Speaker 1: Welcome to two Percent. I'm your host, Michael Easter. This
Speaker 1: is a podcast where we talk about improving your performance.
Speaker 1: I am an author, and today I am extremely pleased
Speaker 1: to bring on a fellow author whose work I very
Speaker 1: much admire. We're going to be talking to David Epstein. So,
Speaker 1: David started as a sports reporter, specifically in the realm
Speaker 1: of the science of sports at Sports Illustrated Now. He
Speaker 1: became famous there and had a big moment of attention
Speaker 1: when he broke the A Rod steroid scandal. So, if
Speaker 1: you are a New York Yankees fan, you probably hate
Speaker 1: the guy already, but please bear with me, because this
Speaker 1: guy is a very, very fascinating thinker who can tell
Speaker 1: us a lot about improving our work life, improving our
Speaker 1: performance in the gym and on the road if we're
Speaker 1: a runner, and just improving our thinking across the board
Speaker 1: in a way that we can live better. And David
Speaker 1: has a new book which we are going to be
Speaker 1: diving into today. It is called Inside the Box, How
Speaker 1: Constraints Make Us Better, and it argues that even though
Speaker 1: we often do not like constraints and we want as
Speaker 1: much freedom as possible, he argues that constraints are actually
Speaker 1: what lead us into better outcomes at work, better outcomes
Speaker 1: in our wellness, better outcomes across the board. Let's get
Speaker 1: into it. David Epstein, thanks for coming on the show Man.
Speaker 2: It is my absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1: So the new book Inside the Box looks at the
Speaker 1: idea of how constraints can actually be beneficial. And there's
Speaker 1: one story that I loved.
Speaker 3: That you open the book with. It's about this company
Speaker 3: called General Magic.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, so they have the people who designed the
Speaker 2: original Mac. You know.
Speaker 4: It's the company was so visionary the iPhone, like in
Speaker 4: basically the IP.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this was in the late eighties, early nineties.
Speaker 4: The sketch the CEO has a notebook his named Mark
Speaker 4: Parratt in nineteen eighty nine where he sketches a thin
Speaker 4: glass rectangle with no protruding buttons and a touchscreen where
Speaker 4: you can download apps and it'll be a phone in
Speaker 4: a computer. Nineteen eighty nine, only fifteen percent of Americans
Speaker 4: had computers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the Internet didn't exist.
Speaker 4: He saw all of this stuff, Like he envisioned a
Speaker 4: virtual meeting space where different devices could connect, and they
Speaker 4: called it the cloud in nineteen ninety like they they
Speaker 4: were ahead, and again they had the designers, the original MAC.
Speaker 2: It was so everything was.
Speaker 4: So alluring, their vision, their talent that Goldman Sachs actually
Speaker 4: took them public in the first so called concept ipo,
Speaker 4: where they went public with an idea.
Speaker 1: Nothing to without a product, nothing to actually sell, just like, hey,
Speaker 1: check out this idea.
Speaker 3: Let's roll.
Speaker 4: I mean they had an idea that they had the
Speaker 4: idea plus the talent, plus a seventeen member what they
Speaker 4: called the Alliance, which was basically other companies that had
Speaker 4: invested in them. So this was seventeen companies from around
Speaker 4: the world. It was the largest consortium of international businesses
Speaker 4: in American business history. Each had given millions of dollars
Speaker 4: in investment. And we're going to be part of the team.
Speaker 2: And so like.
Speaker 1: Apple White, these are giants are like Sony, Right, there's
Speaker 1: all kinds of.
Speaker 4: Grapples Sony, Panasonic, you know, AT and T like all
Speaker 4: the It was actually they covered so much of the
Speaker 4: communications technology world that their meetings had to begin with
Speaker 4: an antitrust lawyer listing all the topics they weren't allowed
Speaker 4: to discuss in their meetings because they covered everything and
Speaker 4: they have this vision. So Mark Parrat, the CEO. He
Speaker 4: raises all this money early, a stock price doubles on
Speaker 4: the first day. It's a Wall Street darling. And he
Speaker 4: says his goal in raising all that money so quickly
Speaker 4: was to create what he called heaven for engineers, where
Speaker 4: they could play and create and be limited only by
Speaker 4: their imaginations. As he said, what more could anyone else
Speaker 4: ask for? And I think the answer in retrospect turned
Speaker 4: out to be a little less freedom because they could
Speaker 4: do anything.
Speaker 2: So they did do anything.
Speaker 4: Everyone who had a good idea, they did it like
Speaker 4: they any They built and built. They had no clear
Speaker 4: they they defined their customer as Joe sixpack, which is
Speaker 4: very vague. So after a few years of miss deadlines,
Speaker 4: they turned around and realized nobody knew the guy or
Speaker 4: what they were building from, or what problem they were solving.
Speaker 3: Like beer.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, just like it's like saying Joe Schmo, you know,
Speaker 4: like random guy. So they didn't take any time to
Speaker 4: define their actual customer. So they ended up building for
Speaker 4: each other and the project just grew and grew and grew.
Speaker 4: They couldn't ever decide what not to do, and so
Speaker 4: it ends up being this huge disaster. They ended up
Speaker 4: selling three thousand units of their personal communicator when it
Speaker 4: comes out. It has so many features that the battery
Speaker 4: life's terrible, the user experience is choppy, it's expensive, it's confusing.
Speaker 4: But there was one interview that I think kind of
Speaker 4: encapsulated their problems, and it was at this guy named
Speaker 4: this engineer named Steve Pearlman, whose job was to create
Speaker 4: a calendar function.
Speaker 2: For their operating system.
Speaker 4: And so he creates it to run from nineteen oh
Speaker 4: four to twenty ninety six and checks it in and
Speaker 4: is like, all right, I'm done. And then one of
Speaker 4: the managers comes to him and says, look, somebody might
Speaker 4: build apps that go way back in history or way
Speaker 4: into the future. You have to make it longer than that.
Speaker 4: So he opens it up again. He goes back to
Speaker 4: year one, fine, thinks he's done. Then another team comes
Speaker 4: to him and says, look, why are you starting with
Speaker 4: that arbitrary religious context. You should go back to the
Speaker 4: beginning of astronomical time. So he builds the calendar app
Speaker 4: from the beginning of the universe way into the future.
Speaker 4: And as he said, if he had stuck from nineteen
Speaker 4: oh four to twenty ninety six, it would have been
Speaker 4: four lines of code and he could have moved on,
Speaker 4: and instead it dragged on for months.
Speaker 2: And this is how everything worked there.
Speaker 4: Because they didn't put boundaries in place, everything grew and
Speaker 4: grew and grew until it just totally collapsed under its
Speaker 4: own weight.
Speaker 1: So this becomes this like big metaphor for the book.
Speaker 1: We often think that freedom is like the most desirable
Speaker 1: thing for creatives. For businesses, it's like, just take some
Speaker 1: smart people, you let him figure it out.
Speaker 3: They'll do it.
Speaker 1: But this becomes this great metaphor for the fact that
Speaker 1: even when you have the greatest teams ever, you need
Speaker 1: some sort of boundaries because without boundaries, things just turn
Speaker 1: into chaos totally.
Speaker 4: And in fact, in one way I would say that
Speaker 4: General Magic was actually a success, which is it's so traumatized,
Speaker 4: you know, in a business sense some of the people
Speaker 4: that were there, especially some of the.
Speaker 2: Younger employees, that.
Speaker 4: They learned all these lessons about the importance of constraints
Speaker 4: that they then took in their next stops in their
Speaker 4: careers and did things like led Google Maps and built
Speaker 4: the Apple Watch, co founded Android, LinkedIn, eBay, you know
Speaker 4: all these other companies that you've heard of or the
Speaker 4: guy who became an absolute zealot for Constraints, a guy
Speaker 4: named Tony Fidell who general Magic was his first job
Speaker 4: out of college and these were his heroes and so
Speaker 4: he was just devastated when the company collapsed. I was
Speaker 4: actually connected with him by the famous venture capitalist Bill Gurley,
Speaker 4: who's famously invested in Uber and Zillow. I told him
Speaker 4: I was interested in constraints and Bill said, oh, we
Speaker 4: have a saying and venture more startups dive of indigestion
Speaker 4: than starvation, like too much, not too little. He said,
Speaker 4: you got to talk to my friend Tony. So he
Speaker 4: connects me to Tony Fidel. The first time I talked
Speaker 4: to him, he's like yelling at me. If you don't
Speaker 4: have constraints, make up constraints. He's like a very intense guy.
Speaker 4: And he went on to lead the design of the iPod,
Speaker 4: and when he showed Steve Jobs a styrofoam model in
Speaker 4: March of two thousand and one, got the green light
Speaker 4: and said we are shipping by Christmas. Gave like ten
Speaker 4: weeks for the first design and then stop and collect
Speaker 4: your lessons and go on. And it forced the team
Speaker 4: to think creatively and repurpose technology. So the famous scroll
Speaker 4: wheel is something that they basically repurposed from a Danish
Speaker 4: cordless phone because they were saying, look, we can't build
Speaker 4: everything from scratch like they had done in General Magic.
Speaker 4: Then Fidel goes on and he co founds Nest, the
Speaker 4: smart thermostat company, where he forces the company to work
Speaker 4: inside a literal box. He makes them prototype the box
Speaker 4: before the product, because he says, this shows what we
Speaker 4: want to communicate to the end user, and if it's
Speaker 4: not in this box, it's not one of our priorities.
Speaker 4: And it was just so interesting to see his arc
Speaker 4: from this like the trauma of General Magic, to becoming
Speaker 4: this absolute zelo for constraints, which is why I wanted
Speaker 4: to give his narrative some air.
Speaker 1: Well. One thing that I thought was really fascinating is
Speaker 1: you could almost see I think the typical point of
Speaker 1: view would be constraints are going to constrain creativity, right,
Speaker 1: and so when you have these products like the iPod,
Speaker 1: the first iPod, the Master, you're like, wow, that must
Speaker 1: have taken a lot of creativity, a lot of thought,
Speaker 1: and just kind of figuring things out. But you also
Speaker 1: write about this idea called is it the Green Eggs
Speaker 1: and Ham effect where having constraints can actually enhance creativity,
Speaker 1: because we'll I'll let you explain it.
Speaker 2: You know it reliably does. In fact, there was just this.
Speaker 4: I cite this recent survey by psychologists around the world
Speaker 4: of known creativity myths things that we know from psychological
Speaker 4: research are not true, And the second most popular one
Speaker 4: is that people are most creative when they're most free.
Speaker 4: And as you mentioned, psychologists know this isn't true. There's
Speaker 4: actually something called the green Eggs and Ham effect, which
Speaker 4: is named for the fact that Theodore Gaizel aka doctor
Speaker 4: Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet that
Speaker 4: he couldn't write a book using only fifty words, and
Speaker 4: it forced him to experiment with rhythm because he couldn't
Speaker 4: use vocabulary. Even before Green eg and Ham, he had
Speaker 4: been given a task to write a children's book using
Speaker 4: only two hundred words from a kid's vocabulary list, and
Speaker 4: at first he starts looking at the list, he starts
Speaker 4: complaining to his wife. He says, there are no adjectives,
Speaker 4: and then he says, I think in fine Susian form,
Speaker 4: it's like trying to make a strudle with no Strudels,
Speaker 4: which I think is hilarious because it's like he was
Speaker 4: the same guy in his personal life as his books.
Speaker 4: And then he just decides, throws his hands up and says,
Speaker 4: I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words
Speaker 4: on the list and make a book. And the first
Speaker 4: two rhyming words are cat and hat, and that kind
Speaker 4: of changed children's literature forever. It gets to this idea
Speaker 4: that cognitive psychologists have really fleshed out now that you know,
Speaker 4: as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has put it, you
Speaker 4: may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's
Speaker 4: actually made to prevent you from having to think whenever possible,
Speaker 4: because thinking is energetically costly, and so if you're not forced,
Speaker 4: you'll just go down what cognitive psychologists call the path
Speaker 4: of least resistance, meaning you'll just reach for ideas that
Speaker 4: you've already used, or that you've seen, what's familiar, what's easy,
Speaker 4: and so unless, in many cases, unless the normal thing
Speaker 4: is actually blocked, it becomes incredibly hard and sometimes impossible
Speaker 4: to be creative.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that was one that one surprised me at first,
Speaker 1: and then two I thought about my own work and
Speaker 1: when I'm doing a book, like I just finished this
Speaker 1: a draft of another book, and as I was writing that,
Speaker 1: I have sections where I'd be like, oh, this kind
Speaker 1: of worked before in my last word, and I'd start
Speaker 1: to do that and They're like, yeah, but you can't
Speaker 1: do that same sort of thing. This is a new book.
Speaker 1: And so it was like I needed that sort of
Speaker 1: constraint to not just default to the easy thing, even
Speaker 1: though it was originally somewhat creative, but now that I'm
Speaker 1: doing it again, it no longer becomes creative.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I mean to your point.
Speaker 4: We were talking before we started recording about my process
Speaker 4: a little bit for the book this time around, and
Speaker 4: this was the first time I ever created an architectural
Speaker 4: plan for the how I was going to order the
Speaker 4: information before I started writing the book.
Speaker 2: I have deportion of this book is mesearch.
Speaker 4: I was terrible at putting constraints in place and wanted
Speaker 4: to get better at it. That's often the case for
Speaker 4: a lot of the things I'm researching is I'm bad
Speaker 4: at it, didn't want to get better, and so I
Speaker 4: wrote way over length in my previous two books, and
Speaker 4: it just incredibly inefficient. So this time I made this
Speaker 4: one page outline. I forced myself to outline the whole
Speaker 4: book on one page. As you can see, I ended
Speaker 4: up writing very very small my own attempt, my brain's
Speaker 4: attempt to defeat my own system.
Speaker 2: But if it's not on this page, it's not in
Speaker 2: the book.
Speaker 4: So this is the first time I wrote the length
Speaker 4: of a book to get a book, and the book
Speaker 4: is tighter than my other's, about twenty percent shorter. But
Speaker 4: it also blocked the kind of some of the methods
Speaker 4: that I was used to because I had never laid
Speaker 4: out a plan ahead of time where I wanted the
Speaker 4: beginning and the end of the book to kind of
Speaker 4: come full circle in a way that the other ones didn't.
Speaker 4: And so I think that was really helpful because especially
Speaker 4: and it's exactly what you're saying, like, we've gotten competent
Speaker 4: at this thing, which is great, but competency can also
Speaker 4: be a trap from getting better.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: It's like you end up lifting the same weights the
Speaker 4: same number of times every day, which means you may
Speaker 4: not get worse, but you're also not going to get better.
Speaker 1: It's like putting bumpers up. If you don't have the bumpers,
Speaker 1: you're probably going to get it in the gutter sometimes,
Speaker 1: and I find out in my own writing where I
Speaker 1: will find a thread that it's I'm like, I don't
Speaker 1: know if it works for the book, but it's kind
Speaker 1: of interesting. And then I'm writing, you know, a thousand
Speaker 1: words on this, and then I read it and I go, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is interesting, but what the hell does it have
Speaker 1: to do with this book I'm writing? Or if I
Speaker 1: could just keep down the lane, it would be a
Speaker 1: much more efficient process.
Speaker 2: I have that problem in spades.
Speaker 4: I mean, I have a very psychologist I was interviewing
Speaker 4: once told me that I have a what he called
Speaker 4: a flat associative hierarchy, which means that I see lots
Speaker 4: of disparate ideas as kind of connected. It's easy for
Speaker 4: me to connect them. And that can be nice because
Speaker 4: I maybe find things that aren't obvious to other people.
Speaker 4: But it also means that I can be incredibly prone
Speaker 4: to doing what you're describing, which is going down these
Speaker 4: rabbit holes of things that I think are interesting and
Speaker 4: they're really not that well connected in a way that
Speaker 4: will make sense to other people.
Speaker 2: And so I really need.
Speaker 4: Structure to kind of prevent myself from writing books that
Speaker 4: are just all over the place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what did this What did report in this book
Speaker 1: make you think about when people get too many resources,
Speaker 1: like specifically financial resources.
Speaker 3: It kind of made me think that.
Speaker 1: A lot of times you find the people who sort
Speaker 1: of have it all almost have nothing because of a
Speaker 1: sort of aimlessness sets in. It's like, when you can
Speaker 1: have everything, why go after anything?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I think it's actually don't think it's healthy.
Speaker 4: For as Jonathan Hyde told me in one of the
Speaker 4: interviews in the book, it's not healthy for anyone to
Speaker 4: have everything everywhere all the time. And a lot of us,
Speaker 4: even if we're not rich, are kind of in a
Speaker 4: situation like that in the digital world now, And so
Speaker 4: I think when it comes to businesses, there are a
Speaker 4: bunch of you know, there are examples in the book
Speaker 4: where people are just sloppy, like when they have too much, right,
Speaker 4: it leads to sloppiness, It leads to not feeling like
Speaker 4: you need to define these boundaries. And I think one
Speaker 4: of the things this gets at one of the things
Speaker 4: that I hope maybe the mindset shift that I hope
Speaker 4: the book engenders, which is from seeing limits as only
Speaker 4: bad to seeing as to seeing them as opportunities to
Speaker 4: clarify priorities and launch productive exploration. And I think when
Speaker 4: people have too much, like to Bill Gurley's more startups
Speaker 4: die of indigestion than starvation. Quote, you're not forced to
Speaker 4: be resourceful and you're not forced to clarify priorities, and
Speaker 4: so you don't. And I actually don't think that's a
Speaker 4: good thing for people, right. It's like, I don't think
Speaker 4: it's good for work, and I don't think it's good
Speaker 4: for having meaning in your life to kind of always
Speaker 4: have your options infinitely open.
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm conscious that it may.
Speaker 4: Sound like sometimes I'm contradicting at least the title of
Speaker 4: the book sounds like I'm contradicting range my previous book,
Speaker 4: which is about broad experiences. But it actually felt like
Speaker 4: a natural next question to me, where it's, okay, you
Speaker 4: get this broad tool set, at some point you have
Speaker 4: to focus this into something, into achievement, hopefully into meaning
Speaker 4: and satisfaction. And I've kind of found that in a
Speaker 4: lot of really talented or hardworking people, they may over
Speaker 4: index on optionality, like keeping their options open all the
Speaker 4: time because they can maybe they're very talented or they're
Speaker 4: very hard working or lucky or whatever it is. But
Speaker 4: sometimes I think they can actually really backfire if people
Speaker 4: start making decisions, if keeping your options open becomes an
Speaker 4: end douneto itself. And so I think I've seen some
Speaker 4: very talented peers and friends endlessly keep their options open
Speaker 4: in a way that actually doesn't doesn't help them reach
Speaker 4: better satisfaction. I'm sure I'm articulating that well.
Speaker 3: I think I hear what you're saying.
Speaker 1: It's like there comes a sort of phobia towards commitment,
Speaker 1: and you sort of tell yourself that if I commit
Speaker 1: to this one thing, I'm saying no to all these
Speaker 1: other possible things that could land on my plate, and
Speaker 1: so it leads to someone being unfocused. I think I
Speaker 1: think a good example would be something like marriage totally.
Speaker 1: It's like that is sort of the ultimate commitment. I
Speaker 1: feel like you see a lot of men are like
Speaker 1: they're afraid to get married because like, well, what could happen?
Speaker 3: I'm going to be tied down.
Speaker 1: But I think when you survey to people in general
Speaker 1: at a population level, marriage people tend to be happier
Speaker 1: because it's like I was talking to my friend John Deloney,
Speaker 1: who has a podcast on relationships and where he's doing
Speaker 1: a book about marriage, and he asked me, He's like, well,
Speaker 1: why did you get married? Like you don't have to,
Speaker 1: you know, he's asking all these people this, and I
Speaker 1: was like, you know, that's a good question.
Speaker 3: And the way I thought of it was, now, you're
Speaker 3: doing the.
Speaker 1: Crossword puzzle in ink, so you got to like, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, Like, you're committed, You're into this thing,
Speaker 1: and you're into it for the law.
Speaker 4: Think a lot harder about what your decisions if you're
Speaker 4: doing in ink totally.
Speaker 1: One thing you brought up in the book too, is
Speaker 1: that so many people think about, well what should I do,
Speaker 1: when oftentimes a better question to ask yourself is what
Speaker 1: should I not do?
Speaker 3: In different situations? Where did you see that manifest I.
Speaker 4: Mean again, that was like part of general Magic's big
Speaker 4: problem was deciding what not to do. But I think
Speaker 4: about that all the time in things like our information diet, right,
Speaker 4: Like people are overwhelmed.
Speaker 2: There's so many things that seem interesting.
Speaker 4: There's so much information coming at you, and I think
Speaker 4: it's a constant question of I'm curious, I want to
Speaker 4: learn things about how can I stay sane? And I
Speaker 4: mentioned I describe this in one genetics lab in the book,
Speaker 4: where they take post it notes and put them on
Speaker 4: the wall, and each one representing one of their current
Speaker 4: commitments or projects. And the first thing that happens is
Speaker 4: once they put them on the wall, so making all
Speaker 4: their current commitments visual is they realize there's way more
Speaker 4: than they could ever get done already in process. And
Speaker 4: so immediately they see it and say, we have to
Speaker 4: start moving some of this stuff out or will never
Speaker 4: get anything done. And they have like a hopper where
Speaker 4: they don't say, we don't have to just throw that
Speaker 4: idea out the window. We can put in a holding place,
Speaker 4: but it's back burnered, right. And then they implement this
Speaker 4: rule where you can't start a new project in the
Speaker 4: funnel unless one moves out of the funnel, so it's contained.
Speaker 4: So they're making these choices about what not to do,
Speaker 4: and some of those things that they decide not to
Speaker 4: do maybe good ideas, but doesn't matter because they weren't
Speaker 4: going to get to anything if they had all these ideas.
Speaker 4: And I kind of took that and did that for
Speaker 4: myself because I thought that idea of making all your
Speaker 4: current commitments visible was really interesting and I did the
Speaker 4: same thing for my own commitments and to immediately realize,
Speaker 4: immediately start looking at it and saying, this is a
Speaker 4: lot of stuff, and these ones are a lot more
Speaker 4: important than those ones, and I like all of these
Speaker 4: and if there were ten of me, I'd be happy
Speaker 4: to do all of them, but there aren't, and so
Speaker 4: it forces you to kind of prioritize. And then I
Speaker 4: did the same thing with my information diet, where I
Speaker 4: logged all the sources over a month that I turned to,
Speaker 4: did the post its on the wall, said which of
Speaker 4: these do I feel was worthwhile and kept that in
Speaker 4: and then occasionally new sources come in and then I'll
Speaker 4: move something else out of the funnel, and it builds up,
Speaker 4: you know, so I have to kind of do it regularly.
Speaker 1: So I say this a ton in the wellness space
Speaker 1: in the sense that when people go I want to
Speaker 1: get healthier, I want to improve my life, they start
Speaker 1: immediately adding. They started saying, Okay, I'm going to drink
Speaker 1: this protein shake every morning, I'm gonna drink this greens powder,
Speaker 1: I'm going to do xyz. But oftentimes, what I've noticed
Speaker 1: is that simply figuring out your worst habit and then
Speaker 1: subtracting that out usually moves the ball way downfield farther
Speaker 1: than would adding all this stuff. It's like, I compare
Speaker 1: it to if you're trying to get somewhere and you
Speaker 1: have your foot on the brake, hammering the gas is
Speaker 1: not going to be an efficient way to do it.
Speaker 1: It's much easier to take your foot off the break
Speaker 1: and then give a little bit of gas. I feel
Speaker 1: like that's just something that people frequently overlook.
Speaker 4: I think, especially like you mentioned in the health and
Speaker 4: wellness space, where there's so much content about optimizing this
Speaker 4: and that and that, you would you could schedule every
Speaker 4: second of your day to optimize if you took all
Speaker 4: of this kind of advice that I think can be
Speaker 4: so overwhelming that even really well intentioned people do start
Speaker 4: and then maybe fall prey to and this is an
Speaker 4: actual psychological term, the what the hell effect, where you're
Speaker 4: trying to optimize all this stuff, you miss once and
Speaker 4: then you're like, what the hell I missed, and you
Speaker 4: just throw everything out the window. So I think that's
Speaker 4: a danger too, So subtracting and starting with simplicity. I mean,
Speaker 4: for me, I wanted to convert myself into a morning
Speaker 4: person when I had a kid, and because I was
Speaker 4: very much a night all before. And one simple thing
Speaker 4: I did is and it's a little embarrassing, but whatever is.
Speaker 4: I started going to sleep in running clothes or workout clothes.
Speaker 4: And because then I wake up in the morning and
Speaker 4: I look in the mirror and I'm like, am I
Speaker 4: going to take these off now?
Speaker 2: No? I'm not. I'm going to go work out. And
Speaker 2: I've worked out every day.
Speaker 4: In the morning for you know, like two years, and
Speaker 4: having us an alarm clock, and so these are really
Speaker 4: simple things where you know, it doesn't have to be
Speaker 4: some crazy change, just like just like a tiny constraint
Speaker 4: that can be helpful. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I see this a lot in this trend of morning
Speaker 1: routines where you see people posting like fifty seven step
Speaker 1: morning routine online, And for me, I always ask, what
Speaker 1: is the ultimate goal of this routine? So I'll take
Speaker 1: myself as an example. My goal is to get up
Speaker 1: and start writing because I need to write a book.
Speaker 1: What does meditating for ten minutes, yoga for five minutes,
Speaker 1: breath work, insert the seventeen other things that you see online,
Speaker 1: What the hell does that have to do with words?
Speaker 3: Getting on a page. It's like nothing.
Speaker 1: What gets word words on a page is sitting down
Speaker 1: in front of a typewriter and putting words on a page.
Speaker 1: So stripping out the things that you can't directly have
Speaker 1: a one to one relationship with this bigger goal you're after,
Speaker 1: I think becomes important totally.
Speaker 4: I mean, and then it's like it's like doing all
Speaker 4: those other things. You can argue that maybe they get
Speaker 4: you in the space to then be more productive when
Speaker 4: you do that, but it's such a roundabout way, right,
Speaker 4: you should first attack the thing that you're thinking about
Speaker 4: attacking instead of all this other stuff around it. And
Speaker 4: I think it one of the reasons I think some
Speaker 4: of the stimization culture is insidious is because it praise
Speaker 4: on really good instincts in people of like self improvement,
Speaker 4: wanting to be better. But it's like in so many cases,
Speaker 4: I think it's just distracting from from the main thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah and yeah, and that's that's just like frustrating for
Speaker 4: good impulses to be I think sort of preyed upon
Speaker 4: in that way.
Speaker 1: Basically totally. So one thing that General Magic did not
Speaker 1: have was managers. Now I think the average employee would
Speaker 1: hear that and be like, oh my god, I want.
Speaker 3: To work at this place.
Speaker 1: So make a case for why managers are important in
Speaker 1: the world where not many people love their manager.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean places have tried, you know, like Google
Speaker 4: did this whole thing where they tried not to have managers,
Speaker 4: and then what they found is, you know, people are
Speaker 4: going to Larry Page with their expense reports and stuff,
Speaker 4: and it just wasn't going to work. But in the
Speaker 4: case of General Magic, people weren't coordinated, right. They weren't
Speaker 4: stopping and getting their less together. They were often working
Speaker 4: on things that were not the most important thing they
Speaker 4: needed to be doing. They were missing things. They would
Speaker 4: start new projects all the time, and it was in
Speaker 4: deep I mean one of the reasons I wanted to
Speaker 4: contrast it to Pixar in the book, where Pixar equally
Speaker 4: large vision developing at the exact same time as General
Speaker 4: Magic basically. So it's like these parallel parallel visions basically,
Speaker 4: and one worked and one didn't. And I spent a
Speaker 4: monch of time with Ed Catmoll, who was co founder
Speaker 4: of Pixar, and he described to me something he called
Speaker 4: the beautifully shaded penny problem at Pixar, which was artists
Speaker 4: or directors would get obsessed over the shading on a
Speaker 4: penny in the background of a scene that the audience
Speaker 4: would never notice. And the way they solved this problem,
Speaker 4: he becomes the real high tech fix was with popsicle
Speaker 4: sticks on a board, and each popsicle stick represented the
Speaker 4: number of the amount of work that one animator could
Speaker 4: get done in a week. And if a director wanted
Speaker 4: animators to keep working on that penny, he had to
Speaker 4: start taking popsicle sticks away from like a main character
Speaker 4: that had to get animated, And that solved the problem immediately.
Speaker 4: But that was an important thing for managers to come
Speaker 4: up with, whereas at General Magic it was so free
Speaker 4: flowing that there was sort of no coherence and no
Speaker 4: useful boundaries. And I don't think that's That's not a
Speaker 4: kind of freedom that's actually helpful for people. You want
Speaker 4: freedom within a framework, not this total freedom where nobody
Speaker 4: really knows what they should be doing.
Speaker 1: I feel like I needed to hear that, because when
Speaker 1: I'm writing a book, I will spend an hour on
Speaker 1: a sentence.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you are the same way. What
Speaker 3: they like, is this the way to do it? Is
Speaker 3: this way?
Speaker 1: Is this the right wording, and you're like, it's one
Speaker 1: sentence among like three hundred thousand or whatever. The number is, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: And so you just get obsessed with like these micro
Speaker 1: details when it's like pulling back is going to allow
Speaker 1: you to be way more efficient.
Speaker 4: I mean, I one hundred percent need deadlines. When I
Speaker 4: I mean first two books I turned in end of
Speaker 4: the day on the day they were due, which for
Speaker 4: something that you're looking two years ahead to, or my
Speaker 4: first book three years I had, it's not that easy
Speaker 4: to do. And this time around, when I signed the
Speaker 4: contract and my agent said, you know, and always when
Speaker 4: I sign the contract, I'm like, oh God, will I
Speaker 4: be able to It's hard to plan to finish something
Speaker 4: two three years later totally and be on time, and
Speaker 4: especially when you don't know what you're gonna find yet.
Speaker 4: And my agent was like, you know, the deadlines of
Speaker 4: course in books are flexible. You don't have to treat
Speaker 4: it as real. I'm like, do not tell me that
Speaker 4: ever again, Like we have to treat this thing as
Speaker 4: totally real. Like Duke Ellington said, I don't need time,
Speaker 4: what I need is a deadline totally.
Speaker 1: Another thing that I thought was interesting about Pixar is.
Speaker 1: They seem to work in these tight teams, and when
Speaker 1: they would do screenings of the films, it's not like
Speaker 1: everyone in the building could walk in and provide feedback.
Speaker 1: And they famously they wouldn't let Steve Jobs watch the
Speaker 1: film all right, because his opinion would be weighted too heavily.
Speaker 1: How did you think about this when you were writing
Speaker 1: the book? Did you have anyone beyond your editor read it?
Speaker 1: And how did you think about who are you going
Speaker 1: to let see this? And how did that influence you?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I should say in the past I have not
Speaker 4: been as good as I should be in giving people stuff.
Speaker 4: Adam Grant, psychologist, has actually given me some very healthy
Speaker 4: criticism on that. He said, you got to show your
Speaker 4: work to more people while you're doing it. And so
Speaker 4: this time around I showed it more than I ever
Speaker 4: had in the past, which included my editor. In the past,
Speaker 4: I didn't even show it to my editor while I
Speaker 4: was working on it. I just showed up with a book.
Speaker 4: This time I showed her stuff while I was going.
Speaker 4: I showed my agent, who's a great reader. I showed
Speaker 4: my wife tons of stuff. So that's not a ton
Speaker 4: of people, but I went from zero to several people,
Speaker 4: this time showing them in the middle, and I think
Speaker 4: that was really helpful, and also talking my ideas off
Speaker 4: of my editor a lot earlier to see if I
Speaker 4: could articulate them reasonably. So that was more of the
Speaker 4: process this time around, where before I would show the
Speaker 4: manuscript in this case sometimes I was showing sections or chapters,
Speaker 4: much smaller pieces.
Speaker 1: I think there is a point too, where when you
Speaker 1: show it to too many people, the feedback becomes chaotic
Speaker 1: because everyone's going to have an opinion, and if you
Speaker 1: wait every opinion equally, you just start adding more stuff
Speaker 1: or there'll be disagreements. When I was at Men's Health,
Speaker 1: we would do these things called wallwalks. Okay, so the
Speaker 1: cover lines in the headlines were very important at Men's Health,
Speaker 1: or so we thought, and we would put the magazine
Speaker 1: up on the wall with all the headlines and the
Speaker 1: cover lines, and there would be like twenty five of
Speaker 1: us who would sit around staring at these headlines and
Speaker 1: cover lines, and someone would throw out an idea, you know,
Speaker 1: a bunch of people would shoot it down. Someone would
Speaker 1: throw out another idea, a bunch of people would shoot
Speaker 1: it down. Third idea. You might have twenty three people go,
Speaker 1: oh my god, that's it, that's fantastic, and then you'd
Speaker 1: have one person go.
Speaker 3: I don't know about that one. I'm not sure if
Speaker 3: it's great.
Speaker 1: So then we'd keep iterating and we would literally spend
Speaker 1: like four hours on a single headline in this magazine,
Speaker 1: and it was maddening. So there becomes this thing where
Speaker 1: I think people overvalue a negative opinion even when the
Speaker 1: vast majority of opinions are good, and there's always going
Speaker 1: to be someone with a negative opinion that's interesting.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's like.
Speaker 4: I sort of made a mistake like that in this
Speaker 4: case with this book, just with the title and subtitle,
Speaker 4: where for the first time I asked for input in
Speaker 4: the past was just just did it, and this time
Speaker 4: asked a number of authors that I admire for input,
Speaker 4: and that was probably a mistake because there was no
Speaker 4: agreement whatsoever. Everyone had some different take, and that put
Speaker 4: me in the space of now ignoring, you know, nine
Speaker 4: out of the ten people's input, basically, But I was
Speaker 4: on this email list of authors mostly who were not
Speaker 4: like me, but mostly business authors, and I would feel
Speaker 4: like an alien when they would talk about their process
Speaker 4: where it was.
Speaker 2: Like, I have you ever heard that thing about?
Speaker 4: So the contrast with Google and Apples like Google will
Speaker 4: ab test forty shades of blue and Apple will be like,
Speaker 4: this is our vibe, this is what we're doing. And
Speaker 4: both of those obviously worked for them, but I was
Speaker 4: much more the Apple style, where these writers were much
Speaker 4: more the Google style. They would have a Google doc
Speaker 4: with kind of a focus group in real time reading
Speaker 4: it and saying, you know, this is what I want
Speaker 4: to and maybe I should be doing that, but I
Speaker 4: don't want to because I a lot of the processes
Speaker 4: for me and what I'm learning and the craftsmanship of
Speaker 4: it that I enjoy. But also, to be honest, I
Speaker 4: felt like it kind of homogenized their writing when you're
Speaker 4: going for that sort of consensus in that group, and
Speaker 4: so maybe it decreased the risk, you know, maybe it
Speaker 4: kind of raised the floor of their writing, but I
Speaker 4: think it lowered the ceiling for sure, because it's sort
Speaker 4: of less unique.
Speaker 1: People wouldn't take as many swings, the swings that could
Speaker 1: have been really interesting. Maybe there were misses, who knows,
Speaker 1: but some of the things that really make something stand
Speaker 1: out and be interesting probably got stripped.
Speaker 2: Away you have to risk missing.
Speaker 4: I mean this is like, you know, all this research
Speaker 4: that shows that innovators are like the successful ones have
Speaker 4: more successes, but they have more failures than the than
Speaker 4: their peers do.
Speaker 1: Also totally you read about this idea thinks slow work fast.
Speaker 1: Tell us about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a phrase from a Danish professor at Oxford
Speaker 4: named Bent flu beer awesomely fantastic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, I know.
Speaker 4: Obviously had to make sure I could pronounce that one.
Speaker 4: And yeah, because if anybody's trying to google him, it
Speaker 4: looks like it's spelled Flipberg. Yeah. And what he he
Speaker 4: kept h he studied big projects for his whole career
Speaker 4: and over decades he kept a database of projects big projects.
Speaker 4: This could be anything from infrastructure to digital transformations, whatever.
Speaker 4: And he had sixteen thousand. He led a lot of
Speaker 4: projects himself too. He had sixteen thousand projects by the
Speaker 4: or he worked on them, I shouldn't say lead, he
Speaker 4: worked on them. He had sixteen thousand projects in his
Speaker 4: database by the end. And what he found was it
Speaker 4: only eight and a half percent of them came in
Speaker 4: on time and on budget, and only zero point five
Speaker 4: percent came in on time and on budget and delivered
Speaker 4: what they had promised. And the typical pattern he found
Speaker 4: was what he called think fast, act slow, where someone
Speaker 4: has an idea and they kind of rushed it into
Speaker 4: implementation before they put boundaries around and really figure out
Speaker 4: what the priorities are and what they're doing, and so
Speaker 4: things expand quickly. And then that fast thinking translates to
Speaker 4: work slow because things get big quickly, and then it's
Speaker 4: very hard to pivot and you start learning lessons more painfully.
Speaker 4: The opposite, what he said was the ideal kind of
Speaker 4: planning was think slow, act fast, where you keep a
Speaker 4: team small. At the beginning, you define the boundary, what
Speaker 4: are we not doing, what is the focus? And then
Speaker 4: when you do move into execution, you're able to work
Speaker 4: much faster because you're not getting surprised by as many things.
Speaker 2: The work boundaries are much more clear.
Speaker 4: And again one of the reasons I picked Pixar in
Speaker 4: the book is because Ben Flubier identified Pixar as like
Speaker 4: the apotheosis of good planning, where they would keep He
Speaker 4: actually calls it Pixar planning.
Speaker 2: A director could stay.
Speaker 4: For years with a small team in story development, refining
Speaker 4: the core of a story cutting away characters, right like
Speaker 4: they cut away the character for Schadenfreud in the first
Speaker 4: Inside Out because they didn't they felt like it was
Speaker 4: getting too many characters, getting too complicated, and that might
Speaker 4: seem inefficient to stay in a small team for years
Speaker 4: while you're refining the story, but the costs only explode
Speaker 4: once you move into production and bring in this much
Speaker 4: bigger team, and so it actually, in the long run
Speaker 4: turns out to be much more efficient. And so that
Speaker 4: kind of thinks slow act fast, where they've spent all
Speaker 4: that time defining the boundaries allows them to work fast
Speaker 4: once they get into it. And I found that to
Speaker 4: be very true for me, where I didn't write a
Speaker 4: single word of my book for a year. Yeah, I
Speaker 4: just planned the architecture and did the research, and then
Speaker 4: it allowed me to write more quickly than I ever
Speaker 4: had once I moved into execution.
Speaker 1: How do you think people can use that sort of
Speaker 1: in the trenches of day to day life making decisions.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think whatever it is they're doing, let's say, if
Speaker 4: it's a work project or some kind of behavior change
Speaker 4: that you're trying to engender, is I think we've talked
Speaker 4: about optimization a little bit and the motivation is you
Speaker 4: see something cool, I'm going to do this tomorrow. I
Speaker 4: think it would actually make more sense to sit down
Speaker 4: and say, what is the goal that this is serving?
Speaker 4: What are the blocks between me and doing this thing?
Speaker 4: Where am I going to draw the line for now?
Speaker 4: Like implement in a small way. What's the first small experiment,
Speaker 4: a low stakes experiment that I can run instead of
Speaker 4: moving straight into big implementation. And so just spend a
Speaker 4: little time figuring out what.
Speaker 2: Are the blocks?
Speaker 4: What's the smallest possible way that you can prototype this
Speaker 4: thing before you move into this bigger execution. Because the
Speaker 4: quicker you move into making something big, the more likely
Speaker 4: you're going to learn harder lessons, and the more likely
Speaker 4: I think you fall prey to that what the hell
Speaker 4: effect where it doesn't really work well and then you
Speaker 4: just throw the throw the baby out with the bathwater,
Speaker 4: so to speak.
Speaker 1: The companies that you highlighted that are doings that were successful,
Speaker 1: they all solve the problem. Yes that in the wellness
Speaker 1: sphere that really made me think about you know, with
Speaker 1: my sub stack, I'll get all these questions from readers
Speaker 1: that are like should I take this supplement? Should I
Speaker 1: do this exercise should I do X Y Z? Insert
Speaker 1: any number of examples, and the question I usually come
Speaker 1: back with, after much trial and error trying to give people,
Speaker 1: you know, well, here's this tart like complicated answer. I
Speaker 1: usually now just respond with what problem are you trying
Speaker 1: to solve? And oftentimes are like, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: heard about this on a you know, online or on
Speaker 1: a podcast, and I thought it sounded interesting, but I
Speaker 1: actually don't know what the problem that will solve for
Speaker 1: me is, you know. And so you get them to
Speaker 1: like pull back, and it's like, all right, if there's
Speaker 1: not a problem that this thing is solving, it sounds
Speaker 1: like it might just be extra work, extra noise, and
Speaker 1: not have that big of a return for you.
Speaker 4: Defining the problem you want to solve, whether it's an
Speaker 4: individual or an organization, incredibly powerful and defining it like
Speaker 4: spending some time again to that think slow and thinking
Speaker 4: about what are you trying to do. There's this famous
Speaker 4: saying people don't want a quarter inch drill, they want
Speaker 4: a quarter inch hole in their wall. Right, So if
Speaker 4: you're thinking about serving the person, what is the actual
Speaker 4: thing that they that they want? Does that mean they
Speaker 4: need a carpenter? Does it mean they need a drill
Speaker 4: or something else.
Speaker 1: All right, here's where I want to mildly push back.
Speaker 1: And the reason I'm doing this is there could be
Speaker 1: people who are listening to this thinking you're saying constraints
Speaker 1: are good. I need more constraints in my life. But
Speaker 1: they might also be thinking my life is already constrained enough.
Speaker 1: I have bills, I have a manager who is complaining
Speaker 1: at me all the time. I have kids, I have dogs,
Speaker 1: I have all these different commitments and constraints. So what
Speaker 1: argument would you make to them about why constraints are good.
Speaker 4: I mean, for one thing, it'd be crazy to say
Speaker 4: the constraints can't be bad. Right, even in creativity, which
Speaker 4: we've talked about, if a constraint, if you're telling someone
Speaker 4: what they have to do and how they have to
Speaker 4: do it, like if they if under this constraint they
Speaker 4: there's no way for them to surprise you or themself,
Speaker 4: then that's bad. It's gone too far. As far as bills,
Speaker 4: you know, nobody likes bills, but jobs and kids and
Speaker 4: dogs and obligations actually turn out to be really important
Speaker 4: for people's sense of well being, so you may bristle
Speaker 4: under them.
Speaker 2: Sometimes because they're inconvenient.
Speaker 4: But I think it's also pretty clear that a dense
Speaker 4: network of obligation is actually a lot of what brings
Speaker 4: meaning to people's lives. And so the founder Emil Durkheim,
Speaker 4: founder of modern sociology, basically he did this famous study
Speaker 4: on suicide when government started first keeping track of statistics,
Speaker 4: and he found things intuitive, things like that suicide rates
Speaker 4: would increase when economic fortunes of a country plummeted, but
Speaker 4: he found they would also increase when the economic fortunes
Speaker 4: of a country skyrocketed. Because anything that unmoored people from
Speaker 4: these kinds of obligations what he called he called anime,
Speaker 4: which means rulelessness. If people were sort of stripped of
Speaker 4: these normal structures and rules that they lived under, they
Speaker 4: would struggle with finding meaning in life. That's not to
Speaker 4: say that every constraint is good, but I think the
Speaker 4: idea that we just need more freedom then will be happier.
Speaker 4: It actually usually looks like the opposite, that people with
Speaker 4: more constraints are happier with married, with kids, with community obligations,
Speaker 4: with regular rituals, and you know, for some people religion,
Speaker 4: going to a job is inconvenient sinking up your schedule
Speaker 4: with someone else to spend time with them is inconvenient.
Speaker 4: Kids are incredibly inconvenient all the time. But these things
Speaker 4: also add meaning to our life. So I think it's
Speaker 4: it's tricky because it feels like more freedom should always
Speaker 4: be attractive. In fact, I went to some years ago
Speaker 4: this writer's retreat where we were all asked, the only
Speaker 4: one I've ever been to where we're all asked, what
Speaker 4: are you optimizing for this year? And I said autonomy
Speaker 4: because after my last book, I became just a writer
Speaker 4: for you know, full time. I left like having a
Speaker 4: normal daily job, and I thought I just wanted to
Speaker 4: spend every minute in the way that I determined. And
Speaker 4: fast forward two years and I learned there's such a
Speaker 4: thing as too much autonomy. Where I was like living
Speaker 4: in an individualized world for one. And so to reel
Speaker 4: that back, I joined the board of a nonprofit in
Speaker 4: my community. I started going to like dance meetups with
Speaker 4: strangers and just started inconveniencing myself a lot more in
Speaker 4: order to add meaning back to my life.
Speaker 3: That's cool.
Speaker 1: It makes me wonder what you think about retirement. I
Speaker 1: feel like when you see data on retirement and well being.
Speaker 1: At first, people are like, oh, this is great, I
Speaker 1: can do anything, and then there's kind of like a
Speaker 1: drop off where they go, I don't know about this totally.
Speaker 4: And there's also all this research that people, you know,
Speaker 4: when they retire, all these rates of dementia and things
Speaker 4: like this are not as cognitively engaged anymore go up.
Speaker 4: And I think, I'm not planning on never retiring good,
Speaker 4: but I think if someone's going to retire, like find take.
Speaker 3: That vacation, but replace it with something, replace.
Speaker 2: It with something that's right.
Speaker 4: There's this I cite this research in the book from
Speaker 4: Sweden where they look at antidepressants being dispensed throughout the country,
Speaker 4: and one of the things they find is that when
Speaker 4: more people in the country are on vacation at once,
Speaker 4: antidepressant dispensing goes way down. But it's true among retirees too,
Speaker 4: who it didn't matter like they were already on vacation essentially.
Speaker 4: But the fact is it's when lots of people are
Speaker 4: doing it at the same time. It's like social control
Speaker 4: of time that has a well being benefit for everyone,
Speaker 4: Whereas the opposite was in the Soviet Union when they
Speaker 4: tried to in order to keep factories running all the time,
Speaker 4: individualize everyone's work routine so that people in the same
Speaker 4: family are on the same block. It wasn't like five
Speaker 4: days of work and two day weekend. They did all
Speaker 4: these different four days of work, one day weekend cycles
Speaker 4: that were different for everybody, and it desynchronized everyone's schedule
Speaker 4: and it.
Speaker 2: Was a social disaster.
Speaker 4: Interesting, that's often what we're doing to ourselves, I think,
Speaker 4: right Like, I remember when Mark Zuckerberg first advertised the metaverse,
Speaker 4: and he was like, it's gonna be amazing. Everyone's going
Speaker 4: to live in their own universe, tailored just for them.
Speaker 4: I'm like, that actually sounds like hell yeah, that sounds terrible.
Speaker 4: Just me, myself and whatever is in this device streaming
Speaker 4: into my brain at all times. I spent too much
Speaker 4: of my time in my head already. So you had
Speaker 4: a great section about health research. So the case study
Speaker 4: here is National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. So before
Speaker 4: about year two thousand, projects are getting a ton of
Speaker 4: funding and they're similarly finding these fantastic results for health.
Speaker 4: All these great drugs, all these good things are happening.
Speaker 4: And then after two thousand, all of a sudden that
Speaker 4: drops off the finding stop. Now, that might seem like
Speaker 4: a bad thing, but in the book you argue, no,
Speaker 4: this is actually a good thing. So walk us through
Speaker 4: that and what it tells us about health research. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I'm glad you asked me about this, because I don't
Speaker 4: think many people are going to ask me about this
Speaker 4: part of the book because it's a little complicated. But
Speaker 4: as you said, it was all these major where there's
Speaker 4: drugs supplements. Before two thousand, most of the results were
Speaker 4: positive that were funded in these studies, and then starting
Speaker 4: in two thousand, they're almost all negative. Supplements aren't working,
Speaker 4: they're not out performing placebo anyway, drugs aren't working. And
Speaker 4: so it looked like all of a sudden, medicine stopped
Speaker 4: working in the year two thousand, like millennium bug. What
Speaker 4: really happened was that researchers started facing more constraints in
Speaker 4: their work, so they were forced to do what's called
Speaker 4: preregistration starting in two thousand for these big supplement and
Speaker 4: drug studies. Preregistration means you have to say what you're
Speaker 4: act actually testing, What do you think this drug or
Speaker 4: supplement is going to do? How are you going to
Speaker 4: measure that, How are you going to analyze the data.
Speaker 4: And that's counterintuitively, that's what caused positive effects to stop
Speaker 4: popping up, because what had been happening was researchers would
Speaker 4: make a hypothesis. They'd guess how some drug or supplement
Speaker 4: was going to improve health. They would analyze the data
Speaker 4: and they would see their prediction was not right. But
Speaker 4: they had all this data, so then they would start
Speaker 4: looking through the data for some other correlation, right, thinking well, okay,
Speaker 4: maybe it didn't drop blood pressure, but maybe.
Speaker 2: It improves cholesterol. Oh what do you know?
Speaker 4: Oh, so then they published as if that's what they
Speaker 4: were looking for in the first place, and this was
Speaker 4: not nefarious. People were not doing this thinking it was bad.
Speaker 4: I did this as a science gratitude, not realizing the problem.
Speaker 4: The problem essentially is that when you're doing this thing,
Speaker 4: which is called HARKing hypothesizing after the results are known,
Speaker 4: it's like being The analogy is like a sharpshooter who
Speaker 4: fires randomly at a wall and then draws a bullet,
Speaker 4: finds a clump of bullet holes and draws a bulls
Speaker 4: eye around them, and somebody who walks up says, wow,
Speaker 4: what a great shooter, Not oh, there was a clump
Speaker 4: because of random statistical variation. And so when researchers were
Speaker 4: retroactively going through their data, and if you have a
Speaker 4: lot of data, you're always going to find a bunch
Speaker 4: of false positives just by chance alone. So it was
Speaker 4: this preregistration forcing someone to stick to the initial prediction
Speaker 4: that showed that most of these drugs and supplements weren't
Speaker 4: working and in fact, most of the prior positive results,
Speaker 4: many of which are drugs that are still out there.
Speaker 4: What's an example, There's like a bunch of blood pressure
Speaker 4: medications that were out there. There's one one very famous
Speaker 4: one called a tenolol. That's very famous drug out there.
Speaker 4: And one of the interesting things about a tennolol was
Speaker 4: it was viewed as a breakthrough because it it does
Speaker 4: lower blood pressure numbers, but people die from heart attack
Speaker 4: and stroke at the exact same rate just with lower
Speaker 4: blood pressure numbers. So you know, it can look good
Speaker 4: but doesn't actually have an useful effect. And so anyway,
Speaker 4: so it was these these greater constraints in how scientists
Speaker 4: were operating that led them to start drawing more true conclusions.
Speaker 4: The downside is because this is a newer era of research,
Speaker 4: like nutrition research is just an absolute mess. So it's
Speaker 4: this famous study that people refer to, scientists refer to
Speaker 4: as the Everything in your Fridge Causes and Prevents Cancer study,
Speaker 4: because it it looked at all the different studies on
Speaker 4: a bunch of different foods and found that basically everything
Speaker 4: had been found both to cause and prevent cancer except
Speaker 4: for bacon's cause cancer.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately. Yes, yeah, indeed.
Speaker 4: And the problem was these studies just are not I mean,
Speaker 4: nutrition is hard to study anyway for variety of reasons.
Speaker 4: But the studies were just not well controlled. And so
Speaker 4: the good the good news is there's a lot more preregistration.
Speaker 4: Now the bad news is, I think this caused some
Speaker 4: understandable mistrust from some of the scientific community where results
Speaker 4: were not holding up. Well, the good thing is it
Speaker 4: was scientists themselves who identified these problems and it led
Speaker 4: to a now a better system.
Speaker 1: Yeah that makes sense. And you use the example of
Speaker 1: Brian Wantson. Yeah, I remember before this became a big deal.
Speaker 1: So he was using those methods where he kind of
Speaker 1: sort of set up these studies and then he just
Speaker 1: combed through the data and be like, well, what can
Speaker 1: I find that was positive? But most of it's just
Speaker 1: going to be, like you said, by chance, you're going
Speaker 1: to have something positive. When I was at Men's Health,
Speaker 1: that dude was like, our are all star because this
Speaker 1: is a health magazine with like little tidbits, and you'd
Speaker 1: have things like if you use a smaller plate, you
Speaker 1: will eat less, like all these little things.
Speaker 3: And then and then it all entirely blew up totally.
Speaker 4: And it wasn't It wasn't just health magazines by any stretch.
Speaker 4: I mean, his work was called, you know, masterpiece in
Speaker 4: a book by a Nobel Prize winner, like he was
Speaker 4: informing nutrition guidelines for Americans. He to me, clearly was
Speaker 4: not intentionally misrepresenting everything, because the problem developed for him
Speaker 4: when he wrote a blog post about his research methods
Speaker 4: and another scientist was like, you can't do that, because
Speaker 4: all your results are just going to be from a
Speaker 4: statistical chance alone. And we see this all the time
Speaker 4: in the world around us, right. Like the example I
Speaker 4: use in the book is if you're watching an NFL
Speaker 4: game and you hear the announcer say, you know, the
Speaker 4: Chiefs are undefeated, when Taylor Swift is in the audience
Speaker 4: and they're playing in division rival on the road. You
Speaker 4: can be sure that they first looked for are the
Speaker 4: Chiefs undefeated when Taylor Swift is in the audience, didn't
Speaker 4: find that, and then started adding more and more qualifications,
Speaker 4: And every time you do that, it's more.
Speaker 2: Likely that you find a false positive.
Speaker 1: Basically, Yeah, I think sports is a great example because
Speaker 1: there's so many times where you know, if it's like
Speaker 1: the Masters, it's oh, well, this guy tends to score
Speaker 1: less when there's this due point in the air and xyz,
Speaker 1: and it's like you just had an intern look at
Speaker 1: all this random stuff and give us some piece of information. Now,
Speaker 1: that is an example where it's kind of just this fun,
Speaker 1: stupid stuff we watch. But I will say when I
Speaker 1: listened to sports podcast, yes I hear people using this
Speaker 1: information as a reason to make a bet, right because
Speaker 1: a lot of podcasts are sponsored by betting companies, And
Speaker 1: so it becomes like, oh, well, the Chief Taylor Swiss
Speaker 1: in the audience, she's going to be at the game.
Speaker 1: They never lose when Taylor's there, so you got to
Speaker 1: push those chips across the table.
Speaker 3: And in that case, I'm like, ooh, I don't know
Speaker 3: about that.
Speaker 4: No, And in fat absolutely and I think also sometimes
Speaker 4: on financial TV when I'll catch that if I'm in
Speaker 4: a gym or something, there will be something very very
Speaker 4: similar with someone who's brought on because of certain predictions
Speaker 4: they're making, and they'll start describing how they come to
Speaker 4: those predictions. And I don't know for sure, but you
Speaker 4: can tell when somebody starts adding different caveats to the category,
Speaker 4: like when the housing market does this, and these other
Speaker 4: three things happen, three things happen, here's here's you know
Speaker 4: what we see in the market. You can be almost
Speaker 4: positive that they were slicing and dicing data in a
Speaker 4: way that ensures that this was that this was a
Speaker 4: false positive totally.
Speaker 1: Your first book, Sports gam that was twenty thirteen. Twenty thirteen, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what led you to write that? A few things?
Speaker 4: So one, I mean, I guess the little secret of
Speaker 4: that book is that it was very much questions I
Speaker 4: had about things that I had seen in sports, either
Speaker 4: as a spectator or I was an eight hundred meter
Speaker 4: runner in college, or as a competitor. So things like
Speaker 4: as a runner in my high school, we had lots
Speaker 4: of Jamaican guys and we had an incredible track team,
Speaker 4: and you know, it's like a country of two to
Speaker 4: three million people, like what's going on over there? And
Speaker 4: then in college I was running against some Kenyan guys
Speaker 4: and realizing they were all from one tiny tribe called
Speaker 4: the Kallengin. And then just seeing things like why, you know,
Speaker 4: watching an exhibition softball game with Major League baseball players
Speaker 4: and realizing none of the best baseball hitters in.
Speaker 2: The world could hit.
Speaker 4: A good softball pitcher and just wondering what's going on
Speaker 4: with this, and so just just wanting to examine those things.
Speaker 2: And then there was also.
Speaker 4: Sort of disclaimer, sad part to the story, but this
Speaker 4: is kind of what led to my writing career in
Speaker 4: many ways. Was so I was a national level eight
Speaker 4: hundred meter runner and I had a training partner who
Speaker 4: died at the end of a race, Oh Jesus, from
Speaker 4: a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or HCM, almost usually the
Speaker 4: cause of a young athlete with no obvious prior symptoms
Speaker 4: dropping dead. And I had his family sign a way
Speaker 4: for allowing me to gather up his medical records and
Speaker 4: kind of investigated what had happened, and he had this
Speaker 4: disease had been misdiagnosed. He had a you know, it's
Speaker 4: caused by a single genetic mutation, and I thought there
Speaker 4: were some lives that could be saved with certain types
Speaker 4: of awareness. And so this is what led me to
Speaker 4: leave my track of training to be a scientist and
Speaker 4: try to become the science writer at Sports Illustrated to
Speaker 4: write about sudden cardiac death and athletes. And that's what
Speaker 4: got me interested in genetics in the first place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what were the big takeaways from that book for
Speaker 1: the average person?
Speaker 4: I think some things that I thought were totally innate,
Speaker 4: like the reflexes they hit a major league fastball, are not.
Speaker 4: They're completely learned. And other things like the will to
Speaker 4: do a lot of physical activity actually has like a
Speaker 4: really strong innate component. But maybe the biggest takeaway, so
Speaker 4: the American College of Sports Medicine has this phrase, I
Speaker 4: don't know if they still have it, but exercises medicine.
Speaker 4: And just like we've learned from medical genetics that no
Speaker 4: two people respond to a medication the same way because
Speaker 4: of differences in their genetics, no two people will respond
Speaker 4: to a specific training exactly the same way. And so
Speaker 4: I think it's worth spending some time kind of experimenting
Speaker 4: with different training modalities because you know, you may have
Speaker 4: the same diet as someone else and it may not
Speaker 4: work as well for you, and so it may be
Speaker 4: worth it to be a little bit of a scientist
Speaker 4: of yourself and see if you can fit your your
Speaker 4: health routines to your physiology or improve a little bit
Speaker 4: over time with some experimentation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I feel like a lot of people kind
Speaker 1: of understand this at a basic level. Though I'm a
Speaker 1: better runner than I am a lifter. Like to take
Speaker 1: my example, I go, you know, I was at mentalit,
Speaker 1: so I had to do all this lifting. There was
Speaker 1: no amount of training I could do that would allow
Speaker 1: me to be super strong and like a big sense
Speaker 1: like that. But running, I'm like, I'm pretty good at
Speaker 1: that outdoor stuff like I can just hike on a
Speaker 1: trail for days and I'm fine where some people are
Speaker 1: just never going to be able to do that.
Speaker 3: And so I think leaning into that.
Speaker 1: But also I think one of the keys with exercise
Speaker 1: in particular is you got to find something you actually
Speaker 1: enjoy and if it aligns with what you're good.
Speaker 3: At, bonus points.
Speaker 1: So how did your second book Range come out of
Speaker 1: the sports gene and quickly tell us about range too.
Speaker 4: So in the Sports Gene, I criticized the research underlying
Speaker 4: the ten thousand hours rule that Malcolm Gladwell had made
Speaker 4: famous because the research was poorly done, and that brought
Speaker 4: me into a public debate with glad Will the first
Speaker 4: time we met.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In the ten thousand hour rule is that you need
Speaker 1: to practice something for ten thousand hours to be an expert.
Speaker 4: Yeah, basically, And the implication is you should specialize as
Speaker 4: narrowly and early as humanly possible. And that brought us
Speaker 4: into this debate that's on YouTube at the MIT Sloane
Speaker 4: Sports Analytics Conference, and I put up some of the
Speaker 4: data showing that most future lead athletes, because we were
Speaker 4: talking about athletic development at that debate, actually had a
Speaker 4: sampling period early where they did a variety of things.
Speaker 4: They learned these broad general skills that scaffold later technical skills,
Speaker 4: They learned about their interest and abilities and delay picking
Speaker 4: one activity. And when we were coming off the stage,
Speaker 4: he said, you got me on that that doesn't fit
Speaker 4: with things that I've thought and written. Why don't we
Speaker 4: And he had been a national level runner two, so
Speaker 4: he said, why don't we run together? Tomorrow back in
Speaker 4: New York and we'll talk about it. And then we
Speaker 4: started talking about what we called the Roger Versus Tiger
Speaker 4: problem because Tiger Woods early specialization, Roger Fetter delayed specialization,
Speaker 4: and pretty soon we leaped out of sports and started
Speaker 4: jumping about in other area. So I was like doing
Speaker 4: research weekly for my runs with Gladwell, and that became
Speaker 4: the book Range about the benefits of breadth in an
Speaker 4: increasingly specialized world. And the introduction is called Roger Versus Tiger,
Speaker 4: which was exactly what we would call our arguments what
Speaker 4: we were running together.
Speaker 1: So your book Range, especially with this idea that specialization
Speaker 1: is not always required for growth and improving in the
Speaker 1: long term. In fact, it's nice to have some range.
Speaker 1: I feel like that's a huge one for parents with
Speaker 1: kids in sports. It's like I remember when I was
Speaker 1: at mental health. I would do a lot of I
Speaker 1: would use as a source this guy Eric Kressy, who
Speaker 1: was a baseball trainer basically, and he would work with
Speaker 1: like the Red Sox, all these pros. But he had
Speaker 1: all these people in that he was up in Boston.
Speaker 1: He'd have all you know, Red Sox are huge up there,
Speaker 1: all the kids to play baseball. All these parents sending
Speaker 1: their eight year olds, nine year olds to him and
Speaker 1: being like, you need to make this kid a professional
Speaker 1: athlete immediately. And he would just be like, you should
Speaker 1: maybe have him go do some other stuff, to play
Speaker 1: different sports.
Speaker 2: So what did you find with that? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 2: that's funny.
Speaker 4: You mentioned that reminds you of this guy, Ian Yates,
Speaker 4: who was a British guy who developed olympians for various sports.
Speaker 4: And he told me one of the problems became so
Speaker 4: he mentioned Bradley Wiggins is famous British cyclist, and he
Speaker 4: would say, I have parents coming to me now saying
Speaker 4: I want my twelve year old doing what Bradley Wiggins
Speaker 4: is doing now, not what Bradley Wiggins was doing when
Speaker 4: he was twelve, which was completely different. And the fact
Speaker 4: is the research shows that the best the most typical path.
Speaker 4: There are a lot of different paths, of course, but
Speaker 4: the most typical path becoming an elite athlete is with
Speaker 4: a sampling period, early variety of activities, broad general skills.
Speaker 4: Now some people call physical literacy those general skills.
Speaker 1: So you're playing you're not just playing baseball, You're also
Speaker 1: like I'm going to be on the basketball team, I'm
Speaker 1: going to run some truck, I'm going to do a
Speaker 1: bunch of stuff.
Speaker 4: Or at least diversifying your movement. So I don't know
Speaker 4: that it matters that you put on a basketball jersey,
Speaker 4: but I think there's a reason why the large, large
Speaker 4: majority of the top soccer players in the world grew
Speaker 4: up playing futsal, which has a small ball that stays
Speaker 4: on the ground and they play on a cobblestones one
Speaker 4: day and sand the next day. It's like soccer in
Speaker 4: a phone booth. It's like much more diversity of problem
Speaker 4: solving and movement, and I think that's really important. I
Speaker 4: do think playing multiple actual different sports is really helpful.
Speaker 4: So there was actually just a paper that came out
Speaker 4: in Science, you know, one of the probably two most
Speaker 4: prestigious journals in the world, scientific journals, that looked at
Speaker 4: thirty thousand performers in sports, science, music, and they found
Speaker 4: this trend in all of those things where the predictors
Speaker 4: of top youth performance were negative predictors of elite adult performance.
Speaker 4: So that happened in sports, it happened for when they
Speaker 4: looked at scientists who won the Nobel They actually progressed
Speaker 4: more slowly earlier in their careers because they're more interdisciplinary
Speaker 4: early on, and they get like a penalty for it
Speaker 4: early on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I feel like this applies to just general
Speaker 1: experiences that you've had in life make you more adaptable
Speaker 1: and able to take on new things. I'll give you
Speaker 1: a good example, dude, sitting right there, my producer Robbie.
Speaker 1: Did you graduate high school? Yeah, he graduated high school,
Speaker 1: didn't go to college. But in high school he starts
Speaker 1: touring around with a punk band. Then he gets into producing,
Speaker 1: correct me if I'm wrong, just yelled out producing trap
Speaker 1: music in Atlanta. This leads into LA where he works
Speaker 1: with all these different artists in the music industry. Then
Speaker 1: he starts working on like the Rock Project, does some
Speaker 1: stuff for Open AI And so as I'm looking for
Speaker 1: someone to help me with this podcast, I start getting
Speaker 1: in resumes and I'm like, there's gonna be an audio component.
Speaker 1: There's also gonna be a heavy video component. Robbie's resume
Speaker 1: comes in, there's all this weird stuff. He's clearly got
Speaker 1: audio but no video. And then I'm looking at other
Speaker 1: resumes where it's just like the perfect St're like this
Speaker 1: perfect pipeline of exactly what I need, and so I
Speaker 1: jump on the phone with a few people. But I
Speaker 1: talked to Robbie and he's like, yeah, I used to
Speaker 1: produce trap in Atlanta, and you know, these guys were
Speaker 1: rolling with guns and stuff, and I'm having to produce
Speaker 1: at two am, just all these crazy experience. I also
Speaker 1: work on open AI, and I'm just like, this seems
Speaker 1: like a person who can just figure out stuff, and
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, that's probably what I'm
Speaker 1: going to value and need more than like, here's the
Speaker 1: button I push. I know exactly what button to push,
Speaker 1: but don't ask me too much else. I'm like this, dude,
Speaker 1: I feel like I can probably just like give them
Speaker 1: stuff and he'll figure it out. And that has absolutely
Speaker 1: been the case.
Speaker 4: But that's like evidence of someone who can learn, who
Speaker 4: can pivot, which basically everybody has to do now. Right,
Speaker 4: Like the period of history where you had a discrete
Speaker 4: period of training followed by living off of that for
Speaker 4: the rest of your career is over for most people,
Speaker 4: if not everyone. And you reminded me of when LinkedIn
Speaker 4: shared with me some data when I was reporting range
Speaker 4: that they did this analysis of a half million members.
Speaker 4: They found the best predictor of someone who would rise
Speaker 4: high in their field was the number of different job
Speaker 4: functions someone had worked in. And I told them, I
Speaker 4: argued to them that, well, I think your guys product
Speaker 4: actually maybe discourages people from doing that because they want
Speaker 4: this very linear LinkedIn right, and you should maybe add
Speaker 4: more space for a narrative or something. They said, you know,
Speaker 4: we think we're doing fine, right, because their business is
Speaker 4: doing fine, So fine for them, but it obviously took
Speaker 4: you thinking a little differently. Is there anything that Robbie
Speaker 4: said kind of that that made you I mean, because
Speaker 4: at some point you must have been a you know,
Speaker 4: is he going to be able to do this job?
Speaker 4: Was there anything in particular that he did that might
Speaker 4: be useful for other people to hear in the interview
Speaker 4: with you or or in his resume or application that
Speaker 4: they kind of got you over that hump of saying
Speaker 4: this is a risk worth taking.
Speaker 1: Well, I think it was the breadth of experiences someone
Speaker 1: who can so in my books, I'll go into kinetic places.
Speaker 1: You know, I've meant to iract or report scarcity brand
Speaker 1: into the Bolivian jungle, and I found in my own
Speaker 1: self like the ability to just like remain calm, learn
Speaker 1: from that, but be adaptable has seemed to transfer over
Speaker 1: to other things in my life. So when I hear
Speaker 1: about him in these you know, trap recording sessions where
Speaker 1: drugs are being dealt, guns are being shown, but he's
Speaker 1: like able to manage that, I'm like, Okay, well he
Speaker 1: can probably manage me because I'm not armed and tell
Speaker 1: me what I need to do right. But also there
Speaker 1: I would say honesty about it. He's like, look, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I've never done video. I did work on
Speaker 1: the Grock project, so I think I can figure video out,
Speaker 1: but I'll tell you I haven't done anything yet. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, I'm confident I can figure it out.
Speaker 1: And so I think there was like the honesty there too,
Speaker 1: And I would say the other people that I talked
Speaker 1: to were just less interesting and it was like very
Speaker 1: clear what I was going to get. But I felt
Speaker 1: like if there was other opportunities that might pop up
Speaker 1: that I could need help with, those people were going
Speaker 1: to be like, well, I don't do that. I do
Speaker 1: YouTube videos, you know.
Speaker 4: In Range, I talked about this research from a woman
Speaker 4: named Abby Griffin who studies serial innovators, and she said
Speaker 4: one of the challenges is they often look like kind
Speaker 4: of a square peg in a round hole because they're
Speaker 4: very broad and they want to learn outside their domain,
Speaker 4: and so it can be like a little confusing to
Speaker 4: an HR person. It's like is this person really the fit?
Speaker 4: And so they may get selected out and so they
Speaker 4: often sort of move between organizations to get that breadth
Speaker 4: that they they need to be powerful because they just don't.
Speaker 4: They're just like not out of central casting for whatever
Speaker 4: that job is. Yeah, how did range make you think about?
Speaker 3: Reporting?
Speaker 1: That book make you think about wellness and how people
Speaker 1: approach well being.
Speaker 4: I think people feel like they have to specialize. In
Speaker 4: many cases, they're not often doing it because they want to,
Speaker 4: Like people are curious and would like to have more
Speaker 4: variety in their life if they didn't feel like they'd
Speaker 4: be penalized for it. And so I think there's some
Speaker 4: ways that we can do things that relate to that,
Speaker 4: like having a hobby unrelated to your work. So there's
Speaker 4: studies showing that if you have a hobby that's unrelated
Speaker 4: to your work or loosely related, it improves your your
Speaker 4: self efficacy, your feeling of ability, to take on challenges,
Speaker 4: whereas if the hobby is too closely related to what
Speaker 4: you already do it work, it actually decreases self efficacy.
Speaker 3: Final question.
Speaker 1: We oftentimes will ask people about the best book they've
Speaker 1: read recently, but I recently tapped you for that for
Speaker 1: my substock posts, which I read a.
Speaker 2: Lot, though, so you know I can always add others.
Speaker 1: Here's what I'll ask you, Okay, because I thought you
Speaker 1: might have an interesting answer for this one. You could
Speaker 1: spend an entire day with someone living or dead. They
Speaker 1: have to be somewhat of a celebrity, so you can't say,
Speaker 1: you know, extra relative to pass away or whatever.
Speaker 4: Who would it be when you say somewhat of a celebrity?
Speaker 4: Can I pick a writer that I think, like a
Speaker 4: lot of literature people would have heard of. But okay, okay,
Speaker 4: and I mentioned him and inside the box. So the
Speaker 4: writer Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine writer I think is like
Speaker 4: one of the most creative minds that ever lived, and
Speaker 4: most of his story he only wrote short stories, and
Speaker 4: they're all like metaphysical thought experiments basically, and he was
Speaker 4: keeping up with the math and science of his day
Speaker 4: and would play out like sort of what it meant.
Speaker 4: So one of his famous stories, called the Library of Babel,
Speaker 4: is about and most of his pages, most of his
Speaker 4: books are between like sorry, his short stories are between
Speaker 4: like four and eight or ten pages, and that one
Speaker 4: is the narrator is in a universe that is basically
Speaker 4: a library of repeating hexagonal rooms that have all identical
Speaker 4: shelves with books on them, and the books all use
Speaker 4: the normal alphabet and appear to just have random orderings.
Speaker 4: But every once in a while people come across a
Speaker 4: word or a phrase, or a sentence even and the
Speaker 4: question is is that order random or not? So it's
Speaker 4: almost like a parable of living in a universe where
Speaker 4: you see signs of order in design, but you don't
Speaker 4: know if they're random or not. So it's really his
Speaker 4: stories make me think about certain human circumstances in a
Speaker 4: way that nothing else, even knowing these aspects of science
Speaker 4: and reading new scientists every week that nothing else has
Speaker 4: gotten me to inhabit some of those ideas the way
Speaker 4: that he does. And the more I read him, the
Speaker 4: more I realize his ideas pop up in things that
Speaker 4: I see all the time, Like if you've ever heard
Speaker 4: that express the map so detailed it became the world.
Speaker 4: It's like, I think it's interesting for writers because we
Speaker 4: have to simplify the ideas we're talking about to be useful.
Speaker 4: And that comes from a one page short story he
Speaker 4: wrote about a cartography department at a university that gets
Speaker 4: obsessed with making more and more detailed maps until they
Speaker 4: make a map that exactly recreates the territory that they're
Speaker 4: trying to show and becomes totally useless. And like he
Speaker 4: shows up in interviews Christopher Nolan if you liked Inception
Speaker 4: Christopher Nole, it was based on two Borges's stories, The
Speaker 4: Secret Miracle and the Circular Ruins, and just like just
Speaker 4: such an interesting thinker, and if you read his nonfiction,
Speaker 4: he was really ahead on sort of calling out European
Speaker 4: fascism before it burst into the public. And it's just
Speaker 4: I think one of the smartest people who ever lived,
Speaker 4: who seem to be just a kind, generous, fascinating soul.
Speaker 4: And I feel like I've been in conversation with him
Speaker 4: through his work and would just love to be able
Speaker 4: to actually spend a little time with him.
Speaker 3: I love it so fantastic was a.
Speaker 4: Very long answer. You just wanted like me to say
Speaker 4: that sorry was not good at Lightning Round.
Speaker 1: That was a great answer because I definitely believe that
Speaker 1: you would like to meet that guy, and I wasn't
Speaker 1: even really that familiar with them, so I'm going to
Speaker 1: do some research. David, thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 1: The book is inside the box. The other two are
Speaker 1: Range and the Sports Genes. You also have a sub stack,
Speaker 1: so everyone check that out. Thanks for coming on to
Speaker 1: chat Man. That was fantastic. It's a total pleasure.
Speaker 4: I mean, you've been a fan of your work from far,
Speaker 4: so it's kind of a treat to get to connect
Speaker 4: in real time.
Speaker 1: Likewise, thanks for checking out the show. Keep an eye
Speaker 1: out for more episodes. We will be dropping two a week,
Speaker 1: and if you have any questions for me for our
Speaker 1: AMA section, please either drop them in the comments on
Speaker 1: YouTube or email them. Please send a video or an
Speaker 1: audio question. That's what we would really love. If you
Speaker 1: want to type it, we're good with that, but we
Speaker 1: would love to hear your voice or see your face
Speaker 1: asking that question. We will do our best to answer
Speaker 1: as many questions as possible. Do not forget to hit subscribe,
Speaker 1: and it's always have fun, don't die