The Explorer's Gene: Alex Hutchinson On Humanity’s Drive To Seek The Unknown, The Science Of Uncertainty, & Why Effort Creates Meaning

Alex Hutchinson is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist, Cambridge-trained physicist, and bestselling author of “Endure” and “The Explorer’s Gene.” This conversation explores Alex’s transcendent perspective on our primordial drive to seek the unknown. We unpack his fascinating evolution from elite runner and NSA researcher to becoming the voice on endurance science, and now, the cartographer of humanity’s exploratory impulse. We dive into the genetic and neurological drivers of uncertainty-seeking, the importance of embracing difficulty, the role of play, and finding meaning through effort in adventure and everyday life. Note: In celebration of Alex’s appearance on the podcast, we’re giving away five signed copies of his transformative book. Subscribe to the newsletter at richroll.com/subscribe for a chance to win. Alex’s work doesn’t merely inform—it transforms. This dialogue is an expedition worth taking. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: AG1: Get a FREE bottle of Vitamin D3+K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs 👉drinkAG1.com/richroll This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp: Get 10% OFF the first month👉BetterHelp.com/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:06Speaker 01

  Exploration is about accepting uncertainty and risk. By doing that on a regular basis, we end up doing difficult things and feeling like our pursuits have meaning. Listen to that inner voice telling you to try something and be willing to take risks in pursuit of something because you never know what you might find.

• 1:26Rich Roll?

  When you think about it, the story of humanity is really a story of exploration. It's a trait unique to our species that compels us to reach higher and go further and boldly go where no man has gone before, to quote Star Trek. From early migration to space travel and even engineering new forms of intelligence, our inclination towards exploration is undeniable. But what is this inclination all about? Why do we have it? Where does it come from? And how can we enrich our lives by cultivating it? These are questions Alex Hutchinson just couldn't shake. So this former elite track and field athlete and Cambridge-trained physicist turned journalist

• 2:08Rich Roll?

  and New York Times bestselling author of Endure, which I might add is perhaps the best book ever written on the science of endurance. This is a guy who sought about finding answers.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  If all else is equal, we want to try something new and something different. We want to pursue the unknown. Exploration isn't just something that evolved from a freak genetic mutation 50,000 years ago. It's something that is a precondition of life. No one gets to Easter Island because they were a little hungry. You have to be deliberately exploring to get there.

• 2:40Rich Roll?

  He's here today to report not only his surprising discoveries, but also why you should care and how what he learned can better nourish our lives with meaning and satisfaction, all of which he details in his latest book, The Explorer's Gene. This is a great conversation. Also, on the back end, we discuss lots of endurance science as well, for all you endurance freaks out there. So, without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Alex Hutchinson. Seven years, Alex, seven years since we first did this.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, my editor reminds me of that, how long it's been that I've been in hibernation for quite a while.

• 3:24Rich Roll?

  I still think of that episode as one of the all timers. It was such a fantastic experience, meeting you, and the audience, you know, loved that episode. It still gets quite a few listens, seven years later. And I was reflecting back, I know we did it in New York City, and I have this vague recollection of it being some kind of second story walk up. I can't remember whether it was a hotel room or somebody's apartment.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  It was a rework. You had rented a rework for like two hours or something like that. So you were passing through, I was passing through, and the fates aligned. And it was just, yeah, an afternoon, we went into this random space and we had a two and a half hour conversation.

• 4:03Rich Roll?

  Back when podcasting was a little bit more simple. And I was a traveling salesman with a case and a couple of mics and trying to catch these things on the fly wherever I could.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  And I was like, what is this thing? A pod something? Sure, that sounds good, yeah.

• 4:16Rich Roll?

  No, it was great. And I suggest or urge anybody who's watching or listening to this, who did not listen to that episode, to go back and find it. It's a Episode 359, I believe. And in that episode, we go much deeper into like your background and all of that, which, you know, we'll probably short circuit a little bit today, given the fact that we've already had that conversation. But it's great to have you here today on the cusp of your new book coming out, The Explorer's Gene. Your book, Endure, I just shared with you, is one of my all time favorites. It's always been sitting on that coffee table over there. And I think to this day, still, is probably

• 4:59Rich Roll?

  the seminal text on the science of endurance for, at least for the layperson. I'm sure there's scientific journals that you've poured through that go into greater detail. But I think of it as sort of the high watermark in terms of understanding the physiology, the art and the science of how to perform at your best in an endurance context.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  That's a super, super nice to hear, Rich. And I think back to that conversation seven years ago, and the book was new. And it sounds funny to say this, but that conversation with you really helped me figure out what it was about. You know, you read a book, and it's not until you hear what other people are taking from it that you get a better sense. And so that really, I think, set the agenda for how I talked about that book in the years that followed. So I'm excited to find out what my new book is about.

• 5:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this is a new exploration, is it not?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 5:52Rich Roll?

  At the core of it really is, you know, kind of the evolution of you as a person that gets into some of the principles that you talk about in the new book, which is this idea that like, for a long time, like, you're the science of endurance guy, like, you're the go to guy with all the answers when it comes to everything from VO2 max to interval training and zone two and mitochondrial density and, you know, all of that, right? But after, you know, a certain amount of time, it's like, okay, like, I think I need to like, break out of this a little bit. Or is there more in life for me to explore that will get me excited and, you know, kind of ignited? And so maybe it would be instructive

• 6:35Rich Roll?

  to kind of walk us through like, that internal journey that you went on.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I guess.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  If I was picking a moment or a kind of a fork in the road, it's like, Endure did really well. Do I now write Endure 2? You know, the Revenge of the Science of Endurance. And that, you know, and it wouldn't have been called Endure 2, but but there are a lot of ways I could have gone down that path. And by any rational measure, it would have been the smart thing to do. Because Endure did well enough that I would have sold a bunch of Endure 2 just on the strength of Endure. In terms of the other, the self branding. We live in this world where of course, where it's like, oh, and then I can, you know, do talks and I can do this and do that. And it all pointed in one direction. But I just couldn't make myself go in that direction.

• 7:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like the actor who's been, you know, typecast in a certain role or known for a certain character and wants to do something different, you know? It's like, that is human, right? At some point, it's like, okay, I've done pretty much everything I can do. It's like marginal gains from here on out in terms of what's going to pique your curiosity. But then balancing that against like the known known of knowing that if you put another book out, it's probably going to do well because you have this built in audience and you have this level of credibility. And this all gets to this idea that you explore in the new book, which is the explore exploit phenomenon. Can you explain what that is?

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, because I mean, I think that the classical explanation is you're sitting in your favorite restaurant and you know that the burger is great. And so usually you order the burger and then you see the server walking by with meatloaf, the special. And you think, well, maybe I should try something different. But you know, you love the meatloaf. So do you exploit your, all this experience you have with the burger, rather? You know, you love the burger. Or do you take a chance on something that might be better or might be worse? And we face these decisions on small scales, like ordering in a restaurant, on large scales, like dating or like career choices, like where you write a book. So it recurs everywhere.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  There's no mathematical answer to what the right answer is. So there's this whole field, there are across many fields, across like biology, how animals forage, or corporate strategy, R and D versus exploiting your current product lines. Everyone is trying to figure out the answer and there's no simple answer. So this is why it's a book and not a fortune cookie, is that...

• 9:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And also people's sort of fundamental psychological makeup, their relationship with risk, their relationship with uncertainty, like that toggles significantly person to person.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a lot of individual variation, but then it's also, what I think a point you're making here is that even if there was a formula, like the formula probably points me to writing in Dear Two, but we don't necessarily want the formula. So what is the psychology? What is our wiring evolutionarily or in terms of the neuroscience? That my thesis at least is that we are drawn to uncertainty. In a way, if all else is equal, we want to try something new and something different. We want to pursue the unknown.

• 9:59Rich Roll?

  We're drawn to it, but we also fear it. And we try to eradicate it out of our lives. That's why we go through the meatloaf hamburger decision, you know, hamster wheel, as if there is a correct answer that will make us feel better or will resolve that like level of uncertainty that for whatever reason makes us feel uneasy.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, as soon as you make a decision, you open yourself up to the possibility of regret. Because if the decision doesn't go perfectly, you're going to say, well, I could have done that other thing. And what we often forget is every choice comes with the possibility of regret. And if we let ourselves get paralyzed by the fear of regret, then we're always taking the safest choice, always taking the one with the least uncertainty. And... One thing we can say mathematically is that does not lead to optimal outcomes. If you never take a risk, never take a chance, never, always try to stick with the safest choice, you will constrain your possibilities.

• 10:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but ironically, regret, you know, later in life, usually gets served up in the form of like, the path you didn't take, you know what I mean? And I can't help but think about Dr. Ellen Langer at Harvard, who always says, "Stop worrying about making the right decision, like, make the decision right," which gets to the heart of like, the regret piece.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, I mean, I certainly don't look back, and I can't think of any sort of bold decisions I've taken that I'm like, "Oh, I wish I had just stayed at home."

• 11:22Rich Roll?

  Done the safe thing.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  I can certainly think of lots of, you know, the classic is, "I wish I had asked that girl to dance," or whatever, you know?

• 11:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  The fear of rejection is a sort of, is one example of this larger fear of getting it wrong, which prevents us from doing things that may, in some cases, lead us to the best experience of our lives.

• 11:40Rich Roll?

  In the context of this explore-exploit paradigm, in your instance, it's basically this, this decision between exploiting this expertise that you've developed over many years, that people seem to enjoy, there's an appetite for it, there's a lot of known knowns, there's not many unknowns, and there's like, security and comfort in that. You know, if you write a book on that subject matter, it's going to do well, you'll be able to pay your bills, all the like, versus this explore, you know, kind of compulsion or disposition, like, "I want to break out of this, I want to do something new, I want

• 12:20Rich Roll?

  to, you know, tease out my curiosity and see where it will lead me." There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns that are exciting and perhaps, you know, scary as well. And so, these two things are kind of butting up against each other, right? And in the case of your decision to, you know, go on this sort of, you know, very meta-exploration of, of exploration, right? Like, it's sort of like, the compulsion to explore, the human instinct to explore, is like, it kind of folds in on itself a little bit.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was such an irrational thing to me, that I was like, "Maybe this is what I should write a book about, because I can't figure out why I want to, I want to explore, so maybe I should explore why I want to explore."

• 13:03Rich Roll?

  When did that... Like kind of epiphany occur to you like when did you realize like oh this is the thing that's nagging at me that I want to resolve?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it took a couple of years. I think it was probably 2020 before I finally started to say to myself, actually, I think this is this is a book topic. And it this sort of meta element of exploring why I wanted to explore dovetailed with a few other things that I'd been thinking of for a lot longer. I'd been thinking about the idea of like going for a long run as a quest or a mission or an exploration. I'd been thinking about I'd been thinking in terms of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, that it just seemed like such a natural fit. And I thought, is there something to say about that? But I didn't know what I wanted to say about that, because that is more of a fortune cookie than a book.

• 13:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  But then I when I started thinking about exploring, I thought that this is a thing that's not just about my book. And it's not just about my long run either. It's not just about one thing. It this is a, you know, as we were talking about earlier with the explore exploit dilemma, which is just one aspect of this, that it's like, this is a sort of fundamental thing that we're facing all the time in our lives. And that we I think a lot of people wrestle with in different ways. Some people are it's not that nobody explores enough. Some people are so compelled by the desire to find out the unknown that they're they're they're never taking advantage of the things they learn. They're just moving from one thing to the next. And some people are stuck like a hobbit at home, afraid that they're gonna miss dinner. And most of us are somewhere in the middle wrestling. And

• 14:36Speaker 01

  so it struck me that this is such a big problem. There must be scientists who are studying this. So that's when I started to dip in. Yeah, this probably about five years ago. And at first, I couldn't find any science. At first, I was like, I was, you know, I was using the wrong search terms and stuff. I was like, this can't be right. Nobody's studying this. Or to the people that are studying it, it's just this really arcane mathematics that is not interesting to people. But gradually, as I tugged on threads, you know, Things started to move and then by the end it was like, oh god, when do I stop the book? Everywhere I look, there's more interesting threads that are all part of this bigger dynamic of explore versus exploit.

• 15:15Rich Roll?

  So you try to answer this question through anthropology, through genetics and physiology, and through neuroscience, but fundamentally, like, we all, it's sort of like consciousness. Like, we know it's real. We don't know where it is or what exactly it is. Similarly, exploration is this kind of fundamental trait that is inherent to being human. Like, we all know this, right? Like, we have this thing inside of us, like, we must go to that place we've never been before. And like, why do we have that? And are we the only species that has it? Like, is that where this began for you? Or like, what was the kind of launchpad? And how did you kind of dive into it?

• 15:58Rich Roll?

  And, you know, like, in the very beginning, even define, like, what exploration is? Like, what, you know, like, kind of put some guardrails up on like, what exactly we're talking about?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I should have put up the guardrails earlier to keep it narrow.

• 16:12Rich Roll?

  But you had to go on an exploration before, you can't do that, you can't like, that's sort of an exploitive thing, right?

• 16:18Speaker 01

  You don't know where the boundaries are until you fall off the edge of the world. And you're like, that's where I should have stopped. You know, there was a 2012 article in National Geographic by a journalist named David Dobbs that, I think it was called Restless Genes, that looked at the genetics of exploration. And, you know, full credit to that article is really like, I look back at it now and it's like, every time I thought I was discovering something new, I look back and I'm like, oh, he actually was on that thread too. So that article introduced me to this idea of an explorer's gene, which is the title of my book and which, you know, public service announcement to everyone, there is not an explorer's gene that determines whether you explore.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  But this idea that there was one particular variant in a gene that has to do with a dopamine receptor that had these far-ranging effects on how ancient populations migrated. They still show up today, so you can see that some populations that migrated really far away from their origins, like, to the southern tip of South America, have a lot of this explorer's gene. Populations that stayed closer in Europe have less of it. And that was like, oh, so there is something more than just, as you said, consciousness, whatever. We know there's something there, but for me, as a, you know, I think of myself as a science journalist. So is there something we can grab on to beyond just because I'm not that's not my I'm

• 17:39Speaker 01

  not a social scientist. I need something quantifiable, something measurable. And that gave me something measurable that then it turned out not to be the basis of a book, right? Like that that there's one chat. I have a chapter on this gene, but it's not a book because it doesn't explain everything. The more the more you dig it, the more the more you realize it's incomplete. But that that got me launched on the idea of maybe we can understand why we have this compulsion.

• 18:02Rich Roll?

  So talk a little bit about it's not one gene. It's sort of a series of genes that interact with each other. This DR D4 gene. What exactly is that? How does it relate to dopamine processing? And then I guess, thirdly, are you concluding that this is like a gene that compelled or continues to compel exploration? Or is it more a result of like natural selection, like the nomadic, you know, exploring people who survived kind of naturally select for that genetic predisposition?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a lot of there's a lot in there. So let me let me start with the the big picture. There's this so dopamine. I'm just going to say it is a very complicated molecule and and one that I can't do justice to in one sentence. But it has to do with our our desire for things and our our prediction of how things are going to be. We get a hit of dopamine when something is better than we expect it's going to be. And so that's fundamentally a driver to sample the unknown because no matter how good something is, if you know how good it is, you don't get that dopamine hit.

• 19:14Rich Roll?

  And it's anticipatory, right? It's not like when you arrive at the destination and enjoy it as much as it is about the anticipation of that destination.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  The dopamine doesn't fire when you taste the the sugar. It fires when you realize you're you see it there. You're going to. So it's driving you on. It's not about the destination. Dopamine is all about keeping you on the journey. And so there we have various receptors for dopamine in the brain. And there's about 50,000 years ago, a random mutation in the gene for one of these dopamine receptors, the DR4 receptor arose, which changed the sensitivity of the gene. It made it if you obtain an unexpected reward, you would get a bigger hit than than people with the regular gene. And so

• 20:04Speaker 01

  People with this gene variant, the current understanding is, they basically, they get a bigger hit from trying something new. And so 50,000 years ago, as it happens, is roughly when humans started spreading around the world. Because there'd been modern-ish humans moving from Africa to Europe and back and back and forth for hundreds of thousands of years before that. And then Neanderthals had been in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, but they'd just stayed there. They'd been happy where they were. You know, they'd expanded a little bit into Europe, but hadn't gone much farther. And then, within a few tens of thousands of years, humans spread out and settled the entire globe. Like, everything.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  I mean, I would say Easter Island is maybe the smokingest of smoking guns to say, there's more to it than just like, we're spreading because it's a little crowded here and I want to go. No one gets to Easter Island because, you know, they were a little hungry and wanted to find, you know, you have to be deliberately exploring to get there, because it's in the middle of nowhere. So, sorry, I'm kind of wandering off track here. I guess the point is, 50,000 years ago is an important time, because that's when humans really started to spread rapidly. And what you find is if you, there's this study in 1999 that plotted various groups of human populations around the world, estimated how far they'd had to migrate in the past

• 21:27Speaker 01

  10,000 years from their original place, and then sampled their genes. Say, how many, how much of this DRD4 novelty-seeking variant do they have? And there was basically a straight-line relationship, where the farther they'd migrated, the more of this gene they had. Now, to your point, that doesn't mean that the gene made them explore. It could be that people just sort of were out there exploring, but some people who were wired to appreciate novelty and the unknown and risk, they were able to thrive when they got to new places. So, that question is still not answered.

• 22:04Rich Roll?

  Right. You can't really extract some kind of valid deduction from that. It's interesting, and there's something there, but it's not conclusive.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  We don't know if that's driving people, but I will say, that gene is also associated with ADHD, which...

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Another complicated topic, but ADHD, there's this thesis or hypothesis that it's adaptive to be like constantly seeking novelty and stimulation if you're a hunter-gatherer.

• 22:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  It's not adaptive if you're in grade four and they're telling you to sit down and shut up. But it's adaptive in some contexts, in historical contexts, and it's also linked to this DRD4 gene. And other animals have this DRD4 gene, and some of them actually have similar variants that make some animals more receptive to novelty than others. And you see similar patterns in them. There's one study where they looked at islands off of Sweden, populations of frogs that had managed to make it off the mainland onto these tiny little islands, and they were way more likely to have the explorer's gene than the mainland populations.

• 23:07Rich Roll?

  So this isn't inherent only to humans?

• 23:10Speaker 01

  This isn't inherent only to humans, but I guess where I would come down, acknowledging the uncertainty of all the information, is that this gene, particular gene variant, when it arose in humans, played a role in the expansion of the population and almost certainly plays a role in people's individual baseline attraction to novelty. Not in an on and off, zero and one, like I have the explorer's gene and you don't. It's more like we're somewhere on a spectrum of really attracted to, moderately attracted to novelty, and that explorer's gene bumps people up a few points on that 100-point scale.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  The real thing I want, I really hope people won't take from the book is that some people have it and some people don't. It's more like we all have wiring that predisposes us to seek novelty, and there are factors, both environmental, how you're brought up, and genetic, that can tweak where you are on that scale.

• 24:11Rich Roll?

  It makes sense from an evolutionary advantage perspective. Like, obviously, the paramount thing with any living creature is to populate and replicate, right? And if spreading out advances that, then it would be advantageous to have a predisposition to do that for purposes of survival and thriving.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  And I think I would broaden the frame a little bit to say it's not just about exploring in the sense of finding a new place to live. It's exploring in terms of finding a new thing to do with rocks, or finding a new way of fishing, or all these sorts of things that... Trying something new is the way to just so maybe a real world example in the modern world to say that the age of exploring is not dead because back to the restaurant example. So some scientists at Harvard did an analysis of I think it was 1.8 million food orders from a food company called Deliveroo, which is, you know, the equivalent of Uber Eats or whatever. And so they were able to analyze how people decide what to order and how much they like their orders. And one of the key findings was in the short term,

• 25:20Speaker 01

  exploring is a risk. If you try a new restaurant that you've never tried before, you will likely rate it lower than if you try one, go back to one that you already know that you like. So it's like, why would I explore? Exploring gives me on average a worse meal. But if you look over time, people's average rating as they order repeatedly from various restaurants, it climbs and climbs and climbs. And that's because, yeah, they're getting some duds, but they're also finding some better options, which are better than their current exploit options. And so by exploring, by accepting those short term losses, they're getting better outcomes. And I think you zoom that on evolutionary time. And if you've got people who are like, no, I'm not just going to keep hunting in the same way. I'm going to, I wonder if we, maybe this other animal is edible. Maybe this mushroom is edible. Oops,

• 26:05Speaker 01

  that guy died. But eventually you discover better and better things.

• 26:08Rich Roll?

  Right, right. So it's a very broad definition of exploration.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:13Rich Roll?

  It's not just, you know, going where no man has gone before.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  My market researchers told me that if I only sold to like people who were going to the moon, I would not be able to make the book work.

• 26:23Rich Roll?

  But you see it played out, you know, everywhere. I mean, obviously writ large in terms of like, we're going to colonize Mars and we're, you know, giving birth to new forms of intelligence right now. And, you know, as much energy and enthusiasm, you know, that is going into those pursuits, there's less sort of concern or putting on the brakes. You know what I mean? It's sort of like, there's a lot of hand wringing and talking about like, well, what is AI going to render for us in the future of humanity? But nobody's saying like, people might be saying like, hey, we shouldn't do this, but like, we're doing it. Like, there's just, there's just no way around, like, this is happening. Like, there's just no way that anything is going to interfere with the development of this new technology because that's what we do.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I mean, to take it out of the present moment, when I think back to debates about should scientists have participated in the development of the atomic bomb? And to me, I could never get upset at the scientists who developed the atomic bomb, because if it was possible and within the scope of knowledge, someone was gonna do it. And I'd never really thought about it in terms of exploring, but I think that's fundamentally what I was recognizing, is that if there's a road, someone's gonna take that road. You can't just sort of put up a sign at the road and say, "Don't go there," because that's, if anything, that's gonna attract people and not repel them.

• 27:42Rich Roll?

  Sure. I mean, if the history of humanity teaches us anything, it's that like, we're gonna do that thing, and we're gonna deal with the fallout and circumstances of it later.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is, which is kind of a negative gloss on exploring, but, but, yeah, you know, it's, but it's absolutely on point, and I think it speaks to the fact that we kind of recognize this. We don't, we don't need the neuroscience or the biology to say, "If there's a road, we wanna take it."

• 28:06Rich Roll?

  So we have this genetic piece, we have all the anthropology, the great human expansion. You talk about like, the Polynesian cultures, and, you know, the, the first people to go to Australia, and all these sort of examples that kind of illustrate like, this predisposition that we have. And then there's the neuroscience component here, which gets into this idea of predictive processing. So explain that.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and, you know, first of all, I apologize, because, because this gets a little bit obscure for everybody.

• 28:36Rich Roll?

  People love neuroscience, though.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  And, and I think this idea of predictive processing, I was making this case to, to my editor at Outside a little while ago, I, I did a piece on it, and we were talking, and it's like, yeah, this is kind of like, hard to follow, and I was like, "Trust me, it's worth it, because predictive processing is one of the big ideas in, in science of this generation," I think. And 10 years from now, everyone will be familiar with this idea, as obscure as it sounds. So it's worth digging into the mud a little bit, and saying, "What is predictive processing?" And it's a grand theory of how the brain works. It's bigger than that, it's as big as you want it to be. It's a grand theory of how life exists, if you, if you sort of follow it down to, all the way to the bottom.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  And it relies on this idea, an idea called the free energy principle, which is this idea that...

• 29:28Speaker 01

  The fundamental precondition of life, whether we're talking about amoebas or you and me, is to minimize surprise. If you're gonna stay alive, you have to understand what's happening and what's about to happen in the world. If you can't minimize surprise, you're gonna, as an amoeba, you're basically, you're not able to maintain a distinction between you and the rest of the world. You're just gonna dissolve into nothingness. So, that's a little obscure, but if you zoom that out and follow the train of logic, you end up with the idea that the brain is a prediction machine. The brain is trying to avoid surprise by predicting what's going on. And this is an idea with a lot of history, but it, basically,

• 30:12Speaker 01

  when I look around this room, the classical view is that there's a bunch of photons bouncing into my eyes and then my brain is saying, "Oh, that must be a ladder. That must be a door." What the predictive view says is that I have kind of taken, I know kind of how the world works. I've looked around when I came in. Now I know what to expect. And so, my brain has a view, has an idea of what it's seeing. It's predicting the world. And only if something deviates from my predictions. It's checking its predictions. What my eyes are doing are just verifying that, yeah, there was a door there a minute ago. There's still a door there. And if something changes, if the door opens, then I will, I will register and have to update my predictions. So, this idea has a lot of depth to it,

• 30:57Speaker 01

  which we don't need to get bogged down in. What's relevant from our perspective is that if you accept the idea that your brain is, its main desire in life is to predict what's gonna happen next, then what follows is that we should go into the closet, turn off the lights, close the door, and never come out. Because in that nice dark closet, we will always know what's happening next, which is nothing. And that's called the dark room problem in philosophy and in neuroscience. And it doesn't seem to suggest that we want to explore. And this was actually something that was debated for about a decade, or about a decade ago was when it was posed. And people were trying to argue, well, how can this be true?

• 31:41Speaker 01

  We don't want to lock ourselves in closets. In fact, we've done experiments where you ask people to sit in a quiet room and they'd rather administer electric shocks to themselves than sit alone in a room. And so it turns out that the resolution is, you have to say, you don't want to just know what's happening right now. You want to know what's happening next. You want to minimize surprise about the future, too. And to minimize, to understand what's coming down the pike, what's going to happen, what might come through that door there, we need to know as much as possible about the world. So a predictive brain is fundamentally wired to look around and say, what do I know least about? Whatever I know least about, where is the greatest uncertainty? I need to go and resolve that uncertainty so that I make sure there isn't a monster behind that door.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  And so in this view, exploration isn't just something that evolved from a freak genetic mutation 50,000 years ago. It's something that is a precondition of life, that we have to go and find out what's over the horizon so that we know what's coming next and we can minimize our surprise.

• 32:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that feels very neat and tidy, but also to me, like, feels a little bit lacking. And maybe that's because it doesn't account for this dopamine piece. Like, I just know from anecdotal personal experience, like, and maybe I'm wired differently, and maybe that's why I'm a recovering alcoholic, but like, the idea of like, oh, there's something over there that's unknown, like, like, I gotta go over there, not so that I can resolve uncertainty, but for the very reason that like, I don't know what's going to happen. There's something intoxicating about that, that perhaps is operating on a hormonal level in the brain.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there are ways of understanding how dopamine fits into this picture of prediction. And so one of the roles for dopamine in that view is that it's basically encoding the precision of your prediction, how well you know something. But Leaving aside the, you know, this stuff is still under debate and I'd be lying if I said I understood it well enough to say anything about it, but in the predictive processing view, what they argue is, or at least what some people, what some scientists argue is that the feeling of reducing prediction error is the feeling of feeling good. It's what we associate with a dopamine hit or whatever. It's the feeling of uncertainty

• 34:01Speaker 01

  going down. So you see something over there, you want to know what it's about, you go over there and what's exciting is the feeling of now I know what's here. That's what feels good and it's on a hormonal level. It's all wired in through this, it's not through this complex system of rewards and hormones and neurotransmitters and things like that. But it's, but the underlying logic, the reason we're wired the way we are is with the goal of resolving uncertainty. Now, that doesn't mean that we always act in ways that resolve uncertainty. And so, you know, one of the sort of explanations that I saw is you can think about hunger or about the taste of sugar, for example. Why do we crave sugar?

• 34:46Speaker 01

  On a fundamental level, it's because it's giving us, it's a source of calories. Why do we crave sex? On a fundamental level, it's because we're propagating the species. But we do both those things in the modern world in ways that don't achieve those goals. You know, we eat sugar well beyond when we need calories or we eat artificially sweetened things that don't give us any calories. We use birth control, some of us. So we're decoupling the underlying drive from how we actually behave. And the same thing is true with uncertainty. Why do we scroll through social media? It would be overly optimistic to say we're scrolling through social media in order to learn about the world and resolve uncertainty. But it's that circuitry. The circuitry that tries to get us to resolve uncertainty that then gets co-opted

• 35:31Speaker 01

  by whether it's social media, whether it's cannabis, whether, you know, whatever the case may be.

• 35:36Rich Roll?

  And modernity is a scenario in which these, you know, fundamental mechanisms which were kind of designed to serve us, we now serve them.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, people talk about when is artificial intelligence going to take over? Well, I mean, the algorithms have kind of taken over in a lot of ways in terms of how we spend our leisure time and what we think of as entertaining. It's like, no, they're telling us what's entertaining. We're not discovering it.

• 36:13Rich Roll?

  It's worth pointing out that you have a PhD in physics from Cambridge and you did a stint at the NSA in Washington DC where you were studying quantum computing and there was an interesting announcement this week from Microsoft about their, you know, new qubit chip, hearkening a new era of quantum computing and what that might augur. And I just thought like, I have to, you're here, I gotta ask you like what you think about this. Because I think it relates to like the, these, these sort of uncertain, you know, kind of future outcomes for the human race.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was interesting. So my, my time as a, in the quantum computing group of the NSA was from 2002 to 2004.

• 36:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I can't imagine how much has changed since then.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  And it was, you know.

• 36:57Rich Roll?

  But conceptually, you understand this.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 37:00Rich Roll?

  Better than most people.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Well, by a, by a grain of sand. What was interesting then is, you know, you'd sit through a lot of talks, projecting the future timeline of what's gonna, you know, when are we actually going to be able to build one? Because tens of millions of dollars were being devoted even 30 years ago to quantum computing, more than that, you know, probably hundreds of millions. And nobody really knew whether it was possible to build one. Because there were, it was a case of unknown unknowns, right? It's not that we knew what had to be done, but it was hard. We didn't even know how we would overcome some of these seemingly intractable barriers. And a lot of the estimates that I saw would be like, ah, sometime around 2030, we'll find out.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Now I'm sitting here in 2025, like, ah, they were actually about right. Now, I guess what, I think, I would say, within the last five years, to me, that's when things have shifted from, can we do this to, yeah, it's gonna happen. And, you know, the Microsoft announcement, you know, it's actually a model of quantum computing that I didn't even know people were still pursuing, that like, they were doing this, I guess, quietly. It's not one of the main models that people are working on. But so it just shows that there's, there are a lot of different routes to get to these destinations, and nobody really knows what's gonna happen until you get there.

• 38:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so are you even capable of translating in layperson's terms how this very powerful new kind of like technological breakthrough might impact, you know, the world?

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny. I had a lot of arguments, so I wrote a few articles about quantum computing not long after I, when I, early in my journalism career, not long after I'd left quantum computing. And I inevitably ended up getting into arguments with physicists, like, you can't explain it like that, that's not exactly right. You cannot assume that people have spent seven years learning quantum physics before you explain it to them.

• 38:55Rich Roll?

  You understand all of these like, you know, quantum physics paradoxes, right?

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:00Rich Roll?

  And predictability problems and everything in order to really understand it.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  So the way I would explain it is, a classical computer, the computers we all use today, they're built on the idea of manipulating bits of data. A bit can be zero or one. And so there's these long strings of zeros and ones that computers are. Flipping or multiplying or whatever, manipulating and performing their calculations. The fundamental difference between a computer, a classical computer and a quantum computer is that a quantum computer, instead of a bit, it has a qubit, a quantum bit, which can exist in a superposition, in a combination of zero and one at the same time. And that, the very hard part, from an engineering perspective, is getting it to stay in that superposition because it's very delicate. And so, it can be zero and one at the same time.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  If you start combining bits, it can hold a very large number of values simultaneously. Now, how does that get you magical results? That's very hard to explain. It's a little more complicated than saying it's doing all these calculations simultaneously. But you can manipulate these bits in ways to make the, use the very odd behavior of quantum mechanics to be able to do calculations that are impossible. From a practical perspective, the most sort of obvious or straightforward use of a quantum computer is that they can factor large numbers very quickly. So you can give, take a number with 100 digits, say, what are its two factors?

• 40:28Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  And that's important because that is the fundamental basis of how our communications are encrypted on the internet. So that's why I was working for the NSA, because they were like, "Oh crap. Well, first of all, wouldn't it be nice to break everyone else's encryption? And second of all, if someone builds one of these, they're going to break all of our encryption." Now, there are ways, there is quantum encryption that you can use to make sure that a quantum computer can't break it.

• 40:55Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  There are pathways forward.

• 40:57Rich Roll?

  There's an arms race.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's not going to break the world. This is an interesting tool, but I don't see it as like artificial intelligence. Quantum computers aren't going to become conscious and start taking, or take over

• 41:12Speaker 01

  All of our jobs or anything like that in the way of artificial intelligence. I think it's a more known pathway as to what they can do.

• 41:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  It's just they'll be really powerful and really interesting.

• 41:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, my completely uninformed sense is it can take gigantic data sets, multiple gigantic data sets, synthesize them and create kind of predictive results from them while also, like all of the discourse right now is about its ability to break encryption and what that means for crypto and that whole world. But that seems to be like, okay, yeah, but like, I'm sure there's a million other things that we haven't even thought of that is gonna, you know, is gonna change as a result of this.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'll probably be really good for things like drug discovery, simulating the behavior of molecules to see how, you know, of theoretical molecules to see which ones might have desirable properties. And the fundamental reason for that is these molecules are quantum mechanical molecules, so that the computer is inherently following the same laws as the molecules. But also, I mean, there was a very early quantum computer that was demoed, demonstrated maybe 15 years ago. And some of the problems they did is like, there's these classical math problems like the traveling sales problem or the wedding guest problem. How do you, you know, Aunt Beth doesn't want to sit with Uncle so and so, but needs to be at this table with that. And you get these problems which are easy to explain, but rapidly become totally intractable for, to solve mathematically.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  The quantum computer can tackle these sorts of problems in a different way, in a way that if you were just using an ordinary computer would require some insane number of classical computers to tackle.

• 42:48Rich Roll?

  And this may feel like a tangent, but you know, it is a form of exploration, you know?

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Well.

• 42:54Rich Roll?

  To bring it back to what we were talking about, like the imperative of the human race to like, hey, we've got this new thing, we gotta figure it out.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Well, and that's, you know, I bring up quantum computing in the book because This was a new thing in, it was basically, the idea was basically floated in 1985, but no one knew anything about it outside a very small circle until the mid 90s when a guy named Peter Shor figured out this idea that, oh, hang on, we could crack encryption with a quantum computer. And then people got interested in it. But so I was in grad school, I was doing my PhD in physics from 1997 to 2000. And so I was there-

• 43:30Rich Roll?

  At the place to do physics.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  It is, I would argue it is the place-

• 43:34Rich Roll?

  The storied history of Cambridge in physics is quite something.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  A very intimidating place to do physics. The condition to get a PhD at Cambridge is, you know, what they write on that little form is, you have to create or, I can't remember the exact wording, but basically the creation of new knowledge. You have to say something new. And that's, you know, that's exploring. And that was a very, I can remember at the time, reading it and thinking, well, how do I, you know, how do I know how to create new knowledge? Like, if I, if I knew what, what, what needed to be done, it would already be done. Like, how do I decide where to go? And so then while I was there, this idea of quantum computing was emerging. And it was like, well, this was something that didn't even exist, effectively, three years ago when I was doing my undergrad. And so it

• 44:19Speaker 01

  was really interesting to see people grapple with a completely new idea and to think, like, where did this idea come from? How did people come up with this idea in an indirect way? I don't know, maybe it led me to, to decide that I didn't want to do physics because I was like, I don't know how to create new knowledge in physics. And I, you know, some of my colleagues, I could see that they had, their, their brains were wired in a way that was allowing them to explore the intellectual space in a way that I knew, I was very good at solving problem sets that my professors said, you know, they, here's a, here's a, here's some physics that we know how to do. It's really complicated. Here's a problem. It's going to take you seven pages of Greek algebra to solve.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  I could do that, but the problem of create new knowledge, I found that really daunting.

• 45:10Rich Roll?

  Right, well, there's a, there's two things. There's a creativity to that. And there's probably some sort of genetic or, or, you know, kind of like neurological predisposition to be able to do that. In the same way, a great athlete has a, you know, preternatural Lee High VO2 Max or something like that. Some people are just wired for that and they probably end up at Cambridge for that reason. But you have a whole section in the book about the exploration of the mind and ideas and the importance of, of, you know, cultivating that, that like idea of how do you come up with new knowledge requires space and patience and is detached from the kind of exploit aspect of this. Like, how do you take all

• 45:55Rich Roll?

  of these people, put them in a room and don't like, you know, put any parameters on them and say, just, you know, go into your mind and like come up with something new?

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I would say, one of the things that I thought was interesting that came out of that area of research was the importance of breadth and of making connections between disparate fields. So you don't create new knowledge by going into the dark room, the closet and locking yourself. You put yourself in a room with people who know different things than you. All of the physics places that I've been, it's all of the good ones. They really put a premium on trying to bring people together in, in different ways. So at Cambridge, there's a tradition that started a century ago with J.J. Thomson, the guy who basically discovered the electron. Tea time, I think it's like 10, was it 10:30

• 46:47Speaker 01

  and 3 o'clock every day? The entire building, hundreds of people go down and get subsidized tea and if you want a little piece of cake, it's 10 pence, or at least it was when I was there. And there's big tables and you sit down and it's basically random. So you're not just sitting with your lab mates, you're sitting, you might be sitting next to the technician who's been working there for 40 years, the senior professor, the visiting academic. And you talk about stuff, and sometimes you're talking about soccer, but sometimes you're talking about physics. And so you're bringing together different areas of knowledge. And there's a place in Canada called the Perimeter Institute, which was endowed with basically the BlackBerry money, hundreds of millions of dollars. It's a theoretical physics, one of the leading places, really thoughtfully designed. The building was built just for the physicists. And so you walk down the hallway, and there's all these little nooks,

• 47:30Speaker 01

  just random in the hallway. There's a little blackboard and a nook and a comfortable chair, so that if you're walking down the hallway chatting to someone, and you're like, "Oh, that's an interesting idea," you just move into this little nook, and you start jotting on the blackboard, because they're really trying to make sure that you don't just lock yourself in the office. And then if you look, there's these big data analyses of like, scientific papers, patents, inventions, things like that, where the more they're able to bring together areas that haven't been combined before, the more likely you are to make a big disruptive innovation. And that's the story of quantum computing. That's quantum mechanics and computer science came together. The fundamental ideas in both those areas had been around for 50 years. But it wasn't until the 70s and 80s that a couple of people

• 48:13Speaker 01

  brought them together and realized, "Oh, if we put these two together, two and two is five."

• 48:17Rich Roll?

  Sure. But in a capitalistic society, that requires having a long view and a pretty healthy relationship with uncertainty. It's sort of orthogonal to, you know, stock market demands. And I'm curious, like, it feels like those sorts of institutions or scenarios in which there is enough kind of funding to get people together and let them be without any kind of specific agenda, isn't really so much a thing anymore? I mean, there's think tanks, and I'm sure there's, you know, at universities, there are these types of things. But given the fact that humanity is sort of facing existential crises in,

• 48:58Rich Roll?

  you know, a variety of ways, like, it feels like a good time to have more of that going on right now.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is a dynamic that's been around for a long time. So there's the Institute for Advanced Study, which was founded in the 1930s. And the idea was, let's just let people, let's take the pressure off. Let's let them, just get smart people and let them think and talk to each other. And it was controversial, because people were like, "No, you need to, you need to kind of crack the whip now and then. You need to make sure they're producing useful things."

• 49:29Speaker 01

  But there's definitely been a trend in the last, let's say, maybe since the 60s. The 60s was, the space race was a time when there was a lot of investment in basic R and D. But, but really ever since the Second World War, there's been this trend where the relevance or the importance or the cultural importance of kind of blue sky, let's figure out how the world works, how the universe works, versus let's build a gadget that's gonna be useful. They've kind of shifted order and importance to the point that now we're focused on gadgets. And there's a guy, I mean, we talked about the explore exploit dilemma. That terminology is mostly, was, was made popular by a guy named James March, who was a, a business thinker at Stanford in a paper in the early 90s.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  And his, he was, he was thinking, interested in business. And his basic thesis was that the rewards of exploration are delayed in time, they don't happen immediately, and they're uncertain and riskier. Whereas the rewards of exploitation, we see them right away and, and we can, we know if it's gonna work. And so as a result, we systematically under invest in exploration. And in the corporate context, that means we systematically under invest in R and D. And that happens on a societal scale too. And the amount of money that the government spends devoted to basic research is, you know, significantly less than half of what it was in the 60s. And of the money that is dispersed, it's, it's less and less risky.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  It's more and more, okay, you've, you've got 80% of the way there, you've already shown that it can be done, we'll give you money to finish it, instead of go figure out what these electromagnetic waves are or whatever.

• 51:09Rich Roll?

  I suppose on some level, Google, Meta, Microsoft, make room for some of it. I mean, you don't get a quantum computer unless you let people sit around and think and talk to each other and try to come up with new ways of approaching hard problems.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and even within, you know, within the government structure. So I think the, the estimate I heard, and, and, you know, I can't verify these numbers, but that the NSA was spending about $60 million a year on quantum computing in the early 2000s. This is decades before it was gonna be useful. And I know what I was doing at the NSA was not building a quantum computer. We were doing basic quantum mechanics research. We were trying to basically understand. You know that an electron can do all these wacky quantum mechanical things. It can be in two places at once. It can teleport. We know that a baseball can't. Where's the boundary between electrons and baseballs? And is that boundary funda-- is there some-- something we don't-- this is still an open question.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  How do you know-- what defines the boundary between the quantum and the everyday world? And how do we figure it out? So we were asking basic questions under the guise or under the-- not the pretense, with the goal of helping to make a quantum computer possible. But so you can get basic research done even within the constraints of trying to do something useful. But it constrains things. It narrows the field of what's possible. And I would say, you know, as a big picture-- joining, I think, your big picture societal critique is that it's harder and harder to find space for that. It's a much more of a return on investment kind of culture where-- and even if, you know,

• 52:51Speaker 01

  there are various calculations, and you can take these calculations for the good of salt. There's calculations that every dollar of R and D that a government spends returns $8 downstream. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. But it's too far-- it's beyond the next election. It's beyond five elections from now. And so, you know, you're gonna get people standing up, you know, in a press conference reading. And can you believe the government is funding, you know, the sex life of squirrels or whatever? Things that sound ridiculous if you take them out of their context.

• 53:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, just the way our society is structured, we don't really make room for, you know, extended horizons on things just because of the machinations of our economic systems. And I think there's also something about what that does to our relationship with self-interest versus communal interest that is not in the grander interest of the race at large.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll just also say, before we get to kind of like, oh, the old days were so great. It's not like, you know, on the savanna 1.5 million years ago, it was like, okay, you seven people, you figure out if we can figure out how to hunt the wildebeest. Like, this is a long-- this is ongoing tension. We're always struggling with our own immediate self-interest and trying to see beyond that.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  It does seem like at some points in our history, we've done a better job than than others.

• 54:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, to ground this back in the text and specifically the neuroscience piece here, talk a little bit about this idea of mental mapping and the impact of this on the hippocampus. I think it's super interesting.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is so the study that I think a lot of people will have heard about is about 25 years ago, some neuroscientists studied London taxi drivers. And London taxi drivers, at the time, I'm actually not sure if it's still the case. They had to, they couldn't use GPS to get around. They had to basically memorize the entire map of London.

• 54:46Rich Roll?

  And anybody who's been to London, that is no small feat.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, they had not invented the grid system when they were mapping, laying out London. So what they found is that London taxi drivers have a bigger hippocampus than everybody else. And hippocampus is, it turns out to be the place that we store our mental maps. And that's a literal, this is not a, not just a metaphor. We have, so I'm in a room right now. If I were to walk around in this room, when I walk near that door, a certain neurons will fire. When I walk in the opposite direction, other neurons will fire, and it'll be repeatable. Every time I go to a given place in the room, there's one specific neuron in that hippocampal map that will fire. So we carry these maps. And so these London taxi drivers were actually having to build very big maps, so they got bigger hippocampuses.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  And there's been a long stream of research since then, sort of finding that people who navigate by forming mental maps, by kind of figuring out where everything is relative to everyone else, they tend to use their hippocampus. There's another strategy of navigation, which you could call stimulus response, which is, I memorize that I have to go three blocks until the gas station. I turn right at the gas station, then I go to the top of the hill. So you're just memorizing landmarks. You don't really know where anything, you just have a sort of linear sense of how you get from point to point to point. And that's actually a quicker and more efficient way of navigating, but you can't take shortcuts or you can't, you can't get, you may know how to get from A to B and from A to C, but

• 56:18Speaker 01

  you don't know how to get from B to C because you don't know how those points relate to each other unless you have a cognitive map. And we all use both of these strategies through life, but The trend is we're using stimulus-response navigation more and more. And that's partly aided by the fact that we have our phones, our GPS with us, which just tells us, "Go to this point, go to that point, go to this point." You don't have to know how it fits together. And I don't want to overstate the evidence, but there's strong hints that this trend is leading to us to have smaller hippocampuses. Hippocampi, you know, it sounds funny saying hippocampi, but having a smaller hippocampus. And there are other bodies of research that suggest

• 57:03Speaker 01

  that having a smaller hippocampus is a risk factor for all sorts of conditions like depression, Alzheimer's, PTSD. Correlation and causation are always hard to tease out. But if you connect those dots, what it suggests is that if you're not forming mental maps, in other words, and how do you form a mental map? You explore. The only way to form a mental map is to go places you haven't been before and then figure out how they relate to other places, to look around, not just to go, "I'm going from point A to point B and then to point C," but to try and construct a map of where you are, to understand where you are. If you're not doing that, and if society is moving you away from that, the risk is that you're letting your hippocampus kind of atrophy

• 57:48Speaker 01

  and that this may be associated with negative health conditions.

• 57:53Rich Roll?

  Does that also apply to the mapping or the synthesis of ideas that aren't necessarily related to anything spatial? Like taking, you know, kind of, I'm imagining you, right? So you're somebody who, in a kind of David Epstein range way, has all of these seemingly wildly differentiated kind of experiences and levels of expertise. You know about endurance, but you're also a physicist and you're a journalist. You have a unique set of skills that all kind of come together to make you the perfect and perhaps only person who could write The Explorer's Gene, right? Similarly, like, the idea of, like, you know,

• 58:38Rich Roll?

  taking ideas or information that you have in the world and how does it relate to this other idea is a form of mapping. It's just not in the kind of GPS context. Does that still relate to the hippocampus? And then secondarily, and maybe this is a different idea. It's not just, you know, kind of our spatial mapping that we've outsourced to our devices. There's all kinds of things that we're now kind of not really interested in paying too much attention to because they're always at our fingertips. And what is that doing to the brain writ large?

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Okay, so to your first question, 100%. The hippocampus isn't just mapping the world, it's mapping ideas. And there's some really neat studies that demonstrate this, showing that, you know, the way we map social relationships, it's on, in some, there's one study that showed it's like, how well you know a person and what sorts of positive or negative experiences you have with them. It's like a two-dimensional map. And people are distant or close to you in the metaphorical sense, but as mapped on a map.

• 59:44Rich Roll?

  And you create archetypes of different people based upon all the people that you've met in the world. And kind of that creates predictability around behavior.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  And then you can then use that to say, that person is like that person. Like you just said, to my great pleasure and flattery, that I'm like David Epstein. It's like, that in some way, you're mapping the characteristics of people. And you're saying, those two people are in the same continent, maybe even the same country. Whereas Alex and someone else are completely at opposite ends of this spectrum. And it's a metaphorical spectrum, and it's not a one-dimensional or a two-dimensional. It might be a five-dimensional spectrum, but it's mapped in your hippocampus. And they find that, for instance, if you, if you take

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  rats and you disable their hippocampus, they can't make these conceptual shortcuts between ideas, that A implies B and B implies C. They can't figure out that A implies C because they don't have a map of how those ideas relate to each other in this virtual space. So this is getting a little esoteric, but the takeaway is that On the one hand, you know, some of the scientists I spoke to are like, so we don't need to worry about using GPS because we use our hippocampus for so many things that it's not on its own, it's not going to have a big effect. But on the other hand, it means that if something does go wrong, you know, if we are neglecting our hippocampus, that it's not just that you're going to get lost on the way to the library, it's that you're going to have trouble connecting ideas with each other.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  And, you know, to your, I guess, to your second point, one of the critiques of social media or entertainment more broadly is this idea of algorithms always constantly telling us what to do next, and that it takes away the active exploration, the active part of figuring out what, where I might like to explore, all I have to do is sit there and the next show comes up.

• 1:01:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So this idea of active versus passive exploration, which you, you know, kind of go into in detail in the book, how are you actively engaged in this exploratory like disposition versus sort of passively engaging in it? So imagine you're on a cruise ship and you're just watching the world go by and you have examples of this, you know, throughout history versus, you know, the way you open the book and you're in Newfoundland and you're, there's no trail markers and you got to figure it out, right? And that the qualitative difference of those two types of adventure experiences.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so the, what I struggled a little bit with is because there's sometimes a correlation between the physical aspect of active versus passive and the, I guess, yeah, the mental aspect. So, because the examples I tend to give, it's like, well, what's the difference between watching a documentary about Mount Everest versus being guided to the top of Mount Everest versus being Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay and finding your way to it? There's a lot of differences. One is that in how hard it is physically, but fundamentally, what the point I'm trying to get across when I talk about active versus passive isn't about what was your heart rate or how heavy was the pack you had to carry? It's what decisions did you have to make? What risks did you have to run? And so.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  I would say that you could hike to the top of Everest and it would be as physically demanding as it is for anybody. But if all you have to do is follow behind someone else's footsteps and make no decisions about is this the right path? Is the weather good enough? Should we go now? You're having a fundamentally different experience. And I've certainly experienced this in terms of traveling on our own versus following well-traveled routes with really detailed instructions, being with a guide or on a package tour. The difference isn't that the scenery is nicer in one place than the other. The difference is how engaged you are and what you're learning about the world.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  And so I guess I connect this then to this, there's a body of neuroscience research and of education research that shows that you can have one person trying to learn or learn about a topic, expose themselves, expose them to a bunch of information, and you can give the exact same information to someone else. The person who's deciding which page to look at or which direction to look is going to assimilate the information with different parts of their brain and learn it in a different way, in a more effective way. It's not the same to be shown information as it is to discover it for yourself.

• 1:04:14Rich Roll?

  On top of that, though, the deeper kind of point here is how do we pursue and enjoy our lives with a kind of deeper connection to meaning and fulfillment? So, yes, there are these neurological, neurochemical things that are happening that we should really pay attention to and try to be active explorers rather than passive, but like, why is any of this important? To me, it feels like, for a lot of people, there's a crisis of meaning in their lives.

• 1:04:55Rich Roll?

  And what you're really getting at beneath the surface, expressly but also implied throughout the book, is like, this is a way to welcome a little bit more meaning into your life. And it doesn't have to be hiking up Everest. This is just reframing how you think about this idea, exploration, with ways to easily invite it more into your life.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think- So if I think about the, you know, this maybe wasn't deliberate, but I think about the way I've structured the book, and I start with the anthropology, then the biology, then the neuroscience, and those are all attempts to sort of understand what's going on, but none of them are really satisfactory. And I think as I get towards the end of the book, there's a sense of which of like, okay, I tried these things and they're interesting, they tell us a lot, but it's not at the heart of the matter. And that, I think the penultimate chapter in the book is about effort and the idea that effort is associated with meaning, something called the effort paradox.

• 1:05:58Rich Roll?

  Right. Now it's becoming a Michael Easter book.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to emphasize again that it's intellectual effort, too. You don't have to ruck to have meaning, although, you know, it's not a bad way of doing it. But let me start by saying, the effort paradox is this idea that sometimes we value things not despite the fact that they're hard, but because they're hard. That, you know, and it's like the mountaineers who, you know, you could hike up the mountain, or you could climb up this, this death-defying rock face, and they're like, well, they don't want to hike up the mountain, they want to climb up the rock face because it'll be, it'll be so interesting to do that. And that is not just about mountain climbing, it's also about IKEA furniture. There's studies on the IKEA effect, that people value furniture more

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  highly if they've had to struggle with these, you know, infuriating instructions. So effort is associated with meaning for reasons that are not, not obvious, that there's a lot of debate about it. And I think effort is maybe not, even effort is, is kind of a proxy for, for something deeper, which is willingness to, this goes back to what we were saying right at the beginning, willingness to accept failure, willingness to accept uncertainty, that if you do something where the outcome is preordained, and there's no risk that it goes wrong, then there's no satisfaction when it happens, because you knew it was going to happen the whole time. The first precondition of something feeling like a

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  meaningful activity is that there's some risk that it might not go, go well. People talk about this in lots of different ways, like the concept of flow, one of its characteristics is that it's at the borders of your capabilities. It's not so hard that you can't do it, but it's not so easy that you know you can do it. And so I think the effort paradox is kind of getting at that idea in one dimension of that idea, but that the broader idea, which goes back to exploring, is, you know, one way of defining exploring is you're taking the choice that is less certain and that might turn out worse. Whether you attribute that to the theory of predictive processing, that's on some deep, seven levels deep level, this is what we were meant to do, or whether

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  it's a psychological process of feeling like I took on something hard and I did it. Now I have gained more confidence in myself that I'm capable of doing hard things. It's going to change my trajectory going forward. Whatever the level of explanation you want to go with, I think this idea of getting off the beaten path really has power.

• 1:08:33Rich Roll?

  Joseph Campbell sort of says it all, and he kind of recurs throughout the book. So if neuroscience isn't your thing, or anthropology isn't your thing, like this is a guy who sort of took a 10,000-foot view of the human condition and extracted, you know, this archetype of, you know, what it means to live a purposeful life. And it basically means embracing bold unknowns and, you know, thinking about struggle not as a bug, but as a feature. And this is the journey, you know, we all must go on, you know, to live a purposeful, meaningful life. And at the same time, everything about, you know, modern society is telling us the

• 1:09:14Rich Roll?

  opposite, you know, remove all uncertainty, live a secure life. You want comfort, you want luxury. These are the things you should aspire to. And, you know, struggle is something that you should remove from your experience. And so in our materialistic sort of culture, like these are our godheads, and we organize our lives around them, we make career decisions around them, and they're completely, you know, kind of contrary to all of these things that we know actually drive us towards happiness and, you know, connection and the things that, you know, we really, deep down beneath all of that, we're really all kind of like driving for.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I couldn't have put it better myself. Like, I 100% agree.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  And what I'll add is that this doesn't mean that life has to be an unremitting slog, that you always have to wake up and, you know, do the ice bath because that's what you hate and, you know, or whatever. It's not George Costanza. Like, everything that seems good, you do the opposite. There's a lot of ways to explore and it's on different dimensions and it can change, you know, over the course of your life. Like, one of the examples I give in the book is just thinking about musical taste. Do you seek out new music or do you go back to your comfort music? And there were times, and the truth is, you know, most people find all the music, you know, the music they love most is the stuff they hear when they're like 20 years old. And then it's a gradually constricting path. And that's certainly been true for me, for better or worse, but not universally. And there are

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  times in my life when I've sought out interesting and challenging new music. And, you know, there are times in life, like when I had my kids and my career was really starting to become more complicated, I was just listening to the stuff that I got when I was in high school. And I didn't need to challenge myself in every way at every, at every point at all times. So it's like, there's a kind of curve I talk about in the book, some people call it the want curve, of like, if something is too easy or simple or familiar, it's boring. If it's way too complicated or too hard, it's awful. And in the middle, there's that sweet spot. That sweet spot is multi-dimensional. And, you know, people can find that challenge

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  in different ways. But if there's no place in your life where you're facing uncertainty, you know, and that certainty might be, will I hate this album as opposed to will I die from trying to, you know, wingsuit off this cliff? But if there's no place in your life that you're facing uncertainty, then I think you're, you're, you're, you're missing an opportunity for meaning.

• 1:11:44Rich Roll?

  What do you make of people's sort of wide variations in their relationship with like risk and uncertainty and adventure? Like, some people are just like, you know, not for me. Like, I'm happy on the couch. And other people just can't wait to get out the door and like, jump out of an airplane.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, these differences are real, for sure. And, you know, when I talk to people about this book, there's definitely some people who are like, that sounds really interesting, Alex, but I am not an explorer. And I'm like, no, you still need to buy the book because exploring is very broadly defined. And it's, you know, it, your personal want curve can be very different. But it's like, you know, I go on canoe trips with friends for many years and

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  We do whitewater, so we're facing rapids several times a day. And I have friends who are just nuts, like some of the people I paddle with. Hopefully, they won't hear me say this, but some of them are not as good paddlers as I am. Like, they're less competent than I am, but they're more willing to just head into the maelstrom of a rapid. And I'm like, do you realize the consequences? I'm going to portage this. And that's just, so I like to think of myself as a bold adventure, but I'm scared out of my pants by these, like, so there's, there's different ways that people, in different dimensions, I've taken big risks in some parts of my life. I'm not willing to take big risks in other parts of my life. All that stuff, there's genetic elements, but there's also, of course, like environmental, what, what, how did you grow up?

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  Did you feel like life was one big risk or were you totally secure? And so I think there's all these things that can influence it. I think we can change, but I think also there's nothing wrong with recognizing that, like, I don't need to become the guy who charges down class three rapids, class four rapids, without a second thought. There's no, there's no right or wrong. For me, the class two might be plenty challenging and I'm facing my fears and getting a sense of accomplishment. There's no absolute barometer of what kind of risks you need to take.

• 1:13:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so, so the real question is to ask oneself is like, am I, am I stretching myself enough so that I'm learning new things and growing and, you know, stimulating my brain and all of that, but, you know, nourishing the soul also by, you know, getting out there and trying things and bursting out of that, like, you know, protective comfort zone that we find so, you know, kind of difficult to transcend.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I faced this with, with running because I, I've been running for a long time now. And in some sense, it's ultra familiar, but. Every race is still like, I get every, every time I race, I'm, I'm driving to the race thinking, why did I sign up for this? What am I doing? And that's like the sign that it's like, yeah, this is right. You need to be here. It's a hill I have to climb every time. But I also, you know, I, I took up rock climbing about a decade ago and I'm a complete novice. I'm terrible at it. But I, I, I take joy in how little I know about it and how, how every time I go, it's, it's a new, new adventure for me because I'm so not good at it.

• 1:14:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  Within the familiar and within the new, you can find that. But the common thread there is a little bit of fear. Not sure how it's going to turn out and whether all, in the, in the racing, in the running context, it's like, will I be able to push myself the way I know I should be able to? What, you know, how, what, what answers will I give when the question is asked?

• 1:15:07Rich Roll?

  Sure. Yeah, the running thing is interesting. I mean, you're, you're this elite track and field athlete, um, you know, who had a, you know, really interesting career as a 1500 runner. And I want to ask you this because I, I've been thinking about this a lot. We're very good at like diluting ourselves or like convincing ourselves that we're like, you know, doing the hard thing when maybe we're really not. And in the context of running or maybe endurance sports at large or any sport, maybe, um, I'm curious on your thoughts about how, how we can kind of get trapped within a bubble. Like certainly, you know, running is something you'll never master. It will always have something to teach you and you can keep going back to that well to kind of learn more about yourself

• 1:15:52Rich Roll?

  and the world and your, the outer edges of your comfort zone and your capabilities, et cetera. But it also can kind of hold you prisoner and keep you from growing in other areas, like to prevent you from like exploring rock climbing because you're very safe in this world. Like you kind of know what that pain threshold feels like. There's a predictability to it. Right? And you can convince yourselves and other people that you're a master of venturing outside of your comfort zone. But are you really? Like that actually has become your comfort zone. And so it works at cross purposes with like all of these principles and ideas that you're talking about. And I'm imagining, you know, you can see this in all kinds of subcultures, like people who just continue to do Ironmans over and

• 1:16:37Rich Roll?

  over and over again. And I'm, I'm sure they get a lot out of it. And there's a community piece and it's very nourishing for a lot of reasons. So I'm not disparaging that at all, but I often think like, Okay, like the sort of learning curve starts to flatten, right? Like, how much more are you learning every year that you show up in Kona? And perhaps you're short-circuiting or short-cutting yourself from growing in other areas of your life if you would be willing to kind of let go of this thing that really has become a comfort zone for you, even though everyone around you will tell you, like, "Oh, my God, like, how do you do that? It's so hard." So you're getting this external validation for it at the same time.

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  I think about this a lot. It's precisely the dynamic that I was thinking about, which we talked about earlier when I was thinking about the book and the science of endurance. Do I try and do something outside the science of endurance? It was really hard moving out. You know, I had an area where I'd spent 10 years building contacts. And then I was, I thought I was a great journalist, you know, well-respected. I'm phoning up people in the explore space and no one's returning my calls. They don't even want to talk to me. They're like, "You're nobody. We don't care." And it was really humbling and really challenging to realize that, you know, it was hard to understand these papers. And part of me is like, "I kind of want to get back to the science of endurance now where I can feel like I'm king of the castle."

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  And I feel within running, there's a similar dynamic for sure, where, you know, when I've taken up other things, I've had this literal conversation with people after, you know, doing rock climbing or trying other stuff and going back and running a 5K and saying to my friends, saying like, "There is no other activity I could take up now at this point in my life where I will ever get as competent as I am, as I can be at running with a relatively minimal investment. I can show up at a 5K and not to pat myself on the back, I can do quite well."

• 1:18:30Rich Roll?

  You're gonna win the Turkey Trot pretty much every time.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  No, I am not winning the Turkey Trot anymore, but I can do well enough that I'm like, "Wow, I must be a pretty special person." With no-

• 1:18:41Rich Roll?

  And that feels good.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  It feels good. But to your point, with no actual, I've put nothing on the line of myself. I've taken no risks. There's nothing. So I get a lot out of running, a ton, like, community and physical fitness and mental health, I think. But I don't get that exploration anymore. And sometimes I tweak it. Sometimes I go and I do an orienteering race or I try something that, you know, I've run some cross-country seasons because I hadn't done that in a while, so I didn't run that. So I try to find some different way of challenging myself. But realistically- Running does a lot for me, but it's not doing the exploring. I have to find that in other parts of my life. And I think, but I think to your point, it's, it's very easy to delude myself into thinking that I'm such a brave guy for going and running

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  a 5K. It's been 35 years. It's not, it's not a big deal anymore.

• 1:19:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What is the relationship between all of these ideas and, and curiosity? Cause it feels like they're, you know, they're close cousins here.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  Some of the stuff that I write about is, it comes from the curiosity literature. And I think it's, ultimately, I think it's kind of similar, similar words for the same concept. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a matter of definition, really, I guess I would say.

• 1:19:50Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, maybe that comes into play in a more practical sense when you think about parenting.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and you know, so my kids are getting a little older now, but I would say, so my kids are nine, eight and 11. And so they, their young childhood really corresponded quite closely with the, the thinking and writing of this book. And so they really influenced that a lot. The way they were constantly, or still are, not interested in doing the same thing over and over again, always interested in, in something different. And they have, and they clearly have a, you know, a drive for this intermediate level of complexity of like, they don't want stuff that they don't understand, but they don't want stuff that they already are familiar with. And yeah, I mean, that's a good question. The,

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  the distinction between curiosity and exploring, I'm not sure I can, can articulate.

• 1:20:45Rich Roll?

  I guess what I'm getting at is, and you talk about this in the book, like you're, you're somebody who you, you go out with your kids and your family and you're doing these, you know, kind of like, pretty intense, like explorations, you know, adventures, et cetera. And, you know, God bless your kids for like, being willing to do that.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  They're good sports.

• 1:21:01Rich Roll?

  Uh, yeah. Like I, I, you know, I'm imagining other kids who are like, no, I'm good. You know, like, I don't want to do that. It feels very uncomfortable. That brings up parenting styles. Like how hard do you push a kid versus like encourage or nudge? Um, and then, you know, kind of not unrelatedly, like how do you, you know, foster and, and um, support? Your child's own unique kind of curiosities, right? So that they can blossom into their own relationship with exploring.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had a really interesting conversation with a Danish scientist named Mark Malmendorf Anderson, who basically uses this predictive processing theory we were talking about earlier to study play, to understand how and why kids play. And so, of course, you know, because I had young kids, I was peppering him with questions about, so, and he has young kids too, or a young kid at least too. How do you encourage this? What do we do? How do we, how do we support it? And his, the answer that he, one of the answers he gave, the one that I liked most was he's like, I try to say yes a lot, and I try to recognize that if something seems worth exploring to them, that's, that's the sign, that's the sign that their brain is reducing uncertainty on that, that neuroscience level, but it's a sign that it's worthwhile.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  And it doesn't matter if it seems like a stupid thing to do to you. It doesn't matter if you know how it's going to turn out. If it's interesting to them, he's like, yeah, you want to dress up like that and do that and climb up that or go in there? Let's do it. Let's, let's, and he's, I think that what he's trying to instill in them is an idea that, you know, that I'm trying to cultivate in my own life and I think is a good idea, which is to be conscious of what you're interested in and what, what attracts your curiosity and follow that. And that, that's a really hard thing to do in the, in the constraints of adult life, right? To, it doesn't matter what you're interested in, you need to pay the rent, you need to do this and you need to do that. But if you can kind of start listening to that voice and, and say yes to yourself too,

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  that, oh, I am interested in that topic, or it would be fun to try rock climbing or whatever. Do it.

• 1:23:05Rich Roll?

  It would be interesting to do a study on the hippocampus psi, hippocampuses of young children in different cultures. I'm thinking about, you know, the typical American child who's got the iPad and, you know, a little bit too early on the digital devices. And the Japanese kid who's like, you know, like walking to school and riding the bus in the subway at age five or whatever, you know, that we've heard these stories, right? Like, like that kid is doing some serious mapping at a very early age and like, you know, getting those neurons to, you know, fire and wire in a very certain way that, you know, the typical kind of North American child isn't.

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, and so. The scientists I spoke to who were worried about hippocampus, they're terrified about what's coming for coming generations because no generation has ever been like current kids in terms of the extent to which they're guided around passively. But there's, you know, there's all sorts of interesting studies of like kids who walk to school versus they're driven to school, ask them to draw the neighborhood. And the kid who's driven to school, it's like, here's my neighborhood. It's a line. It's like, oh, well, that's not much of a neighborhood. And you can really see the differences in how they're assimilating the world around them. And so like, for my kids, we live about a mile from our school and we're lucky enough that it's, we live in a place where it's walkable to school. You know, they started school at age four and

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  my role is, I work from home. I, we've got a car. I could drive you any day of the week and I'm not gonna, never, I'm not gonna drive you. Forget about it. Don't even ask. It can be minus 40, it can be in a monsoon, I'm not driving you. And so they know the neighborhood in a way that I think some of their friends don't.

• 1:24:44Rich Roll?

  How old are they now?

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  They're now nine and 11, especially since I was working on this book. One of the big questions like, when do we start letting them walk alone instead of walking with them? And, you know, at first it was like, they'll, you know, they might get lost, something might happen. Then it was like, but we like walking with them. We want to have this time with them. And then we're like, kids, you want to walk by yourselves? And they're like, no, we like you walking with us. And so anyway, there's, there's a lot of like family dynamic stuff that in terms of, you know, when to, to cut the cord, but they're now at a stage where in fact, I flew here yesterday, so they were walking home from school by themselves.

• 1:25:19Rich Roll?

  Cool. The one section that I found myself wanting to be in this book that really wasn't, and I'm curious what you think about this, is the exploration of one's own mind and past, like in a know thyself way. Like, can you be curious and go on this exploration to? You know, kind of learn more about like, why you do what you do and how you could perhaps do it better if you better understood something that happened to you when you were, you know, like, basically from a psychological perspective, to, you know, kind of have a self, a level

• 1:25:59Rich Roll?

  of self-awareness and self-understanding to then, you know, heal whatever is not, you know, functioning properly, so that maybe in turn, you have a better relationship with the outside world and exploration itself, and you're no longer that person who won't get off the couch.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a really interesting idea, and I think, in some ways, maybe-

• 1:26:19Rich Roll?

  That's its own book, probably.

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  It's the scariest form of exploration of all, right?

• 1:26:22Rich Roll?

  Sure, that's what I'm saying, like, this is the thing no one really wants to do, but is perhaps the most, the most important exploration that somebody should entertain.

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  And, you know, I'm the kind of person who tries to understand why I do things, and I find that I can, I always have three different versions of, of, of why I've done something, and I don't know which one, I never know which one's right, you know, like, even for writing this book, like, did I do it because I was interested in exploring? Did I do it because I was scared of doing another endurance book, like, and I think there's often-

• 1:27:00Rich Roll?

  Or like, look what a badass I am, I can shift gears and write a badass book about something totally new, and people are gonna love it.

• 1:27:06Speaker 01

  Did I do it to show off, yeah, no, it's, these are really hard things to, to, I think, to nail down, and I think not introspecting about why you do things is the surest way to be, to stay stuck on paths that you don't even know why you're sticking to those paths. So, number one reason that I wouldn't have written that is that I am not the right guide for that, like, that's, that's, that's a hard, hard topic, but I think it's an important one.

• 1:27:36Rich Roll?

  ¿Cómo pensamos en la exploración en nuestro mundo explotado demasiado, en el que todo lo que hay es ya explorado y hay imágenes de Google Earth, donde puedes ir a ver lo que quieras ver. ¿Cómo reflejas la relación de la gente con la exploración ahora que ya no hay territorios sin autorización?

• 1:28:00Speaker 01

  Sí, quiero decir, una forma, y la forma en la que he pasado mucha de mi vida es básicamente la negación. Trato de fingir, te llevas a lugares donde puedo fingir que nadie ha estado allí. Es una forma divertida de hacerlo. Me encanta ir a los países de fondo serios donde no puedo recordar cada 10 segundos que hay un signo o una huella o lo que sea, donde tengo que confiar en mí mismo. Pero creo que ese enfoque solo te lleva tan lejos, porque no es verdad. Te estás burlando de ti mismo si imaginas que estás descubriendo el parque nacional en el que estás caminando. Así que a lo largo de escribir este libro, he tenido que pensar muy cuidadosamente sobre la diferencia entre, en la literatura exploradora, se llama "firsting",

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  como la idea de que lo significativo es si eres el primero en hacer este lugar. Y en el mundo moderno, nadie es el primero en llegar a ningún lugar. Así que ahora es la primera persona a saltar con el pie izquierdo al norte.

• 1:28:53Rich Roll?

  Sí, simplemente creamos todos estos "firsts" y estos "FKTs" y cosas así.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  Sí, entiendo, entiendo, me gusta, me atrae esa idea, pero no creo que sea la forma correcta de pensar en ello, porque nos lleva hacia estos caminos cada vez más esotéricos donde estamos tratando de crear formas de diferenciar nuestras experiencias. Y así que creo, supongo que donde estoy tratando de llegar en mi propia cabeza es la idea de explorar lugares porque son nuevos para mí y estar realmente presente en esa exploración. Así que el peligro que he encontrado en mí mismo es que voy a ir a un lugar donde muy pocas personas van y voy a establecer un itinerario muy duro y voy a estropear el culo para llegar al final de ese itinerario.

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  Y voy a poner mi cabeza abajo y voy a caminar o nadar o lo que sea que pueda ser hasta que y voy a establecer mi tenta y voy a cocinar mis comidas y voy a llegar al final y entonces lo hice. Y apenas recuerdo nada sobre el viaje porque mi foco era en hacer esta cosa que la mayoría de la gente no puede hacer. And I'm really trying to shift that to trying to be present in the moment to be, I mean, I know that's an awful cliche, but to be looking around. So one of the ways I've been thinking about that specifically is the way I navigate. You want to get from point A to point B, you have your GPS, you have waypoints, you're following that, you just get from point A to point B. A less efficient way of doing it is you look at the paper map and you think,

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  okay, I need to be in that valley over there that's across the river and to the left of that glacier. And then you navigate your way there. And as a result, you having to look really carefully. You're going to have to figure out where the river is, where the glacier is, where the valley is, what's between you and there. And it just changes your experience. I mean, I had this, I'm using that example because that's the difference between two trips I took two summers ago and one summer ago, I put away the GPS. And so it's not that I'm discovering it anymore, but I'm trying to be more conscious of me seeing something for the first time and me not knowing what's around the corner in that next valley.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  And so I'm also, you know, there's a balance between safety and surprise. I want to do as much planning as I can so that I don't discover that I should have brought crampons. But I don't necessarily want to do that exhaustive planning. Both my wife and I are super planners in a way. So we would know exactly everything about the trail we're going on. And then it's like, well, we didn't even need to go. We already knew what was there. So there's ways of allowing things to be new without having to pretend that I'm the first human to have ever done this.

• 1:31:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. My version of that is far less exotic, but probably something you do and have experienced yourself, which is my favorite kind of runs are when I travel to a city I've never been to, particularly if it's in a foreign country I've never been to. And you wake up that first morning and you've got some free time and you go out for a run. And I just, I never like look at a map, I just like go into a movie without seeing the trailer. Like, I just want to have an authentic experience and get lost on purpose and try to find my way back and see what I see along the way. And that's how you get a sense of your surroundings that way. And those are the most fun and nourishing.

• 1:32:16Rich Roll?

  Experiences that you can have as a runner, I don't know, for me. And I think it gets to this other principle, you know, we've talked about like, you have these like five rules and most of which we've talked about, but one we haven't is this notion of play.

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And first of all, you're braver than I am. It's just like, I can't go for a run without a watch on.

• 1:32:36Rich Roll?

  You're such a, you're such an interesting, curious guy because you're this physicist math guy, right? So of course you're going to have checkboxes and you're gonna, you're gonna Uber plan every single thing, but you're also this like creative guy who's not afraid to try new, like it's a paradox.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  I'm fighting against it. I have to have a watch on, but it's a Timex from, you know, 1995, has no GPS or anything, but I'd have to have it on and I have to know roughly where I'm going. But, you know, I got into LA yesterday. I don't know LA at all. And I was trying to get that experience. So I just, I wanted to shake out the legs when I arrived. So I went out.

• 1:33:08Rich Roll?

  This is an instance in which maybe you should have called me and I could have like sorted you out a little bit for maybe a better experience, but you know.

• 1:33:14Speaker 01

  I wanted to experience Smog for myself, but also, you know, I just went for a random run through the streets near my hotel. I ended up at a taco truck and I got a shrimp taco for three bucks and it was great. And then I kept running and it was just like, it was an exploration run. And maybe that wasn't the neighborhood that I, that had I done planning that I would have stayed in or that I would have chosen to explore. But I went out and I experienced some of, I had a very authentic, super authentic, but no, no, but you're absolutely right. Like, and I did the same thing this morning. I went on a sort of looping run. Just I had a rough idea of where I wanted to go, but I went one way, came back a different way, had to double back occasionally. And it's like, so I know my neighborhood better than, better than I would

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  have probably two or three years ago, had I come here, I would have just sort of laid out a route and followed it. I'm trying to play. And you mentioned this, this idea of play and the idea.

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  Is basically that play is your best guide of what's worth exploring, that this is your deep circuitry telling you where the opportunities to reduce uncertainty are, to find, to create and to reduce it.

• 1:34:23Rich Roll?

  Why does play become such an elusive thing the older that we get? We get so calcified around this and it feels like an indulgence that is verboten.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  I asked a whole bunch of people this because another subtext in this book, which we haven't really talked about is aging. Like, you know, I'm in my 40s and...

• 1:34:42Rich Roll?

  You get calcified in so many... You talked about your music preferences.

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So we did talk about that, but it's like you could see that in so many dimensions of life. And so I kept asking people, so like, you know, should I be trying to explore more? Should I be trying to play more? And the answers weren't as unambiguous as I might have guessed because there are some aspects of youth that you can't just decide to recapture, and one of them is ignorance. You can't unknow what you've learned through life. So one of the scientists I talked to, the example he gave was like, you move to a new city, you may know nothing about the city. And so every place that you go into is an opportunity to explore. But if you've lived there for five years, you know the rhythms of the city. And so if a new place opens up in your neighborhood and it's a hipster coffee shop, you know what hipster coffee shops in the city are like.

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  You know if you like them.

• 1:35:31Rich Roll?

  Novelty becomes very remote.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, you already know it, you can't unknow it. And being an adult, we already know a lot of things. And so there's no point in me exploring naively things that I've already explored and know I hate. And so we can't go back to that completely naive state. There's still a whole lot of world to explore. And this guy, Mark Momdorff Anderson, who I spoke to, who's written a book on play... He's like, you can't tell people to play more. You can't just tell adults, hey, play. Because the definition of playing or the underlying sort of assumption is that it's something that's fun. It's we do for its own sake. But the distinction then is you don't, maybe you don't tell yourself to play, but you give yourself space to play.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  One of the reasons, aside from the fact that they know a lot more, is that one of the reasons that adults don't play as much is that they're busy. They're constrained by the shackles of adult expectations and the need to make a living and stuff. So this goes back to what I was saying before about, you know, listening to your, paying attention to your instincts of what might be fun. But giving yourself space to follow them. It's easy to feel self-conscious about doing something that you're not already an expert at when you're 45 or 55 or 65. That at that point in your life, you're usually doing the things that you've picked out that you know you're good at. And it would be nice to kind of break out of that and say, it's okay to suck. I go to rock climbing and there's like, you know, eight-year-olds who are climbing upside down on the things that I can't even get up. That's okay.

• 1:37:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  I'm an old guy.

• 1:37:03Rich Roll?

  But that changes as you get older too. Like you go through these phases and, you know, through most of adult life, like we don't want to do the things that where we look stupid. And we're all about like, you know, how are people perceiving us? And we're very hyper-conscious of like, you know, things like status. And we have a distanced relationship with things like play because they don't make sense in any kind of transactional way. And that's the way our brain is. And then you get to a certain age and you're like, fuck it, I don't care anymore. Like, and then you're like, fine to show up and be a total amateur and look foolish because like you have a healthier relationship with, you know,

• 1:37:42Rich Roll?

  other people's opinions of you because you've lived enough life and you just, you know who you are and you feel, you know, fine about that.

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think that's. I like to think that I'm approaching that zone, but I think we can all kind of try and approach it a little sooner. You know, why wait?

• 1:38:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:01Speaker 01

  Why deprive ourselves of that in mid-adulthood?

• 1:38:06Rich Roll?

  Well, I'd like for you to take off your explorer's hat and put back on your science of endurance hat. But before we do that, just to kind of wrap this part of the conversation, like, maybe just lay out like what you want people to get out of this book and why it's relevant to the average person who's just living their life and trying to get through the day.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think the first thing I hope people will take away is that we really are wired to explore in some amorphous way, that this feeling that something might be interesting over the hill, that is a human feeling, that is something you should respect in yourself and recognize and pursue. And that moreover, it's a useful feeling to follow. It's one that leads to good things, both in a you're gonna get better restaurant meals eventually if you explore, because you're, you know, in a tangible way, but also maybe more importantly, in a way that leads to feeling like you're doing something meaningful.

• 1:39:16Speaker 01

  That exploration is about accepting uncertainty and risk. And that by doing that on a regular basis, we end up doing difficult things, overcoming our doubts, and feeling like our pursuits have meaning. And so, why does this matter? In our current world, there are a whole bunch of structural forces that are making our lives easier and more predictable, that are eliminating uncertainty, and also eliminating even the need to make decisions, that we're being fed entertainment options, we're being told what to do in a way

• 1:39:57Speaker 01

  that takes away the active part of following our own interests. There's a bunch of different reasons that that is not going to be satisfying in the long term and may even be bad for us in a sort of very tangible neuroscience way, but certainly is a less satisfying way to live. So the sort of takeaway message is

• 1:40:21Speaker 01

  Listen to that inner voice telling you to try something and be willing to take risks in pursuit of something because you never know what you might find.

• 1:40:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, beautiful. At the risk of underscoring what you already shared, what I love about it is that it's not about some big expedition that you're planning. It can be that, but really what you're talking about is a reframe on your lens on the world because every day you're presented with opportunities to kind of indulge exploration from restaurant choices or what's on the menu, very mundane things to those very broad things. But it's a perspective shift as much as it is anything else.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of the ways to bring that about is what if I'm wrong? What if I fail? Will it be so bad? And if the answer is no, then that frees you up all of a sudden to take all sorts of chances because you realize, and this is maybe goes along with what you were saying about as you get old enough, you don't worry about it as much. It's like, it's okay to fail. It's okay to take the wrong path and have to double back. I mean, not to go on a tangent, but after writing this book, I keep the GPS. I'll check directions when I'm going somewhere in the car, but I don't do turn by turn directions. And so I was taking my kids to a birthday party the other day and I got lost. I missed the turn. And they're like, well, mommy uses Waze. But if you'd used

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  Waze, hey daddy, if you'd used Waze, you wouldn't have missed that turn. And they told me this like six times. And I'm like, you know what? We're going to be on time for the party. You guys can just simmer down. I'm okay with this. I missed the turn. It's okay. Now, we've never been down the street.

• 1:42:08Rich Roll?

  I'm imagining that my kids are older. I'm imagining that your kids as teenagers going, God, my daddy won't even use the GPS.

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  Mommy uses Waze.

• 1:42:19Rich Roll?

  So Alex, good news, bad news. Good news is you're still the Science of Endurance guy. Bad news is you're still... As much as you want to transcend this, it remains the case.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  I'm happy to be the Science of Endurance... It's a privilege to be the Science of Endurance guy.

• 1:42:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, listen, you know, in a world of like, you know, kind of fitness influencers and hot takes and latest, you know, sort of over extrapolated findings from weak data sets, like you are this incredible voice of reason, grounded in, you know, evidence-based findings and somebody who, you know, when you talk about these ideas and you write about them, you're the most nuanced of anyone else who's kind of public-facing. I'm sure there are scientists who do this, but like, in the sense that you are a journalist and you're trying to, you know, translate these very, you know, kind of complicated

• 1:43:18Rich Roll?

  ideas for a mainstream audience, like, I mean, there's no one better than you when it comes to this. And I appreciate that very much.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  Well, I... Those are super kind words and I really appreciate that. I guess I'll say the flip side of that coin is it means I'm never willing to tell anybody what to do. Because I don't know.

• 1:43:35Rich Roll?

  Well, the answer to every question is, well, it depends or it's complicated, you know, which isn't very satisfying. It's easier to scroll on Instagram and some guy's yelling at you, telling you that you need, you know, kind of cold water therapy and this is going to solve all your problems.

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a curse. I wish I was wired in a way to just tell... I had an editor at Canadian Running Magazine once who was like, "People want the Hutchinson method, just give them the Hutchinson method." And I was like, "There is no Hutchinson method. Hutchinson doesn't know what the heck to do."

• 1:44:00Rich Roll?

  But much like Steve Magnus, like, I just think elite track and field runners are really good at appreciating the nuance and, you know, something about the two of you guys, like you're also really good communicators of the nuance here and, you know, I'm always trying to provide the most accurate information and be a buffer against bad ideas and disinformation or mainly, not even so much... Misinformation as much as overly reductive information. Because all of these ideas, whether it's thinking about your VO2 max, or fatigue

• 1:44:42Rich Roll?

  resistance, or vitamin D supplementation, or how much zone two should I be doing? And like, should I use compression boots and do sauna work? There's value and benefits to all of these things in the right context for the right person at the right time.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  I'll jump in and give my general take on all of those topics, which is that I've written about all of them because they're all interesting and they're all real and there's science in all of them. None of them matter as much as people tend to think. None of them matters anywhere near as much as like, did you do something yesterday? Did you get out and exercise? Did you enjoy it? Because if you didn't, it doesn't matter what zone it was in. It's sort of paradoxical in that I spend all this time writing about these ideas, some of which are quite arcane and quite focused. None of them matter as much as they sometimes get portrayed to. They're minor details compared to getting out and doing some physical activity.

• 1:45:37Rich Roll?

  It's a curious quirk of the human condition, though, this drive or this need that we have to just sort of be told what to do. Like, just tell me the thing that'll solve the problem and I'll go do it. And there's something about opening up your phone and there's a guy who's looking right to camera, who feels very confident about what he's sharing, that kind of satisfies us. And also perhaps like, it gets back to like dopamine, right? Like, oh, I've got it. Now I know the answer. And we love these little cherries on top of the sundae. And we're not so keen on the meat and potatoes, which is really unromantic and boring, which is basically like, if you want to be good at something, you're gonna have to train

• 1:46:22Rich Roll?

  a lot, you're gonna be tired, and you're gonna have to do, you know, all of it. You're gonna have to like, do a lot of zone two and a lot of threshold work. It's not about the four by four Norwegian method. It's about, like Steve and I talked about, it's like, all kinds of different interval workouts and figuring out ways to stimulate your Body and new and interesting ways that are always creating, you know, kind of these exercise induced, you know, reactions or responses that are going to make you better over an extremely long period of time.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:46:54Rich Roll?

  It must be periodized where you have to be patient and you have to fail and you have to have poor race results, like all of it, right?

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  I would rather just order something that comes in a bottle and it'll make me better by tomorrow. It's much more satisfying.

• 1:47:08Rich Roll?

  So what is the, you know, kind of message that you want to share to the, you know, average endurance athlete, or perhaps even the, you know, the very kind of like elite level age group amateur who's looking for those additional gains? Like, I'm asking you to like, make a reductive statement here, of course. I realize the irony and all of that, but like, when you kind of canvas the, the social media aspect of the fitness influencers, it's like, on the one hand, it's pretty cool that there are all these people who are sharing their fitness tips and knowledge. And it's kind of shocking and amazing that there's so much fascination with things like VO2 Max and Zone 2. Like when I wrote Finding Ultra in 2012, I was talking about Zone 2.

• 1:47:53Rich Roll?

  It didn't really make much of a bit, I gotta say, but then when Peter Attia talks about it and like, you know, Sam Malone is on his podcast, it's like, and you hear about, you know, the Norwegians and like, suddenly it's like a mainstream thing. Like, everybody knows what Zone 2 is and everybody's talking about it and trying to figure out what it means. Like, it's, there's something really cool about that. I just think there's a lot of like, misinterpretation or confusion around the value of understanding these things.

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, VO2 Max is another great example. Like, when I was writing about VO2 Max in, you know, 2009, 2010, it's like, I, you know, I'd have editors being like, what is this thing? Where's the 2 go? What are you talking about? Like, it was just a concept that was considered too arcane to even put in an article. And now VO2 Max, it's like, people care about it. And on one hand, that's really cool because I mean, as markers of fitness go, VO2 Max is a pretty good one. Like, if you, if you wanna have some clinical test that predicts longevity, VO2 is excellent. Does that mean that, I mean, do you need to get your VO2 Max tested? No, I've had my VO2 Max tested twice in my life, and both of those were for, oh no, three times in my life.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  And two of them were for reporting things, one of them was just for fun. Didn't influence my training in any way, it was just out of interest. So, I think his point that Steve Magnus made in his conversation with you is a good one, that really, I mean, a suitable proxy is how fast can you run a 5K compared to how fast you could run it, or a mile, or whatever the case may be, compared to how fast you could run it five years ago. But, fitness is measured, can be measured by performance. Measuring VO2 Max, or knowing a precise zone to train in,

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  these are...

• 1:49:44Speaker 01

  I mean, there are people who are winning Olympics who are, who are paying attention to stuff. So, I don't wanna say it's, it's all meaningless. But, it's next to meaningless unless you're already doing everything possible on the training side. That the precision, the idea that there's a magic intensity, where, you know, if you do it right, you're getting the benefits, and if you don't do it right, you're not getting benefits. I think that is something I would really caution people about. The idea that you're doing exercise wrong because you went slightly too hard or slightly too easy. It's a continuum, and it's a very flat continuum, I would say. Like, there's differences between workouts, but they don't change quickly.

• 1:50:27Speaker 01

  I have advice in terms of how I would structure training if you're someone who wants to do endurance exercise, which is, I think is a great thing. I would say, and, you know, following the sort of Steven Seiler approach, the idea of doing, you know, 80% of your training relatively easily, and 20% relatively hard. I think it's great, I don't think it's the only way to do it. But, if someone was asking for my advice, I would say, that's a pretty good place to start. How easy is easy, how hard is hard? Easy is conversational, hard is you can't converse. And with, you know, you can take it way farther than that, but if you, if you do that and aim for, you know, trying to get at least...

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  I don't know, a couple hours of that exercise accumulated over the course of a week, you're getting a lot of the available benefits without ever worrying about any of this terminology or these kind of other ideas.

• 1:51:23Rich Roll?

  I think being well-informed and kind of understanding all of these things is fine, and there's plenty to read and to learn if you're so inclined to do that.

• 1:51:34Speaker 01

  I wouldn't have a job if that...

• 1:51:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, like, you've got a whole archive, and you know, there's plenty, you can just read every single article you've ever written for the New York Times and outside on top of your book. I think where it gets problematic is when neuroses develop around it, or, to your point, you feel like you're doing something wrong if you're not doing it precisely in that way. And I think where things like VO2 max and zone 2 can lead us astray is when we have an unhealthy relationship to them, where we're kind of valuing the merit of our own relationship with exercise, using those as like a proxy of self-value.

• 1:52:11Speaker 01

  So, as we're recording this conversation, I wrote an article on zone 2 for the New York Times a couple days ago, and I really wrestled with how to kind of present the arguments, the physiological arguments in favor of zone 2 versus the studies that maybe suggest zone 2 isn't some magic... You know, there's conflicting evidence. At this point, I would say I don't really know what the final answer on zone 2 is. But one of the things I was worried about in the article is, am I creating a straw man in my critique of it? Maybe everyone understands that it's just basically guidance, no one's taking it too seriously, maybe I'm hitting something that doesn't need to be hit. And then the article came out, and I got an email from someone saying, "Thank God you wrote that.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  Yesterday, I was sprinting down a hill, trying to stay in zone 2, because if you go downhill, your heart rate drops. So I was sprinting down to stay, trying to stay in zone 2. I tripped and fell, and then as I was standing there with my watch beeping at me, I was bleeding, and I was trying to walk home, and my watch kept beeping to say, 'You're outside of zone 2, you're outside of zone 2.' And I was thinking, surely it doesn't have to be this precise. So, reading your article was a great relief. And I thought, okay, no, it wasn't a straw man. People really have taken this... Some people have taken this message, even though if you were to talk to Peter Attia... Well, Peter is pretty rigid about how strict zone 2 has to be, but Peter Attia doesn't say, "It's only zone 2." He's like, "You have to do VO2 max 2 and whatever." So... The people giving the messages may feel like it's being nuanced,

• 1:53:39Speaker 01

  but people are receiving it in a way that it's like this is the recipe etched into a stone tablet of how I have to do it. It has to be exactly 136 beats per minute, my heart rate. And that's, as you say, it's a relationship with exercise that is probably not healthy or sustainable for most people. And I say this as someone who, I love data. Like you said, I've got this physics background. I used to plot in my training log, I used to keep track of average heart rate during tempo runs, plot things in Lotus 123 back in the 90s.

• 1:54:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm sure you were a maniac.

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  When we entered the GPS era, I stopped tracking any of that stuff because I realized I love the data too much. I would end up obsessing over it and the measurement becomes the outcome. And that's, then it's no longer a good measurement because you're tricking yourself into thinking what matters.

• 1:54:32Rich Roll?

  It's not sustainable and it undercuts that whole idea of play that you were talking about earlier. If you have a playful relationship with it, you're probably going to be more engaged over the long haul and you know, kind of enjoy it more than feel like it's some burden where you're constantly thinking about spreadsheets.

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  I agree. I will say I'll leave room for individual differences in what's fun, right? Like, you know, there are people who, like I did, love the data and love playing with it. And maybe can hold themselves in a healthier relationship than I could because I just would recognize that it would start to drive my training, that I would be in my training, making decisions based on what it would look like in the data. Some people, they love the analytical side. And if they can find a way to keep that in balance, if that makes it fun for them, then that's great. But I think as a broader message, people who are getting obsessed with the data because they think that's the path to ultimate health and that they have to do it and that there's no alternative. That's unfortunate.

• 1:55:30Rich Roll?

  It's also a broader conversation around the whole optimized self kind of movement right now, where there's this idea that if you just dial in all of these variables, that perhaps you could live forever, you know, and then the broader conversation about our relationship with death, you know, it's like a whole thing, right? But I will say, I love understanding these things, and I think that you do an incredible job of explaining the nuances of them, and I think Peter Attia does a phenomenal job of really laying out the science, I think his conversations with Inigo San Milan on Zone 2, the way that the two of you talked about VO2 max gave me a whole new appreciation

• 1:56:11Rich Roll?

  for how complicated that is, like, like, those conversations are available, like, I would encourage everybody, if you really want to geek out, like, listen to Alex's conversation with Peter, it's fantastic. It's just when we develop an unhealthy relationship to those things, and we like shiny new things, right? We want to find that thing that's going to be the differentiator, but these things all tend to be, you know, kind of 1% on top, and yet, you know, we want to indulge them more than we want to indulge the thing that's going to move us the 90%. But there are some interesting things, like, my sense is that part of why you've kind of transitioned or graduated out of this, you know, science of endurance kind of, you

• 1:56:53Rich Roll?

  know, career path, is that, you know, became marginal gains in terms of like, you know, how it was lighting you up and your curiosity and what you were learning, but there have been some interesting things that have occurred recently or developments. I had this guy David Rochon recently, he's sort of, you know, the new guy on the scene who's like, breaking records in ultra-running world and trying all these wacky new ideas and sharing them transparently and doing it in a way that's very engaging, like, you want to root for this guy, you know, it's really fun to see him try all these new things, and he came on here and he was talking about, you know, how the fundamental limiter is like, our ability to absorb carbohydrates and how he's studying competitive eaters

• 1:57:35Rich Roll?

  and trying to figure out if he can just, like, make his body absorb more of these per hour, like, he's going to have this advantage, seems to be working, bicarb, ketones, all these sort of things. So how are you thinking about some of these, maybe not... I don't know if these are new ideas, but you know, he's, he's sort of really going deeper into them than anybody else that I've seen recently.

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, what I would say is maybe to zoom back a little bit is I had gotten into a rhythm of assuming that nothing worked because I'd written so many things, you know, even something, you know, someone would come out and it has a double blinded placebo-controlled study, shows it works, and I'd write an article about it. And then, this is going to be really exciting to see how this develops. And then five years later, it's like, there's still been no other studies that, and I'd realize, oh yeah, there's, you know, sometimes things get published just because it was a lucky, lucky break. So, electric brain stimulation is a great example of that, where there was really good data, and I wrote about it in Endure. No one talks about that anymore, it just kind of faded away. So, I was drifting towards the sort of danger zone of ultra skeptical.

• 1:58:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're getting a little buzzkill-y in some of your pieces.

• 1:58:47Speaker 01

  And then, super shoes came along. Initially, the Nike Vaporfly, and then a whole generation of super shoes. And they, they really do work. Running times got faster. And so, that was a reminder to me that sometimes things work. Sometimes, sometimes the hype is true. There've been a billion shoes that have come out down the pike with claims that this is going to make you faster. Super shoes worked. And so, that kind of forced me to open my, to sort of pry open my brain a little bit and say, let's stay open to the possibility of things working, and don't be, don't, don't assume that I know before I do. And so, right now, like, in running, times are fast.

• 1:59:29Speaker 01

  Times are incomprehensibly fast.

• 1:59:33Rich Roll?

  Even in the last month, a whole bunch of indoor world records.

• 1:59:36Speaker 01

  Five world records or something, or five American records and a couple world records. It's... And so, stuff is going on. And so, the question is, what are the ingredients of that? There are a lot of, but it's like a game of Clue, right? Like, you know, was it Colonel Mustard with the lead pipe? Or was it the bicarb? Or was it taking more carbohydrates in? What, you know, what are the ingredients? And so, there are some things that I, so of things that I think are interesting in recent years. Super shoes definitely work. Hydrogel carbohydrate drinks.

• 2:00:09Rich Roll?

  Explain that.

• 2:00:09Speaker 01

  So, Morton is the company that introduced this idea. And they, basically, the problem with carbohydrate, as David Roach, you know, will attest, although he's more immune to it than most, is that the body wants, seems to want a lot of carbohydrates. You can't absorb it. And you will end up, if you try and take 90 grams of carbohydrate, most people will end up either diarrhea, vomiting, like, it's just bad news. You put it in, if you encapsulate the carbohydrates in a hydrogel, which in your stomach, it basically, in your stomach, there's this kind of gel. The carbohydrates are inside it. Your stomach doesn't even know the carbohydrates are there, so it doesn't know to get upset. It gets absorbed into your intestine, the hydrogel dissipates, you absorb the carbohydrates. So, you can take in more carbohydrates without gastrointestinal distress.

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  There is not perfect, but reasonably good evidence that this mechanism works the way they claim it does. And there's anecdotal evidence from a lot of athletes that this enables them to take more carbs than ever. Now, there are other carb formulations with, you know, tweaking the osmolality and things like that, stuff that I don't fully understand, that also seem to be allowing athletes to get up to that level too. But engineered carbohydrate drinks, I think, are something that has moved the needle. You mentioned sodium bicarbonate, baking soda. That's been around for decades.

• 2:01:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's like grandma stuff.

• 2:01:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. The story I always like to tell about baking soda is that, when I was, in the 90s, when I was in college, it was banned. You couldn't ban baking soda itself, because it's a ingredient, the technique of soda-loading. The idea here is, when you do hard exercise, your bloodstream, your muscles are getting more and more acidic, as lactate rises. Baking soda's a base.

• 2:01:52Rich Roll?

  Buffers it.

• 2:01:52Speaker 01

  It buffers the acid, so you're able to push a little harder before you feel the burn. The technique was banned, but people did it anyway. And, you know, one time after indoor track meet, I took my teammate's water bottle by accident and took a swig right after a race. And it just almost made me vomit because it was full of baking soda. And that teammate then, at the conference championships that year, he soda loaded before all four of his races. And it accumulated enough that he had diarrhea and had to drop out of the relay. And I was the alternate on the relay. So I got called up to the relay, ran a great race, got to stay on the relay. My first trip to nationals in college was because my teammate had put himself in the toilet with soda loading. So that was the problem with soda. Everyone used soda loading worked, but it was just a really unpleasant.

• 2:02:33Speaker 01

  Morton, this hydrogel company, a couple of years ago, started trialing a hydrogel version of baking soda. So you can take baking soda. It doesn't upset your stomach, but it still gets into your bloodstream. That, it's hard to disambiguate what's causing it, but that seems to be a big factor in the times. And it used to be thought that it was just in things like two-minute races, like 800 meters. Now, Kilian Journe is taking baking soda in ultra marathon races to go up hills and stuff like that.

• 2:03:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, if you can just have that buffer, you'll be able to just maintain a higher pace longer than you would otherwise be able to.

• 2:03:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and particularly if there's, you know, in a cycling race, there are surges. In a trail race, in an ultra, there are hills. So anything that's pushing you a little bit into that anaerobic, above your threshold, the baking soda will help you tolerate that.

• 2:03:24Rich Roll?

  And allow you to, you know, quicker acclimate to baseline after a hard effort.

• 2:03:29Speaker 01

  Right. So the rationale makes sense. I would guess that it's one of the things that's making people faster. And then just taking, you mentioned this with David Roach, taking huge volumes of carbs. This has been going on. So 10 years ago, the official recommendations were 60 grams of carbs an hour is as much as the human can, body can handle. Then people figured out that if you combine different kinds of carbs, you can take a little more. So the recommendations increased to 90 grams. Now, a lot of people in professional cycling, in ultra running, and in other sports are taking 120 grams. And sometimes you see people reporting even a little higher than that, 140 grams or something, which is more than double what was thought to be the maximum. There's still scientific debate as to whether...

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  People are actually able to burn this much, or whether they're just managing to get it in their stomach and then pooping it out later, whatever. But cyclists are faster than ever, just like runners. A lot of people suspect that the carbs are a part of it, especially when you're talking about like multi-day events. So if you're hammering for six hours, then you have to hammer again six hours tomorrow and so on. Then not getting into a big energetic deficit during the race may affect recovery. So that's it. Those are some of the big things that jump to mind as like, there's real stuff here.

• 2:04:50Rich Roll?

  What's interesting about Roche is he's kind of an explorer, right? He's going to uncharted territory, you know, track and field, cycling, these sports, they've been kind of the way they are for a very long time, which has allowed people to study what works and what doesn't. Ultra running is newer, you know, it's been around for a while and people have been running long distances. But I think what's new is bringing kind of scientific rigor to it in a new and interesting way. And one of the other things that David is doing and exploring is training for a race like that at, you know, kind of like,

• 2:05:30Rich Roll?

  like basically emphasizing threshold work in a way that most ultra runners don't. And he's doing it on top of 15 years of base building. So it's important to make that distinction.

• 2:05:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he's doing this on top of like, you know, just this robust, you know, endurance engine that he's had for a very long time. But it is, you know, kind of contrary to traditional thought around like how to, how to perform at your peak in races, you know, up to 100 miles.

• 2:05:59Speaker 01

  So I think one of the, one of the key things about ultra running is that it is essentially impossible, not impossible, but

• 2:06:08Speaker 01

  Very, very, very, very difficult to run randomized trials of like, okay, you run 100 miles like this, you 10 people run 100 miles. Now we're going to change something, you do it again tomorrow. And now we're going to try the third condition. So, ultra running, if we're talking about seeking areas of greatest uncertainty, it's a wild west. Like, I don't mean that in the sense that people do crazy things. But I mean, it's an unknown country because we can't test these things. And it's clear that, so you can draw conclusions about what works in a 10-minute effort and extrapolate them to a 100-minute effort or a two-hour effort. Around the marathon, things start to get a little weird, right? Because the people you'd expect to win don't always win because they just,

• 2:06:52Speaker 01

  their legs can't handle it. You mentioned this idea of fatigue resistance. You can measure someone's VO2 max and their lactate threshold and their running economy and get a really good prediction of how fast they can run a half marathon. But, once you get out to the marathon, it's like, well, that guy may have had great running economy two hours ago, but now his running economy has declined much more than someone else's. So, marathon is just the border of where all these extrapolations that work in a range, you know, all the data we have about mile running tells us a lot about 5K running and 10K running too. But it tells us very little beyond the marathon. And so when you get well beyond the marathon, like 100 miles, it's like, when they do studies of what predicts performance, it's like VO2 max, lactate, running economy.

• 2:07:36Speaker 01

  And as it gets, the race gets longer, those predictions get weaker and weaker. You get to 100 miles and it's like, they're irrelevant. I mean, they're not truly irrelevant. Of course, they help. But statistically, they're swamped by these other factors that may be like, how much carbohydrate can you absorb? Or, you know, how delicate is your stomach? How?

• 2:07:56Rich Roll?

  Or what is the terrain like? What is the humidity like? Like, all tiny little variables become meaningful when you extrapolate over that amount of time.

• 2:08:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And those variables, everyone responds to them differently.

• 2:08:08Rich Roll?

  But one thing we do know is that a really good Middle distance track and field athlete can mature into an elite marathoner. We know that there is a directionality, but you know, an exceptional marathoner is unlikely to later distinguish themselves at the 400 meters. Like, it doesn't work in the opposite direction, right? And as marathon running matured, you see more and more, you know, very high level track and field athletes kind of graduate into longer and longer distances and then distinguish them, distinguish themselves at the marathon distance. And because ultra running is still sort of this Wild West and, you know, maturing kind

• 2:08:50Rich Roll?

  of like subculture, as it continues to mature, I think we're going to see elite track and field athletes at the middle distance, not just, you know, stop at the marathon, but continue to progress, especially if, you know, prize money and purses, you know, if there's money to be made in ultra running. And what happens when you have like a legit, like, you know, world-class runner who's been running, you know, at a very high level at various distances for most of their adult life, steps into the running, in the ultra running world? And I think there's just so much, like, you know, opportunity there to like push the limits. And Roche will say this, he's like, "I don't think we have any idea of like what we can

• 2:09:34Rich Roll?

  actually do at these distances yet, we're just at the beginning."

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  It is interesting, like, as you said, there's been a real shift in the marathon. So, two of the fastest women's marathons in history have been run recently by people who were like Olympic 800 meter runners. And it used to be that there was, there was one guy, Rod Dixon, who had been a

• 2:09:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:53Speaker 01

  Like, great 1500, an Olympic 1500 medalist.

• 2:09:55Rich Roll?

  In New Zealand?

• 2:09:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then he won the New York Marathon in like 1983, and there's a famous picture of him holding his hands up after, so, and he was like, "Wow, a 1500 meter runner was good at the marathon, this is a freak." Now, the fastest marathoners in the world, some of them have come from 800. And one theory about that is, the shoes have made it more forgiving. So I can, my, my experience as a 1500 meter runner, running a marathon, it was awful. After 30K, after 20 miles, my legs were just hammered, like, just, I was not even breathing hard, but my quads were just, like, I had a bouncy, middle distance stride. I'd like to think that if you put on some super shoes, these big cushioned shoes, I might have been able to handle the distance a little more. So the penalty for having a

• 2:10:40Speaker 01

  track background may be reduced. I still think ultra running may turn out to be a different beast to some extent. I think it's never going to be a bad thing to have like a high VO2 max like a 5K runner would have. But there's always been this question of like, could an Olympic marathoner or an Olympic 10K runner move up to Western States and dominate? It's one thing to ask 100 mile road championships or something like that. But these races like Western States, trail, altitude, like as you said, there's all these other factors. And I don't think we can take for granted that the best middle distance runners will be great. I think some of them might be. Some of them will have those mix

• 2:11:24Speaker 01

  of characteristics that'll enable them to move up. But I think there will also be some thoroughbreds who try to move up and discover that, oh, wow, it's a different beast.

• 2:11:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that's accurate. I mean, Western States is very different from like comrades or something. You know, like that's a road, you know, these are different.

• 2:11:43Speaker 01

  Although it's a hilly one.

• 2:11:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's true. But it's sort of like straight line, you know, I think. But I think it'll be interesting to see and, you know, just to like, play, you know, fantasy football. Like what happens if like, someone like Cole Hocker is just like, you know what? Like, I'm just gonna, I really just want to go right into ultra running now, you know, and I'm going to spend five years trying to figure out how to do this. Like, just somebody who's like that good.

• 2:12:08Speaker 01

  There will be a SWAT team from Mikey in a helicopter dispatched, put him in a burlap bag, take him to a room and he will decide he wants to run the 1500 after all.

• 2:12:17Rich Roll?

  All right. I could talk to you forever. We got to wrap this up. But maybe just, you know, put a button on like, what you want people to, you know, kind of take away from all of this expertise you have in the endurance world as they try to wrap their heads around engaging with their own endurance careers in whatever capacity.

• 2:12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, so first of all, I think.

• 2:12:40Speaker 01

  I guess, and this connects to what we were talking about earlier. It should be fun. It should be enjoyable. It's not punishment in phys ed class. It's not, you know, you don't go out and running because you did something wrong. So find an activity that you enjoy doing. Find a context in which you enjoy doing it. You know, whether it's the with people, without people, alone, or, you know, down by the beach or in the mountains. Find something you like doing and do that on a regular basis. And that's kind of the prescription for staying active for a long time and maintaining consistency. And I think that's the prescription then in turn for performance. If you're interested in performance, you know, you can force yourself to do something for a

• 2:13:25Speaker 01

  year or two if you're like, I want to see how fast I can do a 10K. But if you can figure out a way of finding the joy in it and not getting caught up in the pursuit of some hypothetical ideal training program that probably doesn't exist. That's what I wish for everybody is, and I lament the training partners I've had who've started to worry that they're doing it the wrong way and gotten caught up and just eventually decided that they just want to go do something else.

• 2:13:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What was your PR at 1500 meters?

• 2:13:53Speaker 01

  It was 342.43.

• 2:13:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:57Speaker 01

  Which if you convert that with the World Athletics official points table is like 400.02 for the mile.

• 2:14:05Rich Roll?

  It's right on the rivet of breaking the four minute mile. So you and Steve share more in common than...

• 2:14:10Speaker 01

  I don't think it's a coincidence entirely. Like, I think if Steve or I had run 335 or whatever, or three, you know, we might be doing something different. But there's something to do with discovering the love of something, but not feeling like you've completed that task that makes you want to keep digging.

• 2:14:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's super interesting. I asked you only because, you know, I just want to make sure that people listening understand that you know what you're talking about. Like, is that four minute miler guy who's telling you to go out and have fun?

• 2:14:37Speaker 01

  I'm 49 now and I still, I get as much satisfaction out of a hard workout now as I ever did, probably more because I'm less neurotic about it. There's nothing...

• 2:14:50Speaker 01

  More satisfying than the feeling of finishing a hard workout.

• 2:14:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, amen. The book is The Explorers Gene. You did a marvelous job on this book. Congratulations and it was a pleasure to have you here today. I appreciate it. Thank you.

• 2:15:03Speaker 01

  Thanks so much, Rich. This was a real pleasure.

• 2:15:05Rich Roll?

  We'll do it again soon. Maybe we don't have to wait seven years to do it. I'd like to have you and Steve here together. I think that would be really fun. Can we make that happen?

• 2:15:14Speaker 01

  I would love that.

• 2:15:14Rich Roll?

  All right, I'll work on it. Peace. Cheers.

• 2:15:28Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors

• 2:16:11Rich Roll?

  who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg, graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis.

• 2:16:54Rich Roll?

  And thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Thanks.

• 2:17:09Speaker 01

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