Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Interview With David Epstein on Genetics and Physical Abilities

Episode Date: December 29, 2014

In this podcast I interview David Epstein, author of the NYT bestseller The Sports Gene, and we talk how genetics, talent, and practice relate to acquiring physical ability. ORDER THE SPORTS GENE: http://amzn.to/1uFWVUD DAVID'S WEBSITE: http://thesportsgene.com/ Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Hey, it's Mike, and I just want to say thanks for checking out my podcast. I hope you like what I have to say. And if you do like what I have to say in the podcast, then I guarantee you're going to like my books. Now, I have several books, but the place to start is Bigger Leaner Stronger If You're a Guy and Thinner Leaner Stronger If You're a Girl. I mean, these books, they're basically going to teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training, and supplementation to build muscle, lose fat, and look and feel great without having to give up all the foods you love or live

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overdue. And ultimately, if you like what you see and you want to buy something, then you can use the coupon code podcast, P-O-D-C-A-S-T, and you'll save 10% on your first order. So thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast and let's get to the show. Hey, this is Mike Matthews. And in this episode of the podcast, I'm interviewing Mustard. Times bestseller and won various awards. A very interesting book that I actually recommended in one of my cool stuff of the week posts. So I'm excited to have David on the show and dive into the fascinating world of sports and genetics and talent and how people get good at things. So let's get to it. All right. Thanks for coming on the show, David. I'm excited to have you. Thanks for having me.

It's my pleasure. Yeah, yeah. All right, so you have a book out. It's actually, I recommended it just, I think it was two weeks ago. I do like a post. I call it Cool Stuff of the Week where I recommend various books that I read and, you know, if I like movies and just random cool things and whatever. So I know that people that are listening and that, you know, read the website and stuff, some of them will have already read the book.

But the book is called The Sports Gene, and that's obviously what I want to focus on in the podcast. So for those listening that don't know about the book, can you quickly tell us what it's about? Yeah, it's basically about everything we've learned in the decades since the sequencing of the human genome about what genetics can tell us about athleticism. In some cases, you know, I learned what it can't tell us, like the ability to react to a major league fastball turns out not to be innate, but rather learned. And other things that I thought, yeah, I think people commonly think are just totally acts of will, like the obsessive drive to train actually have an important genetic component. Yeah, very fascinating subject because obviously, I mean, this is like the cooler, you know,

around the water cooler type of arguments of, you know, how much does practice really matter versus, especially when you're looking at top level athletes versus how much is it just genetic and obviously I want to dive into some of that. So I think we should start with talking a bit about the 10,000 hour rule, which I'm sure a lot of people want to start just because it's kind of on many people's minds these days, probably mainly thanks to Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, or at least that's the book that that's where I first heard about it and kind of where a lot of people were introduced to it.

And for those listening aren't familiar with it, the 10,000 hour rule is basically an argument that that's how many hours of deliberate practice it takes to really master something, you know, like a sport or playing an instrument or whatever. And there's obviously talk about in your book, David. So kind of like, what's your take on that? Well, so the 10,000 hour, part of the underlying theory of the 10,000-hour's work is actually the idea that expertise is only the result of practice and everyone progresses at the same rate, basically.

So the only key to success is the number of hours you accumulate. Yeah, which sounds nice as a formula. Like, you know, then all you've got to do is if just have the grit, if you can grind it out. Yeah, right, exactly. But it actually comes from, I mean, the evidence behind it says nothing like that. I mean, the study it comes from is actually a tiny study of a group of violinists who are already admitted to a world-famous music academy, and the researchers who led it found that the top 10 violinists had, in retrospective

recall, had practiced an average of 10,000 hours by the age of 20. And so that became the sort of famous rule. But the fact is, most of them had not reached 10,000 hours. Yeah, as you say, I mean, average is average. I mean, that could mean that you have people that took 50,000 hours, and then that obscures the 2,000-hour ones or whatever. Exactly. That's exactly what happens in all the studies of sports skill acquisition is there are these

huge, huge ranges. So like if you look at something like chess expertise, which has a lot in common with building certain sports skills, the average number of hours to international master status is 11,053. But some people make it in 3,000 hours and some people are being tracked in the past 25,000 hours and some people are being tracked in the past 25 000 hours and still haven't made it yeah so without a measure of variance it doesn't tell you much and another problem with the original study is that they use people who are already pre-screened into

a world famous music academy so this hopelessly biases a study against finding evidence of talent it would be like doing a study of basketball skill using only NBA centers, noticing it all practiced a lot and saying, well, they only got where they are because of practice, not practice plus being seven feet tall. So it's really kind of a poor bit of science that just completely took off and has really driven sort of some counterproductive trends in sports, I think. Yeah, no, I totally agree. I mean, obviously you talk about this, I think it was in the second chapter, you're talking about high jump I think it was in the second chapter. You're talking about high jumpers.

It was one of them that put in all this time, and this other person, I think he came from Jamaica, it was, came out of nowhere. Bahamas, yeah. Bahamas, yeah, and beat the guy with, who knows, 20,000 hours of practice or whatever. There's the golf, the Dan plan.com. I ran across this recently. I'm getting back into golf myself, actually. It's kind of how I ran into it. Um, and, and this is a guy who he took that rule to heart and, uh, you know, I mean, I'm just

kind of explaining for the, for listeners, they don't know about it. And basically he decided that he, I think it was a photographer and he said, I want to play golf professionally. He had never played before. So he's going to practice 10,000 hours, and then he should be good to go being on the tour or whatever. And, I mean, ironically, I think he's at like 5,000 hours now, and he's like a six handicap or three or four or something like that, whereas a friend of mine, he's 16. He's been playing golf for two years.

He's 16. He has to go to school, and he has a job and friends and whatever. So he plays, but he's not, I don't know if he's even playing as much as the guy Dan is. And he's already a scratch golfer. So, you know, they're going about learning the game differently. But I think Dan, he started with, with like only putting and stuff which they're i mean that's an interesting way of going about it but uh you know they're the he the the kid ryan's probably put in half the time or less so you know that what what can account for that kind

of thing it's made motivation or determination or going about it different or maybe is ryan just you know genetically is he more gifted for playing golf? I mean, it could be some of all of the above. It would be hard to say that he has more motivation than Dan. I mean, Dan dropped everything, devoted his entire life to it, got a PGA-certified coach, all kinds of support, and has really, he wanted to test the 10,000 hours rule, so actually Anders Eriksson, the scientist who did that,

the work that made this famous, has actually consulted with him to make sure he's doing it in all the right ways and things like that. So honestly, I think it probably makes it look like it's more of a nature than a nurture difference because Dan seems to be following to a T what the scientific expert says you should be doing. And so if someone with less hours is doing better than him,

then you have to say, well, maybe there's some fundamental physiological differences there. And that's typical to what we see in all studies of skill acquisition. And the problem, one of the many problems with this kind of strict 10,000 hours thinking is that it doesn't help people find their actual strengths and accentuate that. It just prescribes sort of a cookie cutter plan for everyone. It's the exact opposite of what the, what exercise genetics was saying we should actually be doing. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I totally agree. I mean, even, even just going back to the golf thing, as an example, if you, I mean, you could look at your driving distance, for instance, if you cannot drive the ball a certain distance, you will never be on the PGA Tour, period.

Like if you can't figure that out, you will never become a professional golfer simply because if your long game isn't up to snuff, those courses are too long and too punishing if you can't hit the ball far enough. And going back to – there's a book called Every Shot Counts written by Mark Braude, a professor at Columbia. And he came up with a strokes gained is what it's called. It's a statistical analysis, kind of like sabermetrics for golf and you know, how it just kind of backs up the importance of the long game. So going back to how Dan's going about it, I would say that he's maybe going about it correctly in terms of putting in a bunch of practice, but in terms of learning the game, you know, he, I think he said he only putted for the first six months or something like that. That's completely backwards.

When you analyze someone like Tiger Woods when he was playing his most dominant golf, what made him so dominant was his long game. Yes, his short game was good, but he gained twice as many strokes on the field with his long game than he did with his short game. So my friend Ryan, for instance, he focused on the long game in the beginning, didn't care about his long game they did with his short game. So my friend Ryan, for instance, is he focused on the long game in the beginning, didn't care about his short game. He just became a great ball striker and then learned the short game. And he's a scratch golfer after two years of playing and he's 16 years old. Um, so obviously, obviously, I mean, he also, although, you know, I gotta say like genetically, whatever he's got going for him is not obvious. It's not like he's a super athlete.

He's a normal dude. He's maybe a bit on the taller side. But, you know, it's just an interesting, I like that you're kind of diving into that because it isn't as simple as just put in your time. Like, how you spend that time, how you approach it, what your physical limitations are. These things matter. Yeah, I mean, and that's when you say that he's sort of a normal dude. I mean, a lot of things, like the things that we could outwardly see about him, you know, if he could jump incredibly high or something like that,

or if he were a big guy, but that's actually often the case. I mean, so you mentioned that high jumper from the Bahamas. I mean, the thing that he had that was really special was a really long Achilles tendon and, you know, which is basically like a spring in the back of your leg that rockets you into the air. And so those aren't the kind of things that you really, you really see, you know, in many cases, some of these things are hidden from the eyes. Or I talk about some of my own, you know, I had genetic testing. It turns out I have these genes that, that caused me to respond really well to endurance training where my body really starts changing. And so there's still some mystery to it, right?

We don't know what seems to make some people's central nervous systems better set up to pick up skills quickly, but there are also kind of very small things. Like we don't know much about your friend's sort of real proportions, right? Like UK sport, when they figured out, before they hosted the Olympics in London, they put a lot of money into figuring out what makes someone successful at a particular sport.

So they realized some sports are kind of simple. You know, rowing, you want someone with a strong cardiovascular system, certain sort of bone proportions, and they went around and started measuring people. And they found a woman named Helen Glover who'd never rowed before, really long legs, short brachial index, which is the ratio of her forearm to her total arm, leverage advantage for pulling stuff. I said, hey, have you ever tried rowing? No, she hadn't.

Three years later, she's the first gold medalist for the home team at the Olympics and becomes a national icon. And these aren't things where you would look at her and say, oh, she's got a short brachial index. But it does make for a biomechanical advantage for what she has to do. And thankfully, she had been a good athlete in a number of things but not great. They looked at her and said, hey, we can make you great in something else. And that's very contrary to the 10,000-hour rule, right?

You take an adult athlete and put them in something else like already as an adult. Yeah. No, that's totally fascinating. That's something I want to talk a little bit more when we get to it is where the future – because you get that like growing up, you kind of, as a, as a kid, I mean, I played, I played baseball, uh, for a bit and then I played ice hockey for a bit and I never pursued them professionally. But if I, if I would have wanted to, uh, you know, you have, there is that age where you start coming into your body starts,

you know, you're, you get out of the awkward stage and you start being able to do things with your body. And if you want to take sports seriously, there are certain sports that genetically speaking, like good luck, like it doesn't matter. It's going to take, you know, maybe it'll take 50,000 hours to ever get to a point where you could, where you could really be, be at a play at a top level. But if you would have chose something else, maybe it's 5,000 hours because of like you say, your brachial index is better. If she would have known that a long time ago, she could have been the most dominant rower of all time. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah. And although I would say, and this is kind of a different issue, is that actually even – I'm concerned about people looking for some of those things too early because it looks like – I added actually an afterword about sports specialization to the paperback of the sports gene, and there's this growing pile of science showing that actually the typical route to elite status is having a sampling period early on, particularly before age 12 when you have all this brain flexibility

and it's sort of important to learn physical literacy, a variety of physical skills, where you should just be playing a bunch of different stuff and not focusing in yet. And so one of my concerns is that maybe eventually we go in the opposite direction where right now you're having everyone specialize and that's bad because it really limits their skills

and creativity as an athlete. But I hope if we look at people and say, hey, we can figure out physiologically what sport you should be in now, if that causes them to specialize too early, it's actually going to run contrary to what all the sports science is saying is the typical path, the Steve Nash path. The guy, two-time NBA MVP, didn't own a basketball until he was 13.

He played other sports. He was eight years behind me, and he's a normal-sized guy. Yeah, that totally makes sense. Probably ideally, you'd have a variety of sports. There's certain things. If you're at a certain height, you know, you're just not – you shouldn't be trying to make it in the NBA, for instance. I mean, of course, height can change in terms of growing. But if there are certain things, it's just like, why?

Why do that to yourself? But physically speaking, where you'd have a variety of things that are different where your body could be suited for. And then, I mean, probably a lot of it, then there is a point where like if physically, if you have the body for it, then a lot of the non-physical things, motivation, determination, intelligence,

kind of come into play. Absolutely. And that's since you mentioned the NBA and I actually did some analytics in a chapter called The Truvian NBA Player in the book. So you either need to be tall to be in the NBA or the guys that aren't tall can really jump, at least pretty well. The grand total number of guys who've ever been tested at the NBA pre-draft combine who

couldn't grab the rim is zero. So if you go out and you can't grab the rim then historical precedent says you have a zero chance of being in the nba yeah and coming back to golf if you can't drive the ball a certain distance you will never be on the tour i mean if it's just there's a data uh it's it's in in broadie's book he goes over the same type of analyses where uh there are certain things that if you cannot hit these benchmarks, forget it. It's just you would be the one person in the history of the sport. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah. So there are obviously a lot of beliefs out there in terms of like how race kind of inherently determines athletic potential. And this is, you talked about it, this is a very touchy subject, of course, and I think one you handled very well. So what can you kind of tell us about this? Yeah, so the, and as you mentioned it being a touchy subject, that's why when I discussed it in the book, I sort of take a little bit of a detour for a minute from sports and talk

about what race does and doesn't mean from a genetic perspective in the first place, right? So like most of the world genetic diversity is contained in Africa because all the rest of us migrated out of Africa very Africa pretty recently in evolutionary terms. And so if we just say a black athlete, like people say black athletes dominate running, well, in some ways that's true. I mean, every man who's been in an Olympic 100-meter final since the boycotted Olympics of 1980, whether it's homeland of the U.S., Canada, Jamaica, Netherlands, Portugal, they

all have their ancestry in this small area of the coast of West Africa. And in the book, I discuss why that is. But those people could not be more physiologically different than the people across the continent, the minority tribe in Kenya that dominates long-distance running, right? So they all have black skin because they have low-latitude ancestry and dark skin protects you from equatorial sunlight. But otherwise, they could not be more physiologically different. So there absolutely are traits that come from your geographic ancestry

that influence sports performance. And in America, because African Americans came from a very particular part of Africa, there are some traits that they have on average that are different than people of interest. What are some examples? Well, so for example, they'll have, well, some that affect sports performance

is they have lower hemoglobin. So that hemoglobin is the, carries oxygen in your bloodstream. And African Americans, as part of a suite of traits that help them adapt to malaria in West Africa, have lower hemoglobin. And they are highly underrepresented in endurance events, highly underrepresented.

Even at the college level, in the very longest distance events, you basically don't really see African-Americans represented anymore. And conversely, in- Funny enough, friends of mine, African-American friends of mine, it just comes right to mind, a few of them actually, are really fast sprinters. Endurance sucks. They don't even like, they played football. One of them played track.

He was a track runner and the other played football in high school. And both of them, super fast. Sprinting, endurance, terrible. Yeah, well, I mean, it's because of the zero-sum game. So on average, people from that part of the world have, just on average, not every individual, have a slightly higher proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers. Those are the kind that you need for sprinting, right? Just on average.

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

There's a reason why you won't ever see Usain Bolt being a competitor in the marathon and vice versa because it's a zero-sum game of muscle fibers. Yeah, we see similar things in the fitness world where some people's bodies respond to certain types of training better than others. The training that targets more type 2 fast twitch versus type 1 slow twitch. Again, I mean the science of it is very complicated and there's not that – I mean there are basic principles that if you want to get strong and you want to build muscle, you don't have to really get into the genetics of it. But I was reading up on that recently.

It's interesting. So you talk about how the ability to succeed in certain sports is influenced by genetics more than others. So for instance, basketball. What are some other examples? How does this work? What are some where you see genetics playing a big role versus others where you think it's not so much or it's not as heavily influenced?

Well, so, I mean, one of the points I talk about in the book is how actually the ability to hit a baseball is, nobody's really born. I thought it was those major league hitters had really fast reflexes. It turns out it's absolutely not the case. They have same reflex times as teachers, doctors, lawyers. I mean i outscored albert pujols on a test of simple reaction time but that's not impressive you pat yourself on the back yeah i mean he was in like the 65th percentile compared to a random group of college students so it wasn't like he was that good right it's just that they've learned through specific kinds of practice to interpret body

movements like rotation of a pitcher's shoulder and the flicker of the ball, which is the flashing pattern seams make to predict the future, basically. All the things, all the advice that people are given about hitting a ball, keep your eye on the ball, nonsense. We don't have a visual system capable of tracking an object

as its angular position changes that rapidly as it gets close to your head. You could close your eyes when the ball is halfway in. It wouldn't make a difference. Yeah, what is this that it's like by the time, because it's traveling, let's say, 100 miles an hour, I mean, you don't even have time to react. I mean, right when it leaves their hand, you have to start swinging before it even leaves their hand.

The time it takes just for you to see that a ball is in flight, for that information to cross the synapses to the back of your brain, and then even to start just your muscle twitching, not even the swing, is half the total flight time of the pitch. So there's no way. So in one sense, that's an entirely learned skill, and it's why in the first chapter I write about why softball pitchers can always strike out major league hitters.

At the same time, the higher, the faster the ball goes, the more important it is to be able to pick up those visual cues early in the pitch, which is why you see an average vision among major league hitters of 20-12, meaning they can see from 20 feet away, but I have to stand at 12 feet away to see. So there you have this skill that is in one sense completely learned, but then certain physical traits give people a distinct advantage as the ball speed gets faster and faster. Yeah, and that's a great example because it's just not obvious that visual acuity would be such a determining factor where having poor eyesight, well, then you're never going to be a good ball hitter if you have poor eyesight. Right, because the visual acuity doesn't matter

at all. It doesn't differentiate people at all until they've learned these specific skills that allow them to predict the future. So what I call physical hardware in the book, it only starts to matter once you've learned the specific skills. It doesn't differentiate people until they've gone through training. Yeah, and that kind of goes back to the point you were saying earlier, which is why you should be, you know, in the earlier ages, playing a bunch of different sports and kind of seeing where those take you. That's right.

That's right. And another one in you mentioned you know asking about sports where genes really matter i mean so i wasn't a national level runner and i you know the most famous exercise genetic study of all time is called the heritage family study and in one segment of that that i write a lot about 98 two generation families were put on identical cycling training plans these were sedentary people who hadn't trained. Split between four different university centers, trained for five months, every workout controlled in the lab for pretty high effort.

And most people improved the amount of oxygen they could use moderately. Some people didn't improve at all. And some people improved like crazy. And those geneticists they found a 21 gene predictor set so people had at least 19 of the good versions of the genes improved the amount of oxygen they could use three times as much as people who had fewer than 10 on identical training and really importantly baseline ability had a zero correlation with ability to improve zero so if you looked at that study and day one that pointed to the 10 people you said are the most talented today,

you would miss 100% of the people who ended the study the most talented. And I was one of those. I was diagnosed with early stages, well, sort of symptoms in my cardiovascular system consistent with early stages of emphysema two seasons before I was running at the U.S. National Championships in 800 meters. So it's, I think it's really important to kind of recognize that some of what we're learning in genetics means that we have to think about talent differently because it might not always be that thing that's manifesting on day one. It might be someone's ability to improve and they don't really know

that until you find the right training regimen for them, which might not be the best one for their training partner. Yeah, yeah, that totally makes sense. You know, it also makes you kind of wonder, you look at people. I played ice hockey growing up, like I said, and I didn't really realize how good professional athletes are until when I was a teenager. I mean, my friends, you know, we were good for our age on, you know teenager i mean my friends you know we were good for for our age and on you know the travel teams that we thought we were hot shit so we're in this

uh camp of this one uh guy he was he was playing the lightning at the time the lightning was the worst team in the league he was the worst he was the worst player in our eyes on the worst team in the league right he looked on tv looked terrible he looked like and he was a defenseman just horrible right so we're all talking we're all shit. Why are we at this guy's camp? Or, you know, we do these camps in the summer. He's terrible, whatever. And, uh, so a buddy of mine who was probably the best out of, out of us, he went on to play in college. I don't know where he went from there, but, um, he, he challenged this guy. His name was John, I think, uh, one-on-one right in front of everybody, a hundred, a hundred plus kids in this camp.. And John saw, like, okay, all right.

And this guy was so beyond. He could skate backwards twice as fast and twice as agilely as my friend could skate forward. So you see, and we all just were stunned. And then it gave us a new perspective on just how good anyone playing at a professional level is. But it makes you wonder, like, so you have the best of the best i mean you're pretty much always there's would you think that you're always looking at they almost it's genetic i mean it's kind of a luck of the draw thing but that there's something something genetically that allows them to perform at that level it's not just they practiced a lot and played you know since even take someone like tiger woods swinging a club at two years old

there are probably things about his body that allowed him to perform the way that he did that nobody else could do unless they had the body. Tiger Woods could balance standing on his father's palm when he was six months old. For anyone who has a six-month-old, they know that's extremely abnormal. That doesn't mean that he's necessarily going to grow up

and be a great balancer or a great golfer or whatever, but it absolutely means that he can start practicing golf a lot earlier than a normal kid. Yeah. Which is why he was demonstrating his swing at two. I think he was on TV at like two years old. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. And then he was beating everyone at his country club at 11 or something like that. Yeah, so he was obviously abnormal in physical development. And we can't say exactly how that affected him and his ultimate progression in golf, but it certainly allowed him to start playing a lot earlier than a normal kid would because they wouldn't have developed the motor skills or the strength to be able to do that.

So yeah, I think there's basically every trait. It looks like from, even though we don't know the specific genes for some of them, you can use statistical methods to study identical and fraternal twins to find out if there are genetic contributions. And the question is always whether it becomes whether the genetic contributions are basically small or big, but they are always there, essentially. And so I think absolutely there's always something there. But I also think we can do a lot better job of helping more people sort of find where their talents are because, again, coming out of exercise genetics,

the revolution that came out of medical genetics was to show that because you have a different gene involved in the acetaminophen metabolism than I do, I might need three Tylenol to get the same effect you only need one for. Maybe it just doesn't work for me at all. Same thing is showing up. Painkillers don't do do much of anything for her they were i mean i don't take them often at all but it's it's strange so one advil if i have a really bad headache or something it'll go away for her doesn't really do much of anything yeah and so that that's like well known

for some drugs now the same thing's coming out of exercise genetics that the that the medicine of training it doesn't affect people the same way No one prescription affects two people the same way. And so I think there are probably a lot of people out there thinking, well, I just got a bad draw. But actually, they haven't found the right environment for their genome, which is completely inimitable in the world. Even if they have an identical twin, there are some differences. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and that's one of the questions on this here. Might as well just get into it. So yeah, I mean, you think it was like that this would be kind of the ultimate goal, right, of exercise genetics would be in line with medical genetics, and that's one of the questions on this here. Might as well just get into it. So, yeah, I mean, you think of it like that this would be kind of the ultimate goal, right, of exercise genetics would be in line with medical genetics, and that would be personalization based on our, you know, unique makeups. So how do you, like, what are some examples of this? Like, how would you see this working in the future if we had the understanding that we needed to have

and the technology and whatever? I think the first thing is, thing, in a very small way, it's being implemented with respect to kind of injury things. So there are some NFL players now who have been tested for the versions of their collagen genes, which is basically like the body's glue and pulled together tendons and ligaments. And certain versions make some people much more likely to tear their ACL, for example. And so some of those guys are doing what geneticists now call prehabilitation, which is sort of exercises to strengthen support muscles

to try to prevent an injury from happening. And then there's a gene that's well known to increase the chance that someone has permanent damage from concussion or repeated concussions and to increase the recovery time they need. And so I think a use that we should really be actively thinking about is finding out who has that version of the gene. And so all these brains that are getting dissected of NFL players, that gene is highly overrepresented among the guys who are ending up having their brains dissected after NFL

careers. And so it might really be an important tool for personalizing concussion management. Those people might need more time out than the next guy, or they just can't take as many hits during the week as the next guy. And so I think the first places we're going to see it is in some of this injury and illness, and then I think it will – there are already companies that are marketing it for actual training and diet and things like that. But in most cases, their marketing is way outstripping their science.

Yeah, yeah. Actually, I just talked with on the previous podcast somebody from a company called GeneSolve, if you've heard of them. I haven't heard of that one, but I get contacted by companies fairly frequently. I know there was one called Muscle Genes and DNA Fit and things like that. Yeah, I've heard of both of those. called muscle genes and DNA fit and things like that. Yeah, I've heard of both of those. So there are some reasonable premises to some of this,

but in most cases, what people are being, you know... Yeah, what you're being sold is... It's just not well constrained. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I totally understand. And for most of it, you'd be better off measuring your physiology directly rather than the genes, you know? It's like, why measure your height genes when you could use a tape measure? You know, you're better off measuring directly than indirectly. Yeah.

Yeah, and then there are also things, I mean, in terms of like, well, what are you actually going for? If you're somebody that just wants to get into shape and, you know, lose some weight and be healthy, I mean, we don't need any fancy genetic research for that. That's basic nutrition, basic exercise. That works on everybody. Yeah, that's the thing. Most people have so many things that they can improve just from the get-go that they don't need to be thinking about all the avant-garde stuff for quite a while.

Eat better, exercise better, sleep better, and there's probably some basic supplements, vitamin D, omega-3, stuff like that that you get that stuff in and it can almost feel like you have a new life. Yeah, there's actually that same gene that's involved in concussion recovery. I know there's some people that are starting to personalize. It looks like one of the few genes that might actually be useful for personalizing some supplements.

It changes how people metabolize omega-3 a little bit. I think we'll see some of that with personalized diet. But again, some of the places that are doing that, they're way out ahead of the science with the marketing. Yeah, yeah. So in the course of researching and writing the book, what are a couple of discoveries that just kind of surprised you the most? What are the things that stand out that you just weren't expecting?

that just kind of surprised you the most? What are the things that stand out that you just weren't expecting? I'd say there's one chapter where, well, let me say, I sort of knew very well that physical activity that we undertake alters our dopamine system, you know, the brain's chemical system for experiencing pleasure and reward from things that you do, whatever, drugs, sex, food, whatever. The basic necessities. Yeah, exactly.

But I didn't realize that scientists who study it know that the reverse is true, that differences in the way our dopamine systems are set up and in our dopamine genes and dopamine receptor genes cause some people to feel a much greater sense of pleasure and reward from being physically active. And in some cases, this goes to the extreme, where some people really won't feel okay unless they're constantly being physically active. And these scientists, they breed all kinds of animal models for this. I mean, it's like you just take a group of mice, and all mice run voluntarily a little bit,

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

fascinating and then sort of terrifying because- Yeah, idiocracy. Did you see the movie? Have you seen the movie Idiocracy? I haven't, no. Oh, it's funny. Mike Judge, the guy who did Office Space, he was about to do it. It's where basically the premise is all like you fast forward 20 uh 500 years right so uh one of the guys gets you know you put in a cryogenic chamber forgotten about 500 years goes by and basically all the stupid people have outbred the smart people and in the future the average iq is like 70 and uh so it's that kind of concept

gotcha and i mean one of the things that i found scary about it though was when these scientists IQ was like 70, and so it was that kind of concept. Gotcha. And, I mean, one of the things that I found scary about it, though, was when these scientists were then talking to me and saying, well, you know, we've experimented with, you can breed these animals that have a really high drive to run, and then you can suppress it by giving them ADHD medication, right? Because that changes the dopamine environment in their brain, and they don't feel the need to be physically active anymore to feel okay.

And so if you think about extrapolating that to like what happens with a lot of kids is they have a high drive to move around and you want them to sit down for 10 hours straight so you give them a medication that changes the dopamine environment in their brain, they do exactly what the mice do. So that's great if you want them to sit still for 10 hours a day, not so great if you want them to have the highest possible biological drive to be physically active. Yeah, Kelly Starrett, I don't know if you're familiar with him um yeah yeah so

i had him a couple episodes ago and he was talking just about this uh and advocating the use of standing tables and things and how that changes with kids that you this exact thing where you know some kids just have a very strong drive to be physically active. And sitting there for hours and hours every day just doesn't sit well with their bodies, period. But if they were standing, that changes it and, you know, prevents some of the hyperactive type of behavior. Yeah, I mean, I really enjoyed Kelly's book. I actually got a copy of it as a present for someone, and I think that's a smart suggestion on his part.

Yeah, I think he said he was doing, I think the school that his kids go to, he's getting it put in there, and he's on a campaign to get this knowledge out there. That's great. I'd be a supporter of that for sure. I was totally unrelated to my own book. I mean, I did a little bit of reporting in Japan for my own book because there's some government funding for genetic studies of athletes there. But I was really there

because my fiance had a fellowship there for her own book reporting and I went there and she was looking around at schools because she's writing about education. And I was used to thinking of a Japanese school as being like where all these kids would be sitting really quiet and stoic.

They have these recesses that are like the circus. It's like kids running around on stilts and unicycles. They're crashing and, you know, like nobody's fawning all over them. It is – it's bonkers. That sounds fun. And then they come in and they're, you know, kind of chill out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's funny.

All right. kind of chill out yeah yeah yeah that's funny um all right well this is i usually try to keep them around 40 minutes or so where people go it's getting it's getting along it's getting along so where can people find more where can they find you and obviously i'm going to link the book in the in the post on on the website so they can find the book right there but uh if they want to if they want to check you out where can they find you? Yeah, they can find out at a site at thesportsgene.com, and there's a contact page there that forwards directly to me, and I'm on Twitter at David Epstein. Awesome. Sounds good.

Well, thanks a lot, David. It was great. I think it's definitely just a very interesting subject. I enjoyed the book a lot, and I definitely recommend everyone listening to pick up the book and read it. I think you'll like it. If you have any interest here, if you're a sports fan at all, you're going I enjoyed the book a lot and I definitely recommend everyone listening to pick up the book and read it. I think you'll like it. If you have any, if you have any interest here, if you're a sports fan at all, you're going to like the book. Hey, thanks for having me. Pleasure to talk to you. Yeah, sure. Hey, it's Mike again. Hope you liked the podcast.

If you did go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two, where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. Also head over to my website at www.muscleforlife.com where you'll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you'll also find a bunch of different articles that I've written. I release a new one almost every day, actually. I release kind of like four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I'm involved in over at muscleforlife.com.

All right. Thanks again. Bye.