facts, like they have to know a handful of things and be confident with the language, like the times tables and all these other things before you can even get them to start thinking beyond the problem. Like, I think a lot about this, actually, because I feel like I'm underperforming on this.

Actually, it's a good point though, and I should say so. Again, in research, these are called using procedures knowledge, which is kind of the knowing stuff, and making connections knowledge, which is derivation understanding concepts. And they're both important. It's just that like in some of these famous studies in the United States, almost 100%, essentially, sometimes literally 100% in classrooms would be the using procedures knowledge and not the making connections. But I think that is a tricky thing. There's a study that came out after range, so I couldn't include it, but was on the topic of desirable difficulties. And it was about interleaving, which is. Well, I'll explain the study. 7th grade math classrooms were randomly assigned to different types of math teaching. Some of them got what's called blocked practice, where you get problem type A, A, A, A, BBBBB, and so on. And the students get better really quickly and they rate their teachers well and they rate their own learning well. Other classrooms got interleaved practice where it's like as if you threw all the problem types in a hat and you pick out randomly. And in that condition, the students are frustrated at first. They rate their own learning low, they rate their teachers poorly, but again, they're learning how to match a strategy to a type of problem instead of just do the same thing over and over. And come test time, they all took the same test. The interleaving students who had interleaved practice blew the block practice students away. It was, I think, like the largest effect size I've ever seen in an education study that was randomized 0.83 standard deviations. It was like taking a kid from the 50th percentile and moving them to the 80th percentile. But they didn't like it early on. They don't feel like they're learning. And so I'm not sure what the balance is as a parent where, you know, some of this desirable difficulty is in the long term desirable, but you also don't want to turn someone off from the subject. So what's that delicate balance? I think that's sort of kind of the art of coaching in everything we do, whether that's someone in sport, trying to develop someone for the long term or a parent is like, how do you balance maintaining enthusiasm with optimal development and helping someone have that vision of their future self, like your professor did for you, without having them be burned out? I don't know. I really think that's why there's. What, like, great coaches kind of do, is they figure out how to balance these things, when to make things difficult and when to allow things to be easy and sort of more easily inspirational. But I think that's an art as well as a science.

So what was sort of the takeaway of the idea that. And I don't like using the extreme examples because they're sort of silly and that's the problem with them. But if you look at a high school track team, okay, and you look at, you pick a big Division 1 school and you look at their sprinters, are they genetically predisposed to be sprinters, but without a certain degree of training, could never appreciate it? Or could a certain amount of training overcome a lack of genetic predisposition? I mean, how do you feel about that today versus when you wrote the book, versus when you wrote the article? Because, again, you're getting smarter as we go.

Yeah. When I wrote the article, I was more convinced than I had been before the article that genes were unimportant, completely unimportant. And by the time I wrote the book, I came to feel that there were sort of two extreme camps. One that felt genes have no influence on performance and another that I'd say the other extreme wasn't that practice has no influence. I don't think anybody thought as uncontroversial. So I think one extreme was only practice matters, and the other extreme was practice and genes matter. I think that is not as extreme, saying they both matter.

Which. And my bias is the latter. My bias is just that.

I mean, that's what the evidence shows. And it's like, people don't randomly pick to train for marathon to the hundred meters if they're trying to get to the top level, because there's some zero sum physiology going on there. And so I think to be a sprinter, you're not turning a cart horse into a racehorse, as the saying goes. Like, you have to have some predisposition to being fast and being explosive. And there's a reason why those people are particularly bad. Usain Bolt would be a worse marathon runner than a random person picked off the street because different physiology. But. But I also think it's important to note that at the beginning of the season, and six months later, someone like him are very different in how fast they are. Even over the course of one season, they change how fast they are. So I think the practice is. Is incredibly important. But you also need talent now, which.

Is maybe a reasonable segue into a story that I know you just get asked about all the time, so. But I also feel like for the sake of the listener, if they haven't heard you on another podcast, it's worth them hearing you explain the difference between Roger Federer and Tiger Woods. But of course, once you're done with this, I want to kind of go down more extreme examples and stuff. So is it safe to say that the contrast between Tiger and Roger are elite examples of opposing views?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it's sort of interesting because. Well, I'll give the quick versions of the story first before I criticize myself. The Tiger woods story. I think even if people don't know the details, they probably kind of absorb the gist. 7 months old father gives him a putter. Not trying to turn him into a golfer, by the way. Oh, this reminds me, we should talk about how the Tiger and Mozart stor I think are told wrong after this. So I'm just putting that on our Cork board here. Ten months, he starts imitating his father's swing. Two years old, you can go on YouTube and see him on national television demonstrating his swing on the Mike Douglas show. At 3 or 4, he starts saying, I'm gonna be the next Jack Nicklaus. Fast forward, age 21, he's greatest golfer in the world. And that's sort of the quintessential. I think that story has seeped into culture so much that people who don't even follow golf ever kind of know it. Federer, on the other hand, every bit as famous as an adult, but obscure.

Every bit is dominant.

I mean, just more so over a longer time, for sure. And when he was a kid, he played some basketball, badminton, tennis. His mother was a tennis coach, refused to coach him because he wouldn't return balls normally. He continued on do skateboarding, swimming, wrestling, soccer. When his coaches wanted to move him up a level, he declined because he just wanted to talk about pro wrestling with his friends. After practice, he went on to play handball. Maybe I said volleyball already, I'm not sure. Some rugby.

Do we know how good he was at these other sports, by the way?

He was good at soccer for sure. Most the other sports, I'm not really sure. But he kept playing badminton, basketball, soccer, longer than some of the others. And then soccer was the one that he finally decided he had to. He had to choose between soccer and tennis.

And what age is that when he's having to make that decision?

I think he was starting to think about that as he was like entering his teens, basically. And he wasn't focused on Tiger saying, I'm gonna be the Jack Nicklaus when I'm four. Roger was actually. When he first got good enough to get interviewed by a local paper, the reporter asked him if he ever became a pro, what would he buy with his first hypothetical paycheck. And he says, Mercedes. His mother doesn't want him putting all his eggs in this basket. Is like, appalled. And asked the reporter if she can hear the interview recording. And the reporter obliges. It turns out Roger said, Mercedes in Swiss Germany just wanted more CDs, not a Mercedes. And so his mom's like, all right, fine, but. But it's just very different in every way from the Tiger story. And the way I sort of used these as a device to start range first to set up just the concept going forward. The book proposal was titled Roger versus Tiger. And it was going to be like, when should you be a Roger and when should you be a Tiger? But they felt everyone would think it was a biography of those two guys. My publisher and I thought it was telling that we only know only hear one of those stories. And my question was, which of these is the norm? Obviously, they both work for these individuals. And I think there's many paths to the top, as there are people. But what was the norm? And it turns out that the norm when scientists track athletes en route to becoming elite is that early on, they tend to have what they call a sampling period where they try a wide variety of activities that often includes things like martial arts and dance and doesn't just have to be other sports, gymnastics. And they learn these broad, general, these physical skills, and they learn about their interests and their abilities, importantly, and delay specializing until later than peers who plateau at lower levels. And that turns out to be the norm. And so I sort of felt we should let people know what the norm is instead of always focusing on these very few exceptions that happen to be in, like, the most kind learning environment sports and that aren't that good to extrapolate to everything else.

Now, how much of that do you think is the psychology of it and the neuromuscular physiology of it? So looking at Roger, for example, who I know very little about Roger Federer. That's not. Not the obvious stuff that most people who are not. I'm not a tennis fan or anything like that. But part of his longevity, is it possible to be explained by the fact that he never burnt out versus sort of slowly acquired a love for this thing versus had it shoved down his throat? I'm sure. Like, there's lots of stories of trying to create these tennis prodigies where it probably backfires because by the time the kid is 16, they're great, but they've lost the desire. So it's more of a, a above the neck phenomenon than a below the neck environment. How much of it do you think is that? Versus in playing all those other sports, Roger actually developed synaptic connections that served him better in tennis. He basically created a bigger foundation across his neuromuscular system that ultimately came to serve him when he specialized.

So there are a couple points. So this will be a sort of a longer point for us because you bring up a couple good things. Initially, I thought that most of the effect was going to be accounted for by the fact that if you allow people to delay selection, it's more likely you get them in the sport that they're the best at. Whereas we know the earlier you force selection, the more likely you put the wrong person in the wrong sport. And when selection occurs really early, you end up seeing this huge relative age effect where coaches just pick for kids who are born early in the selection year because they're seven or eight or nine or 10 months older than their cohort. And so they're at young ages. That's a huge difference. And so coaches mistake biological maturation for talent. So I thought most of it was just going to be the fact that if you delay selection more, you'll get the right people in the right sport more. But then I started coming across these studies of German national soccer players or people in the national development pipeline where they were matched for ability at a certain age, tracked for several years, and they see who improves more. And at certain ages you have to focus eventually, but at certain ages, like in the early and mid teen years, it was those who did a wider variety of activities. And so then I started to think maybe there really is something to the skill benefit. Which didn't surprise me intuitively, but I didn't. To see it empirically was interesting. And then I spent some time with, I should say, by the way, my colleague John Wertheim asked Roger Federer about this. One of the questions you asked on the Tennis Channel recently. And Roger Federer said it contributed to his not burning out. You know, you never know how much to trust someone's own story, but it's worth noting that that's what he said. I spent some time with this physiologist for Cirque du Soleil and he noted that they started implementing this program where some of the performers are former Olympians and things like that too, where they would have performers learn the basics of three other performers disciplines, not because they were ever going to perform them, but to see if it would vary up what they were doing, maybe reduce stress related injuries and stuff like that. And they track their injuries next to Canadian gymnastics, I guess it's a Canadian company. And he said it reduced their injuries by like a third. So they implemented it. They must feel really strongly about it if they're taking away from practice time for those performers, their main discipline. There seems to be something. This showed up in another longitudinal study of young athletes where the best predictor of suffering what they called an adult style overuse injury was how specialized the athlete was. And it wasn't necessarily their total time spent in physical activity. It was if it was just the same thing over and over. So there was like some protective effect from diversifying. We can guess at what that is. I'm sure your guesses would be better than mine. But ultimately my feeling is the Roger pattern is more prevalent. One, because you have that breadth of training that predicts breadth of transfer, you're exposed to much more neuromuscular stuff, much more perceptual stuff. And when the challenge gets harder as you go up, you need to draw on those. There's a funny book called Extraordinary Tennis for the Ordinary Player, I think by this guy, Cy Ramo, who's better known as the father of intercontinental beliefs, ballistic missiles, but also wrote some books about tennis and a couple other things. And in it, one of the interesting things in it was that he shows he does some like serious analysis of gameplay at different levels and shows that even for good amateur players, something like 80 or 90% of the points are scored by just keeping the ball in play and someone making an error. And then when you get to the elite level, it's totally exactly the opposite. It's like 80, 90% of points have to be earned. And that completely changes the kind of game that you're seeing. I think the challenge that a lot of these athletes are facing really changes a lot as they go up in levels. And so they really want to have that kind of breadth of training and this experience responding to different types of.

Do you think this overlaps with the Air Force Academy example where having the harder, more orthogonal education in calculus prepares you for more real world problem solving, which is what's happening as you go from calc 1 to 2 to I.

Think so, I think so. And I mean again, that's why I think the theme of the book is that things that'll cause you to be the best today might not be the best for five or ten years from now, or the best way to develop a 10 year old might not be the best way to develop a 20 year old or certainly isn't. And it's also why I think the specialization model may. Well, there's a surprising dearth of research in golf for how popular sport it is, but I think the specialization model may well work for golf because you're not facing some of that same stuff. It is a very kind learning environment. And I mean, I guess the best guy in the world right now, Brooks Koepka, didn't come until later and it's unclear if he even likes golf. But I could see it makes sense to me that the specialization model would work or at least not be deleterious in golf, whereas in the other sports I'm.

What about the sports where physiology is undeniably huge? So the big three being swimming, cycling and running. Cycling's hard to talk about because people tend to conflate the use of drugs with somehow discounting the remarkable physiology of these guys. But. But if you take a Chris Froome, for example, four time Tour de France champion, grows up in Kenya, we can speak to what the importance of early exposure to hypoxia could have been. What is our belief about the training effect and the duration of the training effect necessary to produce world class athletes at that level? Because to me that's as foreign. Like if you said to me, peter, I'm going to put you in a time capsule. You're going to be 16, you're 14 years old again, knowing everything you know today, if you have to become a professional athlete, which sport would it be in? The answer is none. I positively know there's nothing I could ever be good enough in. And that includes if I was willing to do everything that was necessary to become the best cyclist, runner or swimmer, I just couldn't do it.

You'd have to do what some countries host the Olympics, what they focus on is just recruiting more people in the much less competitive sports.

If there's a basket weaving, I have a friend who joked about this because my interests are so diverse. He goes, peter, do you realize that if someone comes up with an Olympic sport that requires solving a differential equation, driving a car fast Shooting a bow and arrow and doing a deadlift, you could be one of the best.

That's basically modern pentathlon. You're pretty much there.

And he listed off 10 other really stupid, esoteric things I do. And I'm like, yep, that's great. That's my claim to fame.

Modern pentathlon is like, like fencing, horse riding, swimming, running. It's like, we should have that. I think there was a time when chess and fiction writing were in the Olympics. So there's hope for you.

I suck at both of those things.

Or like the Brits, I think in the winter sports when skeleton got introduced, which is where you slide it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hilarious.

And there's a great innovation story about that if you want to get to that. But one of the guys who I talked to in their program said, we've got this down like 80% to a science. We make like an open call for women. We, like do some measurements. We know what size they need to be, we know what kind of explosion they need to have. We pick the gold medalist and they've done that. So that stuff's kind of amazing.

But do you think that for these super physiologic things where presumably mitochondrial density, mitochondrial efficiency, fiber distribution matter the most, is that more of a gulf? Is that more tiger? Is that more Roger? Notwithstanding the psychological component, which is obviously enormous.

So I think in sports in General, more people, 100 years ago, you could have come to the Olympics and been the only person who knew anything about training or the only person who was really talented and win. Now, I think in every sport, many more people are ruled out by either their nature or their nurture, no matter what the sport is. But I think in those meaning they're.

Not willing to train hard enough no matter how much their ability, so that.

Rules them, or they don't have the opportunities. I mean, a huge portion of people in the world don't have an opportunity to be exposed to most sports. So they don't have the opportunity. I mean, think one thing. The impact of Title IX in the US is showing in how dominant we are in some women's sports where I think I just saw a stating. Ross Tucker, he's at Science of Sport on prominent Sports scientist. He tweeted that the United States has something like 40% of all the women's registered soccer players in the world. So like, of course we're awesome because we're giving more opportunities. So I think a lot of people, either they're not willing to train, they don't have access to training one of those, or they don't have the nature for it. And the more competitive the sport is, the more important that is right, because it's. Obviously, if we had everyone do identical training, only genes would separate them. And if we had everyone be identical twins, only training would separate them. But I think people are more quickly filtered out by their nature in things like sprinting and.

So how old are you?

I'm 38.

38. So I'm 10 years older than you. But directionally, like, we're both clearly past our prime, right? In the sense of, like, sports wise. Sports wise, yeah. I think I'm past my prime in everything. But clearly athletically, is there a reason that I. Let's assume I'm a decent athlete, which I'm actually not, but let's assume I was. Could I, if I decided tomorrow, like, I want to play tennis, I don't think anybody would ever assume I could become a good tennis player. But is it because the deliberate practice argument would be there aren't enough hours left for you to devote to this. Another argument would be, no, you've missed a critical window, just as we say. By the way, this might be totally bs. I'd like to hear your view on it. This view that we learn languages best at a certain window, and once that window closes, it's sort of like a growth plate closing over a bone. It becomes really hard to learn languages thereafter. Is there something about this critical window of exposure, I guess, is really the thing I'm trying to get at with this question. When it comes to physical talent, that's a tough question.

And there's this book by a neurologist called why Michael Couldn't Hit. And it's about.

I loved this book. Was one of my favorite books.

So he was saying Michael Jordan kind of missed the critical window for developing the perceptual anticipation skill, that you need to see things that are coming because your reflexes are too slow.

Right. Why the greatest athlete we'd ever seen of A generation was a 188 hitter in triple A ball.

Yeah. I'm a little bit of a gadfly about that, though, because I think that was a great book. I loved the book.

I love the Wayne Gretzky story, by the way.

But we'll come back to it later. And one season I think Michael hit like 220 or something like that in the minors, which I think if we went down and picked a random person off the street, they would hit zero in double A. These are people who are stars of college and high school teams or foreign teams. So did he do well or poorly? I don't know. If he had hit 10, you know, I wouldn't have been surprised because he hadn't been playing in a long time. So I'm kind of impressed with what he did. But I also think there's something to.

I mean, I think the point though was the expectation. It's not that hitting.288 or whatever in AAA ball is horrible. No. It's just why isn't the guy that seemingly has the best hand eye coordination in the world immediately to absorb it?

Right. And in that sense, I do think there was probably something to the critical period. And there are always people, there are always exceptions to everything. One of the most dynamic players in baseball now is Lorenzo Cain and he did not play a game of baseball until age 16. That surprises me. He did not know how to play. I think most people would need to have some exposure, not necessarily specialized, but have some exposure at that age. So there's always exceptions. But I do think you want some of that early exposure partly just because you run out of time, because you want your perceptual expertise to coincide with your physical. Yeah, right. So you're just under a serious time limit. And in relating that, the language, I actually do think. And you know, there was a guy who tried, dropped everything when he read about the 10,000 hour rule and decided to try to become a pro golfer by doing 10,000 hours? Exactly.

No.

And he got Erickson to consult with him and everything, named Dan McLaughlin.

How far did he get?

He got to something like 7,000 hours or something like that. And then he stopped. He was having injuries and. And what happened was I think he didn't make it and he didn't nearly make it, but he got really good. So he got better than like 90% of amateurs or something, but wasn't nearly going to get into Q school qualifying for professional tour. And so what I think, and I didn't know if he was going to make it or not because my point has been like people were saying, oh, you were right, he didn't make it. I wrote a little bit about him. I'm like, that's not what I said. I said there's huge individual variation. If he's going to make it, it's not going to be at exactly 10,000 hours. And so he didn't make it.

By the way, do you think there's enough variation that it almost is uncoupled? Like what would be your 90% confidence interval on that or does it even matter? I mean, I think there has to be a 90% confidence interval, right? If you think about it, is it 1,000 to 40,000? If you had to say, 90% of people that become that achieve mastery do so in a certain amount of deliberate practice.

I think it really depends on the sport. I listed in the sports scene. I listed some out hours, and it varied a lot by sport. And so I think it sort of depends what it is. Most of them were in sports were lower than 10,000 hours, significantly 4 to 6,000 hours, kinds of things. And again, these are averages. In chess, it was higher than that. So I think it depends. I think it's sport dependent. And again, something like skeleton. There's a great paper called Ice Novice to Winter Olympian in 14 months, where it's basically just pick somebody and then they can go to the Olympics. So I think it a lot depends on what you're doing. And also, when I sat in on a Harvard Business School class for some reporting I was doing for range, you just reminded me of something where the professor asks the students, he asked them all these things like, how many Subway sandwich shops do you think there are in America? Give your 90% confidence interval.

And basically we can't do it. Because if you're asked that question, if you're asked 20 of those questions, you should be able to get 18 correctly in a reference range. I've played this game myself, and with people, I've never seen anybody come close to it.

People don't go big enough. Give your 90% confidence interval and you'd be better off going like, well, I know there's 10, you know, to like a million. And instead they go much narrower and they end up missing almost all of them. So what would my 90% confidence interval be? And it sort of. It depends what counts too, because there's some accounts of athletes who have done a bunch of different sports. So there are studies that show that invasion sports are the ones that require anticipatory People can't see me doing air quotes. I guess we're on a podcast. But that's the term that they use in the invasion sports, where you have to anticipate things that are happening faster than you can react to. Boxing, soccer, whatever, baseball, things are flying trying to get past you. There's some studies that show that people who have done a variety of invasion sports will then pick up any subsequent invasion sport more rapidly. And so I think there was a case of one woman who had played a variety of sports and Then it only took her like 500 hours to become one of the best basketball players in the world. But she'd played netball and she played a whole bunch of other sports, volleyball and all this stuff. So it sort of depends, what do you count as deliberate? Like Erickson wouldn't count that as deliberate practice because it's not the same sport. But clearly it is like lowering the threshold.

Well, and that's really the Federer point, isn't it? It's that all those other sports he's doing, soccer, badminton, et cetera, I mean, they're still training in a more diffuse way, a set of skills that obviously have gone on to serve him greatly in tennis.

Yeah, and I think this relates to language, if you want to segue to language a little bit, which is. I wanted to write about language in the book. As I was going through all the research, I found so much of it contradictory and confusing that I decided to kind of stay away from it, largely because I just couldn't figure out, I was hoping there'd be. In my proposal, I wrote about this, I'd seen this really cool study and I had video for it where infants who were being raised bilingual, they were given like this Lucite box sort of thing and Plexiglas or whatever it was, and there was some object and they had to find the opening in this clear box and get an object out of it and then put some other object in it. And the ones who were bilingual would try more different strategies. And the researchers were saying, well, they think differently and they have more executive function and, and I thought that was tantalizing. And I loved the video. But I just. The research was all over and my conclusion was kind of, there's a lot of tantalizing stuff, but nobody's quite sure really for a lot of it. But one that I did think was pretty strong was the idea that people who grew up bilingual had an advantage for then learning a third language without being taught it formally. So there are studies where they'll be given like a fake made up language and fake grammar and just have to learn it by immersion. And they seem to do that, that better. And I think that's sort of akin to what, what we see in sports. And with regard to the sensitive period, I do think there is a real sensitive period in language where I think about after like age 12, you're not going to make something your native language anymore. And I think there are cases where kids, feral children cases, these rare cases where a kid like grows up in the woods or isolated from people. And if they haven't learned some. If they haven't had exposure to language by age 12, they never learn it, basically. And that also happens to be about the age you have to start. If you don't start studying chess patterns by age 12, your chances of reaching International Master status drop. International master status again, one down from Grandmaster. They drop from like 1 in 4 to 1 in 55. So I think there are some critical periods, but I don't think for most things, maybe for these feral children, but for most things, I don't think it's nearly the expiration date that people think it is. I think most people can get better at most things than they think they can. And they can get better at most things than they think they can at older ages than they think they can, too.

Yeah, it's funny you say that. That's kind of where I wanted to pivot for a second, which was. All of this discussion is interesting through the lens of being the absolute best tennis player or the absolute best golfer on the planet. But isn't that really besides the point for most of us? Because if there's 7 billion of us on this planet, 6.99999999 billion of us are never going to be good enough at anything to make a living at it outside of our day jobs anyway. I was asked on a podcast recently why I love archery and driving a race car so much. And part of it is there is still, every six months, I'm still able to look back and appreciate the progress I've made. In other words, I'm coming from a place of being so not expert at these things that the joy is actually in the monotonic increase in skill that is actually the joy. To me, it's the. I don't want to say mastery, because that implies you are mastering it, but it's the path towards mastery that is more joyous. And I don't know, it's almost like on some levels it must. Maybe it's not that much fun to be the best in the world at something because by definition you only have one way to go at some point. And that's probably a lot less enjoyable than working your way up the curve. And I guess generalists have the ability to. I don't know. This gets more into the psychology of it again. But you don't have to tether your identity to just this one thing. I always feel bad, actually, for athletes who it's a brutal, brutal way to make a living in the sense that you have a far narrower window in which you can be the best at something versus, like, say, any sort of. Of normal career.

Yeah. And if you interact with a lot of athletes, you hear a lot of them say, now it's just a job, and it's something that they loved at a certain point. I think we were talking about Ayrton Senna earlier. I seem to recall him saying something like, the times of the sport that he loved the most were not when he was necessarily on the top of the world. It was earlier.

It was actually during his last two seasons in karting. It was racing this British guy named.

Fullerton for everything he did that karting was his favorite time.

Right? Absolutely. It was pure bliss. No politics, as he said, just pure racing. I just actually interviewed a friend of mine the other day. This podcast, it'll come out at some point in relation to this one. I'm not sure when, but same question I asked her, she's an Olympian. And it was like, okay, you were the second best in the world on this day. You got a silver medal. When was the sport the most fun? And it's like, oh, yeah, two years before I went to my first Olympics was when it was its most fun.

Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, this makes me think of so many things. One, I think people that are performers need other stuff to do. There was a study I mentioned in range where Nobel laureates are 22 times more likely than a typical scientist to have, like, a serious aesthetic hobby, even though they're certainly not as good at it as they are at their day job. For me, I noticed while I was writing this book, somewhere along the line, I sort of started to forget what I'd loved about writing, I think. And I keep this thing I call my little book of small experiments, where at least every other month, I think of some skill I'd like to learn a little bit about or some interest I'd like to explore a little bit. And I put a hypothesis of, well, what could I try to. Almost like my grad student notebook, what could I try to get some insight into this? And it forces me to try something new every other month. It doesn't have to be a big deal. Maybe it's some job that I don't know about. I just have to find somebody to talk to about it. But when I was sort of losing my enthusiasm for the kind of writing I was doing and starting to feel more pressure because my first book was a surprise success, and then all of a sudden get a lot more pressure after that, I took an online Beginner's fiction writing course. I've been reading this book about the Zen concept of beginner's mind, where you just always keep your mindset as a beginner, never as I've arrived. And this class, it's like, nobody cares who you are. Nobody cares what you've done. You get back into that feeling of being uncomfortable. And I loved it. I mean, it reminded me what I loved about doing this. It made me totally uncomfortable because it's still writing, but it's very, very different. I think it had these huge benefits. Like one of the exercises was you had to write a story using no dialogue whatsoever. And after I did that, I went back to my book manuscript that I had and was like, I've been leaning on quotes in a lazy way. When I don't understand stuff, I don't understand it. The reader's not going to understand it. So I need to learn it better and clarify with narrative writing instead of people's voices. And so in every way it refreshed me. And so now it's like something I really, I really want to do. And one of the kind of share this. I'll tack on another story here, but this is one of the greatest things I've ever seen in sports live. Has to do a little bit with this, having something else going on in your identity. Which was at the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010. Yeah, 2010. I was up at the women's 1.6K cross country sprint. They say sprint, but you go like way up a big hill and come back down and. And there's like four rounds. They're all in a day from the prelims to the metal round. And this woman named Petra Meitic, Slovenian skier, had been one of the top ranked people in the world for years and never medaled at world championships or Olympics. Totally snake bitten. Something would always go wrong. They didn't bring the right skis. Oh, the technician didn't have the right wax ski breaks like just freak stuff. And here she's favored to get silver, I think in Vancouver. And in the warm up right before the first round, she slides off a curve, falls into a frozen creek bed and bruises up all of her side. And they take her through quick examination because she has to go to the first round and say, okay, nothing's broken, it's just pain. Like if you're okay, you can go. And she goes through the first round, qualifies on time when she's. She was the favorite in that round, barely makes it through second round. Similar thing they Examine her. It's just pain, you know, if you can do it, you can go. Third round, she falls down after the finish line, is screaming. They have to carry her away and examine her again and say if anything was really wrong, we'd tell you couldn't go, but if you can go, you can. Final round. You hear her screaming every time. She's, like, pulling the ground, gets the bronze medal, just nips in there. Then they have time to examine her. Final. She broke a whole bunch of ribs on her side. One of them broke off and punctured her lung. And so she came to the metal ceremony with a tube sticking out of her chest in a wheelchair. And I remember she was. I talked to her sports psychologist, and they were saying, if we had known that she had broken all these ribs.

Or had a fricking pneumothorax.

Yeah. They weren't gonna let her go to the medal ceremony. She was like, I will die in the medal ceremony. I'm going. You know. And so they wheeled her and they all said, well. Well, first of all, it's kind of a testament to the mentality that if they told her it was an injury, she wouldn't have done it. Right. But it's just pain. And I was talking to her sports psychologist about what got her here. What's the journey been like, especially after she's always having this stuff going wrong. This must have been like, oh, again. And he said one of the most important things was diversifying her identity. She was getting so fixated and so much pressure. He was like, you need to do something else. So he forced her to start building a house, basically. And that became like, a task for her to do and a whole new thing and a new skill. And he felt like. I thought maybe he was going to talk about some new type of cross training. He was like, no, the building, the house took the pressure off. It gave her some other part of her identity. So it wasn't just as the person who's always having something go wrong. And I just thought that was so interesting that what he felt was his main contribution was giving her a hobby, essentially, and that he thought that really allowed her not to feel the pressure that would break her in some way.

You sort of alluded to it earlier with the story of the Nobel Laureates as well. I can't remember if it was. I think it was Francis Crick who said this. I could be wrong that. And it might have been Watson, but I think it was Crick who said, the key to doing great science is Always being a little bit unemployed. And I'm also probably paraphrasing that and bastardizing it. It must have been said much more eloquently, but you get the point. The gist of it is great insight in science comes from having time to wander in your mind. You said something a while ago about which made me very jealous, by the way, and kind of pissed me off. You would read 10 papers a day in the exploration phase of writing. And it's like, I'd give anything to read 10 papers a day today. Instead, I feel fortunate at least to have a team that can read 10 papers a day for me. I remember that bliss of you just get to read the paper all day, every day, highlight it, take notes, call the author, go to journal club. Like blue. Like, that was unbelievable. And we don't. I mean, it's very difficult to be a scientist today because nobody's paying you to be just thinking, nobody's really rewarding you. Nobody's promoting you based on that. So we've created this very perverse set of incentives. And in some ways, honestly, I consider it a miracle that there was still really good science being done. Most science being done, by the way, just sucks. I mean, if we're going to be brutally honest, if you pull up PubMed and you look at every one of those hundred thousand papers every month that makes their way into PubMed, I think 90 to 95% of them are absolutely useless, serve absolutely no purpose to our civilization, do not advance natural knowledge, do nothing beneficial for us.

They increase the publication count of the person doing them, which is why they're doing them.

That's right. It's an economic tool of the journals and it's a promotional tool. So you don't have any. Any absolutely nefarious actors in the situation. You just have a system with such perverse incentives that nothing.

Some of the predatory journals put those are.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think a lot of the science is bad. I confess in range that I think my own master's thesis was not good science and wouldn't replicate. But I didn't know. Like, I was rushed into studying the specifics of arctic plant physiology really quickly without learning what was actually happening. When I hit a button on the statistics program and how science has to be set up to make conclusions. And I think that's kind of the norm for a lot of scientists. I think this 2005 paper by John Ioannidis that was titled why Most Published Research is False that people kind of wrote off. Now it looks like, he's a genius, right?

Oh, and now I hope I'm not saying something John wouldn't want me to repeat, but I think John's been pretty vocal about this. Probably like seven or eight years ago, I was having dinner with John and I said, john, I want to know bullshit answer on this. What percentage of people who do science for a living, so they apply for grants, they get the money, they do the thing. What percentage of those people shouldn't be doing that? Which doesn't mean they can't work in a lab, but they can't be principal investigators. I mean, he said something to the tune of 95. He's like 19 out of 20 people who basically, for a living, are in the business of generating hypotheses, testing them experimentally, and evaluating the results of those experiments. That's the scientific method. 19 out of 20 people who do that can't do it it and probably should not be doing it.

That's scary. But also, I would guess that we don't want to try to narrow it down to just the people that should be doing it, because you'd have this purifying form of selection where you have to allow some failure.

So this is kind of where I want to go with this thinking, right? So why aren't we going down this tangent? So you've obviously written a lot about the importance of even generalists within science, and you've given a couple of examples which we should go into, about the hard problem that gets solved by somebody whose native scientific tongue is not the one that is being addressed. So I want to talk about that, but I want to contrast it with this other thing, which is I have this thesis that I harp on all the time, which is mostly my way of communicating with myself, to not get so upset at the lack of scientific insight in the world. And the idea is genetics and evolution have never prepared us for science. So the scientific method is less than 400 years old. Even the earliest signs of formal logic as a construct to describe the way we think represents less than 0.1% of our genetic existence. So, Atiya, why would you ever get upset at somebody who can't think logically? Why would you ever get upset when you pull up a story on GOOP that is written like the most insulting thing you've ever seen in your life with respect to science? Why would you let that upset you? Peter, it's like you're expecting something that is simply too much.

And you might be assuming that the people writing for GOOP are trying to get Things. Right. So that might be the assumption.

That's part of the assumption.

I would love to hear you hold forth about goop, to be honest.

So I contrast this with. There has to be some degree of rigidity and formality in the training. I like to think of myself as a pretty good critic of science. I have the ability to read papers and immediately, most of the time, figure out why these are total crap and what all the biases are and all these other things. But to take any credit for that would be ridiculous. I can't take any credit for that. That's simply because I was mentored by people and I went through a formal type of training or informal type of training, really. It wasn't formal and codified, but it was informal. It's. It's going to Journal Club. It's doing the experiments yourself, putting something together, thinking you're slick, and having people tell you, hey, numbnuts, did you realize how many ways you screwed this up and how you've drawn the wrong conclusion? So how do you balance that? You have to go through that type of training with. But sometimes you have to be an outsider.

Yeah. And by the way, what you mentioned, informal training. I think we underestimate the importance of informal training. And you have to kind of set up cultures for it and things like that. So I have a master's degree in geological sciences, and I got a much better education in genetics writing a book than I did in a grad program. I wouldn't know how to run, like, the equipment in the lab, but I basically kept, like, a statistician on retainer and just to talk to me about paper anytime. And that's an amazing way to learn. You're not just being talked at. You have a specific question of why is this right? He's like, no, you can't use this. And so it's an amazing way to have, like, informal learning. And you're right. I think the way to balance that, I think it's difficult because you're right, you do need some formal training in it.

Like, in other words, the takeaway from your book is not that the person who's going to crack the code on pancreatic cancer is currently working at an investment bank as a finance analyst who's never taken a science course. That's not going to happen. Not even close. And I don't think you're trying to suggest that, but I've heard people try to take your work and paraphrase it as, oh, well, all these scientists working on cancer. Screw it, man. They're not going to figure anything out. We need to. We need to go get the history majors to solve the cancer problem. And I'm like, not a freaking chance. Without some modicum of scientific training.

Yeah. And I mean, I think the scientific community, I would say the tech community in particular, would do well to interact with historians. Like, I think there are a lot of things they could learn. Sometimes I feel like the Silicon Valley set maybe doesn't respect history quite enough or it'd be useful for them. But that's a side point. My guess is that when people are saying that, that just like go pick some person at random to do science, maybe they're taking that from the chapter where I wrote partly about Innocentive, which was the VP of research and development at Eli Lilly in the past, this guy named Alf Bingham, who's at Diesel, I remember when I first talked to him, he said, look, I'm an organic chemist. Doesn't have a carbon in it. I'm not even supposed to play with it. Okay. I'm specialized. And I guess he realized at a certain point that chemists at Lilly were getting so specialized that there were certain things they were great at, but it also narrowed their view. So he talked a lot about this terminology in some of the business literature. Exploration versus exploitation. Exploration meaning essentially going and looking for new ideas and solutions. Exploitation. Once you find them, how do you make the most out of them? Both of those incredibly important. And he said, basically the exploration phase is increasingly found outside because people are so specialized, so they're just not covering as much ground. And so he had this idea to just post online some of Lilly's problems in drug development. And at first everyone was like, no way. Proprietary information. He said, well, pick stuff well, nobody will know what we're doing. And they said, who else is going to be able to solve this? So he posts some online and like a third of them get solved. I remember one of his favorite memories was an attorney who solved some important chemical synthesis project because he had worked on some tear gas copyright case or something, and it reminded him of that. And so a third of those problems get solved, which is amazing.

Yeah, that story amazed me, actually.

And in those problems, it does tend to be because they've selected for problems that have stumped the specialists. Right. So it does tend to be the more likely the problem is to get solved, the diversity.

And I think my question on that, to really double click on it, is, did the generalist actually solve the problem, or did the generalist just come up with a clue that completely changed how the specialist went about approaching it. Like in the case of that example, the attorney doesn't actually know how to completely synthesize the molecule. What they're basically saying is, you guys are looking at it this way. Stop, rotate 90 degrees over there and turn around. And I think the answer is over here. To which case either a new set of specialists could do it. Is it sort of a bit of that hybrid?

Yeah. And actually innocent of evolved to where they give different. Now they help other operations post their questions in a way that'll attract what they call solvers. And there are different monetary rewards depending on what kind of contribution it is the person makes. And sometimes he did get people sent in powders and stuff. They synthesized stuff on their own. Other times it was much more like, you're taking the wrong approach. And here's another thing to think about.

But they were still chemists that had to do this right.

Not all of them. Not all of them, but there was a lot of that. Sometimes they'd be chemists from some other area, but sometimes it was totally random people. But again, you're farming it out to the whole world. People have. Not the whole world. I mean, most people don't know about innocentive, but a huge number of people. And I think he was surprised. Sometimes things would come from people who worked with machinery, but weren't really formally trained in it, but had a lot of experience. And so I think sometimes there were true outsiders. But most of the problems don't get to the innocentive stage anyway. They're being handled by the specialists. And I wouldn't extrapolate innocentive to mean that specialists aren't incredibly important. I mean, my broad view of this is the same as physicist Freeman Dyson gave this great speech where he said, we need birds and frogs. The frogs are down in the mud looking at the granular details. The birds are up above. They don't see the detail, but they're integrating the knowledge of the frogs. And he said, the world is wide and deep. It'd be stupid to say one's better than the other. You need both for a healthy ecosystem. His concern was, we're telling everybody to be frogs, and so we're not having birds. And that's kind of how I conceive of it. And I think the biggest impact would come from what Arturo Casa de Val, who's this kind of one of the prime characters of the last chapter, is trying to do, where adding range to people who are within science already, like these people are being formally trained he's just backing up the formal training instead of jumping right into kind of the reductionist studying the body as a machine sort of thing. It's like the initial classes in the program he's pioneering and he's like one of the. I think his H index, which is a measure of his productivity as a researcher, surpassed Einstein's recently, which isn't fair because people publish a lot more now, as you alluded to, for their careers. But, but it still puts him in very rare company. And so he's starting people with how do we know what is true? And the anatomy of scientific errors and also how errors have sometimes led to breakthroughs. And so he's just like backing up the training into these broader concepts and saying you can learn the more specific didactic stuff later, but if you don't learn the broader conceptual stuff, you never get it because you're only going to get more and more and more specialized from here. So I think one way we can approach this is just by backing up the training, basically because I don't think we have to worry about. People will learn the specialized stuff in their field just by doing it and being there. But the other stuff, but that's what we kind of teach them and start them with. But the other stuff like scientific thinking, how does it work? What constitutes evidence? They'll never get that stuff if they don't get it early in training.

Yeah, I sort of cite the examples you've given when I get asked a question a lot, which is someone going to college who wants to go to medical school saying what is the best thing to study in college, to which I don't know the answer. But my advice is anything but pre med. So you couldn't really do anything. And I'm sorry, because I know there's somebody listening to this, I'm sure, who's doing pre med, who's going to go into medical school. And my only take for you is, okay, I'm sorry that you're in pre med right now, but make sure you spend a lot of time doing non pre med stuff in college. You still have the bandwidth to take other classes. You should be doing so liberally, but you are better off being a history major who goes to medical school than a biochem major who goes to medical school. In my opinion, I could be wrong, but having seen enough people go through it, you're going to learn as much biochemistry as you're going to need to learn when you get there, both interpersonally and frankly in the breadth of thinking you'll be better off if you studied something else.

I mean, a lot of Arturo's argument too is I saw him make this argument talking about he went from Einstein to Johns Hopkins School of Public Health because they're allowing him to start this new grad program. And I saw him on a panel about the replication crisis in science. This problem with a lot of work basically not being true. And the head editor of the New England Journal of Medicine said, you can't do that. Training is already too long.

And Arturo said, it's clearly not working.

He said, I'm saying drop the didactic stuff because it's not been working. I think he actually pointed out that the New England Journal of Medicine had the highest retraction rate in some study also. But so I thought that was interesting where he said a lot of that stuff is in one ear and out the other. Anyway, if it's really didactic, people don't even know if they're going to need it or when they're going to need it. And so I thought that was an interesting take that he said you can just, just to drop some of that other stuff. But to your point about telling people not to do pre med. When I was at Sports Illustrated, not so much anymore. But when I was there, I would get asked by young aspiring journalists, what should I do if I want to work as a sports writer, should I major in English or journalism? And my first instinct was to say journalism. If you know what you want to do, get a head start. Second instinct, English. And then if I thought about it, I'd be like, well, I majored in geology and astronomy so I have no idea what to tell you. But stats course, biology course, never hurt anyone. You should do one of those because you'll learn the job by doing the job and that's the only way you'll learn the job.

That is the challenge of giving advice, isn't it? Because I don't feel this way at all anymore. I'm totally comfortable with my non linear path to doing what I do. But I spent a great deal of time frustrated that I couldn't figure out sooner in life what I wanted to be when I grew up and I thought of all the time squandered. But again that was through the paradigm of, of you only had one to two 10,000 hour windows. You didn't take them, you spent them doing something you will never do again. I had my 10,000 hour shot and I put it in the wrong thing and now I never do it again. But I think that Speaks to probably the insights of your book, which is you're discounting a bunch of things you learned in doing that.

And also. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Were you going to.

No, no, no.

Yeah. And also I think your insight into yourself, your skills and interests in the world are constrained by your roster of previous experiences. As Herminia Ibarra, who studies how people find what's called match quality, the degree of fit between their interests and abilities and the work that they do, which turns out to be really important for how likely they are to burn out for their performance for all these sorts of things. And we really underestimate it. She studies basically how people seek this out and transition careers. And she said we learn who we are in practice, not in theory. Which means there's this kind of cultural idea and lots of career gurus and personality quizzes. They kind of seek to convince you that you can just introspect and know what you should do putting in that time. But in fact, the way we learn about what we want to do is we have to do stuff to act and then think you have to do stuff and then reflect on it. And that's the only way you figure it out. And match quality seems to be so important that spending some time in that experimentation is worth it. So one of the that I think is sort of representative of that. This economist who found a natural experiment in the higher ed systems of England and Scotland where in the period he studied, students in England had to pick a specialty in their mid teen years to apply for a certain program in college. The Scottish students could keep sampling throughout university. And he said who wins the trade off? Otherwise the systems were very similar. Who wins the early or late specializers? And what he found was the early specializers do in fact jump out to an income lead because they have more domain specific skills. But the late specializers sample more things and when they do pick, they have better match quality and so they have higher growth rates. So by year six out they fly by. The early specializers, meanwhile.

The early specializers, that's based on the economics.

Yeah.

What about when you look at things that probably matter even more, such as happiness and satisfaction?

He was only looking at finance and career switching because he was looking at huge numbers of people. But we can talk about fulfillment in a sec. So the early specializers then start leaving their career tracks in much higher numbers, even though they have much more disincentive from doing so because they're made to pick so early that they more often make a wrong choice. So the return to match quality was higher than the return to getting a head start and domain specific skills. The dark horse project, which I wanted to get around to anyway, has to do with fulfillment because I think you should tell more of your story because it sounded really interesting and I want to hear more of it. But that project, the dependent variable was fulfillment and it was about how people go on. Yeah.

Well, before we started the podcast, I said there's this thing I've always tried to explain when I've told my story to high school kids or something like that. It doesn't really make sense, which is growing up, all of my energy went into boxing and martial arts and. And I didn't do anything in school. I was super mediocre. And then I had this awesome teacher who, when I was in grade 12 in Canada. You say grade 12, not 12th grade. Sounds stupid.

So weird. I can't believe we can even get.

It's hard that we can even have a discussion. And he called me in one morning and he said, hey, I heard you're not applying to university and stuff. And I said, that's right. And he certainly didn't bust my chops. In fact, I wrote about him after he died and how amazing it was that he just knew what to say. He knew the right thing to say at the right time, which was, hey, I totally get it. When I was your age, all I wanted to do was play in the NHL. And that was the only thing that mattered to me. And you really ought to. Don't let anybody tell you that your dream of being middleweight champion of the world is a dumb idea. It's not. But he said, but it was almost like a Steve Jobs moment, Like one more thing. I think you have a gift for mathematics and you should at least entertain the idea that maybe that's your calling is more in terms of. Of math than it is in fighting. And I remember that day as clear as. I mean, it's so long ago, it's more than half my life ago was that moment. But it did change the course of my life completely. And then I did come back to high school to finish and did better than anybody expected I could ever do. And I've always assumed the reason I was able to do that is I simply took the work ethic of exercising six hours a day, which was sort of what I did in high school. I was. I would run 5 to 13 miles every morning, 400 push ups before bed every night, and everything in between was training around that, and I just applied that to calculus, algebra, physics, geometry, et cetera. So that sort of gets into the Duckworth grit stuff. The question I guess I have in that is, had I taken the grit of age 13 to 18 and basically with no other cognitive capacity, turned it into then doing well in school?

I definitely wouldn't say no other cognitive capacity because, well, I think those things take a certain cognitive capacity, that kind of discipline. But clearly the teacher recognized something in you that you did not recognize in yourself, didn't just pick you out randomly. And I assumed.

Well, especially because I wasn't even the top student in mathematics at the time. I wasn't even near the top. So. Yeah.

So obviously you saw something that you didn't yourself see. And so it seems to me like you had this training, whether that was something that was part of who you are naturally or something that motivated you, that you could take. Take that and transfer that to then something that had better match quality for you. And so it's a combination of you using certain skills and approaches that you had learned and somebody helping you find better match quality, basically. I think that's like an explosive combination in a good way. But it is interesting. I wonder what he saw, because he was right. But did you have any inkling that that was the case at the time, or was that total news to you that he thought you might.

No. In fact, I found math incredibly frustrating because it wasn't something you could BS your way through, at least in English class. I remember this well because I'm actually still very close to my English teacher from high school. I always managed to find a way to weasel through by writing. Every essay I wrote was on Muhammad Ali or Mike Tyson or Marvin Hagler or Jimi Hendrix. I basically screwed my way through English by always figuring out a way to read a book that I was interested in and figuring out a way to write. But you couldn't do that in math. You sort of had to do. So. What I remember is that math frustrated me more than anything. But I wish Woody was still alive for many reasons, but one of them being. I wish I could ask him why he said that.

Yeah, no, it's curious. I mean, and I think a lot of people find math more frustrating than English class. It's like English class more subjective. And you can kind of get through even if you don't a lot of people even if you don't know what you're doing. But that is. That is interesting. I wonder what he saw. And I think that's the reason I said I think it resonates with the Dark Horse Project, which was this project by these two Harvard researchers to sort of figure out how people who find fulfillment in their work go about it in a wide range of careers. Essentially there was a huge variety, but most of the people did not stick on their first sort of dream. Basically there were some, but it was a small minority. Most of them had this. They actually called it the Dark Horse Project because people would come in and say, well, don't tell anybody to do what I did because I started this other thing and then I. Something else came up or something random happened or I realized there wasn't what I wanted to do so I had to start my own thing.

So they also felt sort of sheepish about their non linear path to get there.

And they saw themselves as having gotten lucky and come out of nowhere, which you do have to get luck, luck is important. But they all saw themselves as having come out of nowhere, which is why they called it the Dark Horse Project. What they kind of had in common was this. They would sort of respond instead of sticking to like an ironclad long term plan, they would respond to their lived experience by zigging and zagging and kind of finding what they were good at. Whether that was someone helping them figure that out, which I think is often the case for a younger person or them being older and maturing and sort of realizing that. And it sounds like that kind of happened to you in some way. You view yourself as coming out of nowhere because you had a talent and also some transferable skills that could come together in a way that you hadn't conceived before and it worked really well. So I think you'd be kind of the type for the Dark Horse Project.

I mean, to take something you said a moment ago and couple it to this. So let's say we Fast forward whatever 18 years and your son says to add, I don't want to go to college. I'm going to learn a bunch of stuff that a, I don't need to learn because I could teach it on my own. I'm going to get a degree in something that doesn't necessarily imply what I'm going to do with myself thereafter. The letters don't really matter after my name. And by the way, notwithstanding the fact that maybe by the time our kids are going to college, the debt that they'd incur to do so is itself more debilitating than anything else. So can you make a case that one does not need formal education at that level to go far? I Mean, notwithstanding the fact that sometimes you need it from a professional standpoint, like you can't become a lawyer without going to school. I don't see that changing and things.

Like that, at least in California, you just have to pass the bar.

Actually, that's a great point. You can't become a doctor, I guess, without going to school. And so does this change the way you think about higher education?

Yeah. And, gosh, I don't even know where to start with this question. I hope that College looks different 18 years from now than it does now. Because. Because if we keep ramping up people's debt, then we will make sure that they fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy, where the more you invest in something. One of my favorite writers, Maria Konnikova, wrote a book about conmen. And one of their strategies is they start with asking for small things.

Oh, I thought you meant Kahneman.

Oh, no, no, not Kahneman. No, no, Kahn. Men playing confidence games. Yeah, the book's called the Confidence Game. And she's a. She's a psychology PhD and a great writer. And. And she notes that they'll start with these small lots of small asks because the more you invest, the more likely you are to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy of then saying, well, I've already put some in, so I should keep going, even when to an outsider, it's clear that it's a disaster. And I think the more debt we saddle people with. Like that study, we were just talking about the higher ed systems in England, Scotland. The English students who specialize earlier have more disincentive from quitting, even though they should. When they do quit, their growth rates are then higher because they're quitting in retrospect, response to information about themselves that they've learned. And I think the more, the more time and debt we saddle people with, the more we make sure they will not respond to match quality information. And instead we'll say, yeah, you blunt.

Their receptivity to the signal.

That's right. And I think we want to. Steve Levitt, the Freakonomics economist, did this interesting study where he had people flip a coin to determine major life decisions. And the most commonly asked question was, should I quit my job? And what he found was the people who flipped, I think it was heads and changed their job were better off when he checked in with them later. And so I think you want, like, as little friction as possible to people. Job changing. In fact, when I was watching one of the Democratic primary debates recently, and people were talking about universal healthcare I would think one of the advantages might be that it would lower friction to job changing because you're not as worried about, so that maybe people can shuffle around more and have better match quality. So I think something has to be done about the debt situation. I think there's plenty of evidence that for a lot of students, so. So the economist Bryan Caplan wrote a book called the Case Against Education. I certainly don't agree with, and it's higher education specifically. I certainly don't agree with everything in the book, but I think it's provocative and a rigorous take. And his argument. So we know that some part of college education is signaling to the job world that is not about anything that you've learned. It's just about I am smart enough.

And I'm serious enough.

It's like the minor leagues for the job world. So we're doing them a favor because they don't have to be good scouts. And basically what he was saying is nobody says that either signaling or learning is all of the effect of college. But his argument was that he thinks signaling is like 80% of it, whereas other people would say, oh, maybe it's 20%. So he thinks most of it is just, you need this credential to signal to the work world that I'm okay. And I don't know if he's right about how much it is, but I think it's probably more than people intuit because research seems to suggest that it doesn't change people as much as we might might think in some ways. What I do think is important about it, though, is that it does give that kind of sampling ability. Like I didn't know about it. So the Scottish students in that study also, much more often the late specializers, end up studying something that wasn't offered in their high school because they didn't know about it. I didn't know about the stuff I studied until I got to college. And so without it, I would want there to be some other mechanism for sampling. But I think that kind of communication technology that we have now and the Internet may, if we use it smartly, it can expose you to a lot more stuff. And I think there's huge potential of online courses. I love some of these online courses. So I do think while I would want him to be able to have a sampling period, my kid, I think I don't know that the same kind of college model that we have now will be the answer. And I think there are other things that could expose him to more other things. And. But if society forces the signaling to continue, then what can you do? Then it's just like you have to pay your dues because you have to to pay your dues. The way I see my role as a parent. You mentioned Angela Duckworth, by the way. I should mention the week that my book came out, I subscribed to her newsletter. Her newsletter was titled Summer is for Sampling. And she said kids shouldn't be too gritty until they figure out what to be gritty in. And she says it took me a decade of trying stuff to figure out.

So it really speaks to a broader point here, which is a lot of these insights that we sort of latch onto are slightly out of context.

Yeah, definitely, definitely. And I mean so now if her point is you should be gritty when you should be gritty, I'm totally on board with that. I view my roles. I write a little bit in that section about grit about something. I should have written more about about the way the army adjusted when they realized in an industrial economy and they had this strict upper out structure. It was great because you did want to be specialized because work next year did look like work last year and there were huge barriers to lateral mobility. But knowledge economy comes along and now there's tons of lateral mobility for people who can engage in knowledge creation and creative problem solving. So their highest potential officers started quitting if they didn't have any agency over their career matching. And so first they tried to throw money at people to retain them and people who were going to stay took it, people were going to leave, left anyway, half billion dollars of taxpayer money down the drain. Then they started programs like one they call talent based branching, where instead of saying here's your career track, go up or out, they say we're going to pair you with a coach and try this one career track, then reflect on how it fits you and then try these other two and these other two and we'll triangulate a better fit for you. And that improved retention more than throwing money at people. They've basically built in a match quality sampling system. And so maybe we could do stuff that's how frankly how I view right now my parenting role as being the coach in the talent based branching system for my kid, facilitate help him know that a lot of things are available and get the maximum amount of signal about himself from each one. And I think there are ways that that can be done possibly more effectively and a lot more cheaply than the formal education structure.

How do you know how long to push? So give you two Examples with my daughter. And I feel so bad sometimes telling these stories about her because one day she'll listen to this and she'll be like, dad, I can't believe you embarrassed me. But when she was 5, she said, I want to play the drums. And we've had lots of parents who have interacted with us who said, are you crazy? How did you listen to her? But we were like, oh, we just did. So we got her, like, a set of cheapo little toy drums just to see would she actually do anything. And she did. She wouldn't stop wailing on them. No, she was 4 when she said that. Then when she was 5, she said, no, I really want to keep playing. So I was like, okay, fine. So we got a drum teacher, got her a real set of drums, and away she went. And here she is now, she's 11. She still drums. She loves it. She's. I mean, she's really good. I think I can say that without too much bias, just objectively based on what her teacher tells me, which is like, she drums better than most anyone, and she's only 11, and we never pushed her, right? So it was just. She just wanted to do this. There was one time when she kind of wanted to quit when she was about 7. And we talked to her teacher and said, hey, let's spend way more time just letting her play Taylor Swift songs than doing scales for a while and see what happens. And then it was great. Like, it all came back into the mix. Year ago, she starts taking tennis lessons. I think her tennis teacher is the most awesome guy. He's like this young Russian kid. He's so fun. He's so smart. I mean, I've watched them. I mean, he just has a beautiful way of explaining things to her. She never feels bad. Like, he never hammers her, but he's strict. If she's screwing around, he tells her. She's like, I don't want to play tennis anymore. And I'm like, olivia, are you freaking crazy? Do you know what I'd give to have played tennis when I was a kid? And I don't get into the sob story of, like, we didn't have the opportunity for private tennis lessons or whatever, but it's more the. Tennis is such a beautiful sport. You will be able to play this forever. How can you not want this? And I'm really torn. Do I push her to continue taking lessons? And I'm not saying, like, you have to go and even compete. It's just sit here and play tennis for two hours a week you and mom play. It's fun. Why wouldn't you want to do this? Or do I just say, well, she only wants to play basketball, which is the only sport she wants to play right now. Should I just. I don't know if this is a great example, but I think you get the point. Right. It's like there's always part of me that thinks it's really good for her to keep playing tennis.

Yeah. Yeah.

And she's crazy to stop.

Obviously you're saying she'll regret it. It sounds like it's.

That's my potentially stupid fear, which is you're going to be 51 day and you're not going to be playing basketball because nobody's playing. No 50 year old woman is running around playing pickup basketball. But you will still play tennis. So why wouldn't you continue to learn this now while you have this critical window in which you could get good at this sport?

Yeah. And she could play tennis at startup at 50, she just wouldn't be as good at it.

Exactly. Yeah.

And you're oriented toward achievement. So she might be a great drummer and a crap tennis player. She starts at 50. She might still like tennis though.

Yes. And I'm trying to balance the Yes. I think that's the part of it. I can't let go of this idea that I'm not great at anything. It would be really cool if my kids had the potential to be great at something world class. Like wouldn't it be cool if she could be a world class drummer one day? I have no delusion she won't be as the interest or even the talent to be a world class tennis player. But I still think, why wouldn't you? You have this wind. I think I'm still stuck to this idea that there's a window in which you can assimilate skill, be it language, music, sports. That. To go a little further, if she said I don't know anyway, that's sort of.

And when she's younger also you have more time to put into it and you're a lot less concerned about making mistakes. So you'll throw yourself in and practice in a way that you probably won't when you're older in most things. I mean, that's a great question. It sounds like in drums you found a way to sort of. When she was saying I don't really want to do it anymore to keep her foot in by sort of changing what she was doing.

Right. And it was just this one little audible called on the line. Of scrimmage. Everything was fine. But also, it would have never even occurred to me to put a kid in drums like this was 100% her insisting on it. And there was no resistance from us. I was like, great. But if she'd said, piano, violin, fill in the blank, we would have been equally interested in letting her pursue that. So maybe it just comes back to this broader issue of is there an age at which parents should force some of the sampling? Is there an age at which parents say, enough is enough, you've sampled enough. If you don't want to play tennis anymore, don't play tennis.

I should make clear I don't want to prescribe diversification any more than I want to prescribe specialization. Right. And this gets to something I mentioned before, which is I think we tell the Tiger and the Mozart stories a little wrong.

Yeah, let's do that story, actually. Okay.

So Tiger said in 2000 his father never asked him to play golf. So his father did put a putter in his hand when he was seven months old, but he wasn't attempting to make him a golfer. He was just giving it to him as a toy. And he responded. So he said in 2000, My father never once asked me to play golf. It was always me asking him. It's the child's desire to play, not the parents desire to have the child play that matters, that resonates with the work of this woman, Ellen Winner, who's maybe the world's authority on. On prodigies of that nature that they're usually driving their parents crazy, not the reverse. And that there's not really.

Yeah, I mean, Wayne Gretzky is a great example of that. He listened to these interviews with his parents like they couldn't get this kid to come in for dinner.

And what. Ellen Winner, I think she alludes to some research. I don't think this research was exactly hers, but it's really a problem when someone's parents, if they're low socioeconomic status and they have a prodigy and the person has this incredible drive to master whatever it is they're doing, and the parent can't accommodate because it really is hard for the parents. Obviously, Tiger's father responded to his very unusual display of interest and prowess. Mozart, probably the second most famous example.

Tell people just what the. What's the mythology around Mozart?

Oh, that his father basically was like Tiger Wood's father, except for music that he started very early.

Shoved a violin into the crib and.

Yeah, exactly. And so I was going through these letters, and one that I remember really well about Mozart's early life. Was a musician who'd come over to, to play with Mozart's father, who was a musician. And he recalls young Mozart coming in with the group of adults and saying, I want to play the second violin part. And Mozart's father says, go away, you haven't any lessons, you obviously can't play violin. And then the letter writer, his name was Andreas something, I can't remember the last name, says little Wolfgang started crying and so I said, okay, I'll go play with him in the other room. And his father says, play, but play quietly, don't disturb us. Next thing you know, they hear the second violin part coming from the other room. And so they walk in and look and young Wolfgang Mozart is playing the second violin part with made up fingering because nobody's taught him the fingering. And then the letter. This part I remember verbatim. He says, young Wolfgang was emboldened by our applause to insist that he could also play the first violin part. And so then he goes and does that. And that's when his father says, holy crap. Yeah, and responds to it. So neither of those cases were they like manual manufactured the way we tell that story. So I don't think we should be scared about missing a tiger or Mozart because the best way to find one of those people is probably still to expose them to a bunch of things and see if something lights their fire that way. I mean, I think a Mozart.

That's a great point. That's a great point.

Yeah, I think those, I'm sure there's a lot of those people who never got exposed to the thing that would have ignited what Ellen Winter calls that rage to master. And most people, you're not gonna have a lot of tigers and Mozarts no matter what. And obviously those are exceptions, but I think that's important to keep in mind to go back to. When do you allow your kid to quit? This is something I've seen Angela Duckworth has tried to respond to a number of times. It's very difficult. She'll say things like, don't quit on a bad day, which I think is sensible. But also should you quit on a good day? It's kind of hard to know what is the calculus for when you should quit. Like if you're having tons of bad days, maybe you should quit on a bad day.

And Levitt and Dubner have written about this, right? I think it's in one of their, maybe their third book.

Well, Levitt is always saying, my best thing is I know when to quit. Like everything, like fields of study, projects, whatever.

Yeah. By the way, as a fun, funny aside, you know, Steve has tried very hard to get me to take up golf.

No, really?

Yeah. So he's a very good golfer. A lot of people don't know how good a golfer Steve is incredible. And he's convinced that taking sort of a freakonomics approach to golf, you could take a novice and make them really good in a short period of time. We've had very serious discussions about if I would give him one year, he could turn me into a really good golfer. As someone who's never even touched a golf club, I don't know if that's true, but I'm curious enough that I'd love to try it if I had the time. Because when he's explained to me the logic behind it, like how many steps you can shortcut if you're purely optimizing around this thing and how he's figured out a bunch of these hacks, I'm like, it's kind of fun. It's not going to happen with me, I don't think.

But yeah, probably don't have time to do that. But if you did take him up on that, like that guy we talked about earlier, Dan McLaughlin, who dropped his job to try to become a pro, right.

Who got 7,000 hours into it, I.

Think he got better. So he was getting way better at first. Like anything the learning curve is. But I think how quickly he got better and he had never golfed before ever, was surprising to most people how quickly he got better early on. And so I think doing that, plus, I mean he was practicing, that was like his full time job for the time. But if you did that for a year, plus whatever hacks he's talking about, I bet you'd pass most of the amateur golfers out there because most of them are just going in like swatting and it's like stress relief. They're not even really trying to get better a lot of times, but. But I bet you'd surprise yourself with how good you'd get. But I'm not a huge golf fan.

I'm putting all of that energy into the things that I'm currently doing. But this idea of quitting it is really an underappreciated thing, isn't it? Because sometimes it's time. It really comes down to time and exposure and that's the most valuable resource we have. But the when to do it is still the million dollar question.

Totally. I mean, I think that's why this. I like this model of talent based branching that the army used so much because they pair someone with a coach to help them make that decision and it's still not a science. And I also like, they call it talent based branching because basically it's coached quitting, but they use a different term. So it doesn't sound bad, but I don't know what's perfect. I mean, I think someone, a mother asked me recently, said her son is really good at violin and now he just wants to quit. And I think he like just wants to play tennis. And she was saying, but he's so good and I know he'll love it when he's older. And the best thing I could think of was try to help him keep a foot in, whether that's playing Taylor Swift songs or whatever. Maybe he just needs to back off and try something else for a while. Can you keep a, a foot in that pool so that he doesn't totally detach from it and when he feels regenerated or whatever, can go back to it. We know that progress comes from alternating stress and rest and things like that. So maybe they just need a break or maybe they need to try some other type of training. I think that's undervalued. If someone wants to quit and say, oh, either you have to stick with it or quit, but the approach you took was let's try varying what you're doing. I think that's incredibly undervalued. We act as if it's a binary choice instead of, of why don't we see what else this area has to offer. Maybe you just need to get on a different track. And again, I think that's the brilliance of good coaches is they help personalize that environment so the person continues to be interested and continues to progress. And so the first thing I would try is varying up what they're actually doing. And then if they really want to quit, I'd say maybe keep a foot in if you can for a little while. But then ultimately, if they really want.

To quit, then it defeats the purpose. If some aspiration of life is to find happiness, then yeah, yeah, and make it.

And if they want to come back, maybe they just needed a break, keep it available if possible. But if they quit and they don't regret it, then what are you going to do?

The proof's in the pudding. There are a couple other stories in range that I wanted to ask you about. One of them is the story about the space shuttle Challenger. I'll let you tell the story and then I'll bring my question to it.

Gosh, I don't even know how to tell this story. Quickly, I'll set the stage.

Everybody knows what happened. Let's assume everybody knows. The following January, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger is scheduled to launch. Happens to be the first time there's a civilian on board. It also happens to be the first time it's ever launched on a day that's that cold. And everybody knows what happened, which is whatever. 73 seconds after liftoff, the O ring failed to contain one of the liquid fuels. I can't remember if it was liquid oxygen, but basically there was a spark, an explosion, and the rest is history. You write about, one, the decision to launch that day, two, the challenges of figuring out what was the cause of that. Talk about both of those, especially the former, actually. And then I'll tell you where I'm curious.

What I focused on was this emergency conference call the night before the launch when the weather report came in that it was going to be an unusually cold day in Florida. And so engineers at Morton Thiokol, which was the rocket booster contractor, and NASA, they get on this big conference call in three different locations, a group of engineers, and they say, what should we do? Is this a problem? Should we worry about it? The shuttle was supposed to be cleared for cool temperatures, but nobody really knew because they had never launched below 53 degrees. And they were concerned, as an aside.

By the way, that O ring was from the Apollo program. That's a great example of engineering, sort of shortcut, which is they never actually redesigned the O rings for the shuttle. They literally just took the O rings from the Apollo project, which had a different spec, and brought them over.

Maybe I should describe what O rings are a little bit. It's like it's a strip of rubber that runs. If you can picture the rocket booster, you know, it looks like a missile attached to the shuttle. And the O rings, it's put together in different vertical segments. And the O rings run along the perimeter of the missile, like rocket booster, and seal the joints between pieces. And they have to stay sealed so that they block the rocket fuel coming down the booster from shooting outside, essentially. And there was concern that the rubber of the O ring launched. There were forces that moved the O ring, that moved the metal pieces that were being sealed apart. And the O ring rubber had to expand immediately to maintain contact so that fuel didn't come shooting past. And the concern was that the rubber would harden a little when it was cold, and so it wouldn't expand quite as quickly. And so some rocket fuel would basically shoot through the wall of the booster. And that is exactly what happened. And the question was that they were trying to answer is should we be worried? Because twice before they had had cases where they saw soot on the wrong side of the O ring, which meant rocket fuel had gotten past it. But it wasn't catastrophic. One of those was when they launched it 53 degrees, which was the coolest temperature they'd launched at. One was at like 75 degrees, which was one of the warmest temperatures they had launched at.

And so, and on this day it was like 30 something, right? It's like 38 or something like that.

They were looking at it that it was going to be like 40, but it ended up being colder than they expected even. And I think in retrospect, some of the temperatures of actual components were even colder. There was like ice on the. So it ended up being colder than anybody expected anyway. But their question was, in these temperatures, will the O ring work or not? Basically. And the fact was that they didn't really. There were only 2, 2 cases of this so called blow by when the rocket fuel goes past again, one at the coolest temperature, one at one of the warmest temperatures. And the whole shuttle was thought by the project manager to be cleared for lower temperatures anyway. And so all of a sudden they're having this last minute meeting where they're saying like how do O rings work and when do they work? And the only real they didn't have enough data to answer the question. And one of the engineers was saying we shouldn't do this because I inspected the joints and in the 53 degree day there was lots of black soot behind the O ring. So that means a lot of gas got by and we're lucky it came back. And the 75 degree day something else must have happened because only a little bit got passed. I don't know what happened, but only a little got passed. And so we go colder. So he said they asked him to quantify this. So what's the relationship between temperature and gas blow by? And he said, I don't know, I can't quantify it. All I know is colder is away from goodness. That's how he put it. And they kept saying quantified, quantified, quantified. He said, I can't, I've got photographs, that's it. And I think they're telling a story. And the fact that he couldn't quantify it meant that essentially it was deemed inadmissible evidence, basically because they couldn't quantify what the problem was. And so he made the decision to launch the rest is history.

So the story is tragic on so many levels because it would almost be easier to accept a disaster like that if nobody had seen what could have been done. That's what makes it so painful. But on a second reading, what makes it even more painful is the way the questions are being asked, which is were they asking for him to assign a probability? Like, I don't even understand what the question was. Quantify it. What does that mean?

Yeah, I mean, I think they wanted him to say, at what temperature would it fail? Because the.

Well, it clearly had already failed. So really, this is a probabilistic question.

Exactly.

Yes. But again, that's not a linear question. Right. That's an asymmetry question. That's the question of so and so has an actuarial risk of having a heart attack of 5.4% in the next decade. Should you take preventative measures? I don't know. I mean, depends on your view of the world. What's the upside? What's the downside? What's the risk of doing something about it versus the risk of not doing something about it? Those are very asymmetric risks.

Yeah. And I mean, actually, if you read the Rogers Commission, which investigated the Challenger disaster, Richard Feynman, my middle son, is.

Named after him, by the way.

Oh, okay. So Senna.

Senna and Feynman are two heroes of mine.

And your daughter named after him after.

Actually, she's named after her grandmother.

Oh, okay. Who was also, I'm sure, an exceptional person. There was a point where Feynman was asking this questions like this of, like, what were you trying to get him to say? They say, well, he couldn't quantify his case. He didn't have data. And Feynman says, when you don't have data, you have to use reason. And he was giving you reasons. And there is a point at which they're trying to say, well, at this temperature, based on this data, the chances of failure should have been like one in a. I don't know, a. Some enormous number. And Feynman's like, that's nonsense. You had two cases that had, like, a small failure here, and you're telling me it's basically impossible on a small.

Finite number of launches?

Yeah, yeah. And so obviously there was a lot of COVID your ass stuff going, and they even knew that at the time. So there was this unusual on that conference call once, Morten Thiokol said, well our engineer is saying don't launch, we're going to support that. And then there was all this discussion and they went for an offline caucus where they said, said where they kept being asked for data. Quantify your case, quantify your case, quantify your case. And they said we can't. Okay, I guess we agree to launch. And then they were required to do a sign off that they didn't have to do in the past. So obviously people were sort of in CYA mode at some level or they felt protected by the process. But yeah, I don't think they weren't the best questions that they were asking. I mean, I think they wanted to know at what again, at what temperature will we suffer catastrophic failure? And the answer was that they didn't know, but that things didn't look good and there was reason to be worried.

Think about that question. Even through the lens of the financial crisis, at what loan to value ratio do you see a default? Or if you go through all the metrics, it's like it's a probability distribution. The only way you can really answer these questions is you can't answer them this way. But the only way you can even get estimates of that is to run simulations across distributions, assuming you even know how to, to predict the probability of failure. Which in that case I would argue.

They didn't even have that N spatial most complicated machine ever made. Maybe not as complicated as the credit system, but most complicated machine ever made, not whatever. 24 launches, they all come back safely. And you're right, they didn't know. And in fact, when Morton Diokol gave its first recommendation, their initial recommendation was don't launch below 53 degrees because NASA wanted a temperature. And I think the project manager thought that the whole shuttle was cleared from 33 to 99. So they were putting definite boundaries on it. So they said don't go below 53. And they said, well, what's your reasoning for that? They said well we've done 53 before and it came back and that actually totally backfired. So basically they set the lower bound at what they'd already done and said don't go below it. And so it backfired in the sense that NASA had this very strong engineering culture. Of course that had worked great up till then. And so he said that's not science, that's tradition. That's not an answer. You've departed from engineering. Give us an engineering story. Don't say, just do what we've done before. And I get that like, as Mary Schaefer, a NASA engineer, later said, perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world. So you can't. It is a probability distribution. You can't have perfect safety. But I think their attempt to be prudent backfired because it was viewed as an emotional rather than a scientific case, essentially. But, but as Feynman said, the data wasn't there. So you have to start thinking about reason. And that doesn't mean maybe they would have gone with the same solution, but they had to start thinking about this problem in a different way than they were used to, because usually they did have the data they needed to make a decision. And in this case, they didn't.

The other challenge of these case studies, because it's easy to just stop there, but we also don't realize in the 24 launches prior and the God knows how many launches that followed it, including one or more disaster, by the way, on reentry, what's the denominator? How many times did somebody, first of all, how many disasters were barely avoided, maybe at least another one on the day that it was 53. And could you ever have had a full consensus on any given day? This is a great case study because it has so much the richness of the data that follow are there, but we don't know if every time one of these things goes up, there was also somebody in the room that said, and by the way, with perfectly good reason, no way, no way, no way. And here's the reason. And if that's so, is this the price we have to pay to live in an uncertain world? Or in retrospect, was Feynman right and this one should have been averted using reasonable engineering insight?

Yeah, I think, I think, and it's so easy to say in retrospect, of course, these people are under incredible pressure. They've had all successes in the past. The astronauts know they're taking risks. Everyone knows they're taking risks. But I do think there's a case to be made that this one should have been averted. Like voices were being raised. And in fact, I think one of the reforms that came. You mentioned narrowly averting crisis before this, the 53 degree launch. I think one of the. I spent a lot of time talking to the head of the rocket booster program while I was reporting the book. I think he was saying one of the changes that occurred was sharing information like that with the astronauts themselves, because the feeling was, had they known what happened with that o ring, then they would have said, no, no, no, no, no, we're not ready to go. You guys need to figure this out. And so I don't know whether that would have or it wouldn't have.

That's an interesting idea, but I think.

Maybe, I think it's worth getting a different view when you're assessing that risk.

Was it Atlantis, that which was the one that burned upon reentry? Columbia.

Columbia.

So totally different issue had to do with same culture. That's what I was going to ask you. Was there a cultural similarity in the screw up?

Totally.

Or was it a different. Totally different type of mistake?

Cultural carbon copy. In fact, the investigation commission for the Columbia accident wrote in their conclusions, this is so similar to the Challenger disaster culturally that we deem NASA not a learning organization because they didn't learn from that experience. And what I write about is they had this incredibly strong process culture, essentially that was at this sign, like on the mission, on one of the rooms, it said, in God we trust all others bring data, which is great. Like they were super rigorous, but when they would get into these situations where you didn't have the data you wanted, then continuing to sort of ask for it and follow these very strict procedures meant they really kind of constrained their thinking. Like with Columbia, there were engineers who said, we'd like photographs of a part of the shuttle we think is damaged. And so they went and asked the Department of Defense for those photos. And their superiors not only blocked them, but apologized to the Department of Defense for going outside of the normal process, for trying to acquire things like that. And so in both cases, they kept sticking to this very rigid process. We need an engineer case, we need a quantitative case, or these concerns, like they're not being quantified and you're not going through the proper channels. And so it doesn't count. Evidence and hunches kept being deemed inadmissible because they weren't part of the normal formal process. And it happened in the exact same way both times. People suspected what was going to happen, but because their concerns didn't fit into the normal procedural boxes, they were discounted.

Now, we don't know the denominator. We don't know how many times people had concerns that were completely unwarranted and would have thwarted. So therein lies the challenges.

And that's what Alan McDonald, who was the head of the rocket booster program, told me. He's like, look, if we called off that launch for Challenger, people would be called, as he said, Chicken Littles, because you have to be willing to take risk in the space program. And you don't really get credit for not launching.

As I was about to say, let's assume they had not launched that day and they'd waited until the next day and it was warmer and they launched. We wouldn't be having this discussion about it. You're never a hero in that situation.

That's right. And I think there's one sort of thing that I didn't write about, but that I think has been attributed a little wrongly. Where some people have said there was pressure on Morton Thiokol, for sure, more.

Pressure because there was a civilian and this was more high profile, or what was the.

No, for Thiokol, There was. Was more pressure because NASA had said they were going to like, open up the rocket booster contract.

Got it.

But so people have said, oh, that pressure. Maybe that pressure was a problem. But Iacall gave the initial recommendation not to launch, so they were okay not to launch. And then they were pressed for the quantitative case. So I don't think that pressure was definitive because they initially came with the recommendation of not to launch.

So speaking of stories in the book, this is different, but it's equally perplexing to me, which is the firefighters and these guys who are doing these crazy jumps, rescue things. It's not that I don't believe the stories I do, but I'm trying to be empathetic to that situation and say, where am I making a similar mistake in my life? So spend a moment explaining what that is.

Yeah. This comes from the work of a psychologist named Carl Weich, who writes a lot about what he calls sense making. Like how do people collectively make sense of a dynamic situation? And one of the things he noticed when he was studying wilderness firefighting teams, hotshot firefighters who hike in how to dig trenches around wilderness fires, or smokejumpers who parachute into them, is that they do a great job. They're very reliable. But sometimes something unusual happens, like a fire jumps from one slope across a gulch to another slope and starts chasing them uphill. And when. When unexpected things happen, sometimes they have trouble and sometimes they die. And when they die, what he noticed was they tend. The ones who die tend to die with their tools, chainsaws, drip torches, axes, whatever, hundreds of pounds of equipment. And the ones who survive, or much fewer, have dropped their equipment and run. And in many cases, the hotshots or the firefighters will refuse orders to drop their tools. And so I was going through, like, reports of some of these tragedies, and you'd see, victim is 100ft from safety, still carrying chainsaw and drip torch and backpack and things like that. And even accounts of survivors would say they'd be running, they'd be looking for a place to put their. They couldn't believe they were dropping their equipment because it was so central to their identity as a firefighter. Norman McLean, who most famously wrote A River Runs through it, also wrote a book called Young Men and Fire. And he wrote that being asked to drop your tools is like being asked to forget that you are a firefighter, because that's your whole group identity. And all your training is built on never getting rid of your tools. But in unfamiliar situations, holding onto them kills you. And so Wyke used that as kind of an allegory for what he saw in other usually highly reliable organizations like commercial airlines, where when things go as expected, these very formal, strict procedures work incredibly well. But sometimes having done them so many times makes the organization rigid, such that when things change and when it's obvious to an outsider that they should drop their tools and run, they don't do it because they're so used to doing one thing. And so what he was arguing for is how can we make training so that we have those reliable procedures, but also so that people know they have to improvise, and we can't train them exactly what to do for improvising, necessarily. Although now they do get trained to drop their tools, but who knows what the other.

How many people had to die to figure that out? And again, the more powerful part of that allegory is the what's my tool? Right. What are the tools that I am lugging around that are probably helping me know 99% of the time, but 1% of the time, not only are they not helping me, but they could be catastrophically wounding me.

Yeah.

I mean, have you thought about this in your own life?

Oh, for sure. In fact, when I told that. And this is not nearly as it sounds like it has so little gravity compared to this. But when I was talking before about taking a fiction writing class, I was trying to think about the joy of it and think about new structure, learn new structure for writing. But what really came out of it was this thing where it said to me, I'm using using quotes in a stupid way because I've been writing investigative magazine articles for the last couple years where you and the lawyers really want other people to explain stuff in their voice if they can. But that's not good for this kind of book. And I didn't even think about that. It was not the right way to go about it until I was like, knocked out of it by doing something different. Again, that's not. That's not anything on the level of tragedy. But some of the other things Wike wrote about work. So in commercial airlines, they have these incredible. It's incredibly safe. It's a pretty. Pretty remarkable, actually. But when there are problems, it was usually the large majority of problems would be caused when a situation would change and the flight crew would do the thing they were used to anyway, even though to, like an outsider, would become obvious that they had to shift what they were doing. So I think it's this sometimes paradox of expertise where if you haven't learned to do some improvisation, then you kind of get stuck doing similar things over and over. You know, you get like the typical. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail problem. And I think there's plenty of that in medicine.

You could argue medicine probably has more of that than anything else, given the degree of specialization. But also I think the tacit kind of. What's the word I'm looking for, sort of the air of invincibility. Not invincibility either, is the sort of the. I think part of it stems from the privilege of medicine, which is like you can sit down with. You could meet a person for the very first time in the emergency room, and they'll take their clothes off and you're going to examine them, and they'll tell you a detail about their life they've never told another human being. There's just something about that that says, well, there's still something about this profession we place so much faith in. And then by extension, those in the profession start to project that faith on their own decisions. So I think that coupled with the stakes, coupled with the specialization, I think probably creates a fertile environment for exactly that type of thinking. Now, I mean, I guess the last point I want to ask about on this particular issue is had those firefighters, going back to this particular example, been trained as lifelong firefighters versus they had been sampled across a much broader group of people coming in. Is the point of the story that if you'd come in to that role, having been an accountant working at Subway, just pick a totally random distribution of people, would it be more intuitive to that group to have dropped their tools?

That's a suggestion. Yeah, that it would be. And in fact, What Wyke and MacLean argued is that in the first of the famous disasters called the Mann Gulch fire, a few people survived, and the leader of the group, he ordered people to drop their tools. They refused the orders, essentially, except for the two that did survive. And one of the things they pointed out was that he had a much broader training base. He was used to doing lots of other things with tools, not only firefighting. And so they thought that he was. We don't know for sure, but the argument that they made was that he had had a much broader experience with tools. So he didn't think of them as like, only these things that he used in a certain way for firefighting. And so, in fact, what he did to save himself was. So he's ordering his guys to drop his tools. Most of them aren't. He realized he wasn't gonna. He was far down the gulch. He realized he wasn't gonna be able to run away from the fire, so he actually lit a fire in front of himself, burned the grass and dove into the ash, and the fire burned around him. So he improvised. And now people are trained to do that. The idea that you would stop a fire by lighting a fire in the grass in front of yourself. And that worked, but. So they made the argument that he was much better set up to improvise because he was used to improvising with tools.

David, I could continue having this discussion for another couple of hours, but I want to be sensitive to your time. And so before we wrap, is there anything that. I feel like we've only scratched the surface, frankly, of these two books. I actually thought we'd get through more, but I guess that speaks to how long winded I am when I ask questions.

No, you told me before we started that I could go on and be digressive. And I told you that I'm naturally digressive. So I took you up on it.

It was a perfect, perfect. It was massive match quality at its finest. Anything we didn't talk about in the last few minutes that you. You want a chance to sort of.

Discuss Someone who became that I don't get asked about much in the book, who became a sort of a role model for me, works not so far from here. A woman named Frances Hesselbein, who took her first real job at the age of 54. And I'll keep her story short here, but basically she essentially became. She became a CEO of the Girl Scouts, and when she had one semester of. Of junior college under her belt in her entire life, but now has 23 honorary degrees, she likes to note, and when she actually interviewed for the CEO position, the people before her had had incredible leadership credentials. Captain Dorothy Stratton was one. She started the women's Coast Guard reserve and was university dean. Another was Cecily Kanan Selby, prominent scientist and leader in industry and education. Frances Hesselbein, one semester junior college leader of one of 355 local councils of Girl Scouts. And again, first professional job at age 54. And so she says, no, no, no, I'm not taking that CEO job. I'm never moving out of Pennsylvania. She grew up in Johnstown, and her husband says, no, I'll drive you to New York. You can turn it down in person. And so they ask her, if you took over Girl Scouts. This is late 60s. Girl Scouts is in total crisis. Free fall of membership and volunteers. And what would you do if you took it over? And since she doesn't want the job, she feels fine to say whatever she to speak her mind freely. And she says, throw out our sacrosanct handbook. I'd replace it with ones that appeal to girls of different ages. I'd start working on diversity. If an indigenous girl near an ice flow in Alaska opens a book, I want her to see herself in a Girl Scouts uniform. She just goes through all this. I'd sell some of the underused campsites, even though it'd be painful. Get rid of some of this homemaking stuff, focus on educate girls about sex and drugs and math and science and all this. And she's like, well, that was fun, but I'm never gonna hear from that again. Of course she, she comes back. I mean, this is actually the early 70s when she was interviewing, but so she gets the CEO job and totally transforms the organization, turns the cookie business into like a third of a billion dollar business. Triple's diversity representation adds 130,000 volunteers, people she's paying in a sense of mission, not in money, and basically saves the Girl Scouts. And she works every week. I'm sure she's at her office right now because she works every weekday in Manhattan. She's only 103 and a half. So she has a lot of. I'm sure she has a lot of place to go, but I think she meant a lot of things to me. One, people can make an impact when they're older than they think they can. She's now running the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute and teaching at West Point. Also, she never expected to do any of the things she did. Every time she got offered an opportunity, she'd say, like, nope, I'm not doing it. And then they'd tell her, well, then this Girl Scout troops gonna have to Be folded, sorry. And she'd be like, fine, I'll do it for a month. And would get to try it and be like, wait, I actually love this. And that's everything she did. So she sort of short term planned her way through life. And she had two sayings that really stuck with me. One was, leadership is a matter of how to be, not a matter of what to do. I think that's a powerful thing to think about. So much about leadership is being a good example, not having to know everything. Sometimes I think we have this George Washington standing up in the boat crossing the Delaware, which I don't think that's an accurate depiction. I think there's a real painting of him somewhere. And obviously he's sitting down in the boat. But it's like this idea that they know everything ahead. They're clairvoyant. It's like, no, they need to be a good example. And part of that is admitting that you don't know stuff. And the other was her saying was, you have to carry a big basket to bring something home. And she told me when she was at one of her first training events, some woman complained she wasn't learning anything. She already knew all this stuff. And then this other woman told that saying to Frances and then it sort of became one of her mantras. And I love that saying because I realized again, it was part of this. I don't want to keep coming back to this online beginner's fiction writing class I took. But it was, it was sort of the emphasis of hearing her say that. I said, sure, I can take a beginner's class. And I realized there's like no amount of beginners classes I could take that I wouldn't learn something from. Because if you go in open minded, you'll learn something from it. There was one day in my neighborhood, I live in D.C. now, where I noticed a bunch of increase in the population of wizards in my neighborhood. And so I walked over a nearby hotel, noticed they were having like a Japanese conference. Animation conference. Yeah. And they had a beginning Japanese comics writing class. So I'm like, I'll sit in on that. Probably not going to write a Japanese comic. But it's structure and it's story and narrative and dialogue and all this stuff. You can't not learn from it. So it just made me realize that if you go into it with that mindset, you're just constantly learning something. And so that's an approach I try to adopt. Two of those phrases really stuck with.

Me and I am glad you told that story. That is a beautiful story. And I think it dovetails perfectly into this idea of being a lifelong student, which I think, well, frankly, that's sort of one of the things that's fun about a podcast. So basically just an excuse to learn a whole bunch of stuff.

That's why I figured, I mean, you don't have to be doing this for any professional reason.

Yeah. Well, David, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming up to New York today. I appreciate it.

Pleasure. I enjoyed it.

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