The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 622: Alex Hutchinson - Why We Seek Big Challenges, Adding Texture To Time, The Explorers Gene, Working Through Uncertainty, Tom Hanks, and Pushing The Limits of Human Performance

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes. The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader Be optimistic in the face of uncertainty. We discover who we are by doing it. We learn who we are in practice, not in theory. The only way to fully know if you can do it, is to do the thing. Take action. Fail sometimes. Then keep going. The explore-exploit dilemma. Do we keep on the same path and stick to what we know works or do we go out into the unknown? Do we invest in R&D with no guarantee that it will pay off? This reminds me of Scott Galloway on episode #578, In order to do anything of significance in your life, you must take an uncomfortable risk." The Hard is what makes it good. From Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) in A League of Their Own. The HARD stuff adds texture to time. The effort needed is a source of meaning. Similar to the Ikea paradox. There is more meaning in the piece of furniture if you assemble it. We shouldn't run away from the hard things (like Dottie Hinson was doing in A League of Their Own)> We should run towards them. The effort is where find a source of meaning. Opened with gratitude for him helping me with my first book, Welcome to Management.  The beginnings of chapters/stories. What's most important and what's interesting? Use the best story you have. The beginning is super important. Time with Friction - "I don't want it to be easier." Challenge and complexity make it more meaningful. It's less meaningful if it's not challenging. Effort is a source of meaning. The Ikea Effect. A piece of furniture is worth more to you if you put it together. Why do you keep pushing your limits? What am I getting out of this? Is there some intrinsic pleasure? We are wired to explore, push our limits We are also wired to be lazy, to rest in between hunts. Dichotomy there. Some are nomadic and some settle. It's useful to have both. Alex and his wife take their daughters with them on adventures. They earn a feeling like, "I can do anything." Adding voluntary hardship to a child's life can be helpful. If it's a foregone conclusion, it's not interesting. This is why people love live sports. We don't know how it's going to end. Uncertainty makes it interesting. The same is true for life. Uncertainty - We're willing to pay a lot to not know the ending. The arc is important. "Bold beginning of uncertain outcomes." Alex was shy and didn't introduce himself to girls. "I would have had a better time if I wasn't scared to ask someone out." My first job getting rejected 60 times a day. Useful. His job as a newspaper intern having to go to people's houses after their family member died in a car accident and talk with them. Made everything else seem easier. Quote to open the book: "To say that we should not change wines is heresy; the tongue becomes saturated, and after the third glass even the best bottle yields but an obtuse sensation." – Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin Waffles – They are great. But if you have them every day, you lose the magic. A metaphor for life. Life/Career Advice: Be optimistic in the face of uncertainty. Have both the exploring and exploiting mindset. Explore widely. We discover who we are by doing it. Have to do the thing.

We're wired to explore and we're wired to push our limits and we're wired that way because it was helpful to us as a species. But we still have that wiring. If you know before you even start a challenge that you're going to complete it because there's no way you can fail, that challenge loses all its meaning and all its interest. This episode is brought to you by my friends at Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to being the light to the world around them. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through talent or technical services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person can be magic.

Visit Insightglobal.com slash learning leader today to learn more. That's Insightglobal.com slash learning leader. Welcome to The Learning Leader Show. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text Hawk to 666866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email for me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right.

You'll also receive details about how our book, The Score That Matters, will help you become a more effective leader. Text Hawk to 66866. Now on to tonight's featured leader. Alex Hutchinson is the New York Times, best-selling author of Endure, and a National Magazine Award-winning journalist who has contributed to the New York Times, The New Yorker, and many others. He's a former long-distance runner for the Canadian national team.

He holds a master's in journalism from Columbia and a PhD in physics from Cambridge. And he did his postdoctoral research with the National Security Agency. During our conversation we discussed, Alex shares the science about why we are wired to explore and how to use that wiring to become a more effective leader. Then we went deep into why choosing the. harder path is usually useful for leaders. And then Alex discussed uncertainty and how we can become more optimistic in the face of that uncertainty. Ladies and gentlemen, this one is so good. Please enjoy my conversation with Alex Hutchinson. I wanted to start with something that is a little bit different that shows how kind and generous you are because you probably don't even remember this.

but I sent you an email on April 10th, 2019. And I said, Alex, I love the opening of your book, Endur, and how descriptive you are. And you take me inside of the scene of where we're starting. Could you read the opening paragraphs to my first book, Welcome to Management and maybe give me some notes? And now I look back and I actually reread the email this morning. And I thought, I can't believe I sent that email. That was insane. but not only did you respond, but you sent me back a draft with multiple versions of how the opening of my book could be better.

And I'm just some random dude from the internet. You had no reason to respond and to be that kind and generous. And I think it's worth it to publicly acknowledge how cool that was. And it actually made a difference in my first book because I took your notes and implemented them immediately. least. So I just want to say, thank you. That is such a cool thing of you to do. That is, you know, I'd actually forgotten about that. But now that you mentioned it's like, yeah, I do remember that. And, and you know what? First of all, I'm happy to help. So many people have helped me. If I'm able to help, that's great. But also, it's like, hey, someone likes my writing. Of course, I'm happy to try, you know, like it made me feel really good to be, to your kind words and then to hopefully be able to share my perspective. And of course, as you know, as you know,

now having written multiple books, there's many ways to roam and everyone's got different ways of writing books. But yeah, it's fun to be able to share the context or share experience that you've accumulated over a lot of years. Speaking of that real quick, you are really good in your writing at starting, I don't know if the right word is fast. Ryan Holley told me you've got to grab them by the throat and force them to want to turn the page. And I don't know if I describe it in that way. I don't know if you grab me by the throat, but you make me want to keep reading, whether it's how descriptive you are or how good you are at quickly putting your reader inside of the scene. How do you think about the beginnings of your stories, the beginnings of chapters to pull the reader in? Yeah, that's a good question.

I mean, it reminds me of back in journalism school, which was now 20 years ago for me, at one point, there was a discussion about like, there's two kinds of writers or journalists. It's like those who spend half their time worrying about the first paragraph and those who spend half their time worrying about the last paragraph. And I guess I'm definitely in the first camp. I spend more time on the first and last paragraph or first and last page or first and last paragraph

or whatever the case may be than I do on anything else by far and especially the opening. Because to me it's like you said, whether you're grabbing them by the throat or drawing people in with kindness or whatever it's a free world. And so people don't have to read your stuff. This is not, my stuff is not assigned in grade 11 English.

So it's like if someone's not interested, they're turning the page or clicking the, it's even easier to click the link. I think really carefully about what's most important in the story and can I convey, I mean, there's two things, right? There's what's most important and what's interesting. And sometimes what that means is what's important is what's the message. And what's interesting is maybe the best story you've got. There's lots of ways of doing this.

You know, you can raise something, you know, raise a question that you don't answer to try and drop people in. But really, I don't generally play around with that stuff. I just want to give a sense of here is what I found most interesting in the time I've spent reporting this story. And this is same with talks, right? Okay, in the talk, people can't necessarily walk out of the room as easily as they can click. But are they going to tune in and tune out to your conversation? Don't save your best stuff for two-thirds of the way through. You've got to tell them what's great.

Okay. I want to get into some of your recent stuff. because I love digging into your latest book. And you open talking about the relationship with your wife, Lauren, and the fact that your fourth date, I believe, was a 10-day backpacking trip in Alberta that had no trails, no rangers, no facilities, and is hundreds of miles from the nearest airport. Can you tell me about how crazy you and Lauren are in the fact that was your fourth day to do something like that? Yeah, that was really, even at the time, like sometimes you look back and say,

man, that was so crazy. I can't believe we did that. This was one of those things where at the time, like, this is so crazy. I'm not sure this is the greatest idea. So we, my wife and I were long distance when we started dating. I was living in New York. She was living in Indiana. So we didn't have a ton of time to go to the local diner and sip milkshakes from the same

glass or whatever. We decided to go on a backpacking trip. And we were looking at the sort of the usual, like, oh, we could go to the Rockies. we could go to Bamp, we could go to Jaspper. And then my cousin told me about this place that's north of Jaspper, which is quite, you know, so quite difficult to reach, where it was actually not a park. It was officially designated as like a wilderness area.

So that's why they didn't have rangers or trails or anything like that. And to both of us, it was just like a light went off. That sounds awesome. Let's do that. And so we planned this trip. And, you know, looking back, I don't think we knew fully what we were getting into. we were both at the peak of our running careers at the point, so we were super fit. We were able to push ourselves to the limit, which we did.

But it's like we started that hike, which ended up being 10 days. On the first day, halfway through the day, we came to basically a river, which was water levels were high. And looking back, it was like it was almost the end of the hike. It was everything we could do. We went across, you know, bags, packs unstrapped with a big, long log holding between us so that if one of us lost, so moving, you know, you're on a rocky bottom, super big current, one foot up out of the, or four-legged beast holding this thing so that if anyone slips, we'd be able to try it. Like, it was dangerous. I don't recommend it. And at the end of the

trip, like later, we found there's an old ranger cabin at some place where, from when they used to have rangers. And we found someone that left a little bit of food there, like some pasta, who knows, like five years earlier. And they were like, hey, cool, we can extend our trip by a day. Because but now we have more food because we were that on the razor margin. We had no extra food. And so then our parents were freaking out because we came out of the wilderness a day or two later. Anyway, all of which is to say, that is, that trip is my gold standard for like, that was awesome. There was nobody there. It was rugged. It was hard. It was challenging. And yeah, in a sense, the reason that's the beginning of the book is because I look back at that trip often and think,

that's what I want for my vacations. And then I think, why? Why do I want that? What's attractive about that. That was so freaking hard. You didn't know where to go. It was sort of trackless wilderness. And it's not obvious to me why I love that so much. I just know that I do. And that I would imagine is what led you to the explorers gene, right? Your most recent book to study. Why is this? I was talking with Scott Belski and he said he likes to have time with friction. I'm with you, Alex. Our favorite things to do as if we're going to get a two or three days my wife and I to ourselves without children. The number one thing we both want to do is find a cool place to hike anywhere in the world. And this has changed. This didn't always used to be

what I looked for, but both of us now, this is our favorite thing to do. And so whether it's a beautiful place like Sedona or Zion or wherever, we want to go hike more so than any beach or any ocean. What do you think about this idea of time with friction, which makes it more memorable than time laying on a beach with somebody else. Yeah, I'm like, I'm a thousand percent into the time with friction. That's an interesting way of putting it because it's like, you can do thought experiments. Okay, I love going backpacking. Now, let's say someone's like, hey, you've won the lottery or you've won, you've won

the right to have someone carry all your bags with you for this entire hike. And it's going to be way easier. My initial reaction is, it's not necessarily. what I want. I want it. I don't want it to be too hard. I don't want it, but I want it to be at the edge of what I feel is comfortable or sustainable. And I want to emphasize that this doesn't mean that I think that anyone who has a porter carrying their bags on a hike during the wrong thing. We all have personal curves of, we can get in this later. I, you know, I talk about something called the want curve, which is this sort of sweet spot of challenge or complexity or difficulty.

And it's different for everyone in different contexts. And hiking for me, because I, I'm, you know, come from an endurance sports background. I'm good at it so I can carry my own bag. But the point is, I want it to be challenging for me. And I want, it feels less meaningful to me if it becomes easier, even in the same context. I'm going to the same place, let's say I'm going to the same place, seeing the same sites, sleeping in the same place, but someone is massaging my feet and carrying all my bags. I find that less interesting.

And again, I recognize that doesn't necessarily make sense. You can say, what happened to you as a child that you are so desperate to be struggling. For this book, I talked to a bunch of psychologists, people who study this kind of stuff, and this idea of effort as a source of meaning, that whether it's having kids or going on a hike, a lot of the things that we find meaningful in life, even if we can't say what the meaning of meaning is, it's hard to define the meaning of life, but things we find meaningful tend to be hard, tend to involve some friction. It doesn't mean you can't line the beach ever.

It just means that you're not going to. playing the same thing. You're looking for something different in that context. There's a great scene in the movie, A League of Their Own, where Gina Davis's character, Dottie Henson, is leaving the team at the end of the movie. And she is talking to Tom Hanks, who plays Jimmy Dugan, the manager of the team. And it's an amazing scene. I highly recommend people watch it. I wrote about it my most recent book. But at the end, they're having this conversation and Jimmy Dugan, Tom Hanks is really frustrated because she's leaving. She's the best player on the team and she's leaving them in the World Series.

And she looked at him and she goes, it just got too hard. And Tom Hanks' character goes, the hard is what makes it good. If it were easy, then everybody would do it. And I feel like that is an emblematic for life. That it's kind of along the lines of this effort is a source of meaning. The effort that it takes, the hard is what makes it meaningful. And I know you've done a lot more research and talk to scientists and people about this. Can you share more about why the hard is what makes it good?

Yeah. So there's something, what I found super fascinating is there's a concept called the effort paradox. There's a guy in the University of Toronto named Michael Inslich, who's done a lot of the research on this. And what he's recognizing is that if you think about traditional economic theory, is that toil and trouble, which is what Adam Smith called it in the wealth of nations, should reduce the value of something. If you're going to sell me furniture and you say, oh, by the way, it's going to come as a bunch of flatboards with a bunch of random screws and some totally incomprehensible instructions.

I'm going to say, I'm not going to pay as much for that furniture. That's less valuable to me. In fact, there's been research on something called the IKEA paradox, or I mean the IKEA effect, which is that if you have people assemble the furniture, themselves, they will actually value it more highly. They'll demand more money to get to sell that furniture than if you give them the exact same furniture pre-made. So, and this is a thing that recurs, this idea of an effort paradox, that sometimes we value things not despite the effort they involve, but because they involve effort, it's like, why do we climb mountains? And you think of

mountaineers, it's like, why are they climbing up that hard face when there's like a staircase or there's a gondola on the other side of the mountain? They don't just want to get to the top. It's goes back to this whole George Mallory climbing Everest in the 20s say why you want to climb Everest because it's there it's a terrible answer but it's trying to grapple with this idea of why do people run marathons there's like six people in the world who run marathons because they want to win the Olympics and get rich the other 20 million of us are like I don't know I just want to see if I can do it I want to I want to explore my limits I want to do something because it's hard and I don't want to explore the limits of something easy I want to try it because

it's hard. And so the neuroscience of why we find this meaningful, it's tricky, but it's a very repeatable observation that if you do something that's hard, you end up feeling satisfied and you end up feeling that this activity was worthwhile that I want, that I'm really glad I did this thing. Do you think part of it is part of my ethos is take the stairs? It comes from Michael Easter and I love the 2%. Right? Yeah, to be a 2% or they take the chair. I was at this tournament, a volleyball tournament with my daughter in Orlando, Florida, and there's escalators literally right next to the stairs. And when you're at a volleyball tournament with high school girls and their parents,

there's a lot of very tall athletic people, and yet none of them take the stairs. And so part of me, let me tell, I love you to deconstruct this. This is not how I expected this to go, by the way, Alex, but it's fun. Okay. Part of why I like to take the stairs is I feel in a way that it's on me to prepare myself for the future adversity that inevitably is going to happen, whatever that may be. So I want to be in as good as shape as I can possibly be both physically and mentally. That's why I work out every day and that's why I take the stairs.

And I feel like whatever happens, it's on me to put myself in the best possible position to be able to endure, to use one of your words, whatever that thing is. No guarantees, anything could happen. but if I'm always actively choosing the thing that's a little bit harder or choosing the thing to punish my body in the gym or punish my mind in a way that really stretches me, I feel like I'm better prepared to handle the uncertainty of life. How does that play with this idea of choosing the harder path or choosing to do hard things? Yeah. So this is this is this gets at the heart of I think what prompted this book now. Can I can I ask Ryan,

How old are you? 43. 43. So I'm 49. We're in the same ballpark, but similar, but I'm a little farther down the train tracks than you are. And when I started thinking about this book, it was a lot, a lot of it had to do with exactly what you're describing. Because I've gone through life feeling like I'm going to do the hardest things because it's going to get me ready for whatever the future may hold. And that's that's not just, that's taking the stairs, that's training hard.

Even, you know, I was a competitive distance runner, even after my, my serious competitive career ended. I was like, no, I, you know, I actually tried for a year or two. I was like, maybe I'll just chill out jog a couple days a week. And then after a year or two, I was like, screw that. No. I like the feeling of that I am, you know, ready for anything. And that's true intellectually. And then it hurts.

Like, don't you do, I like feeling sore. If I don't feel sore, I don't feel right. like my because I lift weights like I should be sore literally every day and if I'm not that means I didn't go hard enough like is that is that a sickness is that am I messed up you know like I I wonder that honestly it's a good sickness to have I think but yeah so like you know like I studied hard stuff in school because I was like well I'll do the hardest thing now so that everything will feel easy and I'll I'll read widely because my feeling is maybe sometime 10 years from now it'll be useful that I read war in peace or whatever you know like and

I enjoyed going through life, but then I got to my mid-40s, right? And I started to think, I don't even know if I want to be this honest, but let's say, I don't know what my fantasies were, but maybe I'm going to be like, I'm James Bond. I'm a secret agent. It's like, I'm going to, there's going to be a need for some guy who can run a mile really fast, and then also quote from, you know, Victorian literature and also, you know, do calculus or something like that and can carry a backpack. This is what my life, kind of the sub-narrative of my life was, be ready for everything and anything.

And it's like, I'm in my mid-40s, maybe I'm not going to be a secret agent. Should I just coast from now on? Like, I know a lot of stuff. I'm pretty fit. Maybe I can just sort of ride the slope down for the next 30 years. Now, I sort of said that to myself, but I thought, that sounds awful. There's nothing I want to do less than that. I want to keep pushing my limits.

But why? Because if I'm not preparing myself for something in the future, future, what am I doing right now, choosing the hard limit? It's like, if I'm not going to be the first person to travel down some river in the Northwest Territories, why do I need to, when I go on my canoe trips or my backpacking trips, I like to do it kind of old school. I don't like to go in luxury. I don't like, you know, my friends are like, should we bring a folding chair for

the canoe? Hell no, we should sit on the ground. Like, come on. If we want to stay at home, we can stay at home. But it's hard to know how to justify that. Matt sort of gave root to this, as part of my motivation for like, okay, so what am I getting out of pushing my limits? What am I getting out of exploring the unknown about whether it's intellectually or physically or, you know, internal explorations about my own limits? Is it always

only about what I get out of it in the future, or is there something intrinsic, some intrinsic pleasure of exploration? And since I'm posing the question, I'll give the answer, which is I think there's a mix, I think. And so, you know, the title of my book is The Explorer Gene. That's a bit tongue-in-cheek. There's not a single gene that makes people explore. But the idea is we're wired to explore and we're wired to push our limits. And we're wired that way because it was helpful to us as a species. But we still have that wiring. Interesting. Okay. We're wired to explore. We've had to go seek and find land, opportunity. Also, and I'll bring them up again, since I know you're a fan as well and maybe you guys are friends.

Michael Easter says we're also wired to be lazy. That's why everybody takes the escalator instead of the stairs because they need to conserve their energy to potentially run away from danger back long, long, long ago or conserve energy in order to go hunt to kill something to feed to our families and our tribe. So how do you, I guess this dichotomy of we're wired to explore, but we're also wired to be lazy. and we probably all know those in our lives who are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Very lazy. Don't do anything.

And then the other end is the Alex Hutchinson, who's kind of crazy. I don't know if it's as far as you, but I like to think I'm near that range. Can't run a mile as fast as you for sure. But how does that mix? Because we come from the same group of people, yet some of us are wired to be lazy, not do anything, and others are wired to explore. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So two things to say about, or two ways of looking about at this.

I think. One is on a population level and one is on an individual level. So on a population level, it's good to have a mix of people. It's good to have different inclinations. There is a sort of so-called explorer's gene related to dopamine processing that is associated with things like ADHD. It's also associated in populations that migrated further in prehistoric times tend to have higher proportions of this so-called explorers gene. And so you might say with some people are explorers or some people not, is it better to be explorer or not an explorer? What you find, there's been studies of a tribe or a group of people in Africa who were nomadic hunter-gatherers, and then some of them have settled into agricultural communities. And when you look at the

prevalence of the explorers gene, this DRD-4 variant, in the the two different groups. What you find is that in the nomadic group, the people who have the explorers version of the gene tend to be stronger, better nourished, more muscle. It's the opposite in the agricultural group of people. It's like those people with the explorers gene, they're thriving less. They're doing less. They're less well-nourished, have less muscle. So in two different contexts, these two different, the different places on the spectrum of desire to go explore turns out to be a dead. in different ways. And so in any group of people, it's useful to have people who have different

inclinations in the same way that you can take, I guess a good comparison is chronotype. Some people are night owls, some people are larks or whatever you want to call them. In the past, it was good to have some people who were staying up later on the campfire and others who were going to get up really early so that there was less amount of time where everyone was asleep and some taper toothed tiger could come in and eat all of you. So it's not that one is better than the other. It's that it's useful to have a wide range of different behaviors. That's the population level argument. And I think the individual level argument is that we all have the full spectrum of desires

and urges. Some people that's expressed more fully. Like some people, some people are clearly like driven to explore more than others. But also there's all sorts of environmental and cultural influences, the way you're brought up, what you're taught to value. And the ways some people might be very. very exploratory intellectually, but have zero designer to go backpacking. And that's cool. And it might be, so I think what I would push back against is, and I, you know, when I talk

about exploring to people, there's obviously lots of people who are like, well, that's some people, I don't like to explore. And my answer to that would be that I think if you look carefully in your life, you'll find areas where you do like to get out of your comfort zone. And if you don't, I think that's actually a problem. There's a very small subset of people who really are anti-exploratory. And those usually, there's a small proportion of people among the very old and also people with schizophrenia who really don't explore in any context. And that's, I don't think, a good thing.

One of the things I've noticed from reading about you and your wife, Lauren, is that you'd like to take your daughter's Ella and Natalie with you. You want to have them be part of the exploration as opposed to you guys just doing it as a couple. So this is a choice. and that certainly makes some of the exploring a lot different, maybe tougher, because you're not just worried about you two who, you know, you guys can kind of handle anything when you have kids along. It's a different story.

And you've been doing it since I, from what I read, they were very little. Can you talk more about your philosophy on bringing your daughters with you? Yeah. Let me be clear that this is something we wrestle with every year. And we're currently planning next summer's vacation. and it's like, how hard should it be? What are the kids really want? And, you know, you ask the kids the same question six times.

You get six different answers. It's like, do you guys want to do something challenging or do you want to, you know, go to the, you know, simple? Do you want to go to stay with grandma and grandpa while we go? It's like, some days it's like, bring it on, dad. Other days it's like, I'm not so sure. And you really want to like, so I want to really emphasize that you really want to try and listen to the kids and try. and elicit what they actually want. At least, you know, my kids are 8 and 10 now, so they have wants that they're able to express.

When our oldest daughter was six months old, and we went on some backpacking and canoeing trips, she didn't have any volition, and we were making those decisions for her. And those decisions were partly self-interested. We wanted to be out in the wilderness, and, you know, we couldn't leave our kids behind. So we were modifying what we would do pretty severely because, you know, one of my fond memories is I think when our kids were like, let's say, two and four. We went on a little backpacking trip. I hiked with a big backpack and strapped to the back of the backpack

was one of those little porta-potty things where your toilet training kids because I didn't think our kids would be able to poop in a hole in the ground yet. So I was hiking along in this beautiful wilderness with a toilet strapped to my back, and then we had to hike out with a bag full of diapers, soiled diapers. So obviously we didn't cover a lot of ground on those hikes. But so it's really trying to understand what the kids want,

especially because there's all sorts of unspoken, you know, you can ask them, but if they know that the right answer is, I want to go hiking, Daddy, because I want your approval. Then you're not getting it right. But my feeling is that they get a huge amount out of it, a sort of feeling that they can do anything, that they've been out in the rain, hiking, gotten cold, gotten muddy, gotten tired, gotten hungry.

And with kids, You can try and convince them that there's no choice. They have to keep doing something. Out in a hike, you're not bluffing anymore. It's like, I'm sorry, but we need to get to the place where we're going to camp because there's nothing here. And yes, they keep going and then they realize, holy crap, you know, I did that. And it was fine.

And the one key thing is it's like adversity comes. Things go bad. We get to camp or whatever. Half an hour later, they're running around having a blast. And then we're like, okay, few, we didn't overdo it. at this time. They're okay. I love that because I talk about this with friends all the time. We're figuring out ways to create voluntary hardship for children because its life is built to be easy, especially if you have means and you can provide and live in a nice house and a great

community. There's got to be like hardship. And I'm thinking of all the possible ways to introduce that to life. Okay, I want to dig into the book if you're cool and maybe you can riff on some of my notes that I took. This is at the beginning and it's in chapter four, but the explore slash exploit dilemma. What is that? And can you go deeper on this explore slash exploit dilemma? Yeah. So this is really the fundamental choice in a lot of context, right? You can either keep doing what you're doing. You can follow the path that you're on or you can strike out into the unknown and figure out what's off the path. And so the, The terminology is most associated with a guy named James March, who was a Stanford business professor, very well known, who wrote a paper in 1991 about the Explore Explore Explate tradeoffs in business decision making.

So he's thinking corporate direction. And so, you know, the easy example of that would be, are you going to, you know, invest resources in your existing product line, you know, marketing it more, doing that kind of thing? Or are you going to put resources into R&D and say, you know what, we can. build something better that's going to make our current product line obsolete. And the natural response is, well, those are both important. We should do both of those things. That's true, but you can't maximize both. You can't do everything in this world. You have to choose how you're going to allocate between this sort of exploration and exploitation. And March's, one of March's main messages was that because the rewards of exploration are uncertain and they're distant, you don't

find out for, let's say, if it's R&D for a number of years, whether it's going to pay off, the feedback loop is much weaker, whereas when you exploit and you pour more money into marketing, the current product line, you see a bump in sales next quarter. It's like, wow, that really worked. Let's keep doing that. So we tend to overinvest in exploitation rather than exploration in the corporate context. You can zoom out and think about that in the societal context. Are we investing enough in fundamental blue sky research, or are we just trying to, you know, keep the current system going the way it is? And you can also zoom in and say, look in your personal life and explore, exploit dilemmas are everywhere. It's like the canonical example is you go to a restaurant, you know, your favorite restaurant, you always order the burger.

Is it worth trying the meatloaf that you've never tried before? because it might suck, but it might be good. Maybe you should stick with the burger, which is pretty good. And so we're making these sorts of decisions. It's like dating. It's career choices. You're going to follow the path you're on, or are you going to try launching that business you're considering?

So they're everywhere. And the question is, how do you optimize the explorer exploit, these explore exploit decisions? And that turns out to be a very complicated question. Okay. We've got to answer it, though. Can you give you your best shot? Okay.

Yeah. So it's easy. You just always, you know, If the day starts with a T, it's contextual, right? Like, there's no right answer. The same, two people might make the same different decisions under the same circumstances. And it's not necessarily that one of them is right or one of them is wrong. But you need to think very carefully about what it is you're trying to optimize, what the stakes are.

And so you can, there's a sort of 60-year history of mathematical attempts to solve the Explore Exploite dilemma. And you can model it as basically you're walking into a casino. know, there's a bunch of slot machines. You don't know anything about them. How are you going to spend your money? And they each have a certain percentage probability or a certain payout function. And some of them might be really good. Maybe one slot machine pays out 90% of the time and another one pays out 20% of the time. The only way you're going to find out is by putting money into each of them. And eventually you're going to get a sense, this one seems better. This one seems okay. This one seems crappy. But you don't know for sure because it's all probabilistic. You don't know whether just because you've got two losses on one slot machine, whether it's, just terrible or whether you just had some bad luck. And so the math on how to solve those is exceptionally complicated. But there's been a lot of attempts and algorithms that come out not to give you the right answer every time. Because life is probabilistic, right? It's not like if you do something and it turns out well, it doesn't mean that was the right decision. You might have just got lucky, right? So there's no right answer. But what you want to be able to do is maximize your

odds of a good outcome and minimize regret about missing out on what might have been even better. And I think maybe the most interesting and practical takeaway from this, there's something called the upper confidence-bound algorithm, which is guaranteed mathematically to minimize the amount of regret you will experience in your choices. And what the upper-confidence-bound algorithm says is essentially you should look for the biggest potential upside, the biggest realistic upside. So if you buy a lottery ticket, the upside is you win $50 million, but that's not a realistic upside, right?

You're very unlikely to win the lottery. But if you say, if you look at the sort of reasonable error bars, let's say the 90% confidence, like the outcomes will be in a certain range, you should take the choice that gives the highest realistic upside. So in a career context, what that might mean is you're looking at two jobs. One of them has a good starting salary, you know, stable, but not much prospects for advancement. You're just, that's that's the job and you'll be doing that indefinitely. Another job is maybe more aligned with what you hope to be doing. It has a pathway to your dream job, but it's less stable. The starting salary is worse.

So the average, like, if you're just looking at like what is the most likely good outcome, it's like you should take the first job, it's stable, it's got a good starting salary, blah, blah, blah. But the second one has this upside, which is not out of the question. There's a reasonable pathway that you might get to the job you really wanted. and what the upper confidence bound algorithm says is take a chance on the one with the realistic upside. That's going to get you closer to where you really want to be. Another name for it is optimism in the face of uncertainty. When you're choosing between two uncertain choices and most choices in life are uncertain, right?

You generally don't know what you're going to get, really. Be optimistic. Pick the one that actually will get you. And it won't always pan out. But if nothing else, you generally, won't regret having given it a shot. And I think that's a kind of sentiment that you hear from a lot of people who've tried to do hard things. Like I spent most of my 20s trying to make the Olympics, and I didn't. But I have no regret about that. It was a hard thing to try, and it was worthwhile

trying, and I have no regret about giving it a shot, even though it didn't pan in. When you look at the things that have produced the greatest moments or upside in your own life, anybody could run this audit right now. Look what preceded those moments, whether it's in sports or in your career. To me, there was risk involved. There was some bigger than others. There was the risk of putting in all this effort to practice and lift weights and run and still lose the games and still have bad experiences. And I've been on winning teams and losing teams. There was a huge risk in leaving corporate America for me at the end of 2017 to start my own business because I thought, but it's had by far the greatest upside in my life now is risky and you give up that nice

VP salary at a quorch and 500 company. I don't know, man. I feel like if you if your gut instinct combined with some of the facts and some of the data align, it's almost always worth it to take that shot. And I think. think along the way, though, you should run small experiments. And maybe you have some data behind this, run small experiments to see if that could happen. In my case, it was like, okay, the market's saying, yeah, come speak here, come work with our leaders here, come do this. Okay, it's not just me thinking like, well, I'm just going to quit and hope for the best. It's no, the market and the world was speaking to you a little bit after you running these small experiments that maybe something is here. And that could go

for a lot of different areas of your life. If you're dating, then go on dates, right? Run experiments. go on as many as you need to. Give yourself a chance. If you're thinking of starting your business, start it. You don't have to quit everything. Run an experiment. See if the market likes what you have to offer. I feel like, though, the biggest rewards usually come by you taking some sort of risk.

And let's take a little bit more measured risk and run experiments as opposed to just saying, I'm going all in and throwing everything else away. Yeah, I think there's a couple really important things he said there. one is this idea of risk and uncertainty. Outcomes that are foregone or that are obvious are just really uninteresting. I don't think this is just a personal thing for me. I think it's a general statement that I think of it in terms of, because I'm a running guy, in terms of like running a marathon.

Let's say, if I want to run a marathon, I know I can run a marathon because I trained very seriously as a distance runner for many years. So it's uninteresting to me to find out whether I can run a marathon, which is not the case for someone else, someone who's never, you know, it hasn't done much running. Finding out whether they can run a marathon might be full of uncertainty. So for me to make it interesting, it's like, can I run a marathon in a given time? And so I wrote an article once, probably I would say the only article I've ever written that my mother really didn't like. and then she let me know about the Marine Corps marathon. There was a controversy 15 years ago about some runners who would take in a shortcut to get

because they were not going to make it to the cutoff time. Because Marine Corps is all about participation, but it has cutoff times because you can't keep these major arteries shut indefinitely. And so some people took a shortcut, got their finishers medal. They got found out. It became a big thing in like runners' world. And I heard an article saying, you know what, even though the point of Marine Corps is participation, It's not about going super fast. There is something about these cutoff times that gives it meaning.

And it's not that there's anything magical about six hours versus seven hours for a marathon. It's that if you know before you even start a challenge that you're going to complete it because there's no way you can fail, that challenge loses all its meaning and all its interests. So if you want to complete the Marine Corps Marathon, I don't remember what the cutoff times are exactly, whether it's six or seven hours. you have to be able to complete it in six hours. And there are other marathons. I read a, there was a nice article in the Times about the last finisher in the Honolulu marathon this year that was like who finished it in 16 hours and something.

And he was super thrilled because that was challenging for him. The point is, whatever challenge you are, it's not about the intrinsic level of the challenge. It's about if you want something to engage you to feel meaningful, you have to not know what the outcome is. The outcome has to be uncertain in some way. And so it doesn't mean you just go automatically, you know, like searching for things you don't know. But when you're taking on a challenge, if you're thinking, I don't know about this, I'm not sure how it's going to turn out. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

That's a part of anything that's worthwhile that's doing. There has to be some element of risk. So I'm definitely on board with what you're saying about risk. Why are live sports the most valuable resource for TV networks today? Why? Well, because they have uncertainty because we don't know what's going to happen. We're really interested to watch and see because we don't know, especially if you're a fanatic, if you're a fan of a team and you really want them to win. It's funny, like when your team wins in a blowout, whether you're on the team or you're a fan of the team,

you may remember it kind of, but when they win the close one or it's a comeback or a last second play, you remember those forever. It's amazing the difference. And that's because there was so much uncertainty. You were scared. You weren't sure. And then you made it happen. And I think that's a great metaphor for life.

We shouldn't run away from those moments. In fact, we should probably run towards them, even though they're really scary and we're not sure how it's going to go. That makes a more interesting life. And I feel like that's you, man. I mean, this idea of running towards the uncertainty instead of running. away from it. Yeah, there's a great interview that I, so there's a podcast on Scientific American by a journalist named Christy Ashwandan about uncertainty. It was all about the concept of uncertainty.

And one of our interviews was with a scientist named David Crackauer. And I mean, I'll skip the background details and just say he had this great line about we don't want to know the ending necessarily. In fact, we're willing to pay vast sums of money to not know the ending until it, until it comes. And I think that's the live sports thing. You know, he was making the comparison to, you know, basketball. We don't watch basketball to know what the final score is. We know what it is. We watch it to follow that arc. And that ties into, for me at least, to this idea of a hero's journey, which has become a kind of cliche. Joseph Campbell was this mythologist. I guess he was famous from like the 1930s through the 1980s. He had a very long career. What was interesting to me

in digging into this idea of this hero's journey, which he defined in one place as a bold, beginning of uncertain outcome. So it's, if you're heading out on some mission where you don't know, it's essential that you don't know how it's going to turn out. Otherwise, it's not meaningful. And so I don't want to take out like a 40-minute digression here, but this hero's journey is basically the template for a ton of Hollywood movies. Most famously, George Lucas rewrote the first Star Wars movie after reading Joseph Campbell's book and they became good friends. But Joseph Campbell was one of the world's fastest 800-meter runners in the 19-20. And so when I was digging up trying to understand his hero's journey, I was like, yeah, he understood

this idea of heading out on a mission where you don't know how it's going to turn out and where it's going to, you're going to struggle, where an inherent. And he, in the 80s, just before he died, he did keep some interviews and they were like, you've had this super interesting life. You know, what were the highlights? He was like, oh, the 4 by 800 meter relays at Penn Relays in 1925. It's like, he came from behind. Like you said, the outcome was uncertain. The other team was ahead. He was running the anchor and he won two races with big come from behind victories. And that's 60 years later, he's like, that was the high point in my life. That was it.

We're talking a lot about sports. How does this relate to regular everyday life for people who don't regularly play sports or don't care for sports? This is something I get criticized about from time to time. But it's my story. It's my background. So I talk about sports. But anyway, how does this relate to the non-sporting world of uncertainty, risk?

getting out there, right? How would you do that? Yeah, I mean, this is what, look, look, I'm also a person who everything, sports is a metaphor for everything. But in this case, I think the metaphor is perfect. It fits very easily onto all sorts of things. This sort of maybe an easy example is, as a pretty shy guy, like, I was always very hesitant to ask women out or to ask someone to dance. And it's like, I had lots of friends who were like, dude, you just, you have to accept that, you know, accept failure as an option. And it's like, it's okay. You have to explore. You have to try lots of things. You can't just wait for the perfect

meteor to hit. I was like, well, I'm going to wait for the perfect meteor hit. And, you know, I had to wait another 10 years. But let's be honest. I would have, I want to be careful how I phrase this, but I would have had a good time, a much better time, if I'd been a little more willing to take risks and to eat, to not wait until I was sure that someone liked me before asking them out. Just like, let's, if I want to know whether they'd like me, why don't I just ask? If they don't want to go out with me, they don't want to go out with me. That's fine. And, you know, I guess the other obvious comparison is like you were saying, starting, you know, leaving a corporate life to start your own business or start as an entrepreneur.

If you wait until you know that I think your point about running small experiments is good. It's not about being irrationally optimistic or delusionally optimistic, but it's about looking for the bright side, being real in a realistic sense, and then being willing to accept the possibility of failure. And that's a hard and scary thing in whether it's in your personal. life in your business life or in sports. But it really opens up a whole, a much wider field of possibilities if you're willing to fail sometimes. This is why if I speak with a recent college grad and they're not exactly sure what they want to do or what type of job they want, I push them

to work in sales. Now, this comes from bias because that was my experience. But the reason, and I never sold a thing in my life before I got my first. job in sales after I finished playing football. The reason that it was so helpful, though, was because I got rejected 60 times a day. And that is a, that is great practice for life. And it also makes you just go, all right, no means not yet. Going on to the next call, go to the next one, go to the next one, go to the next one. And was it fun in the moment?

Not a lot of times it wasn't. It was very fun, you know, when you broke through and you started doing well and exceeding goals and winning circle of excellence. that was cool. But part of what made it cool, Alex, and this goes back to what we spoke about earlier, was dealing with all of that rejection, dealing with all of that failure, going through all of the hard stuff to eventually, a couple years later, getting up on that stage in front of your entire company because, you know, you did so well. It wouldn't have, I wouldn't have appreciated if I would have started on stage. I had to go through all of that rejection, all of that failure of sounding like an idiot, being embarrassed in front of my colleagues. because you're sitting in cubicles, you can all hear each other. That thing is an amazing practice. That's probably honestly why I may, now I think about it.

That's why I had the guts and maybe the stupidity to write you an email and asking you, can you edit my book? Can you make this book better because I'm so used to getting rejected? I don't care. What does it matter? And if you just said no or you ignore me, I'd just move on to the next. But I think that is a very useful skill to develop, right? It's being rejected, having people say no, because then you might be willing to ask,

or go for it the next time because it's not that big a deal if you lose or they say no or they ignore you. Yeah. And so my parallel experience would be that my first job out of J school was that a newspaper, I got an internship, a summer internship with a daily newspaper called the Ottawa citizen. And then I got extended for a year after that. So I spent 16 months there as the lowest man on the totem pole, the general assignment intern. So if there's a car crash, like, you know, send Hutchinson to go knock on the door of the person who is killed. killed, you know, the family of the person who was killed and ask how they feel about. It's like, I think we can guess how they feel about it. I don't think I need to ask them, do I?

You do you to do that? Yeah, yeah. And so, look, I'm not condoning all, you know, and I was also the guy getting sent to the dog fashion shows and just to all sorts of situations where people didn't necessarily want to talk to me. And as an introvert, you know, that was hell. But it was also the best possible training. And so I've enjoyed being a freelance journalist, calling my own shots for the last whatever 18 years, but that first year and a half of being forced out of my comfort zone day after day after day was invaluable because like you said, it's similar to you. It taught me, you know, someone says, take off. I don't want to talk to you. That's okay. Like, it's not fun. Nobody likes it. There's a reason I don't do that kind of reporting anymore,

but you learn that the world doesn't end and you move on and you write the next door, you knock on the next door. Sometimes people are actually really happy to talk to you. They're sad that something bad happened, but they want to tell their story. And you realize, you know what, until you ask, you never know. And if they don't want to talk, that's fine. But often they really do want to talk. And that's even better. The quote to open the book is to say that we should not change wines is hearsay.

The tongue becomes saturated. And after the third glass, even the best bottle yields, but an obtuse sensation. This comes from it looks like a potentially French person. whose name I cannot pronounce. Can you go deeper on why you chose that quote to open the book? Yeah, I wanted to seem really pretentious. It was the main reason. But yeah, really what I wanted to get at, how I wanted people to open this book was to understand that I'm not just talking about like sailing across the Atlantic. And I'm not just talking, even though the introduction of the book is about me and my wife and my kids on a crazy hiking trip. It's not.

not just about suffering or about physical exploration. It's about this idea that we want something new. And so it's like, I have this discussion with my kids all the time. So that quote is from a book called The Physiology of Taste, which was a really, it was a really influential book in the 1800s trying to understand how we experience food and drink and why we experience the way we experience. So my kids love waffles for breakfast. And I love waffles for breakfast. And I love waffles for breakfast. And ever since I was a kid, my parents used to make these protein waffles, which were a whole bunch of cottage cheese and eggs. Whatever, that's another story, I guess, but my parents would make these big batches of waffles, freeze them, and I would have them for breakfast. And so I started

doing the same for my kids. And they want them every morning. And I keep having an argument with them. I'm like, trust me, if you have them every morning, you will lose the magic. You will not love them in six months or a year or whatever. And once you don't love them, they're gone. You can't bring back that feeling. It's like if you've listened to the same song 58 times, eventually you're going to not love that song anymore. And so I have this instinct of my own of like,

right now I don't let them have waffles more than twice a week. And it's not because I'm too lazy to make them. It's because I want them to still love those waffles in five years, the way I still love them 40 years later after I started eating them. So there's really something like fundamental. about this idea of you'll lose, the bloom comes off the rose if you go back to the well too often or if you're having the same thing over and over again. So variety, maybe there's nutritional arguments for having variety of diet, but for me it's also about preserving the feeling that

something is new. Love it. Alex, the close, I'm curious, if you were meeting with somebody who was earlier in their career, maybe they just graduated from college and they were uncertain of what they wanted to do. What are some general pieces of life? slash career advice you'd give to them. Yeah. So, I mean, the first thing I would say is going back to what we were saying earlier, which is to be optimistic in the face of uncertainty and to be willing to take risks. An insight that I found interesting in the research for the book is this idea of you have to

have both exploring and exploiting in your life. And the best way to do that, ideally, the best way to combine them is to explore first and then exploit. So you want to, before you dig in, everyone loves grind culture. to be the first one up in the morning working hard. But you got to make sure you're working on the right thing. And the way to do that is to make sure you've explored widely before you settle on where you're going to dig in. So especially if I'm talking to a younger person, I encourage them. Some people know exactly what they want to do when they're eight years old and congratulations to

them. But most of us, we discover who we are by doing it is something that David Epstein said in his book, Range. And I think that's really true. You've got to try a lot of different things. You're not going to know what you love and what you would potentially great at unless you try a whole bunch of things rather than just settling on the first thing that that seems fun to you. So good. The book is called The Explorers Gene, Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. As mentioned, the beginning of this conversation, I am a massive fan of your writing style and output and how you're so good at getting us inside the minds of your characters and the stories you write about all true stories.

that you write about so a huge fan i would highly highly recommend people read the explorers gene not only for the quality of the writing but the actual uh output and what you will get from it to make your life better Alex thanks again man and i certainly would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress man thanks Ryan it's really been a ton of fun to to reconnect and to have a chance to chew over some of these ideas love it man thank you it is the end of the podcast club thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learningleader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Alex Hutchinson.

A few takeaways from my notes. Be optimistic in the face of uncertainty. We discover who we are by doing it. We learn who we are in practice, not in theory. The only way to know if we can do something is to do the thing. Take action, fail every once in a while, get up and keep going. Be optimistic in the face of uncertainty. And then the explore, exploit dilemma.

Do we keep on the same path and stick to what we know works, or do we go out into the unknown? Do we invest in R&D research and development with no guarantee that it will pay off? I don't know. This reminds me, though, of my conversation with Scott Galloway on episode number 578 when he said, In order to do anything of significance in your life, you must take an uncomfortable risk. Then the hard is what makes it good. From Jimmy Dugan, Tom Hanks' character in a league of their own, the hard stuff adds texture to time. The effort needed is a source of meaning.

It's similar to the IKEA paradox where there is more meaning in the piece of furniture if you've assembled it yourself. We should not run away from the hard things like Doddy Henson was trying to do in a league of their own. We should run towards them. The effort is where we find a source of meaning. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leaders Show with Alex Hutchinson. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and you subscribe to the show.

Really important. And then you write a thoughtful review. Rate the show five stars, hopefully by doing all of that. You are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk to soon. Can't wait.