E62: The Power of Subtraction (with Prof. Leidy Klotz)

When you're faced with difficulties in life, how often do you consider taking something away, rather than adding on something new? Professor Leidy Klotz takes on this counter-intuitive idea in his 2021 book Subtract .

Professor Klotz is a Professor at the University of Virginia who studies the science of design, and his work exists at the cross section between design, sustainability and the science of decision making.

In addition to his book Leidy’s is extensively published in the scientific literature and his research has appeared in both Nature and Science. Leidy is a frequent guest on interview programs including Hidden Brain, Freakonomics, NPR, and for The Atlantic. His writing has appeared in outlets such as The Washington Post, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and Scientific American.

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Transcript

For example, I used to run on the treadmill while watching the news while listening to a podcast. Right? And now it's like, well, running is my time to kind of synthesize and to do that act of streamlining that you're talking about, right? Is there a more straightforward way to get from one idea to another? The more we're thinking about, the less likely we are to think about taking something away, which is precisely the thing that we need to do, right? So the more overwhelmed we become, the more likely we are to fall into the trap of just continuing to add. And that's when you get, you know, that that cycling. 2s You have found the Thinking Mind podcast. 4s Welcome back to the Thinking Mind podcast. Today it's Alex and we're in conversation with Lady Clothes. Lady is a professor at the University of Virginia who studies the science of design, and his work exists at the cross-section between design, sustainability, and the science of decision making. In 2021, lady released his first book, subtract. And you know, we're always looking for new ways to improve our lives. And subtract takes really interesting perspective. In the book, lady outlines how human beings are predisposed to add things to our lives to try and make them better new relationships, new forms of work, more money, etcetera. But we have a blind spot that we don't see how sometimes taking things away is often the most elegant and straightforward solution to our problems, and the easiest way to improve the quality of our lives, whether that's in our relationships with our work, or even in our households. And in the book, lady gave us examples from history, including geniuses in design, Nobel Prize winners and rockstars. So we discuss all of that today. In addition to his book light, his research has appeared in both nature and science. And lady is a frequent guest on interview programs such as The Hidden Brain, Freakonomics, NPR, and The Atlantic. 1s This is the Thinking Minds podcast, the podcast all about psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, self-development and related topics. You can support the podcast by following on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen. Staying with a friend, giving us a rating or if you want to support us further, you can check out the Buy Me a Coffee link in the description. Thanks for listening. 12s Lady, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. We're going to talk all about your book subtracts. Very interesting book. I love discovering books that show things from a different angle, something we haven't thought of before. It's very refreshing. First, I wonder if you could tell us a bit about your background. How did you arrive at the this interesting intersection between design, sustainability and and decision making? Yeah. So the book and the shift that you're talking about, I think is, you know, realizing, I guess, that taking something away can be a way to make it better. Right. And that is it holds true across physical and social and mental worlds. And in my background, I'm a professor now, and I think of most of my research as being behavioral science. If, you know, if you're categorizing it somewhere. But my my degrees are in engineering and I also teach in engineering and architecture. And I think, you know, I've just always been interested in the mental processes of how people are designing. And obviously design is something that engineers and architects do, but design is something that we all do. If you take the broadest definition of it, which is, you know, basically changing something from how it is to how we want it to be. I mean, that's the unifying work of the professions, right? I mean, that's what lawyers do. That's what doctors do. That's what engineers do. And so as I was, you know, that I think explains getting interested in that process in engineering and architecture and then studying the basics of that process and realizing that it's not realizing, but studying the basics of that process. And that also applies to other professions. So that's my background in a in a nutshell, and how I got to the, the, the book and, you know, the idea of subtracting to make things better. And doing research on that was there. Did you have a very an acute moment of inspiration for subtract? I know that it came out in 2021. The COVID's have anything to do with it because I know that for me, well, for lots of people, right that moment that everything got wiped out from the calendar was so cathartic for so many of us. Was that, yeah, kind of moment you had or was it something else? 2s It was definitely wasn't cathartic for me. I feel like the, the, the big, you know, for people who weren't experiencing a tragedy, which were the lucky ones, but the I feel like there was a big split between people who had kids and didn't have kids and the people we had two young kids, and so everything got wiped off the calendar. But it also added two huge things back onto the calendar, which was taking care of a 0 to 2 year old and a 2 to 4 or 4 to 6 year old. So that we were that thing made things quite crazy. But it actually the book was written before the whole pandemic started, and I think there were. 2s One of the things that the pandemic certainly did was kind of shake us out of our routines, right? And it forced us to stop doing some things, whether it overloaded us with other things or not, as you know, depended on the person. But the these things that have forced us to stop doing, I think, are some really good evidence that we overlook some traction, even when it can be helpful to us. Right. Because if you if there's something that you're no longer doing and the pandemic is the reason that you're no longer doing it, then you could ask yourself, why? Why didn't I think of this sooner? Right. Why didn't it's it's it's interesting to me, you know, people think, oh, I finally dropped my commute. And it's like you didn't realize the before the pandemic that you were spending all this time, like sitting in a car and that that wasn't enjoyable time. And it took the pandemic to to get rid of it. That, you know, that is an example, I guess, of the pandemic helping us see subtractions that that we otherwise wouldn't have. But no, I mean, in direct answer to your question, the book was written, um, I when the pandemic started, I already had a draft of the book. Yeah. So what was what was the moment for you when you had that realization? I was playing Legos with my son pre-pandemic, and he was three, and we were building a bridge, basically. And the the the bridge wasn't level. That was the situation that we had that we were trying to improve. And I went to improve that by adding a break to the shorter column of the bridge. Right. And I turned back around with the brick in my hand ready to edit, and my son had already removed a brick from the longer column to make the level bridge. And, you know, I'd been thinking about elegant design and minimalism and these kind of ideas before that, but this right there in front of me forced me to think about, okay, this is what I'm interested in, the act of taking something away to making to make a situation better. And it really nicely illustrates what we found after doing all the research, which was that it turns out that we tend to think how I thought in that moment, which is like, okay, here's something that I want to make better. And and I'm going to add something to it. And if my three year old wasn't there, I would have added that block and moved on without even considering a whole nother class of options for for improving the situation. Right? So could you walk us through a lot of what we've been discussing lately on the podcast is. You know, let's understand human nature a bit more clearly and just how we get in our own way. 1s Subtract seems to show that really nicely. So what could you walk us through? The science that indicates, you know, what is this, this tendency we have to add things. Why do we have this? Why do we have almost a prejudice against subtraction? Or maybe subtraction is a blind spot for us. And yeah, I'm trying to think which experiment would be best to illustrate, because I want to. I don't want to leave just with the Lego example mean. So we did 1s the paper had, I think, between 18 and 20 studies and experiments. And the paper was published in in in nature made it on the cover because they could make a title less is more mean. So this is like really robust, rigorous science. That took a long time to figure out that we were thinking this way, I guess maybe the best experimental evidence. And then we'll go into some of the the reasons for it, the best experimental evidence. We created these grids. So they're basically patterns that participants could look at on a computer screen. And the grades were symmetrical from left to right and top to bottom, except for some extraneous marks in one quadrant. And then we would give these to people and say, hey, how would you make this entire grid set up symmetrical and what most people did was add grids to three of the quadrants. The subtractive way of doing it was to subtract 1s blocks from one of the quadrants. And so, you know, long story short, the right answer was to subtract, but more people added and therefore missed the right answer. Even when we incentivized people with money, even when we. And then we would do things like after the, the study, say, hey, did you think about this option, subtractive option? They're like, oh no, I didn't think about that. That's clearly better. So, you know, all of these studies and experiments are kind of getting to the same point that we think first about adding. Right. And we have all these heuristics, decision making shortcuts. We think first about adding and then 2s move on. And. 1s The problem there is that, well, we don't have to move on, right? We think first about adding and one thing that we can then do is think that we've solved the problem and move on without even considering subtraction. And the experiments demonstrated that this happens a lot of the time, which causes us to systems systematically overlooked this whole class of options. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And I guess we what we do is I guess the problem with it is, is it's a bit myopic and we have a problem. Our instinct is to add. 1s If the problem isn't fixed. Our second instinct is to continue to add. In which case if if adding contributed at all to the problem. If we have first edition contributors at all, you have a blind spot and you're just you're making the problem. Guess one of the worst things a person can do when they're trying to fix a problem is to make a problem worse inadvertently. And we see that all the time. You know, I see it in individuals lives. You see it, you see it in social sciences. So it's like you. 1s He there's there's no limit to how much a person can compound their own problems if they're not aware of their blind spots, I guess. Yeah. No, this creates a feedback loop, which, you know, you you're more likely to add. So you put these additions in the world and then you're reminded of the additions. Right. They're familiar. And that makes you even more likely to add. And 1s I'll do one more experiment because it illustrates the issue with cognitive overload too, and kind of well firm up some of the science for listeners, too. But one of the things we did with those grid patterns was say, okay, well, if this is something that is a default, right? This is how we're you know, we just tend to think of adding solutions first. Then if people are mentally under cognitive right or did do two things at once, they're gonna be more likely to go with this default mode of solving problems. So we gave people a grids, and there's a scroll of numbers going across the bottom of the, of the screen while they're trying to solve the grid patterns. And every time a five went by they had to press an F, right. So they're just text. They're just texting when driving or distracted. Right. If people were distracted, they became even more likely to add. Right. And so, you know, as you it's not hard to kind of extend that into daily life, right, where, you know, one mental health challenge or even if it's not a mental health challenge, it's just a, you know, a mental challenge is trying to navigate all the things that we have to think about and do. And it seems that the more we're thinking about, the less likely we are to think about taking something away, which is precisely the thing that we need to do, right? So the more overwhelmed we become, the more likely we are to fall into the trap of just continuing to add. And that's when you get, you know, that that's cycling, which isn't good. 2s And then that's how you end up this sort of monstrosity of a problem. So maybe you could walk us through. If someone is listening to this for the first time and they're maybe having their own eureka moment, I need to. Maybe I need to substract some things from my life. Do you have a sort of standard process that he can walk someone through? How could they begin to look at different aspects of their life through this lens, their personal life, or perhaps their professional life? Yeah, I think the the things that are helpful here are one knowing about it. Right. So listening to this podcast is helpful, and being aware that we have this tendency is helpful. But, you know, that's we're still going to have the tendency even if you're aware of it. And every new situation that you're in now, you're you're back in the same 1s bag facing the same problem that you need to think about this thing that isn't natural to think about. So the more that we can, like, build this into our process, the better. Like build reminders to subtract into our process. So a really easy example of this is when you're doing your to dos, you just say, okay, I'm also going to come up with an equal number of stop doings. Right. And so that's a very simple modification that you can make to your standard process that, you know, overcomes the basic problem, which is that we don't think about subtracting. Right. And that, you know, so if you if you're saying, well, what am I going to stop doing? You're not you're thinking about it. It also makes you feel better about following through with it. We haven't talked about that much yet. But you know, even after you think of taking something away, there are all these reasons why it's hard to do, whether emotionally or cognitively or just, you know, logistically in the world. And so but if you build it into your process, you're kind of giving yourself permission to take away. So. To dos and stop doings. You can imagine this kind of scaled up when you 2s add some at a meeting to your calendar. Do you look at meetings that could come off your calendar if you add. If you're in working in a group and somebody proposes a new rule or, you know, just kind of way of operating, do you also look at two rules that are on the book that think about ways that they could come off? Again, the principle there is just okay trying to set out processes to keep this whole system in balance when you're thinking about it and you know, as you're listening to this, now is the time that you're thinking about it. And so you can go through your little, you know, okay, here are the key decision points in my life. How can I build in reminders to to think about subtraction as an option? Yeah. So one challenge that you mentioned is that we don't think about it, that that makes a lot of sense. And then the other thing you mentioned that I think is really interesting is that we have a resistance to letting go. 2s And maybe you could tell us more about that. Didn't they find that it varies from individual to individual? How difficult? They might. They might find subtracting. Does it come down to how much a person, perhaps over identifies with the process of addition, or just has their ego invested in all the different things that they have going on in their life? 1s All of those things certainly matter. I think I mean, one cool thing about finding that people are systematically overlooking this idea is that you can then look at reasons for it and mean there's actually. You know, this deep biological desire. We all have to display competence, right? To show that we can effectively interact with the world. And of course, there's variations among people. But, you know, that's something that all people generally share. And it's been extended from physical things. You know, displaying competence by moving earth, moving sticks around to displaying competence by completing tasks during the workday. And this is something that we all kind of feel a need to do. So to that extent, it's, you know, everybody's kind of struggling with that. And when I look at, you know, the things that I should subtract, but I don't like some meetings or some, you know, maybe. Responding to an email that doesn't need a response mean it's very often to show competence, right? I just want to show that, okay, ladies, being effective in the world, that if if you subtract, you can be competent, but there's not really evidence of it. Right? I mean, it's something that goes out of sight and out of mind really quickly. So I think to that to that extent, we're all dealing with it. But I also liked your point, though, about, you know, ego and mean. I think that can go both ways. Right. You could imagine really people with a really big ego saying like, this is something that I made and there's no way we're subtracting it whether it's the right thing to do or not. But also, you know, really thoughtful people saying, well, geez, so-and-so put that process in place. I don't know, who am I to question what they did? They must know it better than I do. Why should I even recommend subtracting it? And I think, you know, again, that comes back to why the rules are helpful, right? Because if you're saying no, we're not, you know, we're not passing any judgment on what should or should have been subtracted. We're just saying that, you know, every time you think of adding something, you also think of subtracting something. Then both of those people, the person with the big ego and the person who's, you know, kind of worried about offending somebody, they're like, well, what I'm supposed to do is recommend a subtraction and then we can talk about it. 1s Absolutely. So there's so it will. Incur a process of experimentation, so might not be obvious at first glance. What is the subtract? And I guess a lot of people. A lot of people when they come into the self-development world, one of the first things they learn is you have to audit. You have to audit. You know what's taking up your time versus what's being effective. That's like lesson one, because most people don't even take the time to to view their life from some altitude so that they can make those bigger picture decisions. Most people are just kind of in it there in the day to day decisions. Like another phrase I heard is they're working in the business, not on the business. Yeah. And it's so you wouldn't 1s recommend treating this as a fluid experimental process? Yeah. I love the audit example. Right. Because that's subjective in some ways. And yeah, it's one time oftentimes people will say, well lady, what should I subtract? And I say, you know, unless you're talking about writing or design, which are two things that I know, I don't know what you should subtract. 1s For the most part you need to. And that's where the audit comes in, right? It's like what's what's having an impact. What are your goal. Right. And then once you know your goals values then you can say, okay, these are the things that aren't contributing to it or aren't contributing as much as something else that I could be doing. So it's this process. I also, one thing that that brings to mind is that we're so quick to pilot something new, right? We'll say, okay, I'm going to well, we'll just try this new thing. If it doesn't work, we can always stop and we can use that same approach, but we don't seem to with taking things away. Right. What if we just said, oh, well, we'll just stop having this meeting for the next six months, or just move it from weekly to biweekly for the next few, few sessions. And if it doesn't work, you can always add it back. So, like building in, this idea of a reverse pilot can be a helpful way to, you know, try out subtractions. Even if you decide you don't like. 2s Have you gotten any interesting stories from listeners, from things they've subtracted from their own lives that they found to be particularly helpful to subtract? 1s I get stories about partners being subtracted. I purposely did it like spouses. College students tend to send those to me like, hey, I took your class, I read your book, and I subtracted my boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever, which I don't know. Again, that's the right decision. Depends on your vision and the context. Um, so I get those. I get a lot from there's this really big community of lightweight backpackers. I don't know if you've heard of that, but they they like to send emails and they a lot of them spend a lot of time, I guess, thinking about how to how to lightweight everything. I think the kind of the most powerful ones for me are when people say, oh, this is some mindset shift. We haven't talked too much about that. But just the same way we add activities and physical things, we add concepts to our mental models, right? And one of the hardest things to do is to question our existing mental models. And so it's it's very gratifying to me when people say, oh, you know, I was, you know, I thought totally different about parenting 1s after, you know, reading your book or hearing you on a podcast because, you know, I had been holding on to this idea that I needed to do X, Y, and Z for my kids, and now I'm not holding on to that anymore. And so that kind of feedback, where they've shifted the mental models is really gratifying and kind of frequent. Yeah, yeah, I can imagine, I'm sure, because if you are wedded to an idea, especially if you're wedded to an idea unconsciously. 1s Then you're trapped within the confines of that idea. And an idea is in just a way of thinking about something. But it's a whole way of seeing the world. It covers your whole perspective, and sometimes it's not even. It's just like even simplifying. Ideas or realizing that ideas can be nested within. Greater explanations that form the that actually more eloquently explain whatever phenomenon you're thinking of. Have you found that you've cleaned? Have you cleaned up your own mental maps of things since writing the book? 1s I think so, I mean, I think that part. 1s I still find hard, I do think, but I've paid much more attention to kind of the inflow of things. Right. And so just because it's new information. I mean, of course, information is amazing. I'm a professor. It's the best thing in the world. And, you know, new ideas and new knowledge. It's great. But, you know, just kind of blindly having as much as possible of that come into my life is something that I've switched. So, like, for example, I used to run on the treadmill while watching the news, while listening to a podcast. Right. And now it's like, well, running is my time to kind of synthesize and to do that act of streamlining that you're talking about, right? Is there a more straightforward way to get from, you know, one idea to another? And so now just run outside and or wherever, but don't listen to a podcast at the same time and don't, you know, watch the news at the same time. Just use that as the time for your to, to streamline things. So kind of controlling the information coming in, but also setting aside some time to, to, you know, question the things that I used to think I mean you talked about the pandemic before. I mean, one of the realizations string that was just, you know, the inequity, right? And how it affected people. And I've never thought that everything is like a perfectly level playing field, of course. But I think that experience, one thing that it forced me to shift my mindset about was just how inequitable the playing field is. It's not that, you know, a five year old who doesn't have a good family and financial situation has a slightly less chance of being successful is that they have 2s a 1s just a totally different. 1s Situation then my five year old at the time. So anyway, so so having time to think about that, knowing it. Also just like I think writing the book helps really reinforce for me that know this is a powerful way to change my thinking. So I need to be serious about it. So I'm not great at it yet, but I'm definitely better than before. Yeah, I mean, I think information is a big one because we live in such a informationally dense landscape, and if you really take the time to look at it, most of the information we're getting is garbage. And that's only going to get worse, right? I mean, because it's so easy to produce it with ChatGPT just exactly 100%. Even just thinking about the 24 hour news cycle, you could watch CBS news 24 hours a day, every day because they're always putting out programming. But realistically, how much of the news that you're getting in any instance is worth knowing? It's a bit much more interesting to know. Okay, what do I need to know? What piece of information do I need to know this month or this year that is actually going to be relevant to my life? Relevancy. You. Yeah. Mean that's the there's the difference between like what's new versus what's important. And we have so much information out there. But you know, most of the time what's important is some scientific study from 1975, not the the latest new scientific study. Right. Even even. And that's information. Both of those things are 100, you know, a very credible, high quality information. But the relevance is not the new thing. The relevance is what's relevant to you in the moment. And it was that's an important distinction that I think is hard to make, but I've tried to work on that's a specific thing that as an academic, you can kind of work on, right. It's like, of course we need to like follow the new updates and trends in our fields, but also making sure to kind of stay firmly grounded in in all this, all the good work that's been done in the past. Do you feel that it's fair to put this problem that we have with subtracting and how it interacts with our modern lives? 1s Under the category of evolutionary mismatch. That's this. This bias towards addition was helpful in our ancestral environment. And now it's it's it ceases to be helpful because we're in a time of absolute plenty, absolute overload, whether that's information or nutrition or career. 1s And that's the nature of this problem, because I've discussed this concept with a few different people now in a few different areas. I think that it applies in terms of, you know, this is a behavior that can be well explained from the evolutionary perspective. I think the mismatch implies that, like on balance, it would be better to not have this in the modern era. And I'm not I haven't thought much about, okay, would it be better to would it be better to be completely neutrally wired or mean because, you know, the case couldn't be made, that this is still a helpful heuristic, right? That it's better that our mind kind of goes to this shortcut that saves mental energy, right? And it gives us a, a shorthand and way to make decisions so that we can spend our time on other things. And there are certainly instances where it's not helpful now, but I don't know if like on balance, it's still not helpful or if, you know, maybe it's it's still helpful in general, but there we just need to pay attention to the instances where it's not helpful. Does that make sense? Yeah, I guess it's hard to say because it's hard to measure because it lightly, let's say look at let's look is on the eating front. 1s Here in the Western world, two thirds of people are overweight or obese. And we're seeing the poor health outcomes. So it's measurable. So you can actually say. You know, our ancestry inherited a tendency to have a particular appetite for particular foods. It does seem to be a net negative now, which is not obviously an argument for changing our appetites, but for radically transforming our food environment to make it more in line with our nature. I guess it's like he said. It's much less clear in the world of information and career planning because the measurements aren't as concrete. 1s I like how you framed it there, though. I think in that I think that's, you know, whether it's good or not now it's the way it is. Right. And so thinking about how do we and the and the remedy. 1s We're closer to the remedy once we know about it, right? And it's like sun and it makes it seems like a no brainer to then set up your systems to try to account for this. Right. It's like, no, you know, we we it feels good to eat as many kind of empty calories as possible. So we need to, you know, have some whether it's restrictions or whether it's, you know, information or whatever the intervention is, it makes sense to it's in the public interest to have an intervention about that. So I think it's, you know, kind of the same with with what we're talking about here. If adding is contributing to that, then that's part of it. But if adding is contributing to this kind of like mental overwhelm, like, let's think about ways that we can 2s help address that. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking, well, the cool thing about this idea is you can apply it to so many different levels. You know, I was thinking about the biological level. I was thinking about fasting, stopping drinking alcohol, stopping smoking, even the carnivore diet, obviously the. 1s The. I think the jury's still out as to whether that's a net benefit, but it's an interesting concept, the idea of cutting out most food groups except for meat. And psychologically, I was thinking of meditation, you know, cutting out all of the distractions and just focusing on one thing. Is that something that's the other? Do you have much experience with meditation? I'm not a master meditator, but I did read before we talked. Just simple like stop, breathe, think. And I often will do it in when I present to audiences because. 2s I just do a really short 1 to 2 minute kind of few deep breaths, but. And then I say to people like, I don't know what you thought during that time or what you're thinking after that time, but I guarantee you it's different than what it would have been if we didn't do that meditation. Right. And it just shows people. I think doing the meditation in that. 1s In that context is showing people just how much they are thinking about in any given moment. So yeah, I really like that example. Yeah, just how much they're thinking about the Lions tendency to think by itself, and also just how much. You're missing. One of the things I think about a lot is how much. Like, if there's one thing I wish everyone realizes how much the brain is filtering out in any given moment of time. We're filtering out 99.9% of possible sensory input, and then what your brain focuses on is going to dominate your psychological life in any given moment. So that's. 2s Being able to figure out, okay, what are the what's the junk in that field and what can I actually get rid of and focus on the things that are important to me, or the things that are going to help me rather than hinder me? It's a it's a huge it's it's everything. It's the mental skill. 1s That I think can prepare anyone forward in whatever area of life they do. They want to get better. Yeah, sorry. It's just writing that down. It's so well stated. You know, that filtering out 99% of sensory input. And then, you know, what the brain focus is on is attention is what shapes your experience. Right. And yeah, that's one thing that I notice with my novice meditation is one of the things that often happens is that I just get to a deeper level of idea. Right? Like something that is obviously way more important, but was nowhere near the top of my mind. But when you do the meditation, it kind of lets that clear space for that thing to come to the forefront. I like to examine counterarguments. One thing I'm one thing. I'm curious. Have you received any pushback or challenge about subtracts? I can't imagine that you have because it's a very robust, very robust scientifically. Have you received much challenge or pushback? Well, the kind of the easy straw man to take down is this pushback that people say like, well, here's something that we shouldn't subtract, right? Which of course it is. You know, that's totally not the point, but I think it's still worth bringing up, right? Like the of course additions are good. And I think on balance may be additions are slightly better than subtractions. But the problem is that we're like missing a whole category of options. I think the. Yeah the. 1s The research that we did, showing that we systematically overlook this doesn't hasn't gotten any real pushback. In fact, it's been replicated and, you know, in limited ways so far. But. 2s Certainly the conjecture parts. Right. You know, we're talking about like, oh, is this applying to mental health. And, you know, is this the the mechanism versus, you know, one of ten supporting mechanisms that we should be thinking of? I mean, that's that's fair pushback. And I'm not making the argument that this is the only mechanism in anything. But I think that's probably something that's, that's worth, worth bringing out the other one that I think there's. 1s Certainly. 2s An argument to be made that this is 1s kind of pushed at us by the degree to which this is pushed on us by society and like economic forces, right? The idea that, oh, like capitalism, we're just supposed to grow. And that is the the underlying reason for all this addition. Sure, we might have this small tendency to think of it more, but really, what's the the root cause of all the problems that you're seeing is much more about like the, the bigger system and mean that's that's a fair argument. I, I don't know what the kind of relative effect of those things are on the fact that we're just, like, overwhelmed with all of this, all of this stuff across the areas. I don't know what. What's your strongest 2s counterargument? I'm not sure that I have a counterargument. I've heard you say that subtraction should just be an important. Part of your toolkit, and it's very hard to disagree with that. I think it's a very measured way to think about it. I suppose thinking more with my clinician hat on subtraction. The elegance of subtraction shouldn't be used as an excuse for trying to avoid doing something difficult or something that. 2s Uh, creates a lot of resistance. Like resistance is really good for us and overcoming difficult things. And sometimes the process of addition means try to overcome resistance. And I just think one of the things our brains are wired for is to do that. And I think we're happier as a result of overcoming resistance. So the only thing I would say is to not use this, this concept as an excuse for avoiding difficulty. 2s That's a great point. I mean, my friend Bob Sutton, he's a Stanford professor, has a book coming out called it based on this work on fiction that he's done. It's called The Friction Project. But it's what's cool about that book is that it's talking. Yeah. This sometimes it's good. Right? It's hard, is not bad. My son's preschool teacher used to say that to us and. But I think the thing with subtraction is that we can do it cognitively. Right. And it's it's just a little more cognitive effort. Right. So it is actually harder. Right? You just need to think past your first instinct. And it's the same logistically a lot of times. Right. So if you're thinking even just a really. Tangible example, right? The product design, you're you're designing a phone and you want it to be streamlined like the iPhone. It's not that they never, like, thought about all the features and things that could be added onto that phone is that they had to think of all of those things, and then do more thinking, or more steps to figure out if you could design this thing with with fewer features. And so I totally agree that, like, doing hard things is important. And I think one of the reasons we don't subtract is because there's one of the reasons we don't get these positive subtractions is because we think it's going to be easy, right? We think it's just do nothing less, which isn't the kind of less that makes us happy. The kind of less that makes us happy is to kind of keep persisting and keep growing into keep thinking right and keep overcoming that. That friction and that subtraction can even have an advantage for because it's it's, you know, you're requiring more thought. I'll give one more example there because think of it in terms of writing, right? When you have a blank page that kind of that can be create writer's block, right? It's like for me, it's not a good feeling. When had a blank page, it's like, okay, now I need to create these ideas. It's like it's kind of unknown. But then once you've got the document, then editing is quite fun, right? Because it's within the realm of possibility to what you can do. But it's still a problem, right? You're still making it better, but you're you're able to do it because the words are all there. Plus you're seeing your progress very obviously, because the writing is getting better and better, but it's also more work, right? Because editing any moment of editing beyond kind of good enough is just extra work. But so I think that's an example of it's a very subtractive act, but it can be enjoyable and it um, and it's also more work. Yeah, that's a really good example. I don't I don't think now though, there is ever an excuse for having a blank page like what you're like because you just like I, I've been producing an audio essay once a week, and I'm challenging myself to produce one once a week for three months, so that'd be about 12 at least. And what I do is just every time I have an idea, I put on a Google doc. So I just never have a there's never a blank page. There's always at least a few words there that I can start adding to an hour ChatGPT even more so because you can create a skeleton at least, and then work from there. 2s Yeah, I think that that's fair. I certainly don't start with a blank page either. I've got all my notes and organization, but it's daunting when you don't know where the thing is going. There gets to be a point in the act of creation where you know it's good enough. And the additional effort that's the hard part is still making it better. Yeah. 2s What do they say? Is there like a subtraction that really stands out in your life? Well, God, I really I'm really glad I subtracted that one thing. Hey, this is a new one. But we just paid, like, a home organizer to help us get rid of a whole bunch of stuff. And it's. I mean, it's like the best money we've ever spent on our house. And, you know, it's all has all the classic elements of why it's hard to subtract. It's like, why are we paying this person so that we have fewer things. But yeah, it's it's been really nice and I'm glad we did it. It's, you know, there's the whole thing. That cluttered space leads to a cluttered mind. And so I think it's helped helped with that. Plus it's just, you know, in terms of creating square footage, one of the easiest ways to do that is to subtract all the stuff that's blocking up your current square footage. So that's a very that's a physical one, I think. Also the. 2s Subtracting the. The process of writing a book, you know, or just or the pandemic or anything that kind of shakes you out of your normal everyday routine, forces you to evaluate what are the things that I was just doing in that routine that weren't actually producing anything? And I think that I've been thankful to remove some things like, I don't know, attending meetings or even just doing things with students that have less value than doing other things with students. Those kind of that kind of like ruthless prioritization with time has been something that I'm really thankful for and also kind of regret not doing it for the first decade of my career. Right? Because you look back and you're like, man, I'm never getting that time back of of these things that weren't actually valuable. Hey, day regrets the worst. The worst part of learning any cool new idea to improve your life is just the regret of I can't believe I lived with this for so long. 1s Exactly. But thank you so much for spending some time with us. Is there anything you're excited about that you're working on now that you'd like to share with us? I'm. So I'm working on my next books about how we kind of how our psychology makes our surroundings. And I still need to refine the elevator pitch. But that's why I was excited about your comment about the, you know, kind of we. 2s A filter out 99% of the stuff we sense. But then what we sense really shapes our psychological life, and so much of what we sense is shaped by what's around us. Right? And then our psychology shapes what we put around ourselves. So kind of dealing with that relationship and is it's it's fun to work on right now, but it's one of those ones where I'm going to need to kind of finish the whole book before I know what the what the elevator pitch is. That sounds amazing. I'd be very interested to hear that. I've seen, you know, I've done a lot of home visits. So you see, you see very much how people psychology is a reflection of their environments. Like Carl Jung talks about that a little bit. He said. There are like there are really important congruences that should be achieved, like the congruence between. Our our mental state and our actions between our thoughts and our emotions and between our mental states and our environment. 1s And now getting those confluences aligned is one of, I guess, his. 1s A steps towards a psychologically balanced life. 2s That's awesome. I think it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before about like new science versus, you know, relevant science. And obviously people have shown certain parts of Jung's philosophy to be incomplete. But the that that big idea is also something that's kind of gets lost when you start breaking things down into really small pieces to focus on. And then just this idea that no way the, the physical and psychological, they actually are related very closely. Is that something that when you go into a home environment, will you make recommendations about the home environment, or is that seen as outside of the purview of because, you know, you yeah, you can use it as a way to just kind of understand how that person is feeling. But you could also use it as a way to try to fix it. Um, I don't know if there's any rigor to that. I don't think I don't think it would do, but that's. 1s More of a convention of the profession, because I'm sure that changing someone's environment can change someone's mental health. And we all know from working in different, you know, of course, psychiatrists know from working on different inpatient wards that the way a ward is designed can have a huge impact on the patients and that wards. So I think I look forward to it hopefully becoming more of a part of how we think about mental health. And certainly I'm I'm sure your book can be a really interesting piece of that puzzle. Yeah, I think like connecting those two because, I mean, the architecture and engineers certainly are focusing on that. Right? So like, here's this opportunity to help, you know, through the design of physical things. And it's almost that it needs to be kind of in everybody's mental models. Right. That even the person who's struggling can think about, okay, well, how could I change my physical environment to help with help with this struggle? So yeah, that's that's really helpful framing. Thank you for sharing it. 1s No problem. Well, thanks. Thanks for so much for coming on, Lydia. Where can people find you if they want to learn more about your work? My parents gave me a good Google name, so if you did 2s and yeah, my website has the information about the book and speaking and yeah, all the academic articles are out there and I don't really I'm on social media, but I just kind of am on it. I don't really use it. So that's a big one to subtract for sure. Yeah, I think you're right. Thank you so much. Thanks, Alex. 10s Thanks so much for listening this week. If you've got any feedback, as always, do get in touch. If you enjoyed the episode, why not give us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts? Because it really helps other people to find us. If you want to get in touch, you can find us on Instagram or Twitter, or you can drop us an email. And if you value the show more generally, why not buy us a coffee? Thanks so much!