Welcome to two Percent. I'm your host, Michael Easter. This is a podcast where we talk about improving your performance. I am an author, and today I am extremely pleased to bring on a fellow author whose work I very much admire. We're going to be talking to David Epstein. So, David started as a sports reporter, specifically in the realm of the science of sports at Sports Illustrated Now. He became famous there and had a big moment of attention
when he broke the A Rod steroid scandal. So, if you are a New York Yankees fan, you probably hate the guy already, but please bear with me, because this guy is a very, very fascinating thinker who can tell us a lot about improving our work life, improving our performance in the gym and on the road if we're a runner, and just improving our thinking across the board in a way that we can live better. And David has a new book which we are going to be
diving into today. It is called Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better, and it argues that even though we often do not like constraints and we want as much freedom as possible, he argues that constraints are actually what lead us into better outcomes at work, better outcomes in our wellness, better outcomes across the board. Let's get into it. David Epstein, thanks for coming on the show Man.
It is my absolute pleasure.
So the new book Inside the Box looks at the idea of how constraints can actually be beneficial. And there's one story that I loved.
That you open the book with. It's about this company called General Magic.
Yeah. Well, so they have the people who designed the original Mac. You know.
It's the company was so visionary the iPhone, like in basically the IP.
Yeah, and this was in the late eighties, early nineties.
The sketch the CEO has a notebook his named Mark Parratt in nineteen eighty nine where he sketches a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons and a touchscreen where you can download apps and it'll be a phone in a computer. Nineteen eighty nine, only fifteen percent of Americans had computers.
Yeah, and the Internet didn't exist.
He saw all of this stuff, Like he envisioned a virtual meeting space where different devices could connect, and they called it the cloud in nineteen ninety like they they were ahead, and again they had the designers, the original MAC.
It was so everything was.
So alluring, their vision, their talent that Goldman Sachs actually took them public in the first so called concept ipo, where they went public with an idea.
Nothing to without a product, nothing to actually sell, just like, hey, check out this idea.
Let's roll.
I mean they had an idea that they had the idea plus the talent, plus a seventeen member what they called the Alliance, which was basically other companies that had invested in them. So this was seventeen companies from around the world. It was the largest consortium of international businesses in American business history. Each had given millions of dollars in investment. And we're going to be part of the team.
And so like.
Apple White, these are giants are like Sony, Right, there's all kinds of.
Grapples Sony, Panasonic, you know, AT and T like all the It was actually they covered so much of the communications technology world that their meetings had to begin with an antitrust lawyer listing all the topics they weren't allowed to discuss in their meetings because they covered everything and they have this vision. So Mark Parrat, the CEO. He raises all this money early, a stock price doubles on
the first day. It's a Wall Street darling. And he says his goal in raising all that money so quickly was to create what he called heaven for engineers, where they could play and create and be limited only by their imaginations. As he said, what more could anyone else ask for? And I think the answer in retrospect turned out to be a little less freedom because they could do anything.
So they did do anything.
Everyone who had a good idea, they did it like they any They built and built. They had no clear they they defined their customer as Joe sixpack, which is very vague. So after a few years of miss deadlines, they turned around and realized nobody knew the guy or what they were building from, or what problem they were solving.
Like beer.
Yeah, yeah, just like it's like saying Joe Schmo, you know, like random guy. So they didn't take any time to define their actual customer. So they ended up building for each other and the project just grew and grew and grew. They couldn't ever decide what not to do, and so it ends up being this huge disaster. They ended up selling three thousand units of their personal communicator when it
comes out. It has so many features that the battery life's terrible, the user experience is choppy, it's expensive, it's confusing. But there was one interview that I think kind of encapsulated their problems, and it was at this guy named this engineer named Steve Pearlman, whose job was to create a calendar function.
For their operating system.
And so he creates it to run from nineteen oh four to twenty ninety six and checks it in and is like, all right, I'm done. And then one of the managers comes to him and says, look, somebody might build apps that go way back in history or way into the future. You have to make it longer than that. So he opens it up again. He goes back to year one, fine, thinks he's done. Then another team comes to him and says, look, why are you starting with
that arbitrary religious context. You should go back to the beginning of astronomical time. So he builds the calendar app from the beginning of the universe way into the future. And as he said, if he had stuck from nineteen oh four to twenty ninety six, it would have been four lines of code and he could have moved on, and instead it dragged on for months.
And this is how everything worked there.
Because they didn't put boundaries in place, everything grew and grew and grew until it just totally collapsed under its own weight.
So this becomes this like big metaphor for the book. We often think that freedom is like the most desirable thing for creatives. For businesses, it's like, just take some smart people, you let him figure it out.
They'll do it.
But this becomes this great metaphor for the fact that even when you have the greatest teams ever, you need some sort of boundaries because without boundaries, things just turn into chaos totally.
And in fact, in one way I would say that General Magic was actually a success, which is it's so traumatized, you know, in a business sense some of the people that were there, especially some of the.
Younger employees, that.
They learned all these lessons about the importance of constraints that they then took in their next stops in their careers and did things like led Google Maps and built the Apple Watch, co founded Android, LinkedIn, eBay, you know all these other companies that you've heard of or the guy who became an absolute zealot for Constraints, a guy named Tony Fidell who general Magic was his first job out of college and these were his heroes and so
he was just devastated when the company collapsed. I was actually connected with him by the famous venture capitalist Bill Gurley, who's famously invested in Uber and Zillow. I told him I was interested in constraints and Bill said, oh, we have a saying and venture more startups dive of indigestion than starvation, like too much, not too little. He said, you got to talk to my friend Tony. So he connects me to Tony Fidel. The first time I talked to him, he's like yelling at me. If you don't
have constraints, make up constraints. He's like a very intense guy. And he went on to lead the design of the iPod, and when he showed Steve Jobs a styrofoam model in March of two thousand and one, got the green light and said we are shipping by Christmas. Gave like ten weeks for the first design and then stop and collect your lessons and go on. And it forced the team
to think creatively and repurpose technology. So the famous scroll wheel is something that they basically repurposed from a Danish cordless phone because they were saying, look, we can't build everything from scratch like they had done in General Magic. Then Fidel goes on and he co founds Nest, the smart thermostat company, where he forces the company to work
inside a literal box. He makes them prototype the box before the product, because he says, this shows what we want to communicate to the end user, and if it's not in this box, it's not one of our priorities. And it was just so interesting to see his arc from this like the trauma of General Magic, to becoming this absolute zelo for constraints, which is why I wanted to give his narrative some air.
Well. One thing that I thought was really fascinating is you could almost see I think the typical point of view would be constraints are going to constrain creativity, right, and so when you have these products like the iPod, the first iPod, the Master, you're like, wow, that must have taken a lot of creativity, a lot of thought,
and just kind of figuring things out. But you also write about this idea called is it the Green Eggs and Ham effect where having constraints can actually enhance creativity, because we'll I'll let you explain it.
You know it reliably does. In fact, there was just this.
I cite this recent survey by psychologists around the world of known creativity myths things that we know from psychological research are not true, And the second most popular one is that people are most creative when they're most free.
And as you mentioned, psychologists know this isn't true. There's actually something called the green Eggs and Ham effect, which is named for the fact that Theodore Gaizel aka doctor Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet that he couldn't write a book using only fifty words, and it forced him to experiment with rhythm because he couldn't
use vocabulary. Even before Green eg and Ham, he had been given a task to write a children's book using only two hundred words from a kid's vocabulary list, and at first he starts looking at the list, he starts complaining to his wife. He says, there are no adjectives, and then he says, I think in fine Susian form, it's like trying to make a strudle with no Strudels, which I think is hilarious because it's like he was the same guy in his personal life as his books.
And then he just decides, throws his hands up and says, I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words on the list and make a book. And the first two rhyming words are cat and hat, and that kind
of changed children's literature forever. It gets to this idea that cognitive psychologists have really fleshed out now that you know, as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has put it, you may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made to prevent you from having to think whenever possible, because thinking is energetically costly, and so if you're not forced, you'll just go down what cognitive psychologists call the path
of least resistance, meaning you'll just reach for ideas that you've already used, or that you've seen, what's familiar, what's easy, and so unless, in many cases, unless the normal thing is actually blocked, it becomes incredibly hard and sometimes impossible to be creative.
Yeah, and that was one that one surprised me at first, and then two I thought about my own work and when I'm doing a book, like I just finished this a draft of another book, and as I was writing that, I have sections where I'd be like, oh, this kind of worked before in my last word, and I'd start to do that and They're like, yeah, but you can't do that same sort of thing. This is a new book.
And so it was like I needed that sort of constraint to not just default to the easy thing, even though it was originally somewhat creative, but now that I'm doing it again, it no longer becomes creative.
Absolutely, I mean to your point.
We were talking before we started recording about my process a little bit for the book this time around, and this was the first time I ever created an architectural plan for the how I was going to order the information before I started writing the book.
I have deportion of this book is mesearch.
I was terrible at putting constraints in place and wanted to get better at it. That's often the case for a lot of the things I'm researching is I'm bad at it, didn't want to get better, and so I wrote way over length in my previous two books, and it just incredibly inefficient. So this time I made this one page outline. I forced myself to outline the whole book on one page. As you can see, I ended up writing very very small my own attempt, my brain's attempt to defeat my own system.
But if it's not on this page, it's not in the book.
So this is the first time I wrote the length of a book to get a book, and the book is tighter than my other's, about twenty percent shorter. But it also blocked the kind of some of the methods that I was used to because I had never laid out a plan ahead of time where I wanted the beginning and the end of the book to kind of come full circle in a way that the other ones didn't.
And so I think that was really helpful because especially and it's exactly what you're saying, like, we've gotten competent at this thing, which is great, but competency can also be a trap from getting better.
You know.
It's like you end up lifting the same weights the same number of times every day, which means you may not get worse, but you're also not going to get better.
It's like putting bumpers up. If you don't have the bumpers, you're probably going to get it in the gutter sometimes, and I find out in my own writing where I will find a thread that it's I'm like, I don't know if it works for the book, but it's kind of interesting. And then I'm writing, you know, a thousand words on this, and then I read it and I go, yeah, this is interesting, but what the hell does it have
to do with this book I'm writing? Or if I could just keep down the lane, it would be a much more efficient process.
I have that problem in spades.
I mean, I have a very psychologist I was interviewing once told me that I have a what he called a flat associative hierarchy, which means that I see lots of disparate ideas as kind of connected. It's easy for me to connect them. And that can be nice because I maybe find things that aren't obvious to other people.
But it also means that I can be incredibly prone to doing what you're describing, which is going down these rabbit holes of things that I think are interesting and they're really not that well connected in a way that will make sense to other people.
And so I really need.
Structure to kind of prevent myself from writing books that are just all over the place.
Yeah, what did this What did report in this book make you think about when people get too many resources, like specifically financial resources.
It kind of made me think that.
A lot of times you find the people who sort of have it all almost have nothing because of a sort of aimlessness sets in. It's like, when you can have everything, why go after anything?
Yeah, I mean I think it's actually don't think it's healthy. For as Jonathan Hyde told me in one of the interviews in the book, it's not healthy for anyone to
have everything everywhere all the time. And a lot of us, even if we're not rich, are kind of in a situation like that in the digital world now, And so I think when it comes to businesses, there are a bunch of you know, there are examples in the book where people are just sloppy, like when they have too much, right, it leads to sloppiness, It leads to not feeling like
you need to define these boundaries. And I think one of the things this gets at one of the things that I hope maybe the mindset shift that I hope the book engenders, which is from seeing limits as only bad to seeing as to seeing them as opportunities to clarify priorities and launch productive exploration. And I think when people have too much, like to Bill Gurley's more startups
die of indigestion than starvation. Quote, you're not forced to be resourceful and you're not forced to clarify priorities, and so you don't. And I actually don't think that's a good thing for people, right. It's like, I don't think it's good for work, and I don't think it's good for having meaning in your life to kind of always have your options infinitely open.
I feel like I'm conscious that it may.
Sound like sometimes I'm contradicting at least the title of the book sounds like I'm contradicting range my previous book, which is about broad experiences. But it actually felt like a natural next question to me, where it's, okay, you get this broad tool set, at some point you have to focus this into something, into achievement, hopefully into meaning
and satisfaction. And I've kind of found that in a lot of really talented or hardworking people, they may over index on optionality, like keeping their options open all the time because they can maybe they're very talented or they're very hard working or lucky or whatever it is. But sometimes I think they can actually really backfire if people start making decisions, if keeping your options open becomes an
end douneto itself. And so I think I've seen some very talented peers and friends endlessly keep their options open in a way that actually doesn't doesn't help them reach better satisfaction. I'm sure I'm articulating that well.
I think I hear what you're saying.
It's like there comes a sort of phobia towards commitment, and you sort of tell yourself that if I commit to this one thing, I'm saying no to all these other possible things that could land on my plate, and so it leads to someone being unfocused. I think I think a good example would be something like marriage totally. It's like that is sort of the ultimate commitment. I feel like you see a lot of men are like they're afraid to get married because like, well, what could happen?
I'm going to be tied down.
But I think when you survey to people in general at a population level, marriage people tend to be happier because it's like I was talking to my friend John Deloney, who has a podcast on relationships and where he's doing a book about marriage, and he asked me, He's like, well, why did you get married? Like you don't have to, you know, he's asking all these people this, and I was like, you know, that's a good question.
And the way I thought of it was, now, you're doing the.
Crossword puzzle in ink, so you got to like, you know what I mean, Like, you're committed, You're into this thing, and you're into it for the law.
Think a lot harder about what your decisions if you're doing in ink totally.
One thing you brought up in the book too, is that so many people think about, well what should I do, when oftentimes a better question to ask yourself is what should I not do?
In different situations? Where did you see that manifest I.
Mean again, that was like part of general Magic's big problem was deciding what not to do. But I think about that all the time in things like our information diet, right, Like people are overwhelmed.
There's so many things that seem interesting.
There's so much information coming at you, and I think it's a constant question of I'm curious, I want to learn things about how can I stay sane? And I mentioned I describe this in one genetics lab in the book, where they take post it notes and put them on the wall, and each one representing one of their current commitments or projects. And the first thing that happens is once they put them on the wall, so making all their current commitments visual is they realize there's way more
than they could ever get done already in process. And so immediately they see it and say, we have to start moving some of this stuff out or will never get anything done. And they have like a hopper where they don't say, we don't have to just throw that idea out the window. We can put in a holding place, but it's back burnered, right. And then they implement this rule where you can't start a new project in the funnel unless one moves out of the funnel, so it's contained.
So they're making these choices about what not to do, and some of those things that they decide not to do maybe good ideas, but doesn't matter because they weren't going to get to anything if they had all these ideas.
And I kind of took that and did that for myself because I thought that idea of making all your current commitments visible was really interesting and I did the same thing for my own commitments and to immediately realize, immediately start looking at it and saying, this is a lot of stuff, and these ones are a lot more important than those ones, and I like all of these and if there were ten of me, I'd be happy to do all of them, but there aren't, and so
it forces you to kind of prioritize. And then I did the same thing with my information diet, where I logged all the sources over a month that I turned to, did the post its on the wall, said which of these do I feel was worthwhile and kept that in and then occasionally new sources come in and then I'll move something else out of the funnel, and it builds up, you know, so I have to kind of do it regularly.
So I say this a ton in the wellness space in the sense that when people go I want to get healthier, I want to improve my life, they start immediately adding. They started saying, Okay, I'm going to drink this protein shake every morning, I'm gonna drink this greens powder, I'm going to do xyz. But oftentimes, what I've noticed is that simply figuring out your worst habit and then subtracting that out usually moves the ball way downfield farther
than would adding all this stuff. It's like, I compare it to if you're trying to get somewhere and you have your foot on the brake, hammering the gas is not going to be an efficient way to do it. It's much easier to take your foot off the break and then give a little bit of gas. I feel like that's just something that people frequently overlook.
I think, especially like you mentioned in the health and wellness space, where there's so much content about optimizing this and that and that, you would you could schedule every second of your day to optimize if you took all of this kind of advice that I think can be so overwhelming that even really well intentioned people do start and then maybe fall prey to and this is an actual psychological term, the what the hell effect, where you're trying to optimize all this stuff, you miss once and
then you're like, what the hell I missed, and you just throw everything out the window. So I think that's a danger too, So subtracting and starting with simplicity. I mean, for me, I wanted to convert myself into a morning person when I had a kid, and because I was very much a night all before. And one simple thing I did is and it's a little embarrassing, but whatever is. I started going to sleep in running clothes or workout clothes.
And because then I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror and I'm like, am I going to take these off now?
No? I'm not. I'm going to go work out. And I've worked out every day.
In the morning for you know, like two years, and having us an alarm clock, and so these are really simple things where you know, it doesn't have to be some crazy change, just like just like a tiny constraint that can be helpful. Yeah.
I see this a lot in this trend of morning routines where you see people posting like fifty seven step morning routine online, And for me, I always ask, what is the ultimate goal of this routine? So I'll take myself as an example. My goal is to get up and start writing because I need to write a book. What does meditating for ten minutes, yoga for five minutes, breath work, insert the seventeen other things that you see online, What the hell does that have to do with words?
Getting on a page. It's like nothing.
What gets word words on a page is sitting down in front of a typewriter and putting words on a page. So stripping out the things that you can't directly have a one to one relationship with this bigger goal you're after, I think becomes important totally.
I mean, and then it's like it's like doing all those other things. You can argue that maybe they get you in the space to then be more productive when you do that, but it's such a roundabout way, right, you should first attack the thing that you're thinking about attacking instead of all this other stuff around it. And I think it one of the reasons I think some of the stimization culture is insidious is because it praise on really good instincts in people of like self improvement,
wanting to be better. But it's like in so many cases, I think it's just distracting from from the main thing. Yeah and yeah, and that's that's just like frustrating for good impulses to be I think sort of preyed upon in that way.
Basically totally. So one thing that General Magic did not have was managers. Now I think the average employee would hear that and be like, oh my god, I want.
To work at this place.
So make a case for why managers are important in the world where not many people love their manager.
Yeah, I mean places have tried, you know, like Google did this whole thing where they tried not to have managers, and then what they found is, you know, people are going to Larry Page with their expense reports and stuff, and it just wasn't going to work. But in the case of General Magic, people weren't coordinated, right. They weren't stopping and getting their less together. They were often working on things that were not the most important thing they
needed to be doing. They were missing things. They would start new projects all the time, and it was in deep I mean one of the reasons I wanted to contrast it to Pixar in the book, where Pixar equally large vision developing at the exact same time as General Magic basically. So it's like these parallel parallel visions basically,
and one worked and one didn't. And I spent a monch of time with Ed Catmoll, who was co founder of Pixar, and he described to me something he called the beautifully shaded penny problem at Pixar, which was artists or directors would get obsessed over the shading on a penny in the background of a scene that the audience
would never notice. And the way they solved this problem, he becomes the real high tech fix was with popsicle sticks on a board, and each popsicle stick represented the number of the amount of work that one animator could get done in a week. And if a director wanted animators to keep working on that penny, he had to start taking popsicle sticks away from like a main character that had to get animated, And that solved the problem immediately.
But that was an important thing for managers to come up with, whereas at General Magic it was so free flowing that there was sort of no coherence and no useful boundaries. And I don't think that's That's not a kind of freedom that's actually helpful for people. You want freedom within a framework, not this total freedom where nobody really knows what they should be doing.
I feel like I needed to hear that, because when I'm writing a book, I will spend an hour on a sentence.
I don't know if you are the same way. What they like, is this the way to do it? Is this way?
Is this the right wording, and you're like, it's one sentence among like three hundred thousand or whatever. The number is, right, yeah, And so you just get obsessed with like these micro details when it's like pulling back is going to allow you to be way more efficient.
I mean, I one hundred percent need deadlines. When I I mean first two books I turned in end of the day on the day they were due, which for something that you're looking two years ahead to, or my first book three years I had, it's not that easy
to do. And this time around, when I signed the contract and my agent said, you know, and always when I sign the contract, I'm like, oh God, will I be able to It's hard to plan to finish something two three years later totally and be on time, and especially when you don't know what you're gonna find yet. And my agent was like, you know, the deadlines of course in books are flexible. You don't have to treat it as real. I'm like, do not tell me that ever again, Like we have to treat this thing as
totally real. Like Duke Ellington said, I don't need time, what I need is a deadline totally.
Another thing that I thought was interesting about Pixar is. They seem to work in these tight teams, and when they would do screenings of the films, it's not like everyone in the building could walk in and provide feedback. And they famously they wouldn't let Steve Jobs watch the film all right, because his opinion would be weighted too heavily. How did you think about this when you were writing the book? Did you have anyone beyond your editor read it?
And how did you think about who are you going to let see this? And how did that influence you?
Yeah, I should say in the past I have not been as good as I should be in giving people stuff. Adam Grant, psychologist, has actually given me some very healthy criticism on that. He said, you got to show your work to more people while you're doing it. And so this time around I showed it more than I ever had in the past, which included my editor. In the past, I didn't even show it to my editor while I was working on it. I just showed up with a book. This time I showed her stuff while I was going.
I showed my agent, who's a great reader. I showed my wife tons of stuff. So that's not a ton of people, but I went from zero to several people, this time showing them in the middle, and I think that was really helpful, and also talking my ideas off of my editor a lot earlier to see if I could articulate them reasonably. So that was more of the process this time around, where before I would show the manuscript in this case sometimes I was showing sections or chapters, much smaller pieces.
I think there is a point too, where when you show it to too many people, the feedback becomes chaotic because everyone's going to have an opinion, and if you wait every opinion equally, you just start adding more stuff or there'll be disagreements. When I was at Men's Health,
we would do these things called wallwalks. Okay, so the cover lines in the headlines were very important at Men's Health, or so we thought, and we would put the magazine up on the wall with all the headlines and the cover lines, and there would be like twenty five of us who would sit around staring at these headlines and cover lines, and someone would throw out an idea, you know, a bunch of people would shoot it down. Someone would throw out another idea, a bunch of people would shoot
it down. Third idea. You might have twenty three people go, oh my god, that's it, that's fantastic, and then you'd have one person go.
I don't know about that one. I'm not sure if it's great.
So then we'd keep iterating and we would literally spend like four hours on a single headline in this magazine, and it was maddening. So there becomes this thing where I think people overvalue a negative opinion even when the vast majority of opinions are good, and there's always going to be someone with a negative opinion that's interesting.
I mean, that's like.
I sort of made a mistake like that in this case with this book, just with the title and subtitle, where for the first time I asked for input in the past was just just did it, and this time asked a number of authors that I admire for input, and that was probably a mistake because there was no
agreement whatsoever. Everyone had some different take, and that put me in the space of now ignoring, you know, nine out of the ten people's input, basically, But I was on this email list of authors mostly who were not like me, but mostly business authors, and I would feel like an alien when they would talk about their process where it was.
Like, I have you ever heard that thing about?
So the contrast with Google and Apples like Google will ab test forty shades of blue and Apple will be like, this is our vibe, this is what we're doing. And both of those obviously worked for them, but I was much more the Apple style, where these writers were much
more the Google style. They would have a Google doc with kind of a focus group in real time reading it and saying, you know, this is what I want to and maybe I should be doing that, but I don't want to because I a lot of the processes for me and what I'm learning and the craftsmanship of
it that I enjoy. But also, to be honest, I felt like it kind of homogenized their writing when you're going for that sort of consensus in that group, and so maybe it decreased the risk, you know, maybe it kind of raised the floor of their writing, but I think it lowered the ceiling for sure, because it's sort of less unique.
People wouldn't take as many swings, the swings that could have been really interesting. Maybe there were misses, who knows, but some of the things that really make something stand out and be interesting probably got stripped.
Away you have to risk missing.
I mean this is like, you know, all this research that shows that innovators are like the successful ones have more successes, but they have more failures than the than their peers do.
Also totally you read about this idea thinks slow work fast. Tell us about that.
Yeah, that's a phrase from a Danish professor at Oxford named Bent flu beer awesomely fantastic.
Yeah, I know, I know.
Obviously had to make sure I could pronounce that one. And yeah, because if anybody's trying to google him, it looks like it's spelled Flipberg. Yeah. And what he he kept h he studied big projects for his whole career and over decades he kept a database of projects big projects. This could be anything from infrastructure to digital transformations, whatever. And he had sixteen thousand. He led a lot of
projects himself too. He had sixteen thousand projects by the or he worked on them, I shouldn't say lead, he worked on them. He had sixteen thousand projects in his database by the end. And what he found was it only eight and a half percent of them came in on time and on budget, and only zero point five percent came in on time and on budget and delivered
what they had promised. And the typical pattern he found was what he called think fast, act slow, where someone has an idea and they kind of rushed it into implementation before they put boundaries around and really figure out what the priorities are and what they're doing, and so things expand quickly. And then that fast thinking translates to work slow because things get big quickly, and then it's very hard to pivot and you start learning lessons more painfully.
The opposite, what he said was the ideal kind of planning was think slow, act fast, where you keep a team small. At the beginning, you define the boundary, what are we not doing, what is the focus? And then when you do move into execution, you're able to work much faster because you're not getting surprised by as many things.
The work boundaries are much more clear.
And again one of the reasons I picked Pixar in the book is because Ben Flubier identified Pixar as like the apotheosis of good planning, where they would keep He actually calls it Pixar planning.
A director could stay.
For years with a small team in story development, refining the core of a story cutting away characters, right like they cut away the character for Schadenfreud in the first Inside Out because they didn't they felt like it was getting too many characters, getting too complicated, and that might seem inefficient to stay in a small team for years while you're refining the story, but the costs only explode once you move into production and bring in this much
bigger team, and so it actually, in the long run turns out to be much more efficient. And so that kind of thinks slow act fast, where they've spent all that time defining the boundaries allows them to work fast once they get into it. And I found that to be very true for me, where I didn't write a single word of my book for a year. Yeah, I just planned the architecture and did the research, and then it allowed me to write more quickly than I ever had once I moved into execution.
How do you think people can use that sort of in the trenches of day to day life making decisions.
Yeah.
I think whatever it is they're doing, let's say, if it's a work project or some kind of behavior change that you're trying to engender, is I think we've talked about optimization a little bit and the motivation is you see something cool, I'm going to do this tomorrow. I think it would actually make more sense to sit down and say, what is the goal that this is serving? What are the blocks between me and doing this thing? Where am I going to draw the line for now?
Like implement in a small way. What's the first small experiment, a low stakes experiment that I can run instead of moving straight into big implementation. And so just spend a little time figuring out what.
Are the blocks?
What's the smallest possible way that you can prototype this thing before you move into this bigger execution. Because the quicker you move into making something big, the more likely you're going to learn harder lessons, and the more likely I think you fall prey to that what the hell effect where it doesn't really work well and then you just throw the throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.
The companies that you highlighted that are doings that were successful, they all solve the problem. Yes that in the wellness sphere that really made me think about you know, with my sub stack, I'll get all these questions from readers that are like should I take this supplement? Should I do this exercise should I do X Y Z? Insert any number of examples, and the question I usually come back with, after much trial and error trying to give people,
you know, well, here's this tart like complicated answer. I usually now just respond with what problem are you trying to solve? And oftentimes are like, I don't know. I heard about this on a you know, online or on a podcast, and I thought it sounded interesting, but I actually don't know what the problem that will solve for
me is, you know. And so you get them to like pull back, and it's like, all right, if there's not a problem that this thing is solving, it sounds like it might just be extra work, extra noise, and not have that big of a return for you.
Defining the problem you want to solve, whether it's an individual or an organization, incredibly powerful and defining it like spending some time again to that think slow and thinking about what are you trying to do. There's this famous saying people don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole in their wall. Right, So if you're thinking about serving the person, what is the actual thing that they that they want? Does that mean they
need a carpenter? Does it mean they need a drill or something else.
All right, here's where I want to mildly push back. And the reason I'm doing this is there could be people who are listening to this thinking you're saying constraints are good. I need more constraints in my life. But they might also be thinking my life is already constrained enough. I have bills, I have a manager who is complaining at me all the time. I have kids, I have dogs,
I have all these different commitments and constraints. So what argument would you make to them about why constraints are good.
I mean, for one thing, it'd be crazy to say the constraints can't be bad. Right, even in creativity, which we've talked about, if a constraint, if you're telling someone what they have to do and how they have to do it, like if they if under this constraint they there's no way for them to surprise you or themself,
then that's bad. It's gone too far. As far as bills, you know, nobody likes bills, but jobs and kids and dogs and obligations actually turn out to be really important for people's sense of well being, so you may bristle under them.
Sometimes because they're inconvenient.
But I think it's also pretty clear that a dense network of obligation is actually a lot of what brings meaning to people's lives. And so the founder Emil Durkheim, founder of modern sociology, basically he did this famous study on suicide when government started first keeping track of statistics, and he found things intuitive, things like that suicide rates would increase when economic fortunes of a country plummeted, but he found they would also increase when the economic fortunes
of a country skyrocketed. Because anything that unmoored people from these kinds of obligations what he called he called anime, which means rulelessness. If people were sort of stripped of these normal structures and rules that they lived under, they would struggle with finding meaning in life. That's not to say that every constraint is good, but I think the idea that we just need more freedom then will be happier.
It actually usually looks like the opposite, that people with more constraints are happier with married, with kids, with community obligations, with regular rituals, and you know, for some people religion, going to a job is inconvenient sinking up your schedule with someone else to spend time with them is inconvenient. Kids are incredibly inconvenient all the time. But these things also add meaning to our life. So I think it's it's tricky because it feels like more freedom should always
be attractive. In fact, I went to some years ago this writer's retreat where we were all asked, the only one I've ever been to where we're all asked, what are you optimizing for this year? And I said autonomy because after my last book, I became just a writer for you know, full time. I left like having a normal daily job, and I thought I just wanted to spend every minute in the way that I determined. And fast forward two years and I learned there's such a
thing as too much autonomy. Where I was like living in an individualized world for one. And so to reel that back, I joined the board of a nonprofit in my community. I started going to like dance meetups with strangers and just started inconveniencing myself a lot more in order to add meaning back to my life.
That's cool.
It makes me wonder what you think about retirement. I feel like when you see data on retirement and well being. At first, people are like, oh, this is great, I can do anything, and then there's kind of like a drop off where they go, I don't know about this totally.
And there's also all this research that people, you know, when they retire, all these rates of dementia and things like this are not as cognitively engaged anymore go up. And I think, I'm not planning on never retiring good, but I think if someone's going to retire, like find take.
That vacation, but replace it with something, replace.
It with something that's right.
There's this I cite this research in the book from Sweden where they look at antidepressants being dispensed throughout the country, and one of the things they find is that when more people in the country are on vacation at once, antidepressant dispensing goes way down. But it's true among retirees too, who it didn't matter like they were already on vacation essentially. But the fact is it's when lots of people are
doing it at the same time. It's like social control of time that has a well being benefit for everyone, Whereas the opposite was in the Soviet Union when they tried to in order to keep factories running all the time, individualize everyone's work routine so that people in the same family are on the same block. It wasn't like five
days of work and two day weekend. They did all these different four days of work, one day weekend cycles that were different for everybody, and it desynchronized everyone's schedule and it.
Was a social disaster.
Interesting, that's often what we're doing to ourselves, I think, right Like, I remember when Mark Zuckerberg first advertised the metaverse, and he was like, it's gonna be amazing. Everyone's going to live in their own universe, tailored just for them. I'm like, that actually sounds like hell yeah, that sounds terrible. Just me, myself and whatever is in this device streaming into my brain at all times. I spent too much of my time in my head already. So you had
a great section about health research. So the case study here is National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. So before about year two thousand, projects are getting a ton of funding and they're similarly finding these fantastic results for health. All these great drugs, all these good things are happening. And then after two thousand, all of a sudden that drops off the finding stop. Now, that might seem like a bad thing, but in the book you argue, no,
this is actually a good thing. So walk us through that and what it tells us about health research. Yeah, I'm glad you asked me about this, because I don't think many people are going to ask me about this part of the book because it's a little complicated. But as you said, it was all these major where there's drugs supplements. Before two thousand, most of the results were positive that were funded in these studies, and then starting
in two thousand, they're almost all negative. Supplements aren't working, they're not out performing placebo anyway, drugs aren't working. And so it looked like all of a sudden, medicine stopped working in the year two thousand, like millennium bug. What really happened was that researchers started facing more constraints in their work, so they were forced to do what's called preregistration starting in two thousand for these big supplement and
drug studies. Preregistration means you have to say what you're act actually testing, What do you think this drug or supplement is going to do? How are you going to measure that, How are you going to analyze the data. And that's counterintuitively, that's what caused positive effects to stop popping up, because what had been happening was researchers would make a hypothesis. They'd guess how some drug or supplement was going to improve health. They would analyze the data
and they would see their prediction was not right. But they had all this data, so then they would start looking through the data for some other correlation, right, thinking well, okay, maybe it didn't drop blood pressure, but maybe.
It improves cholesterol. Oh what do you know?
Oh, so then they published as if that's what they were looking for in the first place, and this was not nefarious. People were not doing this thinking it was bad. I did this as a science gratitude, not realizing the problem.
The problem essentially is that when you're doing this thing, which is called HARKing hypothesizing after the results are known, it's like being The analogy is like a sharpshooter who fires randomly at a wall and then draws a bullet, finds a clump of bullet holes and draws a bulls eye around them, and somebody who walks up says, wow, what a great shooter, Not oh, there was a clump
because of random statistical variation. And so when researchers were retroactively going through their data, and if you have a lot of data, you're always going to find a bunch of false positives just by chance alone. So it was this preregistration forcing someone to stick to the initial prediction that showed that most of these drugs and supplements weren't working and in fact, most of the prior positive results, many of which are drugs that are still out there.
What's an example, There's like a bunch of blood pressure medications that were out there. There's one one very famous one called a tenolol. That's very famous drug out there. And one of the interesting things about a tennolol was it was viewed as a breakthrough because it it does lower blood pressure numbers, but people die from heart attack and stroke at the exact same rate just with lower blood pressure numbers. So you know, it can look good
but doesn't actually have an useful effect. And so anyway, so it was these these greater constraints in how scientists were operating that led them to start drawing more true conclusions. The downside is because this is a newer era of research,
like nutrition research is just an absolute mess. So it's this famous study that people refer to, scientists refer to as the Everything in your Fridge Causes and Prevents Cancer study, because it it looked at all the different studies on a bunch of different foods and found that basically everything had been found both to cause and prevent cancer except for bacon's cause cancer.
Unfortunately. Yes, yeah, indeed.
And the problem was these studies just are not I mean, nutrition is hard to study anyway for variety of reasons. But the studies were just not well controlled. And so the good the good news is there's a lot more preregistration. Now the bad news is, I think this caused some understandable mistrust from some of the scientific community where results were not holding up. Well, the good thing is it was scientists themselves who identified these problems and it led to a now a better system.
Yeah that makes sense. And you use the example of Brian Wantson. Yeah, I remember before this became a big deal. So he was using those methods where he kind of sort of set up these studies and then he just combed through the data and be like, well, what can I find that was positive? But most of it's just going to be, like you said, by chance, you're going
to have something positive. When I was at Men's Health, that dude was like, our are all star because this is a health magazine with like little tidbits, and you'd have things like if you use a smaller plate, you will eat less, like all these little things.
And then and then it all entirely blew up totally.
And it wasn't It wasn't just health magazines by any stretch. I mean, his work was called, you know, masterpiece in a book by a Nobel Prize winner, like he was informing nutrition guidelines for Americans. He to me, clearly was not intentionally misrepresenting everything, because the problem developed for him when he wrote a blog post about his research methods and another scientist was like, you can't do that, because all your results are just going to be from a
statistical chance alone. And we see this all the time in the world around us, right. Like the example I use in the book is if you're watching an NFL game and you hear the announcer say, you know, the Chiefs are undefeated, when Taylor Swift is in the audience
and they're playing in division rival on the road. You can be sure that they first looked for are the Chiefs undefeated when Taylor Swift is in the audience, didn't find that, and then started adding more and more qualifications, And every time you do that, it's more.
Likely that you find a false positive.
Basically, Yeah, I think sports is a great example because there's so many times where you know, if it's like the Masters, it's oh, well, this guy tends to score less when there's this due point in the air and xyz, and it's like you just had an intern look at all this random stuff and give us some piece of information. Now, that is an example where it's kind of just this fun,
stupid stuff we watch. But I will say when I listened to sports podcast, yes I hear people using this information as a reason to make a bet, right because a lot of podcasts are sponsored by betting companies, And so it becomes like, oh, well, the Chief Taylor Swiss in the audience, she's going to be at the game. They never lose when Taylor's there, so you got to push those chips across the table.
And in that case, I'm like, ooh, I don't know about that.
No, And in fat absolutely and I think also sometimes on financial TV when I'll catch that if I'm in a gym or something, there will be something very very similar with someone who's brought on because of certain predictions they're making, and they'll start describing how they come to
those predictions. And I don't know for sure, but you can tell when somebody starts adding different caveats to the category, like when the housing market does this, and these other three things happen, three things happen, here's here's you know what we see in the market. You can be almost positive that they were slicing and dicing data in a way that ensures that this was that this was a false positive totally.
Your first book, Sports gam that was twenty thirteen. Twenty thirteen, Yeah, what led you to write that? A few things?
So one, I mean, I guess the little secret of that book is that it was very much questions I had about things that I had seen in sports, either as a spectator or I was an eight hundred meter runner in college, or as a competitor. So things like as a runner in my high school, we had lots of Jamaican guys and we had an incredible track team, and you know, it's like a country of two to
three million people, like what's going on over there? And then in college I was running against some Kenyan guys and realizing they were all from one tiny tribe called the Kallengin. And then just seeing things like why, you know, watching an exhibition softball game with Major League baseball players and realizing none of the best baseball hitters in.
The world could hit.
A good softball pitcher and just wondering what's going on with this, and so just just wanting to examine those things.
And then there was also.
Sort of disclaimer, sad part to the story, but this is kind of what led to my writing career in many ways. Was so I was a national level eight hundred meter runner and I had a training partner who died at the end of a race, Oh Jesus, from a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or HCM, almost usually the cause of a young athlete with no obvious prior symptoms
dropping dead. And I had his family sign a way for allowing me to gather up his medical records and kind of investigated what had happened, and he had this disease had been misdiagnosed. He had a you know, it's caused by a single genetic mutation, and I thought there were some lives that could be saved with certain types of awareness. And so this is what led me to leave my track of training to be a scientist and try to become the science writer at Sports Illustrated to
write about sudden cardiac death and athletes. And that's what got me interested in genetics in the first place.
Yeah, what were the big takeaways from that book for the average person?
I think some things that I thought were totally innate, like the reflexes they hit a major league fastball, are not. They're completely learned. And other things like the will to do a lot of physical activity actually has like a really strong innate component. But maybe the biggest takeaway, so the American College of Sports Medicine has this phrase, I don't know if they still have it, but exercises medicine.
And just like we've learned from medical genetics that no two people respond to a medication the same way because of differences in their genetics, no two people will respond
to a specific training exactly the same way. And so I think it's worth spending some time kind of experimenting with different training modalities because you know, you may have the same diet as someone else and it may not work as well for you, and so it may be worth it to be a little bit of a scientist of yourself and see if you can fit your your health routines to your physiology or improve a little bit over time with some experimentation.
Yeah, and I feel like a lot of people kind of understand this at a basic level. Though I'm a better runner than I am a lifter. Like to take my example, I go, you know, I was at mentalit, so I had to do all this lifting. There was no amount of training I could do that would allow me to be super strong and like a big sense
like that. But running, I'm like, I'm pretty good at that outdoor stuff like I can just hike on a trail for days and I'm fine where some people are just never going to be able to do that.
And so I think leaning into that.
But also I think one of the keys with exercise in particular is you got to find something you actually enjoy and if it aligns with what you're good.
At, bonus points.
So how did your second book Range come out of the sports gene and quickly tell us about range too.
So in the Sports Gene, I criticized the research underlying the ten thousand hours rule that Malcolm Gladwell had made famous because the research was poorly done, and that brought me into a public debate with glad Will the first time we met.
Yeah.
In the ten thousand hour rule is that you need to practice something for ten thousand hours to be an expert.
Yeah, basically, And the implication is you should specialize as narrowly and early as humanly possible. And that brought us into this debate that's on YouTube at the MIT Sloane Sports Analytics Conference, and I put up some of the data showing that most future lead athletes, because we were talking about athletic development at that debate, actually had a sampling period early where they did a variety of things.
They learned these broad general skills that scaffold later technical skills, They learned about their interest and abilities and delay picking one activity. And when we were coming off the stage, he said, you got me on that that doesn't fit with things that I've thought and written. Why don't we And he had been a national level runner two, so he said, why don't we run together? Tomorrow back in
New York and we'll talk about it. And then we started talking about what we called the Roger Versus Tiger problem because Tiger Woods early specialization, Roger Fetter delayed specialization, and pretty soon we leaped out of sports and started jumping about in other area. So I was like doing research weekly for my runs with Gladwell, and that became the book Range about the benefits of breadth in an
increasingly specialized world. And the introduction is called Roger Versus Tiger, which was exactly what we would call our arguments what we were running together.
So your book Range, especially with this idea that specialization is not always required for growth and improving in the long term. In fact, it's nice to have some range. I feel like that's a huge one for parents with kids in sports. It's like I remember when I was at mental health. I would do a lot of I would use as a source this guy Eric Kressy, who was a baseball trainer basically, and he would work with
like the Red Sox, all these pros. But he had all these people in that he was up in Boston. He'd have all you know, Red Sox are huge up there, all the kids to play baseball. All these parents sending their eight year olds, nine year olds to him and being like, you need to make this kid a professional athlete immediately. And he would just be like, you should maybe have him go do some other stuff, to play different sports.
So what did you find with that? Yeah, I mean that's funny.
You mentioned that reminds you of this guy, Ian Yates, who was a British guy who developed olympians for various sports. And he told me one of the problems became so he mentioned Bradley Wiggins is famous British cyclist, and he would say, I have parents coming to me now saying I want my twelve year old doing what Bradley Wiggins is doing now, not what Bradley Wiggins was doing when
he was twelve, which was completely different. And the fact is the research shows that the best the most typical path. There are a lot of different paths, of course, but the most typical path becoming an elite athlete is with a sampling period, early variety of activities, broad general skills. Now some people call physical literacy those general skills.
So you're playing you're not just playing baseball, You're also like I'm going to be on the basketball team, I'm going to run some truck, I'm going to do a bunch of stuff.
Or at least diversifying your movement. So I don't know that it matters that you put on a basketball jersey, but I think there's a reason why the large, large majority of the top soccer players in the world grew up playing futsal, which has a small ball that stays on the ground and they play on a cobblestones one day and sand the next day. It's like soccer in a phone booth. It's like much more diversity of problem
solving and movement, and I think that's really important. I do think playing multiple actual different sports is really helpful.
So there was actually just a paper that came out in Science, you know, one of the probably two most prestigious journals in the world, scientific journals, that looked at thirty thousand performers in sports, science, music, and they found this trend in all of those things where the predictors of top youth performance were negative predictors of elite adult performance.
So that happened in sports, it happened for when they looked at scientists who won the Nobel They actually progressed more slowly earlier in their careers because they're more interdisciplinary early on, and they get like a penalty for it early on.
Yeah, and I feel like this applies to just general experiences that you've had in life make you more adaptable and able to take on new things. I'll give you a good example, dude, sitting right there, my producer Robbie. Did you graduate high school? Yeah, he graduated high school, didn't go to college. But in high school he starts touring around with a punk band. Then he gets into producing, correct me if I'm wrong, just yelled out producing trap
music in Atlanta. This leads into LA where he works with all these different artists in the music industry. Then he starts working on like the Rock Project, does some stuff for Open AI And so as I'm looking for someone to help me with this podcast, I start getting in resumes and I'm like, there's gonna be an audio component. There's also gonna be a heavy video component. Robbie's resume comes in, there's all this weird stuff. He's clearly got
audio but no video. And then I'm looking at other resumes where it's just like the perfect St're like this perfect pipeline of exactly what I need, and so I jump on the phone with a few people. But I talked to Robbie and he's like, yeah, I used to produce trap in Atlanta, and you know, these guys were rolling with guns and stuff, and I'm having to produce
at two am, just all these crazy experience. I also work on open AI, and I'm just like, this seems like a person who can just figure out stuff, and at the end of the day, that's probably what I'm going to value and need more than like, here's the button I push. I know exactly what button to push, but don't ask me too much else. I'm like this, dude, I feel like I can probably just like give them stuff and he'll figure it out. And that has absolutely been the case.
But that's like evidence of someone who can learn, who can pivot, which basically everybody has to do now. Right, Like the period of history where you had a discrete period of training followed by living off of that for the rest of your career is over for most people, if not everyone. And you reminded me of when LinkedIn shared with me some data when I was reporting range that they did this analysis of a half million members.
They found the best predictor of someone who would rise high in their field was the number of different job functions someone had worked in. And I told them, I argued to them that, well, I think your guys product actually maybe discourages people from doing that because they want this very linear LinkedIn right, and you should maybe add
more space for a narrative or something. They said, you know, we think we're doing fine, right, because their business is doing fine, So fine for them, but it obviously took you thinking a little differently. Is there anything that Robbie said kind of that that made you I mean, because at some point you must have been a you know, is he going to be able to do this job?
Was there anything in particular that he did that might be useful for other people to hear in the interview with you or or in his resume or application that they kind of got you over that hump of saying this is a risk worth taking.
Well, I think it was the breadth of experiences someone who can so in my books, I'll go into kinetic places. You know, I've meant to iract or report scarcity brand into the Bolivian jungle, and I found in my own self like the ability to just like remain calm, learn from that, but be adaptable has seemed to transfer over
to other things in my life. So when I hear about him in these you know, trap recording sessions where drugs are being dealt, guns are being shown, but he's like able to manage that, I'm like, Okay, well he can probably manage me because I'm not armed and tell me what I need to do right. But also there I would say honesty about it. He's like, look, I don't know. I've never done video. I did work on the Grock project, so I think I can figure video out,
but I'll tell you I haven't done anything yet. But at the same time, I'm confident I can figure it out. And so I think there was like the honesty there too, And I would say the other people that I talked to were just less interesting and it was like very clear what I was going to get. But I felt like if there was other opportunities that might pop up that I could need help with, those people were going to be like, well, I don't do that. I do YouTube videos, you know.
In Range, I talked about this research from a woman named Abby Griffin who studies serial innovators, and she said one of the challenges is they often look like kind of a square peg in a round hole because they're very broad and they want to learn outside their domain, and so it can be like a little confusing to an HR person. It's like is this person really the fit?
And so they may get selected out and so they often sort of move between organizations to get that breadth that they they need to be powerful because they just don't. They're just like not out of central casting for whatever that job is. Yeah, how did range make you think about?
Reporting?
That book make you think about wellness and how people approach well being.
I think people feel like they have to specialize. In many cases, they're not often doing it because they want to, Like people are curious and would like to have more variety in their life if they didn't feel like they'd be penalized for it. And so I think there's some ways that we can do things that relate to that,
like having a hobby unrelated to your work. So there's studies showing that if you have a hobby that's unrelated to your work or loosely related, it improves your your self efficacy, your feeling of ability, to take on challenges, whereas if the hobby is too closely related to what you already do it work, it actually decreases self efficacy.
Final question.
We oftentimes will ask people about the best book they've read recently, but I recently tapped you for that for my substock posts, which I read a.
Lot, though, so you know I can always add others.
Here's what I'll ask you, Okay, because I thought you might have an interesting answer for this one. You could spend an entire day with someone living or dead. They have to be somewhat of a celebrity, so you can't say, you know, extra relative to pass away or whatever.
Who would it be when you say somewhat of a celebrity? Can I pick a writer that I think, like a lot of literature people would have heard of. But okay, okay,
and I mentioned him and inside the box. So the writer Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine writer I think is like one of the most creative minds that ever lived, and most of his story he only wrote short stories, and they're all like metaphysical thought experiments basically, and he was keeping up with the math and science of his day and would play out like sort of what it meant.
So one of his famous stories, called the Library of Babel, is about and most of his pages, most of his books are between like sorry, his short stories are between like four and eight or ten pages, and that one is the narrator is in a universe that is basically a library of repeating hexagonal rooms that have all identical shelves with books on them, and the books all use the normal alphabet and appear to just have random orderings.
But every once in a while people come across a word or a phrase, or a sentence even and the question is is that order random or not? So it's almost like a parable of living in a universe where you see signs of order in design, but you don't
know if they're random or not. So it's really his stories make me think about certain human circumstances in a way that nothing else, even knowing these aspects of science and reading new scientists every week that nothing else has gotten me to inhabit some of those ideas the way that he does. And the more I read him, the more I realize his ideas pop up in things that I see all the time, Like if you've ever heard that express the map so detailed it became the world.
It's like, I think it's interesting for writers because we have to simplify the ideas we're talking about to be useful. And that comes from a one page short story he wrote about a cartography department at a university that gets obsessed with making more and more detailed maps until they make a map that exactly recreates the territory that they're
trying to show and becomes totally useless. And like he shows up in interviews Christopher Nolan if you liked Inception Christopher Nole, it was based on two Borges's stories, The Secret Miracle and the Circular Ruins, and just like just such an interesting thinker, and if you read his nonfiction, he was really ahead on sort of calling out European
fascism before it burst into the public. And it's just I think one of the smartest people who ever lived, who seem to be just a kind, generous, fascinating soul. And I feel like I've been in conversation with him through his work and would just love to be able to actually spend a little time with him.
I love it so fantastic was a.
Very long answer. You just wanted like me to say that sorry was not good at Lightning Round.
That was a great answer because I definitely believe that you would like to meet that guy, and I wasn't even really that familiar with them, so I'm going to do some research. David, thanks for coming on the show. The book is inside the box. The other two are Range and the Sports Genes. You also have a sub stack, so everyone check that out. Thanks for coming on to chat Man. That was fantastic. It's a total pleasure.
I mean, you've been a fan of your work from far, so it's kind of a treat to get to connect in real time.
Likewise, thanks for checking out the show. Keep an eye out for more episodes. We will be dropping two a week, and if you have any questions for me for our AMA section, please either drop them in the comments on YouTube or email them. Please send a video or an audio question. That's what we would really love. If you want to type it, we're good with that, but we would love to hear your voice or see your face asking that question. We will do our best to answer
as many questions as possible. Do not forget to hit subscribe, and it's always have fun, don't die