Exploring Our "Range" with Bestselling Author David Epstein

This episode features journalist David Epstein who is also the author of two top 10 New York Times bestsellers: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, and The Sports Gene. He was previously a science and investigative reporter at ProPublica, and prior to that a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, where he co-authored the story that revealed Yankee's third baseman Alex Rodriguez had used steroids. His writing has been honored by an array of organizations, from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, to the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Center on Disability and Journalism. David has given talks about performance science and the uses (and misuses) of data on five continents; his TED Talk “Are Athletes Really Getting Faster, Better, Stronger?” has been viewed 7 million times. David has masters degrees in environmental science and journalism. Like many of the characters in his book Range, he has benefitted from a winding career. He worked as an ecology researcher in the Arctic, studied geology and astronomy while residing in the Sonoran Desert, and blithely signed up to work on the D-deck of a seismic research vessel shortly after it had been attacked by pirates.