David Epstein

And he went on to lead the design of the iPod.

And when he showed Steve Jobs a styrofoam model in March of 2001, got the green light and said, we are shipping by Christmas, gave like 10 weeks for the first design and then stop and collect your lessons and go on.

And it forced the team to think creatively and repurpose technology.

So the famous scroll wheel is something that they basically repurposed from a Danish cordless phone because they were saying, look, we can't build everything from scratch like they had done at General Magic.

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.