Interview with David Esptein on genetics and physical abilities

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Hey, this is Mike Matthews. And in this episode of the podcast, I’m interviewing David Epstein. David writes about sports science and medicine, Olympic sports, and is an investigative reporter. His book, the sports gene is his first book and it was a top 10 New York times bestseller [00:03:00] and won various awards.

Very interesting book that I actually recommended in one of my cool stuff of the week posts. So I’m excited to have David on the show and dive into the fascinating world of sports and genetics and talent and how people get good at things. So let’s get to it. All right. Thanks for coming on the show, David.

I’m excited to have you. Thanks 

for 

David Epstein: having me. It’s my pleasure. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. Alright, so you have a book out? It’s actually, I recommended it just I think it was two weeks ago. I do a post, I call it cool stuff of the week where I recommend various books that I read and, if I like movies and just random cool things and whatever.

I know that people that are listening and that, read the website and stuff, some of them will have already read the. book, but the book is called the sports gene and that’s what, that’s obviously what I want to focus on in the podcast. So for those listening that don’t know about the book, can you quickly tell us what it’s about?

David Epstein: Yeah, I’d say it’s basically about everything we’ve learned in the decades since the sequencing of the human genome about what genetics can tell [00:04:00] us about athleticism in some cases. I learned what it can’t tell us, like the ability to react to a major league fastball turns out not to be innate, but rather learned.

And other things that I thought, yeah, I think people commonly think are just totally acts of will, like the obsessive drive to train and actually have an important genetic component. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. Very fascinating subject because obviously, this is like the cooler, around the water cooler type of arguments of, how much does practice really matter versus especially when you’re looking at top level athletes versus how much is it just genetic?

And obviously I want to dive into some of that. So I think we should start with talking a bit about the 10, 000 hour rule, which I’m sure a lot of people want to start just because it’s it’s on, many people’s minds these days probably mainly thanks to Malcolm Gladwell’s book outliers.

Or at least that’s the book that, that’s where I first heard about it and where a lot of people were introduced to it. And for those listening aren’t familiar with it, the 10, 000 hour rule is basically an argument that that’s how many hours of deliberate practice it takes to really master something.

Like a sport or playing an instrument or whatever. And [00:05:00] there’s obviously talk about in your book, David, so what’s your take on that? 

David Epstein: So the 10, 000 hour part of the underlying theory. Of the 10, 000 hours of work is actually the idea that, expertise is only the result of practice and everyone progresses at the same rate, basically.

So the only key to success is the number of hours you accumulate. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, which sounds nice as a formula. Then all you gotta do is if you have the, if you just have the grit, if you can grind it out. 

David Epstein: Yeah exactly. But it actually comes from, it’s, it, the evidence behind it says nothing like that.

The study it comes from is actually a tiny study of a group of violinists who are already admitted to a world famous music academy and the researchers who led it found that The top 10 violinists had, in retrospective recall, had practiced an average of 10, 000 hours by the age of 20. And so that became the sort of famous rule, but the fact is, most of them had not reached 10, 000 hours.

Yeah, as 

Mike Matthews: you say, average is average. That could mean that you have people that took 50, 000 hours and then that obscures the 2, 000 hour [00:06:00] ones or whatever. 

David Epstein: Exactly. That’s exactly what happens in all the studies of sports skill acquisition. There are these huge ranges. So if you look at something like chess expertise, which has a lot in common with building certain sports skills, the average number of hours to international master status is 11, 053.

But some people make it in 3, 000 hours. And some people are being tracked in the past 25, 000 hours and still haven’t made it. Yeah. Without a measure of variance, it doesn’t tell you much. And another problem with the original study is that they use people who are already pre screened into a world famous music academy.

So this hopelessly biases the study against finding evidence of talent. It would be like doing a study of a basketball skill using only NBA centers, noticing it all practiced a lot and saying they only got where they are.

It’s really a poor bit of science that just completely took off and has really driven sort of some counterproductive trends in sports, I think. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, no, I totally agree. Obviously you talk about this, I think it was in the second chapter you’re talking about high jumpers It was one of them that, put in all [00:07:00] this time and this other person that he came from Jamaica was came out of nowhere, Bahamas.

Yeah, Bahamas. Yeah. And and yeah, and beat the guy with, who knows, 20, 000 hours of practice or whatever. There’s a, The the golf, the danplan. com I ran across recently, I’m getting back into golf myself actually is how I ran into it. And this is a guy who he took that rule to heart and I’m just explaining for the, for listeners, they don’t know about it.

And basically he decided that he, I think it was a photographer and he said, I want to play golf professionally. He had never played before. So he’s going to practice 10, 000 hours and then he should be he should be good to go being on the tour or whatever. And ironically, I think he’s at 5, 000 hours now and he’s like a six handicap or three or four or something like that.

Whereas a friend of mine he’s 16, he’s been playing golf for two years and around, he’s 16. He goes, he has to go to school and he has a job and friends and whatever. So he plays, but he’s not, I don’t know if he’s even playing as much as the guy Dan is and he’s already a scratch golfer.

They’re going about learning the game [00:08:00] differently but I think Danny started with like only putting and stuff, which they’re, that’s an interesting way of going about it, but they’re, he the kid Ryan’s probably put in half the time or less, that what can account for that kind of thing?

It’s made motivation or determination or going about it different. Or maybe is Ryan just, genetically, is he more gifted for playing golf? I 

David Epstein: mean, it could be some of all the above. It would be hard to say that he has more motivation than Dan. Dan dropped everything, devoted his entire life to it.

Got up, pGA certified coach. Yeah. All kinds of support. Yeah. And it has really, he wanted to test the 10, 000 hours rule, so actually Anders Ericsson, the scientist who did that the work that made this famous has actually consulted with him to make sure he’s doing it in all the right ways and things like that.

Yeah. So I, honestly, I think, it probably makes it look like it’s more of a nature than a nurture difference because Dan seems to be following to a T what the scientific expert says you should be doing. And so if he’s yeah. If someone with less hours is doing better than him, you have to say maybe there’s [00:09:00] some fundamental physiological differences there.

And that’s typical to what we see in all studies of skill acquisition. And the problem, one of the many problems with this kind of strict 10, 000 hours thinking is that It doesn’t help people find their actual strengths and accentuate that. It just prescribes sort of a cookie cutter plan for everyone.

Mike Matthews: It’s the 

David Epstein: exact opposite of what the, what exercise genetics was saying we should actually be doing. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. Yeah, totally. I totally agree. Even just going back to the golf thing as an example, if you, you could look at your driving distance. For instance, if you cannot drive the ball a certain distance, you will never be on the PGA tour.

Period. If you can’t figure that out, you will never become a professional golfer. Simply because if your long game isn’t up to snuff, those courses are too long and too punishing if you can’t hit the ball far enough. And going back to there, there’s a book called every shot counts written by Mark Brody professor at Columbia.

And he came up with a strokes gained is what it’s called. It’s a statistical analysis, like sabermetrics for golf. And. You know how, and it just backs up the importance of the long game. So going back to [00:10:00] how Dan’s going about it, I would say that he’s maybe going about it correctly in terms of putting in a bunch of practice, but in terms of learning the game, he, I think he said he only putted for the first six months or something like that.

That’s completely backwards. What, when you analyze someone like tiger woods, when he was playing his most dominant golf, what made him so dominant was his long game. He, yes, his short game was good, but he gained twice as many strokes on the field. with a long game with his long game.

They did with his short game. So my friend Ryan, for instance, is he focused on the long game in the beginning, didn’t care about his short game. He just became a great ball striker and then learned the short game. And he’s a scratch golfer after two years of playing and he’s 16 years old. So obviously, he also, although, I gotta say like genetically, whatever he’s got going for him is not, it’s not obvious.

It’s not like he’s a super athlete. He’s a normal dude. He’s maybe a bit on the taller side, but it’s just an interesting, I like that, that you’re diving into that because it isn’t as simple as just put in all, just put in your time, like how you spend [00:11:00] that time, how you approach it, what your physical limitations are.

These things matter. 

David Epstein: Yeah, that’s, and that’s, when you say that he’s a normal dude, a lot of things the things that we could outwardly see about him, if he were, could jump incredibly high, or something like that, or if he were a big guy, but that’s actually often the case.

So you mentioned that high jumper from the Bahamas, what the thing that he had that was really special was a really long Achilles tendon, and, which is basically like a spring in the back of your leg that rockets you into the air, and those aren’t the kind of things that You really see, in, in many cases, some of these things are hidden from the eyes, or I talk about some of my own, I had genetic testing, it turns out I have these genes that, that cause me to respond really well to endurance training, where my body really starts changing.

And so there’s still some mystery to it, right? We don’t know what seems to make some people’s central nervous systems better set up to pick up, skills quickly, but they’re also very small things like we don’t know much about your friend’s sort of real proportions, right? Like the UK sport when they figured out they, before they hosted the Olympics in London, they put a lot of money into figuring out what makes someone successful at a [00:12:00] particular sport.

And so they, they realized some sports, it’s simple rowing, you want someone with strong cardiovascular systems, certain sort of bone proportions. And they went around and started measuring people. And they found a woman named Helen Glover who’d never rode before. Mark. Really long legs, short brachial index, which is the ratio of her forearm to her total arm, leverage advantage for pulling stuff.

I said, Hey, have you ever tried rowing? No, she hadn’t. Three years later, she’s the first gold medalist for the home team at the Olympics and becomes a national icon, right? And these aren’t things where you would look at her and say, Oh, she’s got a short brachial index. But it does make for a biomechanical advantage for what she has to do.

And thankfully, she had been a good athlete in a number of things, but not great. They looked at her and said, hey, we can make you great in something else. And that’s very contrary to the 10, 000 hour rule, right? You take an adult athlete and put them in something else, like already as an adult. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, no, that’s totally fascinating.

And that’s something I want to talk a little bit more when we get to it is where the future, because you get that growing up, you as a kid, I played baseball for a bit and then I played ice hockey for a bit. And I never [00:13:00] pursued them professionally, but if I would have wanted to you have, there is that age where you start coming into your body starts, you’re, you get out of the awkward stage and you start being able to do things with your body.

And if you want to take sports seriously, there are certain sports that genetically speaking, like good luck, like it doesn’t matter. It’s going to take. Maybe it’ll take 50, 000 hours to ever get to a point where you could really be, you’d be able to play at a top level. But if you would have chose something else, maybe it’s 5, 000 hours because of, like you say, that your brachial index is better.

If she would have known that, a long time ago, she could have been the most dominant rower of all time. 

David Epstein: Yeah. And, although I would say, and this is a different issue, is that actually, even I’m concerned about people looking for some of those things too early, because it looks like I added actually an afterword about sports specialization to the paperback of the sports scene, and it’s, there’s this growing pile of science showing that actually the typical route to elite status is having a sampling period early on, particularly before age 12 when you have all this brain flexibility and it’s [00:14:00] important to learn physical literacy, variety of physical skills, where you should just be playing a bunch of different stuff.

Yeah. And not focusing in yet. Yeah. And so one of my concerns is that, maybe eventually we go in the opposite direction, where right now you’re having everyone specialize, and that’s bad because it really limits their skills and creativity as an athlete. But I hope if we, Look at people and say, hey, we can figure out physiologically what sport you should be in now.

If you, if that causes them to specialize too early, it’s actually going to run contrary to what all the sports science is saying is the typical path, the Steve Nash path, the guy didn’t, two time NBA MVP, didn’t play, didn’t own a basketball until he was 13. He played other sports, like he was eight years behind me, and he’s a normal sized guy. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, that totally makes sense where probably ideally you’d have a variety of sports like I mean There’s certain things if you’re at a certain height, you’re just not You shouldn’t be trying to make it in the NBA for instance of course height is it can change in terms of growing but if There are certain things.

It’s just like why do that to yourself, but physically speaking where you have a variety of things that are [00:15:00] different where your body could be suited for and then Probably a lot of it then there is a point where if physically if you have the body for it Then a lot of the non, physical things motivation determination intelligence, you know come into play.

David Epstein: Absolutely. And that’s, since you mentioned the NBA and I actually did some analytics in a chapter called the Vitruvian NBA player in the book. And the, so you either need to be tall to be in the NBA or the guys that aren’t tall can really jump. At least pretty well, like the grand total number of guys who’ve ever been tested at the NBA pre draft combine who couldn’t grab the rim is zero, zero.

So if you go out and you can’t grab the rim, then historical precedent says you have a zero chance of being in the NBA. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. And coming back to golf, if you can’t drive the ball a certain distance, you will never be on the tour. If it’s just, there’s a data it’s in, in broadies book, he goes over the same type of analyses where.

There are certain things that if you cannot hit these benchmarks, forget it. It’s just, you would be the one. [00:16:00] Yeah. Yeah. So there are obviously a lot of beliefs out there in terms of like how race inherently determines athletic potential. And this is you talked about, this is a very touchy subject, of course, and I think when you handle it very well.

So what can you tell us about this? 

David Epstein: Okay. Yeah. So the and as you mentioned it being a touchy subject, that’s why. When I discuss it in the book, I take a little bit of a detour for a minute from sports and talk about what race does and doesn’t mean from a genetic perspective in the first place, right?

So most of the world’s genetic diversity is contained in Africa because all the rest of us migrated out of Africa very pretty recently in, in evolutionary terms. And if we say, if we just say a black athlete like people say black athletes dominate running in some ways that’s true.

It’s every man who’s been in an Olympic 100 meter final since the boycotted Olympics of 1980, whether his homeland is the U. S., Canada, Jamaica, Netherlands, Portugal, they all have their ancestry in this small area of the coast of West Africa. And in the book I discuss why that is. But those people could not be more physiologically different than the people across the continent, the minority tribe in [00:17:00] Kenya that dominates long distance running.

They all have black skin because they’re, have low latitude ancestry and dark skin protects you from equatorial sunlight. But otherwise, they could not be more physiologically different. There absolutely are traits that come from your geographic ancestry that influence sports performance.

And in America, because African Americans came from very particular Part of Africa, there are some traits that they have on average that are different than people of interest. What are some 

Mike Matthews: examples? 

David Epstein: So for example, they’ll have some that affect sports performance is they have lower hemoglobin.

So that hemoglobin is the carries oxygen in your bloodstream. And African Americans, as part of a suite of traits that help them adapt to malaria in West Africa, have lower hemoglobin. And they are highly underrepresented in endurance events. It’s highly underrepresented even at the college level, in the very longest distance events, you basically don’t really see African Americans represented anymore.

And conversely, in 

Mike Matthews: funny enough, friends of mine, I had like African American friends of mine just [00:18:00] comes right to mind. A few of them actually are Really fast sprinters. Endurance sucks. They don’t even they played football. One played track, he was a track runner, and the other played football in high school, and both of them, super fast.

Sprinting, endurance, terrible. 

David Epstein: Yeah, on average, because it’s a zero sum game, so on average, people from that part of the world have just on average, not every individual have a slightly higher proportion of fast twitch muscle fibers. The kind that you need for sprinting, right? Just on average.

That’s not every person, but that means that the tail end of the distribution makes a big difference. And so when you’re only looking for the fastest couple people, they’re more likely to come from that population. And because you have The more fast twitch muscle fibers you have, the less slow twitch you have, you’re either going to be predisposed to sprinting or to long distance running or to middle distance running.

There’s a reason why you won’t ever see Usain Bolt being a competitor in the marathon and vice versa, because it’s a zero sum game of muscle fibers. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. We see similar things in the fitness world where some people’s [00:19:00] bodies respond to certain types of training better than others. The training that targets more type two fast switch versus type one, slow twitch.

Again, the science of it is very complicated and there’s not that, I mean there are basic principles that. If you want to get strong and you want to build muscle, you don’t have to really get into the genetics of it. But I was reading up on that recently. It’s interesting. So you talk about how the ability to succeed in certain sports is influenced by genetics, like more than others.

So for instance, basketball what are some other examples? Like how does this work? What are some where you see genetics playing a big role versus others where you think it’s not so much of, or it’s not as heavily influenced. 

David Epstein: One of the points I talk about in the book is how, actually the ability to hit a baseball is, it, no, nobody’s really born, I thought it was those major league hitters had really fast reflexes, turns out it’s absolutely not the case, they have, Same reflex times as teachers, doctors, lawyers.

I outscored Albert Pujols on a test of simple reaction time, but that’s not impressive. Did you pat yourself on the back? Yeah, he was in like the 65th percentile compared [00:20:00] to a random group of college students, so it wasn’t like he was that good. It’s just that they’ve learned through specific kinds of practice to interpret body movements, like rotation of a pitcher’s shoulder and the flicker of the ball, which is the flashing pattern seams make, to predict the future.

Basically, because all the things, all the advice that people are given about hitting a ball, keep your eye on the ball, nonsense. We don’t have a visual system capable of tracking an object as its angular position changes, that rapidly gets close to your head. You could close your eyes when the ball is halfway in, it wouldn’t make a difference.

Yeah, what is this stat? 

Mike Matthews: It’s like by the time, because it’s traveling, let’s say 100 miles an hour, you don’t even have time to react. Right when it leaves their hand, you have to start swinging before it even leaves their hand. 

David Epstein: It the time it takes just for you to see the balls in flight, that information to cross the synapses to the back of your brain, and then even to start just your muscle twitching, not even the swing, is half the total flight time of the pitch, so there’s no way.

In, in one sense, that’s an entirely learned skill, and it’s why in the first chapter I write about how, why softball pitchers can always strike out major league [00:21:00] hitters. At the same time, major, the higher, the faster the ball goes. The more important it is to be able to pick up those visual cues early in the pitch, which is why you see an average vision among major league hitters of 20 12, meaning they can see from 20 feet away, but I have to stand at 12 feet away to see.

So there you have this skill that is, in one sense, completely learned, but then certain physical traits give people a distinct advantage as the ball speed gets faster and faster. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, and that’s, that’s a great example, because it’s just not obvious that visual acuity would be such a determining factor, where having poor eyesight, then that, you’re never going to be a good ball hitter if you have poor eyesight.

David Epstein: The visual acuity doesn’t matter at all, it doesn’t differentiate people at all until they’ve learned these specific skills that allow them to predict the future. So what I call physical hardware in the book, it only starts to matter once you’ve learned the specific skills. It doesn’t differentiate people until they’ve gone through training.

Mike Matthews: Yeah, and that kind of goes back to the point you were saying earlier, which is why you should be, in the earlier ages, playing a bunch of different sports and, Kind of seeing where those take you. [00:22:00] 

David Epstein: That’s right. That’s right. And another one in, you mentioned, asking about sports where genes really matter.

So I wasn’t a national level runner, and I, the most famous exercise genetics study of all time is called the Heritage Family Study. And in, in one segment of that, that I write a lot about, 98 two generation families were put on identical cycling training plans. These were sedentary people who hadn’t trained.

Split between four different university centers, trained for five months, every workout controlled in the lab for pretty high effort. And, most people improved the amount of oxygen they could use, moderately. Some people didn’t improve at all, and some people improved like crazy. And, in those geneticists, they found a 21 gene predictor set.

People who had at least 19 of the good versions of the genes, Improved the amount of oxygen they could use three times as much as people who had fewer than ten on identical training. And really importantly, baseline ability had a zero correlation with ability to improve. Zero. So if you looked at that study and took, on day one, [00:23:00] that pointed to the ten people you said are the most talented today, you would miss 100 percent of the people who ended the study the most talented.

And I was one of those. I was diagnosed with the earliest stages sort of consistent symptoms in my cardiovascular system, consistent with early stages of emphysema. Two seasons before I was running at the U. S. National Championships. So it’s, I think it’s really important to recognize that some of what we’re learning in genetics means that we have to think about talent differently because it might not always be that thing that’s manifesting on day one.

It might be someone’s ability to improve and they don’t really know that until you find the right training regimen for them, which might not be the best one for their training partner. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. That totally makes sense. It also makes you wonder, you look at. You look at people, I played ice hockey growing up, like I said, and I didn’t really realize how good professional athletes are until when I was a teenager.

Me and my friends, we were good for our age, and on, the travel teams, and we thought we were hot shit, so we’re in this camp. of this one guy. He was playing the Lightning at the time. The Lightning was the worst [00:24:00] team in the league. He was the worst, he was the worst player, in our eyes, on the worst team in the league, right?

He looked, on TV, he looked terrible. He looked like, and he was a defenseman, just horrible, right? So we’re all talking, we’re all talking shit. Why are we at this guy’s camp? We do these camps in the summer. He’s terrible, whatever. And so a buddy of mine, who was probably the best out of us, he went on to play in college.

I don’t know where he went from there. But he challenged this guy. His name was John, I think. One on one. In front of everybody, a hundred plus kids in this camp. And John saw okay, all right. And this guy was so beyond, he could skate backwards twice as fast and twice as agilely as my friends pay for it.

So you see, and then we all just were stunned and then it gave us a new perspective on just how good these, anyone playing at professional level is. But it makes you wonder so you have the best of the best. You’re pretty much all we there’s, would you think that you’re always looking at the almost it’s genetic.

It’s a luck of the draw thing, but that there’s something genetically that allows them to perform at that level. It’s not just, they practiced a lot and played, since [00:25:00] even take someone like Tiger Woods, swinging a club at two years old, or probably things about his body that allows him or allowed him to perform the way that he did that nobody else could do unless they had the body.

I 

David Epstein: mean, Tiger Woods could balance standing on his father’s palm when he was six months old. I think for anyone who has a six month old, they know that’s extremely abnormal. That doesn’t mean that he’s necessarily gonna grow up and be a great balancer or a great golfer or whatever, but it absolutely means that he can start practicing golf a lot earlier than a normal kid.

Mike Matthews: Yeah. Which is why he was demonstrating it playing at two. I think he was on TV at two years old. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And then he was beating his, everyone at his country club at eleven or something like that. 

David Epstein: Yeah, so he was obviously abnormal in physical development, and we can’t say exactly how that, that affected him, and his ultimate progression in golf, but it certainly allowed him to start playing a lot more, a lot earlier than a normal kid would, because they wouldn’t have developed the motor skills or the strength to be able to do that.

Yeah, I think there’s every, basically every trait, it looks like from, even though we don’t know the specific genes for some of them, you can [00:26:00] use it. statistical methods to study identical and fraternal twins to find out if there are genetic contributions. And the question is always whether, becomes whether the genetic contributions are basically small or big, but they are always there, essentially.

And so I think absolutely there’s always something there, but I also think we can do a lot better job of helping. Helping more people find where their talents are. Because again, coming out of exercise genetics, the revolution that came out of medical genetics was to show that because you have a different gene involved in the phenaminophen metabolism than I do, I might need three Tylenol to get the same effect that you’ll need one for.

Maybe it just doesn’t work for me at all. Same thing is going on. 

Mike Matthews: Pain killers don’t do much of anything for her. I don’t take them often at all, but it’s strange. One Advil if I have a really bad headache or something, it’ll go away for her. It doesn’t really do much of anything. 

David Epstein: Yeah, and so that’s like well known for some drugs now.

The same thing is coming out of exercise genetics, that the medicine of training doesn’t affect people the same way. No one prescription affects two people the same way. And so I think there are probably a lot of people out there thinking I just got a [00:27:00] bad draw. But actually they haven’t found The right environment for their genome, which is completely inimitable in the world.

Even if they have an identical twin, there are some differences. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. Yeah and that’s one of the, one of the questions on this. You might as well just get into it. So yeah, you think of it as that this would be the ultimate goal, right? Exercise genetics would be in line with medical genetics, and that would be personalization based on our, unique makeups.

So what how do you what are some examples of this? Like how would you see this working in the future if we had the understanding that we needed to have and the technology and whatever. 

David Epstein: I think the first things well, so in, in a very small way, it’s being implemented with respect to injury things.

So there’s some NFL players now have been tested for the versions of their collagen genes, which is basically like the body’s glue. And pulled together tendons and ligaments and certain versions make. Some people are much more likely to tear their ACL, for example. And so some of those guys are doing what geneticists now call pre habilitation, which, exercises to strengthen support muscles to try to prevent an injury from happening.

And then there’s a gene that’s well known to increase the chance [00:28:00] that someone has permanent damage from concussion or repeated concussions and to increase the recovery time they need. And so I think a use that we should really be actively thinking about is It’s finding out who has that version of the gene and all these brains are getting dissected of NFL players.

That gene is highly overrepresented among the guys who are ending up having their brains dissected after NFL careers. And so it might really be an important tool for personalizing concussion management. Those people might need more time out than the next guy, or they just can’t take as many hits during the week as the next guy.

And so I think the first places we’re going to see it is in some of this injury and illness. And then I think it will, it would, they’re already companies that are marketing it for actual like training and diet and things like that. But in most cases, their marketing is way outstripping their science.

Mike Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I just talked with on the previous podcast, somebody from a company called gene solve. If you’ve heard of them, 

David Epstein: I haven’t heard of that one, but I get contacted by companies fairly frequently. I know there was one called muscle genes and DNA fit and things like that. 

Mike Matthews: I’ve heard of both [00:29:00] of those.

David Epstein: So there, there’s, there are some reasonable premises to some of this, but in, in most cases, the, what, People are being, 

Mike Matthews: yeah, what you’re being sold is, it’s not, it’s just not yeah, I totally understand. And for 

David Epstein: most of it, you’d be better off measuring your physiology directly rather than the genes, it’s like, why measure your height genes when you could use a tape measure, you’re better off measuring directly than indirectly.

Mike Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. And then there are also things, in terms of what are you actually going for? If you’re somebody that just wants to get into shape and lose some weight and be healthy you mean we don’t need any fancy genetic research for that. That’s basic nutrition, basic exercise that works on everybody.

Yeah, that’s 

David Epstein: the thing is most, most people have so much, I mean have so many things that they can improve just like from the get go that they don’t need to be thinking about all these avant garde stuff for quite a while. Eat 

Mike Matthews: better, exercise better, sleep better and there’s probably some basic supplements, vitamin D, omega three, stuff like that, that you get that stuff in and it can almost feel like you have a new life.

David Epstein: Yeah, there’s actually that same. That same gene that’s involved in concussion [00:30:00] recovery. I know there’s some people are starting to personalize. It looks like one of the few genes that might actually be useful for personalizing some supplements. Like it changes how people metabolize Omega three a little bit.

I think we’ll see some of that with personalized diet, but again, some of the places that are doing that, they’re way out ahead of the science with the marketing. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. So in the course of researching and writing the book, what are a couple of like discoveries that just surprised you the most?

What are the things that stand out that you just weren’t expecting? 

David Epstein: I’d say the, there’s one chapter where let me say the, I knew very well that physical activity that we undertake alters our dopamine system, the brain’s chemical system for experiencing pleasure and reward from things that you do, whatever, drugs, sex, food, whatever.

The basic necessities. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And. And, but I didn’t realize that scientists who study it know that the reverse is true, that differences in the way our dopamine systems are set up and in our dopamine genes and dopamine receptor genes cause some people to [00:31:00] feel a much greater sense of pleasure and reward from being physically active.

And in some cases, this goes to the extreme where some people really Won’t feel okay. Unless they’re constantly being physically active. And these scientists they breed all kinds of animal models for this. It’s like you just take a group of mice and mice run all mice, run voluntarily a little bit, right?

And you just separate the ones that run a little bit more from the ones that run a little bit less and let each group breed within itself. And you keep doing that. And after 10 generations you have completely different animals like some that are literally crackheads for running like they look exactly like what those scientists use when they want to model drug addiction and the others that are like lounging around on the wheel you know is what they’ve done is they’ve just caused Basically, quick evolution to happen to select for this incredible drive to be physically active.

And I just thought that was fascinating and then terrifying because 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. 

David Epstein: Idiocracy. 

Mike Matthews: Did you see the movie? Have you seen the movie Idiocracy? I haven’t, no. Oh, it’s funny. Mike Judge, the guy who did Office Space, it’s where basically the premise is, [00:32:00] all you fast forward twenty five hundred years one of the guys gets, put in a cryogenic chamber, forgotten about, five hundred years goes by, and basically all the stupid people have outbred the smart people, and in the future the average IQ is like seventy and it’s that kind of concept.

David Epstein: Gotcha. And, one of the things that I found scary about it, though, was when these scientists were then talking to me and saying we’ve experimented with, you can breed these animals that have a really high drive to run, and then you can suppress it by giving them ADHD medication, right?

Because that changes the dopamine environment in their brain, and they don’t feel the need to be physically active anymore to feel okay. And if you think about extrapolating that to like what happens with a lot of, Kids is, they have a high drive to move around, and you want them to sit down for 10 hours straight, so you give them a medication that changes the doping environment in their brain, and they do exactly what the mice do.

So that’s great if you want them to sit still for 10 hours a day, not so great if you want them to have the highest possible Biological drive to be physically active. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah Kelly Starrett, I don’t know if you’re familiar with him Yeah. Yeah, so I, I had him a couple episodes ago and [00:33:00] he was talking just about this and advocating the use of standing tables and things and how that changes with kids that this exact thing where, you know, some kids just have a very strong drive to be physically active.

And sitting there for hours and hours every day just doesn’t sit well with their bodies, period. But if they were standing that, that changes it and pre, prevents some of the hyperactive type of behavior. 

David Epstein: Yeah, I really enjoyed Kelly’s book. I actually got a copy of it as a present for someone and I think that’s a smart suggestion on his part.

Mike Matthews: Yeah, I think he said he was doing I think the school that his kids go to, he’s getting it, put in there and he’s like on a campaign. to get it in, get this knowledge out there. 

David Epstein: That’s great. I’d be a supporter of that for sure. I was totally unrelated to my own book. I did some, a little bit of reporting in Japan for my own book, because they, there’s some government funding for study, genetic studies of athletes there.

But I was really there because my fiancée had a fellowship there for her own book reporting, and I went there and, She was looking around at schools, because she’s writing about education. [00:34:00] And we think of, I was used to thinking of a Japanese school as being like where all these kids would be sitting really quiet and stoic.

They have these recesses that are like the circus. It’s like kids running around on stilts and unicycles. They’re crashing and, nobody’s fawning all over them. It is, 

Mike Matthews: it’s bonkers. And then 

David Epstein: they come in and they’re, chill out. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, that’s funny. All this is I usually try to keep them around 40 minutes or so where people go it’s getting along too long.

So where can people find more? Where can they find you? And obviously I’m gonna link the book in the post on the website so they can find the book right there But if they want to if they want to check you out, where can they find you? 

David Epstein: Yeah, they can find, I have a site at the sportsgene.

com and there’s a contact page there that forwards directly to me and I’m on Twitter at David Epstein. 

Mike Matthews: Awesome. Sounds good. Thanks a lot, David. This is it was great. I think it’s definitely, it’s just a very interesting subject. I enjoyed the book a lot and I definitely recommend everyone listening to pick up the book and read it.

I think you’ll like it. If you have any, if you have any interest here, if you’re a sports fan at all, you’re going to like the book. [00:35:00] Hey, thanks 

David Epstein: for 

Mike Matthews: having me. It was a pleasure to talk to you. Yeah, sure. Hey, it’s Mike again. Hope you liked the podcast. If you did go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two.

Where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. Also head over to my website at www. muscleforlife. com where you’ll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you’ll also find a bunch of different articles that I’ve written. I release a new one almost every day actually.

I release four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I’m involved in over at muscleforlife. com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.