Derek Thompson (2:58)

Sort of.

Interviewer (2:59)

Our guest is a most unusual person

Derek Thompson (3:01)

to make this argument.

Interviewer (3:03)

Several years ago my friend David Epstein wrote a book called Range, and it became one of those bestselling nonfiction books of the last few years that you see in all sorts of people's libraries and bookshelves. Range is about the case for being a generalist in a world that's designed for specialists. But his new book, Inside the Box, takes on the opposite side of the equation. In a world that celebrates absolute freedom, David encourages us to see the virtues of constraint. If you ask people what they want from life, they'll describe examples of agency and autonomy. Give me a job with more money, a life with more flexibility, a contract with more optionality. But what people tend to enjoy most about their lives are the relationships and achievements that require responsibilities, limitations, rules, constraints. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once wrote that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. It is the sickness that comes from the person who spends so much time keeping their options open that they forget that becoming a real person requires making decisions. We live in an age of anxiety. So perhaps this is the best time to remind ourselves of the ancient wisdom that, ironically, it is our limitations that set us free. I'm Derek Thompson.

Derek Thompson (4:31)

This is plain English.

Derek Thompson (4:56)

David Epstein. Hello.

David Epstein (4:57)

Hi.

David Epstein (4:57)

Thanks for having me.

Interviewer (4:58)

So I want to go back to 2019.

Derek Thompson (5:00)

Your book range comes out. It's a super massive bestseller.

Interviewer (5:06)

Take me back to May 2019. Remind us, what was Range about? And in the aftermath of a book

Derek Thompson (5:13)

like that, how do you find your next project?

David Epstein (5:16)

Yeah, it was about the benefits of

David Epstein (5:18)

having broad experiences and a broad toolbox

David Epstein (5:21)

in an increasingly specialized world, and made the argument that that's increasingly important as the world changes really rapidly and people

David Epstein (5:27)

need to be adaptable.

David Epstein (5:30)

And as you alluded, it found a

David Epstein (5:32)

wider audience than I myself expected.

Interviewer (5:34)

And.

David Epstein (5:35)

And so it was also so much work, and I felt like I needed to live up to it again after that that I decided I was only gonna write another book if I could find the perfect topic.

David Epstein (5:47)

Right.

David Epstein (5:48)

And so over the course about the next two years or so, I started dabbling in a whole bunch of different topics. Cause I never have a problem finding

David Epstein (5:54)

enough things to be interested in. Right.

David Epstein (5:55)

That's not like for you. I think our problem is what do you execute on?

David Epstein (5:58)

Not like, how many things are you interested in?

David Epstein (6:01)

And I found a lot of things that were interesting, but I could not find anything that was perfect, you know. And then I was reading some work by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, the psychologist who's most known for coining the term flow to describe the feeling of immersion in an Activity. And he has this quote where he's talking about marriage, but I think it could be applied to anything where he basically says, the great thing about being committed, if you commit by your choice, is that you free up all this energy for living instead of wondering how to live. So you can get busy living instead of wondering what's around the corner.

Interviewer (6:35)

I actually have the Sheikhs Enmihalyi quote right here in front of me. Yeah, yeah. Before turning things back over to you. By making up one's mind to invest psychic energy in a marriage, regardless of any problems, obstacles, or more attractive options that may come along later, one is freed of the constant pressure of trying to maximize emotional returns. Having made the commitment and having made it willingly instead of being compelled by tradition, a person no longer needs to worry whether she has made the right choice or whether the grass might be greener somewhere else. As a result, a great deal of energy gets freed up for living instead of being spent on wondering about how to live. And later in that passage, he says, limitations are liberating.

David Epstein (7:20)

Yeah. And this hit me in the face

David Epstein (7:22)

like a kick with a golf shoe, you know?

David Epstein (7:25)

And I said, oh, my gosh. This is what I'm doing with topics like, I'm finding really fascinating stuff, but I'm swiping right is that I've never

David Epstein (7:33)

been on the dating app.

Interviewer (7:34)

The left is.

Derek Thompson (7:35)

No, you were swiping the left.

Interviewer (7:36)

Cause you were rejecting. Swiping left is not accepting.

David Epstein (7:39)

Well, no, I wasn't totally rejecting. I was, like, keeping them in the hopper. But then, like, but what else is there? So I was, like, keeping a lot of things open. I want to.

Derek Thompson (7:47)

I'll accept the right.

David Epstein (7:48)

So. And as soon as I read that quote, I said one of the topics I was interested in was useful constraints. I said, I'm writing a proposal on that tomorrow. And naturally, by two weeks later of research, I was ten times as fascinated.

David Epstein (8:02)

And that was the beginning of this book.

Interviewer (8:04)

So I want to put these two

Derek Thompson (8:05)

projects next to each other. Range and your new book, Inside the Box.

Interviewer (8:09)

So Range essentially argues that we need to reject the pressure to specialize and be generous. And inside the Box, you're arguing that we need to reject the allure of freedom and design constraints on our lives. Does this amount to you changing your mind? Is it hypocrisy? Or is there like a. Is there a subtle nuance here in which it can simultaneously be true that the world is pushing us to both specialize and want too much freedom?

David Epstein (8:37)

Yeah, I think it's. And I don't. Even think it's that subtle. I mean, to me it was a natural. Next question. And became more natural as lots of readers asked me versions of the same question, which was okay, I actually have these broad experiences. I have wide ranging curiosity, I have tons of ideas, but I don't know what to do. And so it felt like this natural. Next question of okay, at some point you have to focus that into doing something, into achievement, into satisfaction, all those things. And I count myself among those people

David Epstein (9:03)

that was struggling with this.

David Epstein (9:05)

You know, I was training to be

David Epstein (9:06)

a scientist in my first life. Then I became a writer.

David Epstein (9:08)

I had this very broad background. But I did have a challenge drawing boundaries around my projects. In fact, with my first two books I, I wrote 150% the length of a book and had to cut back to get a book. I cut a trip to Arctic Sweden for my first book that had I drawn better boundaries around the project, I would have seen wasn't going to work. Then when I became a parent and was like, I can't be writing a book and a half to get a book. I realized, you know, there's a hefty dose of me search in this book that I stunk at putting useful boundaries around my work and wanted to get better at that. So I really changed my writing process a lot.

David Epstein (9:43)

But that's a whole other thing.

Interviewer (9:44)

There's several themes from this book that

Derek Thompson (9:46)

I think are worth a deep dive.

Interviewer (9:48)

And the first that I want to discuss is this idea that individuals and

Derek Thompson (9:50)

organizations with ultimate freedom and few constraints often struggle and fail.

Interviewer (9:56)

And the canonical example from your book is this company called General Magic.

Derek Thompson (10:03)

What was General Magic?

David Epstein (10:04)

Yeah, most important company nobody's ever heard of.

Derek Thompson (10:06)

That's exactly right.

David Epstein (10:06)

Most important because of the people who came out of it. So this was a company.

David Epstein (10:09)

It was the first so called concept ipo where their vision talent was so alluring, Goldman Sachs took them public with an idea, not with a product. The mid-90s. So starting in the late 80s really this company was essentially building the iPhone before the Internet. And it was founded by two of the original designers, the Apple Macintosh and then a third Apple employee whose job was seeing the future of technology. And by the way, if you I gotta give you his PhD dissertation. This guy, Mark Peratt, 1976 at Stanford, he coins the term information economy on the first page. Reading this thing is easy. Eerie as hell. Like he saw the next half century of technological change. Not just a promise, but problems with misinformation, inequality, all this kind of stuff. So he's the visionary CEO in 1989. He's sketching a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons and a touchscreen that has rectangular apps on it. And so their vision is obviously correct. Money absolutely pours in. International partners pour in. So many international partners, their meetings have to start with an antitrust lawyer listing all the things they're not allowed to talk about. And in building these personal communicators, they get to work. There's huge amounts of innovation, but they

David Epstein (11:20)

have so much talent and so many

David Epstein (11:22)

resources, they can do anything.

David Epstein (11:24)

And so they do do anything.

David Epstein (11:26)

Every good idea they have, someone starts doing it right. They don't define a clear user.

David Epstein (11:31)

They call their user Joe Sixpack.

David Epstein (11:32)

So they don't really know.

David Epstein (11:33)

And they realize nobody's really met the guy after missing a few years of deadlines. And so the project grows and grows and grows.

David Epstein (11:38)

And the CEO, Mark Peratt, says, why raise so much money to create heaven for engineers where they were unlimited, limited only by the things they could imagine? What more could anyone ask for? And I think the obvious answer became less freedom. I interviewed dozens of former employees there, and the refrain was, we just couldn't figure out what not to do.

David Epstein (11:58)

So I think there was one emblematic interview with this engineer named Steve Perlman. So the thing comes on as a total disaster. Like, the stock price doubles on the first day. Two years later, the company's basically worthless. And because when the communicator comes out, it's like it has a 200 page manual.

David Epstein (12:16)

Nobody really. It's so many features, like, nobody really understands how to use it.

David Epstein (12:19)

So Perlman's supposed to create the calendar

David Epstein (12:21)

function for this thing, and he writes it from 1904 to 2096 and checks it in. Done.

Derek Thompson (12:26)

When you say calendar function, like, why is the calendar function going back to 1904 here?

David Epstein (12:30)

It's just because there may be old apps that people use or because they were readying themselves for the world of apps that people might build, things that have historical stock prices or historical news or whatever. And so he checks it in and he's done, right? And then one of the leaders comes

David Epstein (12:45)

to him and says, steve, people might write historical apps that go way back. You gotta make it bigger. So he opens it back up, makes it go from year one, thinks he's done. Then another team comes to him and says, why are you tying it into

David Epstein (12:56)

this arbitrary religious context of year one? Make it go back to the beginning of astronomical time. So he opens it up and writes the calendar function to go from the big bang.

David Epstein (13:04)

To the future.

David Epstein (13:05)

It would have been four lines of code if he left it in 1904-2096.

David Epstein (13:09)

Instead, it drags on for months.

David Epstein (13:10)

And this was how everything worked at General Magic. Because they could do anything. So they did.

Derek Thompson (13:16)

There's a line by Bill Gurley, the venture capitalist, that says more startups die of indigestion than starvation. That seems appropriate.

David Epstein (13:23)

Yeah. Actually, multiple people claim to me that they coined that line in my interviews.

Interviewer (13:27)

Multiple discovery of the same.

David Epstein (13:28)

Yeah, that's right. Of the same quotation. Yeah.

David Epstein (13:30)

And this idea that, you know, it's

David Epstein (13:32)

really counterintuitive, the idea that they die

David Epstein (13:35)

of too much, not too little, but

David Epstein (13:38)

it's often the case because it doesn't force you to. I mean, I think the things that useful constraints can often do is force you to clarify your priorities and launch productive experimentation. And with so many resources, places like General Magic don't have to do that. They're not forced to prioritize ruthlessly. When I was talking about changing my own writing process, so my book projects are usually about two years.

David Epstein (13:59)

I'm interested in the idea before that, but the formal process, two years this time around, I didn't start writing for a year. Not a word. At the end of a year, just researching.

David Epstein (14:11)

I took a hundred thousand word note

David Epstein (14:13)

sheet, much longer than the book, and made it into a one page outline

David Epstein (14:18)

with the structural architecture of the book, which forced me to prioritize ruthlessly. And if it's not on that page, it's not in the book. So there's all these other things I think are interesting.

David Epstein (14:27)

Right.

David Epstein (14:28)

But that forced me to really prioritize and places like General Magic never have to ruthlessly prioritize.

Derek Thompson (14:32)

One thing that's really cool about the General Magic story is that the expats who come out of General Magic.

David Epstein (14:36)

Amazing. That's why it's an important company.

Derek Thompson (14:38)

Yeah.

Interviewer (14:38)

They go on to build. I mean, it's almost like everything.

Derek Thompson (14:41)

It's like Stanford.

Interviewer (14:42)

It's like the people who graduated from

Derek Thompson (14:44)

General Magic went on to found every

David Epstein (14:46)

person listening to this uses something made by a General Magic alum.

Derek Thompson (14:49)

The iPad.

David Epstein (14:49)

Every day.

Derek Thompson (14:49)

The iPad, the iPhone, Nest, Android, LinkedIn, eBay.

Interviewer (14:54)

Can you tell me how they applied

Derek Thompson (14:56)

the lessons they learned from the implosion of General Magic?

Interviewer (15:00)

Because it did implode.

David Epstein (15:01)

Yeah, it imploded.

David Epstein (15:02)

It was a disaster. Ruined various people's lives and stuff like that.

David Epstein (15:07)

But some of these especially younger employees

David Epstein (15:10)

were kind of, you know, I don't want to say traumatized because not like trauma in the real Psychological term.

David Epstein (15:16)

But it left a scar for them and they took that to the next places they went and all became kind

David Epstein (15:22)

of constraints obsessed to various degrees.

David Epstein (15:24)

The guy who was the most constraints

David Epstein (15:26)

obsessed was this guy Tony Fadell, who, when I first called him and said it was Bill Gurley, had introduced us. And I said, you know, I want to talk about constraints.

David Epstein (15:36)

If you don't have constraints, make up constraints.

David Epstein (15:38)

He's like almost yelling at me. He's a very enthusiastic guy in general.

David Epstein (15:40)

But he went on to design the ipod. He was the lead designer of the ipod and he pitched Steve Jobs a Styrofoam model in March of 2001 and got the green light and said, we're shipping by Christmas and just a few weeks to make a first prototype. Clear customer problem, right?

David Epstein (15:54)

Growing music collections in the MP3 age. No way to carry them on the go.

David Epstein (15:59)

And it forced them to because he set these really tight deadlines for when they would stop, learn lessons, and then

David Epstein (16:05)

do a next version, sometimes called Design

David Epstein (16:07)

Freeze, where you force a stop. It forced them to start borrowing technology instead of building from scratch like they

David Epstein (16:13)

did at General Magic.

David Epstein (16:14)

So the scroll wheel that was the iconic feature of the ipod came from a team member who brought in a Danish cordless phone that had a wheel on it and they had to repurpose stuff. But his.

David Epstein (16:23)

The apotheosis, I think, of his fervor

David Epstein (16:25)

for constraints was Nest, where he forced the team to work inside a literal box.

David Epstein (16:29)

Like he made them prototype the packaging

David Epstein (16:30)

box before the product because it forced him to say, what are the priorities that are so important we communicate them on the box to the end user. And so his whole career became like

David Epstein (16:44)

centered around constraint driven innovation.

David Epstein (16:46)

He wasn't the only one.

David Epstein (16:47)

I mean, interesting one in government, which you might appreciate because of all of your writing about government, was Megan Smith, who was another young engineer there, went on to become.

David Epstein (16:57)

She like led some stuff dealing with

David Epstein (16:59)

Google Maps and all these other things.

David Epstein (17:01)

And then she went on to become

David Epstein (17:01)

the first female Chief Technology Officer of the United States under President Obama.

David Epstein (17:06)

And she told me people had these huge ideas of things they want to do. They'd be like, let's remake education. And she was like, I've seen what happens when you say we're gonna remake everything. It doesn't work.

David Epstein (17:20)

So she developed this philosophy she called Scout and Scale, where she's like, all

David Epstein (17:24)

these people are doing these little prototypes in their communities and some of them might be working.

David Epstein (17:28)

So what we need to do is

David Epstein (17:29)

go find those people that have already learned these lessons in a small way

David Epstein (17:32)

and then just help their good solutions scale. So it's in all these different ways. They all came out with these lessons about putting a bounding box around projects.

Interviewer (17:41)

One of my frustrations, talking to you

Derek Thompson (17:43)

and for people watching us or listening to us, this is not the first or tenth time that David and I

Interviewer (17:47)

have hung out is that every question I have for you always opens up

Derek Thompson (17:53)

like 10 to 15 different tabs in the browser of my own head.

Interviewer (17:56)

Cause I'm like, there's all these different

Derek Thompson (17:57)

things I want to follow up on.

Interviewer (17:59)

One of them is as you were

Derek Thompson (18:00)

offering, the last story on how Tony Fadal went from the disaster of General Magic. Too much freedom to nest, which is hyper constrained by the design process of

Interviewer (18:12)

first design the box in order to

Derek Thompson (18:13)

design the exterior of the product. In order to design the interior of the product.

Interviewer (18:18)

One way that I think about that

Derek Thompson (18:19)

with my own work is it's often instructive, I think, if you are stuck

Interviewer (18:25)

in an essay wondering what it is you want to say, write the tweet. If you can't write the tweet, if you can't express not just the headline, if you can't express in 200 or 300 words why you are excited to share this idea with the world, you don't have an idea, you haven't done the work.

Derek Thompson (18:47)

You need to talk to more people, you need to read more books, you

Interviewer (18:49)

need to read more papers. If you can't write the tweet, you

Derek Thompson (18:51)

haven't written the essay or you're not ready to.

Interviewer (18:54)

And like, I feel like it's similar because the tweet is the packaging, the

Derek Thompson (18:58)

tweet's not the essay.

Interviewer (18:59)

The tweet is the box in which the essay travels through the world, right? Meets its ultimate customer. But in a way I was like, oh, that that explains why this weird

Derek Thompson (19:12)

habit that I've developed works.

Interviewer (19:14)

Because in a weird way, if you reverse engineer from the box, that can provide enough focus to ask the question, what is it that I'm trying to

Derek Thompson (19:23)

make here in the world?

David Epstein (19:25)

That's pretty brilliant. That's very Fidel esque of you.

David Epstein (19:28)

And in fact, he told me that one of the reasons I did the

David Epstein (19:30)

one page outline was he said his

David Epstein (19:34)

the most important advice he gives entrepreneurs or mentors now is to write the

David Epstein (19:39)

press release before they start the project.

David Epstein (19:41)

That's funny. One page press release only, right? Which I think is a very similar thing. And as he said, whether it's the nest box or the press release, because that Forces you to try. Why are you doing this thing? Like you said, what problem am I solving? And he said, it does slow you down. It kind of sucks, right?

David Epstein (19:58)

I didn't enjoy taking 100,000 words and condensing it into a one page outline.

David Epstein (20:02)

I don't know how you feel about

David Epstein (20:03)

doing those tweets, but it's probably hard.

David Epstein (20:05)

But that's the point, right? I think his words were something like

David Epstein (20:08)

with these ultra constraint based things, it

David Epstein (20:10)

slows you down, but it forces that thinking. So when I hear you say that, I'm immediately like, oh, I don't want to do that, but it would absolutely

David Epstein (20:17)

be great for me to do.

David Epstein (20:18)

But it's a little painful, but that's why it's helpful. And then you're liberated within that to do your thing.

Derek Thompson (20:24)

Yeah.

Interviewer (20:25)

This idea that when we fail to

Derek Thompson (20:27)

constrain ourselves, our focus often suffers also clicks into a wonderful idea from the book by the focus and attention researcher Gloria Marks, who introduced a concept I had not heard of before. I read your work called self interruption.

David Epstein (20:41)

Yeah.

Derek Thompson (20:41)

What is self interruption?

David Epstein (20:43)

Ooh. Yeah. This was the scariest research in the book. So what Gloria Marks, she's been following

David Epstein (20:48)

people at work for about a quarter

David Epstein (20:50)

century and finding that we're switching tasks.

David Epstein (20:53)

You know, it was about three minutes. Every three minutes you'd switch a task when she started.

David Epstein (20:57)

Now it's about every 45 seconds.

David Epstein (20:59)

And what she found is with all these constant interruptions like that, whether it's phone notification, other people, whatever, and then often people will say, okay, now today or this week, I have to focus on putting that stuff away. But even if you do that, you will start self interrupting with intrusive thoughts about stuff you should check, things you should respond to at the cadence to which you've become accustomed. As if we have some internal distraction barometer that's like, no, I've become used to this. I'm going to interrupt you with your own thoughts, even if you put the phone away. And so you actually have to train

David Epstein (21:30)

your attention if you want to be able to focus by having, you know. One of the things she recommends is having blocks of focus.

David Epstein (21:36)

So she found that people in offices check emails 77 different times a day on average.

David Epstein (21:41)

Right.

David Epstein (21:41)

That's not 77 emails, that's 77 times checking.

David Epstein (21:45)

Maybe you have to answer all that email, but if you can put it

David Epstein (21:47)

into one or two or three blocks

David Epstein (21:48)

where you're just doing email and then

David Epstein (21:50)

your other blocks, you're not doing that.

David Epstein (21:51)

And try to structure all your work like that.

David Epstein (21:53)

I mean, part of her point is

David Epstein (21:54)

that if you're not structuring your attention

David Epstein (21:56)

now, it is being structured for you.

David Epstein (21:59)

So you either have a choice to structure it and train yourself to be able to have blocks of focus, or it's going to be done to you.

Interviewer (22:06)

One reason why this approach is so

Derek Thompson (22:10)

counterintuitive is that I think our creativity myths and our mythologies of genius and

Interviewer (22:17)

invention tend to associate the moment of

Derek Thompson (22:21)

discovery and the moment of invention with

Interviewer (22:23)

a kind of mindless freedom like go take a shower, go have a bath like our gate.

David Epstein (22:29)

And not that those things can't act.

Interviewer (22:30)

I'm not telling people not to shower, that's for sure.

Derek Thompson (22:33)

They should do so.

Interviewer (22:34)

But it's interesting because your book is

Derek Thompson (22:36)

organized in many ways around one big story that you're trying to myth bust, and that is the story of Dmitri Mendeleev.

Interviewer (22:46)

Tell me what most people understand to

Derek Thompson (22:49)

be the story of Dmitri Mendeleev and the periodic table.

Interviewer (22:52)

Tell me the story that most people

Derek Thompson (22:54)

know and then we'll tell the story that you discovered Israel.

David Epstein (22:58)

Yeah, if they know it, I mean.

David Epstein (22:59)

So I'll tell you.

David Epstein (22:59)

The one that I learned in college

David Epstein (23:00)

chemistry, which is the status quo story,

David Epstein (23:04)

is that he's this Siberian genius in the winter of 1869. He's trying to put all the elements,

David Epstein (23:09)

you know, the chemical building blocks of

David Epstein (23:10)

the universe in order. He senses there's some order, but he can't find it and he's maniacally focused on it. He, he stays up for three days,

David Epstein (23:18)

no sleep, and finally he can't stay awake any longer. And he drifts off into the most

David Epstein (23:23)

impactful nap in human history. And he dreams of the elements sort of swirling around and they snap together in columns and the columns snap together in a grid. And as you move across that grid, the chemical and physical properties repeat periodically,

David Epstein (23:37)

which is why it's called the periodic table.

David Epstein (23:38)

And by the way, and he wakes

David Epstein (23:40)

up and writes it down, finished product.

David Epstein (23:41)

And it's not just a poster that hangs in high school classrooms. It showed us where to find new elements, the gaps in the table, and that motivated the search for the underlying cause of this pattern, which was Adam. So it was a huge breakthrough. Not just a poster. And that's the story that I learned in college chemistry. The Royal Society, you know, one of

David Epstein (24:01)

the most biggest scientific societies in the

David Epstein (24:04)

world, celebrated the anniversary. Matthew Walker and why we Sleep called it the, the epitome, the paradox example of the power of our sleeping brains

David Epstein (24:14)

to our dreaming brains to freed from the bounds of reality.

David Epstein (24:17)

And there's all these funny uses, like

David Epstein (24:19)

Casper used it in mattress marketing and all this stuff like that. That's the story. If people know the story, that's the one they've heard and what's the truth?

David Epstein (24:27)

None of that.

David Epstein (24:30)

So Mendeleev actually had a publishing contract to do a two volume Intro to Chemistry textbook.

Derek Thompson (24:34)

He had a book deadline.

David Epstein (24:35)

He had a book deadline.

David Epstein (24:36)

And even more importantly so in the first volume he'd gotten eight, then 63 known elements in. So he had to get the other

David Epstein (24:43)

55 into volume two.

David Epstein (24:45)

And he realized, and it had to make.

David Epstein (24:47)

He had a customer problem too. It had to make sense to intro students.

David Epstein (24:50)

And he realized he couldn't keep going

David Epstein (24:51)

one element at a time. So he started experimenting with groups and saying, maybe I can find sort of representative families that I can describe at once instead of individual elements. He was absolutely not looking for a law of nature. He was looking for an organizational scheme for his textbook.

David Epstein (25:04)

And it was in doing that that

David Epstein (25:05)

he started to think in families and found the periodic pattern. So it was very much the constraints of a textbook contract, which is like the polar opposite end of coolness from discovering something in a dream, right?

Derek Thompson (25:17)

Yeah, exactly.

Interviewer (25:17)

Caspar's not gonna advertise that, I think.

Derek Thompson (25:19)

So.

Interviewer (25:19)

The gap between the myth and the

Derek Thompson (25:21)

reality of Mendeleev, I think for me draws a bridge between the two big principles I wanna discuss with you.

Interviewer (25:27)

Principle number one, that we overrate the

Derek Thompson (25:29)

degree to which freedom makes us creative and freedom allows us to flourish.

Interviewer (25:33)

And number two, the fact that it is wise limitations and wise constraints that

Derek Thompson (25:39)

often unleash our creativity and allow for flourishing.

Interviewer (25:43)

To get us started on part two, this idea that throughout history, the greatest musicians and writers and thinkers have been empowered by constraints. Tell me about Keith Jarrett.

David Epstein (25:56)

Keith Jarrett, we're talking mid-1970s. In the story I tell, he's a jazz piano phenom, right? He's becoming world famous, he's touring the world.

David Epstein (26:06)

And one of his concert stops is

David Epstein (26:08)

in Cologne, Germany, for a concert promoted

David Epstein (26:12)

by a teenager who has rented out an opera house and all these things. And he shows up ready to play, tests the piano at the opera house and says, concert's off. And Vera Brandes was the name of

David Epstein (26:25)

the teenager who was promoting.

David Epstein (26:26)

She freaks out like, what are you talking about? And it turns out the wrong piano had been brought. In fact, it was untuned. It had like worn felt hammers. So the upper register was tinny. It was too small, it had fewer keys than the piano that he had Requested.

David Epstein (26:43)

And so he says, nope, he's leaving.

David Epstein (26:45)

And she basically begs him to do it, and, you know, she's a teenager. And he gives in and says, just this, just for you, this once. And so he ends up playing, and

David Epstein (26:56)

the piano forces him to work in all these different ways.

David Epstein (27:00)

He doesn't want to use the tinny areas, so he kind of stays to the middle registers. He finds one area that sounds okay

David Epstein (27:05)

enough with his left hand. So he just keeps repeating things there,

David Epstein (27:08)

sometimes for 10 minutes at a time

David Epstein (27:10)

while he's improvising with his right hand.

David Epstein (27:13)

The piano's not big enough to get sound to the back of the opera

David Epstein (27:17)

house, so he adds a percussion by

David Epstein (27:19)

stepping on the pedal without pushing it down. All these innovative elements. And then he, you know, he kind

David Epstein (27:25)

of walks away and he's like, whatever,

David Epstein (27:26)

and goes off to his next gig. And he had almost told once the piano.

David Epstein (27:31)

He had a recording crew there.

David Epstein (27:33)

He was with his manager, and they

David Epstein (27:35)

were starting to tell the recording crew, like, just this one's not gonna be useful. And they're like, whatever, they're already here. Let them stay here. It gets turned into an album, about an hour long improvisation, way too long to play on the radio.

David Epstein (27:46)

But people start playing it in record stores, and everyone who walks in starts asking, what is that? Give me that. And it builds and builds and builds and becomes the best selling solo piano

David Epstein (27:56)

album of all time.

David Epstein (27:58)

And as Jared would say in he. He. He sort of came to have a dimmer view of it later on because

David Epstein (28:03)

it got associated with this sort of atmospheric jazz that he didn't like.

David Epstein (28:07)

But his album that he did say was his best was another piano that had these imperfections. And he said it forces you to work in these ways that you just can't envision ahead of time.

David Epstein (28:16)

So it forced him to create something amazing that I think you and I actually both legitimately also love this album.

Interviewer (28:22)

I listened to it today while writing these questions. I listened to it while reading your

Derek Thompson (28:25)

book, and it is on my Deep Work playlist. I mean, the.

Interviewer (28:28)

There are.

David Epstein (28:29)

It's incredible music to work on.

Interviewer (28:31)

There are tracks on the Cologne album

Derek Thompson (28:32)

by Keith Jarrett that are among just my three favorite pieces of 20th century music. Bar none.

David Epstein (28:38)

I mean, bar none.

Interviewer (28:39)

It's just. And you can hear one thing that

Derek Thompson (28:42)

I think was interesting, you know, reading your reporting on this.

Interviewer (28:46)

It's just repetitive enough. And in my first book, Hitmakers, I

Derek Thompson (28:50)

talked a lot about how what we want from music is this idea that it is.

Interviewer (28:54)

We want hooks that don't announce themselves as hooks. So they can't be too repetitive. But if they're just repetitive enough, they get stuck in our ear, and it's just an amazing piece of work. You call this idea, this concept that

Derek Thompson (29:09)

Keith Jarrett stumbled on with Vera the

Interviewer (29:11)

Teenager, you call it the Green Eggs

Derek Thompson (29:13)

and Ham theory of creativity.

David Epstein (29:15)

Yeah.

Derek Thompson (29:15)

Why?

David Epstein (29:16)

Yeah, that's actually a phrase I took from the psychologist Katronell Trump.

David Epstein (29:21)

And it's after the book Green Eggs

David Epstein (29:24)

and Ham, which Theodore Geisel, aka Dr.

David Epstein (29:26)

Seuss, wrote on a bet that he couldn't write a book using only 50 words.

David Epstein (29:31)

And that forced him to experiment with rhythm in all these new ways. He obviously did it.

David Epstein (29:35)

But actually, even before that, the first bet was he was given a vocab list for kids and asked to use about 200 words to write a book. And first he starts complaining to his

David Epstein (29:45)

wife because there's almost no adjectives. He says, it's like trying to make

David Epstein (29:48)

a strudel with no strudels, which I love. And then he just throws up his

David Epstein (29:52)

hands and says, you know what? I'm just gonna take the first two rhyming words on the list and make a book. And the first two rhyming words, cat and hat. Right.

David Epstein (29:58)

And the rest is history. And it's the idea that having these constraints forces you off what cognitive psychologists call the path of least resistance when you're hemmed in when the typical convenient solution is blocked. So, like the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham,

David Epstein (30:14)

I love how he puts this. He says, you may think your brain's

David Epstein (30:18)

made for thinking, but it's made for

David Epstein (30:20)

preventing you from having to think whenever possible, because thinking is energetically costly.

David Epstein (30:24)

And so you'll go for the low friction easy solution, the path of least resistance, unless that is forcibly blocked, and

David Epstein (30:31)

then you're forced to do totally new things.

David Epstein (30:33)

So it's actually almost kind of impossible

David Epstein (30:35)

to be creative when you have too

David Epstein (30:36)

much freedom, because your brain is wired

David Epstein (30:38)

for convenience, not for innovation.

Interviewer (30:41)

What kind of limits and constraints do

Derek Thompson (30:44)

you think are most helpful?

Interviewer (30:45)

Because obviously there are some kinds of

Derek Thompson (30:46)

limits and constraints that aren't helpful. I mean, one can.

Interviewer (30:49)

And you say this in the book,

Derek Thompson (30:50)

I'm not exposing anything that you didn't observe already.

Interviewer (30:53)

But, like, poverty is obviously a constraint.

David Epstein (30:57)

Bad constraint.

David Epstein (30:57)

Yeah.

Derek Thompson (30:58)

And no one would argue that, like, the best thing we should do for America's children is to make their parents poorer, because that's going to introduce an economic constraint that will turn their children into Keith Garrett. No one's saying that. You're not saying that.

Interviewer (31:11)

But what is a useful way to think about the kind of constraints that

Derek Thompson (31:16)

hurt and the kind of constraints that help.

David Epstein (31:18)

Yeah.

David Epstein (31:19)

And to that point, in fact, late

David Epstein (31:20)

in the book, I talk about constraints that have led to shared prosperity. Right. Because that's what we want. And obviously you've written about that eloquently.

David Epstein (31:29)

And I think the whole idea that

David Epstein (31:32)

there could be such a thing as too much freedom would have been laughable for most of human history. Right.

David Epstein (31:36)

This is sort of a more recent problem. And I think if we're thinking about, say, our own life and work. So again, I think the, the two key principles of a useful constraint is that it forces you to clarify priorities or to launch into productive exploration, typically. Now, if someone's telling you how to do something so specifically that you say, could I surprise myself? And the answer is no, then you're way too constrained. But in terms of clarifying priorities, let's say there's a genomics lab that I write about in the book that was a leader in the world and was losing its lead because the work was getting so messy. And they decide to make all of their current commitments visible on a wall, post it notes on a wall, and immediately realize we've got way too much going on. Because they only ever add, they never take things away. And I think modern life is insidious at adding things to our plate in

David Epstein (32:27)

work and in life.

David Epstein (32:28)

And we are hardwired to overlook taking stuff away. It's called subtraction, neglect, bias. We easily add things and don't take them away. So I think a form of doing that for everyone, of making all your current commitments visible and then making a funnel that's like nothing else is coming in the top of this funnel until something else comes out the bottom can be incredibly useful. So that's something where you're not, you know, you're not impoverishing somebody, you're not even telling them not to do things they want to do, but clarify your priorities. Because I think so much, you know, I think it's never been easier to do too much and compared to now. And I think a lot of the optimization and productivity hacks and all these

David Epstein (33:11)

kinds of things that people want are

David Epstein (33:17)

illusions where they are not being forced

David Epstein (33:21)

to grapple with the fact they have limited time and attention and should be prioritizing ruthlessly. And so we're giving into all these illusions where we're taking on way more than we can do. So that's what some. I don't know if I went too far off track.

Interviewer (33:32)

No, not off Track at all. In a way, I want to go deeper. I mean, it sounds to me like

Derek Thompson (33:36)

you're saying that limitations are good when they fight one of two different enemies, distraction and delay. Right.

Interviewer (33:44)

By fighting distraction, we force prioritization.

David Epstein (33:47)

Yes.

Interviewer (33:47)

And by fighting delay, you're saying, no, do the thing now. And this is one reason why I think deadlines are so important. There's so many characters throughout this book just strewn throughout the book of these incredible achievements that we would want to

Derek Thompson (34:01)

think of as breakthroughs in the shower. But in fact, they're all about deadlines.

Interviewer (34:05)

Tell me about Frank Lloyd Wright and then just keep going on this principle, please, about the idea that what constraints do. The kind of constraints that are useful aren't constraints like poverty, but rather constraints that promote and require us to focus.

Derek Thompson (34:26)

So Frank Lloyd Wright.

David Epstein (34:27)

Yeah.

David Epstein (34:27)

And to set a little bit of

David Epstein (34:28)

the research background for Flankroid. Right.

David Epstein (34:31)

Deadlines. Because I think this is a great

David Epstein (34:33)

example of where you're asking me to differentiate between the good and bad constraints.

David Epstein (34:36)

Deadlines can be either good or bad.

David Epstein (34:39)

Deadlines boost people's creative problem solving and

David Epstein (34:43)

creativity and productivity when it leads them to monotask. And they say, I have to do this thing now. When it leads them to multitask, which

David Epstein (34:52)

it sometimes also does, people say, I have all these deadlines, I have to

David Epstein (34:54)

do a million different things. Then all those good things go down. So it really depends how you use it. But in the case of Frank Lloyd Wright, so Falling Water, probably the most

David Epstein (35:03)

famous work of architecture in the United States,

David Epstein (35:08)

he had months to work on this, thinking about it, but hadn't done anything.

David Epstein (35:15)

And the client then calls and says,

David Epstein (35:16)

hey, I'm a few hours away. I want to stop by and see the drawings.

David Epstein (35:20)

And Frank Lloyd Wright, according to one

David Epstein (35:22)

of his apprentices, marches across the room,

David Epstein (35:26)

sits down and goes to work.

David Epstein (35:28)

And they.

David Epstein (35:28)

He's wearing out pencils so fast, they

David Epstein (35:30)

have multiple people, like getting them ready to sharpen. And in a few hours, he does the plan for falling water, period. Done.

David Epstein (35:37)

And that's the plan that stuck.

David Epstein (35:38)

So it led him to monotask maniacally. And there are all these examples of people like that. Like another that's near him in the

David Epstein (35:46)

book is Duke Ellington, who was the

David Epstein (35:48)

most chronic of procrastinators. Right, left, compositions unwritten, watches unworn, partners unwed.

David Epstein (35:55)

Like everything he put off.

David Epstein (35:58)

So as he liked to say, I don't need time. What I need is a deadline. He got. He wrote almost 2,000 original compositions. I mean, I think he was one of America's eminent creative geniuses. Like the stuff in the 30s he's

David Epstein (36:09)

most famous for to me doesn't hold a candle. The stuff in the 60s, that's total creative reinvention.

David Epstein (36:13)

But he could not work unless there was a deadline pressing him. And then when it when there was, he worked with an intensity that like surprised everyone around him. But again, these were creators who saw the deadline as cause to monotask. And if people use it that way,

David Epstein (36:31)

it's incredibly powerful on any journey.

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Derek Thompson (36:46)

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Derek Thompson (37:03)

episode is brought to you by Spotify Advertising. Right now you're listening to my voice. It's the way I communicate, how I connect, share stories and for most of human history, this is how culture moved at the speed of voice. We told stories out loud, we built trust through tone. Then the screens took over. Attention was reduced to clicks and scrolls. Tech made us faster, but also more fragmented. Now, thanks to AI and connected devices, voice is re emerging as a primary interface and it's helped audio and sound become more integrated and interactive than ever. Spotify calls this shift the Sound on Era. It's the focus of a new report exploring how sound has become the bridge connecting modern media and why brands need a sound on strategy to be heard. If you're curious about the trends reshaping consumer behavior, go to ads.Spotify.com, download the sound on Era report and learn how to turn up the volume on your business. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Hey, you could be earning 2% daily cash back on that purchase and that one.

Interviewer (38:14)

And even that one.

Derek Thompson (38:16)

That's because Apple card users earn 2% daily cash back on every purchase, including everyday items they buy online or in store when using their Apple Card. With Apple Pay, not an Apple Card customer, you can apply in the Wallet app on iPhone subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch Terms and more at Apple Co Benefits how has

Interviewer (38:45)

this changed your work. Like, how has it changed your creative life?

David Epstein (38:48)

Yeah.

David Epstein (38:48)

So first of all, there's the process aspect of my work where with my first two books, I wrote 150% the length of a book. This is the first time I wrote

David Epstein (38:55)

one book to get one book. And I turned it in early because I had this. I took longer time to start, but I gave myself a much more defined box once I started working. And that really liberated me to then enjoy the writing and play with the

David Epstein (39:09)

sentences and things like that. Because I wasn't thinking about the architecture

David Epstein (39:12)

while I was doing that. So I would never not work this

David Epstein (39:14)

way again if I ever write another book.

David Epstein (39:16)

But it also changed the things I do within my workday in a few ways.

David Epstein (39:21)

One, I end my workday now.

David Epstein (39:23)

I used to say, oh, one of

David Epstein (39:24)

my competitive advantages is that I'm going to let my workday go on forever. And I can just do more work than other people, you know.

David Epstein (39:31)

And one, I realized just like when I was an athlete, that's stupid, because

David Epstein (39:35)

recovery is really important if you want

David Epstein (39:37)

to be good again later.

David Epstein (39:38)

But also having a kid and, you know, not wanting the workday to drag on forever. So I stole something from Isabel Allende, you know, one of the greatest living writers who I profile in the book where she lights a candle to start her workday and blows it out at the end every day to be like. And closes the door. Done. I use electric candles because, like, too much paper. I don't want to burn down my office.

David Epstein (39:57)

But having a real end of my

David Epstein (39:59)

workday and a period of recovery, so I'm cycling.

David Epstein (40:01)

And then during the day, I really

David Epstein (40:03)

do batch my work now.

David Epstein (40:04)

So, you know, not everybody can not

David Epstein (40:06)

check email as much as I do during some periods. But I definitely don't start with it because in looking at Gloria Mark's work, I learned about the Zeigarnik effect, which

David Epstein (40:15)

is an unfinished task. Leaves this residue on your brain that

David Epstein (40:18)

interferes with the other stuff you're going to do. And the inbox is always an unfinished task.

David Epstein (40:23)

So I make sure to do some

David Epstein (40:24)

of my important work before I open that. And then I try to make monotasking blocks for whatever I'm doing throughout the day so that I'm minimizing my number of toggles. Another. I'll give you one more that's, like, really mechanical for me. Cause there are also some personal things

David Epstein (40:38)

that I took from this book that

David Epstein (40:40)

were not about my work.

Derek Thompson (40:40)

I want the personal stuff, too. So let's finish work and then go personal.

David Epstein (40:43)

So mechanically,

David Epstein (40:47)

one of the, probably the

David Epstein (40:48)

greatest creative prompt you can have is saying to somebody like how did you solve this problem? And then say, oh, and you can't do it that way. Whether it's like a client meeting or a painter and say whatever the thing they start doing, then say, no, no, sorry, that one's gone. Preclude constraint, right? And I married that with something I learned while I was reporting on Pixar that they used called the three pitches rule, where they would have directors force them to pitch three story ideas. Cause they found that they would fall

David Epstein (41:09)

in love with their first idea and

David Epstein (41:10)

it usually wasn't their best, so they had to pitch three. So for me, my leads for every chapter in the book, I wrote the lead that came to mind. Then I crossed that out and forced myself to write two other leads. Painful, right?

David Epstein (41:22)

Because you get attached to the thing you put down.

David Epstein (41:24)

But I'd say 2/3 of the chapters I probably used not the first one, the second or third one. Because the first one is just the

David Epstein (41:30)

convenient things that comes to mind.

David Epstein (41:31)

It's not the best. So that's a way I change my work in my life. Should I move to the life?

Derek Thompson (41:37)

Oh yeah, I actually wanna go to

Interviewer (41:38)

life because let me set up life. I'm very interested in happiness.

Derek Thompson (41:43)

I write a lot about happiness, I podcast a lot about happiness. Happiness is on my mind right now because I just wrote this long piece about how according to basically every single social survey we have available to us, American happiness just fell off a cliff in the 2000s. And

Interviewer (42:00)

if you look at which groups have the highest level of self reported happiness, it's often married people with kids. And on the one hand you could say that's not surprising because married people

Derek Thompson (42:13)

with kids tend to be economically advantaged.

Interviewer (42:15)

And I think there's something to that.

Derek Thompson (42:16)

So I don't want to rule that out.

Interviewer (42:18)

But it's interesting in the concept or

Derek Thompson (42:20)

in the context, I should say, of

Interviewer (42:22)

our conversation, because married people with kids have the most constraints, the most responsibilities.

Derek Thompson (42:30)

I mean, I have two children now, two and a half and about four or five months old. I cannot work after 5:30.

Interviewer (42:39)

I can't because I'm taking care of

Derek Thompson (42:41)

my children until they're in their beds, until at 8:30.

Interviewer (42:44)

By the time they're in their beds

Derek Thompson (42:45)

by 8:30 I'm exhausted.

Interviewer (42:47)

Like my brain is complete mush by 8:45. So I can't physically work past 5pm anymore and I can't work on the weekends either. But in a weird way, that constraint Promotes such extraordinary focus. And there's one more piece that I

Derek Thompson (43:04)

found is like sort of counterintuitively helpful.

Interviewer (43:07)

If I structure my day around my

Derek Thompson (43:10)

workouts, if I say no matter what, I have to go to the gym for 35 minutes and I go, forcing

Interviewer (43:18)

myself to organize the day around this

Derek Thompson (43:21)

thing that has nothing to do with

Interviewer (43:22)

productivity makes me more productive, I think, because I lose time. So now it's like, it's not just that I have to be home at 5:30, it's not just that I have to go to the gym. All these things are limiting my time. If I want to get any writing done, it has to be done between like 9:45 and 11:15. Let's go. Right?

David Epstein (43:38)

Yeah.

David Epstein (43:38)

The time laser focused monotask on that writing.

Interviewer (43:41)

It's so unbelievably clear to me that

Derek Thompson (43:44)

I can't fuck around the same way I could when I was 25 years old. When to your point, it was like,

Interviewer (43:49)

if I don't finish this writing now, I'll go home and I'll write it

Derek Thompson (43:52)

at 9pm, I'll wake up at 2am and write it.

Interviewer (43:55)

Who cares? I'll wake up at 5am and write it. But that kind of freedom, that ability to do anything whenever always allows you to place your focus in the future rather than right here, right now. And so it ends up working against you. So I now wanna hear, now that I've given you my little sermon, I

Derek Thompson (44:15)

wanna know about how writing this book has changed your life, changed your organization of time or your conception of family life or what's important to you.

David Epstein (44:22)

Yeah, I mean, I think some of

David Epstein (44:23)

the things will not surprise you. Right. And to go to your point, by the way, of people who are married with children, you know, being happier, I mean this goes back to like Durkheim in the late 19th century. He's one of the founders of sociology where when governments first started doing keeping statistics on suicide and he looked at, and at the time it was thought it was just a private psychological problem.

David Epstein (44:45)

And he looked and said, oh no,

David Epstein (44:46)

no, it's a social problem because it goes in waves. And if the economic fortunes of a country turn way down, suicide goes up.

David Epstein (44:54)

But if they go up too fast and it unmoors people from all these

David Epstein (44:57)

things they're used to, suicide goes up also.

David Epstein (44:59)

And people without, basically people without. The less dense their network of reciprocal obligation was, the more likely they were

David Epstein (45:07)

to be depressed and take their own life.

David Epstein (45:09)

And then Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone

David Epstein (45:11)

found basically the same thing where he

David Epstein (45:12)

famously said, joining One club cuts your

David Epstein (45:16)

risk of dying next year in half.

David Epstein (45:18)

And that's a rule of thumb, but

David Epstein (45:20)

it's kind of been backed up by

David Epstein (45:22)

subsequent research that having a network of obligations that impinge on your freedom, you

David Epstein (45:26)

have to be somewhere at certain times, right? But they make life more meaningful. And I had thought when I became a writer, as I started getting more traction in the industry, autonomy became my goal.

David Epstein (45:39)

I actually went to a writer's retreat once, and we had to answer, what

David Epstein (45:42)

were we all optimizing for that year? And I said, autonomy. Fast forward a few years, and I realized there is such a thing as too much autonomy. When we came in here, I was just like, I love coming into an office before we started this, and that's a very privileged thing to say, right? But I realized I was unhappy, and

David Epstein (45:58)

I had to start reeling that back.

David Epstein (45:59)

So I joined a nonprofit board in my community. I started going to dance meetups to have some embodied experience with strangers. I joined a regular dinner and discussion club.

David Epstein (46:07)

And all these things that impinge on

David Epstein (46:10)

my scheduling freedom, where I have to

David Epstein (46:12)

be places where other people are counting on me to be there at certain

David Epstein (46:15)

times that are annoying. But I'm so much happier doing that, having those connections and having those obligations and being a dad and all these things. So some of it was rebuilding my network of obligations that, even though annoying, are really important, because I think I ended up in kind of. Do you remember when Mark Zuckerberg first described the metaverse, and he was like,

David Epstein (46:34)

it's gonna be great. We're all gonna live in a universe totally tailored just to us.

David Epstein (46:39)

I'm like, wait, that's actually horrible. That's, like, what I was doing in real life. Like, you don't sync with anybody else's schedule. It's terrible. But also, I think I started becoming more of a satisficer in my life after doing some of this research where satisficing is a term coined by Herbert Simon. This guy who's a lot of his thinking is in the book.

David Epstein (47:00)

It's a combination of suffice and satisfy.

David Epstein (47:03)

He was trained as a political scientist, but he won the highest awards in computer science, psychology, and the Nobel Prize in economics.

David Epstein (47:12)

And what he showed was that humans

David Epstein (47:15)

don't conform to the rational actor model in economics, where we can evaluate endless options and make the best decision. We have to pick good enough solutions and satisfy.

David Epstein (47:22)

And he said, we should do that proactively. You should have good enough rules.

David Epstein (47:26)

So he wore one type of beret, one kind of socks, said, you need Three pairs of clothing, one on your back, one in the closet, one in the wash, same breakfast, same house for 46 years, et cetera.

David Epstein (47:34)

You'd almost think he's like a low

David Epstein (47:36)

ambition guy if he hadn't won the highest awards in three different scientific disciplines. And so I really took that to heart because I think I have the

David Epstein (47:43)

opposite tendency, what's called maximizing tendencies, to

David Epstein (47:46)

try to evaluate everything and take the best option.

David Epstein (47:49)

And it's almost always a bad thing

David Epstein (47:50)

to be maximizers are maybe we'd call optimizers now, less happy with their decisions, less happy with their lives, more prone to regret. So I'm now very proactive about making decision rules.

David Epstein (48:02)

What would be good enough for this decision, this product?

David Epstein (48:04)

I'm buying, this project. I'm doing, my newsletter. I started as a very proactive satisficing experiment where I say if a book has to be a nine or ten, if I hit six and a half on a newsletter post, it's going out. So I'm much more cognizant about setting good enough rules for all these things and then moving on and not reading all the other reviews or whatever it is for my decisions.

Derek Thompson (48:27)

I want to end with a character that you and I have talked a lot about as you were writing this book. My favorite philosopher, Sren Kierkegaard, a Danish gentleman from the early to mid.

David Epstein (48:37)

I remember you telling me when I first mentioned I was writing about constraints you mentioned in Kierkegaard.

Interviewer (48:41)

Well, one of the ideas I love

Derek Thompson (48:42)

most in his history of existentialism, maybe philosophy, is Kierkegaard's theory of infinitude. Infinitude, where he says, you know, you

Derek Thompson (48:51)

can be lost in both.

Derek Thompson (48:52)

People have been lost infinitude for centuries. That is to say, if you're a Catholic potato farmer whose dad is a Catholic potato farmer whose dad is a Catholic potato farmer, you have no ability to make choices that truly

Interviewer (49:07)

author your individual authenticity. You can't become a true individual because you're locked in the grooves of life. And he said, the opposite though, is

Derek Thompson (49:17)

the problem of modernity. We're not lost in finitude, we're lost in infinitude.

Interviewer (49:23)

We are told we can be anything. We are told that we should seek

Derek Thompson (49:27)

absolute freedom, maximize our happiness in all

Interviewer (49:30)

these different things at once.

Derek Thompson (49:32)

And in the most famous line that

Interviewer (49:34)

he wrote is that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, right? Standing at the edge of a cliff

Derek Thompson (49:40)

and looking down and fearing that you're

Interviewer (49:42)

going to fall, that's fear. But not knowing if you should jump or if you should step back or if you should climb down and being obsessed with thinking through all the different things you can do at the edge

Derek Thompson (49:53)

of that cliff, that is the dizziness of freedom. That is anxiety.

Interviewer (49:57)

And the reason I think that this project is such a good match for

Derek Thompson (50:01)

our times is that I just think Kierkegaard was right. I think that we are told to maximize happiness in so many different aspects of our lives, and it's a process of insanity making, I think, for a lot of people. And so I thought from the second that I heard about this project that the idea of a book singing the gospel of constraint would be incredibly useful. And this book really is incredibly useful. So, David, thank you so much.

David Epstein (50:28)

I really appreciate it very eloquently.