Welcome to two percent. I am your host, Michael Easter. So I recently just turned in a draft of my new book to my editor. It was a very long process. Took me about two years to write this book. And I wrote this book everywhere. I wrote some of it in my office, some of it in my kitchen table. I wrote it on airplanes, I wrote it in airports, all these different places. And I noticed in the writing
process that some places were much better than others. Some places I would be more focused, some places I would be more creative. And it really got me thinking about place and how the places where we live, work and exist affect us and what we do.
Now.
Lucky for us, I have an old friend who used to be a pro soccer player Good Little Factoids, now a professor at UVA, and he has a new book out. His name is Lighty Klotts. It is called in a Good Place, How the spaces where we live, work and play can help us thrive. So this is a really awesome book. If you happen to be a human who takes up space anywhere on this planet, that is to
say you. So I called up Lighty. We're going to talk to him about place We're going to talk to him about his past work, which I featured in my book Scarcity Brain, and that is where we're going to start. He found something really fascinating about the human mind and how we are wired to add often when it is not a good idea.
So let's go LIGHTI thanks for coming on the show.
Thanks for having me, Michael, it's great to be here.
So we first met when I was writing my book Scarcity Brain. A came across your study in Nature about how humans preferentially overlook subtraction and even wrote a book called Subtract about that entire topic. What I thought was amazing and awesome is the whole story behind how that study started, what kicked off the book, and it starts with legos. So tell us that story because it's amazing.
Yeah.
I was playing Legos with my son Ezra, he was three at the time. So it was actually the duplow blocks and we had we had a bridge basically that wasn't level. So the support column on one side of the bridge was shorter than the support column on the other side of the bridge. And so as a dad,
I'm like, all right, I can fix this problem. Turned around behind me, to grab a block to add to the shorter column, but by the time I had turned back around, Ezra had removed a block from the longer column to make the level bridge.
And I think the important point here is that you spent a lot of time in school thinking about engineering as well, so it's not like you're the you don't know what you're doing here, Like you have a PhD in this topic.
Yeah, literally a PhD in engineering. Yeah, so this was like this should have been moment, right, a doting dad and a PhD in the topic of making bridges straight.
But he came up with an answer that was.
Better, better than I did, And I wouldn't have thought of if he wasn't there.
And didn't you actually make the bridge wonky again and take it around and ask your collaborators, colleagues grad students to fix it.
But you would give them.
You would put the legos on the table so they could elevate it, right, And wouldn't most people add, yeah, so I.
Have the version of it right here.
I mean I still carried around like and so yeah, I would you know, make I made a replica, so basically this super simplified and then put the blocks next to it on the table, and I started bringing it around because I was like, I don't I mean, maybe people will just get this, but yeah, the super smart grad students could smarter than me come in and they're
all adding. And then I gave it to my collaborator, who I'd thought I had been trying to explain these ideas to and she was like she failed, and then she said, oh I get it, So what you but what we've what you've been trying to say is that why don't we subtract to make things better?
And then we were off.
So then speaking of that, you're off. This means you set up a series of experiments and what were those? How were they designed? And yeah, how'd that all play out?
My background's engineering. I do a lot of behavioral science stuff and I respect it, and I respected enough to know that for a study like that, I needed help. And so like Gabe Adams and Ben Coomvers and Andy Hale's or the co authors on the study and they're all psychology professors, were just at a table that students were walking by, and we would give them a lego structure that was pre made, just kind of a random structure,
and said how would you make this thing better. We got sixty samples from that and every single one added, and we like send an email saying the biggest bias ever. But then we went into you know, trying to create more like experimental setups where we're trying to figure out, like Okay was trying to make it so that subtracting is at least as good an option as adding, if not better, and then trying to show that people would overlook subtraction to their detriment and you would enjoy the
writing ones. And the classic writing advice right is omit needless words.
All this writing.
There's a whole profession of editors that exist to take things away from our writing and make it better. And we would give people summaries of writing and ask them to make it better, and everybody would add. And then so we did writing. We had a day trip itinerary in Washington, d C. That was just almost it was impossible to execute. I would argue, totally overloaded schedule. There's like a million Yeah, of course, seeing major monuments launch
at a five star bistro. I mean traffic between these things is like three hours of travel time just and then gave people a drag and drop interface where they could take stuff off of the schedule or add stuff to it and buy large people added to this already impossible schedule to make it better.
Or we missed the Vietnam monument. We got to see that too.
That's a good one.
That's subtractive though, that's down into the earth and it's all inspiring because it's subtracting, you know. Then we were playing around with like, Okay, how do how do we create situations we're subtracting? Is objectively the correct answer, because all of the other studies you could just argue, well, people just wanted to have a jam pack schedule, or people just wanted to have longer words. So the Lego one, we created this thing where it was basically.
Like a.
Sandwich, a panel on the bottom and a panel on the top, and then there was a stormtrooper, a Lego stormtrooper being protected by the top panel, and then there was like a column of supports going up. And the task was to try to put a masonry block on the top panel without it collapsing and crushing the stormtrooper. So if you didn't do to any modifications, it would just collapse and crush the stormtrooper.
It was set up so that the most.
Common modification people did was to add a whole row of blocks to strengthen the top the top row. The subtractive way to do it was to move one block and just drop the platform down. And we gave people financial incentives. We told them to so it costs money to add blocks, and they kept the money they had if they If they didn't ad blocks, we told them that the goal was to do it in as fuel blocks as possible. So again they were getting the wrong answer,
but it was very narrow, narrow context. So eventually came of this really elegant grid designs that you could show people on a computer screen. And basically, I mean there were a bunch of different designs, but all of them were symmetrical from left to right and top to bottom, except there were extraneous marks in one of the quadrants. And then we tasked people with like, how would you make this symmetrical? And the subtractive way to do it
was to remove the extraneous marks from one quadrant. The additive way to do it was to add to three quadrants, which of course took more work, and people would still add not even consider subtraction and then move on.
We overlook it.
And it's not that one is any better than the other inherently adding or subtracting. But the point you're trying to make is that if you are consistently overlooking subtraction as an as an option to solve a problem or make an improvement, then you're you're missing like half the options.
And those options are oftentimes more efficient.
Right, And they're like the if you think about this as like a marketplace of ideas, those are the ideas that nobody's thinking of, right, I mean, because everybody's overlooking them. And so I would argue, you know, if I have to pick between adding and subtracting, I would just take heading.
But we don't have to.
Pick their like complementary approaches to making things better. And because the subtractive ones are so underused, I would argue that there's probably more potential there to make your life better.
I would imagine A big one with businesses is meetings. Yeah, you look, you look at the stats on meetings, and I have been growing in frequency and duration over time, and I actually think probably after people started to work from home, I think that there's probably more meetings because it's like you got to meet with someone, but they're often not as productive as we think. It's almost like less, there's more in the meeting space.
Yeah, one hundred percent.
Bob Sutton, who's he's the author of the No Asshole Rule and a bunch of other books. But he and I have this like rule of halves for meetings that I think he came up with, but he keeps trying to give me credit for. And it's, you know, basically like making these Okay, can the meetings be half the frequency or half the half the number of time, half the number of attendees, And you're just like putting rules
on it. But and also I mean there are companies that do meeting doomsdays, which just take meetings entirely off the calendar and then you can immediately add them back. But it's like flipping the flipping the framing in your brain where it's like, Okay, is this something that we should add to our calendar versus is this something that we should we should have to subtract. And I think they end up with far fewer meetings. But that's definitely a huge time stink.
It could be an email or it could be to our previous point about information, just someone make a decision, you don't have to run it by fifty people.
Right, And there's this whole thing of you know, one of the reasons that we do this, you know, on the biological perspective, is just we want to show competence, right, We want to show that we're effectively making change in the world, and that is that disadvantages subtraction because like when we subtract something, the change isn't visible.
Yeah, that's really smart. You played professional soccer. Did you find this in your soccer career at all in terms of like how you were training, how just anything in that field.
There was a marathon er who like got sick before a big marathon and therefore didn't couldn't train as much, and then did really well in the marathon because like he effectively forced to taper, And that's how this idea of like scaling down your training before the games.
Actually came to be. So there's definitely that piece.
One of my favorite soccer ones is you can often these constraints can help. Like I'm coaching a bunch of eleven year olds right now, and like if you tell them they can only touch the ball twice and not dribble it. Actually the soccer gets much better because they're forced to pass and then sometimes even you know, taking people off the field so to shake the system out
of its out of its slumber. So basically, if you're playing like eleven on eleven and you're just like it's not dynamic enough, you go down to like nine people on one of the teams, and then all of a sudden people are having to cover more ground and it just breaks people out of the regular patterns. So definitely those things, but it's also hard. I mean, like one of the things, I think, the more you care about something,
the harder it is to subtract. And when you're trying to be a professional soccer player, it's really really hard to be like, oh, I'm not going to do this thing that everybody else is doing and that's going to help me get ahead.
It's it's really hard.
To think that way. And I would say probably I probably overtrained. I probably aired on the side of doing too much and not being fresh enough.
Yeah, And I feel like in the wellness world, do you see this, especially as people are starting to get into health and wellness, The question becomes what do I need to add and do? An example would be weight loss. People are like, what special diet do I need to add?
And then they go to the grocery store and they buy this massive range of all these new foods and it's like, well, you know, you could just kind of eat less of what you're already eating, or like I'm going to work out, I need insert ten thousand dollars in equipment.
It's like, why don't you just take a walk and do some push ups? That's free.
Yeah, I mean the weight loss one is so like obvious, right, but it's it's so true that a solution is so clearly less one. Reframing though, Like that's helped me because I would always have a hard time doing like rest days, right, and just like so just naming it something, right, This isn't a rest day. This is like my active recovery day. And I could do the exact same thing, but it's like I feel like the sense of accomplishment from doing it.
You've got to frame it for the type a personality that gets into professional soccer. Yeah, this isn't You're not just sitting around, This is actively recovering. Yeah, exactly, Okay, So one of the stories I love from your new book is how in college and you went to Lafayette right in Easton, Pennsylvania.
Got it.
You are playing Lehigh, which is, I don't know, twenty minutes away. They're your giant rival in soccer. Game is at Lehigh, so you are on your away turf, and all the data says that teams that are away teams have a disadvantage because there's crowd around, you're in a new territory.
It just kind of throws you off.
So your coach, before you guys are headed to the game, he's like, I'm going to take a meeting, I'm going to mess around a little bit. And you're all waiting for the bus, like we got to get to the game, and he's just gagging. When you get in the bus, he has the bus go like a really obscure route that takes way longer. So you show up at this game like ten twenty minutes before kickoff and you're kind
of frazzled. But it got you right into the game and you're like, we realized that it almost didn't allow us to sit on that field and get in our heads about being in this a way setting.
Yeah, and our coach would he said. I confirmed it with him, like when I was writing the book, because he would always do weird stuff and I was like, was that intentional? He's like, yeah, I wanted you guys
to get off the bus and play. And the idea was that you know, all the hoopla around the game, any of the nerves, any of the kind of like feeling disoriented in a new space, he would just transport us right to the soccer field, which is the same dimensions, the same grass, very familiar, and maybe have a little bit more adrenaline going through our veins. Because we were like kind of pissed at him for like messing up,
you know, we wanted to. Yeah, And so what I learned from that is like, when we're like going into new territory, it's I mean, it's super important to think about how you approach it, and it's not always good to just show up right before. But one strategy is to show up right before if you think it's going to be an intimidating space, and then just get into the familiar space as quickly as possible.
Yeah, I've noticed, I mean, you do public talks a lot and I've noticed too when people want me there, you know, two three hours before a talk, they're like, okay, just hang out in the green room for two hours. You're just kind of sitting there going, I wonder how big the crowd is, I wonder how big this stage is, what is this how much brighter the light's going to be?
Do I have a conference where you're just like running through your head, whereas in situations where they're like, yeah, just show up like twenty minutes before, you just get right into it, and it's like, oh yeah, this is just like every other talk.
You don't have time to sit and stew.
Yeah, what's the person before me going to say? Right?
And it's like and again, the talk's a great example because it's not like you're not prepared, right, You've done the talk before, You've prepared at nauseum. And what you're doing is like avoiding the awkward spatial stuff so that you can like connect with the audience as best as best as possible.
Yeah, So that's that's another great example.
I will say that like a good green room does that when you like kind of keeps you isolated. But if you the worst is when there isn't a green room and you go and you're like sitting in the audience and then you have to like come from the audience and go up on stage awkwardly.
Hey guys, Yeah, I was the one sitting over that. So what prompted you to write the new book?
I think the new book was in my mind before Subtract. I've always been interested in this intersection between like our physical world and our mental world. And then to write a book, you know, it has to be useful to somebody, so trying to figure out what people needed to know about that intersection because I felt like the intersection between like our physical and mental world, everybody would be like, oh, yeah, that's important, but like where are we supposed to focus
How can it be helpful to us? And so I think that was the motivating factor. And then the book was very like, you know, distilling down to what is what's important about this relationship and how can it help people and how can we use it in our day to day lives.
Yeah, you wrote about how people have three needs, agency, competence, connection, tell us more about those. I thought that was really interesting. And then how it applies to place.
I'll use an example, So agency competence and connection. You can think about like kids playing on a beach, right, So kids goes to a beach. Agency is like they get to decide where to build the sand castle.
Right.
They can they decide where to build it, they can decide how big to build it, they can decide how the shapes the forms. They can decide whether to make packed sand or a drip castle. So this agency is their ability to choose their relationship with their surroundings. Competence is the ability to actually do something right and to to know.
That you can do this.
So compensates or growth like if and it's amazing if you think about like what a kid's learning building a sand castle, right.
Barn awesome examples of your daughter building sand castles.
Were you on the Jersey Shore?
Yeah, Jersey Shore, Ocean City, New Jersey, and we go there every summer, and you know, but she's like doing the drip castles, and I think there's two or three and she's like making these really immaculate drip castles. You're learning how like the water swirls, right, you're learning the material properties of sand, But then you're also learning these
really important things about yourself. Right, So she'd get frustrated if it didn't work, but then she realized that if she did it again, she felt good about herself and she had some light control.
And so she's growing. And then the connection.
Obviously, connection comes in spaces from you know, connecting with other people, but you're also connecting through the creating of the spaces. So what always happens in those projects is like one kid's working and they realize that, well, if I can get other people to do stuff with me, then I can make this thing bigger.
And so she would you know.
I need you to get twenty buckets of sand and bring them up here.
Now, Oh, the worst is the water, right because you're just like endlessly going down to the ocean, grabbing a bucket of water, dumping it in their thing. That's then like filtering right into the ground as soon as you can like get back to the ocean.
Just like and just loop. You know, you see it in kids.
But you also you could think back to our hunter gather ancestors like agency would be, hey, can I like shape this environment so that I don't get killed by a predator or so that I am not exposed to the elements? Right, that's that's agency. Do I have the ability to do that? The competence, Like am I drawn to act on my environment to move to move sticks around in the world? And you know, now it's it's not some you know, the sand castle isn't life or
death proposition. But if you're not drawn to do that, when you're a you know, exposed to the elements, you're you're not going to survive.
So and then the connection, it's fascinating to me.
How you know, we talk about like social connection and like the first reason like Huntergether bands came together was to build big stuff.
I thought that was that was fascinating and it was like these sort of large scale projects, right, So they would come together start building on a project. And that almost led to the development of permanent settlements, right because they're going, well, it's going to take a long time to build this, so we might as well settle in. More people came to help, and all of a sudden we have towns and cities.
Eventually, right, you're figuring out, Okay, now we need agriculture because we need to stay in this spot. Now we need to have like social structures because we got to figure out how to organize this town, and so like the physical thing led to all these social structures.
You know, you.
See microcosms of that even just like Habitat for Humanity, right, that's building this most successful charity. It's fundamentally you're building houses together, but you're building all these social connections too. And there's this kind of culture of shared building that's in every culture all over the world by different names. So yeah, that's agency, competenes, and connection. I think, you know, it's kind of known that those are things in the
psychology world. It's known that those are things that matter for our well being. But the how closely tied they are to our relationship with our surroundings, and like, in fact they like arose from our relationship with our surroundings, and yet we've kind of gotten away from that in the in current times.
Yeah, and I like that.
A lot of the book was very tactical in the sense that it got into how can I upgrade the places and spaces where I exist? What spaces do you think could use the most upgrade in people's lives.
We don't do a great job of taking advantage of all the spaces to which we have access. This could be everything from like an unused room in your house, or like the outdoor space around your house to just like a different route you could take to work that would be much better to you know, all these amenities that your office has that you never go to because we're just on our like tried and true path. That to me is the biggest immediate upgrade that people can have.
Yeah, you're like you kind of get trapped in a cycle of doing the same thing day in and day out, and you don't ever think, Oh, if I, to your point, change my route, did explore the office and saw what it had, or like this room that I've just been shoving stuff in and never use, like I could provide an opportunity for something totally different that I could leverage.
Yeah, and you.
Know, we talked about the you know, the difference between showing up to a space right before versus showing up three days before. Like that's something we all can do in a lot of our spaces, right, So it's like how you can think through like how you interact with the space on the.
When it comes to time.
How can officers improve when you've worked with companies. I don't know if you spend much time in the office I've now I work from home, which we can get into, but when I used to be in working in offices, it was always I don't know, it was kind of just like I don't love this place.
Well, we can workshop this together.
I'm waiting a piece for the Wall Street Journal right now about the offices, and I'm like trying to make the point that I think like agency is the first thing that offices should give us, and yet we jump all these other things, right, And you may have read these articles, but like every five years there's an article saying like open planned offices are great, or closed offices are great, or you know, and then you know, people get into the weeds and they're like, well, this pink
color will make you more creative, and natural light is important and all that stuff. You know, there's there's science behind some of it, but it's also like such a depends on the people, depends on the tas, depends on the office. And if there's a general rule, it's that like people need to feel like they have some say in their relationship with their surroundings, and yet we like skip right by that in the in the office design.
So it's almost like there's some people thinking about open office, first clothes office.
I'll give you an example.
When I was working at Men's Health, we had our own offices for a while. To your point about agency, I had like these nice pieces of art that I liked on the wall.
It was MySpace. People couldn't come bug me.
And then we swa We got a new editor in chief and he was like really hot on this like Silicon Valley trend of open offices, and he switched to an open office. And it was like the worst thing that had ever happened to me, because now I'm like sitting next to people, and I'm you know, I like people, but generally in small and fleeting clusters, you know, and so they're just like people. I felt like people were overlooking me the whole time. I just like I didn't
get anything done. But I also imagine in his case, he's like, no, I actually work better when I can just bounce ideas off you guys and harass you and make sure you're doing your work. And so how does like, how do we find a balance given that we know some people are like me where it's like and in
my space, I need to think in quiet. And then you have other people who thrive on more people being around and almost the I don't want to use the word chaos, but that's how it felt to me of the open office.
Yeah, I think I mean flexibility and multiple uses and making sure that people know that they're allowed to do those multiple uses, right. I mean, I think there's a lot of these spaces and offices. Like I was talking to my editor and she was saying that in her office they have like all these great you know, it's open plan, but they recognize the editors need to do
deep work. So there's these places where you can do deep work, but the boss just comes in and like sits in the deep workplace and just kind of like camps out there.
And so I think making.
Sure that people know the spaces that they have access to, like kind of modeling that behavior is probably pretty helpful. Agency could be lost as something as simple as like you can't open a window, right, and now you know it's nice outside here today we I'm in an old building and like the windows sealed shut because they redid it with air conditioning, and that that takes away my agency in one way, and now I'm probably less likely
to like rearrange the furniture in my office. So just like giving people these like little gateway agency experiences, then making them more likely to kind of feel agency in their larger relationship with the space might make it better.
I guess it was probably from a study that you referenced in the book that I loved was that in retirement homes, when people are allowed to design their space how they want, make these choices about how they're going to live, they tend to have better outcomes compared to retirement homes where it's like this is it.
It's fixed.
No, you can't open the window, you can't move the furniture around, you can't do all the stuff to the walls.
So tell us about that. What are those studies find better.
Outcomes in this case is like likelihood of being alive, right, And so the people who are able to customize their space, and this is a pretty controlled you know, it is controlled and experiments you can get with the people who could customize their space where I think twice as likely to be alive eighteen months later.
That's wild.
Again, this is like, you know, we talk about like these psychological quirks that we have, and we have all these needs and again, like the paint color on the wall, more creative.
Blah blah blah. But this is like life or death.
Like agency is like this core need that we have and yeah, our space that you our spaces are either meeting it or starving it.
How do you think about that with your kids in terms of wanting to give them enough agency and at the same time recognizing that you can't just kind of let them do whatever the hell they want.
I love one of my favorite stories with my daughter with she like she's this preschool that did an amazing job with boundaries, and it's like one of these examples where like a spatial concept has been like taken over into the social world. Right, we talk about boundaries now and it's all about like a human relationship. But of course that came from like protecting your physical space. And so one of the first things they learned was like you could yell space, and that literally meant that people
had to give you like a ten foot radius around you. So, like my daughter's sitting in the in the lego room playing and I'm like trying to do laundry coming through and like I just have to walk through her orbit just a little bit, and she's like space and like all right, all right, can I like walk around here?
And she's like yeah, but you like you can't look at me.
But it was just like her being able to like set this like really healthy thing, right, like this is this is where I end, and you begin over here, but like don't come this is me.
Don't don't infringe, And that's her identity.
I think with my son, when there are opportunities for him to, you know, of course, like set up his own room and so on and so forth, but if they're like simple things to do in the house, like we have a woodstairs that are a little slippery, and so I just wanted to put some carpet tiles on them so that people wouldn't fall.
And I asked my son, like what color do you want?
And you know, then they just stick on and he helped put them on. But I mean he was like totally bought into that. You could see his you know, his self confidence lifting. But I think it also probably makes him like the space better and feel more bought in. So I think it's like trying to give them these agency opportunities where they make sense, right, I'm not letting him decide the you know, what color to paint the
walls or to do it himself. But it's like, Okay, now he can be involved and I can give him this agency, and he's going to feel a greater connection to the space and more agency, which is going to help him in a lot of different other ways.
My sister in law, when we go out and eat with her kids, she's like, Lena, do you want chicken nuggets or do you want a hamburger? It's not like, here's the entire menu, right.
And I think that's you know, that's a strategy for kids, but it's also a strategy for ourselves. It's like well known that the more choices we have, like the worst the worst our decision is, and then the worst is we feel about it. So there's like this classic study of chocolate where people given six choices varieties of chocolate to choose from are happier with their choice than people giving thirty varieties, which included the subset of six.
And is up just because if you have thirty you really have no idea. If you'll it's just overwhelming. You're like, there's no way I picked the right one if I have thirty, But with six, you go, yeah, I had a choice, and I think I might have picked the right one.
I mean there's two parts.
One is it's like there's just too much to consider with thirty and then there's the yeah, the fear of the fear of making having made the wrong decision afterwards. Right, there's all these ones that you're like, man, if I picked that one, I would have liked.
The chocolate better. But that's just chocolate.
And now you think about like the degrees of choice that there are when you're making your surrounding. If you're setting up your home office, be like, Okay, what are the three most important things in my home office and how am I going to design for those first? Before I get into all these things that you know, home depot or you know, the catalogs are trying to get you to start paying attention to.
Yeah, it's like focusing on the most important questions. You had a good example in your book about when you were was it the New Jersey school system you.
Were working for, Yeah, yeah.
Building schools, designing schools, and you talked about how people would get obsessed with the paint color on the wall. You'd be in these meetings and they'd be like rambling forever about the paint color and how did you But that was obviously wasn't going to be like a determinive art. Is this going to be a really good space for kids to learn? Right, Like one shade of white versus
another probably not going to affect test scores. So how would you steer those conversations so they're more productive?
Well, I mean I didn't do a good job with it at the time. I would like let the pink color go. But I think I think the way to steer it is Okay, So you know this situation.
These are all well meaning.
People, right There's teachers and superintendents and architects and engineers, and I think the issue there was the professionals, namely me, should have done a better job of being like, these are the important decisions right now. And if we could have said, look, we're here to talk about safety at drop off, right, and this is why the circulation in
front of the school matters. Here's fencing, but here's other options to help with safety at drop off, and here are the key decisions we really need you to focus on and kind of boiled down the technical stuff to okay, this is what matters now. Then the people that we had assembled would have been able to appine on things that actually mattered for the design at that point. So I mean the general principle there is like what are the what are the important decisions and you know, making
them kind of manageable for people. Because one of the reasons we focus on the paint colors is I mean, it's it's very salient, but it's also we have this like tendency when we're making decisions to focus on the decisions that are like certain and.
We know that we can actually make them. So the pink color.
If you say we're going to have blue walls, you know what blue walls look like, and you know that's a different like that's certain, even though it, like you said, doesn't actually matter. At least we feel like we've done
something and had an impact. When we need to like really fight that tendency when it comes to our spaces because so many of the decisions we can make you're not I mean with safety, you know, going back to safety and like the circulation patterns you're going to you're going to make it safer if you do the right thing, but it's you know, you know, twenty collisions instead of two hundred and you know that's going to happen over time, the outcome is not nearly as certain.
That makes sense. Do you feel like this manifests itself? If you're thinking about how do I my office or workspace better for productivity? What do you feel like are the most important things for people? Does it all just go back to agency or like are there sort of hallmarks where you see most people most of the time tend to do better in a space like X.
I think it's like agency growth in connection, right, It's like again, if you're going to filter it through three things, filter it through those three and so I mean we've talked about agency and that you know that could be the design itself. Growth is interesting because it's not static, right, So like the space that you're in, you know, it works for a couple of years, and then you're kind of like, all right, I'm not it's not challenging me, right,
And this is often why we renovate. We just a new backsplash, It's going to make my life so much better, and then like the novelty wears off and you have to make another new new bike, new backslash. But I think there's other ways to like kind of grow and in your space, right, And it's like you can rearrange things.
You can think about like.
Okay, what are they you know, what are the pictures? And do I want to have new artwork or do I want to you know, now that I'm doing writing with a treadmill desk, you know, should my desk be in a different spot. Those kinds of things are like
small ways to keep growing with your space. And so I think and then connection, right, and I think your men's health example is a really great example of that where it's like, you know, this the reason that the office, the new office design didn't work it was the wrong amount of connection, right, And you like people, but writing is really hard to do with people all around you.
And so just being conscious of like, Okay, what do I need from this space in terms of the amount of connection and how do I set up the space to get it? And I'm sorry to not have like a kind of wirecutter hack, but it's.
It's it's really not. It's individual.
But it's like those those needs are basic, right, Those needs are basic, as basic to all of us as anything, and then how you meet those needs is going to be individual.
Yeah, I've always struggled with.
Trying to remove extraneous stimulation from my office. So there's not you know, the metaphorical squirrel darting in my office and I'm trying to write, and I'm like, oh, but this thing and that thing, and then also not having it feel like a prison at the same time. How did writing this book, I guess, like, what was the space where you would write this book? And how did did your ideas on where you worked best change at all when you were writing this?
So for me, I like, there's a variety of spaces that I mean, I like the university campus. I go to different buildings, but there's not like I'll go to this building to write this kind of thing or this building to write this kind of thing. I totally agree with the distraction thing, right, Like, the spatial distractions are a much bigger risk for me than not having the space be exciting enough, and so eliminating those is important.
Every writer talks about this, But like the balance between like sitting and moving right, you know, some of the easiest way to get unstuck is by just getting up and going for a walk, even if it's a really small one. At the same time, you just got to have your butt in the chair for a certain amount of time. I mean that like the ideas have to you have to spend the time thinking about them and try and struggling with it for those walks to be useful.
But thinking about like the the balance between those things is important. And then I mean going back to the professional athlete stuff, it's like the the the mindset is so dependent on you know, if I can run and then get coffee, I am like that's my best time.
Yeah, that makes sense. Did you as you were writing this, did you change your mind on anything? I found that when I write books, there's often I'll often go into it with one idea and then like, oh, I actually think something different after having done all this research.
The idea that these psychological needs arguably came from our relationship with space aren't just like it's not just another way to meet them. It's like they actually came from That was just blew my mind. And it's like in a lot of it's just everywhere in their research. I mean, there's there's the neuroscience research that shows that like our spatial networks, like the spatial networks in our brain, those are the ones that then got adapted to map our connections with other people.
That makes me think of So you point out on the book, how there's this really beautiful building on your campus that you walk past.
It's a memorial gym.
Yeah, and it's like it looks like there should be Roman baths inside. It's like Beaux Arts, which is an architectural style, and it's also like historically significant. I mean like the after World War One, the students like donated a third of that money to their fallen classmates, right,
I mean edge. And then in World War Two, Roosevelt was here because some like his nephew was graduating or something, and he's supposed to just give the commencement address, but then something happened in Europe and so it was basically his commencement address was like we're going to be in war in Europe, and.
So all these people heard this speech.
So it's like historically significant, beautiful and sticks out. It's like next to tennis courts and open fields.
It made me think about this, the difference between spaces like that that I think were more frequent in the past where they're kind of unique, and spaces we have now where there's almost a creeping sameness setting in the example I like to give is coffee shops. So if you go into like a good coffee shop, it doesn't matter if you go into the good coffee shop in Tokyo or New York City or Mexico City or one US are is they all have the same vibe. It's
all like minimalist, not much in there. It's like you could get planted in any one and you'd be like, I don't know where I am. It could be the one at home I go to. It could I don't know where I am. What do you think about that? Like, what do you think is driving this sort of like sameness you have? And you I think in the book you use the example of hotels. How there's like kind of hotels are all kind of the same.
So I mean there's a level of comfort with like familiarity, right, Like we the reason hotel chain, like you book a Marriott because you know what a Mariat is going to be, right, And so I think that same thing could be happening with the level of sameness in the spaces, is people realize that like, okay, people are going to be more immediately comfortable in this coffee shop if it's exactly like the coffee shop that is where you know, like like the coffee shop in the last.
City where they were.
The other side of that coin is that that's like you know, in this aligns with a lot of your writing, right, that's like an opportunity for Grill. It's like a small amount of discomfort that would actually be better for us in the long run. I think of it as like when you go on vacation to a new spot, for example, like we talked about the Jersey Shore before I go to the Outer Banks. That's like closer to where I
live now. Sometimes like this sucks. It's like doesn't seem like the Jersey Shore and it's just like the it's fundamentally the same geography, but the built environment is like slightly different, and I'm just not used to it. But then once I go for a run and realize, like, okay, like there's no boardwalk, but actually the place where you walk is like along the beach and that's cool, And there's no amusement park, but there's a soccer field right
over here that the kids are going to love. And now I'm like, okay, I'm comfortable at the Jersey Shore. And the outer bank. So it's like this growth opportunity from a slightly different space, but it took you know, a day or a run to become familiar with it and then therefore feel more comfortable.
Yeah, it's like you had to you had to get out and explore the environment instead of just kind of doing what was easiest in the moment.
Exactly.
That's the fastest way to do it, right, is like, just get out there and explore it, and then you will become comfortable.
Like something I'll do in Las Vegas is I stopped using GPS so much when I'm trying to get somewhere.
Yeah.
So it's like, Okay, we're going to this restaurant in Chinatown. I generally know how to get to Chinatown. I kind of know the crosstreets of this place, but I'm not going to put it in GPS. I'm going to figure it out along the way. And that has forced me to have to pay so much more attention to the neighborhoods and the streets, and in doing that, I find myself picking up like, oh, I didn't know that that
place was here. I didn't know that place was I'm going to check that out, So I'm just a lot more aware of my surroundings by not just immediately defaulting to an algorithm saying this is absolutely the most efficient way to get there. Just follow the blue dot, Just follow the line. Don't pay attention to anything but the line and the car.
How do you? Yeah?
And i'd also is like your brain as being like when you're on GPS, it's like your brain has gone to the screen instead of to your surroundings, and it's like the screen is two dimensional and doesn't smell like anything, it doesn't taste like anything, it doesn't sound like much, and you know you're taking you out of like all of these other senses.
Did you change anything about the spaces that you frequent most after writing this? Like a renovation cruise at your house right now, just like overhauling everything or what not?
Renovation cruise?
I mean, the decluttering is like a really easy one if you really like go into the entrance of your door and then like walk into wherever you congregate and think about like how other people are going to experience that. For me at least, there's like a lot of stuff that it's like, oh, I don't want them to see that before they interact with me, right, And just streamlining that kind of thing is just something that I've definitely done that.
Was really useful for me to think about.
And I think you used a great example in the book of a realtor who will kind of like walk into space.
What are you saying?
And I think we get it's so habituated to walking in and out of our house, we don't think about how do other people who have never been here experience this? And to your point, it's like if you have all this stuff, like that's where their eye is going to get drawn and it starts to change the interaction you're going to have with that person in a way. So it's almost like you have to like the places you
most frequent. It's almost like you have to try and wipe the slate claim go into them anew like what am I picking up here, and just spend time thinking about that.
Yeah. Yeah.
And the realtor also she would like close her eyes so that she could like, like the smell, then tap more into the smells and the sounds, because those are things that we tend to know we just too now, right, I mean, there are all these studies showing that people who are in like a noisy office environment like yours. Men's health, they're like more stress at the end of the day, even if they can't tell.
You that their office environment was more noisy.
So like, by tapping into those senses, you're realizing you're more aware of what's going on and you can notice good thing like if it's birds singing or you know, pleasant smells. But you can also notice bad things that you can then get rid of.
Yeah, that the example you just gave is great.
I remember there's this one study I came upon when I was reporting a book, and it basically took groups and had some of them do work in an open concept office that was louder. The other group did work in a quiet office. Both groups said, oh, yeah, I did I did good work. I wasn't affected. Things are great. But when they looked at the actual what they had produced, the group who was not as in the noise and in the chaos actually had a lot better quality work
and we're able to do more. So I think, to your point, we don't realize a lot of these things are affecting us at all, but they are.
Right right, Yeah, exactly. That's a fascinating study.
I should have.
I should have taken that study up to my editor in chief and I'm like, look, man, science, I need my damn office back, like right now, right now. What is like one for kind of one big takeaway before we end? What is like one thing people can use immediately that you learned in your book?
Is it?
Does it go back to agency or like what is that someone says like, okay, what's one thing I can do from reading your book?
Maybe space before screen?
Tell us about that?
Yeah, So the idea is just.
That like we don't pay enough attention to our spaces, like you said, and it's like, all right, well, obviously we're like on screens all the time, and spaces do all these beautiful things for us that the screens cannot. So instead of like fighting that, maybe connect the two and it's just like, all right, when you're drawn to like look at your phone, use that as a queue to be like, have I actually engaged with the space that's around me? Have I paid attention to the space
that I'm in? And I think for me at least that goes a long way towards uh yeah, towards number one, like getting off my phone. But number two, just like appreciating the magic of even a very simple space will have cool stuff that you've never noticed about it. And I think that's that's a cool useful tip that people have. It sounds like early readers have enjoyed and it's been sticky for them.
Do you have a room in your house where you don't have screens purposely?
Oh?
God, this this Uh sorry, I'm kind of rant now. It's like, so I love I mean, I love. Uh.
There's this new book called The Amazing Generation by Katherine Price and Jonathan Hey I and uh like it's meant for tweens and it's about like screen time and it's just like my son's eleven.
He like stopped reading Harry Potter.
It was so interesting to him, and then we had a conversation about screens. He's like, you can't let me get a phone until I'm like this age. But he like really understood it and it was like interesting to him.
So great book.
And then I like read a nice post about it on LinkedIn and then you know they liked it. And then as a result of that, there I'm seeing their stuff in my feet and then I see Catherine by saying like suggesting we should have one room that's screen free, and I'm like, that's the opposite. We should have like one room that has the screens.
Right.
So that's what I've tried to do in my house. It's like, okay, like we have a huge TV.
It's awesome.
We can like watch soccer games and it's like the players are bigger than we are on the TV. But we that's the screen room, right, And I try to put my phone in there when I come in and try that's where he has to play on his iPad and and all the other rooms are are screen free, so I do think, yeah, use the space, and but I would argue for like one screen room instead of one screen free room. I just thought it was like super ironic that we've come so far that that was like the suggestion from the.
Anti screen people.
It's like, just what this one little room you can go in and get away from them.
Totally. I love it. Well, this was awesome talking to you.
The new book is fantastic, and I also recommend Subtract. That's a great one. And I love the work you do.
Man.
I appreciate you taking the time coming on.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Michael. This is super fun. It's always a pleasure talking to you.
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