Thinking Inside the Box (with David Epstein)

What do the inventor of the periodic table, the novelist Isabel Allende, and the almost-creators of the iPhone have in common? Join author David Epstein and EconTalk's Russ Roberts to explore a counterintuitive idea: that boundaries, and not unlimited freedom, often make us more creative, productive, and fulfilled.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Today is April 16, 2026. And before introducing today's guest, I want to correct two errors from recent episodes. The name of the founder of Nvidia is pronounced Jensen Wong. And I misquoted the line from the poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins, and evidently I've done that before. The poem's title is "As Kingfishers Catch Fire." The line, the correct line is, "What I do is me, for that I came." Now on to today's guest, author David Epstein. This is David's third appearance on Econ Talk. He was last on the program in May of 2019, discussing his book Range. Our topic for today is his latest book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. David, welcome back to Econ Talk.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  It's wonderful to be back.

• 1:23Speaker 00

  What's the idea of Inside the Box and the power of constraints?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  I think the main idea is that it's never been easier to do too much in our work lives, in our personal lives, and that we often overvalue complete freedom, a problem that is a newer problem in human history, and undervalue the ability of smart boundaries to make us more creative, to make us more productive, and to make us more satisfied and our lives more meaningful.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  And there's an extraordinary story that runs through the entire book. There are a number of great stories in the book, which we'll get to some of them, but one of them is about the discovery of the periodic table. And you start off with a story that I actually hadn't heard, which is a bit of a myth. To give us the mythical version of how Mendeleev, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, how did he discover, according to myth, the periodic table?

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, Mendeleev, so Siberian genius. In the winter, it's a tough one. In the winter of 1869, suppose he's looking, he has this feeling that there's an order to the elements, all of the chemical building blocks of the universe. And he, but he can't find it, and he stays up for three days where he doesn't sleep. And finally, can't stay awake any longer, and he drifts off into the most impactful nap in human history. And he dreams of the elements swirling around until they snap into columns. And then the columns snap into place next to one another. And he realizes that if you, as you move along those columns, the chemical and physical properties of elements recur periodically, which is why it's called

• 3:03Speaker 01

  the periodic table. And he wakes up, he supposedly wakes up and writes it down exactly as he saw it fully formed. And so it's this, you know, the, the perfect kind of eureka moment. It's been celebrated by scientific societies. Matthew Walker in his blockbuster, Why We Sleep, held it up as the, the ultimate proof that our dreaming brains, loosed from the bounds of reality, can, can accomplish what our waking brains can't. The mattress company Casper used it in their marketing. I learned about it in college chemistry. So that's how I was attuned to it.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  Well, I was excited to read it because it, it joins my two other favorite great things that came to me while I slept. Historical moments. One is Coleridge, although I was probably a drug-induced stupor, but we're not sure. But he supposedly heard the, in his head, the opening lines of his masterpiece Kubla Khan, which sort of stops in mid-

• 4:06Speaker 00

  Poem because I think a sale, a traveling salesman knocked on the door and interrupted his reverie. And then there's Ramanujan, who has, in the episode with David Bessis, we talked about how extraordinary things he claimed came to him in dreams. Perhaps divine, we don't know, but they're, they're, they're hard to believe. They're so extraordinary that they would come to him in his sleep. It is definitely true that our brains work while we're asleep. They work when we're not.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  No doubt.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Thinking about things that we're trying to think about when we're, when we're doing something else. But evidently the Mendeleev stories are a little bit more complicated.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  That's right. And I should say, by the way, just so people know, the, if you think of the periodic table as something that just hangs in high school classrooms, it's actually was incredibly important at the time because it, it not only pointed the way to where new elements should be. Because we only had discovered about half of the ones that we've discovered now at the time, but it also motivated the search for the underlying reason for this order, which was atoms. And so it motivated the search for, for, for atoms. So the real story, can I share with you the real story?

• 5:21Speaker 00

  Spoiler alert, for people who want to read it in the book, you can, you can stop listening now, but by the time you get to the book in a day or two, you'll probably forgotten. So go ahead.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  And I don't think they'll spoil too much anyway, but so the real story is Mendeleev had a book contract to write a two-volume Intro to Chemistry textbook. And he had only gotten eight of the then 63 known elements into volume one. So he had to get the other 55 into volume two, and he had kind of a customer problem, which was it had to make sense for intro students. And so it was in thinking about how could he save space and organize things in a logical way for introductory students that he started experimenting with groups. So he didn't have to explain one element at a time, but could kind of pick an element that represented a full family.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  And in doing that, that's where he started thinking of elements in, in terms of families and essentially stumbled onto the, the periodic pattern. I mean, he eventually realized that he had found this underlying law of nature and in fact said, oh, there are gaps in my table here, which means this is where we should look for new materials. So it led him to make these very bold. Predictions that were so accurate that when he called the gaps, so he labeled these gaps like echo aluminum and echo silicon, echo is the Sanskrit word for one, meaning one spot away from this other element. And when other chemists would find some element and report that they found some element and it would be similar to what he predicted,

• 6:56Speaker 01

  but not the same, he would write them and say, "Check your calculations again." And they would, and he would be right. So it was a pretty amazing story. But I think the gap between the myth and the reality is symbolic of something important, which is that we overvalue this complete freedom and undervalue the power of constraints to make us, to launch us into productive exploration.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  And you reproduce a page of his notes, which show that didn't quite flow perfectly from his brain. There's lots of crossouts and additions and he's trying to figure it out. Kubla Khan, by the way, I think he claimed he just wrote it down as he heard it. But anyway, unedited.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  You know, Russ, speaking of dreams, though, there's like a whole, I realized as I was doing this reporting, there's a whole lineage of people in chemistry, at least, supposedly discovering stuff in dreams. And it's usually they're doing that because they're in a priority dispute and they want to claim, "I could not have possibly seen this other person's work." It's like, "It came to me in a dream." And so there's this whole long lineage in chemistry of discoveries that were supposedly made in dreams, very dubious, almost all of them.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  But could be true. And I want to talk, actually, I want to talk about priority disputes, which is the phrase for who figured this out first. This has been haunting me for a while because in the episode we did with Chuck Klosterman on his book, But What If We're Wrong, or What If You're Wrong, I think it's But What If You're Wrong, or What If, no, it might be What If We're Wrong. You can look that one up. I'm not going to correct it because I'm going to get both.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  He makes the observation that many, many great things are singletons, meaning we know about one. So his example, one of his examples is, can you name anybody who wrote music for marching bands? And I can name one person, John Philip Sousa. Turns out he's not the only guy. He's the only guy that posterity has remembered. If you want to dig in, you can find many, many other composers. But the sort of one that gets remembered, and this is a haunting thing in your, you spend a number of pages talking about how many

• 9:08Speaker 00

  great discoveries had multiple, not sometimes, almost always have multiple people working on the same problem and discovering something very similar right at the same time. We know some of them are, you don't have to be, you know, a scholar to know that Newton and Leibniz had discovered the calculus and apparently independently that Wallace and Darwin both came up with evolution. But your point, which I think is profound, and I'll tie it back in to the Klosterman point, which is Darwin didn't just figure this out like the equivalent of in a dream, this crazy new idea. These ideas were bubbling up constantly in the

• 9:52Speaker 00

  intellectual life of scientists. Talk about that for a little bit, and you can talk about Malthus too, if you want, because it's fascinating.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  No, I mean, absolutely. This is in this chapter where I'm writing about what's called multiple discovery, which is basically the idea, the kind of pioneering sociologist of of science, Robert Merton, first started to attune people to the fact that even though one person was typically, or one team was typically credited with world-changing scientific breakthroughs, if you actually dug into it, there were often multiple people or multiple teams basically arriving at the answer the same day. You know, it's not always as dramatic as like, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filing their patent on the same day, although there were like a half dozen other people that were there about the same time. But it's usually quite close.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  And so when you mentioned Darwin, I think one of the important things is, you know, a discovery like that, or maybe that one in particular, is due to such a break from everything that came before, that it's just, you know, a complete paradigm shift. This person was just thinking, you know, as I would say, outside the box of their whole time. And obviously, it was an incredible breakthrough. But Darwin was so grounded in the thinking of his day. I mean, there were people, he had about 240 pen pals that he would pepper with all sorts of questions. And they helped him set up these kind of pretty well-known mysteries of the day, like, why are we finding marine fossils on mountains?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  And why do, why are we finding fossils of species that we don't see around us? Why do the bones in a wing of a bat and the flipper of a whale and the arm of a human have so much in common? So he was really collecting, you know, even, he would write to breeders, and they would tell him, we know that there are inherited variations when we're breeding. They called them sports, actually. So all of these ideas were percolating. And then he would read other thinking of the day. So I appreciate this one. He was reading Adam Smith, which attuned him to the idea of, you know, how of competitive pressures and how does organization occur naturally out of competitive pressures?

• 12:14Speaker 01

  And it was really kind of synthesizing all those things into a coherent view that gave him this frame to think through. And of course, he wasn't the only one. You mentioned Malthus, where he was reading the Reverend Malthus on population. And Malthus's argument was that, and this had a lot to do with the British Poor Laws of the day. Malthus was arguing that if we basically do a lot of charity, essentially, that there will just be, always be more mouths to feed, because population will grow geometrically and the food supply will not.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  He missed some things that were coming, not his fault. And we have many essays on that. We'll link to some of them on our website, but yeah, carry on.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  He absolutely did. He missed some things that were coming, but... But that's the thing, that's one of the points I try to make in the chapters, that these people who set up really interesting questions don't necessarily have to be right, because they frame a question for someone else, for a lot of other people, that leads them to think differently. So it was, both Wallace and Darwin read Malthus, the same essay, and it crystallized something for them, where they then essentially came up with the exact same theory. So I think it's, one of the points I was trying to make was that these lightning strikes of inspiration are not what they seem. They're actually really people who are tuned into the thinking of the day, paying attention to these well-defined questions, and that's why even the most world-changing breakthroughs are arrived at by multiple people

• 13:46Speaker 01

  at the same time, almost always.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's a, you know, like you say, and you know, it's a powerful metaphor, these guys were actually thinking inside the box, not so much outside the box, and synthesizing what was inside the box already.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  I have to add the quote from Darwin that you quote. He says, "I happen to read for amusement Malthus on population." I don't know if that sentence has ever come out of anyone's mouth or pen since then, but that was very, that was delightful. But the point about-

• 14:20Speaker 01

  That's not what you do in your leisure time, that's reading Malthus.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Exactly. Look, amusement, so amusing. Actually, it's doubly funny. Mostly would say it's not, his pro-style's not so delightful, and the second thing they'd say is, "Conclusions are not amusing either." But anyway, another time for a different topic, another time. But this point about one person which fascinates me, right, so you think, okay, so there were two people. There was Darwin and Wallace. But no, no, your point, which I think is so profound, is that there were dozens of people thinking about these issues, including very practical people, the breeders. You know, we had Matt Ridley talking, and I think you alluded to it, the Wright brothers were not aerospace engineers, there weren't any.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  They were bicycle people. And so, there's all this panoply of people, different skills and intellectual interests. There was a large bunch of the specialization in the past. And, you know, just one more example, which has been on my mind lately, is, can you name a military historian or strategist of the 19th century?

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Of the 19th century.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Who writes about war and theories of war, strategy.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Clausewitz?

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Ah, excellent. Clausewitz. We did not prep this. If you had failed that test, David, I would have cut this part out. Anyway.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Wait, would you ever, really?

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course. That would need to look like, because you don't know who Clausewitz is. It's humiliating. Anyway, seriously. Seriously, there's another 19th century theorist named Jomini I'd never heard of. But I was reading a book about Clausewitz, and it turns out Jomini had some of the same ideas. And even Adam Smith in my field, who's vaunted as this, the father of economics, or the grandfather of economics, have many ideas of his that are, that were around. You know, people who are immersed in this know about Mandeville, say, and that he had some similar, not the same, not exactly the same. But, but people act as if, you know, no one had ever written anything about economics, and this guy comes along and says, hey, do you ever think about this? Divisional labor, competition? And of

• 16:28Speaker 00

  course, there were a lot of people thinking about it. And he became the one person, at least for a long time, that is associated with the beginning, partly because he had a tremendous marketing enterprise. No, no, he didn't do that. But partly because he's a very good writer. He said it very well. And partly because I think this phenomenon, it's just hard to remember more than one person. So, one person gets remembered. But your additional point, which is worth expounding on, is we have this romantic idea that creativity is this, this fountain that only one genius has access to, and fortunately, they came along. So that is a mistake. It's not what the way the world works.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And these, it's really tuning into, I think, tuning into the thinking of the day and, and looking for really well-defined questions. And I should say, to your point also, I think it is, it's just easier to tell a story with one person, right? In many cases, in these priority disputes, somebody fought much harder to become the person in history books.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so, right, not to like, do a huge spoiler in the book, but you mentioned the periodic table story comes back.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  It recurs throughout the book, and Mendeleev, ah, whatever, it's not a spoiler, I just, it's still interesting. The Mendeleev is the person credited in the history books, and there's some reason why, he made, again, he made these bold predictions that others didn't make, and he was, um, his system was very complete, but there were, so there were no periodic tables before 1860, and there were six in the 1860s, all of which, you know, again, Mendeleev, as I say, has some advantages, but all of them got the main idea. And, you know, some of them were forgotten because the diagram was horrific, and like,

• 18:21Speaker 01

  one of them was called, the diagram was a, what the creator called a telluric screw. It was basically like a barber pole with the elements winding around it, and if you looked straight down, you would see the periodic pattern. And so the publisher was like, what is this, and just left it out, so it didn't get published, so that got no notice. But it was really these other, these other things that were setting up the contact, not that Mendeleev and these other, uh, these other people, actually, most of them were not chemists, were not geniuses. They were. But there were these other forces of the time, including, uh, very importantly, an Italian

• 19:04Speaker 01

  guy who said, "You're all measuring the weights of elements differently, here's how we're gonna do it from now on," and handed out a pamphlet, which allowed work to sort of communicate across space, because people could reference one another's work, that really set people up and defined the problem for them. And like, one of the examples I love from that, that chapter, involved the mathematician David Hilbert, arguably, uh, most influential of the 20th century, and one of the things he's most remembered for, and genius, luminary genius, but that he decided to go survey the math landscape and collect two dozen problems that he thought were important, and define them really specifically, and then hand those out to his colleagues, and it set an agenda for math in the 20th century, and many of them got solved, because he, he really,

• 19:47Speaker 01

  he looked around at what was going on in really well-defined problems, and that made a whole bunch of other people look like geniuses, because it kind of focused their energies.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  So cool. I, I was telling, uh... Talking to my wife about this phenomenon of sort of one person and then she said, well, you know, what if I, is Einstein, maybe Einstein's not so unique. And I'm thinking, no, no Einstein. But of course, you have a lot of your book that he has a little footnote. Oh, I'm really the first person to think this way.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. In the paper, in his famous relativity paper, he has a footnote in like the second paragraph where he's noting, by the way, I hadn't read this, uh, this paper, I think by Lorenz. And he's basically saying, was it Lorenz?

• 20:33Speaker 00

  I think it was. Yeah, I think it was.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  And he's, he's basically saying, yes, I realize this guy came up with some of the same things. But just so you know, I hadn't read that yet, basically.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  And that's kind of lost to history, except for listeners to be kind of talk and readers of your book. So it's, it's poor Lorenz.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he's, he was, uh, not to say, so I will say Einstein, I think, did have some unique, what seemed to me at least fully unique in physical interpretations of some of the discoveries, but was not the only one alighting on these equations at the same time.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  Talk about your, there are two parts of, maybe there's more than two, but the two I'd like to hear, hear from you about of your own personal experience with constraints. One is an injury you had in, it was middle school that changed your life. And then also how in the course of writing this book, you tried to adopt some of the principles to your own work. So let's start with your injury because it's, I think it's a very common phenomenon. And tell us about it.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. I appreciate you asking about that. Not that, yeah, nobody's asked me about that as yet. So this particular injury, the specifics was an uncommon phenomenon where in eighth grade, I was a very good athlete. And so I was playing quarterback in some gym class football, you know, touch football in middle school. And instead of kicking off, you would just have someone throw as hard as they could to the other side. And in doing this, I reared back and threw as hard as I could and my arm snapped on the follow through of the throw, my upper arm bone, the humerus in a spiral.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  And it was such a bizarre injury, nobody would believe that my arm was broken. I think I kind of like went unconscious for a second. It sort of shocked my system. And by the time someone took me to the hospital, I remember them laying me on a table, basically taking x-ray, and I'm laying on my back and they told me to put my hand up perpendicular, you know, as if I were shaking hands. And I had my eyes closed because I was nauseous. And I did it and they said, "Put your hand up." And I thought I was doing it. And it turned out that the bone was totally separated from the shoulder. So I was turning my shoulder and feeling a phantom hand out in front of me. We'll never know what happened. The, the doctors said that if there hadn't been witnesses, they would have thought one of my parents had twisted my arm until it broke. But they said, "Maybe there was a bone weakness or an air pocket or something like that,

• 23:13Speaker 01

  but we'll never know because once it broke, the evidence is gone." Uh, I've only seen this happen one other time and it was a major league pitcher and he had to have his arm amputated. Um, so that kind of ruined my life at the time because I had to have my arm strapped to my torso. So, you know, a cast running all the way up to my shoulder and arm strapped to my torso. And so I couldn't, I couldn't play sports anymore. And my life revolved around sports. That was the only thing I was interested in. And, but it, it led to some changes. Like in school at the time, I was taking French class and we had these tests where you had to listen to a recording of a French person speaking and then you follow along on a worksheet and there are blanks and you have to follow well enough to fill in the

• 23:56Speaker 01

  blanks with the word that they said. And I was okay at this, but with the broken arm, I couldn't write fast enough because it was my writing hand to, to keep up. And so I started realizing I'd have to try to memorize the words as I went through and then go back and write them down with my left hand. And I started using sports related mnemonics, like attaching the words as I heard them to some sports image. And I started knocking these tests out of the park, doing better than I'd ever done before. And I started using mnemonics for everything in school. Even decades later, I would read one of the most famous memory studies ever done that involved a Carnegie Mellon undergrad. And in this research, they took him from being able to memorize only seven digits to 80 digits, using sports related mnemonics.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  And he was also an athlete.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  You'd figured it out before. It's a priority dispute.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  That's right. The, but it turns out people have known this for a long time. You know, a lot of people do memory palace and things like that. And I use that to this day. If I memorize an hour-long keynote talk, I'm using mnemonic. And it's not, people will ask me if I have a photographic memory when I'm done with a talk sometimes. And because I talk into slides, sort of, so it's clear that I've memorized everything. If I put my keys down and spin in a circle, I lose them. I do not have a photographic memory. It's that I learned to use these mnemonics. And I was forced to do that because my typical tactic was taken away. It's called a preclude constraint, where when the typical tactic is blocked, you start looking for something different, and oftentimes it's better.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  It also led to me taking up running, because I was barred from contact sports for a year. And I ended up becoming, something I never would have thought of. I ended up becoming a college runner and a university record holder and all these things. And so it's just interesting in retrospect that this thing that blocked my normal modes of being led me to explore learning strategies and athletic activities that I just never would have explored in the past. And I think that's kind of a theme. You know, in some ways, I hope this book is maybe an emotional reframe for people asked to do more with less. But also, part of that reframe is to look at limits as opportunities to clarify your priorities and launch productive exploration.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  And that's what happened in my personal life.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  Now, there's a paradox there, of course, which is, and this is true of everybody. I shouldn't say that. There's a selection bias. We hear from people who make lemonade out of the lemons that get handed out to them. But it's striking how many people who often go through very, very tough things.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  Have a benefit. It's not just, well, it's not as bad as it seemed. The outcome is actually quite extraordinary in a positive way. And yet, at the same time, we wouldn't suggest to people to break your arm and not use your right hand for a while. But the metaphor is a very powerful one, I think. And the idea that restraining your opportunities, your choices can actually be surprisingly, not just turn out better than you thought, but actually better than it was when you were totally free.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really reminds me of, maybe you know this study, the famous London Underground study where there was a strike and certain lines were down for a few days, and so commuters had to find new ways to work. And, you know, these are people who are doing this every day. You would assume they would have optimized the path. And yet, a significant portion of commuters found a different path and stuck with it and saved like 1,500 commuting hours per day, just a two or three day strike that led people to experiment with different paths. So I think arguably, we don't experiment enough. And we tend to follow what cognitive

• 27:54Speaker 01

  scientists call the path of least resistance, where we do the convenient thing or the thing we've always done. Because, as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says, "You may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made to prevent you from having to think whenever possible, because thinking is energetically costly." And so unless the thing you're used to is blocked, you're probably not going to explore as much as you should.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I hadn't thought about it until just now, but it's really an example of unintended consequences, even when it's a random event. Most of the time in economics, when we talk about unintended consequences, they're negative. You think the minimum wage is good, but it puts people out of work. Or whatever's the, you put on price controls, and then that leads to scarcity, in the case of a different kind of price ceiling instead of a price floor.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  And we always think of it as negative. And I remember somebody once asked me, well, aren't there any positive unintended consequences? And of course, there are. But this phenomenon of when something horrible happens to you, and religious people, of course, say it's all for the best. You know, God has a plan and it'll turn out great. And of course, that's, I don't think, always true for most, every person. Don't want to claim that even as a religious person. But it's interesting how often it turns out so much better than you thought, and even sometimes pretty well. And yet, in the moment, you don't want to hear that. So it's a perspective, as you say, it's a reframing that could be useful for us sometimes.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  You're also making me think about, because I should say, the book, in many parts of the book are about sort of self-imposed constraints that can, you know, prevent a team from drowning in possibilities and things like that, or make people more creative. But you are making me think about how often in my own life, something like an injury has led to something useful, where I had a few years ago, I had to get a few stitches in my head. And I was told to try to keep my blood pressure down for, you know, at least a few days, if not a week or two, and not to turn my head independently of my shoulders, if I could help it. And, you know, it was painful, it was annoying, I had to sleep sitting up.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  And a few days in, I found I was so happy that I was wondering what was going on, even though I was, you know, a little bit of pain, and sleeping wasn't annoying. And so I started journaling about my days, and the thing that jumped out at me was that I had to do one thing at a time. I physically could not multitask, I couldn't turn my head quickly, and I would actually feel, if I started trying to toggle between things, my blood pressure rising, and it feel a little tingling on the scar. So it was almost I had this built-in biofeedback.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  If I tried to multitask. And I ended up writing that into one of the chapters about attention and focus, because it was so...

• 30:50Speaker 01

  It transformed it for me in realizing how stressful multitasking was and I hadn't even really been thinking about it. Not that I would wish stitches in the head on anyone, but again, it was kind of revelatory for me in forcing me to do one thing at a time and realizing how great that was, both my productivity, but also just my sense of well-being at the end of the day.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  So I mentioned there were two things from your own life, and there's more than two, but the two I wanted to talk about. So one of them was your sports injury, which changed the arc of your career, even not just your leisure and your college extracurriculars. But the other is that when you're writing the book, you impose some constraints on yourself. And these are constraints that I think all of us think about. I just want to mention, I did, having not played chess on my phone for the last year or two, put it back on for about four days. And now today, just in incredible frustration and embarrassing

• 31:56Speaker 00

  mood swing, deleted it again. I'll put it back on in a few years. But most of the time, we have trouble constraining ourselves that way. So talk about what you did in making yourself both more reproductive and also, I think, a little more sane.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there were, there were kind of two buckets for this. One, how my workday works, and one, the book in specific. Are you thinking about either one of those specifically?

• 32:23Speaker 00

  Either one, both, whatever.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, both. So let me talk about the book specifically. One of the reasons I took on this topic, I guess the older I get, the more I realize or the more honest I am about maybe how much research is in my projects. And it's pretty clear in this one because...

• 32:46Speaker 01

  I have been terrible at drawing boundaries around things, around my workday, around my work projects. So for my first two books, I wrote about 150% the length of a book and then had to cut back to get a book. For my first book, I took a trip to Arctic Sweden that I had to cut. Once I became a parent, you don't want to be taking trips. It was an interesting trip, but you don't want to be taking trips to Arctic Sweden that aren't going in the book. And that was very much because I didn't do a good job of defining my project ahead of time. So this time around, once I did my reporting, because I don't, I don't write,

• 33:27Speaker 01

  basically for the first year of the project, I don't write. I'm just reading papers, interviewing, mapping the landscape. And after that, I sat down, I forced myself to make a one-page outline, one page only. This kind of came at the suggestion of one of the people I interviewed in the book with the lead designer of the iPod, where he tells people to write the press release before they start the project. So you have this kind of bounding box for it. And actually, this is, I have it right behind me. This is, for anyone who's here, this is, this is the one-page outline. You can see, I tried to defeat my own system by writing as small as possible.

• 34:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm shocked. I thought it was gonna be a, you know, a 200-word. No, it's, for those who are not watching this or listening at home, it's, it's a big mess. I'll just leave it at that.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  It's a big mess, but it's one page. And if it's not on that page, it's not in the book. And this forced me, it was painful, but it forced me to clarify my priorities for what was in the book, because in the past, I had this, what designers call "featureitis", anything I thought was interesting, I'm trying to shoehorn it in there.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  And that doesn't necessarily serve the reader. You want to prioritize as the writer. It also led me to, you know, very much in the vein of Mendeleyev, with that small space, it led me to come up with this structure I've never used before, where I tell different slates- ...of the periodic table story throughout the book, each time with a new layer that then introduces a series of linked chapters. And it was trying to put the book in this small space that forced me to think about ways to arrange like topics, whereas in the past I was more just one chapter at a time. And so I think a weakness of mine might have been coherence in my previous books.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  So it also made me much more efficient because, so I was slower to start writing this time around. It took me longer to get to the phase where I started writing, but once I started writing, I executed really quickly because I understood the playing field. So this is what in the book, the Danish researcher Bent Flubier, who studies projects, would call the good, the good sequence for a project, for projects that are usually, in his case, that come in on time and on budget and deliver what they promised, is think slow, act fast. Meaning you have this small early stage where you're defining the problem, you're setting the boundaries, what are you doing? And then when you move into execution, you can, you can do it more quickly.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  The opposite is where you, is think fast, act slow, where you have a big idea, you rush into execution, and then the lessons are gonna be much more painfully acquired because you have momentum and all these things. And so I actually, my, in my first two books, well, the first one I needed an extension, actually, so I didn't even make it by the deadline. The second one I turned in on 5:00 PM on the day of the contract. So I assumed that's what I was gonna do again, and I finished. I had it a month early, I just sat for two weeks because I didn't know what to do. Like, does anybody turn in books early?

• 36:32Speaker 00

  No.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  So I would never not do it this way again. If I, well, for the third time, I'm saying never again. I always say that after writing books, and I believe it, but, you know, then there's a period of recovery.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  But if I did it again, I would always do it this way. It was so helpful.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  But you also changed some habits, so talk about those.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  Email and...

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, and some of these won't make sense for everybody, but, or a lot of people, but I think there's something that people can pull from them. Where the, when I was reporting the chapter about attention and focus, I found it a little bit scary. Where a lot of it was based on the work of this psychologist named Gloria Mark, who for about 25 years was shadowing people at work. First, sitting behind them with a stopwatch. And then later, it became logging their computer activity and heart rate monitors, and all these kinds of things. And what she found, when she started monitoring people about 25 years ago, people switched tasks about every three minutes. And then by 2012, it was more like a minute and a half.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  And by 2022, it was 45 seconds, where it seems to have flattened out at 45 seconds, at least for the last few years. And not only do the number of switches predict people's end-of-day productivity in a bad way, they also predict their stress as measured by heart rate variability. And but the scariest part of this research, I think, was what she showed about self-interruptions, where if you're interrupted by notifications and emails and all these things all day, or other people, and you say, "Well, today, I'm going to focus," and you turn the notifications off, you will just self-interrupt with intrusive thoughts at the rhythm to which you've become accustomed, as if you have like an internal distraction barometer

• 38:21Speaker 01

  that wants to keep a certain rhythm. And so if you want to be able to reclaim your focus, basically, you have to train yourself. It doesn't take long, but you have to start working in some blocks where you're not toggling. So for me, because being a writer, I had a lot of ability to do this. When I was in my deep-focus part of the work, where I was really writing, I wouldn't turn my phone on until late in the day, and I definitely wouldn't check email. I wouldn't check email really until my work for the day was done. So again, it doesn't make sense for everybody. But the email, your inbox, is something called the Zagarnek effect, which is this idea that an open task takes up a little brain space. And my email inbox is always that, right?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Like, there's a million things I can never respond to, and so it takes up brain space. So I stopped opening it during the day. But I think a more sensible thing for most people is to try to do some batching. So Mark found that people in offices check email on average 77 times a day. And different times. So maybe you need to answer all that email. But can you do it in one block where you're just doing email? Or two blocks, or three blocks? And then do your other work in blocks so that you're monotasking for the thing you're doing within a half hour or within an hour? And not toggling all day long, because that feels efficient, but it actually isn't. And it's really stress inducing.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  So if you can block some of your work and start not in your inbox, that's probably helpful. So I think, again, not that everyone can do it to the extent that I did, but probably everyone can do a little better than they are.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  So I threw the chess app off my phone as a constraint. But there's 10,000 others that I still do that I wish I didn't do sometimes, at least. What are your thoughts on why it's so hard? Why it's so difficult? And I've told the story before about being, I think I've told it on the program, of being on a meditation retreat and eating lunch mindfully. Which means you take a bite, you look at it, you remember, think about where it came from, you might smell it, you put it in your mouth, you chew it thoughtfully, you think about the origin of it, the number, as an economist, I would be thinking about the division of labor and all the people who contributed to it and so on. And it's so exhilarating when you're doing it.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  And then I go back home after the retreat's over, and I'm thinking, oh, I'm gonna do that every day from now on. And I can't. I compulsively look at sports on my computer while I eat, or read, or multitask. Why do you think it's so hard? Why is it so hard? When we know, I know, just like you know now, that these are good habits. But why are these habits so difficult for us?

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And by the way, I think it's, I think there's some research that shows that it might interfere with your satiety signals if you're not paying attention while you're eating too.

• 41:17Speaker 00

  Oh, for sure.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  So people end up eating more.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  I bet that's true.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  I think there are a few reasons. I think, one is, again, as Daniel Willingham said, our brains are meant to prevent us from thinking when possible, so we do the convenient thing. And a lot of that is passive, right? We're scrolling, or whatever it is. Whereas what you're talking about, being mindful, I mean, that takes some work. It feels like you're not doing certain things, but it actually takes... Anyone who's tried to meditate in the early going realizes that it's hard. It takes work. It's uncomfortable. That's why it takes a lot of practice to do it well. But another side, I think, is that... And

• 42:02Speaker 01

  again, as Gloria Mark's research shows, we've been trained now way more for the distraction, always doing something side. So you go to a retreat, and you work on a... You practice in a different way for, I don't know, days, a week, two weeks, whatever it is. The whole rest of your life probably has been training you for this other mode of being. And, of course, there's like an army of psychologists behind all of these apps that are trying to engineer your attention, also.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  So I think it becomes so easy, unless you're forcibly putting boundaries in place. If you're not engineering your attention these days, it will be engineered for you by very smart people who have a lot at stake. And so I think, again, we're following the path of least resistance, where, you know, you're falling into attention traps that have been engineered to make you behave in a certain way.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. No comment. So much to say there, but I'm gonna move on. I'd love to, but another time. I want to talk about Isabel Allende, the writer, and the role of a particular date in her life. And I don't remember if he used this word, but it's... She constrains herself, and you'll talk about it. But the other way I think about this is ritual. So tell us about Isabel Allende's writing habit.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so she's one of the great living writers, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and recipient winner. It's kind of weird to call Presidential Medal of Freedom like a leg, as if it's the Olympics. Yeah. And she started writing in midlife, just before she turned 40, when, so her, her father's cousin was Salvador Allende, who I think was the only democratically-elected socialist head of state in the world, the only one that I can think of, anyway, and was, and was overthrown in a coup, and that led Isabel to end up having to flee Chile.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  And so she was in exile when she learned that her grandfather was dying, and so she started writing him a letter on January 8th. And she, she was basically just writing him a letter to say, "All the stories that you told me, they're not going to die with you." So this would have been, by the way, January 8th, I think it was 1981, that "I'm going to preserve them." And as she's writing this letter, a lot of them are about the sort of fantastical, magical stories that her family has told. Some of them, yeah, like that her, you know, that

• 44:55Speaker 01

  she had a relative who could move a sugar bowl with her mind, these, these, these interesting stories. And it starts morphing into a novel, and she realizes that's happening, and so she keeps writing, keeps writing, and it becomes this book called The House of the Spirits, which becomes this international blockbuster. You know, now it's a movie with Antonio Banderas in it and all these sorts of things, but it starts this ritual for her. So the book comes out when she's about 40, where every January 8th from then on... If she has finished the previous book, she starts a new book every January 8th. And she has all these rituals where she needs structure and silence. And before she was this huge international celebrity, sometimes this was in a clothing

• 45:36Speaker 01

  closet where she would set up a typewriter because she needed silence. And she starts cleansing to get ready for this January 8th ritual, throwing out things from the previous project, sort of cleansing her office. She puts a Pablo Neruda book under her computer, or typewriter, then computer, just in case creativity by osmosis is a thing. And this ritual always brings her back, even if she doesn't really have an idea yet, that the ritual sort of forces her to do it again. And she only, since then, so in the last 45 years, she only had one publishing break. So this ritual has led to about a bestseller about every 18 months for the last 40 years. So she's sold 80 million books.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  And by the way, she's plowed a ton of that money into a foundation, like she's given away an enormous amount of money. And the one time she had a break was when her daughter, Paula, who was in her twenties, died of a rare disease. And that they didn't know she had until she fell into a coma. And she writes this searing memoir, Paula, about it, that's just incredible to read. And in the book, she's saying, "I think I'm done writing. This is it, like I just don't have it anymore. This has sapped me." And she skips one January 8th for the first time ever and says, "I'm done, no more writing."

• 47:01Speaker 01

  But then the next January 8th is coming around and she says, "Maybe I'll just sit down and see." So she goes through a ritual again and it pulls her back. And of course, she writes another book and starts the ritual again and reinvigorates her career. And she's so driven by ritual and by, she needs structure and silence, as she said, lots of silence. And for the first few weeks, and it also adds a seasonality to her life, where everyone knows if they need something from her, better have gotten it by January 7th, because then she's away doing her thing. And she'll turn down, by the way, you know, 150 grand to give a talk, once she goes into that, into that phase, because it's so sacred to her.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  And I think it's particularly interesting because if you read profiles of her, because there's magical realism in some of her books, many of them do not have, but some of them do, profiles of her will make it sound like she's a mystical medium. She just sits back and characters speak through her. But in fact, the story of her creation is one of incredible boundaries and discipline that she put in place. So it was amazing to see as a writer, even down to her workday. She lights a candle to start the day and blows it out to finish the day because she has a very defined period of work and then period of recovery. So I adopted that also, by the way. I use electric candles because too much paper, maybe I'm not as brave as her or something like that.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  But I just thought it was so interesting to see someone whose public legend is, again, of this creative lightning strikes, but really it's driven by this incredible discipline and structure and ritual that she's set up for herself.

• 48:37Speaker 00

  So the idea of lighting that candle seems kind of silly.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  It does.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Okay, I was gonna help her write better. Come on. And yet, human beings, I think one of the great lessons of this book is that Daniel Willingham quote about what your brain is meant to do. A lot of what we do is about escaping our brain, and whatever that means, that's a meaningless statement, but I think you know what I mean. And I think about Stephen King. I'm not a big Stephen King fan. I've not read very many of his books. But he has a wonderful book on writing. And when Stephen King becomes a writer, who's, I think, a high school teacher for a while, and he sells a story and he realizes he can be a writer, he gets up every morning and

• 49:27Speaker 00

  I think he, I can't remember if he listens to music or not, but I've done, I do that sometimes. And then I often, I can sometimes will turn it off, or I might continue with it, depends. But it puts you in a different space. And unfortunately, I'm not Stephen King, or maybe fortunately. But he writes a thousand words. And when he's done with a thousand words, which I think in his early career was four hours or so, a page an hour, he would stop. Didn't matter when it was, could have been after two hours some days probably, and some days it was four and a half. You know, and I think he said recently somewhere, I don't know when it was, he said, yeah, now I have to work till like one o'clock. But in the old days, he worked from like... Six to 10 or whatever.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  And you know, if you can write a thousand words a day, that's four pages and in a hundred days, you've got a real book. That's three months and he does it and just like every day, every day, he doesn't get up from the chair till he's written a thousand words. And you know, there's a thousand reasons why that's a stupid idea. But it's not, it's a genius idea.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I love that because like you said, it does seem silly.

• 50:40Speaker 00

  I mean, some days you don't feel it, you're not feeling it, so get up.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  That's why it's important. I mean, when I, when I think back to when I was a competitive runner, I was running the 800 meters. There's a lot of days you don't feel like doing the training that you have to do for that event. It's not pleasant, like people end up in that event because they wanted to be a 400 meter runner and they weren't cutting it and this is a way to survive. So, but there's so many days where the habit, the ritual, sometimes the other people also pushing you on, bring you back because there are a lot of days you don't want to do it. That's why it's important to have. On the days where you feel like it and you're great and you're jazzed up, then I think all the, the discipline and the structure is, is less important. It's all those other days that you also need.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  And I think this is why, if you've ever read the novelist Haruki Murakami, another international phenomenon, talking about, you know, he, he starts doing endurance training to get ready to write a book because it's also an act of endurance where, an act of endurance and ritual and it's like Rick Rubin, the music producer. He, he wrote about in his, his book about creativity, that it's really this kind of, that a lot of the creatives have this very, not, not boring, but, but kind of rigid day where it's very structured. Because that's actually what liberates them to, to do their thing. When they're not having to make a million other decisions and they know this is where they're, they're going to be and it's going to bring them back.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  So I think that discipline and structure actually, almost that boring repetitiveness allows you to, to flourish and expand your thinking within that.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  You have a chapter called Rules of the Game. I think that's the name of the title, but certainly the subject, name of the chapter. You know, I've often reflected on the fact that, you know, accepting the restrictions of the Jewish Sabbath is gotta be a recipe for misery because there's so many things you can't do. And why would you ever choose to not be able to do things you're in the mood for? And yet, something extraordinary happens if you're comfortable with that. And there's so many things in life like that. And I think the, this is not a self-help book, in the kind where you, at the end of every chapter, here's four things you can do, which I appreciate, by the way, I'm glad you didn't do that.

• 53:06Speaker 00

  But it does make you realize that there are rules you can impose on yourself that sweeten life or make you more productive. And you talk toward the end of the book about Bernard Suits, who I'd never heard of. But you write about games. And of course, in some dimension, he was criticizing Wittgenstein. And of course, life is a game, in a certain sense. And games without rules are no fun. Right? Right? If you play Scrabble...

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Have no meaning.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Right. If you play Scrabble and any word counts, you're not playing Scrabble anymore, and it's not fun. So talk about what Bernard Suits was trying to do, and this idea of rules in games.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  I will, but I want to say two things to your comment first, one of which is that Rules of the Game chapter influenced by you. Some of the things that I've heard on Econ Talk...

• 54:10Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, there's some economics in that chapter, yeah.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  So I just wanted to thank you for that.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  And I appreciate your compliment about not doing bullet points at the end of chapters, because, you know, I think of, like, I strongly identify as like a craftsman for writing who's always trying to improve and... You know, so I'm trying to make a Swiss watch of a book. And so I don't want those kinds of breaks. Like, I want my narrative to be narrative. But Suits, so as you mentioned, in Wittgenstein, he was, one of the things Wittgenstein famously said was, "Language is fuzzy." And one of his famous, maybe his most famous example was that there's no core essence of what we call a game. So, you know, some have strict rules, some don't. Some you play alone, some you play with a team, some are just for fun, some are competition, et cetera, et cetera, some are make-believe. And Suits said, "No, I think that's wrong.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  I think there is a core quality of all games, and it's an attitude." And he called it the "lucery attitude," the attitude that you have to take on in order to participate in the game. And he described it as "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles," which I love. And it is that voluntary acceptance of these obstacles that are totally unnecessary, right? You could get from point A to point B in a race much more efficiently, or get down a football field and things like that much more efficiently.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  Lower the basket than I could dunk. Well, it doesn't have to be 10 feet high, come on. That just makes it harder. Makes the hole bigger in golf, come on.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Or, you know, or you could let people just run down the court without dribbling the ball, which seems like it's happening sometimes now, anyway. But his point was that, so he wrote in this brilliant book called "The Grasshopper," which is a parable where he takes Aesop's grasshopper, who plays all summer long. And so, unlike the ants who are hoarding food, he's gonna die during the winter because he's been playing instead of hoarding food. But in this case, in Suits's case, the grasshopper defends his choice and said, "I was doing something that made my life meaningful by pushing against these obstacles." And so I think it's a, it's an analogy for life, you know? Take field, add lines, and suddenly you have collective meaning, where you can engage

• 56:29Speaker 01

  in something with other people. And it allows the attempt to achieve things. And so I viewed that as... Almost like a nugget that encapsulates a huge part of the book that this voluntary acceptance of obstacles, you do it because it can take you places that you never could have otherwise envisioned.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  So it reminds me of Michael Easter. He's got this idea, it's a Japanese word, a "masogi," I think I'm pronouncing it correctly, that it's a horrible challenge, it's not easily done, but it's not impossible and it won't kill you. And that taking those on makes life both vivid and meaningful. You know, sports, team sports, are about a group of people getting together, what was the phrase from Suits again? The voluntary...

• 57:29Speaker 01

  Voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  Right. And so, I mean, silly, you're gonna march the ball down the field and the football... There's nothing really at stake. I mean, it's just a pretend. It's all pretend. It's all, you've made up your own meaning, a goal that... The entertainment is the goal, and that requires a certain set of restrictions on what's allowed. It's not about winning. You know, it's the scene in Raiders of Lost Ark where the guy takes out the big sword and Harrison Ford just shoots him. It's like, but that's cheating. That's not... And that's why it's a great scene, because it's kind of funny, it's not really humorous, but there's a humor, a dark humor there.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  But many times in life, we adhere to restrictions, which is what you're saying, where not just you're more productive, but you can produce, you know, meaning. You know, you could talk, I've talked for a minute about General Magic, because I'd never heard of it, or if I had, I'd forgotten it. I'm sure I've heard of it, forgotten about it. You know, it's this, "Oh, boy, we're on a great quest, we have the most talented people in the world, we're gonna do this great thing," and nothing happens. What were they trying to do and why did they fail?

• 58:41Speaker 01

  So this company, General Magic, in the early, really starting in the late 80s, but in the early 90s, were...

• 58:52Speaker 01

  They saw the future of communications technology. So they were essentially trying to build the iPhone, starting in 1990, essentially, when only 15% of American households even had computers. And they had so much talent. They were founded by three former Apple employees, two of whom helped design the original Mac. The third, his job was looking for the future of technology. And he was, this guy named Marc Parat, absolute visionary. I read his PhD dissertation for Stanford in 1976, in which he coins the term "information economy," and it is eerie to read. I mean, he saw what was coming. So they found this company, it spun out of Apple, to make the new personal communicator. And the idea is so intoxicating and visionary, and the talent is so incredible, that Goldman

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Sachs takes them public in the first so-called "concept IPO," where they go public just with an idea, not with a product. And fast forward, it becomes a disaster. After six months of the product debuting, which is again a personal communicator, they've sold 3,000 units, mostly to people they know. And it just becomes this epic disaster. And there's this question of, like, how could this have failed? Parat later said that he raised so much money so quickly. They had a 17-partner alliance. Their alliance, these people they were working with, these other companies, they covered so much of the communications technology world that they had to start their meetings with an antitrust lawyer, listing all the topics they weren't allowed to discuss.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  But that also made it incredibly hard to make decisions, because there were so many people involved. And Parat said he raised all this money from them and other people because he wanted to create heaven for engineers, where the engineers were free to play and create and limited only by their imaginations. As he said, "What more could anyone want?" And I think the answer was less freedom. Because I interviewed dozens of former employees from General Magic, and a refrain was, "We could not figure out what not to do." They didn't have a clear customer. They called their customer Joe Sixpack.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  After a few years of missed deadlines, they realized nobody knew who that guy was or what he wanted. And so they ended up just building for each other. They had so much talent, so many resources, they could do anything, so they often did. There was actually one, if I can share this, one interview I think was kind of emblematic of the problem there with this engineer named Steve Perlman, who was charged with creating a calendar function for the device. It's quite strong. And he writes the calendar function to go from 1904 to 2096 and checks it in and thinks he's done. And then another, one of the leaders comes to him and says, Steve, somebody might write apps, because they already were building an app store, you know, back in 1990. Somebody might write apps that does historical things or goes way into the future. You have to expand this calendar app.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  So he brings it back, he makes it, he goes back to year one instead. Fine, checks it in, done. Then his other team comes to him and says, Steve, why are you tying this into some arbitrary religious context? Like, take it back to the beginning of astronomical time. So he checks it out again and starts the calendar function to go from the Big Bang, right? Way into the future. And as he said, if he'd left it at 1904 to 2096, it would have been four lines of code. And instead, it dragged on for months, which was a huge waste of time. And that was how things at General Magic happened, because they had not drawn good boundaries and because they did have so many resources and so much talent that they couldn't figure out what not to do. And so it became a disaster. As the venture capitalist, Bill Gurley, when I was interviewing him, said, more startups,

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  we have a saying in venture, more startups die of indigestion and starvation. Too much, not too little. The good thing about General Magic, though, I'd say, is it was almost a trauma for some of the people that were working there. And they came out of it having learned these incredible lessons about the importance of putting constraints in place and went on to co-found or create, you know, Android, iPod, iPhone, Nest, to lead things like Google Maps, Safari, all these other things, LinkedIn, eBay. eBay was actually incubated by a low-level service engineer at General Magic who offered it to General Magic. He was actually obligated to offer his IP.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  And they were like, no, no, we got a much bigger thing going on. It was called AuctionWeb at the time. So he took it out on his own and turned it into eBay. They had the, they basically had the Palm Pilot internally, too. The guy that was making Palm Pilot started as a third-party app for...

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  General Magic called graffiti where strokes with a stylus could be turned into writing. And that guy said, when it was clear General Magic was going to fail, he said, he identified a clear customer problem. Busy professionals wanted to sync their contacts and calendar and take it on the go. So I'm going to do just contacts, calendar and memo pad, period. And General Magic laughed at him and said, you can't compete with us because that was three of the bajillion things they were doing. And Palm Pilot became a hit. When General Magic's device appeared, you know, it had tons of features, but it was, user experience was choppy because it had so much. Battery life was bad and it was confusing. It shipped with a 200-page manual. Can you imagine getting, right, there were eight pages just on the battery.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  But again, it did produce these incredible people like Tony Fadell, who's an important character in the book, who is known as the Podfather because he led the design of the iPod. When he co-founded Nest, the smart thermostat company after that, he forced the team to work inside a literal box. He's like a zealot for constraints. The first time I called him, he's going, if you don't have constraints, make up constraints. He's a very enthusiastic guy. And he made them prototype the packaging at Nest before they had the product because he said, this will show us what our priorities are. If it goes on here, and this is what we want to communicate to the end customer. And if it's not on here, then we can put it in a holding pattern because it's not important enough. As he said, with these ultra-constraint-based things, they slow you down, but they make you think really hard.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  And that's exactly what happened to me in doing this one-page outline.

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was thinking.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that story became a, it comes back toward the end of the book and it's become an important story in the book.

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  So I'm going to close with an observation about economics and let you react to it. We're trained in economics. There's been some revision of this, but the standard economics paradigm is that more is better than less.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  And constraints lower your well-being. Uh, constraints keep you from getting to a higher level of satisfaction. Your income is a constraint. If you had more income, you'd be happier, more satisfied, you'd have more what we call utility, a catch-all phrase to mean good, uh, good, good things. And the older I get, the more problems I have with, with that perspective, uh, because we don't just care about how much stuff we have, we care about where it comes from and whether we earned it and whether we were respected when we earned it. And I understand you can force all that into a utility maximization, maximization framework, but most economists struggle to do that artfully. And as a result, they kind of keep the simple version.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Uh, I'm not a big fan of the revisions of that model. I don't think they've been very successful either. But I think there is a deep lesson here, and it's not just about economics. Because surely if you had a startup, more money is better than less money, because if you have less money, you could starve, you could go bankrupt and your brilliant idea would never come to light. But it's also obvious that if you have too much money, you can't focus for, for, it's just a human challenge. There are exceptions, I'm sure. There are people who can overcome that, but most of us can't. And constraints are very powerful. So, um, take us home with, with a reaction to that.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  First, I think it's clear that constraints can be bad, right? It's almost, almost synonymous with something that is frustrating. Um, but I think you're right, and you said it really eloquently. And I guess maybe, so I don't know that I have that much to add to that. So let me bring in something that I think's interesting and sort of related, which is the most important thinker in the book we haven't mentioned, to me, Herbert Simon. He's trained as a political scientist, uh, won the Turing Award in computer science because he, he, he co-did the first AI demonstration, won the highest award you can win in psychology, and then won the Nobel Prize in economics also for bounded rationality, basically, and some of his other work. And one of the important, um,

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  You know, his life's work was really motivated by the noticing that people didn't really adhere to some of the decision-making behavior that classical economics suggested they would. And one of his important findings, he turned into this word that he coined satisficing, which is a combination of satisfy and suffice. And what he found was that because we have finite brains and finite capacity to evaluate options, we can't actually make optimal decisions. We use shortcuts and heuristics to make our decisions.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  And what Simon suggested was that we actually should proactively do that and set good enough rules for ourselves. So he proactively satisfied. He said, you only need three pairs of clothes, one on your back, one in the wash, and one in the closet. He had the same breakfast every day. He had one beret that he always wore, etc. Because, you know, he famously wrote, "The best is the enemy of the good," where he argued that by looking through, we have this idea if we have more, more, more, that we can optimize our solutions, or maximize, in the language of the people in his field. What he said is, not only can you not, but in fact, if you counted the cost in time and money and energy of attempting to maximize, you'd realize that satisficing is the maximizing strategy, basically.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  So economists were right all along, but, okay, go ahead.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  All right. And so, so I think it's important, instead of always pining for more, even though more has led to shared prosperity in ways that are very, very important, setting good enough decision rules. We're not built to have access to everything, everywhere, all of the, all at the, all of the time. And so I think recognizing that constraints can be good and saying, when you're going into decisions, what are the three things I want this decision to accomplish or this purchase to accomplish or whatever? And when you get that, make the decision and move on instead of wondering if there's always more and better out there. Otherwise, you fall prey to something

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  called Fredkin's Paradox, which is, we spend the most time on the least important decisions because we're having trouble telling the options apart, which is why you agonize over it. But it also means either that it's not that there's not much difference, or you can't figure out much more difference. So maybe it doesn't matter. So I've become a proactive satisficer. It almost sounds, you'd almost accuse Herbert Simon of, you know, having low ambition if he hadn't won the highest award in several different disciplines.

• 1:10:03Speaker 00

  My guest today has been David Epstein. David, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure and honor to be here. And like I said, you're an influence in this book, Russ, so I really appreciate you and your thinking.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  Thanks, David.

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.