Kelly welcomes Leidy Klotz back to the podcast where they last talked about his book, “Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less.” He has a new book, “In A Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive.”

There’s a kind of metaphor you use in the book that happens to you when you’re visiting the bookstore, and your two favorite topics are in two different sections of the store. 

“I like behavioral science and applied behavioral science. To me, what’s going on in the brain is so fascinating and, quite frankly, it’s still a new frontier that we’re learning so much about so quickly that is so relevant to everything we do. And then I like design and the way that the physical world is. But those are obviously in different sections. Behavioral science and the applied behavioral science is in one place and then the design of the physical world is in a totally different section in the bookstore, which is unfortunate. I understand why you need to have different sections for different topics, but there is a ton of overlap between what’s going on in our head and what’s going on in our outer world. That is what I tried to do with this book: to connect some of that in a way that’s useful for readers.” 

This last weekend, I visited the home I grew up in and the railroad tracks behind our house that my friends and I used to walk by the side of to get to the soccer field. Just a flood of memories linked to space and time. 

“Our brains have evolved – networks in our brains that dealt with spatial things are the networks that became adapted when we started to have human relationships. And the human relationships and the spaces are literally like in the same spot in our brain. And there’s all kinds of interesting examples of the things they’re trying to memorize with spaces because that helps them then recall them. But we can use it in our daily lives to just, like you said, you go back and reminisce and all these memories coming flooding back and you don’t really care that much about the railroad tracks, but you do care about the people that you’re thinking about because you went to the railroad tracks with them. I think that’s a really cool example of just how linked these things are.” 

There is a concept you introduce us to in the book that was revelatory to me. Tell us about “Bike-Shedding.” 

“It’s a law of triviality. The story goes like this: there’s a meeting convened to design a nuclear power plant, right? And they get all the relevant parties there. The architects and engineers are presenting on what’s going to happen. The local communities  are there, the safety inspectors, the regulators, and so they’re talking about the nuclear power plan and it’s just kind of like over everybody’s head or just too complicated or just too much to think about. And so the plans are presented, and nobody really says anything. There’s a few kind of softball questions that get answered really quickly. And it’s a two-hour long meeting and they’ve only used up half an hour and they’re like, well, what do we do for the last hour and a half? And they’re like, let’s talk about the bike shed that is going next to the nuclear power plant. And them, all of a sudden, the meeting comes alive and everybody has opinions. here’s somebody who wants a new racking system for the bike shed; paint colors are discussed and it’s this principle meant to illustrate that sometimes the amount of time that we devote to a decision is inversely proportional to how important the decision is.” 

Photo Credit: Amanda Maglione