Thinking Inside the Box (with David Epstein)

May 11 2026

What do the inventor of the periodic table, the novelist Isabel Allende, and the almost-creators of the iPhone have in common? Join author David Epstein and EconTalk's Russ Roberts to explore a counterintuitive idea: that boundaries, and not unlimited freedom, often make us more creative, productive, and fulfilled.

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Time	Podcast Episode Highlights
0:37	Intro. [Recording date: April 16, 2026.] Russ Roberts: Today is April 16th, 2026. And before introducing today's guest, I want to correct two errors from recent episodes. The name of the founder of NVIDIA is pronounced Jensen Huang. And, I misquoted the line from the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and evidently I've done that before. The poem's title is "As Kingfishers Catch Fire." The correct line is, "What I do is me: for that I came." Now on to today's guest, author David Epstein. This is David's third appearance on EconTalk. He was last on the program in May of 2019 discussing his book, Range. Our topic for today is his latest book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. David, welcome back to EconTalk. David Epstein: It's wonderful to be back.
1:24	Russ Roberts: What's the idea of Inside the Box and the power of constraints? David Epstein: I think the main idea is that it's never been easier to do too much in our work lives, in our personal lives, and that we often overvalue complete freedom--a problem that is a newer problem in human history--and undervalue the ability of smart boundaries to make us more creative, to make us more productive, and to make us more satisfied in our lives, more meaningful. Russ Roberts: Now, there's an extraordinary story that runs through the entire book. There are a number of great stories in the book, which we'll get to some of them. But, one of them is about the discovery of the Periodic Table. And, you start off with a story that I actually hadn't heard, which is a bit of a myth. Give us the mythical version of how Mendeleev, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly [Russ mispronounces it Men-del'-e-ev, but it's Men-del-e'-ev--Econlib Ed.], how did he discover, according to myth, the Periodic Table? David Epstein: Yeah, Mendeleev. So, Siberian genius--it's a tough one. In the winter of 1869, supposedly he has this feeling that there's an order to the elements, to all of the chemical building blocks of the universe. But he can't find it. And he stays up for three days, where he doesn't sleep. And finally, he can't stay awake any longer, and he drifts off into the most impactful nap in human history. And, he dreams of the elements swirling around until they snap into columns. And then the columns snap into place next to one another. And, he realizes that as you move along those columns, the chemical and physical properties of elements recur, periodically--which is why it's called the Periodic Table. And, he wakes up; he supposedly wakes up and writes it down exactly as he saw it, fully formed. And, so, it's the perfect kind of eureka moment; and it's been celebrated by scientific societies. Matthew Walker in his blockbuster, Why We Sleep, held it up as the ultimate proof that our dreaming brains, loosed from the bounds of reality, can accomplish what our waking brains can't. The mattress company, Casper, used it in their marketing. I learned about it in college chemistry, so that's how I was attuned to it. Russ Roberts: Well, I was excited to read it, because it joins my two other favorite 'great things that came to me while I slept' historical moments. One is Coleridge, although it was probably a drug-induced stupor, but we're not sure. But, he supposedly heard in his head the opening lines of his masterpiece, Kubla Khan, which stops in mid-poem because I think a traveling salesman knocked on the door and interrupted his reverie. And then, there's Ramanujan, who, as in the episode with David Bessis, we talked about how extraordinary things, he claimed, came to him in dreams. Perhaps divine--we don't know. But they're hard to believe. They're so extraordinary that they would come to him in his sleep. It is definitely true that our brains work while we're asleep. They work when we're not [inaudible 00:04:41], thinking about things that we're trying to think about when we're doing something else. But evidently the Mendeleev story is a little bit more complicated. David Epstein: That's right. And, I should say, by the way, just so people know: If you think of the Periodic Table as something that just hangs in high school classrooms, it actually was incredibly important at the time, because it not only pointed the way to where new elements should be--because we only had discovered about half of the ones that we've discovered now at the time--but it also motivated the search for the underlying reason for this order, which was atoms. And so, it motivated the search for atoms. So, the real story: can I share with you the real story? Russ Roberts: SPOILER ALERT. For people who want to read it in the book, you can stop listening now. But, by the time you get to the book in a day or two, you'll probably have forgotten. So, go ahead, David, take a chance. David Epstein: And, I don't think it'll spoil it too much anyway. But-- Russ Roberts: Yeah, it's not that-- David Epstein: So, the real story is, Mendeleev had a book contract to write a two-volume intro-to-chemistry textbook, and he had only gotten eight of the then 63-known elements into Volume One. So, he had to get the other 55 into Volume Two. And he had a customer problem, which was: it had to make sense for intro students. So, it was in thinking about how could he save space and organize things in a logical way for introductory students that he started experimenting with groups, so he didn't have to explain one element at a time but could kind of pick an element that represented a full family. And in doing that, that's where he started thinking of elements in terms of families, and essentially stumbled onto the periodic pattern. I mean, he eventually realized that he had found this underlying law of nature, and in fact said, 'Oh, there are gaps in my table here, which means this is where we should look for new materials.' So, it led him to make these very bold predictions that were so accurate that when--he called the gaps--so he labeled these gaps, like, eka aluminum and eka silicon. Eka is the Sanskrit word for one, meaning one spot away from this other element. And, when other chemists would find some element and report that they found some element and it would be similar to what he predicted but not the same, he would write them and say, 'Check your calculations again.' And, they would, and he would be right. So, it was a pretty amazing story. But I think the gap between the myth and the reality is symbolic of something important, which is that we overvalue this complete freedom and undervalue the power of constraints to make us, to launch us into productive exploration. Russ Roberts: And, you reproduce a page of his notes which show that it didn't quite flow perfectly from his brain. There's lots of crossouts and additions, and he's trying to figure it out. David Epstein: That's correct, yeah. Russ Roberts: "Kubla Khan," by the way, I think he claimed he just wrote it down as he heard it. But, anyway, unedited. David Epstein: You know, Russ, speaking of dreams though, I realized as I was doing this reporting, there's a whole lineage of people in chemistry, at least, supposedly discovering stuff in dreams. And, it's usually they're doing that because they're in a priority dispute and they want to claim, 'I could not have possibly seen this other person's work.' It's, like, 'It came to me in a dream.' And so there's this whole long lineage in chemistry of discoveries that were supposedly made in dreams. Very dubious, almost all of them. Russ Roberts: But, could be true, and I want to try-- David Epstein: That's right.
8:07	Russ Roberts: Actually, I want to talk about priority disputes, which is the phrase for who figured this out first. This has been haunting me for a while, because in the episode we did with Chuck Klosterman on his book, But What If We're Wrong. Or, What If You're Wrong? I think it's But What If You're Wrong, or whatever. No, it might be, What If We're Wrong? You can look that one up; I'm not going to correct it because I'm going to give both. He makes the observation that many, many great things are singletons, meaning: we know about one. So, one of his examples is, can you name anybody who wrote music for marching bands? And I can name one person, John Philip Sousa. Turns out, he's not the only guy. He's the only guy that posterity has remembered. If you want to dig in, you can find many, many other composers, but there's one that gets remembered. And, this is a haunting thing in your--you spend a number of pages talking about how many great discoveries had multiple--not sometimes, almost always--have multiple people working on the same problem and discovering something very similar right at the same time. We know some of them are. You don't have to be a scholar to know that Newton and Leibniz had discovered the calculus and apparently independently; that Wallace and Darwin both came up with evolution. But, your point, which I think is profound, and I'll tie it back in to the Klosterman point, which is: Darwin didn't just figure this out in the equivalent of in a dream--this crazy new idea. These ideas were bubbling up constantly in the intellectual life of scientists. Talk about that for a little bit, and you can talk about Malthus, too, if you want, because it's fascinating. David Epstein: No, I mean, absolutely. And, this is in this chapter where I'm writing about what's called multiple discovery, which is basically the idea--the kind of pioneering sociologist of science, Robert Merton [Robert K. Merton--Econlib Ed.], first started to attune people to the fact that even though one person was typically or one team was typically credited with world-changing scientific breakthroughs, that if you actually dug into it, there were often multiple people or multiple teams basically arriving at the answer the same day. It's not always as dramatic as Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filing their patent on the same day--probably there were like a half dozen other people that were there about the same time--but it's usually quite close. And so, when you mentioned Darwin, I think one of the important things is--you know, a discovery like that, or maybe that one in particular, is you did such a break from everything that came before that it's just a complete paradigm shift. This person was just thinking, as I would say, outside the box of their whole time, and obviously it was an incredible breakthrough. But Darwin was so grounded in the thinking of his day. I mean, there were people, he had about 240 penpals that he would pepper with all sorts of questions, and they helped him set up these kind of pretty well-known mysteries of the day, like: Why are we finding marine fossils on mountains? And, why are we finding fossils of species that we don't see around us? Why do the bones in a wing of a bat, and the flipper of a whale, and the arm of a human have so much in common? So, he was really collecting--even, he would write to breeders, and they would tell him, 'We know that there are inherited variations when we're breeding.' They called them 'sports,' actually. So, all of these ideas were percolating. And then he would read other thinking of the day. So, you'd appreciate this one, he was reading Adam Smith, which attuned him to the idea of competitive pressures and how does organization occur naturally out of competitive pressures? And, it was really synthesizing all those things into a coherent view that gave him this frame to think through. And, of course, he wasn't the only one. You mentioned Malthus, where he was reading the Reverend Malthus on population, and Malthus's argument was that--and this had a lot to do with the British Poor Laws of the day. Malthus was arguing that if we basically do a lot of charity, essentially, that there will just always be more mouths to feed because population will grow geometrically and the food supply will not. And-- Russ Roberts: He missed some things that were coming. Not his fault. And we have many essays on that. We'll link to some of them on our website. But yeah, carry on. David Epstein: He absolutely did. He missed some things that were coming. But that's one of the points I try to make in the chapter, is that these people who set up really interesting questions don't necessarily have to be right, because they frame a question for someone else--for a lot of other people--that leads them to think differently. So, it was both Wallace and Darwin read Malthus--the same essay--and it crystallized something for them, where they then essentially came up with the exact same theory. So, I think one of the points I was trying to make was that these lightning strikes of inspiration are not what they seem. They're actually really people who are tuned into the thinking of the day, paying attention to these well-defined questions. And, that's why even the most world-changing breakthroughs are arrived at by multiple people at the same time, almost always. Russ Roberts: Yeah. So, like you say--and it's a powerful metaphor--these guys were actually thinking inside the box, not so much outside the box, and synthesizing what was inside the box already. I have to add the quote from Darwin that you quote; he says, "I happened to read for amusement Malthus on population." I don't know if that sentence has ever come out of anyone's mouth or pen since then, but I thought that was delightful. But, the point about-- David Epstein: That's not what you do in your leisure time, reading Malthus? Russ Roberts: [inaudible 00:14:24] amusement, so amusing. Actually, it's doubly funny. Most people would say his prose style is not so delightful. And, the second thing they'd say is his conclusions are not amusing, either. But, anyway, another time for a different topic, another time.
14:40	Russ Roberts: But, this point about one person, which fascinates me. Right? So, you think, okay, so there were two people. There was Darwin and Wallace. But no, no, your point, which I think is so profound, is that there were dozens of people thinking about these issues, including very practical people--the breeders. We had Matt Ridley talking--and I think you alluded to it--the Wright brothers were not aerospace engineers. There weren't any. They were bicycle people. And, so, there's all this panoply of people of different skills and intellectual interests. There was much less specialization in the past. And, just one more example, which has been on my mind lately, is: Can you name a military historian or strategist of the 19th century? David Epstein: Of the 19th century? Russ Roberts: Who writes about war and theories of war strategy? David Epstein: Clausewitz. Russ Roberts: Ah, excellent. Clausewitz. We did not prep this. If you had failed that test, David, I would have cut this part out. Anyway-- David Epstein: Wait, wait, would you have really? Russ Roberts: Yeah, of course, I mean, we don't need to look like--because you don't know who Clausewitz is, it's humiliating. Anyway, seriously. Seriously, there's another 19th century theorist named Jomini, I'd never heard of. But, I was reading a book about Clausewitz, and it turns out Jomini had some of the same ideas. And, even Adam Smith, in my field, who is vaunted as the father of economics or the grandfather of economics--there are many ideas of his that were around. You know, people who are immersed in this know about, Mandeville, say, and that he had some similar--not the same, not exactly the same. But, people act as if no one had ever written anything about economics, and this guy comes along and says, 'Hey, do you ever think about this? Division of labor, competition?' And, of course, there are a lot of people thinking about it. And he became the one person, at least for a long time, that is associated with the beginning, partly because he had a tremendous marketing enterprise. No, he didn't do that, but partly because he's a very good writer, partly because he said it very well-- David Epstein: Yeah, I was going to say, he's a good writer-- Russ Roberts: And partly because I think this phenomenon, it's just hard to remember more than one person, so one person gets remembered. But, your additional point, which is worth expounding on, is: We have this romantic idea that the creativity is this fountain that only one genius has access to. And fortunately, they came along. So, that is a mistake. It's not the way the world works. David Epstein: Absolutely. And, it's really tuning into--I think tuning into the thinking of the day and looking for really well-defined questions. And, I should say, to your point also, I think it's just easier to tell a story with one person, right? In many cases in these priority disputes, somebody fought much harder to become the person in history books. Russ Roberts: Yeah, [?]. Zealous. David Epstein: Right. Not to do a huge spoiler in the book, but you mentioned the Periodic Table story comes back: it recurs throughout the book. And, Mendeleev--eh, whatever, it's not a spoiler, it's still interesting--Mendeleev is the person credited in the history books, and there's some reasons; but again, he made these bold predictions that others didn't make, and his system was very complete. But, so, there were no Periodic Tables before 1860, and there were six in the 1860s, all of which, again, Mendeleev's I say had some advantages, but all of them got the main idea. And, some of them were forgotten because the diagram was horrific. And, one of them, the diagram was what the creator called a 'telluric screw.' It was basically like a barber pole with the elements winding around it, and if you looked at it straight down, you would see the periodic pattern. And so, the publisher was, like, 'What is this?' and just left it out, so it didn't get published, so that got no notice. But, it was really these other things that were setting up the context. Not that Mendeleev and these other people--actually most of them were not chemists, were not geniuses. They were, but there were these other forces of the time, including very importantly, an Italian guy who said, 'You're all measuring the weights of elements differently. Here's how we're going to do it from now on,' and handed out a pamphlet, which allowed work to communicate across space, because people could reference one another's work. That really set people up and defined the problem for them. And, one of the examples I love from that chapter involved a mathematician, David Hilbert, arguably the most influential of the 20th century. And, one of the things he's most remembered for--genius, luminary genius--but that he decided to go survey the math landscape and collect two dozen problems that he thought were important and define them really specifically and then hand those out to his colleagues. And, it set an agenda for math in the 20th century, and many of them got solved, because he looked around at what was going on in really well-defined problems. And that made a whole bunch of other people look like geniuses because it focused their energies. Russ Roberts: So, cool. I was talking to my wife about this phenomenon of one person, and then she said, 'Well, maybe Einstein is not so unique.' And, I'm thinking, 'No, no, Einstein.' But, of course, you have a law in your book that he has a little footnote, 'Oh, not really the first person to think this way.' David Epstein: Yeah, yeah. In the paper--in his famous relativity paper--he has a footnote in the second paragraph where he's noting, 'By the way, I hadn't read this paper'--I think by Lorentz--and he's basically saying--was it Lorentz that it was-- Russ Roberts: I think it was. Yeah, I think it was. David Epstein: And, he's basically saying, 'Yes, I realize this guy came up with some of the same things, but just so you know, I hadn't read that yet,' basically. Russ Roberts: Yeah, and it's lost to history except for listeners of EconTalk and readers of your book. So, it's--poor Lorentz. David Epstein: Yeah. So, I will say Einstein, I think, did have some unique, what seemed to me at least, fully unique physical interpretations of some of the discoveries, but was not the only one alighting on these equations at the same time.
21:17	Russ Roberts: Talk about your--there are two parts of, maybe there's more than two, but the two I'd like to hear from you about of your own personal experience with constraints. One's an injury you had in, I think it was middle school, that changed your life. And then also how in the course of writing this book, you tried to adopt some of the principles to your own work. So, let's start with your injury because I think it's a very common phenomenon, and tell us about it. David Epstein: Yeah. I appreciate you asking about that. Nobody's asked me about that, as yet. So, this particular injury, the specifics was an uncommon phenomenon where in eighth grade, I was a very good athlete, and so I was playing quarterback in some gym class--touch football--in middle school. And, instead of kicking off, you would just have someone throw as hard as they could to the other side. And, in doing this, I reared back and threw as hard as I could, and my arm snapped on the follow through of the throw--my upper arm bone, the humerus--in a spiral. And, it was such a bizarre injury, nobody would believe that my arm was broken. I think I kind of went unconscious for a second; it shocked my system. And, by the time someone took me to the hospital, I remember them laying me on a table, basically taking an x-ray, and I'm laying on my back, and they told me to put my hand up perpendicular, as if I were shaking hands. And, I had my eyes closed because I was nauseous, and I did it, and they said, 'Put your hand up.' And, I thought I was doing it. And, it turned out that the bone was totally separated from the shoulder, so I was turning my shoulder and feeling a phantom hand out in front of me. We'll never know what happened. The doctor said that if there hadn't been witnesses, they would have thought one of my parents had twisted my arm until it broke. But, he said maybe there was a bone weakness or an air pocket or something like that, but we'll never know because once it broke, the evidence is gone. And, I've only seen this happen one other time, and it was a major league pitcher, and he had to have his arm amputated. So, that ruined my life at the time because I had to have my arms strapped to my torso. So, a cast running all the way up to my shoulder and arms strapped to my torso. And so, I couldn't play sports anymore. And my life revolved around sports. That was the only thing I was interested in. But, it led to some changes. Like, in school at the time, I was taking French class, and we had these tests where you had to listen to a recording of a French person speaking and then you follow along on a worksheet and there are blanks, and you have to follow well enough to fill in the blanks with the word that they said. And, I was okay at this, but with the broken arm, I couldn't write fast enough--because it was my writing hand--to keep up. And so, I started realizing I'd have to try to memorize the words as I went through and then go back and write them down with my left hand. And, I started using sports-related mnemonics, like, attaching the words as I heard them to some sports image. And, I started knocking these tests out of the park, doing better than I'd ever done before. And, I started using mnemonics for everything in school. Decades later, I would read one of the most famous memory studies ever done that involved a Carnegie Mellon undergrad. And, in this research, they took him from being able to memorize only seven digits to 80 digits using sports-related mnemonics. And, he was also an athlete. And so, this-- Russ Roberts: You had figured it out before. It's a priority dispute. David Epstein: That's right. But, it turns out, people have known this for a long time; a lot of people do memory palace and things like that. And, I use that to this day: If I memorize an hour long keynote talk, I'm using mnemonic. And, people will ask me if I have a photographic memory when I'm done with a talk sometimes, and--because I talk into slides, so it's clear that I've memorized everything. If I put my keys down and spin in a circle, I lose them. I do not have a photographic memory. It's that I learned to use these mnemonics, and I was forced to do that because my typical tactic was taken away. It's called a preclude constraint, where when the typical tactic is blocked, you start looking for something different, and oftentimes, it's better. It also led to me taking up running because I was barred from contact sports for a year, and I ended up becoming something I never would have thought of--I ended up becoming a college runner and a university record holder, and all these things. And so, it was just interesting in retrospect that this thing that blocked my normal modes of being led me to explore learning strategies and athletic activities that I just never would have explored in the past. And, I think that's kind of a theme. In some ways, I hope this book is maybe an emotional reframe for people asked to do more with less, but also part of that reframe is to look at limits as opportunities to clarify your priorities and launch productive exploration. And, that's what happened in my personal life. Russ Roberts: Now, there's a paradox there, of course, which is--and this is true of everybody--no, I shouldn't say that. There's a selection bias. We hear from people who make lemonade out of the lemons that get handed out to them. But, it's striking how many people who often go through very, very tough things have a benefit. And, it's not just: 'Well, it's not as bad as it seemed.' The outcome is actually quite extraordinary in a positive way. And, yet at the same time, we wouldn't suggest to people to break your arm and not use your right hand for a while. But, the metaphor is a very powerful one, I think. And, the idea that restraining your opportunities, your choices can actually be surprisingly--not just turn out better than you thought, but actually better than it was when you were totally free. David Epstein: Yeah. It really reminds me of--maybe you know this study--the famous London Underground study where there was a strike and certain lines were down for a few days, and so commuters had to find new ways to work. And, these are people who are doing this every day; you would assume they would have optimized the path. And yet a significant portion of commuters found a different path and stuck with it. It saved, like, 1,500 commuting hours per day, just a two or three day strike that led people to experiment with different paths. So, I think arguably we don't experiment enough, and we tend to follow what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance, where we do the convenient thing or the thing we've always done. Because, as the cognitive scientist, Daniel Willingham, says, 'You may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made to prevent you from having to think whenever possible, because thinking is energetically costly.' And so, unless the thing you're used to is blocked, you're probably not going to explore as much as you should.
28:15	Russ Roberts: Yeah. I hadn't thought about it until just now, but it's really an example of unintended consequences, even when it's a random event. Most of the time in economics, when we talk about unintended consequences, they are negative. You think the minimum wage is good, but: Oh, it puts people out of work. Or whatever is the--you put on price controls, and then that leads to scarcity, in the case of a different kind of--a price ceiling instead of a price floor. And, we always think of them as negative. And, I remember somebody once asked me, 'Well, aren't there any positive unintended consequences?' And of course, there are, but this phenomenon of when something horrible happens to you--and religious people of course say, 'It's all for the best, God has a plan, and it'll turn out great.' And of course, that's, I don't think always true for most every person: I don't want to claim that even as a religious person. But, it's interesting how often it turns out so much better than you thought, and even sometimes pretty well, and yet in the moment you don't want to hear that. So, it's a perspective, as you say: it's a reframing that could be useful for us sometimes. David Epstein: You're also making me think about--because I should say that many parts of the book are about self-imposed constraints that can prevent a team from drowning in possibilities and things like that, or make people more creative--but you are making me think about how often in my own life something like an injury has led to something useful. Where, I had--a few years ago--I had to get a few stitches in my head, and I was told to try to keep my blood pressure down for at least a few days, if not a week or two, and not to turn my head independently of my shoulders, if I could help it. And, it was painful; it was annoying; I had to sleep sitting up. And, a few days in, I found I was so happy that I was wondering what was going on, even though I was in a little bit of pain and sleeping was annoying. And so, I started journaling about my days, and the thing that jumped out at me was that I had to do one thing at a time. I physically could not multitask. I couldn't turn my head quickly. And, I would actually feel if I started trying to toggle between things, my blood pressure rising, and I'd feel a little tingling on the scar. So, it was almost I had this built-in biofeedback if I tried to multitask. And, I ended up writing that into one of the chapters about attention and focus, because it was so transformative for me in realizing how stressful multitasking was, and I hadn't even really been thinking about it. Not that I would wish stitches in the head on anyone; but again, it was kind of revelatory for me in forcing me to do one thing at a time and realizing how great that was, both my productivity, but also just my sense of wellbeing at the end of the day.
31:14	Russ Roberts: So, I mentioned there were two things from your own life--and there's more than two--but the two I wanted to talk about. So, one of them was just your sports injury, which changed the arc of your career, even not just your leisure and your college extracurriculars. But, the other is that when you were writing the book, you imposed some constraints on yourself, and these are constraints that I think all of us think about. I just want to mention: I did, having not played chess on my phone for the last year or two, put it back on for about four days, and now today just in incredible frustration and embarrassing mood swing, deleted it again. I'll put it back on in a few years. But, most of the time we have trouble constraining ourselves that way. So, talk about what you did in making yourself both more productive and also I think a little more sane. David Epstein: Yeah. I think there were kind of two buckets for this. One, how my workday works, and one, the book in specific. Are you thinking about either one of those specifically? Russ Roberts: Either one, both, whatever. David Epstein: Okay. Okay, both. So, let me talk about the book specifically. One of the reasons I took on this topic--I guess the older I get, the more I realize or the more honest I am about maybe how much me-search is in my projects. And, it's pretty clear in this one, because I have been terrible at drawing boundaries around things--around my workday, around my work projects. So, for my first two books, I wrote about 150% the length of a book and then had to cut back to get a book. For my first book, I took a trip to Arctic Sweden that I had to cut. Once I became a parent, you don't want to be taking trips. It was an interesting trip; but you don't want to be taking trips to Arctic Sweden that aren't going in the book. And, that was very much because I didn't do a good job of defining my project ahead of time. So, this time around, once I did my reporting--because basically for the first year of the project, I don't write. I'm just reading papers, interviewing, mapping the landscape. And, after that, I sat down and forced myself to make a one page outline. One page only. This kind of came at the suggestion of one of the people I interviewed in the book who was the lead designer of the iPod, where he tells people to write the press release before they start the project so you have this kind of bounding box for it. And actually this is--I have it right behind me--this is for anyone who is--here you go, Russ--this is the one page outline. Russ Roberts: Wow. Cool. David Epstein: You can see I tried to defeat my own system by writing as small as possible. Russ Roberts: Yeah, I'm shocked. I thought it was going to be a 200 word--no--for those who are not watching this or listening at home, it's a big mess. Let's just leave it at that. David Epstein: It's a big mess. But, it's one page. And if it's not on that page, it's not in the book. And, this forced me--it was painful--but it forced me to clarify my priorities for what was in the book, because in the past I had this, what designers call 'feature-itis.' Anything I thought was interesting, I'm trying to shoehorn it in there. Russ Roberts: Sure. David Epstein: And, that doesn't necessarily serve the reader. You want to prioritize, as the writer. It also led me to--very much in the vein of Mendeleev--with that small space, it led me to come up with this structure I've never used before, where I tell different slices of the Periodic Table story throughout the book, each time with a new layer that then introduces a series of linked chapters. And, it was trying to put the book in this small space that forced me to think about ways to arrange like topics. Whereas in the past, I was more just one chapter at a time. And so, I think a weakness of mine might have been coherence in my previous books. So, it also made me much more efficient because--so I was slower to start writing this time around. It took me longer to get to the phase where I started writing. But once I started writing, I executed really quickly because I understood the playing field. So this is what, in the book, the Danish researcher, Bent Flyvbjerg, who studies projects, would call the good sequence for a project--for projects that are usually, in his case, that come in on time and on budget and deliver what they promised--is: 'Think slow, act fast.' Meaning, you have this small early stage where you're defining the problem, you're setting the boundaries, what are you doing? And then, when you move into execution, you can do it more quickly. The opposite is think fast, act slow, where you have a big idea, you rush into execution, and then the lessons are going to be much more painfully acquired because you have momentum and all these things. And so, I actually, in my first two books--well, the first one I needed an extension actually, so I didn't even make it by the deadline. The second one I turned in on 5:00 PM on the day of the contract. So, I assumed that's what I was going to do again. And I finished--I had it a month early, and I just sat for two weeks because I didn't know what to do. Russ Roberts: Wow. David Epstein: Like, does anybody turn in books early? Russ Roberts: No. David Epstein: So, I would never not do it this way again if I--well, for the third time I'm saying 'never again.' I always say that after writing books, and I believe it, but then there's a period of recovery. But, if I did it again, I would always do it this way. It was so helpful.
36:48	Russ Roberts: But, you also changed some habits. So, talk about those, email and-- David Epstein: Yeah. So, and some of these won't make sense for everybody or a lot of people, but I think there's something that people can pull from them. Where, when I was reporting the chapter about attention and focus, I found it a little bit scary, where a lot of it was based on the work of this psychologist named Gloria Mark, who for about 25 years was shadowing people at work. First sitting behind them with a stopwatch, and then later it became logging their computer activity and heart rate monitors, and all these kinds of things. And, what she found when she started monitoring people about 25 years ago, people switched tasks about every three minutes. And then, by 2012, it was more like a minute and a half. And, by 2022, it was 45 seconds, where it seems to have flattened out at 45 seconds at least for the last few years. And, not only do the number of switches predict people's end of day productivity in a bad way, they also predict their stress as measured by heart rate variability. And, but the scariest part of this research, I think, was what she showed about self-interruptions, where, if you're interrupted by notifications and email and all these things all day, or other people, and you say, 'Well, today I'm going to focus,' and you turn the notifications off, you will just self-interrupt with intrusive thoughts at the rhythm to which you've become accustomed, as if you have an internal distraction barometer that wants to keep a certain rhythm. And so, if you want to be able to reclaim your focus, basically, you have to train yourself. And it doesn't take long; but you have to start working in some blocks where you're not toggling. So, for me, because being a writer I had a lot of ability to do this, when I was in my deep focus part of the work where I was really writing, I wouldn't turn my phone on until late in the day, and I definitely wouldn't check email. I wouldn't check email really until my work for the day was done. So, again, it doesn't make sense for everybody. But, the email, your inbox is--there's something called the Zeigarnik effect, which is this idea that an open task takes up a little brain space. And, my email inbox is always that, right? There's a million things I can never respond to, and so it takes up brain space. So, I stopped opening it during the day. But I think a more sensible thing for most people is to try to do some batching. So, Mark found that people in offices check email on average 77 times a day, and different times. So, maybe you need to answer all that email, but can you do it in one block where you're just doing email, or two blocks, or three blocks? And then, do your other work in blocks so that you're mono-tasking for the thing you're doing within a half hour or within an hour, and not toggling all day long because that feels efficient, but it actually isn't, and it's really stress inducing. So, if you can block some of your work and start not in your inbox, that's probably helpful. So, I think--again, not that everyone can do it to the extent that I did, but probably everyone can do a little better than they are. Russ Roberts: So, I threw the chess app off my phone as a constraint, but there's 10,000 others that I still do that I wish I didn't do sometimes at least. What are your thoughts on why it's so hard, why it's so difficult? And, I've told this story before about being--I think I've told it on the program, of being on a meditation retreat and eating lunch mindfully. Which means you take a bite, you look at it, you might think about where it came from, you might smell it, you put it in your mouth, you chew it thoughtfully, you think about the origin of it, the number--as an economist, I would be thinking about the division of labor and all the people who contributed to it, and so on. And, it's so exhilarating when you're doing it. And then, I go back home after the retreat is over, and I'm thinking, 'Oh, I'm going to do that every day from now on.' And I can't. I compulsively look at sports on my computer while I eat, or read, or multitask. Why do you think it's so hard? Why is it so hard--when we know--I know, just like you know now--that these are good habits. But why are these habits so difficult for us? David Epstein: Yeah. And, by the way, I think there's some research that shows that it might interfere with your satiety signals if you're not paying attention while you're eating, too. Russ Roberts: Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah. I think that's true. David Epstein: So, people end up eating more. I think there are a few reasons. I think one is, again, as Daniel Willingham said: Our brains are meant to prevent us from thinking when possible. So, we do the convenient thing. And a lot of that is passive, right? We're scrolling or whatever it is. Whereas what you're talking about, being mindful, I mean, that takes some work. It feels like you're not doing certain things, but it actually takes--anyone who has tried to meditate in the early going realizes that it's hard. It takes work. It's uncomfortable. That's why it takes a lot of practice to do it well. But another side I think is that--and again, as Gloria Mark's research shows--we've been trained now way more for the distraction, always doing something side. So, you go to a retreat and you practice in a different way for, I don't know, days, a week, two weeks, whatever it is. The whole rest of your life probably has been training you for this other mode of being. And, of course, there's, like, an army of psychologists behind all of these apps that are trying to engineer your attention also. So, I think it becomes so easy unless you're forcibly putting boundaries in place. If you're not engineering your attention these days, it will be engineered for you by very smart people who have a lot at stake. And so, I think, again, we're following the path of least resistance, where you're falling into attention traps that have been engineered to make you behave in a certain way. Russ Roberts: Yeah, no comment. There's so much to say there, but I'm going to move on. I'd love to, but another time.
43:07	Russ Roberts: I want to talk about Isabel Allende, the writer, and the role of a particular date in her life. And, I don't remember if you used this word, but she constrains herself, and you'll talk about it. But, the other way I think about this is ritual. So, tell us about Isabel Allende's writing habit. David Epstein: Yeah. So, she's one of the great living writers, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and a recipient, winner. It's kind of weird to call it Presidential Medal of Freedom like as if it's the Olympics. And, she started writing in midlife, just before she turned 40 when--so, her father's cousin was Salvador Allende, who I think was the only democratically elected socialist head of state in the world, the only one that I can think of, anyway--and was overthrown in a coup. And that led Isabel to end up having to flee Chile. And so, she was in exile when she learned that her grandfather was dying. And so, she started writing him a letter on January 8th. And, she was basically just writing him a letter to say, 'All the stories that you told me, they're not going to die with you.' So, this would have been, by the way, January 8th, I think it was 1981, that: 'I'm going to preserve them.' And as she's writing this letter, a lot of them are about the sort of fantastical, magical stories that her family has told. Some of them--yeah--that she had a relative who could move a sugar bowl with her mind, these interesting stories. And it starts morphing into a novel, and she realizes that's happening. And so, she keeps writing, keeps writing, and it becomes this book called The House of the Spirits, which becomes this international blockbuster. Now it's a movie with Antonio Banderas in it and all these sorts of things. But it starts this ritual for her. So, the book comes out when she's about 40, where every January 8th from then on, if she has finished the previous book, she starts a new book every January 8th. And she has all these rituals where she needs structure and silence. And, before she was this huge international celebrity, sometimes this was in a clothing closet where she would set up a typewriter because she needed silence. And, she starts cleansing to get ready for this January 8th ritual, throwing out things from the previous project, cleansing her office. She puts a Pablo Neruda book under her computer, or typewriter, then computer, just in case creativity by osmosis is a thing. And, this ritual always brings her back. Even if she doesn't really have an idea yet, the ritual sort of forces her to do it again. And, since then--so in the last 45 years, she only had one publishing break. So, this ritual has led to about a bestseller about every 18 months for the last 40 years. So she's sold 80 million books. And by the way, she's plowed a ton of that money into a foundation. She's given away an enormous amount of money. And, the one time she had a break was when her daughter, Paula, who was in her 20s, died of a rare disease, and--that they didn't know she had until she fell into a coma. And, she writes this searing memoir, Paula, about it, that's just incredible to read. And, in the book she's saying, 'I think I'm done writing. This is it. I just don't have it anymore. This has sapped me.' And, she skips one January 8th for the first time ever and said, 'I'm done. No more writing.' But then, the next January 8th is coming around and she says, 'Maybe I'll just sit down and see.' So, she goes through a ritual again, and it pulls her back, and of course she writes another book and starts the ritual again, and it reinvigorates her career. And, she's so driven by ritual and by--she needs structure and silence, as she said, lots of silence. And, for the first few weeks--and it also adds a seasonality to her life, where everyone knows if they need something from her, better have gotten it by January 7th because then she's away doing her thing. And, she'll turn down, by the way, $150-grand to give a talk once she goes into that phase, because it's so sacred to her. And, I think it's particularly interesting, because if you read profiles of her, because there's magical realism in some of her books--many of them do not have but some of them do--profiles of her will make it sound like she's a mystical medium. She just sits back and characters speak through her. But, in fact, the story of her creation is one of incredible boundaries and discipline that she put in place. So, it was amazing to see, as a writer. Even down to her workday. She lights a candle to start the day and blows it out to finish the day because she has a very defined period of work and then period of recovery. So, I adopted that also, by the way. I use electric candles because too much paper or maybe I'm not as brave as her or something like that. But, I just thought it was so interesting to see someone whose public legend is, again, of this creative lightning strikes, but really, it's driven by this incredible discipline and structure and ritual that she's set up for herself.
48:37	Russ Roberts: So, the idea of lighting that candle seems kind of silly. David Epstein: It does. Russ Roberts: How is that going to help her write better? Is it? Oh, come on. And yet, human beings--I mean, I think one of the great lessons of this book is that Daniel Willingham quote about what your brain is meant to do. A lot of what we do is about escaping our brain--whatever that means. That's a meaningless statement, but I think you know what I mean. And, I think about Stephen King. I'm not a big Stephen King fan--I've not read very many of his books. But he has a wonderful book on writing. And, when Stephen King becomes a writer--he's, I think, a high school teacher for a while--and he sells a story and he realizes he can be a writer. He gets up every morning, and I think he--I can't remember if he listens to music or not, but I do that sometimes. And then, I often--I can sometimes will turn it off, or I might continue with it, it depends; but it puts you in a different space. And, unfortunately, I'm not Stephen King--or maybe fortunately--but he writes 1,000 words. And, when he's done with the thousand words, which I think in his early career was four hours or so, a page an hour, he would stop. Didn't matter when it was. It could have been after two hours some days probably, and some days it was four and a half. And, I think he said recently somewhere, I don't know when it was, he said, 'Yeah, and now I have to work till 1:00,' but in the old days he worked from, like, 6:00 to 10:00 or whatever. And, if you can write 1,000 words a day, that's four pages, and in 100 days you've got a real book. That's three months. And, he does it, and just, like, every day. Every day, he doesn't get up from the chair until he's written a thousand words. And, there's a thousand reasons why that's a stupid idea: but it's not. It's a genius idea. David Epstein: Yeah. No, I love that, because like you said, it does seem silly. Russ Roberts: I mean, some days you don't feel it, you're not feeling it. So, get up. Go--nope. Sit in the chair. David Epstein: That's why it's important. I mean, when I think back to when I was a competitive runner, I was running the 800 meters. There's a lot of days you don't feel like doing the training that you have to do for that event: it's not pleasant. People end up in that event because they wanted to be a 400-meter runner, and they weren't cutting it, and this is a way to survive. So, but there's so many days where the habit, the ritual, sometimes the other people also pushing you on, bring you back because there are a lot of days you don't want to do it. That's why it's important to have. On the days where you feel like it, and you're great, and you're jazzed up, then I think all the discipline and the structure is less important. It's all those other days that you also need. And, I think this is why, if you've ever read the novelist Haruki Murakami, another international phenomenon, talking about--he starts doing endurance training to get ready to write a book because it's also an act of endurance where, an act of endurance and ritual. And, it's like Rick Rubin, the music producer, he wrote about in his book about creativity that it's really this kind of--that a lot of their creatives have this very, not boring, but rigid day where it's very structured because that's actually what liberates them to do their thing, when they're not having to make a million other decisions and they know this is where they're going to be and it's going to bring them back. So, I think that discipline and structure actually, almost that boring repetitiveness allows you to flourish and expand your thinking within that.
52:21	Russ Roberts: You have a chapter called "Rules of the Game." I think that's the name of the title, but it's certainly the subject, name of the chapter. I've often reflected on the fact that accepting the restrictions of the Jewish Sabbath has got to be a recipe for misery because there's so many things you can't do. And, why would you ever choose to not be able to do things you're in the mood for? And yet, something extraordinary happens if you're comfortable with that; and there's so many things in life like that. And, I think--this is not a self-help book in the kind where you're at the end of every chapter, 'Here's four things you can do'--which I appreciate, by the way; I'm glad you didn't do that. But, it does make you realize that there are rules you can impose on yourself that sweeten life or make you more productive. And, you talk toward the end of the book about Bernard Suits, who I'd never heard of, but you write about games. And, of course, in some dimension--he was criticizing Wittgenstein--and of course, life is a game in a certain sense, and games without rules are no fun. Right? If you play Scrabble-- David Epstein: It'd have no meaning-- Russ Roberts: Right. If you play Scrabble and any word counts, you're not playing Scrabble anymore, and it's not fun. So, talk about what Bernard Suits was trying to do and this idea of rules and games. David Epstein: I will, but I want to say two things to your comment first, one of which is that that "Rules of the Game" chapter, influenced by you. Some of the things that I've heard on EconTalk [inaudible 00:54:10]. Russ Roberts: Oh yeah, there's some economics in that chapter, yeah. David Epstein: So, I just wanted to thank you for that. Russ Roberts: Oh, thank you. David Epstein: And, I appreciate your compliment about not doing bullet points at the end of chapters. Because, I think of--I strongly identify as a craftsman for writing who is always trying to improve, and so I'm trying to make a Swiss watch of a book. And, so, I don't want those kinds of breaks. I want my narrative to be narrative. But, Suits--so as you mentioned in Wittgenstein, one of the things Wittgenstein famously said was, 'Language is fuzzy.' And, one of his famous--maybe his most famous--example was that there's no core essence of what we call a game. So, some have strict rules, some don't; some you play alone, some you play with a team; some are just for fun, some are competition; etc., etc. Some are make believe. And, Suits said, 'No, I think that's wrong. I think there is a core quality of all games, and it's an attitude.' And, he called it the 'lusery attitude'--the attitude that you have to take on in order to participate in the game. And, he described it as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Which I love. And, it is that voluntary acceptance of these obstacles that are totally unnecessary, right? You could get from point A to point B in a race much more efficiently, or get down a football field, things like that, much more efficiently. Russ Roberts: Lower the basket: then I could dunk. It doesn't have to be 10 feet high. Come on, that just makes it harder. David Epstein: [inaudible 00:55:43]. Russ Roberts: Make the hole bigger in golf, come on. David Epstein: Or you could let people just run down the court without dribbling the ball--which seems like it's happening sometimes now anyway. But, his point was that--so, he wrote it in this brilliant book called The Grasshopper, which is a parable where he takes Aesop's grasshopper, who plays all summer long. And so, unlike the ants who are hoarding food, he's going to die during the winter because he's been playing instead of hoarding food. But, in this case, in Suits's case, the grasshopper defends his choice and said, 'I was doing something that made my life meaningful by pushing against these obstacles.' And so, I think it's an analogy for life. Take field, add lines, and suddenly you have collective meaning where you can engage in something with other people, and it allows the attempt to achieve things. And so, I viewed that as almost like a nugget that encapsulates a huge part of the book. That, this voluntary acceptance of obstacles, you do it because it can take you places that you never could have otherwise envisioned. Russ Roberts: So, it reminds me of Michael Easter. He's got this idea, it's a Japanese word of misogi--I think I'm pronouncing it correctly--that it's a horrible challenge. It's not easily done. But it's not impossible, and it won't kill you. And that, taking those on makes life both vivid and meaningful. Sports--team sports--are about a group of people getting together. What was the phrase from Suits again? The voluntary-- David Epstein: The voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Russ Roberts: Right. And so, I mean--it's silly: you're going to march the ball down the field in the football--there's nothing really at stake. I mean, it's all pretend. It's all, you've made up your own meaning, a goal that--the entertainment is the goal. And that requires a certain set of restrictions on what's allowed. It's not about winning. It's the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the guy takes out the big sword and Harrison Ford just shoots him. It's, like, but that's cheating. And that's why it's a great scene--because it's kind of funny. It's not really humorous; but there's a humor, a dark humor there. But, many times in life, we adhere to restrictions, which is what you're saying, where not just you're more productive, but you can produce meaning.
58:24	Russ Roberts: You could talk--I'll try for a minute about General Magic, because I'd never heard of it, or if I had, I've forgotten--I'm sure I've heard about and forgotten about it. It's this, 'Oh boy, we're on a great quest. We have the most talented people in the world. We're going to do this great thing.' And nothing happens. What were they trying to do, and why did they fail? David Epstein: So, this company, General Magic, really starting in the late 1980s, but in the early 1990s, they saw the future of the communications technology. So, they were essentially trying to build the iPhone starting in 1990, essentially, when only 15% of American households even had computers. And, they had so much talent. They were founded by three former Apple employees, two of whom helped design the original Mac. The third, his job was looking for the future of technology. And, he was, this guy named Marc Porat, absolute visionary. I read his Ph.D. dissertation for Stanford in 1976 in which he coins the term, 'Information economy,' and it is eerie to read. I mean, he saw what was coming. So, they found this company, it spun out of Apple, to make the new personal communicator. And, the idea is so intoxicating and visionary, and the talent is so incredible, that Goldman Sachs takes them public in the first so-called concept IPO [Initial Public Offering], where they go public just with an idea, not with a product. And, fast-forward, it becomes a disaster. After six months' of the product debuting--which is again a personal communicator--they've sold 3,000 units mostly to people they know, and it just becomes this epic disaster. And, there's this question of how could this have failed? Porat later said that he raised so much money so quickly, they had this 17-partner alliance. Their alliance--these people they were working with, these other companies--they covered so much of the communications technology world that they had to start their meetings with an antitrust lawyer listing all the topics they weren't allowed to discuss. But, that also made it incredibly hard to make decisions, because there were so many people involved. And, Porat said he raised all this money from them and other people because he wanted to create heaven for engineers where the engineers were free to play and create and limited only by their imaginations. And he said, 'What more could anyone want?' And, I think the answer was less freedom. Because I interviewed dozens of former employees from General Magic, and a refrain was, 'We could not figure out what not to do.' They didn't have a clear customer. They called their customer Joe Sixpack. After a few years' of missed deadlines, they realized nobody knew who that guy was or what he wanted. And so, they ended up just building for each other. They had so much talent, so many resources, they could do anything, so they often did. There was actually one, if I can share this, one interview I think was kind of emblematic of the problem there with this engineer named Steve Perlman, who was charged with creating a calendar function for the device. Russ Roberts: Oh, yeah. It's a great story. David Epstein: And, he writes the calendar function to go from 1904 to 2096, and checks it in and thinks he's done. And then, another one of the leaders comes to him and says, 'Steve, somebody might write apps'--because they already were building an app store back in 1990--'Somebody might write apps that does historical things or goes way into the future. You have to expand this calendar app.' So, he brings away: he goes back to Year One instead. Fine, checks it in, done. Then its other team comes to him and says, 'Steve, why are you tying this into some arbitrary religious context? Take it back to the beginning of astronomical time.' So, he checks it out again and starts the calendar function to go from the Big Bang, way into the future. And, as he said, if he'd left it at 1904 to 2096, it would have been four lines of code, and instead it dragged on for months. Which was a huge waste of time. And, that was how things at General Magic happened. Because they had not drawn good boundaries, and because they did have so many resources and so much talent that they couldn't figure out what not to do. And so, it became a disaster. As the venture capitalist, Bill Gurley, when I was interviewing him said, 'We have a saying in venture, more startups die of indigestion than starvation. Too much, not too little.' The good thing about General Magic, though, I'd say, is it was almost a trauma for some of the people that were working there. And, they came out of it having learned these incredible lessons about the importance of putting constraints in place, and went on to co-found or create Android, iPod, iPhone, Nest, to lead things like Google Maps, Safari, all these other things, LinkedIn, eBay. E-Bay was actually incubated by a low level service engineer at General Magic who offered it to General Magic; he was actually obligated to offer his IP [?Intellectual Protocol?]. And, they were like, 'No, no. We got a much bigger thing going on.' It was called AuctionWeb at the time, so he took it out on his own and turned it into eBay. They basically had the PalmPilot internally, too. The guy that was making PalmPilot started as a third party app for General Magic called Graffiti, where strokes with a stylus could be turned into writing. And, that guy said--when it was clear General Magic was going to fail--he said, he identified a clear customer problem, busy professionals wanted to sync their contacts and calendar and take it on the go. So, I'm going to do just contacts, calendar, and memo pad, period. And, General Magic, like, laughed at him and said, 'You can't compete with us.' Because that was three of the bajillion things they were doing, and PalmPilot became a hit. So, when General Magic's device appeared, it had tons of features, but user experience was choppy because it had so much--battery life was bad--and it was confusing. It shipped with a 200 page manual. Can you imagine getting--right? There were eight pages just on the battery. But, again, it did produce these incredible people, like Tony Fadell, who is an important character in the book who is known as the pod father because he led the design of the iPod. When he co-founded Nest, a smart thermostat company, after that, he forced the team to work inside a literal box. He's like a zealot for constraints. The first time I called him, he's going, 'If you don't have constraints, make up constraints.' He's a very enthusiastic guy. And, he made them prototype the packaging at Nest before they had the product because he said, 'This will show us what our priorities are, if it goes on here, and this is what we want to communicate to the end customer. And, if it's not on here, then we can put it in a holding pattern because it's not important enough.' As he said, with these ultra constraint-based things, they slow you down, but they make you think really hard. And, that's exactly what happened to me in doing this one page outline, so-- Russ Roberts: Yeah, I was thinking. David Epstein: Yeah. That story comes back toward the end of the book, and it's become an important story in the book.
1:04:59	Russ Roberts: So, I'm going to close with an observation about economics and let you react to it. We're trained in economics. There's been some revision of this, but the standard economics paradigm is that more is better than less, and constraints lower your wellbeing. Constraints keep you from getting to a higher level of satisfaction. Your income is a constraint. If you had more income, you'd be happier, more satisfied; you'd have more of what we call utility, a catchall phrase to mean good--good--good things. And the older I get, the more problems I have with that perspective, because we don't just care about how much stuff we have. We care about where it comes from, and whether we earned it, and whether we were respected when we earned it. And, I understand you can force all that into a utility-maximization framework. But most economists struggle to do that artfully, and as a result, they kind of keep the simple version. I'm not a big fan of the revisions of that model. I don't think they've been very successful, either. But I think there is a deep lesson here, and it's not just about economics. Because, surely if you had a startup, more money is better than less money; because if you have less money, you could starve. You could go bankrupt, and your brilliant idea would never come to light. But, it's also obvious that if you have too much money, you can't focus for--it's just a human challenge. There are exceptions, I'm sure. There are people who can overcome that, but most of us can't, and constraints are very powerful. So, take us home with a reaction to that. David Epstein: First, I think it's clear that constraints can be bad. Right? It's almost synonymous with something that is frustrating. But, I think you're right, and you said it really eloquently. And, I guess maybe--so I don't know that I have that much to add to that, so let me bring in something that I think is interesting and related, which is--because the most important thinker in the book we haven't mentioned. And to me, Herbert Simon. Was trained as a political scientist, won the Turing Award in computer science because he co-did the first AI [artificial intelligence] demonstration. Won the highest award you can win in psychology, and then won the Nobel Prize in economics also for bounded rationality, basically, in some of his other work. And, one of the important--his life's work was really motivated by the noticing that people didn't really adhere to some of the decision-making behavior that classical economics suggested they would. And, one of his important findings--he turned into this word that he coined 'satisficing,' which is a combination of satisfy and suffice. And, what he found was that because we have finite brains and finite capacity to evaluate options, we can't actually make optimal decisions. We use shortcuts and heuristics to make our decisions. And, what Simon suggested was that we actually should proactively do that and set good-enough rules for ourselves. So, he proactively satisfies. He said, 'You only need three pairs of clothes. One on your back, one in the wash, and one in the closet.' He had the same breakfast every day. He had one beret that he always wore, etc., because he famously wrote, 'The best is the enemy of the good,' where he argued that by looking through--we have this idea if we have more, and more, and more, that we can optimize our solutions--or maximize, in the language of the people in his field. What he said is not only can you not, but in fact, if you counted the cost in time and money and energy of attempting to maximize, you'd realize that satisficing is the maximizing strategy, basically. Russ Roberts: So, economists were right all along, but okay, go ahead. David Epstein: Right. And so, I think it's important, always, instead of always pining for more--even though more has led to shared prosperity in ways that are very, very important--setting good-enough decision rules. We're not built to have access to everything everywhere, all of the time. And, so I think recognizing that constraints can be good and saying when you're going into decisions, 'What are the three things I want this decision to accomplish, or this purchase to accomplish, or whatever?' And, when you get that, make the decision and move on, instead of wondering if there's always more and better out there. Otherwise, you fall prey to something called Fredkin's paradox, which is we spend the most time on the least important decisions because we're having trouble telling the options apart, which is why you agonize over it. But, it also means either that there's not much difference, or you can't figure out much more difference, or maybe it doesn't matter. So, I've become a proactive satisficer. It almost sounds--you'd almost accuse Herbert Simon of having low ambition if he hadn't won the highest award in several different disciplines. Russ Roberts: My guest today has been David Epstein. David, thanks for being part of EconTalk. David Epstein: It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure and honor to be here. And, like I said, you're an influence in this book, Russ, so I really appreciate you and your thinking. Russ Roberts: Thanks, David.

Time

Podcast Episode Highlights

0:37

Intro. [Recording date: April 16, 2026.]

Russ Roberts: Today is April 16th, 2026. And before introducing today's guest, I want to correct two errors from recent episodes. The name of the founder of NVIDIA is pronounced Jensen Huang. And, I misquoted the line from the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and evidently I've done that before. The poem's title is "As Kingfishers Catch Fire." The correct line is, "What I do is me: for that I came."

Now on to today's guest, author David Epstein. This is David's third appearance on EconTalk. He was last on the program in May of 2019 discussing his book, Range.

Our topic for today is his latest book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. David, welcome back to EconTalk.

David Epstein: It's wonderful to be back.

1:24

Russ Roberts: What's the idea of Inside the Box and the power of constraints?

David Epstein: I think the main idea is that it's never been easier to do too much in our work lives, in our personal lives, and that we often overvalue complete freedom--a problem that is a newer problem in human history--and undervalue the ability of smart boundaries to make us more creative, to make us more productive, and to make us more satisfied in our lives, more meaningful.

Russ Roberts: Now, there's an extraordinary story that runs through the entire book. There are a number of great stories in the book, which we'll get to some of them. But, one of them is about the discovery of the Periodic Table. And, you start off with a story that I actually hadn't heard, which is a bit of a myth. Give us the mythical version of how Mendeleev, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly [Russ mispronounces it Men-del'-e-ev, but it's Men-del-e'-ev--Econlib Ed.], how did he discover, according to myth, the Periodic Table?

David Epstein: Yeah, Mendeleev. So, Siberian genius--it's a tough one. In the winter of 1869, supposedly he has this feeling that there's an order to the elements, to all of the chemical building blocks of the universe. But he can't find it. And he stays up for three days, where he doesn't sleep. And finally, he can't stay awake any longer, and he drifts off into the most impactful nap in human history. And, he dreams of the elements swirling around until they snap into columns. And then the columns snap into place next to one another. And, he realizes that as you move along those columns, the chemical and physical properties of elements recur, periodically--which is why it's called the Periodic Table.

And, he wakes up; he supposedly wakes up and writes it down exactly as he saw it, fully formed. And, so, it's the perfect kind of eureka moment; and it's been celebrated by scientific societies. Matthew Walker in his blockbuster, Why We Sleep, held it up as the ultimate proof that our dreaming brains, loosed from the bounds of reality, can accomplish what our waking brains can't. The mattress company, Casper, used it in their marketing. I learned about it in college chemistry, so that's how I was attuned to it.

Russ Roberts: Well, I was excited to read it, because it joins my two other favorite 'great things that came to me while I slept' historical moments. One is Coleridge, although it was probably a drug-induced stupor, but we're not sure. But, he supposedly heard in his head the opening lines of his masterpiece, Kubla Khan, which stops in mid-poem because I think a traveling salesman knocked on the door and interrupted his reverie.

And then, there's Ramanujan, who, as in the episode with David Bessis, we talked about how extraordinary things, he claimed, came to him in dreams. Perhaps divine--we don't know. But they're hard to believe. They're so extraordinary that they would come to him in his sleep. It is definitely true that our brains work while we're asleep. They work when we're not [inaudible 00:04:41], thinking about things that we're trying to think about when we're doing something else.

But evidently the Mendeleev story is a little bit more complicated.

David Epstein: That's right. And, I should say, by the way, just so people know: If you think of the Periodic Table as something that just hangs in high school classrooms, it actually was incredibly important at the time, because it not only pointed the way to where new elements should be--because we only had discovered about half of the ones that we've discovered now at the time--but it also motivated the search for the underlying reason for this order, which was atoms. And so, it motivated the search for atoms.

So, the real story: can I share with you the real story?

Russ Roberts: SPOILER ALERT. For people who want to read it in the book, you can stop listening now. But, by the time you get to the book in a day or two, you'll probably have forgotten. So, go ahead, David, take a chance.

David Epstein: And, I don't think it'll spoil it too much anyway. But--

Russ Roberts: Yeah, it's not that--

David Epstein: So, the real story is, Mendeleev had a book contract to write a two-volume intro-to-chemistry textbook, and he had only gotten eight of the then 63-known elements into Volume One. So, he had to get the other 55 into Volume Two. And he had a customer problem, which was: it had to make sense for intro students.

So, it was in thinking about how could he save space and organize things in a logical way for introductory students that he started experimenting with groups, so he didn't have to explain one element at a time but could kind of pick an element that represented a full family. And in doing that, that's where he started thinking of elements in terms of families, and essentially stumbled onto the periodic pattern.

I mean, he eventually realized that he had found this underlying law of nature, and in fact said, 'Oh, there are gaps in my table here, which means this is where we should look for new materials.' So, it led him to make these very bold predictions that were so accurate that when--he called the gaps--so he labeled these gaps, like, eka aluminum and eka silicon. Eka is the Sanskrit word for one, meaning one spot away from this other element. And, when other chemists would find some element and report that they found some element and it would be similar to what he predicted but not the same, he would write them and say, 'Check your calculations again.' And, they would, and he would be right.

So, it was a pretty amazing story. But I think the gap between the myth and the reality is symbolic of something important, which is that we overvalue this complete freedom and undervalue the power of constraints to make us, to launch us into productive exploration.

Russ Roberts: And, you reproduce a page of his notes which show that it didn't quite flow perfectly from his brain. There's lots of crossouts and additions, and he's trying to figure it out.

David Epstein: That's correct, yeah.

Russ Roberts: "Kubla Khan," by the way, I think he claimed he just wrote it down as he heard it. But, anyway, unedited.

David Epstein: You know, Russ, speaking of dreams though, I realized as I was doing this reporting, there's a whole lineage of people in chemistry, at least, supposedly discovering stuff in dreams. And, it's usually they're doing that because they're in a priority dispute and they want to claim, 'I could not have possibly seen this other person's work.' It's, like, 'It came to me in a dream.' And so there's this whole long lineage in chemistry of discoveries that were supposedly made in dreams. Very dubious, almost all of them.

Russ Roberts: But, could be true, and I want to try--

David Epstein: That's right.

8:07

Russ Roberts: Actually, I want to talk about priority disputes, which is the phrase for who figured this out first. This has been haunting me for a while, because in the episode we did with Chuck Klosterman on his book, But What If We're Wrong. Or, What If You're Wrong? I think it's But What If You're Wrong, or whatever. No, it might be, What If We're Wrong? You can look that one up; I'm not going to correct it because I'm going to give both. He makes the observation that many, many great things are singletons, meaning: we know about one.

So, one of his examples is, can you name anybody who wrote music for marching bands? And I can name one person, John Philip Sousa. Turns out, he's not the only guy. He's the only guy that posterity has remembered. If you want to dig in, you can find many, many other composers, but there's one that gets remembered.

And, this is a haunting thing in your--you spend a number of pages talking about how many great discoveries had multiple--not sometimes, almost always--have multiple people working on the same problem and discovering something very similar right at the same time.

We know some of them are. You don't have to be a scholar to know that Newton and Leibniz had discovered the calculus and apparently independently; that Wallace and Darwin both came up with evolution. But, your point, which I think is profound, and I'll tie it back in to the Klosterman point, which is: Darwin didn't just figure this out in the equivalent of in a dream--this crazy new idea. These ideas were bubbling up constantly in the intellectual life of scientists. Talk about that for a little bit, and you can talk about Malthus, too, if you want, because it's fascinating.

David Epstein: No, I mean, absolutely. And, this is in this chapter where I'm writing about what's called multiple discovery, which is basically the idea--the kind of pioneering sociologist of science, Robert Merton [Robert K. Merton--Econlib Ed.], first started to attune people to the fact that even though one person was typically or one team was typically credited with world-changing scientific breakthroughs, that if you actually dug into it, there were often multiple people or multiple teams basically arriving at the answer the same day. It's not always as dramatic as Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filing their patent on the same day--probably there were like a half dozen other people that were there about the same time--but it's usually quite close.

And so, when you mentioned Darwin, I think one of the important things is--you know, a discovery like that, or maybe that one in particular, is you did such a break from everything that came before that it's just a complete paradigm shift. This person was just thinking, as I would say, outside the box of their whole time, and obviously it was an incredible breakthrough. But Darwin was so grounded in the thinking of his day. I mean, there were people, he had about 240 penpals that he would pepper with all sorts of questions, and they helped him set up these kind of pretty well-known mysteries of the day, like: Why are we finding marine fossils on mountains? And, why are we finding fossils of species that we don't see around us? Why do the bones in a wing of a bat, and the flipper of a whale, and the arm of a human have so much in common? So, he was really collecting--even, he would write to breeders, and they would tell him, 'We know that there are inherited variations when we're breeding.' They called them 'sports,' actually.

So, all of these ideas were percolating. And then he would read other thinking of the day. So, you'd appreciate this one, he was reading Adam Smith, which attuned him to the idea of competitive pressures and how does organization occur naturally out of competitive pressures? And, it was really synthesizing all those things into a coherent view that gave him this frame to think through.

And, of course, he wasn't the only one. You mentioned Malthus, where he was reading the Reverend Malthus on population, and Malthus's argument was that--and this had a lot to do with the British Poor Laws of the day. Malthus was arguing that if we basically do a lot of charity, essentially, that there will just always be more mouths to feed because population will grow geometrically and the food supply will not. And--

Russ Roberts: He missed some things that were coming. Not his fault. And we have many essays on that. We'll link to some of them on our website. But yeah, carry on.

David Epstein: He absolutely did. He missed some things that were coming. But that's one of the points I try to make in the chapter, is that these people who set up really interesting questions don't necessarily have to be right, because they frame a question for someone else--for a lot of other people--that leads them to think differently.

So, it was both Wallace and Darwin read Malthus--the same essay--and it crystallized something for them, where they then essentially came up with the exact same theory.

So, I think one of the points I was trying to make was that these lightning strikes of inspiration are not what they seem. They're actually really people who are tuned into the thinking of the day, paying attention to these well-defined questions. And, that's why even the most world-changing breakthroughs are arrived at by multiple people at the same time, almost always.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. So, like you say--and it's a powerful metaphor--these guys were actually thinking inside the box, not so much outside the box, and synthesizing what was inside the box already.

I have to add the quote from Darwin that you quote; he says, "I happened to read for amusement Malthus on population." I don't know if that sentence has ever come out of anyone's mouth or pen since then, but I thought that was delightful. But, the point about--

David Epstein: That's not what you do in your leisure time, reading Malthus?

Russ Roberts: [inaudible 00:14:24] amusement, so amusing. Actually, it's doubly funny. Most people would say his prose style is not so delightful. And, the second thing they'd say is his conclusions are not amusing, either. But, anyway, another time for a different topic, another time.

14:40

Russ Roberts: But, this point about one person, which fascinates me. Right? So, you think, okay, so there were two people. There was Darwin and Wallace. But no, no, your point, which I think is so profound, is that there were dozens of people thinking about these issues, including very practical people--the breeders. We had Matt Ridley talking--and I think you alluded to it--the Wright brothers were not aerospace engineers. There weren't any. They were bicycle people.

And, so, there's all this panoply of people of different skills and intellectual interests. There was much less specialization in the past.

And, just one more example, which has been on my mind lately, is: Can you name a military historian or strategist of the 19th century?

David Epstein: Of the 19th century?

Russ Roberts: Who writes about war and theories of war strategy?

David Epstein: Clausewitz.

Russ Roberts: Ah, excellent. Clausewitz. We did not prep this. If you had failed that test, David, I would have cut this part out. Anyway--

David Epstein: Wait, wait, would you have really?

Russ Roberts: Yeah, of course, I mean, we don't need to look like--because you don't know who Clausewitz is, it's humiliating.

Anyway, seriously. Seriously, there's another 19th century theorist named Jomini, I'd never heard of. But, I was reading a book about Clausewitz, and it turns out Jomini had some of the same ideas. And, even Adam Smith, in my field, who is vaunted as the father of economics or the grandfather of economics--there are many ideas of his that were around. You know, people who are immersed in this know about, Mandeville, say, and that he had some similar--not the same, not exactly the same.

But, people act as if no one had ever written anything about economics, and this guy comes along and says, 'Hey, do you ever think about this? Division of labor, competition?' And, of course, there are a lot of people thinking about it. And he became the one person, at least for a long time, that is associated with the beginning, partly because he had a tremendous marketing enterprise. No, he didn't do that, but partly because he's a very good writer, partly because he said it very well--

David Epstein: Yeah, I was going to say, he's a good writer--

Russ Roberts: And partly because I think this phenomenon, it's just hard to remember more than one person, so one person gets remembered.

But, your additional point, which is worth expounding on, is: We have this romantic idea that the creativity is this fountain that only one genius has access to. And fortunately, they came along.

So, that is a mistake. It's not the way the world works.

David Epstein: Absolutely. And, it's really tuning into--I think tuning into the thinking of the day and looking for really well-defined questions. And, I should say, to your point also, I think it's just easier to tell a story with one person, right? In many cases in these priority disputes, somebody fought much harder to become the person in history books.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, [?]. Zealous.

David Epstein: Right. Not to do a huge spoiler in the book, but you mentioned the Periodic Table story comes back: it recurs throughout the book. And, Mendeleev--eh, whatever, it's not a spoiler, it's still interesting--Mendeleev is the person credited in the history books, and there's some reasons; but again, he made these bold predictions that others didn't make, and his system was very complete.

But, so, there were no Periodic Tables before 1860, and there were six in the 1860s, all of which, again, Mendeleev's I say had some advantages, but all of them got the main idea. And, some of them were forgotten because the diagram was horrific. And, one of them, the diagram was what the creator called a 'telluric screw.' It was basically like a barber pole with the elements winding around it, and if you looked at it straight down, you would see the periodic pattern. And so, the publisher was, like, 'What is this?' and just left it out, so it didn't get published, so that got no notice. But, it was really these other things that were setting up the context.

Not that Mendeleev and these other people--actually most of them were not chemists, were not geniuses. They were, but there were these other forces of the time, including very importantly, an Italian guy who said, 'You're all measuring the weights of elements differently. Here's how we're going to do it from now on,' and handed out a pamphlet, which allowed work to communicate across space, because people could reference one another's work. That really set people up and defined the problem for them.

And, one of the examples I love from that chapter involved a mathematician, David Hilbert, arguably the most influential of the 20th century. And, one of the things he's most remembered for--genius, luminary genius--but that he decided to go survey the math landscape and collect two dozen problems that he thought were important and define them really specifically and then hand those out to his colleagues. And, it set an agenda for math in the 20th century, and many of them got solved, because he looked around at what was going on in really well-defined problems. And that made a whole bunch of other people look like geniuses because it focused their energies.

Russ Roberts: So, cool. I was talking to my wife about this phenomenon of one person, and then she said, 'Well, maybe Einstein is not so unique.' And, I'm thinking, 'No, no, Einstein.' But, of course, you have a law in your book that he has a little footnote, 'Oh, not really the first person to think this way.'

David Epstein: Yeah, yeah. In the paper--in his famous relativity paper--he has a footnote in the second paragraph where he's noting, 'By the way, I hadn't read this paper'--I think by Lorentz--and he's basically saying--was it Lorentz that it was--

Russ Roberts: I think it was. Yeah, I think it was.

David Epstein: And, he's basically saying, 'Yes, I realize this guy came up with some of the same things, but just so you know, I hadn't read that yet,' basically.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, and it's lost to history except for listeners of EconTalk and readers of your book. So, it's--poor Lorentz.

David Epstein: Yeah. So, I will say Einstein, I think, did have some unique, what seemed to me at least, fully unique physical interpretations of some of the discoveries, but was not the only one alighting on these equations at the same time.

21:17

Russ Roberts: Talk about your--there are two parts of, maybe there's more than two, but the two I'd like to hear from you about of your own personal experience with constraints. One's an injury you had in, I think it was middle school, that changed your life. And then also how in the course of writing this book, you tried to adopt some of the principles to your own work. So, let's start with your injury because I think it's a very common phenomenon, and tell us about it.

David Epstein: Yeah. I appreciate you asking about that. Nobody's asked me about that, as yet. So, this particular injury, the specifics was an uncommon phenomenon where in eighth grade, I was a very good athlete, and so I was playing quarterback in some gym class--touch football--in middle school. And, instead of kicking off, you would just have someone throw as hard as they could to the other side. And, in doing this, I reared back and threw as hard as I could, and my arm snapped on the follow through of the throw--my upper arm bone, the humerus--in a spiral. And, it was such a bizarre injury, nobody would believe that my arm was broken. I think I kind of went unconscious for a second; it shocked my system.

And, by the time someone took me to the hospital, I remember them laying me on a table, basically taking an x-ray, and I'm laying on my back, and they told me to put my hand up perpendicular, as if I were shaking hands. And, I had my eyes closed because I was nauseous, and I did it, and they said, 'Put your hand up.' And, I thought I was doing it. And, it turned out that the bone was totally separated from the shoulder, so I was turning my shoulder and feeling a phantom hand out in front of me.

We'll never know what happened. The doctor said that if there hadn't been witnesses, they would have thought one of my parents had twisted my arm until it broke. But, he said maybe there was a bone weakness or an air pocket or something like that, but we'll never know because once it broke, the evidence is gone.

And, I've only seen this happen one other time, and it was a major league pitcher, and he had to have his arm amputated. So, that ruined my life at the time because I had to have my arms strapped to my torso. So, a cast running all the way up to my shoulder and arms strapped to my torso.

And so, I couldn't play sports anymore. And my life revolved around sports. That was the only thing I was interested in.

But, it led to some changes. Like, in school at the time, I was taking French class, and we had these tests where you had to listen to a recording of a French person speaking and then you follow along on a worksheet and there are blanks, and you have to follow well enough to fill in the blanks with the word that they said. And, I was okay at this, but with the broken arm, I couldn't write fast enough--because it was my writing hand--to keep up. And so, I started realizing I'd have to try to memorize the words as I went through and then go back and write them down with my left hand. And, I started using sports-related mnemonics, like, attaching the words as I heard them to some sports image. And, I started knocking these tests out of the park, doing better than I'd ever done before. And, I started using mnemonics for everything in school.

Decades later, I would read one of the most famous memory studies ever done that involved a Carnegie Mellon undergrad. And, in this research, they took him from being able to memorize only seven digits to 80 digits using sports-related mnemonics. And, he was also an athlete. And so, this--

Russ Roberts: You had figured it out before. It's a priority dispute.

David Epstein: That's right.

But, it turns out, people have known this for a long time; a lot of people do memory palace and things like that. And, I use that to this day: If I memorize an hour long keynote talk, I'm using mnemonic. And, people will ask me if I have a photographic memory when I'm done with a talk sometimes, and--because I talk into slides, so it's clear that I've memorized everything. If I put my keys down and spin in a circle, I lose them. I do not have a photographic memory. It's that I learned to use these mnemonics, and I was forced to do that because my typical tactic was taken away.

It's called a preclude constraint, where when the typical tactic is blocked, you start looking for something different, and oftentimes, it's better. It also led to me taking up running because I was barred from contact sports for a year, and I ended up becoming something I never would have thought of--I ended up becoming a college runner and a university record holder, and all these things.

And so, it was just interesting in retrospect that this thing that blocked my normal modes of being led me to explore learning strategies and athletic activities that I just never would have explored in the past.

And, I think that's kind of a theme. In some ways, I hope this book is maybe an emotional reframe for people asked to do more with less, but also part of that reframe is to look at limits as opportunities to clarify your priorities and launch productive exploration. And, that's what happened in my personal life.

Russ Roberts: Now, there's a paradox there, of course, which is--and this is true of everybody--no, I shouldn't say that. There's a selection bias. We hear from people who make lemonade out of the lemons that get handed out to them. But, it's striking how many people who often go through very, very tough things have a benefit. And, it's not just: 'Well, it's not as bad as it seemed.' The outcome is actually quite extraordinary in a positive way. And, yet at the same time, we wouldn't suggest to people to break your arm and not use your right hand for a while. But, the metaphor is a very powerful one, I think. And, the idea that restraining your opportunities, your choices can actually be surprisingly--not just turn out better than you thought, but actually better than it was when you were totally free.

David Epstein: Yeah. It really reminds me of--maybe you know this study--the famous London Underground study where there was a strike and certain lines were down for a few days, and so commuters had to find new ways to work. And, these are people who are doing this every day; you would assume they would have optimized the path. And yet a significant portion of commuters found a different path and stuck with it. It saved, like, 1,500 commuting hours per day, just a two or three day strike that led people to experiment with different paths.

So, I think arguably we don't experiment enough, and we tend to follow what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance, where we do the convenient thing or the thing we've always done. Because, as the cognitive scientist, Daniel Willingham, says, 'You may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made to prevent you from having to think whenever possible, because thinking is energetically costly.' And so, unless the thing you're used to is blocked, you're probably not going to explore as much as you should.

28:15

Russ Roberts: Yeah. I hadn't thought about it until just now, but it's really an example of unintended consequences, even when it's a random event. Most of the time in economics, when we talk about unintended consequences, they are negative. You think the minimum wage is good, but: Oh, it puts people out of work. Or whatever is the--you put on price controls, and then that leads to scarcity, in the case of a different kind of--a price ceiling instead of a price floor. And, we always think of them as negative.

And, I remember somebody once asked me, 'Well, aren't there any positive unintended consequences?' And of course, there are, but this phenomenon of when something horrible happens to you--and religious people of course say, 'It's all for the best, God has a plan, and it'll turn out great.' And of course, that's, I don't think always true for most every person: I don't want to claim that even as a religious person. But, it's interesting how often it turns out so much better than you thought, and even sometimes pretty well, and yet in the moment you don't want to hear that. So, it's a perspective, as you say: it's a reframing that could be useful for us sometimes.

David Epstein: You're also making me think about--because I should say that many parts of the book are about self-imposed constraints that can prevent a team from drowning in possibilities and things like that, or make people more creative--but you are making me think about how often in my own life something like an injury has led to something useful. Where, I had--a few years ago--I had to get a few stitches in my head, and I was told to try to keep my blood pressure down for at least a few days, if not a week or two, and not to turn my head independently of my shoulders, if I could help it. And, it was painful; it was annoying; I had to sleep sitting up. And, a few days in, I found I was so happy that I was wondering what was going on, even though I was in a little bit of pain and sleeping was annoying.

And so, I started journaling about my days, and the thing that jumped out at me was that I had to do one thing at a time. I physically could not multitask. I couldn't turn my head quickly. And, I would actually feel if I started trying to toggle between things, my blood pressure rising, and I'd feel a little tingling on the scar. So, it was almost I had this built-in biofeedback if I tried to multitask.

And, I ended up writing that into one of the chapters about attention and focus, because it was so transformative for me in realizing how stressful multitasking was, and I hadn't even really been thinking about it. Not that I would wish stitches in the head on anyone; but again, it was kind of revelatory for me in forcing me to do one thing at a time and realizing how great that was, both my productivity, but also just my sense of wellbeing at the end of the day.

31:14

Russ Roberts: So, I mentioned there were two things from your own life--and there's more than two--but the two I wanted to talk about. So, one of them was just your sports injury, which changed the arc of your career, even not just your leisure and your college extracurriculars.

But, the other is that when you were writing the book, you imposed some constraints on yourself, and these are constraints that I think all of us think about. I just want to mention: I did, having not played chess on my phone for the last year or two, put it back on for about four days, and now today just in incredible frustration and embarrassing mood swing, deleted it again. I'll put it back on in a few years. But, most of the time we have trouble constraining ourselves that way. So, talk about what you did in making yourself both more productive and also I think a little more sane.

David Epstein: Yeah. I think there were kind of two buckets for this. One, how my workday works, and one, the book in specific. Are you thinking about either one of those specifically?

Russ Roberts: Either one, both, whatever.

David Epstein: Okay. Okay, both. So, let me talk about the book specifically. One of the reasons I took on this topic--I guess the older I get, the more I realize or the more honest I am about maybe how much me-search is in my projects. And, it's pretty clear in this one, because I have been terrible at drawing boundaries around things--around my workday, around my work projects.

So, for my first two books, I wrote about 150% the length of a book and then had to cut back to get a book. For my first book, I took a trip to Arctic Sweden that I had to cut. Once I became a parent, you don't want to be taking trips. It was an interesting trip; but you don't want to be taking trips to Arctic Sweden that aren't going in the book. And, that was very much because I didn't do a good job of defining my project ahead of time.

So, this time around, once I did my reporting--because basically for the first year of the project, I don't write. I'm just reading papers, interviewing, mapping the landscape. And, after that, I sat down and forced myself to make a one page outline. One page only. This kind of came at the suggestion of one of the people I interviewed in the book who was the lead designer of the iPod, where he tells people to write the press release before they start the project so you have this kind of bounding box for it. And actually this is--I have it right behind me--this is for anyone who is--here you go, Russ--this is the one page outline.

Russ Roberts: Wow. Cool.

David Epstein: You can see I tried to defeat my own system by writing as small as possible.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, I'm shocked. I thought it was going to be a 200 word--no--for those who are not watching this or listening at home, it's a big mess. Let's just leave it at that.

David Epstein: It's a big mess. But, it's one page. And if it's not on that page, it's not in the book. And, this forced me--it was painful--but it forced me to clarify my priorities for what was in the book, because in the past I had this, what designers call 'feature-itis.' Anything I thought was interesting, I'm trying to shoehorn it in there.

Russ Roberts: Sure.

David Epstein: And, that doesn't necessarily serve the reader. You want to prioritize, as the writer. It also led me to--very much in the vein of Mendeleev--with that small space, it led me to come up with this structure I've never used before, where I tell different slices of the Periodic Table story throughout the book, each time with a new layer that then introduces a series of linked chapters. And, it was trying to put the book in this small space that forced me to think about ways to arrange like topics. Whereas in the past, I was more just one chapter at a time. And so, I think a weakness of mine might have been coherence in my previous books.

So, it also made me much more efficient because--so I was slower to start writing this time around. It took me longer to get to the phase where I started writing. But once I started writing, I executed really quickly because I understood the playing field.

So this is what, in the book, the Danish researcher, Bent Flyvbjerg, who studies projects, would call the good sequence for a project--for projects that are usually, in his case, that come in on time and on budget and deliver what they promised--is: 'Think slow, act fast.' Meaning, you have this small early stage where you're defining the problem, you're setting the boundaries, what are you doing? And then, when you move into execution, you can do it more quickly.

The opposite is think fast, act slow, where you have a big idea, you rush into execution, and then the lessons are going to be much more painfully acquired because you have momentum and all these things.

And so, I actually, in my first two books--well, the first one I needed an extension actually, so I didn't even make it by the deadline. The second one I turned in on 5:00 PM on the day of the contract. So, I assumed that's what I was going to do again. And I finished--I had it a month early, and I just sat for two weeks because I didn't know what to do.

Russ Roberts: Wow.

David Epstein: Like, does anybody turn in books early?

Russ Roberts: No.

David Epstein: So, I would never not do it this way again if I--well, for the third time I'm saying 'never again.' I always say that after writing books, and I believe it, but then there's a period of recovery. But, if I did it again, I would always do it this way. It was so helpful.

36:48

Russ Roberts: But, you also changed some habits. So, talk about those, email and--

David Epstein: Yeah. So, and some of these won't make sense for everybody or a lot of people, but I think there's something that people can pull from them. Where, when I was reporting the chapter about attention and focus, I found it a little bit scary, where a lot of it was based on the work of this psychologist named Gloria Mark, who for about 25 years was shadowing people at work. First sitting behind them with a stopwatch, and then later it became logging their computer activity and heart rate monitors, and all these kinds of things.

And, what she found when she started monitoring people about 25 years ago, people switched tasks about every three minutes. And then, by 2012, it was more like a minute and a half. And, by 2022, it was 45 seconds, where it seems to have flattened out at 45 seconds at least for the last few years.

And, not only do the number of switches predict people's end of day productivity in a bad way, they also predict their stress as measured by heart rate variability.

And, but the scariest part of this research, I think, was what she showed about self-interruptions, where, if you're interrupted by notifications and email and all these things all day, or other people, and you say, 'Well, today I'm going to focus,' and you turn the notifications off, you will just self-interrupt with intrusive thoughts at the rhythm to which you've become accustomed, as if you have an internal distraction barometer that wants to keep a certain rhythm. And so, if you want to be able to reclaim your focus, basically, you have to train yourself. And it doesn't take long; but you have to start working in some blocks where you're not toggling.

So, for me, because being a writer I had a lot of ability to do this, when I was in my deep focus part of the work where I was really writing, I wouldn't turn my phone on until late in the day, and I definitely wouldn't check email. I wouldn't check email really until my work for the day was done.

So, again, it doesn't make sense for everybody. But, the email, your inbox is--there's something called the Zeigarnik effect, which is this idea that an open task takes up a little brain space. And, my email inbox is always that, right? There's a million things I can never respond to, and so it takes up brain space. So, I stopped opening it during the day. But I think a more sensible thing for most people is to try to do some batching.

So, Mark found that people in offices check email on average 77 times a day, and different times. So, maybe you need to answer all that email, but can you do it in one block where you're just doing email, or two blocks, or three blocks? And then, do your other work in blocks so that you're mono-tasking for the thing you're doing within a half hour or within an hour, and not toggling all day long because that feels efficient, but it actually isn't, and it's really stress inducing. So, if you can block some of your work and start not in your inbox, that's probably helpful. So, I think--again, not that everyone can do it to the extent that I did, but probably everyone can do a little better than they are.

Russ Roberts: So, I threw the chess app off my phone as a constraint, but there's 10,000 others that I still do that I wish I didn't do sometimes at least. What are your thoughts on why it's so hard, why it's so difficult? And, I've told this story before about being--I think I've told it on the program, of being on a meditation retreat and eating lunch mindfully. Which means you take a bite, you look at it, you might think about where it came from, you might smell it, you put it in your mouth, you chew it thoughtfully, you think about the origin of it, the number--as an economist, I would be thinking about the division of labor and all the people who contributed to it, and so on. And, it's so exhilarating when you're doing it. And then, I go back home after the retreat is over, and I'm thinking, 'Oh, I'm going to do that every day from now on.' And I can't. I compulsively look at sports on my computer while I eat, or read, or multitask.

Why do you think it's so hard? Why is it so hard--when we know--I know, just like you know now--that these are good habits. But why are these habits so difficult for us?

David Epstein: Yeah. And, by the way, I think there's some research that shows that it might interfere with your satiety signals if you're not paying attention while you're eating, too.

Russ Roberts: Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah. I think that's true.

David Epstein: So, people end up eating more.

I think there are a few reasons. I think one is, again, as Daniel Willingham said: Our brains are meant to prevent us from thinking when possible. So, we do the convenient thing. And a lot of that is passive, right? We're scrolling or whatever it is. Whereas what you're talking about, being mindful, I mean, that takes some work. It feels like you're not doing certain things, but it actually takes--anyone who has tried to meditate in the early going realizes that it's hard. It takes work. It's uncomfortable. That's why it takes a lot of practice to do it well.

But another side I think is that--and again, as Gloria Mark's research shows--we've been trained now way more for the distraction, always doing something side. So, you go to a retreat and you practice in a different way for, I don't know, days, a week, two weeks, whatever it is. The whole rest of your life probably has been training you for this other mode of being. And, of course, there's, like, an army of psychologists behind all of these apps that are trying to engineer your attention also. So, I think it becomes so easy unless you're forcibly putting boundaries in place. If you're not engineering your attention these days, it will be engineered for you by very smart people who have a lot at stake. And so, I think, again, we're following the path of least resistance, where you're falling into attention traps that have been engineered to make you behave in a certain way.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, no comment. There's so much to say there, but I'm going to move on. I'd love to, but another time.

43:07

Russ Roberts: I want to talk about Isabel Allende, the writer, and the role of a particular date in her life. And, I don't remember if you used this word, but she constrains herself, and you'll talk about it. But, the other way I think about this is ritual. So, tell us about Isabel Allende's writing habit.

David Epstein: Yeah. So, she's one of the great living writers, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and a recipient, winner. It's kind of weird to call it Presidential Medal of Freedom like as if it's the Olympics. And, she started writing in midlife, just before she turned 40 when--so, her father's cousin was Salvador Allende, who I think was the only democratically elected socialist head of state in the world, the only one that I can think of, anyway--and was overthrown in a coup. And that led Isabel to end up having to flee Chile.

And so, she was in exile when she learned that her grandfather was dying. And so, she started writing him a letter on January 8th. And, she was basically just writing him a letter to say, 'All the stories that you told me, they're not going to die with you.' So, this would have been, by the way, January 8th, I think it was 1981, that: 'I'm going to preserve them.'

And as she's writing this letter, a lot of them are about the sort of fantastical, magical stories that her family has told. Some of them--yeah--that she had a relative who could move a sugar bowl with her mind, these interesting stories. And it starts morphing into a novel, and she realizes that's happening. And so, she keeps writing, keeps writing, and it becomes this book called The House of the Spirits, which becomes this international blockbuster. Now it's a movie with Antonio Banderas in it and all these sorts of things. But it starts this ritual for her.

So, the book comes out when she's about 40, where every January 8th from then on, if she has finished the previous book, she starts a new book every January 8th. And she has all these rituals where she needs structure and silence. And, before she was this huge international celebrity, sometimes this was in a clothing closet where she would set up a typewriter because she needed silence.

And, she starts cleansing to get ready for this January 8th ritual, throwing out things from the previous project, cleansing her office. She puts a Pablo Neruda book under her computer, or typewriter, then computer, just in case creativity by osmosis is a thing.

And, this ritual always brings her back. Even if she doesn't really have an idea yet, the ritual sort of forces her to do it again. And, since then--so in the last 45 years, she only had one publishing break. So, this ritual has led to about a bestseller about every 18 months for the last 40 years. So she's sold 80 million books. And by the way, she's plowed a ton of that money into a foundation. She's given away an enormous amount of money.

And, the one time she had a break was when her daughter, Paula, who was in her 20s, died of a rare disease, and--that they didn't know she had until she fell into a coma. And, she writes this searing memoir, Paula, about it, that's just incredible to read. And, in the book she's saying, 'I think I'm done writing. This is it. I just don't have it anymore. This has sapped me.' And, she skips one January 8th for the first time ever and said, 'I'm done. No more writing.' But then, the next January 8th is coming around and she says, 'Maybe I'll just sit down and see.' So, she goes through a ritual again, and it pulls her back, and of course she writes another book and starts the ritual again, and it reinvigorates her career.

And, she's so driven by ritual and by--she needs structure and silence, as she said, lots of silence. And, for the first few weeks--and it also adds a seasonality to her life, where everyone knows if they need something from her, better have gotten it by January 7th because then she's away doing her thing. And, she'll turn down, by the way, $150-grand to give a talk once she goes into that phase, because it's so sacred to her.

And, I think it's particularly interesting, because if you read profiles of her, because there's magical realism in some of her books--many of them do not have but some of them do--profiles of her will make it sound like she's a mystical medium. She just sits back and characters speak through her. But, in fact, the story of her creation is one of incredible boundaries and discipline that she put in place.

So, it was amazing to see, as a writer. Even down to her workday. She lights a candle to start the day and blows it out to finish the day because she has a very defined period of work and then period of recovery. So, I adopted that also, by the way. I use electric candles because too much paper or maybe I'm not as brave as her or something like that. But, I just thought it was so interesting to see someone whose public legend is, again, of this creative lightning strikes, but really, it's driven by this incredible discipline and structure and ritual that she's set up for herself.

48:37

Russ Roberts: So, the idea of lighting that candle seems kind of silly.

David Epstein: It does.

Russ Roberts: How is that going to help her write better? Is it? Oh, come on. And yet, human beings--I mean, I think one of the great lessons of this book is that Daniel Willingham quote about what your brain is meant to do. A lot of what we do is about escaping our brain--whatever that means. That's a meaningless statement, but I think you know what I mean.

And, I think about Stephen King. I'm not a big Stephen King fan--I've not read very many of his books. But he has a wonderful book on writing. And, when Stephen King becomes a writer--he's, I think, a high school teacher for a while--and he sells a story and he realizes he can be a writer. He gets up every morning, and I think he--I can't remember if he listens to music or not, but I do that sometimes. And then, I often--I can sometimes will turn it off, or I might continue with it, it depends; but it puts you in a different space.

And, unfortunately, I'm not Stephen King--or maybe fortunately--but he writes 1,000 words. And, when he's done with the thousand words, which I think in his early career was four hours or so, a page an hour, he would stop. Didn't matter when it was. It could have been after two hours some days probably, and some days it was four and a half. And, I think he said recently somewhere, I don't know when it was, he said, 'Yeah, and now I have to work till 1:00,' but in the old days he worked from, like, 6:00 to 10:00 or whatever. And, if you can write 1,000 words a day, that's four pages, and in 100 days you've got a real book. That's three months. And, he does it, and just, like, every day. Every day, he doesn't get up from the chair until he's written a thousand words. And, there's a thousand reasons why that's a stupid idea: but it's not. It's a genius idea.

David Epstein: Yeah. No, I love that, because like you said, it does seem silly.

Russ Roberts: I mean, some days you don't feel it, you're not feeling it. So, get up. Go--nope. Sit in the chair.

David Epstein: That's why it's important. I mean, when I think back to when I was a competitive runner, I was running the 800 meters. There's a lot of days you don't feel like doing the training that you have to do for that event: it's not pleasant. People end up in that event because they wanted to be a 400-meter runner, and they weren't cutting it, and this is a way to survive. So, but there's so many days where the habit, the ritual, sometimes the other people also pushing you on, bring you back because there are a lot of days you don't want to do it. That's why it's important to have. On the days where you feel like it, and you're great, and you're jazzed up, then I think all the discipline and the structure is less important. It's all those other days that you also need.

And, I think this is why, if you've ever read the novelist Haruki Murakami, another international phenomenon, talking about--he starts doing endurance training to get ready to write a book because it's also an act of endurance where, an act of endurance and ritual. And, it's like Rick Rubin, the music producer, he wrote about in his book about creativity that it's really this kind of--that a lot of their creatives have this very, not boring, but rigid day where it's very structured because that's actually what liberates them to do their thing, when they're not having to make a million other decisions and they know this is where they're going to be and it's going to bring them back. So, I think that discipline and structure actually, almost that boring repetitiveness allows you to flourish and expand your thinking within that.

52:21

Russ Roberts: You have a chapter called "Rules of the Game." I think that's the name of the title, but it's certainly the subject, name of the chapter. I've often reflected on the fact that accepting the restrictions of the Jewish Sabbath has got to be a recipe for misery because there's so many things you can't do. And, why would you ever choose to not be able to do things you're in the mood for? And yet, something extraordinary happens if you're comfortable with that; and there's so many things in life like that. And, I think--this is not a self-help book in the kind where you're at the end of every chapter, 'Here's four things you can do'--which I appreciate, by the way; I'm glad you didn't do that. But, it does make you realize that there are rules you can impose on yourself that sweeten life or make you more productive.

And, you talk toward the end of the book about Bernard Suits, who I'd never heard of, but you write about games. And, of course, in some dimension--he was criticizing Wittgenstein--and of course, life is a game in a certain sense, and games without rules are no fun. Right? If you play Scrabble--

David Epstein: It'd have no meaning--

Russ Roberts: Right. If you play Scrabble and any word counts, you're not playing Scrabble anymore, and it's not fun. So, talk about what Bernard Suits was trying to do and this idea of rules and games.

David Epstein: I will, but I want to say two things to your comment first, one of which is that that "Rules of the Game" chapter, influenced by you. Some of the things that I've heard on EconTalk [inaudible 00:54:10].

Russ Roberts: Oh yeah, there's some economics in that chapter, yeah.

David Epstein: So, I just wanted to thank you for that.

Russ Roberts: Oh, thank you.

David Epstein: And, I appreciate your compliment about not doing bullet points at the end of chapters. Because, I think of--I strongly identify as a craftsman for writing who is always trying to improve, and so I'm trying to make a Swiss watch of a book. And, so, I don't want those kinds of breaks. I want my narrative to be narrative.

But, Suits--so as you mentioned in Wittgenstein, one of the things Wittgenstein famously said was, 'Language is fuzzy.' And, one of his famous--maybe his most famous--example was that there's no core essence of what we call a game. So, some have strict rules, some don't; some you play alone, some you play with a team; some are just for fun, some are competition; etc., etc. Some are make believe. And, Suits said, 'No, I think that's wrong. I think there is a core quality of all games, and it's an attitude.' And, he called it the 'lusery attitude'--the attitude that you have to take on in order to participate in the game. And, he described it as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Which I love. And, it is that voluntary acceptance of these obstacles that are totally unnecessary, right? You could get from point A to point B in a race much more efficiently, or get down a football field, things like that, much more efficiently.

Russ Roberts: Lower the basket: then I could dunk. It doesn't have to be 10 feet high. Come on, that just makes it harder.

David Epstein: [inaudible 00:55:43].

Russ Roberts: Make the hole bigger in golf, come on.

David Epstein: Or you could let people just run down the court without dribbling the ball--which seems like it's happening sometimes now anyway.

But, his point was that--so, he wrote it in this brilliant book called The Grasshopper, which is a parable where he takes Aesop's grasshopper, who plays all summer long. And so, unlike the ants who are hoarding food, he's going to die during the winter because he's been playing instead of hoarding food. But, in this case, in Suits's case, the grasshopper defends his choice and said, 'I was doing something that made my life meaningful by pushing against these obstacles.'

And so, I think it's an analogy for life. Take field, add lines, and suddenly you have collective meaning where you can engage in something with other people, and it allows the attempt to achieve things.

And so, I viewed that as almost like a nugget that encapsulates a huge part of the book. That, this voluntary acceptance of obstacles, you do it because it can take you places that you never could have otherwise envisioned.

Russ Roberts: So, it reminds me of Michael Easter. He's got this idea, it's a Japanese word of misogi--I think I'm pronouncing it correctly--that it's a horrible challenge. It's not easily done. But it's not impossible, and it won't kill you. And that, taking those on makes life both vivid and meaningful. Sports--team sports--are about a group of people getting together. What was the phrase from Suits again? The voluntary--

David Epstein: The voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

Russ Roberts: Right. And so, I mean--it's silly: you're going to march the ball down the field in the football--there's nothing really at stake. I mean, it's all pretend. It's all, you've made up your own meaning, a goal that--the entertainment is the goal. And that requires a certain set of restrictions on what's allowed. It's not about winning. It's the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the guy takes out the big sword and Harrison Ford just shoots him. It's, like, but that's cheating. And that's why it's a great scene--because it's kind of funny. It's not really humorous; but there's a humor, a dark humor there.

But, many times in life, we adhere to restrictions, which is what you're saying, where not just you're more productive, but you can produce meaning.

58:24

Russ Roberts: You could talk--I'll try for a minute about General Magic, because I'd never heard of it, or if I had, I've forgotten--I'm sure I've heard about and forgotten about it. It's this, 'Oh boy, we're on a great quest. We have the most talented people in the world. We're going to do this great thing.' And nothing happens. What were they trying to do, and why did they fail?

David Epstein: So, this company, General Magic, really starting in the late 1980s, but in the early 1990s, they saw the future of the communications technology. So, they were essentially trying to build the iPhone starting in 1990, essentially, when only 15% of American households even had computers. And, they had so much talent. They were founded by three former Apple employees, two of whom helped design the original Mac. The third, his job was looking for the future of technology. And, he was, this guy named Marc Porat, absolute visionary. I read his Ph.D. dissertation for Stanford in 1976 in which he coins the term, 'Information economy,' and it is eerie to read. I mean, he saw what was coming. So, they found this company, it spun out of Apple, to make the new personal communicator.

And, the idea is so intoxicating and visionary, and the talent is so incredible, that Goldman Sachs takes them public in the first so-called concept IPO [Initial Public Offering], where they go public just with an idea, not with a product.

And, fast-forward, it becomes a disaster. After six months' of the product debuting--which is again a personal communicator--they've sold 3,000 units mostly to people they know, and it just becomes this epic disaster.

And, there's this question of how could this have failed? Porat later said that he raised so much money so quickly, they had this 17-partner alliance. Their alliance--these people they were working with, these other companies--they covered so much of the communications technology world that they had to start their meetings with an antitrust lawyer listing all the topics they weren't allowed to discuss. But, that also made it incredibly hard to make decisions, because there were so many people involved. And, Porat said he raised all this money from them and other people because he wanted to create heaven for engineers where the engineers were free to play and create and limited only by their imaginations. And he said, 'What more could anyone want?'

And, I think the answer was less freedom. Because I interviewed dozens of former employees from General Magic, and a refrain was, 'We could not figure out what not to do.' They didn't have a clear customer. They called their customer Joe Sixpack. After a few years' of missed deadlines, they realized nobody knew who that guy was or what he wanted. And so, they ended up just building for each other. They had so much talent, so many resources, they could do anything, so they often did.

There was actually one, if I can share this, one interview I think was kind of emblematic of the problem there with this engineer named Steve Perlman, who was charged with creating a calendar function for the device.

Russ Roberts: Oh, yeah. It's a great story.

David Epstein: And, he writes the calendar function to go from 1904 to 2096, and checks it in and thinks he's done. And then, another one of the leaders comes to him and says, 'Steve, somebody might write apps'--because they already were building an app store back in 1990--'Somebody might write apps that does historical things or goes way into the future. You have to expand this calendar app.' So, he brings away: he goes back to Year One instead. Fine, checks it in, done.

Then its other team comes to him and says, 'Steve, why are you tying this into some arbitrary religious context? Take it back to the beginning of astronomical time.' So, he checks it out again and starts the calendar function to go from the Big Bang, way into the future. And, as he said, if he'd left it at 1904 to 2096, it would have been four lines of code, and instead it dragged on for months. Which was a huge waste of time. And, that was how things at General Magic happened. Because they had not drawn good boundaries, and because they did have so many resources and so much talent that they couldn't figure out what not to do. And so, it became a disaster.

As the venture capitalist, Bill Gurley, when I was interviewing him said, 'We have a saying in venture, more startups die of indigestion than starvation. Too much, not too little.'

The good thing about General Magic, though, I'd say, is it was almost a trauma for some of the people that were working there. And, they came out of it having learned these incredible lessons about the importance of putting constraints in place, and went on to co-found or create Android, iPod, iPhone, Nest, to lead things like Google Maps, Safari, all these other things, LinkedIn, eBay. E-Bay was actually incubated by a low level service engineer at General Magic who offered it to General Magic; he was actually obligated to offer his IP [?Intellectual Protocol?]. And, they were like, 'No, no. We got a much bigger thing going on.' It was called AuctionWeb at the time, so he took it out on his own and turned it into eBay.

They basically had the PalmPilot internally, too. The guy that was making PalmPilot started as a third party app for General Magic called Graffiti, where strokes with a stylus could be turned into writing. And, that guy said--when it was clear General Magic was going to fail--he said, he identified a clear customer problem, busy professionals wanted to sync their contacts and calendar and take it on the go. So, I'm going to do just contacts, calendar, and memo pad, period. And, General Magic, like, laughed at him and said, 'You can't compete with us.' Because that was three of the bajillion things they were doing, and PalmPilot became a hit. So, when General Magic's device appeared, it had tons of features, but user experience was choppy because it had so much--battery life was bad--and it was confusing. It shipped with a 200 page manual. Can you imagine getting--right? There were eight pages just on the battery.

But, again, it did produce these incredible people, like Tony Fadell, who is an important character in the book who is known as the pod father because he led the design of the iPod. When he co-founded Nest, a smart thermostat company, after that, he forced the team to work inside a literal box. He's like a zealot for constraints. The first time I called him, he's going, 'If you don't have constraints, make up constraints.' He's a very enthusiastic guy. And, he made them prototype the packaging at Nest before they had the product because he said, 'This will show us what our priorities are, if it goes on here, and this is what we want to communicate to the end customer. And, if it's not on here, then we can put it in a holding pattern because it's not important enough.' As he said, with these ultra constraint-based things, they slow you down, but they make you think really hard. And, that's exactly what happened to me in doing this one page outline, so--

Russ Roberts: Yeah, I was thinking.

David Epstein: Yeah. That story comes back toward the end of the book, and it's become an important story in the book.

1:04:59

Russ Roberts: So, I'm going to close with an observation about economics and let you react to it. We're trained in economics. There's been some revision of this, but the standard economics paradigm is that more is better than less, and constraints lower your wellbeing. Constraints keep you from getting to a higher level of satisfaction. Your income is a constraint. If you had more income, you'd be happier, more satisfied; you'd have more of what we call utility, a catchall phrase to mean good--good--good things.

And the older I get, the more problems I have with that perspective, because we don't just care about how much stuff we have. We care about where it comes from, and whether we earned it, and whether we were respected when we earned it. And, I understand you can force all that into a utility-maximization framework. But most economists struggle to do that artfully, and as a result, they kind of keep the simple version.

I'm not a big fan of the revisions of that model. I don't think they've been very successful, either.

But I think there is a deep lesson here, and it's not just about economics. Because, surely if you had a startup, more money is better than less money; because if you have less money, you could starve. You could go bankrupt, and your brilliant idea would never come to light.

But, it's also obvious that if you have too much money, you can't focus for--it's just a human challenge. There are exceptions, I'm sure. There are people who can overcome that, but most of us can't, and constraints are very powerful. So, take us home with a reaction to that.

David Epstein: First, I think it's clear that constraints can be bad. Right? It's almost synonymous with something that is frustrating.

But, I think you're right, and you said it really eloquently. And, I guess maybe--so I don't know that I have that much to add to that, so let me bring in something that I think is interesting and related, which is--because the most important thinker in the book we haven't mentioned. And to me, Herbert Simon. Was trained as a political scientist, won the Turing Award in computer science because he co-did the first AI [artificial intelligence] demonstration. Won the highest award you can win in psychology, and then won the Nobel Prize in economics also for bounded rationality, basically, in some of his other work.

And, one of the important--his life's work was really motivated by the noticing that people didn't really adhere to some of the decision-making behavior that classical economics suggested they would. And, one of his important findings--he turned into this word that he coined 'satisficing,' which is a combination of satisfy and suffice. And, what he found was that because we have finite brains and finite capacity to evaluate options, we can't actually make optimal decisions. We use shortcuts and heuristics to make our decisions.

And, what Simon suggested was that we actually should proactively do that and set good-enough rules for ourselves.

So, he proactively satisfies. He said, 'You only need three pairs of clothes. One on your back, one in the wash, and one in the closet.' He had the same breakfast every day. He had one beret that he always wore, etc., because he famously wrote, 'The best is the enemy of the good,' where he argued that by looking through--we have this idea if we have more, and more, and more, that we can optimize our solutions--or maximize, in the language of the people in his field. What he said is not only can you not, but in fact, if you counted the cost in time and money and energy of attempting to maximize, you'd realize that satisficing is the maximizing strategy, basically.

Russ Roberts: So, economists were right all along, but okay, go ahead.

David Epstein: Right. And so, I think it's important, always, instead of always pining for more--even though more has led to shared prosperity in ways that are very, very important--setting good-enough decision rules. We're not built to have access to everything everywhere, all of the time. And, so I think recognizing that constraints can be good and saying when you're going into decisions, 'What are the three things I want this decision to accomplish, or this purchase to accomplish, or whatever?' And, when you get that, make the decision and move on, instead of wondering if there's always more and better out there. Otherwise, you fall prey to something called Fredkin's paradox, which is we spend the most time on the least important decisions because we're having trouble telling the options apart, which is why you agonize over it. But, it also means either that there's not much difference, or you can't figure out much more difference, or maybe it doesn't matter.

So, I've become a proactive satisficer. It almost sounds--you'd almost accuse Herbert Simon of having low ambition if he hadn't won the highest award in several different disciplines.

Russ Roberts: My guest today has been David Epstein. David, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

David Epstein: It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure and honor to be here. And, like I said, you're an influence in this book, Russ, so I really appreciate you and your thinking.

Russ Roberts: Thanks, David.

Thinking Inside the Box (with David Epstein)

Chuck Klosterman on But What If We're Wrong

Matt Ridley on How Innovation Works

READER COMMENTS

Steve

May 11 2026 at 7:42am

Jules Elliot Bolton

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May 17 2026 at 2:36pm

Jules Elliot Bolton

May 21 2026 at 5:43pm

nathan

May 14 2026 at 5:14am

Greg McIsaac

May 18 2026 at 2:41pm

Bob Bettwy

May 30 2026 at 8:27pm

Luke J

Jun 6 2026 at 1:30am

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Thinking Inside the Box (with David Epstein)

Chuck Klosterman on But What If We're Wrong

Matt Ridley on How Innovation Works

READER COMMENTS

Steve

May 11 2026 at 7:42am

Jules Elliot Bolton

May 12 2026 at 6:00pm

Maithili Ramachandran

May 17 2026 at 2:36pm

Jules Elliot Bolton

May 21 2026 at 5:43pm

nathan

May 14 2026 at 5:14am

Greg McIsaac

May 18 2026 at 2:41pm

Bob Bettwy

May 30 2026 at 8:27pm

Luke J

Jun 6 2026 at 1:30am

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