← The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network
The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network
RWH068: How to Be Better in Work & Life w/ David Epstein
01:33:38
David Epstein talks about his new book and shares practical strategies & research-based insights to help you flourish professionally & personally.
Loading summary
Transcript95 lines
- [00:01]
William Green
You're listening to tip. You're listening to the Richer, Wiser, Happier podcast where your host, William Greene interviews the world's greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life. This show is not investment advice. It's intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. All opinions expressed by hosts and guests are solely their own and they may have investments in the securities discussed. Now for your host, William Green.
- [00:41]
All right, folks, I'm thrilled to welcome today's guest, David Epstein. David is a superb author who published a hugely influential book in 2019 called Range, which explored the advantages of being a generalist with broad experiences and skills in a world where we're often encouraged to adopt an increasingly narrow, specialized focus. That book was a number one New York Times bestseller. And today we're going to talk in depth about his new book, which is being published this week. It's titled Inside the Box and the subtitle is How Constraints Make Us Better. I read an advanced copy of the book, cover to cover, over the last few days with tremendous pleasure. And I have to say it's really terrific. It's very richly researched. It's full of thought provoking insights for anyone who wants to build a richer, wiser, happier life, whether you're an investor or a business person, an athlete, a creative, or anyone else who's trying to figure out how to live meaningfully in extremely complicated times. So, David, welcome. Thanks so much for joining us.
- [01:40]
David Epstein
It's a pleasure. As I told you, one of my friends was on recently and spoke very highly of you. So I'm honored to be here.
- [01:47]
William Green
Thank you. That was the great Brad Stalberg, who. I'm very grateful for the introduction from Brad. So your new book opens with a beautiful epigraph, an opening quote from a Nobel Prize winning economist and legendary polymath named Herbert Simon. Simon, which sets up the theme of the entire book. And here's the it is a myth, widely believed, but not less mythical for that, that people are most creative when they are most free. And then towards the end of the book you write that if you had to choose a single thinker whose work most influenced the book, it would be Herbert Simon. So can you start by telling us who he was and how he influenced the themes of this book?
- [02:25]
David Epstein
Yeah. So he was, I think, one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, but most people don't know his name. He was trained as a political scientist, but he won the highest awards in computer science, the Turing Award, because he co created the first AI demonstration. He won the highest Award in psychology. He was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and for good measure, he won the Nobel in economics. And when a grad student once asked him to explain his mastery of these multiple fields, he said, you know, actually, all I'm really doing is, is exploring human decision making, and that's what it is at its core. And one of his most important findings was called bounded rationality, the fact that humans do not adhere to the rational actor model of classical economics, where we evaluate all the options and choose the best one because we have trouble evaluating, we have finite bandwidth, we have, you know, mixed motivations in many cases, and instead what we have to do is use sort of mental shortcuts. Or satisfice is a word that Simon coined, which is a combination of satisfy and suffice. We have to take a good enough path to make things comprehensible. And what he argued also was that we should actually do this quite proactively in other parts of our life. So Simon famously, you know, wore the same brand of socks every day and the same beret that he wore, and he had the same breakfast, and he told his daughter that one only needed three pairs of clothes, one on one's body, one in the wash, and one in the closet ready to wear. And so he really tried to set good enough rules for his own life so that he wasn't wasting time and energy agonizing over every decision, and so that he wasn't falling prey to what's called Fredkin's paradox, where we spend the most time on the least important decisions because the options are so similar, we're having trouble telling them apart, which means spending more time probably doesn't matter, and yet that's where we spend a lot of our time, because it feels difficult. So Simon, he researched both the importance of putting constraints around problems for problem solving, of, like, narrowing the box on a problem to make it comprehensible and to drive creativity, as well as this personal aspect of setting up sort of boundaries for yourself in your own decision making so that you don't drive yourself crazy. So it's these multiple streams of him looking at creativity and problem solving and the personal repercussions of some of his work, that even though his name only shows up more late in the book, other than the epigraph, his thinking is behind a lot of it.
- [04:55]
William Green
And you say that it's usually bad to be a maximizer, but I have this sense that being a maximizer in our current culture is a particular problem. So there's a sense in Which Herbert Simon's philosophy of constraints and satisficing is extremely timely. Can you give a sense of why you think we need it more than ever at the moment? Yeah.
- [05:18]
David Epstein
And to explain that term, the maximizer being the opposite of a satisficer in some ways. And nobody's just one or the other. But a maximizer is trying to optimize all their decisions, evaluate as many options as possible, and make sure you get the best. And it turns out that that's almost always a bad thing to be. So maximizers are less happy with their decisions, they're less happy with their lives, much more prone to regret, much more likely to prefer reversible solutions, even though reversible solutions make them less happy and often prevents them from committing to one course of action. And there's evidence that maximizing tendencies are on the rise. And the theory, nobody knows for sure why, but the theory is that it's so easy to endlessly compare yourself to other possible decisions you could have made now because of the Internet, basically, that people never kind of stop agonizing over a decision even once it's made. And so I think in this world of infinite possibility, we're not equipped to have access to everything everywhere, all of the time. Like, that's not a recipe for human thriving. In fact, one of the kind of sadly funny findings, I think, in the research that went into the book was that since infinite scrolling appeared, people have been getting progressively more bored based on international surveys. So just the idea that there's some other thing you could be watching or reading helps spoil the experience of the moment you're actually in.
- [06:40]
William Green
So you talk about this overarching theme in the book that constraints often unleash rather than stifle our potential. And there are a lot of different examples of this throughout the book, which we'll go through some of them in the course of our conversation. But my sense is that you also had some very formative experiences yourself, starting, I think, even in eighth grade, where you started to realize that actually having constraints, rather than being a dreadful thing, may sometimes be a pretty good thing. Can you talk about some of those formative experiences of constraints that meant that you were kind of primed to believe Herbert Simon when you encountered his theories?
- [07:18]
David Epstein
Sure, yeah. And there's to your question, there's a little more of me in this book than in the previous ones, as you mentioned, I bring up eighth grade. So in eighth grade I had this, at the time, devastating experience where I was quite a good athlete and I was playing quarterback in A schoolyard football game in gym class. And because I had a good throwing arm, I was. Instead of kicking for the kickoff, you would throw for kickoff as far as you could. So I did that and my arm snapped in two on the follow through of a throw in a spiral without getting hit. Nothing like that freak injury. I've only seen this happen one other time with an athlete and that guy had to have his arm amputated. So what exactly happened will never be known. But the repercussion was that I was out of sport. I lived for sports. That was it. That was the sun around which my days orbited. And I couldn't play for a while. And I had to have my arm strapped to my body so I couldn't use. It wasn't just a cast, they said. Probably I thought maybe there was some like air pocket or weakness in my bone that got exploited. But once it broke, the evidence is gone. So we'll never really know exactly what happened. But one of the first things that happened was I had a French class in school at the time. I was so uninterested in school at this time, by the way. And we had tests where you had to listen to a recording of a person speaking in French and then you had a worksheet where you had to follow along. But sometimes there were blanks and you had to be listening closely enough to fill in the word that was in the blanks. And I did okay on these things. And then once I had my writing arm strapped to my body, I couldn't keep up with these tests. And so instead what I started doing is trying to memorize the words as they went by and then slowly, once it was done, go back and write them down with my left hand. And I started using mnemonics, which are basically memory tools. So I would attach each word to some kind of sports thought at the time that I thought it related to or some number or whatever it was, some sports statistic. And then I would go back and write them all down. And I started doing better than I had ever done before. And what I realized was that this device that I was forced into, this way of trying to remember things that became incredibly useful for me in school that I still use. I can memorize hour long keynote talks now because I use mnemonic devices and I don't have any special memory. If I put my keys down and spin in a circle, I still lose them. So it's not like I have a photographic memory. So it led to this. Years later, I would read one of the most famous studies ever done on memory, which took a Carnegie Mellon undergraduate, took him from being able to memorize seven digits in a row to 80 digits in a row. And he too was using sports related mnemonic devices. So it was interesting to see that. But that constraint led me to my most useful kind of academic tool. It also because I couldn't play contact sports for a year, I decided to start doing cross country and track to stay in shape. And then I ended up becoming a Division 1 runner and a university record holder. I never would have even tested those sports if not for that constraint. And as I was looking back in my life, all these good things came out of constraints. Like I worked on a ship in the Pacific Ocean once. A seismic that was bouncing sound waves off the ocean floor and learned how to work out with basically no space in a way that I've continued ever since then. This was when I was a science grad student. I was training to be a scientist before I became a writer. I lived in a tent in the Arctic where I was studying the carbon cycle and realized that I felt liberated when I didn't have a lot of stuff around me. So it was all these aspects of constraints in my own life that had. I would never have selected on my own really, but that ended up being beneficial. That said, a huge motivation for this project was the fact that I was terrible at putting constraints around my own work projects. Like, there's a hefty dose of me search in Inside the Box for sure. It's something I wanted to be better at.
- [10:53]
William Green
And it's interesting that you very consciously gave yourself constraints in the structure of the book, right?
- [10:59]
David Epstein
Yes. So my first two books, I wrote 150% of the length that I was allotted and then had to cut it back to get one book. In my first book, I took a trip to Arctic Sweden that I had to cut from the book once I became a parent. You can't be doing that. Like I have to be more efficient with my time. And it's just an insane amount of work to do. 150% of the work to write a book and a half to get a book. So this time around I made. I kind of took this from a suggestion that an entrepreneur that I was interviewing gave was I made an outline, a structural outline for the book on one page and one page only. I actually have it right behind me. What I thought this architecture of the book would look like. And if it's not on that page, it is not in the book. I stuck to that it did one of the things. I guess it did two of the things. If there's a mindset shift that I hope this book engenders, it's to go from seeing limits as just bad to seeing them as opportunities to clarify priorities and launch productive exploration. And this one page architectural outline did both of those for me. It forced me to ruthlessly prioritize what was going to be on that page, which meant what was going to be in the book, and to experiment with structures that could fit those pieces together. So I did that before I started writing. And this is the first time where I wrote the length of a book to get a book instead of way over length. And I think the book is more coherent in some ways because I did that ahead of time. So it slowed me down in the early going. But then when it came time to execute, meaning to start writing, it was by far the fastest I've ever done. So I was used to turning in my books at 5pm on the day specified in the contract. I turned this one in early. I sat on it for a few weeks because I just. I was like, can you turn in a book early? Is that even a thing? So not in my life any other way again.
- [12:49]
William Green
I missed my deadline by two years. I said to my daughter, that's kind
- [12:53]
David Epstein
of typical for books.
- [12:53]
William Green
Yeah, yeah. And so I said to my daughter Madeline, a week or so ago, before I had read your book, just coincidentally, I said to her, I think my next book, I'm just going to make it 111 pages. And so it's an interesting constraint just to decide, you know, I don't need to be a maximalist. But I think it's an eternal problem for me. Like, I feel like I should put everything in.
- [13:14]
David Epstein
I suffer from that. So, I mean, going back and looking at my first book, the Sports Gene, there's now stuff that I wish I would have pulled out. Not that I didn't think that stuff was interesting, but when you're thinking about just ruthlessly prioritizing the things that you want the reader to know, the stories and the research that you think will resonate most that are the most interesting, it's not necessarily everything that interests me. But in that first book, I really did feel like if I learned something interesting, it was going in the book or this time around, I realized readers aren't concerned about what's not in the book. It just has to be the stuff that is in the book that's really interesting. And so I have that same tendency of. If I find Something interesting. And if I did work to find it out, I tend to want to put it in there.
- [13:53]
William Green
I do feel like there's not necessarily in search of the reader, though. I mean, I think of Herbert Simon sort of using that line about, you know, don't let the best be the enemy of the good. And I sort of, you know, I understand the benefit of constraints and of satisfying. And at the same time, I'm very drawn to the kind of attitude of Robert Persic that I discussed with Brad Stalberg, you know, who obviously wrote Zed in the Automotive Maintenance, who was obsessed with quality, the metaphysics of quality, this sort of pursuit of this enigmatic kind of excellence. And so I think I decided maybe in this kind of mad way at some point that I was never going to emphasize, you know, getting things on time, making them short. I was just going to emphasize quality as much as I could. And I don't really regret that. And I'm not saying it's right for everyone, but I'm wondering, like, how you. I'm sort of exposing too much of my own insanity. But I'm wondering how you deal with that kind of inherent conflict between wanting to do stuff that's kind of enduring and beautiful and embodies excellence and quality in its own right, even if that's slightly impractical. And this sense of, like, no, I should actually be more disciplined with myself.
- [15:02]
David Epstein
Well, first of all, I take a lot of time, so I do view myself as a craftsman in writing. And I want the book to be like a Swiss watch, where things are fitting together very well. And I also want to take on writing projects where I'll say, I think at the beginning, I don't think I have all the tools it takes to get to the end. I want to be forced to learn some of those tools. So, again, this book where I had a certain recurring story that kept appearing with different layers, was a new structural experiment for me. So I am into the craft. I mean, so I'm talking about turning in the book early in these things. But my books have been spaced. There were six years between the first two, and there will be seven years between two and three. So for the first year of a book project, I don't even write nothing. Just research, just interviewing, you know, starting to think of the points that are going to go in the outline. So I'm still taking a ton of time. But I think if I didn't have some pretty definite deadline and some definite boundary because I'm drawn to these pretty amorphous Topics, you know, the last book, how broad or specialized to be this one, like, when can constraints make you better instead of just being limiting in bad ways? And so I think I really need a container. Otherwise it will be unclear to the reader where the boundaries are, like, what's fair game for this topic? And so I kind of think I need that to channel myself and have something coherent and the need to fit it. I mean, this book is 20% shorter than my other two. And I think that's actually a sign of improved craft where I was stripping away needless stuff. You know, like Mark Twain said, I didn't have enough time to write a short speech. So I definitely take my time. But if I had unlimited time, I think I would do like the filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, you know, did Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke and all those great movies. His colleague called him the Never Ending man, because if they didn't say, this is the day, this will be shown in theaters, he would just keep tweaking forever. And I think that's the same with me. If it wasn't like, this is the day this has to get into the production process, I would just keep tweaking and tweaking forever. So I think it's a mix. But for me, I think some of that discipline and structure actually helps the craft. I need to cut this back to economical writing to get in this space and to have a certain amount of concision and things that I think actually serve the reader in the end.
- [17:13]
William Green
Yeah, it's a very tight book. It's really a good book. So it worked, whatever you were doing. But I think the tension sometimes is kind of helpful. Like the tension between things like an obsession with quality and an obsession with constraints. You know, one thing I was going to mention that I thought was also really fascinating.
- [17:31]
David Epstein
Can I ask you a question?
- [17:31]
William Green
Yeah. Yeah.
- [17:32]
David Epstein
Wait, hold that thought. I don't want to interrupt your question, but I'm curious, so don't lose your train of thought. Yeah, but I was just curious, since you mentioned missing a book deadline by two years, what was the initial length of the deadline you had for that book?
- [17:44]
William Green
Yeah, I guess it was a couple of years. And then I immediately went off and ghostwrote another book. And I kind of got permission for ghostwriting the other book because it was also being published by Simon Schuster. So that delayed me a bit. And so, yeah, I think probably I kind of had to lie might be an extreme term for it, but I think I sort of had to pretend that I was going to do it in two years when I knew that I wasn't. Because it was sort of a madly ambitious topic. I was trying to figure out, what can you learn from the greatest investors? Not just about how to get rich, but about how to think and how to live. And nobody had really explored that in that kind of way. So it was a really interesting question to me. But there were no limits on it. And so it was a bit of a mad thing. And I was discovering a lot of stuff while I was reporting. I was sort of figuring out what it meant. So it was difficult. But I think next time. There's a part of me that thinks maybe I would actually write the first half of the book without a book deal, because I think actually it made me really miserable, feeling like I had failed before I'd even finished the book. So the book has done well, and it's in 27 languages and stuff. And so now it feels like a success story. But it was kind of a pretty joyless experience, the writing of it, because I just felt like I haven't even handed in and I've already failed. And so you're doing this incredibly difficult thing and failing. So I feel this tension very keenly myself between, you know, doing work that really matters and being pragmatic about how long it takes and the like. I mean, I think part of your secret, in a way, has been you're somewhat ruthless about what projects you take on. Because I tried to lure you, as I mentioned before, without. Before we started talking, I tried to lure you a few years ago into helping with a ghostwriting project. And you were very, very nice about it. But you were like, now I only do stuff where the science is going to, you know, where I can follow in a particular direction that I want to do. So it was really interesting to me as a tell about who you are, that you really valued your independence. And you were also successful enough that you could say, no, I'm only working on my stuff. So I think that's part of the secret is, you know, really to decide what you're prepared to work on and what you're willing to say no to.
- [19:58]
David Epstein
I am ruthless with the projects I select. And I will say that has led me to turn down a lot of projects that I think I would have quite enjoyed. That's when it gets hard. Right. This was easier when nobody was bringing anything to me.
- [20:10]
William Green
Yeah.
- [20:11]
David Epstein
Once you get some professional capital and people are bringing you stuff, in an ideal world, you do all of that stuff. And I think there have been some moments Here and there, where maybe after my first book was kind of a surprise bestseller and all of a sudden I'm getting these queries for things I've never heard of and it would be great to do all of them. And I started maybe inching my way towards saying yes on some things and realizing you can kind of lose yourself in that. And it's easy to say no to things that you don't want to do. I think the difficult thing, and that's problem for most people who are pretty competent, is you have to start figuring out how to say no to lots of things that you do want to do to be able to keep a focus on the really, really important projects and that align with kind of the way that you work.
- [21:00]
William Green
Yeah. Ray Dalio once said something to me along the lines of maturity is about saying no to good projects so that you can really focus on the ones that are really great, that are really true to you. And I, I really struggled with that. But anyway, I have held my thought in my mind, which is related to this because it's about the scarce resource of attention, which is, you know, this is one of the great bottlenecks that you talk about in the book, one of the great constraints and a natural constraint that we have. There's a beautiful quote that you have in the book from a 1970 lecture that Herbert Simon gave where he said it's a little bit wordy, but it's worth hearing because I think it's quite profound. He said, in an information rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else, a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. And then he adds, the design principle that attention is scarce and must be preserved is very different from a principle of the more information the better. Can you unpack that a little? Because I think this gets a problem that all of us are wrestling with increasingly, that our attention is scarce and must be preserved. And yet there's more and more stuff coming at us, more and more information coming at us. And I'm wondering what you think about that and also what you've done in terms of your own constraints to preserve your own attention.
- [22:27]
David Epstein
Yeah, well, I think Simon was starting to see the future. And although I don't know if he would have seen all the way to where we are now. Maybe he would have. Maybe he would have because he was talking about thinking machines very, very early. But if we look at the way people's attention has been fragmented. So I go in a lot of detail in one of the chapters in the work of a psychologist named Gloria Mark, who's been monitoring people at work for decades. And when she started in maybe 25 years ago or so, she would sit behind people at work with a stopwatch and just see what they were doing. That became much more sophisticated methods later of monitoring their computers and all these things. But when she started, people would switch the task they were working on about every three minutes. And 10 years later, you know, it was more like a minute and a half or so. And then by 2022, it was 45 seconds. And that's where it's plateaued. That seems to. Maybe it'll stick there anyway. And it turns out that that's bad for a whole bunch of reasons. One is that multitasking is not really possible. You actually have to stop doing one thing and then activate a different set of rules in your brain that picks up the next thing. And if you think of your brain like a whiteboard where when you switch tasks, you erase, but there's that residue there, psychological attentional residue that carries over, that occupies some of your resources for that next task. So you're not going to do it as well. Maybe you don't need all your resources for it, but if you do, that's going to be a problem. And so the amount of toggling someone does predicts productivity by the end of the day in a bad way. It's a negative predictor, and it's a positive predictor of their stress, measured by physiological measures, things like heart rate variability and stuff like that. So you may have to get a lot of stuff done, but you want to try to do it without toggling. So Mark found that people in offices check email about 77 distinct times a day on average. Maybe you have a lot of email that you have to answer, but if you can do anything to reduce the number of times that you're moving to that inbox from something else, you're likely going to be more productive and less stressed. So if you can batch that email, for example, maybe you can break it into one or two or three or four or five blocks, but anything is better than 77 different toggles. Maybe you can start with just a half hour of blocking some type of work, because to Simon's point, the design principle that attention is scarce, resource that needs to be protected. I think we all kind of know that in theory, and yet we don't do anything to Put it into practice, and we spend all day toggling. And so for me, you asked about some of my particular habits. Obviously I'm, you know, an independent worker, so it's easy for me to say, don't be in your inbox all day. But I think everyone can batch some of their work. So to the extent you can batch types of work so that you're monotasking over the course of the day in different blocks where you may have to get a certain amount of things done, but to what extent can you divide some of those into a time where you're only working on that one thing instead of mixing them all together? And again, maybe that starts with one half hour or one hour where you're monotasking and see if you can expand from there. The other thing I think is you need to try to train your attention. So the scariest research in the book, I would say, was Gloria Mark's findings about how our attention has been trained by our information environment, where maybe you're interrupted by notifications and. Or people or whatever all day long, and then suddenly say, now I really have to focus, so I'm putting this stuff away. You won't be able to, because the finding is that you become accustomed to a cadence of interruption, and your brain will work to maintain that rhythm even if the distractors disappear. So you will self interrupt with intrusive thoughts at the same cadence to which you've become accustomed, even if you take the distractors away. So the things you can do about that are, one, try to have more undistracted time. Put the phone outside the room. Sometimes when you're trying to focus, it actually doesn't take long to start retraining your attention. You have improvement in just a few days. Two, put a pad next to you, and when those intrusive thoughts pop up about this thing I didn't respond to or whatever, write it down. Called cognitive outsourcing, so you take it out of your working memory if you want to be able to have deep focus. A lot of stuff we do doesn't require deep focus, if that's something that you need sometimes. We're now in an environment, we have to kind of train our attention to even be able to do that, because it turns out to be kind of use it or lose it, unfortunately. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [26:46]
Sponsor Voice
All right, I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom forum is from June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year, bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors and builders from all over the world, many of them operating on the front lines of history. This is where you hear firsthand stories from people using Bitcoin to survive currency collapse, using AI to expose human rights abuses, and building technology under censorship and authoritarian pressures. These aren't abstract ideas. These are tools real people are using. Right now, you'll be in the room with about 2,000 extraordinary individuals. Dissidents, founders, philanthropists, policymakers. The kind of people you don't just listen to, but end up having dinner with. Over three days, you'll experience powerful mainstage talks, hands on workshops on freedom, tech and financial sovereignty, immersive art installations and conversations that continue long after the sessions end. And it's all happening in Oslo in June. If this sounds like your kind of room, well, you're in luck because you can attend in person. Standard and patron passes are available at oslofreedomforum.com with patron passes offering deep access, private events and small group time with the speakers. The Oslo Freedom Forum isn't just a conference. It's a place where ideas meet reality and where the future is being built by people living it.
- [28:26]
Curious about online trading, but haven't taken the first step yet? You're not alone, and plus 500 futures is a great place to start. The futures markets are moving Fast and with Plus500 you can explore popular assets like oil, gold, S&P 500, Bitcoin and more. From crypto to commodities, there's always something happening. The platform is super easy to use, so you can trade on the go right from your phone. You can get started with just $100 and jump into the action. See something interesting. Once your account is open, you can trade it in just a couple of clicks. And if you're not quite ready yet, you can practice with a free demo account. No risk, no pressure. With 20 years of experience, plus 500 makes trading more accessible than ever. Check it out at +500.com. Trading and futures involves risks of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus 500 it's trading with a plus. Every business is asking the same question right now. How do we make AI actually work for us? The possibilities are endless. Guessing is too risky, but sitting on the sidelines, that's not an option either. Because your competitors are already making their move with NetSuite by Oracle, you can put AI to work. Today, NetSuite is the number one AI Cloud ERP trusted by over 43,000 businesses. It brings your financials, inventory, commerce, HR and CRM into one single source of truth. And that connected data is what makes your AI smarter. It doesn't guess, it knows. It automates routine tasks, delivers real insights, and helps you cut costs and make decisions with confidence. And now, with NetSuite's AI connector, you can use the AI of your choice plugged into your actual business data. Ask any question you've ever had. Key customers, cash on hand, inventory trends. Let's see your competitors do that. I use this and you should, too, if your revenues are at least in the seven figures. Get the free business guide demystifying AI at netsuite.com tip the guide is free to you at netsuite.com tip.
- [30:28]
David Epstein
All right, back to the show.
- [30:30]
William Green
I thought it was interesting. Also, you quote the great Charlie Munger, who I interviewed for my book, saying, I see these people doing three things at once and I think, God, what a terrible way that is to think. And I remember last year when I went to Omaha for the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, I went to my friend Guy Spears Valuex BRK event. And Dorothy Obert, who was Charlie's secretary for many years, personal assistant for decades, more than 30 years, I think, said it was like being in a Christian Science reading room when she was in the office with Charlie. And sometimes he would sort of call out in his croaky voice, dorothy, you know, just to sort of see if there was someone there because it was so quiet. And Buffett as well, when he's been asked why he's been so successful, says it's about focus. So, I mean, this stuff, I think part of what's interesting is that for anyone who's a knowledge worker of any sort, these things are so transferable. And I was really interested in the section that you had about the great novelist Isabel Allende, who it said in the endnotes to the book that you'd interviewed her three times in 2023. Can you talk about what you learn from that experience? Because she's also a master of figuring out how to create an environment in which she can be incredibly productive and have sustained focus.
- [31:45]
David Epstein
Yeah. And to be honest, as a writer, she's one of the great living writers. And so very much I use this as an excuse to go shadow her through her work day. Right. So Isabel did not start writing until she was almost 40. So she's now sold 80 million books. Didn't start writing until she was nearly 40. And she, when she started writing it was because she was in exile from Chile because her father's cousin was a head of state who was overthrown in a coup and basically she had to leave the country. And when she found out that her grandfather back at home was passing away, she started writing him a letter, just recounting all the stories that he had told her to let him know, look, they're preserved. And pretty soon this turned into a novel. And she started writing that letter on January 8, turned into a book. The book becomes a big hit and she started writing then every January 8th from then on, if she was finished with the previous book, she would start a new book. And her life has this incredible structure to it where in the lead up to January 8th, people know that if like you got to talk to Isabel, it has to be before this day. And she goes through all these rituals of kind of cleaning out her workspace, getting set for January 8, creating silence. Like she would work in a clothes closet if she needed. You know, now she can, she has like a nice office and everything like that, but she didn't always have that. And so she needs silence and structure. And one of the things I thought was so interesting, and this has led to basically a best selling book about every 18 months for 40 straight years. And one of the reasons I thought it was so interesting that everything in her life is so structured, even her workday, when she lights a candle to start her workday and blows it out to end the workday and closes the door and said, that marks the finish of me thinking about this for the day. Is when you read profiles of her, which there have been many, they often portray her as if she's some kind of magical medium where she just sits back and characters just speak through her and their words just flow forward. And I think that's because some of her books have magical realism in them. So they, the article writers maybe want to cast her as this magical person. But the reality of her daily life could not be further from the truth. She's on January 8th, she shuts the door. People in her life know she's disappearing in a certain way. She then writes for several weeks knowing she's not going to keep anything, it's all going to be thrown out. It's just like the warm up of getting into that mode that she has to be in. And she's every day, same hours, silence. She usually has historical research that gives her the frame for the story, basically. And it's this incredible discipline. At one point, she wrote this searing memoir about her daughter who died in her 20s. It's an unbelievable book called Paula. And in the book, she says several times, I think I'm done writing. Like, this is it. This has crushed me. I just don't. This is the last book I'm writing. And that was the one time in these 40 years where she did have a publishing break because she thought she was retired. And then January 8th starts. She skips one January, but then the next one comes and she starts to think, gets nervous, you know, because she gets anxious when January 8th is coming up. And so she decides on that January 8th, she's going to sit down and see what happens. And it takes over again, and it resets her, and the whole process goes on again. So this ritual that she had really brought her back to life, this structure and ritual as a creator. And I just thought it was so interesting to see someone who'd been portrayed as just being struck by lightning of inspiration all the time is actually working in this incredibly disciplined and ritualistic and seasonal kind of way.
- [35:13]
William Green
Yeah, she. There was a lovely quote where she said to you, I'm here to do this and nothing else, and no one can interrupt. And then she said, without the silence and the structure, I wouldn't be able to do it. And it kind of reminded me of this thing from Oliver Sacks, the great writer and Doctor who, just. He had a sign above his desk that just said no. That just sort of was like this stark reminder of like, no, this is what I'm here for.
- [35:37]
David Epstein
And she actually. That's another thing. She was big on designating a space for it. Again, in her early days, that could be a clothes closet that she had to sit in with a typewriter. But whatever that space was, was the space that she designated. And to that Oliver Sacks, I didn't know he had that. He once sent me. I asked him for a blurb on my first book, and he sent me a lovely. He declined, but sent me a lovely note on the most interesting stationery I've ever seen. So I treasured that and saved it. But I bought from a used bookstore. I love that I'm staring at it just right over on a shelf in my office, a postcard handwritten by the great writer Henry Miller, where he's declining an invitation to do something that I'm sure he'd enjoy doing. And kind of not really giving a good excuse for it. He just kind of says, I'm sorry, but I think I'll have to go to Paris again then or something, you know. And he was just, he was so focused on trying to turn himself into a great writer that it's just a reminder. He turned down all these things that I'm sure he, all things being equal, he would have liked to do, but it just would have gotten in the way of the main thing.
- [36:33]
William Green
There's a beautiful thing in Proust where one of these grand ladies sends a telegram saying why she can't come to some party that she doesn't want to go to. And it just says, you know, can't come. Lie follows. Which I thought, lie follows not even pretending that you have an excuse. I think part of what really fascinated me was this idea that you explored in one of the chapters. I think it was a chapter called Target the Bottleneck where you're identifying different bottlenecks that kind of need to be sort of systematically identified, whether it's your own attention or a business with bottlenecks. And there's a phrase in that chapter where you talk about the theory of constraints and this idea of hunting for bottlenecks. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because it clearly had a profound impact on Jeff Bezos and Amazon. So I think it's an important example because it kind of goes. It sort of links our attempts as individuals to identify constraints and also this kind of broader question of how business can improve by identifying bottlenecks and constraints and the like.
- [37:37]
Sponsor Voice
Yeah.
- [37:38]
David Epstein
The theory of constraints originated with an Israeli physicist named Eliyahu Goldret who was actually studying how atoms behave in crystals when a friend of his asked him if he could study his chicken coop building business. The friend had a small chicken coop building business, basically an assembly line, and he had added some workers and it hadn't improved production and he was confused. So Goldrat studies the process and finds that work is always piling up at a certain spot. So it doesn't matter that more workers are working faster at some stages in the process, because it just piles up at the so called bottleneck. And so Goldratt ends up moving one single worker from a step that's going really fast in the process to the slowest one, and it triples the overall output of the system. And this becomes the core insight of what he came to call the theory of constraints, the idea that the overall output of a system is limited by its single least efficient step. And he starts applying that I'm always
- [38:33]
William Green
the single least efficient step. Me personally, in everything I ever do. It's me.
- [38:38]
David Epstein
But that's an important thing to know, right? So I realized that too. I've now started making content on other platforms and things like that. And I'm working with a few other people and doing some of that and realizing that my ability to approve certain types of material is the bottleneck. And so once we know that, then it's, you know, I'm generating all these ideas all the time. One other person is trying to put them into a, into a certain form. But I'm so slow to approve stuff because I'm meticulous about it that it piles up at me. I said, there's no use in having these other steps of the process generate so much material if I can't be approving it. So we need to reform the workflow around my bottleneck, basically. And for many people, for many decision makers, the bottleneck will be their attention, right? And so you want to do all the things you can to widen that bottleneck and make sure that they can take things off of their plate that don't really require their attention. But Goldratt successfully moved us into manufacturing pretty generally. He wrote this bizarre but interesting novel called the Goal, about a plant manager who has to save his factory and can't understand why, even though they have all these new machines, the overall system output isn't improving. And again, it's because it doesn't matter if you apply effort at certain steps if they're still limited by the single slowest step. And it spawned a whole school of management thinking that's been really successful. And the fixes that it engenders often seem really obvious in retrospect. But nobody thinks about them ahead of time. Like one of the case studies I researched had to do with a company that makes custom gearboxes for industry. So every gearbox they make is totally customized. And they did this theory of constraints audit where they basically looked through where is work piling up. And it was this small 15 person design office that designs the gearboxes before they're made. And they were multitasking so much, they were switching which project they were working on. I think it was on average about 55 times a day. And that was leading to mistakes and errors, eventually to quitting. And so they implemented a rule in the design office. Realizing the design office was the bottleneck for the entire company, they implemented a rule they called stop starting and start finishing. You're not allowed to start a new design until you've finished a current design. And that by a few months later, they tripled the number of Designs they were getting out the door and it decreased the total amount of time it took the company to get a gearbox out the door from a year to two months. And so it's just this idea that you can be applying effort in all these places and it doesn't matter if it's still running up against the bottleneck. And I think that's a really profound way to, to look at places for improvement. When Goldrat, there's a 1200 page theory of constraints handbook, but Goldratt wrote the foreword to it and in it he says, can I summarize all theory of constraints in one sentence? I think I can do it in one word focus. The bottleneck shows you where to focus is the highest leverage place to apply effort. Basically.
- [41:33]
William Green
I think it's such an interesting filter and the ramifications are so broad. Right. You talk at one point in the book about working memory, for example, as a bottleneck. So if we have a bottleneck in human cognition, you have to deal with that. So you talk about putting as much information as possible on paper or a whiteboard or a screen or a chart or something just to get it out of your working memory. So it's a beautiful filter. But I was particularly struck in that chapter, I think it was in that chapter that you wrote about a swimmer as well. And that was an extraordinary story because her approach of looking at her own bottleneck, her own limitation, was a really lovely example of this that I think applies to all of us. Can you talk a little bit about that? I think her name was Sheila Taormin, but I'm probably mispronouncing that.
- [42:18]
David Epstein
Sheila Taormina. Yeah. And by the way, this really resonated with my own athletic experience, which I can describe, that I didn't put in the book, but Sheila was a swimmer at the University of Georgia. In 1992, she tries to make the Olympic team, fails in 200 meter freestyle, fails, doesn't come particularly close, and decides to retire. But for her last class at the University of Georgia, she takes Management577 in which she learns about the theory of constraints and decides that her class project will be applying it to her own training. So she's going to unretire and she to try to drop three seconds in the 200 meter freestyle. And so she does this constraints audit of her own training and decides that her personal bottleneck is strength or power. So she's only 5 foot 2, which is really small for an elite swimmer. And she has an amazing aerobic engine, like cardiovascular power, like crazy and that's what her coaches have her working on, lots of swimming volume. So she's working on the things she's already good at and she's not doing any work on the thing that is actually limiting her. So she decides to change coaches, takes this plan, says, this is my, finds a coach that's willing to work with her on what she views as the thing holding her back, and so focuses her whole plan on that. I don't need to keep working on the thing that I'm already good at. That's not my limiting factor. Four years later, having implemented this plan, she tries for the Olympics again and makes it swims exactly three seconds faster than she did in 1992. So executes the plan to perfection and goes to the Olympics and wins an Olympic gold medal as part of the relay team. It's amazing. If people Google and see a photo of her, she's got to be half a foot shorter, at least more than that. She's probably 10 inches shorter than all the other three people on the relay team. So she really did need to focus on her bottleneck. So then she retires after swimming, and then just for health, she starts to come back and starts doing triathlon. Now she has this new approach to training where it's, I'm going to focus on my limiting factor instead of working on the things that come easily that I'm already good at. She unretires, does triathlon, wins the US national championships, goes to the Olympics in triathlon, finishes sixth, goes to the Olympics again in triathlon, next Olympics after that, retires again, unretires again, learns fencing and horse jumping, goes to the Olympics in modern pentathlon. She is the only woman ever to have competed in three different sports across four Summer Olympics. And she was retired in 1992 until she learned about the theory of constraints in a management class. And it gave her this whole new view of how to approach her training. So I thought it was an amazing story and showed how the theory of constraints, which is usually applied to manufacturing and organizational settings, can be applied to individuals. And it resonated so deeply. If you want me to share a
- [44:54]
William Green
little bit of my own Instagram.
- [44:56]
David Epstein
So I was a walk on 800 meter runner in college, 800 meters, half mile walk on, meaning I wasn't good enough to get recruited. And the one good thing about that, about being a walk on, is nobody cares what you're doing. So you have some time to experiment because you're kind of not even really on the team until you prove you should be. And I didn't know the language of the theory of constraints, but with the help of a kind of assistant coach, was just volunteering. We did realize that I had a bottleneck that was holding me back, which was my ability to recover. So a lot of 800 meter workouts can be really. Will really flatten you. And I just could not recover from them at the same rate as my peers. So by the time, you know, we'd have a workout maybe Monday, and by the time the next workout rolled around on Wednesday, I wouldn't be recovered yet. And then there's another one on Friday and it's just never getting recovered. So once we realized this and I couldn't do the same thing everyone else was doing, I actually scheduled class over one workout a week so I'd have an excuse not to show up and started focusing on recovery. I moved down from doing up to 80 miles a week of running down to about 35 miles a week of running so I could recover. And it worked like rocket fuel. I mean, I started improving like crazy. Not only did I make the team, I became a university record holder. You know, I got a chance to run at the US National Championships indoors and things like that. And it led to all this amazing stuff for me. I won this award at my university for the athlete who, in quote, achieved significant athletic success in the face of unusual challenge and difficulty. My unusual challenge and difficulty just being that I was terrible at first, and then I got really good. And the key revelation for me was that I was limited by my ability to recover, so that I had to refocus my entire training philosophy and plan around that limitation.
- [46:37]
William Green
I think there's something really profound here that I wanted to unpack a little bit with your help, which is, on the one hand, it's clearly remarkably helpful to focus on the bottleneck. And most of us tend not to. So to look at the thing that we're bad at. And then I think of a conversation that I had with this guy, Chris Davis, who's a friend of mine who's on the board of Berkshire Hathaway. And he, like me, doesn't know a great deal about sports, but as he puts it, finds it metaphorically rich. And so he was talking to me about Tiger woods staying out of bunkers. And he said Tiger woods wasn't as good as out of bunkers as we understood it. You know, whether this is true or not, I don't know. But he said he wasn't as good out of bunkers. And so someone said to him, you know, what are you going to do to improve your bunker shots? And then he goes and plays at St. Andrews or whatever and doesn't end up in a single bunker because his drives are so good. And so Chris Davis used this as a kind of beautiful metaphor for actually stay away from your weaknesses, which is something that the Charlie Munger would often say. Like, Charlie would say, you know, if you're five foot three, don't become a basketball player. You know, play to something that you're. Play to your strengths in some area that you're passionate about. And this is making me think about, you know, as we talk about, a, there's the path of focusing on your bottlenecks, things where you're weak, and B, there's the path of saying, no, let me stay away from my weaknesses and play to my strengths is a really kind of profound thing. And it. It reminds me sort of more, you know, if you'll forgive this excessively long monologue. But it reminds me of a broader point that Annie Duke brought up when I interviewed her on the podcast back in 2022, and she had been having this discussion. She was going to write this book about quitting. And Philip Tetlock, who's a friend of hers who is an expert on superforecasting, said to her, well, yeah, it's okay, because quitting is the opposite of grit, which Angela Duckworth had just had this big bestseller with. But he said, the opposite of a great virtue is a virtue. And then I started to look this up, and Annie Duke had this amazing endnote in her book where it turned out, I think Thomas Mann had written a letter to Sigmund Freud back in 1929 or an essay or something. And he said, a great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth. And Niels Bohr was so fascinated by this that he apparently had this maxim that was, profound truths are recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth. And he so liked this idea that he ends up designing this kind of coat of arms with this motto in Latin that says opposites are complementary. And it's intriguing to me, this sort of general idea, because I think much of your career has been saying, yeah, these guys kind of got it wrong. And the real story is this. It's like Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule is kind of wrong. And actually it's this or all these interpretations about Isabel Allende being this great mystic is kind of wrong. They're missing the real story, which is she clears her schedule and lives in silence and is incredibly disciplined. And I know I'm throwing a lot at you there, but I think this gets a kind of a profound issue, which is that often it's in a lot of what you're writing about and a lot of what we're thinking about. It's not an either or, it's a yes. And it's like both sides. Yes, you want to be focused and narrow and go deep, and yes, you want range. You know, it's like. Does that stir any thoughts for you?
- [49:45]
David Epstein
No. First of all, I just love some of the thoughts you just shared there. And I think I didn't know that specific quote of Niels Bohr, but I think he is someone who was willing to grapple with ambiguity in general in a way that few people ever have. So that makes a lot of sense when I think about him as a thinker. And I think you mentioned I've critiqued Gladwell quite publicly. I critiqued some of the, at least some of the extrapolations of Angela Duckworth's Grit Research. Those two people became friends and two of my favorite people in the world to talk to. So I love having them both sides of the coin discussion. Although I think Gladwell kind of came over to my side, basically. So that's both sides of the coin now. But even looking at like my last two books, right, Range, the benefits of breadth inside the box, the benefits of constraints. On its face, it seems pretty contradictory, one book after the other, but to me, life is messy. And it's kind of getting into that space where it's messy that's the most interesting. How do we find our way through these things, Right? If range is you build these broad experiences and broad toolkit, and then, okay, well, how do you focus that into achievement so that you're not just pinballing around for your whole life? And so I find great value in diving into apparent contradictions and trying to find reality within them, which I think is typically the case and also typically the place where people have to navigate their lives, where the rubber meets the road. It's not all one or the other. So I think I'm drawn to that kind of thing. I don't know if I got off top, too far off topic of no,
- [51:16]
William Green
I think it gets us something kind of profound. And I think I spend a lot of time arguing certain points of view when I'm covering investing or I cover investing in a pretty strange way because I'm as interested in philosophy and spirituality and the like. So I'm drawing from Left field. But I'll write about someone who's incredibly concentrated, who only owns six stocks or eight stocks or whatever. And then I'll write about someone who owns 100 and something. And what they say it's both true. You should be diversified and you should be concentrated and you should have range and you should have depth and focus. And I mean, I always go back to that F. Scott Fitzgerald quote about the ability to hold contrary ideas at once. You know, I was struck by it. I was looking back at Range this morning, and even like the opening epigraph for Range is so totally different from the epigraph from Herbert Simon right at the start, you're talking about this character from War and Peace by Tolstoy, and it says he refused to specialize in anything, preferring to keep an eye on. On the overall estate rather than any of its parts. And Nikolai's management produced the most brilliant results. So it's a really great example of someone with breadth and range, not over specializing. And then I'm like, yeah, but how does that square at all with the need to concentrate, to focus, to apply constraints, which is at the heart of the new book? So I'm wondering how you unpack that contradiction and conflict and tension in your own mind between the two books.
- [52:42]
David Epstein
Yeah, I mean, to me, again, the Inside the Box felt like a natural progression from Range to me, in part because the most common reader question I got was things along the lines of I've collected all these broad experiences or broad skills, but now what? And I felt that way myself. I've had a zigzagging career, I'm incredibly expansively curious and have a lot of trouble drawing boundaries around my own projects. And so I view the need for constraints as especially important for people who have really expansive curiosity. I mean, the opening story of the book, I mean, mixed in with some personal story in the opening of the book is this story of the discovery of the periodic table, which is, I think, the most important data visualization ever made. It's not just a poster that hangs in classrooms. It actually showed us where to find new materials. And Dmitri Mendeleev, the guy who discovered it, was a massive polymath. I mean, he's left his mark on like every industry in Russia, but he needed certain constraints to then focus this, all of that breadth into a certain achievement. And so I picked him on purpose because he was such a polymath. And yet it took these constraints to channel that into particular achievement. And then the first chapter of the book that goes into this, what I Think of as like the most important company that nobody's ever heard of. Not important because of what they made, but because of the lessons that people took out of the company. This company called General Magic. They had incredible range. They could do anything. They could do anything. I mean they had the designers of the original Mac, Goldman Sachs took them public in the first so called concept IPO because their vision was so incredible. They didn't even have a product yet and it turned into a huge disaster. Not because their talent failed. They had the talent, they had the resources. But as Bill Gurley, the famed venture capitalist told me when I was talking to him for this book, more startups dive indigestion than starvation. Too much rather than too little. They could do anything. And so they did do anything. Every cool idea someone had, they did it. And the project just grew and grew and grew out of control. So that was an example of having all of the skills, all of the talent, all of the vision, all of the resources you could ever want and basically no constraints. And it turned into disaster.
- [54:51]
William Green
And in a way it's the thing that OpenAI is wrestling with at the moment, right as it competes with anthropic like this question of do you try to be everything?
- [55:00]
David Epstein
Totally. And I think in my opinion it's not a good tack for them to try to be everything. In my opinion it's showing, frankly. But everyone can have their own opinions about the tools that they're using. But yeah, I mean, one of the reasons I picked those early stories is to show here an organization and individual who have incredible range. In one case, one also had useful constraints to channel into world changing innovation. In the other, the group had no constraints and it was a disaster. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [55:28]
Sponsor Voice
Curious about online trading but haven't taken the first step yet. You're not alone. And plus 500 futures is a great place to start. The futures markets are moving fast and with Plus500 you can explore popular assets like oil, gold, S&P 500, Bitcoin and more. From crypto to commodities, there's always something happening. The platform is super easy to use, so you can trade on the go right from your phone. You can get started with just $100 and jump into the action. See something interesting. Once your account is open, you can trade it in just a couple of clicks. And if you're not quite ready yet, you can practice with a free demo account. No risk, no pressure. With 20 years of experience, plus 500 makes trading more accessible. Than ever. Check it out at +500.com trading and futures involves risks of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus 500. It's trading with a plus. Okay, be honest. How many times have you been lying on the couch scrolling your phone late at night and you see that one thing you've been looking for? You tap the link, throw it in your cart, maybe browse around a little more. And then you hit checkout. And that is when it hits you. Your wallet is across the room. You have no idea what password you use for this site. And Suddenly buying a $30 item feels like a whole project. But then you see it. That purple button. Shop pay. One tap and you're done. All your info is already saved. No fumbling, no frustration. Just that purple button.
- [56:56]
David Epstein
That's Shopify.
- [56:57]
Sponsor Voice
And if you're a business owner, that button is a game. Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet, meaning fewer abandoned carts and more sales actually going through. But Shopify isn't just a checkout button. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and 10% of all E commerce in the US they've got hundreds of ready to use templates so you can build a beautiful online store that matches your brand. Plus, Shopify is packed with AI tools that write your product descriptions, create page headlines, and even enhance your product photos. It's like having a full team of without the full team price tag. See, fewer carts go abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their Shop Pay button. Then sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com tip that's shopify.com/tip. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. If you're a founder or business leader, you already know this. Every new deal, every new partnership, somebody's asking to see your compliance credentials and getting that stuff together manually. It is a massive time sink. That's why Vanta is a game changer. Vanta automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk and customer trust together on one AI powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SoC2 or running an enterprise GRC program, Vanta keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving. And here's the stat that really got me. Companies like Ramp and RYTR spend 82% less time on audits. With Vanta, that's not just faster compliance, that's more time you're spending on actually growing your business instead of drowning in paperwork. I love that over 10,000 companies, from startups to big enterprises, trust Vanta to handle this stuff so they can focus on what actually matters. Get started@vanta.com tip. That's V A N T A dot com tip.
- [59:00]
David Epstein
All right, back to the show.
- [59:01]
William Green
There's a really interesting contrast you set up between General Magic, which you say had too much of almost everything and too few boundaries and were rarely forced to set limits and choose what not to do, and Pixar, where you interviewed the legendary Ed Catmull, the co founder and president of the company. Can you talk a bit about Pixar as a kind of illustration of how to do this? Right. Of how businesses and creatives in general can apply the power of constraints. So it works.
- [59:31]
David Epstein
And I should say maybe I was remiss in not describing General Magic a little, but basically they were making the iPhone about 20 years too early. They had the perfect vision, they really did, but they couldn't execute because they had too much freedom.
- [59:43]
William Green
Plus rabbits in the office. It was that period where if you were a hot, sexy company, you could wear shorts and have rabbits running around the office. It was a kind of beautiful sort of example of Silicon Valley largesse, where you could just do whatever the hell you wanted.
- [59:57]
David Epstein
Totally. And they did. They defined their customer as Joe Sixpack and after a few years of missed deadlines, realized they didn't know who that was. Nobody knew the guy. So I chose to contrast them in the next chapter to Pixar in specific, because they were doing their thing at the same time, basically. So Mark Peratt, the CEO behind General Magic, and Ed Catmull were in grad school at the exact same time. They were both having these visions looking about 20 years into the future. Both of them were accurate. In General Magic's case, the future of communications technology. In Ed's case, the future of computer animation. And they both had these groups of incredibly creative people. But that's where the similarities ended. But I liked that, that they could be parallel tracks in time. But where General Magic got as big and did as much as possible as quickly as possible, Pixar stayed as small as possible, as long as possible. And Ed made it his life's work to put boundaries in place that channeled creative ideas into creative achievement. These would be things like they let Pixar directors stay in development with a small team in story development for years, stripping away characters, refining the core of a story. This is how, like in Inside out, they lost the character for Schadenfreude in the first go round because they wanted to strip down the story. And it might seem inefficient or excessive to allow that to go on for years, where they're getting constant feedback on the story, but the costs only explode once you move into production. And so actually, in the long run, it's the efficient way to do it, where you're keeping things small until they really have to get big. Or they would have all kinds of rules at Pixar, like one called the three pitches rule, where they found directors would often anchor on their first idea, even though it wasn't their best one. Said, you can't. You have to pitch three, you're not allowed to pitch one. And all sorts of other ways of making constraints, or making constraints visible. One of my favorites was an antidote to what Ed called the beautifully shaded penny problem, where he said directors and animators would get fixated on little details in the background of a shot, like the shading on a penny, that the audience would probably never notice. And they end up animating it for weeks. And meanwhile, there are major characters that might still need work. And so they came up with a system where they would Velcro popsicle sticks onto a board. Each popsicle stick represented the amount of work that one animator could do in a week. And if you wanted to keep working on the shading of that penny, you had to start taking popsicle sticks away from some other character that needed animation. So that very quickly made visual the trade offs that people were making. So once you made that constraint, the amount of time and work you had left visible, it helped people get their priorities straight. So it's just like, as I described it, it's like Ed was putting bumpers in the bowling alley. That allowed people a lot of latitude for zigging and zagging, but kept things going in a certain direction. And his feeling, as he told me, was that there are tons of good ideas in organizations. What's comparatively rare, he said, is a structured system for channeling those ideas into something that actually matters.
- [62:49]
William Green
Yeah, I thought it was really interesting when you talked about their strength being, focusing on, I think you call it, one proximate problem at a time on your way to a moonshot. And it reminded me a little bit of Brad Stulberg talking to me about the importance of breaking down enormous tasks, like becoming an Olympic athlete, into these sort of chunks of like, well, I'm going to do this today and this, this hour and this tomorrow. Can you talk about that habit of breaking down these large endeavors into pieces that you then test a Little bit at a time, because I think it's. Again, it's another of these kind of filters that applies to so much that we do in life, whether it's a company, whether it's individually, you know, like many things that are true, it feels both simultaneously banal and really profound.
- [63:36]
David Epstein
Yeah, I was putting a few notes down there while you said that, because you reminded me of a few things that one of the other guys who came out of General Magic, the big failure, was a guy named Darren Adler, who went on to lead the development of the Safari web browser and other things like that at Apple. And when I was interviewing him, one of the things he told me was because of what happened at General Magic, where they were, everything was the big vision. The big vision was the guiding light. And the intermediate steps to getting to that big vision, not so clear. So Darren told me, coming out of that experience, in everything else he works in, somebody will articulate a vision that motivates people. And then he'll start saying, okay, great, that's our vision, but what's our next step? And he'll often tell people he's managing, we have that vision that can be motivating, but forget about that vision and what's a much earlier step that could be a business or a product all on its own. And he said the response to that usually is like, ah, you're kind of ruining our fun. You know, we want to focus on the vision. And he'll say, fine, but in my experience, when you don't do that, you end up with nothing. And Ed was a master of that. So one of the examples I really like, because he made the goal to make the world's first computer animated feature film. And when he set that goal in the 70s, he originally wanted to be a Disney animator, but he wasn't good enough at drawing. So that's when he came up with a new goal to make the world's first computer fully computer animated feature film. When he made that goal, the cutting edge was solid shapes rotating on black backgrounds. Like, this was way. He was really thinking way ahead. And 20 years later, he did that with Toy Story. It was the world's first fully computer animated feature film. But along the way, he was really good at resisting jumping ahead. So General Magic really tried to jump ahead. They were too far ahead of their time, I would say, in many ways. And Ed, one of the examples I loved, where one of their competitors in the early days bought a supercomputer, and he got concerned that they were going to make the first fully animated feature film before him. And so he sat down and said, let's calculate the number of pixels we think we'd need to animate to do what we want to do, and the processing power of this computer and then how many of those computers we would need to buy to actually make a full film. And by doing that estimation exercise, they realized it would cost a billion dollars just to buy the computers. So he says, no chance. And he decides our competitor has done something stupid, and we're not even going to worry about them. And we're going to keep going one step at a time. Let's go back to figuring out how do we make an image look like it's blurred when it's moving and things like that. And he was right. They had made a stupid move because they were jumping ahead and not taking time to do these estimation exercises and think about how far away really is that, and what are the intermediate steps we need to get to. So he's always breaking down that huge vision that he had that took 20 years to get to, but into all these intermediate steps that had to be solved. Like when I interviewed him and I write this scene in the book, I was sitting with him in his home office, and we were watching a documentary about general magic together so that I could narrate his thoughts. And at one point, he pauses it and he goes to his shelf and he pulls down this book, which I have a copy of. This is called By Spaceship to the Moon, written for, like, middle schoolers in the 1950s. And what it basically does, it's 1952, so it's well before we actually went to the Moon. And it basically goes chapter by chapter saying, here's one problem that has to be solved. Here's how you could get out of Earth's gravity, here's what a spacesuit will have to do, here's how you could eat, etc. And just breaks down all these challenges. And NASA officials actually used this book when they started telling Congress, we think we can do this. And Ed pulled it off his shelf right in his, where he's got mostly adult books, not books like this, made for adolescents. He said, this is what we did. We said, yes, the vision is the moon, but what is every little chapter of some problem that we know has to be solved on the way, and that the vision might be this guiding light that motivates us, but it doesn't tell us what to do. We need these much smaller chunks that have actionable problems for us. In the short term, you write a
- [67:28]
William Green
lot about the benefits of constraints for creative people, whether it's in scientific invention, like you saying that Mendeleev. What he actually needed wasn't the freedom of a dream, but a deadline for this textbook that he was writing, but also in music and writing. And so you write a lot about people like Dr. Seuss and Keith Jarrett, the great jazz pianist, and Bach as well. I was also really intrigued by the stuff that you wrote about Robert Johnson, the great Delta blues guitarist. And you ended up going to a cemetery as part of your reporting. Can you talk about that and what that illustrated for you when you think about a musician like Robert Johnson, who typically you wouldn't find in a book that's supposed to be making us more successful and more productive and the like. What did you learn about constraints from Robert Johnson that's so interesting?
- [68:18]
David Epstein
You asked me about Robert Johnson, the cemetery. I didn't really expect anybody to ask me specifically about the cemetery, to be honest. So it's interesting to be asked. But Robert Johnson, one of the first people inducted into the Rock and Roll hall of Fame, he was a blues player who was most famous because if people have heard the myth of a musician selling their soul to the devil for talent, that's really based on him. Very much where the story was. He was not a good musician and disappeared for a year. And when he came back, he was the greatest guitar player in the world. So we're talking in the, you know, kind of like the 20s and 30s era. And that myth was so pervasive.
- [68:59]
William Green
He was born in 1911. Right. And he died at what, 27, so. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So it's in the 30s, presumably, or late 20s.
- [69:06]
David Epstein
Yep. You know, there's this thing called the 27 Club of Musicians who have died at the age of 27. So he was the first. First one. And this thing about him having sold his soul to the devil and a lot of his. He only ever did two recording sessions. And a lot of the songs are about like Hellhound on My Tail and things like that. And so that added to the myth. The idea being he went to these crossroads in Mississippi and sold his soul to the devil. And it's pervasive. It's mentioned in his citation in the Rock and Roll hall of Fame. It led to a movie with Ralph Macchio that's inspired by it and all these other kinds of things. And. But what actually happened? He died under strange circumstances. Pretty. Pretty clear that he was poisoned by the husband of one of his girlfriends. But what actually happened in the time that he disappeared, because it is true that he was trying to learn to play guitar, wasn't really doing it, and disappeared for a while. But what really happened was he's kind of left town. He went to this town called Beauregard in Mississippi, where a guy a little bit older and better than him at guitar agreed to teach him. And they would go most nights to a cemetery where they would sit together and work on guitar. And so the reality of it, this incredible ghost story mythology that's really compelling, the reality is much more pedestrian than, but I think really interesting that what he really had was silence and structure. A lot like Isabel Allende. The reason that they would go to the cemetery is because it was quiet and there was nobody to interrupt them. So that's why I went to the cemetery, right. Because I'm a weird reporter. I road tripped rural Mississippi so that I could sit alone in a cemetery at midnight just to see if I could experience what they experienced. And I think I found these two graves that were basically benches near one another that the light makes a perfect spotlight on from the moon at midnight. When I was there, if I had to guess where they would have sat, I would have guessed that was the spot. But the reality was it was just this focused training. When I talked to Gloria Mark, you know, who studies focus and attention about what would be the best circumstances to learn something in a focused way, she said, well, you know, ideally you'd be with someone who's a little better than you and in a really quiet environment with no other kinds of distractions. And that's what they had in this graveyard. So the real secret to it was something that I think we all know we should do and yet we almost never actually do.
- [71:21]
William Green
Yeah, it's profound. I think it resonated for me also, because maybe as a reporter, it's exactly what I would have done as well. You know, I would have sat there in the middle of nowhere and been like, oh, this is where he was and this is what he did. And so there's something about the experiential aspect of the reporting that makes you realize, oh, that's why I have to leave my phone and computer somewhere else if I, you know, go sit somewhere with a notebook.
- [71:45]
David Epstein
I'm glad you appreciate that because it was amazing to sit there and just try to tune into that psyche, you know? Yeah, it did remind me that this thing that's kind of obvious, but I just don't do it enough. And I will say I'm glad you appreciate that. As a reporter, too. Because it was this road trip through rural Mississippi that I took in order to write one paragraph. And I broke the windshield on the rental car because I drove down the crossroads that he supposedly sold his. And it's very bumpy and rocky and everything. I don't think I'd gotten the right insurance on the rental car. So it ended up being expensive trip. It took a bunch of time for one paragraph in the book. So I'm really glad that you appreciated it.
- [72:21]
William Green
Yeah, it's beautiful. No, and it's something you'll never forget. And I also.
- [72:26]
David Epstein
Oh, that's for sure true. Yeah.
- [72:27]
William Green
And it's also. It's. He's such a great example of constraints. Right. There's a beautiful description that you had. Right. He had something called a diddly bow, which I'd never even heard of, where he sort of started out. Couldn't afford a guitar, so he nailed a wire to a shack. And then he gets a guitar that is like 15, but it's missing two strings. And so in a way, it gets at something really important, I think, which is. And he only left 29 songs. Right. So here we are racing like crazy to do as much as we can, to scroll as fast as we can or whatever. And you talk in the book about this problem of the extreme freedom of a virtual life, that something has kind of gone wrong here in our attempt to lead a meaningful life. You know, in the last few minutes of our conversation, I'd really love to talk a little bit about that because I think that's a really important part of the book. It's probably my favorite part of the book, the last chapter, where, you know, you're exploring how to build a more constrained life that actually counters this obsession with freedom, but actually turns out to be happier. Can you talk about that? Because I think this also involved a big journey for you. Right. Because you were so obsessed with autonomy. Tell us a little bit about what happened there, Your journey towards understanding that maybe autonomy and freedom weren't all that they were cracked up to be.
- [73:45]
David Epstein
Yeah. Which would be a crazy thing to say for most of human history, because people didn't have enough of it. For me, after my first few years of being a writer, I started to view as my Mount Olympus, if you will, full freedom. You want to be an independent writer. You want to take on only topics of your own choosing, on deadlines of your own choosing, spending every moment of your day in way only of your own choosing. And so I actually went to a writer's retreat at one point, and we all had to answer a question, what are you optimizing for this year? And I said, autonomy. Fast forward a few years, and I learned there's such a thing as too much autonomy. Where I had so little structure that it was like. It's like making decisions all the time. Not only did I have decision fatigue and just a lack of a feeling of kind of stability from a structure that you get in life, but also, I think some of my relationships were suffering because I had individualized my schedule so much that I wasn't inconveniencing myself to sync up with other people. Like, you have to give up some of your own personal convenience if you want to do other things that matter. So. And I was not thriving. Like, I just was not satisfied. And so I started reeling some of that autonomy back. I picked a project to get involved in. I joined a board of a nonprofit in my community, which meant I had obligations to be in certain places with other people at certain times. I started taking these dance classes, which, again, meant it was, like, inconvenient from a scheduling standpoint, but meant that there was, like, a commitment, there was a place that I had to be at certain times. So once I got into the research, I knew I wasn't feeling good. But once I got into the research, I saw that having a dense network of reciprocal obligations is crucial to human thriving. It's one of the main things that comes out in the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which ran for 86 years. Longest longitudinal study on adult development. Followed people literally from cradle to grave, multiple generations. And what it found is that you want this network of obligation, and that cuts against a life that's as convenient as it could be. And so I think having some of this kind of friction that provides structure in our lives, causes us to sync up with other people's schedules, actually gives a lot of meaning to human life. And I think for people, especially if we're working virtual or hybrid or independent, all these things, or maybe we're just leaders, and so we have lots of say over how we're spending our time. We can definitely go too far, and it can impact our sense of, well, being. The challenge, I think, is it always feels like you want more autonomy and more freedom. So it's beguiling, but it's not necessarily good for us. As Jonathan Haidt told me, it's not good for anyone to have access to everything everywhere all at once. He was talking sort of about the Internet more generally. But I think it's a similar principle that this feeling of wanting everything and wanting full freedom and choice is good and abstract. But there are all these. I found that Atul Gawande, that stat that he reported about how the large majority of people say that if they get cancer, they want involvement in choosing their treatment, but then almost nobody who actually gets cancer actually wants that. It's like just this idea that you'll be involved in the choice seems good in the abstract, but then you don't actually want it when it gets there. So that's a pretty specific issue. But I feel like it's kind of analogy for how we always think we want more choice in things, but it might not actually be good for us.
- [76:58]
William Green
There's another really beautiful exploration in the final chapter which I found very thought provoking that I'd love you to talk about, which is this idea of finding a few, as you put it, animating narrative values. So picking out a small number of values that animate your life, that give your life some kind of coherent narrative or theme. Can you explain that to us and why it's so important? And also how you did it yourself, how you thought through the process of, you know, what are the priorities? I want to live by the values I want.
- [77:30]
David Epstein
This idea of narrative values comes from a group of philosophers who study how to feel like your life has meaning essentially. And what they mean by narrative values are essentially themes in the story of your life and themes that are very recognizable. So if you look back at your life and tell your story to yourself, you can probably identify certain themes as if it were a movie. So for me, some of those things were curiosity, open mindedness, diligence. And the reason that you should do this and tell your story to yourself and identify the themes is that it helps with two things. One, it helps you have a more coherent identity. And we know that's really important for people's sense of well being, having a coherent life story. And it helps you consolidate your caring, right? There's so many things you could be caring about in the world. Like there's in one day of reading the news or looking at the world around you, you could find more things to care about than you could ever attend to in your lifetime. And so consolidating your caring becomes really important. Where there may be lots of things that are worthwhile, but having a set of things where you say, here are my values, here are the places where I can add, here are the themes of my story. And so instead of being overwhelmed by all the things you could be doing, these are certain Themes and everything will have to interact with that. It brings a coherence to a life that adds meaning in a way that I think can escape us if we have a less coherent story. I don't know if I'm describing that.
- [78:55]
William Green
Yeah, no, and I think it's a really profound idea. And I was interested that you picked out qualities like curiosity and diligence and open mindedness and forgiveness. And I think about this a lot. It's funny because I find myself saying probably more or less every day I have some sort of internal monologue. I'm always sort of slightly embarrassed to say this, partly because I don't live up to it at all. But I'll sort of say to myself, you know, let me be a force for love, mercy, kindness and compassion. And once in a while I'll sort of add honesty or truthfulness or integrity or something. But it's like they never quite stick or indomitable perseverance or service or something like these things, they're really important to me. But for some reason it's love, mercy, kindness and compassion. And then I sort of think about it and I'm like, really? When I'm confused, it's like it really is just kindness. Like, if I could just be a little kinder, you know, that would be it. I think part of it is in an increasingly complex world, if you can find a handful of virtues that you can kind of commit to. Yeah. It animates everything and it gives you a sort of true north. Does that resonate at all?
- [80:00]
David Epstein
I think that's a great. I think you put it better than I did. I think that's a great way to put it. That. An increasingly complex world. Yeah, yeah. How did you say it? If you can find a few virtues to commit to. I think that's right.
- [80:10]
William Green
Yeah. They can give you a kind of true north. It's like, just to know, you know, because I, I mean, I study like Tibetan Buddhism and I study Kabbalah and I, you know, and I'm constantly reading like, stoicism, all of these things. And so I tie myself up in knots, you know, thinking like, okay, so how does Kabbalah overlap with Tibetan Buddhism? Will they figure out the same things? And then I'm like, dude, just try to be a little kinder, you know, and it's sort of. It's very, very clarifying because like you, I, you know, I live in my head. So, yeah, I think there's something about that clarity. But I tell you, there's a paragraph in my, you know, in the. In the last chapter of your book. I mean, my headline in my notes says, most important paragraph in the book. And I'll tell you what it is which is related to this. This is, I think, my favorite paragraph in your book. And I'll quote it because it does relate to this. It's the one where you say you have finite capacity. Forging narrative values is about consolidating your caring in a world that rains down upon you an infinite number of urgent things about which to care. It is about establishing personal policies, conceptual boundaries that make life manageable, coherent, and meaningful. This is who I am, and this is what I can do. I think that's a really beautiful and profound paragraph. You know, I found myself after reading that, just writing down, you know, okay, so the lesson for me is, you know, the key is to choose your constraints wisely. Like to say, this is who I choose to be. This is what I choose to do. Like, a rich life for me is going to be different than a rich life for most people. It's going to involve more reading, more meditating, more teaching, more writing, more interviewing people, more time with friends and family. More focus on trying to be kinder or more loving or whatever. And that's kind of enough. And so I feel like you're getting at something really, really important here that not many people are talking about, which is this idea of, given that we have this finite capacity, deciding, this is who I am, this is what I can do.
- [82:00]
David Epstein
I'm loathe to add anything because I think you put that beautifully. But, yeah, I mean, it's so easy to be overwhelmed by all the things you should care about and all the people that you should be when you can see all these other possibilities out there. And we're not built to compare ourselves in that way. It used to be hard enough to compare yourself to the things you could be. The person down the block, never mind everyone in the world on the Internet. So I think it's an antidote to overwhelm. And it's also a way to focus on things. I mean, one way to improve on something is to articulate the thing you want to improve on. And so when you mentioned forgiveness as one of my narrative values, that's when I decided that I want to add because it's something that I have not been good at. But someone in my life, who I mentioned in the book, who was the only living Olympian to have survived a concentration camp, was such a forgiving person, he became a close friend.
- [82:47]
William Green
Tell us about him. This is Ben Helfcott, because actually I wanted to end our conversation by asking you about two extraordinary people who've died in the last couple of years. And one of them is this guy Ben Helfcott. And one of them is Jill Ville Viles, both of whom have been really important people in your life, like extraordinary people you've interviewed and become friends with. So, you know, Ben passed away, I think, in 2023 and Jill in 2025. So if you could talk a little bit about Ben first and then Jill. Because these extraordinary people that in some ways I think leave this legacy of, you know, for you, of like, okay, how do I embody in my own life what they embodied? So tell us first about Ben.
- [83:27]
David Epstein
Yeah, Ben was. I first met Ben when I was at Sports Illustrated and I, I wrote about him for an issue called Where Are They Now? Every year. He was the time, the only living Olympian to have survived a concentration camp. He was a two time British weightlifting champion. His basically his entire family and extended family, except for one sister, was wiped out in the Holocaust. And he became one of, and a leader of this group called the Boys. There were about 750, mostly boys, because girls were typically killed earlier who were orphaned from Poland. And England agreed to take a thousand orphans, but they could only find 750. And they kind of became each other's family. And a lot of them went on to wonderful lives. Even though all these things that you usually associate with terrible adulthood happened to them as kids. And Ben, as a leader of the organization, would preach to them every year. We have to go back. We have to go back to Poland, you have to go back to Germany, build bridges. The people today, they're not responsible for what happened to you. And hearing him say that. So after writing about him, he asked him, would I write a book about him? And we just became good friends. He became a bit of a mentor to me. And I have never been as good at forgiveness, despite having nothing nearly so egregious to forgive as he did. And just in seeing that it's just one of those things where you're around someone and just realize you should be better, you know, just by seeing their example. And so I decided that I wanted to become better at forgiving things and letting go of things, whereas I had, you know, had more of a propensity to hold grudges because really you kind of poison yourself when you hold on to things too long. And so it gave me. So I said, here are these narrative values I have. Curiosity, open mindedness, diligence, et CETERA and now here is one that I want to add to my story. And it really gave me something specific to work on instead of just saying, I want to be a better person, like you said, with kindness. If I just do kindness. For me, it was. Forgiveness is one I want to add. So when the opportunity comes up, I'm going to remember that this is a theme I want to add to my story, and it's made a big difference for me. Yeah. I don't know if I should transition straight into that. I'll let you say, did I get what I wanted?
- [85:33]
William Green
No, it's lovely. And I mean, it's particularly resonant for me because my family fled from Poland and ended up in London. And so I grew up. I remember as a teenager, going to visit this great uncle of mine, who's now passed called Chaim, which means life in Hebrew, who had set up a kibbutz in 1947, before Israel was Israel. And he was the most extraordinary guy who had escaped from Auschwitz. And he was less than 5 foot tall because he'd been starved as a teenager. He had been rescued by some British soldiers in the woods in Poland and had gone back to London. I always remember he had gone to what's now, I guess the Polish Embassy on Portland Square, I think, in London, and they gave him a bed to lie on. He and his friend couldn't lie on the bed because they hadn't been on a bed in years. So they ended up sort of sleeping on the floor. And, you know, I went to visit him as a teenager in. In Israel, just as my mother had been to visit him when she was a teenager. And he was. You know, when you see someone like that who's so loving and so kind and so decent, and he would still wake up at night, have nightmares every night because he'd been through just so much. But when you see someone triumph, having been dealt such a terrible hand, it kind of. You never forget it. So there's something about seeing these virtues embodied that's hugely powerful. So, yeah, when I read what you had written about Ben Helfgart has a particular resonance for me. And you saying that here's this guy who weighed 80 pounds when he came out of camp in 1945, and yet he becomes this Olympic weightlifter. It's. There's something about that kind of triumph over ourselves, that you look at these people and you're like, well, if they can become more loving and kinder and more forgiving, like, surely I have some chance.
- [87:12]
David Epstein
It's a good reminder. It's almost like a little bit of a. Not a shaming because that's never how he would have meant it or even maybe knew some of the effect he was having on me. But it's like a self shaming of man. I can really be better.
- [87:23]
William Green
Yeah.
- [87:24]
David Epstein
Like you said, seeing those virtues that you want embodied is such a powerful experience that I think it just becomes seared into your mind when that happens.
- [87:31]
William Green
Yeah. I would love to end just with you talking a little bit about Jill Viles, who is this extraordinary person who died in June 2025. And you wrote a lovely eulogy on your range widely substack newsletter where you described her as the central figure in the most interesting story I've ever reported. So if you could just give us a. It's a long entangled and beautiful story, but if you could give us a sense of who she was and what made her so extraordinary. And also because it kind of relates to this general theme that goes through all of your work, which is of trying to figure out really true what's really going on. I mean, there's something about her and her life that really relates to this idea of figuring out the truth despite the difficulty of doing so.
- [88:11]
David Epstein
Yeah, I've had a lot of trouble grappling with her death. This was the only time when I've had a story kind of come to me in this way where after I wrote my first book, she heard me talking, which was about genetics and sports, and she heard me talking on Good Morning America about it and said, oh, this is divine providence. Like, I've got to write to this guy. Because she had two incredibly rare diseases. One a type of muscular dystrophy called Emory Dreyfus that caused muscle wasting, and the other, in much, much more rare form of fat wasting called partial lipodystrophy. So she would lose fat from certain places in her body as she was losing muscle. And this becomes progressively debilitating. It has cardiac implications and all these things. And she had decided based on a photograph that she saw on the Internet of an Olympic sprinter who won a bronze medal, a Canadian woman who's incredibly muscle bound and had been accused of doping her whole life. She looked at the picture and said, oh, I think this woman is missing fat in exactly the same way as I am. Now. Jill is a. She was a part time like substitute teacher and mom and kind of a tiny town in Iowa. And I think she has the same fat wasting thing I have, but for some reason her body produced insane amounts of muscle, whereas mine Took muscle away. So maybe we have a related gene mutation, but somehow her body found a way to go around it and make muscle instead of taking it away. So maybe if someone studies both of us, they can figure out how to make the body go in her direction, not in my direction. So Jill reaches out to me because she wants me to convince this sprinter, whose name, Priscilla Lopes, sleep to get a genetic test. So she sends me this email first. It's very enticing. And I say, it's intriguing enough that I say, okay, you can send me this more information that you're offering. This arrives, this whole packet. Family lineage photos, all this stuff with this whole biological theory of what's going on. And I'm looking at this, saying, this is incredibly improbable, but, boy, has she done her homework.
- [90:11]
William Green
Yeah, it's a little bit like in the movie twins. Like Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger sort of claiming to be twins. You're like, huh? Like, when you see the picture of the two women, I mean, they could hardly be more different.
- [90:22]
David Epstein
That's right. But I'm like, I don't think this is true. But she has just done an incredible amount of. She really knows her stuff. So, long story short, it took us a long time to get this done, but finally, when I do get in touch with Priscilla and float this idea of, by the way, this stranger would like you to get a genetic test. Right? And she agreed because she said, these doping rumors have dogged me my whole life. I'll show you pictures of all the, like, the women in my family. You can see some of them have this and some of them don't. I would love to clear my name and see if there's something to learn here. And then it took us a while to get the genetic test because when I tried to describe this to some geneticists, they'd say, I don't know, this sounds like you have someone who's, like, stalking a pro athlete. I'm not sure I really want to be a part of this. But eventually we get her tested, and it turns out Jill was right. They have neighboring mutations on the same gene, one of which caused lipodystrophy with explosive muscle growth and one of which cause lipodystrophy and on also muscular dystrophy. And they become the subjects of research. Not only that, but Priscilla ends up needing emergency medical care because given that she was an elite athlete, she had never been checked for certain things you would assume elite athletes wouldn't have. But because of her lipodystrophy condition she did. So it causes a medical intervention in Priscilla's life. They become friends. Fruit flies start getting engineered with Jill's genome in them so they can be studied. Like, she becomes a clearinghouse for people with all these conditions all over the world. Like, they don't know why they're starting to lose their ability to balance. So she becomes this incredible person. And so she starts driving research, Jill does, and by this point, she's lost her ability to walk. And she starts gets another theory of a kind of drug that she thinks can help her. And she through means that are, you know, not like illegal, but not exactly totally like above board in all cases. She got her hands on some experimental treatments. Basically. She was able to talk so confidently about the stuff she knew that I think people would assume that she was a lab worker and so she could get her hands on things. So there was this experimental treatment that was sitting in her freezer and she had worked so hard to get it, and she decided at the last minute, I guess, not to take it because she has a son, she has a husband, and this stuff is very risky. And she died before she had a chance to take it. And before I had a chance to talk to her about that. We would talk, usually somewhat regularly, but we had had a gap before she died because her death was unexpected. I knew she had health problems, but it was unexpected. Her mom called me and told me and her mom said that Jill kept saying I wanted to. She had a book coming out. She'd bought her new clothes that she was going to wear for the book debut. And she died just before it was published. And she was so proud that she was going to be an author. And she kept saying she had pneumonia and that's what eventually led to some complications, that she wanted her voice to get strong again because her voice was weak before she called me. And I don't know, just the thought of that and having this treatment that she could have tried and her not getting to see her book published and everything just.
- [93:12]
William Green
Yeah, it's wrenching. But your eulogy to her was really lovely, I thought, you know, where you talked about her book Manufacturing My Miracle. And I think one of the most touching things in your eulogy was when you talked about how her appreciation for the tiny joys in life is infectious. And there was this amazing story in there that I found kind of humbling where she goes off to this enormous state fair in Iowa and, you know, her husband is just sort of searching for a carnival game that I guess she's capable of playing given her physical ailments. But she Sundays, I lived 10 years in a single night. And there's something sort of inspiring to me about just you look at someone who's dealt such a lousy hand and I spend like so much of my life complaining and feeling so, you know, it's like I've had like a man flu the last couple of days, you know, like a little cold that I whine about, you know. And then you look at this extraordinary woman who dealt such a lousy hand and did such extraordinary things in terms of, like, figuring out stuff that, you know, where people would sort of dismiss her and she would.
- [94:12]
David Epstein
Yeah, yeah. She was always dismissed.
- [94:13]
William Green
Yeah, yeah. And you had a really wonderful, you had a wonderful quote. I think maybe it was in your. When you did a this American Life story, which I loved, which I listened to the other day from, I think 2016, where one of the doctors was sort of ashamed of himself for dismissing her and had the sort of the honesty and integrity to sort of own up to the fact that he should have taken this woman seriously. And so in a way, it strikes me as a kind of central story for your career because it's like it is all about looking for reality, looking for the truth, often when it's kind of obscured or when people think it's something else and when they're close minded and when they're biased. And here's this kind of indomitable woman with all of the odds against her, and she just sort of insists on continuing to find the reality, the truth that other people miss.
- [95:00]
David Epstein
And she insisted in the most polite ways, like, she was relentless, but she was soft spoken and polite, but also relentless. And I mean, I tell her full story kind of in range, but one of the things that really stuck with me about her that I wrote into that remembrance that you're citing was when she started wanting to date and get on the path to getting married and having a family. She found some research that said, some survey or something that said something like 1% of men or something are willing to date a woman with a disability like hers. And she went on online dating things and said, oh, I can get through so many profiles here that with 1% of men are willing to go on a date with me, I could have a new date every week. So instead of focusing on, I can't remember what the exact percentage was, if it was one or five or something like that, but instead of focusing on the 90 or 95 or 99% of men who wouldn't give her a shot. She said, oh, this is amazing. I can play the numbers and I can have a date all the time. Kind of like, how great of a perspective is that on life of just being like, what is the situation affording me and how am I going to make the most of that? I just thought that was a beautiful encapsulation of her approach to the world.
- [96:12]
William Green
Yeah, it's a wonderful model and I always love that phrase. As Jews, when someone dies and you say, may their memory be a blessing. So both with Ben Helfcott and Jill Files, may their memory be a blessing. Obviously amazing people. And so thank you so much for just sharing so many rich stories with us today. It's been great to meet you and really have an opportunity to chat in depth about your books, your life, your work. And you do really beautiful work and bit resentful of the fact that you do it so much more efficiently and quickly than I do. But nonetheless, despite my resentment, I'm very grateful to you.
- [96:44]
David Epstein
I really appreciate that. I really enjoyed the conversation. I think you helped me crystallize Sometimes I have difficulty transitioning some of my writing into talking sometimes. I think you may have helped me crystallize the way I'll talk about some of the narrative values stuff that's in the last chapter of the book because it's also my favorite chapter.
- [96:58]
William Green
Yeah, it's a really good chapter and I think it merits a lot of thought. I want to reread it a couple of times and really actually sit down and think about it. It's profound. I think it has a lot of implications for us as we sort of figure out, well, how do I actually want to live? So thank you. It's just been a real pleasure chatting with you. It's been great.
- [97:16]
David Epstein
I really enjoyed it. Thank you.
- [97:17]
William Green
Thanks.
- [97:18]
Thanks for listening to tip. Follow Richer, Wiser, Happier on your favorite podcast app and visit theinvestorspodcast.com for show notes and educational resources. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not provide financial, investment, investment tax or legal advice. The content is impersonal and does not consider your objectives, financial situation, or needs. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal and past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Listeners should do their own research and consult a qualified professional before making any financial decisions. Nothing on this show is a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any security or other financial product. Hosts, guests and the Investors Podcast Network may hold positions in securities discussed and may change those positions at any time without notice References to any third party products, services or advertisers do not constitute endorsements, and the Investors Podcast Network is not responsible for any claims made by them. Copyright by the Investors Podcast Network. All rights reserved.