266. David Epstein with Katy Sewall: Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better

[audience applauding] Thanks, everyone, for coming.

This is a, this is a great book that's full of so many great things, and we're only gonna scratch the surface.

As you can see, I might have marked it up a bit while I was reading it.

[laughs] Highly recommend, but I wanna start with, um, you know, if there's one thing, David, that we believe in the, in, believe in in the United States, uh, it is freedom.

You know, freedom of choice, freedom to live as we want, to think what we want.

Um, and we have a lot of choices these days.

I mean, when it comes to streaming options alone, uh, we have so many choices.

And I think one of the fundamental questions in this book is, what is the problem of having so much freedom?

Well, let me start, since you mentioned, um, streaming choices.

[laughs] Yeah.

Um, since the introduction of infinite scrolling, international surveys show that people have been getting progressively more bored.

Um, and in, in research that psychologists did to try to understand why, they gave people lots of different videos that they could look at, and they gave people, say, 20 videos and said, "Find whatever you like." Those people ended up switching a lot and being more bored than if they just took one video from that set of 20 and gave it to them and said, "You have to watch this one."

Oh.

And their theory is that just the idea that there's something else you could be doing ruins the experience of the moment itself.

And never, you know, I don't...

I, I think we can perhaps extrapolate that to all other areas of life now, right, where, um, historically, humans compared themselves to the lives of others in their neighborhood or in their school or at their place of work, and now it's to not only to all of humanity, potentially, on the internet, but to all of humanity plus a huge number of, uh...

Well, all of humanity, then all of carefully curated and filtered humanity, and then now all of the fake humanity that's complete- And I think we're just not set up to thrive, uh, in that kind of infinite comparison mode.

And so the idea that we'll always be better off with more choices, which is sort of how humans are modeled in neoclassical economic theory, turns out not to be correct.

Mm-hmm.

So interesting.

Well, one thing you write is that total freedom can lead us to default thinking along the path, and, uh, default thinking, sorry, along the path of least resistance.

So what does that mean, and why does that happen?

Yeah, so a- as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham likes to say, "You may think 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." And so you, you'll, when given just sort of an open field or a blank slate, you'll default to things that are convenient or, um, what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance, right? You'll, you'll go down something that's familiar or convenient to you.

And so if you actually want to grow or be creative or things like that, you actually have to have that convenient solution blocked, um, or else you'll, you'll only do things that are easy.

And, and, and I think there's some ominous signs about this, by the way.