Why More Freedom Is Making You Miserable | David Epstein on Constraints

What if everything you believe about freedom is wrong?

Author David Epstein joins Michael Easter to break down why constraints — not freedom — drive better work, better wellness, and better creativity. Epstein is the bestselling author of Range and The Sports Gene, and his new book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better argues we have it backwards on freedom.

They discuss why General Magic collapsed under unlimited possibility while Pixar dominated, why your brain is literally built to prevent you from thinking, and the simple sleep hack that made David a morning person for two years without an alarm clock.

This is the playbook for thinking slow, acting fast, and finally figuring out what to stop doing.

Two Percent is hosted by Michael Easter. Today’s episode was produced by Joey Fischground, Robbie Hiser, Dana Brawer and Julia Nutter. From Kaleidoscope, our executive producers are Mangesh Hattikudur and Kate Osborn and Julia Nutter. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norvell and Nikki Ettore. Our Head of Video is Maria Paz Mendez Hodes. This episode was edited by Ryan Mulhern. Our theme music is by the Heater Manager.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Welcome to two Percent. I'm your host, Michael Easter. This
is a podcast where we talk about improving your performance.
I am an author, and today I am extremely pleased
to bring on a fellow author whose work I very
much admire. We're going to be talking to David Epstein. So,
David started as a sports reporter, specifically in the realm

(00:38):
of the science of sports at Sports Illustrated Now. He
became famous there and had a big moment of attention
when he broke the A Rod steroid scandal. So, if
you are a New York Yankees fan, you probably hate
the guy already, but please bear with me, because this
guy is a very, very fascinating thinker who can tell

(00:59):
us a lot about improving our work life, improving our
performance in the gym and on the road if we're
a runner, and just improving our thinking across the board
in a way that we can live better. And David
has a new book which we are going to be
diving into today. It is called Inside the Box, How
Constraints Make Us Better, and it argues that even though
we often do not like constraints and we want as

(01:20):
much freedom as possible, he argues that constraints are actually
what lead us into better outcomes at work, better outcomes
in our wellness, better outcomes across the board. Let's get
into it. David Epstein, thanks for coming on the show Man.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
It is my absolute pleasure.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
So the new book Inside the Box looks at the
idea of how constraints can actually be beneficial. And there's
one story that I loved.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
That you open the book with. It's about this company
called General Magic.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah. Well, so they have the people who designed the
original Mac. You know.

Speaker 4 (01:57):
It's the company was so visionary the iPhone, like in
basically the IP.

Speaker 3 (02:03):
Yeah, and this was in the late eighties, early nineties.

Speaker 4 (02:06):
The sketch the CEO has a notebook his named Mark
Parratt in nineteen eighty nine where he sketches a thin
glass rectangle with no protruding buttons and a touchscreen where
you can download apps and it'll be a phone in
a computer. Nineteen eighty nine, only fifteen percent of Americans
had computers.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
Yeah, and the Internet didn't exist.

Speaker 4 (02:22):
He saw all of this stuff, Like he envisioned a
virtual meeting space where different devices could connect, and they
called it the cloud in nineteen ninety like they they
were ahead, and again they had the designers, the original MAC.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
It was so everything was.

Speaker 4 (02:36):
So alluring, their vision, their talent that Goldman Sachs actually
took them public in the first so called concept ipo,
where they went public with an idea.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
Nothing to without a product, nothing to actually sell, just like, hey,
check out this idea.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
Let's roll.

Speaker 4 (02:52):
I mean they had an idea that they had the
idea plus the talent, plus a seventeen member what they
called the Alliance, which was basically other companies that had
invested in them. So this was seventeen companies from around
the world. It was the largest consortium of international businesses
in American business history. Each had given millions of dollars
in investment. And we're going to be part of the team.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
And so like.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Apple White, these are giants are like Sony, Right, there's
all kinds of.

Speaker 4 (03:17):
Grapples Sony, Panasonic, you know, AT and T like all
the It was actually they covered so much of the
communications technology world that their meetings had to begin with
an antitrust lawyer listing all the topics they weren't allowed
to discuss in their meetings because they covered everything and
they have this vision. So Mark Parrat, the CEO. He
raises all this money early, a stock price doubles on

(03:39):
the first day. It's a Wall Street darling. And he
says his goal in raising all that money so quickly
was to create what he called heaven for engineers, where
they could play and create and be limited only by
their imaginations. As he said, what more could anyone else
ask for? And I think the answer in retrospect turned
out to be a little less freedom because they could

(03:59):
do anything.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
So they did do anything.

Speaker 4 (04:02):
Everyone who had a good idea, they did it like
they any They built and built. They had no clear
they they defined their customer as Joe sixpack, which is
very vague. So after a few years of miss deadlines,
they turned around and realized nobody knew the guy or
what they were building from, or what problem they were solving.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
Like beer.

Speaker 4 (04:21):
Yeah, yeah, just like it's like saying Joe Schmo, you know,
like random guy. So they didn't take any time to
define their actual customer. So they ended up building for
each other and the project just grew and grew and grew.
They couldn't ever decide what not to do, and so
it ends up being this huge disaster. They ended up
selling three thousand units of their personal communicator when it
comes out. It has so many features that the battery

(04:43):
life's terrible, the user experience is choppy, it's expensive, it's confusing.
But there was one interview that I think kind of
encapsulated their problems, and it was at this guy named
this engineer named Steve Pearlman, whose job was to create
a calendar function.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
For their operating system.

Speaker 4 (05:02):
And so he creates it to run from nineteen oh
four to twenty ninety six and checks it in and
is like, all right, I'm done. And then one of
the managers comes to him and says, look, somebody might
build apps that go way back in history or way
into the future. You have to make it longer than that.
So he opens it up again. He goes back to
year one, fine, thinks he's done. Then another team comes

(05:23):
to him and says, look, why are you starting with
that arbitrary religious context. You should go back to the
beginning of astronomical time. So he builds the calendar app
from the beginning of the universe way into the future.
And as he said, if he had stuck from nineteen
oh four to twenty ninety six, it would have been
four lines of code and he could have moved on,
and instead it dragged on for months.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
And this is how everything worked there.

Speaker 4 (05:43):
Because they didn't put boundaries in place, everything grew and
grew and grew until it just totally collapsed under its
own weight.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
So this becomes this like big metaphor for the book.
We often think that freedom is like the most desirable
thing for creatives. For businesses, it's like, just take some
smart people, you let him figure it out.

Speaker 3 (06:03):
They'll do it.

Speaker 1 (06:04):
But this becomes this great metaphor for the fact that
even when you have the greatest teams ever, you need
some sort of boundaries because without boundaries, things just turn
into chaos totally.

Speaker 4 (06:14):
And in fact, in one way I would say that
General Magic was actually a success, which is it's so traumatized,
you know, in a business sense some of the people
that were there, especially some of the.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
Younger employees, that.

Speaker 4 (06:30):
They learned all these lessons about the importance of constraints
that they then took in their next stops in their
careers and did things like led Google Maps and built
the Apple Watch, co founded Android, LinkedIn, eBay, you know
all these other companies that you've heard of or the
guy who became an absolute zealot for Constraints, a guy

(06:53):
named Tony Fidell who general Magic was his first job
out of college and these were his heroes and so
he was just devastated when the company collapsed. I was
actually connected with him by the famous venture capitalist Bill Gurley,
who's famously invested in Uber and Zillow. I told him
I was interested in constraints and Bill said, oh, we
have a saying and venture more startups dive of indigestion

(07:13):
than starvation, like too much, not too little. He said,
you got to talk to my friend Tony. So he
connects me to Tony Fidel. The first time I talked
to him, he's like yelling at me. If you don't
have constraints, make up constraints. He's like a very intense guy.
And he went on to lead the design of the iPod,
and when he showed Steve Jobs a styrofoam model in
March of two thousand and one, got the green light

(07:35):
and said we are shipping by Christmas. Gave like ten
weeks for the first design and then stop and collect
your lessons and go on. And it forced the team
to think creatively and repurpose technology. So the famous scroll
wheel is something that they basically repurposed from a Danish
cordless phone because they were saying, look, we can't build
everything from scratch like they had done in General Magic.

(07:55):
Then Fidel goes on and he co founds Nest, the
smart thermostat company, where he forces the company to work
inside a literal box. He makes them prototype the box
before the product, because he says, this shows what we
want to communicate to the end user, and if it's
not in this box, it's not one of our priorities.
And it was just so interesting to see his arc

(08:16):
from this like the trauma of General Magic, to becoming
this absolute zelo for constraints, which is why I wanted
to give his narrative some air.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
Well. One thing that I thought was really fascinating is
you could almost see I think the typical point of
view would be constraints are going to constrain creativity, right,
and so when you have these products like the iPod,
the first iPod, the Master, you're like, wow, that must
have taken a lot of creativity, a lot of thought,
and just kind of figuring things out. But you also

(08:45):
write about this idea called is it the Green Eggs
and Ham effect where having constraints can actually enhance creativity,
because we'll I'll let you explain it.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
You know it reliably does. In fact, there was just this.

Speaker 4 (08:58):
I cite this recent survey by psychologists around the world
of known creativity myths things that we know from psychological
research are not true, And the second most popular one
is that people are most creative when they're most free.
And as you mentioned, psychologists know this isn't true. There's
actually something called the green Eggs and Ham effect, which

(09:19):
is named for the fact that Theodore Gaizel aka doctor
Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet that
he couldn't write a book using only fifty words, and
it forced him to experiment with rhythm because he couldn't
use vocabulary. Even before Green eg and Ham, he had

(09:39):
been given a task to write a children's book using
only two hundred words from a kid's vocabulary list, and
at first he starts looking at the list, he starts
complaining to his wife. He says, there are no adjectives,
and then he says, I think in fine Susian form,
it's like trying to make a strudle with no Strudels,
which I think is hilarious because it's like he was
the same guy in his personal life as his books.

(10:00):
And then he just decides, throws his hands up and says,
I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words
on the list and make a book. And the first
two rhyming words are cat and hat, and that kind
of changed children's literature forever. It gets to this idea
that cognitive psychologists have really fleshed out now that you know,
as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has put it, you
may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's

(10:21):
actually made to prevent you from having to think whenever possible,
because thinking is energetically costly, and so if you're not forced,
you'll just go down what cognitive psychologists call the path
of least resistance, meaning you'll just reach for ideas that
you've already used, or that you've seen, what's familiar, what's easy,
and so unless, in many cases, unless the normal thing
is actually blocked, it becomes incredibly hard and sometimes impossible

(10:45):
to be creative.

Speaker 1 (10:46):
Yeah, and that was one that one surprised me at first,
and then two I thought about my own work and
when I'm doing a book, like I just finished this
a draft of another book, and as I was writing that,
I have sections where I'd be like, oh, this kind
of worked before in my last word, and I'd start
to do that and They're like, yeah, but you can't

(11:06):
do that same sort of thing. This is a new book.
And so it was like I needed that sort of
constraint to not just default to the easy thing, even
though it was originally somewhat creative, but now that I'm
doing it again, it no longer becomes creative.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
Absolutely, I mean to your point.

Speaker 4 (11:21):
We were talking before we started recording about my process
a little bit for the book this time around, and
this was the first time I ever created an architectural
plan for the how I was going to order the
information before I started writing the book.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
I have deportion of this book is mesearch.

Speaker 4 (11:37):
I was terrible at putting constraints in place and wanted
to get better at it. That's often the case for
a lot of the things I'm researching is I'm bad
at it, didn't want to get better, and so I
wrote way over length in my previous two books, and
it just incredibly inefficient. So this time I made this
one page outline. I forced myself to outline the whole
book on one page. As you can see, I ended
up writing very very small my own attempt, my brain's

(11:58):
attempt to defeat my own system.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
But if it's not on this page, it's not in
the book.

Speaker 4 (12:03):
So this is the first time I wrote the length
of a book to get a book, and the book
is tighter than my other's, about twenty percent shorter. But
it also blocked the kind of some of the methods
that I was used to because I had never laid
out a plan ahead of time where I wanted the
beginning and the end of the book to kind of
come full circle in a way that the other ones didn't.

(12:26):
And so I think that was really helpful because especially
and it's exactly what you're saying, like, we've gotten competent
at this thing, which is great, but competency can also
be a trap from getting better.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
You know.

Speaker 4 (12:37):
It's like you end up lifting the same weights the
same number of times every day, which means you may
not get worse, but you're also not going to get better.

Speaker 1 (12:43):
It's like putting bumpers up. If you don't have the bumpers,
you're probably going to get it in the gutter sometimes,
and I find out in my own writing where I
will find a thread that it's I'm like, I don't
know if it works for the book, but it's kind
of interesting. And then I'm writing, you know, a thousand
words on this, and then I read it and I go, yeah,
this is interesting, but what the hell does it have
to do with this book I'm writing? Or if I

(13:04):
could just keep down the lane, it would be a
much more efficient process.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
I have that problem in spades.

Speaker 4 (13:11):
I mean, I have a very psychologist I was interviewing
once told me that I have a what he called
a flat associative hierarchy, which means that I see lots
of disparate ideas as kind of connected. It's easy for
me to connect them. And that can be nice because
I maybe find things that aren't obvious to other people.
But it also means that I can be incredibly prone
to doing what you're describing, which is going down these

(13:34):
rabbit holes of things that I think are interesting and
they're really not that well connected in a way that
will make sense to other people.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
And so I really need.

Speaker 4 (13:44):
Structure to kind of prevent myself from writing books that
are just all over the place.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, what did this What did report in this book
make you think about when people get too many resources,
like specifically financial resources.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
It kind of made me think that.

Speaker 1 (13:59):
A lot of times you find the people who sort
of have it all almost have nothing because of a
sort of aimlessness sets in. It's like, when you can
have everything, why go after anything?

Speaker 4 (14:09):
Yeah, I mean I think it's actually don't think it's healthy.
For as Jonathan Hyde told me in one of the
interviews in the book, it's not healthy for anyone to
have everything everywhere all the time. And a lot of us,
even if we're not rich, are kind of in a
situation like that in the digital world now, And so
I think when it comes to businesses, there are a
bunch of you know, there are examples in the book

(14:30):
where people are just sloppy, like when they have too much, right,
it leads to sloppiness, It leads to not feeling like
you need to define these boundaries. And I think one
of the things this gets at one of the things
that I hope maybe the mindset shift that I hope
the book engenders, which is from seeing limits as only
bad to seeing as to seeing them as opportunities to

(14:51):
clarify priorities and launch productive exploration. And I think when
people have too much, like to Bill Gurley's more startups
die of indigestion than starvation. Quote, you're not forced to
be resourceful and you're not forced to clarify priorities, and
so you don't. And I actually don't think that's a
good thing for people, right. It's like, I don't think

(15:12):
it's good for work, and I don't think it's good
for having meaning in your life to kind of always
have your options infinitely open.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
I feel like I'm conscious that it may.

Speaker 4 (15:24):
Sound like sometimes I'm contradicting at least the title of
the book sounds like I'm contradicting range my previous book,
which is about broad experiences. But it actually felt like
a natural next question to me, where it's, okay, you
get this broad tool set, at some point you have
to focus this into something, into achievement, hopefully into meaning
and satisfaction. And I've kind of found that in a
lot of really talented or hardworking people, they may over

(15:50):
index on optionality, like keeping their options open all the
time because they can maybe they're very talented or they're
very hard working or lucky or whatever it is. But
sometimes I think they can actually really backfire if people
start making decisions, if keeping your options open becomes an
end douneto itself. And so I think I've seen some
very talented peers and friends endlessly keep their options open

(16:13):
in a way that actually doesn't doesn't help them reach
better satisfaction. I'm sure I'm articulating that well.

Speaker 3 (16:21):
I think I hear what you're saying.

Speaker 1 (16:23):
It's like there comes a sort of phobia towards commitment,
and you sort of tell yourself that if I commit
to this one thing, I'm saying no to all these
other possible things that could land on my plate, and
so it leads to someone being unfocused. I think I
think a good example would be something like marriage totally.

(16:48):
It's like that is sort of the ultimate commitment. I
feel like you see a lot of men are like
they're afraid to get married because like, well, what could happen?

Speaker 3 (16:55):
I'm going to be tied down.

Speaker 1 (16:57):
But I think when you survey to people in general
at a population level, marriage people tend to be happier
because it's like I was talking to my friend John Deloney,
who has a podcast on relationships and where he's doing
a book about marriage, and he asked me, He's like, well,
why did you get married? Like you don't have to,
you know, he's asking all these people this, and I
was like, you know, that's a good question.

Speaker 3 (17:18):
And the way I thought of it was, now, you're
doing the.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
Crossword puzzle in ink, so you got to like, you
know what I mean, Like, you're committed, You're into this thing,
and you're into it for the law.

Speaker 4 (17:30):
Think a lot harder about what your decisions if you're
doing in ink totally.

Speaker 1 (17:33):
One thing you brought up in the book too, is
that so many people think about, well what should I do,
when oftentimes a better question to ask yourself is what
should I not do?

Speaker 3 (17:45):
In different situations? Where did you see that manifest I.

Speaker 4 (17:47):
Mean again, that was like part of general Magic's big
problem was deciding what not to do. But I think
about that all the time in things like our information diet, right,
Like people are overwhelmed.

Speaker 2 (18:00):
There's so many things that seem interesting.

Speaker 4 (18:01):
There's so much information coming at you, and I think
it's a constant question of I'm curious, I want to
learn things about how can I stay sane? And I
mentioned I describe this in one genetics lab in the book,
where they take post it notes and put them on
the wall, and each one representing one of their current

(18:22):
commitments or projects. And the first thing that happens is
once they put them on the wall, so making all
their current commitments visual is they realize there's way more
than they could ever get done already in process. And
so immediately they see it and say, we have to
start moving some of this stuff out or will never
get anything done. And they have like a hopper where
they don't say, we don't have to just throw that
idea out the window. We can put in a holding place,

(18:44):
but it's back burnered, right. And then they implement this
rule where you can't start a new project in the
funnel unless one moves out of the funnel, so it's contained.
So they're making these choices about what not to do,
and some of those things that they decide not to
do maybe good ideas, but doesn't matter because they weren't
going to get to anything if they had all these ideas.

(19:04):
And I kind of took that and did that for
myself because I thought that idea of making all your
current commitments visible was really interesting and I did the
same thing for my own commitments and to immediately realize,
immediately start looking at it and saying, this is a
lot of stuff, and these ones are a lot more
important than those ones, and I like all of these
and if there were ten of me, I'd be happy

(19:26):
to do all of them, but there aren't, and so
it forces you to kind of prioritize. And then I
did the same thing with my information diet, where I
logged all the sources over a month that I turned to,
did the post its on the wall, said which of
these do I feel was worthwhile and kept that in
and then occasionally new sources come in and then I'll
move something else out of the funnel, and it builds up,

(19:48):
you know, so I have to kind of do it regularly.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
So I say this a ton in the wellness space
in the sense that when people go I want to
get healthier, I want to improve my life, they start
immediately adding. They started saying, Okay, I'm going to drink
this protein shake every morning, I'm gonna drink this greens powder,
I'm going to do xyz. But oftentimes, what I've noticed
is that simply figuring out your worst habit and then

(20:11):
subtracting that out usually moves the ball way downfield farther
than would adding all this stuff. It's like, I compare
it to if you're trying to get somewhere and you
have your foot on the brake, hammering the gas is
not going to be an efficient way to do it.
It's much easier to take your foot off the break

(20:33):
and then give a little bit of gas. I feel
like that's just something that people frequently overlook.

Speaker 4 (20:39):
I think, especially like you mentioned in the health and
wellness space, where there's so much content about optimizing this
and that and that, you would you could schedule every
second of your day to optimize if you took all
of this kind of advice that I think can be
so overwhelming that even really well intentioned people do start

(21:00):
and then maybe fall prey to and this is an
actual psychological term, the what the hell effect, where you're
trying to optimize all this stuff, you miss once and
then you're like, what the hell I missed, and you
just throw everything out the window. So I think that's
a danger too, So subtracting and starting with simplicity. I mean,
for me, I wanted to convert myself into a morning
person when I had a kid, and because I was

(21:23):
very much a night all before. And one simple thing
I did is and it's a little embarrassing, but whatever is.
I started going to sleep in running clothes or workout clothes.
And because then I wake up in the morning and
I look in the mirror and I'm like, am I
going to take these off now?

Speaker 2 (21:39):
No? I'm not. I'm going to go work out. And
I've worked out every day.

Speaker 4 (21:42):
In the morning for you know, like two years, and
having us an alarm clock, and so these are really
simple things where you know, it doesn't have to be
some crazy change, just like just like a tiny constraint
that can be helpful. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:55):
I see this a lot in this trend of morning
routines where you see people posting like fifty seven step
morning routine online, And for me, I always ask, what
is the ultimate goal of this routine? So I'll take
myself as an example. My goal is to get up
and start writing because I need to write a book.
What does meditating for ten minutes, yoga for five minutes,

(22:18):
breath work, insert the seventeen other things that you see online,
What the hell does that have to do with words?

Speaker 3 (22:25):
Getting on a page. It's like nothing.

Speaker 1 (22:28):
What gets word words on a page is sitting down
in front of a typewriter and putting words on a page.
So stripping out the things that you can't directly have
a one to one relationship with this bigger goal you're after,
I think becomes important totally.

Speaker 4 (22:42):
I mean, and then it's like it's like doing all
those other things. You can argue that maybe they get
you in the space to then be more productive when
you do that, but it's such a roundabout way, right,
you should first attack the thing that you're thinking about
attacking instead of all this other stuff around it. And
I think it one of the reasons I think some
of the stimization culture is insidious is because it praise
on really good instincts in people of like self improvement,

(23:05):
wanting to be better. But it's like in so many cases,
I think it's just distracting from from the main thing.
Yeah and yeah, and that's that's just like frustrating for
good impulses to be I think sort of preyed upon
in that way.

Speaker 1 (23:23):
Basically totally. So one thing that General Magic did not
have was managers. Now I think the average employee would
hear that and be like, oh my god, I want.

Speaker 3 (23:32):
To work at this place.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
So make a case for why managers are important in
the world where not many people love their manager.

Speaker 4 (23:42):
Yeah, I mean places have tried, you know, like Google
did this whole thing where they tried not to have managers,
and then what they found is, you know, people are
going to Larry Page with their expense reports and stuff,
and it just wasn't going to work. But in the
case of General Magic, people weren't coordinated, right. They weren't
stopping and getting their less together. They were often working
on things that were not the most important thing they

(24:07):
needed to be doing. They were missing things. They would
start new projects all the time, and it was in
deep I mean one of the reasons I wanted to
contrast it to Pixar in the book, where Pixar equally
large vision developing at the exact same time as General
Magic basically. So it's like these parallel parallel visions basically,

(24:29):
and one worked and one didn't. And I spent a
monch of time with Ed Catmoll, who was co founder
of Pixar, and he described to me something he called
the beautifully shaded penny problem at Pixar, which was artists
or directors would get obsessed over the shading on a
penny in the background of a scene that the audience
would never notice. And the way they solved this problem,
he becomes the real high tech fix was with popsicle

(24:52):
sticks on a board, and each popsicle stick represented the
number of the amount of work that one animator could
get done in a week. And if a director wanted
animators to keep working on that penny, he had to
start taking popsicle sticks away from like a main character
that had to get animated, And that solved the problem immediately.
But that was an important thing for managers to come

(25:13):
up with, whereas at General Magic it was so free
flowing that there was sort of no coherence and no
useful boundaries. And I don't think that's That's not a
kind of freedom that's actually helpful for people. You want
freedom within a framework, not this total freedom where nobody
really knows what they should be doing.

Speaker 1 (25:31):
I feel like I needed to hear that, because when
I'm writing a book, I will spend an hour on
a sentence.

Speaker 3 (25:38):
I don't know if you are the same way. What
they like, is this the way to do it? Is
this way?

Speaker 1 (25:42):
Is this the right wording, and you're like, it's one
sentence among like three hundred thousand or whatever. The number is, right, yeah,
And so you just get obsessed with like these micro
details when it's like pulling back is going to allow
you to be way more efficient.

Speaker 4 (25:56):
I mean, I one hundred percent need deadlines. When I
I mean first two books I turned in end of
the day on the day they were due, which for
something that you're looking two years ahead to, or my
first book three years I had, it's not that easy
to do. And this time around, when I signed the
contract and my agent said, you know, and always when

(26:17):
I sign the contract, I'm like, oh God, will I
be able to It's hard to plan to finish something
two three years later totally and be on time, and
especially when you don't know what you're gonna find yet.
And my agent was like, you know, the deadlines of
course in books are flexible. You don't have to treat
it as real. I'm like, do not tell me that
ever again, Like we have to treat this thing as
totally real. Like Duke Ellington said, I don't need time,

(26:40):
what I need is a deadline totally.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Another thing that I thought was interesting about Pixar is.
They seem to work in these tight teams, and when
they would do screenings of the films, it's not like
everyone in the building could walk in and provide feedback.
And they famously they wouldn't let Steve Jobs watch the
film all right, because his opinion would be weighted too heavily.

(27:03):
How did you think about this when you were writing
the book? Did you have anyone beyond your editor read it?
And how did you think about who are you going
to let see this? And how did that influence you?

Speaker 4 (27:13):
Yeah, I should say in the past I have not
been as good as I should be in giving people stuff.
Adam Grant, psychologist, has actually given me some very healthy
criticism on that. He said, you got to show your
work to more people while you're doing it. And so
this time around I showed it more than I ever
had in the past, which included my editor. In the past,
I didn't even show it to my editor while I

(27:34):
was working on it. I just showed up with a book.
This time I showed her stuff while I was going.
I showed my agent, who's a great reader. I showed
my wife tons of stuff. So that's not a ton
of people, but I went from zero to several people,
this time showing them in the middle, and I think
that was really helpful, and also talking my ideas off
of my editor a lot earlier to see if I

(27:56):
could articulate them reasonably. So that was more of the
process this time around, where before I would show the
manuscript in this case sometimes I was showing sections or chapters,
much smaller pieces.

Speaker 1 (28:07):
I think there is a point too, where when you
show it to too many people, the feedback becomes chaotic
because everyone's going to have an opinion, and if you
wait every opinion equally, you just start adding more stuff
or there'll be disagreements. When I was at Men's Health,
we would do these things called wallwalks. Okay, so the

(28:31):
cover lines in the headlines were very important at Men's Health,
or so we thought, and we would put the magazine
up on the wall with all the headlines and the
cover lines, and there would be like twenty five of
us who would sit around staring at these headlines and
cover lines, and someone would throw out an idea, you know,
a bunch of people would shoot it down. Someone would
throw out another idea, a bunch of people would shoot

(28:51):
it down. Third idea. You might have twenty three people go,
oh my god, that's it, that's fantastic, and then you'd
have one person go.

Speaker 3 (29:01):
I don't know about that one. I'm not sure if
it's great.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
So then we'd keep iterating and we would literally spend
like four hours on a single headline in this magazine,
and it was maddening. So there becomes this thing where
I think people overvalue a negative opinion even when the
vast majority of opinions are good, and there's always going
to be someone with a negative opinion that's interesting.

Speaker 2 (29:24):
I mean, that's like.

Speaker 4 (29:27):
I sort of made a mistake like that in this
case with this book, just with the title and subtitle,
where for the first time I asked for input in
the past was just just did it, and this time
asked a number of authors that I admire for input,
and that was probably a mistake because there was no
agreement whatsoever. Everyone had some different take, and that put
me in the space of now ignoring, you know, nine

(29:48):
out of the ten people's input, basically, But I was
on this email list of authors mostly who were not
like me, but mostly business authors, and I would feel
like an alien when they would talk about their process
where it was.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
Like, I have you ever heard that thing about?

Speaker 4 (30:04):
So the contrast with Google and Apples like Google will
ab test forty shades of blue and Apple will be like,
this is our vibe, this is what we're doing. And
both of those obviously worked for them, but I was
much more the Apple style, where these writers were much
more the Google style. They would have a Google doc
with kind of a focus group in real time reading
it and saying, you know, this is what I want

(30:25):
to and maybe I should be doing that, but I
don't want to because I a lot of the processes
for me and what I'm learning and the craftsmanship of
it that I enjoy. But also, to be honest, I
felt like it kind of homogenized their writing when you're
going for that sort of consensus in that group, and

(30:49):
so maybe it decreased the risk, you know, maybe it
kind of raised the floor of their writing, but I
think it lowered the ceiling for sure, because it's sort
of less unique.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
People wouldn't take as many swings, the swings that could
have been really interesting. Maybe there were misses, who knows,
but some of the things that really make something stand
out and be interesting probably got stripped.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
Away you have to risk missing.

Speaker 4 (31:11):
I mean this is like, you know, all this research
that shows that innovators are like the successful ones have
more successes, but they have more failures than the than
their peers do.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Also totally you read about this idea thinks slow work fast.
Tell us about that.

Speaker 4 (31:28):
Yeah, that's a phrase from a Danish professor at Oxford
named Bent flu beer awesomely fantastic.

Speaker 2 (31:37):
Yeah, I know, I know.

Speaker 4 (31:38):
Obviously had to make sure I could pronounce that one.
And yeah, because if anybody's trying to google him, it
looks like it's spelled Flipberg. Yeah. And what he he
kept h he studied big projects for his whole career
and over decades he kept a database of projects big projects.
This could be anything from infrastructure to digital transformations, whatever.

(32:03):
And he had sixteen thousand. He led a lot of
projects himself too. He had sixteen thousand projects by the
or he worked on them, I shouldn't say lead, he
worked on them. He had sixteen thousand projects in his
database by the end. And what he found was it
only eight and a half percent of them came in
on time and on budget, and only zero point five

(32:23):
percent came in on time and on budget and delivered
what they had promised. And the typical pattern he found
was what he called think fast, act slow, where someone
has an idea and they kind of rushed it into
implementation before they put boundaries around and really figure out
what the priorities are and what they're doing, and so
things expand quickly. And then that fast thinking translates to

(32:45):
work slow because things get big quickly, and then it's
very hard to pivot and you start learning lessons more painfully.
The opposite, what he said was the ideal kind of
planning was think slow, act fast, where you keep a
team small. At the beginning, you define the boundary, what
are we not doing, what is the focus? And then
when you do move into execution, you're able to work

(33:07):
much faster because you're not getting surprised by as many things.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
The work boundaries are much more clear.

Speaker 4 (33:12):
And again one of the reasons I picked Pixar in
the book is because Ben Flubier identified Pixar as like
the apotheosis of good planning, where they would keep He
actually calls it Pixar planning.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
A director could stay.

Speaker 4 (33:25):
For years with a small team in story development, refining
the core of a story cutting away characters, right like
they cut away the character for Schadenfreud in the first
Inside Out because they didn't they felt like it was
getting too many characters, getting too complicated, and that might
seem inefficient to stay in a small team for years
while you're refining the story, but the costs only explode

(33:47):
once you move into production and bring in this much
bigger team, and so it actually, in the long run
turns out to be much more efficient. And so that
kind of thinks slow act fast, where they've spent all
that time defining the boundaries allows them to work fast
once they get into it. And I found that to
be very true for me, where I didn't write a
single word of my book for a year. Yeah, I

(34:07):
just planned the architecture and did the research, and then
it allowed me to write more quickly than I ever
had once I moved into execution.

Speaker 1 (34:14):
How do you think people can use that sort of
in the trenches of day to day life making decisions.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (34:19):
I think whatever it is they're doing, let's say, if
it's a work project or some kind of behavior change
that you're trying to engender, is I think we've talked
about optimization a little bit and the motivation is you
see something cool, I'm going to do this tomorrow. I
think it would actually make more sense to sit down
and say, what is the goal that this is serving?

(34:43):
What are the blocks between me and doing this thing?
Where am I going to draw the line for now?
Like implement in a small way. What's the first small experiment,
a low stakes experiment that I can run instead of
moving straight into big implementation. And so just spend a
little time figuring out what.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
Are the blocks?

Speaker 4 (34:58):
What's the smallest possible way that you can prototype this
thing before you move into this bigger execution. Because the
quicker you move into making something big, the more likely
you're going to learn harder lessons, and the more likely
I think you fall prey to that what the hell
effect where it doesn't really work well and then you
just throw the throw the baby out with the bathwater,
so to speak.

Speaker 1 (35:18):
The companies that you highlighted that are doings that were successful,
they all solve the problem. Yes that in the wellness
sphere that really made me think about you know, with
my sub stack, I'll get all these questions from readers
that are like should I take this supplement? Should I
do this exercise should I do X Y Z? Insert
any number of examples, and the question I usually come
back with, after much trial and error trying to give people,

(35:41):
you know, well, here's this tart like complicated answer. I
usually now just respond with what problem are you trying
to solve? And oftentimes are like, I don't know. I
heard about this on a you know, online or on
a podcast, and I thought it sounded interesting, but I
actually don't know what the problem that will solve for
me is, you know. And so you get them to
like pull back, and it's like, all right, if there's

(36:03):
not a problem that this thing is solving, it sounds
like it might just be extra work, extra noise, and
not have that big of a return for you.

Speaker 4 (36:11):
Defining the problem you want to solve, whether it's an
individual or an organization, incredibly powerful and defining it like
spending some time again to that think slow and thinking
about what are you trying to do. There's this famous
saying people don't want a quarter inch drill, they want
a quarter inch hole in their wall. Right, So if
you're thinking about serving the person, what is the actual
thing that they that they want? Does that mean they

(36:33):
need a carpenter? Does it mean they need a drill
or something else.

Speaker 1 (36:35):
All right, here's where I want to mildly push back.
And the reason I'm doing this is there could be
people who are listening to this thinking you're saying constraints
are good. I need more constraints in my life. But
they might also be thinking my life is already constrained enough.
I have bills, I have a manager who is complaining
at me all the time. I have kids, I have dogs,
I have all these different commitments and constraints. So what

(36:57):
argument would you make to them about why constraints are good.

Speaker 4 (37:01):
I mean, for one thing, it'd be crazy to say
the constraints can't be bad. Right, even in creativity, which
we've talked about, if a constraint, if you're telling someone
what they have to do and how they have to
do it, like if they if under this constraint they
there's no way for them to surprise you or themself,
then that's bad. It's gone too far. As far as bills,

(37:24):
you know, nobody likes bills, but jobs and kids and
dogs and obligations actually turn out to be really important
for people's sense of well being, so you may bristle
under them.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
Sometimes because they're inconvenient.

Speaker 4 (37:36):
But I think it's also pretty clear that a dense
network of obligation is actually a lot of what brings
meaning to people's lives. And so the founder Emil Durkheim,
founder of modern sociology, basically he did this famous study
on suicide when government started first keeping track of statistics,
and he found things intuitive, things like that suicide rates

(38:01):
would increase when economic fortunes of a country plummeted, but
he found they would also increase when the economic fortunes
of a country skyrocketed. Because anything that unmoored people from
these kinds of obligations what he called he called anime,
which means rulelessness. If people were sort of stripped of
these normal structures and rules that they lived under, they
would struggle with finding meaning in life. That's not to

(38:23):
say that every constraint is good, but I think the
idea that we just need more freedom then will be happier.
It actually usually looks like the opposite, that people with
more constraints are happier with married, with kids, with community obligations,
with regular rituals, and you know, for some people religion,
going to a job is inconvenient sinking up your schedule

(38:45):
with someone else to spend time with them is inconvenient.
Kids are incredibly inconvenient all the time. But these things
also add meaning to our life. So I think it's
it's tricky because it feels like more freedom should always
be attractive. In fact, I went to some years ago
this writer's retreat where we were all asked, the only
one I've ever been to where we're all asked, what

(39:05):
are you optimizing for this year? And I said autonomy
because after my last book, I became just a writer
for you know, full time. I left like having a
normal daily job, and I thought I just wanted to
spend every minute in the way that I determined. And
fast forward two years and I learned there's such a
thing as too much autonomy. Where I was like living
in an individualized world for one. And so to reel

(39:28):
that back, I joined the board of a nonprofit in
my community. I started going to like dance meetups with
strangers and just started inconveniencing myself a lot more in
order to add meaning back to my life.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
That's cool.

Speaker 1 (39:41):
It makes me wonder what you think about retirement. I
feel like when you see data on retirement and well being.
At first, people are like, oh, this is great, I
can do anything, and then there's kind of like a
drop off where they go, I don't know about this totally.

Speaker 4 (39:55):
And there's also all this research that people, you know,
when they retire, all these rates of dementia and things
like this are not as cognitively engaged anymore go up.
And I think, I'm not planning on never retiring good,
but I think if someone's going to retire, like find take.

Speaker 3 (40:13):
That vacation, but replace it with something, replace.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
It with something that's right.

Speaker 4 (40:18):
There's this I cite this research in the book from
Sweden where they look at antidepressants being dispensed throughout the country,
and one of the things they find is that when
more people in the country are on vacation at once,
antidepressant dispensing goes way down. But it's true among retirees too,

(40:41):
who it didn't matter like they were already on vacation essentially.
But the fact is it's when lots of people are
doing it at the same time. It's like social control
of time that has a well being benefit for everyone,
Whereas the opposite was in the Soviet Union when they
tried to in order to keep factories running all the time,
individualize everyone's work routine so that people in the same

(41:02):
family are on the same block. It wasn't like five
days of work and two day weekend. They did all
these different four days of work, one day weekend cycles
that were different for everybody, and it desynchronized everyone's schedule
and it.

Speaker 2 (41:14):
Was a social disaster.

Speaker 4 (41:16):
Interesting, that's often what we're doing to ourselves, I think,
right Like, I remember when Mark Zuckerberg first advertised the metaverse,
and he was like, it's gonna be amazing. Everyone's going
to live in their own universe, tailored just for them.
I'm like, that actually sounds like hell yeah, that sounds terrible.
Just me, myself and whatever is in this device streaming
into my brain at all times. I spent too much

(41:38):
of my time in my head already. So you had
a great section about health research. So the case study
here is National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. So before
about year two thousand, projects are getting a ton of
funding and they're similarly finding these fantastic results for health.
All these great drugs, all these good things are happening.

(42:00):
And then after two thousand, all of a sudden that
drops off the finding stop. Now, that might seem like
a bad thing, but in the book you argue, no,
this is actually a good thing. So walk us through
that and what it tells us about health research. Yeah,
I'm glad you asked me about this, because I don't
think many people are going to ask me about this
part of the book because it's a little complicated. But

(42:23):
as you said, it was all these major where there's
drugs supplements. Before two thousand, most of the results were
positive that were funded in these studies, and then starting
in two thousand, they're almost all negative. Supplements aren't working,
they're not out performing placebo anyway, drugs aren't working. And
so it looked like all of a sudden, medicine stopped
working in the year two thousand, like millennium bug. What

(42:45):
really happened was that researchers started facing more constraints in
their work, so they were forced to do what's called
preregistration starting in two thousand for these big supplement and
drug studies. Preregistration means you have to say what you're
act actually testing, What do you think this drug or
supplement is going to do? How are you going to
measure that, How are you going to analyze the data.

(43:07):
And that's counterintuitively, that's what caused positive effects to stop
popping up, because what had been happening was researchers would
make a hypothesis. They'd guess how some drug or supplement
was going to improve health. They would analyze the data
and they would see their prediction was not right. But
they had all this data, so then they would start

(43:28):
looking through the data for some other correlation, right, thinking well, okay,
maybe it didn't drop blood pressure, but maybe.

Speaker 2 (43:35):
It improves cholesterol. Oh what do you know?

Speaker 4 (43:36):
Oh, so then they published as if that's what they
were looking for in the first place, and this was
not nefarious. People were not doing this thinking it was bad.
I did this as a science gratitude, not realizing the problem.
The problem essentially is that when you're doing this thing,
which is called HARKing hypothesizing after the results are known,
it's like being The analogy is like a sharpshooter who

(43:57):
fires randomly at a wall and then draws a bullet,
finds a clump of bullet holes and draws a bulls
eye around them, and somebody who walks up says, wow,
what a great shooter, Not oh, there was a clump
because of random statistical variation. And so when researchers were
retroactively going through their data, and if you have a
lot of data, you're always going to find a bunch
of false positives just by chance alone. So it was

(44:19):
this preregistration forcing someone to stick to the initial prediction
that showed that most of these drugs and supplements weren't
working and in fact, most of the prior positive results,
many of which are drugs that are still out there.
What's an example, There's like a bunch of blood pressure
medications that were out there. There's one one very famous

(44:39):
one called a tenolol. That's very famous drug out there.
And one of the interesting things about a tennolol was
it was viewed as a breakthrough because it it does
lower blood pressure numbers, but people die from heart attack
and stroke at the exact same rate just with lower
blood pressure numbers. So you know, it can look good
but doesn't actually have an useful effect. And so anyway,

(45:02):
so it was these these greater constraints in how scientists
were operating that led them to start drawing more true conclusions.
The downside is because this is a newer era of research,
like nutrition research is just an absolute mess. So it's
this famous study that people refer to, scientists refer to
as the Everything in your Fridge Causes and Prevents Cancer study,

(45:23):
because it it looked at all the different studies on
a bunch of different foods and found that basically everything
had been found both to cause and prevent cancer except
for bacon's cause cancer.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
Unfortunately. Yes, yeah, indeed.

Speaker 4 (45:37):
And the problem was these studies just are not I mean,
nutrition is hard to study anyway for variety of reasons.
But the studies were just not well controlled. And so
the good the good news is there's a lot more preregistration.
Now the bad news is, I think this caused some
understandable mistrust from some of the scientific community where results

(45:59):
were not holding up. Well, the good thing is it
was scientists themselves who identified these problems and it led
to a now a better system.

Speaker 1 (46:08):
Yeah that makes sense. And you use the example of
Brian Wantson. Yeah, I remember before this became a big deal.
So he was using those methods where he kind of
sort of set up these studies and then he just
combed through the data and be like, well, what can
I find that was positive? But most of it's just
going to be, like you said, by chance, you're going
to have something positive. When I was at Men's Health,

(46:29):
that dude was like, our are all star because this
is a health magazine with like little tidbits, and you'd
have things like if you use a smaller plate, you
will eat less, like all these little things.

Speaker 3 (46:39):
And then and then it all entirely blew up totally.

Speaker 4 (46:42):
And it wasn't It wasn't just health magazines by any stretch.
I mean, his work was called, you know, masterpiece in
a book by a Nobel Prize winner, like he was
informing nutrition guidelines for Americans. He to me, clearly was
not intentionally misrepresenting everything, because the problem developed for him
when he wrote a blog post about his research methods

(47:05):
and another scientist was like, you can't do that, because
all your results are just going to be from a
statistical chance alone. And we see this all the time
in the world around us, right. Like the example I
use in the book is if you're watching an NFL
game and you hear the announcer say, you know, the
Chiefs are undefeated, when Taylor Swift is in the audience
and they're playing in division rival on the road. You
can be sure that they first looked for are the

(47:25):
Chiefs undefeated when Taylor Swift is in the audience, didn't
find that, and then started adding more and more qualifications,
And every time you do that, it's more.

Speaker 2 (47:33):
Likely that you find a false positive.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
Basically, Yeah, I think sports is a great example because
there's so many times where you know, if it's like
the Masters, it's oh, well, this guy tends to score
less when there's this due point in the air and xyz,
and it's like you just had an intern look at
all this random stuff and give us some piece of information. Now,
that is an example where it's kind of just this fun,

(47:55):
stupid stuff we watch. But I will say when I
listened to sports podcast, yes I hear people using this
information as a reason to make a bet, right because
a lot of podcasts are sponsored by betting companies, And
so it becomes like, oh, well, the Chief Taylor Swiss
in the audience, she's going to be at the game.
They never lose when Taylor's there, so you got to

(48:16):
push those chips across the table.

Speaker 3 (48:17):
And in that case, I'm like, ooh, I don't know
about that.

Speaker 4 (48:20):
No, And in fat absolutely and I think also sometimes
on financial TV when I'll catch that if I'm in
a gym or something, there will be something very very
similar with someone who's brought on because of certain predictions
they're making, and they'll start describing how they come to
those predictions. And I don't know for sure, but you

(48:40):
can tell when somebody starts adding different caveats to the category,
like when the housing market does this, and these other
three things happen, three things happen, here's here's you know
what we see in the market. You can be almost
positive that they were slicing and dicing data in a
way that ensures that this was that this was a
false positive totally.

Speaker 1 (48:58):
Your first book, Sports gam that was twenty thirteen. Twenty thirteen, Yeah,
what led you to write that? A few things?

Speaker 4 (49:06):
So one, I mean, I guess the little secret of
that book is that it was very much questions I
had about things that I had seen in sports, either
as a spectator or I was an eight hundred meter
runner in college, or as a competitor. So things like
as a runner in my high school, we had lots
of Jamaican guys and we had an incredible track team,

(49:28):
and you know, it's like a country of two to
three million people, like what's going on over there? And
then in college I was running against some Kenyan guys
and realizing they were all from one tiny tribe called
the Kallengin. And then just seeing things like why, you know,
watching an exhibition softball game with Major League baseball players
and realizing none of the best baseball hitters in.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
The world could hit.

Speaker 4 (49:49):
A good softball pitcher and just wondering what's going on
with this, and so just just wanting to examine those things.

Speaker 2 (49:55):
And then there was also.

Speaker 4 (49:58):
Sort of disclaimer, sad part to the story, but this
is kind of what led to my writing career in
many ways. Was so I was a national level eight
hundred meter runner and I had a training partner who
died at the end of a race, Oh Jesus, from
a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or HCM, almost usually the
cause of a young athlete with no obvious prior symptoms
dropping dead. And I had his family sign a way

(50:23):
for allowing me to gather up his medical records and
kind of investigated what had happened, and he had this
disease had been misdiagnosed. He had a you know, it's
caused by a single genetic mutation, and I thought there
were some lives that could be saved with certain types
of awareness. And so this is what led me to
leave my track of training to be a scientist and
try to become the science writer at Sports Illustrated to
write about sudden cardiac death and athletes. And that's what
got me interested in genetics in the first place.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
Yeah, what were the big takeaways from that book for
the average person?

Speaker 4 (50:47):
I think some things that I thought were totally innate,
like the reflexes they hit a major league fastball, are not.
They're completely learned. And other things like the will to
do a lot of physical activity actually has like a
really strong innate component. But maybe the biggest takeaway, so

(51:08):
the American College of Sports Medicine has this phrase, I
don't know if they still have it, but exercises medicine.
And just like we've learned from medical genetics that no
two people respond to a medication the same way because
of differences in their genetics, no two people will respond
to a specific training exactly the same way. And so
I think it's worth spending some time kind of experimenting
with different training modalities because you know, you may have

(51:30):
the same diet as someone else and it may not
work as well for you, and so it may be
worth it to be a little bit of a scientist
of yourself and see if you can fit your your
health routines to your physiology or improve a little bit
over time with some experimentation.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
Yeah, and I feel like a lot of people kind
of understand this at a basic level. Though I'm a
better runner than I am a lifter. Like to take
my example, I go, you know, I was at mentalit,
so I had to do all this lifting. There was
no amount of training I could do that would allow
me to be super strong and like a big sense
like that. But running, I'm like, I'm pretty good at

(52:07):
that outdoor stuff like I can just hike on a
trail for days and I'm fine where some people are
just never going to be able to do that.

Speaker 3 (52:12):
And so I think leaning into that.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
But also I think one of the keys with exercise
in particular is you got to find something you actually
enjoy and if it aligns with what you're good.

Speaker 3 (52:20):
At, bonus points.

Speaker 1 (52:22):
So how did your second book Range come out of
the sports gene and quickly tell us about range too.

Speaker 4 (52:28):
So in the Sports Gene, I criticized the research underlying
the ten thousand hours rule that Malcolm Gladwell had made
famous because the research was poorly done, and that brought
me into a public debate with glad Will the first
time we met.

Speaker 3 (52:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:41):
In the ten thousand hour rule is that you need
to practice something for ten thousand hours to be an expert.

Speaker 4 (52:46):
Yeah, basically, And the implication is you should specialize as
narrowly and early as humanly possible. And that brought us
into this debate that's on YouTube at the MIT Sloane
Sports Analytics Conference, and I put up some of the
data showing that most future lead athletes, because we were
talking about athletic development at that debate, actually had a
sampling period early where they did a variety of things.

(53:09):
They learned these broad general skills that scaffold later technical skills,
They learned about their interest and abilities and delay picking
one activity. And when we were coming off the stage,
he said, you got me on that that doesn't fit
with things that I've thought and written. Why don't we
And he had been a national level runner two, so
he said, why don't we run together? Tomorrow back in
New York and we'll talk about it. And then we
started talking about what we called the Roger Versus Tiger

(53:32):
problem because Tiger Woods early specialization, Roger Fetter delayed specialization,
and pretty soon we leaped out of sports and started
jumping about in other area. So I was like doing
research weekly for my runs with Gladwell, and that became
the book Range about the benefits of breadth in an
increasingly specialized world. And the introduction is called Roger Versus Tiger,

(53:52):
which was exactly what we would call our arguments what
we were running together.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
So your book Range, especially with this idea that specialization
is not always required for growth and improving in the
long term. In fact, it's nice to have some range.
I feel like that's a huge one for parents with
kids in sports. It's like I remember when I was
at mental health. I would do a lot of I
would use as a source this guy Eric Kressy, who

(54:18):
was a baseball trainer basically, and he would work with
like the Red Sox, all these pros. But he had
all these people in that he was up in Boston.
He'd have all you know, Red Sox are huge up there,
all the kids to play baseball. All these parents sending
their eight year olds, nine year olds to him and
being like, you need to make this kid a professional
athlete immediately. And he would just be like, you should
maybe have him go do some other stuff, to play

(54:40):
different sports.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
So what did you find with that? Yeah, I mean
that's funny.

Speaker 4 (54:44):
You mentioned that reminds you of this guy, Ian Yates,
who was a British guy who developed olympians for various sports.
And he told me one of the problems became so
he mentioned Bradley Wiggins is famous British cyclist, and he
would say, I have parents coming to me now saying
I want my twelve year old doing what Bradley Wiggins
is doing now, not what Bradley Wiggins was doing when
he was twelve, which was completely different. And the fact

(55:07):
is the research shows that the best the most typical path.
There are a lot of different paths, of course, but
the most typical path becoming an elite athlete is with
a sampling period, early variety of activities, broad general skills.
Now some people call physical literacy those general skills.

Speaker 1 (55:24):
So you're playing you're not just playing baseball, You're also
like I'm going to be on the basketball team, I'm
going to run some truck, I'm going to do a
bunch of stuff.

Speaker 4 (55:31):
Or at least diversifying your movement. So I don't know
that it matters that you put on a basketball jersey,
but I think there's a reason why the large, large
majority of the top soccer players in the world grew
up playing futsal, which has a small ball that stays
on the ground and they play on a cobblestones one
day and sand the next day. It's like soccer in
a phone booth. It's like much more diversity of problem

(55:54):
solving and movement, and I think that's really important. I
do think playing multiple actual different sports is really helpful.
So there was actually just a paper that came out
in Science, you know, one of the probably two most
prestigious journals in the world, scientific journals, that looked at
thirty thousand performers in sports, science, music, and they found

(56:15):
this trend in all of those things where the predictors
of top youth performance were negative predictors of elite adult performance.
So that happened in sports, it happened for when they
looked at scientists who won the Nobel They actually progressed
more slowly earlier in their careers because they're more interdisciplinary
early on, and they get like a penalty for it

(56:35):
early on.

Speaker 1 (56:36):
Yeah, and I feel like this applies to just general
experiences that you've had in life make you more adaptable
and able to take on new things. I'll give you
a good example, dude, sitting right there, my producer Robbie.
Did you graduate high school? Yeah, he graduated high school,
didn't go to college. But in high school he starts

(56:58):
touring around with a punk band. Then he gets into producing,
correct me if I'm wrong, just yelled out producing trap
music in Atlanta. This leads into LA where he works
with all these different artists in the music industry. Then
he starts working on like the Rock Project, does some
stuff for Open AI And so as I'm looking for

(57:18):
someone to help me with this podcast, I start getting
in resumes and I'm like, there's gonna be an audio component.
There's also gonna be a heavy video component. Robbie's resume
comes in, there's all this weird stuff. He's clearly got
audio but no video. And then I'm looking at other
resumes where it's just like the perfect St're like this
perfect pipeline of exactly what I need, and so I

(57:41):
jump on the phone with a few people. But I
talked to Robbie and he's like, yeah, I used to
produce trap in Atlanta, and you know, these guys were
rolling with guns and stuff, and I'm having to produce
at two am, just all these crazy experience. I also
work on open AI, and I'm just like, this seems
like a person who can just figure out stuff, and
at the end of the day, that's probably what I'm
going to value and need more than like, here's the

(58:03):
button I push. I know exactly what button to push,
but don't ask me too much else. I'm like this, dude,
I feel like I can probably just like give them
stuff and he'll figure it out. And that has absolutely
been the case.

Speaker 4 (58:13):
But that's like evidence of someone who can learn, who
can pivot, which basically everybody has to do now. Right,
Like the period of history where you had a discrete
period of training followed by living off of that for
the rest of your career is over for most people,
if not everyone. And you reminded me of when LinkedIn
shared with me some data when I was reporting range
that they did this analysis of a half million members.

(58:35):
They found the best predictor of someone who would rise
high in their field was the number of different job
functions someone had worked in. And I told them, I
argued to them that, well, I think your guys product
actually maybe discourages people from doing that because they want
this very linear LinkedIn right, and you should maybe add
more space for a narrative or something. They said, you know,

(58:56):
we think we're doing fine, right, because their business is
doing fine, So fine for them, but it obviously took
you thinking a little differently. Is there anything that Robbie
said kind of that that made you I mean, because
at some point you must have been a you know,
is he going to be able to do this job?
Was there anything in particular that he did that might
be useful for other people to hear in the interview
with you or or in his resume or application that

(59:19):
they kind of got you over that hump of saying
this is a risk worth taking.

Speaker 1 (59:27):
Well, I think it was the breadth of experiences someone
who can so in my books, I'll go into kinetic places.
You know, I've meant to iract or report scarcity brand
into the Bolivian jungle, and I found in my own
self like the ability to just like remain calm, learn
from that, but be adaptable has seemed to transfer over

(59:47):
to other things in my life. So when I hear
about him in these you know, trap recording sessions where
drugs are being dealt, guns are being shown, but he's
like able to manage that, I'm like, Okay, well he
can probably manage me because I'm not armed and tell
me what I need to do right. But also there
I would say honesty about it. He's like, look, I

(01:00:08):
don't know. I've never done video. I did work on
the Grock project, so I think I can figure video out,
but I'll tell you I haven't done anything yet. But
at the same time, I'm confident I can figure it out.
And so I think there was like the honesty there too,
And I would say the other people that I talked
to were just less interesting and it was like very

(01:00:29):
clear what I was going to get. But I felt
like if there was other opportunities that might pop up
that I could need help with, those people were going
to be like, well, I don't do that. I do
YouTube videos, you know.

Speaker 4 (01:00:40):
In Range, I talked about this research from a woman
named Abby Griffin who studies serial innovators, and she said
one of the challenges is they often look like kind
of a square peg in a round hole because they're
very broad and they want to learn outside their domain,
and so it can be like a little confusing to
an HR person. It's like is this person really the fit?
And so they may get selected out and so they

(01:01:03):
often sort of move between organizations to get that breadth
that they they need to be powerful because they just don't.
They're just like not out of central casting for whatever
that job is. Yeah, how did range make you think about?

Speaker 3 (01:01:15):
Reporting?

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
That book make you think about wellness and how people
approach well being.

Speaker 4 (01:01:19):
I think people feel like they have to specialize. In
many cases, they're not often doing it because they want to,
Like people are curious and would like to have more
variety in their life if they didn't feel like they'd
be penalized for it. And so I think there's some
ways that we can do things that relate to that,
like having a hobby unrelated to your work. So there's
studies showing that if you have a hobby that's unrelated

(01:01:42):
to your work or loosely related, it improves your your
self efficacy, your feeling of ability, to take on challenges,
whereas if the hobby is too closely related to what
you already do it work, it actually decreases self efficacy.

Speaker 3 (01:01:56):
Final question.

Speaker 1 (01:01:57):
We oftentimes will ask people about the best book they've
read recently, but I recently tapped you for that for
my substock posts, which I read a.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
Lot, though, so you know I can always add others.

Speaker 1 (01:02:09):
Here's what I'll ask you, Okay, because I thought you
might have an interesting answer for this one. You could
spend an entire day with someone living or dead. They
have to be somewhat of a celebrity, so you can't say,
you know, extra relative to pass away or whatever.

Speaker 4 (01:02:25):
Who would it be when you say somewhat of a celebrity?
Can I pick a writer that I think, like a
lot of literature people would have heard of. But okay, okay,
and I mentioned him and inside the box. So the
writer Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine writer I think is like
one of the most creative minds that ever lived, and
most of his story he only wrote short stories, and
they're all like metaphysical thought experiments basically, and he was

(01:02:48):
keeping up with the math and science of his day
and would play out like sort of what it meant.
So one of his famous stories, called the Library of Babel,
is about and most of his pages, most of his
books are between like sorry, his short stories are between
like four and eight or ten pages, and that one
is the narrator is in a universe that is basically

(01:03:09):
a library of repeating hexagonal rooms that have all identical
shelves with books on them, and the books all use
the normal alphabet and appear to just have random orderings.
But every once in a while people come across a
word or a phrase, or a sentence even and the
question is is that order random or not? So it's

(01:03:30):
almost like a parable of living in a universe where
you see signs of order in design, but you don't
know if they're random or not. So it's really his
stories make me think about certain human circumstances in a
way that nothing else, even knowing these aspects of science
and reading new scientists every week that nothing else has
gotten me to inhabit some of those ideas the way

(01:03:51):
that he does. And the more I read him, the
more I realize his ideas pop up in things that
I see all the time, Like if you've ever heard
that express the map so detailed it became the world.
It's like, I think it's interesting for writers because we
have to simplify the ideas we're talking about to be useful.
And that comes from a one page short story he
wrote about a cartography department at a university that gets

(01:04:13):
obsessed with making more and more detailed maps until they
make a map that exactly recreates the territory that they're
trying to show and becomes totally useless. And like he
shows up in interviews Christopher Nolan if you liked Inception
Christopher Nole, it was based on two Borges's stories, The
Secret Miracle and the Circular Ruins, and just like just
such an interesting thinker, and if you read his nonfiction,

(01:04:36):
he was really ahead on sort of calling out European
fascism before it burst into the public. And it's just
I think one of the smartest people who ever lived,
who seem to be just a kind, generous, fascinating soul.
And I feel like I've been in conversation with him
through his work and would just love to be able
to actually spend a little time with him.

Speaker 3 (01:04:54):
I love it so fantastic was a.

Speaker 4 (01:04:56):
Very long answer. You just wanted like me to say
that sorry was not good at Lightning Round.

Speaker 1 (01:05:00):
That was a great answer because I definitely believe that
you would like to meet that guy, and I wasn't
even really that familiar with them, so I'm going to
do some research. David, thanks for coming on the show.
The book is inside the box. The other two are
Range and the Sports Genes. You also have a sub stack,
so everyone check that out. Thanks for coming on to
chat Man. That was fantastic. It's a total pleasure.

Speaker 4 (01:05:22):
I mean, you've been a fan of your work from far,
so it's kind of a treat to get to connect
in real time.

Speaker 1 (01:05:26):
Likewise, thanks for checking out the show. Keep an eye
out for more episodes. We will be dropping two a week,
and if you have any questions for me for our
AMA section, please either drop them in the comments on
YouTube or email them. Please send a video or an
audio question. That's what we would really love. If you
want to type it, we're good with that, but we

(01:05:47):
would love to hear your voice or see your face
asking that question. We will do our best to answer
as many questions as possible. Do not forget to hit subscribe,
and it's always have fun, don't die