This episode is presented by eBay.

Rob, everyone loves a deal and a bargain from time to time, don't they? Absolutely, mate. And you know where you can grab a great deal? Talk to me. Where? The eBay app. Yes, you are correct. You didn't need to talk to me. I already knew it. I love eBay. When you're buying, you can discover loads of hidden gems. there's so many items where you think I would have never found that anywhere else.

Then when you're buying, you can discover loads of hidden gems. There's so many items where you think I would have never found that anywhere else. Then when you're selling, it's so simple and most

importantly, free. It's free, Rob. When it's this easy to sell for free and there's great deals

on things you love. You can't help but say when it's eBay. It excludes vehicles and business

sellers. Welcome to Scientific American

Science Talk posted on August 10th, 2019. I'm Steve Murski. On this episode, even musicians

who we celebrate for their precocity like Yo-Yo Ma, what's little known and hardly ever

spoken is that he went through the typical so-called sampling period of instruments where he tried a couple, sort of gained a general

knowledge and decided which ones he didn't like. He just went through it a lot faster than most

musicians do. That's David Epstein. He was on the podcast in 2016 to talk about his book,

The Sports Gene. His new book is Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

I was in Washington, D.C. recently, where Epstein lives, and he was kind enough to meet me to talk about the book.

So what is range?

Range is, well, it's the title of my book, of course, but it's a word that I thought

expressed the idea of breadth, breadth of experience, a diversity of tools that someone brings

to a problem, just a sort of personal characteristic of being broad in the way that you approach the world

and you approach problems. And your book has so many examples in it of the problems with

hyper-specialization versus a broader outlook. And you do deal in the book with the issue

of whether you're cherry-picking stuff. And you're really in the book with the issue of whether you're cherry picking stuff.

And you're really not. There's there's so much data that shows that for certain kind of problems,

being a generalist is better. For other kinds, being a specialist is better. Right. That's right.

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