Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 132. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, and do me. I think all of us have at some point our lives picked something and spent hours

and hours trying to get better at it and we've gone through the stages of novice to amateur

and then at some point realizing oh my god there's a long way between here and mastery but uh and some of us keep going and

that's what we're going to talk about today with our guest our guests is David Epstein

David has written a book called the sports gene which is a New York Times bestseller very popular among athletes among people who are Serves some sort of function within the

athletic world and in pro sports and so on and also popular just among people who

are interested in nature versus nurture the whether or not genes make us experts and things or give us the

power to do really well or it's all about practice and he also really really

takes apart the 10,000-hour rule and explains it in great detail in a way that

will make it make sense to you forever.

We're going to talk about that a lot in the interview.

And it's a great book, even if you're not into sports.

That's because it's about practice in general is a big part of the book and whether it's like

video games or anything that you're into that from something that's competitive or something

where you're just trying to beat your own personal record over and over again

or trying to beat some sort of world record, the book applies to all that stuff.

So let's pick his brain. So David, you say early on in your book that the only way you can hit a ball at high speed is to be able to see into the future.

Could you explain what you mean by that?

Right, well it turns out that a Major League fastball, for example, is actually moving too fast

for human biology really to react to it.

So the average reaction time of Major League hitters is about

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