Tim Harford
Tim Harford’s long-running column in the Financial Times, “The Undercover Economist,” reveals the economic ideas behind everyday experiences. His first book, The Undercover Economist, was published in 30 languages and sold…
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Last week, Cautionary Tales described the rise and fall of General Magic, the startup with too much money and too few constraints. Was General Magic really doomed from the start, and what does its fate tell us about AI, drug discovery and our love lives? David Epstein, author of Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, joins Tim to make the case for loving limitations.
For a list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com
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Pushkin. Welcome to Cautionary Tales, and today's conversation is with a very special guest, David Epstein. David, we are going to get into the episode, we are going to talk about your book, which is amazing, I've been enjoying it very much, Inside the Box, but we can't really go anywhere before discussing The Elephant in the Room, which is that You and the Pushkin Podfather himself, Malcolm Gladwell, had a bit of a beef. What happened? How did you and Malcolm nearly come to blows or come to blows intellectually?
00:48
Speaker 2
The Pushkin Podfather, I love that. My first book was about genetics and athleticism. And when I pitched it, I thought I was going to be writing about the 10,000 hours rule, basically, that Malcolm made famous, which embedded in it is the idea that there is no such thing as talent. Now, Malcolm doesn't believe that, but the scientists whose work that he was making famous do believe that. And that's what I thought I was going to write about. And after about a year of research, I realized it wasn't right. And I had to turn around and write a different book. And so I ended up criticizing the 10,000 hours rule quite stridently. Malcolm and I got invited to debate athletic development at this kind of famous sports analytics conference. This was the first time we had ever met. I had no idea that I was going to get on his radar. And it turned into a great discussion. And we were coming off the stage. He said, you know, you made some interesting points there. We had both been nationally competitive runners. This was in Boston. He said, we'll both be back in New York tomorrow. Why don't we run together and we'll talk about it in our own time. And we basically became weekend running buddies for several years and would argue about this stuff on our own time. So it became a wonderful relationship based in disagreement.
02:00
Speaker 1
Amazing. Is it true that your book, Range, your second book, which is another book I absolutely loved, was kind of the result of that conversation or that disagreement?
02:12
Speaker 3
Very much so.
02:13
Speaker 2
So in that first debate, I sort of contrasted Tiger Woods, the most famous story of modern development, probably, early specialization.
02:23
Speaker 1
He's hitting golf balls when he's two or something ridiculous.
02:25
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, he started showing off a swing when he was seven months old. And by two, he was on national television already. And I contrasted that to Roger Federer, who played a dozen different sports and didn't specialize until later than many of his peers. And my question was, which is the exception, which is the norm? And what the science showed was that the tiger is actually the exception and Roger is the norm.
02:47
Speaker 3
So there are lots of different paths.
02:49
Speaker 1
I mean, he's a god, but he's a normal god.
02:52
Speaker 3
Right.
02:52
Speaker 2
His developmental path was representative of the typical path to the top. And so when I made that point that when we started running together, Malcolm and I, he would refer to this as the Roger versus tiger problem.
03:05
Speaker 1
That's a very Malcolm way of thinking about these things, isn't it?
03:08
Speaker 3
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.
03:10
Speaker 2
And that's sort of how the idea for Range began to develop. And in fact, the title of the introduction is Roger versus Tiger. And that came exactly out of a phrase we were using when we were having our own discussions while running.
03:22
Speaker 1
Now, you have also, slightly unfairly, written a third brilliant book, a massive bestseller. And that book is Inside the Box. And that book inspired our episode about general magic. So we are going to talk about general magic. We are going to talk about the power of constraints. We're going to talk about all sorts of things, but we're not going to talk about anything until we have heard the theme from Cautionary Tales. Today, I'm joined by David Epstein. He's a journalist, a science writer, an investigative reporter, and the author of three best-selling books. And we're going to discuss the cautionary tales he's uncovered in the worlds of creativity, science, and business. David, welcome to Cautionary Tales.
04:34
Speaker 3
Thank you very much for having me.
04:36
Speaker 1
I love the book. It's brilliant. It's full of examples of the way limitations and constraints are a good thing, for our creativity and our happiness and our productivity, you start quite early by talking about your own experience as a football player at school.
04:57
Speaker 2
Yeah, this would be as an American football player. And I was playing quarterback when I was in eighth grade. And essentially, I threw a ball as hard as I possibly could. And on the follow through of the throw, my arm snapped.
05:14
Speaker 3
Ow.
05:15
Speaker 1
That sounds really painful.
05:17
Speaker 2
It was very painful, and it's a very unusual injury. The only other time I've seen this was with a Major League Baseball pitcher during a game, and he had to have his arm amputated. We'll never know why it happened, but the result was I had to have my arms strapped to my torso from shoulder down to my hand. My world revolved around sports at the time, right? So I was out of sports.
05:41
Speaker 1
Yeah.
05:42
Speaker 2
But it had some pretty big long-term impacts on my life that ended up being positive. So it changed both my school and my sports life. So in school, which I was not super interested in at the time, and the bane of my scholastic existence was French class, where we had these tests every week, where you had to listen to a recording of a native French speaker, and you had a worksheet that had a transcript that you were supposed to follow along with. but there were blanks in the transcript and you had to catch the words as they were flying by and write the blank down. And I was mediocre at this. And once I had my writing arm, my right hand strapped to my body, it was no chance. I realized I couldn't write fast enough with my left hand to keep up. So I started trying to memorize the words as they flew by. And I did that by attaching the words to things related to sports. I didn't know the term mnemonic device at the time, But that's what I was doing. And I found that I was able to memorize every single one of them. And then I would just go back very slowly with my left hand and write them all in. And I started scoring perfect.
06:47
Speaker 1
So that's an interesting example, because you could have done that at any stage. You could always have used the mnemonics, but it just never occurred to you to look for that kind of option until the most obvious thing, which was just to scribble it down as you go. Once that was closed, you had to find another way. And that turned out to be a better way.
07:08
Speaker 3
Exactly.
07:09
Speaker 2
I mean, only once it was so desperate that I couldn't do it at all was I forced to look for another way. So it was very much necessity being the mother of invention.
07:20
Speaker 1
And you said it changed your sports career as well.
07:25
Speaker 3
Absolutely.
07:26
Speaker 2
Because I was barred from contact sports for a year. I couldn't do football, so I did cross-country running, which I didn't even know was a sport before that, just to stay in shape. And it turned out I kind of liked it. And I've liked the sense of improvement and the guys on the team. And I went back to football, basketball, and baseball once I recovered. But long story short, I ended up running at university, becoming a university record holder. Running is still a big part of my life today. And this is something I never thought of as a sport that I would have participated in until I was forced to experiment with activities that I never would have tried otherwise. And it became one of the most important things in my life. So to this day, I use mnemonics to memorize hour-long keynote talks, and I run almost every day of my life.
08:15
Speaker 1
I find this absolutely fascinating. There's a classic study of this, and we've both written about it, but I'll let you tell the story about the strike on the London Underground, I think back in 2012, and what this tells us about this whole class of constraint.
08:29
Speaker 2
Yeah, so this famous study falls very much in line with the necessity pushing people to experiment in productive ways. And I think that's one of the things that useful constraints do is they drive productive experimentation that people would not have undertaken otherwise. And in this case, during the underground strike, people had to find different routes to work. And during the few days of the strike, a significant number of people found a better route to work than the one that they had been taking for weeks or months or years and stuck with it. And I think it saved, if I recall, like a collective 1,500 hours of commuting time per day or something like that.
09:07
Speaker 1
Yeah.
09:08
Speaker 2
Simply because the path of least resistance was blocked and people were forced into experimentation that turned out to be productive.
09:15
Speaker 1
And it's fascinating because it was only a 48-hour strike. I mean, it's annoying, but really not a big deal. Yeah. And yet that generated, for some substantial minority of people, generated information about the best commute that they could then go on to use for years. So this sort of forced experimentation generates potentially enormous benefits for what is actually quite a small, a relatively small inconvenience sometimes.
09:42
Speaker 3
Absolutely.
09:42
Speaker 2
And so what this all suggests to me is that we probably don't experiment enough and that useful constraints can drive us to experiment.
09:52
Speaker 1
So that's one kind of constraint. Your book's all about the importance of different kinds of constraint your book also has this amazing story of general magic which inspired our recent cautionary tales episode and the issue with general magic their problem was not that they weren't experimenting enough and if only they had some kind of constraint they would experiment more they were experimenting a lot their issue was it was a a different failure to constrain what they were doing. For those who didn't listen to the episode, stop what you're doing now, go and listen to the episode. But the gist is it was this startup in the late 80s, early 90s. They had bags of talent, bags of funding, almost infinite resources, and they kind of They squandered it. They weren't disciplined enough. They weren't focused about their goal. And in the end, when they finally produced a product, it was very disappointing. They wanted to invent the iPhone. They did, on paper, invent the iPhone. But in practice, it was a very disappointing product because they never focused.
11:03
Speaker 2
Yeah, more startups die of indigestion than starvation. Because with General Magic, not only did they have all the talent and all the resources in the world, they had the correct vision of the next... few decades of technology. But because they could do anything, they did do anything. And the project just grew and grew and grew and spiraled out of control.
11:21
Speaker 1
Yeah. But what do you think they should have done? Because there is a view expressed in the documentary that basically you can't invent the iPhone in 2007. The technology wasn't there. There was nothing they could really have done differently. But you don't see it like that, do you?
11:36
Speaker 2
No, I think they should have started much smaller. and had much smaller goals and touch points en route to that longer vision. Since General Magic so vaguely defined their customer, right? They had Joe Sixpack.
11:50
Speaker 3
Nobody knew who that was.
11:52
Speaker 2
That they really ended up building for one another instead of having a specific problem they were trying to solve for someone. So there's this famous saying that people repeated to me in design a few times where people don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole in the wall. So it's to focus on what problem you're solving, not the cool thing that you're building. And General Magic was so focused on the cool thing they were building that they tossed in every good idea someone had. Whereas even people who are internal, right? Like one of their low level service engineers started eBay internally and offered it to them.
12:24
Speaker 3
And they said, no, no, too small.
12:26
Speaker 1
This is never going to work. Yeah. I had a slight disagreement with you about General Magic, David, although maybe this is a rhetorical disagreement rather than a real disagreement, but The thing about general magic is you describe them as having no constraints. But actually, the problem they had is they did have constraints. We all have constraints. There's not infinite money. There's not infinite time. In the end, we are all going to die. The problem was that all the constraints were long term and they could pretend to themselves they didn't have any constraints. And then, of course, in the end, they did run out of money and they did run out of time. So it's it's not that the world without constraints is bad for you. It's that the world without constraints is a fiction. And if you act as though there are no constraints, they will eventually catch up with you.
13:13
Speaker 2
No, I think that's a fair assessment. I mean, I would say that they didn't really run out of money. They had more money than they could spend. They did run out of time.
13:20
Speaker 3
Yes.
13:21
Speaker 2
And I think you're right that we all face constraints. And I think it's hard for us to face those sometimes, right? Like, like Oliver Berkman writes about this, if we just get the right productivity tools in.
13:35
Speaker 3
Place, then we can get everything done.
13:38
Speaker 2
But maybe that's just a refusal to grapple with your own mortality and realize that you have to prioritize ruthlessly. And maybe they were a sort of corporate version of that, where this illusion of unlimited time and unlimited resources got them out of the hard work of having to prioritize ruthlessly and decide what they shouldn't be doing. I would say two-thirds of the former General Magic employees that I interviewed said some version of, I just couldn't figure out what not to do. Because there were no clear boundaries, no clear problem they were solving, no at least short-term money or time constraint. And so it was very hard for them to have priorities. And by the way, I think it's a parable for the AI age where the cost of starting things essentially goes to zero. And I think one of the reasons we've seen this unprecedented adoption and not commensurate rise in productivity is that it's gotten rid of the hard work of deciding what you shouldn't be doing. And so I think general magic is kind of a lesson for the current moment.
14:39
Speaker 1
And I'm gonna pump you for more lessons because there's a, you would never describe your book as a self-help book, but it is helpful to the self. I just wanted to ask for a nugget of advice about how to constrain yourself to get more done? Because I know you've been following your own advice in writing this book.
15:02
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, one of the things for me, this is going to sound really simple, but I've been using something that I call for myself the Hemingway principle. So Ernest Hemingway would stop his writing days in the middle of a sentence so that he knew the important place that he should return to the next day. And so I do this at the end of my workday. My last act is to designate the important place that I will start the next day. And I think this guards against the two main ways that workdays can go sideways, which are falling into your feeds, some algorithmic feed or your inbox in the beginning of the day, and what's called the mere urgency effect, which is this finding that people will prioritize things that feel urgent, like responding to an email, over things that are actually important, even if those important things are objectively better uses of time.
15:51
Speaker 3
I love it.
15:52
Speaker 1
Thank you, David. And we're going to take a handbrake turn and discover how constraints are making scientists more honest with themselves. We will do that after the break. We're back. with me, Tim Harford, and my guest, David Epstein, the author of Inside the Box. And we're currently battling against some municipal workers who are mowing the lawn outside David's house. So we're going to deal with that constraint while we talk.
16:30
Speaker 3
Well played, sir.
16:32
Speaker 1
But actually, the constraint I want to talk to you about now, David, is a constraint on science and the way scientists work. Because there seems to be this moment where a couple of decades ago, the 1990s, where you couldn't turn around without bumping into some exciting new scientific result. The newspapers were full of them. And then suddenly there came a moment where all the cool results seemed to dry up. And you describe this in your book and you say it's a good thing. So what happened?
17:07
Speaker 2
Yeah, that was exciting times, right? Where it was these very counterintuitive findings of like, If I say Florida to you, you'll walk more slowly because you unconsciously associate Florida with old people and things like that.
17:18
Speaker 1
Yes, all of those. The power posing can make you feel more confident and adjust your testosterone level. Hurricanes named after women are more dangerous than hurricanes named after men, because people take hurricanes more seriously if they have a scary male name rather than if they have a soft feminine name.
17:42
Speaker 3
Right, so they evacuate more, right, if it's a male?
17:44
Speaker 1
Yeah, and they evacuate. All of this is nonsense. So how did this sort of nonsense get published? What was going on?
17:50
Speaker 2
And let me just add to that, that beyond the... Because these kinds of psychology findings were the most famous. But if you look at medical findings prior to the year 2000, all these big national institutes of health-funded drug trials for cardiovascular health were finding positive, amazing, miracle drugs. And then starting after the year 2000... almost all of those trials, the new trials were negative.
18:16
Speaker 3
Drugs are no longer working.
18:18
Speaker 2
So it's like if you look at results before 2000, it's like most new drugs work. And then after 2000, almost no new drugs work. So what happened in 2000? It was that in that case, the NIH forced researchers to constrain their behavior. They forced them to write down their predictions for what they were testing ahead of time. And so they had to make a plan ahead of time that they had to stick to And that led to more negative results, meaning those prior positive results essentially were false positives because what researchers were doing was probably making some prediction and then it wouldn't come true. But they would have this big set of data that they would start sifting, looking for correlations. And when they would find something, they would retroactively make a prediction. And then when they published the paper, it looks like that's what they were looking for all along. And I don't think there was any ill intent in this because I did something like this for my own master's project unwittingly, just not understanding. Like it's fine for exploration deciding what to then test. But the problem is when you're sifting a bunch of data retroactively, you're essentially doing almost an infinite number of tests. And for each one of those tests you do, the chances of finding a false positive goes up. So you're basically guaranteeing that you will find false positive associations. So it's really important in order to draw true conclusions to make a prediction ahead of time and then.
19:47
Speaker 3
Stick to that.
19:48
Speaker 2
So if you're testing the drug to, lower cholesterol and it turns out that doesn't work, but you're like, well, I have all this data. Let's see if it lowered something else, heart attack or stroke or blood pressure. Oh, look, one thing was lower.
20:00
Speaker 1
Let's say we had an experiment where I'm going to roll three dice and I've got a red, yellow and blue dice and I'm rolling them. and I don't have any hypothesis in mind. I just roll them and roll them and roll them and roll them. And then I start looking and I get my computer to look as well. It'll be like, well, it's interesting that the blue dice seems to roll odd numbers more and the yellow dice seems to roll even numbers more or the green dice usually rolls more than the blue dice as long as the yellow dice is an even number. But if the yellow dice is an odd number, then that pattern is reversed. I mean, there'll be something and we know it's chance because we're just rolling dice. But there'll be something.
20:36
Speaker 2
This is the kind of thing that led to my favorite hilariously dark paper that people sometimes refer to as the everything in your fridge causes and prevents cancer paper, where it gathered up all the results of nutritional studies and showed that essentially every food you can think of has been found in various studies both to cause and prevent cancer, except for bacon, which was found only to cause cancer.
20:57
Speaker 3
Which was depressing.
20:58
Speaker 1
That's a shame about bacon.
21:00
Speaker 3
Yeah, important for mental health.
21:02
Speaker 1
And there was a famous example of this. which was the researcher Brian Wonsink. So tell us about him.
21:10
Speaker 2
Yeah, Brian was a star in the field of nutritional research. I mean, his papers would make headlines. He was involved in creating the guidelines that are given to Americans for healthy eating. And he would do these incredibly intriguing experiments. The most famous one was the bottomless bowl study, where people were given bowls of soup. and just told to eat until they were satisfied and then stop eating. And some of those people had bowls that were being filled secretly from a tube in the bottom slowly as they were eating. And the finding was that those people ate way more than the people who didn't have the refilling bowl. And the idea being that we don't actually know when we're satisfied. So things like that. Or we'd have people eat way more calories when watching an action movie versus a talk show.
22:00
Speaker 3
All these kind of intriguing findings. So he was a superstar.
22:03
Speaker 2
And then he wrote a blog post about how he does his research. And what he was saying was, oh, you know, so we do these studies and it'll be like, whatever. One example would be, does the cost of a price of pizza affect your satisfaction? And, you know, and maybe the answer was no. And he framed that as being disappointing. But he said, but we've got all this data. So I give it to this grad student and I say, well, find something, find something positive. And she never fails to find something positive. And what he was basically doing was describing flawed methods in research where your initial prediction didn't work out, so you go start sifting the data to find something positive, and you always will because of statistical chance.
22:44
Speaker 1
Yeah, and this is the moment where you go, oh, maybe these guys really, really didn't understand that this was bad research methods, because if they really understood that this is not okay... probably wouldn't have written a blog post.
22:58
Speaker 3
No, absolutely. And again, I did this without knowing it.
23:02
Speaker 2
And then a few years later, as an investigative reporter, writing about bad science, I started saying, some of this sounds very familiar. Like, I think I did some of this. And so obviously, he was unwitting. But that led to this scrutiny that, you know, basically, most of his life's work was eventually retracted. I mean, he was, his studies were cited in like, books by Nobel Prize winners and things like that. So he was a big deal. But I think the good analogy is it's like what he was doing is like a sharpshooter who fires a bunch of bullets randomly at a wall and then finds a group that are clumped together and draws a target and a bullseye around them. And then somebody who comes by afterward will say, wow, what a great shooter. But really it was just sifting for random chance. And that's what Brian was doing.
23:50
Speaker 1
So let's just go through then what what has happened in science to prevent this it is a problem because there is pressure to find results just saying well we looked at this and we didn't see anything should be publishable not actually very easy to publish that kind of result so so instead people are looking for interesting results they're looking for eye-catching results and it's a lot easier to find them if you hark if you hypothesize after the results are known so what constraints were then imposed or self-imposed by scientists to prevent this?
24:26
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think the biggest one is so-called pre-registration, which is writing down your hypothesis ahead of time. So you just mentioned Harking, H-A-R-K, hypothesizing after the results are known. You have to hypothesize before the results are known and then stick to that hypothesis. It doesn't mean you can't explore later, but that exploratory analysis gives you ideas for something you then have to test. It doesn't give you a result.
24:51
Speaker 1
So to come back then to this moment when all the cool stuff seemed to dry up, that sounds like it's bad. Actually, that's the moment where all the imaginary results that were just illusions, all the drugs that we thought worked and don't work, that started to dry up. And that's good news because that's when we stopped believing things that were published in peer-reviewed journals that turned out to be completely untrue.
25:19
Speaker 3
It's great news. And I think one danger is.
25:24
Speaker 2
Because of this so-called replication crisis, what it's called, the failure of a lot of famous results to replicate, people have said, some people have taken that to say like, oh, see, don't trust science. All this stuff was wrong. Whereas these problems were surfaced by the scientific community. In some cases, people criticizing their own work, if not their peers' work. And learning lessons and leading to better practices. And in that sense, I think it's incredible what the scientific community did, take this very hard, painful reckoning to get to a better place. And so to me, in that sense, it breeds more trust in the scientific community over a decent timeline. And the one other thing I think that should give people some solace is, in the midst of all this, there was a study done where people were given descriptions of psychology studies and asked, do you think this result will hold up basically? And sometimes they were given some of the results also. And these were just like randomly selected people. And people were reasonably good at saying like, that just doesn't sound like it's going to be true and that matching reality. So we kind of score one a little bit for common sense and skepticism.
26:41
Speaker 1
And I think one of the things that has improved in our consumption of science, both scientists and I think the wider community of kind of voracious nerds who like to read about popular science, we've got a little bit more like, hmm, really? And just that moment is very powerful.
26:58
Speaker 3
Definitely.
26:59
Speaker 2
And especially now, this was a subtext of something you said earlier, but now when you see studies, like some of the sauna studies, I'm not saying sauna isn't good for long-term health.
27:08
Speaker 3
It may well be.
27:09
Speaker 2
I think there are some real results there. But some of the papers will say, you know, sauna is good for dementia, but But when you're doing it like between four and nine times a month, if it's any more or less than nine, then the result doesn't hold up. And it's usually the sign that someone has been slicing and dicing the data until they've found something positive. So I think you're right that that skepticism is useful, even if it's been kind of painful at times.
27:37
Speaker 1
And just to return to our self-help corner for a moment, David, we've learned something about being appropriately skeptical. about scientific claims. But is there something else in this idea of pre-registration or hypothesizing early that people might use in their own lives?
27:58
Speaker 2
So I think the personal takeaway is that we should all kind of be pre-registering hypotheses more often. So making predictions, say we're trying a behavioral change, we want to exercise more, whatever it is we want to do, making a prediction about finding a thing to try, making a prediction about what it's going to do, and then proceeding and see if your prediction was met or not.
28:24
Speaker 3
That will improve your learning.
28:26
Speaker 2
And this was actually, I wrote about some research where this was applied to entrepreneurs, where they were trained basically in the scientific method, making a hypothesis for what they think their theory of their market is, finding a way to test it. And in this study that randomized entrepreneurs and startups either to that kind of scientific training or just normal market research, those who were trained in the scientific method ended up falsifying their beliefs much more often, finding out that the value they thought they were adding to the market was not right. And the result was that they ended up pivoting a lot more often and succeeding a lot more often. So I think this idea of making a concrete prediction ahead of time, writing it down so that you can compare the result to what your intuition was, is how you end up educating your intuition.
29:13
Speaker 1
Amazing. Well, here is a concrete prediction for you, David. You and I will be back after the break to discuss creativity and happiness. We're back. You're listening to Cautionary Tales. I am Tim Harford, and I am talking to David Epstein, who is the writer of Inside the Box, and he's also a a self-professed lover of limitations. So, David, I am going to start this part of our conversation by reading from what is undoubtedly the greatest work of literature in human history. I do not like them in a house. I do not like them with a mouse. I do not like them here or there. I do not like them anywhere. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them. Sam, I am. So why are green eggs and ham important for your ideas, David?
30:12
Speaker 2
Green eggs and ham was written by Theodore Geisel, a.k.a.
30:16
Speaker 3
Dr.
30:16
Speaker 2
Seuss, on a bet that he couldn't write a book using only 50 words.
30:22
Speaker 3
Yeah.
30:24
Speaker 2
And it was that limitation that forced him to experiment with rhythm because he couldn't experiment with words. And in fact, what led to that bet was a different assignment where he was asked to write a children's book using only about 200 words from a kid's vocabulary list. And he looked at the list, saw there were very few adjectives, and made this Seussian complaint to his wife where he said, it's like trying to make a strudel without any strudels.
30:50
Speaker 3
Yeah.
30:51
Speaker 2
And then he just threw up his hands and said, I'm going to use the first two rhyming words on the list. And the first two rhyming words were cat and hat. And that's what forced him to develop this rollicking rhythm that he became famous for because the typical storytelling path was blocked. And so as some psychologists prefer to the green eggs and ham model of creativity, meaning that because our brains are wired for convenience, or as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says, You may think that your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly. So without limitations, we will do the convenient thing, the path of least resistance. So in order to be creative, the best thing you can do is block the typical solution that you would reach for. And that's what happened with Dr. Seuss and why it became known as the green eggs and ham model because this shows up widely in creativity research.
31:47
Speaker 1
Now- I would love to talk about Keith Jarrett and the unplayable piano. You write about this story beautifully in your book, but I'm not going to talk about Keith with you, David, because loyal listeners can go and listen to our classic episode, Bowie Jazz and the Unplayable Piano. They can read inside the box. They can hear all about it. I also discussed the example in my book, Messy, There were movies about it. I mean, it's an amazing example. I'm totally sold on your ideas, David. I'm very sympathetic to them. But the question that came up again and again in my mind as I was reading the book, and it's always good to have a book that raises questions, is how do we know what a good constraint is and what is an unhelpful or unproductive constraint? So in our episode about the making of Jaws, the shark that nearly ate Hollywood. So the useful constraint that they had was that the shark models didn't work. They were trying to make a movie about a shark and they didn't have a shark. And that forced various innovations. They really leaned on John Williams to produce this score. And John Williams kind of becomes the shark. The camera would become the shark that shoot images. scenes from the perspective of the shark. So you don't, the shark doesn't see itself. The shark would be hidden. All of these things just made a much better movie than if you had this great big, you know, gnashy rubber shark in every shot. So that was a really useful constraint. But a constraint that they were laboring under that I think nearly destroyed the movie was time pressure. They really needed to get the movie shot before The tourists all showed up and then you can't shoot anything because every scene has kind of boats in it. Fortunately, the problems with the shark kind of gave them more time because they would just sit around thinking about the script, thinking about problems in the script. And there was this forced idleness. So the time pressure was somewhat relieved. So you've got one constraint that's great. The shark doesn't work. You've got one constraint that is potentially very dangerous, which is you need to hurry. You need to hurry. how do you know what's working and what's not? What's a helpful constraint and what isn't?
34:16
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's really difficult because even thinking of just time pressure alone, there's research showing that it can either destroy or enhance creative problem solving. And it basically depends on how people use it. If they use it to multitask and try to get everything done at once, it destroys.
34:36
Speaker 3
Creative problem solving.
34:37
Speaker 2
If they use it to monotask and become focused on the most important parts of a task, it enhances creative problem solving. So even that particular constraint is contingent on how one uses it, or I think in many cases, probably whether one's boss protects them, their focus during that period. And so I think broadly speaking, if you have a constraint and to say, can I still surprise myself? Then there's still value there. If not, then it's definitely bad. And you can see this in sort of studies of inventions where people will get more creative. Say there's like 100 pieces that you can use to make an invention. And if people are told, here's 100 pieces, use whatever you want, make something, they are less creative than the people who are told, here are 20 pieces from the set you have to use and you have to make a piece of furniture.
35:25
Speaker 3
Creativity goes up.
35:26
Speaker 2
But if those people are told, here are 20 pieces you have to use and you have to make a chair... that's when creativity starts going down again, right? They're getting both the sort of what you have to do and the how you have to do it. And so there's not really a lot of room for innovation there. But I think it's a balance, right? Like one of the first readers of this book was a guy named Ed Hoffman, who was the first chief knowledge officer at NASA, kind of like the head psychologist in charge of organizational learning. And he said, I have to tell you about this mission called LCROSS, where... the engineers got about half the time and budget they were expecting.
36:04
Speaker 3
And so what did they do? Well, they start complaining.
36:07
Speaker 2
And then one of their leaders says, well, if we were going to get this done anyway, how would we do it? And that leads them to say we'd have to borrow technology. So they take imaging equipment straight from army tanks and engine temperature sensors straight out of NASCAR racing. And they built the probe that confirms water on the moon. Now they never would have, and that became part of their process. They never would have thought that way if they hadn't had half the time and half the budget. That said, if they had a quarter of the time and a quarter of the budget, could they have still pulled this off?
36:35
Speaker 3
I don't think so.
36:37
Speaker 2
So that titration of what becomes sort of an empowering constraint that drives you into productive experimentation versus one that just makes the task impossible, I think that's where a lot of the art is. And if the deadline is so short or the resource is so low, that there's no flexibility in how you get to the strategic goal, then I think clearly it's gone too far.
37:02
Speaker 1
For our Valentine's Day episode of Cautionary Tales, I studied online dating. And one of the conclusions I came to was that the apparently limitless availability of partners was probably not very helpful. Because people were endlessly second guessing. Well, is this the right person for me? I can always go back and find somebody else. And because it seemed as though you were unconstrained, in the end, you just end up lonely and never finding the partner for you. Whereas actually in the pre-internet dating era where you were far more constrained, you would meet somebody and you'd kind of make it work.
37:49
Speaker 2
Yeah. I think this is a problem. This is an analogy to everything now where, because our brains are comparison engines to some degree, and we can now compare everything about our life to the entire internet, and it's kind of a recipe for dissatisfaction. There's this short story I love by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, who, by the way, developed his writing style by writing in his limited English and reverse translating into Japanese.
38:15
Speaker 3
It was an interesting creative constraint.
38:17
Speaker 2
But this story... involves a young boy and girl who meet and randomly and realize immediately that they are the, as he says, the 100% perfect match for one another. And so they go on a park bench and they hold hands and they talk for hours and it's incredible. And then a little doubt creeps in where they say, is it really okay for happiness to come this easily? And so they agree on an experiment where they will both leave And if they really are 100% perfect for one another, they'll meet again and they'll get married on the spot. And so one of them walks off East and the other West and they never meet again.
38:54
Speaker 3
Yeah.
38:55
Speaker 2
And that's how the story ends. And I think that's sort of a parable of this world of, of, of endless choice where there's always that little doubt of if I just swipe right one more time. And I think that can really undermine that ability to compare, to undermine the experience of the moment itself. And, And we see this in strange ways, right, where people have been getting progressively more bored since the introduction of infinite scrolling. And scientists who are trying to understand how that could be ran an experiment where they randomized people to groups where they either had 20 videos they could choose from or one video. from that set of 20 that they had to watch. And the people who had to watch the one were less bored than the people who had the 20. The idea being that just the notion that you could be doing something else that might be better undermines your experience of the moment you're actually living. And I think that's incredibly nefarious.
39:46
Speaker 1
Well, I think you've just given us unasked for our final piece of self-help advice. David, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. What's next for you?
39:57
Speaker 2
Good question, because for the third time I'm saying, after writing a book, I'm saying never again, and I've believed it every time. And so it takes me a little while to recover from it. Yeah.
40:08
Speaker 1
I literally, as I'm speaking to you, David, three hours ago, I sent off the manuscript of my latest book. And I'm in that moment of like, can I bear to do this all over again or not? But yes, so.
40:22
Speaker 3
Never again.
40:22
Speaker 2
And like I said, I've believed it every time. So I'm giving myself, I mean, the book just came out, so I'm giving myself a little time. But in the meantime, I've been experimenting with making longer form videos on YouTube that are sort of reported and journalistic to see if that can work. And it's been interesting. It's been more work than I expected, but one that I made about sports skills and Messi just sort of took off. So I'm curious to see if that can become a platform where I can do journalistic things.
40:48
Speaker 3
And I don't know yet.
40:49
Speaker 1
So what's the YouTube channel? Where will people find it?
40:52
Speaker 2
It's just my name, David Epstein. And they can find it on my website, davidepstein.com. There's a link to it. My YouTube handle is David Epstein author.
41:01
Speaker 3
Excellent.
41:02
Speaker 1
And we will, of course, put the link in the show notes. David, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. Give us the title of your book once again so people can find it.
41:11
Speaker 2
Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better.
41:14
Speaker 1
And people might also wish to check out The Sports Gene and Range, David's two other books. David, thank you. And I will be back next week for another Cautionary Tale. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Keira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really does make a difference to us. And if you want to hear it ad-free and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode... and members-only newsletter every month, why not join the Cautionary Club? To sign up, head to patreon.com slash cautionary club. That's patreon, p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com slash cautionary club.
The Host
