How Adventure Changes Who Are You - Alex Hutchinson

Alex Hutchinson is a science journalist, former physicist, and an author. Why are humans wired to explore? We’re naturally drawn to the unknown, but that curiosity can sometimes lead us off course. So how do you design a life that channels exploration and dopamine in the right direction without going too far? Expect to learn why humans are drawn to explore and what the neuroscience behind exploration does to us in, the truth as BS behind dopamine and how to design your life to maximize dopamine, how uncertainty plays into our drive to explore, if curiosity and exploration are the same, the importance of play, what separates the elite athletes compared to the average person in terms of mental capabilities, and much more… - 00:00 Alex’s Interest in Explorers 03:30 Why Humans Are Drawn to Exploring 06:09 Living in an Explored World 09:45 Untold Truths About Dopamine 18:07 The Role of Uncertainty in Exploration 29:08 Why Putting in Effort Brings More Meaning 35:10 How to Stop & Enjoy Life Better 42:55 Importance of Cognitive Exploration 47:41 Does Exercise Actually Help Mental Health? 53:13 The Truth About Zone 2 Cardio & VO2 Max 56:11 How Alex Changed After Studying Exploration 59:03 Advice For People Who Enjoy Certainty 1:04:19 Where to Find Alex - Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Episode forty six to episodes nine hundred and sixteen, something like that.

• 0:07Alex Hutchinson?

  You had to do nine hundred more people before you were ready for this.

• 0:10Chris Williamson?

  Very important. That was the level of tank emptying that I went through, just having a straight up conversation with you. It's really, um, it's great. I was saying before we started, it's really cool to watch the arc of people who you get to collaborate with and how that sort of progresses over time.

• 0:26Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, exactly back at you. I, I was thinking, I've been thinking a lot in the days leading up this interview of like, wow, you know, twenty eighteen, things were very different for both of us. And, and the conversation I had with you in twenty eighteen was such a pleasant surprise. And I'm glad to see that other people thought that your, your interview abilities were, were as good as I did.

• 0:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, we'll see if I can keep you.

• 0:50Alex Hutchinson?

  No pressure, no pressure.

• 0:51Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, so the pleasant uncertainty today abound, we'll see, we'll see what I can achieve. Um, you've got interested in explorers. Why? What, what's interesting about explorers?

• 1:03Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, I mean, what's not interesting about explorers? I, I, yeah. So where did this book start? I mean, since I was like, five years old, I loved the idea of pretending that I was an explorer in the woods discovering things. But really, I think this book started actually around the time we spoke, after my last book came out. I, I wrote a book about endurance in twenty eighteen, and this is not intended as a gratuitous plug for that book, but the, the, the book did well, and it was the culmination of about ten years, let's say, of really focusing in on the science of endurance, really narrowing and narrowing on an ever decreasing specialty. Um, and it did well enough that I was like, hey, cool, I can be the science of endurance guy for the rest of my life. I can coast on, you know,

• 1:46Alex Hutchinson?

  I should start working on endure two, you know, revenge of the science of endurance. And there's a lot of reasons that that would have been a really smart thing to do. But I couldn't shake the feeling that it actually didn't sound that interesting to me. And I got interested in my lack of interest. I wondered, why, why do I have this pull to do something new? And it connected with a lot of other areas in my life. Why, when I go on vacations, do I like to try and get as far away, far off the beaten track as I can? Why am I always pulled to the unknown? And so I decided, actually, I'd kind of like to, to know the answers to those questions. Maybe I'll write about, I'll research that and turn that into my next book.

• 2:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's the difficult second album, especially if you've had some success with what you did first.

• 2:28Alex Hutchinson?

  My editor was very reassuring to me. He kept, he kept telling me, second books are the hardest. Cause this one was a struggle. This one was, uh,

• 2:38Alex Hutchinson?

  it was a year late. Like I'll say, that was, I missed the deadline by a year, which is not something that's usual for me. I'm usually a pretty good deadline hitter. And I really, really struggled because it was, first of all, yeah, there's, I mean, there's expectations, there's living up to previous work. But also this topic is such a big one. When you, so when I say, I'm interested in exploration, it's like, oh, you mean Christopher Columbus or whatever? And I'm like, yes, and, and, you know, when you go to a restaurant, do you order the same thing? Or do you try something new? And on your career path and in your dating life and all these other things. So I suddenly realized that I was basically writing about the world. And so I could have, you know, I could have, the topic, the more threads I pulled, the bigger the topic got. And eventually,

• 3:21Alex Hutchinson?

  bless my editor, he found, I was like, yeah, I think I can get you something by April. And he's like, no, I'm going to need it by February 15th. I was like, oh, thank God he gave me a deadline.

• 3:28Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Okay. Why are humans drawn to explore then? What, what is it that's in us that causes this to happen?

• 3:35Alex Hutchinson?

  Well, there's, there's two ways we can answer that question. One reason is we explore because it leads to good things. If you're, uh, if you're not just staying in the same sphere, if you're branching out, looking, trying to figure out what's over the horizon, you will eventually discover better things and you will have better restaurant meals and a better career, and you will find a better place to live and blah, blah, blah. So a very sort of utilitarian, exploring leads to good things. The other way of answering it is exploring feels good. It's like, it's exciting to go somewhere new, to discover something you haven't encountered before. And those two things go together, right? Like, the reason exploring feels good is because on an evolutionary level, it led to good things. So it's in the same way that sugar is sweet and it leads us to seek calories.

• 4:20Alex Hutchinson?

  Exploring feels good and that leads us to expand our world and discover better ways of doing things. Those two things, kind of, in the same way that just because sugar is sweet doesn't mean we should always pursue the taste of sugar, doesn't mean that we should always pursue novelty now. That scrolling through social media doesn't necessarily, it taps into that. That circuitry, that desire for new things, it maybe doesn't teach us about the world. But ultimately, exploring is good because it teaches us about the world and it's very satisfying. It's a route to meaning, I think.

• 4:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the sort of adaptive reason for why humans need to explore. And I imagine as well that there's a big distribution when it comes to how exploratory people want to be, because it wouldn't work for an entire tribe to just be full of people that want to climb up that hill over there. You need some people that are going to stay behind. You go, you can go up the hill. I'm going to make sure that we don't all die.

• 5:14Alex Hutchinson?

  That's exactly right. Genetists call this frequency-dependent selection. And it's like, there are, if you look at human height, we've all kind of converged to a pretty similar range. There's a good height to be for a human. But if you look at things like introversion and extroversion, or aggressiveness and things like that, it's actually good to have a big mix of characteristics. You need some people with some characteristics and others with others. So exploring is absolutely one of those where, and you can see this, and there's this really neat data in, for example, in hunter-gatherers, where the more exploratory people, they thrive when they're hunting and gathering. And the more sort of, I'm going to stay back and I'm going to consolidate what we know,

• 5:57Alex Hutchinson?

  they do well when they're in, for agriculture, you know, they tend to be better. So it's like, in any one society, you need people who are pushing the boundaries, but you also need people who are keeping the fires burning at home.

• 6:08Chris Williamson?

  Does that suggest, as more of the world has been explored, that the world is now owned by the people who aren't explorers?

• 6:17Alex Hutchinson?

  Well, I think a good example of that would be something like ADHD, which maybe this is something we'll get into, but there's a gene that's linked to the desire to explore, which is also linked to ADHD. And so we might say that gene was awesome 50,000 years ago, when we were hunter gatherers and the world was unexplored and we were trying to figure out how things worked and where we could go. That gene is a pain in the neck if you're a nine-year-old boy sitting in school being told, yeah, please sit still for the next 10 hours. So there are certainly ways that in the modern world, being a born explorer is like being, you know, a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. There's still lots of scope, I would argue.

• 7:00Alex Hutchinson?

  One of the things that I end up sort of, one of the conclusions that I came away with that I, that makes me feel good, is that actually there's still lots of scope for exploration in the world, even though there's no continents to discover, there's a lot of ways that we can explore. So I think it's a matter of finding a way to harness your, your inclination, whether that's to, to be really exploratory or maybe less so.

• 7:21Chris Williamson?

  All right. Talk to me about the genetics of exploration then.

• 7:24Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, so genetics is obviously, it's, it's a, a fraught topic, right? So I want to be-

• 7:30Chris Williamson?

  Not here, not here, Alex. You're amongst safe friends here. We've all taken the behavioral genetics red pill.

• 7:35Alex Hutchinson?

  Nobody's going to hear this except you and me, right? So this is okay.

• 7:38Chris Williamson?

  Precisely correct.

• 7:38Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. So about 50,000 years ago, humans started to spread out across the globe. So there are various humans and human ancestors and various species that had come and gone and bounced around in Africa, Europe, Asia for hundreds of thousands of years. But about 50,000 years ago, things got serious. And all of a sudden, humans started to spread everywhere, to every habitable spot on the globe, literally. So they're, they're making it to Easter Island, they're making it to the southern tip of South America, they're making it to the Arctic.

• 8:10Alex Hutchinson?

  Another thing that happened about fifty thousand years ago is that there was a random genetic mutation to a dopamine receptor in our brains. So a receptor called DRD4 that basically for the people who got this mutation, it it amped up their sensitivity to dopamine such that they got a bigger kick out of discovering something new or unexpected of finding, you know, finding novelty. And it's what's very interesting. What one of the nuggets of science that got me interested in this topic that that told me there's something more to say other than just like, hey, it's nice to discover new things. Is that if you look at populations around the world and you trace how far they've had to migrate,

• 8:52Alex Hutchinson?

  they had to migrate to get to their current location over the sort of tens of thousands of years since they they left Africa.

• 9:01Alex Hutchinson?

  The farther that population had to migrate, the higher the proportion of the explorer's version of this DRD4 gene, the one that makes people seek and like novelty. And so at the southern tip of South America, you've got populations that are have, you know, eighty percent of them have this explorer's gene. And, you know, in parts of Europe, you've got places where people have, you know, ten or twenty percent have the explorer's version of the gene. So this doesn't mean that everybody in South America explores and nobody in Europe does. But it's it's it's a it's a sign that this behavior is wired into us somehow because we all have the DRD4 gene. So we all have the same reward circuitry that makes us sensitive or attracted to novelty. It's just some people have a higher, a bigger helping in it than others.

• 9:44Chris Williamson?

  So I did a huge DNA analysis at the back end of last year and I've run, I knew that I was going to speak to you today, so I asked ChatGPT to go through my DNA report. Yes, you have a variant of the DRD4 dopamine receptor D4 gene. Your specific result is CA for the DRD4 C8887A variant. If you had two copies, AA of this variant, you would be more likely to respond to stimulants due to lower baseline dopamine activity. Since you have one copy, CA, you are less likely to respond to stimulants.

• 10:13Alex Hutchinson?

  Interesting. So and you can you can wrap. So dopamine is super complicated, right? Like it it affects our lives in many, many different ways. But you can think into of novelty and, you know, drugs, for example. So here's the thing with here's one way of thinking about dopamine is that it doesn't, you don't get a hit of dopamine when something is good. You get a hit when something is better than expected. So that's part of the reason why it drives us to explore, because if you go in a place where you don't know what to expect, that's a great way to to find something that exceeds your expectations. But it also, it's the same kind of thing that drives actually addictive behavior. You take a drug for the first time, it's whoa, it's better than you expected.

• 10:56Alex Hutchinson?

  You want to do that again. You take it for the 10th time, you know exactly what to expect. So there's no more prediction error. You don't get the dopamine hit. The only way to do that is to amp up the dose to to get more, because then you can surprise yourself. So there's a connection between a lot of risk-seeking behaviors and a lot of addictive behaviors, gambling behaviors. So exploring is great, but it's it's it's a

• 11:20Alex Hutchinson?

  this this drive can be harnessed in productive ways. It can also lead us down some some less productive ways, let's say.

• 11:28Chris Williamson?

  What's the truth and the BS behind dopamine that you've learned?

• 11:33Alex Hutchinson?

  I think the biggest misconception, let's say, about dopamine is that it's like the pleasure chemical, that it's it's what you get when you feel feel good. In fact, this has been known for 20 to 30 years that it's actually, you don't get a hit of dopamine, again, when something is good. You get it something when it's better than expected. So it's about expectation. So it's about wanting something more than having it. When the the pleasure of having something, that's like endogenous morphine, basically, endorphins. The pleasure of wanting something, dopamine's related to that. But it also, like, the brain repurposes the same channels for different communication. So every time I I'll be honest, I I had hoped to have the definitive theory of dopamine, like, people, I'm going to tell

• 12:16Alex Hutchinson?

  you what dopamine does. Here it is. Here's the truth. Here's the myth. And I don't, my impression after spending an awful lot of time talking to scientists and reading the papers, is that even scientists aren't entirely sure the the full story of dopamine right now. So so the the message I would hope people will take away is it's not just the pleasure chemical and that the dopamine fasting idea, you know, the idea that, oh, we get too much dopamine in in society today.

• 12:45Alex Hutchinson?

  It's one of those things where I think the scientific underpinnings of that are not solid. It doesn't mean I think the advice is bad to actually try and, you know, maybe not always, you know, be the rat pressing the button saying, give me more, give me more, give me more. But, uh, but dopamine is, is a lot harder to pin down than that.

• 13:05Chris Williamson?

  How do you, or how can people design their lives so that they use dopamine more effectively? Or so that they can get more dopamine without having to do something insanely extreme or get addicted to meth?

• 13:18Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, which is, which is always a good plan. Um, I think I would go back to that distinction I made before between exploring can lead you to learn about the world and exploring can make you feel good. And I would say the dopamine part, like, I think when we talk about dopamine, we're using it as a shorthand for saying, let's do the things that give us a rush that feel good. And often that's mediated by dopamine. I think it's worth being thoughtful about, is this good feeling? Does it, does it align with also teaching me about the world or teaching me about myself, taking me in somewhere that's worth going? Um, or is this just empty

• 14:03Alex Hutchinson?

  calories? Is the, is this the equivalent of just tearing open sugar packets and pouring them down my throat? Or am I eating an apple, which is giving me some nice sugar, but it's also giving me a bunch of other things that are useful. So I, I, I know it's, it's easy to beat up on, you know, like TikTok or whatever, um, and say, oh, we're just wasting our lives with, or even technology in general, right? The, the last 20 years, we can say, oh, modern technology is, is rotting our brains. And I don't think that's, that's true or fair. But I think there are times when I sit scrolling the internet where I really am just sitting there like the rat pressing the button, saying, give me something else that surprises me. Give me something else that's interesting. That's, give me something else that outrages me.

• 14:45Alex Hutchinson?

  And when I do that, I'm tapping into my exploring circuitry. I mean, I'm tapping into my dopamine circuitry. But I'm generally not like, I don't finish. And I'm like, wow, I'm a better person than I was, you know, six hours ago when I sat down in the chair. So there are other ways of exploring, be it reading a book or even on the internet, seeking out deliberately something where you're like, I'm going to learn something. I'm going to tune into Chris's show and I'm going to, you know, hear a great conversation with that nice Alex guy. Um, you know, or what, you know, like I'm joking here, but

• 15:17Alex Hutchinson?

  it's not that we don't want to get those hits. It's just that it's great if they also are leading us in a way that that is worthwhile, too. Can people become too addicted to dopamine? Is that something that you've seen? You know, there's a really interesting book by Anna Lempke, Dopamine Nation, which really gets into the addictive elements of dopamine. And I, it's a little embarrassing when I'm thinking of like, what are the examples I remember from the books? There were a lot of examples of people who are like addicted to masturbating. And I just remember like, whoa, that's a rough, that's a rough road to travel. I mean, how uncomfortable is that going to be after a while? Um, so yeah, I think you can. And I think at least Anna

• 15:59Alex Hutchinson?

  Lempke makes a pretty compelling case that this is really a case of being addicted to dopamine. I think addiction is, it's a word that, that it carries a lot of weight and sometimes gets like, so look, I'm a, I'm a runner, right? And so there's a lot of discussions about is running addictive? Do people get addicted to running? Do those people who have to get up every morning and go for their run, are they addicted to the endorphins or the endocannabinoids or whatever it is? And it's like, well, do they feel worse if they don't go for run? Yeah, they feel worse if they don't go for run. Uh, so in some neurochem, you know, in some neurochemical sense, you could say they're addicted to it. When you, if you talk to like psychologists about the definition of addiction, there's other criteria, like, is it interfering with their life? Like, are they neglecting their family? Are

• 16:42Alex Hutchinson?

  there are kids sitting at home saying, I wish I could have breakfast, but mommy had to go for a three hour run? If that's the case, then that's an addiction that's having a negative effect. And that's what we usually mean by addiction, not just that it's something that we like doing every day. It's like, I'm addicted to having breakfast. It's like, well, I need to have breakfast, but it's not like a problem in my life. And so with dopamine, it's like, yeah, there are people who are masturbating nine times a day, apparently. So I read in this, this book, and that's probably not good. Most of us, I think it's more just like, we may get in these loops and these cycles where we're You know, I certainly know this feeling of like, oh, where did that hour go? I just sat here on social media and I don't, you know, I had things I needed to do and that was not optimal. But I wouldn't say like I'm addicted to it or anything like that.

• 17:27Alex Hutchinson?

  It's just a suboptimal use of time.

• 17:29Chris Williamson?

  Is there some link between dopamine and our sense of the passage of time?

• 17:34Alex Hutchinson?

  That's interesting. I think I don't actually know the, I will confess that I, that that's not a, that's not a topic. I mean, the passage of time is, is a super interesting topic with like effort. And I know that when, the harder you run, for example, the more time slows down. And they've done careful studies on that. I, I would imagine dopamine might play a role in that, but I think there's also like probably other neurotransmitters, but also just the psychological perception. But yeah, like it's, there's definitely a time warp when you, when you're sitting at the internet and all of a sudden you're like, what the hell, how did that, how did that happen?

• 18:07Chris Williamson?

  All right, talk to me about uncertainty. What's the role that uncertainty plays?

• 18:11Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, I think, so if we're trying to like define exploring, there are a few elements, uh, you know, that, that, the, and I think that the first and foremost one is the outcome of what you're choosing to do has to be uncertain. And, you know, maybe you could also argue there needs to be struggle and some other elements like that. But the uncertainty is really at the core of what we're talking about.

• 18:35Alex Hutchinson?

  Not, not knowing what's going to happen. It's, it's not even just like, should I take the 50 50 bet or the 30 70 bet? It's like, I don't even know what the odds are. I don't know, I don't know what's going to happen if I go in this direction. But the only way I'm going to find out is by taking, you know, taking the path to the right that I don't know where it leads. And you, you can argue on, in a number of different ways, including with like neuroscience, that we're wired to pursue uncertainty, to like uncertainty, to, you know, and you could, there's data sets on like, how people order food from Deliveroo, like the, the food delivery company.

• 19:17Alex Hutchinson?

  The Harvard scientists analyzed 1.6 million orders to figure out like, how do we decide when, which, what we want? And one of the insights was that. All else being equal, we tend to, like, if the ratings are equal, if the price is equal, we tend to have a bias toward things we know less about, both in the sense that if I've never tried this before, I want to try it. But also, we look at two restaurants, they're the same, one has a hundred ratings and the other has ten ratings, even if they both are four-star restaurants. It's like, I'll go for the one that's only been rated ten times because I know less about it. So uncertainty is attractive to us in an intrinsic way. And the key point is that it's not that we love not knowing stuff, it's that we love knowing

• 20:00Alex Hutchinson?

  stuff. And by being attracted to uncertainty, it draws us to the best possible ways of learning about the world. Because that's where, if you stick with the stuff you know, you don't learn anything new.

• 20:11Chris Williamson?

  Presumably, there has to be a sweet spot, though. Too much uncertainty would just feel like chaos.

• 20:15Alex Hutchinson?

  Absolutely. And so, in some of the papers, they call it the, I'm not even sure how to pronounce this, I'm gonna go with the Wunsch curve, although I think in Vienna, they would probably say the Wunsch curve. There's a famous German psychologist, pioneer German psychologist, psychologist in the 1800s named Wilhelm Wunsch. And he proposed this idea, this sort of stimulus-response curve, that's a very general phenomenon, where it's like, for any given stimulus, if it's weak, we don't really find it very interesting. As it gets stronger, we find it more and more compelling. But if it gets too strong, understandably, we're like, yeah, we don't like that anymore. And so, for uncertainty, there's a lot of evidence that this is the case, even with like, you could take like, eight-month-old babies and show them like, patterns of toys coming

• 21:00Alex Hutchinson?

  out of a box, or whatever. And if it's super predictable, it's always the same toy, they're like, ah, boring. And you can track their gaze to see if they're interested in. And if it's super unpredictable, it's like, always something different, they find that boring. But if there's some sort of regularity, it's not predictable, but it's not crazy, and you sort of feel like you could figure out the pattern, that's what we tend to find interesting. And that's what this Wunsch curve is about, that's like an upside-down U. You want to be in that sweet spot, where it's like, I don't know what's gonna happen next. But it's not just gibberish. It's like, you know, this applies to music, for example, they've done analyses. It's like, if music is super predictable, this is why, you know, after the age of ten, we don't find Mary Had A Little Lamb that interesting. If it's super predictable, we don't find it all that compelling. But if it's just random tones...

• 21:43Alex Hutchinson?

  We don't find that compelling either. There's a sweet spot, but that sweet spot depends on our experience too. So if you spend a lot of time listening to music or playing music or studying music, you start to prefer more and more complex and less predictable music because you're getting better at predicting what comes next.

• 21:57Chris Williamson?

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• 22:40Chris Williamson?

  join for free, pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 4.0 strap, plus you get your first month for free, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it, after 29 days, I'll just give you your money back. You can get the brand new Whoop 4.0 and that 30-day free trial by going to the link in the description below, or heading to join.whoop.com/ModernWisdom. That's join.whoop.com/ModernWisdom. I remember learning about a study that was done showing the faces of different sheep, newborn babies. Have you seen this one?

• 23:14Alex Hutchinson?

  No, I'm like, where is this going?

• 23:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you were to show me a you, 10, 15 sheep,

• 23:24Chris Williamson?

  unless they were very obviously different, we'd probably go, yeah, that could have been the same one over and over again. It seems that infants have the ability to discern between different animals, and that this is a cognitive process that kind of drops away, like our ability to move our ears. I think that all humans have the ability to move their ears a little bit, but again, the muscles sort of atrophy a little bit. Yeah, no, not with your fingers. You can move them manually yourself.

• 23:49Alex Hutchinson?

  I'm trying to do it right now. I just feel like I feel like an idiot.

• 23:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's not working. And after you get to a certain age, I don't know what the threshold is. Maybe it's sort of eight months, maybe it's a year and a half, something like that. This ability to be able to discern between different sheep or different cows or something, it sort of falls away. And it kind of makes me think about this too, that you have

• 24:13Chris Williamson?

  If if we can't discern between different sheep, even if they are different, the level of uncertainty doesn't cross a threshold, even though there is uncertainty there, it's that we're not able to detect it and that it needs to be above a particular threshold for us to go, huh, yeah, different sheep, that'd be interesting.

• 24:29Alex Hutchinson?

  And what's it's really interesting that this is something that that kids can tune into because I think one of the themes in the research that I was looking at is like, kids are really good explorers and part of that is that they're able to follow their own instinct. I mean, they don't, they have no other guidance. They don't know what they're supposed to be interested in, so they look at what interests them. And and so they are very sensitive, kids seem to be very sensitive to this intermediate level of uncertainty. As I said, you know, eight months old or whatever, they're able to tune into what is a fairly subtle difference in the in the sort of predictability of patterns.

• 25:11Alex Hutchinson?

  And as we get older, a lot of things happen. So I don't know whether it's like we lose that ability or we just get taught like, no, this is what you need to be doing between the hours of 10 and 12 on Tuesdays or whatever. And so we're, we're, we're following for reasons that are sometimes good, we're, we're, we're following patterns that are laid out for us by society and we maybe get less good at understanding what's interesting to us intrinsically. And the, the, the problem is that what's interesting to us intrinsically is the best signal we have of that intermediate level of uncertainty of this is where we can learn about the world. But so, you know, when I,

• 25:53Alex Hutchinson?

  you know, I have this general feeling that we should quote unquote, try to explore more like children. It's hard to articulate what that means, but part of it, I think, is trying to tap back into that. Innate sensation of understanding what you what you find interesting or curious or inexplicable like huh, why did that happen? I I'd like to know, I'd like to follow that up as opposed to just following someone else's curriculum or following what the algorithm algorithm is suggesting to you might be interesting.

• 26:23Chris Williamson?

  Well, reducing down predictability is going to help, but a lot of people get locked into their routines. I often think about this sort of tension between the enjoyment of serendipity and uncertainty and the, you know, reduction in the speed of the passage of time when things are novel and intense. And then also on the other side, the thing that everybody's trying to do, which is be optimal. And by optimal, what you mean is refine down all of the degrees of freedom to a point where you know the best path through a regularly traversed terrain. Like this is a situation that I come up against typically. It's the morning, it's going to work. What's the best route to go to work? Well, actually, you don't want to go past that set of traffic lights because if I hit it wrong and I try to go right, it takes ages. Google Maps doesn't even account for that.

• 27:08Chris Williamson?

  So I'm going to take this route and I'm going to work around it. So you end up with all of the degrees of freedom, just like collapsing in on a very small number of very effective, very efficient, but largely un-novel and un-stimulating and un-uncertain or very certain pathways through life. And yeah, I guess that's the sort of perennial curse of the optimizer, that you end up with a uninspiring but quite efficient existence.

• 27:38Alex Hutchinson?

  I think this is one of the like great tensions of modern life that we're, I mean, it's and it's it's a it's a one of the processes of adulthood and growing older is that we become more and more efficient. We know what we like, we know what we don't like, we know what works, we know what doesn't work. And so we converge on this ever narrow narrowing set of options. And there's, you know, there's a big. Movement or a big literature on habits and how to form better habits. And there's a lot of good reasons for that. I'm a big habit guy myself, but the fact is habits are the antithesis of exploration. And you know, you mentioned commuting and that's a great example.

• 28:17Alex Hutchinson?

  There was a two day strike on the London Underground in, I think it was 2014. And it was an optional strike. So workers could show up or not show up, which meant that some stations were open and some weren't, depending on how many people showed up at a given station. So for two days, people had to kind of, they could still take the tube, but they had to adapt and say, oh, my station isn't open or my destination station isn't open. I have to find a different route or get off at a different place. So this is taking the, as you said, the epitome of an optimized habit. You follow this commuting pattern twice a day, every day of your working life. You know how to get to work. But what they found in a big, they analyzed the Oyster Card data and they found that

• 29:00Alex Hutchinson?

  of the most hyper regular commuters, the people who always took the same route every workday, after the two day strike, about 5% of them adopted a completely different commuting pattern. And basically they'd realized, oh, actually if I get off one stop earlier, I can, you know, do it, it's a five minute walk instead of a 10 minute bus ride.

• 29:20Chris Williamson?

  Coffee shop that I like.

• 29:21Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, or it's a, you know, it's a beautiful, I could take the boat along the canal and it's lovely. And so the point is that even repetition, repetition doesn't guarantee that you find the best, the optimal solution. And that even doesn't account for the fact that, hey, maybe it's nice to just change up your routine sometimes. But it's like, even if you're an optimizer, even if you're like, I want the best,

• 29:46Alex Hutchinson?

  habit doesn't always get you there. Sometimes you need, you need, you don't want to explore every morning. Like you don't want to wake up for work and say, all right, I'm going to invent a new way of tying my shoes and then I'm going to decide which parts of my body to cover with clothing. And then I'm going to try and figure out a completely different way to get to work because you're going to be late for work every morning. But having some exploration, not getting totally calcified into your routines, I think,

• 30:11Alex Hutchinson?

  again, going to go back to this theme, it's both fun and it can lead to better outcomes.

• 30:16Chris Williamson?

  What about effort? Talk to me about the effort paradox.

• 30:20Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, so this is the downside of exploring itself. Or this might seem like the downside of exploring is that it is hard. Let's say you decide that you want to find a new way to work.

• 30:31Alex Hutchinson?

  The most likely scenario is that you're going to get lost or you're going to take longer. It's going to suck. That's, I mean, there's a reason you're taking the routes you have been taking. So, and that's true, I think, in general of any exploratory choice. Going back to what we said before, it's by definition, the outcome is uncertain. And in most cases, on average, it's actually going to be worse than what you already know. So like ordering in a restaurant, if you, if you know what dish you like in that such and such a restaurant, and then you decide, uh, maybe I should try the, the, you know, the meatloaf or whatever. Chances are it's going to be worse than what you already know you like. And so that seems like exploring sucks. It's, it just brings you negative outcomes. Now, in the long term, by exploring, you can discover things that work out to be better.

• 31:14Alex Hutchinson?

  But there's another angle, which is that actually doing things that are challenging that, that involve some struggle, getting lost now and then, can actually be extremely satisfying. And so there's this idea of the effort paradox in psychology, which is that sometimes the harder we have to work at something, the more we like it. And whether that's, you know, running a marathon or whatever, people don't run a marathon because it's easy. They run it because it's hard. Like sometimes you may start, I want to get in shape, so I'm going to start running. But people who run more than one marathon, they're, they're actually, they're attracted to the difficulty of it. And you know, you can extend that to like buying furniture at Ikea.

• 31:54Alex Hutchinson?

  You can probably get a similar piece of furniture pre-assembled. But people have done studies of what's called the Ikea effect, that if you've had to struggle with those, you know, pictographic instructions and figure out how that Allen key works and all that stuff. You put the coffee table together, you end up valuing that coffee table more highly than if you've got the exact same coffee table just delivered to your door pre-assembled. So there's something in us that values effort. What that is, is, uh, it's hard to pin down, but there's, there are a few studies that have been emerging in the last couple of years, suggesting that putting in effort can, is a, is a source of meaning. People, people can't define the meaning of life, but they can tell you when something feels meaningful. And doing hard things tends to feel meaningful.

• 32:36Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether that plays into relationships. Sometimes the classic, I only want them if they don't want me dynamic.

• 32:43Alex Hutchinson?

  Oh, man, that's an interesting, uh, an interesting proposition, or the, you know, the stormy relationships where it seems like you're having to work at it at all times. I mean, I think there's probably a little bit there that relationships that are too easy tend to get. You know, I don't want to tar and paper people's or, you know, be negative about relationships. But if it's just totally without strife, without any tension, then it maybe feels a little boring. And you feel like

• 33:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, it doesn't even need to be tension or strife, right? Effort, you know, if it's just always there. And I mean, look, I, peace is the most important thing in my life. So for me, the more peaceful, the better. But even within that, you don't want something to be, again, so predictable, no uncertainty, no intrigue. So with this uncertainty and effort sort of dynamic that's going on, how do you advise people to better embrace struggle?

• 33:38Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing to, to, to, is to just to recognize that just because something is hard, doesn't mean it should be shied away from it. In fact, some, you know, it's like with, with a hat tip to Michael Easter, who's, who's, uh, who's email list is called 2% because that's the percent of people who take the stairs when there's both the stairs and an escalator available. It's like you look at the stairs and you look at the escalator. It seems obvious that going up the stairs or going up the escalator is going to be a more pleasant and better experience. But when you take the stairs, I, I, you know, I don't think it's just me.

• 34:20Alex Hutchinson?

  It's like, it's, it's, it's much more satisfying to have put in a little effort and recognizing that putting in effort is going to lead you to feel good is, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't make the effort go away, but it helps you reframe it as something that's positive, not negative. This is an opportunity for me to put in effort, which is going to make me feel good as opposed to I'm obliged to take on something hard.

• 34:43Chris Williamson?

  Can that, tying that back to your first book, can that help us with resilience, endurance, suffering, hard times?

• 34:53Alex Hutchinson?

  I mean, I think it's, it's almost a precondition that if you're trying to push yourself, if you're trying to handle difficult times. If you view every negative feeling as a sort of disaster, as something that is as a negative, then it's just a miserable experience and you're going to be inclined to quit earlier. And if you can reframe that and just, and it's in the same way that, one of the things I talked about in Endure is the power of your inner monologue, right? Like, if you're running a marathon and you're telling yourself, this is so hard, there's no way I can do this, I better, I'm going to drop out. That becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because your ability to continue depends in part on what your brain believes

• 35:37Alex Hutchinson?

  about your ability to continue. And if you can turn that around to, I can do this, this is, you know, I've trained for this, it's, I know it's hard, it's supposed to be hard, everybody else around me is feeling it the same way, this is part of the experience, then that becomes a performance enhancing frame of mind. And so I think recognizing that effort can be, it doesn't mean that, it doesn't make it easy, it doesn't change how hard it is, but recognizing that it's not a symbol, a signal that you're doing something wrong and that it actually can be something good, I think that that helps you endure it for longer. You're less likely to quit on things.

• 36:18Chris Williamson?

  Have you thought about how people can avoid seeing all of life instrumentally? If, if everything is done in service of what you get out of it in the future, you actually end up spending all of your days, delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification. It's like winning the marshmallow test over and over again, every single day, but never cashing it out.

• 36:42Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, you've, you've touched on one of the, one of the big dilemmas and something that I really struggled with and that evolved as I was writing this book in my mind. When I started thinking about exploring, I thought, I'm going to write a book and the subtitle is going to be something along the lines of, you know, the case for why we should explore more, or the case for more exploring. But as I got into it, I, I started to have the thoughts that you've just expressed of like, oh, wait, like, it's like, think of listening to music, for example, it's like, most people tend to You find the music you love when you're young, when you're in your teens and twenties. And then most people tend to listen to less and less new music as as time goes on.

• 37:25Alex Hutchinson?

  And there's, there's, you know, it's not totally irrational because you've you've spent some time exploring. Now you know what you like. So, but you might say, that's a, that's a shame. We should explore more. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna fall victim to this narrowing of my taste. I'm gonna keep exploring new music. And I think that's great. But if you were to take that to extreme and say, in fact, I'm never gonna listen to the same song twice. Because exploring is what it's about. Then it's that we can see on, that's absurd on the face of it, right? Because but it's, that's, that's the, the, the perspective of like, always keep exploring, always keep looking to the future. And never stop and like, I really love this song. I'm gonna listen to it 17 times in a row on repeat, even if my, my wife kills me. So you do have to stop and enjoy it. I think that's a really.

• 38:09Alex Hutchinson?

  It, it, so in a, in a sense, there's this idea in decision science called the explore exploit dilemma. And it is a dilemma. It's not like explore exploit, you should always explore. Whenever you come to the fork in the road, takes the road less traveled. It's you've got to think about, maybe now's the time to exploit, to, to take the music that I just discovered and, and sit down and listen to it. Or to, to, to figure out what I, I, you know, or maybe it's not, maybe, maybe this is a good time to explore. But it's not, it's a lot less obvious than I thought it was for precisely, precisely the reasons you said that, yeah. If you never stop and enjoy what you got, then I'm not sure that the exploring is super satisfying.

• 38:51Chris Williamson?

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• 39:36Chris Williamson?

  Right now, you can get $350 off the Pod4Ultra by going to the link in the description below, or heading to eightsleep.com/ModernWisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's e-i-g-h-t sleep.com/ModernWisdom and Modern Wisdom at checkout. How can people better navigate that explore exploit trade off?

• 39:56Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, so I went down a big rabbit hole on this. I was like, I'm, I'm a, I come from a physics background. I'm a quantitative guy. I want the formula that will tell me when to explore exploit. And, you know, I guess I apologize for, for chapter five in my book, which, which kind of follows that, tries to, tries to follow that rabbit hole because there is a ton of like, attempts to produce a formula. And it turns out the math is, in any real world context, the math is, is ridiculous and it becomes very hard to follow. But there are some big principles that I think that come out of the math, but that also are practical in a, in a, in a like, day to day scenario. So,

• 40:39Alex Hutchinson?

  one, one concept is this, is the idea of an uncertainty bonus that, and this, we, we kind of do this intuitively, but it, I think it helps to think of it in terms of it consciously. And this is when you're considering a decision, you don't automatically opt for the one you know less about or the, the, the unexplored road. But the less you know about an option, that you, you give a, a bonus that's proportional to how little you know about it. So you say, all else being equal, I'm going to take the one that's, that I know less about. So, so that, that kind of helps to make sure you're, you're, you're not getting too calcified into that sort of set of habits that you're talking about. It's not, it's not the only factor you consider, but it's like,

• 41:21Alex Hutchinson?

  I'm going to add a bonus if it's going to teach me something new or take me down a fresh path. And then the one other.

• 41:29Alex Hutchinson?

  Kind of heuristic that I think is useful. This is a sort of approximate way of solving this explore exploit dilemma. It's something called the upper confidence bound algorithm. And that's the math version. And the way they translate that into regular language is optimism in the face of uncertainty. That you should be optimistic about the choices you make. And what that means in practice is that if you're choosing between options, you should take the scenario with the best case or the best realistic upside or the best realistic, best case scenario. So realistic is in there because it's like, I'm not saying buy a lottery ticket

• 42:11Alex Hutchinson?

  because its best case scenario is you're a millionaire because that's unlikely to happen. But for scenarios that are realistic, it pays to be optimistic. So an example I guess would be you're considering different job possibilities. One has a higher starting salary and is stable. And so that's, that's a real positive. The other may be less money, a little less stable, but it has a pathway towards your dream job. It has a pathway to what you actually really want to be doing in the long term. It's, it's all else being equal, it's probably worth taking a shot on that. Because that's the, the optimism in the face of uncertainty. That I don't know how things are going to turn out. But that's the, that's the being optimistic.

• 42:55Alex Hutchinson?

  If things do turn out, that's the one that'll make me happiest. And what the math shows is if you, individual decisions, all bets are off. It might turn out well, it might turn out poorly. But in the long term, if you're optimistic in the face of uncertainty, this will minimize your regret. This will minimize you looking back and saying, I wish I had done that. So I think that makes intuitive sense as well as mathematical sense. It's like, you don't look back and say, you're more likely to look back and say, I wish I had asked that person to dance than I really regret asking that person to dance and they said no.

• 43:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, dig into regret minimization a bit more for me.

• 43:30Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, I wasn't sure how, how, how mathematical to get. Regret in the mathematical sense is it's the difference between what outcome you got and the best you could have gotten if you'd magically made all the right choices. Nobody has a crystal ball, so nobody can make all the right choices all the time. So, but regret is like. Often, you can, you can think of these sort of decision trees as gambling games. In reality, you know, we may be talking about careers or dating decisions, but it's like, I bet $5 on this, I bet $10 on that, which, which, you know, which machine should I have bet on? And maybe the best you could have done in a series of 10 bets is getting $100. And if you get, if you made a series of bets and ended up with $70, your regret is $30.

• 44:17Alex Hutchinson?

  So that's the mathematical way of thinking about it. And because nobody is perfect, nobody has clairvoyance, regret always increases, which is kind of a depressing thing to say, but there's no way of going through life without accumulating some regrets of thinking, I kind of wish I had asked her to dance, not the other one. We accumulate regret, but so the goal is not to eliminate regret because that's impossible, but to minimize regret. And the math shows that this kind of optimism in the face of uncertainty is one way of guaranteeing that over the long term, your regret will, will increase as slowly as is realistically possible unless you find the magic genie with the three wishes.

• 44:58Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yeah, very.

• 45:00Alex Hutchinson?

  Which I'm looking for. Yeah, you know, like.

• 45:02Chris Williamson?

  That would be nice. So, you know, it's sort of, I guess, talked about environmental lifestyle, sort of external exploration. What have you come to learn about cognitive exploration? Thinking patterns are seeking of new behaviors, are seeking of new information, algorithms, modern world, stuff like that?

• 45:25Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. So, you know, when I initially started on this topic, I was like, I'm interested in exploring, I think it's more than just about like the way I take my vacations or whatever. I think it's also about ideas, but it's like, it's an analogy. It's a metaphor. And what I was really surprised to discover is that, actually, no, in your brains, it's like the same thing. When you're wandering through a town that you've never been to before, you are mapping it in your hippocampus. So you're forming cognitive maps, like literally there are individual neurons that will light up when you go to a specific point on that map. There are, and there are other neurons that will keep track of what direction you're facing and how close you are to the borders of that town. You're, you're building maps in your brain.

• 46:08Alex Hutchinson?

  There's a famous study about London cab drivers that their hippocampuses are enlarged. That's why, because they are mapping a very complicated city. So their hippocampuses actually have to get physically bigger. So it turns out that the hippocampus isn't just a place for mapping landscapes. It's a place for mapping ideas too. And we keep track of ideas. And so this ideas that are close to each other or far away from each other. This is physically manifested in the brain. And so, you know, one example is we keep track of our social networks in the hippocampus. And so you can think of like, we know people. We have some sense of like hierarchy. Are they more powerful than us than less power or less powerful than us? And how well do we know them?

• 46:53Alex Hutchinson?

  Like, are they close to us? And so that's a two dimensional map. And people literally map their social networks in this, in their hippocampus in this two dimensional way. So all of this is to say that when we talk about different ways of exploring, exploring and exploiting. These really, this is, this is intimately tied to creativity and coming up with new ideas, expanding our cognitive maps of ideas. And so there's a bunch of, there are a bunch of interesting findings that, that, that fall out of that about how we should mix exploring and exploiting to come up with better ideas.

• 47:29Chris Williamson?

  Is, in this context, is exploration and curiosity the same thing? Similar thing, related?

• 47:36Alex Hutchinson?

  I think they're very, very closely related. Curiosity is, is a name for the drive that compels us to explore, I would say. And, you know, I'm not a dictionary guy, but, but that's, that's how I would classify them. And so I think curiosity, um, yeah, a lot of the same discussion applies. And exploration is what you actually end up doing once, because of curiosity.

• 47:59Chris Williamson?

  Does you talk about humans becoming smarter but less creative?

• 48:04Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, so there's a, there's a well-known effect called the Flynn effect. And it's been like a century now. IQ scores keep going up gradually. And so they have to keep rebalancing the scores every few years. There's a lot of debate about why this is probably just that the modern world requires a lot, requires a lot more abstract cognitive, you know, abstract thinking than, than it did to be a, you know, a hunter gatherer a long time ago, or even a farmer.

• 48:33Alex Hutchinson?

  That's one effect. What's less well known is that there are similar tests that assess creativity. There's one something, a set of tests called the Torrance tests for creative thinking. And they also have to re-normalize those scores periodically. But that's because the scores keep dropping. Kids are getting less creative. And so between about 1990 and 2008, there was a significant drop. And after, from 2008 to 2017, which was the next re-normalization, there was a much steeper drop. And it's, you know, it's tempting to think, oh, like, what happened between 2008 and 2017? Let's see, when did I get my first smartphone? And when did social media, you know, like, all of that is speculative.

• 49:18Alex Hutchinson?

  But the fact is, there's evidence that creative thinking, the ability to just come up with,

• 49:28Alex Hutchinson?

  totally new ideas, is maybe going down. And I should say that there's, it's not just these tests of kids. If you look, there's been big analyses of patents and of scientific papers, finding that the number of breakthroughs or disruptive papers that really take a field in a different direction, seems to be dropping.

• 49:49Chris Williamson?

  I need to dig into some of your other stuff, just for a moment. The cognitive things sort of got me thinking. Talk to me about recent data. You must have looked at this. Exercise, activity, physical activity, and mental health. Like, where are we at with that current world?

• 50:09Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, actually, it's good timing. I wrote about that recently. Because there was a big study, there was a big skeptical study. Because, so people like me, I'm a, you know, health and fitness journalist. So I'm always like, the best thing you can do for your mental health is, is exercise. You know, it'll cure your depression, it'll grow your hair back, it'll do all these great things. I try not to be a booster, but it's hard not to. It's, you know, I guess I'm a strong believer in the power of exercise. So there was a big review recently that said, hang on, how good is the evidence really that exercise promotes mental health? And the overall conclusion is the exercise is pretty good. But it's really hard to tease out what, so, for example, there's a lot of studies that find that.

• 50:52Alex Hutchinson?

  Exercise can be as powerful as for depression can be as powerful as cognitive behavioral therapy or of antidepressants. It depends on the population a little bit, but exercise really has powerful effects. But the question is, is it because there's more blood pumping to your brain or there's more, you know, B D N F or other sort of brain chemicals being produced that promote the formation of good connections in between your neurons? Or is it because if you get in an exercise habit, you have a feeling of self efficacy? You feel like, hey, I, I set this goal for myself and I'm, I'm doing it. I'm, I'm really doing something good for myself. And actually I'm meeting my friends there three times a week and I'm having some social interaction.

• 51:35Alex Hutchinson?

  So there's a lot of things that go along with taking up exercise. And so it's not entirely clear which of these are the, are the key ones, what, and what's doing what? So I think it's, it's a very, it's very strong evidence that

• 51:52Alex Hutchinson?

  exercise both maintains and promotes and, and can actually sort of cure, quote unquote, not cure, but ameliorate mental health. But we don't know exactly why, or whether you could get the same thing out of joining a bridge club or, or something like that.

• 52:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. How much of it is the pro-social getting yourself out of the house, structure of your day? How much of this is, I guess, just straight up selection bias for who it is, who, what's the cohort of people, who are the sort of people that are prepared to do that?

• 52:19Alex Hutchinson?

  Exactly.

• 52:20Chris Williamson?

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• 53:01Chris Williamson?

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• 53:41Alex Hutchinson?

  I think the evidence is pretty strong that

• 53:45Alex Hutchinson?

  exercise either increases or slows the decline in the size of some brain regions. This is another topic I looked at recently where you look at it and you can find this, I can find studies that that make me feel really good. It's like exercise is going to make your brain super healthy for, you know,

• 54:05Alex Hutchinson?

  no matter how old you get, but you can also find studies that that that don't find as strong an effect or that say, oh, it seems to maintain the size of this region of the brain, but not that one. And those sorts of findings always give you pause because then it's like, ah, there's no reason it should be selectively. So I, excuse me, if I were summing up, my impression of the evidence is that exercise has actual positive structural effects on the brain, which will in turn help ward off cognitive decline, delay, or, you know, maybe even prevent, depending on how long you can delay it, or at the very least, slow down cognitive decline.

• 54:47Alex Hutchinson?

  So I think that's, you know, when I'm getting out of bed on a cold winter morning, that's, that's one of the most powerful motivators for me. I'd be, you know, the, the truth is the evidence is not like bulletproof at this point, but it's, I, I find it, I find it convincing enough to get me out of bed, put it that way.

• 55:04Chris Williamson?

  If you were to lay at the feet of a particular style of exercise, what you think gives the most benefits to brain health, what would it be?

• 55:12Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, I'm hopelessly biased here. Like, look, I was a, you know, a former columnist for Runners World magazine. And I've been a runner since I was 15. I think aerobic exercise, that's a, doing my best to put aside my biases. I think aerobic exercise.

• 55:31Alex Hutchinson?

  Probably packs the biggest punch for brain health. For, for, we're talking for physical brain health and not necessarily for the mental health aspects where I don't think it's clear which is better.

• 55:45Alex Hutchinson?

  I certainly try and do both, like both resistance exercise and aerobic exercise. And I also like playing like games that involve team orientation, which I think is also like, like another aspect of brain health is like, are you using your brain during exercise? And there's a little bit of evidence that doing things like coordination games, like juggling or, you know, playing football or basketball, that that's even better for your brain because you're using your neurons at the same time that all these growth promoting things are happening. So I would, I would go with running, but with such a small margin that the bigger factor I would say is whatever exercise you enjoy and are willing to do, you're likely going to get a benefit.

• 56:28Alex Hutchinson?

  So it's not like other forms of exercise don't have the benefits.

• 56:33Chris Williamson?

  What, what's the truth on zone two at the moment? There was a period, everyone was super into zone two. That was the hot new goal in school. Now it's VO2 max training and zone two is out the window. What's, I imagine that this is a, this is like a Kardashian getting divorced in your world.

• 56:50Alex Hutchinson?

  That, that there will be more fads and they will be interesting. Actually, like zone two and VO2 max are actually, if you were, if you were using modern buzzwords to describe the training of champion endurance athletes, you would say, eh, about 80% zone two and 20% VO2 max. That's, that's kind of what they do. I would say, so in terms of the zone two stuff, I think it's true that it's a very effective way of both getting fit for performance and also for metabolic health, maybe more importantly. My main quibble with it would be, I think it's been. Sometimes prescribed in an overly specific way that it's not like zone two is magic and zone

• 57:33Alex Hutchinson?

  2.1 is nothing and zone 1.9 is you might as well not get out of bed. In fact, there's a new there's a new paper that just came out from a panel of experts in the last week or two that that among other things makes this point that they're saying that their consensus is like zone 2.5 zone 3.5 it's a continuum and so you don't need to stress about it. Actually, I wrote about zone two for the New York Times. I don't know, last month, maybe I'm trying to make this point that it's like, yeah, it's good, but don't don't you know, you don't have to like be pricking your fingers to test lactate every two minutes to make sure you don't accidentally get out of zone two. Now, I was thinking, I was a little worried that I'd created a straw man. I was like, do people really believe that you have to be this precise? And I got an email afterwards from

• 58:15Alex Hutchinson?

  someone who's saying, thank God you wrote this. This morning I was out for my run and I was sprinting down a hill because I wanted to keep my heart rate high enough to stay at the magical zone two and I tripped and I fell. And as I was walking home, my watch kept beeping at me telling me that I was outside of zone two and I was thinking to myself, there has to be a better way. And I was like, okay, it wasn't a straw man. There are people who have taken this very literally that you have to be exactly at the magical zone two. And I don't think that's correct. But the idea of, I think this is like a great misunderstanding is that endurance athletes train hard all the time. And in fact, it's like 80% of the time out there conversational pace, having a having a laugh and and maybe not enjoying it in the way that the effort paradox

• 59:00Alex Hutchinson?

  allows us to enjoy it, which is that if we're doing a challenge, we're doing something somewhat difficult, but not killing ourselves. Then 20% of the time you go out and you try and find God by pushing yourself really hard, but but not all the time.

• 59:13Chris Williamson?

  Zone two is still king.

• 59:15Alex Hutchinson?

  Zone two, yeah, but if the it's the largest component it or somewhere near it is the largest component of

• 59:22Chris Williamson?

  The territory of zone two, the territory in and around the blast radius of zone two.

• 59:27Alex Hutchinson?

  That's right. If you can see it with your binoculars, you're doing okay.

• 59:30Chris Williamson?

  Okay, cool. Getting back to exploration, did you make any changes to your life after looking at this book? What what has this netted out practically?

• 59:40Alex Hutchinson?

  So there's There's the vague big picture things, but I'll give you a concrete, practical thing, which is that I do my best not to turn on the turn by turn directions in my in my car when I'm going out, or even, you know, on my phone when I'm going for a walk. This is for a couple of reasons. One is that it's like, okay, like, I'd like to be a little more present in my environment and be looking out the window instead of looking at my screen. But actually, there's, there's, you know, in the book, I have a little bit of, I spoke to some neuroscientists who are actually concerned about this, who are actually concerned that just as London cab drivers have enlarged hippocampus because they've learned so much about their environment, people who use what's known as stimulus response navigation, that

• 1:00:25Alex Hutchinson?

  is, who just follow like turn left here, turn right there, turn left, and we can do that with, you know, with or without GPS, their hippocampuses, they're not using their hippocampus, they're using a different part of the brain called the caudate nucleus. And that actually translates into difference, you know, your hippocampus gets smaller and your caudate nucleus gets bigger. And this, over life, when we're kids, we're all, we're all hippocampus, we don't know our way around the world, so we're cognitive mapping everywhere we go, trying to figure out where we are. As we get older, we learn to use this stimulus response approach because it's faster, it's more efficient, it's less prone to errors. But the problem is, as, as the world gets more and more optimized, as I can get into my car and just press a button and I never even have to know my own neighborhood, then

• 1:01:10Alex Hutchinson?

  we're not using our hippocampus as much. And that leads them to being smaller. And there, there is research, and it's a chain of logic that isn't, you know, nobody has shown that turning on your GPS is going to make you get dementia. But there is a chain of logic that people who rely most on stimulus response navigation have smaller hippocampus. People who have smaller hippocampuses are, that is a known risk factor of conditions like Alzheimer's, PTSD, depression. So I don't want to oversell that, but I would say, even with caveats, my takeaway has been

• 1:01:48Alex Hutchinson?

  I I look at, I I figure out where I'm going. I look at the directions. I try and figure out, understand where I'm going. And then I turn it off until I until I need it. And so I don't use the turn by turn directions. And that means I get lost sometimes. And that means I have my kids chirping me from the backseat saying like, mommy uses ways. Mommy wouldn't have missed that turn. Why don't you use ways? And I'm like, kids, we're gonna be 90 seconds later than we would have like simmer down. And

• 1:02:15Chris Williamson?

  Think about my hippocampus, okay?

• 1:02:17Alex Hutchinson?

  Exactly.

• 1:02:18Chris Williamson?

  Think about my hippocampus.

• 1:02:19Alex Hutchinson?

  The hippocampi.

• 1:02:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Alex Hutchinson?

  So that's yeah, that's a concrete thing.

• 1:02:23Chris Williamson?

  What would you say to people who like the thesis that you're putting forward, but still are met with a degree of discomfort when it comes to the prospect of exploring novelty, uncertainty? No, fuck you, Alex. I I quite, I quite like my certainty. I don't want, I don't want to, where would you go? Sort of existentially, philosophically, mantra wise, like what can people use to rely on to help them feel more comfortable in their new world of exploration?

• 1:02:52Alex Hutchinson?

  Well, if this was at a cocktail party, I would say, that's great. You're you're fine. Like, I'm not gonna try, I'm not, you don't need to, you do you. But if if if they were open to gentle nudging, the question I would ask them, I think, is, are you doing anything in your life where you don't already know the outcome? Is there anything you do this today, or this week, or this month, or this year, that isn't the same as what you were doing a year ago, or five years ago? Because if not, then when you think about it that way, you might think, huh, you know, there was a time in my life when every day I went to school or whatever,

• 1:03:35Alex Hutchinson?

  and and learned something new, or did something different, or learned a skill, or tried a game. And and that's actually can be really rewarding. So I would say, if if you can't, you don't have to go to the South Pole to be exploring. But if if you're not, if there's not some area of your life where you're

• 1:03:56Alex Hutchinson?

  Pushing into territory where you don't know how it's going to turn out, whether it's exploring new music or taking up a new hobby or wandering through your neighborhood through by a different route than you normally do. You know, these are all, these are all steps on a, on a very broad scale. And you can be anywhere on that scale. Your, your, your want curve is different from everybody else's want curve, and it will change through a life. But if you're way on that left side of the want curve, where everything is predictable, everything is the same. You've optimized everything to the point of, of total predictability.

• 1:04:34Alex Hutchinson?

  Consider, consider that you might enjoy a surprise now and then.

• 1:04:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I have been trying over the last couple of months to live the philosophy that I don't necessarily know what's best for me all the time.

• 1:04:50Chris Williamson?

  I typically do.

• 1:04:52Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:52Chris Williamson?

  But there's a degree of, what do you say? Self-knowledge, self-management, lifestyle design narcissism. It doesn't affect anybody else, but you know, it's just, no, no, no, I know, I know what's best. I know what I want to order from Flower Child. I don't want to try that new thing. I know the best route to get to Gold's Gym at 3pm on a Tuesday. And um, yeah, I'm

• 1:05:17Chris Williamson?

  trying to, as somebody that quite likes control, somebody that likes to reduce down uncertainty. I would say I have maybe like probably quite a lot of people. I love adventure, I have a lot of curiosity inside of me, but I also like control. I don't like to feel like stuff's out of control. I like order, I like structure, I like having a routine. And these two things, you know, the tension exists between the ears.

• 1:05:44Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, there's a definite yin and yang, and I'm, I'm like you, I'm, I'm actually. I would describe myself as like a recreational optimizer. It's like, no, seriously, I know how we should load the dishwasher. Like, if you put that plate there, then we're not going to get as much water on that. And then we'll be like, I, I've thought this through, I've gamed it out, I've performed the experiments. So don't load the dishwasher this other way. And there's a fun in the optimization, but, but it is in tension with my, my simultaneous desire to have adventure. So I would think, I think of this in the context of like going on vacations. My, my wife and I, or my, my family and I, we, we do some, some fun like backpacking. I do some

• 1:06:25Alex Hutchinson?

  canoeing where we're, the goal is to get out and to be, to have an adventure. And yet, the ink, the instinct is also, let's Google and see if we can find trip blogs from anybody else who's done this trip. We'll find pictures of every, everything we're going to see there. We'll know exactly what to expect. We'll know whether we need to bring crampons. We'll know whether we need this or that. And we'll be fully prepared for this. And then you go on the trip and it's like, all right, it's exactly what I expected. So hang on, why did I come here if I already did all that research? So these, these, these impulses are constantly at war and, and, and always will be, I think. And sometimes just need to give a push. And so I, it was interesting, last summer, my, my, we, my family, we did a hiking trip in the Pyrenees. And my wife and I were both

• 1:07:10Alex Hutchinson?

  super busy leading up to it. And we got there and we were like, holy crap. We actually didn't do our usual like obsessive level of, layer of research on this hiking route. Um, it was awesome. So we, each day we were like, well, let's figure out what's coming next. Cause we don't know, we didn't, we didn't research it. So, and then that's a lesson that I'm, I'm trying to keep in mind that it's like, yeah, control and optimization are great, but sometimes it's nice to just like, who the hell knows? Let's see what happens.

• 1:07:39Chris Williamson?

  Alex Hutchinson, ladies and gentlemen. Alex, dude, you're awesome. Uh, whatever, seven, seven and a half years parentheses, uh, on the show. And yeah, I mean, the stuff that you write, what is it runners? What is it you write for runners? Well,

• 1:07:52Alex Hutchinson?

  I'm now at Outside Magazine. So I write about once a week for Outside Magazine on new research in, in, uh, fitness, endurance, that kind of stuff.

• 1:08:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, everyone needs to follow you on Twitter at Sweat Science. It's, you know, if you like evidence-based exercise stuff, you're awesome. And, uh, new book, why should people go and get it?

• 1:08:09Alex Hutchinson?

  Well, they should explore the topic of exploring. I hope it'll, you know, there's no magic formula, but I hope it'll encourage people to find spaces in their life to be surprised.

• 1:08:20Chris Williamson?

  Sick. Alex, I appreciate you.

• 1:08:22Alex Hutchinson?

  Thanks so much, Chris.

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