David Epstein: Thinking Inside the Box

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Gist — “David Epstein: Thinking Inside the Box”

Host: Mike Pesca
Guest: David Epstein
Date: May 12, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation between host Mike Pesca and author David Epstein about Epstein’s newest book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. The discussion centers around the provocative idea that limitations—of time, resources, attention, and even rules—can actually foster creativity, productivity, and coherence, rather than stifle them. Drawing on real-world case studies from business, filmmaking, science, and Epstein’s own writing process, the episode challenges common myths about boundless freedom and explores how intentional constraints can lead to better outcomes in work and life.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Myth of Unlimited Freedom vs. The Power of Constraints

[06:51]

• Pesca and Epstein debunk the assumption that eliminating constraints or “shackles” leads to the best work.
  • Epstein: “We're huge. Not always wrong, but usually wrong in thinking that more choice, more resources, all of these things would be better... There's a strong drive, like basically a hardwired human bias to always add things... to overlook solutions that involve taking away.”
  • Referencing research showing creativity actually improves when options or familiar solutions are blocked.

2. Creativity Under Rules: Examples from the Arts

[08:06] – [09:22]

• Constraints in arts/film history:
  • The Hays Code in classic cinema forced filmmakers to find creative ways around censorship, giving rise to film noir.
  • Blumhouse Productions’ low-budget model compels directors to focus on story and tension over special effects:
    • Epstein: “That's like, you know, Get Out, Whiplash... All these movies that returned 10,000x... because they basically forced these storytellers to become the best versions of themselves and rely on tension and narrative instead of spectacle and unlimited resources.”

3. Business Cautionary Tale: General Magic

[10:26] – [14:14]

• General Magic (late ‘80s/early ‘90s), a Silicon Valley startup with seemingly unlimited resources and talent.
  • Too much freedom led to scope creep, lack of priorities, and eventual collapse.
  • Example: Calendar app expanded from covering years 1904–2096 to spanning the Big Bang to the far future—with disastrous inefficiency.
  • Epstein: “They had so much talent and so much money, they had no reason not to do anything. And so they did everything and it just. It collapsed under its own weight.”

4. “Beautifully Shaded Penny Problem” at Pixar

[15:08] – [16:03]

• Directors/artists sometimes obsess over minor details (like the shading of a background fish) at the expense of core needs.
• Solution: Visualize time and resource constraints—Pixar animators tracked their available work time with popsicle sticks, instantly clarifying trade-offs.

5. Perfectionism, Prioritization, and the Value of Deadlines

[17:35] – [18:58]

• The drive for perfection is worthwhile on key priorities, but not sustainable for all details.
  • Example: Miyazaki’s films, where hand-drawn animation requires deadline-induced focus.
  • Epstein: “He would not stop unless there was something forcing him to stop... Otherwise... he never would have finished a single film ever.”

6. Lost Coherence in a Boundless World

[20:36] – [21:25]

• Modern creative and communication output has lost the sense of a finite, coherent “album” in favor of never-ending, scattershot content.
• Both agree that containers (natural or self-imposed) helped focus and coherence in past eras.

7. Planning and Boundaries in Creative Work

[21:25] – [24:22]

• Epstein recounts refining his own writing process for greater coherence by intentionally constraining himself (“design freeze”), spending a year mapping and planning before writing a word.

  • Pesca: “Plan slow and then act fast... You applied that to your philosophy with this book.”
  • Epstein: “Yeah... stay small, you really work out boundaries. What is the problem I'm trying to solve... linger in that phase and then... once you move into the phase where you’re executing... you execute really quickly...”
• 8. Modularization for Successful Projects
     [24:40]

• Data from project management: Modular approaches (like solar farms) outperform “big bang” unbounded projects for reliability and success.

9. Attention as the Ultimate Modern Constraint

[31:24] – [34:56]

• Short attention spans caused by frequent task-switching have become the universal constraint.
  • Research by Gloria Mark: Office workers now switch tasks every 45 seconds, leading directly to increased stress and reduced performance.
  • Epstein: “When you switch tasks, you erase, but there's a residue and the residue builds up and impairs the next thing you’re doing...”

10. How to Invite Constraints (Practical Advice)

[34:56] – [37:40]

• Ways to add productive constraints:
  • Train attention: Work in uninterrupted blocks, keep the phone out of sight, and jot down intrusive thoughts for later.
  • Make commitments visible: List current projects/obligations physically, and don’t start new ones until you finish something (use a funnel system).
  • Conduct “subtraction audits”: Regularly remove low-priority items from your to-do list instead of continually adding more.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On the Universal Urge to Add:

• “There's a strong drive, like basically a hardwired human bias to always add things, like more stuff, more options, all these things to overlook, solutions that involve taking away.” — David Epstein [06:51]

On Too Much Freedom:

• “More startups die of indigestion than starvation, meaning of having too much rather than having too little.” — Bill Gurley via David Epstein [09:35]

On Making Choices and Prioritization:

• “If you're doing [perfecting] with every part of what you're making, you're never getting it done.” — David Epstein [17:35]

Creativity Requires Boundaries:

• “Comedians are especially astute about this: No, you need rules. You can’t bounce a rubber ball off a rubber wall. You need something to hold firm in that equation.” — Mike Pesca [05:45]

On Modern Life’s Constraint:

• “We have to recapture our attention because some of the busyness is a little bit self-inflicted... It's just a question of if you're doing it or you're letting it be done to you.” — David Epstein [31:24]

On Scientific Discovery and the Replication Crisis:

• “Most published research is... not true in the sense that it would not replicate... [But] I'd say absolutely [this is science], because it was scientists themselves who started identifying these problems, sometimes in their own work and often in their colleagues’ work...” — David Epstein [41:39]

---

Important Segment Timestamps

• [06:05] – Epstein joins the episode; introduction to the core thesis on constraints and creativity.
• [10:39] – Deep dive into General Magic, the pitfalls of unlimited resources.
• [15:08] – Pixar’s “beautifully shaded penny” resource visualization anecdote.
• [18:16] – Miyazaki, deadlines, and the necessity of boundaries in creative work.
• [21:25] – Epstein’s process for imposing structure and coherence in his writing.
• [24:40] – The importance of modularization in project success.
• [31:24] – The tyranny of lost attention: statistics and effects from workplace studies.
• [34:56] – Step-by-step strategies to intentionally add constraints to boost creativity and productivity.
• [38:18] – Explanation of HARK (Hypothesizing After Results are Known) and scientific methodology.

---

Conclusion

The conversation between Mike Pesca and David Epstein is thought-provoking, practical, and wide-ranging. By wrestling with examples from business, art, and personal discipline, they make a strong case that often the best way to unlock creativity, achieve excellence, and preserve well-being is to “think inside the box.” Imposing intentional, thoughtful constraints—on time, resources, or even attention—is more than a productivity hack; it’s a necessary corrective to the myth of boundless freedom.

Epstein’s stories and actionable advice provide a roadmap for individuals and organizations seeking to do more with less, stay focused, and outsmart the trap of endless options.

---

For Further Reading:

• David Epstein, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better
• Range Widely (Epstein’s Substack)

Listen to the full episode for more stories and actionable insights on living—and creating—inside the box.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign

[B]

It's Tuesday, May 12, 2026 from Peach Fish Productions, it's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Ah, here's a report. The UAE has been secretly carrying out attacks on Iran. There was an attack that took place in April around the time President Trump was announcing a ceasefire and sparked a large fire knocking much of the refinery's capacity offline for, for months. That's the Iranian capacity they hit. And you know, for months. If it hit in April, that means it's been offline ever since. If it was such a secret strike, wasn't everyone wondering, hey, why is that refinery offline? And then is the even bigger1 Because UAE was tweeting, intimating that they weren't taking getting hit by Iran just sitting there. There was this one in Reuters. Saudi Arabia has been covertly hitting Iran. They escalated to de escalate and it seemed to work. So neither of these Gulf states just taking the incoming shahed drones firing on this decimated lack of an air force rival. Now, does it mean that the United States has more support and air cover than we thought? Well, then we knew until now, but the United States knew that UAE and are Iran were and were able to and willing to strike Iran. And still they're pursuing the cease fire, aren't they? So this tells you that the United States did not say, all right, well it doesn't matter if we have the condemnation of most of the UN Security Council, if we have these allies along with Israel, we can continue pounding the Iranians. It's more like they said, ok, we got the message of how far they're willing to go. And the answer is somewhat far, but not so far, that we should continue the war. This is also really important since Saudi Arabia is, to say the least, not as affected by the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz. Because Saudi Arabia, if they want, they can move their oil through the Strait of Hormuz, which borders Saudi Arabia more than it does Iran. But Saudi Arabia is still susceptible to that choke point. But of course, Saudi Arabia has that east west oil pipeline. So they could ship most but not all. I think, you know, they want to get 7 billion barrels of oil out of there a day. And maybe the east west pipeline only allows for 5 billion barrels. But the point is even this enemy of Iran, who has struck Iran, who is able to work around the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the United States definitely knew that. And when even that country is more or less saying we need a cease fire, we need a reopening of the strait. We need an ending of the blockade. You know that the United States is taking it seriously. Donald Trump, he's not doing well domestically with this war. And really, I think there is only one big important ally and that's Israel, who very much wants it to continue. The Israelis might be right, but they're pretty much alone in the world on the show today. Well, first a note about my other show, how to you probably have some credit card points, some airlines points, some movies mileage and hotel points lying around. Maybe it's more than lying around, maybe it's piling up. We talked to one person who had so many points, didn't know the best way to utilize them. So we brought on our expert to answer how to get the most out of points.

[A]

Credit card points are almost always going

[B]

down in value and probably worse so than the US dollar or most fiat

[A]

currencies, 20, 30, 50% lower value.

[B]

You wake up overnight and that vacation that you had been saving up years for is no longer possible. You knew it. You just knew it. They weren't benign after all. Our guest today, and I have enormous respect for him, is David Epstein, who's been on the show before talking about, among other things, his book range, how important it is to diverge in the kinds of pursuits you have, from the athletic to the intellectual. Well, now David is writing the ying to that yang, the other side of that coin inside the box, how constraints make us better. Yes, it is true. He has so many excellent real world examples. Plus I offer the idea of bouncing a rubber ball off a rubber wall, which never really happens, but if it did, it wouldn't be very bouncy, would it? Know, everyone knows you have to bounce the concrete ball off the rubber wal. And before I enter a place where all the walls are rubber, I give you Mr. David Epstein. As we go inside the box. Whenever I talk to comedians or filmmakers, and I talk to comedians a lot, I identify the greatest gap between the audience's experience or conception of creativity and the performer or artist's conception of of creativity is this. The audience generally seems to think that creativity flourishes best when there are no rules. Creativity needs room to flourish. But the artists always tell me, and comedians are especially astute about this, no, you need rules. You can't bounce a rubber ball off a rubber wall. You need something to hold firm in that equation. I give you another analogy. The reason that trampolines work is that the human body has mass and substance. So what we're getting at here in the creative realm is the Idea of constraints. And if you want to take it beyond the creative realm, if you want to take it into science and into technology and into all ways of thinking, then I have the book for you. It is by the great David Epstein, the author of Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. David. David, welcome back to the gist.

[A]

Yeah, nice to be back. It's been a while, so I have

[B]

to say that I'd have you on for any book you wrote, but this is a pet passion of mine. I've always believed it. And your book fleshed out a lot of the questions I have and a lot of anecdotes, but also where do we go from here type questions. So let's just start with the general concept. We all have constraints that we have to deal with. Are we wrong to say, if we could just undo these shackles of how much time I have or how much pressure I have, or how little funding I have, we generally do better? Or are there some rules as to which constraints would make us flourish and which constraints really do constrain us?

[A]

Yeah, I think we're huge. Not always wrong, but usually wrong in thinking that more choice, more resources, all of these things would be better. Obviously there are, there are levels below which that becomes totally true, but there is a strong drive, like basically a hardwired human bias to always add things, like more stuff, more options, all these things to overlook, solutions that involve taking away. And in fact, we're not really equipped to thrive. We're with seemingly unlimited choice and unlimited ability to compare ourselves to things. Or like the blank page, when we're trying to create something, the tension is that we want it, People report wanting it more and more freedom. Right. Like in an international survey that some psychologists did recently of known creativity myths, for example. So things we know from research are not true. The most popular finding was that people are most creative when they are most free, when in fact we know the quickest way to make someone more creative is actually to block the solutions that come to mind for them, the convenient thing and most of their options. And it forces them to think in these new ways. So I think whether it's an issue of planning our days or, or just working on projects, we overvalue unlimited choice.

[B]

Yeah. I think about the great periods in cinema and the reason that film noir existed was because of the Hays Code, which was, you can't do this. You have to have two legs on the floor when you kiss, you have to cut away from, you know, it was a very censorious code. But within and to get around those rules, we had this flourishing of a cinema, the types of which, you know, we hadn't seen before and we still try to get to or a lot of directors long for.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, even now if you look in film. So for example, this Hollywood hit factory, Blumhouse Productions, they took this approach where they said, you know, instead of throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at these like Marvel remakes and all that stuff is we're going to get interesting filmmakers purposely give them really small budgets. That's going to force them to use a small number of locations, a small number of speaking roles. And so they're going to really have to build tension through the story, not through the effects. And that's like, you know, get out whiplash. Like all these movies that returned 10,000x and had all this critical acclaim because they basically forced these storytellers to become the best versions of themselves and rely on tension and narrative and instead of spectacle and unlimited resources.

[B]

Yeah, Dogma's a lot like that too. Now how many directors will knowingly go in for that, agreeing with it? Don't directors want the biggest budget possible?

[A]

I mean, I think everyone wants the biggest whatever it is possible most of the time. The problem is it's usually not good for you. So like when I was interviewing the famed investor Bill Gurley, who's well known for his early investments in Uber and Zillow and all these other companies, and he said, we have a saying in venture more startups die of indigestion than starvation, meaning of having too much rather than having too little. Because when you have too much, you're not forced to clarify your priorities and you're not forced to experiment productively. So that's one of the things that good constraints can do, is force you to clarify your priorities and to launch into productive experimentation. So the difference, there's a difference between what we want and what actually brings out the best in us. That's kind of, I mean that the. If you want to get into it. The company that I profile in the first chapter, I think is very emblematic

[B]

of that general magic. Yes, I did want to get into it because it's a great example of, well, who really has no constraints. If you had to put your finger on a company that had no constraints or a project that did it was this one.

[A]

Yeah, and this was a company. It was the first sort of start talking late 80s, early 90s, the first so called concept IPO in Silicon Valley history, meaning they went public with an idea, not a product, because they were so visionary and had so much talent, Goldman Sachs took them public with an idea. And this was a company that was making a personal communicator, basically the iPhone, way before the iPhone. Founded by three former Apple employees, two of whom designed the original Mac, one of whom, this guy, Mark Peratt, was just a true visionary. Like, I read his PhD dissertation in 1976 at Stanford when I was doing reporting. And on the first page, he coins the term information economy. And it is crazy to read, because he saw what was coming over the next half century. Not. Not just the. The promise for commerce and all these sorts of things, but also the problems with misinformation and rising inequality and all these things. And so anyway, in 1989, he's basically sketching the iPhone. Like, if you saw the sketch, it's a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons and a touchscreen where you have rectangular apps on it. There's no Internet at the time. Right. 15% of American households have computers. But he. He saw the future. And so, you know, partners pile in, money piles in. All the communications tech firms invest millions of dollars. So it's like they have such a big consortium that their meetings have to start with an antitrust lawyer listing all the topics they're not allowed to discuss.

[B]

And as Peratt says, that's how family dinners start. With me, by the way,

[A]

it is he. As he said, he later says, you know, my goal is the stock price doubles on the first day, etc. My goal in raising so much money was to create heaven for engineers where they were free to create and play with no limits but their imagination. What more could anyone ask for? And I think the answer was a lot less freedom because it turned into disaster. Yeah. And anybody who had a good idea, they did it. And it just got bigger and bigger. I interviewed dozens of former employees, and the refrain was probably three quarters of them would say something to the effect of, I just couldn't figure out what not to do.

[B]

Right, Right.

[A]

So they just did more and more, and it became just an epic disaster, like a total collapse.

[B]

And the example that I think most of is the calendar, where they included a calendar app and it went from 1904 to 2096, which you might say that's quite a long time to schedule an appointment. I don't know if I need to schedule appointment during the Gilded Age, but if so, fine. But of course, someone said, why stop there?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. So then one guy said, well, hey, is the guy. The engineer creating it was a guy named Steve Perlman. And, you know, one of the leaders says, Steve, somebody might make apps that go to his back into history. You got to make this longer. So he sets it. He create, you know, checks it out again, opens the work, sets it to go from year one, checks it in, thinks he's done, and then another team comes to him and says, Steve, why are you tying the calendar function into this arbitrary religious context? It should go back to the beginning of astronomical time. So he opens it up again, writes the calendar app to go from the Big Bang way into the future. And if they had stuck with 1904 to 2096, it's four lines of code, but instead it drags on for months. And this was just emblematic of everything at General Magic. They had so much talent and so much money, they had no reason not to do anything. And so they did everything and it just. It collapsed under its own weight. Eventually, I think they, they. When this, they missed tons of deadlines. And when the product appeared, it had so many. It shipped with a 200 page manual because it had so many features and it was very confusing to people. And it sold about 3,000 units in the first six months, mostly to people whose names they recognized.

[B]

So, okay, talk me through this or tell me why I understand why that failed. But then we have so many examples in artistry where someone is obsessed with getting a detail right. So in your book, a good version of this, a good anecdote of this is in one of the Pixar movies, what I think was the Incredibles, the director, would that be Brad Bird, was obsessed with the fish in the background of a shot, glimmering and shimmering. And then someone quite astutely made a visual, tangible representation of the amount of resources, if you wanted to spend it on the shimmering fish, that wouldn't be spent on, say, main characters. So that I understand. And what was it? Something with popsicle sticks?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. This was. Ed Catmull, the, you know, who was running Pixar at the time, told me they called this the. In this case, it was a fish, but that they. They referred to this issue as the beautifully shaded penny problem because it was a director. Artist would get obsessed with some tiny detail, like the shading on a penny, or in this case, a fish in the background of a shot. And they would just get sucked in and work on it while there was other more important stuff to do. So that the popsicle sticks were. They made a board where they velcroed these popsicle sticks, and each one represented the amount of work that an Animator could do in one week and they would put them next to the things that needed to be animated. And so if you wanted to keep working on that fish or that penny, you had to start taking popsicle sticks away from some other character that had to be animated. And so it basically made the time and resource constraint visible. And it pretty much instantly solved the problem because people could now see the trade offs they were making.

[B]

So I get that anecdote. On the other hand, I remember watching the behind the scenes of a Pixar movie and I can't quite remember which one it might be. Monsters Inc. And they talked so long about the breakthrough of making the fur on the amazing. The fur was just off the. Off the chain fur. And I guess with Monsters Inc. Fur is important, but they talk so long about the realistic fur. Or I'll give you another example. Maybe you know this one, the Steely Dan song. Peg Walter, Donald Fagan and Walter Becker were not happy with the first solo. And then they were not happy with the second guitar solo. And I think they went through, I see different numbers. I saw a short doc on it. 30 attempted solos from like seven guitar players. And then they finally chose Jay Graden's guitar solo. And that is put forward as an example of fantastic artistry and fantastic creativity and just how good Steely Dan is or how specific Steely Dan is, if you don't like Steely Dan. But Bruce Springsteen had does this many takes and I think Brian Epstein did with the Beatles. So how do we know when it's the unconstrained time wasting aspect or example of what you're talking about? And how do we know when it's the driven to perfection no matter what it takes that actually yields the transcendent result? Example.

[A]

Yeah, I think the drive to, to, you know, exercise the mastery of craft is great and essential in these cases. Right. I think the question is what are your priorities for it? If you're doing that with every part of what you're making, you're never getting it done. Right. If you're doing it with a beautifully shaded penny and with Sully's fur, you're never finishing and actually making something. So I think the issue is one not of getting people not to be conscientious about their work, but but of helping them prioritize what are the most important places. Like a guitar solo may well be that place. Or I think of like Miyazaki. I mean, I love Miyazaki films. You know, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke.

[B]

Just say it like I love Me some Miyazaki right there. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

And see, that's why I'm the guest and not the podcast, because I miss an opportunity like that. But he had a colleague, his closest colleague, kind of lifelong work partner, called him the never ending man because he would not stop unless there was something forcing him to stop. So he famously, you know, because he was all. Everything was hand drawn, right. And there'd be little scenes of just like people crossing in the street that they do a million drafts of. But he also needed that, hey, this is going to be in theaters on this day. To force him to prioritize, like, what were the things you'd really spend that time on. Otherwise, his partner said he never would have finished a single film ever.

[B]

Yes. And you've just given me an insight, which is the guitar solo on Peg is part of a larger effort. And that larger effort was called the album Asia. And Asia has seven songs, three on side one and four on side two. And the total running length is 39 minutes, 56 seconds. And so therefore, to spend that amount of time on a crucial thing that is probably the best song. I don't know, Deacon Blues on the album is rational. Is important. It's what makes the album. Now, I would say that when you're talking about, oh, I don't know, maybe we could just fritter away our time thinking about having a calendar app that could schedule something in the year 4000 BC that is not the equivalent of Asia. And I also think in our current world, there are. These are output. I'm trying to think if it's true for creative output and communication output and also technical output. Don't hold me to this, but in our creative and communication output, we've lost the distinct album packet of information that we're going to work on and craft and we're going to take all this time and then it's going to be done and maybe we'll take a week vacation to get to the next thing. Now, I. That everything is always on and that whatever video that we come out with will have to be followed by 15 more in order to monetize it. We've gotten into less of a bound, constrained world.

[A]

Yeah. And I think. I think there can be, you know, what we've been talking about for the last few minutes resonates with me a lot personally, because I care about my craft and try to improve. And I also think that sometimes my previous books, like one weakness was sometimes coherence. And I think that may be a little bit what you're getting at where there were these. When these albums were a self contained journey, there had to be a level of coherence that I think there doesn't have to be now where everything is just like scattershot. A million different things.

[B]

Yeah. Like look at the State of the Union. It's meant to be clipped. And not that we could. Not that we could trust Trump to be non scattershot, but there are whole movies like that that are meant to be consumed as a second screen. And we keep restating, stating the premise because they're not even meant to be distinct things that they once were.

[A]

Yeah. And again I think that's because. Right. You're making it meant to be clipped and there's not like a. There's not a container that demands coherence. I think that's usually unfortunate for narrative. And again, even aside from Internet viral things like one of the reasons I wrote this book was a hefty dose of me search. Like I stunk at this, at drawing good boundaries around my projects. In the past. I wrote 50% over the length of. Of my first two books that I was allotted and then had to cut back because I had not given myself like what. What is this container? So this time around actually have behind me. I, I forced myself to make a structural plan. See it here, you're watching this video on one page and one page only. You can see I wrote very small to try to defeat my own system. But the that that was condensed from a hundred thousand word note sheet that I had. And the goal was to force myself to ruthlessly prioritize and have to arrange things so that there would be a sense of coherence for the entire project instead of what I had done in the past, which was almost like in some ways a batch of magazines articles stapled together that I then tried to write transitions for so that it would seem coherent. So it slowed me down for sure. I didn't write a word for the first year of the project. But then when I did, I was able to execute really quickly because I had these priorities more clear and I think it's a more coherent, coherent project. To your point about albums, well, that

[B]

echoes the advice on something like the Big Dig or a municipal works project, which is plan slow and then act fast. And so spend a lot of time in the planning stages. But then when you deploy the workers, have them get in and out as quickly as possible. And you applied that to your philosophy with this book.

[A]

Yeah, I mean that. I think that idea you're referring to the Think slow, act fast. Comes from this Oxford researcher named Ben Flubier, who spent his whole life, Danish guy, studying projects. And he said the pattern of successful projects was this think slow, meaning you stay small, you really work out boundaries. What is the problem I'm trying to solve? What is the thing I'm trying to do? And you linger in that phase and then it gives you all this clarity, which once you move into the phase where you're executing or so like I learned in the reporting that the advertising world has this famous saying, give me the freedom of a tight brief. Like you want the parameters worked out really carefully. Where the opposite, like the Big Dig is what Flubier calls think fast, act slow. Where you get a big idea, you rush into big implementation. Like this is often the case where Congress decides we're going to do some big project. And it's just like this, you know, huge instant influx of money. And because you rush into execution and things get so big, you're going to end up acting slow, even if you work hard, because lessons are going to be painfully acquired. There's lots of momentum, there's huge coordination costs with lots of people. And so you'll execute slowly even if you're working really hard.

[B]

Was it Flu Ba. Flu Bear who had the list of projects and if they failed or succeeded?

[A]

That's right, yeah. Yeah, he had a database of 60. He led some projects himself also. He wasn't only studying them, but yeah, 16,000 projects that he love the stat.

[B]

And which one, which ones didn't.

[A]

Eight and a half percent came in on time and budget and 0.5% came in on time and on budget and delivered the whatever they had promised. One interesting side note of that is he found the thing that was almost always came in on time and budget and delivered were solar farms because they're so modular. So an engineer can tinker with like one panel to test different things they want to do and then they just wire a whole bunch of panels together. So he's a big advocate for breaking any project down to be modular to the extent you can.

[B]

We'll be back with more of David Epstein right after this. We're back with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box How Constraints Make Us Better. So onto your process because you write about this on your blog for a past book, you went to Sweden, the Arctic Circle, great trip, very eye opening. But it didn't make the book. You threw it out and you said in the past you've thrown out 50% of your books. And my question is, how do you know which 50%? Are you sure that the books that resulted, that the 50% that was discarded was the right 50%? Are you sure that if you hadn't done 150% of the book, you wouldn't have the best hundred percent of book that actually resulted?

[A]

That's a good question. I think some of it, I think was easy to see in the aftermath. Like that trip I took to Arctic Sweden for my first book where I was writing about genetics. And it just became clear that it didn't fit when I came back and that if I. That it would take away even more from the coherence of the book. So in many cases, this was me writing chapters in isolation. And then once I learned enough and realized what the core of the book was, it was kind of obvious that some of this stuff just was not there. And also, you know, and of course, I had an editor who, who I say, do you agree with these cuts and things like that? So there's no way to know the counterfactual, did I cut the exact right stuff? But I think actually a lot of it was quite obvious where you're just like, this is another. This is a different project. It's something I found really interesting and I'm shoot, trying to shoehorn it in, but it's actually a different project.

[B]

It's obvious in retrospect as you gain experience. And maybe if you had read your book before you wrote your book, because you'd have one of those magic time machines that go back to 2000 BC that the guys were working on, you'd have gotten that insight. But here's the thing. People listening to this interview may have heard that offhand reference of, you know, I went back to read his dissertation before I interview him. This is how David does his work. He will read every single study in a topic that he's considering on Google Scholar. You once told me that you wrote whole chapters of your book. I don't know, maybe you blogged about this too, but you wrote whole chapters. You didn't like it. You said, I need to improve the prose. You took a prose. Sorry, you took a dialogue course. You took a screenwriting course. And it worked.

[A]

Fiction writing course. Yeah.

[B]

Okay, so there you go. So these all seem like they weren't wasted times because they paid off. But is there a through line so that you know that the fiction writing course might be the waste of time or the indulgence or every single Google Scholar study might not be the best use of your time? You put a lot of Time into the books. And the books are all great and bestsellers. If you refine your process over the years, I say, fine, but I would not have wanted you to go back and to have less ambition with those first two books, trips to Sweden notwithstanding.

[A]

No, I appreciate that. And I spent even longer this time in this project only doing research and interviewing and reading papers before starting to write. It was a full year, so. So 50% of the time I was allotted for this project, I did not write a single word. And I was just reading those studies and mapping the territory basically is how I think about it. I sort of make these, yeah, landscape map, which papers, cite which papers, so you start to see which researchers are the most important and all those sorts of things. And there is no question that my process, to the extent I keep writing books, because for the third time I'm saying never again. I always believe it. There must be like a period of recovery that like a woman who's given

[B]

birth, you forgot the pain.

[A]

Yeah, that's right, exactly.

[B]

Endorsement.

[A]

Well, I think of it, I was a college 800 meter runner, so I always think of it like that. It's like, oh, it's torture in the middle. But at the, you know, you start forgetting if you did a good job. And my process will never be super efficient in that sense. Like I need to cast a wide net and read a ton of stuff that is going nowhere. And that's one of the ways I can find some of the other stuff. That said, I think what was very different this time was at a certain point I took all of that and said, you know, I've spent a year casting a wide net reading like a maniac interviewing. And now I'm going to condense this into a container that helps me execute the writing so it doesn't sprawl. So I'm as inefficient as ever in my search phase. But I was so much more efficient in my writing phase this time because I then took that and stopped, you know, what some designers call design Freeze said, I'm stopping. I'm not making forward momentum, I'm making the box for myself, the architecture, and then going forward in that way. So I think, I don't think it was a decrease in ambition. I mean, I still did crazy things like I didn't cut a trip to Arctic Sweden, but I took a, a quite extensive road trip through rural Mississippi literally to sit in a graveyard at midnight with nobody there. And I cracked the rental car windshield and of course didn't get the insurance on the way, because I was driving down various crossroads in Mississippi, so I still do that crazy stuff for one sentence. But you know, I'm a parent. I didn't want to be writing a book and a half to get a book anymore. Like I needed to be more efficient with my time. And I think the project, you know, there's one story that we've in and out of the book this time and I think, I think it ended up as my most coherent.

[B]

For sure, the constraint that we put on ourselves causes creativity to flourish. This is the thesis. But so then you would say that since we, the more constraints we have, the more likely we're to get things that are unique or things that are creative. That's one aspect of creativity. But don't we all have the same constraint now? And might that add up to creativity that is similar to the next guy and therefore not that creative? And that constraint is attention. We don't have time and especially attention. And so do you predict we're going to get, you know, a decade's worth or two decades worth of creative output, maybe even technological output that seems similar to everything else?

[A]

Yeah, it's a good question because I've been following the first wave of sort of research on how generative AI affects cognition. And there are definitely signs so far, a variety of signs that like, it's like gps where you rely on it and then you don't learn stuff yourself. And also, you know, in some of these studies that MIT has been doing with people writing, it's finding that their writing is more uniform when they're working with AI models. And so I think that is worrisome, you know, and I also think when we think about not having time, I think it's never been easier to do too much. And I think AI is making that even more true for individuals and organizations. And I think we have to recapture our attention because some of the busyness is a little bit self inflicted. So I mean, I get into this work on attention, which I thought was kind of the scariest part of the research for the book from this psychologist named Gloria Mark, who found that not only has our attention switching been when she started tracking this, people were switching their tasks at work about every three minutes in the early 2000s, and now it's about every 45 seconds. The downside there is because as she described it, your brain's like a whiteboard where when you switch tasks, you erase, but there's a residue and the residue builds up and impairs the next thing you're doing. And now we know it really increases your stress too. Basically the number of toggles you make over a day, the higher your stress will be at the end of the day as measured by physiological measures like heart rate variability and things like that. And again, some of that is self inflicted where if you have a certain number of tasks to do. So let's say she found that people in offices check email on average 77 different times a day. Maybe you have to answer all that email, but can you put that into one or two or three blocks where you're just doing email and then you're not doing email and then you're doing something else. And if you can do that so that you're not toggling as many times, not only will it be better for your stress, but you'll start to reclaim some of your attention and you'll actually feel like you have more time. Because the more toggles you do, the less you actually get done. It feels like you're getting more done, but you're not. And so I think we can almost, you know, time is always limited, right? Like a time in a day, the time in your life. But I, but I think we can reclaim some quality time if we structure our attention. Because if we're not structuring our attention now, then companies are structuring it for you. So it's just a question of if you're doing it or you're letting it be done to you, right?

[B]

Then they're mining it. People listening to this will have a question and that question might start with the words how to. I don't know if you know, there's this podcast called how to. I host it there. I will say, David on the Mount Rushmore of hosts, you're there.

[A]

I guess that's only. How many hosts have there been? I guess I have to have to

[B]

be there where I. We are up to five now, so I don't know who's. Someone's not there. There's definitely some selection. Okay, so people listening to this will, I think, I hope, buy into your thesis and then say, okay, but how to invite constraints into my life. I understand if there were constraints, I'm not going to say, oh, I wish I had pure freedom. How to best invite constraints and how to best constrain myself to be more productive or creative. And there are methods of this in the book. There are commitment devices and preclude constraints. Give me some good ways. How to give myself some constraints to make me more productive or creative.

[A]

Well, let's say we just talked about we were talking about attention. So let's continue on that. So the the again, the most frightening thing in from Gloria Marks research is that if we're interrupted all day by notifications or whatever else toggling or even other people, we become accustomed to a certain level of interruption. And if you say now I have to focus and do real work or whatever it is or be present, just be present for your family. So I'm going to turn the notifications off. You will continue to self interrupt with intrusive thoughts at the rate to which you've become accustomed as if you have some kind of internal distraction barometer that gets set to a certain rhythm and doesn't want to change. And so we have to start training our attention. Fortunately it doesn't take long to start training it back. But that's things like have blocks in a workday where your phone is out of the room and off because it's shown that if it's visible it impairs your ability to think. Maybe start with a half hour, then see if you can get up to an hour when you don't need it and put a pad next to you so that and as the intrusive thoughts pop in about what you should check or whatever, write it down. Called cognitive outsourcing so it's not taking up space and try to expand that time where you're not being interrupted by anything. And and if you can reclaim some of your capacity for sustained attention, it translates into your personal life too. Or when you're spending time with your family, you're not thinking about what you should be checking. So important thing to do for attention, I think in other areas, I think one thing that can be really helpful, whether it's an organization or an individual, and I write about this a little bit specifically in the book with respect to a genomics lab. But they were getting so overwhelmed by all the things they were doing, like so much stuff was in process that it led to frustration, stress, errors, etc. And so they made all of their current commitments visible, literally post its on a wall. And the first thing that happened as soon as they did that was everybody agreed there's way too much. We could never get this stuff done. There's way too much in process. And they realized that there were kind of medium priorities competing with higher priorities. And so they said all right, we're, we're shifting some of the things that are lesser priorities away and we're making a funnel, like a literal visible funnel on the wall and we're not allowed to put something else in the top of the funnel until one thing comes out the bottom of the funnel. Sometimes. Sometimes this rule is called stop starting, start finishing. Like you can't start a new one until you finished a current one. I think that can be really valuable exercise for people to do, like even make your commitments visible and say, if I had to cut one thing out in the next 90 days, what would it be? And then do it. Because we only add. Modern work in life is insidious at just adding, adding, adding to our plate and never taking away. So you have to do these subtraction audits. And I think making the commitments visible can be really helpful with that.

[B]

Start with whatever shows you're streaming. Don't start a new one until you finish the last one. Okay, there's one big area I want to ask you about. So Hark is the scientific trap of thinking that you discovered something that you weren't looking for. And you say eureka, but it's retroactively justifying a result that really isn't robust. And it's one of the big problems with our replication crisis. I want to ask you about that, but tell me what, remind me what Hark and the audience what Hark stands for again. So we could establish the concept.

[A]

Yep, H A R K hypothesizing after the results are known. So this is where in the way the scientific method is supposed to work is. You make a hypothesis, a prediction of what you think will happen or what you're testing, how you're going to test that and then you see if it comes true. Harking is when you, maybe you probably did that, but it didn't work out the way you thought. And so you have the data in hand and then you retrospectively make a hypothesis that fits it. And it seems like this shouldn't be a problem. Like why not? You got the data, let's look back into what it says. But in terms of drawing true conclusions, it's actually a huge problem.

[B]

So there are many, many well known experiments like X rays where there was. They were running cathode ray experiments and he noticed some barium coated screen was acting weird. And from there you get X rays or penicillin or even you just the general idea of it doesn't have to be that scientific. An X ray. We put some water in a well and we thought the wildebeest would react this way. But then we noticed and they didn't. But we noticed something strange and the zebras were reacting this way. And from there we got real scientific Insight is that harking

[A]

so that kind of observation after the fact. So harking hypothesizing after the results are known is fine for exploratory work. If you say the thing that I thought didn't turn out, but look at this other thing in the data. Okay, now I'm going to go test that. So with the X rays it's like, oh, we noticed this unexpected thing. Can we repeat it now prospectively, not just retrospectively. That is fine. The problem is those, those retrospective observations are then published in papers as if they were the prospective.

[B]

Oh, they don't do anything else. They don't do anything else on them. Because I'm just thinking if the results are robust, then you could keep find, finding it again and again. Then that's a bona fide scientific insight.

[A]

Yeah. So if you repeated it that way, again, if it gave you an idea for something to then test prospectively, great. The problem is when you're only doing it retrospectively. I mean, not to get into the statistical weeds, but you're basically doing an infinite number of tests because you're just looking for a correlation in the data that's true. And that means you will every single time come up with, potentially come up with a false positive.

[B]

Yeah. And so there's always some correlation. There's the P hanging problem. But there's also some correlation that satisfies the requirement of scientifically robust or sorry, I shouldn't say robust. Scientifically significant.

[A]

Statistically significant. Yeah. And I mean, look, the scientists. When I'm writing about this replication crisis and why like most published research is not true in the book, I am not accusing these people of fraud or anything. I did this as a science grad student and I just did not know better. It's very counterintuitive when you get this big database, you have these really powerful statistical programs. Oh, let's start sifting it and look for relationships and just not thinking about how that impacts your ability to draw true conclusions. So I think it's been unwitting for the scientific community and it's caused this huge reckoning, the so called replication crisis, where a huge portion of famous research, you know, turned out not to be true to be false positives.

[B]

Did you say most?

[A]

Most. I think it's a fair assessment now that most published research is, is, is not true in the sense that it would not replicate. Yeah. When it comes to experimental research. Right.

[B]

How is that allowed to happen and be labeled science?

[A]

Yeah. I mean again, since I did this when I was a grad student, and I published some of that research. There was not a focus. I think there was this. This explosion of big data programs and ability to do all these statistical analyses, these computer programs, without really understanding what they were doing. That, that and pressure to publish more papers and all these things. And people just were not thinking about methods in as rigorous a way as they should have. And I mean, Daniel Kahneman, one of my intellectual heroes, right, who won a Nobel Prize, wrote thinking fast and slow. He has a chapter in his book about priming research, which he later acknowledged, you know, turns out all this stuff was wrong. And I fell into some of the same cognitive biases that I write about. And so I think it was just not as much focus on methods. So in psychology, for example, there was a project to try to replicate 100 famous findings, and I think a little less than 40, a little fewer than 40 of them replicated in cancer research. It looked even worse than that. But. And you say, is this science? I. I'd say absolutely. Because it was scientists themselves who started identifying these problems, sometimes in their own work and often in their colleagues work, saying, hey, we're doing some things wrong and attempting these replications and saying, what's wrong? We got to get our house in order. So I think science is now at a methodologically stronger place than it has ever been before because of this very painful period which scientists themselves kind of cracked open.

[B]

Yeah, more than ever before when half the research was bunk. So I don't know if that's that high a bar.

[A]

There's some bad incentives, right. And things like where people should be incentivized more, first to publish negative studies, you know, because they're much more incentivized to publish positive studies and incentivized to do replication attempts. You know, that doesn't sound as sexy instead of doing your own original thing, but it's. It's the lifeblood of science. With something like an X ray, it can be easier because, like, oh, you just see, does it work this next time? But with other types, it can be more complicated. But in some cases, like with a lot of health studies now, you. You're forced, if you want funding, to record your predictions ahead of time. And that makes it. That's a relatively new thing and it makes a huge difference inside the box.

[B]

How constraints make us better. David Epstein is the author. He also wrote the New York Times bestseller range. His substack range Widely is a must read for me. Thank you so much, David.

[A]

It's totally a pleasure. Always nice to talk to you, Mike.

[B]

And that's it for today's show. Cory War produces the Gist. Kathleen Sykes runs the Gist list. Ben Astaire is our booking producer, and Jeff Craig runs our Socials. Michelle Pesca oversees it all benevolently, and thanks for listening.