How to add more exploration in your life (w/ Alex Hutchinson)

“When was the last time you did something you didn’t do yesterday?” asks journalist and explorer Alex Hutchinson. Alex joins Chris to examine whether the desire to explore is baked into our genes, how he intentionally tries to get lost in his neighborhood, and what he learns from following his curiosity. Featured guest Follow Alex Hutchinson on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/sweat_science/?hl=en and at alexhutchinson.net/ https://www.alexhutchinson.net/Buy The Explorer’s Gene https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063269767 by Alex Hutchinson Connect with the team Follow Chris on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en and at chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/Buy Chris’ book, Humor Me https://t.ted.com/ZGuYfcL Watch How to Be a Better Human videos on YouTube at TEDAudioCollective https://www.youtube.com/TEDAudioCollectiveFollow TED on X https://x.com/TEDTalks, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ted, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TED, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences/, and TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoksFor the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Chris Duffy?

  This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court, and that fight needs your support today. Donate at N R D C dot org slash human, and your gift will be matched five times.

• 1:23Chris Duffy?

  This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and today I want you to join me on an adventure, an exploration into the unknown. Okay, what did you think of when I just said that? Were you imagining like a grand treasure hunt, or did you think of a scientific expedition into a remote wilderness? Those do sound exciting. But what if adventure and exploration were more immediately accessible? What would it do for our lives and our sense of ourselves if we could break out of the ordinary on a more regular basis? Today's guest, Alex Hutchinson, thinks that we all want and need the unknown in our lives, and he's got lots of research and data and ideas about how we can find it. To get us started, here's a clip of Alex reading a passage from

• 2:04Chris Duffy?

  his new book, The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Is a hike through a national park really exploring? One view is that true exploring involves venturing into territory where no human has preceded you. If there are footprints, you're not exploring. Alternatively, you could argue that exploring is simply another word for trying something new. If the TV show you're watching gets boring and you change the channel, you're exploring what else is on the airwaves. Neither of these definitions really captures what the concept means to me. The Latin word explorare means to reconnoitre, inspect or investigate. It was formed from ex, which means from or out of, and plorae, to wail or lament. The original meaning is thought to have been to scout the hunting area for game by means of shouting. That's not quite what I mean either, but there's a kernel of something important here.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  You're seeking information rather than just novelty. Meaningful exploration, I will argue, involves making an active choice to pursue a course that requires effort and carries the risk of failure, what the mythologist Joseph Campbell called a bold beginning of uncertain outcome. Most importantly, it requires the embrace of uncertainty, not as a necessary evil to be tolerated, but as the primary attraction. If you're given a choice between being shot or being banished into the jungle, you choose the jungle to maximize your odds of survival. Exploring, by contrast, is heading into the jungle when your alternative is being an accountant. The stakes may be greater small, and the undiscovered country may be literal or metaphorical. But by choosing the uncertain option, you're seizing an opportunity to learn about the world.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  It might even be the murky boundaries of your own capacities and limits that you're seeking to discover, a goal that maps nicely onto endeavors like running a marathon, the great suburban Everest, as London marathon founder Chris Brasher put it, or hiking in a national park.

• 3:55Chris Duffy?

  Whether your personal Everest is suburban, urban, rural or remote, we're going to learn more about all of them in just a moment. But first, we take an adventurous detour into the world of podcast advertising.

• 4:14Chris Duffy?

  This episode is brought to you by Planet Visionaries, a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. What connects a hidden laboratory in the Amazon, giant pandas in China's mountain forests, research relating to the ocean, and communities living alongside wildlife in India? That's what you'll hear on season six of Planet Visionaries. Stories from the explorers, scientists, and conservation leaders whose work addresses research, biodiversity, and conservation issues in specific locations. Planet Visionaries, hosted by environmental advocate and professional climber Alex Honnold, brings you real stories of discovery, determination, and research and initiatives relating to environmental change.

• 4:57Chris Duffy?

  In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 5:07Speaker 03

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• 6:05Chris Duffy?

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• 6:47Chris Duffy?

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• 7:05Chris Duffy?

  We are back. We're talking about exploration and adventure with Alex Hutchinson.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Alex Hutchinson, science journalist and the author of the book The Explorer's Gene.

• 7:14Chris Duffy?

  Okay, so Alex, for people who have not read your book and aren't familiar, how would you define exploration? Is an explorer only someone who climbs Mount Everest? Or are there other ways to explore in our everyday life and what are those?

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm going with the broadest possible definition of exploration. When I was writing the book, I often would be chatting with people and say, "I'm writing a book about exploration." And one of the common responses was like, "Oh, that's really interesting." Personally, I'm not an explorer. Yes, you are. You don't know it. But we're not just talking about parasailing to the North Pole here. It's ordering a new dish in a restaurant. It's exploring new art or new music, venturing into the unknown. It's any way in which we're not just sticking with what we already know.

• 7:55Chris Duffy?

  It's funny because I've been thinking a lot on my end, just in my world about like humor and how we can laugh more and how we can have these delightful experiences. And so much of it is a parallel that I wouldn't have expected between like, how do you find things that make you laugh and how do you have an exploration, which is you can't just do the same boring routine every single day and expect to find something delightful and new that makes you laugh. And that is at the core of exploring as well.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of the great experiences in life, whether it's humor or whether it's inspiration or whether it's meaning, they come from not just doing what you did yesterday because you already know what yesterday was like. And so there's no surprise. There's no joy. There's no, you know, discovery in that.

• 8:35Chris Duffy?

  Okay, here's my other annoying question, based exclusively on the title of your book, which is, I hear explorer's gene and I think, oh, some people are born with it and some people aren't. But I don't think that's what you believe.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  So the explorer's gene, what I'm expressing there is that there is wiring in our brain that goes back, let's say 50,000 years in the way humans process dopamine that makes us particularly, even compared to our, you know, closest ape relatives, particularly drawn to the unknown. And it is true that some people are, you know, have the volume on that signal turned up a little higher than others. We all know that, you know, some people are just, you know, irresistibly drawn to, they have to be exploring all the time. But all of us have this same wiring, the DRD4 receptor in the brain that makes humans, all of us, drawn to the unknown.

• 9:27Chris Duffy?

  Okay, well, I want to talk more about that wiring that we all have and then people who are on the extremes. But first, tell me more about that specific part of the brain, the DRD4.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, dopamine is, is like, it's in the zeitgeist right now. Obviously, we hear a lot about it and it's the villain that's making us scroll TikTok. And I kind of hoped in this book that I'm going to demystify dopamine once and for all. I'm going to give the simple explanation. So then I talked to a bunch of scientists. I was like, oh crap, dopamine is really complicated and it does a lot of different things. In this context, what dopamine does is act as a marker of prediction error. So when something is different than you expect, Ideally, when it's better than you expect, you get a big hit of dopamine. If it's worse than you expect, it actually suppresses dopamine. And so it's a marker of surprise.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  The fact that we're wired to appreciate, to want more dopamine means we're wired to want to go to places where we will be surprised. So this is the fundamental thing is that it forces you to, or forces us as a species to keep discovering new things, to find better ways of doing things. And the sort of, the, the, the, the big smoking gun historically is the way humans spread around the world, unlike any other mammal. Not just when we were like running out of food or when there was a big glacier coming at us or whatever. Humans just, after hundreds of thousands of years of hanging around in Africa and the Near East, suddenly they just were like, we have to go everywhere. We have to go to Tahiti, we have to go to Easter Island, we have to go to the south tip of South America, we have to go to the North Pole. Well, not quite, but close.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  So that's kind of a, where you can see that there's something about humans that really values exploration.

• 11:06Chris Duffy?

  Okay, so there is this element of exploration that is in all of us. And at the same time, as you said, some of us are calibrated a little more highly, or some of us prefer the couch to the adventure a little bit more.

• 11:19Chris Duffy?

  You are uniquely calibrated, pretty far on the adventure side, to the extent you tell a story in the book about your fourth date with your wife. Can you tell us the, the early courtship of your wife here?

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we were living in different cities, so it was a sort of compressed or a courtship, let's say. But we started talking about going for a hike and, and that, things progressed rapidly. And basically our fourth date was going to the Rockies for a backpacking trip. I mean, I'd only ever been backpacking once before, so it's not like I knew a lot about backpacking. But, and we were like, yeah, should we go to Banff or should we go to Jasper? Like, you know, these are the classic places you go in Canada. Then my cousin told me about this place that's north of Banff and Jasper called the Willmore Wilderness Area. And I was like, well, what's there? And he's like, nothing. There's no rangers, there's no trails, there's, it's just a big wilderness area, it's totally unserviced. I was like, okay, well, let's, let's go there.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  We had planned to spend nine days, I think it was, backpacking, just sort of going wherever we wanted to go. But we found some food at one point in a little ranger, like in an empty ranger's cabin. Like, hey, all right, we can go an extra couple of days. And this was pre-cell phones, so then our parents were flipping out by the time we got out. But anyway, it's, it's the greatest trip I've ever taken because we weren't just. Uh, following a trail to predetermined sites where it's like, all right, the blog says we should see a waterfall to the right, uh, now. Yeah. Oh, wait, there's the waterfall. So it told me that I, that Lauren and I had found, found each other appropriately, but it also really underlined what I love about that kind of travel. That's not, even though, look, I go to the, I go to the top sites and I, I want to see the things

• 12:58Speaker 02

  that everyone else has seen, but I also really value not knowing what I'm going to see.

• 13:04Chris Duffy?

  I mean, I relate to this so much, not in any way in the spending nine to 14 days in the wilderness in an unserviced area, but in the, if you take me to a new place, I, I want to see the odd, weird, unusual sights. That's what I'm delighted by. I'm, I'm less interested in seeing the thing that's on the postcard and more like, what's the, who's the weirdest guy in your neighborhood? And what's the museum that he started in his basement? Like, that's what I'm really interested in. I would have never like self identified as an explorer, but I think in your broader definition of exploring, I'm, I feel, oh, that is exactly what I love. That's what brings me the most joy. And, and here's a piece that I think is really interesting for people listening who maybe don't necessarily identify as like as adventurous or as explorers is.

• 13:47Chris Duffy?

  For me, I have felt like a lot of that exploration, a lot of that new excitement, it's been much harder to access since I've had young kids. And I love, I love having kids. I love being a parent, but it has made it so that it is harder to be like, let's spontaneously take a trip across the border. Let's, you know, let's get on a plane. Let's do something else. But you talk a lot in the book about how even with young kids, even having, you know, your two daughters, you, you have made it a thing that is in your family and that you're instilling in them as well.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  I would say to the extent that there's me trying to make my kids explore, but actually I think the bigger arrow goes the other direction, that having young kids has helped open my eyes to the possibilities of exploration, not necessarily, uh, you know, parachuting into the Rockies or whatever, but just in the, the joy, cause, cause look, for kids, every day is exploration and discovery. They're like, you know, wow, look, when you turn a glass of water upside down, isn't this amazing? It goes all over the place. They're discovering new things in, in, in so many ways and it's a joy to. To watch them explore and to see that. And instead of like watching them explore, why don't we go explore? Why don't we go down to the park? And I don't have to be in the Rockies. We're like, we live near a, you know, a block from a river that runs through, I'm in a city of

• 15:02Speaker 02

  four million, like Toronto. It's not the wilderness, but there's parks and we can go and like, I don't know what's in that patch of trees over there. Let's go find out. Let's go see if we can climb that tree. You know,

• 15:13Chris Duffy?

  In fact, you've been talking in the book about how you bought a lightweight boat that you can carry down and just get in the water when you want to.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  I've used it less than I than I wish I had because there's always the tension like there's the, there's aspiration and then, and then there's reality. But my oldest daughter was born in 2014. My, my, and my second daughter was born in 2016. I started writing this book in about 2018. And, and that's not a coincidence. Like a lot of the thoughts that are in there were that, that road was started by seeing kids explore the world. And, and to some extent, seeing,

• 15:46Speaker 02

  comparing that and contrasting that with my life in my mid 40s. And I'm like, when's the last time I did something that I didn't do yesterday, or last week, or last year, or last decade? And, and really, and it doesn't have to be that way. It may sound like I'm romanticizing exploration, like, oh, it's just this glorious thing. It's all sunshine and rainbows. And personally, I'm an explorer. So therefore I wake up every morning and I'm eager to venture into the unknown. And that's not, that's not the case. There's always a tension in all of us. We, we hate uncertainty. We, we fear not knowing how things are going to turn out. But it's rewarding. So, so it's, it's not just a question of like, well, I'm not an explorer because I get nervous about the idea of the unknown. We all do. It's a question of embracing that and, and trying to

• 16:31Speaker 02

  remind yourself that, yeah, yeah, yeah. But once I'm there, I'm so happy that I, that I did it.

• 16:35Chris Duffy?

  I would like to have you read a passage from the book. It's on page 165 that I think

• 16:41Chris Duffy?

  is, is directionally in, in this conversation that we're talking about right now.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  All right. Here we go. But there's one thing that such journeys have in common with the journeys of explorers in the physical world. Sometimes knowing where you're headed isn't an advantage. Alexander Mackenzie never would have set out for the Pacific coast if he'd realized how far away it actually was. Neither would Columbus have set out for India. The same can be true in the world of ideas.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  I never would have conceived my theory, let alone have made a great effort to verify it, if I had been more familiar with major developments in physics that were taking place, the great Hungarian-born physical chemist Michael Palanyi once wrote about one of his scientific contributions. "That's true in life more generally, whether you're brainstorming ideas at work, or, like Niels Van Der Poel, rethinking how to train for your next race. It's easy to find arguments for sticking with the familiar, but sometimes you have to venture into the unknown and see for yourself what's out there."

• 17:33Chris Duffy?

  Well, first of all, I just love that, and I think that that idea that not knowing where we're going is a desirable thing is one of my big takeaways from this book, because so often what I want is I just wish I knew it was going to work out okay. I just wish I know what the right choice is. And in fact, you make such a powerful argument that the last thing we should want is to know what's going to happen.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  I was reading a book by a friend of mine named John Goodman recently, and he had a line in it that I loved. He's out on vacation somewhere and, you know, seeing some beautiful sight, and he hears someone next to him say, "It's just like the pictures." And then he writes, "Is there a sadder sentence in the English language than 'it looks just like the photos'?" And I struggle with this in like planning vacations, right? Or planning anything, in fact. I'm a very meticulous planner, because I don't want to die. I stick to that goal. I think that's a good goal, but it's like the risk is you know exactly what's going to happen at every point. It's not that I've been able to turn off that planning because I really don't want to die, but I'm trying to balance it with like, I don't need to know everything about what's going to happen.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  I would like to not know about the waterfall around the next corner, or about the museum in the guy's basement to, you know, that's dedicated to toenails or whatever. You want to have the act of discovery that's part of it. It's not that you need to always, it's like, go this way, go in this direction at all times, or go in that direction. You have to find the balance between, like, planning makes sense, it's a logical thing, but always knowing what's going to happen, it takes away some of the sauce of discovery.

• 19:09Chris Duffy?

  Okay, we're going to take a quick ad break, and then we will be right back.

• 19:24Chris Duffy?

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• 21:10Chris Duffy?

  And we are back. I find that as I've gotten older, and I think this is a very common, maybe even cliche, observation that like, time seems to be moving faster from a subjective experience. When I think about my memories, right? It's like there's this huge chunk of time. And then the next 10 years are like a really small chunk of time in my memories. But what I found is that... Places where I was in my life, where I was doing a big exploration, right? If I take a big trip, those have such a bigger mental space in terms of defining my life and being memorable. It's almost like I like planted a flag that stopped the flow of time so from going so quickly.

• 21:52Chris Duffy?

  I imagine that there's, there's an element of exploration in that. I wonder if you could just talk about like our subjective experience of life when we are exploring versus when we are in these routine moments.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  That's a super cool observation. The way I would frame it is think about the difference between being in the driver's seat of a car and being in the passenger seat of a car. You drive through an unfamiliar city, you get to your destination and then someone asks you, can you get back to where you came from? If you were in the driver's seat of the car, you'll have a pretty good chance as long as you weren't like, let's leave aside turn by turn directions for now. Let's, let's say you have navigated through this town. You had to pay attention to where you were. You know each turn. If you were in the passenger seat of the car chatting away with your, your friend, probably you're like, you've looked out the same windshield, you've seen everything the same, but you have no clue how to get back to where, because you were not paying attention, you were passive rather than active.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  And I think that's a really kind of a deep distinction. I know the version of that distinction is like, what's the difference between, you know, climbing Everest for the first time versus being led up Everest by some Sherpa guides versus watching a National Geographic documentary on Everest? And we say, well, to explore, we want to learn about the world. Well, it's like, if you want to learn about the world, the National Geographic documentary is your best bet. Like you're going to, you're going to learn a ton about Everest. But in terms of the, how much, to your point about like, when you look back, like how much mental space is the hour you spent watching the National Geographic going to take up in your memories versus? The the other extreme, the active extreme where you're making the choices, where you're having to think, you're having to look around and say,

• 23:31Speaker 02

  is that massive chunk of ice going to fall on my head and kill me? You're going to remember so many more, it's going to take a, you know, 5,000 times more space in your memory because you're actively making decisions. I think this is like a big challenge in modern life. Like, what is the problem with sitting and scrolling Instagram all day? Well, there's, maybe there's many problems, but but one of the problems is that you're not making any choices about what's interesting to you. The algorithm is feeding you what it thinks you're going to be interested in. And it's very good at telling you that, but you're not choosing

• 24:04Speaker 02

  what to follow. You're not, there's nothing at stake. There's, you don't have to think carefully about whether to scroll, because if you scroll wrong, you're not going to fall off into a crevasse or whatever.

• 24:14Chris Duffy?

  I moved to Los Angeles seven years ago, something like that. And at first I just needed to use Google Maps to get where I was going, because I quite literally couldn't find my way. And then I found after a while, I was still relying on it and actually hadn't really learned any of the ways in my neighborhood. And that is because even though I was in the driver's seat, I was still the passive recipient of how to go. And so there's something interesting about like, even when we are in our daily routines, can we switch from passive to active in a small way, right? Can I turn this off and say, do I actually know how to get to my kid's preschool or to the grocery store without the directions telling me? And probably I do, and if I don't, I'll at least remember the wrong turn that I took the next time.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. It's, it's, it's actually kind of funny that I spent like five years writing this book. And people are like, what's the one thing, what's the key change you made in your life? It's like, well, I turn off turn by turn directions. Like, I look at the map, I want to know where I'm going, I check. And then I'm like, I get into the car and I turn it off until I get lost.

• 25:11Chris Duffy?

  Really? That's a real change that you made in your life?

• 25:13Speaker 02

  That's, that's 100% like the most concrete thing. There's two reasons for it, basically. One is the kind of, that it's, it's a marker, it's a reminder that I'm okay getting lost. It's a, so it's a signpost for how I want to be trying to live my life more broadly is that I want to be present. I want to be looking around. And to your point, it's, it's not just, do I know how to get to my kid's soccer practice? It's do I know where I live? Do I know what the neighborhood is? Do I know if someone says, you know, that old warehouse on, you know, on such and such street? I think they're doing something. I'm like, what warehouse? If I'm looking around when I drive, it's like, I know my neighborhood. I know what the businesses are there. I know what the people are. I know what it looks like. So I want to be active and present. So there's a, there's a symbolic aspect of, of turning off

• 25:57Speaker 02

  the, the turn by turn directions. I will also say, there was a study published about a year ago that found that taxi drivers and ambulance drivers were about half as likely to die of Alzheimer's disease than bus drivers. And this is people who, who are working in the pre turn by turn directions era. So we're talking a group of people who are all spend their days driving, but one group of people drive a different route every day and have to look around and figure out where they're going. And the other group just drives the same route over and over again. So they don't have to think about where they're going. If you don't use your brain, then your brain is just like, okay, but we don't, we can get smaller. So, so there's famous

• 26:40Speaker 02

  studies showing that the hippocampus, which is where we store spatial memory and basically, if you're exploring, you're using your hippocampus, that gets bigger in taxi drivers. London taxi drivers famously have bigger hippocampuses. But conversely, if you don't use your hippocampus, it gets smaller and a smaller hippocampus is associated with conditions like Alzheimer's disease and dementia and a bunch of other stuff. So, so it's like, I want to get lost sometimes. I don't want to get lost in crucial moments. I don't want to get, you know, there, there's times when I absolutely use turn by turn directions, but when I'm going to my kid's soccer practice for the 57th time this week, like, okay, I'll, I'll go and maybe I'll get stuck in traffic for two more minutes, or maybe I'll take a wrong turn if I'm going to someplace that I haven't been in six months or whatever. But that's my big change.

• 27:24Chris Duffy?

  I've also been thinking about that, that switch into uncertainty and into being in a more active mode, not just in the, the physical choices that I make, but in the social choices I make in other choices. So for example, like, If I'm, you know, walking in my neighborhood and I see my neighbor, certainly I can just say, hey, how are you doing? Or, you know, crazy weather this week, like something like that. That's kind of a classic one. And I'm not really making any choice. And we're just acknowledging each other, but we're not going deeper. But I can also kind of take a swerve into the unknown and say, if they're an older person, hey, what was your, I actually don't never, I've never asked you what your career was, or what's something that you've been interested in lately?

• 28:07Chris Duffy?

  Like, taking a turn where I get to know them a little bit more, it feels a little dangerous. It feels like, oh, it might be a weird, uncomfortable conversation. But it also has this chance of, of leading me to a whole new place, to exploring the relationship in a way.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  That's such an interesting thing, because I would say one of my largest professional challenges and dilemmas as a journalist, like I'm a super introvert and a risk averted, risk averse person. And so as a journalist, when I call people up to interview them, first of all, I spend like four hours in the bathroom psych myself up to talk to a stranger, which, which is, which is not a good trait for a journalist. But second of all, I do all this research until I'm pretty sure I know what they're going to say. And then I only ask them the questions that I know that how they're going to answer. And it's like, and when I deviate from that and get something unexpected, it's like, oh, this is going to make the story so much better. Like, I know intellectually, it's so much more satisfying to be willing to ask the questions that I don't know the answers to. But, but both in a professional and social context,

• 29:06Speaker 02

  it's, it's easy to, like, it's so much more, feels so much more safe to, to ask the questions you only know the answers to, and not to, to take the risk of asking, you know, what if you ask a question that's the wrong question? And that insults someone, or brings up something bad, or what, you know, whatever, or that, or that you forget that you already asked that last week, or whatever. So that form of exploration is absolutely as rewarding and also as fraught with uncertainty as, as, you know, going to the North Pole. And look, there's a reason that politicians and athletes and the public figures have this extensive media training to make sure that they never say anything unexpected or interesting.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  And it's like, oh, for God's sake, like, it's, on the one hand, as a journalist, I'm like, don't you understand that if you spoke like a human being, it would be so much more interesting? But on the other hand, I also understand that if they speak like a human being, they might make, they might say something that is going to end up. Biting them, that it's going to become, you know, it's going to go viral or whatever, and it's going to make them look bad. And so the fear of the risk, the small risk that something goes wrong smothers all the opportunity to go in unexpected directions, and which is so much more interesting and more rewarding for people.

• 30:24Chris Duffy?

  Is there a point where exploration and adventure aren't the best idea? I mean, I can think of a lot of examples physically, but I wonder about mentally and socially as well. Like, is there, where is the balance between pushing yourself to do things that are new and different and stretch you, and also knowing when to stop? Where do those balance? Where does that tension come into play?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  So, in the physical world, right, it's easy to think of examples, and it's like, it's surprising, you look through the historical roles of famous explorers, and it's like, wow, they did this great thing. And then they're like, they couldn't stop, they wanted to top it. And so, oh yeah, two expeditions later, they sailed off the edge of the earth, and now they're dead. And so, that's the sort of metaphor. But in reality, yeah, I think it's sort of the idea that you never stop and appreciate, you spend all this time exploring, pushing, trying to discover something new, and then as soon as you get there, you're like, I need to find the next thing, I need to find the next thing. And so I thought about that a lot in the career context. I had written this book on the science of endurance, and I had the opportunity, and it sort of, it did well enough that I could, I had the

• 31:31Speaker 02

  opportunity to spend the rest of my life being the science of endurance guy. And so, and yet I was dissatisfied with that idea, and so I decided I wanted to keep exploring, and I wanted to understand why that was. So I wrote, decided to write a book about why I wanted to keep exploring. But at the same time, as I was doing that, I was like, but this is so stupid. Like, I spent 20 years trying to get to this point in my career, and as soon as I got there, I'm like, all right, I guess I did it, now let's do something else. And so I think it's a sort of... Permanent tension for all of us to balance, like to be wanting to find out what's next, but to find ways of of enjoying, you know, where you just reached the summit that you got to.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  But yeah, I don't think it's an unvarnished good to always be thinking about what's next instead of what's now.

• 32:20Chris Duffy?

  Okay, so thinking about prescriptively how people can bring exploration into their life across a variety of of areas of their life.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's there's an idea that comes from a a German psychologist in the 1800s named Wilhelm Vant. He has this, he had this, this general curve of like, how crazy is something versus how productive and how enjoyable is it? And there's a sweet spot in the middle. And so that's a complicated way of saying that you need to, obviously, you want to find a balance between stuff that's predictable and routine and stuff that's just too crazy and random. And I guess the the argument that I that I make in the book is that your sense of what's fun and what's interesting is not just a sort of self indulgent feeling that's telling you what's fun. It's actually a guide to to where

• 33:13Speaker 02

  you have the greatest potential to learn about the world. Being able to ask yourself, not just, will this please my boss? That's important, too. We all have to please our bosses. But what would I do if I didn't have to please my boss? What is it that I find most interesting? Which of these projects am I most curious to to know how it would turn out? So I I think to find the sweet spot the on the Vant curve, the only reliable way to do it is to to ask yourself what's most interesting to you. And it's hard to do that. It's hard. We all have responsibilities that that trump that. But but to tune into your sense of interest as a so in other words, I guess, maybe if I can say this more concisely,

• 33:55Speaker 02

  rather than thinking that the outside world, you'll be able to mathematically prove which is the best way to explore, pay attention to inside what you find most interesting.

• 34:06Chris Duffy?

  Something that I've done a few times is bought a Powerball ticket and said like, okay, if I win $600 million tomorrow when this ticket comes up, what would I do? What would the work like? Not just obviously I'd go on in a lavish vacation, I'd spend the money, but like, what would I do for work? And I think that it has been really clarifying often for me to think like, I have to make money. I know that. But if I took that away, if the money wasn't the decision factor, what would I want to do? And often that has clarified for me like what career choices I should make.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  That's a great way of doing it. I'll give, I'll give an example from my own life of tuning in. Relatively early in my career, I had a choice between two great career paths with, with two great magazines, Runners World and Outside, both of which I, I loved and have ended up, ended up working for. But I, at that point I had to choose between them. And so I did all the sort of classic pro and con lists and talking to mentors and blah, blah, blah, made a decision, called up the magazines and said, I'm sorry, I can't take your offer. And yes, I'd love to take your offer. Went downstairs to have dinner with my family and, and realized I was crying. And I was like, that's a little weird. And so I just realized, I, I don't know what the pros and

• 35:16Speaker 02

  cons are, but obviously I am, I really want this other option. So I went back upstairs, like, you know, an hour later, called the magazines back and said, I think I made a mistake. Is it okay if I rescind my rejection in one case and, and acceptance in the other case? And they were both very nice and they, they said yes. But that was a case of like, okay, throw away the pro and con list. It's like, this is where I, this is where what I feel is going to be most interesting and rewarding is even though I wasn't in touch enough with my feelings to recognize them until I'd already gone down the wrong path.

• 35:45Chris Duffy?

  I love that story. It also makes me think that like, you know, I feel like there's a lot of pressure in the world today, societal pressure and personal pressure to have these optimized. I have made the right choice, whether it's like, I, I am buying the microwave that is the number one reviewed microwave and has five star reviews or in our lives, like I am going to

• 36:08Chris Duffy?

  look at the algorithmically perfect job and career path. And instead I think trusting that our, it's not like our emotions are the only thing. But that like what we kind of feel and what we actually want is a thing too that is is much harder to quantify. And you are like a hard science, hard math, hard numbers guy. I mean, you worked for the NSA as a physicist, I believe you were working on quantum computing.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:31Chris Duffy?

  So you're not like the touchy, I'm, I am the touchy feely English major, right? So I of course I'm going to say that, but you, you are the numbers like quantifiable guy.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  This was highly out of character for me and outside of my, my sort of self-image, but I'll pat myself on the head here and say, to my credit, I recognize that finally the feelings were strong enough that they were breaking through my, my hyper analytical approach.

• 36:52Chris Duffy?

  Okay. Another domain where I'd love to hear how you would recommend. How should people get more of a spirit of adventure in their personal life? And I'd actually love for you to give us maybe two answers that may be similar, but different. One is for family. So including like kids and then other is just in your kind of like romantic, like personal life of your connection with another person.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Within the context of family life in general. So again, and I'll bring up this guy, Mark Meldorf Anderson, who's the theorist of play. And I was asking him more or less this question and his answer, which I really liked was he just tries to say yes as much as possible. Kids, I know I mentioned this, this Vont curve, this sweet, sweet spot of like knowing where the world has the most to teach you. And in his view, like kids are the best at tuning into this. They don't yet, they're not yet suppressing that instinct in favor of trying to, well, they're certainly not trying to impress me as far as I can tell. They want to do something like they've gone down the slide already. Now they want to go up the slide. Yes, you can do that. You want to play a game that seems absolutely, you know, nonsensical to me?

• 38:02Speaker 02

  Let's do it. Let's let you be the guide and let's follow your instincts. Now, I will also say in my family life, we've done a bunch of like backcountry traveling because that's, that's what Lauren and I love to do. And so we've taken our kids along on it. And this is not, the kids weren't like, please daddy, I'm two years old. I want to go on a canoe trip where we're, you know, sleeping on a rough stick and, and you know, eating gruel for breakfast. There's a little bit that we're imposing too, but just because a kid says no, or that they don't want to do it, like. If we turned around on every hike where my kids had said, I'm tired, I don't want to do this, we never would have got more than, you know, 30 yards from our front door.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  So the kids are capable of a lot. And so with the right approach, if you're patient and you, you know, not, I'm not advocating like putting them on forced marches, but I'm saying have, have high expectations for them. Don't, don't, don't let the, we all have the voice that says, I don't want to do this. And they don't yet know how to suppress it. If you take some opportunities to take all of you together out of what might be your comfort zone and, and try some things where you don't know what the food is going to be like. You don't know you're going on a longer walk or something. That's super rewarding for them. My kids are still young, so the jury is still out, but I, I hope it sets them up for, for maintaining that attitude through life, for being open to new experiences and new adventures.

• 39:28Chris Duffy?

  I've heard some people talk about type two fun. Have you heard this before?

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:32Chris Duffy?

  Yeah. So like type one fun is fun while you're doing it. And type two fun is it's only fun afterwards, when you think about having done it, but in the moment, it can be kind of excruciating.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  It's a tough balance when you're imposing type two fun on, on a powerless kid. And so we're constantly sort of trying to make sure we're finding the right balance on that and not, and not overdoing it. There's a whole range of experiences that open up if you're willing to go beyond type one fun to, to not only do things, to not only eat ice cream, but to do the things that instantly that, at this particular moment might seem challenging, but boy, it's going to be exciting when you get to the top of the mountain or whatever.

• 40:09Chris Duffy?

  And they build such a sense of pride and accomplishment. Like when I think about my own type two fun experiences, I'm really proud that I did them because I'm like, wow, that was wild, but we got through it. And now I'm feel more connected to the people I did it with and proud of myself. But in the moment, I thought like, why am I wasting my vacation days being uncomfortable? I could have been on a beach reading a book.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  There's definitely times when we've been on vacations asking, why are we doing this? And then we finish it and we're like, yeah, why did we do that? That was really hard. That's, that's what a friend of mine calls type three fun, where it's not fun when you're doing it. And you look back on it and it still wasn't fun, but for some reason you, you do it again. Anyway, there's a, I think that that's maybe where you have a problem, but.

• 40:50Chris Duffy?

  That's great. What about the relationship? How can you bring exploration to relationships?

• 40:54Speaker 02

  Let me actually give the 30, 37% rule. There's a famous problem in math, which is like, It was framed in the 1950s as what's called the secretary problem and apologies for the patriarchal and misogynist language, but basically it's like you're a 1950s businessman, you're interviewing for a secretary, you know, you're going to interview whatever, 100 candidates or whatever, and some of them seem pretty good. How do you decide when you've seen enough and you're gonna just choose to hire someone? If you set up the problem with certain constraints, what you end up with is that you get someone, your second candidate looks pretty good and you just hire them. Well, you don't know, there's 98 other candidates, maybe one of them's just like twice as good. But on the other hand, if you interview all of them, and then you're like, oh, the second candidate was the best one, you go back and it's like, oh, I took another job

• 41:38Speaker 02

  already. So how much do you explore before you just shift to exploit and hire somebody? And the math suggests that you should explore roughly 37% of the available candidates. So you should interview at least 37 people and then hire the next person who's better than anyone you've seen before. And so there is a sort of tongue in cheek school of dating advice that's like, of the available candidates, you should at least explore 37% of who's available. Now, that is obviously ludicrous. I'm not actually giving that advice, but you can translate that advice to, if you're trying to find the balance between exploring and exploiting,

• 42:23Speaker 02

  you should generally, if you're starting in a new area, you should start by explore a period of exploration, because if you don't explore first, you don't know what your options are. And then, just as importantly, you eventually have to shift to what's called in the literature, exploitation. And that's not the, not in the negative sense of the word, but taking advantage of the knowledge that you have. Because if you just keep exploring, then you're 52 years old, still hanging around the college bars looking for dates, and that's not cool. So, this is not really advice for building a relationship, I guess, but it's more advice on like, yeah.

• 42:55Chris Duffy?

  Finding the person.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  How do you know when you've found the one? And that answer is different for everybody.

• 43:00Chris Duffy?

  Reading your book, you talk about how you had this big success of your first book, Endure, and you kind of didn't expect it. And so the obvious thing then was to be like, I'm just gonna keep doing the same thing. Like, that was successful, don't mess with success. And that was pretty unfulfilling as a path for you.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  One of the people I spoke to was this super interesting guy in Denmark named Mark Malmendorf Anderson, who's a theorist of play, which is, this sounds like a pretty awesome job description. So he talks about why we play and what's happening in our brains. And I kept sort of pressing him about, oh yeah, you know, we talked a lot about kids. And I was like, so we need to be telling adults to play more, to get outside, you know, to disconnect from work and to go smoking. And he's like, yeah, yeah, you can do that. But also like, what happens if, you know, a creative and interesting and motivated person is able to play within the context of their work too, like to, to, to explore, to follow what's interesting to them. And he gave me all these examples of like Mozart,

• 44:03Speaker 02

  who was a brilliant composer, but also was a very playful guy, such that he was like writing songs in fake Latin that sounded like dirty words if you were, like if you were not paying attention. So, you know, setting up his singers to actually go up and sing very rude things without realizing it. Anyway, so like exploring, it's not just outside work. And I think it's more an attitude that, that we want to cultivate it in all spheres of our life and not just try and sort of live for the weekend. So, I mean, when people ask why we should explore, there's the sort of, the version of, because it gives you good things. Then there's the version that it's like, because it's fun, because it feels good, because it's engaging, because it's rewarding, because it feels meaningful.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  So a good exploration, it's not just about like the gold pot at the end of the rainbow. It's about like, this is awesome. I'm so happy to be here. This is, this is what I live for.

• 44:57Chris Duffy?

  Alex Hutchinson, it has been an absolute pleasure. I love that you're the first person in our show to say, get lost in a positive, loving way. So thank you for that.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, Chris. This has been a ton of fun.

• 45:08Chris Duffy?

  That is it for this week's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to our guest, Alex Hutchinson. His book is called The Explorer's Gene, and it is fantastic. I can't recommend it more highly. Please get yourself a copy. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and my new book is called Humor Me. You can find out more about my book, my live show dates, and other projects at ChrisDuffyComedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team that summits in Audio Everest every single week. How to make me not sound like a total buffoon. Reporting back from the Acoustical North Pole, we've got Ted's Daniela Bolarezzo, Banban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Chloe, Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Laney Lot, Tensikasun Manivong, Antonio Le, and Joseph DeBryan. Ryan Lash ventured deep into the unknown with this episode's video footage, and the episode was fact-checked

• 45:52Chris Duffy?

  by Matthias Salas, who explores multiple sources for all factual assertions. On the PRX side, they are cutting audio in uncharted territory, pioneering peaks, and eradicating pops. Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez, thanks to you for listening. Please share this episode with someone who you would go on an adventure with. We will be back next week with even more episodes of How to Be a Better Human for you to explore. Until then, thanks for listening and take care.

• 46:28Chris Duffy?

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• 47:14Chris Duffy?

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• 47:53Chris Duffy?

  Donate at N R D C dot org slash human and your gift will be matched five times.

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