Leading Productivity Expert: Avoid the Biggest Traps on Social Media

Because everything's competing for your attention now, if you're not structuring your attention, then algorithms are going to structure it for you. David Epstein is a New York Times best-selling author >> examining the factors that enable people to excel in sports, the arts, business, science. His TED [music] Talks on performance science have been viewed more than 11 million times. You're somebody who thinks a lot about how we can be better. I have now almost 20 years of experience in [music] in in vetting studies. If I think there's some misperception out there, I'm kind of obsessive about wanting to to change the narrative. You may think that your brain is made for [music] thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible. We spend the most time and energy on the least important decisions because we're having trouble telling the difference between the options. What we often need to do is clarify our priorities. >> [music] >> For our productivity, for our sense of well-being, we have to have constraints and boundaries. And that's hard, but more important in this kind of information overload, infinite choice world that we're living in now. David, so great to see you. So excited to have you back on the show. It's been a handful of years. You're on the precipice of releasing this fantastic new book. Congratulations. >> Thank you. And I wanted to start with kind of how I think of you. I think of you as an athlete, of course, this track and field athlete, this lifelong runner, a writer, a scientist, a thought leader, very much in the tradition of other authors like Malcolm Gladwell, perhaps, Adam Grant, Daniel Pink. And you come up with these positions that put you at odds with modern productivity culture. The most famous of which is you upending the 10,000-hour rule that pitted you mano a mano against Malcolm Gladwell. This sort of match quality grit versus fit thing that you know, kind of made you an antagonist Angela Duckworth. How do you think about your work and when somebody asks you at a cocktail party like, you know, what do you do? Like, how do you answer that question? I usually start asking them about what they do instead because I'm more curious about that than telling them what I do, but I think about it as I obsess over mistranslations or misperception of data in scientific research and then work to try to either correct or or temper the repurcussions of those misperceptions basically. So, when I see something, I follow a ton of research. You know, I transitioned from training to be a scientist to being a writer. And I'm like a dog with a bone when I get onto some research that I see is becoming very popular and is being completely misinterpreted. Um and I should say with that happened with both Angela and Malcolm, but they are like two of the most wonderful people in my life now. So, these were very generative relationships based on disagreement. >> Yeah, so you had this very famous kind of debate with Malcolm where you guys were pitted against each other on this 10,000 hour rule idea. But, you know, the TLDR of that is that in the aftermath of that, you guys became friends and running buddies. And if there's one thing about Malcolm is like he's fine with being wrong. Like, he's like, it's cool. Like, ideas change and you evolve and he's not really hung up on that. No, not at all. So, the first the first time we ever met was for this debate at MIT and they brought us back five years later. And at the end you know, I we were we were talking about how our minds had changed since our first meeting and he said, "Oh, you you you convinced me." We were because I was arguing about that the science actually shows early specialization is not the typical path to becoming elite, the 10,000 hours and usually it's early sampling where you gain these broader toolbox and learn where you fit and things like that. And he said, "You convinced me. I think I made this error of conflation where with the idea that it takes a lot of practice to become great, which is true, but I conflated that with the idea that implies necessary early hyper specialization, which I now think is false. So, we ended up kind of on the same ground. And I think he actually set a great model for me. After some years of us So, we we ran together the first time the day after our debate because he kind of said, when we were coming off stage, "You got me with some of that data. Like, why don't we go run together and we'll talk about this?" And several years later, I said, "You know, now we're good friends, you could have just crushed me. You know, I I just didn't have the professional capital at that point." And he said, "Yeah, but I have the luxury of learning from my critics." And that set like such a beacon for me to think about when you have earnest critics, not just someone like ranting at you on the internet, but earnest critics, is what can I learn from them to be better. And he became kind of a even though we still have disagreements about plenty of things, but he became a role model for me in that sense. There's something very high integrity about that and and somewhat obvious also, like if we can just hold our ideas a little more loosely and be open to being proven wrong and when we're proven wrong, like kind of embrace that with curiosity. That engenders trust over time and yet when you kind of canvas culture, like people don't generally do that. They doubling down even in the face of you know, incontrovertible evidence that suggests that they're wrong. And there is this idea that if you change your mind or if you're proven wrong, that like there's something bad about that that that erodes trust, but in fact it's quite the opposite. >> And I'd say Malcolm's like the embodiment of that phrase, strong ideas loosely held. Like, he will put something forth as if it's like absolutely he's positive, but then if you bring something that contradicts it, he'll change, right? He'll be like, "Yeah, oh yeah, I was wrong about that." >> Next, moving on, you know. And that like all all this research I've written about about people who have good judgment and make good forecasts, you know, about things in the future. One of the absolute uh common characteristics of them is many small updates. Like they're constantly flip-flopping and changing. But it seems like sometimes in the public sphere, you get punished for flip-flopping, even though it is one of the hallmarks of people with good judgment. Somebody I don't know if it's you, but somebody who kind of writes books like you do should write a book about this. Yeah, there there is >> Cuz it is a real cultural problem. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I wrote a chapter about it in Range about this good judgment. And also Philip Tetlock, the psychologist, has written about some of this. But I think what remains to be done is putting it in this context of kind of the information environment today, where it feels like you'll you'll really be punished and people become so reactionary that they they double down cuz that's so easy to do, right? Like somebody, if you put something out in the public, somebody on the internet is going to attack you in a horrible way. Like in a way where prior to the internet, you maybe would have been attacked twice in your life and now you might get it 10,000 times a week. And I think that just makes people really, really reactionary and and difficult to kind of Mhm. change, right? They just want to punch back. Like they feel hurt and they want to hurt somebody back instead of actually looking for the the right idea. >> Yeah, and what are the long-term implications of that on, you know, human psychology and just culture, politics, etc. when we're in that fear stance? Like nobody wants to say anything because they don't want to be criticized because of the nature of social media and just you know, having a voice in the public square. I mean, again to go to Malcolm, one amazing thing was I was attacking his most famous idea and he was still willing to change on it, where there was a British author who who wrote kind of a version of the same thing in the UK that was very popular. And when I was on British radio with him, he just absolutely came after me. Like there was no maybe you have some points here. It was you're wrong and even if you were right, it would be the wrong message to send, right? So, I kind of got to see these two different avenues where one person who because he had published this and become famous for it was just like holding on to it with a death grip, you know? >> So, in other words, not only is he holding on to being right he's also saying at the same time like even if I'm wrong it doesn't matter cuz it's like better if this was true. And and and I I >> [laughter] >> and I think that's really presumptuous cuz my take is always what kind of differences between people are important uh for outcomes we care about not just folklore but which are which are real, which matter for outcomes we care about and then how do we use those things to get the best outcomes for all people and sometimes that might involve information that people don't necessarily like but I still think it's important to do. And in terms of science writing generally I mean right? I have a I have a new book coming out and something in there I mean I have a chapter in there about how much scientific research is wrong, right? And and I learned some of this because when I was a grad student I did some inappropriate statistical analysis. And I I had an independent fact I fact-checked it. I hired independent fact-checkers and yet something in there will not be right. Whether it's because I made a mistake, I framed something wrong, it it's just science that doesn't replicate. I I did a tons of vetting. You know, I had scientists read it. I had my fact-checker read it. I have now almost 20 years of experience in in in vetting studies. But if you're going to write about a lot of science, I think you have to go in knowing something here is not going to hold up the way that I thought it would. I just don't know what it is yet. >> Mhm. And then be ready to to correct that when you find >> Yeah, in the new book you use the example of this Cornell uh nutrition researcher and you kind of canvas, you know, the problematic nature of like the you know, developing the hypothesis in advance and in retrospect. I mean, maybe it's worth kind of like discussing that right now. >> Yeah, so this was a Cornell researcher named was Brian Wansink who was the the most arguably the most famous nutrition researcher in the world at at one time. He did these really fascinating studies, the most famous one being the so-called bottomless bowl study where people were told to eat as much soup as they wanted, but some people had a there was a hidden tube under one of the bowls that was refilling it. And the finding was that those people ate much more. The idea being like we don't know when we're actually full. >> [snorts] >> Fast forward a few years and basically his his whole life's work was retracted more or less. Retracted or at least corrected. And what happened was he was doing what's called harking, which is stands for hypothesizing after the results are known, meaning he would have some hypothesis for what he wanted to test. You know, like that people will eat more if their snacks come in a larger bowl or something like that. Or if they're watching an action movie versus a romance. >> Mhm. And maybe that wouldn't work out. And he'd say bummer. Like my hypothesis didn't work out, but then he had all this data. So, well, let's go look through the data to actually see some correlations that do hold up. Maybe it's uh well, if you are watching the action movie and your snacks are in a big bowl after 9:00 p.m., then you eat more, right? They'd add all these qualifiers. It's like when you watch an NFL game and you hear, you know, the Chiefs are undefeated at home when Taylor Swift is in the audience and they're wearing their alternate jerseys or something. You can be sure that somebody first looked for a simpler stat. It didn't hold up. And then they went data dredging basically to look for associations. The problem is when you do that, you're almost ensuring that you're going to find false positives. Cuz you're essentially doing an infinite number of tests just looking for something that'll work. >> So that you can reverse engineer almost to you know, confirmation of your your bias towards a certain hypothesis. >> And and you may not even know that you're doing it, right? So what you have to do is set your hypothesis ahead of time and stick to it, right? This is the problem is what's called researcher degrees of freedom. Having too much freedom in to to retroactively fit a hypothesis to the data. And it it's this has led to some kind of a sadly funny story that some scientists call the everything in your fridge causes and prevents cancer study. This study that looked at all all of the research done on various foods and showed that almost everything has been found both to cause and prevent cancer. Except bacon which sadly was only found to cause cancer. So Yeah, this is uh you know, in a macro sense uh when you kind of think about that in the context of our eroded um you know, trust in experts and institutions is truly problematic and just because I'm I'm steeped in the the kind of like health and nutrition space. I'm not a scientist, but anybody who is interested in that and is scrolling on social media will find any number of like influencers who are cherry-picking whatever study to say whatever. >> Yeah. And it just creates mass confusion and paralysis because essentially to your point like everything's toxic, everything's going to kill you. And there's always some PubMed thing that somebody can point to to say this is bad or this is good. And it's very reductive and you can't help but think like what was the hypothesis going into this? You know, what were the variables that were controlled for and you know, what were the biases of the researchers etc. uh that are driving these results. And it just creates this morass of confusion. Absolutely. I think there are a few few good things though. One is this problem which is akin the analogy I use is like a sharpshooter who shoots at a wall and then goes and draws a bull's-eye around some of the bullets that are grouped. And then then people come in later and say wow, what a good shooter. But the person was just firing randomly and then drawing the bull's-eye around it. That's like what's happening with some of this science and especially in nutrition science. The good thing is it's scientists themselves who raised these concerns sometimes about their own work. Once that I did this in one occasion as a grad student not realizing it was a problem. I had access to a very powerful statistical program, had a ton of data. Go find me some correlations, right? It didn't occur to me, it's kind of counterintuitive that looking backward would cause would make you almost assuredly finding false positives. But the scientific community raised this and now things are are better, which is why in in the book I lead one chapter with this crazy study that makes it look like in the lead-up to the year 2000 to the millennium, all these dietary supplement and medication studies are producing all these miracles. And then in 2000, bang, everything stops working. It's like, what happened? Was there a millennium bug or something that caused this to stop working? It's no, it's that the the funding agency said, you have to register your hypothesis beforehand now, so we know what it is. And that caused almost all of these studies to stop working. So that So science is working better because of it. So I think working better than ever, so I hope trust can be rebuilt. But the the influencer point, it's tough to do anything about that, but I think there's some basics that people should be equipped with, like small interventions almost never cause huge changes. So when you see studies that are promising some tiny change that leads to some big effect, very unlikely to hold up in the long run. Big Big effects usually require large or sustained interventions. And also when they're very particular, like there was a sauna study that I was criticizing at some point where it was like some cognitive effect, but you had to do sauna between 9 and 12 times, you know, for at least like certain years during your life. And when you start to see these very particular requirements for it, that means somebody almost certainly was like looking how they could divide the subject groups in the study to to get a positive result. It wasn't there in the first place. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is over indexing on weak data sets to draw conclusions that aren't necessarily supported by the data. Like, that's sort of the general kind of like root of a lot of these conclusions around outcomes. Like, small sample sizes, very minimal positive outcome, but an overemphasis on the connection between these two things to create a video and like make everybody engage in a habit change that isn't really moving the needle. And all of these things are like 1% cherry on top of the Sunday stuff. That's like a whole I'm glad you said that because that I feel like is a whole ethos or movement that And I understand why people get attracted to this 1% stuff. Like, let's say it's true. >> Yeah. But while ignoring these fundamentals that account for all of the other stuff, right? >> it's like usually it it involves a capsule or some kind of like fun new behavior as opposed to the drudgery of like, well, you know, go to bed early and >> [laughter] >> like eat real food and move your body. That's right. And and I mean, I'm for stuff that motivates people to change, right? But but it's like the fundamentals are the fundamentals for for a reason. If you want to be a good runner, you have to run a lot. >> I see this all the time with runners. Like, it's like which of these shoes with the new foam should I get and and these trying these little things and these dietary supplements and >> Norwegian method is going to unlock, you know, unlimited potential all of a sudden and this is all you have to do. But it's like first of all, you have to run consistently and stay injury free and and and recover. Like, you have to run and recover. And so, it's like jumping ahead to get getting the new equipment or the or the latest fad where you kind of haven't gone through the basics. It's sort of a dopamine inducing activity that is confused with actually doing something that's moving you forward. It's a form of analysis paralysis. >> Yeah. Yeah. And and it's I think it's tough to get away from too. I mean, even knowing I don't know about you, but even knowing everything I know, I I still sometimes if I get fed some influencer thing that's giving me some kind of 1% thing and claiming it's going to change my life, I still sometimes I'm like a little bit curious and I look even knowing what I know cuz it's everywhere, right? So. >> And I'll try these things. I love it, too. You know what I mean? I'm not going to the source material and you know, rifling through it to see its effectiveness, but you know, as a lifelong athlete, you know, swimmer, what- whatever, like, you know, I know that like it's just it's really about the basics. And yeah, there's always improvements and iterations on training science, etc. But it's all marginal in comparison to you know, what we know works. But then what gets trafficked on the internet, you know, is just a is this reductive version of that that gets delivered to the average person who doesn't have the kind of background that you have in athletics or science. >> right. I mean, the the good thing about some of the science sort of good and I made sure to to put in a little bit about this because I was in writing in this chapter about how much scientific research is not true is that there are studies showing that people are reasonably good at guessing what science isn't going to replicate. So, if they if they're if a study is described to them and and then they're asked, do you think this replicated or not? People actually get it right a majority of the time. Like it just doesn't sound right. So, I think if you can slow down a little and say, does this sound likely? Is this a small intervention that promises a huge effect? It's it's not likely to be true. Meanwhile, I think the less sexy thing, and maybe I would say this having because I've just been thinking about constraints for the last few years, is structuring your life in a way that makes make the basics easier and more repeatable, right? It's like putting structures in place that get you just to do the fundamental things instead of looking for these kind of marginal gains that that often, you know, at the elite level often people are focusing on the marginal gains and that's what you hear about. >> take advantage of that 1%. But for the average person, this is a distraction. Yeah. Yeah. >> More than it is helpful. >> they've already gone through that other 99% that you haven't really seen, right? So that's why they're focused on those little margins. Well, good thing we have Steve Magness to police the internet. >> [laughter] >> On this stuff, right? God bless him. >> energy for policing the internet than I do. >> he has he must >> have a very thick skin. Yeah. Oh, he does Do you know how I don't know if I've told you Steve and I first met years ago when he was a source of mine when I was at ProPublica when I was investigating the Oregon Project. Okay, that's how we first met. And so Cuz you're the one who broke the story the Nike Oregon Project story and he was your inside man. >> He was an inside He was one of the inside men, yeah. And um he went through some stuff I mean, that is a tough position to be in. Like I was getting stacks of paper from lawyers and I had an organization behind me. Explain for the audience who might not know what we're talking about. >> Oregon Project was probably the most famous track group in the world for years. It was funded by Nike, highly funded. It was meant to create Americans who could win medals in distance running. It was the head coach was Alberto Salazar, the most famous American distance runner and one of the greatest. And Steve Magness, who who we're talking about, who's a physiologist and and performance writer and coach to some elite runners, was an assistant coach there and started to be asked to do things that he thought were unethical, like to test an illegal method of of using a supplement for training to You know, he saw some documents that suggested athletes were using banned substances and things like that. And he decided to to speak out about it. Um and when I was at ProPublica working with the BBC, we did an investigation of the team. Long story short, it led to the the team being disbanded and the coach being suspended. And Steve was the first person to be willing to put his name and face, you know, on camera. We were doing a documentary for the BBC behind these allegations, which then led other people to come out. But he was kind of on an island against a very famous organization that didn't like what he was saying. And so, I kind of feel like he's like been through it, you know? There's a He's battle-tested. You know, he was a Jeffrey Wigand character. There's when I think of him, this this will sound silly, but there's a in in in anime that I really like called One Piece, that's really famous. And there's a part where one guy is trying to encourage another guy to have bravery. And so, he has him uh It's This is silly. I can't believe I just said publicly that I watch this thing. But anyway, There's a fight between these two guys that can turn into dragons at one point. And one is way overmatched. And the guy who's trying to encourage him, his mentor, says, "Bite him. Bite him." And he's like, "What?" And he bites him. He says, "You just bit the strongest guy in the world. Can anything frighten you now?" And I feel like that's kind of where Steve was. It's like he he just bit the strongest guy in the world. Like, can anything frighten him now? And >> [laughter] >> I don't think so. >> Yeah, that's wild. Steve has told that story on the show. He's been on a couple times. I've had Mary Cain on. I've had Kara Goucher on. So, if you if you're watching or listening and you want to learn more. And I think we talked about it when you were on the show the first time a couple years >> time ago. I don't remember for sure, but Yes. Let's talk about constraints. I mean, the last time you were on, we talked mostly about range, which is essentially you making the case for why being a generalist is better than honing in on a specific skill early in life. And you have all these case studies that kind of dispel this idea that you know, whether it's Tiger Woods or, you know, name your kind of superstar in their respective discipline, you're kind of upending this idea that like you have to specify early and just commit yourself, uh, you know, maniacally to a certain thing. And the new book is really kind of the inverse of that. You know, you're saying, uh, yes to generalism, which is basically like kind of expanding the scope of your life experience to this new book which is about like, okay, how do you focus and kind of implement constraints to drive productivity, creativity, and essentially like your hottest take is is that constraints are like a necessary, um, component of having a happy life. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, first of all, you've obviously tapped into something clear, which is it seems on the face of it like it's in conflict with with this book Inside the Box with my last book Range. And first of all, if someone's going to argue with me, it's going to be me. Like I'm always kind of looking to challenge my own ideas, but also I view it as a kind of an obvious next question in some ways. Like some of the most uh, common questions I got after Range were things like, okay, I have this broad toolbox, I have these broad experiences, what now? And it's some point you have to focus that into achievement of some sort. And there's a hefty dose of me search in this book, right? Where I have this wide-ranging curiosity, I have this zigzagging career, and I have struggled to channel that. In There's a reason why I have a book out every 6 years is because it's really hard for me to draw boundaries around my projects, and so I wanted to get better at this. And and I did. So, I don't think it would take me 6 years again. So, if if AI doesn't obviate books, then I think I'll be writing them more often. Um, >> So, you've benefited from going on this exploration. I mean, that was a major impetus for the exploration in the first place is that readers were asking me the same question I had for myself. Um which is how can I draw boundaries around my projects to to contain them and and and kind of focus my energy in a productive way. And along the way as I got interested in learning about constraints, I realized also that we are always attracted to more freedom, but more freedom isn't actually always good for our for our creativity, for our well-being, especially and I think this is especially true now in the AI age where there is infinite capacity to start things and be overwhelmed by things and to do more and more and more and more. And there are all these kind of productivity hacks that I think are really illusions and what we often need to do is uh clarify our priorities and grapple with the fact that we have limited time and energy and and clarify. So, one of one of the most useful things I did as I learned about constraints was that I now recommend everyone is make all of my current commitments visible. Like I took posted notes. I write about a genomics lab in the book that did this, but put them on posted notes, put them on the wall and immediately the thing that I saw was I couldn't finish all of this stuff ever. And that's just what I have going now. And so immediately you start to say, what are the priorities here and and what are the things that I can I can move to later. And so I think it's for our productivity, for our sense of well-being, we have to have constraints and boundaries. And that's hard, but more important in this kind of information overload, infinite choice world that we're living in now. >> Mhm. It's not dissimilar from the idea that we need to welcome discomfort into our lives. Like discomfort, this Susan David idea of like discomfort is a price of admission for a meaningful life. And you know, our lives are so lined with convenience these days and this cultural priority around like luxury and relaxation, etc. that we actually have to go out of our way to seek out uncomfortable experiences to stress ourselves to feel alive. And this is a sort of creativity, productivity version of that. Like we have to seek out constraints because things like AI or technological tools or the infinite scroll or you know, like just an unlimited number of movies that we can watch on Netflix we sort of dilute ourselves into thinking that this is good Yeah. >> when in fact it's limiting. And it makes people unhappy like the there are these international surveys that show that people have been becoming more bored since infinite scrolling came into existence. More bored. That's very counterintuitive. The fact that you can choose from all these entertainment options and find the best thing and yet you get more bored. >> But it's the wrong kind of boredom because we want boredom, rumination, you know, or like just our our ability to like engage our imagination as a function of boredom. But this is a boredom it's almost like a more like an anime. Like it's not it's not that kind of boredom. It's kind of like a depressed boredom. I mean anime is a is a is a keyword in the late in the book this word that means basically rulelessness. And and a popularizer of it was Emile Durkheim who was widely regarded as the founder of modern sociology, French sociologist in the late 19th century when governments started keeping statistics about all sorts of things. He looked at suicide statistics in a systematic way for the first time ever. And at the time suicide was considered an individual psychological problem. Like something's wrong with that person. Okay. What he showed was that's absolutely not the case that it rises and falls the prevalence of of suicide with social conditions. And that it's a a movement in many ways, not individual psychological problems. He saw that when the economic fate of a country plummets, that suicide goes up. But surprisingly, he saw that when it rises too fast, it also goes up. Like anything that unmoors people from the things that ground them you know, in their identity and that that in some sense of habit and repetition causes people to feel desperate. And I feel like we have so much of that today where so much of virtual life is as as Jonathan Haidt told me when I was interviewing him for that chapter is this endless cycle of micro dramas with a cast of changing characters, right? People who just come in and out. And it just doesn't feel very grounded in reality. And so I think we the convenience you mentioned. Convenience is a problem. Everything has gotten so convenient that we don't have the friction that like adds meaning that causes learning. There There's I was just I was just writing about these brand new studies that look at people writing essays with AI, and they don't learn anything from their own essay cuz they're just relying on the tool. So you want these what psychologists call desirable difficulties. These things that slow you down, that make learning more frustrating, but they actually make it much better in the long term. So in some ways I agree, the book is very much about things that feel inconvenient, but that actually make you better and have a greater sense of meaning. There's something tragic about the fact that we have to go out of our way to find these things. Like, you know, it wasn't that long ago where life would just present us with this naturally, and this was just part of living and growing up. >> Yeah. And now we're insulated from these things that uh you know, actually make us feel alive because we were under the misapprehension that uh they were making us unhappy when in fact the contrary is the case. Yeah. No, I I I I totally agree. I mean, I I I think it's it's it's counterintuitive, right? It's deeply counterintuitive. Like the idea that having more options and all these things won't just be better and bring us to better decisions and make us happier, but it's what the research shows again and again and again is that like people are making decisions in the interest of preserving optionality. Like you hear that phrase all the time, keeping your options open. And that becomes an end to itself and that's actually like a really bad way to to make decisions basically. People in in in studies express a preference for reversible decisions for example because they want to keep their options open, but tend to be much happier with irreversible decisions. >> Mhm. And so I think it's seemed attractive. Like I remember when Mark Zuckerberg talked about making the metaverse. And he he he had this kind of video that he made and he said, "It's going to be amazing. Everyone can live in a universe that's tailored just to them." And I'm now looking at this through the lens of the constraints research that I did for this book. It's like that is the worst thing a man like that's like literally sounds like, you know, the underworld that you go to if you're bad. And so I think some of the things that sound like they might be good uh just turn out, you know, our brains aren't meant to have access to everything everywhere all of the time. For better or worse, we are in this hyper optimization focused culture that tells us if we're not fully dialed in, then there's something wrong with us, which in my opinion is kind of a form of violence given how challenging life is already, how difficult it is to just strike a healthy balance between work, >> [music] >> family, and all our grown-up responsibilities. And the expectation that somehow amidst all of this that we're supposed to stay balanced, present, and grounded. I know that I need support and therapy is one way I get it, which has been crucial in managing all the pressure. Therapy is not just for moments of crisis. It's this incredibly powerful tool for growth and for becoming more intentional about how we show up in our lives. BetterHelp makes therapy easier [music] to fit into your routine because it's all online. You can connect with a therapist by phone, video, or message chat, all according to your schedule. 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So, like, state the thesis, and I want to understand like this journey that you've gone on to really understand the relationship between constraints and you know, kind of transcending productivity, you know, into like kind of breakthroughs and, you know, interesting results. Like, when you look at all these case studies, like, what have you discovered? >> Yeah, and you and you're right that it feels that So, in this group of psychologists did an international survey recently about creativity myths, and things that we know are not true from research. And they found the most popular myth was that people are most creative when they are most free. Well, in fact, it's it's the opposite. So, as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says, you may think that your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly. And so, if you have total freedom, you just go down what cognitive psychologists call the path of least resistance, meaning you will reach for solutions that you have seen before, that you have done before. It's almost impossible to do anything creative unless that path is blocked, the path of least resistance, using what's often called a preclude constraint. You you preclude the solution that you're that you're used to. And so, now one psychologist calls this this impact of blocking familiar solutions on creativity. It's like the fastest way to spur creativity is to say, "What's the thing I usually do? I'm not allowed to do that this next time." Whether that's art or I'm going into a client meeting, what if I couldn't propose the usual thing, what would I do? This one psychologist calls it the Green Eggs and Ham effect, which is named for the fact that Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet that he couldn't write a children's book using only 50 words. And so, it forced him to experiment with rhythm. Uh because he couldn't experiment with vocabulary. Even before that, he had a bet that he couldn't do one with 200 words from a vocabulary list. First, he looks at the list, starts carping to his wife, says, "There's no adjectives. What am I supposed to do?" Then he he he said in in in fine Seussian form, he compared it to making a strudel with no strudels. So, I think he was like in his personal life who he was in his public life. And then he decides, "You know what? I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words on the list and make a book." And the first two rhyming words are cat and hat, and changes children's literature forever. But this shows up again and again and again when people are often it's not by choice, right? That that I think is a important thing in the book that whether you self-impose constraints or whether they're imposed on you, if you view them instead of limitations as opportunities to clarify priorities and to launch into productive experimentation, it can be the most powerful tool you have. So, there are things like we were talking a little bit about NASA before this and NASA had a mission when I gave this book to this guy named Ed Hoffman who was that what's called NASA's first chief knowledge officer. It's kind of like the head psychologist at NASA. He goes, "Oh man, I'm really thinking about this mission called El Cross where the team ended up with half the time and budget that they wanted." So, first they complained and then they said, "If we were going to get this done, how would we do it?" And they end up having to borrow tech. They take imaging equipment from army tanks and engine temperature sensors from that straight out of NASCAR. They build a probe that finds confirms water on the moon. And so, it's this always that blocking of of what you would have done otherwise that is the thing that launches us into creative exploration. A lot of artistic innovators, you know, whether it's Picasso or Bach, they will self-impose these constraints. It's as if they have some I mean, I guess it's like great practitioners always. They're like way ahead of the science. They they do this stuff intuitively and then decades later science catches up and says, "This is why it works." So, a lot of the serial innovators kind of self-imposed constraints that that block their own solutions. The musician who says, "These chords are off the table." You have the colon concert example of the kind of mistuned broken piano, you know, kind of creating this legendary concert experience. >> Miles Davis did that for kind of Blue where he limited what, you know, probably the greatest jazz album of all time. Yeah. This is where your work kind of intersects with Tom Sachs who's just on my brain because uh he was recently on the podcast and I was with him at South by Southwest, you know, just the other week. And his whole idea of ISRU, in situ resource utilization. Like this is a guy who decided he wanted to have have space program. >> Yeah. Uh and he was going to uh erect this space program with basically plywood and like whatever he could find at the scrapyard, you know? And this this this turns into like this really magical kind of gigantic art installation that leads him into a relationship with JPL and NASA. Like by him kind of imagining I'm going to do this, working with the constraints, and you know, kind of leveraging his sculptural talents, actually turns into like this long-standing relationship where he's like the in-house art director to JPL with their Mars mission. Like it's insane, right? So it's like this visionary aspect that's also grounded in like practicality and driven entirely by very limited resources and constraints. I mean, that whole Institute Resource Utilization, right? Because it's NASA, it sounds like because they make acronyms for everything, right? Basically, it means use what you got. Yeah, basically. What's what's what's what's what's what's around here that we can use? And And how can we repurpose all this stuff, right? >> Yeah, in the same way that Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi. Like you just like these incredible projects are are entirely, you know, on a very foundational level, like expressions that emerge from constraints. Constraints are the very essence of what gives birth to these timeless works. Absolutely. >> And yet culturally, you know, we think, "Well, okay, you did that, but now you have the big budget. You're going to make the movie." And then you make some giant movie, and it's terrible. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I I think that that testifies to the fact that we kind of can't do this kind of thinking unless we're forced. We can force ourselves, right? We can self-impose constraints. But without them, we do the path of least resistance thing. Like we we we don't think about how we could use all the different materials around us and use other things unless we're forced to. Right. Life is hard, and for most people, these constraints are imposed upon us. You know, you could take the case of an author with a publishing deadline, but in the in the context of a person with their everyday job, they're constantly, you know, being told what they can't do and there's guardrails everywhere. Like that's the average person, you know, daily experience. But if you look at an artist or just even a musician who has a keyboard. Like today, you could do there's just an infinite number of sounds that that thing could make, right? And that essentially is paralyzing. And so you have to volunteer, in the same way that you have to sign up for a marathon or like go out of your way to like do something that's difficult. The onus is on the individual to take responsibility for imposing those constraints and that's difficult. >> It's very difficult. And to your point about the kind of typical person's everyday experience, I should say I wrote a book about how constraints can be useful and why we undervalue them, but it is also clear in creativity research that when you if you prescribe what someone has to do and basically how they have to do it, that that can be stifling. Like if you're telling them No agency with >> constraints in place and the person says, "I can't possibly surprise myself." That means they're in a bad spot, right? You cuz you There needs to be enough room for them to do something surprising, basically. But you're right. I think in a lot of life right now, it's it's incumbent upon us to to to impose useful constraints because everything is so open and there's so much choice and so much optionality and and and all this kind of stuff. >> So make the use case for the average person. I'm not an artist. I'm not a musician. I'm not, you know, a sculptor like like Why is this relevant to me and how is it of practical use in my daily life? I go to my job and, you know, my life's, you know, already hurried and insane and you know, I'm just trying to level up a little bit here. Like how does this actually work? So when I think about constraints that I've applied to myself, I think of this acronym BCS in my head, which is B is batching your work, so doing work in in blocks so that you're mono-tasking in specific blocks instead of multi-tasking. C is commitments visible, make all of your current commitments visible, posted notes, and then you'll probably realize you're overcommitted and look for things that maybe you can take away. And S satisficing, setting good enough rules for your decision that once they're reached, you make the decision and and don't look back. So, first batch some of your work if you can, like because everything's competing for your attention now, if you're not structuring your attention, then algorithms are going to structure it for you, basically. And so, if you can batch some of [clears throat] your work where you're doing a you're mono-tasking for blocks during the day. So, I I write a lot about the research of this woman named Gloria Mark who studies attention span and focus at work, and it's been getting worse, right? Like 20 years ago when she started, people would spend about 3 minutes on a task before flipping. Now, it's about 45 seconds, basically. Yeah, I mean, say that again. The average person in their job is shifting their attention every 45 seconds. >> Yeah, switching what's on their screen every 45 seconds, basically. And and checking email about 77 times a day on average. And what she found is that the number of switches you make predicts poorer productivity at the end of the day, but also, you know, she was started measuring heart rate variability and it predicts stress also at the end of the day. There's now some budding evidence showing that it impacts immune function if you're toggling a lot, like it's a stressful thing to do, but I don't think people realize that. So, if you can batch, you can check all those emails, but can you check them in one block or two blocks so you're not toggling between things? Like, if you took all the stuff you have to do for the day, could you try to organize it into these blocks where that's the only thing you're doing? And it should be better for your productivity and your and your stress level and your attention. Some of her research was I think some of the scariest stuff when I was doing the book, because one of the things she found was that our attention spans get trained. So, if you're interrupted by notifications or other people or whatever all day long, you become accustomed to a certain level of cadence of interruption. And so, then if you say, "Now I have to focus." and you remove the phone or whatever it is, you will self-interrupt at the cadence to which you've become accustomed with intrusive thoughts in order to to maintain that cadence of interruption. I've noticed that in my own That's scary. >> own brain. Yeah, like I will like, "Okay, I've locked the phone away and I'm ready to like work on the book." And then I'm just, you know, I'm so acclimated to those, you know, minute constant interruptions. >> It's like we have some internal distraction barometer that's like gets set. The good news is you can start to make a difference in a few days of like blocking work so that you're not toggling as much. And also doing what's called cognitive outsourcing, which means just give a pad next to you and when that intrusive thought comes in, just write it down so it's not stuck in your head. So, the BCS, the three main tips, C was commitments visible. Like I said, make all of your current commitments visible. So, we have a hardwired bias humans do called subtractive neglect bias. So, we overlook solutions that involve taking stuff away. Maybe this is because for most of our evolutionary history, we didn't have to worry about having too much. We had to worry about having too little. But so, we always reach for additive solutions. And so, if you can make all of your commitments visible, you'll probably see that you're over subscribed and can say, "Which are the ones I really need to focus on now?" Put the other ones other ones later. So, stop starting and start finishing like don't start a new one until you've you finished one. So, get the post-it notes out and write these things down and put them on your wall and have a, you know, kind of come to Jesus moment. >> That's right. And then the S in the BCS is for satisficing rule. So, satisficing is a term uh coined by a Herbert Simon, who I think was one of the most brilliant people who ever lived. Political scientist trained by training. Did the first AI demonstrations. He won the highest award in computer science, won the highest award in psychology, is one of the founders of cognitive psychology, then won the Nobel Prize in economics for good measure. And he coined this term satisficing, which means instead of trying to optimize, it's like the the antithesis of optimizing. He said humans can try to optimize, but they can't because we have finite brains, we can't evaluate all the options, we don't know all the repercussions. So, we have to come up with shortcuts. And in fact, we should do that proactively because then you save cognitive bandwidth for decisions, and you end up happier. So, coming from his work, researchers developed a satisficer-maximizer scale. Maximizer means you're always trying to optimize. We'd probably call it an optimizer now. And it turns out it's almost always a bad thing to be. Less happy with their decisions, maximizers are less happy with their lives, they're more prone to regret. Even when they make a good decision, they don't feel as good about it. And there's evidence that it's on the rise as a as a as a quality, maybe because it you can infinitely compare your choices now to so many things. Whereas satisficers will set good enough criteria for a decision ahead of time saying, "Here are the three things that need to be met by this decision. Once those are met, I go with it." Instead of endlessly evaluating options. So, I think in this world of infinite choice, where consumer choice has multiplied a hundred millionfold compared to before the Industrial Revolution, that setting these kind of rules for good enough and saying once I surpass that, maybe that'll go to outstanding, but once I surpass good enough, done with that decision. Otherwise, you'll constantly fall prey to something called Fredkin's Paradox, which is we spend the most time and energy on the least important decisions because we're having trouble telling the difference between the options, which means it probably doesn't matter if we spend more energy because we can't tell the difference, but that's where we end up spending the most time and energy in agonizing because the options are similar, which also means we could probably just choose and and and wouldn't make much difference. The distillation of that idea is essentially that perfectionism is toxic, uh whether you call it optimization or just this, you know, really unhealthy relationship with holding yourself to a certain standard that's unachievable. It's a It's a personal violence. And this idea of of good enough being the ultimate life hack. Yeah. It It sounds And that runs contrary to this whole like, you know, kind of like self-optimization uh culture. And and it sounds bad because like when I think about anything I'm doing, am I aiming for good enough? No, I'm not aiming for good enough. You know, you're aiming for great. Well, that's actually not true. I started a newsletter a few years ago and that has actually turned out to be and I started doing some like a form of dancing class where I was a total beginner. And one of the reasons these have been very important good enough exercises in my life. So, when I'm writing a book, if I say it this has to be like a nine or 10 on the effort level, a newsletter, if I hit six and a half, ready to send. And that's been a really important exercise for me in satisficing and saying some things can be good enough. And And that means sometimes they'll go to great, like it'll come out that way. But once I hit good enough and it goes out and then the sun rises again tomorrow, and I think it's helped dilute some of my own maximizing tendencies. So, it kind of goes against my natural proclivities. Like I think I'm more naturally a maximizer, but I've I've become much more proactive in setting out criteria for good enough and saying, "Look, when that when that's met, I'm okay to move to the next thing." That's similar to the Seth Godin kind of idea of like you have to ship your work, right? Like he's just he's constantly These books are coming out all the time with him and he writes a blog post every day and he just moves on, but he's so focused on the shipping part, like, you know, and whether it's a book or, you know, somebody who's writing a song or trying to come up with a comedy routine, you know, we just get in our own way and we don't want to put it up on its feet until it's perfect and we then never end up shipping anything as a result of that kind of self-upbraiding of our, you know, the quality of our work product. I I got that paralysis kind of after Range because it ended up being more successful than I expected and I had left my normal day job to finish it because I I I was I was a traditional investigative reporter at the time and I was just not able to get both things done at the same time. And so suddenly I didn't have this place where I was writing constantly and had this one bigger work that I was associated with and I kind of felt like oh gosh, anything short of that means I'm going backward and I did have a little bit of paralysis for a little while. And that's when I started the newsletter where good enough is good enough and I think that was really really helpful for me. Yeah, how can you get off the dime? Lower the stakes. I'm a huge fan of low stakes practice. In thinking about the new book, uh I was this is such a trivial example, but um I think you've seen like I've been posting these sort of daily morning gym, you know, like just holding myself accountable by like being in my home gym in the morning. Every time it's like 4:24 and it's at the crack [laughter] of dawn. And I keep saying like I'm just wake I wish I could sleep in more like I just I you know, like anyway, I'm just up at that hour so I might as well get in the gym. But it's you know, how can I turn this into a creative fun thing of like sharing this um through a through a unique lens as a creative exercise, not for any other reason than that, honestly. Almost like going on an artist date out of Julia Cameron's like the artist way book. Like this is my artist date. Yes, I'm in the gym, but like let me make this a fun creative thing with photography. One of the rules that I set for myself is like I'm going to take a picture of this LED clock, no matter what time it says. But I want that photo to be different every time. Like how can I get it, you know, a different angle on it or whatever and keep it interesting within the constraints of this shipping container, you know, kind of situation. So there's guardrails and walls, like there's only so many things I can do. The clock is there. How can I do How can I play with that and find new and interesting ways to photograph it? That's been really fun. That's not a silly example at all. I mean, that that's basically like what Picasso was often doing where he would do a whole bunch of versions of the same idea. It's like, this is the idea. Now I'm going to look at all these little tweaks that I can do on it. And in fact, that tinkering with something that you have already, instead of like creating something totally new, was synonymous with creativity for most of human history until the romantic period, basically in the late 18th century, where there was this sort of rebellion against enlightenment thinking, and that's That's when this idea of like the pure flashes of originality and genius and the and the so-called cult of the hero rose up. But that's That's not the real story of creativity. It's much more often taking something and and tweaking it and what can you do with all the I mean, I write about Shakespeare's work in the book. All copied. Like everything he was Romeo and Juliet, he adapted from this guy Arthur Brooke's epic poem, which was adapted from a bunch of other people. He almost took some exact lines, actually, Shakespeare did. And with King Lear, like he probably even acted in a different King Lear. He like changed one of the daughters' names from Cordelia to Cordelia. And he changed the ending and he made it his own. But it's like one of the most creative minds in history and he was always taking something that was there and seeing how can I make this my own? And so I think when we're thinking about creativity, the idea that it's these like free creations of the mind with no limits is is like a-historic. You know, it's it's much more often building on something that's already there. And so, I think that's how that's how people should think of it. And And by the way, I was telling you before, I think your morning posts have been important to me personally in a different way. I don't know if we can get into that, but I'm like, I don't know why anyone would care about this. But anyway, um yeah, a couple things in what you just shared. First of all, like upending the genius myth. Um this is This is just, you know, total fabrication. like Anytime you see some great man theory, you know, there's legions of people who supported that and probably a lot of other people who were dancing around the same idea at the same time and this person got all the credit. But beneath the surface at the same time, like all great artists steal. But the interesting um kind of ripple that you offer in the book is this notion of, you know, taking the new idea, but contextualizing it in something familiar. And you use like MLK and and how he, you know, kind of was borrowing from white preachers uh sermons and making them his own so that there was something familiar like in the way that Shakespeare would borrow and create this like capsule that was relatable for an audience, but then doing your own unique thing within that. That's right. Yeah, this this chapter is sort of about the tension between creativity and originality. And if you want people to come along with a new idea, the best way to do it is to ground it in something that's really familiar with them to them. If it's too original, it kind of doesn't work for people. And you can see this all over the place in product design, by the way. It's like why early electric vehicles had the charging port where the non-existent gas tank is with a thing that looks like a gas hose, right? It's to to convey to people what the function is compared to something they're used to. Or when Edison first electrified New York City, he kept the bulbs at a certain dimness so it would look like gas and kept lamp shades even though he didn't need them so it feel still like the gas light people were used to. Or folders on your computer, right? They're not really folders, but that tells you what they do. With MLK, he was trying to get people to come along with a really radical idea, which is uh he was trying to get white Protestants to accept um the black demand for equality, which was a radical idea and and to get involved in in helping it along. And so he borrowed what he what he was used to coming up from the gospel preaching tradition where originality was seen as suspect, basically. You were supposed to preach to the choir. Like sometimes people use that phrase preaching to the choir as a negative thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You wanted to preach to the choir. They they expected a version of the hits. And so he would give them a version of the hits. He would borrow, but he would put his own spin on it. So, even the let freedom ring repetition from his most famous speech was borrowed from a speech by his friend Archibald Carey who borrowed that from a speech by the activist investigative journalist Ida B. Wells. It was this culture of repurposing things people were familiar with and then kind of shoehorning your unique message into it. So, what MLK would do something called typology where he would find a story throughout history. He'd start with something that the audience could not disagree with, right? The story of uh Moses as a liberator. Can't disagree with that, right? Foundational story. And then he'd move to uh Abraham Lincoln. Liberator like Moses. And then he'd move to Gandhi, liberator from colonialism. And then he'd move to now it's your turn, right? So, he tells these stories that everyone totally agrees with. And then he would say, "And by the way, here's how it's going on right now and what you can participate in." And by that point this uncomfortable idea looks like it's just a lineage from Moses to Abraham Lincoln to Gandhi to like this the Supreme Court um and so he smuggled these really radical ideas by grounding them in incredibly familiar material. Sometimes so familiar that, you know, like some analogies he used to it get voted that they shouldn't be used anymore because they've been so overused and things like that. But But that's kind of the the real history of getting people to accept creative ideas is grounding them in in in something really familiar. Yeah, you get buy-in by sharing the familiar and you're engendering trust uh before you kind of hit them with the novel idea within that kind of like nutshell that um people are already comfortable with. Totally. And And whatever it is, grounding it like the visions for change you know, are are are more compelling. I think this is Adam Grant said it this way once that I resonated with me. Visions for change are more compelling when they're when they include visions of continuity. And I think that's really true. From a persuasiveness perspective, there's obvious takeaways. But like how is you know, like I again like okay, somebody's listening to this. Like how is this how does this operate in their life? Like what how are they taking, you know, some some of that wisdom in a practical sense and implementing it? >> Yeah, I think it depends what they're trying to do. If they're trying to Let's say they're trying to build something or they're trying to change people. Maybe those people are people in their personal life, people in their professional life, whatever it is. That's starting in places that those people already understand and agree with and showing them how this connects to the continuum they're familiar with is really important. And I think that's important even for yourself. So, I would say in the past cuz I'm I'm very much kind of a relentless self-experimenter, I would say. And often in the past that's been today I'm going to do this to I'm going to be a totally new person starting tomorrow, you know. I went through this phase where once I decided I I was like missing lunch, I decided I was only going to eat like raw kale stalks for lunch. And it's like man, you really have to chew those things, you know. So, it's like going from zero to 60 just instantly. And it has never worked well. You you fall prey to this thing um in psychology called the what the hell effect, where you then you mess up once and you're like, "Ah, what the hell." And just throw the whole thing out. >> whole thing out. And so I think even for personal self-improvement, looking at where have you been and you want to aim for this change, but but what sort of a continuous through line where you can do that? 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In the case of this book and this adventure that you went on to kind of get to the bottom of of these ideas, is there anything that surprised you or that you ended up changing your mind on from your operating hypothesis going into it? >> I would say the first the most famous work done the most obvious work. And when I even mentioned that I was doing a book on this, people said, "Oh, you have to read the paradox of choice research." Which some of the most famous research involved people this like clever experiment where people were exposed to different number of like jelly at a store that they could buy. And when the when the choice set became reached a certain size, they would be paralyzed and just wouldn't buy anything at all. >> [snorts] >> And that probably became the most famous work in this. So, it's it's the most common thing people tell me about. And by the way, I love the researcher that's the most associated with this. And I cite some of his other work. But that work it didn't give me great confidence that it would hold up. And when I was looking around there, I think there are signs that it hasn't held up that well. And so, the the like kind of first thing that I thought I was going to write about, I turned out not to write about at all. I think there are other problems with too much choice like we can see and I cite some of this research in the book that when health care choices or investment choice sets become too large and complex, people actually do make worse decisions or will just not do it at all. But some of the more famous paradox of choice stuff turned out I I just I just couldn't convince myself that the research would hold up basically. And so, I basically left it out. So, that definitely went against like what I wrote in my book proposal cuz I thought maybe I would lead the book with this kind of stuff. >> That whole idea. Yeah, I mean just reflecting on that example of like you're at the grocery store and there's like, you know, 50 different brands of peanut butter. Yeah, if I want peanut butter, I'm still buying peanut butter. I'll make a choice. But I can see it for example in the supplement context. Like, you know, there's just a million supplements that are all making these great promises and you're like, well, this is all nonsense and then you don't buy any of them. >> Yeah, when I looked at the the bigger body of research, it looks like it has more to do with choice set complexity. So, like peanut butter's not that complex, but 401k options may be pretty complex. And so, as they get this the options grow larger, people are more likely to just be like, I don't know and and not do anything. Um that study, that jelly study, and other So, the two most famous studies in the area that I was counting on going into the book, I ended up not writing about. The other one was this famous playground study where when I would talk to psychologist, they'd say, oh, this is like the study where kindergartners were taken to a playground, one with no fence and one with a fence, and in the one with no fence, they all huddled around the teacher. In the one with a fence, they went crazy and explored. And the idea was that these boundaries give them the safety to explore. This is great. Like, maybe I lead the book with this. And I could not track down I saw this study being cited all the time in other studies, but I could not find the primary study. And so, finally I track it down. The best source I can find is to like and all these citations in books are citing each other, right? So, I'm just like going around in a circle. >> [snorts] >> Finally, I track it down to like a student project that won some award. The get the guy is now a a professor. So, I reach out to him and say, this thing's really famous like, do you know is what did you base this on? And he says, I took the word of some child psychologist, and I could never find a primary study. I'm really sorry I perpetuated this. And so, I think it got famous because it it gets at something that we kind of know is true, that like you you you explore more within boundaries. But again, it was like the other most famous study that everyone told me about when I said I'm writing about constraints, turned out to not even exist. So, >> no there there. It's like this ouroboros. It makes it it it lowers my confidence in the the you know the scientific canon. Like if that could you know become so famous and so accepted without there actually being a root source for the idea. Uh what else is out there that you know Yeah, I mean you start to realize like how sloppy some of the stuff is. That said again, I think the scientific community is what compared to the rest of the world is like wonderfully self-correcting in some ways and a lot of the problems they're having is because they have criticized you know scientists have criticized scientists. But you know that that that finding is it's sexy. It's interesting. Like I could have seen opening a book with it or it's like this picture of kindergarteners in one area where they're huddled around the teacher and then the other area where they're exploring and wild and this is like a metaphor for life. But you know sadly for me it turned out the study doesn't exist. >> the experiment, it would probably be true. It may It just didn't get run. It didn't get run and so I'm not going to open a book with it if it didn't [laughter] actually happen. But what I take from that is the doggedness in your in your reporting. Like you you are truly a science-minded investigative journalist. And I reached out to Brad Stolberg to say like hey Dave's coming in like you know what in your experience would be good to talk to him about or what might I not know that would be cool. And he said David is a guy who will literally get on a plane and fly across the country to have a one-hour conversation with somebody when it could have easily been on Zoom. And I think that speaks to the the depth of your commitment to really to veracity and and getting to the truth and and and really being deeply connected to the ideas that you're exploring. What is that about? And maybe a follow-up to that is you know how are you thinking about the current state of investigative journalism in 2026? >> I'm really flattered to hear that by the way. Um I thought you were going to say his favorite work of mine was some reporting I did about drug cartels. That's how I was doing that for a year. But for for this book, I think maybe one of the things he's thinking of is I did this whole road trip through rural Mississippi while I was following up on a sort of legend about a famous musician for the book. And I basically ended up road tripping through rural Mississippi so that I could sit in an abandoned graveyard for an hour at midnight and experience something that I want to write about. So it was a I even I broke the windshield on the rental car driving down like a famous crossroads where musicians make deals with the devil. So it was like this long trip where I broke a rental car, didn't hadn't gotten the insurance just so that I could sit in a certain graveyard at midnight. And I think Brad was like >> Robert Johnson. Um who was uh supposedly famously sold his soul uh to the devil to become the greatest guitar player in the world. But in fact, what he just did was went and found some solitude and a and a teacher basically. And I remember Brad was like "What are you doing there?" Like [laughter] in But when I get curious about something, I I just I'm very motivated to I I just I can't drop it. When I For example, with that playground study, when I started to feel like maybe it's not real I just can't drop it. I find that very interesting to follow up on. And like I told you at the beginning of this, how I describe my job is I obsess over misperceptions of research. And so if I think there's some misperception out there I'm kind of obsessive about wanting to to change the narrative. To your question about how investigative reporting is now it's challenged, I think for a lot of reasons. One of which is it's slow. It's an inherently slow form. When I was at ProPublica, which is an an all investigative uh operation so much time was spent going down dead ends. You know, I don't know what the story is yet. I'm just in exploratory mode. And that happens for my books, too. I do a lot of interviews where I'm just in exploratory mode. And it's really hard to have that luxury now when people are forced to produce so much where you may not have the luxury of going down a dead end because something has to be has to be made like every 2 seconds. Um so ProPublica had like when I came in they said we do have rules. The rules are you have to take on something that is of a certain level of importance and they would help you evaluate that. And it it has to be something that's you know not done already and those sorts of things but you did have the luxury of failing. Mhm. And I just think that is such a luxury now. Like investigative journalism is expensive. You have to have the opportunity to fail. That there are just not many people who are being afforded the the ability to fail in their work in a way that would allow them to do that. And and you might get sued, right? So it's expensive in that way too. I think one of my friends my closest friend from Sports Illustrated guy named Pablo Torre has been doing some incredible investigative reporting and it's kind of made a new format. He has a podcast now. And I don't know if you heard about this stuff with the LA Clippers kind of circumventing the salary cap by like funneling some money through a a sort of what turned out to be a fraudulent environmental company. He's been doing that work. And he likened it to he saw unboxing videos on YouTube, you know where like a kid will open a toy and you share in the joy of their excitement and he's doing that with journalism where he's got his documents and he'll bring a few people into the studio and he'll say turn over page one and they'll unbox the journalism together. And I think that format is really innovative. And so maybe it'll open up people to seeing how we can do investigative work cuz one of the things he and I talked about was when we were to SI it would have been very hard to do stories like that because of the kind of traditional format but he found this other format that works in a different medium. And so I hope we'll start to see some of these what what you can keep going back to it too, right? He doesn't have to encompass everything in one story. It's been like nine episodes or something. Cuz once he does one people leak him stuff, and then he does another. >> That's interesting. It's just making it visually dynamic. And using the affordances of the medium, you know? And so I think investigative journalism is in trouble. It's very easy to attack investigative journalists, also. And so like I used to always be white-knuckling it through investigative stories. Like some of my colleagues at ProPublica would like almost gain energy from being in a public controversy. I I was not like that. I If I felt like something was important to do, I'd do it, but I said, "When will this be over and everybody stop being mad at me?" And I think even knowing that the internet people are going to criticize you, it's still hard to put something out that's investigative in nature and just have this army of people or maybe bots or who knows like tearing you down all the time. So I think there's the social aspect, there's the economic conditions of journalism. But I'm hopeful when I see stuff like Pablo. I mean, cuz I've now started pitching him investigative ideas that I don't think I could have gotten into traditional magazines. So I'm hopeful that we'll see some kind of rebirth, but it's under pressure, for sure, cuz people just don't have the ability to fail. >> Yeah. I mean, that idea of creating a visually arresting, you know, uh version of investigative reporting via like this unboxing, you know, conceit is a is an example of leveraging constraints to make something to like reinvent the form, you know, which I think is really cool. But in reflecting on investigative journalism, you know, writ large, like this is necessary to a healthy society, right? And when I think about it, I think about two different aspects. The incentive structure, which is broken, really right now. There is no viable business model to support like reporting that takes months and months and months and months. >> And I would argue there never was. It was just piggybacking on the other stuff that made money. >> It was subsidized by advertising in magazines that had wide distribution, right? >> at SI, when I would do investigative stories, and some of the criticism would always be, you guys are just trying to sell magazines. I'm like, this is the nobody will advertise an investigative story. Like, we're not doing this because it's selling magazines, right? Um so, it was it was always piggybacking on the other stuff. >> Yeah. The second pillar is an appreciation for the truth. Yeah. And we're in this post-truth world. Like, do people care about the truth? They should. >> Do they? You know what I mean? Like, that that that's the the heart that has to pump the whole thing right now. >> Yeah, as well. I mean, and that's kind of a scary thing. Like, when I was thinking about this, I would say the most unusual chapter in the new book is chapter 10, which is about based on the work of this economist named Douglas North, who won the Nobel Prize for showing the importance of institutions for the long-run flourishing of countries. And I institutions, he didn't mean hospitals or colleges. He meant what he called the rules of the game in a society. Or as he put it, the constraints on human behavior that come from social norms or or political and economic structures. And what he showed was that these are the foundation of shared prosperity. That for long for most of human history, people only did business with their kinship network or their religious network, but then when constraints came in that made strangers more predictable to one another, they started doing business across these boundaries and that led to shared prosperity. What some of his work and the the people that then did work after him showed that these rules of the game in society, when they're sort of more equitable and people can see that, they trust strangers more. They collaborate more. And that that has an effect long after those institutions are gone. So, these natural experiments I write about where like a border was drawn between some towns, some of them have good equitable institutions and some don't. And a a century after those institutions disappear, it still affects how the grandchildren in that area will trust and collaborate with strangers. The implication of that, I think, is that we've now been seeing almost open public corruption in many cases, uh clear cases of rules don't apply to some people that are basically flaunted. And based on this research, that should have a really bad effect in the long run on people's willingness to trust strangers. And I just saw that Pew just released a survey showing that America is now the only country where a majority of adults say other people have bad morals. Which is exactly what you'd expect if we're kind of proactively tearing down these agreed-upon social norms and institutions. So I think even if we turned it around tomorrow, we'd have some lasting damage. But we have to kind of find some hopefully way back and and and to have some agreed-upon social norms for for behavior so that it's not just a free-for-all all the time. The degree of norm violation these days is unlike anything I've ever seen. And I often I'm reflecting on like, what are the long-term implications of this? Even if we were to reverse course and try to find our way back, like what is the you know, what is the full extent of the damage that has been done? Yeah. And you see it played out in the psyche of the average person and the way they conduct themselves on social media, if that is, you know, kind of a reliable proxy for kind of where people are at. Yeah. Just the anger and the vitriol and the the division and the acrimony is is really at a level that is unprecedented. Totally. >> At least in my life. I actually think at this point you know, I used to want to sometimes online kind of correct people if I thought they were saying something wrong. And then I had a no fighting on Twitter policy so that that I implemented. But now I think it's also just getting older that I wouldn't fight on Twitter anyway and more mature, but I almost think that having a certain temperature and tone when you're in the public discourse is like a radical act of like staying moderate and not turning the temperature up. A lot of people are turning the temperature up for profit, right? And but I'm I'm almost less concerned with people saying something wrong now than if their tone than if they are uh conflict entrepreneurs. Mhm. You know, if that's what they're thriving off of building conflict. So, even if someone's wrong, but I think they have an earnest and civil tone, I'm like, I think you're contributing to the good side even if I think your idea is wrong. But the presumption that people are operating in good faith when you engage with them, you know, in my experience is quickly, you know, becoming eroded. Like now I'm beginning to assume that, you know, this that people are are, you know, I'm going to assume first that they're not operating in good faith. Like that's been flipped. >> And that's like a terrible >> Yeah, it's terrible. >> flip to have. I mean, ultimately, I think, you know, we're a hyper social species that survives by collaborating in huge groups, and I think in the long term that could really undermine it. But on the topic of institutions, norms, and trust, I'm reminded what you shared reminded me of of Yuval Noah Harari's kind of perspective on this, which is essentially that human beings have built societies based upon stories. And whether it's a border or a corporation or, you know, a government institution, it's essentially an imagined story that we all buy into, and that engenders trust and allows us to function as a society. When you erode these norms and you degrade the trust, these stories start to become porous, and they degrade, and with it our trust. And how does a society move forward and cohere when, you know, we can't all agree upon some shared story of reality? Yeah, I mean, the the foundational stories are like to your point about Harari, that's what allows human collective action. That's one of the reasons why we're special, right? Symbolic language, we can have stories that are agreed upon, shared abstract ideas that allow us to all move in a direction together. I think we don't have that then we won't all move together, basically. Then you don't have collective action. So, I'm hoping we can find a way to kind of rewrite some of our shared stories. You know, I hope out of some of this crisis there'll be an opportunity to do some of that. Because if we if we don't have some agreed upon social norms, again, going to Douglas North's work, just the long-run fate of the nation just looks a lot worse. Period. >> Mhm. And a norm, I suppose on some level, is a constraint. Absolutely. I mean, that's what Douglas North called it, and that's what he won the Nobel Prize for, and what in showing that these norms preceded rather than followed technological innovation. Where social norms would come up that gave people freedom within a framework, ability to collaborate because they understood how other people would work. And and that led to That was one of his great paradigm shifts was showing that these changes of norms preceded rather than followed technological innovation and and enabled it. The core of your work always comes back to this idea of how we can be a little bit better. Um at work, at home, in our relationships, with respect to whatever goal that we're working towards or or thing that we're trying to realize in our life. And I'm curious cuz I've been thinking a lot about change, like how you think about change. What really drives change and what differentiates someone who could read a book like yours and go, "Got it. I'm putting it into action, and wow, my life's already getting better." versus the person who might read your book and still get still be stuck and and and unable to actually translate self-awareness or information into positive action. >> That is such an interesting question. And so, I'll speak from my own experience of a lot of books that have changed me and what's made the difference. I think, and maybe this will go to the medium being the message of constraints is picking something small to start with and and picking one thing. Even I haven't implemented everything that my book implies one should be doing. But there are some things that I implemented. But you got to get back to the dance videos. To the dance Yeah, I Do you know how I got interested in that kind of dancing, by the way? It was during the research process, I saw a documentary about shuffle dancing. And it's it's created in crowded clubs in Melbourne when people had limited space and wanted to be able to change direction quickly with limited That's why it ended up being good for Instagram because people have to change direction in really small space. So I was like, "Oh, this is right up my alley. Let me do this." So It was it was a courageous act. I >> learn how to dance and make videos and put those on social media. >> Well, when I first did it, I had like 100 followers who were my friends. >> [laughter] >> Now I'm starting to make like other videos and so now I'm much getting more self-conscious about it. So I think I should I go back and delete them or actually do more. I don't know what the answer is. Um but I think just picking off one thing that seems like a reasonable personal experiment because I don't want people with my book or any other book to feel that what the hell effect where you have to change everything tomorrow and then you don't do it and you say, "Well, forget it." Throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you do that thing of like putting all your current commitments up on the wall, say if I had to cut out one thing in the next 90 days, what would it be? And maybe try that. Maybe try one week where you don't look at email first thing in the morning and you do some of your other important work. So it's not you don't fall prey to this thing called the Zeigarnik effect where open things that you haven't answered occupy your brain so you can't do other stuff. Take take Take just one thing and and implement that instead of worrying about doing all of the stuff. Cuz I just think that can feel so overwhelming. It's like if I only did these 20 things, everything would be perfect. Like one experiment at a time. One experiment at a time. It's one thing to say constraints drive creativity. Uh another thing to say constraints drive productivity. This is kind of like a Cal Newport idea, deep work, like put your phone in a lock box and, you know, like don't check you only check your email twice a day, etc. He's my neighbor. I've taken a few tips from him that I did implement in my life. >> Yeah, that's an interesting brain trust, you know. And Dan Pink, it's like we're all like in the That's very cool. I'm imagining these salons of, you know, you [laughter] you sitting around exchanging high-minded ideas over a whiskey or something. You might be disappointed about the high-mindedness of the ideas, but >> [laughter] >> Um but it's another thing altogether to tie this idea of constraints to happiness. So, I want to spend some time around how you kind of arrived on that and and, you know, what the what the support for that notion is. Yeah. There are a few different things where I think about constraints and happiness. One we talked about a little, which is setting these satisficing rules, right? Which is not falling prey to maximizing and trying to optimize all of your decisions and setting those good enough rules and just sticking to them. It shows that people are happier. Mhm. That they're happier with their lives, they're happier with their decisions. Not agonizing after you make the decision, right? Herbert Simon, who came up with satisficing, he was very much like that. And he he simplified his own life in many ways. He said, you you only need three pairs of clothes, one in the wash, uh one in the closet, one on your body. And he he kind of simplified everything he possibly could. Um to save his bandwidth for things that were were more important. >> Minimalism as a a lifestyle constraint. >> And and at least in the places where it's not a big deal, right? If there's some places you want to agonize more, okay, but you don't have to do it in everything. And again, there are these surveys showing the rise of this kind of maximization of everything. Even there's interesting study that looked at as consumer options have exploded, people start to see the things they buy more of as an expression of their identity. And so, they start to feel this greater weight for every decision they made. So, just setting good enough criteria for some of these decisions. Satisficers are more happier are happier by almost every metric than are maximizers. And again, what I'm wary of is is that it sounds like have low standards. Satisficers don't necessarily have low standards, but they have standards at all other than best imaginable. And so, they have the possibility of being happy with their with their decisions. I think the other type of it and this is like the last chapter of the book is where I get sort of more personal and philosophical about kind of this more conceptual constraints in life, some of which have to do with grounding yourself in the real world. And I think of Robert Putnam, the political scientist who wrote the book Bowling Alone, which looks incredibly prescient in retrospect, where he talked about the decline of civic engagement and the impacts it would have on health and longevity. And this was around 2000 when he was writing it and saying, you know, people are retreating into their own world with TV, so they're not going to the bowling club anymore and having civic engagement. And he famously said, "Joining a club Joining one club cuts your risk of dying in the next year in half." That's kind of a rule of thumb. But now this analysis of about 150 studies with over 300,000 subjects pretty much backed him up that that kind of social integration has a a greater impact on survival than does quitting smoking for cardiac patients. Like grounding yourself in something real. It requires you to give up some scheduling autonomy. So, like when I started going to dance classes, I wasn't having any embodied experience with strangers, I realized. And I wanted some of that. And so, I started going to these meetups or classes and it it's it's an As an independent writer, I could have the absolute ultimate cocoon Yeah, lifestyle. There was a I was invited to a writer's retreat some years ago after Range and I was we all had to answer a question, "What are you optimizing for this year?" And I said autonomy. I thought what I always wanted as a writer was to spend every minute in a way of my own choosing. Fast forward 2 years, I realized there's such a thing as too much autonomy. Like I ended up in this individualized schedule I wasn't synced with anybody else. So started getting back in activities. I joined a club. I started going these dance things where it's annoying. I may have to go somewhere, you know, at the time may not fit my schedule, but it actually started to give me back some sense of syncing with other people and some sense of meaning. I started reading about like the Soviet Union had desynced everybody to keep factories going where they gave everybody a four-day work week and a one-day weekend and it was a social disaster because everyone had individualized schedules so they weren't synced up with other people. And so I think sacrificing some of your own scheduling autonomy to sync up with other people is a is a really important thing. So join something. Join anything. This is where the new book dovetails with Range because essentially what you're saying is we have this notion like let's say, okay, you're a writer. You've got an epiphany for a new book. The first thing that comes to mind is wouldn't it be great if I could just go to this cabin in the woods without a phone or anything and nobody could bother me and I would just write, you know, an absolute masterpiece because I wouldn't be distracted. But ultimately that is not in service to your best work. You're better off being at home where you're interacting with friends and going to a dance class and having people kind of impede upon, you know, your schedule in ways you probably prefer they didn't. But ultimately that's going to end up not only making you happy, but also the book that it might take longer for the book, but when the book comes out, it's probably going to be a better book. I don't know if it does take longer also. I'll say this book was a new experience for me. And there was one cabin in the woods thing I did cuz I wanted to put constraints on myself cuz I've had These are different kinds of constraint. The The cabin in the woods is a constraint is it's a different kind of constraint. And the My first two books I wrote 150% of a book to get one book because I had not drawn a a boundary around the project. Then I became a dad and said, "I cut a trip to Arctic Sweden for my first book." Right? To Brad's point, I went to Arctic Sweden for something that didn't end up in the book. And I can't be doing this now that I have a kid. And so, and I need my work day to end at a certain point. >> Uh-huh. And so, I did a few things like >> that contrasting that with the idea that like, "Well, this kid is very inconvenient to like my writing lifestyle." >> inconvenient. [laughter] Incredibly Adds all this meaning to my life, >> Yeah. but super inconvenient. And so, I This time I did I have this thing I call a master thought list that's all my ideas. It's arranged in a certain way. I printed it out. I went to a hermitage in the garden of a Franciscan monastery for 2 days, but didn't talk to anybody, no internet, nothing. Read through it. Said And it's well longer than the book. Whichever ideas are stuck in my head now, I'm doing a one-page outline for this book. If it's not on that page, it's not in the book. And this is the first time the book is 20% shorter. It's the first time I didn't overwrite it. I turned it in early. And this is the first time I had a work day that ended. In the past, I said my competitive advantage will be that I will let this swallow my life, and then I'll recover afterward. This time I borrowed from one of the characters in the book, Isabel Allende, one of the greatest living writers. I got to follow her through sort of her writing routine. And one piece of it, she starts her books on the same day every year, but one piece of it was she lit a candle to start every work day, turns it off, close blows it out, closes the door to end the work day, and that's shut down. I took that ritual. I I use electric candles. I have too much She's braver than I, and I have paper in my office, but Cal does that, too, actually. He says like, "System shutting down." at the end of his day. And so, for the first time, I said I have a time when my work day is going to end. And I turned my book in early. I I know I sat around for 2 weeks saying, "I'm early. I can't possibly turn it in. I have to keep tinkering." I never would have thought like, "My plan is to turn it in at 5:00 p.m. on the day it's due in the contract." But I think I'd forgotten what I knew from like athletic training, which was you're better when recovery is part of the program, when you program in the recovery instead of just letting it swallow everything. And so, I would I think I was both better and faster. Listening to that story, I'm I'm hearing you, the scientist, and I'm hearing Cal, the, you know, computer scientist. Yeah. You know, people who are trying to like, you know, de- decode like, you know, how to function, you know, in the world at a you know, at a at an op- in an optimal way or a good enough way, I suppose. But then I hear But like But like what is so funny about this story that you just shared is like, you used the example of Allende and like this this beautiful practice of like her lighting a candle and, you know, like I And what's missing in your and Cal's analysis of that is her treating that as a ritual, like a sacred ritual. Like it has a certain energy to it that that is is beckoning and demanding a level of like reverence. >> Yeah. Right? >> Yeah. That maybe gets missed in the, you know, the ones and zeros of the Cal Newport brain. >> No question. I see you're you're very diplomatically and eloquently calling us robotic and and her wonderful, which is which is true. Um but I mean, everything about writing still has like a spiritual mystique to me. Like I still see books as these magical little puzzle boxes that are more mysterious to me than like any technology really is. So, I do have a feeling, you know, and I look at I have a library in my office and I look at the books that I admire and still wonder how people got these things done. I look at even my own books and wonder how I got them done. I'm not all the way on the end of the Isabel Allende spectrum where she puts like a book of Pablo Neruda poetry under her computer just in case uh beauty by osmosis is a thing that will will get into her writing. Um but I do feel that ritual gets me in a sort of state of sort of a sacred space, I guess, for for doing what I want to do that I rarely inhabit in other times. You know, may- maybe sometimes when I'm floating on a forest trail or something like that, I feel that way. But the ritual for writing does make me feel that way. I mean, it really is the doing that brings me back, right? If I'm glad I'm forced to produce a book because otherwise I'd probably do it and and and never put it out there, but >> This takes us back to Tom Sachs and this idea that he has, called nolling. He used to be a furniture designer for Knoll, and Knoll has all of these rules about how you should organize your workspace. And when you're facing a creative block, his sort of practice is always be nolling. Okay, so that's fine. So, all right, well then, you know, clean your workspace or whatever. And there's something sacred about that. It's cheeky, like this idea that he has, but the idea is you have to acclimate yourself into the creative kind of head space in order to like do your thing. And whether it's lighting a candle or organizing your pens or whatever, what feels like procrastination or maybe trivial or frivolous is actually essential to um kind of luring yourself lulling yourself into the head space where you can do your best work. >> It's interesting that, you know, we think of creative people as just this like free-flowing, you know, they're they're like wandering around like a undersea plants, you know, being whatever the wave takes them and then being hit by inspiration. >> [gasps] >> But when I was reading a tons of work about the habits and rituals of creators while working on this book, and it's pretty remarkable how structured they are. Like, they all have these sort of regularities and rituals. And I think it's really what liberates them to perform within that. It gets them in that performance mindset, you know, just like someone before shooting a free throw or doing whatever the figure skating routine has kind of that routine that gets them in the mindset. Um and I think it does create that space. Um but it can I I think it can be it can seem surprisingly rigid from the outside when you're thinking about people doing creative work, but I think it's actually like that structure that gets people in the space. And And I have I implemented other stuff like you know, I like to borrow anywhere you see good ideas. So like Hemingway would end on in the middle of a sentence so that he automatically knew where he was going to pick up the next day. Yeah, that's very helpful to me, too. Cuz I I get cut If I don't know where where I'm picking up the next day, then I'll just I'll just wander around and do nothing. >> You do that for a while if you're not. So I like to do that because then I come back and I'm like I'm I'm I'm positive of something that I can do right now that's important where I start and it's not opening my email. It's starting with this thing. So lots of those like structures and rituals. On the uh subject of having your feet planted firmly on the ground while also reaching for the stars like the there's you and Cal and then there's Ayende. I'm curious around how you think about goals. You have some interesting ideas around goal setting and and and working towards goals. And I've I've kind of evolved my thinking on this. Certainly, you know, goals have been crucial in my life and have, you know, kind of helped me go from where I was to where I am in in many stages of my life. And there's a practicality to that and um a functionality to that and it's like arithmetic like you set it, you calendar it, there's a way to do it. And when it works, it's great. It engenders self-esteem and it progresses your life in positive directions. But as I reflect on my life now and identify like the most meaningful experiences that I've had and really how I went from where I was to where I am right now, it really has nothing to do with goals. And so [snorts] I'm thinking about goals as something to almost transcend on some level. So, I'm curious around your thoughts on this. I mean, I'd be interested to hear you hear hear you say more about that about what you think did do it for you. Um but I kind of agree with that. I mean, I've always I would say when I was teenager or early 20s, I was incredibly long-term goal-driven, right? I knew all the things I was going to do exactly how I was going to do them well and they were going to be like I was going to go to the Air Force Academy, I was going to become a test pilot, I was going to become an astronaut. Of course, I didn't do any of those things. And all of the most important projects in my life have been opportunistic pivots. Sometimes from personal tragedies or devastations, other times uh from something that just popped up and interested me that I for whatever random reason got some keyhole view into. And so, I think goals can be useful, but I think if they're preventing you from opportunistic pivots, >> [snorts] >> that's a really a bad thing. And so, I think having a you know, instead of asking who's younger than me and has more than me saying comparing yourself to yourself yesterday because you're not really sure where you're going anyway and being open to opportunistic pivots is is really really important. And at this point, again, I I did so much there's so much me search in this latest project that now I feel like putting these kind of structures and rituals in place and trusting that I'm going to kind of thrive and do interesting things within them is sort of more important to me than the goal because the the goal often doesn't give me anything actionable to do. Like I I think about this when I was an 800-meter runner where I would have these time goals and then I'd cross the finish line and get a glance at the clock and either I'd be happy or sad. And usually sad because they were usually stretch goals. So, most of the time it just makes you annoying and annoyed. And it did but it didn't give me anything to do. Whereas if I had certain experiments that were like make a move with 300 m to go. Oh, that's something that I can try in practice and then try in a race. And so a lot of goals I think just they're like an aspiration, but they're not actually giving you the thing to do today. Where I think these kind of structures and experiments can actually give you something to do today. But I'd be interested to hear you say more about what you think did work for you though. >> Well, I think from a constraints perspective, when you set a goal, you're layering your life with constraints. Like because you're working towards this goal, it means you're going to have to say no to these things so that you can say yes to these things and it, you know, provides structure to your life. >> And I think that that is fantastic and probably more people more people than less can benefit from a little bit more goal setting. Like knowing what to say no to. Yeah, so that it drives a decision tree and and really focuses your attention. Um the flip side of that is what you talk about like this, you know, developing this proclivity to quit things. Like if you're so attached to a certain goal, then those blinders that you have on are going to prevent you from pivoting or, you know, if all the evidence while you're working towards this goal is trying to tug you in a certain direction, you're going to ignore that when maybe that is the true direction that you should be leading your life. And so you know, you can go off course ultimately, you know, if you look at it in a long term, you know, from a long term perspective. So it's a yes and situation. I think you should have goals and work towards them, but you need to be open to experiences from that kind of curiosity and experimentation kind of spirit. Like let's just say like, oh, the first book I wrote or this podcast or like being in these in this studio, like none of these are a function of having white boarded them. Like they are an outgrowth of like investing in my curiosity and being like, oh, this is cool. I'm going to do this and like, oh, that looks interesting. I'm going to move over here. And that doesn't mean that I'm like a ping-ponging around. Like I'm doing it from a place of intentionality and, you know, kind of trusting my gut and there are guardrails and structures around like how I make those decisions, but it's not because I set a goal. Yeah. Yeah. >> And so, I'm trying to make sense of like how these two things live together. That's like I mean, it sounds like you're describing this kind of freedom within some decision-making framework, right? And I was just in Angela Duckworth's class, actually. So, we were talking about her earlier. And she invited me to class just for one of her sessions and in the class she was talking about what she now calls the Paramecium principle. Have you heard of this already? Okay, so obviously she's most famous for grit, passion and perseverance. >> Yeah. And what she was telling her students was I she was basically saying, "If I could redo grit a little bit, I think I'd put a little bit more on the passion side emphasis because I think we've actually often taught young people to persevere, but then they persevere at something and put their head up 10 years later and they're like, 'I actually don't like this thing.'" Mhm. And so, the Paramecium principle, this Paramecium single-celled organism, and all it really has is detectors that detect food nourishment or warmth. And it'll detect a little and it will move in that direction. If it detects more, it goes in that direction again. If it doesn't, it tries a different direction. And so, it's making this constant series of pivots and what she was explaining to her students was that's engagement or interest is the thing that you should be pivoting to. And she was saying not not happiness, that's a different thing, but interest or engagement and pivot toward it. And to me, this is like a total reconception of her of her work um in a way that I think is really interesting and productive where don't feel like you're a failure because you didn't persist in this goal that might not be the right goal for you because how could you have how could you know if it's the right like one of my favorite phrases from Range was we learn who we are in practice, not in theory. That you can't conceptualize what's right for you in the future because you change and the world changes. You actually have to do stuff and then reflect on it to understand you have to act and then think. Not not the reverse. And so I was pretty psyched to see her promoting this Paramecium principle where it's like, "Yeah, you want to persevere when something matters, but you want to be constantly like titrating, you know, your your path so that you're you're reacting your level of interest." So again, everything that's been important to me in my life has been an opportunistic pivot. And and that requires kind of letting go of the the direction I thought I was going in. >> Mhm. >> So when you think of yourself as this successful author, was that a goal that you set for yourself or was that more, uh, you know, kind of a maturation of your curiosities and your obsessions? No, I mean, I did like disclaimer is a little bit of a sad origin to the story, but more than a little bit, but, um, when I became a writer, so I was in grad school. I was training to be a scientist. Um, I lived in the Arctic studying the carbon cycle and stuff. And I had a training partner when I was a runner who dropped dead at the end of a race, few steps after a mile race. First guy in his family of Jamaican immigrants, you know, who was who was making it and uh, he was like one of the top ranked guys in the country in his age group. And I was devastated. I mean, I remember I still remember the day like our coach I wasn't there when it happened, called and said, "Oh, Kevin died at the track today." You know, you say died when somebody ties up at the end of a race. I'm like, "Well, you know, it happens to the best of us." He said, "No, no, he died, like he died." And that's what launched me into writing because our newspaper said, you know, he had a heart attack. I don't even What does that even mean for a guy at this age, this level of health? I ended up getting his family to sign, uh, waiver allowing me to gather up his medical records and investigate. Turned out he had this misdiagnosed, uh, textbook case of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an enlargement of a certain part of the heart that's usually the cause of a young athlete dropping dead with no prior symptoms. That's what got me interested in genetics, eventually led to my my first book The Sports Gene. And and that's when I said, I want to write about this cuz I think we can save some people for a public audience, not people like me who are buying a science magazine with their disposable income, but people who read say Sports Illustrated. And that's when I decided to go in that path and try to become the science writer at Sports Illustrated. So, it was very much a pivot from something that felt meaningful to me at that moment and totally changed my trajectory from from going into the sciences to becoming a writer. But it does illustrate this idea of of you know, this this career emerged from you investing in your curiosity and what was lighting you up. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I will say one other thing that I learned when I was in grad school for sciences was I started you know, my work started getting so narrow and I started asking myself, am I the type of person who wants to spend my whole life learning one or two things new to the world or much shorter spans of time learning things new to me and synthesizing them and translating them and I was learning that I was the latter type of personality. And and I just couldn't have known that before I tried it. What is it that hamstrings you the most from the subject matter in in the new book? Like what is it that trips you up or you still struggle with? You mean in terms of the implications of things that I would implement say or >> refusal or recalcitrance around like putting up constraints when you know, after writing this book you know, you should. >> struggle with satisficing because I think my um even I I know how much of the optimization stuff online is nonsense and and praying on our intentions, but I still have that reflex to want to maximize a lot of my decisions and look for the best. So, that's a struggle for sure. The amount of autonomy that I have the luxury to have in my schedule, giving some of that up has been a struggle, but I've done I mean, when I realized that it was bad for my well-being that I had optimized for something that is bad for me, I joined the board of a non-profit in my community. I you know, joined a like dinner and discussion club. You know, I started doing all these things to have a grounding in the real world again and sometimes that's an annoyance from a scheduling standpoint. Um and so I still struggle with that sometimes but it's but it has undoubtedly been better for my well-being. And there's some advice that important figure in the book Tony Fadell gave me that Tony Fadell was the he he led the team that created the iPod and he co-founded he co-founded Nest the smart thermostat company. He now mentors entrepreneurs and he says the most important advice he gives them is write the press release first. Cuz he says that will give your bounding box like on one page assume this thing is done and write the press release as it would look cuz that will show you what the priorities are and if it's not there and you know, maybe it's not as much of a priority. And he was like you got to do this for your for your book. Um and any project you do and I struggle with that because early on I kind of say, well, I can't do that. I need to be more exploratory but but I think it actually is a good exercise cuz it's not that you can't change it but it at least gives you some direction to start moving in. Um and and and there is good work showing that I write about that specific curiosity boosts creativity like if you can find a sort of a narrow lens to to dive in at first that will actually help your curiosity flourish and I've been so used to in the past being so wide-ranging that um it's good advice but it's been hard for me to take. Another example of that or a similar parallel is screen writing which other [snorts] than poetry is the most constrained form of writing. It has all these rules and you know, you can't say too much and it's very restrictive but fundamental to it is this art and science of crafting the log line like almost you know, in advance of even writing the script Mhm. really distills everything down to, you know, literally one sentence and everything stems from that. So, that constraint drives the creative process of like telling this story. >> Yeah. That reminds me when you say that of uh Hayao Miyazaki's work who did Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke and all those great movies where he the first thing he would do would be to like he'd he'd he'd he'd go away and he'd he'd draw one picture like one image and then he would show it to the whole team and say this is like the tenor Mhm. of what this movie's going to be. Everyone has to work to like the the tenor of this image which is like that logline. It's like here's the the the core thing. Or in advertising industry they have a famous saying, "Give me the freedom of a tight brief." It's like give me really specifically what we're doing here and then that kind of liberates you to create uh inside of it. Where I think the the the blank page is often kind of people's Mhm. people's [clears throat] enemy. I mean, what Isabel Allende told me is she often she'll start with historical research and that gives her like the stage for her theater basically. Because if it's just too open, um it's it's difficult to start. >> Mhm. [clears throat] Or Ryan Holiday's note card you know, routine where he's just he's never not working on a book cuz he's always reading and he's making these note cards and so there there's always a process. >> You know, I I was in the bookstore and I accidentally elbowed over a stack of one of the note cards. I was [laughter] like absolutely horrifying but luckily they luckily they slid and like fanned out so they were still in order and he's like Yeah. >> he he was very stoic about it as you might imagine but like kindly put them in palm like I'm taking a wide berth around that table from now on. >> We read these narratives of people who have transformed their lives and it seems so dramatic and it it it's always portrayed as one fell swoop when the reality is it's, you know, a million micro behaviors and tiny decisions over a very extended period of time that really is the engine of transformation every single time. And so so the question that I have for you is does the hare ever beat the tortoise? >> [sighs] >> Does the hare ever beat the tortoise? Cuz I'm a tortoise guy. I'm always playing the long game and I'm a late bloomer and you know, everything that I've been able to actualize in my life essentially was a decade in gestation. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there are there are a million ways to get anything done. So, I don't want to say the hare doesn't ever beat the tortoise. Like but I kind of think one of the themes underlying a whole bunch of my work is that optimizing for the short-term will often undermine longer-term development. And so that head starts are overrated. And that if you want to do something sustainable in the long-term, like it's going to be slow and it's going to be many small changes, you know, layering of constraints and structures and things like that. But I think there are there are exceptions. Like if I think about you know, there was this research about entrepreneurs a few years back looking at the average age of founders of fast-growing startups. You want to guess what the average age of I think it was top 1 in 10,000 rate of growth. Average age of a founder on the day of founding. You want to guess? 42. 45. Good guess. Cuz I think we usually associate it with people who are younger, right? 32. Yeah, 35. Or the Mark Zuckerberg or famous drops out famously drops out of college and he he said young people are just smarter. He said that when he was 22, right? Don't hear him saying that anymore, surprisingly. But, you know, some of those young entrepreneurs absolutely succeed by going fast and being early, but it's the exception. It's not the norm. >> Mhm. And so I think the norm is this much slower gestation that requires pivots and requires learning things that you just couldn't have known without experience. Um and it's more sustainable too. You said optimizing for the What did you say again? What was the quote? Optimizing for the short-term >> short will often undermine long-term development. Yeah. When you say that, the first person that comes to mind is Bryan Johnson. Are you familiar with Bryan Johnson and his quest to live forever? >> Isn't he trying to Yeah, I was going to say, isn't he trying to optimize for eternity? But he's optimizing in the short-term as a means to optimize for the ultimate long-term, right? Like it's a conundrum on some level. And he's a very curious figure. Like on the one hand, like talk about his experimentation. Like he's just experimenting all the time and he's sharing transparently what he's doing, what's working, what's what what what's not working. And is he not the ultimate uh human guinea pig for self-imposed constraints? Because he has constrained his lifestyle to such a degree, and yet he seems happier than he was before. And I'm just curious if you've followed this trajectory at all or if you have any kind of insights on this or what we can what we can kind of take away from what he's doing. I see him only sparingly, so I don't know the details of his behaviors, but I see like when it pops up sometimes if something he does goes viral. And sometimes I think there's, you know, some nonsense in some of the things that he's talking about. Other times where he's doing clearly healthy things. He's [laughter] exercising. And And I also think to your to your point about putting all these constraints on himself, I think he's clearly doing something that has given his life meaning. Right? He's found this project and this structure that he's sort of all in on, like his own little sports team kind of. So good for him. I think when he's sharing some of these things about his biological age and some of that stuff is pretty suspect. You know, it used to be based on telomeres, these like >> a rigorous scientist. >> Yeah, yeah. So there's some measures of those that I think are You know, I always when you see somebody giving their biological age to like two decimal points, you're like no. Like this is just fake accuracy about some of this kind of stuff. So, without knowing all the details of the stuff he's doing, I think he's doing something providing structures to give his life meaning. He's obviously doing some things that are very healthy, eating healthier, exercising. All right, we talked about But it's probably he's getting attention for these marginal gains attempts where most of the gain is probably coming from these very foundational things that that he's doing. >> Sleep, nutrition, things like that. I mean, I I don't think that he's he's giving those short shrift. Yeah. But yeah, there's a lot of bells and whistles and fancy stuff, and he's a brilliant marketer, and he clearly understands how to operate on the internet to garner attention. Um and I promise you he is going to die short of some kind of AI breakthrough that's going to, you know, like that we upload his consciousness or something. Um but I don't think any amount of supplements or or, you know, putting a helmet on your head or whatever is going to make him live forever. Um but there's a cheekiness to it, you know, that makes it kind of fun to follow what he's doing, and and he's just, you know, he's he's a provocateur. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think personal experimentation's interesting. I think where it gets troublesome is like passing off some of these marginal gain things, first of all, as if they're the whole secret, or passing off things that are not gains at all, right? Which is classic in a lot of the supplement industry, basically, where something it it doesn't work, basically, and you're passing it off as a miracle cure, or it works a very little, Mhm. [clears throat] and you're passing it off as having a huge effect. Again, I don't know the extent to which he's doing that cuz I'm familiar with him, but I don't know Yeah. >> the specifics of his routine. >> that he is almost subliminally like conveying this message of self-imposed constraints actually make your life better and happier, it's consistent with your message. >> That That That I don't think is is That I think is true, and I think boundaries and guardrails and rituals and things give people a feeling of meaning. Mhm. Um and happiness and structure um and of bounds in a world that can feel very overwhelming. But again, to the extent that he is like making people have FOMO about these little optimizations that they should be doing, I don't think that's great. Again, I I don't I don't I don't know. I'd be careful about speaking to this cuz I don't know exactly what he's doing. >> is the neurosis that accompanies like our inability to live up to some optimization standard. And there's stuff like this looks maxing stuff now. Have you heard of this? >> did a whole episode on this. Yeah, so so oh, that's right. Um It's insane. Um and you guys were talking about that. I I can't remember the name of the Adam Skolnick? Uh clavicular? That guy. That's the guy that you guys were talking about him. Um and uh that's not helpful for people, I think. Like that again is a space where I think we have to have a good enough feeling. Like maybe this is a weird thing to relate it to, but when I was thinking about writing this my third book, I I was actually I had so much freedom that I started bouncing around all these ideas. I was like, I I find books so consuming that I'm not going to go until I find the perfect idea. So, I ended up just bouncing around a million ideas and never diving in. And then I read this passage from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the term flow for the feeling of immersion in an activity. He was actually talking about uh like marriage, but it doesn't matter. You could apply what he was saying to anything where he said, "The great thing is, once you're committed by your own choice, if you're committed, you can stop you can start living and stop wondering how to live. Like instead of spending all this energy on wondering what else you should be doing, you can you can start just living." And I immediately read that and said, "I'm spending all this time wondering what topic to take on where I should pick something that interests me and just dive in." And I was like, immediately that day decided I'm writing a proposal on constraints, right? And and I think that applies more broadly to life, whereas you want to decide on something that's good enough and dive in on it and give it some of yourself instead of thinking, "How are all the other ways that I could be optimizing this this thing?" And so, you know, I bristle a little bit against some of the optimization culture, even though I'm very much like a self-improver, just because I think it can give people a feeling of like never finding some stability. You know, there's always some other things they could and should be doing that would make it better if only. But like you're never going to clear the decks and have that moment where "Now is the time when I'm going to start the thing I really want to do." So, you just have to start it in this imperfect, messy way and not worry about what the internet is telling you about optimization. A lot of it is an ill-fated attempt to uh fill some spiritual void on some level that will give your life a sense of like meaning and purpose. But on the point of that you just made, I'm reminded of Ellen Langer, like her whole thing about like stop worrying if you're making the right decision, just make the decision right. >> Yeah, make the decision right. That's right. >> decisive. There's a difference between decisiveness and optimization, I guess. Um when you're decisive and then you just you make a decision and then you just take the first the next, you know, little action and you start to string these actions together, that's how everything works. Like I too, like I'm writing a book right now. I haven't written a book in a really long time and I couldn't figure out what it was that would get me excited enough to write about. And then finally, I was just sort of cajoled into committing to a certain idea, not knowing if I was capable of actually being able to see it through, but just, you know, okay, well, here's one idea like today and that's not very good, but, you know, it's it's been 2 years, you know, it's taken me a long time, but I'm like, "Oh, I can see it now, you know, it's starting to come together." When I couldn't at the beginning. So, this notion that you have to have it all fully actualized in your mind before you can start keeps people stuck in the starting gate and never doing anything. >> I think that's a good prompt like you mentioning, you know, you you couldn't see how maybe this book was going to be at the beginning. I I when I do a book project, since I don't do them that often, I want to take on a project that at the start I don't have the skills required to finish it. Cuz I I can't find any other way to like voluntarily force myself to learn with the ferocity that I do when I have a book project. And so, I actually think that's a really good thing. It's scary, right? Because you don't know everything about what you're going to have to find, but I think that's like a great like force you forcing function for improvement is starting a project where you don't have everything you need to be able to do >> embracing the discomfort of it and discomfort is the grist for growth. I I mean, desirable difficulties. Yeah. Final thoughts. Uh what is it that you want people to take away from this notion of constraints make us better? If you had to distill it down into kind of a final call to action. I'd say um uh a mindset shift from viewing limits as oppressing you to viewing them as opportunities to clarify your priorities and launch into productive experimentation instead of bristling against them. What can I do with this? Amazing. Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, available everywhere. And [clears throat] thanks for coming on the show, man. It's great. It it's a total pleasure. >> about anything. You should come back all the time. >> love to come back more often and and I hope you'll keep posting your morning routines because as I've converted myself into a morning person, I find them very inspiring. Like it's no matter when I wake up, I see your digital clock and um so, you know, you've just also been a a personal inspiration for me and the way you approach things with a very human kind of um truth seeking, right? Like I think you you I think you could peddle a lot of nonsense if you wanted to and you don't. I appreciate that. Thanks, man. [snorts] Pleasure. To be continued. >> [laughter] >> Cheers. Peace.