The Case for Embracing Limits

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Zachary Karabell: Everyone always tells us to think outside the box What if that’s wrong? What if we should think inside the box? That’s gonna be the subject of today’s What Could Go Right. I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and we’re gonna talk today with David Epstein, who has a new book out called Inside the Box, and it’s not nearly as inside the proverbial box as it suggests, but it does raise this whole question that all of us have in a world where it seems like there is absolutely no limit to what we can do, what we can think, what we can read, what we can choose.

How do we make the best decisions, and how do we all grapple with that? How do we navigate in the best sort of way? I mean, I certainly face this in my own life. I have a good degree of freedom to choose what I wanna do. That freedom does not always make it easy to choose what I wanna do, and I think that’s something that most of us, in one form or another, relate to, albeit all of our individual circumstances are different.

Everywhere in the world, people are facing this conundrum of choice, possibility, and what to do about it. I’m really excited to talk with David, partly because of an inherent tension in his last two books. He wrote a book about range, about how we should be generalists, and now he’s written a book about how we should create constraints, and those would seem to be in some sort of tension, but maybe they’re not, and maybe they are the yin and yang that we need to all aspire to.

So let’s see. David Epstein, it’s great to have you on What Could Go Right. In a purely self-reflective, narcissistic fashion, I love the title of the book because it plays around with the same inversion of a phrase that people think about. So if What Could Go Right is the inversion of the usually asked, “What could go wrong?”

Mm-hmm. Uh, then Inside the Box is the inversion of the usual phrase, “Outside the box,” right? Total softball. I’ve answered this question about 27,000 times and can do so in my sleep. What is inside the box?

David Epstein: Well, I never answer it the same, I have to say.

Zachary Karabell: Oh, that’s good.

David Epstein: I’m not the rehearse my bullet points kinda guy.

Zachary Karabell: Good.

David Epstein: It is an argument that we overlook limits as our potentially most powerful tools for driving creativity, for spurring innovation, and, and even for personal contentment, and that we overvalue complete freedom in the abstract and undervalue the power of limitations. And in fact, even if your goal is to think outside the box, the best way to do that is to put constraints on yourself, kind of ironically.

Um, and we can talk about that if you want because of how our, our brains work.

Zachary Karabell: How much of your work builds on Barry Schwartz and the paradox of choice or people like Sheena Iyengar, who also kind of did this issue of cognitive studies, behavioral studies, that when we’re presented with a plethora of possibilities or infinite choice, it kind of freezes our ability to make actual choices?

David Epstein: A little bit, but not a ton, and partly, I would say, because some of that work, uh, didn’t hold up very well to replication. Like the famous choosing from jams study, where if there were more jam options, people didn’t choose, I, I think is, you know, it, it just hasn’t held up that well. That said, some of Barry’s work on what’s called satisficing was, is crucial, and particularly toward the end of my book, where so- Satisficing is a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice, and what it means is basically the opposite of optimizing, like the culture we have now of optimizing everything, or as psychologists would say, maximizing.

So Barry and his colleagues created a scale to test how much of a satisficer versus maximizer one is. A maximizer being someone who wants to evaluate all the possible options so that they can always get the best thing. And as it turned out, it’s almost always bad to be a maximizer. So maximizers are less happy with their decisions, even when they’re good, less happy with their lives, more prone to regret, more prone to preferring reversible decisions, even though it kind of prevents them from committing one way or the other, and they end up less happy.

And so one of the things I definitely touch on that Barry and others pioneered is the fact that this proliferation of endless choice makes people, especially people with maximizing tendencies, which, which there’s some evidence those are on the rise, miserable And they’d be better off with much fewer choices.

Zachary Karabell: You, you talk in the book a little bit about infinite optionality, or you, you, you address this question, and you’re somewhat critical of… Well, not critical, but you, you point out some of the risks of that, right?

David Epstein: Yeah, absolutely.

Zachary Karabell: But I wonder, we do live in a world of somewhat infinite optionality, just de facto, yes?

David Epstein: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, ’cause I, I think about this, like when I was growing up, someone would come over and you’d say, “Do you wanna listen to some music?” And somebody would say, “What do you wanna listen to?” And you’d point them to your record collection, and, you know, they’d say yes or no, or they’d pick it. And of course, now the answer is, “What do you wanna listen to?”

or “What do you have?” And the answer is, “Well, everything,” right? Like-

David Epstein: Yeah. Yeah. Theoretically, the optionality is unlimited. In reality, what you know about or, or what you’re gonna search, whatever, puts some limits on it. But even the unused unlimited optionality, I think is quite bad for us. So for example, there’s some research showing that people have been getting progressively more bored since the introduction of infinite scrolling.

And scientists who are trying to figure out why this might be ran experiments where, for example, they randomized people either to a group where they’d have 20 videos, and they could pick whatever they wanted to watch, or to a group where they only get one video from that same set of 20, and they just have to watch it for the allotted time.

And the people who are forced to focus on the one are less bored than the people who can pick from the 20 that includes the one. And the theory of those scientists is that the, just the ability to compare your choice to what the other things you could have possibly chosen undermines the experience of the moment itself.

And I think there’s evidence that that occurs really, really broadly, whether it’s the vacation we take, the clothes we wear, the Netflix we’re watching, that this pretty new in human history ability to endlessly compare to what else you could have been doing is really bad for satisfaction of the thing you actually end up doing.

Zachary Karabell: See, I always wonder about these things from a then-and-now perspective. So boredom as a category of human experience is very hard to measure historically, partly because the vast number of human beings, no one ever thought to ask about their daily experience of life, you know, in 1500. So was a Burgundian peasant bored in 1510?

Like, I have no idea. Was that even a category that would’ve occurred to them normatively, psychologically? I guess what I’m pushing back in is, are we more bored, or has the, has the presence of so much more choice made us hyper-tuned to our ability to not actually muddle through things that otherwise in the past there would’ve been no optionality, we just would’ve dealt?

And even then, boredom as a category may not even occurred because it suggests alternatives.

David Epstein: Yeah, I mean, about the 16th century Burgundian, I don’t know. But for the last recent decades, we do know because there are standard surveys that psychologists use. And either way, whether it’s only the fact that we’re more aware- I think it’s bad for your sense of thriving and contentment either way, whether that’s sort of a, a manufactured artifact of having more choice that, that you’re aware that you can be– that you’re allowed to be feeling bored.

I think the, the end result is that it just doesn’t lend to wellbeing and thriving.

Zachary Karabell: Do you find that in your own experience?

David Epstein: I definitely have some maximizing tendencies. I mean, in many ways there was a lot of me search in this book, things I was bad at in my work life or things that I wanted to change, and so I kind of put limits on myself in various ways from how many work commitments I take on to just even finding sort of satisficing exercises in my life.

I mean, before I get on Amazon, for example, whatever thing I’m gonna buy, I decide ahead of time the job that I’m hiring this thing for. You know, broom or whatever it is, what do I need this thing to do? And when I find one that does those things, I will buy it. I don’t wanna read every review. I don’t want the broom that also has a laser pointer because I get sucked into that stuff.

And so it’s important for me ahead of time to define what do I want, and once I have that, I just stop. And so I, I put all sorts of kind of boundaries around my attention.

Zachary Karabell: But with that, what, what did you learn in some of the research you did for the book about… And this is, like, the obligatory AI portion of the conversation.

I think in this case, legitimately asking the question of implications, and I think we all need to be a little more cautious about our leap to certain conclusions about what we think This is going to mean in the future. I mean, there’s, there’s probably just enough conversation about AI and way too much conclusions about AI.

Because you, you address this in, in the book.

David Epstein: Let me give one thing that I think sort of in– that I just think is interesting or maybe symbolic of a larger point. Just to educate myself over the last almost two years, I spent a bunch of time with one AI company that helps other companies implement AI.

And roughly what I saw, you know, very simplifying, I would drop some of those implementations into two different buckets. One, which was more normal, where a company would say, “We need AI,” and they would just try to implement it everywhere, and it would sprawl and lead to what some researchers have now called work slop, like this incredible volume of stuff that nobody’s totally sure what to do with.

And I think that’s some of the reason why we’ve seen this historically unprecedented adoption and not the commensurate productivity gains. And then some of the other organizations would really take time to define what the problem is. One of them made what they called a map of jobs to be done, like throughout the whole organization.

Which of these fit something that this tool can do well? So they did really a lot of work up front. This made me realize that it’s never been easier to do too much. And a lot of these organizations, as I assume a lot of individuals are, because the cost of starting stuff goes to zero, they’re skipping over the hard work of deciding what not to do.

And I write about that a bunch early in the book, but I think it’s more important than ever to clarify your priorities ahead of time. And there’s this famous saying for products that people don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole in the wall. So it’s like, what is the problem I’m trying to solve, not what is the cool thing that I could make.

And I think it’s more important than ever to do the problem defining, uh, ahead of time.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, that was your mantra also about how you discipline yourself going into an Amazon shopping moment, right? Mm-hmm. You set your question of what am I looking for and stay with that rather than letting that be the jumping-off point to a- an endless either a rabbit hole or a open funnel.

David Epstein: I mean, if you’re not structuring your attention, then it’s being structured for you by some algorithm on the other side. And so, uh, for me, I think it’s whether it’s shopping or just, like, the way I focus on things at work, I, I want to be the one commanding that.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I mean, you’re not, I think, saying that constraints should constrain creativity or constraints should constrain curiosity.

It’s more, I think, a reaction to… And, and tell me if this is a fair characterization. It’s a reaction to the feeling of infinity or the reaction to a sort of a inchoate letting your attention drift from stimuli to stimuli, from social media video to social media video, the, the scrollification of contemporary culture.

David Epstein: Scrollification. I like it.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

David Epstein: Yes. And let me, let me mention since you mentioned creativity specifically, because there’s a lot of that in Inside the Box. I like, uh, uh, the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has written that while you may think your brain is made for thinking, it’s actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible, because thinking is energetically costly, and so our brains are wired for convenience, not for hard, the hard work of creativity or whatever else.

And so it’s actually kind of impossible to be creative when you don’t have any limitations. You’ll go down what cognitive psychologists call the path of least resistance. Mm. Something that’s familiar that you’ve already done before that’s just easy. So you want to block that if you wanna be creative.

That’s the best creative prompt you can have, is what’s the thing, first thing that comes to mind? Okay, you’re not allowed to do that. Hmm. And so one psychologist has termed this the Green Eggs and Ham effect, after the fact that Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham famously on a bet that he could, he couldn’t write a book using only 50 words, and that’s what forced him to experiment with, develop this rollicking rhythm because he couldn’t be expansive with vocabulary.

And that shows up in this mountain of research that y- y- if people are just left open, they kind of can’t be creative, and that eminent creatives do these things to themselves. They will restrict or u- use what, what psychol- what some psychologists call a preclude constraint, right? They preclude all the solutions that have been used before, which forces them to do something new.

So it’s kind of the necessity is the mother of invention, uh, you know, just in a systematic way. Now that I know this, I see it in the news all the time, right? Like, the Ukrainian drone industry, they got cut off from Chinese parts, and suddenly they created this incredible homegrown drone industry. When China wasn’t allowed the newest AI chips, DeepSeek decided to come up with a creative architecture and work around it and outperform ChatGPT.

I was just reading about India that sent a probe to Mars for significantly less than the budget of the film Gravity. And because they couldn’t just do it the way that the US had done it, they had to come up with a strategy of circling the Earth and building up speed and then sort of slingshotting. And so it’s just all these examples that you see in real life of constraints driving creativity that just wouldn’t happen if the need weren’t there.

Zachary Karabell: I wanna pivot for a moment ’cause you were at Sports Illustrated. You wrote a book about sports once upon a time. We’re recording this toward the very end of the World Cup.

David Epstein: I m- I made an amazing World Cup prediction, by the way, in an interview that didn’t get used. I’m so upset about it. I predicted that Norway was gonna beat Brazil.

Zachary Karabell: Wow.

David Epstein: And I’m like, so I’m, I’m big into Norway’s developmental, uh, pathways for developing sport talent, and I could not believe that the person didn’t use the quote, so now I have no evidence-

Zachary Karabell: Wow …

David Epstein: that I did it.

Zachary Karabell: You were, like, early on the, uh, the Haaland.

David Epstein: Oh, I, I’ve been, like, stumping about Norway’s youth athletic development programs for, like, a decade.

Zachary Karabell: So in what way? Like, talk about that for a sec. There was a whole story about Argentina’s youth program being-

David Epstein: Sure …

Zachary Karabell: kind of a Dickensian, abusive, take the orphans off the street kind of thing.

David Epstein: So when I was writing my first book, The Sports Gene, I was traveling all around the world, uh, looking at sports development, and Norway’s kind of the opposite to what the US has going on now.

So first of all, I’ll say that they are doing things in sports that have never been seen before. I mean, in the last two Winter Olympics, they’ve won more gold medals than, like, the US and China combined. They have two of the best runners of a generation. They have people who are right around the top 10 in golf and tennis.

Obviously in soccer now they’re doing well. I mean, and they’ve been winning things in world championships that you don’t associate with Scandinavia, like beach volleyball.

Zachary Karabell: Right.

David Epstein: So it’s not just

Zachary Karabell: skiing. And also a country of five million people, right?

David Epstein: That’s right. Smaller than the size of, like, you know, metropolitan Atlanta.

And they have this philosophy called idrettsglede, which is joy of sport and joy of sport for all. And they do not allow kids to be ranked or selected before the age of 13. They end up with higher physical activity rates for life, much higher than we have, much higher participation in sports in teen years.

And since they’re not pushing selection, people get to sample different sports. They gain general athleticism first, which is the way you should develop. And when they do pick a sport, they’re much more likely to pick one they actually like and fit into, because the earlier you force selection, the more likely you put the wrong person in the wrong spot.

You know, in the US, you see this thing called the relative age effect show up in a lot of our junior teams, where because selection is so early, coaches mistake biological maturation for potential, and they end up just picking kids who were born in the early part of the birth cohort year. Hmm. And so the teams end up filled with those kids, but then because that’s not potential, it washes out later on.

Now because we have more athletes than everybody else, we can still excel at the top level in most sports. I was a Division I college runner. There are thirty to forty thousand young adults in our college system in serious running training. That’s probably equal to the rest of the world combined, right?

So we have structural advantages, but in terms of individual development, we don’t do nearly as well as a place like Norway. So I try to take any chance I can to, uh, just promote some of what they’re doing because they view mass participation and elite performance as aligned, not in conflict, and that’s, that’s not the case here.

Zachary Karabell: So basically what you’re saying is the United States can afford to be highly inefficient, that even if our system is per unit of body deeply suboptimal, it gets sort of papered over because we’re just throwing so much bodies at the problem, as it were.

David Epstein: Exactly, yeah. And I mean, when I lived, I don’t live in New York anymore, but there was a U8 travel soccer team that met across the street from me.

And I’m like, is there a human being in the world that thinks that eight-year-olds can’t find good enough competition in a city that’s larger than Norway- … that they have to travel? No. Nobody thinks that. It’s the adults’ economic interest to try to lock in the U8 customer pipeline, then the U9, and someone just told me that, who lives in Summit, New Jersey, told me that they have a junior pre-U3, pre-academy U3, whatever it was.

So when you’re four years old, you’re in the pre-academy program, and now you can be Three or two and be in the pre-pre-academy program. This is a customer retention strategy. It has nothing to do with everything we know about optimal athletic development. There was just this big paper in Science that reviewed years of this research on athletic development and showed that the things that are associated with elite youth performance, like early specialization and, and not multi-sport, are inversely associated with elite adult performance.

So don’t believe me, believe the journal Science. Let me just say the title of the paper for any, like, parents who wanna go. It’s, uh, Recent Discoveries on the Acquisition of the Highest Levels of Human Performance in the journal Science.

Zachary Karabell: You know, it raises this question, too, of the amount of sort of time and money that the average suburban parent spends and takes on shuttling their youthful progeny from one sports event, sports league to another.

I, I’m sure some economist is now working on this, but one has to imagine that while that looks constructive for GDP, you know, ’cause you’re buying gas and you’re buying equipment and you’re doing all these things, as an outcome long term, particularly as an investment, particularly given what you’re saying about, you know, whatever that yields, unless you believe that it’s all about character building and then our, our kids who participate in these sorts of sports are somehow better suited for th- the modern age of AI and, and workforce, uh, it’s a very questionable use of time and money.

David Epstein: I think the part that’s not even questionable is when the kids are spending more time traveling than they are even playing. I, I think that’s the case for a lot of kids in a lot of these sports. When I’ve been to countries that produce the best soccer players in the world, again, you mentioned we’re recording this in the middle of the World Cup, unlike that U8 travel soccer team that met near me and was learning set plays and all that stuff, kids are playing futsal, which is a game where the ball is ha- about half the size and twice the weight, and it stays on the ground, and they’re playing on cobblestones, you know, and sand, and they touch the ball six times as many times per minute as in soccer.

And it’s learner led, you know, self-organized activity. And there’s been all this hand-wringing about why the US doesn’t do better in soccer, ’cause we have more soccer players than even most of these countries do. And I think it’s that we don’t have that kind of informal street ball culture where people really learn the creative footwork.

All these guys, Messi, Lamine Yamal, Cristiano Ronaldo, they all grew up playing futsal, not soccer. But we skip over that because we wanna get right to doing the thing that the pros are doing right now, even though you’re 10.

Zachary Karabell: So as we go deeper in this particular rabbit hole, ’cause I’m fascinated by it, so you worked at Sports Illustrated.

It’s a fascinating to be able to now have to say to Gen Z, you have to kind of explain what Sports Illustrated was.

David Epstein: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. Um, and just how massively significant. I guess people still recognize Sports Illustrated for the swimsuit issue, if they recognize it at all. Yeah.

David Epstein: Maybe.

Zachary Karabell: Dean Acheson once wrote about being present at the creation for the new world order i- in the 1950s, and you were sort of present at the destruction.

How did that happen? Like, there’s more appetite than ever for sports. There’s more appetite than ever for commentary about sports, and somehow this- thing that had been so central unravels, and yet there’s more hunger than ever for exactly what it was doing.

David Epstein: I was only partly present for the destruction.

I mean, I started as a temp fact checker, and my first day was the first time they ever announced layoffs. And then I became a senior writer pretty quickly. But by the time I left, it was still making a lot of money. De- decreasing amounts of money, but still making a lot of money. And then a few years later, it got, like Sort of broken apart and so and became unrecognizable.

What happened? I mean, precedence moved to TV, the internet, and, and SI, they started online coverage, CNNSI, if you remember that- Yeah … early. But I think initially they were like, “Yay, we started a website. We’re ahead,” and then didn’t really cultivate it into something that reflected the brand and the kind of coverage that the magazine had.

Meanwhile, some of the kind of writing that Sports Illustrated used to do, like the older features, are incredible, but as athletes became more the keepers of their own story and with their own channels to get out, the access for some of that kind of stuff just decreased. Hmm. I think it was a confluence of things.

One, just people’s reading habits shifting. Another, just the typical innovator’s dilemma, right? Where it’s like Kodak invented digital photography and then scuttled it because why would you mess with the thing that’s working? And then you don’t turn around until you’re in a crisis point and realize that you should have disrupted yourself ’cause you had this thing that was working and you’re not gonna kill the golden goose.

Right. But by the time you decide to do it, it’s way too late, so I think there was some of that as well.

Zachary Karabell: And do you feel that way about investigative reporting now? So you were an investigative reporter at SI, then you’re an investigative reporter at ProPublica. ProPublica, of course, has a model that was supposed to inoculate it from some of the vicissitudes of the market and also allow places like The Washington Post and The New York Times to outsource a little bit of their sort of fixed cost, ’cause it’s costly.

Mm-hmm. Can take months, and you’re basically paying a team a pretty good salary while they try to unearth a story. You know, the joke always being Woodward and Bernstein would never have been able to do the Watergate story today ’cause nobody would have sort of paid for them to follow all the cul-de-sacs and the leads.

On the flip side, there’s more information than ever. There’s more inputs in people trying to find stuff, much of it unreliable. Data

David Epstein: tools.

Zachary Karabell: So, like, is this a wash? Yeah. Uh, should we be mourning the past? Should we be celebrating the present or feeling like it’s a disaster?

David Epstein: If we’re talking about journalism specifically, I think some of the national investigative journalism is better than anything we’ve ever seen.

Like ProPublica would build custom data tools, and some of the stuff that could be done with that was incredible. Like you just never could have done it in the past. You know, scraping tools, like all kinds of analysis. I mean, you know, I had a story I was working on where I got a document leak, and we’re talking millions of pages.

There’s no way I could have gone through that except they had like a custom sifter for me so I could find the important things. So on the national level, I think some of the things that ProPublica’s doing is some of the best investigative reporting that’s ever been done. I think a challenge is people are inured to some of it because there’s like so much corruption and scandal in the news.

I mean, there, there have been so many things going on that I, I think are bigger than Watergate, but they just don’t get as much attention because there’s so much, so that’s one challenge. And then I think investigative reporting at the local level has largely been decimated. That’s not true everywhere, but local investigative journalism, like, makes change quickly.

And I think local journalism has been just ravaged throughout a lot of the country. So while I think there’s some great national reporting going on, n- not to say there isn’t still some great local stuff, but that’s where I think it’s really been ravaged and we’re in a, we’re in a The– not a great spot.

Zachary Karabell: And you don’t think that’s compensated for by the, you know, the Instagram posts and the TikTok videos and the Facebook groups which still exist. I know no one ever talks about it anymore, but they’re still part of the mix.

David Epstein: Yeah, at the local level, I don’t. I mean, I think sometimes you need someone who’s dedicated to following some bill through the city council- Right

or following the expenses of some mayor or whatever it is, and I don’t think that’s totally replaced. And you can see, actually, there was this study in Economist that, that looked at… ‘Cause you had this natural experiment where when Craigslist moved into a community, it takes over all the ads that papers would have, basically.

And you could see when it would move in, voting rates would go down, corruption scandals were more likely and all these sorts of things. There, there’s some cool things, usually nonprofit, that are working to replace it in some places, but nothing nearly at the scale of, of what’s, what was destroyed.

Zachary Karabell: So I wanna bring this back to the books.

This kind of conversation, which I love, you know, kind of going from topic to topic on, on things that are really tractionable within society right now is what I would define in your terms as range, right? We– This is– we’re covering a lot of different things.

David Epstein: Mm-hmm.

Zachary Karabell: You’ve had an eclectic life.

David Epstein: Mm-hmm.

Zachary Karabell: I’ve had a whole variety of different careers, some overlapping, some sequential, and that leads to a certain curiosity about things that are not necessarily linearly connected, but they’re connected in our experience, and we’re both alive in the world today and presumably curious, and I think a lot of people listening and watching this are as well.

So that’s kind of a, an example of range or what range can provide, or potentially what range can also get in the way of, which is a clear linear conversation. But so how does that contradict or harmonize with then the inside the box work, which would seem to be more of a call for constraints rather than range and more of a, “Well, we should have a linear coherent conversation build to a point,” or you should make a series of less eclectic choices.

Uh, are those in tension or, uh, is there a way in which you harmonize them or both?

David Epstein: Yeah, I, I think a little bit of both, and I’ll tell you the genesis of the project, I guess is so range, which was this argument for generalism and for the power of broad experiences and broad ways of thinking about the world in a rapidly changing environment.

And one of the most common questions, to paraphrase, that I got from people who liked range, so these are people who really liked it, would be, “You know, I felt seen. I’m curious about so many things. My challenge is figuring out what to do because I’m interested in so many things.” And that is me also. Again, me– my publisher told me never to use the word me search because they said it’ll sound like you’re writing the book for you and not for other people, but it’s the reality of it.

Zachary Karabell: I think it’s a great term. Did you make it up?

David Epstein: I don’t think I did. I’m not sure where I got it from, but I don’t think I made it up. I mean, this is a total tangent, but a science writer that I love named Christie Aschwanden was interviewing me once, and I think I was talking about how elite performers are often wrong about how they do what they do.

So when scientists study them, they find that how they explain what they do, they’re actually wrong about it. And I use this quote Just because you’re a bird doesn’t mean you’re an ornithologist. Hmm. And she loved that quote and asked me the origin, and I thought I had seen it somewhere and it wasn’t there, and she went looking and couldn’t find it anywhere, so she just attributed it to me.

So I’m totally unclear if I created that quote or not. But me-search I’m pretty sure is, like, an older term, and kind of obvious, so the idea that I would have invented that seems unlikely. But anyway, so range is this argument for breadth. I’ve written three books, and it’s been six to seven years between each one, and part of that is because I get interested in so many things that I have trouble focusing on one.

And then once I do, I was in the past, until Inside the Box, putting such vague boundaries around the project that it would end up sprawling. You know, now I know after doing the reporting for Inside the Box that designers call this featureitis. It’s like everything that’s cool, you go after it and you put it in even if it’s not in service of the user.

And I kind of had that issue with books where I would, I would end up stripping a lot of that stuff out, but it meant that I was doing this incredible amount of excess work that was never going to contribute in the end because I just wasn’t focusing myself. So for Inside the Box, I saw it as, you know, once you have these broad tools, how do you focus that into achievement and hopefully into satisfaction eventually?

So this time around, I actually delayed writing quite a bit. I, I didn’t start writing for a year on this book, just researching. And then I took my hundred thousand word What I call master thought list, you know, information. Read it while at a hermitage at a Franciscan monastery where I didn’t open my mouth for two days.

It was wonderful. And then forced myself to outline on one page and one page only the structural plan for the book. So all these things that I had just 100,000 words to one page. Actually, it’s, this is it right here, this page. I, I tried to write, like, as small as humanly possible- Wow … to defeat my own system.

Zachary Karabell: But- For those of you listening, that it’s a page of just every square inch full of notations and notes

David Epstein: and- Arrows and bubbles and ladders and things. And it forced me to prioritize ruthlessly. And I said, “Okay, this is what’s going in the book, and if it’s not on this page, it’s not going in the book.” And that was, like, liberating for me to explore those topics.

And I then executed the writing so much more rapidly that I was just sitting on the book because I was done and didn’t know… I’m like, “I can’t s- turn this thing in early, can I? That’s not a thing,” ’cause I’d never heard about that with books. But putting good boundaries around my expansive curiosity really empowered me.

Zachary Karabell: Do you go right into another topic, or do you let yourself breathe for a little bit?

David Epstein: Not just let myself breathe. I usually try to do something different. I mean, I really like trying new things. So just before this book came out, I started, for the first time, making long-form video, seeing if, okay, here are topics.

Let me start with topics I’ve written about and just turn them into video form and maybe have some illustrations that wouldn’t have been easy in a book to see can I do the kind of journalism that I like in this form that I know is increasingly popular while books are decreasingly popular?

Zachary Karabell: Hmm.

David Epstein: And at first nobody was watching them, and then in the last month a lot of people started watching them.

And so now I’m wondering if I can do long-form stuff that I’m proud of. Uh, that’s something I’m playing with right now.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, one of the, uh, people who had been on an earlier episode of this season, uh, is Bruce Feiler, who’s an old friend, and since we did the podcast, I asked him how the book was going and the book tour.

And Look, everything is unique and some things are general, so I don’t know, and none of us do, what, exactly what a trend is in the present, ’cause those things are usually much more clear retrospectively. But his experience was that more and more people seem to be deeply interested in hearing about a new idea or concept that a book promotes, so in this case, Inside the Box.

In his case, it was a book about ritual. And that there’s a lot of appetite for a discussion, podcasts, interviews, TED Talk, but that the ratio between people who then feel like they then need to buy and/or read the book seems to be getting ever larger. So whereas once upon a time you’d go, “Oh my God, I heard this incredible interview with David Epstein on, on this great book.

I gotta go buy it.” And increasingly it would appear people are much more like, “Oh, I heard this great interview with David Epstein about Inside the Box, and he talked about this theory, and I’m gonna tell you about the theory over coffee to a friend,” and have no interest in buying the book. I’m, I’m not saying this, by the way, to, like, depress you, me, or anyone else who has books they’re promoting.

It’s just, I- No … I wonder if that’s in fact where things are going, and I think from my own experience, there’s some truth to that. You know? That I’m, I’m often much more willing to, like, hear an interview, go, “Wow, that was great. I really learned a lot from that,” but not then translating it into I need to spend 20 hours delving into what it is I just heard about.

David Epstein: A few thoughts about that. I think that’s probably true. I know there was, among some of my peers, Tim Ferriss did an online post recently where he showed his sort of book sales and this cliff that they’ve fallen off of after years of steady sales, and he attributed that for him to AI, but his books, I think, are probably especially vulnerable to that because they’re, like, such practical, you know, diet, exercise advice.

Right. Things like that.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, his point was those are the kind of questions you could ask ChatGPT or Claude or DeepMind.

David Epstein: Right. Right. Yeah, and so my guess would be that diet books, for example, which used to be probably one of the mainstays of publishing, are probably, my guess would be, I don’t know, but that they’re not doing very well anymore.

But I think you’re right about that ratio of people. I, I’m an anachronism in that way, I guess, and part of the reason for that, I think, why I’m an anachronism, is that I’ve found that if I talk to AI about some book, or not to depress you, but even if I usually listen to an interview, I feel like I learn something, but it doesn’t really stick in the way that it does when I consume it in a much slower form, like in a book.

Maybe that’s just me, but I think there’s a lot of value to slow consumption if you actually want knowledge to be usable. So I think in many cases, people are getting the feeling of learning, and this is actually showing up in some of the first research on AI and cognition. There’ll be this incredible back and forth that involves a ton of information.

People will really feel like they’re learning, and then when they’re kind of tested on it, they can’t use the knowledge at all. And so there’s a feeling of learning and not, not a reality of learning. This is what psychologists call desirable difficulties. You actually wanna slow down learning if you want it to be sticky.

So for me, I’m probably still gonna be reading, but I think that’s less and less true. The one thing I’ve found interesting is people will listen to interviews And I think far fewer of them are likely to buy the book, but they seem more likely to then invite me somewhere to talk about it.

Zachary Karabell: Exactly.

David Epstein: And maybe that makes sense.

They’re listening to me speak. They liked something. They wanna hear me speak more or share it with a group.

Zachary Karabell: Right.

David Epstein: And so I think book sales, at least my experience, book sales have declined, but invites to give an hour-long talk or something have, have increased.

Zachary Karabell: So that’s exactly right, and I’ve, I’ve heard this now from a wide variety of people, so that it’s like the book as a commercial entity in and of itself may or may not be in some sort of Tim Ferriss or the decline we’re talking about.

Books as a launching pad for a much wider range of discussions not only seems robust, but even more robuster than it would’ve been in the past. You know, meaning it is– You wouldn’t have gotten those invites had you not been talking about the book that you had written. It provides some sort of tangible material foundation for a much broader arc of conversations, which is kind of wild culturally, right?

Like, it, it required the book. It may not have required- Yeah … the level of book sales, but it still required the book

David Epstein: Yeah, it’s very interesting. So Range made it briefly to be a number one New York Times bestseller, and Inside the Box debuted at, like, number eight, which is great, but not number one, and with a tide that has lowered all boats, I guess.

Um, and yet immediately started leading to invites for speaking probably quicker than anyone would have even read the book, right? So that is an interesting trend. I’m curious if that will keep up.

Zachary Karabell: So when you look at the world today with all these challenges around endless choice, seeming vociferous tendencies of politics, culture, economics, w- do you approach the world writ large and when you write about it writ small with a degree of, “Oh my God, we’re, we’re heading downhill fast”?

Do you approach it as these are just human psychological constraints at an individual level? I mean, you, you seem certainly on the… Once you create an optimism, pessimism scale and name it, um, we don’t have one right now, but, you know, you seem more on the upbeat side temperamentally. I think there’s a lot of temperament that goes into these things, not just cognition.

But are you concerned about the arc of the world writ large, or are you m- more focused on the possibilities?

David Epstein: Great question. I mean, I’m definitely concerned about things. Um, you know, before I got into writing, I was training to be an environmental scientist, and there was a lot of– I was studying the carbon cycle in the lower Arctic, and it’s, like, very concerning.

Zachary Karabell: Is that why you stopped being an environmental scientist?

David Epstein: No, that’s, that’s not why I stopped. Although, once I became an investigative reporter, I did sometimes get exhausted from it. Like, some of the reporters I would notice, it was almost like they would absorb energy from being involved in a controversy, where for me, I was more like, “Can we get past this part?”

You know? That did kind of tire me out sometimes, but that’s not why I left, uh, training to be a scientist. But I will say, so there was a lot of concern there. At the same time, if you had told me when I stopped that career path basically twenty years ago, that we would be where we are with the efficiency of renewable energy, I would have thought you were joking.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

David Epstein: I mean, it’s incredible. Now, there are, I think, structural and political barriers to making full use of it, but what people accomplished in developing the technology is just incredible. And so I am worried about current trends, especially in this country. But I also try to remind myself, and, and I write about this slightly.

I did this, like, very quick history of humanity at one point in Inside the Box where I write about, you know, for, for three hundred thousand years, humans were living like squirrels. We were chasing food and running away from being food. And then life doesn’t change for almost three hundred thousand years.

Then you go to twelve thousand years ago, agriculture, and we start settling bigger groups, all that. And then life doesn’t change that much until three hundred years ago, basically. And then if you took someone from three hundred years ago and brought them to the present, it’d be like science fiction.

Exactly. I mean, even someone– Let’s say you took, like, maybe my great-grandmother or something. Born in 1860, would be in a house where they used horses for transportation, an outhouse. Oil lamps for light, and then could die at the age of 80 in 1940 with a car and indoor plumbing and a refrigerator. And so as bad as things feel, I like to remind myself that since 1990, 118,000 people per day on average have been lifted above the international poverty line, per day.

And so I just like to be balanced about it because I know there’s the if it bleeds, it leads aspect to news where, you know, a lot of negative things get reporting, and there are definitely a lot of things to be concerned about. But I also think people should spend some time on the website Our World in Data, which is just some Oxford professors- So good

that just visualize public data and go type search the thing that you’re concerned about, and you’ll get numerical context that helps put it in perspective. In some cases, that perspective might make it more concerning, but in most of the time when I’m on there, it nuances the negative in ways that I think are pretty encouraging.

So, you know, try to balance those perspectives.

Zachary Karabell: And look, even in your carving out concern for this country, I think we all know that while whatever Norway is doing is fascinating and often inspiring, one does have to step back and recognize it’s simply a simpler task with five million people who, after many centuries of failing to kill each other successfully enough, have decided to live in some sort of communal concord.

It’s just an easier lift- No doubt about it … to be Norway- No doubt … than it is to be the United States. That is no knock on whatever the Scandinavian countries are doing to address basic issues of balancing the individual’s community- Yeah … balancing, you know, meaning in life versus, like, all the things.

But it’s just easier to do than a 350 million person American democracy, let alone India, right, with one point X billion people and- multiple languages. So I do think one needs to put that in perspective, too. Um, which doesn’t mean that Americans should sit around going, “Well, you know, it’s a tough road, so loose we’re not fighting the Civil War literally again.”

But I think sometimes we forget that. These are big asks societally.

David Epstein: Very much so. And what you reminded me of is when I went to Finland and-

Zachary Karabell: Yeah …

David Epstein: learn about their schools, because they’re always scoring so well in their national testing. No homework- And it’s cool … like, that’s the

Zachary Karabell: big thing.

David Epstein: Yeah, yeah. And there’s a bunch of stuff, and, and it’s really interesting to learn about.

And I think there are things we can take from that. At the same time, it’s like a country that has, like, no immigration, right? And they don’t really allow that, and so they, they don’t have much poverty. They don’t have a lot of people that are trying to adjust to the native language, et cetera, et cetera.

And so I do think there are things we can learn from them. But when I see people make the comparison, they’re like, “Do what Finland does,” I think it’s just not comparable. Yeah. That, like, our challenge is totally different. So again, I think there are things we can learn from them for sure. Like, they have a focus on not letting kids get tracked down really early.

And in many cases, if you prevent that early, it never happens. And so I think they’ve seen that there’s this important intervention moment. If they get tracked down early, they stay down forever. If you can avoid it, much of the time it will never happen. And so I think they do some really smart things.

But overall, the challenge is completely different, so you just have to have that in mind if you’re trying to make a direct comparison.

Zachary Karabell: David Epstein, it’s been such a pleasure having this wide-ranging conversation with you. I’ve tried to stay inside the box, although I think at times our conversation absolutely went outside the box.

We’ve gotten in all of your, all of your books. Certainly not all of your life.

David Epstein: I know. That might be a first.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

David Epstein: Not sure I’ve touched on all of my books in another interview-

Zachary Karabell: Well- …

David Epstein: before …

Zachary Karabell: good. I’m glad to have presented that opportunity for you. And although we did discuss how few people now go out and buy a book when they’ve listened to an interview, I’m going to suggest that all of you go out and buy his book now that you’ve listened to this interview.

Anyway, thanks so much for your time, David.

David Epstein: Thank you for having me.

Zachary Karabell: So yet another conversation in the proverbial books. This eclectic range of ideas I think is partly what makes for the most creative endeavors, and I, I think in many ways, this conversation demonstrated that. And creativity is absolutely one of the, the sources of optimism in the world.

It is human creativity that leads to solutions. It’s also human creativity that occasionally leads to absolutely terrible outcomes, but yeah, you can’t have the yin without the yang. You can’t have one without the other. I wanna thank Kaleidoscope for producing and my team at the Progress Network for all the work they do.

Please subscribe, not just for my Edgy Optimist on Substack, but also for the Progress Network’s What Could Go Right weekly newsletter. We’ll be back with you next week. Please, if you’ve got comments, suggestions, ideas, criticisms, send those to the Progress Network site at theprogressnetwork.org.