David Epstein

Then Fidel goes on and he co-founds Nest, the smart thermostat company.

where he forces the company to work inside a literal box.

He makes them prototype the box before the product because he says, this shows what we want to communicate to the end user.

And if it's not in this box, it's not one of our priorities.

And it was just so interesting to see his arc from this, like, the trauma of general magic to becoming this absolute zealot for constraints, which is why I wanted to give his narrative some air.

You know, it reliably does.

In fact, there was just this, I cite this recent survey by psychologists around the world of known creativity myths, things that we know from psychological research are not true.

And the second most popular one is that people are most creative when they're most free.

And as you mentioned, psychologists know this isn't true.

There's actually something called the Green Eggs and Ham Effect, which is named for the fact that Theodore Geisel, a.k.a.

Dr. Seuss, wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet that he couldn't write a book using only 50 words.

And it forced him to experiment with rhythm because he couldn't use vocabulary.

Even before Green Eggs and Ham, he had been given the task to write a children's book using only 200 words from a kid's vocabulary list.

And at first, he starts looking at the list.

He starts complaining to his wife.

He says, there are no adjectives.

And then he says, I think in fine Seussian form, it's like trying to make a strudel with no strudels, which I think is hilarious because it's like he was the same guy in his personal life as his books.

And then he just decides, throws his hands up and says, I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words on the list and make a book.

And the first two rhyming words are cat and hat.

And that kind of changed children's literature forever.