Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hanson.

If you're new to the podcast, thanks for listening.

And if you've listened before, welcome back.

I've been looking forward to this episode for a while, where I'm joined by a very special guest,

science journalist and best-selling author David Epstein.

David is the author of The Sports Gene, Range, which he came on the show to talk about about a year ago,

and his new book, Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better.

Research on creativity and attention, decision-making, and even happiness tends to point in the same direction.

It's not endless freedom, but rather

limits and boundaries and structure that make our lives more productive, more creative, and maybe

even more meaningful. It's easy for this to sound counterintuitive for people. After all,

we have built a whole culture out of personal freedom, and don't get me wrong, freedom is great,

but it turns out that you can maybe have too much of a good thing. People can do anything, often end up doing nothing. And some of the best things humans have ever made came directly out of somebody being just a little bit boxed in. So, David, thanks for joining me today. How are you doing? I'm doing well. It's a pleasure to be here again. Really happy to have you back. I love your work. Love your writing, as you know.

And I want to start where I just started, which is first reading the title of the book and just kind of laughing internally because it was such a stark contrast to your previous book, Rage, which was in a sense about broadening.

This book is more about constraining. So I'm

wondering how you got from one to the other and why your interest in this topic.

Yeah. There's sort of three main things I can point to that got me interested. But to start

with the one that you've already identified is like, why this after range, which is about the

benefits of broad experiences and skills. And honestly, it felt to me like a natural next question,

which was once you get these broad experiences and skills, eventually you have to channel that

into something, what some kind of project, some kind of life that has boundaries and meaning

and identity. And so it felt like a natural next question to me. And that was

...