David Epstein: Why Constraints Make You More Creative (Not Freedom)

19:10James Altucher:I see. So let's spill the constraints. Although, again, Bach was a huge constraint. Bach was like a constraints zealot. I mean, so he, first of all, picked up this incredibly constraint-ridden form, the fugue, where you use a very simple melody and then you just torture it in all these different ways and have multiple lines of melody sort of chasing and interweaving and morphing this original melody. And he did this in a way that nobody else ever had. and he would just, in his sort of magnum opus work called The Art of Fugue, it's 14 successive fugues, each getting more and more complicated, starting with this tiny 12-note sequence, and then he flips it upside down, and then he turns it backwards.

19:54And with every successive fugue, he layers more constraints on himself until the last one where he adds a new theme in that's B-flat-A-C-B, which in German musical notation is B-A-C-H. So he puts his own name in, which is a very difficult thing to harmonize with, and in doing that progression, it starts forcing him into these musical transitions that had never been heard before because he boxed himself into this huge degree, and that's exactly what forced him to go somewhere that he couldn't have envisioned in the past, and it led to this incredible lasting influence where he was, like I mentioned this survey of composers around the world, and he is far and away first place as the most important composer in history.

20:37They say his music lives in every note played since his death.

20:42James Altucher:Even more important than John Williams, who was also in that survey, apparently. He got some votes. He got some votes in the survey as well. Yep. Oh, there was one other example I really liked, which is the Dr. Seuss example. Yeah, the Dr. Seuss. So Dr. Seuss, by the way, when I was researching Dr. Seuss, I was reading some other children's literature of the time. And it was so boring. Like, so Johnny walks to school. Johnny ties his shoes. I mean, I'm really glad to have become a parent in the post Dr. Seuss, you know, after Dr. Seuss lived. So when he was getting started, at first someone asked him, gave him a vocabulary list for kids and asked him to pick about 200 words and see if he could write a book using only those.

21:23And first he starts, he looks at the list and starts complaining to his wife. He says, there's no adjectives. And he says, I love this line. He says, it's like trying to make a strudel without any strudels. Because he's like the same guy in his personal life. And then he gets frustrated and decides, well, I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words. And the first two rhyming words, cat and hat. And the rest is history. And that actually led to a publisher, a famous publisher, betting him that he then couldn't write a children's book using only 50 words. And that became green eggs and ham.

21:56And there's actually in psychology, basically a model called the green eggs and ham model of creativity, which is this idea that all this psychological research shows that the best way to make someone creative is to restrict their normal means of doing something. So having a restricted vocabulary forced Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, to experiment with rhythm. And that's when he developed this rollicking rhythm because he couldn't really use that many words.

22:19James Altucher:By the way, it's very interesting because I remember from his biography that the 225 words approach, as opposed to the 57 words approach, the publisher actually created two distinct publishing divisions based on those, you know, So one for ages like four to six and the other ages six to 10 based on those word counts. Absolutely. And Dr. Seuss himself, you know, so he co-founded the Beginner Books imprint, which became this smash and remade all of children's literature. And he included other constraints other than vocabulary lists, like pictures had to be continuous across two pages depicting one scene.

22:53And there were color limits, like the cat in the hat was, you know, plain red and plain blue, basically. And there were other various limits, like you couldn't picture something that wasn't described in the text. So he would put all these constraints on authors and some of them would complain. And he said, well, okay, you're not for our imprint, Ben. So those were just rules they either had to follow or find another place to publish.

23:14James Altucher:Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It would mean so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at alcatra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

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24:51James Altucher:Find the vacation you're looking for in Missouri. Whether you're searching for this, Wanting something like this Oh, that's cute Maybe up for something like this Or just really, really need something more like this You'll find the vacation you want in Missouri Missouri, it's the getaway that gets You Plan your fun at visitmo.com So, let's say I'm hearing all this I'm reading your book What's a how-to? Let's say I'm a creative and I want to write a book. And like anybody, somebody might have writer's block or painter's block, a painter who's sitting down in front of a blank canvas. What are some constraints they can immediately put on themselves other than a deadline?

25:42James Altucher:What are some constraints they can immediately put on themselves to kind of spark up that creativity? So let's say if you're a painter, like Kandinsky said, everything starts from a dot. So just put something down and then work around it. Like having something down to work around. Maybe you don't keep that, but put a splotch on and start turning it into something. And that's how you'll start generating ideas because you need something specific. Or as a writer, so there's actually research on this called specific curiosity, where you should find some question to investigate. It doesn't have to be your last question.

26:14It doesn't have to be your ultimate question. That doesn't even matter. But you want it to be really specific because that leads to what's called idea linking. So if you start investigating a really specific question, it will lead to sort of other thoughts if it's specific enough, and you may end up somewhere totally different, but that's what gets you started on the path. I mean, to use myself in this example, the whole Mendeleev story came because I was wondering why the chemical symbol for tungsten is a W, right? It turns out it's just because it's a German word, but then that led me to reading about how elements are named, and oh, there's an element called Mendelevium, and I go, oh, what's the story behind that?

26:49And so there's all this research showing that if you can get people to think through a specific narrow puzzle, they'll start making these jumps that lead to greater creativity. So try not to do the blank page thing and try instead to find some very specific question. And don't worry about if it's not the one you're going to end with. It just gets you on this path where you start making these stepping stone links to interesting ideas.

27:11James Altucher:That's funny because I've never heard that specifically, but in my own writing, sometimes there might be some story that just sounds ridiculous to me and I'll put it down and then I have to link it to some... My challenge is I always have to link it to something in my life so that it becomes a coherent text. And it's an interesting exercise. Totally. You're like building your semantic network, right? You're connecting ideas and it's having all of these different things connected that usually leads to insights that there's something new. Okay, you mentioned earlier how you kind of pick the structure of your book before you start writing it, but what else do you do to kind of increase your creativity?

27:50James Altucher:And then the next question I want to ask you after that is, how can this be applied to learning? So constraints seems, instead of just saying to a kid, learn everything, what are the appropriate amount of constraints to learn something, to be great at something or to be better at something? Yeah, so, okay. So the first question for me is, how do I apply this to my own creativity? Yeah. I keep something I call a master thought list. I know it's a dumb name. It's not like for, I was never attempting to brand it for anything. It's just for myself. And when I see interesting things, you know, it's a stat, a quote, a study citation, whatever it is, I'll drop it in the list.

28:26Sometimes I use Rome Research Now, which is sort of like building a wiki of your own research kind of. And I have, it's so large now because I've been doing this for years that there are certain particular questions that a lot of things orbit, basically. And so I'm often collecting material and thinking like, which of these kind of fundamental questions that I'm really interested in, does this one orbit? And I drop it in that area and eventually like things accumulate around certain topics. And that's often how I realize, you know, something that I'm incredibly interested in. My neighbor and friend Dan Pink does this too.

29:00He calls it a spark list though, where he keeps this list of things that intrigue him. And then sometimes you notice they're starting to accrete around basically a certain idea. So I'm always doing that. and the result is I have way more ideas that I'm interested in investigating than I will ever be able to execute in 10 lifetimes. So my problem is very much deciding what to go execute on. But when I'm doing this, and I think things are starting to orbit a certain topic, I try to make that question that they're pursuant to as specific as possible. So I keep going back and saying, what is the question that these are pursuant to and refining that and refining that and refining that so it's as specific as possible.

29:37and then that becomes like a really generative engine once I know the question that I'm investigating, you know.

29:42James Altucher:Do you remember an example where you honed in on a question starting with many questions around some idea? Yeah, I mean, well, so all of my books have worked this way. So for my first book was about the balance of nature and nurture in developing physical skills, essentially. And this was very much, I was recording things that confused me. Say that I saw, you know, why could a good softball pitcher strike out the best Major League Baseball hitters? I was a national level runner, noticing that these Kenyan runners aren't just from Kenya, they're actually from one specific minority tribe. And so it was just logging these questions and starting to realize, oh, all of these things are orbiting this question of what's the balance of nature and nurture in developing sports skills.

30:25And so anyone who reads that book would probably see I'm coming from all these weird different angles that seem sort of surprising that someone would cast that wide of a net. But it made a lot of sense to me because I had homed in on that specific question that all these other smaller questions were basically orbiting. And then the same thing happened again with range where that was a little different, but similar in the sense that it started off with me and Malcolm Gladwell debating, again, athletic development and whether it was best to specialize as early as possible or to diversify early and delay specializing.

30:59And we came to call it basically the Roger versus Tiger debate because Tiger Woods specialized very early and Roger Federer did all this diversification and delayed specializing. And the essential question became, when in the rest of life is it better to be a Roger versus a Tiger? And that kind of motivated the, that was like the engine for range. So all the books, there's like typically a pretty much one question to become, once I sort of alight on it, I say like, oh, that's the question I'm interested in. And then And it's like a blossoming, basically, from there.

31:31James Altucher:By the way, I didn't know that Roger Federer didn't specialize in tennis early on. What did he diversify in? He played tennis, but he didn't specialize. He played... Let's see if I can remember. Let's see if I can remember all the things Roger played. He played soccer, which he was very good at. He almost stuck with soccer instead of tennis. Basketball, badminton, rugby, volleyball, skateboarded, skied, swam, wrestled, table tennis, badminton. I had no idea. Handball. Yeah, his mother was actually a tennis coach, but she declined to coach him because he wouldn't return balls normally. He wanted to goof around.

32:06And then, yeah, he wasn't super focused at first on being a great... So Tiger Woods, by the time he was three, was saying, I'm going to be the world's next great golfer. Roger Federer, when he got good enough to be interviewed by his local newspaper, the reporter asked him what he'd buy with his first hypothetical paycheck, if he ever became a pro. And he said a Mercedes. And his mother was aghast that she didn't want him putting all his eggs in that basket. She asked the reporter if she could listen to the interview recording, it turned out he said Mercedes in Swiss German. He just wanted more CDs, not a Mercedes.

32:34That's funny.

32:35James Altucher:Well, and I remember from range also, you talked about Pele kind of diversifying before focusing on essentially American soccer or football. All of the greats. No, not, I shouldn't say all the greats. The typical pattern for the greats is that they diversified earlier, had what scientists tend to call a sampling period, where they learn a variety of skills, general skills, general athleticism. Now people are calling it physical literacy that's kind of scaffold later technical skills and they learn about their own interests and abilities and delay specializing until later than peers who plateau at lower levels.

33:08So there's plenty of variability, but there was actually just a new paper in science, you know, one of the most prestigious journals in the world that looked at about 30 ,000 different careers of athletes, musicians, and scientists and backed up this pattern that there is a trade-off between short and long-term development. So the factors that predict elite youth development, like early specialization, are negatively associated with elite adult performance. And this showed up even in scientists too, where future Nobel laureates progressed more slowly earlier in their careers because they were more interdisciplinary.

33:41So they were like slower to get tenure and they published less and all this stuff. So that gets at a lot of what I think Range was about, this fundamental trade-off between optimizing for the short-term and developing in the long-term.

33:51James Altucher:But you know, you look at like, again, in the Tiger Woods example, or in chess, the Magnus Carlsen example, like these people who started at the age of three or earlier doing what they were doing, and that's how they became the best in the world. Chess and golf are very poor models of almost everything else that humans want to learn. So I think arguably it does make sense. Well, in chess, in fact, if you haven't started studying, doing pattern study by age 12, your chance of reaching any level of master status drops by an order of magnitude. Like you have to be studying those patterns. But golf and chess are very, what's called kind learning environments where the next steps and goals are given to you.

34:32These patterns repeat. They're very pattern-based. Feedback is quick and accurate. You don't have to worry about the rules changing and not as much human dynamics involved and all those things. And so those, so there's only a few areas where true prodigies show up. It's basically like golf, chess, and playing classical music. And so those tend to be poor models. of development for other things. Not that they don't have anything. I mean, I think there's tremendous value in some of the skills that you can learn in those things. For sure, they can transfer. But in and of themselves, they're not good models for development generally.

35:06James Altucher:Well, tennis too, though, it has similar pattern, right? There's like the rules aren't going to change. There's the forehand, the backhand, the serve that you have to learn. Yeah, but the sports that involve what's called anticipatory skills, where you have to do things faster than biology can really accomplish them. So you have to be predicting basically what's going to happen in the future. People who grew up before about the age of 12 who've played three different of those types of sports then will learn subsequent skills more quickly for any other sports. So it's the sports that involve those so-called anticipatory skills where you really want to be diversified.

35:45James Altucher:So was Ted Williams diversified? So he was, you know, the only, was he the only 400 batter? I think he was the last one. And so that's an anticipatory thing, hitting a baseball. I guess he diversified. He didn't really start playing. He wasn't at professional level. He was like an adult almost. I actually don't know Ted Williams. I know he had tremendous eyesight. I don't know what his developmental background was. And so, so again, this veers into the learning. Like, let's say you have a kid and you want the kid to find something he or she is passionate about and then learn as quickly as possible or actually have the best chance of being great at something, what kind of constraints would you sort of put on your kid?

36:28Yeah, and I think this is where we get it, kind of the combination of range and inside the box, which is first you have to explore some things to figure out what are your talents and abilities and interests, where you fit, right? And the earlier we make people choose, the more likely you put the wrong person in the wrong place. So one of the reasons I think that we see this inverse correlation between elite youth and elite adult performance is that when you're forcing people to pick before puberty, you just have no idea who you're really getting for the most part. And so if it is the best match, then, and so you have lower what's called match quality, the degree of fit between who you are and what you do.

37:04Once you get into something, once you've got a lane that seems to fit, then I think the most promising learning model is what's called the constraints-led approach, which has actually been around for a long time, but it's having a public moment because some athletes like Shohei Otani and Victor Wimbanyama and Kelsey Plum have been speaking out about it basically. And it's in opposition to what's normally called blocking in practice where you show someone how to do something and then have them do it over and over a bajillion times. Constraints-led approach conceives of the teacher or the coach as what they call an environment architect.

37:41And they're supposed to set constraints that then force the learner to explore and find their own best solution. What's called, in the literature, it's called self-organizing, which means your physiology and psychology are unique. So your best solution to a given problem is going to be unique. And if you're going to find the best solution, you're going to use your tools a little differently than anyone else. And so let me give you a super simple, like maybe the simplest example I've ever seen of this was I was with an Olympic development swim club in Australia. and they had young swimmers. And instead of saying, you know, working on freestyle that you put your arm here and your leg here or whatever, they had hoops that they put under the water and they said, get through on your stroke without touching the sides.

38:26And they'd get smaller and smaller. And this would force them to figure out how to get in as linear a position as possible using their unique physiology. And so that's like how the constraints-led approach work. And it requires more thinking on the part of the teacher or coach but then it leads to this explosion of experimentation among the learners that ultimately leads them to better solutions.

39:04James Altucher:Okay, so let's just pick a random thing. Let's say a kid's interested in, I don't know, astronomy and doesn't know how, you know, let's say anywhere between 8 and 13 years old and then wants to, just loves it, loves looking at the stars. And so you figure, okay, this is an area where they might be interested in. How would you build constraints so that they become, or they at least have the best chance of becoming like a world-class astronomer? Yeah, I minor in astronomy in college, by the way. So a bit of interest for sure. I think what I would probably do in that case is do something kind of project-based.

39:36So let's say I did my thesis for my minor on evidence that there had been plate tectonics or movements of the surface of the planet in the moons of Jupiter. And that's like a pretty niche thing, obviously. But again, having a really specific question made it super fascinating. It's like just, you know, initially you just want to get a kid fascinated, right? I talk to my kid about astronomy all the time. My academic background is in environmental science and astronomy, and he's seven. I'll never be cooler to him than I am right now because I can actually answer a fair number of his questions. Why is the sky blue, for instance?

40:14Why is the sky blue? Because of Rayleigh scattering, right? Because the shorter wavelengths of blue get scattered backward by things in the atmosphere, so they go to your eyeball, whereas the longer wavelengths of red light can pass right through and go out to space. That's why it's the bluest when the sun is directly overhead, because then there's the shortest amount of atmosphere between your eyeball and the sun, whereas when the sun is farther down by the horizon, there's a lot more atmosphere between you and the sun and so some of the radiation that will appear red to your eyes is then getting scattered because it's having to pass through more atmosphere.

40:49So I think giving a specific project, so now I'm just trying to fascinate my son by astronomy but I force him first of all to answer questions. Like when he wants to know something, I'm wary that this will make me sound like I'm some kind of drill sergeant father, but we have a ton of fun with it. Where if he has a question, like we read New Scientist together, and I'll stop before some fact about cosmology and make him guess. And then we'll start talking about his guess. He makes me guess everything too. It's called the generation effect. If you force someone to guess something, it doesn't at all matter if they get it right.

41:21It doesn't matter if they're in the ballpark. But forcing the guess primes your brain for subsequent learning when you then do find the answer. So forcing guessing instead of just handing them over the information, that's called a desirable difficulty. And then having certain questions you investigate once in a while where it's a very specific thing. It almost doesn't matter what it is. A light on some question that you see a little spark in your kid and say, all right, instead of bouncing to the next thing, let's keep that as a continuous thread that we keep investigating. Because again, that leads to this idea linking where they really start to get invested in a line of thinking and have novel thoughts.

41:57James Altucher:That's really interesting. So thinking about it, I wouldn't know what resources to use so that I would get into this kind of guessing game pattern with a kid. A thing that I would not do is immediately turn to ChatGPT on everything. Because I think the first line of research that's coming out about how AI affects cognition makes it look a lot like a GPS, where if that's all you use all the time, you don't learn how to get around. And that's okay for your GPS if it's always there. But if you actually need to learn stuff or learn how to think, that's not so good. And that's kind of how it's looking.

42:37So I think a constraint, a rule that I would put on them is brain first, tool second. You could absolutely, I mean, there'd be great uses of LLMs for having astronomy discussions with your kid or forcing questions they could guess at, but I would make them guess first. And when they're younger, I would try to be analog. I mean, again, we do this. I get new scientists in the mail. And we flip through. You know, it's targeted at people who are much older than my son. But we can do it together. And we'll go through articles slowly together and find things to talk about.

43:12James Altucher:And does your son use screens a lot? Like, is he playing games on a tablet all day? Very little. When we moved about five years ago houses, we left our TV behind and didn't get another one for several years. and now it's in the basement. So he didn't really have that much exposure to it. And the tablet, like 10 minutes a day, like before he goes to bed. No, he's very low screen. And I think that makes a lot of sense. Like I'm not a Luddite by any stretch. I'm using AI. I love using AI for certain things. But I think in the developing brain, it makes a lot of sense to be much more analog than we were even before AI.

43:49Like I would take Chromebooks and technological aids out of classrooms early on just because you actually want things to be really difficult and inconvenient for a developing brain. That's how it learns.

44:00James Altucher:It's interesting about this. You want to delay the point where they choose their final interest or passion as much as possible. So you look at the educational system in the UK versus here, where they kind of have to pick a career by what we would call 10th or 11th grade and then go into a more specialized school. And then that becomes their career in many cases. Whereas in the U.S., it's not really like that. Even whatever your major is in college doesn't necessarily become your career in most cases. Almost never does. Yeah. And then you can argue the U.S. has become much more technologically innovative than the U.K.

44:36James Altucher:has been. I don't know if it's related, but maybe it is. I mean, to use something really specific, there was actually a study looking at the higher ed systems of England and Scotland during a period where they were extremely similar except for, as you said, the students in England had to specialize earlier. They had to test into a certain program of study where the students in Scotland could sample through college if they wanted to. And the question in the study was who ends up winning more of the... Well, so the earlier specializers do get hired more quickly out of training because they have more domain-specific skills, and they jump out to an income lead.

45:16But the later specializers, they sample more different things, And when they do pick, they have higher match quality or better fit with what they do. So their growth rates are higher. And by about six years out, they would, in aggregate, fly past the early specializers. And then the early specializers would end up quitting their career tracks in much higher numbers, even though they had more disincentive from doing so, essentially because they were made to pick so early that they more often made poor choices. So that was a direct comparison. And then when work like that was extended to a number of countries where people were matched for, it was about a dozen countries, they're matched for their parents years of education their years of education their national test scores when those were available and this was a random sample so you know a lot of people didn't have tertiary education and the pattern was basically that the later specializers you know so some people got sort of early technical training and some people got broader education the later specializers they are behind in income early on but they're so much more adaptable that they're much more resistant to shocks in their industry, et cetera.

46:16And they end up doing better. This was measuring earnings over their lifetime. So they're losing the short term and they win in the long run. And the faster growing an economy was in the study, the greater the long-term advantage that accrued to the people who had the general background.

46:32James Altucher:That's really interesting. That's very valuable information. So look, this is all interesting. I'm going to definitely, just like with range, your last book, I'm definitely going to apply or start thinking more formally about constraints in my own work, which is mostly, let's say, writing or public speaking or even podcasting. Looking back on it, and as I was reading the book, I was thinking this, definitely with my writing, the most successful writing I've done is when I've put more constraints on myself as opposed to just, oh, today I'm going to write. And you've given me a way to formally think about this, how I can put these constraints on.

47:07James Altucher:I really think The Hero's Journey by Joseph Campbell. I don't know if this is necessarily an evolutionary view of the format by which stories are successful, but it's definitely a great way to write using that as a constraint, like that model. For sure. And even if you end up deviating from it, I think starting with it helps you get going. And obviously you can do what you want when you're writing your story, but having some model that you're working toward, I think is so much more fruitful than just having something being open and thinking that brilliance is going to pour forth because you've put no restrictions on yourself.

47:40It's quite the opposite.

47:42James Altucher:Well, and that's great in the Duke Ellington or jazz example, which is that there are a lot of constraints to jazz. There is a musical format, like it's certain chords and so on. But then improvising around those constraints is what makes someone successful at jazz. Totally. I mean, I think jazz, even in some of the neuroscience research on jazz, it looks a lot like language in certain ways where there's a clear grammar. And once you've mastered that grammar, you can do all sorts of improvisation just like we do with language. I guess like genre fiction, you know, a lot of people look down on genre fiction.

48:15James Altucher:Like I say, he's John Grishow or Danielle Steele. And, but actually it's really hard because you're given these constraints. Oh, it's gotta be a romance and they've gotta meet and then hate each other. And then, well, you know, there's little, I think Harlequin romance, they have like, it's like a whole guide to, there's like a hundred different points you have to hit in every single romance novel. But to actually make a romance novel, that's when the real creatives stand out. Because then to make a good romance novel, it's, you know, by all those constraints, you know, you have to improvise and be different within those constraints, you'll break out if you do that well.

48:49Yeah, and I mean, so you mentioned some people do look down their nose at so-called genre fiction, but it's also the best-selling authors in the world or in the history of the world, right? and I think the one reason people might look down at it is because they view it as a lack of creativity. Oh, they're just doing this model, right? It's almost like a factory model. But that idea that creativity was synonymous with complete originality was not even an idea until the late 18th century Romantic period that was like rebelling against the Enlightenment and wanted to portray this idea that creatives are just like struck with lightning from God and have these ideas out of nowhere.

49:30Before that, like in Shakespeare's time, creativity was associated with taking something the audience already understood and tweaking it in new ways. So you put your spin on it, almost like someone covering a song where it's like, I know this, but they're doing something totally different with it and making it their own. That was viewed as how, what was really the epitome of creativity. And it was much more this historical blip that kind of flipped the script and said, oh no, it has to be totally original. And so I think there's still some of that streak among certain literati, I guess, who would look down at genre fiction.

50:03But I don't think most people do because most of the people that are reading are reading genre fiction.

50:06James Altucher:That's a really good point that basically success in the arts seems to come with more constraints. Like the more constrained the form is that you're being creative in, the more likelihood there is for financial success, at least, if you're good at that form. Yeah, and I don't even think it's just financial success. I think it's success with communicating something to an audience that they will receive and understand and think about. And that the more, right, this is like Robert McKee in his legendary, probably most famous screenwriting book, I assume, maybe by a lot ever, story, writes. Interestingly, fantasy always has the most conventional plot, what he calls the arch plot, which is very much like the hero's journey, basically.

50:46because if the setting and scenery is going to be super fantastical, then you need to balance that with making the other stuff, like the plot, really conventional. And conversely, if the plot is going to be really unconventional, then you're going to want a more conventional kind of setting to balance that because you need something to meet the reader or the viewer partway.

51:08James Altucher:That's interesting because then you look at literary fiction and often it's a conventional setting and a conventional story, like a professor having problems with his marriage in a university town. And that's like a classic. Are you describing Stoner by John Williams? Oh, you know what? That does describe Stoner, which actually is one of the greatest novels of all time. But it is one of the greatest novels of all written. As you read it, I know very few people have read Stoner by John Williams. Yeah, different genre. I mean, one of the greatest books ever written and has like almost no plot, right?

51:38Because it's writing and it's narrative, it's introspection following a guy from birth to death are in some ways revolutionary. and the setting is the most conventional thing imaginable. In fact, I love that book. I got a version in Anniversary Edition where in the back they printed Williams' letters to his agent and she's like, there's no plot. The publishers aren't interested. And he's like, you know, people might actually read this book. It's actually kind of revolutionary in certain ways, even though it doesn't really have a plot. And it's really interesting seeing him try to convince his agent of that.

52:12James Altucher:It's very interesting you read that book. I find that book to be often a filter on readers. Because that is, I don't want to say it's a hard to read book, but it's not, it really is revolutionary in that it's so conventional that it becomes somewhat difficult to read. And, you know, the main character is a boring guy, basically. Yeah, I mean, the execution is exquisite. If you're going in looking for scintillating plot, right, it's not there. But again, it's that balance. He's doing something that I had never experienced with his narration and his writing, whereas everything else could not be more ordinary.

52:48James Altucher:And it's kind of funny. His only other novel that I know of is Augustus, I think was the title. It was a book about a novel version of the first Roman Emperor Augustus, which is completely, I did not expect from the guy who wrote Stoner. And then he didn't write anything else, I don't think. No, yeah, he did. he wrote Butcher's Crossing, like a Western, is amazing. I mean, his oeuvre is diverse, and it's all amazing. Oh, okay. I didn't know that. That's interesting. So look, well, I have one idea for you, actually. You should make a kind of workbook somehow of this. So for every industry and every form of creativity, you should tell like 10 different or however many different stories of a famous artist or creator or whatever, and the constraints that they had on them that led to...

53:37James Altucher:So you do this in the book, like you tell these stories, but I would do it almost like in this almost bullet point fashion. Like, here's Duke Allenton, here were his constraints, here were the results. Interesting. I think that's a great idea. Maybe I will do that. Right now I'm going to get through this book lunch and then take a breath, but I'd love to follow up with you and just talk on our own time about that idea a little more if you're interested. Yeah, no, that would be great because then I found that even just talking to you right now, that's like the most inspirational stuff is the way that you know, Dr.

54:07James Altucher:Seuss had these constraints and then created the cat in the hat. Like that makes me think of already in life, all the constraints that one has, whether, you know, like I know of one guy who's been on the podcast, he, he wanted to always be a writer, but he was commuting into work, some business job. And the only time he had to write was on the subway while everyone else was reading the newspaper or sleeping. He would write a page a day and he, you know, developed this great, you know, murder mystery series as a result. So people become like really successful by, having these constraints. And even the constraints you naturally have in life, like he only had time to ride on the subway ride, commuting in and out of work, was enough of a constraint to make him be a success.

54:45And I think we often think, oh, if I can do a little bit in this way on the subway, I'd be really great if I had total freedom and all this other stuff. And I think we're often mistaken in that belief that a lack of restrictions seems great in the abstract, but actually doesn't usually get the best out of us. And so I'm kind of hoping that Inside the Box is sort of an emotional reframe for people dealing with limits.

55:11James Altucher:Well, David Epstein, once again, thanks for a great book that I'm sure I'm going to think about for a long time afterwards. Like I still think about range all the time. So thank you for that. And this one is Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. And good luck with the book launch. Do you have any idea what book you want to write next? What's the next topic? No, I mean, I have a lot of ideas, but I like to take a breath. I've left a long time between my books, and that's partly because I sort of want to take a breather after a book comes out and do some shorter things and prototype ideas, right?

55:42Write some articles, things like that before I fully jump into a next book.

55:45James Altucher:All right, well, David, thanks so much. And again, the book is Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. Thanks so much for having me. Pleasure.

56:26James Altucher:The End

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