← The Jordan Harbinger Show
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- [00:02]
Jordan Harbinger
This Father's Day at Lowe's, we have extra big deals for a very limited time so you can get dad the
- [00:08]
David Epstein
gift he's been wishing for.
- [00:10]
Jordan Harbinger
Get a free select Craftsman dewalt or Cobalt battery when you buy a select combo kit. Plus save $90 on a Kobalt 24 volt battery, string trimmer and leaf blower combo kit.
- [00:21]
David Epstein
Now $129.
- [00:23]
Jordan Harbinger
Our best lineup is here at Lowe's ballot through 615 while supplies last selection varies by location.
- [00:30]
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- [01:20]
Jordan Harbinger
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers, even the occasional rocket scientist, war correspondent or arms dealer. And hey, if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show and I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started Today on the show, Everybody loves the story of the genius who wakes up from a dream and changes the world. Dmitri Mendeleev supposedly dreams the periodic table into existence, bolts upright in bed, and suddenly chemistry has a seeding chart. Beautiful story. Also apparently mostly bullshit. The real story is less magical and a lot more useful. Medelev was boxed in by a textbook deadline. He had to cram the known elements into a limited space under pressure with imperfect information. And that constraint helped him see the pattern everyone else had missed. So today we're asking a question that sounds like something your boss says right before ruining your weekend. What if constraints actually make us better? Not all constraints, obviously. Some constraints are just bureaucracy with a necktie. Some are budget cuts wearing a fake TED talk mustache. But the right constraints, limits, deadlines, rules, friction, forced choices, those can sharpen thinking, expose nonsense, and turn chaos into creativity. My guest today, David Epstein, author of Range and the Sports Gene, which many of you have probably read. And his new book is Inside the How Constraints Make Us Better. We'll discuss why too much freedom can make us stupid. How a company full of Apple legends built the iPhone before the iPhone and still somehow face planted what Pixar understands about creative discipline. Why writing down your prediction before the results come in makes it harder to lie to yourself.
- [03:24]
David Epstein
And.
- [03:24]
Jordan Harbinger
And how a terrible piano helped create one of the most legendary jazz recordings of all time. So forget think outside the box. That advice has been beaten to death by consultants wearing quarter zips. The real question is, how do you find the right box and when should you willingly step inside it? Now here we go with David Epstein. Weird time to be an Epstein, am I right? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, that's topical.
- [03:47]
David Epstein
I honestly don't get as much crap about it as I would have expected. You know, they're always the same jokes online. If I post something like, don't you have an island? Or something like that? And I'll respond, you know, if you watch this video enough times, then I'll buy one. But yeah, it's a little weird. Like when I walk my son to school since we're in dc, there's sometimes people holding signs that say Epstein. And he can read. Yeah, what's that like? Well, they're not cheering for us, bud.
- [04:12]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, it's not us. It's a different Epstein. And I'll tell you, in 15 years.
- [04:16]
David Epstein
Then it's like, well, he abused some people. What? Abuse?
- [04:19]
Dr. Abigail Marsh
How?
- [04:19]
David Epstein
Abuse? What is that? You know?
- [04:20]
Jordan Harbinger
And you're like, oh, boy, he lied on his tax forms. Anyway, what do you want for lunch, bud?
- [04:24]
David Epstein
What's going on? For lunch?
- [04:25]
Jordan Harbinger
I do hope that you call your tax drawer The Epstein files. I think that would be a funny household.
- [04:32]
David Epstein
Just lean right into it.
- [04:33]
Jordan Harbinger
Why not?
- [04:34]
David Epstein
The saving grace is that it's like the Jewish Smith. So there's a lot of us.
- [04:38]
Jordan Harbinger
That's true. I would love to hear about Inside the Box, the sort of constraints, ideas, because I feel like I've spent my whole life with everyone telling me, you know, remove the constraints. You know, your book title, Inside the Box. The idea here, I assume, is everybody's telling you to think outside the box. And I don't know, maybe there's a box for a reason. That's kind of where you're going with this, right?
- [05:01]
David Epstein
That's right. The cliche outside the box telling people to free themselves from all of the bounds or restrictions that usually, you know, you're talking about creativity that are restricting their creativity. And there's a mountain of psychological research that shows that actually giving people this totally open space and saying think differently is the quickest way to get them to do something completely uncreative. Because the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says, you may think your brain's made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible, because thinking is energetically costly. And so if you're just given an open field of possibility, you'll just do the convenient thing or the familiar thing or what neuroscientists call the path of least resistance. So actually, the best way to get someone to have outside the box ideas, like new, creative, original ideas, is to really narrowly confine them in a way that blocks the solutions that are most familiar to them.
- [05:54]
Jordan Harbinger
I just did a show about this yesterday about how AI is taking advantage of our brain's shortcuts, right? So the whole we only construct reality in our brain. Your eyes aren't really seeing what your brain thinks they're seeing. It's constructing this and all the cognitive bias that goes along with it. It seems like in order to be as creative as possible, we have to put boundaries around those things so we don't just activate all of that and create the same thing as everyone else.
- [06:19]
David Epstein
No, that's exactly right. You put it exactly right. Again, the quickest way is to use what psychologists call a preclude constraint. You block those things that your brain would do for convenience. There are interesting ways that this interacts with AI, right? We're seeing now this first generation of research about how using AI impacts cognition. It was early days, but it looks so far like gps, where if you are always relying on it, you don't learn how to get around. And that's fine if you always have access to gps. But when it comes to learning how to use your brain in everything that you do, because you're wired for convenience, if you're turning to that immediately, it's not really great. My summary of the research so far is brain first, tool second.
- [07:00]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, that's smart. I failed to make this point yesterday, but I guess after I've slept on it, it's more clear. AI is doing to our brains what teachers always thought calculators were doing to us. Like, you're not going to have a calculator in your pocket. It's like, aha, Mrs. Career. I do have a calculator in my pocket, right? But now it's like, well, hey, you're not always going to have an AI assistant brain here to draft your documents for you. And it's like, maybe, but I don't know. Drafting a document's pretty hard, and I don't really want to do it manually or outline it. I'll just have ChatGPT do the whole thing. And then it's like, oh, I tell myself this with AI stuff all the time, right? I. Oh, I'll put my spin on it. And then I get it and I go, nah, that looks pretty good. I'm just gonna use it just exactly as it is on the screen. And then months down the line, or possibly years, I don't even know how long I've been using AI. And I go, is this creating just like me in my voice in a really expert way, or has my voice just changed to be whatever ChatGPT spits out at me and puts on the screen? I don't know the answer, dude.
- [07:58]
David Epstein
I don't.
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Jordan Harbinger
Yeah.
- [07:59]
David Epstein
And for some of those uses, maybe you will have access to it all the time and like a gps, and maybe you can just use it that way. But in terms of developing your own thinking, people use it a lot for writing, and that's fine. But certain types of writing, the point is not as much the writing as the you learning how to organize ideas or how to think. So these are what psychologists call desirable difficulties. These things that are effortful and are frustrating oftentimes, but are exactly what make you learn. And I think there's a danger of outsourcing all of those things. And then it might get to the point where you're not really adding anything, right? You're not actually, like learning anything. And that's what's showing up in some of these studies. So I think we have to be structured in how we decide to use AI, unless we want to outsource our entire brains to it, at which point, what is the purpose of you?
- [08:47]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, well, that's the uncomfortable truth. Somebody had pitched me something today. They were just on a bunch of shows and this is like their media pitch. And it was essentially, will your job be around in two years? Which is the speed of adoption, they're assuming. And the test was, can somebody who sits with a manual or three for two weeks with nothing else to do learn how to do your job at a sort of functional level? They don't have to be great at it, but can they do it? Will it take a manual or two? And will it take a week or two? And if the answer is yes, you're totally screwed. So you have to figure out something else to do. That's right.
- [09:21]
David Epstein
And I do think though, there's hope for some of this stuff. If you look at the history of technological innovation. An example I always like is when ATMs were introduced in the US in the early 1970s. And I went back and read news coverage there and it's apocalyptic.
- [09:35]
Jordan Harbinger
There's going to be no more banks, right? Or something.
- [09:38]
David Epstein
The tellers, I think there were about 300,000 at the time. They're all going out of business. And instead, what happened over the next 40 years, at least maybe they will eventually. But as There were more ATMs, there were more bank tellers because they made branches cheaper to operate. And so banks open more branches, fewer tellers per branch. But more interestingly is that it fundamentally changed the job from one of someone who's doing repetitive cash transactions to someone who's a marketing professional, slash customer service representative, financial advisor. Like this much broader mix, what sometimes people call soft skills, what I like to call durable skills because they never go out of fashion. And actually the Financial Times just did this analysis showing that since the mid to late 1980s, the returns to these social and collaborative skills have been outpacing the returns to technical skills at an accelerating rate. Which I think is probably the opposite of a lot of people's intuition of what happens with technological disruption.
- [10:30]
Jordan Harbinger
Yes, this jives with my experience, right? Because I go to a bank around here and 50% of the time I get a teller, that English is their second language, they count the money and that's it. And they're new, they've been there for a week. Coin flip if they're there next month, right? Then there's another sort of middle aged lady who's a bank teller and I go up and When I get her, I can ask her all sorts of questions about how the accounts operate and what's the cheapest way for me to wire money over here. And she'll be, actually, you should use this. And, well, in this case, I would give you a cashier's check, and I can waive the fee for that. It's usually four bucks, but I would do that because otherwise it's going to delay the payment by this, and they're going to wait till it clears because it's over this amount, and then that's going to delay your transaction. I'm like, wow, you actually know a lot about these things. Try asking an ATM those questions and see what happens.
- [11:17]
David Epstein
Yeah, of course, now, you know, say, asking a chatbot those questions, but they still go wrong in all kinds of ways. I was recently talking with ChatGPT, and it brought up some obscure stat about the number of pen pals that Charles Darwin had. And I happen to know that stat because it's something I've written about in the past. But I'm like, there must be a handful of people in the world that know this. And then it started saying how this was researched and attributing it to this one researcher. And I was looking, and I'm saying, that's wrong. So I asked, what's your source? And it turns out it was me. Somebody had taken some of my writing, put it on Goodreads, and the AI took nearby paragraphs and kind of mashed them into something new.
- [11:54]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah.
- [11:55]
David Epstein
And so there are all these really convincing ways that they still go wrong. And so I think human judgment in connecting to strategy is still really important. And this, I actually think, does relate to some of the stuff inside the box, where over the last year, I spent a bunch of time with a company that helps other companies implement AI. And in most of those cases, the implementation was sprawling. People rush, and they how many different things can we do with it? And it leads to what researchers are now calling work slop, where you've taken away the hard work of deciding what not to do. Because it's almost frictionless to start stuff and you start a million things, and it leads to this huge volume of work that nobody's sure how to connect a strategy, whereas the organizations that I think did better, One of them literally did a map of jobs to be done, or others would define a problem and then say, how do we match the tool to this problem? So instead of just rushing into this hue blimp implementation, because I think it's never been easier to do too much than it is now. That's a major theme, which is, in that circumstance, how do we figure out what not to do. And that becomes this critical skill.
- [13:04]
Jordan Harbinger
That's an interesting new problem to have. All right, so, David, you opened the book with one of the greatest science urban legends of all time. This guy Mendeleev, he dreams up the periodic table. And I remember hearing this. Oh, it came to me in a dream. You know, it was probably in one of those YouTube cartoons where it's like, what's the story behind this? And I thought, wow, what a genius. His dreams came up with this really concise way that we still use to look at all the elements. It's incredible.
- [13:30]
David Epstein
Yeah. Not even just an important visualization poster in your high school classroom or whatever, but because we only knew about half the elements at that time, it actually led to us realizing where we could look for new materials and motivated the search for atoms, which is the underlying cause of this order. And the idea was that Mendeleev, this Siberian genius, was trying to order all the elements, all the building blocks of the universe, stayed awake for three days and then finally fell asleep. And in his dream, they snap into place in this grid where if you move across the grid, the chemical and physical properties repeat periodically, which is why it's called the periodic tables.
- [14:08]
Jordan Harbinger
Oh, I always wondered about that. Okay, we don't have to explain that, but that does make sense. And then they just added a random block underneath it of elements that you can make in a lab that don't exist for more than a fraction of a second.
- [14:19]
David Epstein
Pretty much that's true. And so that I learned that story in college chemistry, that he dreamed this, but it's celebrated by scientific societies. Casper used it hilariously in their mattress advertisements. But it's completely false. And so I was surprised to learn the true story was that Mendeleev had a publishing contract for a two volume Intro to Chemistry textbook. And he'd only gotten eight of the then 63 known elements into volume one. So he had to get the other 55 into volume two. He didn't have enough space to go one at a time, so he started looking for families that he could describe at once. And that's where he stumbled on this pattern. He wasn't looking for a law of nature. He was looking for an organizational scheme for a textbook. And I think the gap between the Mendeley of myth and reality is symbolic of something much more important, which is that we overvalue complete freedom. That outside the box, blue sky thinking and undervalue the power of useful constraints to drive our best thinking.
- [15:13]
Jordan Harbinger
Why is it that we love the dream version so much? Is it because it lets us believe breakthroughs are some kind of magic instead of a ton of work?
- [15:21]
David Epstein
I think that's definitely part of it. And we associate freedom with creativity. A group of psychologists did an international survey of known creativity myths. So these were things that we know from mountains of research are not true. And the two most popular were that people are most creative when they're most free. And that group brainstorming is a great way to come up with creative ideas. And so I think it's just intuitive. We feel, oh, if only I had more freedom, my imagination would fill the gaps. It's not how our brains work. So our intuition is just wrong about how to get our best ideas.
- [15:52]
Jordan Harbinger
What is the actual box that Mendeleev was trapped inside? Was putting himself inside, perhaps is a better word.
- [15:58]
David Epstein
There are a number of layers of constraints that he had. So there was first this space constraints of the textbook where he just did not have enough space to keep going. Because what he did was again, he did the path of least resistance. Oh, what's the best way for me to describe all the elements? I'll just go one at a time, basically. And so you do the thing that's convenient and easy. One of the really important things that constraints can do is launch us into productive experimentation that we would not have taken on otherwise. Necessity is the mother of invention. And so when he was forced away from that thing, that came to him easily. I have to start experimenting with these other mechanisms. And he also had a customer problem, which was it had to be a logical organization for beginners. So he had to save the space. He needed a logical organization for beginners. He had a deadline, right? We know deadlines can be either really bad or really good for creative problem solving. And it depends if it leads you to start multitasking or to hyper focus and monotask. And if it's the latter, which is what happened to him, then you really can have some of your best ideas if it forces you into this monotasking. Like Duke Ellington said, I don't need time, I need a deadline. So he had all these constraints that pushed him into this almost hyper focused experimentation where he was going through all these different possibilities very quickly that he had never explored before.
- [17:12]
Jordan Harbinger
You know those people in college that it's the night before a giant thing is due and it's 8pm and you walk in and you're like, man, I'M so jealous. Are you done with your paper? And they're like, no, man, I haven't started yet. And they're rolling a joint and watching, I don't know, Super Troopers or something like that on the TV. And you go, what, around 10:30 when you're putting your mask on or whatever, you're going to bed, they're like, all right. And you hear their knuckles crack and the light turns on and they stay up until 6 o' clock in the morning and somehow they put this thing out. And these aren't guys that like failed out of school, right? These are guys that went to law school with me afterwards. Is that what they're doing? Is their brain just going, you know what? I need a crazy amount of pressure and constraints in order to do my work. So here we go.
- [17:55]
David Epstein
Yeah, I don't know that I'd advocate the Super Troopers roll a joint 3am method, but yes, Super Troopers. But it is really hard focusing on ideas, abstraction, symbolic language is not something that was a part of most of human history in the way that we have to do it now. And so it's actually quite hard to force yourself to focus on abstract stuff for hours on end. And a deadline can really help with that, where you have this sort of definite space that you're going to have to fill. And this shows up in eminent creators, not just in college students. I mean, Frank Lloyd Wright famously had months to drop the plans for Falling Water, you know, the most famous piece of architecture in America, and didn't do anything. You know, he sort of thought about it. Things are gestating, right? Using this network in your brain called the default mode network, where it's sort of like marinating in there, but you're not exactly focused on the task. The guy who commissioned it called him and said, I'm a few hours away, I want to drop by and see the plans. So he marches across his office and starts working so fast that his assistant said they could barely keep the pencils sharpened fast enough and does it in those few hours and that's it. And so I think that mix of having some gestation with then this really now is go time. You can't focus for that long at a really high intensity anyway. And so that deadline can often push us to say, this is the time. This I can do. And so it can be helpful.
- [19:20]
Jordan Harbinger
I'm not one of those people, to be clear, I get anxiety thinking about those. Even other people starting a paper on the last night beforehand. That's just not.
- [19:28]
David Epstein
I can't that's extreme, obviously, right?
- [19:29]
Jordan Harbinger
Yes. But I knew so many people like that. There were people in law school that got almost straight A's, as far as I know, that would be sober maybe a few moments before finals and would go to class sometimes or most of the time. But then there was a guy who didn't buy the books, and then finals would roll around. This person would be in the library when I woke up and went to the gym, and they would be there when I went to bed at night. And they would crush it. Absolutely. Are they sociopaths and had other problems? Yes, but the way these guys could cram, I've never seen anything like it in my life.
- [20:07]
David Epstein
That's interesting. And arguably, maybe they succeeded in spite of that, in spite of those. Not because of it, but when I sign a book contract, it's like, deliver this thing at 5pm two years from today, and I go, okay, what do I do tomorrow? There's this huge list of tasks to be done. And so to even make it feasible, I think of it, I call it cutting stone. It's like taking a hack at the stone just a little bit each day. But I need a. What is the task that I'm going to make do for myself tomorrow? To give myself some actionable thing. That goal in two years is not an actionable thing. It's a vision, basically. I think sometimes having that this is the allotted time and I know what I should be doing during this time. You're not having to make all these little decisions about competing priorities. It's like having this system of smaller goals where it takes away that what is the priority? Because obviously these people you're talking about would get to a point where, oh, the priority is now very clear. And for them it was leaving it to the last minute. But I think everyone can use that in work. They figure out a way of how can I box myself in enough so that the priority for what I should be doing right now is very clear? I'd say the two pillars of what useful constraints can do for you is forcing you to clarify priorities and launching you into productive exploration. It sounds to me that they were using this time pressure to clarify exactly what they should be doing.
- [21:27]
Jordan Harbinger
Most people hear constraints and they think, bureaucracy, lack of money or resources, lack of time, some idiot manager ruining everything. So what kind of constraints you mentioned you touched on this earlier, but what kind of constraints are we defending and what kinds of constraints are we not defending?
- [21:43]
David Epstein
Yeah, the word constraints obviously is practically synonymous with something that's frustrating, restraint and constraint.
- [21:50]
Jordan Harbinger
Have the same root word, right?
- [21:51]
David Epstein
That's right. And I think when it comes to. When you mentioned managers and bosses, in many cases it's not only the constraint itself, whatever it is, but it's that the people upon whom it's being foisted don't feel like they have any agency in it. And so that I think is a leadership issue. Actually in the book, I ended up interviewing a lot of people who used to work with Steve Jobs. I wasn't writing about Steve Jobs, but because I wrote about some companies that had a lot of people who worked with him, I ended up talking to dozens of people who'd worked with him and, and one of the things that they told me was the biggest difference between his first time at Apple, where he then got forced out and when he came back in the late 90s, and so he gets forced out of Apple, he goes to Next Computers where he says, we're going to have a. The hard drive casing is going to be a perfect magnesium cube. He really was micromanaging and dictating everything. And when he came back the second time, he was much more of a constraint setter. Right. So he comes in and Apple's a mess. They're in danger of going out of business. They're making a ton of computer models. They were making printers and servers and this tablet thing called the Newton. And he comes in and draws a two by two grid on a whiteboard and puts desktop and portable on one axis and consumer and pro on the other. That's it cancels everything else and lays out some of the customer need. What problem does these things have to solve? And then lets people go within that. At first, of course, because so much stuff got canceled, people were upset. But then he really defined the box for people and then let them go to town within that. And the people I talked to said they actually found that liberating. It's like this saying the advertising industry has give me the freedom of a tight brief. They're showing you the problem to be solved, but then giving you a lot of freedom within it. If a manager is putting constraints on someone and that person says, is there room for me to surprise myself? And the answer is no, then it's way too constrained. You're not using the good part of constraints to get people to experiment.
- [23:44]
Jordan Harbinger
Constraints make us smarter. Ad breaks mostly make me employable. Back after this. This episode is also sponsored in part by BetterHelp. Summer is a funny time because it can make life feel really full in the best way. And also in the how the heck are we supposed to do all this kind of way. Maybe your calendar's packed with travel, work, deadlines, weddings, family visits, trying to see friends, trying to actually relax, and somehow feeling guilty that you're not making the most of the season. For us, it's been especially chaotic. There's school events, getting ready to be away for a month on a long family trip, packing, schedules, work logistics. We're definitely losing our minds a little bit. And that's why summer can be a really good time to check in with somebody who is trained to help. Not because anything has to be wrong, but because life moves fast. Therapy can help you zoom out, figure out what actually matters and make choices that line up with the life that you want to be living. Because you only get one of these. And the goal isn't to have a perfect summer. It's to build a life where you feel more present, more grounded, and more connected to what matters. BetterHelp has over 30,000 fully licensed therapists in the US, has served over 6 million people globally, and helps match you with a therapist through a short questionnaire. If it's not the right fit, you can switch at any time. You don't have to say yes to everything. This summer, find support in therapy, Sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com Jordan that's betterhelp.com Jordan. This episode is also sponsored by Bolan Branch. I've noticed something funny about getting older. When you're younger, you'll spend hours researching a new gadget, but the thing you spend a third of your life lying on every night, somehow that just gets ignored. At some point you realize comfort isn't indulgent, it's practical. We upgraded to Bolan Branch and we haven't looked back. Their bedding is made from 100% organic cotton designed to be soft, breathable, comfortable right out of the box. We started with the signature sheets, then added another set for the hot summer months. They're percale sheets which have that crisp, cool feel that we love. The quality is obvious the second you climb in. The sheets feel cool and breathable and somehow they get even softer after washing. It's one of those rare upgrades where you feel the benefit every single day. And right now, Bolan Branch has a special deal for our listeners. Sleep cooler this summer with Bolen Branch during their annual summer event. For a limited time, get 20% off site wide at bowlandbranch.com Jordan with code Jordan that's Bolen branch B O L L A N D B-R-A N C-H.com Jordan code Jordan to take 20% off bolenbranch.com Jordan code Jordan exclusions apply Here's a little scoop you might not be aware of. When you use our promo code, you're not just scoring a discount, you're also giving the show a pretty big boost. We don't earn commissions from sales, but when companies see that listeners are engaging with the ads and the sponsors on the show, it encourages them to keep sponsoring us. So if you're planning to sign up for anything, please remember to use our codes. They're all on the deals page. Jordanharbinger.com deals it is a win win. You get an awesome deal and you help keep the show going strong. I really appreciate your support. Now back to David Epstein. You write in the book about you call it the dizziness of freedom that modern life gives us. There's just, we just have so many more options than any humans before us. What does this do to our brains? Because it leads to confusion where we think I need more freedom, but we actually need more boundaries or better boundaries.
- [26:45]
David Epstein
Yeah, that phrase dizziness of freedom comes from Soren Kierkegaard, the philosopher. And that idea to emphasize your point that there could be too much freedom and choice would have been laughable for most of human history. And it's still laughable for a lot of people in various parts of the world. But increasingly, since about the 19th century, you started to see in a lot of eminent thinkers and philosophers and things like that would start taking up this issue for the first time in history of we have too many options. Less of our life is structured by rulers and religions and all those sorts of things. And so people started having to face choices about everything, who to love, what to do, what to be, et cetera. And that's when you started to see mass anxiety basically popping up in society because there's the weight of all of these potential options. And we see it now with social media, for example, where things like socially prescribed perfectionism, that behavior are on the rise because people have so many things to compare themselves to. So it's like this endless possibility of choices of what you could be doing or what you should be doing. And it tracks with this steep rise in anxiety. And so our brains are really not built for this kind of endless comparison and optionality. In the past, you'd compare yourself to the people you could physically see wherever you lived.
- [28:05]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. The whole this is like Dunbar's number, right? And Your tribe is 150 people. But even then, your whole village, Saxony might have been like 75 people or somewhere around there. So, yeah, you're comparing yourself to the other four people in your generation that you grow up near.
- [28:21]
David Epstein
That's right. You would think that having an endless number of entertainment options can't be bad. Right? You'll get to something better. And yet, since the introduction of infinite scrolling, people have been getting progressively more bored. And in these studies, to follow up on that, if you give people 20 videos they can watch, for example, they will be more bored than if you just give them one from that same set of 20 and say, you just have to watch this one. And the theory is that it's this endless ability to think about what else you could be doing, your other possible choices, that undermines the experience of the moment itself.
- [28:52]
Jordan Harbinger
I can't remember what this was related to, but somebody told me this week that some of the most popular stuff on streaming platforms is Friends and, I don't know, Seinfeld. It's stuff that's been gone off the air for 25 years. And the reason that this is bad is because streaming platforms 1. It illustrates your point really well, right? It's just like, oh, my God, there's so many new movies. You know what? They have Friends and I've already seen this. It feels comfortable. I'm going to go watch that again. It's like, you mean there's 7,000 movies on here that you haven't seen and you're going to rewatch a series from the 90s and. But also, it causes streaming platforms to go, why are we making all this new, expensive stuff when we can license Friends, Seinfeld and curb your enthusiasm for a flat fee. It's already done. We could upload this in a week when we sign the papers or something like if that. And it's actually limiting the amount of new stuff that's going to get made? At least that's the theory. I thought that was interesting. But to your point, we're so bored because there's infinite options. That doesn't really make sense on its face. And yet is it that we're bored or is that we're just so overwhelmed by choice that we decide, okay, I'm gonna constrain myself to something I already know. Well, and the answer is the thing you watched every day in college. I don't know. Is our brain sort of doing this automatically? You think?
- [30:07]
David Epstein
Yeah, I mean, I think these are sort of two sides of a coin where these studies that show that People are getting more bored. So we know there's this increasing kind of boredom. And I should distinguish when I say boredom, sometimes it's good to be still not have something that you're doing that can actually be really good for all sorts of things, for well being, creativity. But this is bored, where you're actually engaged with something and still feeling bored. So we know that's on the rise. And I think there is also this choice paralysis with overwhelming stuff that I think a lot of people smartly, but certainly not everybody choose to limit by just picking something they know is good enough. Because there's probably something in those 7,000 movies that they would like better potentially. But it turns out to be actually a really healthy behavior called satisficing, which is a portmanteau that this Nobel laureate psychologist and economist coined. That's a combination of satisfy and suffice and picking just good enough rules for something being like this show that I know I like is good enough and I'm not going to keep looking turns out to be really important for a sense of well being. Whereas on the opposite end of the spectrum from satisficing or satisficers are what's called maximizers, or maybe we'd now call optimizers. Maybe where you really do want to keep looking and see like is there something better? And maximizing it turns out in psychological research is it's almost always bad to be a maximizer.
- [31:29]
Jordan Harbinger
This sounds miserable already. This girl I'm dating is really amazing and she checks 25 out of 26 boxes. But there's a lot more women in this app. Maybe I should look for the one that checks all 26 boxes. That way I have somebody who also loves pickleball or something. You know what I mean? It's just like you're never going to be happy.
- [31:47]
David Epstein
Exactly. That's right. And so maximizers turn out less happy with their decisions, they're less happy with their lives, they're more prone to regret, they're more likely to prefer reversible decisions, even though that prevents them from basically committing one way or the other. So they'll act for the purpose of maintaining optionality and that just becomes an end to itself. I've heard this in businesses, by the way, where they'll say, well, this decision is a two way door. And then that just prevents you from committing one way or the other.
- [32:13]
Jordan Harbinger
I think you've just described every bachelor on earth. That's what I was doing in my 20s, right? Like oh man, she's so great. And she really likes me and she wants to date me exclusively. Time to break up with her. I guess it was fun while it lasted. What are you doing to yourself?
- [32:28]
David Epstein
I don't want to date anybody who would date me. Somebody better.
- [32:31]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, exactly.
- [32:32]
David Epstein
There is this psychologist named Scott Stanley who studied this and came up with this phrase called sliding versus deciding. You do want to take data and understand what you like and what your options are when you're young. But the sliding versus deciding documents this trend that he found in relationships where younger people will increasingly do what he calls sliding, which means they'll be in a relationship but they want to keep their options open so they won't decide. You know, I'm really committed here. But as time goes on, they end up sleepwalking into escalating commitment. And if they do that and get married, they're more likely to be unhappy, more likely to get divorced versus those who decide and say, okay, now I'm committed and we're doing this. And so how you get into it, whether you slide with the intention of keeping your options open because they're closing anyway, it's really the illusion of keeping your options open. You're less likely to end up happy with your decision.
- [33:21]
Jordan Harbinger
Man. So interesting. There's so many roads we can go down here, but I want to make it practical. So for somebody listening who feels overwhelmed, which is a lot of folks, what is one of the first constraint audits they should run? Is it I have too many projects. How do we sort of do this? And I would like you to be specific if possible. Like if somebody's got tabs open, three half started side hustles and a book and a notes app full of ideas. What is the first box that you would want to see them put themselves in?
- [33:48]
David Epstein
Two things to start with the first one, make all your current commitments visible. And this can be post its on a wall. Visualizing it is really better. And what people will typically see when they do this or teams that I describe a lab that does this in the book with their innovation team they will usually see, okay, first of all, there's a lot of medium priorities competing with high priorities. And there's more stuff here than I could get done even in a best case scenario. And so put those up and force yourself to say if I had to cut something out in the next 90 days, what would it be? And then make a funnel with the stuff that's high priority. Physical funnel, put the post its in the physical funnel. Nothing else can go in the top until something else comes out. The bottom it's a rule called stop starting, start finishing and you will actually get more stuff done. This works really reliably. And once you've got that funnel, change your to do list. Right? People's to do list. We have a hardwired bias always to add. It's called additive bias.
- [34:43]
Jordan Harbinger
Tell me about it.
- [34:44]
David Epstein
Our associated bias called subtraction neglect bias. We overlook solutions that involve taking away. So we always add and end up with too much stuff to do. And so with your to do list, put one thing that if you got this thing accomplished tomorrow, it would be a good productive day. You can have other bonus things that once you get that thing done. But usually what happens is people have a to do list and they don't get to everything. Called the planning fallacy. We're really bad at estimating. We always think that things will take less time than they actually will. What happens is you think you're going to get more done. You don't get it done. You carry stuff over to the next day's to do list. And that happens repeatedly until the list gets so long that you just rip it up and throw it out because you don't even want to look at it anymore. Maybe I'm just describing me.
- [35:26]
Jordan Harbinger
This is hitting home so hard. I've said this on the show before, but one of the things I learned how to do, I don't know, a decade ago or so was instead of I have a to do list, right? But it has certain things in it that live also in my calendar. And I know via experience, in order to do 10 emails from show fans, it's going to take me this number of minutes and I guess other things. I guesstimates. I have review notes for David Epstein podcast and it's going to be 30 minutes long. Okay. And that's on the calendar. So if I have 15 things on my to do list, I also have 15 calendar entries. And then I go, huh, that has me working until 9pm I have to move a few of these things off and they have to go somewhere. There's only so much physical space on this calendar. That way you start to quickly realize, oh, I've planned 27 hours of things to do in an eight hour if I'm lucky day. And that is not a recipe for success. And so you start to eliminate things that don't need to get done. And then they also vanish from my to do list. And I was at a seminar probably 15 years ago and the speaker made some joke like half of the people in this room probably have Write book as a to do list entry and everyone laughed. And I remember going into my to do app and being like, delete. Because I definitely had that in there. And the joke is, write book. Yeah. As if that's one task that's something that's going to take eight months, like eight hours a day or whatever of work, and you have it on there as a thing you're going to check off on Saturday morning after you get coffee. It's ridiculous.
- [36:53]
David Epstein
What you're talking about having done is really smart and not many people do that. I write a bunch about Pixar. Every project has its own idiosyncrasies, but there's a lot of similarities. And so they would time how much different processes took so they could go forward and make better predictions and not fall prey to the planning fallacy. So you see that in there's this research on managers that shows that they always underestimate the time things will take and they don't learn from it unless they're actually recording the time that things took. So seeing that, making it visual. When I was spending time with Ed Catmull, the co founder, and he described to me this problem Pixar had that they called the beautifully shaded penny problem, where the director might get obsessed with some little detail in the background of a shot, like the shading on a penny, that the audience would never really notice. And so they'd have animators working and working away on it. Meanwhile, there were higher priorities, things that needed to get done. And so they came up with this system where they figured out how much work one animator could do in a week. So they had their baseline understanding and then they put popsicle sticks velcroed on a board. And each popsicle stick represented the amount of work one animator could do in one week. And if they wanted to keep animating that penny, they had to take sticks away from some other maybe major character and start putting it on the penny. And once they saw that, like your calendar, once they saw that visualized, it became clear the real trade offs that you have to make and what your priorities should be.
- [38:16]
Jordan Harbinger
That is fascinating. And yeah, the beautifully shaded penny, you can probably apply that to building anything. I could see looking at something like the iPhone, for example, and going, when you open an app, instead of just appearing, it should expand like the genie effect on a Mac. Well, it's not quite smooth enough. The processor's only this. Okay, well, we have to design an animation that works within that processor. And it's like, sir, we don't have an email app for the phone and we think that would be really useful. And it's like, oh, no, I need them to animate beautifully when they open. And it's like, okay, you know, the phone is 15% less useful than it could be because we don't have an email app on here. I can see getting really sucked in to things like that regularly.
- [39:00]
David Epstein
Being able to do a lot is a gift, but it can also be a curse in some ways. I mean, someone who really influenced me when I was working on this book, this guy named Tony Fadell, who was the lead designer of the ipod and then he was the co founder of Nest. He had worked at this company before that had like all the resources and talent in the world and they could do anything. So they did. And it became a disaster because everything just grew and grew until it completely was incoherent and collapsed. And so he became obsessed with putting constraints and bounds on design projects. And so with Nest, for example, he forced the team to work inside a literal box where he had them prototype the box, the packaging before the product. Because he said, this is what the customer is going to see and if we can't fit it on this box, then clearly it's not a priority. That doesn't mean we can't have other ideas, but those are on the back burner, right? Because he was always using these kind of limits to try to get people to rein in that excessive design stuff and really focus on the priorities. He told me that the main advice, the best piece of advice he gives entrepreneurs now, as he mentors a lot of entrepreneurs, is to write the press release for whatever they're doing before they start the project because it forces you to address what problem am I really trying to solve here? Right? What is my value proposition? It gives you that bounding box of what is it I'm actually trying to do. And if it's not on here, that doesn't mean it's a bad idea, but maybe it's for later.
- [40:21]
Jordan Harbinger
So give listeners a test. How do you know if you're lovingly polishing some detail that nobody cares about but you while a big thing is still broken?
- [40:31]
David Epstein
I mean, I think really, really narrowly defining the problem you're trying to solve and the person you're trying to solve it for? So that company, that disastrous company I mentioned that Fadel was at, they were basically trying to make the iPhone a generation early. And they defined their customers, Joe Six Pack. And nobody ever really defined who that was.
- [40:50]
Jordan Harbinger
What does that even mean? A guy With a six pack or like, he drinks a lot of beer. I'm confused.
- [40:54]
David Epstein
You know, it's like Average Joe. And after they missed a bunch of deadlines, they realized nobody knew the guy. Right. Who is Joe Sixpack? They hadn't defined who is the person we're trying to solve a problem for and what is the problem? There's this famous saying, design that people don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole in the wall.
- [41:12]
Jordan Harbinger
Yes, exactly. That's funny.
- [41:13]
David Epstein
What is the problem that I'm actually trying? Not what are the thing that I think I'm making or doing. What is the problem I'm trying to solve? And taking a lot of time to define that really narrowly.
- [41:22]
Jordan Harbinger
I think it's somehow hilarious that they thought the first guy to buy a smartphone with a touchscreen was going to be a dude who drinks a six pack of beer every night and is the average Joe. No, sir. Has that ever happened. Early adopters are always not the average person by definition.
- [41:39]
David Epstein
They just did not think about it. They had so much money, right? It was this company called General Magic. And they were the first concept IPO in Silicon Valley history where Goldman Sachs took them public with an idea, not a product. Because their vision was correct. When you read their plans and documents starting in 1990, they saw the future. They had the right vision of what was coming. The CEO in 1989 drew in his notebook a schematic of a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons and a touchscreen and rectangular apps and label it remote, A phone, pewter. This was. This was before the web existed. So they had the vision, but they didn't define who they were doing and what they were doing. Let me actually give you what I think was the emblematic interview from what went wrong at General Magic. There was a guy named Steve Perlman there whose job was to create a calendar function for this personal communicator. And he writes it to go from 1904 to 2096. And then he checks it in and thinks he's done. Then one of the team leaders comes to him and says, Steve, someone might write a historical app. You got to make this thing go back farther. So he writes it to go from year one to the future, checks it in, thinks he's done. Then another team comes to him and says, Steve, why are you tying this into this arbitrary religious context? You should make it go back all the way to the beginning of astronomical time. He opens it up again and writes it to go from the big bang to the Future. Right. And if he had stuck with 1904 to 2096, it would have been four lines of code. And instead it drags on for months. And that's how everything there worked, because they had the talent to do it. They had the resources to do it. So every interesting idea someone had, they did it. And when the thing came out, nobody understood what they were supposed to do with it because they were just building for each other ultimately, because they hadn't defined the person they were actually building for.
- [43:23]
Jordan Harbinger
This reminds me of. I don't suppose you're a Simpsons fan, but remember there was an episode where Homer Simpson meets his long lost brother and his brother owns a car company and he's like, I need you to help me design a new car. And he designs the biggest crap.
- [43:36]
David Epstein
I do remember this. Yeah.
- [43:37]
Jordan Harbinger
And it's like this ugly green car that has terrible everything because it's way overloaded with junk that no one cares about.
- [43:44]
David Epstein
Yeah. Homer had the General Magic problem and
- [43:46]
Jordan Harbinger
he runs the company. That's what this sounds like. Right? Because General Magic had Apple legends, money, partners, talent. This proto smartphone vision years before everyone else. The pioneering concepts, the touchscreen app store. I'm going off the book here, but I think they had emoji like things or stickers. The cloud. The web doesn't exist and they're thinking about the cloud. This is just the Avengers of Silicon Valley building the future and somehow still face planting. Even though they had unlimited everything, they
- [44:14]
David Epstein
had so many partners because it was such an alluring vision that information technology companies from around the world, you know, poured in millions of dollars each. And there were so many of them, they covered so much of the IT world and the communications world that their meetings had to start with an antitrust lawyer listing all the things they weren't allowed to discuss. They had everything. And they did do innovative things. They made an early form of USB precursors to emojis. Like you said, they were doing interesting stuff. I interviewed a few dozen of former employees and I would say three quarters of them said some version of. I just couldn't figure out what not to do. So they would just do stuff. They would just do any idea that they would have. But in a certain way, I think the company was a success in that it scarred these younger people so thoroughly that they came out of there because it was such a collapse. The stock price doubled on the first day, and two years later, it's basically worthless. So some of the people that came out of there learned these lessons about the importance of putting boundaries around your projects. And they created Android and iPhone and iPod and LinkedIn and eBay and Nest and Safari, you know, things that all of us use every day. But they came out really with these lessons about how you have to constrain a project and define the problem you're trying to solve, or else it will inevitably grow because of our additive bias.
- [45:26]
Jordan Harbinger
I think it's interesting you'd said something along the lines of more startups die of indigestion than starvation.
- [45:33]
David Epstein
Yeah, that's something that Bill Gurley told me, the venture capitalist who well known for his investments in Uber and Zillow. Actually, more than one investor I spoke to claimed that they coined that one. But Bill is certainly the one that
- [45:44]
Jordan Harbinger
told me first, what is the difference between a visionary founder and a founder who's just drunk on possibility? Because it seems like general magic was not killed by incompetence by any stretch. It was basically brilliance with no adult supervision. Kinda.
- [46:00]
David Epstein
Mark Peratt, the CEO, said years later his goal in raising all that money and bringing all that talent was to create heaven for engineers where they were only limited by their imagination. As he said, what more could anyone else want? And the answer is a little less freedom.
- [46:14]
Jordan Harbinger
A working product.
- [46:15]
David Epstein
Yeah, give me the freedom of a tight brief. People get liberated when you give them these boundaries. And there's some research I cite looking at founders that I think is relevant, where it actually randomized different founders who were very early stages, very early, like just starting out basically, to different types of training to get their product going. And some of them got the typical, you know, do some market research training. And others got trained in basically the scientific method of market research, where it says, what's your hypothesis for the problem you're trying to solve? What's your value proposition? How are you going to test if that's correct? And what's a decision rule for deciding? One of the companies I described that went through this training was making a search engine basically for tattoo artists specifically. And their theory that people would recognize the artist they wanted if they just found them, it just took too long to find them and say they were going to collapse that time. And they went out and started interviewing people and realized that actually the time was not the thing that they were concerned about. It was their own ability to evaluate the artist's skill, essentially. And so once they realized that their theory of the problem they were solving was wrong, they pivoted and created this sort of expert network to help people find what they were looking for instead. And the companies that were trained in that process of articulate what your proposition is and go test it pivoted much more often. The other companies that didn't would just retrofit their story basically, and they would very rarely pivot away from their initial idea. And so I think in that research, again, where people were randomized different types of training, those that got the scientific method training ended up doing a lot better and making more money. It was the ability to take that vision and actually before you rush into big execution to test is this right? Does the problem that I think I'm solving even exist?
- [48:04]
Jordan Harbinger
Think outside the box is what people say when they have no plan and a lanyard. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Marathon At Marathon gas stations, every stop is the start of fun, like the awesome fuel savings you can get with Marathon Rewards. Join Marathon Rewards today and start earning rewards on every gallon of gas. You can redeem rewards at any time, saving up to $1 per gallon. And don't forget, Marathon stations are packed with all the conveniences you need to stock up and live life on the go where fun runs on full Available at participating Marathon locations. Terms and conditions apply. See marathonrewards.com for detail. This episode is sponsored in part by AT&T. You know why I love Summer? All those plans we made. They finally make it out of the group chat. Seems like there's more time to fit everyone in. Whatever you've got in store this summer. Capturing those moments is a must. That's why I love the iPhone 17 Pro I picked up from ATT. Its center stage front camera auto adjusts the frame to fit everyone in group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone. No awkward cropping or asking strangers to take it. Just the perfect group selfie every time. And ATT makes sharing those moments with everyone easy because you got to share the pic or it didn't happen right? Right now at any AT&T, ask how you can get the iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible trade in requires eligible plan Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit att.comiphone or visit an AT and T store for details. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do. Take a moment. Support our sponsors. They're amazing. All of the deals and discount codes and ways to support the podcast are on the website, searchable and Clickable over at jordanharbinger.com deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find a code. Email us. Jordanordanharbinger.com we're happy to dig up those codes for you. It really is that important that you support those who support the show. Now back to David Epstein. You mentioned this in the book. You need some sort of kill list. You're going to build this. Okay, who's it for? Let's get real clear on that. We can expand it later. What's it gonna have? These three functions. We can always expand it later. I mean, the problem with General Magic sounds like the idea of an over the air OS update was not anything that existed, right? So they were like, no, it has to be in the thing that ships because we can't update it until we build a new one. So we have to make this one amazing. Whereas iPhone could launch and go, yeah, this doesn't work. This isn't really there. There's no app store, yada yada yada, but who cares? We're gonna build that and then everyone will just Download it over at&t or whatever overnight and we can do it later.
- [50:34]
David Epstein
Yeah, but even before that, there was one third party app developer who was working with General Magic, making an app for their operating system called Graffiti where you could use a stylus to make different strokes that would be turned into writing. And when it was clear that General Magic was going to fail, he decided to make his own product. He identified a customer problem. Busy professionals want to sync their contacts and calendar and take it on the go, period. He said, I'm going to have three functions. Memo pad, to use the writing thing. Contacts, calendar, that's it.
- [51:03]
Jordan Harbinger
Is this a Palm Pilot or something?
- [51:05]
David Epstein
Palm Pilot. It was like three of the bajillion things that General Magic was already doing, but presented in a way that showed people the problem to be solved. So they understood what to do with this thing. And at first General Magic laughed and like, you can't compete with us. You know, we got AT&T, Motorola, Sony, all this stuff. And he blew them out of the water because he started small. He found a customer problem to solve and then he added to it later once he solved an initial problem.
- [51:31]
Jordan Harbinger
Palmpilots were super freaking cool, man. I had one of these things, had like a metal case and I had a WI fi card in it and I had all these expand. I basically built a tiny computer out of this thing. I was obsessed with that. Those things were such game changers.
- [51:44]
David Epstein
Totally.
- [51:44]
Jordan Harbinger
Palm eventually failed too, for different reasons, but I can see why it was such a success initially. All right, so these problems are not unique to startups they're not unique to specific workplaces. I look at the Pixar thing, right? The separating obsessive craft from self indulgent nonsense. And I even see this in podcasting. So many podcasters, I'll meet them at events or something and they're obsessing over room tone or they're like, this vintage mic sounds better than this new digital mic. And I'm like, oh, how long is your podcast? How long have you been doing it? And almost every time. Well, I haven't really started yet because I want to get my setup right. Guys, this is the shiniest penny west of the Mississippi. Just start your stinking show, record something somewhere and put it on the Internet. They can't do it.
- [52:28]
David Epstein
That impulse to get things perfect before you start too, I think is strong, but obviously super counterproductive. And I think it actually embedded in that is the idea that you can have a perfect vision. You have to start doing the thing and putting it out there and that's when you're gonna learn, right? So you mentioned Pixar. They would allow directors to stay for years with a small team in story development because they know that you don't get it right away. You have to like test the story and refine it and simplify it. And the costs only explode once you move into production. And then it becomes harder to learn and harder to pivot. And so getting everything right in the beginning, there's no way you can do it. It's just an illusion. So you need to start small and that's when you'll get those lessons and then you can pivot and add those things on top. But there's a real impulse to, I think sometimes focus on the marginal things at the expense of the main thing. I see this, I was a competitive runner and you'll see this in running where people are don't have anything dialed in about their training, but they're worried about this shoe or that shoe. You need to get the fundamental training block in right? First you need to run more and carve out time to run more. Then you can worry about that little 1% thing at the top. But it's almost attractive to concern yourself with that thing and not the fundamentals that, that drive more than 90% of the actual performance.
- [53:43]
Jordan Harbinger
That's because running sucks, David. I don't know if you know that. It's terrible. It's like nobody wants to do it. So that could be why.
- [53:51]
David Epstein
So maybe it's just a procrastination. You're like, as long as I haven't decided which shoes to get. I don't actually have to do this.
- [53:56]
Jordan Harbinger
I'm waiting for my special Vibram shoes that I had to order from Europe in a special size and material before I can start running. It's going to take six weeks to get here. They're being custom made for me right now. Sorry, but go ahead, go out without me and have fun.
- [54:08]
David Epstein
Can't possibly start before that. Yeah.
- [54:10]
Jordan Harbinger
David, you argue that constraints, they don't just make us creative, they make us honest. And I'm curious how that happens. You get this anecdote around the year 2000 with these NIH heart trials that made treatments suddenly look a little bit less miraculous.
- [54:24]
David Epstein
Yeah. So that was this interesting phenomenon where all these big trials for medications and dietary supplements leading up to 2,000, most of them would have positive results. They would improve blood pressure or some kind of cardiovascular health. And then Starting the year 2000, almost all of the trials became negative. And so the question was, what the heck happened in 2000? It's like a millennium bug and medical research stops working. What actually happened was this segment of NIH that I was looking at starting in 2000 required people to do what's called pre registration, where it says your hypothesis for what you think this medication or supplement does. You have to record that ahead of time before you do the test. And that's what turned all these results negative. So it turns out that many of the positive results, which by the way, are for medications and supplements in some cases that are still out there, were false positives, because what was happening, not by anyone's ill intent, but a scientist would have a theory this drug is gonna do a certain thing that wouldn't work out. But they're like, well, I've got a ton of data. We didn't lower blood pressure, but I've got a ton of data. So I'll look through the database and see maybe something else went down, some other marker. And when you have a lot of data, you're always going to find something. It's counterintuitive why you aren't allowed to do that, to draw true conclusions. This is called harking, or hypothesizing. After the results are known. And it effectively means that you're doing a ton of different tests and you're likely to have positive results just by statistical chance, essentially. So if you find something interesting, you then have to retest it. But since so much of this was done, and I did, I was a science grad student, I did this without knowing it, it's mostly unwitting. You have these powerful statistical programs, what you wanted to test didn't work out and say, well, let's look for something else. But it turns out that this powered just a huge number of false conclusions and so would lead to papers like this one that people refer to as the everything in your fridge causes and prevents cancer study.
- [56:22]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, I live in California, I walk into a parking garage and it's like, by the way, substances in here may cause cancer. And I'm thinking, so exhaust fumes? Or are you thinking I'm going to start eating the concrete that's chipping off the wall? I don't understand why that's here.
- [56:35]
David Epstein
But they may prevent cancer too.
- [56:36]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, that's true.
- [56:37]
David Epstein
This study gathered up all these nutritional studies and saw that basically every food had been shown in various studies to cause and or prevent cancer in different studies, except bacon, which unfortunately only caused cancer. But ah, bummer, gotta worry about your mental health too. And so there's just like this huge raft of false conclusions. And I should say scientific research is in a much better spot now because of this forced pre registration where you have to write down your hypothesis. And it's very similar to what we were talking about with businesses getting trained in the scientific method where when they're forced to put down their theory and test it, and it can't just be revisionist history, you're one much more likely to find out that your theory is wrong. But that's important because that gives you something to pivot off. And I think everyone should do this for whatever they're doing, trying to improve what is my theory of the thing I'm trying to do. Write it down explicitly and then you use that for learning and pivoting.
- [57:33]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, because this is not just a science problem. Right. Every entrepreneur, investor, dad or dating coach, whatever, every person explaining their life after the fact. Don't we all kind of do this? Harking is such a human instinct. Right? Of course I want to look right. Or come up with some things. It's basically like saying you predict the future, but you just wait until the thing happens and go look, I knew that was going to happen. That's the most relatable thing I think ever.
- [57:58]
David Epstein
And the analogy that scientists will use is a sharpshooter shooting at a wall and they just randomly scatter bullets everywhere and then they find a group that's clustered together and draw a bullseye around it.
- [58:08]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, that's literally called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. I think isn't it.
- [58:12]
David Epstein
Yeah. And then someone who comes in sees like, oh, what a good shooter. But really, it's just. They just found a random grouping. And it's not all bad, right? This retrospective hypothesizing, it gives you stuff where you notice something interesting. Then you have to test that, though.
- [58:24]
Jordan Harbinger
That's how we ended up with Viagra, isn't it? Oh, my God, this is terrible for heart stuff. But everybody came in with a boner.
- [58:30]
David Epstein
There's actually quite a few medications that have been found that way where a side effect. They're not trying to test this, but a side effect comes up. I think Rogaine, for example, was supposed to be a blood pressure medication and they noticed people's eyebrows were growing together and stuff. Oh, maybe it's useful for something else. But you then have to test that thing to see if that's actually right.
- [58:47]
Jordan Harbinger
Oh, gosh, that's so ridiculous. So normal people should also pre register decisions. That's the takeaway. Write down what you think will happen and what would change your mind. Man, I bet people hate doing this because it removes your ability to totally bullshit yourself later, which is the point, probably totally.
- [59:03]
David Epstein
There's in range. My previous book, I wrote about all this research on how people become good at forecasting, making predictions about trends in the world. And one of the most impactful practices of the superforecasters was they wrote their predictions down, they recorded them, and so they would see, oh, I got this one wrong. That means I have to somehow tweak my model of the world. And so they weren't practicing this revisionist history. It's hard to do that. Right. When I used to work at Sports Illustrated and for a while there was this special fantasy football section where we would make draft picks and all this stuff. And I would do that. And I'm like, man, I'm really good at this. Because I would remember when I was made a steal that someone didn't expect and turned into a good player. And then after I was reading this forecasting research, I went back and looked at all my actual predictions. Because it was in a magazine, I'm like, I had completely forgotten all of my terrible predictions. It was only the good ones that I had good ones and I had terrible ones, but I had only really remembered the good ones. And so there was no reason for me to think, oh, you know, I'm kind of missing on certain things. So you don't really update your model to become better unless you're recording.
- [60:06]
Jordan Harbinger
You know, it's funny, I've done Shows on psychics and stuff like that. And spoiler alert, there's no such thing. But not every psychic or person who says they're a psychic, I should say, is an actual con artist. Most of them are, but some people have deluded themselves into believing that they actually are psychic. And this is exactly, I think, the process that they probably go through. They go, oh, my gosh, I totally knew where this person was or where they were going to find the body or what happened to this person because they were watching the news and they're not writing anything down. So their cognitive bias says, oh, my God, I knew that they would find her in that park. Okay, but if you wrote it all down, you would have had 87 guesses about other things that didn't happen at all. And this is how psychics on TV work too, right? The guy says a name starting with M and no one raises their hand and they goes, no, no, no, no, no, sorry, it's an N. And then somebody raises their hand and they edit out all the misses. So it looks like the guy goes, someone's name starts with an N. Oh, my gosh, it's you. Is it your husband? Even though he guessed five other types of relatives before that. Yeah. O is was his name. Norbert. Oh, my God. How did you guess that? Well, they edited out the other six things that he had guessed prior. But we're doing this to ourselves sometimes, right? We're just not remembering all of the whiffs.
- [61:15]
David Epstein
And so if you want to improve your judgment, you have to do the painful thing of making specific predictions and recording them. The good thing is, again, that leads to this huge benefit, as shown in this forecasting research, where it might feel bad at first, but don't worry, it's hard to predict things. And just recording it and seeing I got something wrong, so in which way should I update? It doesn't mean you have to change your mind about everything, but say, if you got something wrong, I should update a little bit in the direction of what actually happened. And over time, your judgment becomes much better.
- [61:44]
Jordan Harbinger
Tell the Keith Jarrett Colon concert story. This is one of those stories where every detail gets worse, but somehow the outcome gets better.
- [61:53]
David Epstein
Yeah. So this is 1975 in Germany. This teenager who had become kind of a phenomenon named Vera Brandes by promoting concerts, has her biggest promotion, where she gets Keith Jarrett, this virtuoso American jazz pianist, to come to a concert. She rents out Thousand person plus Opera Hall. It's going to be her biggest thing. And he shows up and he's notoriously sort of ornery, right? It was sometimes if he heard a camera click, he'd stop a concert or walk out, you know, just all these sorts of things. And he shows up to the opera hall and he's on this incredible travel stint, and he hits a few keys on the piano and says, concert's off. And she's what turns out that the transport company had brought the wrong piano. Right Brand, wrong piano. This piano had worn out felt hammers. It wasn't tuned properly. It had fewer keys than the piano that he had requested, which you don't normally think about. And so he says, no, I'm done. And she first starts scrambling, right? She asks a local university, they have the right model, can she use it? They say, all right, you can use it. And it's raining. So she makes a plan with her school friends to throw a blanket over it and wheel it across the town square in Cologne. But the piano tuner they have says, do you have, like, 40 grand to give me? Because if you wheel that thing across the cobblestones in the rain, you're gonna have to buy a new one. And so ultimately, there's no choice. There's no alternate plan. So she goes and stops a car with Keith Jarrett, who's driving away, and begs him basically to do this. And for whatever reason, he decides to do it. Maybe he sees this, like, teenager in distress.
- [63:30]
Jordan Harbinger
She was fricking crying her eyes out, for sure. Yeah, this is a nightmare. This guy's a terrible person. I half get it, but wow.
- [63:37]
David Epstein
And she told me she had seen him play with Miles Davis before, and she'd heard Miles Davis swear at some of his band members in a certain way. And so she tried to imitate that to him. I guess it worked. So he comes back and decides to play. And the upper registers, especially tinny, they get it a little bit tuned, but there's only so much you can do in, like, an hour or two, right?
- [63:55]
Jordan Harbinger
Because it's broken, right? It needs new parts and extra key. Everything's wrong.
- [63:59]
David Epstein
So he stays away from the upper register because it sounds tinny. There are other parts of the piano that he sort of wants to stay away from. It's not big enough to reach the upper parts of the theater. And so he uses his foot to bang it against the pedal as a percussion mechanism without pushing the pedal. And he has to do all these repetitive parts. Well, his left hand is often. Sometimes for minutes at a time, doing the same repetition while he's improvising with his right hand in the Parts of the piano that sound good. And he thought about at first he was going to send away the recording team that he'd brought there. He said, there's no way we're going to use this. But since they're already there, they let them record. He moves on from it, goes on to the next country and the next concert the next day. And this hour long improvisation starts getting played on records in the background of stores. It's way too long to get played on the radio. And people start asking about it because it's amazing. And pretty soon it starts selling and it becomes the best selling solo piano album of all time. And as he acknowledged, it was the imperfections of this piano that forced me to do something I would not have tried before. He said that happened multiple times in his career. What is an imperfect instrument just forced him to try things that he just would not have ever tried before. So it's kind of a classic case of the aspect of constraints where they force you away from the convenient solution and into a space that you couldn't have imagined before.
- [65:16]
Jordan Harbinger
Huh. So for writers, founders, podcasters, parents, athletes, how do we deliberately create the bad piano without wrecking the concert? I guess there's a few things I could do. Change things up like crazy. Do the show with pants on for once. I don't know. I mean, what do I do crazy now? Exactly. What do I do to shake things up in a way where it's not like, do it in the dark and then the video doesn't work, you know, how do I make this happen?
- [65:41]
David Epstein
Yeah. Well, let me give you an example that I use for my own work, which is a combination of that and another Pixar thing called the three pitches rule, where they had this rule where they forced directors to pitch three story ideas because they found that if they just had one idea, they'd get attached to it. And their first idea usually wasn't their best idea. Called the creative Cliff illusion. We think our best ideas come first, but they don't. And so I did that for the book where at the opening of every chapter, I write what comes to mind. You start somewhere, it pops to mind. And then I would cross that out and force myself to do two other openings starting in different places. And three quarters of the chapters ended up opening with one of those second or third attempt. Because the thing that typically came to mind wasn't necessarily the best. It was just a place to start. And so I think if there are opportunities to do the thing that comes to mind and then cross it out that can be an incredible creative prompt. Like if you say, if we went into the next client meeting and we weren't allowed to propose the thing we usually propose, what will we propose instead? And I'm not saying you have to do that, but even just the generative prompt can be really useful.
- [66:45]
Jordan Harbinger
How does this all connect to Dr. Seuss and the 50 word bet that produced Green eggs and ham? What's the green eggs and ham model of creativity?
- [66:54]
David Epstein
Yeah, so he was bet by a famous publisher that he couldn't write a book using only 50 words, and that became Green eggs and Ham. And that forced him to experiment with rhythm because he couldn't be expansive with vocabulary even before that. Actually, the reason that bet arose was because previously children's literature before him, most of it was really literal and boring. And he was given a vocabulary list for kids and asked if he could pick about 200 words and write a book with those. And at first, he looks at the list, sees there's very few adjectives, and starts complaining to his wife. He says, it's like trying to make a strudel without any strudels. And then he throws up his hands and says, I'm just going to use the first two rhyming words on the list and write a book around it. And that was cat and hat. Right. And the rest is history. It again forced him to experiment with his rollicking rhythm, and he ended up co founding a kid's book imprint that became, you know, altered children's literature that had all these constraints of what words were you allowed to use. Every two page shred had to be a single picture. You couldn't show anything on the picture that wasn't also described in the text. All these rules. And if authors didn't like it, then they weren't part of his imprint. One psychologist came to define this as the green eggs and ham model of creativity. Because it's these sorts of restrictions that block our default solutions that launch you into this exploration that you would never try otherwise.
- [68:13]
Jordan Harbinger
Man, this is. It's fascinating to hear how some of the most creative genius stuff that has defined our culture for generations, or at least a generation and change comes out of a bet or like, all right, the easiest thing to do is rhyme cat and hat. Now what? But is there a danger that we romanticize some of the suffering here? You know, it's like, great news, the piano sucks and you can only use 200 words. Now go be a genius.
- [68:37]
David Epstein
Where's the line here romanticizing the suffering? I'd say there are the most powerful tools that we have for learning are what psychologists call desirable difficulties, things that make, you know, equivalent to weightlifting with your brain. There's some pain involved, but that's how you get where you want to go. I tend to think the more dangerous romanticization is the idea that all we really need is all the constraints lifted and then we'll really blossom. And that kind of wasn't actually even an idea until the romantic period in the late 18th century, where it was a sort of a reaction to the Enlightenment, where logic and things were taking precedence and there was a group that wanted to push the pendulum back or create in the first place this idea that lightning strikes of inspiration are just where our good ideas come from. But that's not really the case. That said, there's certainly such a thing as too much constraint. No question about that.
- [69:30]
Jordan Harbinger
Ideas are cheap, execution is hard, and sponsorship is how I avoid testing that theory from the back of a van. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you in part by Air Doctor. You know what's funny? We'll filter our water, exercise, wear organic clothing, and then we just sit around breathing whatever's floating through the house. But clean air matters. You're breathing it all day, all night, while you sleep. Your kids are sleeping while you're working, relaxing or dealing with allergies, dust, odors, wildfire season, which happens more and more now. That's why we've added Air Doctor into the mix at home. And for us, it's about cleaner air for the family, fewer odors and extra peace of mind. Air Doctor uses powerful three stage filtration that captures extremely small particles, about 100 times smaller than what typical air purifiers can remove. It helps capture dust, pollen, mold, spores, pet dander, wildfire, smoke, bacteria, viruses, odor smoke, ozone, VOCs, volatile organic compounds. It's whisper quiet, has auto mode to help ensure optimal Air 24, 7 and filter reminders so there's no guesswork about when to replace things. Air Doctor won Newsweek's Reader's Choice award for best air purifier. Head to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code Jordan to get $250 off select AirDoctor air purifiers, including the 3500, 4000 and 5500 models. You will receive Air Doctor's 30 day money back guarantee. This is an exclusive podcast only offer available now at airdoctorpro.com that's a I R D O C T-O-R-P-R-O.com and use promo code Jordan this episode is sponsored in part by AT&T. You know why I love Summer? All those plans we made. They finally make it out of the group chat. Seems like there's more time to fit everyone in whatever you've got in store this summer. Capturing those moments is a must. That's why I love the iPhone 17 Pro I picked up from ATT. Its center stage front camera auto adjusts the frame to fit everyone in group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone. No awkward cropping or asking strangers to take it. Just the perfect group selfie every time. And ATT makes sharing those moments with everyone easy because you gotta share the pic or it didn't happen. Right? Right now at any at&t ask how you can get the iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible trade in requires eligible plan terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit att.comiphone or visit an ATT store for details. Don't forget about our newsletter, Wee Bitwiser. It's practical, it's an under two minute read, and it's something from the show that you might not have heard in years, or if you haven't listened to every episode, something from the back catalog you may have never heard. So come check it out. It's at jordanharbinger.com News now for the rest of my conversation with David Epstein. Does the constraint create creativity or does it just reveal who has the skill to adapt to the constraint?
- [72:07]
David Epstein
That's a good question. I mean, certainly some people are more creative than others, but I think you can actually make just about anyone more creative with certain constraints. And you can see this in these studies where if people are told to make some kind of invention and they're given 100 pieces and they can use whatever they want, and some people do okay at that, some people who view themselves as less creative don't do very well. And then if those people are told, you know what, you can only use 20 pieces and you have to make a piece of furniture, suddenly they become a lot more creative. Now it can go too far where if they're told you can only use 20 pieces and you have to make a chair, then it's like that's when the creativity dips again. But by hemming those people in, they actually do become more creative. There are even systems you can use. There's studies of people trying to come up with advertisements, advertise this new shoe that has a lot of cushioning or whatever, and the people who view themselves as uncreative struggle. But then when they're given a rubric where it's a system of, all right, start with one aspect of the shoe cushioning. Relate it to one aspect of something else that brings to mind softness in your mind, a cloud. And so maybe the ad is the picture of the shoe and the sole is a cloud or something. And when they can go through these steps of just pick off one piece and then just relate it to something else, it actually boosts quite a bit. People who had struggled with an open page and viewed themselves as non creative.
- [73:28]
Jordan Harbinger
Tell me about paired constraints. I thought this was kind of an interesting concept. What does it mean to both preclude something and promote something? It's a unique juxtaposition of things here.
- [73:37]
David Epstein
Yeah. This is a framework identified by a psychologist named Patricia Stokes, whose work was going back in history and looking at artistic innovation. And the theme of artistic innovation that she found over time was what she came to call paired constraints. And paired, because there are two sets of constraints in most the large majority of artistic innovations that she identified. The first constraint is what she calls a preclude constraint, where you block the familiar thing so that you won't use it. And the next is called a promote. You force yourself to use something else in its place. And so to give a simple example, Claude Monet, right at the time, painters used light and dark shades to portray different impressions of light. And they would mix black with colors to darken them. And he said, I'm not going to use light and dark shades at all. I'm not going to use black at all. He banned black so thoroughly that at his funeral, when they put a black shroud over his coffin, one of his friends freaked out and started yelling, no black from Monet, and went and got a floral tablecloth to put over his coffin. And so that was his preclude, no dark and light shades. And in its place, what he promoted were pure colors next to one another, almost in a mosaic that would give any impression of light that a viewer could see. And that was the birth of Impressionism. And it's just that system of what is the status quo. I'm gonna block it, and what's this thing that I'm gonna try in its place? Turns out to be the hallmark of artistic innovation over history.
- [75:02]
Jordan Harbinger
First of all, great example, but the no black constraint almost sounds silly until it becomes Impressionism.
- [75:08]
David Epstein
Yeah, no, no. That was the founding of Impressionism because it refers to giving an impression of light. And so that was the founding. Getting rid of black. It could have been silly. Right. There's no guarantee that just precluding the status quo leads you to the good solution. But it's necessary, but not sufficient to get these artistic leaps.
- [75:27]
Jordan Harbinger
So why does removing, let's say, an obvious tool, why does that open up a new world? How does that work?
- [75:32]
David Epstein
Again, just because our brains are programmed to go down the path of least resistance. And so if you're not constrained, you will just do what's familiar. You'll reach for something, the first thing that comes to mind, or the thing that's the most convenient, or the thing that you've done over and over again. Right. Something called the Einstelung effect in psychology, where you've solved certain problems a bunch of times a certain way, you'll keep doing it that way, even if there are better solutions available. Like when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail problem. You'll just reach for the familiar. And it's quite hard to knock ourselves off of that unless forced.
- [76:05]
Jordan Harbinger
So take a stuck person through this. Maybe they're writing a book or something like that, I don't know. Or building a product. What do they write under the preclude side of the page? And what goes under? Promote. How do they do this?
- [76:17]
David Epstein
One of the reasons I wrote this book was me search. I was terrible at this stuff. There's a reason why I spent seven years between my books because I was really bad. I was like a general magic of write. Everything I thought was interesting goes in and then I would have to cut it back.
- [76:30]
Jordan Harbinger
So you have like 16 half started books now somewhere in your computer?
- [76:34]
David Epstein
Yep.
- [76:34]
Jordan Harbinger
Wow.
- [76:35]
David Epstein
I cut full chapters for my first two books. I took a trip to arctic Sweden for my first book that I had to cut.
- [76:39]
Jordan Harbinger
Oh, that's.
- [76:40]
David Epstein
Once I became a parent, couldn't be taking trips to arctic Sweden that I wasn't going in the book.
- [76:43]
Jordan Harbinger
How do you feel about that? I mean, you had a great experience, but on the other hand it's, oh man, I went to arctic Sweden for no reason.
- [76:49]
Dr. Abigail Marsh
I.
- [76:49]
Jordan Harbinger
In show business there's this phrase called kill your darlings where you write this amazing scene and then someone's like, that doesn't fit. And you're like, but it's so cool. It's so amazing. And it's like, yeah, well, okay. But it doesn't fit, so get rid of it. Hollywood, they make an amazing scene with a bunch of special effects and it's like, we don't really need this in journalism.
- [77:08]
David Epstein
We call it drown your kittens.
- [77:09]
Jordan Harbinger
They're so Dark. These metaphors are all so dark.
- [77:12]
David Epstein
Yeah. Very aggressive. And how do I feel about it? It was an interesting trip, but I feel that I would have written more books than I have written in my life up to now had I been better about this.
- [77:22]
Jordan Harbinger
Had you not wasted literally years writing things that didn't get published. Yeah, probably. Okay.
- [77:26]
David Epstein
Exactly. And so this time around, instead, I'd actually decided not to write at all for a year this time around, and just research an interview. And then I compiled this hundred thousand word note sheet and then I printed it out and I went and read it slowly as soon as I finished, because you can't hold a hundred thousand words of information notes in your head, obviously. I forced myself on one page to create a structural outline for the book because things are fresh in my head, so the interesting things will be fresh. And if it's not on that page, it did not go in the book. And it forced me one to ruthlessly prioritize. And also, because I couldn't get in everything I wanted, I wanted to get in as much stuff as I wanted. It forced me to experiment with these different structures. So this is the first time where instead of having just chapters that are in some ways disconnected, I have four sections of three chapters each that are thematically related. And that's because this limited space forced me to find organizational schemes, basically. And so it made me so much more efficient. So I didn't start writing until much later in the process than I did in the past. But when I did, I had this defined architecture, so I executed so quickly. So I actually turned the thing in early, which I didn't even know was possible with a book. I was just sitting on it for a few weeks, like, what do I do now? And I enjoyed it more because once I had the structure defined, I could be more thinking about just the writing and the execution.
- [78:51]
Jordan Harbinger
I wonder how many times in her career, your agent, has someone turned in a manuscript early? I can't imagine that ever happens.
- [78:58]
David Epstein
I mean, it's usually like, sometimes people are years late.
- [79:01]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah.
- [79:01]
David Epstein
The book industry is not known for people making their deadlines. And it's tough because when you sign the contract, you don't really know what's going to happen. You have all this reporting left to do, you have people you need to get to. And so it's hard to know if the deadline is reasonable or not.
- [79:14]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, that's true. Plus, you got to go to Sweden and hang out with the penguins for this one chapter.
- [79:18]
David Epstein
That's right. Well, the penguins are down south I
- [79:21]
Jordan Harbinger
didn't even know that there's no penguins all the way up north. I guess they're all down south.
- [79:24]
David Epstein
Penguins are south, polar bears north. When I was a science grad student, before I became a writer, I was living in the tent in the Arctic in the north.
- [79:31]
Jordan Harbinger
So, okay, when you say tent, though, come on.
- [79:34]
David Epstein
It was technically called a weather station. So it was like a steel skeleton with more tarp material draped over it. So it was stronger than a normal tent, but it was very tent like.
- [79:43]
Jordan Harbinger
All right, we're taking five minutes to talk about this because first of all, what were you studying? Not many people do that, I assume, right? You're not there with thousands of people?
- [79:51]
David Epstein
No, a few dozen, and in the middle of nowhere. And I was studying the carbon cycle. So specifically in the lower Arctic, the ground is frozen all year round, like rock hard, maybe a meter below ground. And as that ground is warming up, it's releasing more nutrients, which is a proportionally large amount into the ground there. And so it's changing the plant life. And the question was, could we get a sense from using the radiation that plants give off quickly, of is this going to lead to more carbon being taken out of the atmosphere or more going into the atmosphere? So we're trying to come up with a method of analyzing the radiation that plants give off to get a sort of quick and dirty estimate of what was going on with the carbon cycle.
- [80:32]
Jordan Harbinger
That's super interesting. And you're living up there with people. You don't get to choose the people. Right. Somebody who's leading the project does. Do you guys know each other beforehand? Because I can imagine things can go wrong up there. Right. Somebody's a little bit annoying. But you're in the Arctic and it's like, listen, man, I'm gonna kill you. I can't deal with you anymore in this tent.
- [80:50]
David Epstein
Yeah, you couldn't. I mean, the only way to get out of there fast was the helicopter. I worked with one lab and our lab group went up there, and then there were several other lab groups that were up there at the same time. Because this area had been designated as what's called a long term ecological research center. So it had perpetual funding. So obviously it's a very unusual situation. You know, you can't shower every day. The reason that the station was where it was is because it was near a lake that stayed unfrozen, and so you could jump in and take your bath and things like that.
- [81:17]
Jordan Harbinger
That's amazing. Wait, how did it stay unfrozen there's? Just like a heat vent.
- [81:20]
David Epstein
No, no, it was just. It was just deep enough and we were in the lower Arctic that there was enough water that it wouldn't fully freeze over. And you can't be showering all the time because you're not allowed to put water into the ground. Otherwise, you're changing the areas that you're studying there. So you have to be careful about that.
- [81:37]
Jordan Harbinger
Yikes. That is just a really unique experience. How long were you up there?
- [81:41]
David Epstein
Just a few months. Basically, nobody lives there in the dead of winter. The only way to get close to there is the access road for the pipeline. Nobody lives there at certain times of year. I also lived on a ship in the Pacific Ocean when I was still training to be a scientist. I had some unusual experiences.
- [81:55]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, ships are also just sort of a macrocosm. What it would be like to live in a tent with a bunch of other people. A dozen other people.
- [82:02]
David Epstein
Sorry, I should have clarified. The tent that I lived in was just me. There were a bunch of other tents, lots of small tents.
- [82:07]
Jordan Harbinger
You had some privacy. You have to smell everybody all the time.
- [82:10]
David Epstein
That's right. I mean, okay, I only voluntarily smell everyone all the time, but I wasn't forced to smell everything all the time.
- [82:15]
Jordan Harbinger
Okay, got it. All right, well, that's a different podcast. All right. Wow, that's very unique, man. Unbelievable. So what's your favorite example? Back to the topic at hand. What's your favorite example of a constraint that maybe sounds really dumb on paper, but forces brilliance in practice? What's your Monet? I'm not using black. What's a good one that most people could probably apply.
- [82:35]
David Epstein
We talked a little bit about this earlier, but the subtraction audit, where since we know people only build up more obligations and more tools and more responsibilities, is regularly listing everything you've got and saying, if I have to cut something out in the next 30 days or the next 90 days, what's it going to be? Also setting decision rules, which can seem a little silly. Why should you need them? But one that I use that I find helpful is if I'm agonizing about some decision. If this decision isn't made by X date, the answer is no. And then sticking to that. And I actually find that really helpful because I have a tendency to sort of kick decisions down the road. And so using those sorts of decision rules, I think can be really simple and really, really helpful.
- [83:15]
Jordan Harbinger
So if constraints are not the enemy of freedom, but the structure that makes some kinds of freedom possible. What is one box that you wish more people would willingly step into?
- [83:27]
David Epstein
Oh, that's a really interesting question for our age. Derek Thompson, for example, has been writing a lot about how much time people are spending alone. And it's pretty scary. And it's like time spent doing everything else has plummeted, and time spent alone and online has gone way up. And we know that's not good for people for all sorts of reasons. In fact, we're all individualizing our schedules, right? And the Soviet Union actually tried this in the 20s, where they gave everyone individualized work schedules in the hope of being more efficient in their production. And it was a social calamity because people didn't have to sync their schedules anymore. And so they didn't. And so they were spending all this time alone, and they had to undo that. And I think in many ways, we've been doing that to ourselves. There are huge advantages to remote and hybrid work and all those things. But if we're not replacing the time where you have to be somewhere at a certain time and have obligations to other people, we know it's really important to human thriving to have a dense network of reciprocal obligations. You're obligated to other people, and they're obligated to you to do things. And I think this increase in time spent only online, or what the MIT professor Sherry Turkle says, we are forever elsewhere. Like, we're not living where our feet are. And so I think putting more obligations into the real world, where your body is in a certain place with other people and you have to be in a certain place at a certain time, is really important for human thriving. And I'm frankly kind of scared at how much we're moving away from that.
- [84:57]
Jordan Harbinger
What is a limitation in your own life that you used to resent, but now you recognize it as a gift?
- [85:04]
David Epstein
End of the workday. So I used to think, oh, my competitive advantage is that I will just let my workday expand to everything. And then I had a kid, and when he walks through the door, that is not feasible. And at first I said, gosh, how am I going to get this stuff done? I actually started borrowing from one of my favorite authors, this practice of lighting a candle at the beginning of the workday and blowing it out at the end to signify the ending. So you start to get this cue starts to be meaningful. For switching modes, I use electric candles. So I'll burn down my office.
- [85:34]
Jordan Harbinger
Oh, yeah, I was curious about that.
- [85:35]
David Epstein
With a real flicker, though, it looks. It's really nice.
- [85:37]
Jordan Harbinger
Does it go off when you blow on it, though, or you have a switch.
- [85:41]
David Epstein
Switch. That would be cool. So now when my son comes in the door, I switch into a different mode, just like I was when I was an athlete. Like, stress plus rest equals growth, and I was not programming the rest. And so now I have this mode where I shift into a different mode and I get recovered. You know, it's like, identity is like a house, and you don't want to be spending all your time in one room. And I think I was doing that in many cases, and it was actually making everything take longer because I wasn't recovered when I actually came down to do something. So at first, I obviously didn't resent my son, but I bristled against the inability to let my workday expand. And now I think it's both good for my wellbeing and my productivity.
- [86:21]
Jordan Harbinger
Thank you, man, for coming in. I really appreciate it. It's a fascinating conversation. Yeah. I looked at my old notes before, and I think you came on before the pandemic or right when the pandemic started or something like that with your book range. So it's been a minute.
- [86:35]
David Epstein
Yeah. But I'm much more efficient now. So if I decide to write more books, I could get them out more quickly because of some of the ways that I changed my work habits from the research that went into this book. But obviously, I've done a bunch of interviews over the years, and eventually they all blurred together. But you're sort of stood out because you're just asked some questions that nobody else asks, really. So it stood out in my mind. So I really appreciate that.
- [86:57]
Jordan Harbinger
Thank you, man. That's high praise. I know you do a ton of media, so I actually was surprised when you remembered me on the phone because I was like, wow, he's either faking it or has a really good memory.
- [87:05]
David Epstein
So it just stands out from the mass of the ones that are sort of more similar and just kind of do your bullet points kind of thing. So you are easy to remember, actually, because you stand out.
- [87:13]
Jordan Harbinger
You can probably tell when somebody doesn't read the book. Right? It's probably pretty obvious.
- [87:17]
David Epstein
Yeah. You can tell.
- [87:19]
Jordan Harbinger
For me, my problem is always speaking of constraints. Shit, I have 32 pages of notes. I'm probably gonna get through, like, 12 maybe. And that's if, like, you're not long winded and I don't get sidetracked and stuff. And that's. What are the odds of that happening? Right? It's like, okay, I'm gonna get through 30% of these notes. So in real time, I'm like, yep, skip this whole section on collaboration. But yeah, I'm looking at my notes now, and if we wanted to, there's a whole other show. There's at least eight pages of stuff. Designing for real humans doing, monotasking, collaboration, satisficing commitment. You kind of touched on that comparison. I mean, I skipped all that stuff just because, I don't know, it was interesting where we were going, and then I jumped to the end. So I guess my point is I do not understand how somebody who doesn't read the book can do this. What are you doing? Are they just hoping you talk a lot? I think that's the whole plan.
- [88:10]
David Epstein
I think so. And one of the ways you can tell, too, is it becomes much less conversational. The ideas are all disconnected and it doesn't really feel that conversational. It's just like winding you up and let you go.
- [88:21]
Jordan Harbinger
Yeah. Now that you're done with that segment, here's the next thing I want you to talk about. Yeah.
- [88:24]
David Epstein
Yeah. I mean, so like, in this case, we digress for a few minutes to talk about the Arctic. And it's like, that's actually fun to do that, to make room for that and then you can get back. So it just feels much more like a conversation than I'm just being like, pushed in. In automaton to do bullet points.
- [88:38]
Jordan Harbinger
I don't know. Sometimes I'm like, self conscious about doing that, but I probably shouldn't be.
- [88:42]
David Epstein
I think it's interesting. It's interesting as a listener, too, I would think.
- [88:45]
Jordan Harbinger
So somebody's going, oh, he lived in the Arctic. Oh, you're just not going to talk about that. Okay, all right, never mind. Somebody wants to bite on that, and that person is me, at least. So there's probably a few thousand more that think the same. I would. At least. I would bet.
- [88:57]
David Epstein
Your interest is obviously a good proxy for a lot of other people's interests.
- [89:01]
Jordan Harbinger
That's what I'm hoping. I guess that has to be true, otherwise this show would not be successful at all. That's a good point. I didn't think. I never thought about that. David, man, thank you. I know you probably have a bunch of other media. Thank you for spending this time with me. Thank you so much. Time for my run. No, I'm kidding. I'm not going to run.
- [89:15]
David Epstein
You don't have the right shoes yet. You can't possibly.
- [89:17]
Jordan Harbinger
That's right. I can't run. I don't have. That's exactly it. I don't have the right shoes.
- [89:20]
David Epstein
Thanks so much for having me.
- [89:21]
Jordan Harbinger
My pleasure. Thanks for coming in. You're about to hear a preview where Dr. Abigail Marsh unpacks why psychopathy is more treatable than we think, how kindness can quietly reshape lives, and why we may need to rethink labels like sociopath.
- [89:37]
Dr. Abigail Marsh
You know somebody with psychopathy already. So if 1 to 2% of the population has a clinically significant level of psychopathy, and most people's social networks include 100 to 150 people, all of us know somebody with psychopathy. So that's the bad news. But the good news is that the stereotypes people have about psychopathy are usually a little off. And so the person with psychopathy, you already know, you may just not have recognized that that's what their behavior adds up to. Many people who are psychopathic themselves are like, I don't want to be this way. I just don't know how to behave differently. No differently from somebody with any other disorder. It's just they can't find anybody who will help them. I fully recognize that people with psychopathy are totally capable of coming up with a code for how they want to live, including a code that dictates, like, what it means to be a good person, even if they don't have the same emotions and drives and motivations as other people do. So I think that's really important to clarify, however, in that context, people who are psychopathic just don't intrinsically value other people's welfare that much. They are just much more instrumental in their social interactions. Every interaction is about, like, what can I get? What can I get out of this person? What can I get out of this situation? So that's why there's so much manipulating and lying and exploitation is. It's because people most of the time are just sort of tools to get whatever the ultimate goal is. Every other psychological disorder can be treated. And so why would these be uniquely immutable? And in fact, the evidence is they can be changed, they can be improved, they're totally treatable.
- [91:04]
Jordan Harbinger
To hear the science behind who actually does the most harm, check out episode 1293. It might change how you see everyone around you. We've all been told some version of think outside the box, usually by somebody standing next to a sad conference room bagel. But David Epstein's argument is much more interesting than that. The box is not always the enemy. Sometimes the box is the point. Mendeleev's deadline helped him see order and chaos. General magic showed us what happens when brilliant people have too much possibility and not enough focus. Pixar reminds us that creativity is not just inspiration. It's bumpers, feedback, and the humility to stop beautifully shading the penny while the movie is still broken. And maybe the most uncomfortable part of this conversation is that constraints don't only make us more creative, they can also make us more honest. Write down what you think will happen before it happens. Decide what would change your mind before your ego gets involved. Create rules that prevent you from wandering into the same lazy solution. Remove the obvious tool force a better move. That doesn't mean every limitation is secretly a gift. Some constraints are unfair, some are brutal, some are just scarcity dressed up as wisdom. We don't need to romanticize suffering or pretend a broken piano automatically makes you Keith Jarrett. But when we choose the right constraint, a deadline, a kill list, a 50 word limit, a decision rule, we stop treating freedom as infinite options and start using it as directed energy. So maybe the question is not how do I escape every box? Maybe it's which box would make me better. All things David Epstein will be in the show. Notes on the website, advertisers, deals, discount codes and ways to support the show all@jordanharbinger.com deals Please consider supporting those who support the show. Our course, Six Minute Networking is at sixminutenetworking.com, i'm ordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in decision making, leadership, or some good old organizational psychology, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
- [93:44]
David Epstein
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- [94:17]
Dr. Abigail Marsh
Grainger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24. 7 support support call 1-800-granger click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.