Pod Insights Planet Money We almost had a smartphone in the 90s. Why did it fail? About this episode In the early 90’s, a company called General Magic began working on a portable device that would allow people to check email, make phone calls, even play games. It was basically a smartphone. But it never caught on.
On today’s show, a theory about why this device failed. General Magic had generous investors, world-class talent and creative freedom. But is it possible what they needed was constraints?
Further reading and viewing:
David Epstein’s book is Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better https://davidepstein.com/inside-the-box/.
Tony Fadell’s book is Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Make Things Worth Making https://www.buildc.com/the-book.
Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude’s documentary is called General Magic https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/.
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This episode was hosted by Erika Beras and Emma Peaslee. It was produced by Emma Peaslee with help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and James Sneed. It was edited by Marianne McCune and fact-checked by Charlotte Isidore. It was engineered by Jimmy Keeley with help from Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message. What if, instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current, so you can win more deals. Learn more at hubspot.com.
0:17 Speaker 01 This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:22 Speaker 02 OK, how many times have you sat and thought about how much more you could accomplish if you had more, more time, more money, more resources?
0:32 Speaker 01 Like, how good your project could be if you had just one more day?
0:35 Speaker 02 Or a bigger budget, or more help.
0:38 Speaker 01 Well, this is the story of a company that did have all of that. And they were making something amazing, something most of us touch every day, a smartphone.
0:47 Speaker 02 But, and this is the part that is bonkers, this was happening nearly two decades before the iPhone came out.
0:57 Speaker 03 Before the internet, before Wi-Fi, before mobile data, before cell phones even.
1:03 Speaker 01 Tony Fadell was employee number 29 at that company.
1:07 Speaker 03 Before even email really existed for people, before anything like Amazon or e-tailing existed, before downloadable games or downloadable music existed. All of that stuff. We were creating all the technology that would later become what the iPhone was.
1:24 Speaker 01 Nowadays, Tony is a businessman. He's always been a computer geek. His words, not ours.
1:29 Speaker 03 I was making fake IDs on a Mac in high school because you had a laser printer. And a laser printer was like, oh, my god, I could replicate things in the world. So I was making fake IDs on laser printers.
1:39 Speaker 01 You must have been very popular.
1:41 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, yeah, I made a lot of money, too.
1:42 Speaker 02 Tony was brought up in the 70s and 80s to build things.
1:47 Speaker 03 I was fixing things. I was changing electrical sockets.
1:51 Speaker 01 You're describing yourself as kind of being like a shop class kind of kid.
1:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, my grandfather taught shop class.
1:58 Speaker 02 Oh, seriously, a shop class kid. Okay.
2:00 Speaker 03 He always had the mantra, if a human made it, a human can fix it and build other things, too.
2:06 Speaker 02 Tony's favorite thing to tinker with was computers.
2:09 Speaker 03 It was your own world. You could make anything you wanted.
2:12 Speaker 01 And around the time Tony was in high school, mid 80s, computer geeks actually started to become cool.
2:17 Speaker 03 And Rolling Stone, there was a huge article by Steven Levy about the original Mac team. And I was like, oh, my God, there's computer guys like me, guys and gals like me, building this thing that I love, the Macintosh, and they're in a rock and roll magazine. I'm like, superstars.
2:35 Speaker 02 He's 15, and he became obsessed with these computer engineers.
2:40 Speaker 03 Oh, I could be like that. So they were my heroes. And so I would just track them obsessively. Yes, stalking, you could say.
2:48 Speaker 02 Tony went to college, launched a few startups, and he kept reading tech magazines. And then one day, he saw something buried in the gossipy type pages in the back of one of those magazines. Tony learned his heroes were working on this top secret project. It was at a brand new company called General Magic.
3:08 Speaker 03 And I was like, General Magic? What? What is this?
3:12 Speaker 01 And he didn't care how, he just wanted in.
3:15 Speaker 03 I had no idea what they were doing, but whatever it is, I needed to get involved.
3:18 Speaker 01 He found a number, started calling sometimes 10, 15 times a day.
3:22 Speaker 02 This is your favorite band. You're like, I want to get on the road with the band.
3:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, I'll be a roadie. Whatever it takes. I just want to be with this band. So after, you know, a six to seven month knocking on the door, getting rejected, and pestering the hell out of everyone there, they gave me a job and I went crazy.
3:39 Speaker 02 Tony moved to Silicon Valley to work with his heroes. He was 21. His dream had come true. He was hired as a software engineer in the hardware team at General Magic to make the first smartphone, this thing that was going to change the world in 1991. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erica Barris.
4:00 Speaker 01 And I'm Emma Piesley. General Magic had everything: the vision, the talent, the money. But having everything might have been its undoing.
4:10 Speaker 02 Today on the show, what the push to create the first smartphone can teach us about how genius ideas come to life or don't.
4:32 Speaker 04 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. Support for this podcast and the following message come from E-Trade from Morgan Stanley. Simplify your finances and discover the convenience of investing and banking all in one place. Plus, get up to $1,500 when you open a brokerage account with a qualifying deposit today. Learn more at etrade.com/offer. Banking products and services are provided by Morgan Stanley Private Bank, National Association, Member FDIC. Terms and other fees apply. Investing involves risks. Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC, Member SIPC.
5:08 Speaker 00 This message comes from Babson College. The world needs entrepreneurial leaders, and you can become one at Babson College. Gain the skills to lead, motivate, and inspire through a specialized master's or MBA program with full-time, part-time, and online options. Turn ideas into action with a graduate program that caters to your professional needs and fits your lifestyle. Ranked number one in entrepreneurship by US News and World Report. Visit babson.edu/gradprograms.
5:38 Speaker 01 General Magic was creating basically an iPhone, but in the early 90s.
5:43 Speaker 02 At that time, I was carrying quarters around to use payphones. Computers were in like 15% of American homes. And yet, here was General Magic creating this ultimate portable interconnectivity device, where from your palm, you'd call people, send them faxes, you'd be able to buy things on it, book travel, navigate yourself around, play games.
6:05 Speaker 01 And none of this existed. Tony was part of the team that was building all of it.
6:11 Speaker 03 We were creating the entire operating system. We were creating all the chips. We were creating the devices. We were creating all the network servers and network server software. All the user interface, all the applications. We were creating-
6:27 Speaker 01 That is a lot.
6:28 Speaker 03 We were creating the touchscreen. We are creating everything-
6:32 Speaker 01 What?
6:32 Speaker 03 -in this little company. All of it at this company.
6:35 Speaker 01 Research, development, and engineering were all happening at once. And they had the talent to do it. General Magic was started by those rock stars. And they handpicked other budding rock stars to work there, too.
6:47 Speaker 02 It was so exciting. General Magic even hired an in-house film crew.
6:52 Speaker 05 Smile, you're on candid camera.
6:54 Speaker 02 That ended up making a documentary about the company. So we've seen footage of younger, long-haired Tony hunched over a small screen with a bunch of wires connected to a keyboard.
7:06 Speaker 06 I'm hooking up a demo so that we can see keyboards working with the device.
7:12 Speaker 01 He's building an early version of the USB.
7:15 Speaker 06 It's important. If you want to hook up disk drives and things of that nature, yeah. It's really important.
7:21 Speaker 01 Another employee, Megan Smith, was working on a touchscreen. You can figure out where you are, whether you're touching T or whether you're touching a caps lock.
7:28 Speaker 02 And how small will it finally be, do you think? Someday. Dick Tracy Rishwatch. And the money was there to fuel all these experiments. The company's investors included all these telecom and electronics giants like Apple and AT&T and Motorola and Sony and Panasonic, to name a few. They literally threw many, many millions of dollars at this Silicon Valley startup because they all wanted a piece of what could potentially be the next big thing. People from those companies would sometimes come visit.
8:01 Speaker 03 They were just like mesmerized, like, what is this you're building? They had no reference point because it was so different than anything they had seen. So they're like, whoever these people are, they're really geniuses. It's really cool. I don't understand it, but we'll just keep them going because it's clear they think they know what they're doing.
8:17 Speaker 02 The employees called themselves magicians. And there was even a bunny in the office.
8:21 Speaker 01 An actual bunny named Bowser because, of course, magicians need a rabbit. And the magicians worked endlessly.
8:28 Speaker 03 Just people programming whatever at all times of the day and night, doing things. And so, "Come over here and check this out." People would be sleeping there overnight. We were there so often, the place smelled. You know, people would hang up their dirty clothes on the cubicle walls.
8:44 Speaker 01 Oh, gosh.
8:45 Speaker 03 Ew. It was like a huge dorm room. Smelled like one.
8:49 Speaker 01 And their job was just to come up with ideas and try everything. And their bosses encouraged that.
8:56 Speaker 03 I'm like, hey, I'm thinking about this. Yeah, that's a good idea. Go work on that. I'm like, OK. And then I'd show them. They're like, well, maybe a little bit more of this, maybe more of that. And then go off and do it.
9:04 Speaker 02 And the funders, those giant companies, they also had ideas. Tony would travel as far as Japan to meet with Mitsubishi or Sony. And those companies wanted the general magic device to work with their systems. So Tony would come back to the office and they'd all keep tinkering.
9:22 Speaker 01 They had so much cash that in 1994, they traveled around the country by private jet to show off their product. And they got lots of press attention.
9:31 Speaker 05 Some say it's revolutionary. Others simply say it's magic.
9:36 Speaker 02 It was quite possibly the wildest, the money-est, the most creative company of its time. And Tony was right at the center of it.
9:46 Speaker 03 It was the biggest sandbox, playing with the smartest, coolest geeks. You see our founders skipping through the hall and singing.
9:54 Speaker 02 So this sounds like ideal, like this sounds like the dream.
9:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
9:57 Speaker 02 And, and, yeah, OK. So you're living the dream.
10:00 Speaker 03 Living the dream.
10:01 Speaker 02 Tony was having the time of his life. But a few years in, he started to think there might be problems. Like, they had not made anything yet. Nothing actually existed. And there was no real schedule, no real deadlines.
10:18 Speaker 03 When I joined, they were like, we're going to ship this product in the next year to year and a half.
10:23 Speaker 02 OK.
10:23 Speaker 03 Sounds great to me. Well, 12 months goes by. And I'm like, OK, we're shipping a product. I'm just trusting everyone. Like, I guess this is how you ship a product. I don't know.
10:34 Speaker 02 These guys should know.
10:34 Speaker 03 I'm 22. Yeah, these guys know they've done it before, so I'm just going to follow the lead. Then 18 months go by and I'm like, Wait a second. We're not even close to shipping anything. And then it was 24 months. And I'm like, what? Then it was, it was, you know, 32 months.
10:50 Speaker 01 12 months turned into four years, and they still hadn't actually finished the product they had set out to build. And at that point, there started to be pressure. Sony and Panasonic and Motorola and all those companies were like, hello, where is the product that we invested in?
11:06 Speaker 02 They had to get a product to market. So in fall of 1994, they finally did. And in true tech fashion, the company's leaders, the tech rock stars, held a big splashy show for its debut.
11:20 Speaker 05 So welcome to the first public demonstration of General Magic's technologies. I want to talk a little bit about.
11:26 Speaker 02 The device existed, the Sony Magic Link, powered by General Magic. It was like a mini tablet, but chunkier. You could choose apps from a touchscreen while holding it in your hands and almost fit it in your pocket. General Magic played a promotional video and all.
11:42 Speaker 05 It's a new way to reach just about anyone, anywhere, anytime. You're only a press a button away. Sony Magic Link. And what it takes off your desk is only matched by what it takes off your mind.
11:58 Speaker 01 The future was here. The magicians, they had delivered. You could send a fax, track your checks, read a book, play a game like Solitaire.
12:06 Speaker 02 All for the price of $800 in 1990s dollars. And there was just one minor issue.
12:15 Speaker 03 This Magic Link ended up being the biggest flop in Silicon Valley for a decade or more.
12:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, they ran into a very econ 101 problem.
12:25 Speaker 03 When customers press and everybody looked at it, and they go, what is this?
12:30 Speaker 02 It is not enough to have supply. You gotta have demand.
12:34 Speaker 01 Less than 3,000 Magic Links were sold, mostly to family and friends of the magicians. And within a few years, this company that was going to change the world became a distant Silicon Valley memory.
12:47 Speaker 02 How did that happen? How did this visionary idea become a nothing product?
12:53 Speaker 02 Well, that whole story you just heard, that whole story was the reason it became a nothing product.
13:00 Speaker 01 At least, that's the theory of one guy who spent years researching what happens when people have too much freedom.
13:06 Speaker 05 They were a spectacular failure because they had too much. They had too much talent. They had too much time. They had too many resources. They could do anything. And so they did do anything.
13:17 Speaker 02 David Epstein is a journalist, and he says, years later, when he got his hands on the thing General Magic built, this iPhone before the iPhone was actually pretty fun.
13:27 Speaker 05 I mean, I played with a Sony Magic Link, and it's definitely cool. But part of the problem was, there was so much that it was incoherent. I mean, it shipped with a 200-page manual. Can you imagine getting a device like--
13:41 Speaker 02 A phone book, essentially. We first learned about General Magic from a book David wrote called Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. David studied what made Dr. Seuss, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Isabella Yende, and NASA, and Pixar, successful. And his big theory that cuts across all of them is that to be creative, to be successfully creative, you need limits.
14:05 Speaker 01 David says what happened at General Magic is a great example of why people need constraints. And you can basically distill his takeaways into three lessons. Number one, they didn't have a clear customer in mind. They didn't have a problem they were fixing or a need they were filling. Basically, nothing to guide what they were making.
14:23 Speaker 02 They did have an imaginary customer in their heads named Joe Sixpack. Basically, a guy lazing on his couch with a beer, watching TV. What they didn't think about was what problem they were solving for him. Like, he didn't need email in his pocket, because odds are Joe Sixpack didn't even own a computer.
14:43 Speaker 05 Is Joe Sixpack gonna read a 200-page manual? I mean, I've read a lot of the manual.
14:49 Speaker 05 It's elaborate.
14:50 Speaker 01 They did test the magic link on a few real people, like Tony's mom.
14:54 Speaker 03 My mom was a user tester. So my mom came to visit me, my mom sat in user testing. She's like, I don't get it. What is this thing for? It didn't work. Was it me? Did I do something wrong? I don't understand why I even need this thing. I was like, wait a second.
15:08 Speaker 02 Moms always know.
15:10 Speaker 03 And I was like, yeah. Who is going to purchase this? What problems are we going to solve for them with this? Why are they going to want to put their money down?
15:18 Speaker 02 Tony and David agree. Sure, the technology may have been ahead of its time. But David says a big part of what tripped them up was not having a clear picture of their customer.
15:28 Speaker 05 It was a problem because it didn't tell them what to do and, and, and more importantly, what not to do. So if they had a very specific customer in mind and they identified some real customer problems, they would have had priorities.
15:40 Speaker 01 And the fact that they weren't listening to what customers needed was compounded by who they were listening to. That's the second problem David identified. Too much money. See, General Magic's idea was so revolutionary that it attracted the attention and money of a lot of powerful partners. You know, those companies Tony was flying to visit like Sony, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Philips, AT&T.
16:04 Speaker 05 They, they covered so much of the communications technology world that whenever they had meetings, the meetings had to begin with an antitrust lawyer listing all of the topics that they were not allowed to discuss. So they wouldn't run afoul of antitrust regulations.
16:20 Speaker 02 But what they were talking about was this product that they were locked into because they had so much investment from all these companies.
16:29 Speaker 05 General Magic probably would have done better to stay really, really, really small. It might seem inefficient to stay small for years, but that's when you're laying the groundwork and setting the boundaries and not letting the costs explode.
16:40 Speaker 02 Like they hired way more people after Tony.
16:44 Speaker 01 There's this principle called Brooks's Law. It's named after Fred Brooks, who was a computer scientist. He led the development of the operating systems that NASA used in the space program. And Brooks's Law essentially says that when you add people to a project that's already late, it's going to be even more late.
17:01 Speaker 05 They spent a lot on people. They spent on offices. They had a gigantic bush in the shape of a bunny, even when they were already having problems.
17:11 Speaker 01 The essentials.
17:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, the essentials.
17:13 Speaker 02 And they spent a lot on materials. General Magic was pretty much building everything from scratch. Like, at one point, Tony reinvented the technology that connected the remote to a TV, even though that had been around for many years.
17:28 Speaker 05 They were never forced to look around at the technological environment and say, what's realistic and what can we borrow and build on?
17:33 Speaker 02 I mean, what was the problem with all that?
17:35 Speaker 05 The problem was, because they had time, they had money, they really ended up kind of building for each other, almost the engineers sort of trying to impress one another.
17:45 Speaker 01 Which brings us to the third and final big lesson General Magic's failure teaches us. It's hard to make magic when you have no bosses and no deadlines.
17:54 Speaker 05 Everyone who had a good idea, they did it. Like, they very rarely told someone, no, they couldn't do something.
18:01 Speaker 02 David says what they had were leaders.
18:05 Speaker 01 What was the difference between a leader and a manager to them?
18:09 Speaker 05 The leaders were legendary programmers. And so I think it was, we're going to listen to these people who are legends, are our icons, but those people were not equipped to be giving them deadlines and help clarifying what they should be doing and priorities and all those things either. They were off doing things that they thought were cool, but that weren't the priorities also.
18:29 Speaker 01 Games, emojis, sound effects.
18:32 Speaker 05 Can I give an example of what I think was an emblematic case inside of General Magic? The engineer Steve Perlman, who was charged with creating a calendar function. And Steve wrote the calendar function to go from 1904 to 2096. And he checks it in and thinks he's done.
18:50 Speaker 02 Cool.
18:51 Speaker 05 And then one of the leaders of the company comes to him and says, Steve, somebody might write historical apps. You have to write this calendar to go back farther. So he opens it up and writes it to go from year one to the future. Okay, checks it in, thinks he's done. Then another team comes to him and says, Steve, why are you tying it into this arbitrary religious context? You should make it go back to the beginning of astronomical time. Right? So that's how Steve Pearlman ends up opening up the calendar function and writing it to go from the Big Bang to the future. And
19:21 Speaker 02 On a device that maybe doesn't yet exist.
19:23 Speaker 05 And as he said, if he had stuck with 1904 to 2096, it would have been four lines of code and he could have moved on. But because they could do anything, they did, and everything always got bigger.
19:35 Speaker 02 Meanwhile, the magic link, what was supposed to be the first smartphone, never delivered on its most basic promise.
19:44 Speaker 05 This thing that was going to be a phone and a computer and more, didn't end up having a phone.
19:50 Speaker 02 And we can look at the magicians and go, wow, what a disaster. What a wreck.
19:56 Speaker 05 Too bad.
19:57 Speaker 02 And move on. Or we can look at general magic the way Tony Fadell did, as a blueprint for what not to do.
20:06 Speaker 01 After he left the company, Tony applied what he learned to future projects, like big projects, including the real iPhone. And in the most iconic features of those products he helped create, you can actually see and touch the lessons Tony learned. That's after the break.
20:31 Speaker 04 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. Support for this podcast and the following message come from E-Trade from Morgan Stanley. Discover a wide range of investing choices and banking solutions all in one place. Plus, get up to $1,500 when you open a brokerage account with a qualifying deposit today. Learn more at etrade.com/offer. Banking products and services are provided by Morgan Stanley Private Bank, National Association Member FDIC. Terms and other fees apply. Investing involves risks. Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC, Member SIPC.
21:06 Speaker 00 This message comes from Babson College. The world needs entrepreneurial leaders, and you can become one at Babson College. Gain the skills to lead, motivate, and inspire through a specialized master's or MBA program with full-time, part-time, and online options. Turn ideas into action with a graduate program that caters to your professional needs and fits your lifestyle. Ranked number one in entrepreneurship by US News and World Report. Visit babson.edu/gradprograms.
21:35 Speaker 04 This message comes from Rula. World Mental Health Day takes place in October, making it a great time to take that next step in getting support if you need it. Rula makes accessing quality mental health care affordable, with sessions costing an average of $15 with insurance. So turn off the talk track that's keeping you from progress, and head to rula.com. That's R U L A dot com to find a therapist the easy way.
22:02 Speaker 01 In the years after leaving General Magic, Tony did a lot of reflecting about what went wrong. What made this company that had all the best people, all the money, all the possibility fail? He ended up writing his own book. It's called Build, where he talks about his time at General Magic and all the lessons he took away. He kind of turned what happened there into a list of everything not to do.
22:24 Speaker 02 A few years after leaving General Magic, he was hired by Apple to work on this idea he had: a portable MP3 player. When he had a prototype, Steve Jobs saw it, and he was like,
22:37 Speaker 03 Oh, this is, this is great. I really want to do this thing. Now, you have to remember, this is March 2001. Apple was $500 million in debt. Steve goes, I'm greenlighting this project. We need to do this.
22:51 Speaker 01 But they were gonna have to do it on a budget. And Tony says that ended up working in his favor.
22:57 Speaker 03 You can have too much money. You absolutely, because you don't have constraints to make you think hard. When, when you know the clock is ticking, and the bank account is draining, and you have to really understand what it is you're building, it focuses people.
23:11 Speaker 02 Right at the outset, Tony says, he and his team knew what they were making and had a very specific customer in mind who wanted a very specific thing.
23:22 Speaker 03 I want to take all my digital music with me everywhere I go. I want to take 1,000 songs in my pocket. We knew exactly what that product needed to do.
23:31 Speaker 01 At Apple, with a limited budget and a clear scope, Tony says he looked for ways to build on what was already out there.
23:37 Speaker 02 You didn't completely build it from scratch.
23:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, I went to all the different big companies and small companies around the world doing MP3 to find the right processors, ground level software necessary, the right batteries, the screens and everything else. So he's like, what are the Lego blocks I can get? Stick them together, add a bunch of software, add a bunch of things to make this thing work.
24:00 Speaker 01 Everything from the interface software to the chips, to the batteries, to the hard drive, even the design. In building the iPod, Tony thought of this Danish cordless phone he admired. So?
24:10 Speaker 03 I ran right to Bang and Olufsen, bought a couple, tore them apart and go, oh yeah, yeah, that's just the Opto coupler, da, da, da, da, da. Like, I can just do that, no problem.
24:19 Speaker 02 The result was the classic iPod design with the wheel and the button in the middle. The lesson? Literally, you do not have to reinvent the rotary wheel.
24:28 Speaker 01 And to make it, Tony gave his team deadlines. He was not just a leader, he was a manager. So day one, he told them.
24:36 Speaker 03 We're going to need to do this by Christmas, which was less than eight months away. Why? Because Sony was the number one in every audio category. I knew how Sony worked, they're going to come out with something this Christmas. And if it does, that means Apple is going to be cancelling this project. I was like, this is going to have to work. We must ship by Christmas.
25:00 Speaker 01 And he says that big deadline wasn't the only constraint. He set up lots of little deadlines. Tony and Apple got the iPod done and debuted it in months.
25:08 Speaker 03 When we launched the product to the world at Apple, literally two hours after that launch was done, Steve called me in and said, let's talk about the next one.
25:18 Speaker 02 Wow.
25:18 Speaker 03 Literally, we had not even shipped the one. He's like, I want to talk to you about the next one.
25:22 Speaker 01 Iteration. They kept tinkering with the iPod, kept releasing new models. Tony worked on 18 of them.
25:29 Speaker 03 General Magic, we only got one, we only got one shot because it took so long, so many years. We had no more money and so we never had the chance to make another go at it.
25:39 Speaker 02 At Apple, all those iterations of the iPod eventually led to the iPhone. And Tony worked on that, too. The first three iterations. Now we're up to the iPhone 17s.
25:50 Speaker 01 After the iPhone, Tony went on to invent the Nest thermostat. And that was also wildly successful and kicked off an Internet of Things revolution.
25:58 Speaker 02 A lot of Tony's colleagues at General Magic emerged out of that chaos to do big, techie things. Some of them were early employees at Google. One of them invented the Android phone. Another one created eBay. One founded LinkedIn.
26:13 Speaker 01 David Epstein says, when he first started researching for his book, the thing that most surprised him was how the exact thing we imagine will get in the way of creative success can be the thing that makes it possible.
26:26 Speaker 02 Isn't it like what everyone says they want is no oversight, no deadlines? Like, we could be so free and so creative if we could just, you know, fling sand into the air and make something out of nothing.
26:34 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's interesting because in any way you cut it, in the abstract, people say they want more freedom. And in reality, it's, it's often not good for them. Our preference for complete freedom in the abstract is often a mismatch with what actually gets the best work from us and makes us the most satisfied.
26:53 Speaker 02 In David's book, he writes about Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. One of his most famous books came from a simple constraint. An executive at the publishing company told him he could use no more than 225 words from a vocabulary list for first graders to help them learn to read. Dr. Seuss picked the first two that rhymed and created the title for The Cat in the Hat.
27:17 Speaker 01 And this concept is a hallmark of his work. This constraints idea has been called the green eggs and ham hypothesis. That book has just 50 words. And the idea is when you have limits like that, you can do work that's more creative.
27:29 Speaker 05 Constraints force you to do something difficult. Right? You have to give up something, or you have to find a way to do something that you haven't done it before. And that's difficult. But it's what psychologists call a desirable difficulty, because you get the best out of yourself.
27:47 Speaker 01 We asked David, if constraints are so desirable, why do we humans so often think we want unbridled freedom?
27:55 Speaker 02 The idea of like, you know, ideas will come to you if you just kind of run through a big field or whatever and just have all the money pouring down on you. Like, why does that idea persist?
28:03 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's a good question.
28:05 Speaker 02 David says there's lots of ways to answer it, but there's one that really caught me. Because it's about how we're wired to want more.
28:13 Speaker 05 Humans have something called additive bias. This is a cognitive bias that's probably a result of the fact that for most of human history, the main problem was having too little, not too much. And so it's likely that we are not well-equipped to even understand when to intuitively say like, oh, this is too much and to cut back.
28:33 Speaker 02 You sort of have to force yourself to impose constraints in your life.
28:37 Speaker 01 No gods, no masters, but maybe deadlines.
28:44 Speaker 02 Listeners, we need your help. We want to know how the economy is working for you. Does it feel like things cost more these days? Groceries, gas, going on dates? And if it does feel that way, have you found any great life hacks that are maybe helping you get by? We want to hear from all of you. Send us an email at [email protected] and maybe we'll call some of you up to chat.
29:07 Speaker 01 This episode of Planet Money was produced by me with help from Sam Yellowhorse Kessler and James Sneed. It was edited by Mary Ann McCune and fact-checked by Charlotte Isidore. It was engineered by Jimmy Keeley with help from Timofo Fredo. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
29:21 Speaker 02 Big thank you to Sarah Kurish and Matt Maugh. Their documentary, parts of which you heard in this show, is called General Magic. Tony's book is called Build, and David's is called Inside the Box. Links to the documentary and the books can be found in our show notes. I'm Erica Barris.
29:38 Speaker 01 I'm Emma Peaslee. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
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