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Demetri Kofinas: 00:00:00 Today's Episode of Hidden Forces Is Made Possible by Listeners Like You Demetri Kofinas: 00:00:00 Today's episode of Hidden Forces is made possible by listeners like you. For more information about this week's episode, or for easy access to related programming, visit our website at hiddenforces.io, and subscribe to our free email list. If you listen to the show on your Apple podcast app, remember you can give us a review. Each review helps more people find the show and join our amazing community. With that, please enjoy this week's episode. Demetri Kofinas: 00:00:48 What's up everybody? My guest today is David Epstein. Probably the most wide-ranging thinker I've ever had on this podcast. David is what you would call a renaissance man. He's worked as an ecology researcher in the Arctic, studied geology and astronomy while residing in the Sonoran Desert, and during his time working as a journalist for Sports Illustrated, co-wrote the bombshell story that revealed that Yankees third baseman and three-time league MVP Alex Rodriguez was using performance enhancing steroids as early as 2003. As if those accomplishments and experiences weren't enough, David is also the author of two wildly popular books, the Sports Gene, which examines the science behind extraordinary athletic performance, and Range, a book that attempts to explain why generalists triumph in today's specialized world. Demetri Kofinas: 00:01:57 Anyone who knows me or who listens to this podcast won't be surprised to learn that I agree with David on pretty much everything insofar as learning is concerned. In fact, I'd go a step further, and say that this podcast is or at least attempts to be the embodiment of the ideas that he writes about in his most recent book. I am a full-on believer in the power of wide ranging, interdisciplinary thinking. I've often made the case for it on this program. It's why I bring on guests and cover topics from so many different domains and disciplines. Because I believe that in order to be successful in today's rapidly changing world, you can't just rely on the narrow set of skills for which you've received your diploma, or confine yourself to the sources and methods of a given discipline or occupation. Regardless of how well they have served you in the past. Demetri Kofinas: 00:03:03 What I love most about this episode and my conversation with David is that it makes the case empirically for the type of thinking and learning that I think this show strives to instill. It's from the bedrock of my own personal and career development, and I'm excited to share that formula with all of you today. With that, please enjoy my invaluable conversation with author and journalist David Epstein. Demetri Kofinas: 00:03:40 David Epstein, welcome to Hidden Forces. David Epstein: 00:03:43 Thank you very much for having me. Demetri Kofinas: 00:03:44 It's great to have you here, man. David Epstein: 00:03:46 It's great to be here, especially because I'm admiring that you're an over preparer for interviewing the way that I am; you've got your diagrams and highlighted notes and all these things, so- Demetri Kofinas: 00:03:54 Did you see this picture here? I use these pictures to remind me; they help me navigate the most important content on the page, and this one I think is because I wanted to talk about, are we becoming more similar to pre-industrial man? That's the scene where the ape in 2001 realizes that he can use the femur to hit people. David Epstein: 00:04:13 By the way, this is great, you know, not to get off track here. But you're building your semantic network by doing this, right? Which is when you learn something new, you should try to relate it to a bunch of other stuff: visual, auditory experiences, whatever, and that's how you get it to stick more firmly in your mind and be more capable of retrieval, right? If you connect things in your semantic network, so that's clearly, you're doing, you know, you intuited your way to that process. Demetri Kofinas: 00:04:33 Yeah. So totally. I mean, we could talk about that also. I have a whole process for that. You hear that, listeners? If you haven't subscribed to the super nerd tier yet, David just gave us an implicit endorsement of the rundowns. David Epstein: 00:04:44 Yeah, I actually have all sorts of methods for doing this. One of the things that I did early on, even before I started interviewing people, was that I would, if there's a book I really liked, I would read it while I was also listening to it on eBook. A lot of times I would be reading passages that I heard on the audio book, and I would remember the street that I was on when I heard them. Demetri Kofinas: 00:05:03 Oh, that's so interesting. I don't want to get you off track here- David Epstein: 00:05:06 No, it's fine. Demetri Kofinas: 00:05:06 This is great. David Epstein: 00:05:07 One of the researchers in the book named Ogi Ogas, who I talk about his work on the Dark Horse Project, which is basically about how people find work that fits them well. But he's also done a bunch of memory research. I mean, he's a computational neuroscientist. He won half a million dollars in who wants to be a millionaire, and he got the million-dollar question right, but he had decided not to risk it, and when he told me one of his strategies was because you want to build a semantic network and relate things to each other, is when he learned stuff he'd stop and try to relate it to all these other facts. Then in the show, he said they cut out most of the time, so you can talk to the host as much as you want. So, he would just blather and try to bring up tons of random stuff, hoping that something would cue the right string in his semantic network, and the answer would come to mind. So that was his strategy, and he got all the questions right. Demetri Kofinas: 00:05:50 That's so interesting. Are you familiar with memory palaces? David Epstein: 00:05:52 Yeah, I use some memory techniques myself. I haven't used memory palaces much, a little bit. But yeah, I think it's, yeah, it's basically building a semantic network. Demetri Kofinas: 00:05:59 Yeah, there was also someone who wrote a book called Moonwalking with Einstein. David Epstein: 00:06:03 Yeah, yeah. Foer. Demetri Kofinas: 00:06:04 Fantastic. He actually won the pneumonic prize, like the best memory prize or something like that. David Epstein: 00:06:09 Got a great book deal out of it. Demetri Kofinas: 00:06:10 Yeah, and he had no background. He learned how to do that. David Epstein: 00:06:12 Yeah. Demetri Kofinas: 00:06:13 It's amazing. David Epstein: 00:06:14 Even for my first book I started reading memory research, and that's one of the areas where you realize it is tremendously improvable beyond what most people... Like, we don't normally do almost any of the stuff that supplements memory unless we're having some really intense experience, basically. Demetri Kofinas: 00:06:29 That's fascinating, man. So, we were talking a little bit about my experience with dementia before we started. The one thing we didn't talk about was the incredible memory improvement that I experienced right after my surgery. Because I got my acumen back immediately. Because there was some sort of block between short term and long-term storage. When I got it back, I don't think it was just my perception, I think that my memory was actually sufficiently improved because I had developed all these techniques to build redundancy into experience, and afterwards I had a photographic memory. I'm not sure what it was, but you know, that faded over time. But I had the best memory of my life was after my surgery. David Epstein: 00:07:06 Gosh. That's in a category of, you know, I write about these desirable difficulties, these challenges that make learning better in the long run. I think having a brain tumor is a desirable difficulty for memory improvement beyond even what I would have conceived, but that's very impressive. Demetri Kofinas: 00:07:19 You know, it's super interesting. You'd like it, man. Because I could tell from your work. So, I have so many questions for you. It's hard to know where to start. I do want to maybe ask about your progress, but maybe we can talk about that later. There were two things that stuck out to me. One was this idea of abstract thinking, and the other one was the learning process itself. Some of it had to do with improvisational learning, some of that just had to do with the fact that the way we learn is sometimes more important than what we learn. What was this book about for you? How do you describe it to people? David Epstein: 00:07:50 That's a good question because the question I start with is sort of amorphous.
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