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Youth Inc. with Greg Olsen
"Range" Author David Epstein on Talent, Trainability, and Why Constraints Build Better Athletes
00:47:38
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- [00:00]
A
What's up everybody? Welcome back to a really special episode here on you think. You know. Today's guest is someone who and they joke because when I book my own guests it's people that I'm really into. And this is a best selling author of the sports gene range and he has a new book coming out called Inside the Box. David Epstein. David, I'm a huge fan of your work and I just think you're one of the most relevant voices to what we cover here on on you think. So we really appreciate you taking a couple of minutes to to chat with us today.
- [00:32]
B
I really appreciate you having me and was tickled when you slid into my DMs introducing yourself as if I wasn't from Chicago and had every idea who you are.
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A
Youth sports in America are at a crossroads and I'm here to help lead the conversation forward. I'm Greg Olson. Each week we're sitting down with top athletes, coaches and more to talk about what's working, what's broken and what's next. Welcome to you think. There's a handful of people. I don't do it a lot. I typically let my team kind of pick guests that they think are relevant. But I'm an avid book collector. I could show you multiple of your books. We had Michael Lewis on. We had Malcolm Gladwell earlier in the season. Like I am a huge reader. I always joke like all my best information I've stolen from people smarter than me and you are one of those people. So I was first exposed to your work with the sports gene. I'm a dad, obviously played professionally and had my own career. But now the inspiration of you think is just, you know, how do we raise kids in this youth sports world? And that's in essence the aha moment that led us to create you think. So I want to go back to the beginning and we're going to cover a wide range of ideas here. Pun intended, take me back. I think one of the biggest questions people have is was your child born an athlete?
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B
Yeah.
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A
And you make your child an athlete and I think those are a lot of the ways that people are making decisions in, in today's landscape. And as someone who's studied that, I think your voice is super relevant.
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B
Yeah. I mean there's obviously some of both. Right. Is that that genes matter. I mean that's a lot of what my first book was about, but not always in the ways that we think. So I would say the, an important message from that book that that came out to me was was that Trainability is really an incredibly important kind of talent. So we know people are, you know, maybe surpassingly familiar with the idea that we've learned because of differences in physiology and genetics, that no two people respond to medicine the same way. Right. Like someone might need three Tylenol while someone else needs one because of differences in their genes involved in acetaminophen metabolism turns out to be similar for training. So that no two people respond to identical training the same way because of differences in their psychology, their physiology, all these things. And so I think one important message for parents in that book is that we're often mistaking, just like biological maturation or training physiology fit for, for potential. This is one of the reasons, like so much youth sports, you see this relative age effect, you know, where kids born in the early part of the birth cohort are just deemed to have higher potential, but it's really that they're 9, 10, 11 months older and other kids haven't gotten a chance to train the same way. So I think talent is a real thing, but trainability is the most important kind of talent and it doesn't always show up immediately. And so I think we have to be careful about writing people off based on what we see at a given moment before they'd have had a chance to kind of try different types of training and see what connects with them.
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A
That's so fascinating. And we're going to get into the age and puberty and my boys are seventh and eighth grade, my daughter's in seventh grade. We're like right in that wheelhouse where some kids are 62 and some kids are 52 and everyone thinks that's the differentiator. We're going to get to that in a minute, but I want to stay with what you're talking about. Is it fair to say that this applies, this whole, like genetic, this whole sports gene element that you studied, does it apply both physically and is there a mental. We all know tall parents make tall kids, big parents make big kids within ranges of, of of, you know, kind of differences. But was this is the same thing for the mental approach is to your point. Trainability, coachability, mental toughness, the ability to have grit. Like are those non physical assets also passed down or can we teach them both?
- [04:18]
B
So elements of them are for sure passed down. There's actually something that scientists call the first law of behavioral genetics, which is that all behavioral traits have some genetic component. Everyone that we've studied so far has some genetic component, but zero of them have are fully genetic. Okay, and so it's in fact to make it simple, it's like very often using statistical methods, you find that about half. It's about half and half. Basically. That's not always true, but it's kind of a rule of thumb. But one of the most interesting things to me in researching the sports gene was that some of the things that I assumed were just acts of will, like the drive to do a certain type of training turn out to often have an important basis in someone's physiology. Like we, you know, have chemical messaging systems in our brains that make us feel senses of reward for, you know, food or drugs or working out. And different people get different sense of reward from different types of physical activity. And so I think finding what fits and gives you that that feeling of reward and internal motivation requires some kind of experimentation. So if someone isn't feeling that for a certain type of physical activity, they shouldn't just say, I'm broken. It's actually you can experiment with different things and find something that will kind of internally fire you up more that, that, that fits some of your innate traits.
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A
Well, I think, I think that's so interesting because some of the questions that we get from our parent, from parents and our listeners is how do I know if my kid falls into these boxes? Right. Everyone talks about there's these wide range of outcomes and the predisposition both mentally and emotionally, and all that comes at various ranges for all these different kids. So when you factor in all these different factors, how do we know? Like, how do I know I'll just take my own kids for this? How do I know where my three kids fit into these boxes? Are they highly internally motivated? Are they going to be have great emotional intelligence? Are they going to have grit? Like, is it just trial and error? Is it you just hope for the best? Like, how do parents find out whether these traits apply to their son or daughter or not?
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B
Yeah, I mean, some of it is trial and error. There's, you know, at like elite levels of certain sports that are very directly physiologically based, you know, like elite distance running and cycling. There are things that you can study in people's muscle fibers that will tell you a lot what they're best fit for. But that's a smaller number of sports where you're really going to get value from that. And we're talking about people that are already at a really advanced level. And so for the most part, I think some of it is some trial and error. But what, what I would do is build in like a reflect a reflective Practice with your kids. So there's some really interesting research showing that one of the habits of, of kids and, and people developing in general who get off of performance plateaus. So let me give you actually specific studies. Some of the famous studies were done in the Netherlands tracking kids from about age 12 up to adulthood. Some of them went on to be like runners up in the World cup, you know, and it followed them in school also. And there were certain physiological traits that they had to have if they were going to the top level. Like if a, if a kid couldn't hit 7 meters a second sprinting, which isn't that fast, but it's, it's a little fast, by age 12 they were not going to be a professional soccer player. Like there were certain physiological cutoffs. But if they made that cutoff, one of the most important things was this behavioral trait called self regulated learning where if you go and look at videos, like I've seen videos of these kids when they're 12, they're sometimes going up to the trainer or coach and saying, you know, I think I've mastered this thing we're doing. I think I need to work on this other thing. Like they're taking responsibility for their own learning. So that's called self regulated learning. And eventually they have this system of what's the thing I need to work on? What's a way I can try to work on that? Here's the experiment. Then I'm going to reflect on that and do it over and over and over again. And so I think helping a kid build that reflective practice of it doesn't have to be as systematic as that. But well, what, what met your expectations and what didn't about this practice or this sport experience, like what do you think you need to work on? What were you good at and what were you not so good at? And helping attune them like get the most learning they can out of these experiences and they start to kind of evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses a little more explicitly I think is a really important thing. And that will help kids find the place where they fit. Because it turns out that we don't get all the learning we possibly could get just from doing stuff you actually want to do explicit reflection. This shows up all over the place. Like cardiac surgery teams. There's studies where they're randomized into either teams that do procedures 100% of the time or 80% of the time, procedures 20% reflecting on what went well and what went wrong. And the 8020 group actually improves their performance at A faster clip. So I think building in a reflective practice while you help your kid try things.
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A
That's fascinating. And again, like everything else, I'm sure there's going to be kids that are more adapt to doing that at 12, and maybe other kids are not emotionally capable and, you know, mature enough to handle maybe 12, 14, 15. But yeah, to your point, that's up to every parent, every coach to kind of figure out what buttons to push on each kid, what levers to pull to bring out the best. That's, that's super fascinating because we spend so much time thinking repetition. And I know in, in a lot of your work, you've kind of challenged the 10,000, 10,000 hour rule and how relevant that is for, again, generally speaking, for everybody. We've always been taught that the best way to learn is deep learning, very innate, you know, very deep level training and time on task and all of these traits. And here you are saying we're actually finding greater development, less work, more mental practices around what that. Look, I think that would surprise a lot of people totally.
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B
And it's not to say that it's not to diminish the role of like deep practice by any stretch of the imagination. But I think what we understand about development now is that especially early on, you actually want this broader base that now people who study it have been calling the last few years physical literacy, meaning it's like this broader base of physical capabilities and athletic tools that kind of scaffold later technical knowledge. There was just this huge review out in the journal Science, or like the most prestigious science journal in the world, looking at 30,000 careers. And this included like musicians, chess players, athletes and scientists. And the pattern was the, that if you wanted peak elite youth performance, you should specialize really early. But if you wanted peak adult performance, you actually want to build this broader base. So there was actually a negative correlation between some of the things that built peak youth performance and that built peak adult performance. You want this broader base early on where you're not diving deep right away. Like, I always remember this guy named Ian Yates who was running some of the Olympic development, like talent development programs for the uk. I always remember him telling me that kid, that parents would call him and say, I want my kid doing what that gold medalist is doing right now, not what that gold medalist was doing when they were also 12 or 13, which is something totally different.
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A
And I think we all fall victim to that, right? It's, you know, you want the, the guy who played in the major leagues, who hit a Bunch of home runs. You want him to train. Your son had a hit in seventh grade, but maybe he doesn't remember how he hit in seventh grade and he only remembers how he hit after 10 years in the big leagues or in minor, you know, in NBA basketball, you know, whatever the sport may be. Stay on that study because I actually read that study too. And of course we spend a lot of time on this show talking about specialization. It's probably the number one most discussed conversation at every dinner table, at every friend group dip, you know, parent dinner party, you know, school function. I know it was a big part of your work with range. And you talk about how in this like super specialized world that really generalists tend to have the most long term success and whether that's in sports or just in life, business, careers, family. Yeah, dive in a little because I read that the one you, the article you just quoted. I read that front to back because I've always been such a strong proponent of non specialization and being adapted to everything. Our kids play a sport a season and they fall behind some of the other kids. So right. We've had those conversations at home saying, all right, they bat at the end of the lineup. This kid who only plays baseball bats at the top of the lineup. Are we doing this wrong? So again, as someone who has studied that intensely, give our listeners what the facts present.
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B
Yeah, I mean and I'll give the facts and then I think there is. I want to come back to what you said there because the facts show that there are many, many ways to the top, but that the typical pattern is what scientists call a sampling period early on where someone has a, they learn a broad range of skills in sports. This is like movement variability turns out to be very important. So the differences between what's called.
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A
So movement variability meaning lateral change of direction, linear speed, jumping, landing, just broad macro level physical movement.
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B
Absolutely. And specifically lots of different, what's called anticipatory situations. So let's say if you've played at least three different. What's attacking sports. So where you have to. So this would be something where bodies and balls are moving at a pace faster than you can. Really not like running and swimming, you know, basically, but, but even, even wrestling because you have to react to, to body movements before your reflexes are quick enough to do it. You have to be seeing things ahead and it forces your brain to try to anticipate based on the pieces in front of you, what's, what's happening. And if you've played at least three of those before about age 12, you have an advantage for then picking up any future skills going forward. It looks almost exactly like kids who grow up bilingual, where they're actually behind in some of their language skills early on and. But they have no deficit in the long run and they have an advantage for picking up subsequent languages and it's like the same ages. So these look like really similar systems where if you build in these kind of generalized problem solving skills that aren't so specific to solving one problem over and over, it lays this base for you that makes you better able to learn later on. And it shows up again. It shows up not just in sports skills, but in cognitive skills as well, that you want this broader base that puts you behind sometimes early on, but that scaffolds later knowledge. But the problem, I think it also, by the way, sorry, before I move on to that, the issue that you were talking about with your kids, because I want to come back to that. The science study is a compilation of a whole bunch of other studies. And all of those researchers have been studying these things for 15 years at least. And they put in three buckets. The advantages that they detected for this early generalization. The first one was what's called match quality, which is that the earlier you make someone pick, the more likely you get the wrong person in the wrong thing. Basically, it's like the more likely you're making them, you know, marry their high school sweetheart. Not that. And that totally works out for some people, but it's not the right move for, in aggregate for most people. Like, you want to give them a chance to gather some data. So match quality hiring.
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A
Why? It's college admissions. Right? You could get the smart. If you interviewed, if you had three applicants, you could get three really smart people. But if you have 10,000 applicants, your odds are greater.
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B
Exactly, exactly. So match fit. The next one is this generalized model I've been talking about where when you get this broad base, you're better able to learn any skills going forward. And then the third one was resistance to physical and psychological injury. Basically that when people have a broader base and a better fit, they're much, much more resistant to burnout and to physical injuries. So in fact, in one of the studies they cited, they didn't really blow this out in the paper, but it's in the citations. It was a tracking study looking at kids developing injuries basically over about four years. And the best predictor of a kid suffering what they call what's called a adult style overuse injury. So something that's Going to like probably affect them forever was they were playing one sport and one sport only nine or more months of the year. And it wasn't just about sport volume because some kids that played sports all year round but diversified, they had huge volume. But there was a protective effect of diversifying the movement variability. There's, there's all kinds of, like I spent some time with Cirque du Soleil when I was researching range. This didn't make it into the book, but probably should have where they were looking at some of this data and made their performers, because they have all like these former Olympians and all this stuff, they made their performers learn the basics of three other performers skill sets, not because they were going to perform it, but because they were hoping it would reduce injury rates. And they measure, it's a Canadian company, they measure their injuries next to Canadian gymnastics. It reduced their injuries by a third, diversifying these movement patterns. And there's all kinds of reasons, we can speculate why, but the fact is it works.
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A
That's fascinating. All right, so let me be devil's advocate now, right? So I'm going to take the counter position. I'm one of these families and I say, Johnny, Sally, my daughter, my son, they aren't the best athlete in the school. Right. It's easy for Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Judge and LeBron James. It's easy for them to be a seasonal athlete, walk into any gym, walk onto any field. And whether or not they've been practicing the skill of said sport for the last five months is really irrelevant. They are uniquely athletic, they're uniquely gifted and they can survive. Maybe my son or daughter doesn't fit into that category. Most people don't. What, what do you say to them when they say, listen, our best opportunity for our son or daughter to get good enough at something to be a high school athlete, to be a collegiate athlete, whatever the end goal is, is their only avenue in our mind right now is to pick a sport and develop all their time and energy to developing the skill set in the short term to be able to keep up. What, what would your counter to that be?
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really important argument because right. Some of the athletes that are big and strong and fast, they're gonna be able to play whatever they want in high school. And so, so the argument, so we know what the science is, but I think the argument in, in like the subtext is should I optimize for short term development even if it is at odds with long term Development like, does that make sense? Because I think the, the science shows pretty clearly now that, that optimizing for short term development really early on will undermine long term development in most cases. And yet there are cases where maybe you should do that. I think it's a problem, it's a structural problem because you can't as a parent kind of withdraw from the system because this, the system is forcing some of this. Like when I lived in.
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A
They're keeping up with the Joneses element.
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B
Exactly. I mean, when I lived in New York City, at one point I lived across the street from a U8 travel soccer team. Right. Is there a human being in the world who thinks 7 year olds can't find good enough competition in a city of 9 million people that they need to travel? No, but that's that adult's economic interest. Right. It's a pipeline. So if you're not on U8, you can't be on U9, etc. It's not the kids development. They probably spend more time traveling than playing. But the problem is the way the structures are set up. It's so competitive. The selection is occurring at such an early age, which again is why we get that relative age effect that you may have to be more specialized just to not be able to play anymore at all or else you have no opportunities. The contrast is like just coming off the Winter Olympics.
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A
Right.
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B
Norway just dominated another Winter Olympics thoroughly and I think to a historic degree. And they're not just good at Winter Olympics. They, they won beach volleyball, they have some of the best runners, golf, tennis, soccer. And that's a country with a population about the size of metropolitan Atlanta. And they view mass participation as aligned with elite performance in the end. So they have a national ban on sorting kids before the age of 13. So you're not allowed to deselect kids before that age. So that I think would be a better system if we weren't deselecting kids. But if you're in this system that we have where kids are getting deselected so early, what are you going to do? Like they may have to focus just to be allowed to compete, but it is going to undermine their long term development. So it's, it's, it's what psychologists call collective trap. Right. You can't just withdraw as an individual parent. So that's why I think it's important, you know, talking about some of the things you're talking about and that hopefully we can slowly have some structural change.
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A
Everything you're saying, I'm literally thinking like I've lived every one of these steps into varying degrees with all three of my children. And you know, I, I, I have younger families that reach out to us or just people I know in town. And when they ask me, they're like, what did you do? I'm like, well, I'm going to tell you what we did when they were 10. But now I'm going to tell you what I would do if they were 10 again. Because a lot of the things we did, I wouldn't do again. Right. And, and we had great moments and we had great memories. And back then when you're playing travel baseball, you were doing it with your friends and yes, we would travel to Florida and to Texas at 10U baseball, we did it right. Like my hands in the air. But we did it with your buddies at school. We did it with kids that practice two or three times together. And then we went and tested ourselves against teams from other. Those days are clearly done. There is no team. There is collection of talent development is completely dead in most cases of youth sports. But I think you presenting the data and not just us giving anecdotal evidence of Patrick Mahomes and all these, you know, famous athletes that everyone knows, hey, he played high school baseball, he played high school football. I think the science behind it, that's not just cherry picking isolated moments and saying we're looking at decades of sample sizing. If you think your kid's going to be the exception to that rule, more power. I hope that's the case. But what history tells us is more likely than not your kid's not going to be the exception to the rule. So here's the data and here's the path that you should be traveling and then people can make up their mind as they will.
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B
Yeah, I mean it's tough. Like we, we need, we need collective change overall. And I think it's going to take time because in the US we have so many athletes. I mean, in most sports we just have more. Like, I think of, I was a Division 1800 meter runner. And so in my sport and track and field, we probably, the NCAA System probably supports 30 to 40,000 young adults in serious training. That's probably equal to the rest of the world combined because nobody else has a system like that. And so we can have terrible development and we're still going to have a ton of. Because the talent funnel is so big, we're still going to have a ton of people coming out at the top. And so I think unlike places like Norway, Australia, that Have really invested in these developmental pipelines. We've much more invested in funnels, which. And our funnels are so big we haven't really had to focus on individual development. And so we don't, we kind of don't have that necessity. So I think we burn a lot of individuals, but we'll still do fine at the top because we have such a, you know, such a big funnel.
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A
Yeah, it's like an optimization conversation. Right. Like, are we incentivized to optimize our pipelines and our streams or to your point, we're going to be good enough to compete where in a country like Norway, if they don't optimize every athlete and they don't reach the ceiling of every potential suit, you know, every potential, you know, athlete in that pipeline, if they don't get the right athlete to the top and then maximize, they'll never compete.
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B
Yeah, they're screwed.
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A
To your point, we're kind of spoiled in the sense of we don't really have to do it perfect and we can still be very good. But I want to change subjects because you said something before that was super interesting to me when you were talking about, you know, it's, it runs very parallel to bilingual children and you know, you hear all the time that kids are born. I have twins, so I have boy, girl, twins. They're both 17 years old, seventh grade, 13 years old. They could not be any different minded. Their brains don't work right. One can, you know, one's a, you know, a writer and can speak and public speak. One's in math. Like right brain, left brain.
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B
Yeah. To the, to the people who have fraternal twins, believe in genetics. I hear right, because they're, I'm living
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A
it in my household. They were born at the exact same moment and they are very different personality. But here's my question. In the same sense that people are born, right? Right brain, left brain, strong in math, strong in languages, science, whatever it is you brought up attacking sports, Right. Basketball, more instinctual sports. I think of like my older son that's more of his strength. Not going to get on the 100 meter dash and blow anybody away. But on a basketball court, some feel some sense. Spatial awareness, instincts much more his strength. I think of my daughter a lot more macro. She runs track and field. Get on the starting line, blow the gun and she'll rip. Do you believe some kids are predisposed to the types of sports they could excel at? Like, and is that just a pure nature element of what their brain wiring is at an early age to make someone better at swimming, diving, and track and field, as opposed to lacrosse and soccer.
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B
Yeah. I mean, I don't think anyone has a perfect answer to this, but I think there's no question that there are these kind of innate proclivities, but they also dovetail with things like what, what someone you saw do something that excited you. Right. But. But. But some of those things have innate components. Right. It's like you see somebody do something and it fires you up in a way that maybe it didn't fire somebody else up. So there's like something that. That clicks in there. And whether that clicking is totally because of your innate capacities, whether it's because of something in your home environment, I think that's very, very difficult to untangle. But. But it doesn't really matter if it came about via genetics or if it came about via your genetics in some environment, because it's a thing that's there that you're not really sure exactly how it got there. But I think that. Looking for that. But I think that is absolutely the case. And I think that's why you want to give kids sort of some exposure to various things, if you can and see, like, what lights that spark. There's so much attention on looking for prodigies. Right. Like after I wrote the sports gene, I get this huge flood of parents wondering if their kid was a prodigy. You know, is their kid Tiger Woods?
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A
Or.
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B
Or. Or I would get a lot of music, Mozart, whatever. When you look back through those stories, like, the Tiger woods story is not how we normally tell. He said himself, my father never asked me to play golf. It was always me driving him crazy to play golf. His father did give him a putter at seven months old, but it. It was just something he was done with giving story this way.
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A
It's a better story. Yeah.
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B
He wasn't telling him to play golf. He was like, I'm done with this thing. He sawed it off and just gave it to him as a toy. And it turned out that, you know, Tiger was very physically precocious or Mozart. Like, he was driving his father crazy to start playing music when he was a little kid. So those kind of prodigies, they announce themselves, they only come up in a very small number of activities. It's usually playing classical music, golf, and chess, because these are very particularly structured activities, and they drive their parents crazy. And then the parents either can respond or not. So you don't have to worry about missing a kid like that. Like, they. They will Announce themselves for the. For the rest of humanity. The best way to. To figure out if they have that spark is actually to let them try some different things and see what kind of lights that. That fire for them. You know, give them. Give them some experience. And it could be things in the sport itself, like a feeling they get. I mean, I had played some football, basketball, baseball in high school, but I wasn't growing, and I want to do college sports turn. Turn to running, and that feeling of improvement just kind of, like, lit a fire in me. I didn't know the 800 meters was even an event until somebody forced me to run it. But that feeling just, like, sparked me, and I just wanted to keep going. And so I think giving. Trying to give kids, like kids insight into themselves, all humans, insight into themselves is constrained by their roster of previous experiences. And so they've had a very limited menu of experiences. Chances that they've gotten the insight about what they're gonna be best at is very, very low.
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A
My unscientific observation is, what is it about really, really successful authors that have running backgrounds? I feel like I've spoken to many accomplished who. When they talk about their. Their past sports successes, a lot of them were like, collegiate runners and still remain, like, active adult runners. Is that a. Is that. Am I on to something, or is that just a coincidence?
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B
No, I think it's totally a thing. And it's interesting. Like, there are a ton of books written about, like, by Runners for Run. I mean, I was just doing a Q and A with the CEO of the Atlantic. His book all about. It's a biography of him via running.
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A
Yeah, there's something there.
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B
Yeah. And I think some of it is that to be a writer and to be a runner, you're okay spending a lot of time on your own, in your own head. So I think that's one of the things, like, when I'm writing a book, like, I just finished one, and it's a grueling process. No, there's no structure, except for the structure that I make, period. And it's a lot of time in your own head structuring your own work. And so Haruki Murakami, one of my favorite novelists, wrote, wrote a book called what I Talk About When I Talk About Running, where he basically talks about how he starts doing endurance running training to get ready to write a novel, because he's gonna, again, have to be disciplined with himself, you know, and sitting all day. So I think. I don't know all the answers, but I think there's some commonality in the ability to structure your own training and spend a lot of time by yourself, basically. Not sure how if that speaks well
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A
of us, but now some. Somebody's gonna test that. But that's just my observation. All right, I wanna dive into your new book. It's coming out here soon, Inside the Box, pre ordered, ready to rock.
- [29:55]
B
Thank you.
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A
But something that I think is super relevant. And then I'd love you to kind of give us a sense of some of the other areas. But one particularly relevant section that you dive into is called like environment architect. Right. How do we as coaches, parents, whoever the adult is that's building these experiences in these moments for the kids to. To partake in? How do we create these. These moments where there is enough structure that there's order, but there's also enough freedom that there is no fear of failure. There is internal creativity. You touched on it a little bit earlier with like giving people this freedom to go out there and explore. I find it to be a fascinating kind of conversation. I know some other authors have dipped their toe into these conversations, but define environmental like architecture in regards. Especially in regards to Inside the Box, your new work.
- [30:44]
B
Yeah. So that that term, environment architect comes out of something called the constraints led approach to. To motor skill learning. And it conceives of the coach as, instead of kind of a lecturer, a teacher at the front of the room as that environment architect, where their role is really to set up an environment to put in place constraints that force the learner to then explore and find their own best solutions. And it's been around for a while, but it's having a real public moment because Victor Wembanyama and Shohei Ohtani recently mentioned that they were. They were using it and why? I think it's kind of simple in some ways, but brilliant. Well, let me give you an example of ways I've seen this first. So a really simple example. When I was in Australia learning about their sports development. It's an amazing sports country. It's like 16 million people or 20 million people or something. They have a lot of pro sports, so they have to cultivate a lot of athletes. I was at an Olympic development swimming club and instead of showing the kids, here's what you do with your elbow and here's how you angle your arm. They put hoops of different sizes under the water and the kids had to swim through without touching them.
- [31:52]
A
And.
- [31:53]
B
And that forced them to get their body as linear as possible. And each one of them comes up with their own the solution that is unique to their physiology. So instead of this cookie cutter, this is how you do it. It's, here's the thing you have to do, you have to do. It's called self organizing, which is you use your physiology to solve this problem. And so I think in some ways it's a recognition of what we've learned about how different people really are physiologically and that the best movement solution for each person is actually going to be somewhat different. So you want to try to force them into a place where they have to solve that on their own instead of just copying a solution. And you can do this in all kinds of ways. I mean, some of the soccer research shows you should put people at a disadvantage, you know, small sided game, maybe a weird shaped field and 4 on 7 or something like that. And it will immediately force people to, to explore solutions in a way that they wouldn't have before. Like we, we go down in all this writing, if you're not forced to explore, you go down what's called the path of least resistance. Basically your brain, you might think your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible. Because thinking is metabolically costly. So unless you're hemmed in, you basically won't explore enough. So putting these constraints in place, there's a, there's a great study, by the way, in the NBA that looked at 30,000 games. And when a star goes down for a team in the absence of the star, the other players start spreading around the ball more, so they explore different strategies and then when the star comes back, they're better than they were before. So if you can have a star go down for a little while and then come back, some of these new strategies will actually stay around. So it forces them into this exploration. So the constraints led approach, which again is really having a moment, it conceives of that the coach or the trainer, like this environment architect whose role is how can I put some boundaries in place and then kind of step back and let the kids do the learning and exploration on their own. So I think it's a really great approach, both scientifically valid, but also preserves the play aspect, right? It's like you set the initial conditions and then the kids play and problem solve. And it's that cognitive aspect of problem solving that, you know, when we're telling kids exactly how to, we know things they should do, right? Like, you know, lots of things that a youth athlete should do to be better. But if you're just telling Them all that stuff, you're kind of offloading the cognitive learning of the task and like taking that away. What you want to do is put them in a situation where they're forced to learn. And that's what the constraints led approach is all about.
- [34:23]
A
So I'm sitting here as like a youth coach and I'm running these things through my head. I'm probably very guilty of saying, okay, I know exactly how you should do it. Do it exactly the way I should do it.
- [34:31]
B
The more you know, the harder it is. Right.
- [34:32]
A
And you're going to have success. Right. Like it. That's a hard thing for me to let go. I go through it with my own children. I'm like, you know, well, yeah, if you didn't like your outcome, you should have just tried doing what I told you to. You know, like that's every parent, but that's just the way my brain's wired. So let me ask this question. Is it safe to say this approach, again, back to our earlier discussion, better long term outcomes, but maybe not as conducive to winning the game tomorrow.
- [34:56]
B
Exactly. Because you're not teaching the set play or something like that the same way you're, you're cultivating the athlete.
- [35:02]
A
My ability to manipulate the game for the outcome in the near, near future is better if I control everything.
- [35:09]
B
That's right.
- [35:10]
A
But maybe not in the long term best interest of long term physical and athletic development, which is obviously the goal. That, that's interesting.
- [35:18]
B
Exactly. I mean, you mentioned, you know, talking to Malcolm Gladwell and he's written a bunch about how if you want to win basketball at a certain age in youth, like you just run a certain press all game. Right. Because nobody learns how to play that way. Right. Or not many people do. So it's really a tension between needing to win at the youth level and development. But I hope people can use some of the constraints led approach on their own. I mean, I write a little bit in Inside the Box about like Kyrie Irving, for example, you know, is one of the greatest finishers in history. Credits his ability to do these weird angles and spins to missing a portion of his backboard, the right side of his backboard when he was a kid growing up. And so he'd have to like get under the hoop and do all these things. And so those are great examples of what's called preclude constraints, where one thing you can do as a parent next time you're playing with your kid, however they normally solve whatever movement problem they're doing, block that say you can't go to the right or you can't use that part of the back. Just block the normal thing and see what happens and they'll start exploring and that, and that leads to this. You know, it's like you can see the neurons wiring together in real time as they're trying new stuff.
- [36:22]
A
Is there an age element for this? Is this applicable at all ages to a degree. I mean, or is this something that kids have to be a little bit. Right. Because I think of every, every time I've coached, I think back to like fourth grade basketball and if we didn't create real good order and that half court gym that we shared with another team at the other half of the gym, it was going to be, I always joke, like it just turns into recess. Right. It's just chaos.
- [36:48]
B
Yeah.
- [36:49]
A
So how is it so speak to our youth, our youth coaches right now maybe that are in, you know, middle school and below, which is where all the time I spend currently. What is the balance between structure constraints in your words, how, how far do I take the constraints before I know I'm going to have some semblance of order, but I'm also going to leave enough freedom for growth.
- [37:12]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that's some of the, the art of it. And because especially with kids, right, Especially if you're managing a bunch of them, you have to have some semblance of order or else you've just got like,
- [37:21]
A
oh my God, hurting. I, I done my daughter's for my son and daughter's fourth grade basketball, church league years and I just think like, oh my God, if I would have created this, you know, environment architect where I just create this free, I think I would have ran out of the gym.
- [37:37]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's got to be hemmed in in some way. So like, let's say an easy example if you're in basketball is, is putting one team at a disadvantage. Like you can do, you can do the thing you were normally doing at half court, the drill that you were normally working on. But say, you know, watch someone score in some certain way and say you're not allowed to do that the next time. I mean, that's one of the things that Victor Wembanyama has been working on is he has a trainer who's saying you're always solving this the same, you're not allowed to do that on the next one because that's what you always do. And people are getting used to it. So when something good happens, take it away and See what they do, or put a team at a numerical disadvantage and see what they do. And you can do those kind of small things inside of the structure that you already have, force them, you know, to always use the glass or something and see what happens. So trying to fit that within a structure, that doesn't drive you crazy as, as an adult. Right. So it can be on a smaller scale. It doesn't have to be everything about, about practice, just finding ways to force them to. Into productive experimentation.
- [38:35]
A
Can we undo if, if, say we've. And again, I'm probably guilty of this. I think back, I'm a very structured person. It's just the way my brain is organized. I've run very structured practices with my own kids, with the kids I've coached, and we've had success, we've won, kids have gotten better, kids have made their teams in high school and beyond. Like, so we've had what I would determine as being success. But let me say, say I wanted to reevaluate the environment. I want to take more of what you're saying right now and implement it into my kids and my team. Is there ever a past, the point of no return, like, can you undo some of this? Can you, if you haven't done it up till 12, 13 years old and you start now, can you still create some of these moments even if you hadn't done it leading up to it?
- [39:19]
B
Oh, for sure, for sure. I mean, I don't think these guys like the pros who are talking about it now because it was, it was like profiled in the New York Times. I don't think it was something they were using as.
- [39:29]
A
Okay, so you're saying this is something you could be a late adopter to and still reap the benefits?
- [39:33]
B
Totally, totally. I mean, I think for youth, it particularly captures something useful that's like, there's still a play aspect within it. And, and once you've architected the environment, it might be actually nice for the parent or coach because they don't have to micromanage every little thing that's going on if they. And it takes a little practice to get to, you know, what's a situation you can set up that's actually useful and not just chaos, but in some ways at the adult level, it's probably much easier. I mean, a lot of the research comes out of soccer looking at changing the surface, changing the ball. So, you know, futsal, for example, where the ball stays on the ground mostly, and, and so it totally changes the strategy. Playing it kind of in A, you know, in a very tight space or numerical disadvantage, or you're not allowed to use a certain section of the field. So I actually think it's a lot easier to implement at the. At the adult level.
- [40:20]
A
I'm sure you're familiar. Daniel Coyle wrote a book called the Talent Code, and he went down and studied futsal in the same kind of element to what you're describing. And that's kind of what I'm. It's. It's a. I don't have a lot of soccer background, but it makes sense to me. Talk more about inside the box. Like, I know we've talked about the constraints and, and creating these environments give us, give our readers a sense. For anyone who's either read some of your former work, like I've read all of it, or someone who maybe is not as familiar with your work, and this might be the first book that they read, like, give us a sense of what we can look forward to, compare and contrast. Again, someone like myself who's familiar with what you've written in the past, what we could expect.
- [40:59]
B
Yeah, I appreciate you asking. It's called Inside the How Constraints Make Us Better. And my previous book to this was called Range, and it was about the benefits of having a broad skillset, broad toolbox, but broad experiences in an increasingly specialized world. And I think a natural. Next question that came off of that was, all right, well, you get these broad tools, ultimately, you have to focus. You can't just pinball around. You have to focus that into achievement and focus that into something. And inside the Box is kind of my answer to that is, once you have these tools, how do you use limits and boundaries to. To focus yourself into doing something that. That is really achievement? And it kind of ranges from personal creativity, you know, like, why does the form of a haiku stimulate rather than stifle creativity? To some of the things we talked about in motor skill learning and productive experimentation, up to sort of personal contentment. Because it turns out our finite brains are not really wired to thrive with the infinite choice that a lot of us are facing now, particularly sort of in the AI world.
- [42:00]
A
At the top of the list. I can't pick a movie on Netflix.
- [42:03]
B
Yeah. So it's, It's. It's actually not great for human thriving to have when we have too much choice. It's crazy because since about infinite scrolling was introduced just a little bit before 2010, international surveys show that people have been getting increasingly more bored. So as we've had more choice, we've been getting Increasingly more bored because your brain's a comparison engine where you're watching one thing and you're thinking about all the other things you could potentially be watching, and it kind of ruins the experience of the moment. And so the book ranges from these very technical things of like, how can you instantly make yourself more creative or, or looks at some business startups and some disasters of freedom and, and other places like Pixar and how they religiously use rules to channel people's creativity up to these sort of more personal elements that look at how we, we might be able to improve our sense of contentment in this world that's just overflowing with information and choice. And if I can, since we're speaking to a lot of parents here, I think, yeah, please, if I can share, like, what to me was kind of the most terrifying research in the book that I think is pretty relevant to parents that I'm thinking about with respect to my kid. There's a researcher named Gloria Mark. I have a chapter in it about attention and focus, which is by any measure not doing great. Right. Like, workers in about around 2,000 switched screens. They were looking at about every three minutes. Now it's down to about every 45 seconds. And the scary thing she found was that we become accustomed to a certain level of interruption. So if you're getting notifications all day and, or people are interrupting you or whatever, you almost have like some kind of internal barometer where you become accustomed to that. And even if you say, now I'm going to focus and you put the phone away, you will self interrupt at the cadence to which you've become accustomed with like, intrusive thoughts about other things you should be doing. So if you want to be able to have sustained focus, you actually have to train your attention some by kind of trying to batch tasks so you're not toggling between a million things all the time. But this is the thing I'm doing now. This is the thing I'm doing next. And I think this is part of the reason that we're for the first time in more than a century seeing a decline in some cognitive testing scores among kids because they're having trouble kind of with their focus to be able to take the test. And if there's a presence of a phone near them, even if they're not allowed to touch it, they do even worse. So that's kind of changed some of the things that I do with respect to my own attention and the ways that I'm thinking about my son and the use of devices.
- [44:25]
A
I'm now thinking of my kids doing their homework every night and their phone while they're not again they're not on it per se, but it's face down within arm's reach of them. So you're suggesting just the enticing. It's so enticing that the idea that I could grab it if I chose to is equally as distracting if not more so than if I actually was holding it in my hand and not reading my textbook.
- [44:53]
B
Even if you can't grab it. So when these studies have been done, the phone can be on the table in sight but they're not allowed to touch it and they still perform more poorly than if it's out of sight because it's your mind is what. What's there. What could I be checking and think it's this, this self interruption. So I would say if it's a time when they're, they shouldn't have the phone, ideally put it out. So I do that now for my own work. If I need to focus deeply put
- [45:17]
A
the phone on the room. I get mad at my kids and I'm guilty of it.
- [45:20]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean we all.
- [45:22]
A
Let me ask you this. Our kids school takes, makes them turn their phone in and then they check it out at the end of the day. Do you, would you, would you say the science and the, and the research supports that or not?
- [45:34]
B
Absolutely. And I understand it might be annoying for parents in, in some ways but absolutely the science supports that. And the more phone dependent the kid is, the, the bigger will be the, the decrease in their score on cognitive testing if the phone is. Is in sight.
- [45:51]
A
I, I just think talking to really smart people is the obvious statement but people that are just so well versed in so many of the conversations that we have and so often we have them anecdotally. Right. We storytell what was your childhood like? What was your particular life like? And while it's relevant from our, you know, we have some really cool guests and really cool stories. I think our viewers and our listeners to be able to kind of aggregate and say okay this is the entire, this is what the research says of large populations. And these tend to be the best practices I personally find the most interesting. And for you to take some time to talk to us today again. David Epstein new book Inside the Box comes out in May. Do I have that right?
- [46:32]
B
May, May 5th. Yep.
- [46:33]
A
Check it out. Sports gene range. Of all the books of like the top three books that I probably reference the most and like have taken little nuggets ranges at or near the top. Hidden potential by, like. There's a handful of, like, Holy Grail books that I really source and take a lot from. And Range was is probably at the top of the list, if not number one. And I'm looking forward to Inside the Box and getting my hands on it here in a couple months.
- [47:03]
B
I appreciate that so much. You made my day. Thank you for having me. And that's just. Yeah, as a writer, that's just an incredibly gratifying thing to hear as a
- [47:10]
A
dad, as a coach, as someone who grew up in this world. Resources like yours and the books and the stuff you publish is so helpful. So, David, good luck with the new book. Hope it's a huge success. I'm assuming it's going to be. And we're gonna have to have you back on here for a part two. We got a lot more to cover.
- [47:25]
B
I'd love to. I appreciate you. Thanks so much for having me. And I appreciate what you. You're doing here.