← Travis Makes Money
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You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by gohighlevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis what's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast where it's our mission to help you all make some more money. Today on the show, I have a new friend, David Epstein. He's a number one New York Times bestselling author whose books Range and the Sports Gene have sold millions of copies worldwide. A former senior writer at Sports Illustrated and investigated reporter at ProPublica, his work explores how people succeed in complex, high stakes environments. His forthcoming book, Inside the Box How Constraints Make Us Better, which is releasing in May, reveals how constraints drive better performance, faster decisions and more valuable outcomes. He also holds master's degrees in environmental science and journalism and lives out in Washington, D.C. david, what's up man? Welcome to the show.
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A
Thanks so much for having me.
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B
So before we dive into some of the backstory here and and talk about where you how you got to where you are now, tell me the new book, Inside the Box. This seems to be a little bit outside of the topics that you've talked about before. What prompted you to explore this topic more?
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A
Two main things. So my last book range was about the benefits of broad skills and experiences in an increasingly specialized world. And that book went much wider than I expected, basically. And probably the most common question that I got from readers was something along the lines of, okay, I've got this broad background, now what? And so this book inside the Box is my answer to that, which is how do you then focus that into achievement? And the fact is the second big impetus was there's a hefty dose of me search in this book, which is that I was that way, broadly curious, broad skills and experiences, ton of trouble focusing my projects like my first two books. I wrote 150% of a book and then had to cut it back to get one book because I did not do a good job at Drawing boundaries around my own projects. So it was partly responsive to reader questions from my last book and partly, you know, something I was terrible at, I wanted to get better at.
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B
When you decide to go on a topic like this, how much time is spent in research versus writing?
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A
That's a great question. I'm usually interested in the topic before I'm thinking about it as work. So it's something I'm researching again because I want to get better at it. The ME search component, but explicitly once I sign the contract for it. Pretty much a two year process, but the first year, zero writing, none research, only reading papers, interviewing, making basically a map of the territory so I can start to understand who are the important figures I'm going to need to talk to. What are the important papers? You know? Now I've used AI to make these citation maps, these webs that show me what are the most important papers in an area of research. And that's all I'm doing. And at the end of that year, in this case, again, I put more constraints on myself with this book than I had in the past. And one of those was at the end of that year, I forced myself to make an architectural plan basically for the structure of the book. To be honest, what I actually did is I took this hundred thousand word notes document that I had printed it out, went and rented the hermitage in the back of a Franciscan monastery that had no Internet, no one to talk to for several days, read it flipping pages by hand, and as soon as I finished, said, now I'm outlining the book based on what's in my memory from having done that on one page and one page only. Wow. And if it's not on that page, it's not in the book. And I think that gave one. It forced me to clarify priorities so I didn't have bloat the way that I did with my past books. But it also led me to have a coherent structure because if you're putting it on one page, you really need to make sure things are linked. It can't just be scattered stuff all over the place. And it gave me this framework that allowed me, once I moved into execution or writing, to move so quickly that I turned the book in early. My previous books I turned in at 5pm on the day the contract specified. This time I was just sitting on it for several weeks, even though I started writing later than usual because I drew this process out a little more. Making the architecture. Once I moved into execution, I had such clear boundaries that I wrote fast.
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B
Wow. So it's definitely sort of that, like, spend five hours sharpening the axe adage of, you know, like, yeah, you get six hours to chop down a tree. And then, you know, somebody said, oh, I would spend the first five hours sharpening the ax. It sounds like that's exactly what you did when we compile all of this. And then once you actually sit down to do the work. The product was the easy part. It was everything else that was, that was difficult.
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A
Totally. And there's a, there's a researcher in the book named Bent Flubier, a Danish guy who studies how projects go wrong or right. And this is basically what he advises, what he calls think slow, act fast. Where if you spend time early on when you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. That's Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored jobs.
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A
Learn more@schwab.com trading on drawing the boundaries. When you move into execution, it'll be much faster, but typically people rush into execution and then you've got momentum and it's harder to pivot and all these things. And that's what happened with my past books. I mean, they worked out well, they sold well, but they took longer than they should have. You know, it was six or seven years between those books. It didn't have to be that way because I rushed into execution to some degree. Instead of spending this time and saying, where are the boundaries here? What is the framework? And then you can execute quickly.
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B
Tell us about your time at the monastery.
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A
So yeah, there's a Franciscan monastery in Washington D.C. that had these two little one room hermitages out back in their gardens that they allow visitors to use. And it's a beautiful place to just get into a reflective mood. There's nothing there. You know, there's like a fork and a plate and a concrete floor and this garden and a few books. And I just didn't open my mouth for several days. All I did was turn over these pages that I read again. This was a hundred thousand words. So my notes were significantly longer than the actual book would turn out to be. But. And you can't hold that much information in your brain. Right. But having just read it, I said, okay, the things that stick in my head now as fascinating having just done that are the things that I think will be interesting to other people. So I'll put those down. But it was beautiful. So I would do it. I would spend a few hours just doing the reading, then walk around the gardens, maybe go for a run or something like that. Or, you know, in a few cases they would leave a few books about the life of St. Francis in the back. Maybe I would read a little bit about the life of St. Francis and then return to it. It was almost like having three, three workdays in one. It was like I'd have a several hour workday, take a break, another, and then, and then a third. It was amazing and it, and so refreshing because I was monotasking the whole time. It helped me understand how much of the daily stress I feel is a result of multitasking that I don't need to be inflicting on myself.
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B
It's pretty crazy. The volume of quality work that you can do when you just remove distraction.
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A
It's crazy. It's crazy. And even doing the same work but breaking it into monotasking blocks, it just feels so much less stressful.
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B
Yeah. Like into little bite sized chunks for your career. Now you started off just, you started off in journalism, right. And then you started writing books and the books went very well. I don't know if you know the stats, but on a recent episode, my producer and I. My producer just sold the book and he's writing, he's working on his first book and we're talking about some of the, some of the stats about books. And I think it was over 5 million books came out in 2025 alone. And it was something like less than 10% of them sold more than 500 copies or something like that.
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A
It was, it was, wow, 500. Oh boy.
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B
It was a wild stat. I might be messing that up to some degree, but it was, it was one of the ones that like when he said it, I was like, what? That's crazy.
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A
Obviously it was a very skewed distribution but that's.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. And that because that also includes all of the self published books, which is, you know, a bigger portion of the total books that were released. But your books, I've sold millions of copies. Why do you think that is?
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A
You know, the first one was an accident a little bit. I was a writer I came out of before I was even a journalist. I was training to be a scientist and I got off that track. And the first book, the Sports Gene, was all these things that either from having been a competitor, I was a competitive runner, or from watching sports I didn't understand about the balance of nature and nurture. And I'd been pitching those things at SI and usually getting rejected. So I did it as my side passion project, assuming that these were just my nerdy sports science interests.
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B
The ramblings of a science sports nerd.
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A
Yeah, yeah. And then it, then it caught on, I think partly because I ended up writing, taking a scientific look at things like race and gender and sports and things that people didn't normally talk about in polite company and looking at what science actually had to say about those things. And then I, I kind of shredded the science underlying the so called 10,000 hours rule with, which brought me into these public debates with Malcolm Gladwell that we then bec. Became fast friends. But we first met through a debate. And so I think, if I had to guess, I think my books always, you know, whether the first one, balance of nature, nurture and developing skills. The second, how broad or specialized to be. The third, how to. How to focus yourself to achieve things and not fall prey to overwhelm in this fast changing world. I think they all take conversations that people are having all the time that are important to them, whether they're explicitly framing it that way or not. But you usually just talk about it with your own intuition. And so it takes these conversations and adds stories and research to them that just make those conversations more productive. So I think that's part of what it is, is that the topics I'm drawn to tap into these conversations people are having, but usually not in nearly as substantive a way as they could. So to get this newest book, of course I don't know how this one will do, maybe this one will flop and then I'll sound like an idiot. But when I told people I'm writing about how constraints can be useful instead of only limiting in bad ways, they would often say, oh, that's so true. And then I'd ask, oh, give me a story. And they usually couldn't so it's like something that people feel is true, but they're not really sure why.
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B
Yeah, they don't necessarily.
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A
Yeah. So I think maybe that's sometimes what I'm doing is taking this thing that they kind of feel intuitively is true but aren't sure why and giving them the lexicon and the why.
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B
Would you agree that constraints ironically bring freedom?
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A
Yeah, I think in many levels, obviously you can be too constrained. But there's the personal level, where when we have discipline or decision rules in our own lives or structure, where then you are free to do your thing and flourish within that. Right. This is why so many artists live such a disciplined life in many ways, because you don't want to be having to make a million little decisions every day. Right. You want that structure outlined so that you're weighing in on the important decisions, then all the way up to the more conceptual level. Some of what I write about in Inside the Box is that really the foundations of modern prosperity and the modern economy are based on what the economist Douglas north, who won the Nobel Prize, called institutions. But he said they were the humanly devised constraints that restrict behavior in ways that make strangers more predictable to one another. So these can be social norms or legal systems that limit our options. And prior to those, the advent of those people only did business with their kinship network or their religious network or their neighborhood. And it was these kinds of rules that made strangers more predictable by hemming in some of their choices that allowed collaboration to start transcending those boundaries. And that's what gave rise to modern prosperity. It allowed what economists call impersonal exchange for you to do business with people that you don't personally know. And so I think that's the reason why, for example, the Harvard Law School's commencement every year starts with the words with this phrase that includes wise restraints that make men free. It's these agreed upon limitations where we sacrifice a certain amount of freedom, but it really frees us to flourish in all these ways that we. That we couldn't otherwise.
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B
Yeah, it reminds me. It reminds me just even of marriage.
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A
Right.
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It's like you. There's freedom in the commitment. It sort of prevents you from. Like you, You. You exist now inside of this container, but inside of that container allows you a new type of freedom to. To experience life in a much more meaningful way.
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A
That's a great way to put it. And in fact, there's a quote in the introduction of Inside the Box from Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, who is the Psychologist. He's most well known because he coined the term flow to describe the feeling of immersion in an experience of total immersion. And I came across this quote of his where he's talking about marriage and he basically says, the great thing about being committed by your choice is that you can stop wondering how to live and start living.
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B
That's right.
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A
All this energy gets freed up where you don't have to wonder if there's something better around the corner and you can actually start experiencing the moment. And I think you could almost extrapolate that to anything. Where there's all this research that I put into the book that shows that especially in this world of seemingly infinite choice, our brains are kind of FOMO engines and that if we don't make decisive commitments to things, we become really unhappy because then we're just constantly wondering if there's some. Some better thing. So we're in a tough spot where all of this choice has actually made it incumbent upon us as individuals to start drawing lines for ourselves if we want to be happy.
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B
You fall prey to the grass is always greener syndrome rather than just watering the grass where you are. And that's probably going to be where it ends up being most green, you know. Turns out you just got to pour a little fertilizer where you already are. You know what I mean?
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A
That's right. That's a great way to put it. You.
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B
You mentioned that this felt intuitive based on your own anecdotal experiences. Something that felt intuitive. Was there anything during your research that surprised you?
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A
Probably the most surprising research to me. I mean, I guess I was. Two things jumped to mind when you asked that. One is there was this international survey that psychologists did asking of known creativity myths. So things that we know from research are not true about creativity. And the most popular one was the idea that people are most creative when they are most free. And I would have said that probably also, but it turns out that our brains are pretty much built to be lazy and that if you have a total blank page, it becomes really hard to do anything that's inconvenient, essentially. So you actually. The best way to make people creative is to block the convenient solutions or the things that they're used to and it forces them to do more creative things. Another thing that really surprised me was this research about our attention spans where that our attention spans are getting trained in such a way that even if we remove our notifications and all that stuff, we will self interrupt with intrusive thoughts about the things we could be checking and so it becomes very hard to focus. And so you actually have to train
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A
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B
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A
Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher for delivery. Your attention span, if you want to be able to focus deeply.
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B
How do you do that?
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A
Good way to do it is by one thing to do is by breaking your work into blocks. So this psychologist who did this research named Gloria Mark, she found that, for example, workers in offices check email on average 77 different times a day. And that's just one form of toggling. So what you really want to do is reduce toggling. So maybe you have to answer a hundred emails, but if you can break that into one or two or even three blocks where you're just doing email and then you're not doing that and then you're doing something else. So what you really want to do is reduce the number of toggles so that you're, you're monotasking at least for a few minutes, if not maybe a half hour, an hour, instead of all day long toggling between those things. That's the best way to start. And then put a pad next to yourself where when those intrusive thoughts come up, you write it. You know, this thing you didn't respond to, write it down. It's called cognitive outsourcing. So that it doesn't stay taking up working memory.
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B
I have to do that all the time. During podcast interviews, my brain gets pulled. Somebody says something and it reminds me that I got to do something later and then I'm only thinking about that thing. So I literally have dry erase markers right next to me all the time. So I can just write it down, get it out of my head, I'll remember it later, but I got to focus in on this conversation right now.
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A
You know, there you go. It's called the Zeigarnik effect, that it leaves this like residue in your brain, basically. So you have to get it out of there if you want to be able to focus.
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B
I'm curious, David. We talked a little bit before we hit the record button. You mentioned that you Did a writing workshop with James Clear. What value did that bring to your writing career? And in general, how do you view the role of mentorship or coaching in your career?
- [18:56]
A
First of all, it was fun because writing can be very lonely. And so it's fun to be and you don't really get a chance to see how other people do things. I used to, when I started at Sports Illustrated. I started as a temp fact checker and it was great because I was surrounded all day by people better than me and the things that I was trying to get good at. But then once you become good, you become more isolated. And so it was nice to be around people and see what they do. But also I realized that some of these other writers, writers I really admire of them, I was the only one who was only a writer. They, they had built businesses, newsletters, videos, courses, you know, not, not everyone, all of those things. But nobody was only writing books and none of the others had come through traditional journalism the way that I had. And so it started to open my mind to the fact that I didn't need to think of myself as just a book author. I can think of myself as, you know, an idea entrepreneur, someone who likes sharing interesting things and investigating. And that doesn't have to only occur in these traditional forms that take forever to get out into the world. And they started to attune me to the fact that, hey, you have an audience now, these people are interested in you. You don't have to wait so long to give them more stuff. So that started me on the path to. That's when I started a newsletter. And you know, I recently just started a YouTube channel and, and that, and that's a place where you can do real long form stuff, like real meaty
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B
stuff without the express permission of some corporate suit.
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A
That's right. That's right. And I do like having editing, I do like having other eyeballs, sure. But what I think I didn't like as much was this sort of formulaic, it was hard to do stories that I sometimes found really interesting if they didn't just fit this certain specific format of some publication or something like that. And so I've really enjoyed that. And I think it was that retreat that James hosted that was my first just keyhole view into, hey, you can build a business around these things that you love to do, not just write a book every once in a while.
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B
What does that looked like for you in practice? Now you mentioned you have the YouTube channel. Is this like keynote speeches? Are there other like different Monetization points that you've put into the overall quote unquote business.
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A
Now, speaking became a big part of it. And I didn't know that the speaking world existed. When I wrote my first book, I got invited to talk about some of the stuff in the book. And I go to this event and I talk. This is amazing. People are listening to me talk about stuff that I'm just interested in on my own time. And an agent came up to me from the audience and said, hey, do you have an agent? And I said, oh, yeah. And I gave her the name of my literary agent for books. And she said, you know, these other people speaking are getting paid, right? And I was like, they're getting paid just to talk about this stuff they're interested in.
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B
Is that meme from we're the Millers? Yeah, you guys are getting paid.
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A
I hadn't known to ask. I just didn't know to ask. So when they invited me, I said, oh, yeah, great, I'll come. And so that led to me getting representation for speaking. And it's turned into something that has been a hugely important part of my business and also something that I really enjoy.
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B
Yeah, I was going to ask about that.
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A
I got, you know, then I started seeing real elite speakers and realizing, okay, I need to up my game with this.
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B
Yeah, that's a new skill.
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A
Yeah, that's right. And. But that I enjoy it. It's still storytelling. It's still sharing information. I liked some of the visual design stuff. And as I became more independent, it also became a way for me to network since. For my reporting. Since I don't have a publication now, I say, oh, it's David Epstein calling from Sports Illustrated. You know, I'm just me. Networking at these events with people in different industries can be hugely important one, because I like them. Their people are interesting to learn about their work life. Yeah. But also it gives me this broader network where when I do need to interview somebody, I can often work through my contacts a lot better to get to someone. So it's been. It's been really useful that way. So, yeah, speaking's been a big, big part of the growth of what I do.
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B
I also just love the instantaneous feedback when you're speaking on stage versus, you know, we obviously do a lot of podcasting. It just feels sometimes like you're shouting into the Grand Canyon. You know, it's like, is anybody listening to me? You know what I mean? And I feel like writing books would probably feel somewhat similar to that, where it's like, you put all of this, I mean, years of effort and time and energy and it's all you're thinking about. And then you ship off the product and you go, well, hope that's well received, you know, but you know, exactly if it's being well received and you know, right now, you know, totally.
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A
There's nothing like interacting with a live audience. And it's, it's so intimate in a way too. Even if it's a big, you know, conference room or something like that. And I memorize, fully memorize my top 45 minutes, 60 minutes, memorize every word. But then I feel free to improv off that based on how things are going. And when you get one of those audiences where you know they're with you and you and you've got your script memorized but you're starting to feel free to improv a little off them, it is just that's like the flow feeling that Csiks and Mihaly talks about. So I just love that when that happens. It doesn't happen every time, but when it does, it's like, you know, I was a competitive 800 meter runner. It's like when you run a PR, that same feeling.
- [24:18]
B
How, how are you now thinking about next steps? Like how do you already have a book idea in mind? Are you heads down focused on promoting this book? What, what is going through your head at the moment?
- [24:30]
A
Yeah, I find books so consuming that I always have lots of ideas, but I do resist jumping right into them. Again, I am heads down promoting this one right now, but I'm also, as I mentioned, I mean, I just launched the YouTube channel. I've got a bunch of work in the hopper, so a lot more work than is up has been done already. But it's just been, you know, the process of actually getting it up and finished has been a little slower than I expected. But I think I posted six videos and I just had one that took off, you know, went past into the six figures of views, which is kind of exciting and it's really engaging because I'm in that experimental phase where some stuff does nothing and then some kind of takes off. So I'm really interested to do more of that now and see because I've found myself engaging with serious long form stuff on YouTube more recently in the last year or two. And so that's what I want to do. I want to be able to do serious reported, interesting, practical stuff there.
- [25:36]
B
Great.
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A
So I think that's going to be a little bit of my focus along with book promotion for the rest of this year.
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B
Yeah, well, luckily it also acts as book promotion, so.
- [25:45]
A
Yeah, yeah, I'm so early. I don't have like a big subscriber base yet. But this, this video that I just posted shows me that you don't actually have to have a lot of subscribers for one to start going.
- [25:56]
B
It's the be. That's the. To me, that's the only good thing that has come from the tiktokification of all social media channels is the fact that basically all algorithms now follow that as a path. That like subscriber base doesn't really matter. Each individual piece of content that's posted is, is successful or unsuccessful based on its own merit, regardless of if you have a hundred subscribers or you have 10 million subscribers. So. And then, you know, it's, it's, it's another good place for your audience to come connect with you. And you know, it's like they, they read a book and they want more from you and it's like, oh man, he's not coming out with another book for four more years. And now they can come, they've got a newsletter to subscribe to and they can watch you do some YouTube videos and break down some concepts that, that they really like hearing from you from. So I appreciate, for all the work that you're doing, man, and really appreciate your time on the show today. The new the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better, which is coming out in May. So by the time you're listening to this right now, this book will be out. So please be sure to go pick up a copy and support David and learn from some of the immense research that you heard that he did here on the show today. David, I appreciate you taking the time, man. Where else can people go to get more from you?
- [27:02]
A
They can go to my site, David epstein.com and I have a free newsletter, David epstein.substack.com so. And the YouTube channel, which is just. David Epstein, author, Brand Spacing New.
- [27:13]
B
David, I appreciate you taking the time, man. I know you're a busy guy. Don't take that for granted. Everybody else listening. Remember, money only solves your money problems, but it's usually easier to solve the rest of your problems when you got a little bit of money in the bank. So let's solve that one first here on the Travis Makes Money podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you guys next time. Peace.