David Epstein On Why Constraints Drive Creativity, The Myth Of Productive Freedom, & How Limits Make Us Better

25:38And the new book is really kind of the inverse of that. You're saying yes to generalism, which is basically like kind of expanding the scope of your life experience to this new book, which is about like, okay, how do you focus and kind of implement constraints to drive productivity, creativity. And essentially, your hottest take is that constraints are a necessary component of having a happy life. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, first of all, you've obviously tapped into something clear, which is it seems on the face of it like it's in conflict with this book, Inside the Box, with my last book, Range.

26:22And first of all, if someone's going to argue with me, it's going to be me. I'm always kind of looking to challenge my own ideas, but also I view it as a kind of an obvious next question in some ways. Some of the most common questions I got after range were things like, okay, I have this broad toolbox. I have these broad experiences. What now? And at some point you have to focus that into achievement of some sort. And there's a hefty dose of me search in this book, right? Where I have this wide ranging curiosity. I have this zigzagging career and I have struggled to channel that. There's a reason why I have a book out every six years is because it's really hard for me to draw boundaries around my projects.

27:03And so I wanted to get better at this and I did. So I don't think it would take me six years again. So if AI doesn't obviate books, then I think I'll be writing them more often. So you've benefited from going on this exploration. I mean, that was a major impetus for the exploration in the first place is that readers were asking me the same question I had for myself, which is how can I draw boundaries around my projects to contain them and kind of focus my energy in a productive way. And along the way, as I got interested in learning about constraints, I realized also that we are always attracted to more freedom, but more freedom isn't actually always good for our creativity, for our wellbeing, especially, and I think this is especially true now in the AI age where there is infinite capacity to start things and be overwhelmed by things and to do more and more and more and more.

27:57And there are all these kind of productivity hacks that I think are really illusions. And what we often need to do is clarify our priorities and grapple with the fact that we have limited time and energy and clarify. So one of the most useful things I did as I learned about constraints was that I now recommend to everyone is make all of my current commitments visible. Like I took post-it notes. I write about a genomics lab in the book that did this, but put them on post-it notes, put them on the wall. And immediately the thing that I saw was I couldn't finish all this stuff ever. And that's just what I have going now.

28:30And so immediately you start to say, what are the priorities here? And what are the things that I can move to later? And so I think it's for our productivity, for our sense of wellbeing. We have to have constraints and boundaries. and that's hard but more important in this kind of information overload, infinite choice world that we're living in now. It's not dissimilar from the idea that we need to welcome discomfort into our lives. Discomfort, this Susan David idea of discomfort is the price of admission for a meaningful life. And our lives are so lined with convenience these days and this cultural priority around luxury and relaxation, et cetera, that we actually have to go out of our way to seek out uncomfortable experiences, to stress ourselves, to feel alive.

29:22And this is a sort of creativity, productivity version of that. We have to seek out constraints because things like AI or technological tools or the infinite scroll or just an unlimited number of movies that we can watch on Netflix, we sort of delude ourselves into thinking that this is good when in fact it's limiting. And it makes people unhappy. There are these international surveys that show that people have been becoming more bored since infinite scrolling came into existence. More bored, that's very counterintuitive. The fact that you can choose from all these entertainment options and find the best thing, and yet you get more bored.

30:03But it's the wrong kind of boredom, because we want boredom, rumination, or just our ability to engage our imagination is a function of boredom. But this is a boredom, it's almost like, more like an anime. It's not that kind of boredom, it's kind of like a depressed boredom. I mean, anime is a key word late in the book, this word that means basically rulelessness, and a popularizer of it was Emile Durkheim who was widely regarded as the founder of modern sociology, French sociologist. In the late 19th century when governments started keeping statistics about all sorts of things, he looked at suicide statistics in a systematic way for the first time ever.

30:48And at the time, suicide was considered an individual psychological problem. Like something's wrong with that person. Okay. What he showed was that's absolutely not the case, that it rises and falls, the prevalence of suicide with social conditions, that it's a movement in many ways, not individual psychological problems. He saw that when the economic fate of a country plummets, that suicide goes up. But surprisingly, he saw that when it rises too fast, it also goes up. Like anything that unmoors people from the things that ground them in their identity and that in some sense of habit and repetition causes people to feel desperate.

31:29And I feel like we have so much of that today where so much of virtual life is, as Jonathan Haidt told me when I was interviewing him for that chapter, is this endless cycle of micro dramas with a cast of changing characters, right? People who just come in and out and it just doesn't feel very grounded in reality. And so I think we, the convenience you mentioned, convenience is a problem. Everything has gotten so convenient that we don't have the friction that adds meaning that causes learning. I was just writing about these brand new studies that look at people writing essays with AI and they don't learn anything from their own essay because they're just relying on the tool.

32:08So you want these what psychologists call desirable difficulties, these things that slow you down, that make learning more frustrating, but they actually make it much better in the long term. So in some ways, I agree, the book is very much about things that feel inconvenient, but that actually make you better and have a greater sense of meaning. There's something tragic about the fact that we have to go out of our way to find these things. It wasn't that long ago where life would just present us with this naturally, and this was just part of living and growing up. And now we're insulated from these things that actually make us feel alive because we were under the misapprehension that they were making us unhappy when in fact the contrary is the case.

32:55Yeah. No, I totally agree. I mean, I think it's counterintuitive, right? It's deeply counterintuitive. The idea that having more options and all these things won't just be better and bring us to better decisions and make us happier, but it's what the research shows again and again and again is that like people are making decisions in the interest of preserving optionality. You hear that phrase all the time, keeping your options open. And that becomes an end to itself. And that's actually like a really bad way to make decisions basically. People in studies express a preference for reversible decisions, for example, because they want to keep their options open, but tend to be much happier with irreversible decisions.

33:36And so I think it seemed attractive. Like I remember when Mark Zuckerberg talked about making the metaverse. And he had this kind of video that he made and he said, it's going to be amazing. Everyone can live in a universe that's tailored just to them. And I'm now looking at this through the lens of the constraints research that I did for this book and said, that is the worst thing. That literally sounds like the underworld that you go to if you're bad. And so, I think some of the things that sound like they might be good just turn out. you know, our brains aren't meant to have access to everything everywhere all the time.

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36:32If you pay attention at all, you know that constraints drive unique creative solutions, and yet there still is this intractable notion that the path to creativity is freedom. Like, oh, you know, when you're free, then you can just create. So like state the thesis and I wanna understand like this journey that you've gone on to really understand the relationship between constraints and kind of transcending productivity into kind of breakthroughs and interesting results. When you look at all these case studies, what have you discovered? Yeah. And you're right that it feels that... So, in this group of psychologists did an international survey recently about creativity myths and things that we know are not true from research.

37:18And they found the most popular myth was that people are most creative when they are most free. Where in fact, it's the opposite. So as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says, you may think that your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly. And so if you have total freedom, you just go down what cognitive psychologists call the path of least resistance, meaning you will reach for solutions that you have seen before that you have done before. It's almost impossible to do anything creative unless that path is blocked, the path of least resistance, using what's often called a preclude constraint.

37:55You preclude the solution that you're used to. And so now one psychologist calls this impact of blocking familiar solutions on creativity. It's like the fastest way to spur creativity is to say, what's the thing I usually do? I'm not allowed to do that this next time, whether that's art or I'm going into a client meeting, what if I couldn't propose the usual thing? What would I do? This one psychologist calls it the green eggs and ham effect, which is named for the fact that Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet that he couldn't write a children's book using only 50 words. And so it forced him to experiment with rhythm because he couldn't experiment with vocabulary.

38:31Even before that, he had a bet that he couldn't do one with 200 words from a vocabulary list. First, he looks at the list, starts carping to his wife, says, there's no adjectives. What am I supposed to do? Then he said in fine Seussian form, he compared it to making a strudel with no strudels. So I think he was like in his personal life who he was in his public life. And then he decides, you know what, I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words on the list and make a book. And the first two rhyming words are cat and hat and changes children's literature forever. But this shows up again and again and again when people are, often it's not by choice, right?

39:06That I think is an important thing in the book that whether you self-impose constraints or whether they're imposed on you, if you view them instead of limitations as opportunities to clarify priorities and to launch into productive experimentation, it can be the most powerful tool you have. So there are things like, we were talking a little bit about NASA before this and NASA had a mission. When I gave this book to this guy named Ed Hoffman, who was what's called NASA's first chief knowledge officer. It's kind of like the head psychologist at NASA. He goes, oh man, I'm really thinking about this mission called LCROSS where the team ended up with half the time and budget that they wanted.

39:46So first they complained. And then they said, if we were going to get this done, how would we do it? And they end up having to borrow tech. They take imaging equipment from army tanks and engine temperature sensors from straight out of NASCAR. They build a probe that confirms water on the moon. And so it's always that blocking of what you would have done otherwise that is the thing that launches us into creative exploration. A lot of artistic innovators, whether it's Picasso or Bach, they will self-impose these constraints. It's as if they have some... I guess it's great practitioners always. They're way ahead of the science.

40:21They do this stuff intuitively and then decades later science catches up and says, this is why it works. So a lot of the serial innovators self-impose constraints that block their own solutions. The musician who says, these chords are off the table. You have the Cologne concert example of the kind of mistuned, broken piano, you know, kind of creating this legendary concert experience. Miles Davis did that for Kind of Blue, where he limited what, you know, probably the greatest jazz album of all time. Yeah. This is where your work kind of intersects with Tom Sachs, who's just on my brain because he was recently on the podcast and I was with him at South by Southwest, you know, just the other week and his whole idea of ISRU, in situ resource utilization.

41:04This is a guy who decided he wanted to have a space program and he was going to erect this space program with basically plywood and whatever he could find at the scrapyard. And this turns into this really magical kind of gigantic art installation that leads him into a relationship with JPL and NASA. By him kind of imagining I'm going to do this, working with the constraints and kind of leveraging his sculptural talents actually turns into this longstanding relationship where he's like the in-house art director to JPL with their Mars mission. It's insane, right? So it's like this visionary aspect that's also grounded in practicality and driven entirely by very limited resources and constraints.

41:58I mean, that whole in-situ resource utilization, right? Because it's NASA, it sounds like because they make acronyms for everything, right? Basically, it means use what you got. Yeah. Basically, what is around here that we can use? And how can we repurpose all this stuff, right? Yeah. In the same way that Robert Rodriguez has made El Mariachi. Totally. These incredible projects are entirely, on a very foundational level, expressions that emerge from constraints. Constraints are the very essence of what gives birth to these timeless works. Absolutely. And yet, culturally, we think, well, okay, you did that, but now you have the big budget and you're going to make the movie, and then you make some giant movie, and it's terrible.

42:42Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that testifies to the fact that we can't do this kind of thinking unless we're forced. We can force ourselves, right? We can self-impose constraints, but without them, we do the path of least resistance thing. We don't think about how we could use all the different materials around us and use other things unless we're forced to. Right. Life is hard. And for most people, these constraints are imposed upon us. You can take the case of an author with a publishing deadline, but in the context of a person with their everyday job, they're constantly being told what they can't do and there's guardrails everywhere.

43:16That's the average person daily experience. But if you look at an artist or just even a musician who has a keyboard, today there's just an infinite number of sounds that that thing could make, right? And that essentially is paralyzing. And so you have to volunteer in the same way that you have to sign up for a marathon or go out of your way to do something that's difficult, the onus is on the individual to take responsibility for imposing those constraints. And that's difficult. It's very difficult. And to your point about the kind of typical person's everyday experience, I should say, I wrote a book about how constraints can be useful and why we undervalue them.

43:57But it is also clear in creativity research that if you prescribe what someone has to do and basically how they have to do it, that can be stifling. If you're telling them - No agency within that. If you put constraints in place and the person says, I can't possibly surprise myself, that means they're in a bad spot. There needs to be enough room for them to do something surprising, basically. But you're right. I think in a lot of life right now, it's incumbent upon us to impose useful constraints because everything is so open and there's so much choice and so much optionality and all this kind of stuff.

44:34So make the use case for the average person. I'm not an artist. I'm not a musician. I'm not a sculptor. Why is this relevant to me and how is it of practical use in my daily life? I go to my job and my life's already harried and insane. And I'm just trying to level up a little bit here. How does this actually work? So when I think about constraints that I've applied to myself, I think of this acronym BCS in my head, which is B is batching your work. So doing work in blocks so that you're monotasking in specific blocks instead of multitasking. C is commitments visible. Make all of your current commitments visible, post-it notes.

45:12And then you'll probably realize you're overcommitted and look for things that maybe you can take away. And S, satisficing, setting good enough rules for your decision that once they're reached, you make the decision and don't look back. So first batch some of your work if you can. Because everything's competing for your attention now. If you're not structuring your attention, then algorithms are going to structure it for you, basically. And so if you can batch some of your work where you're monotasking for blocks during the day. So I write a lot about the research of this woman named Gloria Mark, who studies attention span and focus at work, and it's been getting worse, right?

45:49Like 20 years ago when she started, people would spend about three minutes on a task before flipping. Now it's about 45 seconds, basically. Yeah. I mean, say that again. The average person in their job is shifting their attention every 45 seconds. Yeah. Switching what's on their screen every 45 seconds, basically, and checking email about 77 times a day on average. And what she found is that the number of switches you make predicts poorer productivity at the end of the day, but also she started measuring heart rate variability and it predicts stress also at the end of the day. There's now some budding evidence showing that it impacts immune function if you're toggling a lot, It's a stressful thing to do, but I don't think people realize that.

46:26So if you can batch, you can check all those emails, but can you check them in one block or two blocks so you're not toggling between things? If you took all the stuff you have to do for the day, could you try to organize it into these blocks where that's the only thing you're doing? And it should be better for your productivity and your stress level and your attention. Some of her research was, I think, some of the scariest stuff when I was doing the book Because one of the things she found was that our attention spans get trained. So if you're interrupted by notifications or other people or whatever all day long, you become accustomed to a certain level of cadence of interruption.

47:01And so then if you say, now I have to focus and you remove the phone or whatever it is, you will self-interrupt at the cadence to which you've become accustomed with intrusive thoughts in order to maintain that cadence of interruption. I've noticed that in my own brain. Yeah. I will like, okay, I've locked the phone away and now I'm ready to work on the book. And then I'm so acclimated to those minute constant interruptions. It's like we have some internal distraction barometer that gets set. The good news is you can start to make a difference in a few days of blocking work so that you're not toggling as much.

47:40And also doing what's called cognitive outsourcing, which means just keep a pad next to you. And when that intrusive thought comes in, just write it down so it's not stuck in your head. So the BCS, the three main tips. C, it was commitments visible. Like I said, make all of your current commitments visible. So we have a hardwired bias humans do called subtractive neglect bias. We overlook solutions that involve taking stuff away. Maybe this is because for most of our evolutionary history, we didn't have to worry about having too much. We had to worry about having too little. But so we always reach for additive solutions.

48:11And so if you can make all of your commitments visible, you'll probably see that you're oversubscribed and can say, which are the ones I really need to focus on now and put the other ones later. So stop starting and start finishing. Don't start a new one until you've finished one. So get the post-it notes out. Get the post-it notes out. And write these things down and put them on your wall and have a kind of come to Jesus moment. That's right. That's right. And then the S in the BCS is for satisficing rules. So satisficing is a term coined by Herbert Simon, who I think was one of the most brilliant people who ever lived, political scientists by training, did the first AI demonstration.

48:48So he won the highest award in computer science, won the highest award in psychology, was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, then won the Nobel Prize in economics for good measure. And he coined this term satisficing, which means instead of trying to optimize, it's like the antithesis of optimizing. He said humans can try to optimize, but they can't because we have finite brains. We can't evaluate all the options. We don't know all the repercussions. So we have to come up with shortcuts. And in fact, we should do that proactively because then you save cognitive bandwidth for decisions and you end up happier.

49:21So coming from his work, researchers developed a satisficer maximizer scale. Maximizer means you're always trying to optimize. We'd probably call it an optimizer now. And it turns out it's almost always a bad thing to be less happy with their decisions. Maximizers are less happy with their lives. They're more prone to regret. Even when they make a good decision, they don't feel as good about it. And there's evidence that it's on the rise as a quality, maybe because you can infinitely compare your choices now to so many things. Whereas satisfacers will set good enough criteria for a decision ahead of time saying, here are the three things that need to be met by this decision.

50:04Once those are met, I go with it. instead of endlessly evaluating options. So I think in this world of infinite choice, where consumer choice has multiplied a hundred million fold compared to before the industrial revolution, that's setting these kind of rules for good enough and saying, once I surpass that, maybe that'll go to outstanding, but once I surpass good enough, done with that decision. Otherwise, you'll constantly fall prey to something called Fredkin's paradox, which is we spend the most time and energy on the least important decisions because we're having trouble telling the difference between the options, which means it probably doesn't matter if we spend more energy because we can't tell the difference, but that's where we end up spending the most time and energy and agonizing because the options are similar, which also means we could probably just choose and it wouldn't make much difference.

50:52The distillation of that idea is essentially that perfectionism is toxic, whether you call it optimization or just this really unhealthy relationship with holding yourself to a certain standard that's unachievable. It's a personal violence. And this idea of good enough being the ultimate life hack. And that runs contrary to this whole self-optimization culture. And it sounds bad because when I think about anything I'm doing, am I aiming for good enough? No, I'm not aiming for good enough. You're aiming for great. Well, that's actually not true. I started a newsletter a few years ago and that has actually turned out to be, and I started doing some like a form of dancing classes where I was a total beginner.

51:38And one of the reasons, these have been very important, good enough exercises in my life. So when I'm writing a book, if I say it, this has to be like a nine or 10 on the effort level, a newsletter, if I hit six and a half, ready to send. And that's been a really important exercise for me in satisficing and saying some things can be good enough. And that means sometimes they'll go to great. It'll come out that way. But once I hit good enough and it goes out and then the sun rises again tomorrow, and I think it's helped dilute some of my own maximizing tendencies. So it kind of goes against my natural proclivities.

52:10I think I'm more naturally a maximizer, but I've become much more proactive in setting out criteria for good enough and saying, look, when that's met, I'm okay to move to the next thing. that's similar to the seth godin kind of idea of like you have to ship your work right like he's just he's constant these books are coming out all the time with him and he writes a blog post every day and he just moves on but he's so focused on the shipping part like you know and whether it's a book or you know somebody who's writing a song or trying to come up with a comedy routine you know we just get in our own way and we don't want to put it up on its feet until it's perfect and And we then never end up shipping anything as a result of that kind of self-upbraiding of the quality of our work product.

52:57I got that paralysis kind of after range because it ended up being more successful than I expected. And I had left my normal day job to finish it because I was a traditional investigative reporter at the time and I was just not able to get both things done at the same time. And so suddenly I didn't have this place where I was writing constantly and had this one bigger work that I was associated with. And I kind of felt like, oh gosh, anything short of that means I'm going backward. And I did have a little bit of paralysis for a little while. And that's when I started the newsletter where good enough is good enough.

53:31And I think that was really, really helpful for me. Yeah. How can you get off the dime, lower the stakes and give yourself permission? Low stakes practice. Huge fan of low stakes practice. Yeah. In thinking about the new book, this is such a trivial example, but But I think you've seen, like, I've been posting these sort of daily morning gym, you know, like, just holding myself accountable by, like, being in my home gym in the morning. I love them. Every time it's like 424. I know. And I keep saying, like, I'm just waking. I wish I could sleep in more. Like, I just, you know, like, anyway, I'm just up at that hour.

54:06So I might as well get in the gym. But it's, you know, how can I turn this into a creative fun thing of like sharing this through a unique lens as a creative exercise? Not for any other reason than that, honestly. Almost like going on an artist date out of Julia Cameron's like the artist way book. Like this is my artist date. Yes, I'm in the gym, but like let me make this a fun creative thing with photography. One of the rules that I set for myself is like, I'm going to take a picture of this LED clock, no matter what time it says, but I want that photo to be different every time. Like, how can I get it, you know, a different angle on it or whatever and keep it interesting within the constraints of this shipping container, you know, kind of situation.

54:53So there's guardrails and walls. There's only so many things I can do. The clock is there. How can I play with that and find new and interesting ways to photograph it? That's been really fun. That's not a silly example at all. I mean, that's basically like what Picasso was often doing, where he would do a whole bunch of versions of the same idea and say, this is the idea. Now I'm going to look at all these little tweaks that I can do on it. And in fact, that tinkering with something that you have already, instead of like creating something totally new, was synonymous with creativity for most of human history until the Romantic period, basically in the late 18th century, where there was this sort of rebellion against enlightenment thinking.

55:33And that's when this idea of like the pure flashes of originality and genius and the so-called cult of the hero rose up. But that's not the real story of creativity. It's much more often taking something and tweaking it and what can you do with all... I mean, I write about Shakespeare's work in the book, all copied, like everything. He was... Romeo and Juliet, he adapted from this guy, Arthur Brooks' epic poem, which was adapted from a bunch of other people. He almost took some exact lines, actually, Shakespeare did. And with King Lear, he probably even acted in a different King Lear. He changed one of the daughter's names from Cordella to Cordelia, and he changed the ending.

56:15He made it his own. But it's one of the most creative minds in history. And he was always taking something that was there and seeing, how can I make this my own? And so I think when we're thinking about creativity, the idea that it's these like free creations of the mind with no limits is like a historic, you know, it's much more often building on something that's already there. And so I think that's how people should think of it. And by the way, I was telling you before, I think your morning posts have been important to me personally in a different way. I don't know if we can get into that. But I'm like, I don't know why anyone would care about this.

56:47But anyway, yeah, a couple of things in what you just shared. First of all, upending the genius myth, this is just total fabrication. Anytime you see some great man theory, there's legions of people who supported that and probably a lot of other people who were dancing around the same idea at the same time and this person got all the credit. But beneath the surface at the same time, all great artists steal, But the interesting kind of ripple that you offer in the book is this notion of taking the new idea, but contextualizing it in something familiar. And you use MLK and how he was borrowing from white preachers' sermons and making them his own so that there was something familiar in the way that Shakespeare would borrow and create this capsule that was relatable for an audience, but then doing your own unique thing within that.

57:47That's right. Yeah. This chapter is about the tension between creativity and originality. and if you want people to come along with a new idea, the best way to do it is to ground it in something that's really familiar to them. If it's too original, it kind of doesn't work for people. And you can see this all over the place in product design, by the way. It's like why early electric vehicles had the charging port where the non-existent gas tank is with a thing that looks like a gas hose, right? It's to convey to people what the function is compared to something they're used to. Or when Edison first electrified New York City, he kept the bulbs at a certain dimness so it would look like gas and kept lampshades even though he didn't need them so it would feel still like the gaslight people were used to or folders on your computer, right?

58:30They're not really folders, but that tells you what they do. With MLK, he was trying to get people to come along with a really radical idea, which is he was trying to get white Protestants to accept the black demand for equality, which was a radical idea and to get involved in helping it along. And so he borrowed what he was used to coming up from the gospel preaching tradition, where originality was seen as suspect, basically. You were supposed to preach to the choir. Sometimes people use that phrase, preaching to the choir is a negative thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You wanted to preach to the choir.

59:04They expected a version of the hits. And so he would give them version of the hits. He would borrow, but he would put his own spin on it. So even the Let Freedom Ring repetition from his most famous speech was borrowed from a speech by his friend Archibald Carey, who borrowed that from a speech by the activist and investigative journalist Ida B. Wells. It was this culture of repurposing things people were familiar with and then kind of shoehorning your unique message into it. So what MLK would do, something called typology, where he would find a story throughout history. He'd start with something that the audience could not disagree with, right?

59:39The story of Moses as a liberator. You can't disagree with that, right? Foundational story. And then he'd move to Abraham Lincoln, liberator like Moses. And then he'd move to Gandhi, liberator from colonialism. And then he'd move to, now it's your turn, right? So he tells these stories that everyone totally agrees with. And then he would say, and by the way, here's how it's going on right now and what you can participate in. And by that point, this uncomfortable idea looks like it's just a lineage from Moses to Abraham Lincoln to Gandhi to like the Supreme Court. And so he smuggled these really radical ideas by grounding them in incredibly familiar material.

1:00:22Sometimes so familiar that, you know, like some analogies he used to it get voted that they shouldn't be used anymore because they've been so overused and things like that. But that's kind of the real history of getting people to accept creative ideas is grounding them in something really familiar. Yeah, you get buy-in by sharing the familiar and you're engendering trust before you hit them with the novel idea within that nutshell that people are already comfortable with. Totally. And whatever it is, grounding it, the visions for change are more compelling. I think this is Adam Grant said it this way once that resonated with me.

1:01:00Visions for change are more compelling when they include visions of continuity. I think that's really true. From a persuasiveness perspective, there's obvious takeaways, but again, okay, somebody's listening to this. How does this operate in their life? How are they taking some of that wisdom in a practical sense and implementing it? Yeah, I think it depends what they're trying to do. If they're trying to, let's say they're trying to build something or they're trying to change people, maybe those people are people in their personal life, people in their professional life, whatever it is, that starting in places that those people already understand and agree with and showing them how this connects to the continuum they're familiar with is really important.

1:01:41And I think that's important even for yourself. So I would say in the past, because I'm very much kind of a relentless self-experimenter, I would say. And often in the past, that's been, today I'm going to do this. I'm going to be a totally new person starting tomorrow. I went through this phase where once I decided I was missing lunch, I decided I was only going to eat raw kale stalks for lunch. And it's like, man, you really have to chew those things. So it's like going from zero to 60 just instantly and it has never worked well. You fall prey to this thing in psychology called the what the hell effect where you then you mess up once and you're like, ah, what the hell?

1:02:17And you just throw the whole thing out. And so I think even for personal self-improvement, looking at where have you been and you want to aim for this change, but what's sort of a continuous through line where you can do that? Like building on things that already work for you, whether that's your sense of motivation, your sense of structure, your sense of obsessiveness, whatever it is, what can you take from that to get to this new place instead of just saying, I'm going to be like a totally new person tomorrow?

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1:05:37We were talking earlier about how scientists sort of go into an experiment with a certain hypothesis, how that can become problematical. In the case of this book and this adventure that you went on to kind of get to the bottom of these ideas, is there anything that surprised you or that you ended up changing your mind on from your operating hypothesis going into it? I would say the first, the most famous work done, the most obvious work. And when I even mentioned that I was doing a book on this, people said, oh, you have to read the paradox of choice research, which some of the most famous research involved people, this like clever experiment where people were exposed to a different number of like jelly at a store that they could buy.

1:06:25And when the, When the choice set reached a certain size, they would be paralyzed and just wouldn't buy anything at all. And that probably became the most famous work in this. So it's the most common thing people tell me about. And by the way, I love the researcher that's the most associated with this. And I cite some of his other work. But that work, it didn't give me great confidence that it would hold up. and when I was looking around there I think there are signs that it hasn't held up that well and so the like kind of first thing that I thought I was going to write about I turned out not to write about at all I think there are other problems with too much choice like we can see and I cite some of this research in the book that when healthcare choices or investment choice sets become too large and complex people actually do make worse decisions or will just not do it at all but some of the more famous paradox of choice stuff turned out, I just couldn't convince myself that the research would hold up basically.

1:07:23And so, I basically left it out. So, that definitely went against what I wrote in my book proposal because I thought maybe I would lead the book with this kind of stuff. That whole idea. Yeah. I mean, just reflecting on that example of you're at the grocery store and there's 50 different brands of peanut butter. If I want peanut butter, I'm still buying peanut butter. I'll make a choice. But I can see it, for example, in the supplement context. There's just a million supplements that are all making these great promises and you're like, well, this is all nonsense and then you don't buy any of them.

1:07:53Yeah. When I looked at the bigger body of research, it looks like it has more to do with choice set complexity. So peanut butter is not that complex, but 401k options may be pretty complex. And so as they get this, the options grow larger, people are more likely to just be like, I don't know and not do anything. But that study, that jelly study and one other. So the two most famous studies in the area that I was counting on going into the book, I ended up not writing about. The other one was this famous playground study where when I would talk to psychologists, they'd say, oh, this is like the study where kindergarteners were taken to a playground, one with no fence and one with a fence.

1:08:27And in the one with no fence, they all huddled around the teacher. In the one with a fence, they went crazy and explored. And the idea was that these boundaries give them the safety to explore. this is great. Like maybe I lead the book with this. And I could not track down. I saw this study being cited all the time in other studies, but I could not find the primary study. And so finally I track it down. The best source I can find is to like, and all these citations and books are citing each other. Right. So I'm just like going around in a circle. Finally, I track it down to like a student project that won some award.

1:09:01The guy is now a professor. So I reach out to him and say, this thing's really famous. Like, do you know, what did you base this on? And he says, I took the word of some child psychologists and I could never find a primary study. I'm really sorry I perpetuated this. And so I think it got famous because it gets at something that we kind of know is true that like you explore more within boundaries. But again, it was like the other most famous study that everyone told me about when I said I'm writing about constraints turned out to not even exist. Yeah, there's no there there. It's like this Ouroboros.

1:09:36It lowers my confidence in the scientific canon. If that could become so famous and so accepted without there actually being a root source for the idea, what else is out there? Yeah. I mean, you start to realize how sloppy some of the stuff is. That said, again, I think the scientific community compared to the rest of the world is wonderfully self-correcting in some ways. And a lot of the problems they're having is because scientists have criticized scientists. But that finding is sexy, it's interesting. I could have seen opening a book with it where it's like this picture of kindergartners in one area where they're huddled around the teacher.

1:10:20And then the other area where they're exploring and wild. And this is like a metaphor for life. But sadly for me, it turned out the study doesn't exist. If you ran the experiment, it would probably be true. It may be. It just actually didn't get run. It didn't get run. And so I'm not going to open a book with it if it didn't actually happen. But what I take from that is the doggedness in your reporting. Like you are truly a science-minded investigative journalist. And I reached out to Brad Stolberg to say like, hey, Dave's coming in. Like what in your experience would be good to talk to him about?

1:10:51Or what might I not know that would be cool? And he said, David is a guy who will literally get on a plane and fly across the country to have a one-hour conversation with somebody when it could have easily been on Zoom. And I think that speaks to the depth of your commitment to veracity and getting to the truth and really being deeply connected to the ideas that you're exploring. What is that about? And maybe a follow-up to that is, how are you thinking about the current state of investigative journalism in 2026? Good question. I'm really flattered to hear that, by the way. I thought you were going to say his favorite work of mine was some reporting I did about drug cartels as I was doing that for a year.

1:11:36But for this book, I think maybe one of the things he's thinking of is I did this whole road trip through rural Mississippi while I was following up on a sort of legend about a famous musician for the book. And I basically ended up road tripping through rural Mississippi so that I could sit in an abandoned graveyard for an hour at midnight and experience something that I wanted to write about. So I broke the windshield on the rental car driving down like a famous crossroads where musicians make deals with the devil. So it was like this long trip where I broke a rental car, hadn't gotten the insurance just so that I could sit in a certain graveyard at midnight.

1:12:08And I think Brad was like - Who's the musician? Robert Johnson, who supposedly famously sold his soul to the devil to become the greatest guitar player in the world. But in fact, what he just did was went and found some solitude and a teacher, basically. And I remember Brad was like, what are you doing there? But when I get curious about something, I just am very motivated to, I just can't drop it. For example, with that playground study, when I started to feel like maybe it's not real, I just can't drop it. I find that very interesting to follow up on. And like I told you at the beginning of this, how I describe my job is I obsess over misperceptions of research.

1:12:45And so if I think there's some misperception out there, I'm kind of obsessive about wanting to change the narrative. to your question about how investigative reporting is now. It's challenged, I think, for a lot of reasons, one of which is it's slow. It's an inherently slow form. When I was at ProPublica, which is an all investigative operation, so much time was spent going down dead ends. I don't know what the story is yet. I'm just in exploratory mode. And that happens for my books too. I do a lot of interviews where I'm just in exploratory mode. And it's really hard to have that luxury now when people are forced to produce so much where you may not have the luxury of going down a dead end because something has to be made like every two seconds.

1:13:35So ProPublica had, like when I came in, they said, we do have rules. The rules are you have to take on something that is of a certain level of importance and they would help you evaluate that. And it has to be something that's not done already in those sorts of things, but you did have the luxury of failing. Mm-hmm. And I just think that is such a luxury now. Investigative journalism is expensive. You have to have the opportunity to fail that there are just not many people who are being afforded the ability to fail in their work in a way that would allow them to do that. And you might get sued, right?

1:14:10So it's expensive in that way too. I think one of my friends, my closest friend from Sports Illustrated, a guy named Pablo Torre has been doing some incredible investigative reporting and it's kind of made a new format. He has a podcast now. And I don't know if you heard about this stuff with the LA Clippers kind of circumventing the salary cap by like funneling some money through a sort of what turned out to be a fraudulent environmental company. He's been doing that work and he likened it to, he saw unboxing videos on YouTube, you know, where like a kid will open a toy and you share in the joy of their excitement.

1:14:43And he's doing that with journalism where he's got his documents and he'll bring a few people into the studio and he'll say, turn over page one and they'll unbox the journalism together. And I think that format is really innovative. And so maybe it'll open up people to seeing how we can do investigative work. Because one of the things he and I talked about was when we were at SI, it would have been very hard to do stories like that because of the kind of traditional format. But he found this other format that works in a different medium. And so I hope we'll start to see some of these where he can keep going back to it too, right?

1:15:16He doesn't have to encompass everything in one story. It's been like nine episodes or something. Because once he does one, people leak him stuff and then he does another. That's interesting. Just making it visually dynamic. And using the affordances of the medium, you know? And so I think investigative journalism is in trouble. It's very easy to attack investigative journalists also. And so like I used to always be white knuckling it through investigative stories. Like some of my colleagues at ProPublica would like almost gain energy from being in a public controversy. I was not like that. If I felt like something was important to do, I'd do it, but I was like, when will this be over and everybody stopped being mad at me?

1:15:52And I think even knowing that the internet, people are going to criticize you, it's still hard to put something out that's investigative in nature and just have this army of people or maybe bots or who knows, like tearing you down all the time. So I think there's the social aspect, there's the economic conditions of journalism. But I'm hopeful when I see stuff like Pablo, I mean, because I've now started pitching him investigative ideas that I don't think I could have gotten into traditional magazines. So I'm hopeful that we'll see some kind of rebirth, but it's under pressure for sure because people just don't have the ability to fail.

1:16:22Yeah. I mean, that idea of creating a visually arresting version of investigative reporting via this unboxing conceit is an example of leveraging constraints to make something - Absolutely. To reinvent the form, which I think is really cool. But in reflecting on investigative journalism writ large, this is necessary to a healthy society, right? And when I think about it, I think about two different aspects. The incentive structure, which is broken really right now. there is no viable business model to support reporting that takes months and months and months and months. And I would argue there never was.

1:17:06It was just piggybacking on the other stuff that made money. It was subsidized by advertising in magazines that have wide distribution. I mean, at SI, when I would do investigative stories and some of the criticism would always be, you guys are just trying to sell magazines. I'm like, nobody will advertise in an investigative story. Like we're not doing this because it's selling magazines. Right. So it was always piggybacking on the other stuff. Yeah. The second pillar is an appreciation for the truth. Yeah. And we're in this post-truth world. Like, do people care about the truth? They should, do they?

1:17:41You know what I mean? Like that's the heart that has to pump the whole thing right now as well. I mean, and that's kind of a scary thing. When I was thinking about this, I would say the most unusual chapter in the new book is chapter 10, which is based on the work of this economist named Douglas North, who won the Nobel Prize for showing the importance of institutions for the long-run flourishing of countries. And by institutions, he didn't mean hospitals or colleges. He meant what he called the rules of the game in a society, or as he put it, the constraints on human behavior that come from social norms or or political and economic structures.

1:18:17And what he showed was that these are the foundation of shared prosperity, that for most of human history, people only did business with their kinship network or their religious network. But then when constraints came in that made strangers more predictable to one another, they started doing business across these boundaries and that led to shared prosperity. What some of his work and the people that then did work after him showed that these rules of the game in society, when they're sort of more equitable and people can see that. They trust strangers more, they collaborate more. And that that has an effect long after those institutions are gone.

1:18:49So these natural experiments I write about where like a border was drawn between some towns, some of them have good equitable institutions and some don't. And a century after those institutions disappear, it still affects how the grandchildren in that area will trust and collaborate with strangers. The implication of that, I think, is that we've now been seeing almost open public corruption in many cases. Clear cases of rules don't apply to some people that are basically flaunted. And based on this research, that should have a really bad effect in the long run on people's willingness to trust strangers.

1:19:23And I just saw the Pew just released a survey showing that America is now the only country where a majority of adults say other people have bad morals, which is exactly what you'd expect if we're kind of proactively tearing down these agreed upon social norms and institutions. So I think even if we turned it around tomorrow, we'd have some lasting damage, but we have to kind of find some hopefully way back and to have some agreed upon social norms for behavior so it's not just a free for all all the time. The degree of norm violation these days is unlike anything I've ever seen. And I often And I'm reflecting on like, what are the longterm implications of this?

1:20:05Even if we were to reverse course and try to find our way back, like what is the full extent of the damage that has been done? And you see it played out in the psyche of the average person and the way they conduct themselves on social media. If that is kind of a reliable proxy for kind of where people are at, just the anger and the vitriol and the division and the acrimony is really at a level that is unprecedented, at least in my life. I actually think at this point, I used to want to sometimes online kind of correct people if I thought they were saying something wrong. And then I had a no fighting on Twitter policy that I implemented.

1:20:49But now I think it's also just getting older that I wouldn't fight on Twitter anyway and more mature. But I almost think that having a certain temperature and tone when you're in the public discourse is like a radical act of staying moderate and not turning the temperature up. A lot of people are turning the temperature up for profit, right? But I'm almost less concerned with people saying something wrong now than if they're conflict entrepreneurs, if that's what they're thriving off of, building conflict. So even if someone's wrong, but I think they have an earnest and civil tone. I'm like, I think you're contributing to the good side, even if I think your idea is wrong.

1:21:27But the presumption that people are operating in good faith when you engage with them, in my experience, is quickly becoming eroded. Now I'm beginning to assume that people are... I'm going to assume first that they're not operating in good faith. That's been flipped. And that's a terrible flip to have. Ultimately, I think we're a hyper-social species that survives by collaborating in huge groups. And I think in the long term, that could really undermine it. But on the topic of institutions, norms, and trust, I'm reminded, what you shared reminded me of Yuval Noah Harari's kind of perspective on this, which is essentially that human beings have built societies based upon stories.

1:22:13And whether it's a border or a corporation or a government institution, it's essentially an imagined story that we all buy into and that engenders trust and allows us to function as a society. And when you erode these norms and you degrade the trust, these stories start to become porous and they degrade and with it our trust. And how does a society move forward and cohere when we can't all agree upon some shared story of reality. Yeah. I mean, the foundational stories are like, to your point about Harari, that's what allows human collective action. That's one of the reasons why we're special, right?

1:22:53Symbolic language, we can have stories that are agreed upon shared abstract ideas that allow us to all move in a direction together. I think if we don't have that, then we won't all move together, basically. Then you don't have collective action. So I'm hoping we can find a way to kind of rewrite some of our shared stories. I hope out of some of this crisis, there'll be an opportunity to do some of that. Because if we don't have some agreed upon social norms, again, going to Douglas North's work, just the long run fate of the nation just looks a lot worse, period. And a norm, I suppose on some level, is a constraint.

1:23:30Absolutely. I mean, that's what Douglas North called it. And that's what he won the Nobel Prize for in showing that these norms preceded rather than followed technological innovation, where social norms would come up that gave people freedom within a framework, ability to collaborate because they understood how other people would work. And that led to, that was one of his great paradigm shifts was showing that these changes of norms preceded rather than followed technological innovation and enabled it. The core of your work always comes back to this idea of how we can be a little bit better at work, at home, in our relationships with respect to whatever goal that we're working towards or a thing that we're trying to realize in our life.

1:24:13And I'm curious because I've been thinking a lot about change, like how you think about change, what really drives change and what differentiates someone who could read a book like yours and go, got it, I'm putting it into action and wow, my life's already getting better versus the person who might read your book and still be stuck and unable to actually translate self-awareness or information into positive action. That is such an interesting question. And so I'll speak from my own experience of a lot of books that have changed me and what's made the difference. I think, and maybe this will go to the medium being the message of constraints is picking something small to start with and picking one thing.

1:24:56Even I haven't implemented everything that my book implies one should be doing, but there are some things that I implemented. But you got to get back to the dance videos. To the dance. Do you know how I got interested in that kind of dancing, by the way? It was during the research process. I saw a documentary about shuffle dancing and it's created in crowded clubs in Melbourne when people had limited space and wanted to be able to change direction quickly with limited. That's why it ended up being good for Instagram because people have to change direction in really small space. So I was like, oh, this is right up my alley.

1:25:24Let me do this. So. It was a courageous act to like learn how to dance and make videos and put those on social media? Well, when I first did it, I had like a hundred followers who are my friends. Now I'm starting to make like other videos. And so now I'm much getting more self-conscious about it. So I'm thinking, should I go back and delete them or actually do more? I don't know what the answer is. But I think just picking off one thing that seems like a reasonable personal experiment, because I don't want people with my book or any other book to feel that what the hell effect, where you have to change everything tomorrow and then you don't do it and you say, well, forget it.

1:26:02Throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you do that thing of like putting all your current commitments up on the wall, say if I had to cut out one thing in the next 90 days, what would it be? And maybe try that. Maybe try one week where you don't look at email first thing in the morning and you do some of your other important work. So it's not, so you don't fall prey to this thing called the Zagarnik effect where open things that you haven't answered occupy your brains, you can't do other stuff. Take just one thing and implement that instead of worrying about doing all of this stuff. Because I just think that can feel so overwhelming.

1:26:35It's like, if I only did these 20 things, everything would be perfect. One experiment at a time. One experiment at a time. It's one thing to say constraints drive creativity. uh another thing to say constraints drive productivity this is kind of like a cal newport idea deep work like put your phone in a lock box and you know like don't check only check your email twice a day etc he's my neighbor i've taken a few tips from him that i did implement yeah that's an interesting brain trust you know and dan pink it's like we're all Like in the... That's very cool. I'm imagining these salons of you sitting around exchanging high-minded ideas over a whiskey or something.

1:27:20You might be disappointed about the high-mindedness of the ideas. But it's another thing altogether to tie this idea of constraints to happiness. So I want to spend some time around how you kind of arrived on that and what the support for that notion is. Yeah. There are a few different things where I think about constraints and happiness. One, we talked about a little, which is setting these satisficing rules, which is not falling prey to maximizing and trying to optimize all of your decisions and setting those good enough rules and just sticking to them. It shows that people are happier, that they're happier with their lives, they're happier with their decisions, not agonizing after you make the decision.

1:28:00Herbert Simon, who came up with satisficing, he was very much like that. And he simplified his own life in many ways. He said, you only need three pairs of clothes, one in the wash, one in the closet, one on your body. And he kind of simplified everything he possibly could to save his bandwidth for things that were more important. Minimalism as a lifestyle constraint. And at least in the places where it's not a big deal, right? If there's some places you want to agonize more, okay, but you don't have to do it in everything. And again, there are these surveys showing the rise of this kind of maximization of everything.

1:28:32Even there's interesting study that looked at as consumer options have exploded, people start to see the things they buy more of as an expression of their identity. And so they start to feel this greater weight for every decision they made. So just setting good enough criteria for some of these decisions. Satisficers are happier by almost every metric than our maximizers. And again, what I'm wary of is that it sounds like have low standards. Satisficers don't necessarily have low standards, but they have standards at all other than best imaginable. And so, they have the possibility of being happy with their decisions.

1:29:09I think the other type of it, and this is like the last chapter of the book is where I get sort of more personal and philosophical about kind of this more conceptual constraints in life, some of which have to do with grounding yourself in the real world. And I think of Robert Putnam, the political scientist who wrote the book Bowling Alone, which looks incredibly prescient in retrospect, where he talked about the decline of civic engagement and the impacts it would have on health and longevity. And this was around 2000 when he was writing it and saying, people are retreating into their own world with TV, so they're not going to the bowling club anymore and having civic engagement.

1:29:43And he famously said, joining a club, joining one club cuts your risk of dying in the next year in half. That's kind of a rule of thumb. Wow. But now this analysis of about 150 studies with over 300 ,000 subjects pretty much backed him up that that kind of social integration has a greater impact on survival than does quitting smoking for cardiac patients. Like grounding yourself in something real. It requires you to give up some scheduling autonomy. So like when I started going to dance classes, I wasn't having any embodied experience with strangers, I realized. And I wanted some of that. And so I started going to these meetups or classes.

1:30:18As an independent writer, I could have the absolute ultimate - Cocoon lifestyle. I was invited to a writer's retreat some years ago after range, and we all had to answer a question. What are you optimizing for this year? And I said autonomy. I thought what I always wanted as a writer was to spend every minute in a way of my own choosing. Fast forward two years, I realized there's such a thing as too much autonomy. I ended up in this individualized schedule or I wasn't synced with anybody else. So, I started getting back into activities. I joined a club. I started going to these dance things where it's annoying.

1:30:51I may have to go somewhere. The time may not fit my schedule, but it actually started to give me back some sense of syncing with other people and some sense of meaning. And I started reading about like the Soviet Union had de-synced everybody to keep factories going where they gave everybody a four-day work week and a one-day weekend. And it was a social disaster because everyone had individualized schedules, so they weren't synced up with other people. And so I think sacrificing some of your own scheduling autonomy to sync up with other people is a really important thing. So join something, join anything.

1:31:20This is where the new book dovetails with range because essentially what you're saying is we have this notion, like let's say, okay, you're a writer, you've got an epiphany for a new book. The first thing that comes to mind is, wouldn't it be great if I could just go to this cabin in the woods without a phone or anything and nobody could bother me. And I would just write an absolute masterpiece because I wouldn't be distracted. But ultimately, that is not in service to your best work. You're better off being at home or you're interacting with friends and going to a dance class and having people impede upon your schedule in ways you probably prefer they didn't.

1:32:04But ultimately, that's going to end up not only making you happy, but also the book that it might take longer for the book, but when the book comes out, it's probably going to be a better book. I don't know if it does take longer also. I'll say this book was a new experience for me. There was one cabin in the woods thing I did because I wanted to put constraints on myself because I've had my first - There are different kinds of constraints. The cabin in the woods is a constraint, is it's a different kind of constraint? Yes. And my first two books, I wrote 150 % of a book to get one book because I had not drawn a good boundary around the project.

1:32:36Then I became a dad and said, I cut a trip to Arctic Sweden from my first book, right? To Brad's point, I went to Arctic Sweden for something that didn't end up in the book. And I'm like, I can't be doing this now that I have a kid. And I need my workday to end at a certain point. And so, I did a few things. But also, contrasting that with the idea that like, well, this kid is very inconvenient to like my writing lifestyle. It's incredibly inconvenient. Incredibly inconvenient. Adds all this meaning to my life, but super inconvenient. And so, this time I did, I have this thing I call a master thought list.

1:33:09That's all my ideas. It's arranged in a certain way. I printed it out. I went to a hermitage in the garden of a Franciscan monastery for two days, but didn't talk to anybody, no internet, nothing. Read through it, said, and it's well longer than the book. Whichever ideas are stuck in my head now, I'm doing a one-page outline for this book. If it's not on that page, it's not in the book. And this is the first time, the book is 20 % shorter. It's the first time I didn't overwrite it, I turned it in early. And this is the first time I had a workday that ended. In the past, I said, my competitive advantage will be that I will let this swallow my life and then I'll recover afterward.

1:33:42This time, I borrowed from one of the characters in the book, Isabel Allende, one of the greatest living writers. I got to follow her through sort of her writing routine and one piece of it, she starts her books on the same day every year, but one piece of it was she lights a candle to start every workday, turns it off, blows it out, closes the door to end the workday and that's shut down. I took that ritual. I use electric candles. She's braver than I have paper in my office. But Cal does that too, actually. He says like system shutting down at the end of his day. And so for the first time, I said, I have a time when my workday is going to end.

1:34:17And I turned my book in early. I sat around for two weeks saying I'm early. I can't possibly turn it in. I have to keep tinkering. I never would have thought. My plan is to turn it in at 5 p.m. on the day it's due in the contract. But I think I'd forgotten what I knew from athletic training, which was you're better when recovery is part of the program, when you program in the recovery instead of just letting it swallow everything. And so I think I was both better and faster. Listening to that story, I'm hearing you, the scientist, and I'm hearing Cal, the you know, computer scientist, you know, people who are trying to like, you know, decode like, you know, how to function, you know, in the world at a, you know, at an opt in an optimal way or a good enough way, I suppose.

1:35:04But then I hear like, but like what is so funny about this story that you just shared is like, you use the example of Allende and like this, this beautiful practice of her lighting a candle. And what's missing in your and Cal's analysis of that is her treating that as a ritual, like a sacred ritual. It has a certain energy to it that is beckoning and demanding a level of reverence, right? Yeah. That maybe gets missed in the ones and zeros of the Cal Newport brain. No question. I see you're very diplomatically and eloquently calling us robotic. her wonderful, which is true. But I mean, everything about writing still has a spiritual mystique to me.

1:35:50I still see books as these magical little puzzle boxes that are more mysterious to me than any technology really is. So I do have a feeling, and I have a library in my office and I look at the books that I admire and still wonder how people got these things done. I look at some of my own books and wonder how I got them done. I'm not all the way on the end of Isabella Enda spectrum where she puts like a book of Pablo Neruda poetry under her computer just in case beauty by osmosis is a thing that will get into her writing. But I do feel that ritual gets me in a sort of state of sort of a sacred space, I guess, for doing what I want to do that I rarely inhabit in other times.

1:36:37Maybe sometimes when I'm floating on a forest trail or something like that, I feel that way. But the ritual for writing does make me feel that way. I mean, it really is the doing that brings me back, right? I'm glad I'm forced to produce a book because otherwise I'd probably do it and never put it out there. This takes us back to Tom Sachs and this idea that he has called knolling. He used to be a furniture designer for Knoll and Knoll has all of these rules about how you should organize your workspace. And when you're facing a creative block, his sort of practice is always be knolling. Okay, so that's fine.

1:37:12So, all right, well then, you know, clean your workspace or whatever. And there's something sacred about that. It's cheeky, like this idea that he has, but the idea is you have to acclimate yourself into the creative kind of headspace in order to like do your thing. And whether it's lighting a candle or organizing your pens or whatever, what feels like procrastination or maybe trivial or frivolous is actually essential to kind of luring yourself, lulling yourself into the headspace where you can do your best work. It's interesting that we think of creative people as just this free-flowing, they're wandering around undersea plants, being wherever the wave takes them and then being hit by inspiration.

1:37:54But when I was reading tons of work about the habits and rituals of creators while working on this book. And it's pretty remarkable how structured they are. They all have these sort of regularities and rituals. And I think it's really what liberates them to perform within that. It gets them in that performance mindset, just like someone before shooting a free throw or doing whatever the figure skating routine has kind of that routine that gets them in the mindset. And I think it does create that space. But it can seem surprisingly rigid from the outside when you're thinking about people doing creative work.

1:38:35But I think it's actually like that structure that gets people in the space. And I implemented other stuff like, you know, I like to borrow anywhere you see good ideas. So like Hemingway would end on in the middle of a sentence so that he automatically knew where he was going to pick up the next day. That's very helpful to me too. Totally. I like to - If I don't know where I'm picking up the next day, then I'll just wander around and do nothing. That's right. You dither for a while. So I like to do that because then I come back and I'm like, I'm positive of something that I can do right now that's important where I start.

1:39:06It's not opening my email, it's starting with this thing. So lots of those structures and rituals. On the subject of having your feet planted firmly on the ground while also reaching for the stars, is like there's you and Cal and then there's Allende. I'm curious around how you think about goals. You have some interesting ideas around goal setting and working towards goals. And I've kind of evolved my thinking on this. Certainly, goals have been crucial in my life and have kind of helped me go from where I was to where I am in many stages of my life. And there's functionality to that. And it's like arithmetic, like you set it, you calendar it, there's a way to do it.

1:39:52And when it works, it's great. It engenders self-esteem and it progresses your life in positive directions. But as I reflect on my life now and identify the most meaningful experiences that I've had and really how I went from where I was to where I am right now, it really has nothing to do with goals. And so I'm thinking about goals as something to almost transcend on some level. So I'm curious around your thoughts on this. I mean, I'd be interested to hear you say more about that, about what you think did do it for you. But I kind of agree with that. I mean, I've always, I would say when I was teenager, early 20s, I was incredibly long-term goal-driven.

1:40:42I knew all the things I was going to do exactly. I was going to do them and they were going to be like, I was going to go to the Air Force Academy. I was going to become a test pilot. I was going to become an astronaut. Of course, I didn't do any of those things. And all of the most important projects in my life have been opportunistic pivots. Sometimes from personal tragedies or devastations, other times from something that just popped up and interested me that I for whatever random reason got some keyhole view into. And so I think goals can be useful, but I think if they're preventing you from opportunistic pivots, that's really a bad thing.

1:41:20And so I think instead of asking who's younger than me and has more than me, saying, comparing yourself to yourself yesterday because you're not really sure where you're going anyway and being open to opportunistic pivots is really, really important. And at this point, And again, there's so much me-search in this latest project that now I feel like putting these kind of structures and rituals in place and trusting that I'm going to kind of thrive and do interesting things within them is sort of more important to me than the goal. Because the goal often doesn't give me anything actionable to do.

1:41:52I think about this when I was an 800 meter runner where I would have these time goals and then I'd cross the finish line and get a glance at the clock and either I'd be happy or sad and usually sad because they were usually stretch goals. So most of the time it just makes you annoying. annoyed. But it didn't give me anything to do. Whereas if I had certain experiments that were like, make a move with 300 meters to go, oh, that's something that I can try in practice and then try in a race. And so a lot of goals, I think just, they're like an aspiration, but they're not actually giving you the thing to do today, where I think these kinds of structures and experiments can actually give you something to do today.

1:42:29But I'd be interested to hear you say more about what you think did work. Well, I think from a constraints perspective, when you set a goal, you're layering your life with constraints. Because you're working towards this goal, it means you're going to have to say no to these things so that you can say yes to these things and it provides structure to your life. And I think that that is fantastic. And probably more people than less can benefit from a little bit more goal setting. Like knowing what to say no to? Yeah. So that it drives a decision tree and really focuses your attention. the flip side of that is what you talk about like this you know developing this proclivity to quit things like if you're so attached to a certain goal then those blinders that you have on are going to prevent you from pivoting or you know if all the evidence while you're working towards this goal is trying to tug you in a certain direction you're going to ignore that when maybe that is the true direction that you should be leading your life and so you know you can go off course, ultimately, if you look at it from a long-term perspective.

1:43:32So it's a yes and situation. I think you should have goals and work towards them, but you need to be open to experiences from that kind of curiosity and experimentation kind of spirit. Let's just say like, oh, the first book I wrote or this podcast or being in this studio, none of these are a function of having whiteboarded them. They are an outgrowth of investing in my curiosity and being like, oh, this is cool. I'm going to do this. And like, oh, that looks interesting. I'm going to move over here. And that doesn't mean that I'm like ping-ponging around. I'm doing it from a place of intentionality and kind of trusting my gut.

1:44:11And there are guardrails and structures around how I make those decisions, but it's not because I set a goal. And so I'm trying to make sense of like how these two things live together. That's like, I mean, it sounds like you're describing this kind of freedom within some decision-making framework, right? And I was just in Angela Duckworth's class, actually. So we were talking about her earlier. And she invited me to class just for one of her sessions. And in the class, she was talking about what she now calls the paramecium principle. Have you heard of this already? Okay. So obviously she's most famous for grit, passion, and perseverance.

1:44:44And what she was telling her students was, she was basically saying, if I could redo grit a little bit, I think I'd put a little bit more on the passion side emphasis because I think we've actually often taught young people to persevere, but then they persevere at something and put their head up 10 years later and like, I actually don't like this thing. And so the paramecium principle is paramecium single celled organism. And all it really has is detectors that detect food nourishment or warmth. And it'll detect a little and it will move in that direction. If it detects more, it goes in that direction again.

1:45:16If it doesn't, it tries a different direction. And so it's making this constant series of pivots. And what she was explaining to her students was that's engagement or interest is the thing that you should be pivoting to. And she was saying not happiness, that's a different thing, but interest or engagement and pivot toward it. And to me, this is like a total reconception of her work in a way that I think is really interesting and productive where don't feel like you're a failure because you didn't persist in this goal that might not be the right goal for you because how could you know if it's the right?

1:45:54One of my favorite phrases from range was we learn who we are in practice, not in theory, that you can't conceptualize what's right for you in the future because you change and the world changes. You actually have to do stuff and then reflect on it to understand. You have to act and then think, not the reverse. And so I was pretty psyched to see her promoting this paramecium principle where it's like, yeah, you want to persevere when something matters, but you want to be constantly titrating your path so that you're reacting to your level of interest. So again, everything that's been important to me in my life has been an opportunistic pivot.

1:46:27And that requires kind of letting go of the direction that I thought I was going in. So when you think of yourself as this successful author, was that a goal that you set for yourself or was that more kind of a maturation of your curiosities and your obsessions? No. I mean, disclaimer, there's a little bit of a sad origin to the story, more than a little bit. But when I became a writer, so I was in grad school, I was training to be a scientist. I lived in the Arctic studying the carbon cycle and stuff. And I had a training partner when I was a runner who dropped dead at the end of a race, a few steps after a mile race.

1:47:04First guy in his family of Jamaican immigrants who was making it. He was one of the top ranked guys in the country in his age group. And I was devastated. I mean, I still remember the day our coach, I wasn't there when it happened, called and said, oh, Kevin died at the track today. You say died when somebody ties up at the end of a race. I'm like, well, it happens to the best of us. No, no, he died. He died. And that's what launched me into writing because all our newspapers said, you know, he had a heart attack. What does that even mean for a guy at this age, this level of health? I ended up getting his family to sign a waiver allowing me to gather up his medical records and investigate.

1:47:44Turned out he had this misdiagnosed textbook case of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and enlargement of a certain part of the heart that's usually the cause of a young athlete dropping dead with no prior symptoms. That's what got me interested in genetics, eventually led to my first book, The Sports Gene. And that's when I said, I want to write about this because I think we can save some people for a public audience, not people like me who are buying a science magazine with their disposable income, but people who read, say, Sports Illustrated. And that's when I decided to go in that path and try to become the science writer at Sports Illustrated.

1:48:15So it was very much a pivot from something that felt meaningful to me at that moment and totally changed my trajectory from going into the sciences to becoming a writer. But it does illustrate this idea of this career emerged from you investing in your curiosity and what was lighting you up. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I will say one other thing that I learned when I was in grad school for sciences was my work started getting so narrow and I started asking myself, am I the type of person who wants to spend my whole life learning one or two things new to the world or much shorter spans of time learning things new to me and synthesizing them and translating them.

1:48:53And I was learning that I was the latter type of personality. And I just couldn't have known that before I tried it. What is it that hamstrings you the most from the subject matter in the new book? What is it that trips you up or you still struggle with? You mean in terms of the implications of things that I would implement, say? Or your refusal or recalcitrance around putting up constraints when after writing this book, you know you should. I still struggle with satisficing because I think my... Even I know how much of the optimization stuff online is nonsense and preying on our intentions, but I still have that reflex to want to maximize a lot of my decisions and look for the best.

1:49:36So that's a struggle for sure. The amount of autonomy that I have the luxury to have in my schedule, giving some of that up has been a struggle, but I've done, I mean, when I realized that it was bad for my wellbeing, that I had optimized for something that is bad for me, I joined the board of a nonprofit in my community. I, you know, joined a, like a dinner and discussion club. You know, I started doing all these things to have a grounding in the real world again. And sometimes that's an annoyance from a scheduling standpoint. And so I still struggle with that sometimes, but it has undoubtedly been better for my wellbeing.

1:50:11And there's some advice that an important figure in the book, Tony Fidel gave me that Tony Fidel was the, he led the team that created the iPod and he co-founded Nest, the smart thermostat company. He now mentors entrepreneurs and he says the most important advice he gives them is write the press release first. Because he says that will give your bounding box. Like on one page, assume this thing is done and write the press release as it would look, because that will show you what the priorities are. And if it's not there, maybe it's not as much of a priority. and he was like, you got to do this for your book and any project you do.

1:50:46And I struggle with that because early on, I kind of say, well, I can't do that. I need to be more exploratory. But I think it actually is a good exercise because it's not that you can't change it, but it at least gives you some direction to start moving in. And there is good work showing that I write about that specific curiosity boosts creativity. If you can find a narrow lens to dive in at first, that will actually help your curiosity flourish. I've been so used to in the past being so wide ranging that it's good advice, but it's been hard for me to take. Another example of that or a similar parallel is screenwriting, which other than poetry is the most constrained form of writing.

1:51:30It has all these rules and you can't say too much and And it's very restrictive, but fundamental to it is this art and science of crafting the log line, like almost in advance of even writing the script that really distills everything down to literally one sentence and everything stems from that. So that constraint drives the creative process of telling this story. Yeah. That reminds me when you say that of Hayao Miyazaki's work, he did Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke and all those great movies where the first thing he would do would be to like he'd go away and he'd draw one picture like one image and then he would show it to the whole team and say this is like the tenor of what this movie is going to be everyone has to work to like the tenor of this image which is like that log line it's like here's the the core thing or an advertising industry they have a famous saying give me the freedom of a tight brief it's like give me really specifically what we're doing here.

1:52:30And then that kind of liberates you to create inside of it. Where I think the blank page is often kind of people's enemy. I mean, what Isabella Allende told me is she often, she'll start with historical research and that gives her like the stage for her theater basically, because if it's just too open, it's difficult to start. Or Ryan Holiday's note card, you know, routine where he's just, he's never not working on a book because he's always reading and he's making these note cards. Slotting them into the note cards. So there's always a process. You know, I was in the bookstore and I accidentally elbowed over a stack of one of the note cards.

1:53:08It was like absolutely horrifying. But luckily they slid and like fanned out so they were still in order. And he's like, and like he was very stoic about it as you might imagine, but like kindly put them in the palm. Like I'm taking a wide berth around that table from now on. Yeah. We read these narratives of people who have transformed their lives and it seems so dramatic. And it's always portrayed as one fell swoop when the reality is it's a million micro behaviors and tiny decisions over a very extended period of time that really is the engine of transformation every single time. And so the question that I have for you is, does the hair ever beat the tortoise?

1:53:50Does the hair ever beat the tortoise? Because I'm a tortoise guy. I'm always playing the long game and I'm a late bloomer and everything that I've been able to actualize in my life essentially was a decade in gestation. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there are a million ways to get anything done. So I don't want to say the hair doesn't ever beat the tortoise. shortest. But I kind of think one of the themes underlying a whole bunch of my work is that optimizing for the short term will often undermine longer term development. And so that head starts are overrated. And that if you want to do something sustainable in the long term, like it's going to be slow and it's going to be many small changes, layering of constraints and structures and things like that.

1:54:38But I think there are exceptions. If I think about you know, there was this research about entrepreneurs a few years back looking at the average age of founders of fast-growing startups. Do you want to guess what the average age of, I think it was top one in 10 ,000 rate of growth, average age of a founder on the day of founding. Do you want to guess? 42. 45. Good guess. Because I think we usually associate it with people who are younger, 32. Yeah, 35. Or Mark Zuckerberg, a famous dropout, famously drops out of college. And he said, young people are just smarter. He said that when he was 22, right?

1:55:13Don't hear him saying that anymore, surprisingly. But some of those young entrepreneurs absolutely succeed by going fast and being early, but it's the exception. It's not the norm. And so I think the norm is this much slower gestation that requires pivots and requires learning things that you just couldn't have known without experience. And it's more sustainable too. You said optimizing for the, what did you say again? What was the quote? Optimizing for the short term. I think will often undermine long-term development. Yeah. When you say that, the first person that comes to mind is Brian Johnson.

1:55:52Are you familiar with Brian Johnson and his quest to live forever? Yeah, I was going to say, isn't he trying to optimize for eternity. But he's optimizing in the short term as a means to optimize for the ultimate long-term, right? It's a conundrum on some level. And he's a very curious figure. On the one hand, talk about his experimentation. He's just experimenting all the time and he's sharing transparently what he's doing, what's working, what's not working. And is he not the ultimate human guinea pig for self-imposed constraints because he has constrained his lifestyle to such a degree, and yet he seems happier than he was before.

1:56:37And I'm just curious if you've followed this trajectory at all, or if you have any kind of insights on this or what we can kind of take away from what he's doing. I see him only sparingly, so I don't know the details of his behaviors, but I see when And it pops up sometimes if something he does goes viral. And sometimes I think there's, you know, some nonsense in some of the things that he's talking about. Other times where he's doing clearly healthy things, he's exercising. And I also think to your point about putting all these constraints on himself, I think he's clearly doing something that has given his life meaning.

1:57:10Right. He's found this project and this structure that he's sort of all in on like his own little sports team kind of. So good for him. I think when he's sharing... Some of these things about his biological age and some of that stuff is pretty suspect. It used to be based on telomeres. For a rigorous scientist. Yeah. Yeah. So there's some measures of those that I think are... I always, when you see somebody giving their biological age to two decimal points, you're like, no. This is just fake accuracy about some of this kind of stuff. So without knowing all the details of the stuff he's doing, I think he's doing something, providing structures to give his life meaning.

1:57:48he's obviously doing some things that are very healthy, eating healthier, exercising, right? We talked about, but it's probably he's getting attention for these marginal gains attempts where most of the gain is probably coming from these very foundational things that he's doing. Sleep, nutrition, things like that. Absolutely. I mean, I don't think that he's giving those short shrift, but yeah, there's a lot of bells and whistles and fancy stuff and he's a brilliant marketer and he clearly understands how to operate on the internet to garner attention. And I promise you he is going to die short of some kind of AI breakthrough that's going to, you know, like that we can't foresee right now.

1:58:22Reupload his consciousness or something. But I don't think any amount of supplements or, you know, putting a helmet on your head or whatever is going to make him live forever. But there's a cheekiness to it, you know, that makes it kind of fun to follow what he's doing. And he's just, you know, he's a provocateur. Yeah. And I think personal experimentation is interesting. I think where it gets troublesome is like passing off some of these marginal gain things, first of all, as if they're the whole secret or passing off things that are not gains at all, right? Which is classic in a lot of the supplement industry basically, where something doesn't work basically, and you're passing it off as a miracle cure or it works a very little and you're passing it off as having a huge effect.

1:59:05Again, I don't know the extent to which he's doing that because I'm familiar with him, but I don't know the specifics of his routine. To the extent that he is almost subliminally conveying this message of self-imposed constraints actually make your life better and happier, it's consistent with your message. That I think is true. And I think boundaries and guardrails and rituals and things give people a feeling of meaning and happiness and structure and of bounds in a world that can feel very overwhelming. But again, to the extent that he is making people have FOMO about these little optimizations that they should be doing, I don't think that's great.

1:59:49Again, I don't know. I'd be careful about speaking to him because I don't know exactly what he's doing. The downside is the neurosis that accompanies our inability to live up to some optimization standard. And this stuff like this looks maxing stuff now? Yeah. I did a whole episode on this. Yeah. Oh, that's right. It's insane. And you guys were talking about that. I can't remember the name of the - Adam Skolnick? Clavicular? That guy. That's the guy that you guys were talking about, him. And that's not helpful for people, I think. Like that again is a space where I think we have to have a good enough feeling.

2:00:27Like maybe this is a weird thing to relate it to. But when I was thinking about writing this, my third book, I was actually, I had so much freedom that I started bouncing around all these ideas. I find the book so consuming that I'm not going to go until I find the perfect idea. So I ended up just bouncing around a million ideas and never diving in. And then I read this passage from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the term flow for the feeling of immersion in an activity. He was actually talking about marriage, but it doesn't matter. You could apply what he was saying to anything where he said, the great thing is once you're committed by your own choice, if you're committed, you can start living and stop one how to live.

2:01:06Instead of spending all this energy on wondering what else you should be doing, you can start just living. And I immediately read that and said, I'm spending all this time wondering what topic to take on, why I should pick something that interests me and just dive in. And I was like, immediately that day decided I'm writing a proposal on constraints. And I think that applies more broadly to life, whereas you want to decide on something that's good enough and dive in on it and give it some of yourself instead of thinking, how are all the other ways that I could be optimizing this thing. And so, I bristle a little bit against some of the optimization culture, even though I'm very much like a self-improver, just because I think you can give people a feeling of never finding some stability.

2:01:47There's always some other things they could and should be doing that would make it better if only, but you're never going to clear the decks and have that moment where now is the time when I'm going to start the thing I really want to do. So, You just have to start it in this imperfect, messy way and not worry about what the internet is telling you about optimization. A lot of it is an ill-fated attempt to fill some spiritual void on some level that will give your life a sense of meaning and purpose. But on the point that you just made, I'm reminded of Ellen Langer, her whole thing about stop worrying if you're making the right decision, just make the decision right.

2:02:25Yeah, make the decision right. That's right. decisive. There's a difference between decisiveness and optimization, I guess. When you're decisive, and then you just, you make a decision and then you just take the next little action and you start to string these actions together, that's how everything works. I too, I'm writing a book right now. I haven't written a book in a really long time and I couldn't figure out what it was that would get me excited enough to write about. And then finally, I was just sort of cajoled into to committing to a certain idea, not knowing if I was capable of actually being able to see it through, but just, okay, well, here's one idea like today, and that's not very good, but it's been two years.

2:03:07It's taken me a long time, but I'm like, oh, I can see it now. It's starting to come together when I couldn't at the beginning. So this notion that you have to have it all fully actualized in your mind before you can start keeps people stuck in the starting gate and never doing anything. And I think that's a good prompt. Like you mentioning, you couldn't see how maybe this book was going to be at the beginning. When I do a book project, since I don't do them that often, I want to take on a project that at the start, I don't have the skills required to finish it. Because I can't find any other way to voluntarily force myself to learn with the ferocity that I do when I have a book project.

2:03:47And so I actually think that's a really good thing. It's scary, right? Because you don't know everything about what you're gonna have to find, but I think that's a great forcing function for improvement is starting a project where you don't have everything you need to be able to finish it. Well, you're embracing the discomfort of it, and discomfort is the risk for growth. I mean, desirable difficulties. Yeah. Final thoughts. What is it that you want people to take away from this notion of constraints make us better if you had to distill it down into kind of a final call to action? I'd say a mindset shift from viewing limits as oppressing you to viewing them as opportunities to clarify your priorities and launch into productive experimentation instead of bristling against them.

2:04:34What can I do with this? Amazing. Inside the box, how constraints make us better available everywhere. And thanks for coming on the show, man. This is great. It's a total pleasure. I can talk to you about anything. You should come back all the time. I would love to come back more often. And I hope you'll keep posting your morning routines because as I've converted myself into a morning person, I find them very inspiring. No matter when I wake up, I see your digital clock. And so, you've just also been a personal inspiration for me and the way you approach things with a very human kind of truth seeking, right?

2:05:09Like I think you could peddle a lot of nonsense if you wanted to and you don't. I appreciate that. Thanks, man. Pleasure. To be continued. Cheers. Peace.