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Why You Feel Overwhelmed All The Time (and how to fix it) - David Epstein

David Epstein is a science journalist and author. Is discipline really freedom? When we feel overwhelmed, it can seem like the problem is that we have no freedom. But maybe the opposite is true: maybe we have too much freedom, too many options, and too little structure. So why can setting constraints become a superpower? And when you’re overwhelmed, why might choosing limits actually make you feel more free? Expect to learn what the Green Eggs and Ham effect is, why having constraints is so unsexy, how setting limits powers learning, the real meaning of “The Road Not Taken”, why it is important to decide what not to do, how to tell if you have too much freedom or too many constraints, and much more… - Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get 10% discount on all Gymshark products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom - 0:00 How Dr Seuss Changed Children’s Books Forever 3:30 Why We Avoid Constraints (and Why That’s a Mistake) 11:37 Why Is Choice So Overwhelming? 18:06 The Tension Between Freedom and Constraint 22:07 The Genius Behind General Magic 29:33 How Limits Power Learning 37:01 Why Fewer Options Feel Harder to Choose From 45:58 Is Anything Truly Original? 53:56 How to Break Free From Habit and Convention 56:45 Are Constraints the Secret to Great Design? 01:00:26 Is Multitasking Secretly Hurting You? 01:03:48 The Best Examples of Locking In 01:08:44 When Optimisation Turns Into Obsession 01:13:39 How to Use Constraints Without Being Trapped 01:15:41 What the “Road Less Travelled” Really Means 01:18:08 Where to Find David - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Chris WilliamsonhostDavid Epsteinguest
Jul 9, 20261h 18mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 3:30

    How Dr Seuss Changed Children’s Books Forever

    1. CW

      What's the Green Eggs and Ham effect?

    2. DE

      That is a, describes a finding in psychology that people become more creative when the easiest solution is taken away from them. So it is named after the Dr. Seuss book, Green Eggs and Ham, which he wrote on a bet that he couldn't write a children's book using only 50 words, and that restriction forced him to experiment with his rollicking rhythm, right? Because he couldn't experiment with vocabulary. So it's, it got that name in psychology because it represents this huge body of work that shows, as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham likes to say, "You may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible," because thinking is energetically costly. And so your brain wants to do the convenient thing, the easy thing, what neuroscientists call the path of least resistance.

    3. CW

      Mm.

    4. DE

      Like, just reach for stuff you've seen before. And so it actually becomes kind of impossible to be creative unless the easiest thing you would reach for is, is blocked.

    5. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    6. DE

      So the thing that actually led to that bet with Theodor Geisel, AKA Dr. Seuss, was before that, he was asked if he could write a children's book using about 200 words from vo- from a vocabulary list for kids.

    7. CW

      Is that so that most kids would have access to it, not, n- not be able to not comprehend?

    8. DE

      That's right. And there was a, a kind of visionary publisher who correctly deemed children's literature at the time very boring, and so he wanted to... It, it was an assault on illiteracy. He said, "Look, kids are not learning to read in as big of numbers as they should. Why don't we try making something interesting for them?" And Dr. Seuss takes this list, looks at it, realizes there are almost no adjectives, and starts complaining to his wife. He basically, he, he makes this very fine, I think Seussian comment. He says, "It's like trying to make a strudel without any strudels." And then he just throws his hands up and says, "I'm just gonna take the first two rhyming words on the list and write a book." First two rhyming words, cat and hat, and the rest is history. So that's what forced him originally to develop that rollicking rhythm that he became known for because the things he would've done otherwise were, were blocked. And so that Green Eggs and Ham effect that a psychologist named is, is summarizing this huge body of work that shows that the best way to prompt creativity is to pull away the path of least resistance, the convenient thing that people would look for otherwise.

    9. CW

      What would be the convenient path of least resistance when it came to writing that book? Because what it sounds like is that it is more effort to work with fewer words.

    10. DE

      Yes, definitely. It's, it is more effort because the, the things that, the easy things, familiar phrases, right? Like, one of the things that jumps out about Seuss's work is the phrases are unfamiliar.

    11. CW

      Mm.

    12. DE

      Normally, if he'd been left to his own devices, he would've gone for more familiar phrasing, which is what all children's literature did at the time. I mean, it was very literal, you know. Johnny ties his shoes, walks to school, and all these things. His-

    13. CW

      Not this sort of LSD absurdism that he ended up with.

    14. DE

      Exa- Well put. Um, and, and he, he actually used this to, to co-found a whole book imprint that changed literature for kids and, and helped boost literacy, where he basically put constraints on the authors. It was, you know, vocabulary constraints. It was, uh, the pictures all have to be continuous across two pages. They can't depict anything that isn't described directly in the text, et cetera. And he said, "If you don't like those constraints," and some of them didn't, "then you're just not one of our authors."

    15. CW

      Mm.

    16. DE

      But they built the most successful, uh, children's imprint ever made by restricting people from the things... You know, those who bought in, said, "I'll give it a try"

    17. CW

      Mm-hmm

    18. DE

      ... uh, found that they were able to do work that they never would've envisioned

  2. 3:30 – 11:37

    Why We Avoid Constraints (and Why That’s a Mistake)

    1. DE

      otherwise.

    2. CW

      Why do you think talking about constraints is so unsexy?

    3. DE

      I think the word itself [laughs] is, yeah, unfortunately unsexy for me. Uh, I think the word itself is, like, almost synonymous with something that's frustrating.

    4. CW

      Mm.

    5. DE

      And so I think our brains are built for, to always overvalue freedom, complete freedom and choice in the abstract, right? And, and the theory for why this is, is that in our evolutionary history, we didn't really have a problem with having too much of stuff or too much choice, but we did have a problem with having too little.

    6. CW

      Issues of scarcity, not abundance.

    7. DE

      That's right. And so that we evolved to always want more, to be programmed to want... You know, I, I think of it as, as similar to the brain and the way that we are with sugar with our bodies, right? We, w- we evolved to like it because there was only a little bit available, and it was useful when you found it. Now, it's all over the place, and, and we consume way too much of it because we're just not built to treat it as, like, the scarce resource as we should. And so you can see in all these surveys and things, people always say they want more choice, right? Uh, o- one of the... When, when psychologists did this international survey of known creativity myths, since we were talking about creativity-

    8. CW

      Mm

    9. DE

      ... things that we know from research are not true, the top one was that people are most creative when they are most free, and we know this isn't true. Or-

    10. CW

      So th- they surveyed people and said, "What are your beliefs around creativity?"

    11. DE

      Yeah.

    12. CW

      They came back and said, the more freedom equals more creativity.

    13. DE

      Yeah, I mean, they, they offered them a whole, a huge list of, like-

    14. CW

      And they rank ordered this

    15. DE

      ... statements of things that they, that they, um, and then people would say they agree with it or they don't agree with it, and so they could see-

    16. CW

      Most agreed with

    17. DE

      ... what were myths. Yeah.

    18. CW

      Good.

    19. DE

      Most agreed with myth. Yeah.

    20. CW

      Yes.

    21. DE

      It was, like, tied with that group brainstorming is a good way to come up with lots of novel ideas. Though that's, that's another one we can talk about, but, um... Or you see, like, people always say they want more options for consumer things, right? So consumer options have increased by about 100 million fold compared to pre-industrial societies, which dwarfs the increase in wealth, which is only, like, 400 fold. And people always say they want it. Economic theory models us as if we'll always be better off-

    22. CW

      Yeah

    23. DE

      ... with more choice.

    24. CW

      Yeah.

    25. DE

      But then you look at things like since the introduction of infinite scrolling, people have been getting progressively more bored, which makes no sense. And researchers who are trying to figure out how this could be, like, how could more choice-

    26. CW

      Mm-hmm

    27. DE

      ... make us more bored-

    28. CW

      Mm-hmm

    29. DE

      ... in entertainment options, would run experiments where they would, say, randomize some people to a group where they would have 20 videos that they could choose whatever they wanna watch, or they were just given one from that same set of 20, and they have to watch it, and the people who had to watch the one are less bored than the people who have the 20. And the thinking is that because our brains are comparison engines, that just the idea that there's some other thing that you could be doing undermines the experience of the moment itself. And so it's all this disconnect with how, you know, rational actor man is modeled in economics and, and what's real in our psychology where the rubber meets the road.

    30. CW

      Is this similar to Barry Schwartz's stuff?

  3. 11:37 – 18:06

    Why Is Choice So Overwhelming?

    1. CW

      What is going on in human psychology that means that we don't like it? Like, why would that be the case? Why would choice be overwhelming and trying to work out what the source code is or what the particular bug that's been hacked here is?

    2. DE

      Yeah. I think some of it in that case, like with the retirement plans, is anticipated regret basically. I think that's, uh, fear of having made the wrong decision.

    3. CW

      Because it was on, it was on your shoulders.

    4. DE

      Yeah, the fear of having made the wrong decision, that you're, you're, you get so obsessed It, it, it, it becomes, it feels so bad, the idea that you might make the wrong decision-

    5. CW

      Mm-hmm

    6. DE

      ... that you end up making [laughs] no decision basically, and people stall and stall and stall. So we are comparison engines, right? So th- the, the ability for us to feel bad about p- what other thing we could have done-

    7. CW

      Mm

    8. DE

      ... it's kind of a bedeviling aspect of psychology, right? In, in, in all things. The- these-- To go back to maximizing, there, there's, there's evidence from these international surveys that some aspects of maximizing tendencies are actually on the ri- Nobody's a maximizer or satisficer in all things.

    9. CW

      Mm.

    10. DE

      But some people are much more of maximizer or satisficer, and there's evidence that the maximizing tendency is on the rise, particularly in, like, the richest parts of the world.

    11. CW

      Mm.

    12. DE

      And that includes things like socially prescribed perfectionism, right? People feeling like they're never-

    13. CW

      Good enough

    14. DE

      ... like, their, their life should always be doing something better. And of course, the theory is that it's this ability to compare yourself infinitely to what other people are doing, like, on social media and all these things, and we're not built for that, right? It's like we are comparison engines. We are... You know, we compare our status, all these things. But in our history, that was, like, to the people in your immediate vicinity, to the people on your block. Not to the entire world. And so I think it's just a, a poor fit for, for how our brains work.

    15. CW

      Mm. Uh, Herbert Simon wore the same socks, ate the same breakfast, lived in the same house for 46 years, and won the Nobel Prize.

    16. DE

      Yeah. He s- You, you would, you would... You'd almost accuse the guy of having low ambitions for some of the things that he did if he hadn't won both the Nobel Prize in Economics, the Turing Award, so the highest prize in computer science, 'cause he was a founder of AI, and then he won the highest award in psychology, and his feeling... So he coined satisficing because he said humans, humans do not behave according to these economic models. We, we can't. We're not equipped to evaluate infinite options. We have all these other motivations that aren't just maximizing utility. Uh, and we can't predict the, the consequences of our choices. And so his feeling was that we should proactively satisfice in, in areas of our life where we can. So the reason he had one beret, one pair of socks, he told his daughter, "One only needs three sets of clothing, one on one's back, one in the closet ready to wear, and one in the wash," right? And so he sounds kind of lame, except he was, he was preserving cognitive bandwidth-

    17. CW

      Mm

    18. DE

      ... for the things that he found most meaningful, which were his, his, his work.

    19. CW

      Yeah. So there's research that shows people are more satisfied with irreversible decisions-

    20. DE

      Yeah

    21. CW

      ... than reversible ones.

    22. DE

      Yeah.

    23. CW

      And yet modern optimization culture, decision theory, a lot of the time, if it doesn't have a psychological inf- informed view, specifically seek reversible decisions.

    24. DE

      Yeah.

    25. CW

      Does that mean that keeping your options open is a form of self-harm?

    26. DE

      I think it often can be, especially when it becomes an end to itself. Like, I can't tell you how many people, including my peers, who will be talking about a decision, and they'll start talking about optionality and which one preserves optionality, and I'm like, that makes a lot of sense at a certain point in your career for that to be, like, a, a, a certain value. But at a certain point, you don't want preserving optionality to be the end in itself, right? There's this-

    27. CW

      You've preserved optionality to preserve optionality to preserve...

    28. DE

      Exactly. Turtles all the way down in optionality. And then-

    29. CW

      Yes

    30. DE

      ... there's, there's this interesting research by this guy Scott Stanley on relationships that's finding increasingly younger people are doing what he calls sliding versus deciding in relationships, where in the interest of keeping their options open, they'll say, like, "I'm just gonna keep seeing how it goes. I'm not really committed." And then their options are closing whether they like it or not if they stay in, right? So they kind of sleepwalk into this escalating commitment.

  4. 18:06 – 22:07

    The Tension Between Freedom and Constraint

    1. CW

      Interesting that, uh- If somebody's CV looked like their dating history, they would look like an incredibly unreliable employee.

    2. DE

      [laughs]

    3. CW

      Uh, but if somebody's dating history looked like their CV, they would look like someone that didn't have an awful lot of experience, depending on what it was that you did. But, uh, yeah, I, I... Learning can only be done through updating, so there is a tension here, right? There is a tension between the desire for freedom and, and, and-

    4. DE

      Absolutely

    5. CW

      ... the need for constraint.

    6. DE

      Absolutely.

    7. CW

      Because in order to update your model, you need to expose yourself to as much as possible. So it feels like these two things are in tension.

    8. DE

      Yeah, absolutely. And, and, I mean, my previous book was about expanding your experiences, your mindset.

    9. CW

      Do you know what episode that was on the show?

    10. DE

      Uh, I don't know what episode. I mean, it must have been seven years ago, basically.

    11. CW

      84.

    12. DE

      84?

    13. CW

      This will be like-

    14. DE

      I want, like, a... I want, like, an 84 out of print or something.

    15. CW

      You should 1,180-something-ness maybe. 1,150.

    16. DE

      I was 84?

    17. CW

      84.

    18. DE

      I was n- I would not have guessed double digits.

    19. CW

      84, dude. Crazy. Fucking crazy.

    20. DE

      That's pretty cool.

    21. CW

      That was one of the... The one that we did on Range was one of the highest played that I'd ever... It was the first time that we ever hit the charts on Apple in 2019. It was the first... It was the episode that put us on-

    22. DE

      Really?

    23. CW

      ... put us onto the charts. Yeah, it was, like, mid- middle of the year in 2019.

    24. DE

      How cool is that?

    25. CW

      I remember because I'd j- I'd just started doing two a week a couple of week- a couple of months before, and I'd started the year with Rory Sutherland, and he was insane, and it was brilliant. And I was like, "I should do this twice a week." And then, yeah, partway through the year, episode 84, that was us. With Range.

    26. DE

      Wait, who, who was episode one?

    27. CW

      Stuart Morton. He is a, a guy that I trained with at the gym, and he was gonna row the Atlantic solo. It was 14 million oar strokes across-

    28. DE

      That's cool

    29. CW

      ... the course of a few months, and every single expedition. This is before he went out. Every single expedition that he tried to do, there was some huge meteorological catastrophe, or the boat had a, a, it got hit by a something, and every single time. He may have done it now. Uh, I kept an, an eye on him for a good while 'cause it... Compelling story. Really cool. Um, but yeah, I just found some dude in the gym, was like, "Hey, you, you. It's me and you. Sit down."

    30. DE

      That's amazing.

  5. 22:07 – 29:33

    The Genius Behind General Magic

    1. CW

      Uh, all right. What was General Magic? 'Cause this was a, a company that I feel like I should have heard of.

    2. DE

      Yeah. I, I-

    3. CW

      But I haven't

    4. DE

      ... I like to call it the most important company nobody's ever heard of. [laughs]

    5. CW

      Yes.

    6. DE

      Not, not important because of what they accomplished, 'cause they went down in flames. But because of the people that came out of it.

    7. CW

      Hmm.

    8. DE

      So this, this is a story about the danger of having too few constraints. So this was a company that, uh, was so visionary in the early '90s that Goldman Sachs took them public in the first so-called concept IPO in Silicon Valley history. They went public just with an idea, right? Not with a product. Founded by three former Apple employees, two of whom designed the original Mac. Uh, the third guy, his job inside of Apple was seeing what's the next frontier after personal computing, named Marc Porat. Absolute visionary. He was the CEO. I was reading his PhD dissertation during book reporting. 1976 at Stanford, he coins the term information economy on the first page, and this thing is eerie to read. He saw the future [laughs] uh, in, in a way that I certainly never have. And not, not just the promise of technology, but the dangers with automation, with misinformation, et cetera, et cetera.

    9. CW

      Hmm.

    10. DE

      And in 1989, in a big red leather notebook, he draws a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons and a touch screen with rectangular apps on it that's gonna be a, a phone and a computer and a fax machine and ATM and video games and messaging and everything else.

    11. CW

      Hmm.

    12. DE

      The web didn't exist yet, right? 15% of American households had computers, but this thing is so visionary that money pours in, talent pours in. They form this 17-member alliance of international telecom companies so big that their, their meetings have to start with an antitrust lawyer listing all the things they're not allowed to discuss, right? And they can do anything. They have unlimited money. They have unlimited talent.

    13. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    14. DE

      And so they frequently do do anything. Any good idea, they're making this personal communicator. Any good idea that somebody has, they, they basically do it. They define their customer as Joe Sixpack, which is as good as no definition at all because nobody has met that guy.

    15. CW

      Hmm.

    16. DE

      And so they're doing this incredible innovation, precursors to USB, the precursors to emojis, all these things. But it just keeps growing and growing and growing until it starts to collapse under its own weight because they have no focus whatsoever. This incredible amount of resources, it obviates the need to decide what they should actually be doing.

    17. CW

      Mm.

    18. DE

      So I interviewed dozens of former employees.

    19. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    20. DE

      And I'd say three-quarters of them said something to the effect of, "I just couldn't figure out what not to do." The, the emblematic interview was with this engineer named Steve Perlman.

    21. CW

      Right.

    22. DE

      Who was writing a, a calendar function for the communicator.

    23. CW

      Mm.

    24. DE

      And he writes it to go from 1904 to 2096, checks it in, thinks he's done. Then a team leader comes to him and says, "Steve, someone might write historical apps. You have to make this thing go back farther." So he opens it up and writes it to go from year one to the future. Done. Then another team comes to him and says, "Steve, why are you tying it into this arbitrary religious context? You should make it go back to the beginning of astronomical time." So he opens the calendar function up and writes to go from the Big Bang to the future. And it takes months, when it would've been four lines of code if they stuck in 1904 to 2096. This is how everything happened at General Magic. They, they go public in the mid-'90s. Mark Porat said he raised so much money because he wanted to create heaven for engineers, right? Where they were free to create and, and, and l- limited only by their imagination. He said, "What more could anyone ask for?" I think the answer was less freedom because they could not figure out what not to do. So it totally imploded. You know, stock price doubles first day, worthless two years later.

    25. CW

      Wow.

    26. DE

      But the people that came out of it, especially the young people, were scarred by this and took these lessons about the importance of putting limits in place, and they co-founded LinkedIn and eBay and Nest and created Android and iPod and iPhone and, uh, G- Google Maps, Safari, all these, all these other things. And so I think it became important in that way because the lessons that these other founders took about the need for constraints, uh, became incredibly important. One, one of the important characters in the book, this guy Tony Fadell, was, like, the most scarred 'cause he w- it was his first job out of college.

    27. CW

      Mm.

    28. DE

      And these were his rock star heroes, and it goes down in flames, and it's like a trauma for him. He goes on to lead the design of the iPod, and then he co-found Nest, the smart thermostat company, where he... When, when I first interviewed him, by the way, he was like, "I'm interested in constraints." And Bill Gurley, the venture capitalist, had connected me with him.

    29. CW

      He's been on the show.

    30. DE

      Okay.

  6. 29:33 – 37:01

    How Limits Power Learning

    1. CW

      How do limits power learning?

    2. DE

      This is the, a kind of complicated part of the book, where I write about the so-called replication crisis in science, the fact that most published research is not true. And the reason it's not true is because people haven't had enough limits in how they go about discerning the truth. So before I got into writing, I was training to be a scientist, and I, I, I should just say, since I'm going to accuse scientists in a way, I made these same exact mistakes when I was a grad student. The issue is we gather data. Whether we're doing it like scientists or we're just doing it in our own life or we're doing market research or whatever it is we're doing, what we should be doing first is making predictions about what do we think. What is our theory of the world? What is our theory of this drug we're testing? What is our theory of our product and the v- its value add in the market? Or whatever it is that we think we're doing.

    3. CW

      Mm.

    4. DE

      And then you gather the data, and you look to see if that prediction was correct. But that's not really how people have been doing it. They've been sometimes make a prediction, sometimes not, gathering data, and then retrospectively looking for associations in the data

    5. CW

      It's called herd, herd's guess or something. What's the-

    6. DE

      Harking is one of the-

    7. CW

      Harking. That's it, sorry

    8. DE

      ... basically hypothesizing after the results are known.

    9. CW

      Yeah.

    10. DE

      So it's like a sharpshooter firing randomly at a wall and then drawing a bullseye around some clump, and someone who comes later will say, "Oh, that, they're a really good shooter," but really they just circled retrospectively.

    11. CW

      Hmm.

    12. DE

      And that's what science, a lot of scientists have been doing. So there's this interesting point in the year 2000 where b- in, in the lead-up to 2000, decades leading up to 2000, there are all these big trials for medications and supplements to improve cardiovascular health, and most of them were positive. And then in 2000, all of a sudden, almost all of them are negative from 2000 on.

    13. CW

      Hmm.

    14. DE

      And there was this question of, what the heck is going on? Like, did medicines stop working at the millennium? But in fact, it was because a funding agency decided for these trials, you have to record your prediction of what's gonna happen ahead of time. And so they put more constraints on the people doing the work, and suddenly they saw that these, their predictions were not right, and what they had actually been doing all along was retrospectively making predictions by sifting all the data, right? Just whatever they thought was not right, so they just said, "Well, we've got all this data. Let's go find something else that pops out."

    15. CW

      Hmm.

    16. DE

      It seems like you should be able to do that. You have a bunch of data. Why can't you draw a conclusion? But it turns out that for statistical reasons, that's actually like running an infinite number of tests. You're just saying, like, "What's, what's here that I can find?"

    17. CW

      Yeah, yeah.

    18. DE

      And so it might pinpoint something for you to then test, but to say you can draw true conclusions from that, you, you can't. And so some of this thinking was applied to businesses in a study where businesses were randomized different types of training for market research.

    19. CW

      Hmm.

    20. DE

      And some of them were trained in the scientific method where they said, "Come up with your hypothesis of how your product fits the market. Uh, come up with a way to test it. These have to be specific predictions of what you think, what you think people will value in your product or whatever it is, and then test it and see what happens." And most of the companies that did that, that got that training, found that there, something about their theory was wrong, about the value they thought they were adding, what people would want, and all those things, and they would pivot. And those companies were much more likely to succeed and start making money than the ones who really didn't make a strong prediction, didn't test it, and ended up not pivoting, so they really didn't learn.

    21. CW

      Hmm.

    22. DE

      So you wanna learn, whatever it is, your own exercise, something you're improving at work, make a prediction for what you think this, something you're gonna try, whether it'll work or not, and then test it. And then you tweak your beliefs slowly according to that. We should all be making a lot more predictions about what we think's gonna happen whenever we make a decision.

    23. CW

      Hmm. Yeah.

    24. DE

      And then you update little by little by little.

    25. CW

      Who was that guy with the soup bowl?

    26. DE

      Uh, Brian Wansink was the soup bowl guy, and he's kind of a poster child for non-replication science. So the soup bowl was this famous study where, uh, people were given bowls of soup and just told, "Eat until you're full and then stop." And some of those people secretly had a tube under the table that was filling the soup bowl while they were eating slowly. And the finding was that those people ate much more, even though they were told, like, "Just stop eating when you're full," that the people who had the, the secretly refilling bowl ate, like, way more than the people who didn't. And so the conclusion was we don't have a good visual mechan- we don't have a good mechanism for deciding when we're full.

    27. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    28. DE

      It actually depends on this visual aspect.

    29. CW

      Sounds plausible.

    30. DE

      Whether that's true... Well, yeah. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but basically his entire life's work has been retracted. So Wansink was the most famous nutrition researcher in the world. Nutrition research is a frigging mess.

  7. 37:01 – 45:58

    Why Fewer Options Feel Harder to Choose From

    1. CW

      It feels like our brains are sort of, uh, cognitive misers.

    2. DE

      Definitely.

    3. CW

      Just wanna default to familiar things.

    4. DE

      Yes.

    5. CW

      That's path of least resistance, uh, leaning into past habits. Why would it be the case then that it takes more cognitive effort, given that decision-making is such a huge burden?

    6. DE

      Yeah.

    7. CW

      Why does it feel more effortful when there's fewer choices?

    8. DE

      Because we think harder. We think deeper. It's, it's, psychologists call it desirable difficulty, right? So when there are fewer choices, you don't survey as much, right? And it sort of depends. Like, if you're talking about a consumer decision-

    9. CW

      Mm

    10. DE

      ... it, it, it won't necessarily feel more effortful when there are fewer choices. But if you're talking about a creative decision, it, it will. And it's in large part because you explore the possibilities of this limited space in much more depth-

    11. CW

      Mm

    12. DE

      ... than you would, uh, if you were just given open possibilities.

    13. CW

      Do you know if people spend more time assessing the entire set of options when there's more or less?

    14. DE

      Uh, I don't know. If they spend overall more time-

    15. CW

      You know what I mean? Like the size of the pie

    16. DE

      ... but they might be going thinner over the, um... That's a good question. I think it probably depends on the context.

    17. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    18. DE

      For consumer options, they do spend more time when there are more options.

    19. CW

      Yes.

    20. DE

      Like if it's like-

    21. CW

      Yeah

    22. DE

      ... what's the thing that you're gonna buy at the store?

    23. CW

      Which is where the, uh, uh, paralysis analysis, the, exactly why it happens.

    24. DE

      Yeah.

    25. CW

      You go into the store that's got every type of jeans on the planet, and you walk out with no jeans.

    26. DE

      That's right. That's right. Or you walk out with jeans and you're just thinking if you should have gotten something else, so then there's the regret aspect. Um, so I think it's probably context-dependent. Uh, yeah, but for consumer decisions, people spend more time when there are more choices.

    27. CW

      Okay. So constraints force us beyond those defaults-

    28. DE

      Yeah

    29. CW

      ... right? Rather than being in freedom. So having constraints pushes you off the path of least resistance, which is typically, uh, leaning on what you've done previously. So actually, a pivot from freedom to constraint must be a, a unique, uh, situation for humans to go through if it's within the same sort of decision-making criteria. Like if previously you had all of the options in the world, and now those are being constrained, especially including the one that you used to resort to an awful lot.

    30. DE

      Right.

  8. 45:58 – 53:56

    Is Anything Truly Original?

    1. CW

      yeah. Um, so you said this there about, um, originality.

    2. DE

      Yeah.

    3. CW

      Like, how do you come to think about creativity and originality? Is, is there anything that's truly original?

    4. DE

      Only if it's not going to be that useful. So things that are truly original usually don't really connect with people, uh, in, in any particular way. So the idea that creativity and originality were synonymous wasn't even really a thing until the late 18th century Romantic period, which was a reaction against the Enlightenment, basically, with its emphasis on logic and science and all this stuff. So there was this group that wanted to build what they called the cult of the hero, like these creators that were just struck by divine lightning, and, you know, it's just ideas came out of nowhere. But that's not the reality of how creativity works. I mean, before that, creativity was more associated with taking something that people generally understood, and your skill was in showing that you could make it different. So Shakespeare-

    5. CW

      Mm

    6. DE

      ... for example, I mean, like-

    7. CW

      He didn't write Romeo and Juliet, or he didn't come up with the idea.

    8. DE

      No, not even clo- No. He adapted it from Arthur Brooke, who had a... his countryman, who had adapted it from other people. I mean, by the time Arthur Brooke was writing it, he had in the introduction, "You'll recognize this play, people," 'cause they'd already seen it somewhere else. I mean, there are lines in Romeo and Juliet that today you would probably call close enough to plagiarism. [laughs] There, there were chain... You know, Shakespeare put a spin on them, but there were, like, very unique words that he would use in the, in the same lines, but that wasn't a problem because it was about him taking the hits, like a musician-

    9. CW

      Mm

    10. DE

      ... and putting his spin on it.

    11. CW

      Mm.

    12. DE

      And that was seen as what you do, 'cause y- you... People understand the story, and so now they get to really focus in on what is this person doing differently with this thing that I understand. And that's the case for artistic creatives. It's for... Like, to go back to Edison, I mean, he didn't invent the light bulb. He wasn't even close to inventing the light bulb. But he made it. He got people to accept it because he did things like keeping the wattage low and keeping lampshades even though you didn't need them for gas, because he didn't have gas lamps anymore, because it gave this sense of familiarity. What modern designers call skeuomorphism, where you give a new thing characteristics of the old thing so that people understand what they're supposed to do with it.

    13. CW

      Mm.

    14. DE

      It's why you have folders on your computer, or why the first electric cars had a thing that looked like a gas nozzle that plugged into where the nonexistent gas tank is.

    15. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    16. DE

      Right?

    17. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    18. DE

      Um, and so any idea, you know, the more radical an idea is, the more important it actually is to ground it in something that people already understand. So I, I think this is, is, is also a more democratic view of creativity because you don't need to just come up with this bolt of lightning. It's like take something that's there and, and start tweaking.

    19. CW

      There is a And you say judgmentalness, and u-understandably, if you've spent a long time coming up with an idea and somebody else comes along and takes it, probably likely to get pretty pissy, right? Uh, I think that's the, the typical way that people approach, uh, idea ownership-

    20. DE

      Yeah. Mm-hmm

    21. CW

      ... in the modern world. Uh, but yeah, that line, originality is just undetected plagiarism. That's why I've been thinking a lot about Suno, this AI-

    22. DE

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

    23. CW

      ... music thing. Have you tried it?

    24. DE

      I have not tried it, no.

    25. CW

      It is fucking terrifying how good it is.

    26. DE

      I mean, I saw there was just, like, some huge hit, right, that was just like from Suno.

    27. CW

      A num- a, a number of artists are over half a million plays a month on Spotify, which is a big band. Uh, uh, and they don't exist. It's all silicon. Um, but I've been, I've been thinking about that, and obviously there's an awful lot of pushback from musicians that, uh, this is turning a much more sacred industry than content creation, which I don't think anybody thought was that, that sacred to start with. Your Instagram news feed hasn't been the birthplace-

    28. DE

      Right

    29. CW

      ... of sort of the, the highest good in terms of artists-

    30. DE

      Sure

  9. 53:56 – 56:45

    How to Break Free From Habit and Convention

    1. CW

      How do you... Okay, so how do you break with habit and convention that's come before then in this, in this way?

    2. DE

      Uh, break instead of embedding in it, like if you wanna get somewhere new?

    3. CW

      Yes.

    4. DE

      I think first identifying w-what it is. What do you wanna break with, right? So there's some of the innovators in the book that I write about, like for example, Virginia Woolf. She's one of the... I'm a big fiction writer, 'cause I-- reader, 'cause I think you have to read if you wanna be a great writer. Fiction has much more structural diversity, so I think it's important to read for someone who wants, who's cares about their writing craft. I care about writing craft a lot, even though maybe it's getting commodified. But even when AI turns out my lights, I'm gonna be doing it, because I just find it very engaging. Um, but she was writing these... She, she's written three of the, the 100 best books ever written probably. But before that, she was writing these conventional books. And she wasn't happy with them, but she couldn't get out of that mode. And so she took this time to start writing essays about what the conventional status quo of the time was. Reading all these books, defining it, and saying, "Look, these, these, these modern novels at the time, they're out of step." Like, h- life has become more complex than these things reflect. And so she really defined what the status quo was, and then literally said, "Now I'm blocking this. Here are these techniques of writing that every popular writer is using, including me, and I'm not allowed to do this anymore." You know? And for example, a narrator that knows everything about the characters, I'm not allowed to do it anymore. And that's how she came up with what we now call stream of consciousness, basically.

    5. CW

      Hmm.

    6. DE

      By really working hard to define what is the status quo, and then saying, "I'm not allowed to do it." And then she launched into these short stories, each one of which was a single experiment in a different form of narration.

    7. CW

      Hmm.

    8. DE

      And then one of those experiments, she was like, "This is the thing." And then she took off, and her next three books were three of the greatest ever written.

    9. CW

      Didn't Stan Lee use this as well?

    10. DE

      Uh, Stan Lee was ... He, he had some constraints forced on him, uh, where he was the editor, uh, at a, a comic company, Atlas Comics. And their whole business strategy was to pump out a huge volume of comics. They were, they were a volume shop. Fire hose of content. And then their rivals, DC, became their distributor and limited them to only about eight titles a month.

    11. CW

      Hmm.

    12. DE

      So they were like, they, they, they kneecapped their business strategy, basically.

    13. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    14. DE

      And so Stan Lee's like, "Okay, if we only get eight titles, then we have to make long-running stories with characters that people are going to engage with on a long-term basis." And that's when they came up with superheroes with character flaws. You know? Teen angst, anger problems, all these things, and that was the birth of-

    15. CW

      More complex

    16. DE

      ... that was the birth of Marvel. That's where they rebranded as Marvel. They were forced into that. If they were allowed to keep d- they never ... There would be no Marvel if they hadn't been limited by their own rival to a small number of titles a month and had to figure out how to make longer stories that had, had narrative development.

    17. CW

      So cool.

  10. 56:45 – 1:00:26

    Are Constraints the Secret to Great Design?

    1. CW

      D- okay. So do you think that designing with constraints in mind leads to better designs then, like this principle of universal design?

    2. DE

      In, in many cases. Some, some people find this controversial, but the, the idea of universal design, it came out of the disability rights movement in the 1960s. But the idea was that if you design for people, the most constrained users, let's say those are people who are young or old or big or small or-

    3. CW

      Hmm

    4. DE

      ... pets, whatever, or have disabilities, you'll often be identifying user problems that are just extreme versions of problems that many more users have. And so it can show you where to focus your design efforts. So some of the simple things in the world, like curb c- the reason that curbs are, have a part that's level with the street, those were originally made for wheelchairs, but it turns out they're better for everybody, right?

    5. CW

      Hmm.

    6. DE

      Or web pages that work on mobile have these hierarchical, logically structured menus and, but that really came out of making websites that could be read by screen readers for people with visual impairment.

    7. CW

      Hmm.

    8. DE

      But that led to the need to hierarchically organize these menus on, on websites, which turns out to be beneficial for everybody. Or one of the examples I use in the book where, I've lost it now, but I gained about 12 pounds to research one chapter because I had to do an Army obstacle course-

    9. CW

      Hmm

    10. DE

      ... wearing body armor from Vietnam to the present. And I'm not a big guy, and so some of this stuff, like, outweighed me if, once I had like water and batteries and all this stuff. And I was there because I was learning about the design of modern body armor. And what had happened, since about Vietnam, it had just gotten heavier and heavier and heavier and heavier. Especially, uh, like in Iraq, when people were, could be hit by shrapnel from any standpoint. They just like covered, turned soldiers into turtles. And they were protected, but they couldn't move, and that caused all these other dangers. And then about 10 years ago, when women were first allowed into the close combat force in the military for the first time, they realized the body armor was way too heavy. And so the Army had to design body armor specifically for women. So it had to be smaller, more mobile. You could mix and match parts. And they made it much lighter, and it turned out that it was better for a huge portion of the force. So they had to start calling it ... They had things like a notch in the back for a hair bun, but it turns out everyone wants to be able to raise their head when they're lying prone on the ground, or to be able to shoulder a rifle, things like that. And so this, this armor that was designed specifically with women in mind, who are only like 1 to 2% of the close combat force, ended up being used by h- a ton of the men. So the Army actually had to rebrand it as unisex just to get all the guys-

    11. CW

      Hmm

    12. DE

      ... like who it would be good for to use it.

    13. CW

      Hilarious.

    14. DE

      So, so it came out of, you know, studying these very specific mobility problems and ended up building something better for everyone.

    15. CW

      What was that story about, was it the F16 seat?

    16. DE

      Oh, yeah, yeah. This was pre-F16, I believe, where w- when, when jets were proliferating, uh, there were a whole bunch of accidents in the Air Force. It'd be like, there was one weekend where there were like 17 different accidents. Not all, not all deaths-

    17. CW

      Mm-hmm

    18. DE

      ... but accidents. And at first, the Air Force thought it was pilot error, and then they commissioned a young lieutenant to study ... Th- these, these cockpits had been created based on the average measurements of a whole bunch of pilots. And this young lieutenant that they commissioned to study it went and started taking body measurements and realized there is no such thing as the average pilot. Like, if you took even three measurements on someone, you know, arm length, thigh circumference, and, uh, height, it was like 3% of people who would even be in the middle 30 percentiles just with those three measures.

    19. CW

      Yeah.

    20. DE

      So in designing this cockpit for the average pilot, they had actually designed it for, for no one.

    21. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    22. DE

      And so the answer was adjustable cockpits. And they started having a lot fewer accidents.

  11. 1:00:26 – 1:03:48

    Is Multitasking Secretly Hurting You?

    1. CW

      So will this mean that doing one thing at a time is crucial? I have to assume that multitasking is basically the anathema of being able to do this well.

    2. DE

      Multitasking is Worse than I thought it would be. Well, so first of all, it's not really possible because it's actually our brain... That's not true. There's some types of multitasking that are possible. We can walk and talk at the same time. When, when, when we're combining it with a function that's basically automatic, you know, we can do things and breathe, then multitasking is possible. But the way that people generally think about it, two different cognitively engaged tasks, it's not possible.

    3. CW

      You think about parallel processing when in fact it's task-switching.

    4. DE

      Right. That's right. You have to drop one set of rules and activate another one, and there's always a cost when you do that. So as Gloria Mark, a psychologist who, who studies people at work, says, "Your brain's like a whiteboard, and you erase when you switch, but there's that residue left-

    5. CW

      Hmm

    6. DE

      ... for the next thing, and it interferes with the next thing. That builds up over the day until you sleep, basically." And she's been studying people at work. Her, her research is the scariest thing that went into the book, I think. She's been studying people since about 2000. And when she started, like, she would... First she would sit behind people with a stopwatch. You know, these days it would be keyloggers and mon- cameras and everything. People were switching tasks about every three minutes on average. Then by 2012, it was every 75 seconds. Then by 2022, it was every 45 seconds. That's where it's stuck for a few years. And that's terrible for your ability to get anything done. The more switches someone does a day, the lower their end-of-day productivity-

    7. CW

      Hmm

    8. DE

      ... and the higher their end-of-day stress. That, measured by things like heart rate variability and immune function, like you can see this huge impact on stress. And the scariest thing is she found that your in- your attention gets trained so such that if you're interrupted by notifications or other people or whatever all day, and then you suddenly say, "I'm putting this away. It's time to focus," you will self-interrupt with intrusive thoughts at the rate to which you've become accustomed-

    9. CW

      Wow

    10. DE

      ... as if we have this internal distraction barometer that wants to keep a certain cadence going. And so the, the ways to combat this are to try to work in blocks, where... She found that people a few years ago were doing about 77 different email t- so in and out of the inbox about 77 times a day on average, which actually sounds like-

    11. CW

      Seems kind of low

    12. DE

      ... low to me. Yeah.

    13. CW

      Yeah.

    14. DE

      Um, but if you have to answer all those emails, but can you do it in o- one or three or five or seven blocks, where you're just doing email, and then you're not doing email, and have a block of other things, and you can start to regain some of your ability to pay attention. I, one thing I find for me, this isn't from Dr. Mark's wor- And, and keep a pad next to yourself, by the way, so when those intrusive thoughts pop in, you write it down. Cognitive outsourcing. One thing that's, I've found useful, um, is what I call the Hemingway principle, where Ernest Hemingway would stop his workday in the middle of a sentence.

    15. CW

      Yep.

    16. DE

      Because then the next morning he knows an important thing that I am starting with is this sentence. So I try to make the last thing I do in every workday defining what is the important thing I'm gonna start in the morning because it kind of saves me from two possible problems: one, getting lost in feeds, mindless stuff, or two, getting lost in my inbox or falling prey to this thing called the mere-urgency effect, where people prioritize things that feel urgent over things that are important-

    17. CW

      Mm-hmm

    18. DE

      ... even if it's a worse use of time.

    19. CW

      Yeah, you got the Eisenhower Matrix upside down. It's a little Ziganaky as well with that-

    20. DE

      Yep, yep

    21. CW

      ... open loop-

    22. DE

      For sure

    23. CW

      ... overnight thing. Yeah, very cool.

  12. 1:03:48 – 1:08:44

    The Best Examples of Locking In

    1. CW

      What, who are your favorite examples of people who locked in singularly very well?

    2. DE

      My favorite examples. It's a good question. I mean, I, I love the example of... I write a lot about Isabel Allende, but I would say that because I'm, I'm a writer. Again, I, I really, I strongly identify as a writer, as a craftsman in that way. And for this book, I got to shadow one of the greatest living writers, Isabel Allende, who didn't start publishing books until she was about 40, and then started her first book on January 8th, has started a new book every January 8th, assuming the previous one is done. Since then, since the age of 40, it's been 44 years now. She's produced a bestseller about every 18 months on average for 44 years, 80 million copies sold. And she organized her life around ritual. And again, this started when she was, just before she was 40. Every book January 8th. She clears out this room. But before she had all these resources, she did it in a closet.

    3. CW

      Hmm.

    4. DE

      Right? Wherever she could, she m- makes a quiet space, designates certain time. She lights a candle to start her workday, blows it out at the end, closes the door so that that story is staying for me there. And she implemented all of these rituals. She puts a certain book of Pablo Neruda poems under her computer just for, you know, inspiration. But really, all this stuff is a cue. Like a basketball player who takes three dribbles and claps before they shoot a free throw, you start to associate these rituals with how you get into your head space for performance.

    5. CW

      Hmm.

    6. DE

      And so as she said, like when I was around her, her family would say, "If, if you want anything from her," she has this big foundation she's given $20 million of her book proceeds to, "you have to get it by January 7th," because then her life turned outward, as she calls it, is disappearing. And everyone around that, everyone around her knows that-

    7. CW

      Hmm

    8. DE

      ... and respects that. And so it was just amazing to see that and think about, you know, what could I take for myself, but just to be, be around someone like that. I will say, though, she, uh... I offered to send her an advance copy of the book because she's in the book, and it was like April, and so I... Like, she probably just started a novel. She can't read it.

    9. CW

      Hmm.

    10. DE

      And so she emails back, "Yes, send me a copy. As you know, I just, it was January 8th was recently, so I started another book. I can't read it, but send it. Thanks. Bye." Great. Perfect answer. Like, I know she's locked in. And then I, just a few weeks ago, I get a message from her saying like, "I'm loving the book," all this stuff. I'm like, "What are you doing? You're supposed to be writing and not reading anything." And she sends me this email. Can I read this email to you-

    11. CW

      Yeah, yeah, yeah

    12. DE

      ... what she sends?

    13. CW

      Please.

    14. DE

      She said, she said I could share this. She says, "I started a novel on January 8th and gave myself a deadline to finish a first manuscript by the end of March," which is crazy. She says, "The reason for this short deadline is not important." So whatever it is, she doesn't want to tell me. She said, "My agent and my brother read it and liked it a lot. It still needs polishing, but it's May and I find myself without work until next January 8th. I'm going crazy." I'm getting rid of my clothes, replacing the furniture, walking in circles, reading compulsively, et cetera. Your book's been an inspiration. I need to give myself a task with boundaries. For example, write a novel set in Lima in the year 1610 about a cowardly Spanish soldier, an Inca maid, and the Inquisition. Or a story set in 1810 Ireland about a girl/witch expelled from her village who seeks revenge. You get the idea. I can't start writing until January 8th, but I can start researching and planning. I have total freedom to do whatever I want, and at my age, 84, I have no obligation to keep writing. This freedom is lethal. Help, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. Love, your pen pal." Then an hour later she sends another email that says, "Have any ideas for me? Not the Inquisition or the Irish witch." [laughs] So it's kind of interesting.

    15. CW

      This freedom is lethal.

    16. DE

      She-- Because her whole life has been this cycle, this ritual, and all of a sudden she decided to give herself this ridiculously short deadline for reasons I don't know.

    17. CW

      Hmm.

    18. DE

      And has suddenly found herself without that structure that gave meaning and pace and seasonality to her life.

    19. CW

      Jared, you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem? I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Co. last night. But they're non-alcoholic. And that's not a problem? Sorry, man, I, I just kept chugging, waiting for the regret to creep in. Never happened. See, most people, like Jared, don't want to change what they drink. They just don't want the next day to be a complete write-off. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. They make the best NA brews on the planet. [burps] You can find Athletic Brewing Co.'s best-selling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you, or best option, get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped direct to your door. Right now, get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Near beer terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Company, fit for all times. Bottoms up. [laughs]

  13. 1:08:44 – 1:13:39

    When Optimisation Turns Into Obsession

    1. CW

      There's an interesting trend that's going on at the moment. You used... You interchangeably used the word maximizer with optimizer-

    2. DE

      Yeah

    3. CW

      ... earlier on.

    4. DE

      Yeah.

    5. CW

      And I do think that kind of the, uh, era of the optimizer is maybe we're toward the tail end of it now, but has certainly been around for about-

    6. DE

      Oh, you think?

    7. CW

      Yeah.

    8. DE

      Tell me more.

    9. CW

      This is me licking my finger and putting it in the air. There is a big pushback at the moment against over-optimization, against, uh, I think what people see as an unnecessary obsession with tracking metrics, with, uh, restricting life, especially what's seen as being associated with fun, not drinking alcohol, not staying up late, not cheating on your diet, not not training-

    10. DE

      Hmm

    11. CW

      ... et cetera, et cetera. And, uh, I get it. I do understand, and I've certainly gone through my era of David Allen's Getting Things Done and Pomodoro timers and Cal Newport. Like, I think everybody kind of goes through that and squeezes themselves out of the aperture of the anus on the other side of it, which is pretty important. Um, what is... What's fascinating to me, though, is w- what people see routine as when they can't understand why the routine is there is something much closer to superstition than, uh, uh, preparedness. That, "Why are you doing all of this stuff?" Like, it doesn't relate to your performance in any case.

    12. DE

      Hmm.

    13. CW

      Why are you lighting the candle?

    14. DE

      Hmm.

    15. CW

      Like, the candle doesn't matter. I, I think baseball is probably the canonical example of this, where, uh, it's a sport that's very iterative, that, uh, success and failure in each of those iterations is very tightly defined. You either got on base or you didn't get on base. And you see the players, and ev- in between every pitch, one glove, other glove.

    16. DE

      Mm-hmm.

    17. CW

      Tap, tap, helmet.

    18. DE

      Yeah.

    19. CW

      Sand, wiggle, bat. Like, everybody has... I mean, there's stories of baseball players who didn't clean the helmet for their entire career-

    20. DE

      [laughs]

    21. CW

      ... because they thought it had become imbued with some special sacred, "And if I change this thing, that is the reason."

    22. DE

      Yeah, it's like a totem. Yeah.

    23. CW

      Yeah, it is. It is. It becomes clo- way closer to a rain dance than it does to a ritual or a routine. And, um, you kind of slippery slope your way down. I think the, the era of the optimizer, it's having a huge wobble. If the, if there was a VIX index for optimizers at the moment, it would be fucking through the roof.

    24. DE

      [laughs]

    25. CW

      Um, and I think that this is because people feel like they're overwhelmed. I think that it is due, due to massive amounts of optionality, chaos, unpredictability about the future. Is AI gonna take my job? Is Iran gonna come and fucking blow everything up? In that, I just want a little bit of simplicity. I want to do-

    26. DE

      Yeah

    27. CW

      ... something that feels like fun, and I don't want the rest of my life to feel like homework.

    28. DE

      Uh, I, that makes sense. I mean, I'm, I'm a self-improver, so I've felt those things. Sometimes I kinda like experimenting on myself. At the same time, like, I was a Division 1 800-meter runner, right? And the better I got, the actually, the, the less I used to commit. Like, eventually I said, "I don't need a watch anymore."

    29. CW

      Yeah.

    30. DE

      I can go by feel because I understand this well enough. And I thought that was sort of freeing. On the, the other hand, so I try to think of this because I do have a tendency. I have some maximizing tendencies myself, and I have a tendency to get overwhelmed when I see some of these optimization things, say, "That's the, that's the thing," you know?

  14. 1:13:39 – 1:15:41

    How to Use Constraints Without Being Trapped

    1. CW

      What about avoiding constraints becoming too constraining? How do you know when the problem is too much freedom or too much constraint?

    2. DE

      Yeah, I think there's an art to that, right? I think you can see in studies, for example, of problem-solving, when people are basically told not only what they have to do but how they have to do it, that's too much constraint. Like, their ingenuity, their creativity goes way down. So you'll see it in these studies of mechanical inventions, like if people are given 100 pieces and told to make anything, they make less creative inventions than if they're given only 20 pieces and said, "You have to make a piece of furniture."

    3. CW

      Hmm.

    4. DE

      But if they're given only 20 pieces and told that they have to make a chair, then it goes the other way. Like, the creativity totally drops. So if there's no... If you say, "Could I still surprise myself?" and the answer is no, then you're, you're way too constrained. So I think the point is to leave that wiggle room where you're forced to explore.

    5. CW

      Hmm. That's fascinating. What have you a- applied to your own life beyond the dance halls and the pickleball and the turning up at the same time?

    6. DE

      Oh, yeah. I mean, I, I totally... I do my work completely in blocks now, which requires a little more pre-planning.

    7. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    8. DE

      Right? So this is a block where I'm gonna be doing email. This is a block where I'm gonna be doing research or writing or whatever it is. And again, the last thing I do at the end of every workday is to say, "What is the important thing I'm going to start with tomorrow?" So I'm not making any decisions when I wake up. I've already designated this important thing. I set decision rules for things that I do. I mean, my newsletter, this isn't gonna make anybody wanna read it, but is a satisficing exercise for me because I have these optimizing, maximizing tendencies. So if, if a book, say, has to be like a 9 or 10, the newsletter, if I g- reach six and a half, I send it out.

    9. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    10. DE

      Right? Again-

    11. CW

      How do you make that judgment?

    12. DE

      Just my own quality judgment. I mean, I always... Subjective, obviously. But I always have these other things in my head every time I send it out where I'm thinking, "Ah, here's like three m- you know, here's something else I should put in there." But if I feel like it's a six and a half out of 10 already-

    13. CW

      Hmm

    14. DE

      ... I send it. And that's been a very important satisficing exercise for me to actually ship, you know, to actually get things out the door.

    15. CW

      Hmm.

    16. DE

      'Cause otherwise I can kind of feel that paralysis at anything short of a book, basically.

    17. CW

      Hmm.

  15. 1:15:41 – 1:18:08

    What the “Road Less Travelled” Really Means

    1. CW

      What's the true meaning of the road less traveled?

    2. DE

      It's funny that you should ask that. It is not what the way that people usually often quote it in graduation season, which is that it's this ode to rugged individualism, the poem, um, saying that v- you know, you take the road that less people have trod, and therefore, that's what led to your success. What Robert Frost was actually doing was sort of criticizing, um, his... Edward Thomas, his walking partner, who would, when they would come to two roads that looked the same, would agonize over which one to take, and then no matter which one they take, when they were done, he would say, "We should've taken the other one."

    3. CW

      Hmm.

    4. DE

      So if you look at that poem, The Road Not Taken, closely, Frost says both roads were just as fair. He says neither had footprints in it from that morning. So he was actually criticizing the, uh, the drive to think about what else you could have been doing. So I think the rugged individualism, like zigging when other people zagging, I think that's an important message also.

    5. CW

      Hmm.

    6. DE

      But it's not the one he intended, and I think the one he intended is actually even more important for, uh, uh, for our modern condition.

    7. CW

      I've got a, an essay that I wrote a little while ago. "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all." The line comes from Hamlet, and it's usually misheard as an insult, as if Shakespeare is sneering at morality, like ethics often soften us or thought drains courage from the body. That's not what's happening. Shakespeare isn't attacking goodness. He's pointing at self-awareness and naming its cost. In the "to be or not to be" soliloquy, Hamlet isn't really weighing life versus death. He's circling a more practical question. Why do humans hesitate to act even when action would clearly relieve suffering? Why do we endure situations we don't want, and why do we tolerate lives that we could, in theory, change? Well, pain isn't the only obstacle. Imagination is. By conscience, Shakespeare means something closer to consciousness, the ability to think ahead, judge ourselves, and simulate futures before they arrive, to see consequences coming and experience them emotionally in advance. And unfortunately, that ability cuts both ways. The very capacity that makes us reflective, ethical, and intelligent also makes us hesitate. We imagine worst-case futures so vividly that we treat them as already real. So courage isn't defeated by fear. It's defeated by simulation.

    8. DE

      Fascinating. That's a beautiful passage.

    9. CW

      Isn't that cool? Isn't that cool?

    10. DE

      Fantastic. No, our ability to, to think about those counterfactuals, which I think is also unique as far as we can tell, um, among life.

    11. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    12. DE

      A blessing and a curse.

  16. 1:18:08 – 1:18:42

    Where to Find David

    1. CW

      David Epstein, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, you rule. From episode 84 to episode 1,100-

    2. DE

      Episode 84

    3. CW

      ... and whatever the hell this is. Where should people go to keep up to date with everything you're doing?

    4. DE

      Uh, davidepstein.com. They can find my stuff there, my newsletter which is free, some tips from Inside the Box-

    5. CW

      Mm-hmm

    6. DE

      ... and info about my books.

    7. CW

      Heck yeah. David, I appreciate you. All right.

    8. DE

      Thank you.

    9. CW

      See you next time, my beauties. Dude. [upbeat music] Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, YouTube knows who you are deeply. It thinks you're gonna like this one even more. Go on, press it

Episode duration: 1:18:43

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