It is fashionable these days to speculate about robots taking jobs. Less well-observed, is the fact that seemingly great companies are being built today with far less jobs to start with. What if you only needed a small number of people to do extraordinary things?

Deep in the heart of the pink city of Jaipur, there are a remarkable set of astronomical instruments known as the Jantar Mantar. Built in the early 18th century, these observational tools were designed to divine not only the movement of the stars and the passage of time, but more importantly the direction of one’s life.

Why do some companies survive and others simply crumple? And stranger still — for star-crossed brands such as Yahoo and Blackberry — why did major investments in innovation not save them from being blindsided by the future? In my view — it is all a problem of scale. Big leaders favour big solutions for big problems. But just like the search for the Higgs Boson particle, sometimes in order to understand how dramatic transformations happen, you have to start by looking for things that are very small.

Now that robots look like they are in fact serious about taking some of our jobs, us humans can at least reassure ourselves that we are better at creative tasks like design. But is that, in fact true?

David Epstein is the New York Times bestselling author of The Sports Gene, an investigative journalist, and a long time contributor for Sports Illustrated where he co-authored the 2009 report that Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez had used steroids. He has also been a crime writer, has lived in the Sonoran desert, on a ship in the Pacific Ocean, and in the Arctic. Fortunately, it was in Soho, New York City that I was able to meet up with him where we talked about the intersection of sports and genetics, the physiology of elite athletes, why Kenyans are such great marathon runners, Belgian Blue cattle, the origins of cognitive ability, and how to find the world’s best fighter pilots or bob sled drivers.