David Epstein in Conversation with Malcolm Gladwell

David welcome to the 92nd Street Y is this your this is your first time on stage here is it I did the Q one time is my first a oh really yeah the DA is more fun than the Q I think I think so yeah we I thought we would start by talking about how we know each other yeah I think that's a I've wanted to do that like at the end to make sure we did that so can I say how we know each other yes what we'll give each give our version of the events because I suspect it might be different but you go first okay my version is that in our relationship our first date was I guess me criticizing some of your work in my first book yes and and and I remember when you know not expecting that book to do much I was at like a very small event in Greenwich Village and somebody came by and said you know I just saw reading your book at a cafe Malcolm Gladwell and I was like oh darn I didn't I didn't think it would get on your radar yeah and then our second date was you critiquing me back in The New Yorker also being very positive but also critiquing me back well you know I hold on ironic I wrote an article for the magazine which was I mean it was the warmest sweetest face of your book yes and then I did a separate piece for the website where I gently pushed back against some of your more outrageous assertions okay and then pick up the story from here okay then I was I am so gentle you are a book tour with almost no book why was I in well I was in Washington DC and I'm going into NPR and then you come swinging through the door me you did did you not remember this we had it was in the movies they would call this meeting cute and then for some reason we started running together yeah well no you skipped over our third date yeah which was the first time we actually met in person which was at the MIT Sloan Sports analytics conference oh that's right that was the first time we met in person we were invited to do a debate that was 10,000 hours versus the sports gene yeah and and in some ways my preparation for that debate because you're very clever and I'd never met you I didn't want to get embarrassed yeah so I did a lot of homework and that that debate in some ways seeded some of the ideas for for this for this book but but what I really want to say about that debate was you could very much have just like tried to you know crush me or like using your literary crowd or whatever it was clout but instead we ended up having a great conversation not only that but when we came off the stage you told me what you thought my good points were and said when we're back in New York tomorrow why don't you go running he said this was a great idea you should explore that more and for me this was in many ways like the people I write about in chapter 10 of range where this could have become a zero-sum thing which frankly with some other authors that I came into conflict with it did become a zero-sum thing but in this case it wasn't like those like the foxes in chapter 10 you were willing to update your mental models and I learned from that and I think in some ways it empowered me to take on a more amorphous and ambitious book in this project that I that I know isn't perfect but that I was willing to do because of that and that's sort of openness in exchange I think made me better and I think if that happened more you know we can see in society there I think there are too many conflicts that are viewed as zero-sum ideas we were both disincentivized from agreeing about thing in many ways but it made me better that's for me it's kind of a model of an intellectual relationship so I really appreciate we do I mean I feel sorry you'll see because I have a I helped this whole theory of love bombing which was when you're someone criticizes you the only appropriate response is to love them back even if you're doing it cynically because it completely disarms us the last thing they're expecting but in your case I started out thinking all this love bomb him and then I realized actually he has convinced me so started cynical and ended up totally idealistic in the sense that I was like oh he's told me right I tried to love bottom and failed because he actually won me over so by the way not to put a critique one of your theories but I've seen your your responses to like like some of Christian breeze criticism and I wouldn't call that love bombing I was worried I was maybe a teeny we all stray off the straight and narrow but I do in the main I like to love by critics but wait we have to get to the point what was it so we had this discussion wasn't a debate it was a discussion the MIT Sloan conference and you said it's soda seeds for this book what was the seed so in trying to anticipate what I thought you would have to argue in this debate I I said well you'll have to argue in favor of early specialization in sports and so I went and looked at all the research I could find about the development of athletes and it showed that this pattern that athletes who go on to become elite have a sampling period where they play a broad range of sports they they gain these this broad general skills that become a scaffolding for later skills they learn about their interest they learn about their abilities they delay specializing until later than their peers who plateau at lower levels and and it's not even just a selection effect because when you match kids in studies where they're matched for a certain ability level a certain age and tracked the ones who in a certain age do more variety of different sports improve more by time to basically and so I sort of brought that up and you know in some ways that was incompatible with with some aspects of the 10,000 hour theory and so when we were walking up the stage and we framed it as the Roger verse tiger prop right so pause on that point okay build-out Roger versus Tiger because there's a beautifully simple way of illustrating this argument okay so Tiger Woods probably even even for people who don't know his story you've probably absorbed at least the gist of it which is 7 months old his father gives him a putter not trying to train me to be a golfer but just gives him a putter he starts carrying it around in his baby Walker at 10 months he starts imitating a swing he was physically precocious two years old he's on national television two years old the CDC development benchmarks are stands on tiptoes and kicks a ball and he went on television and showed his driving off in front of Bob Hope basically by three his father was media training him at four he started hustling people basically you know he's famous as a teenager by 21 he's the greatest golfer in the world Roger Federer and maybe the most famous development story in the history of anything Roger Federer meanwhile played about a dozen different skiing skateboarding badminton tennis basketball soccer all these things mother was a tennis coach refused to coach him because he wouldn't return balls normally she said it was no fun when his coaches tried to bump him up a level he declined because he just wanted to talk about pro wrestling with his friends after practice when he finally got good enough to warrant an interview with a local newspaper and the reporter asked him if he ever became a pro what he would buy with his first paycheck he said in Mercedes and his mother was appalled and asked if she could hear the interview recording and and he'd actually said Mayer CDs and a Swiss German accent he just wanted more CDs and so then she was like okay we're doing okay his father had no rules just said don't cheat don't care anything else and he specialized year he continued playing badminton basketball soccer specialized years after what is Roger Federer really only playing tennis mid teen years basically where he's only doing tennis but he still continues to non formally play soccer even though he's doing that and in other informal sports continues with them even after that and the question basically was which one of these models is the normal but it's one should we extrapolate over why this is Tamayo is the fascinating question so we have these two two of the greatest athletes of the last yeah 50 years represent diametrically opposed models of development one one unknown yeah wasn't story we're in love with the tiger model if I pulled the audience most of them would say the tiger implicitly is is the model that leads to greatness you're arguing no it's the Roger model why it doesn't I wouldn't thing I've never understood is why did we fall in love with the targa model and not like the Roger model wait I thought you made us fall in love with the tiger model don't blame me you're I can just I did not write a book about I just didn't I no no no that's true that is that is very true that ideas that you started became outrageous in other hands in many cases that's it but I remember the Time magazine article that was like unrecognizable about yeah well it was that point I was positing that there was another Malcolm Gladwell walking around curly hair who had a set of views that I would there were some unknown to me but but in terms of tiger as I think to steel it's dramatic it's incredibly dramatic there's a video of him on YouTube at age two it makes a ton of intuitive sense it's very easy for a prescription to tell people and I think as you said we're obsessed with precocity right you said these child prodigy videos are human cat videos and I think that's true and I'm mad I didn't think of that line for my book but is that an is that enough though because it's also clear that Tiger pays an extraordinary price for his precocity in a way that Federer does not right in fact it's not difficult to reach the conclusion that one of the reasons Tiger had a kind of meltdown for many years is that he really has been a prisoner of golf since he was this high and one of the reason Federer seemed so well-adjusted is that he's he had a normal childhood he did he completely had a normal childhood his his the writer who probably knows the family best called his parents pulley not not pushy so he did have a very normal childhood yeah so so even given the fact that the Tiger model is costly we still embrace it yes because well we're obsessed with excellence and I think so if one of the themes in range I think is that there are and maybe this doesn't apply to golf and we can talk about that but that there are things that you can do that cause head starts that actually systematically honor long term development but I think that is a deeply counterintuitive idea and when push comes to shove our intuition is that getting ahead is getting ahead and that that prodigious performance in a child is a trajectory not just a cross-section but that's that's often not the case but but it's also it's just it's admirable to see someone want to work that hard like I respect that in them but and it's intuitive that that would work but also that's you know one of the reasons we do science is because our intuition always figured it out so let's walk through the reasons why the tiger model doesn't work and as far as I can tell from reading your book there's at least at least three if not more but starting with explain walk us through the match argument which is a really interesting one which had never occurred to me the so match quality is this term that that economists use to basically describe the degree of fit between an individual's abilities their interests and the work that they do it turns out to be incredibly important for motivation for their performance right and even their apparent grit so you get good fit and it'll look like grit when someone does something when they're when they're in something that fits correctly and the problem is in in sports selection this dovetails with something you've written about the earlier it goes the less likely you you optimize someone's match quality so one of the things that happens when you delay matching is you give people a chance to get more signal about what they're good at and they end up picking better matches for themselves and not just in sports so so you know one of the other studies and range looks at timing of specialization in higher education and the question the Economist asks is who wins the trade-off the early specializes or the late specialized errs and what he finds is the early specialize errs do in fact jump out to an income lead after college but by year six the later specialized errs who have picked a fast a better match have a faster growth rate fly past them and the early specialized IRR start quitting and much higher numbers because you know it's like if we treated those those decisions the way we treated dating we would never pressure people to settle down that quickly before they took some more data about things and so so so to pause on this because I think this is a crucial point the parent who says who observes of their six-year-old that you know Lucy enormous tea is really well coordinated and flexible I want to make her a gymnast yeah the mistake they're making is that you don't know at 6:00 whether Lucy is best is best cut out for gymnastics and if you wait until 12 you message may be a bad example here but if you wait longer you have a better likelihood of figuring out what her skills match up with definitely six is just too soon yes gymnastics is female women's gymnastics specifically is a weird example because it requires a pre puberty PDF what's better but because you know female gymnast has shrunk from five foot three to four foot nine on average in the last thirty years because it makes their power to weight ratio better and lower moment of inertia so that's a whole different advantage but but you're absolutely right so in Tiger Woods by the way he said in 2000 his father never asked him to play golf it was him asking his father to play is the child's interest that matters and so I think the idea that he was like father manufactured from the get-go like you shouldn't be worried about missing the next Tiger Woods because if there's that like incredible incredible sort of outlier display of interest like that's not something that his father manufactured from the get-go yeah so so I think people are worried about missing that but really what you should be oriented toward his match quality and there's all sorts of reasons so you've written about the relative age effect right so I was just looking at the breakdown of the birthdays of soccer players in the u-17 under-17 European Championships 47% of them were born in January February and March and 6% in the last three months of the year and that's because as we put selection earlier and earlier all the coaches are selecting four is the kids that are effectively a year older and they are actually biologically mature and they're mistaking that for talent and then they're in the pipeline you've deselected the other kids and it's getting more and more exacerbated where we're picking for things that have nothing to do with the traits you ultimately want because we're driving selection earlier yeah so that's one argument that by and I can see actually it's it's kind of fascinating to apply that outside of sports as well so the equivalent would be to observe of your six-year-old that she has a facility for counting and to put her immediately into a pre math ph.d program that's that would be that but that's exactly what yes what parents are doing and in fact what they're encountering is a good example because that what these things that parents do are usually based on is the observation of what's called a closed skill something like counting or the kid walks early or something like that and those kinds of closed skills that aren't these more general pieces of scaffolding that that are good for long term development there's a fade-out effect on those kinds of skills whether they're in sports whether they're in math lots of lots of academic programs that are meant to give kids a boost early on to get them on a different trajectory and it does initially because the way you can give them the fastest improvement is by teaching them closed skills that have to do with procedures that are used over and over and over and there's a ubiquitous fade out effect which is actually just other people catching up because everyone's gonna learn that skill eventually and it ceases to become an advantage and so we make choices based on precocity in these closed skills in many cases that are not really in the long term in advantage so second argument is that in order to excel at a complex skill in the long term you need to build a broad base yeah so walk us through that both I'm interested in this one this one's even more relevant outside the sports realm yeah yeah but give us both sports and non sports in this instance yeah so wonder if this is me we should introduce the issue of the kind and wicked learning environment basically which are which are terms taken from a psychologist named Robin Hogarth and and one of the reasons there's a real lack of study in Gulf which is interesting but one of the reasons I can believe that early specialization may in fact work in golf although the best player in the world right now Brooks kepta picked up golf later because he got in a car accident and his parents didn't wanna do contact sports anymore but is a time learning environment is where all the information is available next steps are totally clear people often wait for each other to take turns patterns repeat feedback is automatic and totally accurate after everything you do so golf is almost like an industrial task you try to do known movements over and over and over with as little deviation as possible that's a kind learning environment so is give me other examples chess is a kind learning environment so it's based the grandmasters advantage in chess is basically patterned recognized and that also is the reason why it is so amenable to automation because computers are even better at pattern recognition so the the kinder in environment is you know Golf is like entertainment and we still watch people playing chess because it's entertainment but the more of a kind environment the skill is the more easy it is to automate which is why you know now that your iPhone app can like beat Garry Kasparov on the wicked and our challenge is where the the rules may not be clear people are acting in real-time they're more dynamic you may or may not get feedback after everything you do next steps aren't always clear the feedback may be delayed or may be inaccurate so hogarth use this example I love of a famous New York City physician who became renowned because weeks before patients would develop typhoid by palpating their tongue feeling around their tongue with his hands he could predict that they would get typhoid right again and again again and as one of his colleagues eventually observed he was a more productive carrier of typhoid than typhoid mary using just his hands and so yeah that's a really wicked learning environment because the feedback yeah wait that wasn't even another joke the the feedback teaches exactly the wrong lesson and so he gets famous for this feedback loop that teaches him the wrong lesson most environments aren't that wicked either but the closer you are to the wicked end of the spectrum the more you have to do what's called transfer where you take knowledge and skills and have to apply them to situations you have never seen before so this more repetitive using procedures knowledge then can become an impediment because you're stuck doing the same things when you really have to transfer to situations you haven't seen before starting a business would be wicked starting a business would be would be wicked and I think that's one reason why like if there was some recent research from LinkedIn that showed like people who who become successful executives one of the best predictors is the number of job functions they've worked across within an industry or again to go to this obsession with precocity when Mark Zuckerberg was 22 and he said young people are just smarter and MIT northwestern in the Census Bureau just has research out showing that the average age of a founder of a blockbuster startup on the day of founding not even when it becomes a blockbuster is about 46 yeah but like the tiger story we just focus on the Zuckerberg story but actually people have to zigzag usually quite a bit before they find that that grant cuz the goal isn't initially clear like it is in in kind learning environment yeah yeah so it's odd that the the the kind of myth of precocity and the the idea that the tiger bottle is so important is relevant only in the areas that were least interested in that's you right I should have talked to you before I wrote some of the lines in the book yeah no that's that's yeah very clever way to phrase it and and that's so one of the things that I was critiquing in range was you know books in in the did we both read sort of in the performance genre have used the tiger model is the most popular model from which to extrapolate to everything else in the world like literally I think talent is overrated the back cover says Tiger Woods the polgár's the chess family and this is what works for anything that you care about in fact it's that leap that is a problem it may work in golf but it's the extrapolation where we've made mistake yeah yeah the the let's let's talk a little bit about this this notion of in sports so what's a good example of a wicked sport I don't think any sports are that wicked I think because they're all rule-bound so what Hogarth said is either tennis is more wicked than in golf yeah because tennis set is dynamic you have to you have to use so-called anticipatory skills where the sport is actually happening too fast for you to react to so you need to learn to pick up cues and a player's body and you know the ball and things like that to act faster than you could otherwise so it's much more dynamic but it's still you know in soccer really one of the reasons why applying like Moneyball stuff to soccer has been so difficult because it's so fluid and the game changes so much that analytics hasn't made nearly as big an impact there is like baseball where something happens and it stops and something happens and it stops and so analytics have made a much better impact but hogarth then says what we're really mostly playing in the world the things we most care about our Martian tennis where you can see people doing something but nobody's told you the rules it's up to you to deduce them and by the way they can change at any time and that's that's these these other challenges that we mostly are about what about I was thinking that there's a third reason why you would want to take a generalist course supposed to a specialization course and that is that you it is only through taking a generalist approach that you could have novel skills not only but the chief reason you'd want to need one it like so I'm thinking of this in basketball that you know every now and again there's someone like a Hakeem Olajuwon or Steve Nash these brilliant basketball players who have strong grounding in soccer yeah and that's very rare among basketball players but we say of those who come to basketball late from soccer that they have certain skills that are unusual yeah or at least they have developed certain skills much more than their peers that's right come from soccer and that is what gives them their their their special advantage their comparative advantage so it's it's quite conceivable that had he not play soccer Steve Nash would not been a superb mba player because what what sets him apart as an NBA player is the fact he brings an unusual skill set it just so happens that I was emailing with Steve Nash about this last week Canadian royalty yes and there was this HBO real sports segment about sport development in Norway because like Norway blew everybody away and these last Winter Olympics and it's all this unstructured stuff they're not even allowed to have formal games until you know competitions until until they're sort of mid or later teen years and and Steve's a big soccer fan you know and France which just won the World Cup overhauled its development pipeline starting decades ago to incorporate this so a French soccer player young soccer player plays about half as many formal games as an American soccer player of the same age and and they have this saying there's no there's no remote control meaning the coaches aren't even allowed to talk to them most of the time they want to do this like freeform unstructured stuff so I actually think that so Steve Nash didn't even get a basketball till he was 13 by the way and I liked him as an example because he's relatively normal-sized like he's not that big for those she was plus for those of you who don't know Steve it occurs to me I'm so deep inside basketball nough stood I get there other people or not right Steve Nash is someone who sort of physically resembles me yeah he and happens to be one of the 10 greatest point guards of the last 50 years two-time NBA MVP for sure oh yeah yes I mean he's three legendary basketball player and he's a he's a skinny guy from Canada I mean you could just the number of parallels between him and me are astonishing right right this Venn diagram is you in any but um but so so go back to silly emailing with Steve oh yeah and so we watched this real sports and he's actually exploring starting an academy to incorporate these principles of unstructured play because I think in some ways multi-sport is actually just a proxy for movement diversity really because if you go around to you know Brazil the kids aren't even playing soccer they're playing futsal this game that's like small ball stays on the ground they'll play on a shape this sighs one day sand one day cobblestones the other day so they're playing futsal but it's really a different game all the time it's different involving different anticipatory skills and and so he's into this and so he wants to start an academy because he realizes that his imprimatur you know Steve Nash's name will allow parents to say okay maybe we will do like what the science says we should do instead of going to early specialization and Judy Murray Andy and Jamie Marie's mother has done the same thing in the UK where she basically facilitates unstructured development and people send their kids to her camp they won't let the kids do this stuff on their own but if Judy Murray says it's okay like then it's yeah it's information yeah but this is another thing that's wrong with really specialization which again sounds like it's specific to sports but applies and I want to talk about that this notion and you pointed out that when you specialized early and you're doing the same repetitive movements over and over again your risk of injury later in life starts to increase oh yeah so but this is there's a beautiful parallel to this in non-sporting thing yes which is this notion of burnout yeah and I wonder whether that's not a really crucial that somehow there is something about an early specialization that leaches the joy out of an intellectual activity and limits it far too early I think that's I think that's probably true for a lot of people but by the way I want to say one interesting about the injury issue which is Cirque du Soleil lots of Olympians they looking at this kind of day they have a ton of physiology data decided to have their performers learn the basics of other performers skills not because they were gonna perform them but to see if it would make them more creative and subjectively they thought it did but they measure their injury rates next to Canadian gymnastics and drop their injury rates by a third so something about doing that makes people less fragile and I have theories about what that is but it doesn't matter the fact is it works but but I think you're absolutely right so like when I started I had to write about music and range of course because probably then the next domain that's most associated with early specialization and when you look at those studies the main reason that people they're promising musicians quit is that they report a mismatch between the instrument they play and the instrument they wanted to play and if you look at the pattern of their development they will usually so the ones who come on to become the best typically have a sampling just like the the athletes so like even yo-yo ma who actually you know did focus very early had a sampling period went through it a heck of a lot quicker than most people because he didn't like the first two instruments that he was playing and this what what the ones going to become exceptional they early on spread their early practice across a larger number of instruments whereas what it looks like for the ones who plateau at lower levels and or quit they have their first instrument where they get tons of practice and and someone kind of tells them you know you can't switch now you have a head start you'll get behind so it's you know some cost fallacy kind of thing and and they end up quitting so I can Battle Hymn of the tiger mother you know in the first page she says here the secrets to successful children and assigns one of her children violin and and presides over five hours a day of practice and and and to the author's credit later in the book she acknowledges the daughter says you picked it not me and quits right people that part of the message didn't get his famous five hours of file in a day is just the most bananas idea I've ever heard not just but the child who has to play five hours but for the parent who has to listen to five hours no why would anyone do that to themselves I I my parents drove idea they violated by the way what that one week it lasted what my sampling curry was one week so it's great and I walked away why why did I quit violin after one week because my brother who's older and musical I say that in scare quotes I had this child listen to him endlessly bang away on the piano and I was like it clearly it's gonna take many many years for him to even be remotely kind of pleasing on this instrument why would I put everyone else in our family through the same painful so magnanimous of you I don't have that Reuben hey bris is not about my family pathologies this is about something much fun but I want to talk about this in terms of just talk about this in terms of schooling what this so if you're if I make David Epstein czar of American schooling this leave sports aside for a while yeah I would like you to redesign the curriculum of K through 12 to maximize people's development as human beings I see not even K through 12 came through the end of college tell me what you would do in light of what you've learned from range geez what a question the first thing I would do is but before I would just overhaul the system from the bottom I would start with things that we actually could do at no cost today which is so so chapter four is called learning Fast and Slow with apologies to Daniel Kahneman and it it details these really well-known findings in cognitive psychology about learning that again are deeply counterintuitive because they showed the quickest way to demonstrate progress actually undermines long term progress so the probably the single most surprising study in the book to me was this one done at the Air Force Academy I love this one is amazing so because you could never do this any other place right so you have an Air Force Academy that brings in you know whatever a thousand students every year they all have to take a sequence of three math courses calculus one calculus two and they are randomized to professors for calculus 1 re randomized for calculus 2 re randomized again and so you have this incredible experimental condition and and these researchers who wanted to see the impact of teaching in this incredible natural experiment and so they followed thousands of students and a hundred different professors and what they found was that the students so the the student and the students characteristics coming in were evenly spread across classes the students who over performed compared to the ability that came in with the most in calculus one then systematically underperformed in all of the follow-on courses the professor whose students did sixth best in calculus 1 out of 100 and got the seventh best ratings from the students finished dead last in how his students performance was in their follow-on math courses after that there was almost an inverse relationship between how well students over performed in calculus 1 and how much they then under in the follow-on courses in between how well they rated that first professor and it turned out what those professors were doing was they were teaching using procedures knowledge they were teaching a narrow curriculum that worked really well for the calculus one test but did not set up these broad frameworks that allow you to scaffold later knowledge and so again that's so deeply encounter intuitive that you could do something that causes this kind of short-term progress everyone had to take the same tests of course and somehow undermines long term development and so I think you know you can you can kind of see what I'm getting at this fact that the way we use testing is evaluation can be a real problem if you're incentivizing people to impart using procedures knowledge that can make kids do the best on the test but it's not the best for their long-term development that's a problem testing is wonderful but for learning so there are three in that chapter sort of three strategies testing interleaving and spacing testing is just quiz yourself right you want to force someone to generate an answer before they know what they're doing because it's the attempt to generate an answer that then Prime's your brain to remember something when you were told the answer so you want to test before people are ready interleaving means doing tons of different kinds of problems the way that math study usually works in u.s. is you do a type of problem do it do it do it do it problem ay-ay-ay bbbbb ccccc and that leads to using procedures knowledge what you want to do is never show the same exact problem twice and what that forces the learner to do is to match a strategy to a problem instead of learning how to execute a procedure that's called interleaving where you mix up these problems third spacing you don't want to do we usually do you do one thing you wait and then you just move on to something else whether this is school or professional development what you really want to do is do something do some other things and then come back to that thing and so you have this you're repeatedly coming back to things so a famous spacing study Spanish vocabulary learners they were taught one group was taught eight hours on one day the other group four hours on day one four hours a month later all the same total training eight years later when they were brought back group two remembered two hundred and fifty percent more with no study in the interim right same amount of study so the first thing I would do is incorporate testing spacing testing for evaluation not testing I mean sorry testing not for evaluation testing for learning before people are ready spacing and interleaving in everything we do because that's no cost stuff that that scaffolds learning in a totally different way where you learn this this knowledge is called making connections knowledge instead of but this but instead of procedure underneath all that is this really fundamental insight which is that the sometimes the very best teachers are those who disadvantaged us in the short term yeah yes and I mean that's one of the themes of the book is that the things that you can do they look the best in the short term in order to be in your terms in order to be the best at X it seems intuitive that you should just start doing X as soon as possible but that turns out not to be the right thing more more in a more conceptual level if I were the schools are I think there's there's something to talk about that the there's a section book I talked about the army and their failure to retain their most talented officers and first they tried to throw money at them and that the people who are gonna stay stayed anyway the people were going to leave left anyway and that was a half billion dollars of taxpayer money and then they started something called talent based branching where instead of saying here's your career track up or out someone goes in say here's a bunch of career tracks you can sample a couple will pair you with a coach and after each one they'll help you reflect on what you learned about your own abilities what you learned about your own interests and you'll keep triangulating until you get this better match and I think I would take that conceptual approach to kind of everything where you help people who's one of my favorite quotes in the book is from Herminia Barrett who studies how people find careers that fit them she says you learned we learned who we are in process in practice not in theory and what she means is there's this whole industry that tells you can just introspect and decide who you are but in fact the only way we learn about ourselves and our options is by doing stuff and reflecting on it so I think I would want to build that kind of talent based branching where the teacher or coach is someone who helps a person reflect on what they've learned about their own abilities and interests from these multiple experiences you know what the enemy of what you're describing is is self-knowledge I've always thought that self-knowledge was overrated why is it so important to know the kind of person you are and what you're describing is the benefits of not knowing so people who say I'm not a math person I'm I'm very X or Y are precisely the people who would who would who would object or who would great would have a problem with the kind of course of action you're describing right you're asking people to sample widely yes outside their areas of specialty right or their areas of interest or their areas of another interest their areas of imagined interest and imagined specialty right on the on the grounds that they don't know what it is it's that will that they'll either thrive at or what they need to be good their insight into themselves is constrained by their roster of previous experiences period yeah and and that's an important thing to know and not only that but this concept this concept they're right about the end of history illusion right which shows that we are at every time point in life we realize we've changed a lot in the past our preferences our values what we think our strengths and weaknesses are the friends we prefer the things we like to do for fun and at every time point we then underestimate how much we will change in the future we keep saying like man I changed a lot from these experiences there but now I'm pretty much done and we say that at every time point so it leads to these really weird results like when people are asked how much they would pay to see their favorite band today ten years from now the average answer is 129 dollars and when they're asked how much they would pay wait that wasn't even a joke when they're asked when they're asked how much they would pay today to see their favorite band from ten years ago the average answer is eighty dollars and so we really underestimate how much we changed this idea that we we come like fully formed with with insight into ourselves is is not supported by any other work in them you know this reminds me of in my this season of my podcasts I have all these episodes about Jesuits it's the theme is how to think like a Jesuit because I love the way Jesuits think and the Jesuits had this really lovely notion and by the way if there's a Jesuit in the audience and I get this wrong just raise your hand and correct me I'm not a Jesuit that's why I'm like but they have a notion what's called disordered attachments and the idea this is an idea from Saint Ignatius is that you cannot approach a problem if you're bringing with you attachments that get in the way of seeing listening clearly seeing the nature that so that guy I was talking to gave me this example of when he was a novice and he was supposed to be sent out to do your training and he said to his senior he said you know I'll do anything you want I'll go anywhere to do my training just don't send me to a hospital because I just can't stand beside the blood and people dependent and the guy said you're going to a hospital and it's exactly your point oh he was observing that he had a disordered attachment to the idea that he was someone who could deal with who could not deal with that particular set of problems and that set of problems were not useful to the direction he wanted to go on and this the senior priest understood that no that's you're 25 years old you can't have a definite self definition that rules out this massive area of your presumed responsibility which is people who are suffering right we're physically suffering I mean especially at at 25 at the the period of fastest personality change over your life is 18 to 28 so making those decisions for a 25 year old is it's making a decision for someone that you don't really know yeah and for a world that you can't really conceive yeah and I don't think that's a good stretch it's go radical for a moment what if for example would you go for the following idea what if we if we had students choose their - when you when at the point in high school when you start choosing your own courses what if we took that away and we just had people assigned people courses randomly I think that would probably be fine as long as we again I think we should implement this kind of but I love that you without even a moment like mister stop we're in the Upper East Side of Manhattan we're within walking distance of Dalton we've just suggested that the premise on which all of this high-priced education is based yeah it's just nonsense well I mean yet the evidence no but but the evidence for that is actually pretty clear though yeah like quiet because school outcomes come from their selection of students and those students others background factors and things like that African stuff they learned in school the equivalent would be a hospital that boasted of its success in curing people and only admitted the healthiest people right they basically just admitted members of the US Olympic team and then turned around and said oh my God look at our look at the the health status of our of our patients right extraordinary they're setting World Records that's how much we cured them right right things like yeah no wait so this is so you're in favor of randomization what was your caveat that I think especially at those early ages yeah I just want to make sure anything they do like when I when I first started in training to be a scientist when I did my first lab work I thought here's where I'm gonna learn that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life and I learned that maybe this wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life and I wasn't happy about that but that was a very important signal to get but I think you want to make sure that that you help them maximize their learning from these experiences and and some people do that on their own so-called self-regulatory learners and the thing they do the most of is they stop and reflect and so so I think you want to help them and make sure that they're getting signal from whatever it is that they're doing and I don't think you would lose much by randomizing anyway because the fact is like when Jim Flynn who I think we we both know studied college students both in in the UK and in the u.s. he found that the skills that they were able to use to get good grades at elite colleges what had a I think it was about a point zero three correlation with their abilities on a test of critical thinking that really matters in the world so we're clearly in viewing people with skills that are no good for critic analyzing the actual world so I don't think you stand to lose very much in most cases what about this brings up a second notion which is does this argument suggest that you may learn more from situations where you are relatively speaking performing badly than situations where you're performing well well so so Kaiser no relationship no I mean the cognitive psychologist Nate Cornell's say if your difficulty is not a sign that you aren't learning but ease is and I think that's a that's a good thing to keep in mind if something is too easy then maybe you like to do it but that doesn't mean that you're not learning much right like you can go to the gym and lift the same weights the same number of times every day and you won't slide backward but you also won't won't cause adaptation yeah and and so no I think there's I think there is something to that so why why then do we persist what is the value of assigning grades to academic performance in high school I assume part of the goal is to give people a sense of how they're doing but if you really wanted to what self-regulatory learners really need or the kind of the best learners is very fast feedback so when you actually give them a test and then show them the answers like weeks later that's not good for learning you would want to do it like right away yeah or work with them right away not just give them the answer so I but I think it's for because we need a system that likes if it's people for colleges you know and give them some ostensibly is to give them some kind of feedback about how they're doing and how they're learning is but I think in but why can't that be exactly why is it I don't know I mean I just said playing with it strikes me that the more you think about your argument the more sort of subversive it becomes because if you really wanted to redesign an educational system from scratch based on these ideas yeah you really are sweeping away a whole lot of the kind of rituals that surround formal education I think there are things that are done well in formal education - I should say by the way like so chapter 2 is about these steadily rising IQs across the world and I think some of that has to do with things that that are learned in school in that sense you think thin effect is so the Flynn effect is this observation that in the developed world at least and also in parts of the yeah the non bubbler IQs have been rising steadily over the last hundred years I thought that was like didn't Steven Johnson famously argue it was video games so it's it seems to be this well it's controversial but seems to be this more abstract thinking basic because that all the games have been on the most abstract type of tests like not the stuff that's taught in school yeah that's an argument that school hasn't helped but it's it's like things like Ravens progressive matrices we get these abstract designs you have to fill in the missing one so this was supposed to be the test that like if Martians landed it could tell how smart they were and in fact it's the one that has to had the most change and so I don't think it's from things that are explicitly taught in school but the way that that we've learned to as Flynn would say look through scientific spectacles to do classification and abstraction I don't think that's necessarily taught on purpose but I do think it is is it ingrained in what happens in school and I don't want to rag on schools too much cuz I point out in the high point not stopping you I mean this is the perfect place to rag on school David you have no bow but but I mean I do point out that everyone thinks that education has gotten worse since their day right but actually so I I put in range some questions from you know like the 60s that sixth graders would say said I thought it was said now patients got more expensive since their higher education I think right but so this would be like middle school education basically and there was without question middle schoolers have a better grasp of basic concepts than their forebears did without question but if you look at the test questions that test the same level in the 60s it was like you know rate times time problem just apply it and and now it's like these complex word problems that require multiple steps and so the challenge has gotten much harder because we're not training people to do repetitive tasks anymore because we're not in that same kind of industrial world so school is actually doing better it's just the challenge has outpaced that yeah yeah in any case that the main thrust of your argument is not so much that what schools are doing is wrong but that the the the the techniques that students and parents use to navigate education are wrong we're making different oh you know we're just making the wrong choice is within a stable environment that's really the kind of yeah I mean one program that I learned about was researching is called career academies that targets kids who you know are are by traditional measures not not really headed to college and gives them some sort of vocational training basically or early exposure to types of work and surprisingly even when they often do not decide to go in to do anything with that career they still do better overall like in income wise going to do something totally totally different and and I think a little bit of that has to do again they're getting more significant sort of signal about themselves and about match quality than you often do in traditional classes yeah yeah when is um speaking of match quality presumably you couldn't keep searching forever I mean I have no idea what I'm gonna do when I grew up I literally have no idea what I'm gonna do that now like no idea I mean when I was a teenager that was maybe the Air Force Academy be a test pilot and be an astronaut and I've gotten like linearly less long term goal directed I don't know whether whether you're your particular position right now is a best-selling author is generalizable to the general public no no I mean but but this was but in the Dark Horse project in the book the the common trait of people who find fulfilment in their careers is it focused on short term planning and and that resonated with me so much such that I ended up as a subject in the study which I disclosed in the book what they do is they all came in and would say well you know don't tell people to do what I did because I came through this weird path I thought I was gonna do one thing then I tried I didn't like it so i zigged and zagged and they all view themselves as having come out of nowhere which is why the researchers called it the Dark Horse project and their common trait is this short term planning where they don't look around and say here's who's younger than me and has more than me they say here's Who I am right now here my skills and interests here the opportunities in front of me I'll try this one here's my hypothesis about what I'll learn and a year from now I'll change because I will have learned something new and they just do that until they get to a spot where they can kind of uniquely succeed and feel fulfilled and so I've totally abandoned that that longer-term planning in favor of these short-term proactive experiments and and why would you have to stop you can keep doing that year old yeah does your if you were running a company based on these observations would you put that observation into practice that's to say right now companies do a version of this right they silo people from the get-go hmm you start out in marketing you stay in marketing unless you're one of the very very few to rise to the very top and then maybe you get a shot too are you thinking you would do much more cross specialization with it even at four people in their 30s and 40s absolutely absolutely the you know one of my favorite character knew but kind of got her first like real job when she was 54 basically but and in a lot of the characters did that Oliver Smithies was another of my favorite characters right who he he he started in med school and then does chemistry and becomes because he sees a lecture and loves it and it becomes a biochemist when that was not a thing now that's its own specialty at the time it was this weird hybrid and then his 50s he decided to take a sabbatical two floors away like every couple years he goes in new domain two floors away from his own lab to learn DNA and then at 60 does his work that wins in the Nobel Prize and lower like on drag I'm the only in the last chapter the only scientist who's won both the igg Nobel Prize for the silliest research and the Nobel Prize for and he says which one did he win first ignoble for levitating frogs with magnets and why is that ignoble that sounds like a really interesting thing they they ask you if you're willing to accept it because of the reputational thing first and he was he was like happy to accept it and he likes to say it's psychologically unsettling to switch gears but he likes to say I don't I like to say I don't do research I only do search and I sort of love that he and you and we were just talking about Bill Simmons before this and the ringer who's who's bounced around and had some huge successes and some failures in some of the work that he's done and one of the things is now these people who are becoming famous at the wringer went in with totally different jobs and he allowed them to come on a podcast or to write a story or do this other thing and now they are famous yeah because he allowed this sort of internal mobility and then for to try things like you were you were just calling someone a genius who was hired as an online editor and now as a famous podcaster right and that's not what she was hired for and he allows people to try different things yeah it was one of like the happiest workplaces that visited do it well it's interesting because the what that reminds us is that we have going back to this question of math we have way too much confidence in the accuracy of the match mechanisms with that are in place for sure like so you you know the there is no reason for someone who is 25 or 28 or 30 years old to believe they have the system has successfully matched them with what their what they ought to be doing yeah I mean or you can you mean you can always be looking to make that match better right and again this is what the army realized where they said are our traditional tests are not doing as good a job as this talent based branching base yeah that you have to actually do some experimentation and maybe that's annoying but it should be viewed as an investment in long-term development yeah we have questions number and I've been remiss and not looking at them oh here's a good one that points out that there's a difference between the u.s. in and the English educational systems and to our credit we generalize longer and yeah the Brits specialized earlier yes so would you they must your your argument would suggest they're paying a price for that correct in fact the economists who study that was got interested in it because he was gonna go into the British school system at the last minute decided he wasn't sure what he was gonna do and and decided to come into the u.s. school system instead and decided to that got him interested in studying specialization timing so he looked at for example the school systems in England and Scotland which are very similar except for specialization timing where Scotland allows some more sampling in England you know mid teen years you already have to be like applying to programs in college and he said who wins this trade-off the earlier the late specialized errs and what he found is it's usually the late specialized errs that you know there's a million ways to you have to get to performance but that the late specialized errs have higher growth rates because they match better and they and they end up quitting less because they match better do you think that that is that is more of an issue with people of high ability that is to say do people of high ability require longer to find their match yeah I don't know I think you know I don't know the answer to that I think you could make the argument that they have more options to choose from so for example like if you look at something like the the study of mathematically precocious youth that has these five cohorts that it started tracking from age well and so some of these people are middle-aged now the it takes these kids who scored eight hundred on the SAT when they're 12 on the SAT math and and the girls have score 810 to also score like super high on the verbal if you score high on one you tend to score high on the other but a lot of the girls who scored 800 a math score very high in verbal and they tend to have this wider variety of careers whereas you know if some of the boys are have this high ability tilt then they'll go toward that tilt but the people who are more even tend to have these more options so they spread across this larger numbers are lovely if I'm remembering this this research correctly they make this lovely observation that boys to find what they like is what they're good at and girls don't they separate those two traits and this is why they were trying to understand why there was so much there were all these brilliant girls who were brilliant in science and math who were leading science and math and they they thought they had scrubbed out all the bias and scrubbed it all the and and they were so puzzled by this and what they realized in the end was it was this simple this difference in definition it's a it's a matching gift definition boys match to things they were good at thinking that that would that correlated with what they would like indras girls never made that ascent in many ways that the girl position is superior to the boy position don't you think typical yeah hold on how does being a generalist protect one against AI yes so that's kind of like the topic of the first chapter in some ways so I've kind of I think it's and I didn't make this up in AI researcher gave me this this idea to think about AI on a spectrum from from chess where it's based on there's a huge database of previous knowledge they're you know very constrained rules it's not changing and so computers have made totally explosive exponential progress done to self-driving cars where we've made huge progress and very constrained rules but there are sometimes unfamiliar situations and it turns out we were not as close right like like Elon Musk keeps pushing it out two years seven two years - the others - when we're gonna have all the way to something like scientific research or cancer research we're ibm's watson has been such a big flop that some of the AI research as i talked to were worried that it would damage the reputation of AI in healthcare and as one of the oncologists that quote had said the reason watson did well on Jeopardy and and not in cancer research is because we know the answers to jeopardy and so i think in those those challenges that are more repetitive yeah those are much more amenable to automation if you look at things like James Bessemer a good example of the ATM when that came in and was supposed to obviate bank tellers and in fact we it caused more bank tellers because it made every branch cheaper and so banks could open more branches and they could hire more tellers overall but it totally changed the job from someone who had these very specific procedural skills that had to do with transactions to someone who has this much more amorphous human behavior marketing customer service kind of orientation to these much more sort of softer skills and even even where AI is really good like in chess I mean it was Garry Kasparov who recognized when he played deep blue more of expects this idea that humans and computers have opposite strengths and weaknesses and he realized the computer was far superior tactics which is patterns that's you know that's most of chess and grandmasters patterns study is their advantage but humans are good at strategy this bigger picture planning of how to manage the little battles to win the war and so some of his efforts led to this freestyle chess tournament where humans could play with computers or whatever they wanted and the the a couple of amateur humans with normal laptops beat the best humans they beat the best computers and they beat the best grandmasters with the best computers these so-called centur teams these were people who were moderate amateur chess players who knew something about computer search who could hand a lot of glowing information so suddenly overnight this stuff that Kasparov has spent his life learning is outsourced to the computer and he's no longer the best where when the game when the humans are doing the thing that humans are uniquely good at yeah by the way parenthetically I've never understood why people got so worked up about the fact that a computer could be in chess it's like saying psyche getting worked up about the fact that a car can beat a human in a race well like yeah it's a car I mean why we have races because we raced people who are like ourselves right you don't race a car normally because it's in a different class has an engine uses gasoline for yourself so then in chess there like they import not just a different species but an actual like machine I don't like whoa the machine could beat me well I mean anyway just crazy it was IBM marketing it was actually I think that IBM the we're almost out of time but we have about a few more questions a few more minutes what has been your book has been out for mmm how many days to to put it I guess it has a three you're too modest to say this it's everywhere and having this kind of sensational effect and when you and I you and I did a David and I did a similar kind of thing back in March March sports centric that words and I have to say as you were describing this idea to a roomful of was at this this sports nerd conference called Sloan and it was like two thousand nerds and they were so riveted you could have heard a pin drop as you're explaining this there is something about this idea that seems to grab people by the lapels what why why do you think everyone is so kind of powerfully attracted to this argument I think I think well I think there have been very strong arguments that people perceive going in the other direction for one no reason but you look at that David see anyone but I think this is a topic how broad or how specialized to be that is important to everyone whether they discuss it explicitly or implicitly that that the signal is very strongly on one side to only do one and that we talk about all the time but that we talk about purely with intuition and so I think my goal was to not to be the final word on this because I don't even know ultimately how you could ever have the final word on this but to look and see what research was out there and bring to those conversations some concrete information that I hope could make those discussions much more productive and interesting for people so I hope it's that this important discussion that's only been grounded in tuition maybe we'll go a little bit of a different place now and that plus so much of it was deeply counterintuitive for me again this idea that you can do things in the short-term that undermine your develop in a long-term and so I so I think you know apparently counterintuitive nough sometimes works in writing yes it does it does thank David thank you very much David will be by the way before you don't clap yet' David you will be signing books we're downstairs I'm not sure somewhere somewhere in this area David will be signing your books I encourage you all to read this book I genuinely think it is an eye-opening and much needed and beautifully written well book and you're to be commercially and and you know I want to thank you for your support of it because like I said this has been like a model sort of intellectual relationship for me you make me sound like I'm be an old guy like this is Karate Kid none and your I take it all back take it off back all right thank you very much David thank you [Applause]

Channel: 92nd Street Y

Views: 40,202

Rating: 4.8697066 out of 5

Keywords: 92Y, 92nd Street Y, malcolm gladwell, david epstein, athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, scientists, generalist, specialist, excellence

Id: Jd6QQBP3rO8

Length: 60min 29sec (3629 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2020