David Epstein is the author of "The Sports Gene" which examines the science of extraordinary athletic performance. He became interested in the topic after observing natural differences in sprint ability between Jamaican immigrants and others growing up, as well as differences between athletes he trained with. Genetics plays an important role in athletic ability, as certain populations are predisposed to excel at certain sports due to traits like muscle fiber types or visual perception abilities. However, genetics are just one piece of the puzzle and training can help uncover natural abilities. It's difficult to predict athletic potential at a young age based on baseline abilities alone.

1. ARI
Now I am speaking with David Epstein who is the author of the sports gene inside the science of
extraordinary athletic performance so David thank you so much for taking time to talk to me.
DAVID
My pleasure thanks for having me.
ARI
So right away, like what made you start to work the sport gene?
DAVID
Pretty much a couple questions of my own sport experience, so I grew up outside of Chicago on an area
with a large population of Jamaican immigrants and we had these incredible trek teams, thanks to my
Jamaican sprinters and when I was about 15 and I realized that Jamaicans are now like two and a half-million
people registered, so I wonder what the heck was going on over there and in college I moved up
to a bit of longer distance runner, am now running against some certain athletes and meeting those guys
and learning the direction in one tiny town in the real western valley and again wondering like what’s
happening in that little area, at the same time on training with a group of five guys in the same thing day
in and day out, we were getting more different and not more of the same, I just started to wonder, how
things like that can happen, you know combined with things like all these sport spectators like the ability
of female soft ball pitchers strike out the greatest baseball hitters which didn’t make sense to me, so I
chance to start examining all my own questions, I jumped at it.
ARI
So you were running which systems mostly?
DAVID
I was in college as a national 800 meter runner.
ARI
Okay, I was a sprinter in high school and I was doing 100 and 200 and when I was in maybe seventh you
know junior high, that was great, I was actually pretty good, and I was very competitive but as I got into
ninth and 10th grade, it just seemed like the field got much better and I wasn't keeping up with it, it’s just
interestingly and so natural you start to see certain populations and that was so much better at certain
especially running.
DAVID
Yeah, I mean the amazing thing is that it becomes even more exaggerated and like the highest level of
competition, for example every man who's been in Olympic 100 m final since they boycotted Olympics in
1980, whether his homeland is US, Canada, Jamaica, Nigeria, Portugal and Nederland, every single one
of them actually has a recent ancestry in a very small area on the coast of West Africa, no matter what

2. country they actually grew up in, that’s actually pretty remarkable, you know one of the things I take out
of the book is a kind of like taboo for some people but a lot of people got really interested in.
ARI
Now I mean you can’t deny the data right and there was something that I read about that was nature
versus nurture in general, but there was something that I have seen and the part of that was something
which has to do with pain tolerance with the Messiah I think it was.
DAVID
That actually are set of distant runners that are from the Nandi tribe in Kenya and they have an adult
circumcision ritual where young man have to be circumcised without any anesthesia and they have to
basically not flinch what’s going on or so sort of become man of the integrated in the society and some
people think that has kind of led to them being very stoic, which is an advantage for distant running, but I
don't put in kind of stock in that, one, because there are already ton of native population that have really
brutal initiation rituals, you know that won’t be the qualification which the people of Brazil would be
better runners than the ones in Kenya.
ARI
Is that the ones with the fire arms?
DAVID
I don’t think they are fire arms but that’s goes to show right there, a lot of them are famous those people
in Kenya are subset of the Callahan people who are only 12% of the Kenya population, but produce
basically all of the great runners, so when we think of Kenyans has been great as been great marathoners,
Callahan people has been great marathoners, so they put their success in perspectives, 17 American men
in history run faster in two hours and ten minutes of marathon, just 4 minutes 15 seconds per mile pace
and 32 Callahan did that last October alone, and they happen to have really good at certain bodybuilder
leads to good running economy which we need more speed per oxygen that they use, I dive into
physiology behind that in the book because it has nothing to do with the circumcision ritual that kind of
anecdotally some people think might add to their stoicism.
ARI
So does that mean there is a sport gene or there is really nothing you know there are certain things that
you just, if you don’t have it, and then you can’t do it?
DAVID
Yeah there is one easy example, has anyone ever seen they are naturally some consumer genetic test and
most of them are total like marketing BS, the one gene that they all test for is called the ACTN3 gene, a
code for proteins on only to enhance muscle fibers, the kind of gene that’s needed for sprinting and
jumping sort of things, and if you don't have at least one of the Sprint version of that gene basically that
produces that protein, you will not be in the Olympic 100 m final period, like you are ruled out, that said,
the reason these test are basically useless is because that only ruled out 1 billion of 7 billion people on

3. earth, so it’s incredibly nonspecific, you will do a better job with a stopwatch, but you are looking at one
puzzle piece, you need that piece to finish the puzzle, but by having only that peace and not the other
pieces, you just won’t really know what you have, but you still don't finished the puzzle without that
piece, that’s just one example of a gene like that.
ARI
Forgetting running for a second, what about other things, the ones that’s much associated with muscle
fiber, I don’t know about power lifting but you know in general.
DAVID
Sure like in dance sports and things like that, there are some in most cases, not sort of single genes are
known that will affect all sort of genes to actually work contrary to kind of the daily news reporting on
genes, instead of single genes having large effect that happens, but it's rare, usually large networks of
genes working in combination to produce effects, so for example; the most famous exercising genetics
study of all times is called the heritage family study, I read about it extensively in the book and it
researches to multigenerational families put on an identical endurance training, tightly controlled the lab
for high effort and found that a large proportion of how much any individual improved, they durability
use oxygen when exposed to training or they were dictated by which family they are in and in 2011, those
researchers found that 21 gene predictors said, so the people who had a least 19 of so-called good
versions of these genes improve the amount of oxygen they could carry, three times as much of people
even anyone who had done the identical training, so this is what is coming out of exercising, just like
medical genetics sort of note to people respond to a Tylenol the same way, because of differences in gene
didn't metabolize significant, same thing showing up a training, no two people respond to medicinal
training the same way, because of differences in their genes, so this counter trainability is what is really
coming out of endurance genetics.
ARI
How can you really use that information, and one if you are a parent, I guess you just want your kids to
just do sport or something, and I guess if you are a teenager or an adult and you want to figure out what
might make more sense for you.
DAVID
I think it depends, I think one, it’s important to recognize a couple things, first of all that, so in the health
study for example, the correlation between someone's talent level measured by their aerobic endurance at
baseline had a zero correlation with their ability to improve in training, so when scientists looked on the
first day of training, so these ten people of the most talented, they will miss 100% of the people who in
the study looking the most talented, so it’s important to realize we recognize talent on day one, that’s
what we always do and some sport skills is it correlation to initial building up its ability to improve and
others there's no correlation, so they can really recognize the don't know when someone counted until you
kind of manipulate the environment to find the training that is ideal for them and some of these is now
done for elite athletes based on their physiology, but I don't think if we examine physiology in kind of
Taylor training pre-puberty, you don’t really know what someone's physiology is anyway, so I think
rather than doing any testing, which is important to keep in mind that you don't really know what a kid is

4. good at until you have a chance to sample, so this is what we call the sampling theory, which is what at
least to age 13, mostly athlete actually practice less than people who can't tell at lower level and they go
through these sampling theory with a finding what they're actually training with.
ARI
So you mentioned that there are some, whether it’s a correlation between baseline and the outcome, what
is it like, could you give some examples?
DAVID
So like a really simple to understand example, in high speed ball skills, there are studies that look into
how certain visual feels like, there perception is just a really simple example, but in studies where people
are randomly targeted, they don't know they're being picked because of their depth perception and their
training in high-speed ball skills, or catching intercepting balls, things like that, the people who have just,
nobody is been trained in the skill before for better basically physical hardware for depth perception will
start out better when the ball going fast and they will also improve much more rapidly.
ARI
There is an example that I got from YouTube about baseball players, you really can't see the ball coming
at you right, 90 mile-per-hour fastball, so there is a reaction speed there that comes and that's almost
subconscious.
DAVID
That’s right.
ARI
Is that any baseline to that, or is there something that’s completely trained?
DAVID
That one is instinct, to be frank with you, that’s actually what major-league baseball players do is, it
should be impossible for our biology like you the advice that people get to keep their eye on the ball is all
total nonsense, your eye can't track an object that finger position is changing that rapidly which is close to
your face and the minimum human reaction time to concede a ball in slide of that information across the
synapses at the back of your brain and for you to initiate most of your action, its 200 millisecond that’s
fifth of a second, that’s half a total flight time of majorly the pitcher to initiate most of yours actions, it's
hard to slow the way that hitters can do this is because they've learned to practice to interpret the body
movements of the pitcher like shifts of the torso, rotation to shoulder, the Flicker of a pitch, the flashing
pattern seems when the ball rotates, to group that’s called a chunk, signal that light when the ball is off
the pitcher's hand and they've already decided if they are swinging or not where the balls going and they
really don't have to rely on their reflexes and that’s an interesting skill, because nobody does it baseline,
so everyone is incapable of doing it baseline and only learned how to do it when they learn how to
interpret those body movements and they are certainly different learning rate for sure and some of those
are based on visual skills, but everyone is zero, everyone's worthless at baseline, so there's nothing really

5. to correlate to a baseline, actually nobody can do it, and even if you look at major-league hitters, they are
as useless as literally as soft ball pitchers, because they haven't learned how to interpret those body
movements.
ARI
That’s really funny, I know that applies in tennis as well with tennis serving and a lot of times and they'll
say that if the person bounces the ball twice that they are going to go to the left corner , like they just try
to learn those things, it also reminds me, there is great Discovery Channel show it’s called Ultimate
Warrior or something, they looked at a Israeli defense fighter guy who knew Crop McCaughey and the
test they were was showing how someone pulled a gun on him and then he basically reacted and grab the
gun and punched the guy and his reaction of grabbing the gun and delivering the punch was faster than
the brain snaps of the guy basically could react and pull the trigger, which you know it’s like a quarter of
a second, so it was completely has he trained.
You mentioned else that at least to another point that I really want to talk to you about, you said about
kids basically been sampled in sports and stuffs before they are around 13, that gets me into the 10,000
hour rule, which you pretty much debunked and I always thought that team is just a weird thing, so can
you talk about that a little and what it was based on and how that really doesn't apply in this case.
DAVID
The 10,000 hour rule is an idea largely popularized by a couple of best-selling books, that there is no such
thing as talent and there really is ten thousand hours of effortful practice is necessary and sufficient to
make anyone an expert in anything, you know whatever, chess, baseball, whatever becomes the first
problem with that is, it comes from a study led by Florida State psychologist named Howard Erickson and
his original study which he did looking at 30 violinists reconstructed their practice careers and install the
10 best two will go on the communal national soloist had practice a lot more than the others in schemes
are solitary practice and accumulated an average of 10,000 hours of practice by age 20, but for starters,
that was telling you that it was never meant to be strapping to the rest of the world, but it was 30 violinist
who are already so highly prescreen that they gained admission to the world-famous music Academy, so
it will be like doing a study of what causes a basketball skill learning your sample to NBA centers, they
all practice a lot and therefore saying only practice got them where they are, practice is not to be 7 feet
tall, so it’s a whole lot of prescription range, and then most of the people did not reach 10,000 hours in a
10,000 hour group, the coverage was weighted by two people who went way over 10,000 hours, so it was
actually huge individual variation and that shows up in every study of skill acquisition to let them check if
actually if 11,053 hours on average to reach international matters, some people make it 3000 hours and
some people are suddenly trained to 25,000 hours and still haven’t made it, so you can average it and you
can say 11,053 hour rule, but do we really tell you anything about reality and what exercise genetic is
showing, is it each person’s ability to profit differently from the type of training that’s really the
difference, so no one person’s hours is the same as the next persons hour. The 10,000 hour rule will never
rule in the first place, it will never rule even for violin, Howard Ericson is been so dismayed about the
popular portray of it, if he has links on his webpage of the state of the letter title ''The danger of
delegating education to journalists'' and thumbs up he’s doing pretty well.

6. ARI
The thing that is so bizarre about any sort of who really popularize in and when I read in his book, it was
like wow, it's really cool and kind of weird, amazing in some ways, but it's also the examples that he
gave, one of them was Bill Gates having worked in the computer lab, like sneaking out at night and
working in the computer lab, it doesn't even make sense to me, why 10,000 hours, and the idea that
basically there is no inability, that basically means that we are all commercials essentially, whatever you
apply yourself to and by that same token I feel like that, same if you don't apply yourself that way, then
you are not going to be an expert in that way.
DAVID
If 10,000 hour rule is cool for hard work matters, but that will be completely uncontroversial, among
scientists who study skill acquisitions for a long time, so that’s not kind of adding anything new to the
bodywork, but the problem is, the more we figuring out how people differs, the more mostly how
important it is to get someone you know two people have the same genotype, I love this quote from James
Tanner who was a world class healer and he was also the world expert in body building development and
something like no two people have a similar gene, therefore for optimal development, no two people
should have the same environment, and so really what we are figuring out is how do we find the
environment that is adoptable for each person's individually physiology and psychology in something like
the 10,000 hour rule which seems to suggest that these cookie-cutter approaches is the opposite of
everything that’s coming out of science, not only that, but it’s really having the damaging effects on skill
acquisition for youth sports, where kids are being sort of pushed into professionalize training and to
actually wanted them to do what scientists called learn like a baby at that stage, now had explicitly
professionalize training and just been immersed in sort of physical skills and gaining morality physical
skills, so what’s happened, to reader John O Cain and a little bit of his data, and he’s notice in big cities
now, this push to early specialization have led to coaches with lots of technical expertise, coaching kids
who are much younger in the city rehabilitation resources and consequently those city now don't produce
any professional athlete.
So there is a huge over representation now, athletes come from towns of 50,000, to 100,000 that don't
have access to these kind of professionalize coaching until they are older.
ARI
Interesting that's really interesting, yeah and so again it's like one of the reasons that I found using the
beginning was because part of what I focus on and what I'm passionate about with less doing is about sort
of shortcuts of hacking things and findings some of the most awful part of things and at first this sounds
like a real users, but 10,000 hours is a lot of time, that’s not really a shortcut and so might especially as
you said, some people can do this mastery in 3000 hours or less or more and to blindly follow that in a
path that you really may not end up being good at, but you really might like, it does seem really
deleterious.
DAVID
Yeah and I mean it won’t work with sports anyway, because it turned out that athlete gets to the real level
before 4000 hours of deliberate practice, so what they actually do is they need to 12 or 13 and they do

7. have implicit learning will them not told what exactly they should do, because they want to learn the way
they learn language, just by learning it unconsciously, not having to like take through steps, and after that,
they start to focus in on more technical skills, but they make, it varies between the sport, but for a pro
sport usually is about 6000 hours will be a high average to make the level for certain sports or 4000 hours,
so that numbers is just misleading.
ARI
One more thing about it too is, I feel that there's got a be some sum sense of what the law diminishing
returns are and what I was thinking about was actually like golf, so I start playing golf after college
actually and I fairly quickly became like a seven handicap, which is really good and now I'm not
anywhere near that, because I don’t play that much, but what you find, is that like getting from you know
20 handicap to 14 handicap, you know you can do that in a month or two if you are really focused on
getting to 14 to a 7 can take a lot longer and then, once I was at seven, I was it a seven handicap for
probably two years and never improve beyond that, as deliberate as I thought I wanted to be because, if
you think about it in golf, you are basically talking about taking a fraction of a stroke off of every hole,
which doesn't matter how much, it gets harder and harder.
DAVID
Yeah, that’s actually mentioned that to guy in in early on my book and McLachlan who quit his job as a
commercial photographer when he read about the 10,000 hour rule and decided to do 10,000 hour on golf
practice and become a pro, because that’s what they all said, I stay in touch with him, I really like him
and he’s really enjoying the journey, he sent me an email the other day, you know he’s kicking down his
progress was just very rapid first and you know he’s in his 30s and he email me the other day saying. I
feel like I have kind of like stagnated the last year after this really rapid progress, I think he is now
entering and I think he’s now 5,000 or 6,000 hours in the project which finishes sometimes in 2017, I
think he’s sounding like he’s feeling the diminishing returns now.
ARI
Yeah and then the other questions finally about that too is, what happened after 10,000 hours, it’s like are
you just home free then and there's no room for improvement or you mean what?
DAVID
Yeah I mean it depends, if you want to be a national chess master, then I point it out that 11,053 hour rule
when incredible sort of wrote about it, I heard oh you didn’t people who are good enough, if you have
passed 10,000 hours, how can you now say they are not good enough, they aren’t grand masters yet
because they are way past 10,000 hours, some have been to 25,000 hours and haven’t made it, what do
you tell them, it’s just an incredible simplification that takes away so much of what is useful in a century's
worth of science and skill acquisition.
ARI
Right exactly and so that's really eye-opening, fascinating and on the one hand it's good to know that
that's not something you have to strive for because again as I said, it takes away the disappointment and

8. you just don’t put in efforts, psychological you're not working hard enough to it, so I'm very happy to
have that to the bond.
DAVID
Australia you know that didn't have a centralized court science Institute when they realize how you did
you kind of like switch adults between sports and find something that works better for them, they
institutionalized that in the lead up to when they were hosting the Olympics and ended up with gold
medalists, who had not even played their sport the previous Olympic 2010 and ended up winning ten
times as many medals, particularly the United States, because they started just focusing on what's going to
be the best fit for people, that's one of the reasons why they punch above their weights in international
sports.
ARI
And you know notice on that one too, is that if you take an opposite approach when you're really just
trying to be innovative, you know whether it's entrepreneur or in some other way, when you're creating
something new, then technically you could be an expert after 10 hours and nobody else knows how to do
it, then you are an expert right?
DAVID
That’s a good point, a lot it has to do with the competitive field for sure.
ARI
Right absolutely because you mentioned chess with that and then you know, if you're 17 years old and
you are playing with a bunch of four year olds, then it doesn't take much time for you to become an expert
and we all start playing chess at the same time. So my last question that I always like to ask on the
podcast is, what are your, and this can be from anything that you know or learned or research or study,
but what are your top three tips for people to be more effective and in my world that usually means
getting more done, but it really can be whatever you think can make someone more effective.
DAVID
I think first of all that everyone who is trying to skip over or what, sports time, we used to call that
sampling period, where we would jump into something we want to learn, we focus really specifically on
it, but the signs from now and sports also from music shows that, the performers early kind of first play
around a little bit, they have a place where they figure out what they like to devote a lot of time to it and it
also gains are the broad range of baseline skills before they really focused in and so they have to, you
know they might see their peers getting a head start like Stephen Nash the two-time NBA VP didn't own a
basketball till he was 13, so when they first started, a lot of peers around in front of them, the game
describe their physical skills allowed them to get farther ultimately.
And the same thing sort of happens to musicians they sample a number of different instruments before
they focus in and so think allowing yourself that sampling period, it means you allowed someone else to
get a head start because you will catch them, that’s the pattern and one of the character traits that shows
the greatest correlating to the Netherlands, they track kids in a range of sports from age 12 all the way up

9. to the pros and there are certain physical traits that the kids will go to the pros, but it’s also behavioral
traits of when I watch the video of a kid aged 12, the only ones that were pros were the only ones
undergoing the coach going, why are we doing this drill again and what does this help me work on and I
already master this, can I just do something that’s hardened and the coach will say just calm down, but it
turned up this is what those sports scientists call self-regulatory behavior, those kids are taking
responsibility for their own practice quality, they are becoming orchestrated of their own development
project that they have to do eventually and when they access their weaknesses, they do it much more
similarly to how objective coach observers do it and kids who don't exhibit that behavior nature of our
clueless about their weaknesses aren't able to form a plan to fix them, so we should all take that cycle of
kind of assessment plan for improvement and evaluate that plan work and see how your weakness is and
to come to that cycle, that's what they do and they continually improve others stagnate.
And lastly just remember that Tanner quote that even if you have an identical twin, there are differences
between you and them and the gene, so they are siblings but there are differences and so if a training Plan
or whatever ever skill you're trying to acquire even working for you the way its working for your peer or
partner or colleague, the problem might be you, you are in a very deep sense of the world is given the
optimal environment for your unique set of skills and so we will take a trial and error approach to
yourself, your study of that equals one and the goal is trying to find the optimal environment for your
development and it’s not the same environment exactly as everyone else’s.
ARI
That's great, that is really a great advice, thank you for sharing that, so David, I am going to put links in
the show now and book and everything. Where is the best place for people to find more about you?
DAVID
Thesportgene.com I have some info and contact on that site.
ARI
Okay we will have that there, so David thank you so much, it’s really been great talking with you and I
appreciate your time.
DAVID
Thank you.

10. to the pros and there are certain physical traits that the kids will go to the pros, but it’s also behavioral
traits of when I watch the video of a kid aged 12, the only ones that were pros were the only ones
undergoing the coach going, why are we doing this drill again and what does this help me work on and I
already master this, can I just do something that’s hardened and the coach will say just calm down, but it
turned up this is what those sports scientists call self-regulatory behavior, those kids are taking
responsibility for their own practice quality, they are becoming orchestrated of their own development
project that they have to do eventually and when they access their weaknesses, they do it much more
similarly to how objective coach observers do it and kids who don't exhibit that behavior nature of our
clueless about their weaknesses aren't able to form a plan to fix them, so we should all take that cycle of
kind of assessment plan for improvement and evaluate that plan work and see how your weakness is and
to come to that cycle, that's what they do and they continually improve others stagnate.
And lastly just remember that Tanner quote that even if you have an identical twin, there are differences
between you and them and the gene, so they are siblings but there are differences and so if a training Plan
or whatever ever skill you're trying to acquire even working for you the way its working for your peer or
partner or colleague, the problem might be you, you are in a very deep sense of the world is given the
optimal environment for your unique set of skills and so we will take a trial and error approach to
yourself, your study of that equals one and the goal is trying to find the optimal environment for your
development and it’s not the same environment exactly as everyone else’s.
ARI
That's great, that is really a great advice, thank you for sharing that, so David, I am going to put links in
the show now and book and everything. Where is the best place for people to find more about you?
DAVID
Thesportgene.com I have some info and contact on that site.
ARI
Okay we will have that there, so David thank you so much, it’s really been great talking with you and I
appreciate your time.
DAVID
Thank you.