Dave, you're kind of a myth buster in sports, meaning that while the rest of us are busy blindly falling in love with athlete stories, you get into their actual history and their habits and you find out what's really behind their success in this industry.

And then you go around the world,

basically, correcting all of those wrong assumptions. So I just want to hear about the time

none other than Serena Williams showed up at one of your talks. Yeah, so basically I was giving

a talk to a small group. And I was going to talk in part about

the research that shows that athletes who go on to become elite do not follow the so-called

$10,000 rule, right?

That in fact, they tend to have wide variety of sports and physical activities.

David Epstein is a best-selling author, sought-after speaker, and host of the Slade

podcast, How To.

It can be martial arts, dance, rock climbing, whatever.

They learn these sort of broad general skills, learn about their interests and abilities

and delay specializing.

And right, I'm going to marshal all this scientific data and everything.

And then I see Serena sits down in the second row and I'm like, oh my God, like no amount of

scientific data is going to save me if after this talk she stands up and says, you're an idiot.

That's not how it works at all, right?

And so I finished the talk, and I'm like, you know, very nervous about it.

But she raises her hand to ask the first question.

She stands up and says, you know, I think my father was ahead of his time.

He had me doing ballet, gymnastics, taekwondo, track and field, Venus and I practice throwing a football to learn the overhand motion for a serve.

I still do that.

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