Specialisation Is For Insects | David Epstein

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   Yeah, it's really interesting,…

   1. DEDavid Epstein0:00

      Yeah, it's really interesting, and that's not to- that is absolutely not to say that specialists aren't important, right? Absolutely not. In fact, I like to highlight the NPR, you know, our public radio did a review of Range, and they- they say that I spend a lot of time giving credit to dissenters, which- which I like because not even dissenters, like I agree we need specialists also. I- I like the way that- that the physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, uh, and- and great writer, uh, framed it. He said, "We need frogs and birds. Frogs are down in the mud looking at all the little details. Birds are up above, they can't see those details, but they can integrate the information of frogs." And he said, "The problem is we're telling everybody to become frogs." And- and when the- when, you know, when disciplines and science changes that- that becomes a big problem. And that's sort of how I- I think of it. And so- so I think you need... Like, these problems that stumped the people at Lilly, obviously they were solving a lot of problems on their own, they were posting the ones that they got stuck. So, I think with the combination of that, of the indocentive approach and those specialists, that's where you get the best of both worlds, and you have this healthy problem-solving ecosystem.

   2. CWChris Williamson1:04

      I am joined by David Epstein all the way from the opposite side of the Atlantic, and we're talking about Range today. How are you, David?

   3. DEDavid Epstein1:14

      I'm well. Thanks for having me.

   4. CWChris Williamson1:16

      You're, uh, all over the place at the moment, right? You're a busy guy.

   5. DEDavid Epstein1:19

      Yes. Uh, uh, quite honestly, I'm getting sick a little bit of my own voice. (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson1:23

      Oh. (laughs) Yeah, yeah. Well, I, uh, thankfully for the listeners, I don't think that they will be. So, we're gonna, uh-

   7. DEDavid Epstein1:30

      (laughs)

   8. CWChris Williamson1:30

      ... we're gonna dig into your new book today, Range, right? Talking about generalists and specialists.

   9. DEDavid Epstein1:36

      Yeah, absolutely.

   10. CWChris Williamson1:37

       Why, uh, why did you write the book, first off?

   11. DEDavid Epstein1:41

       Y- you know, it- it sort of- it sort of came- the genesis of it came in sort of two parts, one of which was, uh, I wrote a book before this called The Sports Gene, um, about genetics and athleticism. And I, as- well, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, I devoted several pages to criticizing his work. That's how he puts it, to basically criticizing the science underlying the 10,000 hour rule. And so we got invited to this conference here called the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. It's founded by the general manager of the Houston Rockets. Um, and we were invited there to debate, 10,000 hours versus The Sports Gene. And it- so it's on YouTube, you can see it.

   12. CWChris Williamson2:16

       Oh, wow.

   13. DEDavid Epstein2:17

       And he's- he's very clever and I didn't want to get embarrassed (laughs) . So- so I did my homework, tried to anticipate what he would argue, you know, and thinking, all right, well, he's got to argue for early specialization. It's- it's kind of implicit in some of the things he's written. Um, and so I went and looked at- at science of athletic development and saw that, in fact, in most sports and in most places of the world, athletes who go on to become elite have a so-called sampling period where they play a variety of sports, they gain these broad general skills, they, uh, learn about their interests and abilities, and they actually delay specializing until later than peers who plateau at lower levels. And I sort of brought that up in the debate and he said, "Ah, you know what you-" later, "You know what you kind of got me on was that thing. You should- you should write more about that." And I sort of filed it away in the back of my head, um, and didn't think about it much more for, you know, more than a year. And then I was doing some work with a foundation here in the- I was giving a talk to some military veterans who'd been given scholarships by this foundation called the Pat Tillman Foundation to aid them in new career trajectories, and I talked a little bit about late specialization in sports. And since they weren't athletes, I sort of tacked on a little bit of research about the work world. And they were so enthusiastic about it because they were all career changing and they'd been told they were behind and all these things, um, that it was like, you know, they just wanted more and more and more, and they all wanted to follow up and keep in touch. And I sort of said, these people have had these incredible experiences, you know, some of them are former Navy SEALs and all this kind of stuff, and they're being told like that they're behind, you know, instead of how they can wield those experiences. And so I sort of thought, all right, there's- there's something worth doing here.

   14. CWChris Williamson3:50

       Yeah. So how did the debate with Malcolm go? Do you- did you draw? Was it deduced to draw? How do you think it went?

   15. DEDavid Epstein3:56

       You know, first of all, I think we- we have more common ground than 10,000 hours versus The Sports Gene, to be quite honest (laughs) .

   16. CWChris Williamson4:02

       Mm-hmm.

   17. DEDavid Epstein4:02

       Um, and we- we were... So it's on YouTube, people can see that, but we had a- we were invited back in March to the same conference. Um, and we went again, and this time it was- it wasn't framed as a debate, just as a discussion. And it- this one's on YouTube too, and at minute 54 he says, "You know, I- I now feel a little differently. I think I've conflated two ideas. The ide- the idea that you need a lot of practice to become good, with the idea that in order to become good at X, you should do only X and only X starting as early as possible. And I think one of those is true and the other is not, and I think I conflated them, so now my idea's a little different." And I- I thought that was, you know, a great way to- to sort of update the- the mental model. And I mean, he's a super open-minded guy, I think we both learned things from our discussions, and that was our- our recent discussion and that- that's sort of where he's at- where he's at on it, so...

   18. CWChris Williamson4:50

       I mean, if you've managed to change Malcolm Gladwell's mind, and he's somewhere on the book, right? Like- like on the- (laughs)

   19. DEDavid Epstein4:56

       (laughs) Yeah, yeah. He- he gave-

   20. CWChris Williamson4:57

       Like, he's on the front page of the book.

   21. DEDavid Epstein4:58

       ... he- he gave like the world's greatest, uh, blurb, I think. It says something like, you know, "For reasons I can't explain, uh, David makes me enjoy the experience of being told everything I thought about something was wrong," or something like that.

   22. CWChris Williamson5:09

       Wow.

   23. DEDavid Epstein5:10

       Which- which of course everything he thought about it isn't wrong, but- but you know, what he's- he's- he's saying.

   24. CWChris Williamson5:16

       Yeah, I get it, man. That's, um, that's a big accolade from a very, very well respected, uh, guy in that field. So moving on to the book itself, where does it begin? Where do we start with Range?

   25. DEDavid Epstein5:28

       Yeah, so it's- bec- because it's sort of, you know, one of the seeds of its genesis was in the sports world, um, that's- that's kind of where it begins. Because when we were having that first debate, we sort of talked about this, what- what we kind of framed as the Roger versus Tiger, uh, problem. So everyone knows the Tiger Woods story, but maybe they don't know it, but you- you've absorbed the gist of it probably, which is that, you know, he- he specialized very, very young. His father gave him a putter when he was seven months old and he dragged it around in his little baby walker. Not- not- not trying to make him into a golfer, but just like giving him something to play with, you know?

   26. CWChris Williamson6:02

       Yeah.

   27. DEDavid Epstein6:02

       And he-But by, but he was very physically precocious, and by 10 months, he was imitating a swing he'd seen his father practicing, and two years old, this is also on YouTube, two years old, he's, he's on a national television show showing off his golf swing in front of Bob Hope, who's sort of a famous television personality here. Um, you know, at three, his fat- his father, by this point, realizes that there's something very unusual.

   28. CWChris Williamson6:25

       (laughs)

   29. DEDavid Epstein6:25

       At three, he starts sort of media training him, you know, playing reporter and having him answer some, some questions. Uh, and, you know, fast-forward to the age of 21, he becomes the best golfer in the world, and, and from a very young age was ... Like, there's some, there's some sort of cute interview clips of him saying, like, you know, "I'm gonna be Jack Nicklaus," or whatever, when he's four years old, basically. So, on the other end of the spectrum was Roger Federer, who, who was also, you know, a gifted athlete, clearly, from the time he was young, but, um, played, dabbled in swimming, skiing, wrestling, handball, basketball, tennis, table tennis, badminton, soccer, a little bit of rugby. I think I'm missing one, but anyway, bunch of stuff.

   30. CWChris Williamson7:05

       (laughs) A lot.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Yeah. …

   1. DEDavid Epstein15:00

      uh, battery life, all these things. So Game Boy's practically indestructible.

   2. CWChris Williamson15:04

      Yeah.

   3. DEDavid Epstein15:04

      Um, i- i- during the research of this book, I found one in my parents' basement. It had batteries that had expired 2007 and I tr- flipped it on a played Tetris for a couple minutes. Um-

   4. CWChris Williamson15:11

      Still, uh, they're indestructible, aren't they?

   5. DEDavid Epstein15:13

      Indestructible. You get it wet, you know, you l- leave it out, dry out, it comes back. And also because the technology was well-understood, they were able to pump out tons of games really quickly, like-

   6. CWChris Williamson15:22

      Mm-hmm.

   7. DEDavid Epstein15:22

      ... both internally and from external developers. You know, it was almost like making a platform where app developers could start making stuff quickly because they already knew all this technology. And so that was a real... I mean, he was like a pure sort of generalist inventor. But, but I think the... In, in some of the other research, it was sort of that, those, those polymath inventors who have their area of expertise but then they, they kind of understand things that are adjacent to it.

   8. CWChris Williamson15:44

      Yeah. It, it sounds like there's a lot of frontiers that you've gone into with this, considering, as you say, the sports gene focused on athletics and, and sports-

   9. DEDavid Epstein15:52

      Yeah. Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson15:52

       ... whereas now we're talking industry, we're talking professionals, individual career, multiple career, sports again, um-

   11. DEDavid Epstein15:59

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson15:59

       ... you know, a- all that sort of stuff. There's a lot of different ways to go here. I don't... I'm going to guess, considering how busy you are, I'm going to guess that you won't have heard Naval Ravikant on Joe Rogan yet.

   13. DEDavid Epstein16:09

       No, I haven't, but I know that he's... You know, I- I know who he is. I haven't heard him on Joe Rogan, no, no.

   14. CWChris Williamson16:14

       Okay. Have you consumed much of his content?

   15. DEDavid Epstein16:17

       Not a lot, no, no.

   16. CWChris Williamson16:17

       Okay. Well, I mean, he is, um... He's a real force to be reckoned with. He's the real deal, man. Um, and I, I highly recommend anyone who's listening and yourself, go check it out. It's a fantastic podcast, Joe Rogan's most recent one with Naval. And on that, he says, "The greatest pleasure in life for me is learning something from one industry and then layering it onto a latticework of things from other industries."

   17. DEDavid Epstein16:43

       Yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson16:43

       He tal- he's talking about it in the, um, (sighs) uh, in the context of people who virtue signal with the number of books that they're reading or that they've read, and look at how many books-

   19. DEDavid Epstein16:54

       Interesting.

   20. CWChris Williamson16:54

       ... I've gone through, this, that, and the other. And Naval is a big proponent of reading a book until he gets something that he likes and then just putting it down, and then maybe go back to it five years later. Like, he just wants-

   21. DEDavid Epstein17:06

       That's interesting.

   22. CWChris Williamson17:07

       ... to have... I think one of the things that's interesting with that is he read a lot as a kid. His mother used to drop him off at the library-

   23. DEDavid Epstein17:13

       Mm-hmm.

   24. CWChris Williamson17:13

       ... um, after school 'cause he lived in, like, a pretty rough area in New York, I think, um, and she'd leave him at the library. He read everything in the library, like dictionaries, religious books, uh, magazines, whatever it was.

   25. DEDavid Epstein17:26

       Hmm.

   26. CWChris Williamson17:26

       So he's coming at it from someone who has big base of knowledge and now, because of that, is able to take all these different concepts, piece them together, and has the, uh, perspective, the broad perspective where he's able to make connections that other people aren't. I thought that was, I thought that was, um, super interesting.

   27. DEDavid Epstein17:47

       That's interesting. I know you mentioned a number of really interesting things. And I, and I'm interested to hear this too because some people... I've lost track of my, like... Twitter now is... the inboxes. I'm losing track of my various inboxes, but-

   28. CWChris Williamson17:57

       Yeah.

   29. DEDavid Epstein17:58

       ... um, it's g- because some people tweeted at me about Naval, and some of them were like, "I wonder what he thinks about this because he advocates for only specialized knowledge," and then others were like, "This sounds like it works with what Naval says about combining knowledge."

   30. CWChris Williamson18:09

       Yeah.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Okay. I was at…

   1. CWChris Williamson30:00

      Come on.

   2. DEDavid Epstein30:00

      Okay. I was at this conference of- of the people who are interested in investing, and you know, what do I know?

   3. CWChris Williamson30:05

      (laughs)

   4. DEDavid Epstein30:05

      But they invited me to the conference to- to talk and-

   5. CWChris Williamson30:08

      You're just the- you're just the guy who doesn't- doesn't have a clue sitting in the corner. That would be me.

   6. DEDavid Epstein30:10

      Right. Right. (laughs)

   7. CWChris Williamson30:11

      We'd be sat in the corner together.

   8. DEDavid Epstein30:13

      Um, but so ... And they put up ... Before I went up they took something from my- my book and did a poll for the audience, you know where they could vote on their cell phones?

   9. CWChris Williamson30:21

      Okay.

   10. DEDavid Epstein30:22

       And- and the poll was, what do you think is the average age of a founder of a blockbuster startup on the day of the founding of the company?

   11. CWChris Williamson30:32

       Okay, go ahead.

   12. DEDavid Epstein30:32

       And the ... I think the choices were-... 25, 35, 45, 55, and 25 was the overwhelming answer.

   13. CWChris Williamson30:39

       Well, Mark Zuck- Mark Zuckerberg said once, "All old people are stupid," right? Or, "All young people are clever."

   14. DEDavid Epstein30:44

       No, young people are just smarter.

   15. CWChris Williamson30:45

       That's it, yeah.

   16. DEDavid Epstein30:47

       Um, right, he was 22 years old when he said that. Um, so he-

   17. CWChris Williamson30:49

       (laughs)

   18. DEDavid Epstein30:49

       ... had an interest in saying that, okay? And, and, but the actual answer, there's just some, some pretty new research from MIT and Northwestern and the US Census Bureau that show the average age is actually about 45 and a half, and that's, that's not when the company becomes breakthrough, it's, uh, the day of founding, right? So these people at this event who really pay attention to all this investing stuff, um, were overwhelmingly, it was like 70%, they thought 25. And I think the reality is that those startup founders often have to do some zigzagging, and they end up with these sort of unique groups of skills where it makes sense for them to go compete on their own ground and try to start up something new, um, because they have these sort of intersecting skills. Um, and obviously, startups are, are high risk, high failure, high reward, and all those things. But, but I do think you can be a big winner or a big loser as a, as a generalist. Um-

   19. CWChris Williamson31:45

       Yeah. How much do you think-

   20. DEDavid Epstein31:46

       ... you know.

   21. CWChris Williamson31:46

       As you're discussing that there, one of the things that comes to mind is diminishing margins of return.

   22. DEDavid Epstein31:50

       Mm-hmm.

   23. CWChris Williamson31:51

       So thinking about as someone specializes down, there is only so much better that you can get at something. Anyone who's tried weightlifting or power lifting knows that to PB within your first y- you're PBing every week in your first year of, like, going to the gym, right? But then after 10 years of training, for you to add, like, five kilos onto your total, it needs an ungodly amount of preparation, and people are working at the very margins of their performance.

   24. DEDavid Epstein32:16

       Right. So there's a question of maybe you can get more bang by incorporating a new skill where you're on the lower end of the learning curve still, and I think that's, that's interesting. But there's two things. E- e- even, even aside from diminishing returns, you can actually start to have really perverse effects from increasing specialization. So, so surgeons is, um, an area where I mention in the book that specialized surgeons have fewer complications, period. They do. Um, that's good. So if you have to have surgery-

   25. CWChris Williamson32:42

       Like, fewer problems, fewer problems happen.

   26. DEDavid Epstein32:43

       Fewer problems.

   27. CWChris Williamson32:44

       Right, cool.

   28. DEDavid Epstein32:44

       That's right, fewer problems, specialized surgeons. And, and even if you account for the n- the, their experience, the number of times they've done the surgery, specialized surgeons still do better. So there's something on top of just experience ab- about, about being a specialized surgeon that makes them even better. I don't know what it is.

   29. CWChris Williamson32:59

       Interesting.

   30. DEDavid Epstein33:00

       But that's, that's the finding. And so if you need to have surgery, um, you know, you want a specialized surgeon. At the same time, specialized surgeons, uh, tend to do a huge number of procedures that don't need to be done at all, such that, um, you know, if you ... There are these, these studies I cite where if you have to check into, um, a hospital with a heart problem, uh, you're, you're less likely to die ... And this is, of course, these are US-based studies. Um, if you check in on the dates of a national cardiology conference because you're less likely to get some of these intervention procedures that you may die with, right? So the, the cardiologist who wrote the editorial for this study said, "My, my colleagues and I would joke that this is the safest place to have a heart problem, at our conference, and this study really turns that on its head-"
4. 45:00 – 55:57

   Hang on. …

   1. DEDavid Epstein45:00

      And then they're like-

   2. CWChris Williamson45:01

      Hang on.

   3. DEDavid Epstein45:01

      ... "Yeah, that's the point," right?

   4. CWChris Williamson45:03

      Yeah.

   5. DEDavid Epstein45:03

      And so, now, this guy's name is Alf Bingham, who founded Innocentive. Now, there have been a bunch of, um, I don't want to say copycat, just other, other things like that. Like one's called Kaggle, and that looks for outside solvers for machine learning program, which is something you consider really specialized, but it turns out that the people who solve those problems, you know, someone who solves like a Kaggle health problem where it's something, something with data and healthcare or whatever, they often aren't an expert in machine learning, and they often aren't an expert in healthcare either, but they have like some-

   6. CWChris Williamson45:31

      Are there, are there like bounties for these as well?

   7. DEDavid Epstein45:33

      Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson45:34

      Wow.

   9. DEDavid Epstein45:34

      The, the companies can post whatever kind of reward they want.

   10. CWChris Williamson45:37

       This is like, um, uh, Fiverr designs, but for like really, really difficult stuff. The listeners will be, uh, familiar with the Stephen Wolfram episode. I sat down with Stephen Wolfram last week of Wolfram Language 1-

   11. DEDavid Epstein45:50

       Oh, wow. That must've been interesting.

   12. CWChris Williamson45:52

       Man, he, that guy is a force of nature.

   13. DEDavid Epstein45:54

       I saw a lecture from him once. Whew.

   14. CWChris Williamson45:55

       He's a force of nature, man. Like a terrifying individual, terrifying and fascinating individual. And he was saying that they livestream like a ridiculous amount of their calls now. So, it's just like, you wanna know what's going on in the Wolfram Language office today, 'cause he's a at-home CEO, right?

   15. DEDavid Epstein46:13

       Mm-hmm.

   16. CWChris Williamson46:13

       And, um, he's just there. He'll be on his treadmill desk, treadmill in a way, and there'll be like a, a few hundred, a few thousand people just watching, and there's a-

   17. DEDavid Epstein46:22

       I wanna see that.

   18. CWChris Williamson46:24

       There's a, it's f- it's freely available online. Freely available to watch those guys going on, right?

   19. DEDavid Epstein46:27

       Oh.

   20. CWChris Williamson46:27

       And so, you're talking about this thing where people are, are crowdsourcing it. He is in real time just allowing other people on the internet. Some of them, I'm gonna guess he's got like a super popular coding, like, subculture fan base, right? But I'm gonna guess-

   21. DEDavid Epstein46:42

       I'm sure.

   22. CWChris Williamson46:42

       ... I'm gonna guess that that would be, you know, like, me or you might have like the sports on or whatever, like in the background.

   23. DEDavid Epstein46:47

       Yeah.

   24. CWChris Williamson46:47

       But they'll be, they might be working away doing some stuff, and they've just got Stephen Wolfram like on his treadmill desk at home-

   25. DEDavid Epstein46:51

       (laughs)

   26. CWChris Williamson46:51

       ... like cracking on. But, you know, there we go again. Like, you, and, but anyone can go on, right? And he was saying exactly the same thing. He said exactly the same thing, that people are giving them solutions from different disciplines that they, they, they wouldn't have thought of.

   27. DEDavid Epstein47:04

       Yeah, it's really interesting. And that's not to, that, that is absolutely not to say that specialists aren't important, right? No, absolutely not. I- in fact, I like to highlight that NPR, you know, our public radio did a review of Range, and they, they say that I spend a lot of time giving credit to dissenters, (laughs) which, which I like because not even dissenters. Like, I agree we need specialists also. I, I like the way that, that the physicist and mathematician, Freeman Dyson, uh, and, and great writer, uh, framed it. He said, "We need frogs and birds. Frogs are down in the mud looking at all the little details. Birds are up above. They can't see those details, but they can integrate the information of frogs." And he said, "The problem is, we're telling everybody to become frogs." And, and when the, when, you know, when disciplines and science changes, that, that becomes a big problem. And that's sort of how I, I think of it. And so, so I think you need, like these problems that stumped the people at Lilly, obviously they were solving a lot of problems on their own. They were posting the ones that they got stuck. So, I think with the combination of that, of the Innocentive approach and those specialists, that's where you get the best of both worlds, and you have this healthy problem-solving ecosystem.

   28. CWChris Williamson48:05

       Yeah, absolutely. Um, how do you know if you're a frog or a bird? For the listeners at home, how do they work that out?

   29. DEDavid Epstein48:11

       That's a, that's a great question, and, and a semantic issue to some point, right? Like, if you look in the patent research, it has to do with how many technological classes have you worked across? If you look in this comic book research I cite, it has to do with how many different genres have you worked across and all these sorts of things. Um, so, so, you know, I, I don't, I don't really know. I don't have a perfect answer to that, although I think most people have some intuition about it actually. Um, but I definitely don't have a perfect answer about it.

   30. CWChris Williamson48:36

       I get... I, I don't think that there really is going to be one-

Episode duration: 55:57