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

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plantpower20. Check out. Because everything's competing for your attention now, if you're not structuring your attention, then algorithms are going to structure it for you. David Epstein is a New York Times bestselling author examining the factors that enable people

to excel in sports, the arts, business, science, is TED talks and performance science.

I've been viewed more than 11 million times.

You're somebody who thinks a lot about how we can be better. I have now almost 20 years of experience in vetting studies.

“If I think there's some misperception out there, I'm kind of obsessive about wanting to change”

the narrative. You may think that your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible. We spend the most time in energy on the least important decisions because we're having trouble telling the difference between the options, but we often need to do is clarify our priorities.

For our productivity for our sense of well-being, 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. David's so great to see you so excited to have you back. The show, it's been a handful of years, you're on the precipice of releasing this fantastic

new book, "Congratulations." Thank you.

“And I wanted to start with kind of how I think of you.”

I think of you as an athlete, of course. This tracking field athlete, this lifelong runner, a writer, a scientist, a thought leader. Very much in the tradition of other authors like Malcolm Gladwell, perhaps Adam Grant, you know, pink, and you come up with these positions that put you at odds with modern productivity culture, the most famous of which is you upending the 10,000-hour rule that

pitted you monoamono against Malcolm Gladwell, this sort of match quality grit versus fit thing that kind of made you an antagonist, Angela Duckworth, how do you think about your work and when somebody asks you what a cocktail party like what do you do, like how do you answer that question? I usually start asking them about what they do instead because I'm more curious about

that than telling them what I do, but I think about it as I obsess over mistranslations or misperception of data and scientific research and then work to try to either correct or

temper the repercussions of those misconceptions basically.

So when I see something, I follow a ton of research, you know, I transition from training to be a scientist, being a writer and I'm like a dog with a bone when I get onto some research that I see as becoming very popular and as being completely misinterpreted.

of the most wonderful people in my life now.

“So these were very generative relationships based on disagreement.”

Yeah, so you have this very famous kind of debate with Malcolm, you guys were pitted against each other on this 10,000-hour rule, but you know, the TLDR of that is that in the aftermath of that, you guys became friends and running buddies. And if there's one thing about Malcolm is like he's fine with being wrong, like he's like it's cool, like ideas change and you evolve and he's not really hung up on that.

No, not at all.

So the first time we ever met was for this debate at MIT and they brought us back

five years later, and at the end, you know, we were talking about how our minds had changed since our first meeting and he said, oh, you convinced me, we were because I was arguing about that the science actually shows early specialization is not the typical path to becoming elite, the 10,000 hours and usually it's early sampling where you gain these broader toolbox and learn where you fit and things like that.

“And he said, you convinced me, I think I made this error of conflation where with the idea that”

it takes a lot of practice to become great, which is true, but I conflated that with the idea that implies necessary early hyper specialization, which I now think is false. So we ended up kind of on the same ground and I think he actually set a great model for me.

After some years of us, so we ran together the first time the day after our debate, because he kind

of said, when we were coming off stage, you got me with some of that data, like why don't we go run together and we'll talk about this and several years later, I said, you know, now we're good friends, you could have just crushed me, you know, I just didn't have the professional capital at that point and he said, yeah, but I have the luxury of learning from my critics and that set like such a beacon for me to think about when you have earnest critics, not just someone like

ranting at you on the internet, but earnest critics is what can I learn from them to be better and he became kind of a, even though we still have disagreements about plenty of things, but he became a role model for me in that sense. There's something very high integrity about that and and somewhat obvious also, like if we can just hold our ideas a little more loosely and be open to being proven wrong and when we're proven wrong,

like kind of embrace that with curiosity, that engenders trust over time and yet when you kind of canvas culture, like people don't generally do that, doubling down, even in the face of, you know, incontrovertible evidence that suggests that they're wrong, and there is this idea that if you change your mind or if you're proven wrong, that like there's something bad about that, that that erodes trust, but in fact, it's quite the opposite. And that's a Malcolm's like the embodiment

of that phrase strong ideas loosely held, like you will put something forth as if it's like absolutely he's positive, but then if you bring something that contradicts it, it'll change. And they're like, yeah, oh yeah, I was wrong about that next moving on, you know, and that like all this research I've written about about people who have good judgment and make good forecasts, you know, about things in the future, one of the absolute common characteristics of them is

many small updates, like they're constantly flip-flopping and changing, but it seems like sometimes in the public sphere you get punished for flip-flopping, even though it is one of the hallmarks of people with good judgment. Somebody, I don't know if it's you, but somebody who kind of writes books like you do should write a book about this. There is, it is a real cultural problem. Yeah, I mean, I wrote a chapter about it and range about this good judgment, and also Philip

“Tettlock, the psychologist has written about some of this, but I think what remains to be done”

is putting it in this context of kind of the information environment today where it feels like you'll, you'll really be punished and people become so reactionary that they, they doubled down because that's so easy to do, right? Like somebody, if you put something out in the public, somebody on the internet is going to attack you in a horrible way, like in a way where prior to the internet, you maybe would have been attacked twice in your life and now you might get

it 10 times a week, and I think that just makes people really, really reactionary and difficult to kind of change, right? They just want to punch back, like they feel hurt and they want to hurt somebody back instead of actually looking for the right idea. Yeah, and what are the long-term implications of that on humans' psychology and just culture politics, et cetera, when we're in that fear stance, like nobody wants to say anything because they don't want to be criticized because

of the nature of social media and just having a voice in the public square. I mean, again,

to go to Malcolm, one amazing thing was I was attacking his most famous idea and he was still

willing to change on it where there was a British author who wrote kind of a version of the same thing in the UK that was very popular and when I was on British radio with him, he just absolutely came after me. Like there was no, maybe you have some points here, it was, you're wrong and even

different avenues where one person who, because he had published this and become famous for it, was just like holding on to it with a death grip, you know. So in other words, not only is he holding on to being right, he's also saying at the same time, like even if I'm wrong,

“it doesn't matter because it's like better if this was true. And I think that's really presumptuous”

because my take is always what kind of differences between people are important for outcomes we care

about, not just folklore, but which are, which are real, which matter for outcomes we care about and then how do we use those things to get the best outcomes for all people and sometimes that might involve information that people don't necessarily like, but I still think it's important to do. And in terms of science writing generally, I mean, right, I have a, I have a new book coming out and something in there. I mean, I have a chapter in there about how much scientific research is wrong,

right? And, and I learned some of this because when I was a grad student, I did some inappropriate statistical analysis and I had an independent, I fact-checked it, I hired independent in fact-checkers and yet something in there will not be right, whether it's because I made a mistake, I framed something wrong, it's just science, it doesn't replicate. I did tons of vetting, I had scientists read it, I had my fact-checker read it. I have now almost 20 years of experience

“in vetting studies, but if you're going to write about a lot of science, I think you have to go”

and knowing something here is not going to hold up the way that I thought it would, I just don't know what it is yet and then be ready to correct that when you're in the new book, you use the example of this Cornell nutrition researcher and you kind of canvas, you know, the problematic nature of like the, you know, developing the hypothesis in advance and in retrospect, I mean, it's worth kind of like discussing that right now. Yeah, so this was a Cornell research

name was Brian Wandsink who was the most, arguably the most famous nutrition researcher in the world at one time. He did these really fascinating studies, the most famous one being the so-called bottomless bowl study where people were told to eat as much soup as they wanted, but some people had a, there was a hidden tube under one of the bowls that was refilling it and the finding was at those people ate much more the idea being like we don't know when we're actually full.

That's four to a few years and basically his whole life's work was retracted more or less retracted or at least corrected and what happened was he was doing what's called harking which is stands for hypothesizing after the results are known, meaning he would have some hypothesis for what he wanted to test. You know, like that people will eat more if their snacks come in a larger bowl or something like that or if they're watching an action movie versus a romance and maybe that

wouldn't work out and he'd say bummer like my hypothesis didn't work out but then he had all this data so well, let's go look through the data to actually see some correlations that do hold up. Maybe it's well, if you are watching the action movie and your snacks are in a big bowl after 9 p.m. then you eat more, right? It adds all these qualifiers. It's like when you watch an NFL game and you hear, you know, the chiefs are undefeated at home when Taylor Swift is in the audience

and they're wearing their alternate jerseys or something. You can be sure that somebody first looked for a simpler stat. It didn't hold up and then they went data-dredging basically to look for

associations. The problem is when you do that you're almost ensuring that you're going to find

false positives because you're essentially doing an infinite number of tests just looking for something that'll work. So that you can reverse engineer almost confirmation of your bias towards a certain

“hypothesis. And you may not even know that you're doing it, right? So what you have to do is set”

your hypothesis ahead of time and stick to it, right? This is the problem is what's called research or degrees of freedom, having too much freedom to retroactively fit a hypothesis to the data and this is led to some kind of a sadly funny story that some scientists call the everything in your fridge causes and prevents cancer study. This study that looked at all all of the research done on various foods and showed that almost everything has been found

both to cause and prevent cancer. You said bacon, which sadly was only found to cause cancer. Yeah, this is, you know, in a macro sense, when you kind of think about that in the context of our eroded, you know, trust in experts and institutions is truly problematic and just because I'm steeped in the kind of like health and nutrition space. I'm not a scientist, but anybody who is interested in that and is scrolling on social media will find any number of like

influencers who are cherry picking whatever study to say whatever and it just creates mass confusion and paralysis because essentially to your point like everything's toxic,

everything's going to kill you and there's always some pub med thing that somebody can point

what was the hypothesis going into this, you know, what were the variables that were controlled for and you know what were the biases of the researchers etc that are driving these results

“and it just creates this morass of confusion. Absolutely. I think there are a few few good things”

though. One is this problem which is akin to the analogy I use is like a sharp shooter who shoots at a wall and then goes and draws a bulls eye around some of the bullets that are grouped and then then people come in later and say wow, what a good shooter but the person was just firing randomly and then drawing the bulls eye around it. That's like what's happening with some of this science and especially in nutrition science. The good thing is it's scientists themselves who raised

these concerns sometimes about their own work. I did this in one occasion as a grad student

not realizing it was a problem. I had access to a very powerful statistical program. I had a ton of

data, go find me some correlations, right? It didn't occur to me. It's kind of counterintuitive that looking backward would make you almost assuredly finding false positives but the scientific community raises this and now things are better which is why in the book I lead one chapter with this crazy study that makes it look like in the lead up to the year 2000 to the millennium all these dietary supplement and medication studies are producing all these miracles and then in 2000

bang everything stops working. It's like what happened was there a millennium bug or something

“that causes the stop working? It's no it's that the the funding agency said you have to register”

your hypothesis beforehand now so we know what it is and that caused almost all of these studies to stop working so science is working better because of it so I think working better than ever so I hope trust can be rebuilt but the the influencer point it's tough to do anything about that but I think there's some basics that people should be equipped with like small interventions

almost never cause huge changes so when you see studies that are promising some tiny change

that leads to some big effect very unlikely to hold up in a long run big change big effects usually require large or sustained interventions and also when they're very particular like there was a sauna study that I was criticizing at some point where it was like some cognitive effect but you had to do sauna between nine and twelve times you know for at least like certain years during your life and when you start to see these very particular requirements for it that means

somebody almost certainly was like looking how they could divide the subject groups in the study to to get a positive result it wasn't there in the first place yeah I mean I think a lot of it is over indexing on weak data sets to draw conclusions that aren't necessarily supported by the data like that's sort of the general kind of like root of a lot of these conclusions around outcomes like small sample sizes very minimal positive outcome but in over emphasis on

the connection between these two things to create a video and like make everybody engage in a habit change that isn't really moving the needle and all of these things are like one percent cherry on top of the Sunday stuff that's like a hole I'm glad you said that because that I feel like as a whole ethos are movement that and understand why people get attracted to this one percentage and let's say it's exciting yeah but while ignoring these fundamentals that account for

all of the other stuff right because it's like usually it involves a capsule or some kind of like fun new behavior as opposed to the drudgery of like well you know go to bed early and you know like in a real food and move your body that's right and I mean I'm for stuff that motivates people to change right but but it's like the fundamentals are the fundamentals for for reason if you want

“to be a good runner you have to run a lot I see all the time with runners like it's like”

which of these choose with the new foam should I get and and these trying these little things in these dye to survive for Norwegian method is gonna unlock you know unlimited potential of

certain and this is all you have to do but it's like first of all you have to run consistently and

stay injury free and recover like if to run a recover and so it's like jumping ahead to getting the new equipment or the latest fad where you kind of happen going through the basics it's sort of a dopamine inducing activity that is confused with actually doing something that's moving you forward it's a form of analysis paralysis yeah yeah and and it's I think it's tough to get away from I mean even knowing I don't know about you but even knowing everything I

know I still sometimes if I get fed some influencer thing that's giving me some kind of one percent thing and claiming it's gonna change my life I still sometimes I'm like little bit curious now look even knowing what I know because it's everywhere right so and I'll try these things I love it too you know I mean I'm not going to the source material and you know rifling through it to see

that like it's just it's really about the basics and yeah there's always improvements and

iterations on training science etc but it's all marginal and comparison to you know what we know works but then what gets trafficked on the internet you know is just a is this productive version of that that gets delivered to the average person who doesn't have the kind of background that you have right athletics or science that's right I mean the good thing about some of the science sort of good and I made sure to put in a little bit about this because I was in writing in this chapter

about how much scientific research is not true is that there are studies showing that people are reasonably good at guessing what science isn't going to replicate so if they if their if a study is described to them and and then they're asked do you think this replicated or not people actually get it right I'm a majority of the time I could just doesn't sound right so I think if you can slow down a little and say does this sound likely is this a small intervention that promises a huge

effect it's it's not likely to be true meanwhile I think the less sexy thing and maybe I would say this having because I've been thinking about constraints for the last few years is structuring your life in a way that makes make the basics easier and more repeatable right is like putting structures in place they get you just to do the fundamental things instead of looking for these kind of marginal gains that that often you know at the elite level often people are focusing on

the marginal gains and that's because he can they can really take advantage of that one percent yeah the average person this is a distraction yeah yeah more than it is they've already gone through

“that other 99 percent that you haven't really seen right so that's why they're focused on those”

little margin well good thing we have Steve Magnus to police the internet and stuff right he's got more energy for policing yeah yeah he has he must have very thick skin yeah oh he do you know

how I don't know if I've told you Steven I first met years ago when he was a source of mine when

I was at pro-publico and I was investigating I knew that yeah okay that's how we first met and so yeah you're the one who broke the store the Nike Oregon project story and he was your inside man he was he was one of the inside man yeah and he went through some I mean that is a tough position to be in like I was getting stacks of paper from lawyers and I had an organization behind explained for the audience who my story what we're talking about the Nike Oregon project was

most famous track group in the world for years was funded by Nike highly funded it was meant to create Americans who could win medals in distance running it with the head coach was Alberto Salazar the most famous American distance runner and one of the greatest and Steve Magnus who we're talking about who's a physiologist and and performance writer and coach to some elite runners was an assistant coach there and started to be asked to do things that he thought were on ethical

like to test in a legal method of of using a supplement for training to you know he saw some documents that suggested athletes were using band substances and things like that and he decided to to speak out about it and when I was at pro-publica working with the BBC we did an investigation of the team long story short it led to the the team being disbanded and the coach being suspended

and Steve was the first person to be willing to put his name and face you know on camera we were

doing a documentary for the BBC behind these allegations which then led other people to come out but he was kind of on an island against a very famous organization that didn't like what he was saying and so I kind of feel like he's like been through it you know there's a he's battle test it

“there you know he was a jeffrey wagon director there's when I think of him this this will sound silly but”

there's an uh in an anime that I really like called one piece that's really famous and there's a part where one guy is trying to encourage another guy to have bravery and so he has him it's this is silly I can't believe I just said publicly that I watched this thing but anyway there's a fight between these two guys that can turn into dragons at one point and one is way over matched and the guy who's trying to encourage him is mentor says bite him bite him and he's like what any bite

him says you just bit the strongest guy in the world can anything frighten you now and I feel like that's kind of where Steve was it's like he just bit the strongest guy in the world like can anything frighten him now and I don't think so yeah that's wild Steve is told that story on the show he's been on a couple times uh had Mary Kain on I've had Kara Goucher on so if you if you're watching

“or listening and you want to learn more and I think we talked about it when you were on the show”

the first time because one time we can't remember sure but yes let's talk about constraints I mean the last time you were on we talked mostly about range uh which is essentially you making the case for

these case studies that kind of dispel this idea that you know whether it's tiger woods or you know

name your kind of superstar in their respective discipline you're kind of upending this idea that like you have to specify early and just commit yourself you know maniacally to a certain thing and the new book is really kind of the inverse of that you know 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 like your hottest take is that constraints are like 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 with this book inside the box with my last book

range and first of all someone's gonna argue with me it's gonna be me like 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 like some of the most common questions I got after range were things like okay I have this broad

“tool box I have these broad experiences what now and it's 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 range in curiosity I have this zigzag in 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 and so I wanted to get better at this and and I did so I don't think it would take me six years again so if AI doesn't on the eight 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 to contain them and 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 well-being 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 and more and 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 and clarifies one of the most useful things I did as I learned about constraints was that I now recommend everyone is to 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 immediately the thing that I saw was I couldn't finish all this stuff ever and that's just what I have going now and so immediately you start to say what are the priorities here and and what are the things that I can I can move to later and so I think it's for our productivity for our sense of well-being 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 like discomfort this Susan David idea of like discomfort is a price of admission for a meaningful life and you know our lives are so lined with convenience these days and this cultural priority around like luxury and relaxation etc that we

actually have to go out of our way to seek out uncomfortable experiences to stress ourselves to feel alive and this is a sort of creativity productivity version of that like we have to seek out constraints yeah because things like AI or technological tools or the infinite scroll or you know like just an unlimited number of movies that we can watch on Netflix we sort of delude ourselves into thinking that this is good yeah when in fact it's limiting and makes people unhappy like the

there is 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 get you get more bored but”

it's the wrong kind of boredom because we want boredom rumination you know are like just our slack and ability to like engage our imagination is a function of boredom but this is a boredom it's

depressed boredom I mean anime is a is a is a key word in the late in the book this word that means

“basically rulelessness and and a popularizer of it was a meal derkeim who was why the regard is”

the founder of modern sociology, friend sociologist in the late 19th century when government started keeping statistics about all sorts of things he looked at suicides statistics in a systematic way

for the first time ever and 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 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 plummetz that suicide goes up but surprisingly he saw that when it rises too fast it also goes up like anything that unmores people from the things that ground them you know in their identity

and that that in some sense of habit and repetition causes people to feel desperate

“and I feel like we have so much of that today where so much of virtual life is as Jonathan”

I told me when I was interviewing 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 the convenience you mentioned convenience is a problem everything has gotten so convenient that we don't have the friction that like adds meaning it causes learning they're these brands 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 so 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 like

you know 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 you know 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 yeah no I totally agree I mean I I think it's it's counter-intuitive right it's deeply counter-intuitive like 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 like here 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 to make decisions basically people in 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 and so

“I think it seemed attractive like I remember when Mark Zuckerberg talked about making the Metaverse”

and he 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 to the lens of the constraints research that I did for this book and said that is the worst thing of that like that's like literally sounds like you know 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 of the time

this episode is sponsored by Better Health may is mental health awareness month honestly my opinion every month should be focused on our mental health but it is a good reminder kind of a call to action that whatever you're carrying you don't have to carry it alone for whatever reason we feel like we have to keep quiet about what it is that we're going through and everybody is going through something all the time but suffering in silence is nonsense whatever shame prevents you

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“I've spent a lot of time talking about my Rivian driving my Rivian obsessively sharing”

photos of my Rivian on Instagram but the best is when I hand the keyfob over to someone who's

never driven one and there's always this moment that instant where they feel the acceleration,

silent, immediate and they just start laughing because it doesn't feel like any car that I've ever driven before and it reminds me this is one of those things you really have to experience it's not just fast it's smooth it's quiet it's focused it's the kind of movement that makes everything else feel a little outdated and Rivian makes it easy to drive for yourself you can book a demo drive online pick a time show up and just get out on the road no pressure so if you've

ever been curious don't just take my word for it go to Rivian.com and feel it for yourself if you pay attention at all you know that constraints drive unique creative solutions

“and yet there's still is this intractable notion that the path to creativity is freedom like”

oh you you know when you're free then you can just create so like state the thesis and I want to understand like this journey that you've gone on to really understand the relationship between constraints and you know kind of transcending productivity you know into like kind of breakthroughs and you know interesting results like when you look at all these case studies like what have you discovered yeah and you're right that it feels that so in this group of psychologists didn't

international survey recently about creativity myths and things that we know are not true from research and they found the most popular myth was that people are most creative when they're most free. In fact it's 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 family's resistance using what's often called a preclude constraint you preclude the solution that you're that you're used to and so now once I call just calls this 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 to a client meeting what if I couldn't propose a 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. Suss 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 even 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 he said in in finds Sussian form he compared it to making a strutal with no strutals 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 a 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

“when people are often it's not by choice right that that I think is a 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 that was called NASA's first chief knowledge officer it's kind of like the head psychologist

in NASA he goes oh man I'm really thinking about this mission called El Cross where the team ended up with half the time and budget that they wanted so 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 a borrow tech they take imaging equipment from army tanks and engine temperature sensors from that straight out of mass car they

build a probe that finds confirms water on the moon and so it's this 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 you know whether it's Picasso or Bach they will self impose these constraints it's as if they have some I guess it's like great practitioners always they're like

up and says this is why it works so a lot of the serial innovators kind of self impose constraints

“that block their own solutions the musician who says these chords are off the table you have the”

colon concert example of the kind of mistune 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 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 and you know just the other week and his whole idea of ISRU in situ resource utilization like

this is a guy who decided he wanted to have a space program yeah and he was gonna erect this

space program with basically plywood and like whatever he could find it's scrap yard you know and

this this turns into like this really magical kind of gigantic art installation that leads him into a relationship with JPL and NASA like by him kind of imagining I'm gonna do this working with the constraints and you know kind of leveraging his sculptural talents actually turns into like this longstanding relationship where he's like the in-house art director to JPL with their Mars mission like it's insane right so it's like this visionary aspect that's also grounded in like practicality

and driven entirely by very limited resources and constraints I mean that whole institute 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 the same way that Robert Rodriguez made elementary actually like

just like these incredible projects are entirely you know on a very foundational level like

expressions that emerge from constraints constraints are the very essence of what gives birth to these timeless works absolutely and yet culturally you know we think well okay you did that but now you have the big budget right we're gonna make the movie and then you make some giant movie and it's terrible yeah yeah I think that that testifies to the fact that we kind of 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 like we 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 know you can take the”

case of an author with a publishing deadline but in the in the context of a person with their everyday job they're constantly you know being told what they can't do and there's guard rails everywhere like that's the average person you know daily experience but if you look at an artist or just even a musician who has a keyboard like today you could do 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 like go out of your way to like do something that's difficult the onus is on the individual to take responsibility for imposing those constraints so that's difficult it's very difficult and to your point about the kind of typical persons everyday experience I should say I wrote a book about how constraints can be useful and why we undervalue them but it is also clear in creativity research

that when you if you prescribe what someone has to do and basically how they have to do it

that that can be stifling like if you're telling them you know age if you put constraints in place and the person says I can't possibly surprise myself that means they're in a bad spot right you because you 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 it's incumbent upon us to to impose”

useful constraints because everything is so open and there's so much choice and so much optionality and and all this kind of stuff so make the use case for the average person I'm not an artist I'm not a musician I'm not you know a sculptor like like why is this relevant to me and how is it of practical use in my daily life I go to my job and you know my life you know already hairy and insane and you know I'm just trying to level up a little bit here like 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 see as commitments visible make all of your current commitments visible post it notes and then you'll probably realize you're overcomitted and look for things that maybe you can take away an S satisfying 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

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 doing a 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 like 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 switching what's on

their screen every 45 seconds basically and 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 the end of the day but also you know she was started measuring heart rate variability and it predicts stress also at the end of the day there's now some butting evidence showing that it impacts immune function if you're toggling a lot like it's a stressful thing to do but I don't think people realize that so 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 like 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 address 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 and 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 that's my own brain yeah like I will like okay I've locked the phone away and I'm ready to like work on the book and then I'm just you know I'm so acclimated to those you know my new constant interruptions it's like we have some

internal distraction barometer that's like gets set the good news is you can start to make a difference in a few days of like blocking work so that you're not toggling as much and 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 see it was commitments visible like I said make all of your current commitments visible so

we have a hard-wired 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 and so if you can make all of your commitments visible you'll probably see that you're over subscribed and you can say which are the ones I really need to focus on now put the other ones later so stop starting and start finishing like don't start a new one until you've you've finished one so get the post it notes out get the post right things down and put them on your wall and have a you know kind of come to Jesus moment that's right and then the S in the BCS

“is for satisfying rule so satisfying is a term coined by a Herbert Simon I think was one of”

most brilliant people who ever lived political scientists trained by training did the first day eye demonstrations we won the highest award in computer science won the highest award in psychology is one of the founders of cognitive psychology then won the Nobel Prize in economics for good measure and he coined this term satisfying which means instead of trying to optimize it's like the the antithesis of optimizing 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 so coming from his work researchers developed a

satisfying maximizer scale maximizer means you're always trying to optimize we 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 as a quality maybe because you can infinitely compare your choices and home to so many things where as satisfied as we'll set good enough criteria for decision ahead of time saying here are the three

things that need to be met by this decision once those are met I go with it instead of endlessly

“evaluating options so I think in this world of infinite choice where consumer choices 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

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 in energy and agonizing because the options are similar which also means we could probably just choose and it wouldn't make much difference. The distillation of that idea is essentially that perfectionism is toxic whether you call optimization or just this you know really unhealthy relationship with holding yourself

to a certain standard that's on achievable it's a it's a personal violence and this idea of good enough being the ultimate life hack yeah it's not runs contrary to this whole like

“you know kind of like self-optimization culture and it sounds bad because like when I think about”

anything I'm doing am I aiming for good enough no I'm not aiming for good enough you know aiming for great 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 class that was a total beginner and 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 this has to be like a nine or ten on the effort level a newsletter if I hit six

and a half right a send and that's been a really important exercise for me in satisfying and saying some things can be good enough and that means sometimes they'll go to great like 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 peclivities like I think I'm more naturally a maximizer but have had become much more proactive

in setting out criteria for good enough and saying look when that when that's met I'm okay to

“move to the next thing that's similar to the Seth Goden kind of idea of like you have to”

ship your work right like he's just he's constantly 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 we then never end up shipping anything as a

result of that kind of self upgrading of our you know the quality of our work product. I got that paralysis kind of after range because it ended up being more successful when I expected and I had left my normal day job to finish it because I was I was I was a traditional investigator 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

“news letter where good enough is good enough and I think that was really, really helpful for me.”

Yeah how can you get off the dime lower the stakes and get yourself permission huge fan of those takes in thinking about the new book I was this is such a trivial example 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 and the morning them and it's like 424 and I keep saying like I'm just awake I wish I could sleep in more like I just

I you know like anyway I'm just up at that hour so 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's 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 so there's guard rails and walls like there's only so many things I can do the clock is there how can I do 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 that's

basically like what Picasso was often doing where he would do a whole bunch of versions of the same

idea it's like 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

so-called cult of the hero rose up but that's 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 like he probably even acted in a different King Lear he

liked changed one of the daughter's names from Cordella to Cordelia and he changed the ending he

made it his own but it's like 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 is like a historic you know it's it's much more often building on something that's already there and so I

“think that's how that's how people should think of it and by the way I was telling you before I think”

your morning post have been important to me personally in a different way I don't know if we get into that but I'm like I don't know why anyone can't care about this but anyway yeah a couple of things in what you just shared first of all like upending the genius myth yeah this is this is just you know

total fabrication like anytime you see some great man theory you know there's lesions 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 like all great artists steal but the interesting kind of ripple that you offer on the book is this notion of taking the new idea but contextualizing it in something familiar and use like MLK and how he you know kind of was borrowing from white preachers sermons and making them his own so that there is

something familiar like in the way that Shakespeare would borrow and create this like capsule that was relatable for an audience but then doing your own unique thing within that that's right yeah this this chapter is sort of 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 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 feels still like the gas light people are used to or folders on your computer right they'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 and to get involved in in helping it along and so he borrowed what he was used to coming”

up from the gospel preaching tradition where originally he was seen as suspect basically you were supposed to preach to the choir like sometimes people use that phrase preaching to the choir is a negative thing you wanted to preach to the choir they they expected a version of the hits and so he would give them a version of the hits he would borrow but he would put his own spin on it so even though let freedom ring repetition from his most famous speech was borrowed from a speech by his

friend Archibald Kerry who borrowed that from a speech by the activist investigative journalist I to be wells it was this culture of repurposing things people were familiar with and then kind of shoe-horning your unique message into it so what MLK would do something called typology where he would find a story throughout history to start with something that the audience could not disagree with right the story of Moses as a liberator he 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 this the Supreme Court and so he smuggled

these really radical ideas by grounding them incredibly familiar material sometimes 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 but that's kind of the the real history of getting

by and by sharing the familiar and you're engendering trust before you kind of hit them with the

novel idea within that kind of like nutshell that people are already comfortable with totally and

“whatever it is grounding it like the visions for change you know are are more compelling I think this”

Adam Grant said it this way once that I resonated with me visions 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 like how is you know like again like okay somebody's listening to this like how does this how does this operate in their life like how are they taking you know some some of that wisdom and 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's 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 and

“I think that's important even for yourself so I would say in the past because I'm 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 you know I went through this phase where once I decided I was like missing lunch I decided I was only going to eat like raw kale stalks for lunch and it's like man you really have to chew those things you know so it's like going from 0 to 60

just instantly and it has never worked well you you fall prey to this thing some in psychology

called the what the hell effect where you then you mess up once and you know like oh what the hell and 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 but what sort of a continuous through line where you can do that like building on things that 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 as some of you know I am in a very different season of training that I've ever been in before I'm rebuilding slowly intentionally after this spinal fusion surgery that I underwent this past May and I'm learning what it means to be patient with my fitness and how to prioritize sustainability over intensity and I gotta say that whoop specifically my new whoop 4.0

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problem problematical in the case of this book and this adventure that you went on to kind of get to the bottom of 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 a different number of like jelly at a store that they could buy and when the when the choice set became reach a certain size they would be paralyzed and just wouldn't buy anything at all and that probably became the most famous work and this so it's 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 nice sight some of his other work but

that work it didn't give me great confidence they 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 and 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 I just couldn't convince myself that the research would hold up basically and so I basically left it out so that definitely went against like 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 like you're at the grocery store and there's like you know 50 different brands of peanut butter yeah 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

like you know there's 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 yeah when I looked at the the bigger body of research it looks like it has more to do with choice set complexity so like peanut butter is not that complex but 401k options maybe 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 kindergartners were taken to a playground one with no fence and one with a fence and in the one with no fence they all huddled around the teacher and 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 and 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 the guy is now a a professor so I reach out to him and say

this thing's really famous like do you know is 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 a godfamous because it gets at something that we kind of know”

is truth like you 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 yes there's no there there it's like this oraborus it lowers my confidence and the you know the scientific canon like if that could you know become so famous and so accepted without they're actually being a root source for the idea what else is out there that you know yeah I mean

in start to realize like houselopy some of the stuff is that said again I think the scientific community is one compared to the rest of the world is like wonderfully self correcting in some ways and a lot of the problems they're having is because they have criticized you know scientists have criticized scientists but you know that that's that finding is it's sexy it's interesting like I could have seen opening a book with it where it's like this picture of kindergarteners in one

area where they're huddled around the teacher and then the other area where they're exploring and wild and this is like a metaphor for life but you know sadly for me it turned out to study if you ran the experiment it would probably be true it may it may it just actually didn't get run yeah it didn't get run and so I'm not gonna open a book that it didn't actually happen but what I take from that is the dog innocent you're in your reporting like you know you are truly a science-minded

know what in your experience would be good to talk to him about or 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 the depths of your commitment to really to a veracity and and getting to the truth and and and really being deeply connected to the ideas that you're exploring what is that about and maybe a follow-up to that is you know how are you thinking about the current state of investigative journalism in 2026 I'm really flattered to hear that by the way um as I do gonna say his favorite work of mine was some reporting I did about drug cartels that's I was doing that for a year but

for 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 as a I even I broke the windshield on the rental car driving down like a famous crossroads where musicians make deals with a devil so it was like this long trip where I broke a rental car didn't hadn't gotten the insurance just so that I could sit in a certain graveyard at midnight and I remember like Robert Johnson was 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 and a teacher or basically and I remember Brad was like what are you doing there like and but when I get curious about something I just I'm very motivated to I just I can't drop it when I 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 jobs I obsess over misperceptions of research and 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 Pro Publica which is an all investigative operation so much time was spent going down dead ends you know

I don't know what the story is yet I'm just an exploratory mode and that happens for my books too I do a lot of interviews where I'm just an 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 has to be made like every two seconds so Pro Publica

“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 it has to be something that's you know not done already in those sorts of things but you did have the luxury of failing and I just think that is such a luxury now like investigative journalism is expensive you have to have the opportunity to fail that there are just not many people who are being afforded the the ability to fail and their work in a way that would allow them to do that and you might get sued

right so it's expensive in that way too I think one of my friends my closest friend from sport

illustrator 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 I 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 and 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 turnover 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 heard SI 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 what where you can keep going back to it too right he 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 it's interesting it 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

was important to do I do it but I was like when will this be over and everybody stopped being mad at me

“and I think even knowing that the internet people are going to criticize you it's still hard to put”

something out to 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 an 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 yeah I mean that idea of creating a visually arresting you know a version of investigative reporting via like this unboxing you know conceit is an example of leveraging constraints to make something absolutely to like reinvent the form absolutely is really cool but in reflecting on investigative journalism you know writ large like 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 yet really right now there is no viable business”

model to support like reporting that takes months and months and months and months and months

and I would argue there never was it was just piggybacking on the other stuff that made one 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 this is the nobody will advertise an investigative story like we're not doing this because it's selling magazines right so it was 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 that they should do they you know what I mean like that that that that's the the heart that has to pump the whole thing right now yeah as well I mean and that's kind of a scary thing like when I was thinking about this I would say the most unusual chapter in the new book is chapter 10 which is about 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 and what he showed was that these are the foundation of shared prosperity that for a long 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 and 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 so 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 in a century after those institutions disappear it still affects how the grandchildren at

“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 and 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 and 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

and to have some agreed upon social norms for for behavior so it's not just a free for all the time the degree of norm violation these days is unlike anything I've ever seen and I often am reflecting on like what are the long-term implications of this even if we were to reverse course and try to find our way back like what is the you know what is the full extent of the damage that has been done yeah 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 you know kind of a reliable proxy for kind of where people are at just the anger and the vitriol and the the division and the acrimony is is really at a level that is unprecedented totally and it's to my life actually think at this point you know 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

on Twitter anyway in 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 like staying moderate and not turning the temperature up a lot of people are turning the temperature up for profit right and but I'm almost less concerned with people saying something wrong now then if they're tone

“then if they are conflict entrepreneurs you know 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 you're ideas wrong but the presumption that people are operating in good faith when you engage with them you know in my experience is quickly you know becoming eroded like now beginning to assume

that you know this that people are are you know I'm gonna assume first that they're not operating

in good faith like that's been flipped and that's like a terrible yeah it's terrible it's a terrible flip to have I mean ultimately I think you know what 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 of institutions norms and trust I'm reminded what you shared reminded me of of you've all known horrories kind of perspective on this which is essentially

that human beings have built societies based upon stories yeah and whether it's a border or a corporation or you know 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 corrode these norms and you degrade the trust these stories start to become porous and they degrade and with it are trust and how does a society move forward and cohere when you know we can't all

agree upon some shared story of reality yeah I mean the the foundational stories are like

“to your point about her arey that's what allows human collective action that's one of the reasons”

why we're special right symbolic language we can have stories that are agreed upon shared abstract ideas that allow us to all move in a direction together I think 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 you know I hope out of some of this crisis there'll be an opportunity to do some of that because if we 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 absolutely I mean that's what Douglas North called it and that's what he wanted Nobel Prize for and what 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 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 things that we're trying to realize in our life and 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 get still be stuck

and 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 even I haven't implemented everything that my book implies one should be doing but there are some things that I

implemented but you gotta get back to the dance videos to the dance 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 it's created in crowded clubs in Melbourne when people had limited space

“want to be able to change direction quickly with limited that's why I ended up being good for”

Instagram because people have to change direction really small space so I was like oh this is right up my album let me do this so it was it was a courageous act I 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 getting more self-conscious about it

so I'll think it 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

have to change everything tomorrow and then you don't do it and you say well forget it throw

“in the baby out with the bath water if you do that I think 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 as you don't fall prey to think all this a garlic effect where open things that you have an answer to occupy your brains you can't do other stuff take take 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 like if I only did these twenty things everything would be perfect like one experiment at a time one experiment at time

it's one thing to say constraints drive creativity another thing to say constraints drive productivity this is kind of like a call new for ideas you work like put your phone in a lock box and you know like don't check you only check your email twice a day et cetera

he's my neighbor I've taken a few tips from him that did implement it yeah that's an interesting

brain trust you know and in pink it's like we're all like in the that's very cool a imagining these salons you you're sitting around exchanging high-minded ideas over a whiskey or something you might be disappointed about the high-mindedness of the ideas but um but it's another thing all together to tie this idea of constraints to happiness so I want to spend some time around how you kind of arrived on that and and you know with the with the support for that notion is

“yeah there are few different things where I think about constraints and happiness one we”

talked about a little which is setting these satisfying rules right 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 happy with their lives they're happy with their decisions not agonizing have to make the decision right her but Simon came up with satisfying he was very much like that and he he simplified his own life in

many ways he said you 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 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 they're these surveys showing the rise of this kind of maximization of

everything well even 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 satisfies others are more happier are happier my almost every metric than our maximizers and again what I'm wary of is is that sounds like have low standards

status fighters 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 with their decisions

“I think the other type of and this is like the last chapter of the book is where I get”

sort of more personal and philosophical about kind of is 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 scientists who wrote the book Bowling Alone which looks incredibly prescient and 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 you know people are

retreating into their own world with TV so they're not going to the bowling club anymore and having civic engagement and he famously said joining a club joining one club cut your risk of dying in the next year and a half it's kind of rule of thumb wow but now this analysis of about 150 studies with over 300,000 subject pretty much back to them up that that kind of social integration has a 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 and it's it's a no as an independent writer I could have the absolute ultimate cocoon yeah there was I was it invited to a writer's retreat some years ago after range and I was we all had to answer a question

what do 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 like I ended up in this individualized schedule or wasn't synced with anybody else so started getting back in activities I joined a club I started going these dance things where it's annoying I may have to go somewhere you know the time may not fit my

some sense of meaning I started reading about like the Soviet Union had decent everybody to keep factories going where they gave everybody a four day work week in a one day weekend and it was a social disaster because everyone had individualized schedule 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 it is a really important thing so join something join anything this 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 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 you know an absolute masterpiece because I wouldn't be distracted yeah 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 kind of impeded upon you know your schedule in ways you probably prefer they didn't but ultimately

that's gonna 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 gonna 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 and 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's different

kinds of constraints the cabin in the woods is a constraint is it's a different kind of constraint and the 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 then I became a dad and said I cut a trip to Arctic Sweden for 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 can't be doing this now that I have a kid and so and I need my workday to end at a certain

point and so I did it also that contrasting that with the idea that like well this kid is very inconvenient to like my writing my stuff incredibly convenient incredibly as all this meaning to my life but super inconvenient and so this time I did I had this thing I call a master thought list it'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 I think”

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 it's not in 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 override 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 this time

I borrowed from one of the characters in the book is a belay end day 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 likes a candle to start every workday turns it off close it blows it out closes the door to end the workday and that's shut down I took that ritual I that I use electric candles I've too much she's braver than I and I've 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 and I turned my book in early I I know 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 like my plan is to turn it in at 5 pm on the

“day it's doing the contract but I think I'd forgotten what I knew from like athletic training which”

was your better when recovery is part of the program when you program in the recovery instead of just letting it swallow everything and so I would I think I was both better and faster listening to that story I'm 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 you know at an optimal way or a good enough way I suppose but then I hear

play like sir like what is so funny about this story that you just shared is like you use the example of I end day and like this this beautiful practice of like her lighting a candle and you know like a and what's missing in urine cows analysis of that is her treating that as a ritual like a sacred ritual like it has a certain energy to it that that is is beckoning and demanding a level of like reverence yeah right yeah that maybe gets missed in the you know the ones in

zeros of the Cal Newport brain no question I see you're you're very diplomatically and eloquently calling us robotic and wonderful which is true yeah but I mean everything about writing still has like a spiritual mystique to me like I still see books as these magical little puzzle boxes that are more mysterious to me than like any technology really is so I do have a feeling you know

how people got these things done I look at some of my own books and wonder how many got them done I'm not all the way on the end of the Isabella end day 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 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 for doing what I want to do that I rarely inhabit another times you know

maybe 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 if I'm glad I'm forced to produce a book because otherwise I'd probably do it

and never put it out there but this takes us back to Tom Sachs and this idea that he has

called Nolan he used to be a furniture designer for Nolan and Nolan has all of these rules about

“how you should organize your workspace and when you're facing a creative block his sort of”

practices always be Nolan okay so that's fine so 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 pans 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 you know we think of creative people is just to like free flowing you know they're they're like wandering around like a undersea plants you know being wherever the wave takes them then being hit by inspiration but when I was reading tons tons of work about the habits and rituals of creators will work in this book and it's pretty remarkable how structured they are like they all have these sort of

“regularities and rituals and I think it's really what liberates them to perform within that gets them”

in that performance mindset you know just like someone before shooting a free throw or doing whatever to 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 I think it can be it can seem surprisingly rigid from the outside when you're thinking about people doing creative work but 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 see good ideas so like Hemingway would end on in the middle of the 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 get cut if I don't know where where I'm picking up the next day then I'll just I'll just wander around and do nothing that's right you do there for a while if not so I like to do that because then I come back and I'm like I'm I'm positive of something that I can do right now

“that's important where I start it'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 well also reaching for the stars like there's you and Cal and then there's I am day I'm curious around how you think about goals you have some interesting ideas around goal setting and and working towards goals and I've kind of evolved my thinking on this certainly you know goals have

been crucial in my life and have you know kind of helped me go from where I was to where I am

in in many stages of my life and there's a practicality to that and a functionality to that and it's like arithmetic like you set it you calendar it there's a way to do it and when it works it's great it engender self esteem and it progresses your life in positive directions but as I reflect on my life now and identify like 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 here here 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 right I 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

keyhole view into and so I think goals can be useful but I think if they're preventing you from

“opportunistic pivots that's a really a bad thing and so I think having a you know 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 is really really important and at this point again I did so much there was so much research 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 I think about this when I was 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 happier sad and usually sad because they were usually stretch goals so most of the time it just makes you annoying I know it but it didn't give me anything to do where is 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 kind of structures and experiments actually give you something to do today but 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 like

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 you know provides structure to your life yeah and I think that that is fantastic and probably more people 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 um the flip side of that is what you talk about like

this you know developing this pro-clivity 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 you know if you look at it

“in a long term you know from a long-term perspective so 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 like let's just say like oh the first book I wrote or this podcast or like being in these in this studio like none of these are a function of having whiteboard at them like they are in outgrowth of like casting 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 a ping-ponging around like doing it from a place of intentionality and you know kind of trusting my gut and there are guardrails and structures around like how I make those decisions but it's not because I said a goal yeah yeah 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 an 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 parametium principle have you heard of this already okay so obviously she's most famous for grit passion and perseverance and what she was telling her

students was I she was basically saying if I could re-do 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 ten years later and like actually don't like this thing and so the parametium principle it's parametium 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 takes more goes in that direction again if 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 not happiness that's a different thing but interest or engagement and pivot toward it and to me this is like a total reconstruction of her 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 have how could you know if it's the right like one of my favorite

phrases from range was we learned we are in practice not in theory that you can't conceptualize what's right for you in the future because you change in the world changes you actually have to do

and so I was pretty psyched to see her promoting this parametrient principle where it's like yeah you want to persevere when something matters but you want to be constantly like titrating you know your 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 and and 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 you know kind of a maturation of your curiosities in your possessions no I mean I did like disclaimer is 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 first guy and his family

of Jamaican immigrants you know who was who was making it and he was like one of the top rank guys in the country and his age group and I was devastated I mean I remember I still remember the day like our coach I wasn't there when I happened called and said oh Kevin died at the track today you know you say died when somebody ties up at the end of a race like well you know

“happens to the best of us and no no he died like died and that's what launched me into writing”

because all our newspapers said you know you had a hard attack I don't know 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 lying me together as medical records and investigate turned out he had this misdiagnosed textbook case of hyper-trophic 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 my first book of sports gene and 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 it's sports illustrated so it was very much a pivot from something that felt meaningful to me at that moment and totally changed my trajectory from from going into the sciences to becoming a writer but I know it's

illustrate this idea of you know this this career emerged from you investing in your curiosity yeah what was lighting you up yeah for sure I mean I'll say one other thing that I learned when I was in grad school for sciences was I started you know my work started getting so narrow and I started asking myself am I the type 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

and I was learning that I was the latter type of personality and 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 like 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 yeah or your refusal or recalcitrons around like putting up

“constraints when you know after writing this book you know you should I still struggle with”

satisfying because I think my even I know how much of the optimization stuff online is nonsense and and praying on our intentions but I still have that reflex to want to maximize a lot of my decisions and look for the best so 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 well-being that I had optimized for something that is bad for

me I joined the board of a non-profit 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 but it has undoubtedly been better for my well-being and there's some advice that an important figure in the book Tony Fidel gave me that Tony Fidel was the he he led the team that

created the iPod and he would cover 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 and you know maybe it's not as much of a priority and he was like you got to do this for your for your book and any project to do and I struggle with that

“because early on I kind of say well I can't do that I need to be more exploratory but but I think”

it actually is a good exercise because it's not that you can't change it but at least gives you some direction to start moving in and and and there is good work showing that I write about that

that will actually help your curiosity flourish and I've been so used 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 and has all these rules and you know you can't say too much and it's very restrictive but fundamental to it is this art and science of crafting the log line like almost you know in advance of even writing

the script that really distills everything down to you know literally one sentence and everything stems from that so that constraint drives the creative process of like telling this story yeah that reminds you and you said of uh high on the azaki's work it's spirited away in princess

manokin all his great movies where he the first thing he would do would be to like it's he'd 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's gonna be everyone has to work to like the the tenor of this image which is like that log line it's like here's the the the core thing or an advertising industry they have a famous saying give me the freedom of a type brief it's like give me really specifically

“what we're doing here and then that kind of liberates you to create uh inside of it where I think”

the the the blank page is often kind of people's people's enemy i mean what is a belly and they told me 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 holidays no 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 no body is a no card so there there's always a process you know i i was in the book store and i accidentally elbowed over a stack of one of the no cards i was like absolutely horrifying but luckily luckily they slid in like fan doubt so they were still an order and he's like like he was very stoic about as you might imagine but like kindly put them in palm like i'm

taking a wide birth around that table now on yeah we read these narratives of people who have transformed their their lives and it seems so dramatic and it it's it's always portrayed as one

fell swoop yeah when the reality is it's you know 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 so the question that i have for you is does the hair ever beat the tortoise does 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 you know everything that i've been able to actualize in my life

“essentially was a decade in gestation yeah i mean i think there are there are million ways to get”

anything done so i don't want to say the hair doesn't ever beat the tortoise like 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 you know layering of constraints and structures and things like that but i think

there are there are exceptions like if i think about you know there is this research about entrepreneurs a few years back looking at the average age of founders of fast growing startups i'm going to guess with the average age of i think it was top one in ten thousand wrote a rate of growth average age of a founder in the day of founding you want to guess 42 45 good

“guess because i think we usually associate it with people who are younger right like 35 or the”

Mark Zuckerberg i famous drops up famously drops out of college and he said young people are just smarter he said that when he was 22 right don't hear him saying that anymore surprisingly but you know 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 as 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 we'll often under my long term development yeah when you say that the first person that comes to mind is Brian Johnson are you familiar with Brian Johnson yeah but his quest to live forever isn't he trying to yeah i was going to say is he trying to optimize for eternity but he's optimizing in the short term yeah as a means to optimize for

the ultimate long-term right like it's a conundrum on some level and he's a very curious figure

and he's sharing transparently what he's doing what's working what what what what's not working and is he not the ultimate human guinea pig for self-imposed constraints because he is constrained his lifestyle to such a degree and yeah he seems happier than he was before and 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 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 like when 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 or he's doing clearly healthy things exercising and and i also think to your to your point about putting all these constraints on himself i think he's clearly doing something that is given his life meaning right 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 you know

it used to be based on telemeters and it's like rigorous scientists yeah yeah so there's some

measures of those that i think are you know i always when you see somebody giving their biological age

to like two decimal points you're like no like 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 give his life meaning he's obviously doing some things that are very healthy eating healthier exercising or 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 that he's doing nutrition things like that i mean i don't think that he's he's giving those short shrift yeah 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 a i break through that's going to you know like that we can't force you right now 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 and he's just you know he's a provocateur yeah yes 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 is if they're the whole secret or passing off things that

are not gains at all right which is classic and a lot of the supplement industry basically where something it doesn't work basically and your past get off is a miracle cure or it works a very little and your past get off is having a huge effect again 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 that he is almost sublimally like conveying this message of self-imposed constraints actually make your life better

and happier it's consistent with your message that i that i don't think is is 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 they can feel very overwhelming but again to the extent that he is like making people have fomo about these little optimizations that they should be doing i don't think that's great and i don't know i'd be careful

there's a good side is the neurosis that accompanies like our inability to live up to some optimizations standard and this stuff like this looks maxing stuff now yeah it's a whole part of the code on that so so oh that's right it's insane and you guys were talking about that i can't remember the name of the i'm scolnick that's a good that 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 like 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 was like i i find a 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 me hi chicks and me hi the psychologist who coined the term flow for the feeling of immersion and activity he was actually talking about like marriage but it doesn't matter you could apply what he was saying anything where he said great thing is once you're committed by your own choice if you're committed you can stop you can start living and stop wondering

“how to live like instead of spending all this energy on wondering what else you should be doing”

you can you can start just living and i immediately read that and said i'm spending all this time

and i was like media that day decided i'm writing a proposal on constraints right and 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 this thing and so you know 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 like never finding some stability you know there's always some other

things they could and should be doing that would make it better if only but like 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

like meaning and purpose but on the point of that you just made i'm reminded of Ellen Langer like her whole thing about like stop worrying if you're making the right decision just make the decision right yeah make the decision right that's being 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 first the next you know little action and you start to string

“these actions together that's how everything works like i too like i'm writing a book right now”

i've 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 controlled into committing to a certain idea not knowing if i was capable of actually being able to see it through but just you know okay well here's one idea like today and that's not very good but you know it's been two years you know it's taken me a long time but i'm like oh i can see it now you know 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 keep people stuck in the starting gate

and never doing anything i think that's a good prompt like you mentioning you know you

couldn't see how maybe this book was going to be at the beginning uh when i do a book project since i don't do 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 i can't find any other way to like voluntarily force myself to learn with the ferocity that i do when i have a book project and so i actually think that's a really good thing it's scary right because you don't know everything about which we're going to have to

find but i think that's like a great like forcey forcing function for improvement is starting a project

“where you you don't have everything you need to be in your embracing the discomfort of it and”

yeah discomfort is the gris for growth i mean desirable difficulties yeah final thoughts uh 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 called action i'd say um a mindset shift from viewing limits as a pressing you to viewing them as opportunities to clarify your priorities and launch and reproductive experimentation instead of bristling against them what can i do with this

amazing inside the box how constraints make us better available everywhere and thanks for

coming on the show man it's great it's a story about anything you should come back all i would love to come back more often and 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 like no matter when i wake up i see your digital clock and um so you know 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 like i think you you i think you could pet a lot of nonsense if you wanted to and you don't i appreciate that thanks man pleasure to be continued cheers peace (upbeat music)