Modern Wisdom - #936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks

Episode Date: May 3, 2025

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… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 46 to episodes 916, something like that. You had to do 900 more people before you were ready for this. It's very important. That was the level of tank emptying that I went through just having a straight up conversation with you. 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. Yeah, I mean, exactly back at you.

I've been thinking a lot in the days leading up to this interview of like, wow, 2018. Things were very different for both of us. And the conversation I had with you in 2018 was such a pleasant surprise. And I'm glad to see that other people thought that your interview abilities were as good as I did. Yeah, well, we'll see if I can keep you-

No pressure, no pressure. I was going to say, so the pleasant uncertainty today abound, we'll see what I can achieve. You've got interested in explorers. Why? What's interesting about explorers? Yeah, I mean, what's not interesting about explorers? So where did this book start? 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 wrote a book about endurance in 2018. And this is not intended as a

gratuitous plug for that book, but the book did well and it was the culmination of about 10 years, let's say, of really focusing in on the science of endurance, really narrowing and narrowing on an ever decreasing specialty. 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, I should start working on Endure 2, 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 do I have this pull to do something new? And it connected with a lot of other areas of my life. Why when I interest. I wondered why do I have this pull to do something new?

And it connected with a lot of other areas of 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 know the answers to those questions. Maybe I'll research that and turn that into my next book. Yeah. It's the difficult second album, especially if you've had some success with what you did first. My editor was very reassuring to me. He kept, he kept telling me second books are the hardest because this one was a struggle. This one was, 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 expectations, there's living up to previous work, but also this topic is such a big one. When I say, I'm interested in exploration, it's like, oh, you mean Christopher Columbus or whatever? And I'm like, yes. And 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, the more threads I pulled, the bigger the topic got. And eventually, bless my editor, 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. Okay. Why are humans drawn to explore then? What is it that's in us that causes this to happen? There's two ways we can answer that question. One reason is we explore because it leads to good things. 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 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. 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. 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 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. 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 and go, you can go up the hill. I'm going to make sure that we don't all die. That's exactly right. Janetta's just called 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 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 I'm going to stay back and I'm going to consolidate what we know, they do well for agriculture. They tend to be better nurses. 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. Does that suggest as more of the world has been explored, that the world is now owned by the people who aren't explorers?

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 a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. There's still lots of scope, I would argue.

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 inclination whether that's to to be really exploratory or maybe less so. All right talk to me about the genetics of exploration then. Yeah, so genetics is obviously, it's a fraught topic, right? So I want to be- Not here, Alex, you're amongst safe friends here. That's right. We've all taken the behavioral genetics red pill.

Nobody's gonna hear this except you and me, right? So this is okay. Precisely correct. 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

to every habitable spot on the globe, literally. So 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. Another thing that happened about 50,000 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 amped up their sensitivity to dopamine such that they got a bigger kick out of discovering something new or unexpected, of finding novelty. And what's very interesting, one of the nuggets of science that got me interested in this topic that told me there's something more to say other than just like, hey, it's nice to discover new things. If you look at populations around the world and you trace how far they've had to migrate, they had to migrate to get to their current location over the sort of tens of thousands of years since they left Africa. 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, you know, 80% of them have this explorer's gene. And you know, in parts of Europe, you've got places where people have, you know, 10 or 20% 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 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 hand than others. 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 chat GPT 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 C888 7A 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. Interesting. about dopamine is

that 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 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. 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 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 this drive can be harnessed in productive ways. It can also lead us down some less productive ways, let's say. What's the truth and the BS behind dopamine that you've learned? I think the biggest misconception, let's say, about dopamine is that it's like the pleasure chemical that it's what you get when you 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. The pleasure of having something, that's like endogenous morphine, basically, endorphins. The pleasure of wanting something, dopamine is 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 had hoped to have the definitive theory of dopamine like, people, I'm going to tell you what dopamine does. Here it is. Here's the truth. Here's the myth. And 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 full story of dopamine right

now. So the message I would hope people would take away is it's not just the pleasure chemical and the dopamine fasting idea, you know, the idea that, oh, we get too much dopamine in society today. 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 maybe not always be the rat pressing the button saying, give me more, give me more, give me more. But dopamine is a lot harder to pin down than that.

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? Yeah, which is always a good plan. 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 align with also

teaching me about the world or teaching me about myself, taking me in somewhere that's worth going? Or is this just empty calories? 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 know it's easy to beat up on TikTok or whatever and say, oh, we're just wasting our lives with – or even technology in general, right? That over the last 20 years we can say, oh, modern technology is rotting our brains.

And I don't think 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. Give me something else that outrages me. And when I do that, I'm tapping into my exploring circuitry. 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 hear a great conversation with that nice Alex guy. I'm joking here, but 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 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 Lemke, 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 books? There were a lot of examples of people who are like addicted to masturbating and I just remember them like, whoa, that's a rough road to travel. I mean, how uncomfortable is that going to be after a while? So yeah, I think you can. And I think at least, and Alenki makes a pretty compelling case that this is really a case of being addicted to dopamine. I think addiction 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 it carries a lot of weight and sometimes gets like, so look, 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 they 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 a run? Yeah, they feel worse if they don't go for a run. So in some neurochemical sense, you could say they're addicted to it. If you talk to psychologists about the definition of addiction, there's other criteria like, is it interfering with their life? Are they neglecting their family? Are their 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 it'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 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 had things I needed to do and that was not optimal.

But I wouldn't say I'm addicted to it or anything like that. It's just a suboptimal use of time. Is there some link between dopamine and sense of the passage of time? That's interesting. I think I don't actually know the – I will confess that that's not a topic. The passage of time is a super interesting topic with like effort and I know that when the harder you run, for example, the more time slows down. They've done careful studies on that. 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 there's definitely a time warp when you're sitting at the internet and all of a sudden you're like, what the hell? How did that happen? All right. Talk to me about uncertainty. What's the role that uncertainty plays? I think so if we're trying to like define exploring, there are a few elements, you know, 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. 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. Not knowing what's going to happen. 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 what's going to happen if I go in this direction. But the only way I'm going to find out is by taking the path to the right that I don't

know where it leads. You can argue in a number of different ways, including with neuroscience that we're wired to pursue uncertainty, to like uncertainty. There's data sets on how people order food from Deliveroo, the food delivery company. The Harvard scientists analyzed 1.6 million orders to figure out how do we decide what we want. One 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 10 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 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. Presumably, there has to be a sweet spot though. Too much uncertainty would just feel like chaos. Absolutely. And so in some of the papers, they call it the, I'm not even sure how to pronounce this. I'm going to go with the Wundt curve. Although I think in Vienna, they would probably say the Wundt curve, although I think in Vienna they would probably say the Wundt curve. There's a famous German psychologist, pioneer German psychologist in the 1800s named Wilhelm Wundt.

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 that this is the case even with like you can take like eight month old babies and show them like patterns of toys coming out of a box or whatever and if it's super predictable it's always the same toy they're like boring and you can you can track their gaze to see if they're 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 it.

And if it's super unpredictable, it's like, oh, it's something different. They find that boring. But if there's some sort of regularity that'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. That's what this vunt curve is about. It's like an upside down you. You want to be in that sweet spot where it's like, I don't know what's going to 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 10, 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, 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. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. I've won Whoop for over five years now, since way before they were a partner on the show and it's the only wearable I've worn whoop for over five years now since way before they were a partner on the show. And it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with because it is the best.

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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 slash modern wisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. I remember learning about a study that was done showing the faces of different sheep, newborn babies. Have you seen this one? No, I'm like, where is this going? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So, uh, if you were to show me, are you, uh, 10, 15 sheep? Um, unless they were very obviously different, we'd probably go to, 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 muscle sort of atrophy a little bit. Yeah. No, not with your fingers. You can move them manually yourself. I'm trying to do it right now. I just feel like I look like an idiot. 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, uh, 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 is that we're not able to detect it. And that it needs to be above a particular threshold for us to go, ah, yeah, different sheep. That'd be interesting. And it's really interesting that this is something 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 have no other guidance. They don't know what they're supposed to be interested in. So they look at what interests them. 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 sort of predictability of patterns. 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 following, for reasons that are sometimes good, 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 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, 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 think is trying to tap back into that innate sensation of understanding what you find interesting or curious or inexplicable like, huh, why did that happen? 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 is suggesting to you might be interesting. Well, reducing dumb predictability is gonna 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 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.

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. Uh, no. Traverse terrain. Like this is a situation that I come up against typically it's morning. Uh, it's going to work. What's the best route to go to work? Well, I actually don't want to go past that set of traffic lights.

Cause if I hit it wrong and I try to go right, it takes ages. Google maps doesn't even account for that. So I'm going to take this route and I's going to work. What's the best route to go to work? Well, I actually don't want to go past that set of traffic lights. Cause if I hit it wrong and I try to go right, it takes ages. Google maps doesn't even account for that. 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 unnovel and unstimulating and ununcertain 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.

I think this is one of the great tensions of modern life that we're, I mean, it's, and it's, it's a, it's it's 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-narrowing set of options. And 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 mentioned commuting and that's a great example. 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 enough, they analyzed the Oystercard data and they found that 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 do it. It's a five-minute walk instead of a 10-minute bus ride. It's a coffee shop that I like. Yeah. Or 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, change up your routine sometimes. But it's like even if you're an optimizer, even if you're like, I want the best, habit doesn't always get you there. Sometimes you don't want to explore every morning. 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, um, again, going to go back to this theme, it's both fun and it can lead to better outcomes. What about effort? Talk to me about the effort paradox. Yeah. So this is the, the, the downside of exploring it.

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. The most likely scenario is that you're going to get lost or you're going to take longer. It's going to suck. I mean, there's a reason you're taking the route you have been taking. 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 know what dish you like in such and such a restaurant and then you decide, maybe I should try 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 just brings you negative outcomes. Now in the long term by exploring, you can discover things that work out to be better. But there's another angle, which is that actually doing things that are challenging, 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 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 actually attracted to the difficulty of it. And you can extend that to like buying furniture at IKEA. 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 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'd 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 it's hard to pin down, but there are a few studies that have been emerging in the last couple of years suggesting that putting in effort is a source of meaning. 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. I wonder whether that plays into relationships sometimes, the classic, I only want them if

they don't want me dynamic. Oh man, that's 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 peoples are you know, be negative about relationships But if it's just totally without strife without without any tension, then it maybe feels a little boring. And you feel like you need some effort. 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? Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing to recognize is just to recognize that just because something is hard doesn't mean it should be shied away from. In fact, it's like with a hat tip to Michael Easter whose 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. You look at 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 don't think it's just me. It's like it's much more satisfying to have put in a little effort and recognizing that putting an effort is going to lead you to feel good is, you know, 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. Can that, are you tying that back to your first book? Can that help us with resilience, endurance, suffering, hard times? I mean, I think it's, it's almost a precondition that you, if you're trying to push yourself, if you're trying to handle difficult times, if you view every negative feeling as, as a, as a sort of disaster or 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 it's in the same way that one of the things I talked about in Endure is the power of your inner monologue, right? 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 about your ability to continue. If you can turn that around to, I can do this, I've trained for this, 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. 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 signal that you're doing something

wrong and that it actually can be something good. I think that helps you endure it for longer. You're less likely to quit on things. Have you thought about how people can avoid seeing all of life instrumentally? 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, uh, delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification. You just like winning the marshmallow test over and over again every single

day, but never cashing it out. Yeah. You've, you've touched on one of the, one of the big dilemmas and something that I've 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 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 20s, and then most people tend to listen to less and less new music as time goes on. And it's not totally irrational because you've spent some time exploring now, you know what you like. But you might say, that's a shame, we should explore more. I'm not going to fall victim to this narrowing of my taste, I'm going to 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 going to listen to the same song twice because exploring is what it's about.

We can see that's absurd on the face of it, right? That's the perspective of like, always keep exploring, always keep looking to the future and never stop. I really love this song. I'm going to listen to it 17 times in a row on repeat, even if my wife kills me. So you do have to stop and enjoy it. I think that's a really… So 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 a fork in the road, take the road less traveled. You've got to think about maybe now's the time to exploit, to take the music that I

just discovered and sit down and listen to it or to figure out what I, you know, or maybe it's not. 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 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. This episode is brought to you by 8 Sleep. Sleep isn't just about how long you rest, but how well your body stays in its optimal temperature range throughout the night.

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That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. How can people better navigate that explore exploit trade off? 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 or exploit. I apologize for chapter five in my book, which kind of tries to follow that rabble because there is a ton of attempts to produce a formula.

It turns out in any real world context, the math is ridiculous and 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 day-to-day scenario. So one concept is the idea of an uncertainty bonus. We kind of do this intuitively, but 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 unexplored road,

but the less you know about an option, you give 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 I know less about. So that kind of helps to make sure you're not getting too calcified into that sort of set of habits you're talking about. It's not the only factor you consider, but it's like, 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 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 because it's 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 a real positive. The other maybe 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 all else being equal, it's probably worth taking a shot on that because that's the optimism in the face of uncertainty. I don't know how things are going to turn out, but that's the being optimistic. 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. If 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. 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, then I really regret asking that person to dance, then I really regret asking that person to dance and they said no. Yeah, dig into regret minimization a bit more for me. Yeah, I wasn't sure 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. But regret is like, often you can think of these sort of decision trees as gambling games. In reality, we may be talking about careers or dating decisions, but it's like, I bet $5 on this, I bet $10 on that, which machine should I bet on? And maybe the best you could have done in a series of 10 bets is getting $100. And if you made a series of bets and ended up with $70, your regret is $30. 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 increase as slowly as is realistically possible unless you find the magic genie with

the three wishes. Yes. Yeah. Very. Which I'm looking for. Yeah. You know, like. Which I'm looking for. Yeah. You know, like. That would be nice. Uh, 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. 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 an, 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. 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 building maps in your brain. 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 ideas that are close to each other or far away from each other, this is physically manifested in the brain. And so, 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 or less powerful than us? And how well do we know them? Like are they close to us? And so that's a two-dimensional map and people literally

map their social networks in their hippocampus in this two-dimensional way. So all this is to say that when we talk about different ways of exploring, exploring and exploiting, this is intimately tied to creativity and coming up with new ideas, expanding our cognitive maps of ideas. And so there are a bunch of interesting findings that fall out of that about how we should mix exploring and exploiting to come up with better ideas. In this context, is exploration and curiosity the same thing, similar thing, related? I think they're very closely related. Curiosity is a name for the drive that compels us to explore, I would say.

I'm not a dictionary guy, but that's how I would classify them. And so I think curiosity, yeah, a lot of the same discussion applies and exploration is what you actually end up doing once because of curiosity. Desi, you talk about humans becoming smarter, but less creative. Yeah. So 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 more abstract thinking than it did to be a hunter-gatherer a long time ago, or even a farmer. That's one effect. What's less well-known is that there are similar tests that assess creativity. There's once 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 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 rise? You know, like, all of that is speculative, but the fact is there's evidence that creative thinking, the ability to just come up with, you know, 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. I need to dig into some of your other stuff just for a moment. The cognitive thing 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? Yeah, actually it's good timing. I wrote about that recently, uh, cause there was a big study.

There was a big skeptical study. Cause so people like me, I'm a 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. Um, I try not to be a booster, but it's hard not to. 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 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. The question is, is it because there's more blood pumping to your brain or there's more BDNF 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 set this goal for myself and I'm doing it. 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. 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 key ones, what's doing what. So I think it's a very strong evidence that exercise both maintains and promotes 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 something like that.

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, what's the cohort of people, who are the sort of people that are prepared to do that? Exactly. In other news, you might have heard me say that hold luggage is a Psi-op meant to keep you poor and late.

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If you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. Right now you can get a 20% discount to see everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom that's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. And what about the link between exercise and brain health? Is that something else that's been sort of reassessed? I think the evidence is pretty strong that 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 make me feel really good. It's like exercise is going to make your brain super healthy for, you know, no matter how old you get. But you can also find studies that don't find a strong 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, 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 maybe even prevent depending on how long you can delay it or at the very least slow down cognitive decline. So I think that's, when I'm getting out of bed on a cold winter morning, that's one of the most powerful motivators for me. The truth is the evidence is not bulletproof at this point, but I find it convincing enough to get me out of bed, put it that way. If you were to lay at the enough to get me out of bed, put it that way. 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? Yeah, I'm hopelessly biased here. Like look, I was a former columnist for Runners World magazine and I've been a runner since I was 15. I think aerobic exercise, that's it, doing my best to put aside my biases, I think aerobic exercise probably packs the biggest punch for brain health. 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. I certainly try and do both resistance exercise and aerobic exercise. And I also like playing games that

involve team orientation, which I think is also 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 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 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. It's not like other forms of exercise don't have the benefits.

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 girl in school. Now it's VO2 max training and zone two is out the window. I imagine that this is like a Kardashian getting divorced in your world. There will be more fads and they will be interesting. Actually zone 2 and VO2 max are actually, if you were using modern buzzwords to describe the training of champion endurance athletes, you would say about 80% zone 2 and 20% VO2 max. That's kind of what they do. I would say so in terms of the zone 2 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 2.1 is nothing and zone 1.9 is you might as well not get out of bed. In fact, there's a new paper that just came out from a panel of experts in the last week or two 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. And actually I wrote about zone two for the New York Times,

I don't know, last month maybe, trying to make this point that it's like, yeah, it's good, but you don't have to like be pricking your fingers to test lactate every two minutes to make sure you don't accidentally get be pricking your fingers to test lactate every two minutes to make sure you don't accidentally get out of zone two. 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 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 leading, 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 this strong end. There are people who have taken this very literally that you have to be exactly at the magical zone too. 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 laugh and maybe not enjoying it in the way that the effort paradox allows us to enjoy it, which is that 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 not all the time. Zone two is still king. Zone two, yeah, but it's the largest component, or somewhere near it is the largest component of the trading. The territory of zone two, the territory in and around the blast radius of zone two. That's right.

If you can see it with your binoculars, you're doing okay. Okay, cool. Uh, getting back to exploration, did you make any changes to your life after looking at this book? What, what has this netted out practically? 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 car when I'm going out or even on my phone when I'm going for a walk. This is for a couple of reasons. One is that it's like, okay, 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, in the book, 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 is who just follow like turn left here, turn right there, turn left, and we can do that with or without GPS, their hippocampus is, they're not using their hippocampus, they're using a different part of the brain called the caudate nucleus. And that actually translates into different, your hippocampus gets smaller and your caudate nucleus gets bigger. And this over life, when we're kids, we, 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 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 we're not using our hippocampus as much. And that leads to them being smaller. And 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 to measure. But there is a chain of logic that people who rely most on stimulus response navigation have smaller hippocampus. People who have smaller hippocampuses, 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 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 need it. 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 going to be 90 seconds later than we would have, like simmer down and- Think about my hippocampus, okay? Yeah, exactly. Think about my hippocampus. Won't somebody think of the hippocampi? Yeah. So that's the, that's the concrete thing. 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 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? Well, if this was at a cocktail party, I would say, that's great. You're fine. Like, I'm not going to train, you don't need to, you do you. But 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 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, there was a time in my life when every day I went to school or whatever and learned something new or did something different or learned a skill or tried a game. And that actually can be really rewarding. So I would say, if you can't, you don't have to go to the South Pole to be exploring, but if there's not some area of your life where you're 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 by a different route than you normally do. These are all steps on a very broad scale. You can be anywhere on that scale. 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 one curve where everything is predictable, everything is the same, you've optimized everything

to the point of total predictability, consider that you might enjoy a surprise now and then. 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. I typically do, 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, no. I know, I know what's bad. 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 3 PM on a Tuesday.

And, um, yeah, I'm trying to, as somebody that quite likes controlled, somebody that likes to reduce down uncertainty, uh, I would say I have maybe like probably quite a lot of people. I love adventure. controlled, somebody that likes to reduce down uncertainty. Uh, I would say I have maybe like probably quite a lot of people. I love adventure. Uh, I have a lot of curiosity inside of me, but I also, uh, 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, uh, these two things, you know, um, the tension exists between the ears. Yeah. It, there's a definite yin and yang. And I'm like you, 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 there will be like, 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 it is in tension with my simultaneous desire to have adventure. So I think of this in the context of like going on vacations, my wife and I, or my family and I, we do some fun like backpacking, I do some canoeing where weing. The goal is to get out and to have an adventure. And yet 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 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 impulses are constantly at war and always will be, I think, and sometimes just need to give a push. And so it was interesting last summer, my family, we did a hiking trip in the Pyrenees and my wife and I were both super busy leading up to it. And we got there and we were like, holy crap, we actually didn't do our usual obsessive level of research on this hiking route. It was awesome. So 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 then that's a lesson that 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. Alex Hutchinson, ladies and gentlemen, Alex dude, you're awesome. Uh, whatever, seven, seven and a half years, parentheses on the show. And yeah, I mean, the stuff that you write, what is it, runners? What is it you write for Runners Wallet?

I'm now at Outside Magazine. So I write about once a week for Outside Magazine on new research in fitness, endurance, that kind of stuff. 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 new book, why should people go and get it? Well, they should explore the topic of exploring.

There's no magic formula, but I hope it'll encourage people to find spaces in their life to be surprised. Sick. Alex, I appreciate you. Thanks so much, Chris.