Why You Feel Overwhelmed All The Time (and how to fix it) - David Epstein
CChris Williamson
Mental HealthSmall Business/StartupsManagement
Transcript
00:00:00What's the green eggs and ham effect?
00:00:03That describes a finding in psychology that people become more creative when the easiest solution is taken away from them.
00:00:11So it is named after the Dr. Seuss book, Green Eggs and Ham, which he wrote on a bet that he couldn't write a children's book using only 50 words.
00:00:20And that restriction forced him to experiment with his rollicking rhythm, right?
00:00:24Because he couldn't experiment with vocabulary.
00:00:27So it's, it got that name in psychology because it represents this huge body of work that shows, as a cognitive scientist, Daniel Willingham likes to say, you may think 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.
00:00:45And so your brain wants to do the convenient thing, the easy thing, what neuroscientists call the path of least resistance, like just reach for stuff you've seen before.
00:00:51And so it actually becomes kind of impossible to be creative unless the easiest thing you would reach for is blocked.
00:00:58So the thing that actually led to that bet with Theodore Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, was before that, he was asked if he could write a children's book using about 200 words from a vocabulary list for kids.
00:01:10Is that so that most kids would have access to it, not be able to not comprehend?
00:01:14That's right. And there was a kind of visionary publisher who correctly deemed children's literature at the time very boring.
00:01:22And so he wanted to, it was an assault on illiteracy.
00:01:24He said, look, kids are not learning to read in as big of numbers as they should.
00:01:27Why don't we try making something interesting for them?
00:01:30And Dr. Seuss takes this list, looks at it, realizes there are almost no adjectives, and starts complaining to his wife.
00:01:38He basically, he makes this very fine, I think, Seussian comment.
00:01:41He says it's like trying to make a strudel without any strudels.
00:01:44And then he just throws his hands up and says, I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words on the list and write a book.
00:01:50First two rhyming words, cat and hat.
00:01:53And the rest is history.
00:01:55And that's what forced him originally to develop that rollicking rhythm that he became known for, because the things he would have done otherwise were blocked.
00:02:02And so that green eggs and ham effect that a psychologist named is summarizing this huge body of work that shows that the best way to prompt creativity is to pull away the path of least resistance, the convenient thing that people would look for otherwise.
00:02:14What would be the convenient path of least resistance when it came to writing that book?
00:02:19Because what it sounds like is that it is more effort to work with fewer words.
00:02:25Yes, definitely.
00:02:26It is more effort because the things that, the easy things, familiar phrases, right?
00:02:31Like one of the things that jumps out about Seuss's work is the phrases are unfamiliar.
00:02:36Normally, if he'd been left to his own devices, he would have gone for more familiar phrasing, which is what all children's literature did at the time.
00:02:42I mean, it was very literal, you know, Johnny ties his shoes, walks to school and all these things.
00:02:47Not this sort of LSD absurdism that he ended up with.
00:02:50Well put.
00:02:51And he actually used this to co-found a whole book imprint that changed literature for kids and helped boost literacy, where he basically put constraints on the authors.
00:03:03It was, you know, vocabulary constraints.
00:03:05It was the pictures all have to be continuous across two pages.
00:03:10They can't depict anything that isn't described directly in the text, et cetera.
00:03:14And he said, if you don't like those constraints, and some of them didn't, then you're just not one of our authors.
00:03:17But they built the most successful children's imprint ever made by restricting people from the things, you know, those who bought in said, I'll give it a try.
00:03:27Found that they were able to do work that they never would have envisioned otherwise.
00:03:30Why do you think talking about constraints is so unsexy?
00:03:33I think the word itself is, yeah, unfortunately unsexy for me.
00:03:39I think the word itself is like almost synonymous with something that's frustrating.
00:03:43And so I think our brains are built for to always overvalue freedom, complete freedom and choice in the abstract, right?
00:03:51And the theory for why this is, is that in our evolutionary history, we didn't really have a problem with having too much of stuff or too much choice.
00:04:00But we did have a problem with having too little.
00:04:02Issues of scarcity, not abundance.
00:04:04That's right.
00:04:04And so that we evolved to always want more, to be programmed to want, you know, I think of it as similar to the brain in the way that we are with sugar with our bodies, right?
00:04:12We evolved to like it because there was only a little bit available and it was useful when you found it.
00:04:16Now it's all over the place and we consume way too much of it because we're just not built to treat it as like the scarce resources we should.
00:04:24And so you can see in all these surveys and things, people always say they want more choice, right?
00:04:32One of the, when, when psychologists did this international survey of known creativity myths, since we were talking about creativity, things that we know from research are not true.
00:04:40The top one was that people are most creative when they are most free.
00:04:43And we know this isn't true.
00:04:45So they surveyed people and said, what are your beliefs around creativity?
00:04:49Yeah.
00:04:49They came back and said, the more freedom equals more creativity.
00:04:53Yeah.
00:04:53I mean, they, they offered them a whole, a huge list of statements of things that they, that they, um, and then people would say they agree with it or they don't agree with it.
00:05:00And so they can see what were myths.
00:05:02Yeah.
00:05:02Most agreed with myth.
00:05:03Yes.
00:05:04It was like tied with that group brainstorming is a good way to come up with lots of novel ideas.
00:05:09That's, that's another one we can talk about, but, um, or you see like people always say they want more options for consumer things, right?
00:05:16So consumer options have increased by about a hundred million fold compared to pre-industrial societies, which dwarfs the increase in wealth, which is only like 400 fold.
00:05:26And people always say they want it.
00:05:29Economic theory models us as if we'll always be better off with more choice.
00:05:32But then you look at things like since the introduction of infinite scrolling, people have been getting progressively more bored, which makes no sense.
00:05:41And researchers who are trying to figure out how this could be like, how could more choice make us more bored in entertainment options would run experiments where they would say, randomize some people to a group where they would have 20 videos that they could choose whatever they want to watch.
00:05:56Or they were just given one from that same set of 20 and they have to watch it.
00:05:59And the people who had to watch the one are less bored than the people who have the 20.
00:06:03And the thinking is that because our brains are comparison engines, that just the idea that there's some other thing that you could be doing undermines the experience of the moment itself.
00:06:12And so it's all this disconnect with how, you know, rational actor man is modeled in economics and what's real in our psychology where the rubber meets the road.
00:06:20Is this similar to Barry Schwartz's stuff?
00:06:22Some of it is.
00:06:23Yeah, I mean, Barry Schwartz's, some of it absolutely is.
00:06:27So I think the way where it, and he was one of the pioneers of, I think, showing that the economic models of what should make us happy and satisfied and lead to good decisions are not the case.
00:06:39And one of the places that he was really impactful had to do with the affective consequences or the consequences on our psyche of too much choice.
00:06:48So there was a, he and his colleagues built this thing called the maximization scale.
00:06:56And so this is how much of a satisficer on one end, satisficer is a term coined by this Nobel laureate, Herbert Simon.
00:07:03That's a combination of satisfy and suffice.
00:07:05So it basically means setting good enough rules for decisions and taking it on one end versus how much of a maximizer are you on the other end?
00:07:13Maybe we would call that an optimizer now.
00:07:15But it basically means you will explore all of the possible options looking for the best thing.
00:07:21And it turns out that there's not a lot of evidence that maximizers actually make better decisions, even though they spend a lot more time making decisions.
00:07:27And they are less happy with their choices.
00:07:30They're more prone to regret.
00:07:33They are less happy with their lives.
00:07:35They're much more likely to opt for reversible decisions, even though that typically prevents them from kind of committing one way or the other.
00:07:43And so the people who are more satisfied tend to be these people who say, here's what good enough looks like.
00:07:47And once I get to it, I'm going to take it and move on.
00:07:49Because we can't, we can't actually maximize anyway, because we're not good at predicting the consequences of our choices.
00:07:55We can't evaluate infinite options.
00:07:58And so if you counted the cost of agonizing over decisions, I think people would see that satisficing is actually the maximizing strategy in the long run.
00:08:07It's so interesting, I think, when people consider, do you want to go into the jeans store and see one pair of jeans, or do you want to see 20 pairs of jeans?
00:08:15And you go, I want to see more because I'm going to be able to get closer to my fully maximized, optimized utility function to derive the most value from the jeans that I'm going to buy.
00:08:27But for all of those reasons, people seem less happy.
00:08:30Something would tell me that if you couldn't return jeans, if there was no refund option, no returns, no exchanges, that people would probably be happy with their jeans as well.
00:08:40Probably.
00:08:41But certainly actually no exchanges, because that would be the most direct one-to-one.
00:08:46You know, this is basically directly tested in some studies, not with jeans, but with other objects where people are either allowed to exchange it or not.
00:08:53Okay.
00:08:54And the people who are not end up happier with what they have.
00:08:57So it's kind of like, despite the fact that they could have chosen wrong and been unable to switch it.
00:09:01That's right.
00:09:01Chosen wrong.
00:09:02But they're committed, so they don't end up regretting.
00:09:04This is like Ellen Langer famously said, don't make the right decision, make the decision and then make it right.
00:09:09Right?
00:09:09You can't know what the perfect thing is anyway.
00:09:11So I think it's sort of more important what you do with it after you've made the choice than agonizing on the front end.
00:09:16The thing that's interesting is we're very bad at rationally assessing how a decision will make us feel.
00:09:26What we do in advance is look at this perfect, sterile, hermetically sealed environment where we would be rational actors and we would be able to derive the maximum amount of satisfaction, effective satisfaction, affective satisfaction from the decision that we made.
00:09:44But we aren't able to discount for the paralysis analysis, the regret minimization concern, the I'm going to go back, I'm going to take them back, I'll do the thing.
00:09:55I mean, how many times, I remember when I was a kid, when Nokia was still sort of the phone on the market and there was lots to choose from, do I want the one that's sideways, do I want the one that slides up, do I want, and I would spend, it was kind of interesting to me.
00:10:10It's the same as people with cars to a degree.
00:10:12What level of trim do I want?
00:10:13What sort of interior do I want?
00:10:14What particular type of alloys do I want?
00:10:16And actually, if I get the 2023 model instead of the 22, they upgraded this thing on the interior, but a lot of the time, I probably wasn't all that satisfied with my decision.
00:10:28But in advance, do you want to have that choice restricted?
00:10:31No, absolutely not.
00:10:32Of course.
00:10:32So we have this inability to predict how unsatisfied we will be with the maximum amount of the thing that we think that we want, which is freedom.
00:10:39And this runs into all sorts of consequential things.
00:10:43Like if you survey people and say, if you got cancer, would you want to be involved in choosing your treatment?
00:10:50And something like two-thirds of people say, yes, absolutely, I would want that agency.
00:10:54And then among people who actually get cancer, it's like 10%, right?
00:10:59Like once that actually comes, they want somebody taking that burden off of them.
00:11:04That's interesting.
00:11:04And some of it has to do with complexity too.
00:11:07So more choice is good to an extent.
00:11:09It's just that we've usually blown way past that extent.
00:11:12So if you look at things like people's retirement plans, you know, 401ks, if they have a company match, once the choice sets get increasingly complex, they're more likely to make no decision at all.
00:11:21Even if that means foregoing free money from the company, right?
00:11:25And so at a certain level of complexity, it's like, it makes no sense that you wouldn't want more choices, right?
00:11:31But human psychology does not behave according to the rational actor model of neoclassical economics.
00:11:37What is going on in human psychology that means that we don't like it?
00:11:41Why would that be the case?
00:11:43Why would choice be overwhelming?
00:11:45I'm trying to work out what the source code is or what the particular bug that's been hacked here.
00:11:48Yeah, I think some of it in that case, like with the retirement plans, is anticipated regret, basically.
00:11:56I think that's fear of having made the wrong decision.
00:11:59Because it was on your shoulders.
00:12:01Yeah, the fear of having made the wrong decision.
00:12:02That you get so obsessed, it becomes, it feels so bad, the idea that you might make the wrong decision, that you end up making no decision, basically.
00:12:13And people stall and stall and stall.
00:12:15So we are comparison engines, right?
00:12:16So the ability for us to feel bad about what other thing we could have done, it's kind of a bedeviling aspect of psychology, right?
00:12:26In all things, these, to go back to maximizing, there's evidence from these international surveys that some aspects of maximizing tendencies are actually on the right.
00:12:35Nobody's a maximizer or satisficer in all things, but some people are much more of maximizer or satisficer.
00:12:42And there's evidence that the maximizing tendency is on the rise, particularly in like the richest parts of the world.
00:12:47And that includes things like socially prescribed perfectionism, right?
00:12:50People feeling like they're never, like their life should always be doing something better.
00:12:54And of course, the theory is that it's the ability to compare yourself infinitely to what other people are doing, like on social media and all these things.
00:13:02And we're not built for that, right?
00:13:04It's like, we are comparison engines.
00:13:07We are, you know, we compare our status, all these things.
00:13:10But in our history, that was like to the people in your immediate vicinity, for the people on your block, not to the entire world.
00:13:17And so I think it's just a poor fit for how our brains work.
00:13:21Herbert Simon wore the same socks, ate the same breakfast, lived in the same house for 46 years, and won the Nobel Prize.
00:13:28Yeah.
00:13:29He's, you would, you would, you'd almost accuse the guy of having low ambitions for some of the things that he did if he hadn't won both the Nobel Prize in economics, the Turing Awards, the highest prize in computer science, because he was a founder of AI.
00:13:40And then he won the highest award in psychology.
00:13:42And his feeling, so he coined satisficing, because he said humans, humans do not behave according to these economic models.
00:13:49We can't, we're not equipped to evaluate infinite options.
00:13:53We have all these other motivations that aren't just maximizing utility.
00:13:57And we can't predict the consequences of our choices.
00:14:01And so his feeling was that we should proactively satisfy in areas of our life where we can.
00:14:05So the reason he had one beret, one pair of socks, he told his daughter, one only needs three sets of clothing, one on one back, one in the closet ready to wear, and one in the wash, right?
00:14:13And so he sounds kind of lame, except he was, he was preserving cognitive bandwidth for the things that he found most meaningful, which were his, his, his work.
00:14:25Yeah, so there's research that shows people are more satisfied with irreversible decisions than reversible ones.
00:14:30Yeah.
00:14:31And yet, modern optimization culture, decision theory, a lot of the time, if it doesn't have a psychological informed view, specifically seek reversible decisions.
00:14:42Yeah.
00:14:42Does that mean that keeping your options open is a form of self-harm?
00:14:46I think it often can be, especially when it becomes an end to itself.
00:14:49Like, I can't tell you how many people, including my peers, who will be talking about a decision and they'll start talking about optionality and which one preserves optionality.
00:14:58And I'm like, that makes a lot of sense at a certain point in your career for that to be like a certain value.
00:15:05But at a certain point, you don't want preserving optionality to be the end in itself, right?
00:15:10There's this-
00:15:11You've preserved optionality to preserve optionality to preserve-
00:15:13Exactly.
00:15:14Turtles all the way down in optionality.
00:15:16And then there's, there's this interesting research by this guy, Scott Stanley on relationships that's finding increasingly younger people are doing what he calls sliding versus deciding in relationships.
00:15:27Where in the interest of keeping their options open, they'll say like, I'm just going to keep seeing how it goes.
00:15:33I'm not really committed.
00:15:34And then their options are closing whether they like it or not, if they stay in, right?
00:15:37So they kind of sleepwalk into this escalating commitment.
00:15:39And if they end up getting married, they're more likely to get divorced.
00:15:42They're less likely to be happy.
00:15:43So compared to people who say, I'm in or I'm out.
00:15:45And that's the decision.
00:15:46So sliding in the interest of feeling like you're keeping your options open actually leads to these bad outcomes.
00:15:51And you don't do the hard work of saying like, am I in or am I out?
00:15:55Yeah.
00:15:55I mean, how many people, she's, she's kind of hot and you know, we'll hang out.
00:16:00She seems quite nice and well, she's coming over a good bit.
00:16:02So I'll, I'll give her a drawer and she can have a toothbrush holder.
00:16:06And well, I mean, you know, her lease is up.
00:16:08So we, well, cool.
00:16:09Like she can move in or whatever.
00:16:11That's one of the ones he mentions in the research.
00:16:12It's like someone's lease is up.
00:16:13So like, well, it'd be easier just to move in, but they didn't really make a commitment to each other.
00:16:17That one comes up a bunch in that research.
00:16:18I bet it does.
00:16:18Well, I was going to get a dog anyway.
00:16:20So why don't, why don't we buy a dog?
00:16:22And we've been together for a couple of years.
00:16:23I suppose like it's the thing that you do is to get engaged.
00:16:26Now you're engaged and it's like, well, you know, like I'm off the pill.
00:16:29So like, oh, maybe we didn't fully plan to have, like you can fall backwards through your entire life.
00:16:35Yeah.
00:16:36Relationally.
00:16:36Yeah.
00:16:37And in terms of career, like, well, you know, like I'm here.
00:16:40Like it's, I, I did the thing at uni and it was sort of the, it was the first guy that I spoke to at the graduate fair.
00:16:46Yeah.
00:16:46And he just seemed, he seemed nice and like convenient.
00:16:49And I think taking data, right?
00:16:52Whether it's dating or with your career is, is really important.
00:16:55In fact, I think if we treated careers like dating, we'd never force people to settle down so quickly.
00:16:59Right.
00:17:00You want them to take data, but you want this to be intentional.
00:17:02What am I doing here?
00:17:03What did I learn about myself?
00:17:04How does that inform the pivot?
00:17:05Whether it's a relationship or not just, am I keeping my options open and seeing what comes around?
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00:18:06It's interesting that if somebody's CV looked like their dating history, they would look like
00:18:12an incredibly unreliable employee.
00:18:15But if somebody's dating history looked like their CV, they would look like someone that
00:18:21didn't have an awful lot of experience, depending on what it was that you did.
00:18:24But yeah, learning can only be done through updating.
00:18:29So there is a tension here, right?
00:18:30There is a tension between the desire for freedom and the need for constraint.
00:18:34Absolutely.
00:18:34Because in order to update your model, you need to expose yourself to as much as possible.
00:18:38So it feels like these two things are in tension.
00:18:41Yeah, absolutely.
00:18:42And I mean, my previous book was about expanding your experiences.
00:18:49Do you know what episode that was on the show?
00:18:52I don't know what episode.
00:18:53I mean, it must have been seven years ago, basically.
00:18:5684.
00:18:5784?
00:18:57This will be like...
00:18:58I want like an 84 out of print or something.
00:19:00You should have 1,180 something this may be.
00:19:041,150.
00:19:04I was 84?
00:19:0584.
00:19:06I would not have guessed double digits.
00:19:0884, dude.
00:19:10Crazy.
00:19:11Fucking crazy.
00:19:13That's pretty cool.
00:19:14That was one of the...
00:19:14The one that we did on Range was one of the highest played...
00:19:18It was the first time that we ever hit the charts on Apple in 2019.
00:19:24It was the first...
00:19:25It was the episode that put us onto the charts.
00:19:27Yeah, it was like mid, middle of the year in 2019.
00:19:30How cool was that?
00:19:30I remember because I'd just started doing two a week, a couple of weeks, a couple of months
00:19:34before, and I'd started the year with Rory Sutherland, and he was insane, and it was brilliant.
00:19:40And I was like, I should do this twice a week.
00:19:41And then, yeah, partway through the year, episode 84, that was us.
00:19:44Wait, who was episode one?
00:19:46Stuart Morton.
00:19:47He is a guy that I trained with at the gym, and he was going to row the Atlantic solo.
00:19:52It was 14 million all strokes across the course of a few months, and every single expedition...
00:19:57This is before he went out.
00:19:58Every single expedition that he tried to do, there was some huge meteorological catastrophe,
00:20:03or the boat got hit by something, and every single time...
00:20:08He may have done it now.
00:20:09I kept an eye on him for a good while, because it's a compelling story.
00:20:12Really cool.
00:20:14But yeah, I just found some dude in the gym.
00:20:15It's like, hey, you, you.
00:20:17It's me and you.
00:20:17Sit down.
00:20:17That's amazing.
00:20:18I want to ask you about this thing.
00:20:19It's like a banger of a way to start.
00:20:20It's fun.
00:20:20And you were 84.
00:20:21How many people in the top 100 have been repeat guests?
00:20:24In the first 100?
00:20:25Yeah.
00:20:26In the...
00:20:26Oh, a good few.
00:20:28Okay.
00:20:28Robert Greene, James Clear, Rory Sutherland's been on eight times, a bunch of my other friends,
00:20:33including George Mack, yourself.
00:20:36Fuck me.
00:20:36We have to figure out some way to slice and dice this data for me to have a record of some
00:20:39type.
00:20:40I'm sure we can do it if we don't know.
00:20:41Very easy.
00:20:42The earliest...
00:20:43I mean, you'll be in terms of book sales over the last five years, you will be certainly
00:20:47up there with range because that absolutely smashed it.
00:20:49So, I mean, yeah, it's cool, dude.
00:20:52Seeing the full arc of people.
00:20:55I had Robert Wright, who wrote The Moral Animal and Why Buddhism is True, had him on for his
00:21:00new AI book this week or last week.
00:21:03And we haven't spoken for five years.
00:21:04That was the most...
00:21:05The Moral Animal was the single most influential book in my intellectual journey.
00:21:09I got to sit down, have a chat with him again.
00:21:11He's like, Chris, it's been so great to see you.
00:21:13I love your sub stack.
00:21:14I subscribe.
00:21:14It's cool.
00:21:15It's like a little professional...
00:21:16You're in different universes of...
00:21:19It's great.
00:21:19There's a Christopher Hitchens line.
00:21:21He says, it's a melancholy lesson of old age that you cannot make old friends.
00:21:27Interesting.
00:21:27Oh, wow.
00:21:28What a beautiful quote.
00:21:29Isn't that great?
00:21:30Yeah.
00:21:30I think about that a lot, especially with the show, that I get to watch...
00:21:34I don't know who...
00:21:36I'll have had someone on the show that's died.
00:21:39I'll have had someone on the show that's gone to prison.
00:21:41I'll have had someone on the show who's been in a car wreck, who's maybe gone to jail
00:21:46for some heinous crime or some false accusation crime or whatever.
00:21:51Like a thousand people.
00:21:52There's a big...
00:21:52I think you should have a family reunion of guests.
00:21:55Fuck me.
00:21:55Could you imagine that?
00:21:56I think there's probably quite a lot of beef in between some of the guests that I'm not
00:21:59aware of.
00:22:00Exciting.
00:22:01What family reunion doesn't have some beef with some of the people coming?
00:22:03That's true.
00:22:04I can make it into a Hunger Games thing and the one that is left over.
00:22:08All right.
00:22:08What was General Magic?
00:22:10Because this was a company that I feel like I should have heard of, but I haven't.
00:22:14I like to call it the most important company nobody's ever heard of.
00:22:17Yes.
00:22:17Not important because of what they accomplished because they went down in flames, but because
00:22:21of the people that came out of it.
00:22:22So this is a story about the danger of having too few constraints.
00:22:26So this was a company that was so visionary in the early 90s that Goldman Sachs took them
00:22:33public in the first so-called concept IPO in Silicon Valley history.
00:22:36They went public just with an idea, right?
00:22:39Not with a product.
00:22:41Founded by three former Apple employees, two of whom designed the original Mac.
00:22:47The third guy, his job inside of Apple was seeing what's the next frontier after personal
00:22:50computing named Mark Peratt.
00:22:52Absolute visionary.
00:22:53He was the CEO.
00:22:54I was reading his PhD dissertation during book reporting, 1976 at Stanford.
00:23:00He coins the term information economy on the first page.
00:23:03And this thing is eerie to read.
00:23:05He saw the future in a way that I certainly never have.
00:23:12And not just the promise of technology, but the dangers with automation, with misinformation,
00:23:18et cetera, et cetera.
00:23:19And in 1989, in a big red leather notebook, he draws a thin glass rectangle with no protruding
00:23:25buttons and a touchscreen with rectangular apps on it.
00:23:28That's going to be a phone and a computer and a fax machine and ATM and video games and
00:23:32messaging and everything else.
00:23:34The web didn't exist yet, right?
00:23:3715% of American households had computers.
00:23:39But this thing is so visionary that money pours in, talent pours in.
00:23:43They form this 17-member alliance of international telecom companies so big that their meetings
00:23:51have to start with an antitrust lawyer listing all the things they're not allowed to discuss,
00:23:55right?
00:23:55And they can do anything.
00:23:56They have unlimited money.
00:23:57They have unlimited talent.
00:23:59And so they frequently do do anything.
00:24:01Any good idea, they're making this personal communicator.
00:24:03Any good idea that somebody has, they basically do it.
00:24:06They define their customer as Joe Six Pack, which is as good as no definition at all because
00:24:09nobody has met that guy.
00:24:12And so they're doing this incredible innovation, precursors to USB, the precursors to emojis,
00:24:16all these things.
00:24:17But it just keeps growing and growing and growing until it starts to collapse under its own way
00:24:23because they have no focus whatsoever.
00:24:24This incredible amount of resources obviates the need to decide what they should actually be doing.
00:24:31So I interviewed dozens of former employees, and I'd say three-quarters of them said something
00:24:37to the effect of, I just couldn't figure out what not to do.
00:24:40The emblematic interview was with this engineer named Steve Perlman, who was writing a calendar
00:24:45function for the communicator.
00:24:47And he writes it to go from 1904 to 2096, checks it in, thinks he's done.
00:24:51Then a team leader comes to him and says, Steve, someone might write historical apps.
00:24:54You have to make this thing go back farther.
00:24:56So he opens it up and writes it to go from year one to the future.
00:25:00Done.
00:25:01Then another team comes to him and says, Steve, why are you tying it into this arbitrary religious
00:25:04context?
00:25:05You should make it go back to the beginning of astronomical time.
00:25:07So he opens the calendar function up and writes it to go from the Big Bang to the future.
00:25:11And it takes months when it would have been four lines of code if they stuck in 1904 to
00:25:152096.
00:25:16This is how everything happened at General Magic.
00:25:19They go public in the mid-90s.
00:25:21Mark Perlman said he raised so much money because he wanted to create heaven for engineers, right?
00:25:25Where they were free to create and limited only by their imagination.
00:25:30He said, what more could anyone ask for?
00:25:32I think the answer was less freedom because they could not figure out what not to do.
00:25:36So it totally imploded.
00:25:37You know, stock price doubles first day, worthless two years later.
00:25:41Wow.
00:25:41But the people that came out of it, especially the young people, were scarred by this and took
00:25:47these lessons about the importance of putting limits in place.
00:25:50And they co-founded LinkedIn and eBay and Nest and created Android and iPod and iPhone and
00:25:57Google Maps, Safari, all these other things.
00:26:02And so I think it became important in that way because the lessons that these other founders
00:26:06took about the need for constraints became incredibly important.
00:26:12One of the important characters in the book, this guy Tony Fidel, was like the most scarred
00:26:16because it was his first job out of college.
00:26:18And these were his rock star heroes and it goes down in flames and it's like a trauma for
00:26:23him.
00:26:23He goes on to lead the design of the iPod.
00:26:25And then he co-founds Nest, the smart thermostat company, where he, when I first interviewed
00:26:30him, by the way, he was like, I'm interested in constraints.
00:26:32And Bill Gurley, the venture capitalist, had connected me with him.
00:26:34He's been on the show, friend of the show.
00:26:36And Bill had told me when I said I was interested in constraints that he said, we have a saying
00:26:40in venture that more startups die of indigestion than starvation.
00:26:43He says, you got to talk to my friend, Tony.
00:26:45I talked to Tony.
00:26:46Tony says, that's my saying.
00:26:47I say that.
00:26:48I've got to interject here.
00:26:50Do you know what Churchillian drift is?
00:26:52No.
00:26:52So any unattributed quote over time is more likely to be attributed to Churchill.
00:26:58Okay.
00:26:58But it's kind of, if nobody can define who said it first, it's almost everybody's.
00:27:02I think dogs are sort of like that.
00:27:04If you've got a child with you, I can't go up and pet your child.
00:27:07If you've got a dog with you, that is a gift to humanity.
00:27:09An unattributed quote is kind of the same thing, but for public intellectuals.
00:27:12That's fair.
00:27:13I would have thought, see, my first thoughts would have been you attribute either Yogi Berra
00:27:18or Mark Twain.
00:27:19Mark Twain.
00:27:20There's definitely a Twainian drift as well.
00:27:21I don't think he's said almost any of the things that he has actually said on the internet.
00:27:24That's the position you need to get into, though.
00:27:26Okay.
00:27:26One of my favorite things is to be accused of having said great quotes that I didn't.
00:27:31Yeah.
00:27:31I'm like, this is the freest plagiarism that I can ever do.
00:27:36Like, I'm culpably deniable.
00:27:38Are they good quotes, though?
00:27:39The ones that are bad, I mean, that is the entire, he said this thing and I didn't, and
00:27:43now I'm getting castigated for it.
00:27:45A lot of the time, they're pretty good.
00:27:47A lot of the time, they're not sloppy.
00:27:48That's nice.
00:27:49I have a quote, so I have a different quote problem with this one quote where I gave it
00:27:54for an article once, and I thought I was taking it from someone else.
00:27:58And I sort of told the reporter, like, I can't remember who said this, but the quote was,
00:28:01I was talking about how expert performers often don't know how they do what they do.
00:28:05Like, they'll give an explanation, but they actually often don't know.
00:28:07Don't tell me that you quoted yourself and forgot.
00:28:09So I said the quote was, just because you're a bird doesn't mean you're an ornithologist.
00:28:14Even fly doesn't mean you know how you're doing it.
00:28:16And neither she nor I have ever been able to find another source.
00:28:19I swear I was taking it from somewhere, but I've never been able to find another source.
00:28:23So she ended up attributing it to me, and I still am skeptical, but I like the quote.
00:28:26Well, that's okay.
00:28:26I feel like originality is just undetected plagiarism, and if it wasn't detected, then
00:28:31it means that you got away with it.
00:28:32Okay, I've never been able to find it.
00:28:34However, if you forget who's-
00:28:36Someone watching this is going to find it now.
00:28:38It'll be fine.
00:28:38Leave it in the comments.
00:28:39Yeah, the internet's going to get it.
00:28:39Yeah, yeah, find out who it is.
00:28:41If you say, I can't remember who said this quote, but this, this, this thing, and it
00:28:47later turns out that you said it, that's an additional level of embarrassment.
00:28:51Not knowing who said it is moderately embarrassing, especially if you say it a lot, but not knowing
00:28:56who said it and finding out that it was you is a sort of dementia that should be reserved
00:29:01for all day.
00:29:01It doesn't bode well.
00:29:02Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:29:04Bill Gurley, indigestion.
00:29:06Tony Fidel.
00:29:07Okay, so at Nest, he, this was kind of the apotheosis of his fervor for constraints where
00:29:12he forced the team to work inside a literal box where he made them prototype the packaging
00:29:16before the product because he said, this is what the end user is going to see.
00:29:21On a shelf.
00:29:21If we can't fit it here, this thing that we're trying to tell them, it's not a priority and
00:29:26we're putting it on the back burner.
00:29:27And so it's, I think that's what useful constraints can often do is force you to clarify your priorities
00:29:31in a way you wouldn't otherwise.
00:29:33How do limits power learning?
00:29:37This is the, a kind of complicated part of the book where I write about the so-called
00:29:43replication crisis in science.
00:29:45The fact that most published research is not true.
00:29:48And the reason it's not true is because people haven't had enough limits in how they go about
00:29:52discerning the truth.
00:29:53So before I got into writing, I was training to be a scientist and I should just say, since
00:29:57I'm going to accuse scientists in a way, I made these same exact mistakes.
00:30:01When I was a grad student, the issue is we gather data, whether we're doing it like scientists
00:30:07or we're just doing it in our own life, or we're doing market research or whatever it
00:30:10is we're doing.
00:30:12What we should be doing first is making predictions about what do we think?
00:30:15What is our theory of the world?
00:30:16What is our theory of this drug we're testing?
00:30:18What is our theory of our product and its value add in the market or whatever it is that
00:30:22we think we're doing?
00:30:24And then you gather the data and you look to see if that prediction was correct.
00:30:29But that's not really how people have been doing it.
00:30:31They've been, sometimes make a prediction, sometimes not, gathering data and then retrospectively
00:30:35looking for associations in the data.
00:30:38It's called Hurt's guessc or something.
00:30:39Parking is one of the, hypothesizing after the results are known.
00:30:43So it's like a sharpshooter firing randomly at a wall and then drawing a bullseye around some
00:30:46clump.
00:30:47And someone who comes later will say, oh, they're a really good shooter, but really they
00:30:50just circled retrospectively.
00:30:52And that's what a lot of scientists have been doing.
00:30:55So there's this interesting point in the year 2000 where in the lead up to 2000, decades
00:31:01leading up to 2000, there are all these big trials for medications and supplements to improve
00:31:05cardiovascular health.
00:31:07And most of them were positive.
00:31:10And then in 2000, all of a sudden, almost all of them are negative from 2000 on.
00:31:15And there was this question of what the heck is going on?
00:31:17Like if medicine stopped working at the millennium, but in fact, it was because a funding agency
00:31:22decided for these trials, you have to record your prediction of what's going to happen ahead
00:31:26of time.
00:31:27And so they put more constraints on the people doing the work.
00:31:31And suddenly they saw that these, their predictions were not right.
00:31:35And what they had actually been doing all along was retrospectively making predictions by sifting
00:31:38all the data, right?
00:31:39Just whatever they thought was not right.
00:31:41So they just said, well, we've got all this data.
00:31:42Let's go find something else that pops out.
00:31:45It seems like you should be able to do that.
00:31:46You have a bunch of data.
00:31:48Why can't you draw a conclusion?
00:31:49But it turns out that for statistical reasons, that's actually like running an infinite number
00:31:53of tests.
00:31:54You're saying like, what's, what's here that I can find?
00:31:56And so it might pinpoint something for you to then test, but to say you can draw true
00:32:00conclusions from that, you can't.
00:32:02And so some of this thinking was applied to businesses in a study where businesses were
00:32:06randomized to different types of training for market research.
00:32:09And some of them were trained in the scientific method where they said, come up with your hypothesis
00:32:13of how your product fits the market.
00:32:17Come up with a way to test it.
00:32:18These have to be specific predictions of what you think, what you think people will value in
00:32:22your product or whatever it is.
00:32:24And then test it and see what happens.
00:32:27And most of the companies that did that, that got that training, found that something about
00:32:31their theory was wrong about the value they thought they were adding, what people would
00:32:34want and all those things.
00:32:34And they would pivot.
00:32:35And those companies were much more likely to succeed and start making money than the ones
00:32:39who really didn't make a strong prediction, didn't test it, and ended up not pivoting.
00:32:44So they really didn't learn.
00:32:45So you want to learn, whatever it is, your own exercise, something you're improving at work,
00:32:49make a prediction for what you think that's something you're going to try, whether it will
00:32:53work or not, and then test it.
00:32:56And then you tweak your beliefs slowly, according to that.
00:33:00We should all be making a lot more predictions about what we think is going to happen whenever
00:33:02we make a decision.
00:33:04And then you update little by little by little.
00:33:06Who's that guy with the soup bowl?
00:33:08Brian Wansink was the soup bowl guy.
00:33:11And he's kind of a poster child for non-replication science.
00:33:14So the soup bowl was this famous study where people were given bowls of soup and just told,
00:33:20eat until you're full and then stop.
00:33:22And some of those people secretly had a tube under the table that was filling the soup bowl
00:33:26while they were eating slowly.
00:33:28And the finding was that those people ate much more, even though they were told, like,
00:33:32just stop eating when you're full, that the people who had the secretly refilling bowl
00:33:37ate, like, way more than the people who didn't.
00:33:40And so the conclusion was we don't have a good visual mechanism.
00:33:43We don't have a good mechanism for deciding when we're full.
00:33:45It actually depends on this visual aspect.
00:33:47Whether that's true or not, I don't know.
00:33:50But basically, his entire life's work has been retracted.
00:33:53So Wansink was the most famous nutrition researcher in the world.
00:33:56Nutrition research is a frigging mess.
00:33:58There's a sadly humorous paper that sometimes people call the everything in your fridge causes
00:34:02and prevents cancer paper.
00:34:05It gathered up all these different studies of different foods and plotted them.
00:34:11And you could see literally every food had been found to cause and prevent cancer multiple
00:34:14times, except bacon, which was found only to cause cancer, which is sad.
00:34:18Yeah, but for mental health, you know, you got to keep your mental health.
00:34:20Cracked my tooth on a piece of bacon recently.
00:34:22I think my sole takeaway from that piece of bacon, bite down and pull, you know, my sole
00:34:31takeaway from that wasn't anything to do with nutrition.
00:34:33It was just that the Muslims were right.
00:34:35Like that was Allah getting me back.
00:34:38Yeah.
00:34:38Or maybe the Jews as well.
00:34:39Like both of them actually, but finally something they can agree on.
00:34:44Diploma, we can use that.
00:34:45That's something we can build on that.
00:34:47Come together, guys.
00:34:48No pigs.
00:34:49The Wansink.
00:34:51So Wansink was doing this the way that his career came down, because he was like one of
00:34:55the people in charge of issuing, you know, making recommendations for dietary guidelines
00:34:59to Americans.
00:35:00And the time when his career came down, he was a superstar.
00:35:03He wrote a blog post talking about how he does research.
00:35:07And he basically said, the blog post, I believe, was titled The Grad Student Who Never Says No.
00:35:13And he was writing this praiseworthy account of this grad student where he said they would
00:35:19test something like, did the, you know, price you paid for pizza affect how much satisfaction
00:35:26you had from it?
00:35:27You know, whatever it was.
00:35:28And they would find out, no, it doesn't matter.
00:35:30Or like, does watching a talk show versus sports matter for how many pretzels you'll eat
00:35:35or something?
00:35:35And they would make some prediction and find out, oh, it didn't pan out.
00:35:38And so he said, but we have all this data.
00:35:40So I would tell the grad student, go and find something in there that's true.
00:35:43And he says, she never says no.
00:35:44She always goes through the data and finds something.
00:35:46And that's exactly the problem.
00:35:48So other scientists immediately jumped on this and said, that's like a textbook way of how
00:35:52to get false positives.
00:35:54And ultimately about 18 of his, his famous papers were retracted.
00:35:57So, but it's nutrition research is a mess like that.
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00:37:01It feels like our brains are sort of cognitive misers.
00:37:04Definitely.
00:37:04Just want to default to familiar things.
00:37:06Yes.
00:37:07That's path of least resistance, leaning into past habits.
00:37:12Why would it be the case then that it takes more cognitive effort, given that decision-making
00:37:20is such a huge burden, why does it feel more effortful when there's fewer choices?
00:37:25Because we think harder.
00:37:28We think deeper.
00:37:29It's a psychologist called desirable difficulty, right?
00:37:32So when there are fewer choices, you don't survey as much, right?
00:37:39And it sort of depends.
00:37:40Like if you're talking about a consumer decision, it won't necessarily feel more effortful when
00:37:44there are fewer choices.
00:37:45But if you're talking about a creative decision, it will.
00:37:49And it's in large part because you explore the possibilities of this limited space in much
00:37:54more depth than you would if you were just given open possibilities.
00:37:58Do you know if people spend more time assessing the entire set of options when there's more or
00:38:05less?
00:38:06I don't know if they spend a lot more time because they might be going thinner over the...
00:38:11That's a good question.
00:38:13I think it probably depends on the context.
00:38:16For consumer options, they do spend more time when there are more options.
00:38:20Like if it's like, what's the thing that you're going to buy at the store?
00:38:22Which is where the paralysis analysis, exactly why it happens.
00:38:28You go into the store that's got every type of genes on the planet and you walk out with
00:38:31no genes.
00:38:32That's right.
00:38:32That's right.
00:38:33Or you walk out with genes and you're just thinking if you should have gotten something
00:38:36else.
00:38:36So then there's the regret aspect.
00:38:38So I think it's probably context dependent.
00:38:41Yeah.
00:38:42But for consumer decisions, people spend more time.
00:38:44Okay.
00:38:44So constraints force us beyond those defaults, right?
00:38:47Rather than being in freedom.
00:38:48So having constraints pushes you off the path of least resistance, which is typically leaning
00:38:56on what you've done previously.
00:38:57So actually a pivot from freedom to constraint must be a unique situation for humans to go
00:39:04through if it's within the same sort of decision-making criteria.
00:39:08Like if previously you had all of the options in the world and now those are being constrained,
00:39:12especially including the one that you used to resort to an awful lot, that must really
00:39:16generate creativity.
00:39:17You know, my favorite example of this, when I found out what your book was about, I've
00:39:21only ever had one.
00:39:22It's great to have like, I don't know what it is that you do for a research process, but
00:39:26you have more stories per page than I think any other author.
00:39:30It's fucking insane.
00:39:32I only ever had one example of this.
00:39:33Jack Butcher, who does Visualize Value, graphic designer, worked with huge companies for a long
00:39:39time, left to go and do things on the internet, very influenced by Naval's work, came up sort
00:39:44of the same time as me and George Mack.
00:39:46He's coming to the England game at Houston, in Dallas with us this week.
00:39:50He decided to restrict himself one font, one colorway, one style of design, geometric shape.
00:39:58And it meant that all of it, hey, dude, you're a graphic artist.
00:40:02The clue is in the name.
00:40:03It's about the graphics.
00:40:04It's about the font and the drop shadow and how well this thing's rendered and the color
00:40:09gradient.
00:40:10No, I don't want to do that.
00:40:11All I want to do is focus on the two things that matter most, which is what is the quote
00:40:14that I'm choosing to represent or the idea that I'm choosing to represent and the way
00:40:17that I'm representing it.
00:40:18That's it.
00:40:19So he only had two things and he blew the fuck up.
00:40:21And then I've been talking really hard about those two things.
00:40:23He blew the, and yeah.
00:40:23So he was choosing the best ideas and representing them in the best way.
00:40:29This is, so that's fascinating.
00:40:31So one, he limits, he explores the space more readily.
00:40:34Once he limits those, what's there?
00:40:36And this happens in all sorts of things.
00:40:37Like there's this, this approach in sport learning called the constraints led approach
00:40:42or CLA that's been around for decades, but it's having a moment right now because Victor
00:40:45Wimbanyama and Shohei Otani have publicly associated with it, where instead of sort of teaching
00:40:52someone a repetitive motion, the coach is like an environment architect where they try to set
00:40:56up just restrictions that force the person to find their own best solution.
00:41:02And the key thing of it, so it's like Kyrie Irving, you know, he has all these like
00:41:05weird spins and angles and he grew up with a backboard that was missing a chunk.
00:41:09And so he had to like reach under and do all these sorts of things.
00:41:12And you see in these studies that you put like, you know, four on four soccer in a small space
00:41:18and people start exploring what's available.
00:41:21There's less available, but they explore what is available in this much more vigorous way
00:41:26and try all sorts of new and different things.
00:41:28So there's that aspect of it where he would explore the space more actively and vigorously
00:41:33because he limited it, but it's also in a way.
00:41:35Sort of textbook of artistic innovation.
00:41:38I mean, there's the history of artistic innovation.
00:41:41There's this woman who studied it named Patricia Stokes, a psychologist and creativity researcher.
00:41:45And the theme that she identified in artistic innovation was this process that she called
00:41:50paired constraints.
00:41:51Paired because it's two steps.
00:41:53The first is what she called a preclude constraint, which means blocking the familiar thing, like
00:41:58identifying the status quo and then block it.
00:42:01And then the next step is called a promote constraint.
00:42:05You take, just like you were talking, you take this thing that you do want to do and say,
00:42:08I must use this.
00:42:09So the classic example is Claude Monet, who said, all right, painters are using light and
00:42:15dark shades to portray light.
00:42:18I'm not going to use light and dark shades.
00:42:19I'm not going to use black at all.
00:42:20I'm not going to mix anything with black.
00:42:21No black.
00:42:22He banished black so thoroughly that at his funeral and someone draped a black shroud over
00:42:26his coffin.
00:42:26One of his friends freaked out and started yelling, no black for Monet and went and got
00:42:30a floral tablecloth and put it over his coffin.
00:42:33And Monet said, instead of using light and dark, I'm just going to use only pure color.
00:42:36And I'm just going to put pure color next to each other and sort of a mosaic and see if
00:42:41I can give off any impression of light that someone could see.
00:42:43And that was the birth of impressionism.
00:42:45But that's kind of the pattern that she identified in artistic innovation.
00:42:48You say, here's the status quo.
00:42:49I'm blocking that.
00:42:50And here's this thing I'm forcing myself to use in its place, which sounds quite similar
00:42:54to what you were describing.
00:42:55Now, presumably you can force a constraint that it turns out makes the work worse.
00:43:00Definitely.
00:43:00No question.
00:43:01This is a messy, as Stokes would document, often these innovators would do this repeatedly
00:43:08and they would have, uh, one of the things about these successful innovators, and this
00:43:14is true not just an art, is that they have more, they just have more failures than other
00:43:18people do.
00:43:18Like they have, you know, it's like Thomas Edison's like over a thousand patents.
00:43:21Most of them are stinkers, right?
00:43:23Don't lead anything.
00:43:24And then a fewer world changing.
00:43:25Does this suggest then that if you're going to take a constraint-focused approach, you need
00:43:32to have a degree of longevity, resilience, and a sufficiently broad enough set?
00:43:38Because the likelihood, if you're going heavy on constraint, you may end up with some of
00:43:43the winners, you may invent the light bulb, but you may also fall way worse than sort of
00:43:48the middle of the bell curve, which is typically where most people are going to given all of
00:43:52the options.
00:43:52Does that make sense?
00:43:53Yeah.
00:43:53Yeah.
00:43:53I guess it depends.
00:43:54You need to roll the dice a bunch of times.
00:43:55Yeah.
00:43:56I guess, I mean, I guess it depends what you're going for, right?
00:43:59The easiest thing to do is to just look at what everyone else is doing and do that.
00:44:02And you probably kind of end up somewhere in the middle, if you can do that competently.
00:44:06Yeah.
00:44:06Right.
00:44:06Yeah.
00:44:07Yeah.
00:44:07If you're trying to do something-
00:44:09That's AI.
00:44:10That's AI.
00:44:10That is AI.
00:44:11Yeah.
00:44:12So you may not want to be there much longer.
00:44:14Yeah.
00:44:15But if you're trying to do something different or something new, then you have to come up
00:44:19with some way to force yourself to try something new.
00:44:22And what Stokes was arguing was, this is the structured way that these people do it.
00:44:26It doesn't guarantee success, but this gives you a structure to try to get somewhere new.
00:44:30You know, I've been trying to think about things that I've done through the podcast,
00:44:341,100 episodes.
00:44:36About 400 episodes in, we stopped using smash cut trailers at the start.
00:44:42So we never did the full-on Hollywood-style trailer thing, but we did use to just take
00:44:46episode 88 for you, or 84, we'll probably have 15 seconds or 25 seconds of a good bit
00:44:53from the middle of the episode.
00:44:54We got rid of that, and now the episode always just launches with a question that I'm really
00:44:58interested in, or a comment about something that I'm really interested in, that's constrained
00:45:03me down, that I only have, whatever, five seconds to try and say something good that's as engaging
00:45:08or more engaging, hopefully, than a fully edited trailer with all of the movement and all of
00:45:12the, this is the bit that's going to come up later on, and the open loop and the Zygarnik
00:45:16effect that kicks in.
00:45:17But what it means is, it's focused my attention on what's the most compelling and interesting
00:45:22thing that sets the tone for the rest of the conversation that I want to ask.
00:45:26That's fantastic.
00:45:27It forces you to clarify your priority.
00:45:29And by the way, I've never heard someone use the Zygarnik effect that fluently in a
00:45:33sentence, so congratulations on that, unless they were describing the Zygarnik effect.
00:45:37Yeah, I think I've red-pilled everybody on this enough.
00:45:39It's one of my favorites.
00:45:41James, I was in Austin, downtown, and this was four years ago, James, my business partner
00:45:46in Nutonic, was sat next to me at a bar, and I just farted out the story about the Zygarnik
00:45:50effect.
00:45:51Six months later, it was in his best-selling book.
00:45:54That's a good magpie writer right there.
00:45:56Absolutely.
00:45:57Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:45:58So you said this there about originality.
00:46:01Yeah.
00:46:01How do you come to think about creativity and originality?
00:46:04Is there anything that's truly original?
00:46:08Only if it's not going to be that useful.
00:46:11So things that are truly original usually don't really connect with people in any particular
00:46:19way, so the idea that creativity and originality were synonymous wasn't even really a thing
00:46:26until the late 18th century Romantic period, which was a reaction against the Enlightenment,
00:46:31basically, with its emphasis on logic and science and all this stuff.
00:46:34So there was this group that wanted to build what they called the cult of the hero, like
00:46:36these creators that were just struck by divine lightning, and ideas came out of nowhere.
00:46:42But that's not the reality of how creativity works.
00:46:44I mean, before that, creativity was more associated with taking something that people generally
00:46:48understood, and your skill was in showing that you could make it different.
00:46:51So Shakespeare, for example, I mean...
00:46:54He didn't write Romeo and Juliet, or he didn't come up with the idea?
00:46:57No, not even close.
00:46:59No, he adapted it from Arthur Brooke, who had his countrymen, who had adapted it from other
00:47:03people.
00:47:03I mean, by the time Arthur Brooke was writing it, he had an introduction.
00:47:06You'll recognize this play, people, because they've already seen it somewhere else.
00:47:09I mean, there are lines in Romeo and Juliet that today you would probably call close enough
00:47:15to plagiarism.
00:47:17Shakespeare put a spin on them, but they were like very unique words that he would use in
00:47:22the same lines.
00:47:24But that wasn't a problem, because it was about him taking the hits, like a musician, and putting
00:47:29his spin on it.
00:47:30And that was seen as what you do, because people understand the story.
00:47:34And so now they get to really focus in on what is this person doing differently with this
00:47:39thing that I understand.
00:47:41And that's the case for artistic creatives.
00:47:44It's for, like, to go back to Edison, he didn't invent a light bulb.
00:47:48He wasn't even close to inventing a light bulb.
00:47:49But he made it, he got people to accept it, because he did things like keeping the wattage low and
00:47:55keeping lampshades, even though you didn't need them for gas, because he didn't have gas lamps
00:47:58anymore, because it gave this sense of familiarity.
00:48:01What modern designers call skeuomorphism, where you give a new thing characteristics of
00:48:06the old thing, so that people understand what they're supposed to do with it.
00:48:10That's why you have folders on your computer, why the first electric cars had a thing that
00:48:14looked like a gas nozzle that plugged into where the non-existent gas tank is, right?
00:48:19And so any idea, the more radical an idea is, the more important it actually is to ground
00:48:24it in something that people already understand.
00:48:26So I think this is also a more democratic view of creativity, because you don't need to just
00:48:31come up with this bolt of lightning.
00:48:33It's like, take something that's there and start tweaking.
00:48:35There is a, how do you say, judgmentalness, and understandably, if you've spent a long
00:48:44time coming up with an idea and somebody else comes along and takes it, probably likely to
00:48:48get pretty pissy, right?
00:48:50I think that's the typical way that people approach idea ownership in the modern world.
00:48:57But yeah, that line, originality is just undetected plagiarism.
00:49:00And that's why I've been thinking a lot about Suno, this AI music thing.
00:49:05Have you tried it?
00:49:07I have not tried it, no.
00:49:08It is fucking terrifying how good it is.
00:49:10I mean, I saw there was just like some huge hit, right?
00:49:13A number of artists are over half a million plays a month on Spotify, which is a big band.
00:49:20And they don't exist.
00:49:21It's all silicon.
00:49:23I've been thinking about that.
00:49:24And obviously, there's an awful lot of pushback from musicians that this is turning a much
00:49:31more sacred industry than content creation, which I don't think anybody thought was that
00:49:34sacred to start with.
00:49:35Your Instagram newsfeed hasn't been the birthplace of sort of the highest good in terms of artists,
00:49:40autism.
00:49:41However, they have been getting increasingly unhappy and saying this should be stopped or
00:49:48this should be banned or it should have some sort of label on it.
00:49:51And I understand why, because if you've spent a decade or two decades learning to play the
00:49:56guitar, that feels like a high cost that some guy that's able to just prompt an app on
00:50:02his phone has slipstreamed, being able to speed run this thing that you're supposed to put
00:50:06your time in.
00:50:07Yeah.
00:50:07Not at the same level that starting a podcast does.
00:50:11Podcasters also are going to get pissy about Notebook LM and other services similar to that
00:50:17taking our jobs.
00:50:18But broadly, a podcast is just a good dinner.
00:50:23Like, and everybody's had a good dinner.
00:50:24So the skill gap seems to be less.
00:50:26Like we've put less in on the front end, even though when you get to the top, like hopefully
00:50:29you develop some skills, but no one has spent 20 years podcasting in their bedroom to finally
00:50:35go out onto the stage to play the main gig that they've always wanted to with the equivalent
00:50:39of their guitar.
00:50:41But the ethics of it sort of fall apart a little bit when you realize that every musical movement
00:50:47has just built on the ones that came before.
00:50:49Yeah.
00:50:49And every great musician has taken some thing that they loved from their inspo and just tweaked
00:50:57it a little bit because my guitar only had four strings.
00:51:00So I had to do it.
00:51:00Or my guitar only had one string.
00:51:02Yeah.
00:51:02So I had this particular constraint.
00:51:04You go, well, the corpus that you have taken your inspiration from, your originality is
00:51:10just undetected plagiarism there.
00:51:12This is just easier to detect because the corpus that it's learning from has been literally taken
00:51:19from everyone as opposed to an elevator jingle that you were listening to in the airport.
00:51:25And you realize that's an interesting chord progression.
00:51:27I hadn't really thought about using a three over four as opposed to a four over whatever the
00:51:30fuck.
00:51:31Like.
00:51:32So it's, it's more obvious when we see that plagiarism now.
00:51:36And I think that's why people are getting increasingly territorial about their ideas.
00:51:40Yeah.
00:51:40I mean, there are a lot of deep philosophical questions embedded in that.
00:51:43How much does the human involvement matter?
00:51:46Right.
00:51:47Um, does it matter?
00:51:49Do people only care about the product?
00:51:51I mean, cause obviously there's the, I mean, look, I'm a book author.
00:51:53Like our stuff is, you know, my work's pirated the day it comes out.
00:51:58Right.
00:51:59Um, but I'm not territorial.
00:52:02I mean, it's, I mean, it's, it's a tough one.
00:52:06It's a tough one.
00:52:06And I think there's, I think it's a bit of a golden age for in-person events, like in-person
00:52:13podcasts, in-person concerts, because people do want that humanness to it.
00:52:17But for the things that are going to play on Spotify a million times, do they care about
00:52:21that?
00:52:21I'm not so sure.
00:52:23Yeah.
00:52:23Um, and I think that's, you know, one of the, one of the legal arguments that gets made.
00:52:27I mean, I've gotten notices, you know, when AI's like digested my books for like class action
00:52:31suits and all that stuff.
00:52:32And, and those notices, my understanding is that they're primarily because they pirated
00:52:36them.
00:52:36Not, not because they were using them, but because they got them in a pirated method.
00:52:41But had they just bought them and digested it into the model, is that tantamount to a
00:52:47person who could just read a ton?
00:52:48Yeah.
00:52:49And now it's a part of my inspiration soup.
00:52:51Yeah, maybe.
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00:53:56How do you, okay, so how do you break with habit and convention that's come before then
00:53:59in this, in this way?
00:54:00Uh, break instead of embedding in it?
00:54:04Like if you want to get somewhere new?
00:54:05Yes.
00:54:05I think first identifying what it is, what do you want to break with, right?
00:54:09So there's some of the innovators in the book that I write about.
00:54:12Like for example, Virginia Woolf, which is one of the, I'm a big fiction writer, because
00:54:15I'm a reader, because I think you have to read, if you want to be a great writer, fiction
00:54:19has much more structural diversity.
00:54:20So I think it's important to read for someone who wants, who cares about their writing craft.
00:54:24I care about writing craft a lot, even though maybe it's getting commodified.
00:54:27But even when AI turns out my lights, I'm going to be doing it because I just find it very
00:54:30engaging.
00:54:31Um, but she was writing these, she's written three of the, the hundred best books ever written
00:54:37probably.
00:54:38But before that she was writing these conventional books and she wasn't happy with them, but
00:54:43she couldn't get out of that mode.
00:54:44And so she took this time to start writing essays about what the conventional status quo of
00:54:49the time was reading all these books, defining it and saying, look, these, these, these modern
00:54:55novels at the time, they're out of step.
00:54:56Like life has become more complex than these things reflect.
00:55:00And so she really defined what the status quo was.
00:55:02And then literally said, now I'm blocking this.
00:55:05Here are these techniques of writing that every popular writer is using, including me.
00:55:09And I'm not allowed to do this anymore.
00:55:11You know, and for example, a narrator that knows everything about the characters, I'm not
00:55:14allowed to do it anymore.
00:55:15And that's how she came up with what we now call stream of consciousness, basically by really
00:55:19working hard to define what is the status quo and then saying, I'm not allowed to do it.
00:55:24And then she launched in these short stories, each one of which was a single experiment in
00:55:28a different form of narration.
00:55:29And then one of those experiments, she was like, this is the thing.
00:55:32And then she took off and her next three books were three of the greatest ever written.
00:55:35Didn't Stan Lee use this as well?
00:55:38Stan Lee was, he had some constraints forced on him where he was the editor at a comic company,
00:55:48Atlas Comics, and their whole business strategy was to pump out a huge volume of comics.
00:55:56They were, they were a volume shop, firehose of content.
00:55:59And then their rivals, DC became their distributor and limited them to only about eight titles a
00:56:07month.
00:56:08So they were like, they, they, they kneecapped their business strategy, basically.
00:56:12And so Stan Lee said, okay, if we only get eight titles, then we have to make long running
00:56:17stories with characters that people are going to engage with on a long-term basis.
00:56:21And that's when they came up with superheroes with character flaws, you know, teen angst,
00:56:27anger problems, all these things.
00:56:28And that was the birth.
00:56:29More complex.
00:56:29That was the birth of Marvel.
00:56:30That's where they rebranded as Marvel.
00:56:32They were forced into that.
00:56:33If they were allowed to keep, they never, there would be no Marvel if they hadn't been limited
00:56:37by their own rival to a small number of titles a month and had to figure out how to make longer
00:56:41stories that had, had narrative development.
00:56:44So cool.
00:56:45Okay.
00:56:46So do you think that designing with constraints in mind leads to better designs then like this
00:56:50principle of universal design?
00:56:52In many cases, some people find this controversial, but the idea of universal design, it came out
00:56:57of the disability rights movement in 1960s.
00:56:59But the idea was that if you design for people, the most constrained users, let's say those are
00:57:05people who are young or old or big or small or pets, whatever, or have disabilities, you'll often be
00:57:12identifying user problems that are just extreme versions of problems that many more users have.
00:57:20And so it can show you where to focus your design efforts.
00:57:24So some of the simple things in the world, like curb, the reason that curbs are, have a part that's
00:57:28level with the street.
00:57:29Those were originally made for wheelchairs, but it turns out they're better for everybody.
00:57:32Right.
00:57:32Or web pages that work on mobile have these hierarchical, logically structured menus.
00:57:39And, but that really came out of making websites that could be read by screen readers for people
00:57:43with visual impairment.
00:57:45But that led to the need to hierarchically organize these menus on websites, which turns out to be
00:57:49beneficial for everybody.
00:57:50Or in one of the examples I use in the book where I've lost it now, but I gained about 12 pounds to
00:57:55research one chapter because I had to do an army obstacle course wearing body armor from Vietnam to
00:57:59the present. And I'm not a big guy. And so some of this stuff like outweighed me if once I had like
00:58:05water and batteries and all this stuff. And I was there because I was learning about the design of
00:58:10modern body armor. And what had happened since about Vietnam, it had just gotten heavier and heavier
00:58:15and heavier and heavier, especially like in Iraq, when people could be hit by shrapnel from any
00:58:20standpoint, they just like covered, turned soldiers into turtles and they were protected, but they
00:58:25couldn't move. And that caused all these other dangers. And then about 10 years ago, when women
00:58:30were first allowed into the close combat force in the military for the first time, they realized the
00:58:35body armor was way too heavy.
00:58:38And so the army had to design body armor specifically for women. So it had to be smaller, more mobile.
00:58:45You could mix and match parts and they made it much lighter. And it turned out that it was better
00:58:50for a huge portion of the force. So they had to start calling it, they had things like a notch in
00:58:55the back for a hair bun, but it turns out everyone wants to be able to raise their head when they're
00:58:58lying prone on the ground or to be able to shoulder a rifle, things like that. And so this, this armor
00:59:03that was designed specifically with women in mind who are only like one to 2% of the close combat force
00:59:07ended up being used by a ton of the men. So the army actually had to rebrand it as unisex just to
00:59:13get all the guys like who would be good for to use it. So it came out of, you know, studying these
00:59:18very specific mobility problems and ended up building something better for everyone.
00:59:23What was that story about? Was it the F-16 seat?
00:59:28Oh yeah. Yeah. This was pre-F-16, I believe where when, when jets were proliferating, uh, there were a
00:59:37whole bunch of accidents in the air force. Like there was one weekend where there were like 17 different
00:59:41accidents, not all, not all deaths, but accidents. And at first the air force thought it was pilot
00:59:47error. And then they commissioned a young lieutenant to study these, these cockpits had been created
00:59:55based on the average measurements of a whole bunch of pilots. And this young lieutenant that they
01:00:00commissioned to study it went and started taking body measurements and realized there is no such thing
01:00:03as the average pilot. Like if you took even three measurements on someone, you know, arm length,
01:00:07eye circumference and, uh, height. It was like 3% of people who would even be in the middle 30 percentiles
01:00:15just with those three measures. Yeah. So in designing this cockpit for the average pilot, they had actually
01:00:19designed it for, for no one. And so the answer was adjustable cockpits and they started having a lot
01:00:25fewer accidents. Does all of this mean that doing one thing at a time is crucial? I have to assume that
01:00:30multitasking is basically the anathema of being able to do this well. Multitasking is worse than I thought it
01:00:36would be. Well, so first of all, it's not really possible because it's actually our brain. That's
01:00:41not true. There's some types of multitasking that are possible. We can walk and talk at the same
01:00:44time. When, when, when we're combining it with a function that's basically automatic, you know,
01:00:49we can do things and breathe, then multitasking is possible. But the way that people generally think
01:00:53about it, two different cognitively engaged tasks, it's not possible. Think about parallel
01:00:58processing when in fact it's task switching. That's right. You have to drop one set of rules and
01:01:02activate another one. And there's always a cost when you do that. So as Gloria Mark, a psychologist who,
01:01:07who studies people at work says, your brain's like a whiteboard and you erase when you switch,
01:01:13but there's that residue left for the next thing. And it interferes with the next thing that builds up
01:01:17over the day until you sleep basically. And she's been studying people at work. Her, her research is
01:01:22the scariest thing that went into the book. I think she's been studying people since about 2000.
01:01:28And when she started, like she would, first she would sit behind people with a stopwatch. You know,
01:01:32these days it would be key loggers and cameras and everything. People were switching tasks about
01:01:37every three minutes on average. Then by 2012, it was every 75 seconds. Then by 2022 is every 45 seconds.
01:01:44That's where it's stuck for a few years. And that's terrible for your ability to get anything done.
01:01:51The more switches someone does a day, the lower their end of day productivity and the higher their
01:01:55end of day stress that measured by things like heart rate variability and immune function. Like you can
01:02:01see this huge impact on stress. And the scariest thing is she found that you're in your attention
01:02:06gets trained. So such that if you're interrupted by notifications or other people or whatever all day,
01:02:13and then you suddenly say, I'm putting this away, it's time to focus. You will self-interrupt
01:02:17with intrusive thoughts at the rate to which you've become accustomed.
01:02:21Wow.
01:02:22As if we have this internal distraction barometer that wants to keep a certain cadence going.
01:02:30And so the ways to combat this are to try to work in blocks where she found that people a few years
01:02:35ago were doing about 77 different email. So in and out of the inbox about 77 times a day on average,
01:02:41which actually sounds kind of low to me. Yeah. Um, but if you have to answer all those emails,
01:02:47but can you do it in one or three or five or seven blocks where you're just doing email and then
01:02:53you're not doing email and have a block of other things and you can start to regain some of your
01:02:57ability to pay attention. I, one thing I find for me, this isn't from Dr. Mark's where in,
01:03:02and keep a pad next to yourself, by the way. So when those intrusive thoughts pop in,
01:03:05you write it down, cognitive outsourcing. One thing that I've found useful, um, is what I call
01:03:11the Hemingway principle where Ernest Hemingway would stop his work day in the middle of a sentence.
01:03:15Yep. Because then the next morning he knows an important thing that I am starting with
01:03:20is this sentence. So I try to make the last thing I do in every work day, defining what is the
01:03:25important thing I'm going to start in the morning, because it kind of saves me from two possible
01:03:28problems. One, getting lost in feeds, mindless stuff, or two, getting lost in my inbox or falling
01:03:34prey to this thing called the mere urgency effect, where people prioritize things that feel urgent over
01:03:38things that are important, even if it's a worse use of time. Yeah. You've got the Eisenhower matrix
01:03:42upside down. It's a little Zeigarnik-y as well with that open loop overnight thing. Yeah. Very cool.
01:03:48What, who are your favorite examples of people who locked in singularly very well?
01:03:55My favorite examples. It's a good question. I mean, I, I love the example of, I write a lot about
01:04:02Isabel Allende, but I would say that because I'm, I'm a writer. Again, I, I really, I strongly identify
01:04:07as a writer, as a craftsman in that way. And for this book, I got to shadow one of the greatest living
01:04:12writers, Isabel Allende, who didn't start publishing books until she was about 40 and then
01:04:18started her first book on January 8th, has started a new book every January 8th, assuming the previous
01:04:26one is done. Since then, since the age of 40, it's been 44 years now. She's produced a bestseller
01:04:30about every 18 months on average for 44 years, 80 million copies sold. And she organized her life
01:04:36around ritual. And again, this started when she was just before she was 40. Every book, January 8th,
01:04:42she clears out this room, but before she had all these resources, she did it in a closet,
01:04:47right? Wherever she could, she makes a quiet space, designates certain times. She lights a candle to
01:04:53start her workday, blows it out at the end, closes the door. So that, that story is staying for me
01:04:58there. And she implemented all of these rituals. She puts a certain book of Pablo Neruda poems under
01:05:03her computer just for, you know, inspiration. But really all this stuff is a cue, like a basketball
01:05:07player who takes three dribbles and claps before they shoot a free throw. You start to associate
01:05:11these rituals with how you get into your headspace for performance. And so as she said, like when I
01:05:17was around her, her family would say, if you want anything from her, she has this big foundation,
01:05:22she's given $20 million of her book proceeds to, you have to get it by January 7th because then her
01:05:27life turned outward, as she calls it, is disappearing. And everyone around that, everyone around her knows
01:05:32that and respects that. And so it was just amazing to see that and think about, you know, what could I
01:05:38take for myself, but just to be, be around someone like that. I will say though, she, uh, I offered to
01:05:48send her an advanced copy of the book because she's in the book and it was like April. And so I, like,
01:05:55she probably just started a novel. She can't read it. And so she emails back, yes, send me a copy.
01:05:59As you know, I just, it was January 8th was recently. So I started another book. I can't
01:06:02read it, but send it. Thanks. Bye. Great. Perfect answer. Like I know she's locked in.
01:06:07And then I just a few weeks ago, I get a message from her saying like, I'm loving the book, all this
01:06:13stuff. Like, what are you doing? You're supposed to be writing and not reading anything. And she
01:06:16sends me this email. Can I read this email? Yeah, yeah, yeah, please. She said, she said I could
01:06:20share this. She says, I started a novel on January 8th and gave myself a deadline to finish a first
01:06:25manuscript by the end of March, which is crazy. She says the reason for this short deadline is not
01:06:30important. So whatever it is, she doesn't want to tell me. She said, my agent, my brother read it
01:06:34and liked it a lot. It still needs polishing, but it's May and I find myself without work until next
01:06:38January 8th. I'm going crazy. I'm getting rid of my clothes, replacing the furniture, walking in
01:06:43circles, reading compulsively, et cetera. Your book's been an inspiration. I need to give myself a task
01:06:48with boundaries. For example, write a novel set in Lima in the year 1610 about a cowardly Spanish
01:06:53soldier, an Inca maid, and the Inquisition. Or a story set in 1810 in Ireland about a girl-slash-witch
01:06:58expelled from her village who seeks revenge. You get the idea. I can't start writing until January 8th,
01:07:03but I can start researching and planning. I have total freedom to do whatever I want, and at my age,
01:07:0784, I have no obligation to keep writing. This freedom is lethal. Help! Exclamation point,
01:07:11exclamation point, exclamation point. Love, your pen pal. Then an hour later, she sends another
01:07:16email that says, have any ideas for me? Not the Inquisition or the Irish witch.
01:07:20So it's kind of interesting. This freedom is lethal.
01:07:23Because her whole life has been this cycle, this ritual, and all of a sudden she decided to give
01:07:27herself this ridiculously short deadline for reasons I don't know, and has suddenly found herself
01:07:32without that structure that gave meaning and pace and seasonality to her life.
01:07:38Jared, you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem?
01:07:41I don't consider all that, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of
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01:07:47But they're non-alcoholic.
01:07:49And that's not a problem?
01:07:51Sorry, man. I just kept chugging away for the regret to creep in. Never happened.
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01:08:37Bottoms up.
01:08:44There's an interesting trend that's going on at the moment. You interchangeably used the word
01:08:48maximizer with optimizer earlier on. And I do think that kind of the era of the optimizer is,
01:08:54maybe we're toward the tail end of it now, but has certainly been around.
01:08:58Oh, you think? Tell me more.
01:08:59This is me licking my finger and putting it in the air. There is a big pushback at the moment
01:09:03against over-optimization, against, I think, what people see as an unnecessary obsession with
01:09:08tracking metrics, with restricting life, especially what's seen as being associated with fun,
01:09:14not drinking alcohol, not staying up late, not cheating on your diet, not training, et cetera,
01:09:19et cetera. And I get it. I do understand. And I've certainly gone through my era of
01:09:26David Allen's getting things done and Pomodoro timers and Cal Newport. I think everybody kind
01:09:32of goes through that and squeezes themselves out of the aperture of the anus on the other side of it,
01:09:37which is pretty important. Um, what is, what's fascinating to me though, is
01:09:42what people see routine as when they can't understand why the routine is there is something
01:09:50much closer to superstition than, uh, uh, preparedness that why are you doing all of this
01:09:57stuff? Like, it doesn't relate to your performance in any case. And why are you lighting the candle?
01:10:02Like the candle doesn't matter. I think baseball is probably the canonical example of this where
01:10:06it's a sport that's very iterative, that, uh, success and failure in each of those iterations
01:10:12is very tightly defined. You either got on base or you didn't get on base and you see the players and
01:10:18in between every pitch, one glove, other glove, tap, tap, helmet, sand, wiggle, bat. Like everybody
01:10:26has, I mean, there's stories of baseball players who didn't clean the helmet for their entire career
01:10:31because they thought it had become imbued with some special sacred. And if I change this thing,
01:10:35that is the reason. Yeah, it is. It is. It becomes way closer to a rain dance than it does to a ritual
01:10:41or a routine. And, um, you kind of slippery slope your way down. I think the, the era of the optimizer,
01:10:48it's having a huge wobble. If the, if there was a VIX index for optimizers at the moment,
01:10:51it would be fucking through the roof. Um, and I think that this is because people feel like they're
01:10:56overwhelmed. I think that it is due to massive amounts of optionality, chaos, unpredictability
01:11:01about the future. Is AI going to take my job? Is Iran going to come and fucking blow everything up
01:11:04in that? I just want a little bit of simplicity. I want to do something that feels like fun. And I
01:11:10don't want the rest of my life to feel like homework. That makes sense. I mean, I'm, I'm a
01:11:15self-improver. So I've felt those things. Sometimes I kind of like experimenting on myself at the same
01:11:19time. Like I was division one, 800 meter runner. Right. And the better I got the, actually the less I
01:11:25use search. Like eventually I said, I don't need to watch anymore. I can go by feel because I
01:11:29understand this well enough. And I thought that was sort of freeing on the, the other hand. So I try
01:11:34to think of this because I do have a tendency. I have some maximizing tendencies myself and I have
01:11:37a tendency to get overwhelmed when I see some of these optimization things. That's the, that's the
01:11:41thing, you know, it's going to be the answer. But then if you have enough of them, it's like,
01:11:43okay, I have to write five pages in the morning and then I have to do this kind of exercise.
01:11:47Right. And so I try to ask myself sometimes if there were one behavior I wanted more of right now,
01:11:54if I could only pick one behavior that I wanted more of right now for myself, what would it be?
01:11:59And I find that it's just like a helpful thought exercise for me to say, like, I'm just going to do
01:12:04this one. I don't know if it's true, but I've heard this story a bunch of times that for a very long
01:12:10time and maybe even still now, every decision that Elon made, Tesla, SpaceX was run through the same
01:12:18single ordinating principle, which was, does this get us closer to Mars? No, it's definitely changed at
01:12:23least because he's bothered with the moon more than he is with Mars at the moment. And that Bezos had
01:12:27the same thing at Amazon, which was, does this improve customer experience? If you have a single
01:12:31ordinating principle, one thing that everything else gets squeezed through, it's pretty easy to
01:12:36understand, does this thing contribute to that goal or not? As soon as you have two or three or four
01:12:41different conflicting goals, well, this one's going to improve goal A, but actually you take a little
01:12:45bit of a hit on goal B and it's going to make goal C, it's neutral for goal C, but it's going to make goal D
01:12:49a little bit easier. So, but I value goal B a little bit more than C and A. So it's really,
01:12:54really hard to work out. But if you squeeze that down, and I think this is one of the unseen benefits
01:13:01of doing macro multitasking too, from a life direction perspective, not just within the day,
01:13:06but across periods of time.
01:13:07Absolutely pro macro multitasking over, yeah. Go ahead, sorry, continue.
01:13:11Yeah, just the periodization, periodization of goals, right? Like you'll make, you will lose more fat
01:13:17in six months if all you're doing is fat loss and you will gain more muscle in six months if all
01:13:21you're doing is muscle building, which means that across a year you can lose more fat and gain more
01:13:25muscle if you do them separately than if you try and do 12 months of them together.
01:13:29Absolutely. And, and I think you'll, you'll do those things, right? Yeah. You'll do them better.
01:13:34Yeah. You'll bring clarity easier. You'll probably like it more. Yeah. Yeah. Totally agree.
01:13:39What about avoiding constraints becoming too constraining? How do you know when the problem
01:13:46is too much freedom or too much constraint?
01:13:49Yeah. I think there's an art to that, right? I think you can see in studies, for example,
01:13:52of problem solving, when people are basically told not only what they have to do, but how they have to do it,
01:13:57that's too much constraint. Like their ingenuity or creativity goes way down. So you'll see it in
01:14:02these studies of mechanical inventions. Like if people are given a hundred pieces and told to
01:14:06make anything, they make less creative inventions than if they're given only 20 pieces and said,
01:14:12you have to make a piece of furniture. But if they're given only 20 pieces and told that they
01:14:15have to make a chair, then it goes the other way. Like the creativity totally drops. So if there's no,
01:14:19if you say, could I still surprise myself? And the answer is no, then you're, you're way too constrained.
01:14:24So I think the point is to leave that wiggle room where you're forced to explore.
01:14:28That's fascinating. What have you applied to your own life beyond the dance halls and
01:14:33the pickleball and the turning up at the same time?
01:14:36Oh yeah. I mean, I, I totally, I do my work completely in blocks now, which requires a little
01:14:41more pre-planning, right? So this is a block room to be doing email. This is a block room to be doing
01:14:45research or writing or whatever it is. And again, the last thing I do at the end of every workday
01:14:49is to say, what is the important thing I'm going to start with tomorrow? So I'm not making any
01:14:53decisions when I wake up. I've already designated this important thing. I set decision rules for
01:14:58things that I do. I mean, my newsletter, this isn't going to make anybody want to read it, but
01:15:01it's a satisficing exercise for me because I have these optimizing, maximizing tendencies.
01:15:07So if a book say has to be like a nine or 10, the newsletter, if I get reached six and a half,
01:15:12I send it out. Right. Again, how do you make that judgment? Just my own quality judgment. I mean,
01:15:18I always subjective, obviously, but I always have these other things in my head. Every time I send
01:15:22it out where I'm thinking, ah, here's like three, you know, here's something else I should put in
01:15:26there. But if I feel like it's a six and a half out of 10 already, I send it. And that's been a very
01:15:32important satisficing exercise for me to actually ship, you know, to actually get things out the door
01:15:36because otherwise I can kind of feel that paralysis at anything short of a book, basically.
01:15:41What's the true meaning of the road less traveled?
01:15:45It's funny that you should ask that. It is not what the way that people usually often quote it in
01:15:50graduation season, which is that it's this ode to rugged individualism, the poem saying that,
01:15:55you know, you take the road that less people have trod and therefore that's what led to your success.
01:15:59What Robert Frost was actually doing was sort of criticizing Edward Thomas, his walking partner,
01:16:07who would, when they would come to two roads that looked the same, would agonize over which one to
01:16:12take. And then no matter which one they take, when they were done, he would say, we should have taken
01:16:15the other one. So if you look at that poem, the road less traveled closely, Frost says both roads were
01:16:19just as fair. He says, neither had footprints in it from that morning. So he was actually criticizing
01:16:25the drive to think about what else you could have been doing. So I think the rugged individualism like
01:16:33zigging when other people zagging, I think that's an important message also, but it's not the one he
01:16:38intended. And I think the one he intended is actually even more important for our modern condition.
01:16:45I've got an essay that I wrote a little while ago. "Does conscience does make cowards of us all?"
01:16:49The line comes from Hamlet and it's usually misheard as an insult, as if Shakespeare is sneering at
01:16:54morality. Like ethics often soften us, or thought drains courage from the body. That's not what's
01:16:59happening. Shakespeare isn't attacking goodness, he's pointing at self-awareness and naming its cost.
01:17:04In the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, Hamlet isn't really weighing life versus death. He's circling a
01:17:09more practical question. Why do humans hesitate to act even when action would clearly relieve suffering?
01:17:15Why do we endure situations we don't want and why do we tolerate lives that we could, in theory,
01:17:19change? Well, pain isn't the only obstacle, imagination is. By "conscience", Shakespeare means
01:17:26something closer to consciousness, the ability to think ahead, judge ourselves and simulate futures before
01:17:32they arrive, to see consequences coming and experience them emotionally in advance. And unfortunately,
01:17:37that ability cuts both ways. The very capacity that makes us reflective, ethical and intelligent
01:17:42also makes us hesitate. We imagine worst-case futures so vividly that we treat them as already real.
01:17:49So courage isn't defeated by fear, it's defeated by simulation."
01:17:53Fascinating, that's a beautiful passage.
01:17:55Isn't it cool?
01:17:56Isn't it cool?
01:17:57Fantastic.
01:17:58No, our ability to think about those counterfactuals, which I think is also unique as far as we can tell,
01:18:05among life. A blessing and a curse.
01:18:07David Epstein, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, you rule from episode 84 to episode 1100 and whatever the
01:18:14hell this is. Where should people go to keep up to date with everything you're doing?
01:18:17DavidEpstein.com. They can find my stuff there, my newsletter, which is free,
01:18:21some tips from inside the box, and info about my books.
01:18:24Heck yeah. David, I appreciate you. All right. See you next time, my beauties.
01:18:28Dude.
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