The Current - Are you an explorer? Alex Hutchinson says we all are

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

Alex Hutchinson knows all about the thrill of discovery, having ventured deep into the wilderness of far-flung places like Tasmania. In his new book, The Explorer's Gene, the journalist argues that we’re hardwired with that desire to embrace uncertainty and the unknown — and looks at what happens if we stop. 

How did the internet go from this? You could actually find what you were looking for right away, bound to this. I feel like I'm in hell. Spoiler alert, it was not an accident. I'm Cory Doctorow, host of Who Broke the Internet from CBC's Understood. In this four-part series, I'm going to tell you

why the internet sucks now, whose fault it is, and my plan to fix it. Find Who Broke the Internet on whatever terrible app you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers and we are wanderers still. For the astronomer Carl Sagan, it is natural to want to explore what's going on beyond our planet. For the Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie, it was a desire to reach the west coast of North America that motivated him. For a young child, exploring can be as simple as heading into the forest to see what lies beyond the edge of a neighborhood park.

For Alex Hutchinson, the urge to explore has sent him to the impenetrable landscapes of Tasmania and to the unmarked back country of Newfoundland on a grueling five day hike, all of which got him thinking about what drives us to do these sorts of things. Alex Hutchinson is a Canadian journalist, long distance runner and the author of the bestselling book, Endure. His new book is The Explorer's Gene, Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. Alex is with me in studio. Good morning. Morning, Matt. Good to have you here.

It's great to be here. Do you believe, Carl Sagan, that exploration is in our nature? I think exploration is in our nature. I think not exploring is also in our nature. And so that finding that balance between the two is really the tension. Why did you want to write this book? You mentioned you wrote a bestselling book about endurance and what pushes us to do extraordinary things and how we can get to that place. Why did you want to look at this? Yeah, I mean, I've been fascinated by exploration since I was a kid, you know, wandering in

the woods, but I think the real push was after this last book. My previous book was 2018 about the science of endurance and I'd spent about a decade reporting on exactly that topic. And I was sort of set up to follow this path for the rest of my career. And I realized that I wanted to do something different, that I didn't want to write Endure II. Instead I wanted to do something different, that I didn't want to write in dear to. Instead, I wanted to do, I wasn't sure. I didn't know what I wanted to do.

And I didn't know why I wanted to do something different. And that became a sort of obsession for me. And I ended up, in a sense, writing a book about trying to fit why I wanted to do something different for my next book. What is exploration? I mean, how do you define what exploration is? Yeah. book. What is exploration? I mean, how do you define what exploration is? Yeah, you can think of it on a spectrum from, you know, sailing west across the Atlantic to see if there's anything there.

That's an extreme form of exploration, being the first to do something that very few of us will ever experience or maybe even want to experience. At the other end, you could say, oh, you know, every time I'm lying on the sofa and get bored of whatever I'm watching on TV and change the channel, I'm exploring the airwaves and that's a kind of meaningless definition. So for me, there's a middle definition where it's not just about physical exploration, it's not just about extremes or anything like that, but there has to be some stakes. You're venturing into the unknown, you're trying, taking a path where you don't know how it's going to turn out, where there's probably going to be some struggle along the way and trying to find out what lies along that path.

And there is uncertainty that's kind of at the heart of that. There has to be uncertainty. If you know what's going to happen, for better or worse, then you're not exploring. Are we hardwired, do you think, to do that? I think we are on a very deep level that there's something crucial that goes beyond even just being human but being alive that we're trying to be able to predict what's going on in the world around us. We want to know what's going to happen so that we don't get eaten by the lion that's hiding behind the next tree. And so in order to be able to predict what's going to happen, we need to be willing to seek out the unknown so that we can learn about the world. Tell me more about that.

I mean, that gets to the title of the book. I mean, is there some sort of gene? Do we know scientifically what's going on there? Jared So, there is a gene. You know, the title of the explorer's gene is, I don't know, provocative or metaphorical. There is a gene and that did get me interested. Initially, one of the threads is that there's evidence, there's a gene related to the way we process dopamine in the brain that makes some of us a little bit more responsive to the thrill of the unknown or of surprises. And you can, there's this sort of body of anthropological evidence where you can say, oh, look, the farther a population migrated away from the cradle of civilization in Africa,

you can look at their ancestor or their descendants today and say, oh, populations at the southern tip of South America have a really high prevalence. And 80% of them might have this explorer's version of the gene, whereas you go back closer to the origins in Sardinia, you might have 10 or 20%. The important caveat is that it's not that some people are wired to explore and some aren't. This is evidence that we're all wired to explore, but some of us just have the volume turned up a little bit higher. What happens? I mean, you mentioned dopamine. What happens in our brain when we embrace

that uncertainty? Yeah. So, I mean, this idea of dopamine, of course, is a big thing in the current discourse about what's driving us to be addicted to social media and stuff. The point about dopamine is not that we get a hit of dopamine when something is good, we get a hit when something is better than expected. So it's a marker of prediction error where you can't get it just from doing the same thing over and over again because then you learn what to expect. So, this drives us to try new things, to go new places, because only in doing that will we find something that's better than our existing expectations.

But that speaks to that whole kind of balance between whether you explore or whether you exploit, right? That comes out in the book a lot in terms of, people call it a comfort zone for a reason because it's comfortable and you might get to a place where you don't want to go any further. How do you see that? Matthew 18 Yeah, I mean, I think when I started out working on this book or thinking about this topic, I imagined that we'd end up with a subtitle like the case for exploring more, why we all need to get out of our, you know, comfort zones. And I realized actually, you know, comfort zones are

pretty nice sometimes. And you know, there is this whole literature on what's called the explore-exploit dilemma that transcends disciplines like that terminology comes from the business world. You know, should you spend on R&D or should you just market the heck out of your current product? But it's also in, you know, animal foraging. How does a bee know when to move on from, you know, the nectar where it knows there's nectar but it's used a lot of it, but maybe there's a better patch on the next flowers over. So every living thing confronts this, and we confront it on, you know, when you go to

a restaurant. You put everywhere in your life, but you go to a restaurant, you're going to order the food or the dish that you got last time, which was pretty good, or do you try something else on the menu? It might even be the restaurant that you choose to go to. Yeah, yeah, and the key point here though, to your question, is that ordering the new thing doesn't always pay off.

It's not always great when you just sort of pick something new. Sometimes the comfortable favorite is great, and so it's more a question of understanding when is the time to explore and when to exploit than just to saying, hey, we all need to explore more. How does that play out in your life? Are you somebody who is, I say, hey, we all need to explore more. How does that play out in your life?

Are you somebody who is, I mean, again, hardwired to kind of push out of that comfort zone or is occasionally the couch where you want to be? Yeah, it's far less. I'm definitely not like Indiana Jones, you know, writing a book about exploring because I am Mr. Super Explorer. I actually am. The stories in the book would suggest otherwise. And I mentioned, I mean, traipsing around

on this part of Newfoundland with no trail with your family in tow trying to find somewhere to camp because there's no actual place to camp. So there's definitely, there are different elements and different parts that mix together. In some ways, I'm very risk averse. My friends would describe me as anxious and cautious and an over planner. But there's also a part of me that craves being surprised. And I think those two things are linked, right? Because I'm such a planner, I eliminate uncertainty in so many areas of my life that I'm left thinking, oh man, I need to do something. I need to do a hike where there is no trail.

Because if there is a trail, I'm going to go and read so many travel blogs that there will be no surprises left to me on that trail. I will know every step of the trail I just I'm so interested in that idea of the uncertainty bonus right like what we get out of that we live in in A society where you can cut so much of that out of your life, but you don't get that extra piece Right you don't get that bonus that you were just talking about Yeah and and this is this idea of an uncertainty bonus is really cool because it shows up in the Mathematics of if you're trying to let's say you turn this into just a mathematical game, a gambling game of how

you're going to maximize your odds. And it turns out that when we're evaluating two things, we unconsciously add an extra little piece of value to anything that we don't know. And we don't do it consciously. So it's easy to forget about that and not realize it and to sort of, like you said, organize it out of our own lives. But it's a very satisfying thing to feel. It's what makes it exciting to discover something new. So pursuing that uncertainty bonus is worthwhile, but it doesn't mean, like, risk is another question. So, like, you want uncertainty, but you don't want to fall off a waterfall or whatever How does the story of this speed skater from Sweden speak to what we're talking about? Yeah

so there's a guy Neils van der Poel who I think a lot of people might recognize the name because he won a couple of gold medals at the 2022 Olympics in speed skating the 5,000 and 10,000 meters what people may not realize is how unbelievably unconventional his training was leading up. So he was a guy who he won a couple of gold medals at the world junior championships, so very good skater, went to the 2018 Olympics and came 14th, which is, you know, better than a poke in the eye, I would take it. But yeah, he was disappointed, basically quit skating, joined the army, went and did a year of special forces training in northern Sweden. And then he decided he wanted

to come back and make a speed skating comeback. So to do that, he spent a year of special forces training in northern Sweden. And then he decided he wanted to come back and make a speed skating comeback. So to do that, he spent a year doing nothing, not skating at all, doing running and cycling and ski mountaineering, doing these ridiculous, like biking the length of Sweden, 20 hour races. And then I got to get serious, got to sort of build my fitness. So he went just on the bike and did nothing but threshold training on the bike. And then when he, he only started skating something like three weeks before he returned to racing and he did nothing but race-based training. So without getting into the

details of the training idea, the point is there have been, I don't know, dozens and dozens of speed skating champions over the last decades, all of them train within a very narrow envelope of how one trains to be an elite champion. Do this and it will get you there. Yeah. And he took all that and he, he had followed that path and been pretty good. He was a world junior champion, but he said, you know, forget all this. I'm going to invent. I didn't even mention he didn't want to train seven days a week. He wanted his weekends off so he could go skydiving, which he had discovered that he really enjoyed from his military time. So he's training five days a week, insanely hard in a completely unconventional way. He goes and sets two world records and wins gold medals at the Olympics. So I think this is to me this is it's just

a cool story for one thing, but it's also a reminder that just because we do something over and over and everyone does something in some way the same way, it doesn't mean we've explored all the possibilities. There's there's a lot of still unknown even in the things that seem familiar to us. One of the things and that part of it is the fact that he didn't want to, you know, do his training on the weekend that he wanted to do something else. You write in the book a lot about play and how I mean that, you know, skydiving to some people might be a form of play, not for me, thank you very much, but to some it might be that young people and kids in particular, it's obvious, but they are more attuned to the idea of exploration

than they may be as they get older. What's going on there? I mean, this is around the time horizon, but also just what kids are hard to do when they're young if we let them do it. Yeah, so I talked to a guy in Denmark named Mark Malmdorf Anderson, who's a theorist of play, which sounds like an awesome job.

And his thesis is essentially that play is the counterpart of exploring. In exploring, we're drawn to uncertainty. In play, we're basically creating situations where we can have the feeling that we're resolving uncertainty. So, you know, you take your kids to the playground, they're like, what is it like to go down that slide? I don't know, they go down the slide a couple times. Then they know the uncertainty is gone. So that's why they're like, okay, now we're going to go up the slide, even though you're yelling at them like, no,

this kid's coming down, like, stop that. But they are very intuitively aware of where there are possibilities to get that feeling of learning about the world. And you can see this in like eight month old infants, you're showing them sequences of shapes if they're very predictable They look away their board if they're very unpredictable if they're random they look away because they get bored if there's an intermediate level of Predictability that's what gets them interested. So I think the instinct to play which is very which we support in kids It allows us to tune in to Opportunities to learn about the world where it's not too predictable, but not too crazy.

And I think we become deaf to that at our peril as we get older. I'm Sarah Trelevin, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy.

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I think of when our kids were young, how they played and it would just, you would see organized things, but sometimes it would be just disorganized kind of chaos. What does that do to their development, do you think, when they are able to do that in that context that you just described? Yeah. So there's a woman named Alison Gopnik who's a very prominent developmental psychologist, and her theory is that the whole point of childhood is that it's a solution to the explore-exploit dilemma not for an individual but for the species. We give our children a very long period of protected development compared to other species,

and what they can do is then learn how to learn. So they are wired to explore widely in a way that in laboratory tests in Alison Copnick's laboratory, kids sometimes do better at picking up patterns than adults do because they're more open to the unexpected. So if you create a sneaky pattern that's not the sort of what you're going to guess the pattern is going to be, then kids can pick that up. And so kids are, in a sense, exploring ways of exploring. So, as random and counterproductive as their actions often seem, and I say that as a parent of young children who seem often very

random and counterproductive, they're learning things that we can't, we don't know how to teach them. We can't tell them, it's like, no, no, you should be studying your math or whatever. It's like, no, do that crazy thing that's gonna make a huge mess because you're learning things that I can't even intuit. Should we be surprised that we play, or some of us play less as we get older and that we might be less attuned to exploring widely as we get older?

We should not be surprised. Although I wrestle with this, the message here a lot. Like in any context where there's a time horizon, it makes sense to explore more early in the game. And if the game is life, then when you're young, the more you, it makes sense to explore because you have a long time to take advantage of the things you discover.

The less time you have left, the more you might say, well, let's just stick with the things I know I like, because there's no point in discovering something new now. I think we still sometimes err on the side of leaning into that curve too much, because we live a long time now. You know, I'm 49. If I keep exploring, I may have four decades to enjoy that.

So there is some logic to it, but I still worry about it. But this is the thing, so I was saying when you came in, one of the things, I like the book a lot, and then I got to that point in which you're talking about getting older and how you think about whether you continue exploring or not. And this light bulb went on. It's like, that's what, it feels like that's what this is about in many ways. How do you think about that in your own life? As you get older, how much you explore versus what you exploit that you've already explored? Jared Sussman Yeah, okay. You've put your finger on the real reason I wrote this book, which is the feeling in my 40s that I think I'd always been animated by the feeling that I was

preparing for some future great moment that everything I did, whether it was learning a new language or exploring a new place or learning a new skill, somehow this was going to come in handy in the future as in some sort of James Bond scenario. It's going to unlock something that you need. Yeah. Unbelievable. This guy can speak Norwegian and therefore, you know, so there was a sense of a real future orientedness. And at a certain point, you know, in midlife, you think, well, maybe I should be living for the present now, like, maybe I don't need to explore anymore in the future. And that really tormented me this idea of like, I don't know, but I like exploring. And so I think about this a lot. I don't think they're easy answers. But I think one thing to say is that you can argue for exploring

in two different ways. One is very utilitarian. We explore because one thing to say is that you can argue for exploring in two different ways. One is very utilitarian. We explore because it leads to better things. We learn about new food sources or discover new dishes or new experiences. The other is that exploring is fun and fulfilling and rewarding and full of meaning. And so, those two things are linked in the same way that the taste of sugar tastes good to us because it's giving us, leading us to calories which are useful. that the taste of sugar tastes good to us because it's giving us, leading us to calories, which are useful. But at this point in my life, I want to explore

and I think there's reasons to explore in a utilitarian way, but I'm shifting the emphasis a little bit to the idea that exploring is fulfilling and is a way of giving my life meaning and purpose. One of the things that people talk about a lot now is that kids may not be playing the way that they used to. And it's not nostalgia, it's looking at technology around them, how we shape our lives, what informs our lives. You quote a senator from the United States, Chris Murphy, talking about the algorithm,

the algorithm being in some ways the death of exploration. How has the technology around us made us less active, more passive passive and perhaps less prone to exploring? Yeah, I think this is a really emerging topic in society, right? We're much more conscious of the role of screens and social media, taking away the sort of random exploration or even the directed exploration and just telling us this is what you're going to watch next, this is what you're going to listen to next, this is what you're going to scroll to next. And that that's replacing your sense of exploration because something else is doing it for you. Something else is prompting or presenting those things instead of you discovering them.

So if we go back to this idea of play as a really sensitive tool to guide you towards the areas where you personally have something to gain or learn from it. Well, the algorithm is not going to allow you to follow that instinct. It's going to make some average, a pretty good guess of what you're going to find titillating, but it's not allowing you to tune into your best barometer of where you can learn about the world. But the other point here is that before we get too fixated on how the screens and the technology and the algorithms are affecting us, we also have to think, why is it that my kids always want to be on the iPad? What is the alternative when they go outside? What are they allowed

to do compared to what kids were allowed to do when I was a kid, much less two generations ago? And there's been this tremendous loss in freedom and mobility and independence and autonomy. So we have to think about the screens, but we also have to think about, hey, let's give kids an opportunity to explore in a real way. Are you encouraged by the success of people like Jonathan Haidt, who, I mean, he writes about screens,

but a lot of what he writes about in The Anxious Generation is about play, is about letting kids play. Yeah, and I think that's probably the biggest marker that encourages me that this isn't just a few crazy people. The way that book has resonated. It feels like something is happening, right?

Yeah. And I think there are different strands coming through this. Chris Hayes' book, you spoke to recently. We're coming to similar conclusions from all these different directions. And I feel like the more you triangulate to this idea that, yeah, you need to accept some risk, you need to have some uncertainty, you need to escape from the algorithm and make some decisions yourself, even though the algorithm is useful. And when I go and buy something online, I will check the online reviews. I want to do what everyone else says is good. But how do you embrace risk? I mean,

the online reviews, I wanna do what everyone else says is good. But how do you embrace risk? I mean, as a parent especially, that's a scary thing, right? We want our kids to have a big fulfilling life, but we also don't want them to get hurt. We want to protect them. And I will say, one thing that does not solve this dilemma is writing a book about exploration. You don't suddenly relax and think, oh, I'll let my kids... My kids recently started biking to school for the first time in the last couple of weeks. Which is freeing and scary. It's amazing, but you know, that you look out the window and it's like, what the heck, they just blew through the very first stop sign eight seconds after I said, remember you stopped at

a stop at all the stop signs and stay on the right hand side of the road. So, you know, I struggle with, but I'm trying to find little wins. You know, like my kids are nine and 11, and I, you know, in thinking about these exact topics, I was realizing, I don't think my kids have ever gone to a store by themselves and bought something, because I pay with card now. And so I was like, kids, get over here. Here's the $10 bill, go to the gas station and buy milk. And it was the biggest adventure of their life.

They were thrilled. How do you tell people, or how do you convince people that they can make time for exploration? In the middle of everything that's going on, people are, the reason that they might put the iPad in their kid's hand is because they're super busy. The algorithm helps take some of the pressure off. How do you make time?

How do we make time for this? Yeah, I mean, it's a real struggle. And I will say, one of the things I noticed in my own life is after having kids The way some of my other forms of exploration had to contract that all of a sudden I was like I'm just gonna listen to my playlist of teens that I've been listening to for the last, you know, 30 years I I you know, I'm exhausted not not in a physical sense, but just in an emotional mental sense. So I would say one thing is

to recognize that not all exploration has to be epic. And it doesn't involve, it doesn't even have to involve going outside. So there are ways of exploring by reading new books, by thinking, talking to new people, by trying out new things, hobbies, or even foods or cooking. There are ways of doing things that are new to you that don't involve disrupting your entire life. But ultimately I think that, you know, one of the questions I asked everyone about, every scientist I spoke to who's an expert in play is like, how do we get adults to play more?

And, you know, to a person they were all saying, you can't just tell people to play. Like, people have jobs and responsibilities and excessive demands on their time. So it's just a question of they will play naturally if they can make a little space for themselves. Play is what we want to do. It's a self-motivated behavior, but it's a way of finding little spaces in your day, in your life, in your week where you can say, what do I actually want to do? What would be interesting to me right now?

It's not a self-help book, but you come with rules, rules to explore better. And you can explore, then exploit, seek the uncertainty, sweet spot, play more, embrace the struggle, but one of them is also minimize regret. What is that? Yeah, this is, so, of course I was trying to write a self-help book because they sell a lot of copies, right?

But there isn't easy, there are not a lot of easy answers here, or let's say science-backed answers here. One of the ones that is science-backed, which I found fascinating, which comes from the math of explore-exploit decisions, is this idea of minimizing regret by being optimistic in the face of uncertainty. So you can't always make the right choice in an explore-exploit dilemma. The nature of exploring is it's uncertain. So you're never, you can't guarantee you always make the right choice in an explore exploit dilemma. The nature of exploring is it's uncertain. So you're never you can't guarantee you will make the right choice. What you want to do is make choices such that when you're looking back, you will even if it went wrong, you will not regret it. And I think you know, an easy example that maybe the reflects my own insecurities as a kid is like asking someone to dance. It's terrifying to take that leap when you

don't know if it's going to be a yes or it's going to be a no. And sometimes if you make the leap, it sometimes will be a no. But looking back, how often does anyone regret saying, oh man, I wish I hadn't asked that person to dance compared to the, for me at least, the orders of magnitude more times that I look back and say, I wish I had asked that, tried asking that person to dance or whatever you know, whatever metaphorical equivalent of that. So you take a chance, you look at what has the best, the biggest possible upside, what has the best realistic outcome?

And you say, let's try that. And even if it doesn't work, at least I won't regret trying. What was the last time you hit that uncertainty sweet spot? Oh, that's a good question. I would have to say, last summer we went on a hiking trip in the Pyrenees and I write in the book about this trip I took in Newfoundland, which was probably too hard,

too scary and I ended up defaulting back to like walking with my phone in my hand and the GPS so we wouldn't get lost. And so I was really trying to focus on feeling exploration, but not in pursuit of a goal. And I think on this hike in Spain with my family, I really felt in the moment and was able to keep the GPS in the pocket. It was challenging, but not that sort of terrifying that I felt a little bit in Newfoundland. Those are the moments that we're all looking for. Alex, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much, Matt.

You've been listening to The Current Podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.