Why Boundaries Make Us More Creative with David Epstein

- Today is April 16th, 2026. And before introducing today's guest, I wanna 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 King Fishers 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 EconTalk. 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 EconTalk.

- It's wonderful to be back.

- What's the idea of inside the box and the power of constraints?

- 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, a, 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, to make us more satisfied in our lives, more meaningful.

- Now, 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 Mendela, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, how did he discover according to myth, the periodic table?

- Yeah, Mendeleev. So Siberian genius in the winter, it's tough one in the winter of 1869, suppose he's looking, he has this feeling that there's an order to the element, all of the chemical building blocks of the universe. And he's, he, but he can't find it. And he stays up for three days where he doesn't sleep. And finally he can't stay awake any longer and he, 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 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. And it's been celebrated by scientific societies, Matthew Walker and his blockbuster, why We Sleep Held it up as the, the ultimate proof that our dreaming brains loose from the bounds of reality can, can accomplish what our waking brains can't. The mattress company, Casper used it in their marketing. I I learned about it in college chemistry. So that, that's how I was attuned to it.

- Well, I was, I I was excited to read it 'cause it, it joins my two other favorite great things that came to me while I slept historical moments. One is Ridge, although it was probably a drug induced stupor, but we're not sure, but, but he supposedly heard the, in his head, the opening lines of his masterpiece, KLA K which sort of stops in mid poem because I think a sale, a traveling salesman knocked on the door and and interrupted his reverie. And then there's Ramen NuGen, who as an episode with David Beis, we talked about how extraordinary things he claimed came to him in dreams, perhaps divine. He, we don't know, but he, 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 thinking about things that we're trying to think about. Yep. When we're, when we're doing something else. But evidently the mendela have stories a little bit more complicated.

- That's right. And 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?

- Spoiler alert for people who wanna 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

- Chance and that don't spoil too much anyway, but yeah, it's not that. So the real story is Mendel have 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. And in doing that, that's where he started thinking of elements in, in terms of families and, 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, he called the gaps, he, so he labeled these gaps like cca, aluminum and cca, Silicon CCA is the Sanskrit word for one, meaning one spot away from, from this other element. And when other chemists would, would find some element and report that they found some element, and it would be similar to what he predicted, 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, 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, to, to launch us into productive exploration.

- And you reproduce say a page of his notes which show that didn't quite flow imperfectly from his brain. He, there was lots of crossouts and additions lots and he's trying to figure it out. Yeah, KLA K by the way, I think he claimed he just wrote it down af as he heard it. But anyway, you know, Russ,

- Speaking of his dreams though, there, 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 gr 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, 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,

- But could be true. And, and that's right. I wanna talk, actually, I wanna 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 Clusterman 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 are wrong? You can look that one up. I'm not gonna correct it 'cause I'm gonna give both. He makes the observation that many, many great things are singletons, meaning we know about one. So his exam, one of his examples is, can you name anybody who wrote for music for marching bands? And I could name one person, John Phillips Susa. Okay. Turns out he's not the only guy, he's the only guy that posterity is remembered. If you wanna dig in, you could find many, many other composers. But there's sort of one that gets remembered. And this is a, a haunting thing in your, you spend a number of pages talking about how many 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 Leni had discovered the calculus and, and in apparently independently that Wallace and Darwin both came up with evolution. But your point, which I think is profound and we'll, I'll tie it back in to the clo clusterman point, which is Darwin didn't just figure this out, like in the equivalent of in a dream, this this crazy new idea. These ideas were bubbling up constantly in the intellectual life of, of, of scientists. Talk about that for a little bit. And you can talk about Maltus too, if you want. 'cause it's fascinating.

- No, I mean, absolutely. And 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, or one team was typically credited with world changing scientific breakthroughs, that 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 is not always as dramatic as like Elisha Gray and, and Alexander Graham Bell filing their patent on the same day, although were like a half dozen other people that were there about the same time. But it's, it's, it's usually quite close. 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 a 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, he had about 240 pen pals that he would pepper with all sorts of questions. And, 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 and why do, why are we finding fossils of species that we don't see around us? Why do the bones in a, in a wing of a bat in the flipper of a whale and the arm of a human have so much in common? So he was, he was really collecting, you know, he 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 you'd appreciate this one. He was, 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, out of competitive pressures. And it was really kind of synthesizing all those things into a coherent view that, that gave him this frame to, to think through. And of course he wasn't the only one. You mentioned Malus, where he was, he was reading the Reverend Malus on population and Malthus's argument was that, and this had a lot to do with the British poor laws of the day. Malus 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 will not. And

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

- He absolutely did. He missed some things that were, 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, for a lot of other people that leads them to think differently. So it was, it was both Wallace and Darwin Red Mouth, this the same essay and it crystallized something for them where they then essentially came up with the exact same theory. So it, so I think it's one of the points I was trying to make was that these, 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 at the same time. Almost always.

- Yeah. So it's a, you know, like you say, and I, you know, it's a, it's a powerful metaphor. These guys were actually thinking inside the box, not so much outside the box and synthesizing what was in the box inside the box already, I have to add the, the quote from Darwin that you, that you quote, he says, I happen to read for amusement mouth song population. I dunno if that sentence has ever come out of anyone's mouth or pen since then. But I, that was very, that was delightful.

- I that found what you do in your, your leisure time at reading mouth something

- Exactly. Look amusement so amusing. He's actually, it's, it's doubly funny. It mostly would say it's not his, his pro style's not so delightful. And the second thing they'd say is his 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, the breeders, you know, we had Matt Ridley talking and I think you allude to it, the, you know, the Wright brothers were not aerospace engineers. There weren't any, they were bicycle people. And, and so there, there's all this panoply of people of different skills in intellectual interests. There was less, much less specialization in, 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

- Of the 19th century

- Who writes about war and theories of war strategy?

- Kitz - Ah, excellent. K Kitz. We did not prep this. If you had failed that test, David, I would've cut this part out anyway.

- Wait, wait. Would you ever really?

- Yeah, of course I would need to like, 'cause you don't know who k Clausewitz is. It's humiliating anyway. Seriously, seriously. There's another 19th century theorist named Germanie I'd never heard of, but I was reading a book about Kitz and it turns out Jamy had some of the same ideas. And even Adam Smith in my field who's vaunted as this, the, the, the father of economics or the grandfather of economics. There are 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 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 'cause he had a tremendous marketing enterprise. No, he, no he didn't do that. But partly 'cause he is a very good writer.

- Very, I - Was gonna say he writer, he said it very well. And partly 'cause 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 that creativity is this, this fountain that only one genius has access to. Unfortunately they came along. Yeah. So that is a mistake. It's not what the way the world works.

- 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 the history books. Yeah.

- Newton,

- Yeah. I mean zealous, right? Not to like do a huge spoiler in the book, but you mentioned the periodic table story comes back, it recurs throughout the book. And Mendel of, ah, whatever, it's not a spoiler. I just, it's still interesting. The Mendel of is the person credit in the history books. And, and there, there's some reasons why he made, again, he made these bold predictions that others didn't make. And he was, his, 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, Mendel's 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

- Yeah,

- Like one of them was called the, the diagram was a, what the creator called a teluric 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 context. Not, not that Mendel and these other, these other people that actually most of 'em were not chemists, were not geniuses. They were, but there were these other forces of the time, including very importantly an an Italian guy who said, you're all measuring the weights of elements differently. Here's how we're gonna do it from now on and hand it out a pamphlet, which allowed work to sort of communicate across space because people could, could reference one another's work that really set people up and to find the problem for them. And like one of the examples I love from that, that chapter involved the mathematician David Hilbert, arguably most influential the 20th century. And one of the things he's most remembered for, and a 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, he looked around at what was going on and really well-defined problems. And that made a whole bunch of other people look like geniuses because it kind of focused their energies.

- So cool. I, I was telling, 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 in your book that has a little footnote. Oh, not really the first person to think this way.

- Yeah, yeah. In 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, this paper I think by Lorenz. And he's basically saying, was it, was it Loren that the paper was,

- I think it was, yeah, I think it was.

- 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 I hadn't read that yet, basically.

- Yeah. So, and that footnote is kind of lost to history except for listeners to be come talk and readers of your book. So it's it's poor runs. Yeah, yeah,

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

- 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, I think 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, well, let's start with your injury 'cause it's, I think it's a very common phenomenon and tell us about it.

- Yeah, I appreciate asking about that. Not that. Yeah, nobody's asked me about that as yet. So the 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, 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. 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 an 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 'cause I was nauseous and I did it. And they said, put your hand up. And I, 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, we'll never know what happened. The, the doctors said that if there hadn't been witnesses, they would've thought one of my parents had twisted my arm until it broke. But he said there maybe there was a bone weakness or an air pocket or something like that, but we'll never know because once it broke, the evidence is gone. And I've only seen this happen one other time. And it was a major league pitcher and he had to have his arm amputated. 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 my shoulder and arms strap 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, 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 in a worksheet and they're blanks and you have to follow well enough to fill in the blanks with the word that they said. And I was okay at this. But with the broken arm, I couldn't write fast enough 'cause 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 outta the park, doing better than I'd ever done before. And I started using mnemonics for everything in school. You know, 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. And he was also an athlete.

- And

- So

- You figured it out before it's another, it's a, it's a priority dispute.

- That's right. The but it turns out people have known this for a long time. You know, people, 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 onic 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, 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, and oftentimes it's better. It, 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've thought of. I ended up becoming a college runner and a university record holder and all these things. And so it was 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've explored in the past. And I think that's kinda a theme, you know, in, 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, is to look at limits as, as opportunities to clarify your priorities and, and launch productive exploration. And, and that's what happened in, in, in my personal life.

- Now there's a paradox there, of course, which is, and this is true of everybody, I shouldn't say that this is selection bias. We, 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 have a benefit. It's not just, well, it's not as bad as it seemed. The outcome is actually quite, quite extraordinary in a positive way. And yet at the same time, we wouldn't suggest to people to break your arm Yes. 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.

- Yeah, it really reminds me of maybe, you know, this study, the, 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've optimized the path, and yet a significant portion of commuters found a different path and stuck with it and saved like 1500 commuting hours per day, just a two or three day strike that, that led people to experiment with different, different paths. So I think arguably we don't experiment enough and we tend to follow what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance, where we do the convenient thing or the thing we've al we've always done. Because as a 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.

- Yeah, I hadn't thought about it until just now, but it, it's really an example of unintended consequences. E even when it's a random event, most of the time in economics, when we talk about unintended consequences that are negative, you know, you, you think the minimum wage is good, but oh, it puts people outta work or whatever's the, you put on price controls and then that, that, that leads to scarcity in the case of a different kind of a price ceiling instead of a price floor. And we always think of them 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 wanna 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 at the moment you don't wanna hear that. So it's, it's a perspective, as you say, it's a reframing that could be useful for us. Sometimes

- You, you're ma you're also making me think about, because I should say the, 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 it, you know, it was painful, it was annoying. I had to sleep sitting up. And a few days in I found I was so happy that I was wondering what was going on. Even I was, you know, a little bit of pain, sleeping was 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, 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. Yeah, amazing if I tried to multitask. And I ended up writing that into one of the chapters about attention and focus because it was so transformative for me in realizing how stressful multitasking was. And I hadn't even really been thinking about it that, not that I would wish stitches in the head on anyone, but again, it was kind of revelatory for me in en forcing me to do one thing at a time and realizing how great that was both my productivity, but also just my, my, my sense of wellbeing at

- The end of the

- Day.

- So I mentioned there were, you know, two things from your own life that, and there's more than two, but the two I wanted to talk about, so one of 'em was just your, your sports injury, which changed the arc of your career or even not just your, your leisure and your college extracurriculars, but the other is that you, 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 wanna mention, I, 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 mood swing deleted it again. It'll, it'll, I'll put it back on in a few years, but most of the time we, we have trouble constraining ourselves that way. So talk about what you did in ma in making yourself both more productive and also I think a little more sane.

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

- Either one. Both. Okay.

- Whatever. Okay. Okay. Of both. So, so lemme talk about the book specifically. One of the reasons I took on this topic, I I, I guess the older I get, the more I realize or the more honest I'm about maybe how much me search is in my projects. And it's pretty clear in this one because 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. And for my first book, I took a trip to Arctic Sweden that I had to cut, you know, one, once I became a parent, you don't wanna be taking trips. It was an interesting trip, but you don't wanna be taking trips to Arctic Sweden that aren't going in the, 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, I did my reporting because I don't, I don't write 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, this kind of came at the suggestion of one of the people I interviewed in the book with the lead designer of the, 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 you, this is, this is the one page outline. Wow. You can see I tried to defeat my own system by writing as small as possible. And

- 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.

- 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 feature, anything I thought was interesting, I'm trying to shoehorn it in there. Sure. And that doesn't necessarily serve the reader like you want to prioritize as the writer. It also led me to, you know, very much in the vein of mendeleev w with that small space, it, it led me to come up with this structure I've never used before where I tell different slices 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, in my previous books. 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, in the book, the, the Danish researcher Bent Flu beer who studies projects would call the, the good, the good sequence for a project, for projects that are usually in hi in his case, that come in on time and on budget and deliver what they promised is think slow, act fast. Meaning you, 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. The opposite is where you is, 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 'cause 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 and I just sat for two weeks because I didn't know what to do. Like, does anybody turn in books early? So I would never not do it this way again, if, 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.

- Yeah.

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

- But you also changed some habits, so talk about those Oh yeah, like email and,

- 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, 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, 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. And by 2022 is 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 the, 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, or, or other people, and you say, well, today I'm gonna 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 that wants to keep a certain rhythm. And so if you want to be able to, 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 zar effect, which is this idea that an open task takes up a little brain space and my email inbox is always that, right? 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 check 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, and not toggling all day long because that feels efficient, but it actually isn't. And it's really stress inducing. So if you can block some of your work and, and start not in your inbox, that's probably helpful. So I, 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.

- 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 I 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, the origin of it, the number, as an economist, I would be thinking about the divisional labor and all the people who contributed to it and so on. And it's so exhilarating when you're doing it. And then I go back home after the treat's over and, and I'm thinking, oh, I'm gonna do that every day for now on. And I can't, I compulsively look at sports on my, on my computer while I eat or read or multitask. Why 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?

- 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. So people end up Oh, for sure. Eating

- More. Oh yeah, I bet that's true.

- I I think there are a few reasons. I think one is, again, as, as Daniel Willingham said, our brains are, are meant to prevent us from thinking when possible. So we do the convenient thing. And a lot of that is pretty, is is passive, right? We're we're scrolling or whatever it is. Whereas what you're talking about being mindful, I mean that, that, that takes some work. It, it feels like you're not doing certain things, but it actually takes anyone who's tried to meditate

- Yeah. 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 again, we've, we've, as Gloria Marks research shows, we've been trained now way more for the distraction always doing something side. So you go to a retreat and, and you work in 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, 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.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- 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 a, in into tension traps that have been engineered to, to make you behave in a certain way.

- Yeah, no comment. There's so much to say there, but I'm gonna move on. I'd love to, but another time I wanna, I wanna talk about Isabelle Allende, the writer and the role of a particular date in her life. And I don't remember if you 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, about Isabella Day's writing habit.

- Yeah, so she's one of the great living writers presidential medal freedom winner and a recipient winner, it's kind of weird to call it presidential freedom, like, like as if it's the Olympics. And she started writing in midlife just before she turned 40 when, so her, her father's cousin was Salvador Ende, who, 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. 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 thi this would've been, by the way, January 8th, I think it was 1981, that I'm gonna 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 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 and keeps writing and it 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. 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, and before she was this huge international celebrity, sometimes this was in a clothing 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 in since then, so in the last 45 years, she only had one publishing break. So this, this ritual has led to about a bestseller about every 18 months for the last 40 years. So she sold 80 million books. 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 ease and that they didn't know she 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 is sap to me. And she skips one January 8th for the first time ever and said, I'm done. No more writing. 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, 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. So, and, 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, 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. 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, but some of them do. Profiles of her will make it sound like she's a mystical medium, just, just, she just sits back and characters speak through her. But in fact, the story of her creation, one of incredible boundaries and discipline that she put in place. So it was amazing to see as a writer, even even down to her workday, she, 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. But, but I just thought it was so interesting to see someone whose, whose public legend is, is again of this creative lightning strikes, but really it's driven by this incredible discipline that, that and structure that she's, and ritual that she's set up for herself.

- So the idea of lighting that candle seems kind of silly. It does. It, it, how could, is that gonna help her write better? Is it, I mean, come on. And yet human beings, I mean, I think one of the great lessons of this book is that, is that Daniel William quote about what your brain is meant to do. A lot of what we do is about escaping our brain in whatever that means. That's a meaningless statement. But I think, you know what I, what I mean, and the, you know, 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, he was a high, I think a high school teacher for a while, and he's realize he sells a story and he realizes he can be a writer. He gets up every morning and I think he, I can't remember if he listens to music or not, but I've done that. I do that sometimes and then I, 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 I, unfortunately, I'm not Stephen King or maybe fortunately, but he writes a thousand words and when he is 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, it 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 dunno when it was, he said, yeah, now I have to work till like one o'clock, but in the old days I worked from like six to 10 or whatever. 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 a, 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.

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

- Mean, I mean, some days you don't feel it, you're not feeling it. So get up, go

- That, that, that's why it's important. Sit in the chair. I mean, when I, when I think back to when I was a competitive runner and I was running the 800 meters, there's a lot of days you don't feel like doing the training Yeah. 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 wanna do it. That 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, it's all those other days that you also need, you know, I think this is why if you've ever read the novelist Haruki Murakami another international phenomenon

- And

- 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

- Yeah.

- He, he wrote about in his his book about creativity that it's really this kind of, that, that a lot of their 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 gonna bring them back. So I think that discipline and structure actually al almost that boring repetitiveness allows you to, to flourish and expand your thinking within that

- You have a chapter called Rules of the Game. I think that's the tame of the title, but certainly the subject name of the chapter. You know, I 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, a self-help book in the kind where you're at the end of every chapter, here's four things you can do, which I appreciate, by the way. I, I'm glad you didn't do that. 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, and he was, he was criticizing Stein. And of course life is a game in a certain sense. And games without rules are no fun. Right, right. If you play Scrabble Yeah. No

- Meaning,

- And, and Right. If you play Scrabble in 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 and, and games.

- I will, but I wanna say two things to your comment. First one of which is that that Rules of the Game chapter influenced by you, some of the things that I've heard on econ talk in, in chapter, oh, there's some economics in that chapter. Yeah. So I just wanted thank you for that. Oh, thank you. And, and I appreciate your compliment about not doing bullet points at the end of chapters because, you know, I, I think of like, I 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 switch Swiss watch of a book. And so I don't want those kinds of breaks. Like I want my narrative to be narrative. Yeah. But suits. So as you mentioned in in Vichtenstein, he was, one of the things Vichtenstein famously said was, language is fuzzy. And, and one of his famous, maybe his most famous example, was that there's no core essence of what we call a game. So there, 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 belief and suit said, no, I think that's wrong. I think there is a, a core quality of all games. And it's an attitude. And he called it the looser 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, that voluntary acceptance of these, 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, things like that much more efficiently

- Lower the, lower the basket than I could dunk. Wow. Wow. It doesn't have to be 10 feet high. Come on. It just makes it harder. Yeah. Make the hole bigger in golf. Come on.

- 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, so he wrote it in this brilliant book called The Grasshopper, which is a parable where he takes Asaps grasshopper who plays all summer long. And so unlike the ants who are hoarding food, he's gonna die during the winter 'cause he's been playing instead of hoarding food. But in this case, in Suits case, the Grasshopper defends his choice and said, I was doing something that made my life meaningful by pushing against these, 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 in something with other people. And, 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, that this voluntary acceptance of obstacles, you do it because it can take you places that you never could have otherwise envisioned.

- So I, it reminds me of Michael Easter. He is got this idea, it's, it's a Japanese word of oggi, 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, and meaningful. You know, at, at sports team, sports are about a group of people getting together. What was the phrase from suits again? The voluntary, voluntary

- Attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

- Right? And so mean silly, you're gonna march the ball down the field in the football. I mean, it's nothing really at stake. I mean, it's just to pretend, it's all pretend, it's all you've made up your own meaning a goal that the entertainment is, 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, you know, the scene in Raiders of Lost Ark where the, the guy takes out the big sword and Harrison Ford just shoots him. Right? It's like, but that's cheating. That's, 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. Yeah. But, 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'll check for a minute about General Magic 'cause I'd never heard of it, or if I hadn't forgotten, I'm sure I've heard it and 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?

- So this company, general Magic, in the early, really starting in the late eighties, but in the early nineties were they saw the future of the communications technology. So they were essentially trying to build the iPhone starting in 1990, essentially, when only 15% of American household even had computers. And they had so much talent. There was 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 Mark Pert, absolute visionary. I read his PhD dissertation for Stanford 1976, in which he coins the term information economy. And it is eerie to read. I mean, he saw what was, 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, is so incredible that Goldman 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, they've sold six months of the product debuting, which is again, a personal communicator. They've sold 3000 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? Pratt later said that he raised so much money so quickly, they had a 17 partner alliance. Like they, 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. But that also made it incredibly hard to make decisions because there were so many people involved. And Pratt said he, 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 is 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 Six pack. 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 is charged with creating a calendar function for the device.

- It's a great story.

- 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. 'cause they, 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. So he brings it back, he makes it, he goes back to year one instead, fine checks it in done. Then its 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've been four lines of code. And instead it dragged on for months, which was a huge waste of time. And that was how things had 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. We have a saying in venture, more startups dive indigestion than starvation. Too much, not too little. The the good thing about general magic though, I would 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-founder create, you know, Android, iPod, iPhone, nest to lead things like Google Maps, safari, all, all these other things. They, LinkedIn, eBay was actually incubated by a, a low level service engineer at General Magic who offered it to General Magic. He was actually obligated to offer his ip. And they were like, no, no, we, we got a much bigger thing going on. It was called Auction Web at the time. So he, 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 General Magic called Graffiti, where strokes with a stylist could be turned into writing. And that guy said, when it was clear, general Magic was gonna fail, he said he identified a clear customer problem. Busy professionals wanted to sync their contacts and calendar and take it on the go. I'm gonna do just contacts calendar and memo pad period. And General Magic like laughed at him and said, you can't compete with us. 'cause that was three of the bajillion things they were doing. And Palm Pilot became a hit. So 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. But again, it did produce these incredible people like Tony Fidel, who's an important character in the book, who is known as the pod father because he led the design of the iPod when he co-founded Nest, a smart thermostat company. After that, he forced the team to work inside a literal box. He, 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 like, he's a very enthusiastic guy. And he made them prototype the packaging at Nest before they had the product. 'cause 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, it's, 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. And that's exactly like what happened to me in doing this one page outline. So

- Yeah, I'm mistaken.

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

- So I'm gonna close with the observation about economics and let you react to it. We're trained in economics. There's been some revision in this, but the standard economics paradigm is that more is better than less. And constraints lower your wellbeing. 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 catchall phrase to mean good, good, good things. And the older I get, the more problems I have with, with that perspective. 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 maxim maximization framework. But most economists struggled to do that artfully. And as a result, they kind of keep the simple version. I, 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, 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 take us home with, with, with a reaction to that

- First, I think it's clear that constraints can be bad, right? It's almost, almost synonymous with something that is frustrating. But I think you're right. And you said it really eloquently and, 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 is interesting and sort of related, which is 'cause the most important thinker in the book we haven't mentioned to me, Herbert Simon was trained as a political scientist, won the touring award in computer science. 'cause he, he, he cod did the first AI demonstration, won the highest award, he win in psychology, and then won the Nobel Prize in economics also for bounded rationality, basically in some of his other work. And one of the important, you know, his, 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, his important findings, he, 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. And what Simon suggested was that we actually should proactively do that and set good enough rules for ourselves. So he proactively satisfies, he said, you need, 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, et cetera. Because he, you know, he, 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 and more, more that we can optimize our, our solutions or, or maximize in the, 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.

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

- 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, we're not built to have access to everything everywhere, all of the, all at 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, I want this decision to accomplish or this purchase to accomplish or whatever. And when you get that, make the decision and, and move on instead of wondering if there's always more and better out there. Otherwise you fall prey to something called Fred Kins paradox, which is, we spend the most time and 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, doesn't matter. So I've become a proactive satisfier. It almost sounds you, you'd almost accuse Herbert Simon of, you know, having low ambition if he hadn't won the highest award in several different disciplines.

- My guest today has been David Epstein. David, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

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

- Thanks David.