Going Deep with Chad and JT - Ep. 76 - David Epstein Joins, Range, The Arctic

Episode Date: June 26, 2019

What up stokers, in episode 76 we hit you with some more knowledge! Author David Epstein joins us to discuss his new book, Range, which explains how generalists thrive in this new modern world. We also cover his time in the arctic and his experience as an author. Dive on in! Check out his new book here: https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized-World/dp/0735214484

Oh what's up stokers of stoke nation this is Chad Kroger coming in with the going deep with Chad and JT podcast before we get started with the most popular podcast in SoCal. For sure. Yeah. And we just ran through some of the scents. What did you think? We have a guest here, David Epstein, author of Range and the Sports Gene. And also in Expert Nose. Expert Nose. Yeah.

Just put the test on. Finally calibrated nose. I definitely found a couple I liked. Yeah. Whoa, that's a great review. We'll cover them in the mid-roll. Yeah. Okay, sweet. Go for our faves.

Dude, and then also, I got to say this about Manscaped. Chad, you've been doing ads for them even when they don't pay for them. And your love of the game and your love for Manscaped paid off because Manscaped just made a huge order for 20 episodes.

Yeah. Because my dog here manifested it with just pure love. It all comes from love and i think it kind of relates to the book playing around having fun experimenting yeah finding the right company that's the good for it i don't know i've been waiting for someone to make the manscaping connection to this book thank you i appreciate that i was thinking about the whole drive over i can't believe it hadn't happened yet yeah just wait teed it up for you maybe in the

net you could do it release the second version just put the manscaped yeah just add another chapter yeah re-release cool yeah so we're here with david epstein welcome to the pod thank you thank you so much for doing it my pleasure we both read your book loved it thank you i love having a book an author come on because it forced me to read a book and a certain amount of time you know it's dude i'm i i get like a kid too where i'm like i'm nervous talking to authors for one thing. And then like when I do finish the book, I want to tell everybody I read a book. Yeah.

I don't even really have questions for you. I just want to be like, dude, I read your book. That's cool. I appreciate that. It's an achievement. Yeah. Yeah. It's an awesome book too.

Yeah, because I think you touched on this in the end, but sort of it, you know, these days everyone talks about specialization. It's like the move, like people are like, don't follow your passion, go to like a trade school kind of thing. But this argues that generalists are more successful in the long run in life. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's career. Especially the way the work world is changing now.

So like some of the research I look at, you know, just to put in sort of concrete terms, for example, when we were more of an industrial economy, when like organizations were more specialized because they could count on facing the same challenges over and over and over, it actually did pay to specialize. And so you would see that even in like inventors.

So like some of the patent research I talk about, you'd see the biggest contributions were coming from people who are drilling down in one type of technology. Yeah. And there, you know, there's like 450 different technology classes in the patent research I talk about, you'd see the biggest contributions were coming from people who are drilling down in one type of technology. And there, you know, there's like 450 different technology classes in the patent office. And then explosion of the knowledge economy. And all of a sudden things are changing really rapidly. You're needing to like combine domains of knowledge. And suddenly now it's these people who have spread their work across a large number of technological domains. And they're sort of merging these different fields and making these like motley connections and all this and so i think this is very much you know in some ways like a modern

phenomenon like a re-rise of a generalist in some ways yeah go ahead no i'm adolf oh yeah just and it really allows people to think outside of the box outside of their like range of knowledge um to to sort of touch on their whole foundation of education. And everything they've experienced. Yeah. Like so many people in the book pull from like childhood experiences. That's right. Like they see their mom clean something like with an unconventional method and that's how

they solve like a molecular biology problem like 30 years later. That guy, speaking of playing, you're talking about Oliver Smithies who was a Nobel laureate who passed away not that long after I interviewed him. But he was like just – that particular – what was happening was he would go in on Saturdays. So I would look at all his notebooks and you'd notice like all his important work was done on Saturdays. And he said that's because he – on Saturday he'd do what he called Saturday morning experiments where you go in. Nobody's around, so you can just basically screw around. No judgment.

Right. And so he would just like play with all the equipment. And on one of those days, he was trying to figure out a way basically to separate molecules so you could like study them in a certain way. And long story short, he has this memory of helping his mother starch his father's shirts for laundry. And he would throw out the starch and it would like solidify when it cooled. And he's like, maybe I could like run molecules through that, that you know put an electric current and they'll move through it and so he goes and like raids the janitor's closet for starch like cooks it up does that and it becomes like

the start of a breakthrough that like totally revolutionizes um molecular biology basically and so he when he was young he he was trained to be a doctor and then he saw a chemistry lecture and was like let me go check that out and so he ends up merging biology and chemistry which now is its own specialty but at the time was like this totally weird hybrid of stuff so he was always doing this stuff and what one of my favorite favorite you know memories of talking to him and his colleagues was when his colleagues when they had equipment that was broke or that was old that they didn't want they would leave it with a label that was NBGBOKFO,

which meant no bloody good but okay for Oliver because he would play with anything and experiment around it. So instead of throwing out their equipment, they'd give it to him, and he'd make these breakthroughs with it and eventually won the Nobel Prize. Beast. That's awesome. And you say that there's a difference between – it's good to hyper-specialize if you're in a kind environment.

Is that what it's called? Where like it's the same situation over and over again. It's not dynamic with like different variables. And then there's wicked environments where everything changes. So you kind of need to have a range of experience to be able to have the problem-solving skills for it, right? Yeah, totally. So those are terms sort of I took from the psychologist Robin Hogarth.

So the kind learning environment, right, you can count on tomorrow looking the same as yesterday. Patterns repeat. So like the basis of specialty in those areas like chess is repetitive patterns. But that's also why, and you get, whenever you do something, you get feedback that's like totally accurate. So you can just like get better just by trying things. That's also why like chess is so to automate, because it's structured a kind learning environment. So if you're in a kind environment now, you're in much more danger of getting automated, because these are processes that don't change over time. They just repeat, not like creative challenges, right? The wicked environment is where maybe you're not even sure

what to do next. You might have to create something new that hasn't existed before. You can't just count on patterns repeating. And then in some cases, the feedback you'll get actually sends you in the wrong direction. So one of Hogarth's favorite examples was this New York City physician who had this ability to palpate patients' tongues, feel around their tongues, and could predict weeks before they showed any symptoms they'd get typhoid, right? And he becomes rich and famous doing this. And as one of his colleagues later observed, he was a more productive carrier of typhoid using only his hands than even Typhoid Mary. So he was actually giving it to them, and the feedback was telling him he was making accurate predictions,

and so he kept doing it. What happened to that dude? He retired as a prominent physician. Wow. Does he live in shame now? It only turned out later. He's actually not alive anymore. But was he terribly embarrassed when he perished?

Yeah, when did they find out? No, no, he wasn't. I mean, and that's actually... I mean, there's right now, there's like massive... And I get to a little bit of this in the end of the book, right? So like one of these studies that shows with certain heart problems, if you get checked in for like emergency heart treatment, you're less likely to die if you're checked in on the dates

of a national cardiology conference when specialized cardiologists are away because you're less likely to die if you're checked in on the dates of a national cardiology conference when the specialized cardiologists are away because you're less likely to get procedures that aren't going to help you, but might kill you because they're so used to doing the same thing. So, I mean, this kind of stuff is happening right now and we know it in droves and it's been happening for a long time and there is not much sense of embarrassment. There needs to be some more sense of embarrassment about it. Yeah. See, you scared me too. I was on a plane reading your book and in there it said, said uh you're more likely to crash if it's a cruise first time together i'm already afraid of flying so i was like gonna go up to the stewardess i'm like how many times you guys done this together yeah that's what you do when you walk in the plane like say like first

time flying if so be like maybe order a few more drinks you know right like yeah yeah it almost seems like specialists sort of uh it's sort of like cardiologists or something. They sort of work within their, it becomes automatic for them. So like, oh, let's put a stint in to solve this problem. So when you have people who are more generalists, they can touch on a bunch of different examples to be like, oh, maybe this issue is not one we see every day. Yeah, and it's not to say that we don't need those cardiologists right like we need we need both i liked how the the physicist and mathematician freeman dyson styled these so we need we need birds and frogs the frogs are down looking at the details the

birds are up above integrating the knowledge of the frogs problem is we're telling everybody to be frogs basically that's a problem so these cardiologists like it used to be that a cardiologist was specialized now to be specialized you have to be a cardiologist who maybe like only works on cardiac valves, like the little doors that close that blood out. And what that means is they're all working on what's called surrogate markers. Basically like what you're really trying to do is get someone not to die of a heart attack or stroke, right? And there's something wrong with the valve you think. And so you treat the valve and the assumption is that that will make them less likely to die of heart attack or stroke. But in many cases, it turns out that's totally unaffected. Like, they die of heart attack or

stroke at the same rates with a different valve or lower blood pressure numbers. And as people get so specialized, they're only looking at one part of the organism and assuming it's like a proxy for the outcomes they care about. And in many cases, it's turning out not to be, where these generalists who are zoomed out and looking at the outcomes you actually care about, you know, are showing that all this stuff, like all these surgeries, some of the most popular surgeries in the world, you know, when more general practitioners put them up against, in trials against sham surgery, right? So it's done in Finland with probably the most common orthopedic surgery in the world, this meniscus repair. And some of the people got sham surgery, which means

they make an incision, they bang around as if they're doing surgery, they sew them back up and send them home, and it performs just as well as the actual surgery. Oh my god. So it's turning out that like when you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, like a lot of the stuff we're doing, like just does not work. Yeah, so it's almost like you should look to, for your leaders, they should be more generalists. Yeah, someone has, Someone should be keeping an eye on integrating all this knowledge because the specialists are just looking at a tiny piece of a complex system. Can I throw some kind of professions at you and find out if they're kind or wicked? Yeah, sure.

And this is a spectrum, of course, right? Right. Yeah, yeah. Chef. Chef, I would say a lot of chefs are in a more of a kind learning environment where they're doing the same thing over and over. But when you're getting to the ones who are innovating with their cuisine and things like that, I think that's a much more wicked environment

where they're trying to combine domains of knowledge. They don't have previous feedback data to go on. They're trying to do something new. So I think that's. Oh, that's cool. So it kind of also depends how you apply your craft. Yeah. Which defines whether it's kind or wicked.

Definitely. What about. Because I mean, like if you think of like in fast food where I don't know, maybe you wouldn't call those people chefs. Right. But that's sort of built on the idea that we're just going to do the same thing over and over and over. Right. Well, it's like basically industrial. over well. It's like basically industrial. So as you move away from kind of the industrial tasks where you're trying to do a known thing as well as possible over and over and over toward these

tasks where you're actually like changing menus and maybe different times of year are different for you. So let me give you an example. Like this isn't with a chef, but when Google flu trends started this thing where Google would analyze search queries about flu. And they had this big paper in a famous scientific journal that said, we predicted the spread of flu, you know, as accurately and a little more rapidly than the CDC did this year. Big, you know, all these headlines. Each year it gets worse because it turns out that like people don't search the same stuff at the same time every year. And a couple of years after they debut that, it misses by over a hundred percent. And instead of like having another paper that's like, you know, actually this isn't good,

they just quietly put up a holding page that says, it's early days for this kind of prediction that's sitting there now. So, like, we're not really going to do it anymore. So it's these sorts of things where, like, human behavior changes that are much more wicked. And I think that could happen with with cuisine as like taste change, as the business environment changes, all those things can happen quite a bit over time, which is one of the reasons why I think that's a difficult profession to be in if you're sort of on the entrepreneurial side of being a chef. What about stand up? Stand up, I think the kind

part about stand up is that you get feedback quickly. But other than that, I think it's pretty wicked because you, by definition, have to do stuff that like nobody else is doing, right? Unless you're like plagiarizing, basically. You're constantly having to do something totally new, like originality is part of the coin of the round. Even if you're doing the same routine every time? You can do your routine, but you still had to create that routine like out of nowhere, basically. Right. And so it has an element of kindness in that you'll get feedback that's accurate quickly. So one really wicked thing is if you don't get feedback automatically or if the feedback is delayed and inaccurate.

And I think you can get pretty good and quick feedback in comedy if you're live, right? Yeah. Where, you know, you see how the audience reacts. But that's like being a writer. Like you had to create, I mean, it is being a writer. You had to create all that stuff out of nowhere in the first place. Yeah, that's like with actors and comedians and stuff they say that oftentimes it's not beneficial to start an early age because you you want to sort of gain a ton

of experience during your youth and your adolescence or you can draw upon those different sort of emotional experiences and um so you can eventually put that into your work as opposed to just sort of being an actor from a young age. That's sort of all you focus on. It sort of limits your range of experience. Yeah, you have a life worth commenting on too. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the same for writers too.

They always think like the best way to come across interesting stories is to live an interesting life basically and you come across that stuff. I just yesterday met up with a comedian named Brian Callen. Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's jacked. And, you know, he's so much like this.

Like, all of his comedy comes out of, like, stuff in his life. Like, he's interested in a ton of different things. He reads a ton. Right. And all of his comedy

comes out of, like, these questions that he's having about, like, his own life. Sometimes, like, very serious ones that he puts a comic turn on. But it's very much like that.

Just this voracious interestingness that he then, synthesizes in his comedy yeah like yeah we draw upon like surfing tanning yeah eating pokey dancing dancing yeah we sort of with our stuff we sort of dive into a whole different array of dancing. What else? Poki. Maybe that's it. Wrestling each other. Wrestling. Wrestling. You know, just a beer bong. Big spectrum of great experiences.

Paintballing. Paintballing. We're going to go do that soon. We should come. Paintballing? I'd love for you to come. Are you guys avid paintballers? Yeah, we're trying to get there.

I mean, it's tough to make the time for it, but yeah. Serious commitment. Yeah. Yeah. I remember doing that when i was a lot younger like in the winter and you end up with like serious welts if you get because there's always some dick that's going to shoot you from point blank range yeah and they could like tap you on the shoulder you know our buddy kevin would do that yeah there's always that guy he's a small yeah some people are just there because they're sadists they're not there for like the tactical experience like words to live by don't get in a paintball war with sadists yeah just that is for like the tactical experience like words to live by don't

get in a paintball war with sadists yeah just that is good like invading russia in the winters i don't think you know how potent that is a lot of people who can really take that as lifelong advice i do have to admit i do get pleasure out of pwning preteens well you know well it's like the one space we're allowed to check yeah it's good to know what floats your boat. I'm just being honest. Yeah, you're being vulnerable. Yeah. I also like how in your book you kind of deconstructed grit. And, like, you do believe in it.

Like, you're like, yeah, it doesn't matter. But we can't just say that it's never okay to not quit. Yeah. I mean, in fact, a lot of the critique I made of grit came basically straight out of stuff. I expanded on stuff that was in the actual scientific papers about grit like by angela duckworth and her colleagues and by the way i should say the day before this book came out so angela duckworth is like the most famously associated with grit um the day before my book came out besides my dad besides your dad well

that goes without saying um the uh her her weekly newsletter was called summer is for sampling and it was like basically you should do a whole bunch of stuff you know because before you like get too gritty because obviously what else will you know how else will you know what you like what you're good at and that's what i she says that's what i did for a decade before i knew so i'm kind of like all right well i don't believe that that's a coincidence of timing like with a book about to come out but but i think that's great so so it seems like her message is sort of more like make sure to work hard when you should wait you think she's trying to take a bite out of your like no no i i think she's i think she's just nuancing her view i don't think she's like trying

to like contradict me sorry yeah i think she hopefully she thinks i it was a reasonable take and in fact like i said some of the critique came out of her work so maybe she felt some of this stuff anyway and just thought this was a good chance to get it out there. But so some of my critique of grit is like, so the most famous study, for example, was done on U.S. Military Academy cadets going through beast barracks. There's rigorous six-week orientation. Turned out grit's a 12-question survey. Half the points scored for resilience and half the points for consistency of interests. And it was a better predictor of who would get through that beast barracks

than were these more traditional measures like test scores and athleticism and all this stuff. And that's great, but life isn't a six-week orientation. And so when you look in the longer term at those gritty cadets who graduate, then since about the 1990s, half of them drop out of the Army as soon as they possibly can. It's got to such proportions that a high-ranking Army officer suggested defunding West Point because he called it an institution that taught its cadets to get out of the Army, which, of course, it isn't. But it turned out that the Army maintained this strict up-or-out work structure

while the knowledge economy exploded around them and allowed for all this lateral movement and people cobbling together their careers. So suddenly, where you had very specialized work in the past and these barriers to lateral movement, now it's like everyone has to be a problem solver and work world is changing really fast. And so these cadets would see that they could move laterally into the work world and that they had developed new interests because the period from 18 to your late 20s is the fastest time of personality change in your whole life. so it's not exactly a surprise to develop new interests and they would leave right and so the army didn't develop a grit problem overnight like first they're like oh you know millennials like they developed a match quality problem where they weren't giving people

the ability to search out match quality which is the term economists use for the degree of fit between your abilities and interests and the work that you do i love that yeah so first they threw money at them to try to get them to stay. People were going to stay, took it. People were going to leave, left anyway. Half a billion dollars down the drain, taxpayer money. I know, you're like, nobody saw that coming. Because when I read it, I'm like, oh, it's a good idea.

And then you read the consequence of it, and you're like, oh, duh. A mere half a billion to learn that lesson. And so then they started these other programs, like what they call talent-based branching, where instead of saying, here's your career track, go up or out, they say, here's a coach we're going to pair you with. Here's a bunch of career tracks, dabble in this one. They'll help you reflect on how it fits you. And then another, another, another, until you like triangulate a better fit for yourself. And they've had much better success using that for attention

than they did just throwing money at people. Because people want some, you know, ability to match their careers to their interests and their abilities. I thought that was such a good message that if you're doing a job you like, you're probably going to have more grit because you like it. So you're more committed to doing it well. I think the phrase to keep in mind is when you find fit, it looks like grit. When you get someone, it's demonstrably true that when you put someone in a spot that better matches their interests and their talents, they will exhibit all these characteristics as if they were just gritty from the beginning anyway they'll persist longer

they'll work harder all these sorts of things so fit I think there's a lot of evidence that fit is is more important than like trying to develop grit in in some kind of vacuum or something like that my brother he took a similar route to a lot of the people you mentioned in this book because he started out right after college well he studied engineering in college then he went to finance and after a couple years in finance he sort of realized he's like he's like you know you can make a lot of money in this but this my heart's not in it and so i don't see much of i see a ceiling for myself so he got out of that and opened and started a franchise did that for two

years and he realized he didn't want to be part of that anymore and then found himself in naval architecture so sort of he took this path of engineering to finance to entrepreneurship and now he's back to different engineering and now he's on barges wearing a hard helmet is I said how you say it? Yeah. A hard hat. And he's happy as fuck. Oh, okay. So he's happy as fuck. That's what I was going to ask. He's happy as fuck

was exactly how I was going to phrase the next question. Yeah, yeah. But because that's like indicative of this research that resonated with me a lot because I've been this crazy, like I was living in a tent

in the Arctic when I decided to try to become a writer. Yeah, that was cool. How was that? Keep going. I'm sorry, but we should circle back. Okay, I'll circle back to the Arctic. I decided to try to become a writer. Yeah, it was cool. How was that? Keep going. I'm sorry, but we should circle back. Okay, I'll circle back to the Arctic. It resonates with this research in range called the Dark Horse Project,

where these Harvard researchers are basically trying to find how people find fulfilling work. A lot of these people were also very materially successful, but that wasn't a condition. It was just that you're fulfilled. And what they found was it wasn't originally called the Dark Horse Project. It had some like other like boring, more academic name. And these people would come in and they'd start talking to them and the people would be like, well, don't, you know, don't tell people

to do what I did because like I started down this other path or, and then like I left that and I sort of had a couple false starts and tried a few different things. And then, you know, I found my thing. And often it's like something where they sort of like made their job a little. It wasn't just like filling some job that existed. And, you know, I came out of nowhere. So like, don't tell people to do what I did. And it turned out like 90% of the people viewed themselves that way as having like, oh, luckily come out of nowhere. So they viewed themselves as dark horses, which is why these researchers called it the dark horse project. Because these people who find fulfilling work tend to have this like short-term focus essentially where instead of saying like here's the ladder i'm going to climb in 20 years they say like here's

who i am right now here my interest and skills here the opportunities in front of me i'm gonna try this one and then a year from now maybe i'll change because i will learn something about myself and they just keep bouncing around doing that until they find work that's fulfilling for them or in some cases sort of like carve out their sort of own type of work basically i think that's how we feel about ourselves too yeah a lot of our reader or a lot of our listeners they write in and they're like yo should i quit my job what should i do and i'm always kind of like hesitant to tell them to quit their job because you don't want to tell someone to you know give away their stability but and i don't want to be like hey try and do what we did because i wouldn't even know how to put that down but that's the same right so if you're in the dark horse project you'd go in and be like I don't want to be like, hey, try and do what we did. Cause I wouldn't even know how to put that down.

That's the same, right? So if you're in the dark horse project, you'd go in and be like, I don't know how to tell people to do that. That's what they all come in. They're like, I don't know how to tell people. Don't tell people do what I did. Cause that's not like, yeah, it's just like that. And here, if they ask you like, should they quit their job?

Here's a study that you can give them right by the, by Steve Levitt, the, the, the Freakonomics economist basically, where he has this big following. And so he had people who were trying to make major life decisions flip a digital coin on his website, whether it was like get a tattoo, have a kid, like go on a diet. But the most common question people asked was should they leave their job? And if people flipped heads, you know, they're supposed to leave their job. Not everybody followed it. Like they're not bound by this.

They can do whatever they want. But his analysis showed that there was a causal effect of if people got heads that they would leave their job people like heads more than tails yeah and then there was and then there was a causal effect of that on their happiness when he checked back in with them later so the conclusion was kind of like if you're thinking about quitting your job like probably you should and i love this because you know i feel like there's so much pressure on millennials today they're they're like there's so many options i don't know what to do there's too many options like there there aren't any traditional. I don't know what to do. There's too many options. There aren't any traditional routes anymore.

And this book sort of gives them the freedom to be like, well just go out there and experiment. Try a different job. Yeah, just go follow your bliss kind of thing. And I didn't write that with an eye toward their mental health or anything like that. So even where the book starts in sports, I kind of, I know that with showing that like athletes who go on to become elite have these so-called sampling periods where they play

a wide variety of sports, you know, learn these general skills, learn about their interests and abilities and delay specializing until later than their peers. And I know that there was one of the advantages of that is also that they end up with a lot fewer like injuries. But I didn't even like mention that because I was like, i don't think that even like matters to crazy sports parents so i'm just going to focus on performance only not like people's mental health performance only so i think a lot of the stuff you know about this zigzagging experimenting i was like looking for the studies about how this influences performance and the the feeling good about it in many cases

is sort of like a whole separate is part of it like also having the choice that you picked it and that it wasn't like foisted upon you by your folks or by your government or the people around you? I think so. I mean, for sure we can say, so like one of the chapters is about music, right? And think of the book, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. This is where that term, the tiger mother, came into common lingo. And the excerpt of her book was like the most commented on article in the wall street journal's history and it excerpted the

first page of her book and then a couple more pages first page she promises the secrets to raising stereotypically successful children and one of them she assigns her daughter violin and like can't play any other instrument and has to play violin and then she you know presides over like three four or five hours of practice a day and everyone remembers that nobody remembers the part of the book later where her daughter goes you picked it not me and quits yeah right but that part like didn't stick in the public con to her credit she included that in the book and that's like in studies of like thousands of musicians by far the most common cause for quitting is when a young musician says the instrument they want to play or they are playing is not the one that they would like to be playing.

And with like Roger Federer and stuff, how he just sort of played around. A lot of these amazing athletes, like Dane Reynolds is one of the best surfers in the world. He didn't start until he was like 12. So you find that, which I didn't really realize about a lot of athletes. I thought that was really interesting that they sort of played around with everything until they found their one. And then that's when they honed in that's when the specialization occurred and a lot of them have exposure early on to those sports right it's just they're not doing like the highly technical sort of like like in the u.s so i lived in brooklyn until recently and there was a u7 travel soccer

team that met across the street from me right like i don't think anybody thinks six-year-olds can't find good enough competition in a city of nine million people that they need to, like, travel for it, right? But they're, like, customers for whoever's running that league. Then you go to, like, Brazil, and none of the kids are doing that. They're playing futsal, like, in a, you know,

sand one day, cobblestones the next day, like, small areas, you know, on a basketball court. And so it's, like, really, like, a different game every day. And I think that gets to one of these findings, this, like, classic research finding that goes like this breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer what that means transfer right is the term psychologists use to mean taking your skills and knowledge and your ability to apply them to something totally actually getting the horsepower or sorry yeah and like totally new problem or totally new endeavor and that's

if you're in like a more wicked world where you have to create stuff that's the the skill you need. And what predicts your ability to do that is how broad the challenges you faced in training are and whether that's sports or math or whatever else. Have you thought about like, cause it's all about kind of work excellence in the book. Does this apply to like personal life too? Like being a generalist versus being like a specialist, like, is it better to like have a wider sampling of partners early on so that you can have like, so that you have better fidelity to your partner later? Or is it like? I think, I mean, obviously I think that's like, there's a lot of personal stuff for

each individual involved in that, but for sure. I mean, so my feeling was like when I was reading about career matching, how people find their best fits careers, I was like, you know, we already in many ways think about dating like this. We don't tell people like pick, pick and stick, you know, like settle down really quickly. You're like, no, gather some data like before you settle down and things will go better. And actually I ended up cutting it from the book because I had to cut like 20,000 words. But there were these, some mathematicians who had worked through like optimal dating

basically. And it was like, you know, so you can go through these proofs where it's like say you you know rate all your partners from one to ten you should like expose yourself to 27 different people and then take the next person who rates over a seven if you want to like optimize your chances so like if you want to like so there are all these algorithms like there are for career matches stuff if you want to like get into it that like that were you nervous to get into the more personal stuff versus like the work stuff a A little bit I mean already this question is so amorphous like I think it's I think it's it's this question of how broad or specialized to be I think is like important to everyone but it's you know it's there's a lot of semantics and a lot of

matter of degree in it and so all I can hope to do is make those discussions more interesting and productive and so and it's already kind of squishy in a lot of ways. And I was trying to bring a lot of like science to bear on it. So I was a little fearful of going where like everything would be like squishy basically. Right. Because I wanted to keep it ground. You didn't want to over-prescribe it where you're like saying everything could be filtered through that lens. Yeah. Yeah. Because I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's the case. Like there are

things I mentioned in the book, like surgeons, for example, for sure, specialized surgeons get better result. They get fewer complications on top of even just having more experience, right? Something about being specialized, even on top of their experience, but they're also way more likely to do a surgery that you don't need, right? So like you'll have fewer complications in that surgery you didn't need anyway. But there are times when it's better to be a specialist for sure. And in the personal part, it's just like, yeah, I don't want to be too prescriptive, basically, and hope that sort of people will connect some of the stuff to their own life. But also just that's like, I was already a little self-conscious about it because like you mentioned, I appreciate that you read my first book, The Sports Gene, too.

And that was an area where I was in like the hard sciences, which is sort of where my training came from, where it's physiology, genetics. And here I'm getting into a lot of social sciences and I was already sort of like, you know, some of that is already a little more amorphous. So I was like just self-conscious about going too far with that. Do you have any thoughts on education reform by applying this sort of how we can change the education system so that it's a little more effective? Yeah, put this in mind. I think there's like the micro and the macro. So in the micro sense, the fourth chapter is about learning techniques, right? So this is irrespective of what exactly it is you're trying to learn, but there's stuff like, it's just a new study came out that I wish would have come out in time for the book, but of interleaving, which is one of the learning concepts I talk about.

So in this one, seventh grade math classrooms were assigned to different types of studying. One blocked practice, well, not one, lots of classrooms, but one condition is blocked practice. You get the same type of problem over and over, A, A, A, A, B, B, B, B, B, so on. The others get interleaved where like you never see the same problem twice. And those kids in the interleaved condition, more frustrated. Their progress is apparently slower. They rate the teacher worse. And then come test time when everybody is seeing problems they've never seen before,

they blow away the other group, like not even close. It was like the effect size was on the order of moving someone from the 50th to the 80th percentile, like huge. But it requires that sort of broader training where you're doing all these different types of problems. So within what you're trying to learn, you should use those kinds of techniques, like where you broaden the tree. The problem is, and this is like one of the themes of the book, the way that you can get the fastest short-term improvement undermines your long-term development, right? And so that's sort of internal to what you're learning. In the larger sense, long-term development, right? And so that's sort of internal to what you're learning. In the larger sense, I would, because, so one study that resonated with me was an economist who studied

the higher ed systems in England and Scotland. And they're very similar, except the English students have to specialize earlier. And he said, who wins the trade-off? What he found was, in England, the students start with higher income right out because they have more domain-specific skills. But in Scotland, they've sampled a little and they pick better fits. And so their growth rate's higher. They pretty soon catch up and erase that income gap. Meanwhile, the English students start quitting their career tracks in much higher numbers. It's like dating, right? They were made to choose so early, they made more mistakes. And so I would orient the whole system. So I think there's a lot of data like that that suggests that correct matching is more important than the actual stuff that you're learning. And so I would reorient the system toward that to make it more like the Army's talent-based branching where there's many more things.

And part of the job of the teacher is actually helping you reflect on what fits your abilities and your interests. Yeah, our buddy Nick, he sends his daughter to a pretty insane, well, it's not insane, it's a cool new revolution. Insane because we're not used to it. Yeah, revolutionary kind of school where it kind of encourages them to sort of find their own interests. Like they're digging in like a sandbox, right? So if they're like digging in a sandbox and then the teachers come

and they're like, so what's the circumference of the hole? You just, stuff like that. So they'll integrate these like mathematic principles or whatever into like their playtime. And they're doing what you're talking about too, where they, if a kid's not reading at seven or whatever the traditional age is where they're supposed to have that down, they don't worry about it. And then they say, if that kid picks it up at nine, oftentimes there'll be a better reader than the kids who picked it up earlier, just because it happened more, I guess, in the development of their organic life. But I don't know. Maybe there's something to what you're saying about like just picking stuff up later.

Yeah. I mean that's like there's some data in New Zealand where they don't even try to teach kids to read as early and then they like rocket past the kids who were taught earlier because the way when we give the easiest way to give someone a head start is to teach what's called closed skills which is essentially a way to execute certain types of procedures or like but the and and so in studies of those sorts of like these programs that try to give kids like a head start in certain academic skills there's what's called a like this ubiquitous fade out effect where that advantage you know the idea was to get them on this different trajectory and then but it turns out not to be the case they that effect fades out and that's really not that they're getting worse it's that everyone else is catching up because they were taught these skills that everyone is going to learn anyway so it's like you know teaching kid to walk early like there's no

evidence that that provides any long-term advantage it might be impressive for the while but there's like no correlation with like, you know, athleticism or anything like that at all. What would you say to parents who have a kid who displays early signs of being, like, a prodigy at, like, you know, tennis, for example? What would you encourage them to do? That's a good question because I have a four-month-old. So, you know, I'm, like, thinking about all this kind of stuff. And I think there are two things. Is he badass?

You really have to ask that? Sorry about that, I'm like thinking about all this kind of stuff. And I think there are two things. Is he badass? Do you really have to ask that? Sorry about that. I'm sorry. Talk about my genetics being like, come on, man. You're right. You're right. My bad. And so, or my wife's genetics probably is the better draw.

The two. Yeah. Combined for a super. Magic of recombination. Super genetics. So I think there are two things to keep in mind. One is like these Tiger Woods and Mozart stories, right? We've been telling them kind of wrong. So Tiger Woods, as he said himself, his father never asked him to play golf. He was always the one

bugging his father. And so then his father started facilitating all this training, but it was Tiger's like very unusual interest at a young age. And Mozart, similarly, so we have this image of his father driving him nuts and all this stuff. In fact, I was looking up old letters about Mozart's life, and there's this musician who comes over one day who writes a letter about Mozart, and he's coming to play with his father because his father's a musician.

And little Mozart comes in and is like, hey, I can play second violin. Can I play with you guys and mozart's father's like get out of here like you haven't had any lessons like you can't play violin and so mozart starts you know starts crying and the musician's like i'll go play with him in the next rooms just to like keep and then the next they hear like second violin coming from the next room and so they all come in they're like what the hell know, and then I remember the letter says specifically, little Wolfgang was emboldened by our applause to insist he could also play the first violin. And then he goes and plays like the first part with his like made up fingering. And then his father responds to that. So in both of these cases, it was the parent responding to this kid's incredible display of prowess. So the

idea that they like manufactured them, and if you don't start manufacturing them, you'll get behind, you'd be better off exposing them to a bunch of stuff and see if they like miraculously take to it like that. I mean, that's incredibly rare, right? There's no way to make it. But we've been telling those stories a little wrong. So first of all, I'd say to parents, don't worry about missing Tiger or Mozart. You'd actually maximize your chance by exposing them to more stuff and see if they have this like crazy response. But beyond that, like you mentioned tennis specifically. So there was this famous tennis study from the 80s that tracked it was in sweden and it's tracked people some people became top 10 in the world top 100 in the world and the worst thing was to be too good when you were really young because and the way to be really

good when you're really young was to learn like technique that everyone else would catch up with anyway the worst thing especially for girls if they were really good when they were really young, someone would go take them and say, oh wow, like there's some serious talent here. If we just get them on like a serious training plan, they'll be really good. And so they move them into what's called a restrictive environment where all the stuff they were doing that was working before, they're like, no more of that. Now I can do this thing. And almost all of them have quit by the time they're like 17. And now there's like plateau. and they're not learning like the general athleticism skills anymore now they're just doing technique and so the ones that went top 10 in the world

were not the like the best juniors so they didn't end up getting pulled into that like incredibly like restrictive learning environment yeah it's like with comedy too when people get success early on like a lot of industry accolades or whatever you often see them decline pretty rapidly i'd say yeah a lot of people they just they either they get arrogant or they just they just don't try as hard or yeah they get stuck doing the same thing over and over again yeah they get noticed for having like this this trade or quirk but it's only like 30 of their act and then they get kind of popular for this, this traitor quirk, but it's only like 30% of their act. And then they get kind of popular for it.

And then it becomes their entire act. Like every joke ends in that quirk. And you're like, man, I kind of miss when you had like a better diversity of like punch lines and structures and stuff like that. So it's like the creativity that made them unique in the first place is like cut off by their own success. Yeah. And they just short circuit to it, but it doesn't feel as like complete.

That's interesting. I mean I think about that a lot. So like again I'm only mention my first book because you mentioned that you'd read it. I loved it so much, yeah. Sports Gene guys, grab it. After that, you know, like my then agent was like, you know, Sports Gene 2 basically. And I'm kind of like I don't know what that is and like I want to do something different. And he was like, alright, well just gene two, basically. And I'm kind of like, I don't know what that is. And like, I want to do something different. And he was like, all right, well, just don't let it be five years before you have another book out.

That'd be a huge mistake. It's been six years. And like it totally, the stuff I did in the interim, I left sports, I was at Sports Illustrated when I wrote the sports gene, left as soon as it came out and went to this investigative startup called ProPublica where I started reporting about drug cartels and the DEA and stuff and it was those skills that allowed me

to like generate this like wider ability and interest that went into this book and so I have no interest in living the life that's like the sports gene part two like that seems super boring to me right so it was like taking this left turn where it was right when that book came out where the every the feedback I was getting was like brand yourself as the sports gene guy right now keep doing that i'm like i wouldn't have left the science track to get into this business if i wanted to like do the same thing over and over and i think it's it's paid off it's worked out yeah yeah both for my like sense of well-being and interest and also like this has taken on like gotten out a lot faster than i thought it would have you investigated cartels like Like have you gone down?

Yeah, but honestly, I was more so than investigating the cartels. I was really kind of investigating the kind of deals that the DEA makes in the pursuit of cartels. So it was very much more really, even though like some, you know, bad stuff that the cartels did ended up in these stories, but like it's no secret that cartels do bad stuff. It was more about some of the bad stuff the DEA was doing oh what are some examples of that so they would make um you know basically to make a long story short they would make a lot of deals that would let off like a very large

number of murderers to try to get to one person who then themselves would get like a light punishment basically so there'd be like huge um like huge amounts of bad deal making basically that would result in getting to someone um who was running a cartel but when they weren't even like that important anymore and you're leaving the whole like system still in place with all of his henchmen exactly you'd basically go like one rung of the system at a time, leave that in place because you send all those people back. And then by the time you get to the top person who's like not even that important anymore

and you take them out and you like issue a press release, which is great. Yeah, because it looks good because everyone's like, oh, that's the head of the thing. So they got him. But you've left like the structure in place. And there's all this kind of weird stuff along the way. Like it's crazy.

Like agencies fight about when they have to collaborate, they'll fight about like, you know, who gets to seize the money that they're owed because then they get to like take a picture of it in their press conference so like i'd be talking to this guy who's in a cartel and he's like i can tell you an address in mexico where you can go and like lift up the floorboards and take six million dollars because like the feds haven't come and picked it up because they're arguing about like who's gonna get to pick it up yeah i'm like maybe just get out of this journalism thing and go like go drive over just go fix things or grab the money i'm sorry just like just like all kinds of like ridiculous stuff like that you know that's awesome yeah that's oh should we talk about the arctic yeah sure yeah so i was in my past life

i was uh a training to be a scientist at a certain point. And in environmental science, geology. And I was living up in, I lived on a research vessel in the Pacific Ocean. That was pretty interesting. That had gotten attacked by pirates the year before, which was pretty cool. That's cool. I wasn't on it when that happened. And when I was living up in the Arctic, I was basically studying the carbon cycle in the Arctic tundra like something has to do with like how things will change up there when there's when like climate change is

happening. But my work was getting like so so specialized so quickly and I was kind of like am I the type of person who wants to spend my whole life learning one thing new to the world that's like pretty disconnected from even other stuff in science or like much shorter spans of time learning things new to me and connecting them and translating them and I was definitely the latter so so you know decided to living up there in a tent when I decided to try to become a writer and how did you relate what you were doing in the arctic to I mean were all your friends like in the same field or no I mean some some were but not not not so much no yeah no my friends were

all over the place I didn't really have I mean one of the things that happened though when when I was working in a lab is I met someone else who had decided to get off the science track and was going to be a writer and I was like this is the person I like by far like connect with the most right and so that sort of started getting me interested in that oh that's cool yeah did you have a girlfriend when you were out there in the arctic um i did yeah i did yeah but but not in the arctic no not in the arctic no no she was back in new york right yeah when i was living in the arctic when i lived on the ship in the pacific ocean that was not good for my relationship right because the email was supposed to be um like satellite email so and they gather up all the emails and then send it out once a day

because it's expensive. And I swear that thing was not working because like, you get pissed emails. Like, yeah, living on a boat was kind of the beginning of the end of that, a previous relationship.

So if you're a pirate, think twice about being monogamous. Or have your girlfriend work on the boat. Yeah, yeah. We're like, we're going to go find some booty together. And then so you grew up playing sports.

Where'd you grow up? Chicago. Okay. In the city? No, in Evanston, just outside, just to the north. Okay.

And then you went to college in Canada? No, no. In New York, Columbia. Damn, I'm missing a lot. Starts with a C. So that's where you ran at? You were a runner at Columbia?

Yeah, yep. I thought it was so interesting too in the sports, you talk about how like all your coaches thought you were like a tough runner because you progressed at a certain clip. You started horrible and then you got good. And then there was this guy who came in who was like a world beater, but he never got much better. And so they applied all this like psychological like labels to you guys.

Like, oh, he's an underachiever. He's like an overachiever. But's, like, an overachiever. But it turned out it was all just genetic, right? Yeah, I mean, a big portion was clearly, like, our ability to respond to types of training. So nobody cared what I did because I was a walk-on, so I didn't get recruited. Whereas he was the guy they paired me with,

was, like, already a national runner in Canada. And they, like, were counting on him to, like, score points and all this stuff. And so for two years, like, nobody cared what I did, and I could just, like, go experiment with my training. And that's what I did. And then I found a type of train that really worked for me and then took off. Right. And so then I started improving like crazy and beat him and he never beats me again. And so it's way better to be that guy than to be the guy who, for the most part, if you don't quit, then for the guy who's like, comes in good and stagnates. Cause they're like, oh, he's a head case, you know? So now he's

getting pep talks all the time. And I'm like, I think that's making it worse. And I got the university's award for the athlete who, and this is a quote, achieved significant athletic success in the face of unusual challenge and difficulty. I'm like, my unusual challenge and difficulty just being that I sucked at first. I'm a big believer in lowering expectations.

I was just like the worst kid for like 20 years. So anything after that, my parents were like, he's killing it. Yeah. Yeah. But the point being that. He showed up on time. I'm like, yeah. You know, and that actually speaking of sports, like I remember the first time I went to the

Detroit Lions training camp and realized that like literally people were getting like stickers if they like were in attendance that day on time. And I'm like, man, it's kind of crazy. That's like for me, I'm the fifth. Getting stickers. Can you imagine being an adult and you're like i got a fucking sticker let's go right in an adult with like a 10 million dollar contract i'd be amped yeah that's true everyone likes stickers yeah i'm the fifth child so there are no expectations for me they're like they're you know what they always say they're like he's probably just gonna run into money that's like

what they always say but they're like they're no like all my siblings yeah all my siblings like like especially the older ones they had a lot of expectations placed upon them and so but with me it was sort of like i had a lot more freedom to sort of choose what i wanted to do and sort of you know like i went to college it was a biology major that lasted two days two days yeah went to philosophy. I was a biology major. That lasted two days. Two days. That's impressive. Went to philosophy. Like, it was just like I was able to sort of, they didn't really care what I was doing.

They didn't want you always to host a comedy podcast? No. In the beginning? No. But now they do. I think. That'd be wild if your dad knew what a podcast was. He's like, podcasting.

Yeah, he'd be one of those outside-the-box generalists who really, yeah. He'd be like a tiger podcast. That's what i should start doing with my kid be like dude i was curious too if you rewrote the sports gene now yeah because there was some like racial not implications but there was like some analysis of like racial differences and how people but it wasn't really based on race it was more based on where you're from. Yeah. But, like, it was a tense conversation then, but it feels like it's even more tense now. Yeah. I think what I would do, and I've thought about that a lot, I think what I would do is make sure in the writing

to emphasize certain points more, right? Like, I think it was good that I made, like, one of the chapter titles was We Are All Black, sort of, because it was basically about how you know modern humans having come out of africa like there there were our ancestors in africa for a long time and all these genetic mutations are building up and then a small group of them come out of africa and then a small group moves to the next place and so on so each each one of those groups is just a subset of the genetics that were in africa in the first place and so there's so much genetic

variation in africa like when we say like a black person like you're basically encompassing almost the genetics that were in Africa in the first place. And so there's so much genetic variation in Africa. Like when we say like, oh, a black person, like you're basically encompassing almost all the world's genetic variation. It's not, it's not an exaggeration to say, if you like got rid of all the white people in the world, you would still preserve most of the world's genetic variation. And so I think I would sort of emphasize those points about how like, you can't, you can't really,'t really like race in that sense becomes like a sort of I mean you can you can always make something an arbitrary construct but in terms of genetic differentiation it's like totally

meaningless basically yeah so I think I would just dwell on that even longer than I did before and also on some of the perverse effects like so there was a point where I was realizing, like, okay, people won't like this because they'll say that, you know, because there's this idea that, well, if, you know, African-American athletes are good, it means, like, they're less intelligent, right? And I went back into the history and saw that, in fact, athleticism was viewed as, like, this important part

of a well-rounded person for a long time. And, you know, like,ler was going to make like the olympics in germany was going to be show the master race sound body sound mind and all that stuff and then jesse owens comes in and reigns on that parade and so then they make like a marketing trip they flip the narrative yeah yeah where it's like well yeah close closer to animals that's why like more athletic right so this was always like this like it was never like out of science it was always like this like marketing stuff that came out of bigotry in the first place and i put that in the book but i think i would have just like emphasized it more i think i would have gone in maybe i would have

even put like a whole chapter on that history right like really set that up to make it like very clear where i was coming from and you go into such specifics and you're not like oh um kenyans are great long distance runners you find out there's like a specific um like uh what tribe tribe from kenya yeah that are really good runners yes and they have like genetic differences from other kenyan people yeah i mean that's one of the things you realize is like you can go to africa and like two people who are next door neighbors are more genetically different than like me and like yaoming you know or something right and for people who can't see i'm like a full two feet shorter than yaoming um and yeah so you go to kenya and they're sort of like those kalenjin people they can really run you know and that's like they're like populations like the size of

atlanta or something like that right and they're like vastly bad i mean half of the american distance running team at the last olympics was kalenjin runners oh it was interesting about kepler too that he sort of discovered astrophysics yeah because like you blew my mind yeah you talk about copernicus and stuff and the house minor coming back to be useful yeah yeah that was so cool it was sort of a refresher for me too and like how these guys early on had to really in order to discover that we revolve around the sun all that kind of stuff had to really sort of think outside the box. And use analogies.

Yeah, using analogies to discover that is crazy. Like thinking about the sun, like smell, like how the power of smell dissipates over distance. I mean, and think about this. The model that Kepler inherited, you know, that he came into where it's everything revolving around the earth and this idea that there was like this basically invisible clockwork up in the sky and that the stars were like on like a surface basically that was surrounding the earth. It had lasted for 2,000 years, the basics of that, 2,000 years.

So that's like serious disruption when you're turning that over. And he believed it at first when he came into it, but then started to realize, you know, long story short, there were some problems with it and that there was no, there was nothing for him to go on. He was totally in new territory, right? Like people hadn't even believed this idea that forces that act on Earth could also act like in other places. You know, he had no notion of, gravity existed, but it wasn't anything we think of it. It wasn't like this, the forces we think of it. He didn't know about inertia and all this stuff. And so all he could do was say like, well, how are the planets like moving the way they are? Let me think about proof of concept in other areas.

Well, okay, he just read about magnetism. He's like that can act invisibly across distance or smells, right, where like it dissipates the farther you get from it. Maybe there's some kind of magical force like that. And he just keeps on going through one analogy after another after another saying like what's what's conceptually possible here and eventually he basically like founds astrophysics by um you know realizing that there isn't this clockwork and there's actually like physical laws that are working throughout the universe and so i wanted to ask you this and i know it's a tough question to answer but who do you think is the smartest person in history the smartest person in history gosh that's an incredibly hard question who's the smartest person in history i mean i

think you'd have to put like i mean i think you'd have to put isaac newton up there pretty high um yeah i think i'll i think i'll go with newton and I think, like, we don't even realize, like, the degree to which... Because, I mean, he was in a ton of different stuff, right? Like, we think of him... Actually, what you think of him as having done probably depends on, like, what you heard about him doing first. Like, I think of him with, like, the invention of calculus and things like that. But, like, what... Do you have, like, a first thought when it comes to, like...

The apple, I guess? Right, right. So, like, he did so much important stuff that, like... The physics of, like, the normal stuff that we can see how balls move. Yeah, not the quantum kind where it's all like really weird stuff. Where it's the unseen stuff. Yeah, but I mean he was in, you know, he was like revolutionizing like everything he touched basically. So would your top five be all scientists basically? No, I mean, no personally because I, I mean, I have this like affinity for sort of like artists and writers, but I think like when people think of like, you know, when people think of like the embodiment of the intellect, they think of Einstein. So you might put Shakespeare up there, like Tolstoy or something. I think Tolstoy is brilliant.

Absolutely brilliant. And Cervantes, like totally brilliant. You know, sometimes I read the first part of Don Quixote and like my first impression was like, I can't believe like a human being wrote this. And I read War and Peace recently. And I didn't know this i thought it was gonna be this like ponderous russian epic but in fact like once you get the russian names down it's total barn burner you know it's like soap opera and and i didn't realize but it's like it's basically a novel length argument well many novels length argument against the great man

theory of history that was popular in tolstoy's time this idea that like the great man theory of history is this idea that the entire history of the world could basically be summarized as the biographies of a small number of great men and he was like that's total crap actually these men are are in effect cultural forces like push them to that point yeah yeah and so he uses Napoleon is like the main his main example of this and he goes and does like this historical reporting showing that all this stuff that like war historians reported about Napoleon's decisions could not have been true. And in fact, like when he was defeated in Russia,

it was just like, like he didn't have anything to do with their like victories or their defeats really. And that like when he was issuing orders, they like couldn't even get to the battlefield in time by the time stuff had changed, you know? So it was just really fascinating that way and gave me like a different take

on history too. I feel like it could be a balance. Like there's some dudes who were like, just, I think that's the truth of it. It was just really fascinating that way and gave me like a different take on history too. I feel like it could be a balance. There's some dudes who were like just one in a millennium. And then sometimes it's just like it was going to happen. Someone had to be the face of it. I think that's the truth of it. I think that's the truth of it, that it's a mix. And that he was rebelling against sort of a certain stance.

And that like, you know, it's kind of a happy medium in the end. And the stakes were so much higher for like newton and kepler and stuff you referenced that one guy who got burned at the stake yeah you know you really had to like it's now you just get some significant accountability too yeah if he wrote in for advice on the podcast yeah and he was like yo like what should i do i'd be like give it up dude yeah i'd be like we'll get back to it in a decade or so now you just get demonetized on youtube yeah that's the burning that's right when people like complain about getting like suspended on twitter it's like you could have been burned dude it made me think too when you talk about generalists and

specialists and polymaths polymaths yeah um like that when i see like bill nye or neil degrasse tyson on tv sometimes i'm, are they just like pop scientists? Like, are they just like dudes who are good at like talking on camera, but they're really don't have like the scientific depth that a lot of their peers probably have. But after reading this, I'm like, no, maybe they're generalists and they're just really good at a, they're good at tying everything together. Yeah. And I'll say, so I think, I think sort of the precursor to those guys, maybe the most

important modern scientific communicator was carl sagan right who i think he you know i think it's no surprise that like neil degrasse tyson's show was named after you know cosmos after carl sagan did that originally and sagan in fact and so i like if not if carl sagan hadn't been doing what he was doing i doubt i would have minored in astronomy because that ended up in all this popularizing of stuff, you know, and, and it turns out that Carl Sagan was like, in terms of being a hard scientist, not so much there. So there's, there's this joke among whatever astronomy jokes, not, not exactly like a goldmine of comedy in the astronomy industry, but that Carl Sagan's greatest contribution to science was Lynn Margulis, which was one of his, one of his wives who he like said, like, you can't major in English, study biology.

And she became this incredibly eminent biologist. That's a joke. That was his greatest contribution to science. Right. Which I think is totally absurd because even though he wasn't spending as much of his time publishing the hard science papers, what he was doing was such a unique skill that it like inspired a ton of people to like take on new questions i think he won the pulitzer for writing a book about psychology which wasn't even in his field at all right and so you could argue like yeah he wouldn't do his papers but like he was doing something so much more unique and and so much more you know than most of the stuff valuable

that like whether or not he was i think it happens with bill simmons too where other sports writers are like he's not even like a good sports writer you know and then you're like well yeah but he he's obviously connecting to people in a way that might supersede connecting to people and building stuff like i was i was on i was with him like a couple weeks ago and um you know he was at espn like he could have just stayed at espn and been like you know like printing money he was like their most popular writer and instead he tries to do, he tries to start Grantland, you know, and that works for a while. And then it doesn't, goes to HBO. That doesn't work.

Then he starts The Ringer, which is working really well. And so I think he's also like, he's very entrepreneurial. And that was, that seemed to me from my brief exposure to be like one of the happiest workplaces I've been in. And I think it's partly because, so like, I don't know if you follow The Ringer stuff ater stuff at all but like like Mallory Rubin who's blown up with a podcast at the ringer now yeah she was one of my colleagues at sports illustrated and like didn't get an opportunity to try stuff other than her very narrow job over there they're like hey come on a podcast let's see how you are and next thing you know she's like famous right and so I think they've allowed a lot of a lot of people that were hired yeah a lot of people that were hired in there are now in jobs that they were not hired for and they're like

blowing up and so i think there's part of the happiness maybe i'm just speculating on this but is there that they're allowed to like try different things internally and some of them have blown up like that they say that about streaming services as well for like creators and stuff that they give them a lot more freedom with their you know with like network tv they give them like some strict very strict parameters that sort of suck the life out of their creation but with these streaming services they sort of give them the that's like just go try you know they sort of say do your thing and we'll support it essentially that's what i hear someone told me that when hbo like their strategy when they got game of thrones was like commission a ridiculous number of pilots and then just cut a lot of them out right which is kind of like if you look at you know science about science like

how in technology how innovation happens which is like you need to you need to seed a ton of stuff because when you're trying to do something new you don't really know where the breakthroughs are gonna come through so you don't want to try to be like too efficient you have to like throw a ton of lines in the water and some stuff works okay i was gonna say too like if we end up having a writer's room for something that we're working on like should we be wary of having too many people who are just writers like to take the message of your book like should we have like a baker in there yeah i mean you're gonna get hungry if you're in there a long time or like a plumber like because they talk about different points of view but that's probably the most radical difference in point of view you can have

yeah i don't know if you have to have the plumber in there but like i think you know you should keep talking to people widely but the most the most speed though yeah the most the most the plumber call phil and be like yo there's jokes not there's a lot of good reasons to have a plumber on speed out anyway so it's like you're not losing anyway. But, you know, like to think about some research that went into range about writers, right? There was this study where, so of the comic book industry, right? And the comic book industry offers an interesting case

because in the mid-50s, this psychiatrist convinced Congress that comic books were turning kids into deviants. And he fabricated some of his work. mid-50s, this psychiatrist convinced Congress that comic books were turning kids into deviants. And he fabricated some of his work. But in an effort to not get, like, regulated by Congress, the comic book industry started the Comics Code Authority, which was a self-censorship body. So, you know, censorship for the next, like, two decades, whatever. 1971, a federal agency asked Stan Lee to help educate the public about drug abuse. And so he writes a Spider-Man narrative where Peter Parker's friend overdoses on pills. Comics Code Authority doesn't approve it. Marvel publishes anyway. It's received so well, suddenly, bang, like censorship standards

are relaxed. And there's like this creative explosion, right? Characters with like adult emotional problems, you know, all this like nonfiction, all this other stuff. And so these scientists wanted to study that period for over the next several decades where like the creativity exploded and see what causes creators, team or individual, to make comics that are valuable on average and more likely to make a blockbuster. And they had been studying industrial processes, right, like kind world environments. So they said, well, it'll be number of years of experience that the creator has, resources of the publisher, number of previous comics they've made, because in industrial production, that stuff all does predict performance. No, no, no. The best predictor is the number of different genres that a creator has worked across, right? Of 22 different

genres. And not only that, but as the genres got higher, an individual with a lot of breadth became more and more important. So initially, an individual who had worked in one, two, or three genres, you were better off with a team of genre specialists who could have that experience by platoon. But after five genres, the individual surpassed the team in terms of their ability to make a blockbuster and so clearly at like high levels of breadth individuals can integrate information in a way that even a team maybe can't replace right and and it's there was like an exactly analogous finding in technological innovation so i think in the writer's room it's important to have like some people who have

individual breadth in addition to like people who are genre specialists nice that's like jordan peel uses comedic timing for his horror films yeah yeah i thought that was so cool when i said because i i really like his work so i like wanted to shoehorn him into the book where he was like yeah that's where he learned his you know and his stuff is so unique like i've seen a lot of horse i kind of i think horror stuff is really good and super specific yeah i think horror is like good for structure for writing, right? Like, because I view writing sort of as filmmaking in the sense that you get your scenes or your information and then you just order them from one.

So one out point goes to the next in point, whether that's a section break or chapter break or whatever. And like, you can look at some horror movies where the material is like patently stupid, but if they structure it well, you still kind of want to be like, all right, I kind of want to come back from commercial break anyway. Yeah. What was that one that did super well?

It was super low budget. It was about like demons. Paranormal activity. Yeah. Would you say that sort of follows that example? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I think so. That totally blew up. It just gets whipped out of a room. They're raising the sheets. Yeah. Yeah. But it scares the, I watched that in college. That totally blew up. The camera just gets whipped out of a room. They're raising the sheets. Yeah. Yeah. But it scares the, I watched that in college.

I couldn't sleep. Yeah. Dude, I can't watch scary movies. They scare me. I love them. My therapist, my parents made me see when I was like five,

said my imagination just runs too much. Yeah. Yeah. Like even if I see a trailer for it, I'm just like, I'm out. Yeah. I won't sleep.

I love the rush. Yeah. So one more thing. I'm sorry. You've explained so much stuff from I love the rush. Yeah. So one more thing. I'm sorry you've explained so much stuff from the book, but still, because you've got to grab it. I also wanted to, could you talk about dropping your tools? Yeah. This thing really, like, blew me away about the firefighters.

Yeah, this was a tough, and this was, like, the hardest, like, chapter by far to write of either of my books because just structurally. So dropping your tools is a phrase from a sociologist Carl Weick and he got it from his study of wilderness firefighters hot shots and

smoke jumpers so the people who either hike in or parachute in and dig trenches around fires to contain them and what he noticed was that when you know they're really good at what they're highly trained in all this. And when something would, when something unfamiliar would happen, often it was the case of like they were fighting, you know, digging around a fire on one hill slope and it would like jump across the other hill slope and start like chasing them. They would die sometimes.

And when they would die, they would die with their tools. And even when they were really close to safety, they're carrying, you know, 200 pounds of equipment or whatever. And even when they were ordered to drop your tools and run, they would often not do it and die with their tools. So you'd see these reports of like the body recovery when it's like, you know, still has ax and saw and all these things. And the few times there were survivors and they're interviewed, they'll say like, you know, someone's yelling at me, drop my tools and run. And I realize eventually I have to. And I'm, so I'm putting down my ax and they'll like look for places to bury it or like keep it safe. He's like, I can't believe I'm putting down my tools because their training was so focused on

like your tools are your competency, right? This is, this is part of your identity as a firefighter. You never drop them. But it turns out that when something unusual happens, sometimes you have to improvise. And their training was so specific and specialized that they weren't in a mindset where they could improvise. And so Weick saw this, and he used that just as like an allegory because he studies what's called high-reliability organizations,

you know, where like failure costs like lives and things like that. And what he would see is these organizations where people were really well trained to do something specific. The problem was they would lose the ability to improvise even like how a novice would. Like even when someone normal would realize like, yeah, drop your shit and run, you know. And so it was with airlines. With airlines, like most of the accidents were when a team would stick to a plan that they'd done before, even while like any outside observer could see that the situation was changing really rapidly. And he saw that in all these industries.

Or that high wire guy. Right, right. One of the, Carl Wallenda, right, who, that video is amazing. I guess they used to show a lot of stuff on the news that they don't show anymore because like they showed his death where he's walking a high wire and he starts to teeter and he grabs at his balance pole instead of the wire behind him, below him. It's so incredible. Then he grabs the wire and the pole starts following and he lets go to grab the pole again. So then he falls off, loses the pole and grabs it again in the air while he's falling down.

My God, what was he thinking? I mean, I think he's not. It's like when you get that kind of specialized training, one of the reasons it works in repetitive situations is because you move these things from your prefrontal cortex back to these automated parts of your brain where you better not be thinking or else you won't be able to execute them as quickly.

The problem is that also means like they execute, you know, unless you find a way to like break that circuit, you just keep doing it. And when the time comes to improvise, sometimes those people can be much, much more rigid than people who don't have as much training. Right. I wanted to ask you, so you said it took six years to write. How long did the research take? Well, it didn't take, it was six years between the books. Yeah. And because my feeling after finishing a book is like never, don't ever do it again. So it takes me like some recovery time.

Yeah, it's hard to say because the research – so the first year of both my books, like once I have a book contract, I don't even write anything. I basically try to read 10 scientific journal articles a day every day for the year. And so I read a lot by the end of the year. But it always – something always starts before that. Like the introduction of this book that's about sports came out of, very much out of my first book, where those set me up with these debates, this debate with Malcolm Gladwell at this thing called the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference at MIT, founded by the general manager of the Rockets. And I'd never met Malcolm and, um,

you know, we're in this debate and like, we're, we're, whatever, we're going to have this debate. And I'm like, this guy's really clever.

I don't want to get like slaughtered on stage. You know, it's going to be on YouTube and whatever. And so I tried to anticipate his arguments. I'm like, obviously he's got to argue for early specialization. This is about athletic development, particularly this conference.

Yeah. You were kind of, it was about his 10,000 hours thing. Yeah. Oh, it's framed, it's on YouTube. It's framed as 10,000 hours versus the sports gene. Right. Like Ali versus Frazier.

Yeah, exactly. Except for more important and bloodier. Yeah. And so I was like, well, he's got to argue for early specialization. So I went and just like, I'm like, I'm the science for Sports Illustrated. Like, I'm just going to look. If that's his hypothesis, let's see what it is. And you go look everywhere and it's like, I'm like, I'm the science for sports illustrated. Like, I'm just going to look if that's his hypothesis. Let's see what it is. And you go look everywhere.

And it's like, nope, you know, athletes have this sampling period and they delay specialization. The ones who go on to become elite. And not only that, but then I was like, well, maybe it's just talent selection. So then I go look for other studies and see like, you know, in European soccer studies, they'll take kids, match them for skill at a certain age, track them for several years, see who improved more. And it's the kids who did like more, you did more disorganized play and more other sports. And so I framed this as the Roger versus Tiger problem

because Roger Federer played all these sports as a kid. And when we come off the stage, Malcolm goes, you know what you got me on was that Roger versus Tiger thing. You should write about that. And I didn't really think about it much, but he and I became running buddies then and would talk about this stuff on our own time. And he's a huge, massive track nerd.

Like the thing he cares about the most in the world, I think, is track and field. Really? Yeah. And running. Yeah. Interesting. And I mean, he was really good. He was a Canadian provincial champion when he was a teenager.

And I didn't, I just sort of filed that away in the back of my head because I was going to start this new job where I was doing like the cartel stuff or the DA stuff. And then I got invited a guy that I had run track with in college was called Tillman Scholar the Pat Tillman Foundation yeah we're huge um he's here yeah I really love Pat Tillman oh okay yeah and his family I mean the documentary about what they did yeah after you know his death was pretty incredible yeah it's amazing so I've gotten more involved with that foundation every year um and but this was the first time I was invited. And my friend told me, you know, like, just invited me to give a talk to these, like, 15 people who had been given scholarships. They give scholarships to military veterans, current soldiers, and military spouses to basically aid

career changes. And so I go and I'm like, all right, I'll talk to them about this stuff that I was just talking to Malcolm about, late specialization in sports, but I better, like, find out something about other work because they don't want to hear just about sports. So I tack on a little bit of research that ended up in range on the last five minutes of the talk. And it was like catharsis. They're coming up and being like, where can I find more about this because I'm behind and I don't fit the typical experience for whatever

job i want like an ex-navy seal a guy who ex-navy seal who had studied geophysics and history undergrad was in grad school in dartmouth and harvard at the time sends me an email saying i'm so relieved to have seen this you know like he felt behind yeah yeah i'm like i'm like how can such a person feel behind and so it sort of brought that conversation malcolm and i had had back to my head and i sort of thought gosh maybe there's like an interesting project that would be important to people to do here that goes just using sports as like the jumping off analogy but and so so i was thinking about it a lot um but then like the actual like sign the contract to like turn in a manuscript was about two years and then like

another six months where i have to like cut it down to size because they always tell me it's too long. But I had already been like, you know, doing a lot of that. There's no like defined period because I'm just like so much of my job is just like following whatever I happen to be interested in. So do you have a day job right now? I do not right now. So what's your day look like? I mean, I'm going around doing stuff like this mostly now. Like going to podcasts and going. I mean, I'm going around doing stuff like this mostly now.

Like going to podcasts and going. I mean, the book just came out really recently. And it's about to be published in the UK next week. And so publishing it actually involves writing a lot of articles too. So I've been doing a lot of writing, traveling around a bit. But I'm trying to decide if I'm going to go back to the day job I had before this where I was doing like investigative stuff. I haven't decided yet. But I don't need a rush.

I've been so stoked on the breadth of coverage that this has gotten. Yeah. You and me both. Yeah. Cause I, I looked up other podcasts, listen to you. And I was like,

Oh damn, he did like every podcast. It got, you know, the last book got some attention too, but it was not like that, like explosion out of the gate. This has been different.

It's like, cause you're cool. Yeah. I was going to say, cause I, it was kind of a cynical question i guess that's why i holstered it for a second do you think it's because of the book or do you do you have a better team working with you now um i this so because so my first book was like sort of surprising success

in that way which meant like you end up with a bigger team behind you the next time so so riverhead which like publishes some of my own favorite writers um they're like a bigger team behind you the next time. So Riverhead, which like publishes some of my own favorite writers, they're like a fantastic team. And they have like devoted a lot more resources to me this time. And also like after the first book, I also had more of my own, you know, audience and things like that.

So there was like more of everything that's helpful. And the first book got, you know, it brought me to events where like I started meeting other people who, you know, have big newslet where like I started meeting other other people who you know have big newsletters and all these sorts of things so it's like everything since then like lined up to make it right but even even so um it's still been some good fortune like a lot of places I was pitching like the book got excerpted in like you know the Atlantic and then there was like an adaptation of the New York Times and all these things and some of those things

were coming through like at the last minute. So it was still, you know, a lot of things fell my way that didn't have to. Is your family stoked on your literary success? Yeah, I think so. I think so. But, you know, like family's family. I'm just like. They're weird.

Yeah, I'm just like a member. Yeah, I mean, they are, but like I'm just like a member, you know. Dude, they are. They're weird about this stuff. Yeah. Like with our experience too. They're just like, you tell them what you're doing and they're like oh that's cool so they just don't i don't know that's a good thing about it though you can always be like just like normal

yeah yeah yeah you don't want them to raise you up to other you yeah yeah keep they keep you grounded we go on a fox once in a while this guy waters world show do you know jesse waters he has a fox show and then my dad ran into him last weekend yeah hilarious and they like exchanged phone numbers my dad's a huge fox man really yeah and he's like i've been talking he's like yeah jesse's gonna put me on the air will you be very proud of him and then my family i went out to visit him and my family was like are you gonna text jesse i was like no no probably not and then my dad was like my dad was like i'm going to and i was like yeah because you're a star fucker dad and then my dad was like huh

but I knew I made him think about himself your dad's probably already like snapchatting with him yeah exactly if your dad gets on you should

nag him a little bit that's it yeah cause the only show you got on I did I talked to my dad about it a little bit he's like

I was talking about something totally different and then he's like he's like but if I were you JT I think I'd bring more energy when I'm on there and I was like

okay dad okay ouch yeah jeez but he's a beast But if I were you, JT, I think I'd bring more energy when I'm on there. And I was like, okay, dad. Okay. Ouch. Yeah. Jeez. He's a beast. Yeah, I was telling my dad something.

He's like, you know, your brother's calling. I got to hang up the phone. I'm like, all right. But I love my family. No, I think they're always just trying to help. Like my dad, I remember like if I have a girlfriend, my dad's like, well, don't settle down too quick. But then if I'm like dating a bunch of different girls, he's like, do you really think that's what life is about? And I'm like, you're kind of like moving the target on me constantly.

But I do think it's all. That's good. He's balancing. Whatever it is, he's balancing it out. Yeah, he doesn't want me just to go. There's a range in the parenting. There you go. I was telegraphed out. I did.

Reading this book, I was like, damn, my parents did a pretty solid job. All right. Should we answer some questions? pretty solid job. Yeah. All right. Should we answer some questions? I'm down. Yeah. Let's do this. What's up, Kings of Stoke? Love the pod and the positive vibes.

Looking for some advice on a sitch that's come my way recently. About a month ago, my girlfriend of one and a half years and I broke up. She was one month into her five-month exchange that is 16,000 kilometers away. But things ended well, and there's a chance of rekindling things when she's home. In the meantime, a longtime childhood friend of mine and her boyfriend of three years broke up. I've been passively crushing on her forever, but I've never said anything as any one of us has always been in a relationship or were too young.

I think she may have had feelings for me at various points too, but I'm not sure about how recently. What I'm asking you Sultans of Stoke is whether or not I should make a move. These past few weeks, we've both been single and talking a little bit. I'm worried if I don't make a move, I'll be stuck passively crushing,

but I'm also not sure how the move will be received. Also, my proposition for you dudes is to try and get the true meaning of Stoke into the dictionary. It would be rad. Cheers, bros, and thanks for the dope advice. Fuck Puzio and his long hair. Your bro from Canada. Puzio's a guy I fought in high school. Okay.

So am I supposed to answer this question? I think it's an easy one though we all do yeah yeah he was like I don't know if I should make a move because I don't know how it'll be received like nobody does make a move like how how hard a question is that like David I love it I don't know I mean like be polite and everything you know so that you can still be friends if it doesn't go well right and take it well if it doesn't go well yeah like too much take it well if it doesn't go well. Yeah, like too much risk aversion, man. Like, take your shot. Yeah. Yeah, you got to go for it.

How did you ask out your current wife? My current wife, we met, you know. Not that you've had another one, but yeah. My current wife, yeah, I have to think through my wife. Or another different one's coming, yeah, yeah. We actually were at, it was a week before I was moving to New York from D.C. at the time, actually, and we met at a mutual friends party. And she actually approached me and started giving me this whole like just just like beelined over and started giving me this talk about like the evolution of Catwoman and like what it meant

about feminism and I was like this is kind of awesome like it was super interesting and we you know I think like two days later I asked her out and we went out and then spent like the next five days straight together, and then I moved to New York. So it was very much like no plan hard to get. I had to shoot that shot because I was about to move. And so then we dated between D.C. and New York. Nice.

That's sort of rom-com-esque. It was a little. It was a great way to start the narrative, actually. So I've really enjoyed our story as a couple the way it's evolved. Yeah, that's cool. That's awesome. Yeah, and I think we're all in agreement. You just got to go for it.

Go for it. Watch something that pumps you up and then go over there and tell her how you feel. Matt McConaughey rom-coms, I always say. What's up, dogs? I'm somewhat of a small frame dude and trying to bulk up. I've been hitting the gym the last few months but not seeing the results I want. Any big tips on how to get my muscles stoked on growth? Yeah, I mean, first you'd have to know

what he's doing but like don't do too much cardio if you're just trying to grow you have like up your protein intake don't worry about like most of the ridiculous supplements go with like something normal you know protein creatine something like that um you know and try to snake and probably one of the mistakes that like a lot of people make is if you want your physiology to change, you can't lift the same weights the same number of times every day. You've got to move up your weight, and you've got to leave time for muscular adaptation. So make sure you leave some time between your heavy bouts because that's when your muscle remodels. Yeah, recovery is key.

Key. Yeah, I don't really have anything on top of that. Oh, sleep a lot because that's when you're sleeping is the time of most secretion of human growth hormone, which is helpful. And I would also say, dude, we don't just want you to be cosmetically jacked. We want you to be legit functional jacked. So make sure you're doing squats, deadlifts, and go slow. But if you can learn form for like power lifts, using like a CVC pipe, and then moving slowly into actual weight, I mean, that's where you're really going to see major gains. so make sure you're keeping a compound nothing makes me more amped than a squat sesh you can just feel the t rising it's the good

kind of grit it's the kind of suffering you have to put yourself through I love it speaking of the oh sorry go ahead no I just I just walk out of the gym just like like 10 feet wider I did something I feel like I did something yeah yeah speaking of the tea rising there was in one of the guys i interviewed in the sports gene um was studying like how to get guys t to rise before competition and he had this you know he said like all right well in evolutionary theory like testosterone rises because like men i'd say in many ways are like more people call women hormonal but testosterone goes bananas in response to the environment. And so, you know, in response to opportunities to mate or to fight, testosterone rises. And so he was like, all right, I'm going to show these guys porn and violence

before, like, a game and monitor their testosterone levels. And what he found was that, like, the violence, they both worked, but violence worked a little better. And so he would have them before doing some of their workouts, like watch some violent movies basically. Whoa. Wow. Is that why I'm like, I really like wrestling and boxing,

and I'm also very horny. Is that because I actually like those behaviors or I like the feeling I get from the testosterone increase? Or you're used to say, right? I could only speculate on that. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. That might just be something unique about you too. Oh, thanks, Todd.

I think that's unique about you. Although I do. You're horny. Yeah, I was going to gonna say i do get horny after die hard so there's something did i also heard that bronze and you're nuts going back to manscaped makes tea rise exponentially did not know that did i heard because they were like yeah when brad pitt was uh filming troy they're like he would bronze naked and they're like by the way it pitt was uh filming troy they're like he would bronze naked and they're like by the way it raises your teeth nice but that wasn't like people so who knows you're like whole bodies covered except for your nuts yeah um you're just outside with the boxers

yeah uh what's up guys my name is jack and i'm a cleveland stoker i'm writing to you guys because of a serious problem the squad one of our friends who is very nice and lik name is Jack and I'm a Cleveland Stoker. I'm writing to you guys because of a serious problem with the squad. One of our friends who is very nice and likable is 19 and refuses to get his license. As a result, multiple squad members have to drive his ass all over Cleveland. In one instance, I drove 30 minutes out of my way at 12.50am just so he could get home without so much as a thank you, let alone gas money. This has gone on for around three years at this point. It really lowers Stoke and makes us resent him even though he's a nice guy whenever we bring this up he gets angry aggro and sometimes violent how can we address the issue of him getting a license and driving with him even though he gets super fucking aggro thanks so much you guys have changed my perspective on a lot of things and made

me a much more positive and fun person thank for sure dog you guys impact so many stokers lives don't forget that boom clap jack dude i would would say that he doesn't sound like a nice guy. No. Yeah. You say a couple times that he's a nice guy, but then when you just ask him about getting a driver's license, he gets violent. I would say this guy's like an oppressive, overbearing person

who you should feel no guilt over kind of not hanging out with him as much anymore. Yeah, stop giving him rides. Steal his phone download uber problem solved like how hard is this one i love it yeah so but if we get a lot of these questions where it feels very complicated to the person involved in it but i think you're totally right like he doesn't sound that nice yeah get a license man come on he gets a simple request doesn't he want a license that's what i want to know like don't you want to drive I was so pumped

to get my license he's just not incentivized because he has all these buddies who will drive him around that he never has to DD maybe there's something else going on maybe he's got like

a depth perception problem and they should like ask him if there's something else going on that he doesn't want to like admit to so he's getting pissed like bro are you not good

at evaluating distance with other cars on the road he's like what I'm fired at that you're like dude I'm not going to judge you. And then he gets violent. You're like, dude, you obviously have like a big sensitivity here.

He gets violent, but he can't hit you because of his depth perception. Yeah, it's not a big deal. He's just whiffing. Oh, man. If he hears this, he's going to be really pissed. Like, dude, when you throw punches, like you're way off. So obviously you can't drive. Oh, he's going to be so aggro here's this next

question thoughts on cargo shorts stoked on them back in the day the important caveat back in the day yeah yeah i don't wear them um but i used to i don't like them but my opinion could change. I like them when soldiers wear them. Fair enough. Yeah, if the person repping them is badass, then the shorts are badass by extension. If Jocko Willink, do you know Jocko Willink? Yeah. If he rolled up wearing cargos, I'd start wearing them.

Yeah, are you big on inspirational stuff? Do you watch inspirational stuff to get you pumped? Not that much. Not that much. Not that much. What gets you pumped? What gets me pumped? That's a good question. Like if I'm trying to do what?

I don't know. Just like when you're just like, like, is there something, is there some kind of thing that when you take it in, you're like, fuck yeah, let's go. That's a good question. I mean, there's some like people

that I love to read it. Like I get really stoked about it. They're just like doing, doing a good job of what they're doing. I mean see actually a couple pages into your book I started fist pumping really yeah I was like this is fucking good let's go so this is a competent person giving me some information yeah I don't know like lighting a fire under myself is like definitely not a problem I've ever had so I don't like require a lot of of like that bunsen burner is going at all times yeah yeah and more more so i'm

probably usually trying to like get a little more stoic than like needing to be pumped more right i think like i'm usually managing myself in the other direction me too like my girlfriend sometimes if we get into a little tift i'll be like what do you want and it's always just for me to sit still she's like just sit still for a couple minutes i'm like oh i have that problem too i just go run sprints or something i run a lot too yeah yeah yeah yeah i uh y'all throwing just some jessica simpson maybe that maybe i'm amping myself up too much no because it's it's like lonely at that level of amp yeah yeah yeah that's what's going on i feel you dog um all right what's up guardians of stone

first off i wanted to start off by saying uh f you aaron but he wrote it out i'm sorry aaron he said and you know this is a lone voice in and out is dank and you know it go hang out with chicken broth the broken or something aaron doesn't like in and out and it's kind of you know a big deal to us. Yeah, what's not to like about In-N-Out, Aaron? Whoa. Where do I... Where do I begin?

Let me start with the fries. You always go with the fries, dude. I'm telling you, they're pretty good. Yeah, dude. That's my favorite part. They are hot garbage. Yikes. I can't comprehend how you could feel that way.

And you don't want to build a bridge to us having a common compromise on this. No, no. I mean, we all like Five Guys, for sure. So that's cool. So he's not just trying to be contrarian. Yeah, no, no. Five Guys is good, for sure. You're all right. All right's not just trying to be contrarian. It really is. Yeah. No, no. Five guys is good for sure. You're all right.

All right. What's up, Guardians of Stoke? First off, I want to start off. Okay. We already read that part. Go hang out. Got that. All right.

So I'm heading to Cabo in a week and a half, and I'm super pumped, as you should be, but I'm in somewhat of a dilemma regarding the trip. I have to go to Cabo with my family and not my dogs. How should I go about this trip since I'm not with my dogs chugging on jet skis? Do I bring my mom to Mango Deck, even though she will witness mass amounts of wet t-shirt contests and

demoralizing activities my dad would be stoked on it but i don't know how i feel about bringing my mom along for the ride to get down at squid row thanks amigos and fuck pusio i would say drawing from the book if this is possible, follow your bliss, you know? Like maybe take some solo adventures. Be like, Mom, Dad, I love being here with you. I'll be back for dinner, but I gotta go find myself at the mango deck. I gotta go express my range.

Yeah. That's what I was gonna say. Take some side trips. I think, personally, I'm not taking my mom to mango deck, I don't think, but to side trips, no problem. Dude, I don't take my mom, because one time I went to mango deck with my mom when I was like 13, and they weren't doing a wet t-shirt contest, and Dude, I don't take my mom. Because one time I went to Mango Deck with my mom when I was like 13 and they weren't

doing a wet t-shirt contest. And I got sad about it to my mom. And then she went over there and tried to jumpstart it with her energy. And then she came back and she was like, they're going to do it. And I am going to compete. And I was like, no, no, no. That's a worst case scenario. Yeah.

So did you watch? No, of course not. I don't think she ended up doing it. I mean, but all respect to my mom for having a good time in Cabo. So yeah, to this stoker, I wouldn't just write your mom off as like, you know, no fun. She might be too much fun. Yeah, that's a risky run too. Yikes.

She could get way more mango deck. Yeah, and it's easier for girls to find a dude on spring break than for dudes to find a girl. I think that guy with the guy who won't get the license, they should replace their friend with you because you don't even get upset when we're talking about your mom kickstarting a wet t-shirt contest. No, I mean, it's all love. Yeah. She's the best. Yeah, for sure. And everyone has their things. What's up, Chad and JT? First off, I just want to say thank you, dogs, for keeping me amped. So lately, I've been talking to this girl who I really like. We used to date back in high school and I've always had fire chemistry. There's just one problem. She has super bad anxiety and is often depressed. It is nothing new for her. She has a condition where her body doesn't make enough serotonin. So I'm wondering

if it is possible to ever make her happy. Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against anyone with mental illnesses, but I'm starting to wonder how wise it would be for me to take things to the next level. I don't want her to think that I'm only talking to her because I want to fix her or anything like that, but I do really care about her. Any advice you dogs have would be greatly appreciated. Keep up the good work. Also, if you could leave my name out of it, as I have showed her some of your vids.

Thanks, boys. Hope we get some treatment, I think. Yeah. And also, I wouldn't worry about too much what might come to pass. if it's going well right now i would just you know bank on the fact that it'll keep going well and that by the time something does happen you guys will have enough trust with one another that you can kind of navigate it together or if it's too gnarly you know you can always go man i mean she'll be all right without

you and like you're not don't feel beholden to the situation. I think that's good of you to have those instincts, but it's not absolute. I wouldn't overthink it that she thinks you're trying to fix her either. I think you're just being compassionate. Yeah. Yeah, assess how you feel with her and just take it day by day. It's not your job to fix her also. She'll figure it out, but maybe if she wants treatment or something, help her out. just take it day by day, you know? And it's not your job to fix her also, you know?

She'll figure it out, but maybe if she wants treatment or something, help her out. Yeah, you can nudge her in that direction for sure. Yeah. Just be supportive. Yeah, yeah. Don't borrow trouble.

Focus on today. Be supportive. Hey, bros. Me and my longtime stoker need advice on a family sitch. My sister is engaged to a total schmole. A schmoll is like an undesirable in the friend crew that most people want to boke boke means to kick out and we don't know if we should let her know what's up or let their relation be the problem is they were best friends for five years but only dated for six months before moving in together and

getting engaged we loved their relation when they were just friends but ever since they started dating things have felt off it may have started with good intentions but ever since they got together they have been depleting each other's stoke meter meter their wedding date is a year from now do we say our peace and let our sis know we think he's a schmole or let it be worth noting there has been a sitch or two where he felt like he was coming on to my longtime stoker who's basically fam would appreciate your feedback as we are big fans of the pod and your wholesome masculinity oh that's very nice of you thank you that's a tricky one stuff I'd say I'm my first instinct you guys say something really sorry I don't mean to like i think so yeah i think that's that he does it's a better thing to

do is to say something yeah i think so but you say it and then you you gotta just say your piece say your piece and then let them do what they're gonna do and also dude i think one of the critical details was that he says they're happy but then you say they were depleting each other's stoke tank oh we did yeah i think that think that's one of the main things. Yeah, if the stoke tank is low, then it's worth saying something. Yeah. Maybe go about it in an indirect kind of way. Be like, I noticed your stoke tank has been depleted.

Yeah, keep it about the person too. Don't bring in the partner as much. Just be like, hey, are there things in your life that aren't ideal for you right now that we think we can improve like why such low froth and if you have them work on the other parts of their life then it might make more obvious what's not working in their life yeah fair all right losing my native tongue good day my gen shortly after stern played your city council clip which gave me mega stokage i became a devotee to your pod giving me all the stoke I needed weekly. Sometimes I listened three times a week. Eventually all my dogs were noticing that my speech patterns were changing. Then the GF said that her friends had noticed that my dialect made an extreme change, which made the GF notice the

sudden change as well. She then connected my changed speech to how you two dudes speak. While absorbing all the good vibe, your accents and vocab became crazy contagious. My girl asked me to work on getting my OG speech back. I felt loved. Then things turned raw when my boss called me in to talk about the way I had been speaking. In my job, I give a weekly address to my fellow crew, and my recent speech patterns have become a distracting subject of consternation from my buds. While my stoke was high, my vernacular and slang was not chill for our squad.

My boss said that if he does not see a change soon, he'll be forced to pull me from that task, resulting in a demosh. My concern, if I don't take a break from going deep, I may risk some disruption in my job and my personal life. I'll take any advice from your wisdom on the air. I'd say set aside

some time, where you go to your cave, your garage, the gym, whatever, and just let it rip. Say know say jib blouse mole stoke Relish just let it so you can just get it out, you know purge it out of you So then you can talk hello madam clear the hopper. Yeah, get back to your OG speech Maybe you can like after going deep like listen to the audiobook of like the decline and fall of the Roman Empire or something.

It'll get you back in that like. Exactly what I was thinking. Hit it with a palate cleanser. Yeah. Do like three hours of going deep and then just pop on like Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Exactly.

And then you're going to walk into work with a pretty fun balance. Yeah. Exactly. That'll work. Or the Harry Potter audio books. Then you might end up sounding, yeah,

it depends what character influences you the most. Like Gross style, you're like, when Liviosa, dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone's like, you're the top surgeon at this hospital. That could cause another problem.

Yeah, maybe one of the answers is just to start your own podcast now. Like, he's got the voice down. Why would you waste it? Yeah. That'd be a good combo, too. Harry Potter and that's range. Yeah. What's up, bros?

Yesterday was Father's Day and all was going good. My parents explained that they were getting a divorce. Stoke level is low and I'm just a freshman in high school and about to be a sophomore. I just want to know

how to get back stoked and maybe get some poon in the summer. Thanks, Chad and JT. Keep stoking America, dudes. I was not expecting that last sentence. No, it was... How some people deal with quick change of timing. Trauma, you know.

Dude, watch Fast and the Furious. That's all I was... What do you think, David? I don't know. I don't know what to think about that. These questions are heavy. Yeah. Be open with the parents, I think.

That's a difficult thing. And so I hope this person can stay connected to both of their parents. And I think that will, if so, that will help in all aspects of their lives, including the other aspects of the email they're looking for. So, you know, they're going to be disrupted a little bit, and I think you just got to expect that, some disruptions coming Yeah. And if there's probably things you can, I mean, I don't know what the context of your guys' relationship is, but if you, if you need something from them, maybe ask, you know, you can't ask them to stay together, but you can ask

maybe for like, you know, someone to talk to or, you know, just extra help that you might need processing all of this. I know that's really hard to do when you're upset at them and when you're just upset in general. But, yeah, I think the more you can be open to reaching out to people, the easier it will be. And I would say just to love them both equally. I've seen a lot of kids who have gone through that who place their anger in one parent or the other, and I think it's just detrimental to their development as a whole.

So I'd say have empathy for each situation and um try as hard as you can to love them both equally and you know be a good son to uh both of them in the same way right yeah and support them yeah because it was easy when my parents got divorced to just blame one of them yeah i mean i felt like my dad was like steamrolling my mom. But now when I think about it, they were both steamrollers just running into each other. Yeah. All right. What's up, patriarchs of positivity?

I'm currently facing a dilemma that I would love your sage insight on. I am a white guy and currently dating a Latino woman who is caring and kind. However, there is one major red flag. She apparently hates white people. For some context, we have reasonably different political views, yet whenever politics or anything involving the topic of race comes up, she goes off on how white people are the reason for all the world's problems and are basically the spawn of Satan.

I know as a white person my race has its flaws, but no race is perfect. I think it's extremely closed-minded and far from woke to put the sole blame for everything on one group of people. It makes me super uncomfortable knowing that she hates a large group of people that look just like me. I'm self-aware enough to know that my very average dong is not powerful enough

to overcome intense racial bias. Dude, it's very enlightening to me. Do you think this is reasonable grounds to break up with my girlfriend? Sincerely, Jay from ATX. No, dog, I wouldn't break up. I think you just got to be honest with her and then also just try to detach a little bit from what she's saying she obviously likes white people a little bit

she's dating you so i would i know it's hard but i wouldn't take it so personally and then i would just try to talk to her about like maybe when it's close quarters between you guys separating her ideology from how you two interact with one another yeah Yeah, I'd also be honest with her and say, tell her how it makes you feel when she talks about white people that way, I guess. Yeah. And also I admire the humility about his dong. And dude, if she has a tough day at work

and that's a result of white people that she's working with and stuff, she's probably going to need a place where she can express that. And sometimes it's going to come out a little bit hotter than she probably intends. that's just what people need sometimes yeah no i agree i think this is part of like a bigger issue right of like there are a lot of groups that have been disadvantaged and like you know white guys deserve some criticism and i think some of this is like

seeing these structures that are set up to disadvantage some people and there's like a cathartic aspect of like being able to criticize. And I think that's, you know, important for a lot of us not to try to take too personally and say like, well, not all of us, you know, and sort of let some of that criticism be aired and try to understand where it's coming from. Right. Can I go back to my question? Yeah. Yeah. I think we're almost done.

Thanks, man. All right, David, we got one more question. I think we're almost done. Thanks, man. No, sure. Thanks. All right, David, we got one more question. What's this juice made out of, by the way, or is it cream?

It's almond milk, pink salt, E3. I don't know. Tricolitis. Hold on. Tricolitis. Apparently, it has good probiotics. All right. Very tasty. And protein.

I think low carb. A lot of people have been asking what's in the blue drink. It's sprouted almond milk, raw honey, toco, tri and oil, pearl powder, organic E3 live blue magic powder, of course, and pink salt. All right. Last question. What's up fellas. Love the pot. I'm a 23 year old dude who does pretty well with the ladies, but I have an issue where I'll be really interested in a girl. And as soon as I have sex with her, I lose all interest. It's pretty frustrating because I feel super immature when all my friends are settling down within women and even some getting engaged.

It doesn't matter what I do, even when I'm being friend-zoned and obsessed over a girl for years and finally hit it, my brain loses all interest even to the point where I can't stand talking to them. It doesn't matter how attractive or great their personalities are. Just wondering what advice you guys have

for this type of behavior or what I could do to finally find the right one. I know people say I just haven't found the right one yet, but I've been with dozens of girls with the same outcome every time. Dude, I would hit it. I was just going to say, 23 years old, right? Again, you're dead in the middle of the fastest time of personality change in your whole life, right?

This is something I was writing about, the so-called end of history illusion, this idea that like we all recognize we've changed a lot in the past and then say like, but now I'm pretty much done, you know, things aren't going to change in the future. And we underestimate the amount of change at every time point in life in like our own personalities. And a 23-year-old is right in the middle of the fastest time of personality change, for sure underestimating the amount his personality will change. So I would say don't settle down just for the sake of settling down, but you're going to change. And one of the predictable ways people change is in traits that allow them to have more stable relationships.

So don't worry. That is immature, right? But he is immature, it sounds like, and that will change. Those personality traits change over time, so it'll change as you get older. You can't sweat it anyway. You shouldn't settle down with someone you don't want to settle down with. Yeah, I agree. I'd say don't think on it too much.

Don't put too much pressure on yourself. I think people are right. You just haven't found the one. You're young, so just take it easy yeah and if you want to explore different like methods of like courtship where you like slow it down a little bit where you wait like five dates or so before you get physically intimate that might kind of change the way you're responding to things too but i agree it's like i mean i think you put it beautifully yeah thanks for sure and david it's been an absolute treat

having you on the pod thank you so much for coming on guys check out Range here it is excellent book I loved it and the sports gene they're both fire what are you up to now man I don't know

I'm living like the books I don't know I'm going to stay open to what I've gotten like when I was a teenager, I was sure I was going to go to the Air Force Academy, be a test pilot and astronaut, right? Didn't do any of those things. And all the projects that have turned out to be the most important to me were never anything I foresaw. It's always been me like following an interest at the time and then zigzagging. And so I'm going to do this for a little bit.

And the last book opened up a lot of opportunities I didn't expect. That might be the case again. So I'm going to stay this for a little bit and the last book opened up a lot of opportunities I didn't expect that might be the case again so I'm going to stay open for the next couple months and not think about it too much actually awesome dude well thank you so much for coming by it's my pleasure, thank you for having me

we keep going for a little bit that was a lot of fun thanks for coming in and thanks for testing the clones, too. You know, I wanted to make a tangible contribution in case I didn't say anything interesting, so I've got the clones lined up for you over here. That was key.

Yeah. No, you dropped a lot of dense information bombs. I think it's going to be really informative. Cool. Yeah. That's a lot of fun. That's cool. You guys actually give legitimately good advice

to people who are kind of like approaching you in a funny, but also serious way. Some of those questions are pretty serious. You're just cloaking them in funny language. Yeah, combine the two. You're like, my parents are getting divorced, and I would like to have sex. You're like, all right. I wasn't expecting that last part.

You're going through very emotionally fragile stuff that you want to medicate with just some good old-fashioned fun. Yeah. Actually, I forgot about the first part. So I was like, oh, fuck. There was a more serious first part. I should comment on that. Oh, that's why you told him to watch The Fast and the Furious?

Yeah, because I was like, oh, he just wants to bone. I'm like, watch The Fast and the Furious. I'm like, oh, wait. It is divorced. My bad. That's hilarious. Cool. All right.

Thanks, man. Have a good one. Yeah, thanks very much. Great to meet you. And if you give me a couple days notice before you post, I'll put it in my newsletter. Oh, sweet. Thanks, man. Appreciate that.

Maybe like two or three days. Cool. Yeah, it should be next Wednesday. Yeah. Next Wednesday? Mm-hmm. Yeah, thanks, man. All right.

Thanks, Aaron. Looking forward to the next thing you write. We're pumped on it. Yeah. I appreciate you got both of them. They're pretty different, so that's like a little bit. Dude, just the range of stuff you cover. You're a generalist to the highest order yeah thanks so much there's so many stories have a great one thanks man later before we begin the beefs and everything i just want to wish a very happy birthday to our dog zach his girlfriend

natalie reached out it's his birthday june 26 happy birthday dude thank you for being a stoker thank you for listening to the pod and you're a legend dude beast chad who is your beef of the week well since on this day of recording it's the anniversary of fast and the furious i'm doing all fast and the furious so my beef of the week is with johnny tran this dude comes in with his freaking crotch rocket, trying to flex on Paul, destroyed his Lancer, Mitsubishi Lancer Evo. Is it?

That's not an Evo. Just his Lancer. Is it? I don't even know. Dude, how did I not know this? He destroys his car, his 10-second car, his green car. It's beautiful. It has NOS in there.

He destroys it, and then he-second car, his green car. It's beautiful. It has NOS in there. He destroys it. And then he just starts flexing all over. He beats Jesse at Race Wars with his Honda 2000. It's like – Well, he's probably got, what, $200,000 under his hood? Yeah, he's got, like, 200 grand under the hood of that car. And it's like he just comes in all flexing with his, you know. And then he's, like, hanging out with his family and then, like, gets, like, ambushed and accuses Dom of being a freaking narc.

And it's like, you got to cool your jets Johnny Tran all right what are you doing dude quit flexing all over town you know quit establishing turf you know why do you have to like come up to Dom and be like you stay away I stay away everyone stays happy it's like why don't you try to coexist okay because maybe you two could race each other and be a pretty epic race but you have to go in with and then you make um you make ted drink that oil because you're like saying you have no engine you got no engines do we do we you make him drink oil johnny very few redeemable qualities yeah and then most then most of all, he kills Jesse, shoots at Paul, shoots at Dom, shoots at Jordana Brewster. He's just a pretty vile human being.

I'm going to go ahead and say it. And it's hard to be empathetic towards him because Dom comes from a broken home, not where his parents weren't great, but his dad died at an early age, you know, in a really dramatic way. Johnny comes from a solid home yeah where it was economically stable had his parents there had a strong nuclear family and he still decides to be a dude who tortures people and blows up people's 10 second cars yeah and it's like dude i'm glad paul capped his ass oh yeah, yeah. I'm going to say it. Damn, dawg. I'm glad. And I'm not one to, you know, I'm not in support of that, but you had it coming, dude.

But if someone is going to meet that end, Johnny was one of the ones who deserved it. Yeah. Paul's going to come through and say what up. So he said what up in the most epic of ways by ending you. You got later, Johnny, and you deserve it. That's my beef. who's your beef my beef of the week is with the dark for as long as i can remember i've hated the dark i grew up in like the suburbs and it would get

so dark at night like when i take out the trash and i'd sprint outside and sprint back inside and that's why i like living in cities because there's always lights. And you can always just kind of see what's around you and it doesn't feel as scary. Because I think to me lights mean life and death means dark. Like I think of death as being unable to open your eyes. And you're just stuck in that eternal darkness. And I just don't care for it. Scares me.

The dark. The dark. I hate the dark. I used to sleep with the light on, the TV on. I just hate the dark. Yeah, I feel you. The unknown, bro. What's out there? Probably boogeymen, dude.

It's scary, dude. Boogeymen are no joke, and they will come and fuck your world up. But on the lighter side, you know what, dude? I think if you step into the unknown, you're going to be pleasantly surprised. My dog. When you look in the mirror, when I look in the mirror,

I see a 15-year-old scared boy. That's how I identify as. I'll always think of myself as the 15-year-old scared version of myself. But sometimes I'll catch myself in the mirror and be like, nah, you're a man now, dog. Who do you see? I wanted to ask my dad this too,

but I forgot. That's a good question. What age do you think of yourself as? I think I'll eternally be 21. I'm never going to deviate from that. And that's like peak fun, just like let's have a good time. Peak fun, peak bronze,

peak highlights and hair from the sun there, al natural. Peak, you know. Yeah, I sort of foresee a young forever vibe, but not in like the corny way with those like 45-year-old dudes who are just like, dude, you're trying too hard. It's more like sort of a – It's a mindset not a lifestyle like a laird hamilton way dude nice yeah yeah for sure yeah you're gonna make laird look like the fucking crypt keeper that's the goal aaron what uh i'm serious too uh laird better look the fuck out i'm like not

even like thanks i'm being so sincere uh aaron what age do you see when you look in the mirror probably 30 for sure yeah yeah i think i think you're a man dude i know it i know it on some i'm having fun i like what i'm doing and i feel competent but uh but there's just it's not like in a bad way I'm just always like I'm always in touch with that person you know that sensitivity it's not even that it's just like yeah that it is that it's like but that's just my baseline do you see like oh look at this 15 year old with killer voc vocab and the ability to make very succinct points? Oh, no, I don't think that.

You can just add that to me. My dog. Thank you, dude. Yeah, you can be a cool 15-year-old. Yeah. I don't have to lead with the scared part. Very intelligent 15-year-old. Right.

Look at this prodigy. That's badass. All right, Chad, who is your babe of the week? My babe of the week is Mia Toretto. Nice. And Michelle Rodriguez, Letty. Mia, you make excellent tuna sandwiches. You drive fucking like a freaking beast in the best way possible.

You and Paul go to Cha--cha-cha and then you drive home and you just fucking rip up the road and i love it and then you know you you get mad at paul because you figure out he's a cop but then you're like no he's still he's still good he's good so i'm gonna help him out and he just come through in the clutch every time support dom support the grocery store making those tuna sandwiches take off taking off the crust and looking fire the whole way through and letty you got this aggro thing about you that's just so sexy sorry to get crude on the pod but she doesn't take shit from anybody she doesn't take shit from her she beats that dude who like come at race wars who like comes on to her just kind of like

oh hey baby you want to race and she's like yeah i'll dust your ass and she dusts his ass and then she's a beast in the hijackings even though it's not the best thing to do because you're breaking the law um and uh and then you're a good lover for dom so shout out to you for sure what up babes what about you my baby of the week is my grandma um she uh bit the dust a year ago at 98 she almost made it a century that's when you see the years 21 to 18 you're like holy crap yeah you covered some time and um she was just the best you met her a couple times yeah she Yeah, she's great. Funny as hell.

Like just no sentimentality, you know, which is in stark contrast to me. Like I'd go, I'd be hanging out there and I'd just be like, grandma, you know what? You're just the best grandma in the world. And she'd go, shut up. She's like Joe. Yeah. And then like, she's exactly like Joe. And then I'd come visit her sometimes.

And like at the old folks home, they love it when there's visitors. So like some of her friends would come up when I was there and she would straight up just look at her friend and be like, you're just jealous. No one came to visit you today. And I was like, whoa, my aunt heard me say that. And she's like, she was a viper. And it's because she had to be tough. She raised six kids with no husband. He passed away. Oh, wow. And she was a tough woman. Like she grew her own food. She recycled. She was like big into sustainability. And it wasn't out of like a ideological thing. It was out of a practicality thing. She grew up, you know, on during the depression. So she knew what

it meant to really have to survive. And she passed that message to all of her kids. They're all fiercely independent. They all moved out at 18. They went a million different places. They did a million different careers and they've all lived big lives. And I think it's because she instilled that mentality in them. And she was just a funny, funny lady. You'd see her at Thanksgiving.

You'd be like, how's it going? And she'd be like, I'm hungry. And then you'd be like, grandma, you want to hang out for a bit? She's like, no. You'd be like, right on and then he'd be like grandma you want to hang out for a bit she's like no you'd be like right on man just tell me how you feel right on joe yeah she's just like joe i think that's why i love joe he's my grandma um they're both at east coast toughness although joe's from chicago and uh yeah i miss you a lot grandma and uh yeah it was good celebrating your life last week and it was good seeing all my fam you guys are all babes as well all right chad who is your legend of the week uh legend paul walker

vin diesel um you know then you came with apprehension on paul paul paul came in paul is just the true example in fast and the furious of like someone who took chances took risks shot his shot you know just went in there guns blazing he's like i'm doing this no matter what all right you guys are gonna let me race you better let me race and um so i really respect him for that i think it's something we should all strive for it's like don't take no for an answer you know they say if they're laughing at you, throw in your pink slips. Tell them what up. You know, Vin Diesel too, you know, he's king of the road.

Toretto. Everyone looked up to him and he held that spot well. Even though he was breaking the law, I thought, you know, he's a good leader to his squad. He was, you know, he's a good sort of like, he's like, he figures out that Paul's a good guy. So he lets him into the squad, you know, and they bond and it's beautiful. So, and he's like he figures out that paul's a good guy so he lets him into the squad you know and they bond and it's beautiful so and he's also jacked so and then paul has great hair and a great tan so i mean they're just legends all around what can you say i mean they drag race and they fucking own the road they own their whips and uh they both are good solid solid

additions to the squad. For sure. Legends. Love that, dude. Who's your legend? My legend of the week, and I don't think I'll say it right, is N.G. Moy. N.G. Moy is from China. She is said to be one of the legendary five elder survivors of the destruction of the Shaolin Temple by the Ying Dynasty. And she is said to have been a master of various martial arts including the shaolin martial arts and wing chung which is what bruce lee studied they said

she invented it wow yeah and a lot of people think wing chung is just like more ornate dance than functional uh combat style but i've met this guy at the gym, Michael, and he's a Wing Chun guy. And he's like, bro, I was a bouncer in Germany. When I say it works, it works. Some people challenge it. They don't think it works. It's because they have a low IQ when it comes to fighting. I have no reason to talk to these people.

And I was like, dude, fuck yeah, man. Fuck yes. Fuck yeah, dude. And I guess one of the main principles of Wing Chun is chain punching, which is just rapid fire, fist over fist, dude. And I guess one of the main principles of Wing Chun is chain punching, which is just rapid fire, fist over fist firing. That sounds intense. It sounds intense.

It looks cool. And thank you, NG Mui, for inventing it. You're a legend. If someone came at me rapid fire like that, I don't know what I'd do. It's scary. I'd run. I doubt that. Thanks.

My dog. All right, Chad Chad what is your quote of the week my quote of the week is so Dom and Paul they get their car blown up by Johnny Tran and Paul just in his cool ass demeanor is just like so what the hell was that all about

and Ben is just like, yeah, don't worry about it. He's like, we got a 20 mile hike, humor me. And he just puts it so, it's so concise, he's a man of few words, but he puts it so well, he really

paints the picture. Paul goes, what the hell was that all about? And he's like, a business deal that went sour. Plus I made the mistake of sleeping with Trans Sister? And he's like, a business deal that went sour. Plus, I made the mistake of sleeping with Trans sister. And you're like, oh, I get it now. I get why there's beef. And he throws it in just as like a little like, you know, thing at the end.

Yeah. Dude, what's ironic about that is that Paul would later do that to him. Yeah. Right? You break your heart, I'll break your neck. What goes around comes around. Yeah. Paul's like, well, i plan on doing the same thing paul's like wow we have a lot in common we're gonna be great friends yeah what's your quote dude my quote of the week is from former

legend of the week my dog trevor moylan it was a couple years ago there was a fierce battle going on in our fantasy football league over how to punish someone who had broken the rules and everyone on the whatsapp thread was at loggerheads over it and we were tied on the vote six to six so we said all right trevor will be the judge of what the verdict is because he didn't have uh like a bias towards either guy and he wasn't on the whatsapp thread so he hadn't been like kind of contaminated by the discourse so we're like all right he can be a fair judge of what of how we should punish this dude so me and my buddy robbie call him and he's like what's up kind of contaminated by the discourse. So we're like, all right, he can be a fair judge of what, of how we should punish this dude. So me and my buddy Robbie call him and he's like, what's up guys? I'm eating some ice cream. We're like, dude, we got to talk to you. He's like, all right,

I'll step outside. He goes outside. We're like, look, we have to come up with a punishment for Danny. Here's your two available options. And we just figured Trevor will pick one and that'll be it. Trevor goes off book and says, no, I don't like either of those options. I'm going with a third option. And I was like, no, Trevor, that's not available to you. It's only two options. He goes, I don't give a fuck. I'm pissed off about this shit and I'm going to punish him. We're going with the third option. And I was like, oh fuck, dude, did we deputize the wrong guy? So we started arguing about it nonstop. And I told Robbie before the call, I'm going to be chill. I'm going to be chill. But then I blow a gasket. I'm like, Trevor,

no, there's two options. You got to go with one of the options. He goes, I don't give a fuck. I'm not doing that. And so I get so mad. And I'm for like 45 seconds. I'm like, Trevor, please just listen to me, dude. Just, just pick one of the options. That's what we agreed on. Don't, don't make this go on forever with a third option. We'll never stop arguing. And then I finished just like being pissed. And then he just goes, I got some ice cream melting inside. I got to go. And then he hung just like being pissed. And then he just goes, I got some ice cream melting inside. I got to go. And then he hung up on me.

I stared at the phone. I was like, no, no, no. So what do you do? Dude, I forget. But I just thought that was such an epic sign off to be like, I got some ice cream melting inside. I got to go. Dude, so creative. You can't push him around, dude.

Yeah. You can't put him into a fixed decision. He wants, you know, he wants data that I couldn't provide. He wanted ideas I couldn't provide. Yeah. Oh, you're angry? You know what's more important than your anger?

This McFlurry. I got some ice cream melting inside. Boom. That's good stuff. It was badass. All right, dude. Guys, that will be it for episode 76 of Going Deep in Chatting JT.

Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for being stokers. Thank you for our author, David Epstein. Check out his book, Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Anything else? We've read two books now. Dude, I've read two books.

We did it. Boom, dude. I'm repping the new Going Deep shirt. Dude, no disrespect to some of these other podcasts he was on, but I don't think some of those people read the book. Oh, really? Yeah. We read the book.

We read the book. Guys, you can get this shirt at ChadGoesDeep.com. I'll take a book report on that book. I got to go to San Diego. Oh, you got to go to San Diego? Yeah. All right, my dog. All right.

Thank you, Stokers. Anything you want to say? No, just thanks to David Epstein for coming on, and have a good drive down to San Diego, man. Thank you, dude. Yeah. Later. Later, Aaron.

Thank you. If you need advice San Diego, man. Thank you, dude. Yeah. Later. Later, Aaron. Thank you. If you need advice, these guys are really nice. You want to know what to do, where to go. When you need someone to guide you, just have the grows beside you

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