The One You Feed - From Comfort Zones to Adventure Zones: The Journey of Personal Exploration with Alex Hutchinson

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

In this episode, Alex Hutchinson discusses moving from comfort zones to adventure zones and the journey of personal exploration. He delves into the human nature of exploration and fulfillment. Alex also explains how to find the balance between contentment and the drive to seek new experiences, the psychological benefits of embracing challenge, and the explore-exploit dilemma. He shares insights from his book “The Explorer’s Gene,” offering practical rules for meaningful exploration and emphasizing the importance of risk, effort, and play in leading a fulfilling life. The conversation encourages listeners to actively pursue novelty and growth, regardless of age or circumstance. Exciting News!!! Coming in March, 2026, my new book, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is now available for pre-orders!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Key Takeaways: Exploration as a theme in both physical and metaphorical contexts. The balance between contentment and the desire for new experiences. The concept of the “explore-exploit dilemma” in decision-making. The impact of age on the tendency to explore and seek novelty. The importance of meaningful exploration and active engagement. The psychological benefits of effortful and challenging activities. The role of environmental factors in shaping attitudes toward risk and exploration. The significance of play in fostering creativity and exploration. Strategies for minimizing regret in decision-making. The influence of personal experiences and choices on the capacity for exploration. For full show notes:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you enjoyed this conversation with Alex Hutchinson, check out these other episodes: Navigating Life’s Disruptions: Insights on Adapting and Thriving with James Patterson How To Cultivate Excellence in a Chaotic World with Brad Stulberg By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed, and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! This episode is sponsored by: Shopify – The commerce platform that helps you build, grow, and manage your business all in one place. Start your $1/month trial at shopify.com/feed. Pebl – an AI-powered platform that helps companies hire and manage global teams in 185+ countries. Get a free estimate at hipebl.ai Brodo Broth: Shop the best broth on the planet with Brodo.  Head to Brodo.com/TOYF for 20% off your first subscription order and use code TOYF for an additional $10 off. Alma is on a mission to simplify access to high-quality, affordable mental health care. Visit helloalma.com to learn more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's a cliche for a reason that being on a journey is fulfilling in its own way, independent of the destination, and arriving at the destination, like, you ought to have a destination that you're aiming for, but I don't want to just stop and say, hey, I'm here. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. There's a real tension in my life between wanting to be content with what's here and wanting to keep reaching for what's next. It's a tension I feel deeply. Part of me wants peace and stillness, enoughness, and part of me comes alive when I'm somewhere new, trying something unfamiliar, stepping into the unknown. In this conversation, Alex Hutchinson and I talk about that tension through the lens of exploration, what it means, why some of us resist. it and why exploring doesn't have to mean climbing mountains or crossing deserts. It might mean new music, a different way home, a choice that carries some uncertainty. We also talk about the

risk of living too narrowly and why a meaningful life may require us to keep stretching even a little. Alex's new book is the explorer's gene. I'm Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Starting something new is always really difficult because we get caught up in the stories of what if it doesn't work out or what if I put time into this and it fails. And I felt all that when Chris and I started this podcast, but I'm so glad that I did start, that I started taking positive steps towards something that mattered. And so if you're thinking of building a business, Shopify makes that leap a lot less chaotic. It's the commerce platform behind. millions of businesses and about 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S.

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what-ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash feed. Go to Shopify.com slash feed. That's Shopify.com slash feed. Hi, Alex. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. I'm really excited to talk with you about your book, The Explorer's Gene, why we seek big challenges, new flavors, and the blank spots on the map. I find this topic really fascinating for a lot of reasons that we will get into, but before we do that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild,

and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, and think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I love the parable.

The first thing it says to me is a reminder of our autonomy, for better or worse, that none of us are born good or bad or strong or weak. you know, all these things that we're making choices every day, small choices, that reinforce our journey to the place we want to be. And so we'll be talking about exploring today. And when I was writing the book and telling people, hey, I'm writing a book about exploring, one of the common answers I would get is, oh, that sounds interesting. Personally, I'm not an explorer. And there's a lot of things behind a sentence like that, which is, you know, they're saying, I don't want to, you know, parisail to the North Pole or something like that. But also, when I think about this terrible. I think about those conversations and I think you're feeding the path of not wanting to

explore. It's not that you're not an explorer that you're essentially choosing not to be. And I love exploring, but there's lots of times when I don't want to explore, but I'm trying to continue to feed that path because I think it makes me a better version of me. Yeah, I mean, the book says the explorer's gene, which leads us to believe there's some gene in there. Also, if we look at like one of the most well standardized ways of looking at personality, which is called the Big Five personality test. There is something on there, which is openness to new experience. And so it does seem that there is some degree, perhaps, of a little genetic predisposition towards adventuring. Perhaps there's a personality trait that's a little bit more adventurous.

But I agree with you in the main, which is that, since, is it ever really start with, I'm not the kind of person who I think are worth examining because we can be very different types of people. 30 years ago I was a homeless heroin addict, right? We can cover vast areas of difference. And so I think this idea of exploration, I love that you're setting out right away, like we don't have to say we are or are not an explorer. It's just to What degree do we want to pursue that? And why is it valuable? Absolutely.

And I should start with my apology about the book title. Publisher. Well, no, no. So here's the truth. I pitched this book to my publisher under the title of the Explorers Gene. And based on some research, which we can get into, that there is some genetic element. And the publisher accepted it, and we signed a contract. I started working on it.

And then I said to my editor, like, we're not really going to call it the explorers. right? Like, because it's not, that's exactly the opposite of the message that I want to send, which is that we could all explore. And he's like, no, no, no, we love that title. And I'm like, no, no. So the title is, I would like to say, a little bit tongue-in-cheek in the sense that it's a straw man that I try to knock down in the book. But you're right, that there is a genetic element. And there are differences. You know, you can go to any kindergarten and you can see some kids who just are just dying, bouncing off the walls, wanting to go and explore the world and others who are more cautious.

But to me, the big message from actually the genetic part of the story is that, without getting too sidetracked by it, but there's a dopamine receptor in the brain called DRD4, whose activity correlates pretty well with exploratory behavior. The message isn't that some people have that gene and some people don't. We all have DRD4 receptors. We all have this response. In some people, it's turned up a little louder than others. But the message is really actually universal that if there's an explorers gene,

we all have it. So I want to hit on something that you say, I believe, very late in the book. I may have even pulled this from the afterward. But you say the trajectory of adulthood is towards ever greater efficiency, narrower focus, and well-worn routines that make each day more and more similar to the last. Exploration is the anti-habit, the antidote to a diminished palette of life's choices. Say more about that. That really jumped off the page at me. Well, thanks. And I think it really gets at the heart of what got me launched on this book. And I would say in terms of the behind the scenes conversations, the other conversation I had with my editor is it's not a midlife crisis book. I'm not just going to write about my midlife crisis. But, you know, I just turned 50 a month or two ago.

So as I was writing this, I was in my mid-40s. And that is a time when you start thinking, it's like, is there anything new left for me in life? Have I done all the cool, fun adventures that I'm going to do? And now I'm just kind of, is there this sense that the paths are narrowing? I'm not going to learn new stuff now. I'm just going to keep doing the stuff that I've done in the past. And when you dig into the exploring literature, there is actually a logic behind the idea that kids are explorers and adults. We explore less and less. And the logic makes sense.

Like I would talk to all these researchers and say, but should we tell adults that they need to explore more? and the response was generally like, well, you don't necessarily when you're 45 want to explore like when you're a kid because you know a lot of stuff. You already know some. You've tried things. You know that it doesn't work to tie your shoes that way. You know that it doesn't work eating that particular plant or whatever. So you don't want to necessarily pretend you don't know anything. So we do become less exploratory as we age, but it's about the trajectory. It's about still finding opportunities to explore no matter where you are on that trajectory. Yeah, it's one of the things that I have found I'm about five years older than you. You look great, by the way. I would never have,

I would never have guessed you were that age. Something about aging that is a narrowing. And I feel it in myself. I feel this just, I don't know how else to call it, a narrowing both of what I want to do. And I'm not one of those people that is like fight against aging at all costs, right? There's a wisdom to age gracefully. But for me, it has felt more and more important to try and not let that narrowing, not let that collapse towards what's most comfortable happen. And it takes some effort. But I really love this idea that exploration is a way to work against that. I think an example that a lot of people will identify with is the music we listen to, right? You know, when you're young, you're obviously influenced by what your friends and peers are listening to, but also you're,

you're exploring. You're finding out what you like and you're trying different genres. And people do studies on this. And it's like the peak period of like emotional resonance for the music you discover is in your late teens and early 20s. Yep. And that's an intense time of life too. But, you know, by the time you're my age, most people aren't going out and discovering new

music. And I will say in all, you know, humility and honesty, I'm not either. When I flip on my music, I'm like, oh, yeah, I want to listen to that album that I just loved when I was 25 and conjures up all these memories. And there was a great editor by one of the editors of pitchfork on making the case for continuing to listen to new music. And one of the arguments, you know, there's lots of arguments. You're supporting the arts, yadda, yeah.

But also it's like, think of the albums, think of the music that has emotional resonance to you that you discovered when you were a certain age and you associated with that time. By listening to new music now, you're creating the soundtrack for you to look back on in 10 years. want to continue to make memories, you don't just want to coast on your existing memories. And it's hard. So I wrote a book on exploring, but I still just like listening to the music I loved when I was 18. But I fight against it. Yeah, it's interesting. This is one area that I still tend to explore, because music is so hugely important to me. I mean, so much of the music, some of my favorite music I found in the last, you know, 15 years. But I mean, what I'm listening to right now,

semi-obsessively are two records that came out last year. However, my genres are sort of like, okay, I kind of know what I like in these areas. I mean, I like to push the envelope a little bit, but I always sort of gravitate back to, for me, it's the song. I mean, I think it's just the art form of a song that is the heart of it to me. So this is an area that's important to me to keep exploring, but I noticed that my exploration is within certain bounds. Sure, and that's maybe a good balance between the wisdom of discovering that, you know, maybe you don't like, I won't call out any genres, just, you know, you don't like opera. I do not like country rap.

Let me be clear. Let me be very clear on this topic. Now, maybe there's good country rap and I just haven't heard it, but I'm going to make a bold statement right there. I will say no comment, but I don't think you're going to get a ton of push back. But the point I'll make is that I think this is a great example of how we can be more exploratory or less exploratory in different parts of our lives. So it's like, as I confessed, I'm not being particularly exploratory in my music habits these days. I'm finding my exploration in other parts of my life. And the people who don't want to parasail down the North Pole, which is all good.

Can you do that? Is that actually technically possible? There's a guy to the South Pole who set the fastest, the fastest solo record to the North Pole, a South Pole, Björgousland, I think. I've probably got the name on. And it was basically like, yeah, like he had a sail and he was paris,

ski sailing or something. I don't even have, I probably go. Anyway, people do, because, because there's no new places on the globe to go, you have to find new ways of going to old places.

And so people, people are doing that. And so when I would have these conversations with people who are like, I'm not an explorer, the way I would push back, to say, I bet there's areas in your life where you are continuing to explore. I hope there are areas in your life where you, whether it's music or the books you read or the ideas you think or the places you go.

There's lots of dimensions. One of the bodies of research I looked at is you can bring people into a lab and have them do various tasks that kind of test your baseline willingness or desire to explore. And there is a trajectory where, as I was saying before, whereas the older you get, you get better at exploring. you actually pick the right choice more often, but you stick with the familiar more often. And that's fine. That's what, you know, that that does reflect the accumulation of knowledge.

But there's a subset in that data. And in one study, it was about 20% of older adults who were just like, no, I don't explore at all. It's like you give them a set of choices where exploring is obviously the best, the right answer. And they're still like, no, no, no, I'm just going to stick with the known. And so I think the message for people, for people like me and you as we, as we, you know, we're not riding off into the sunset, but as we see the sunset on the horizon, is it's not that you have to pretend you're 18, but if you get to that point where you're no longer pushing yourself in any dimension of your life, you're no longer experiencing the feeling of discovering something new, of being bad at something, of trying something where you don't know whether you'll like it or not, that's, I mean, I don't want to be judgmental, but that's maybe, I don't know if it's a problem, but it's unfortunate because I think what's one of the great joys that that we can find in different aspects of our lives. It's ironic we're having this conversation right now because my son, who is 27, just last night texted me and got off of a route in Morocco. I don't know how to say it, but it could currently be described as exploratory as that has not been previously documented and no one has yet completed an uninterrupted traverse.

Wow. And I don't know if he did the whole thing or not. But it's ironic to me that we're having this conversation literally after last night. He was like, okay, we did it and headed back to Marrakesh. Amazing. So. I hope he was parasailing because that would really make it into it. I don't know that you can parisail in the desert and mountains. I'm not even sure what parasailing is to be totally less than any.

I mean neither. I always mix up parasailing with like kite surfing, wind surfing. You know, anyway. It sounds like it's an awesome trip. And it is a reminder that, yeah, like, The world's a big place. And even if somebody has been there before, you can still take trips where you're like, man, I don't know what's going to happen around the next corner.

Yeah. So you describe in the book, you kind of start off by sharing a journey that you made hiking with your wife and your kids that you really didn't quite know where you were going. It was very exploratory. It was not like the Appalachian Trail where you go, okay, here's the trail. I go straight up here through here. It was a lot more all over the place, for lack of a better word. You end the book by talking about being in the Pyrenees, which was a much more known trip.

Are you finding that the adventures that you are going on and taking your family on are more in this slightly less exploratory than the really exploratory ones? Or is it still a mix? So I'm searching for the perfect mix. And I would say, you know, big picture, when I started off writing a book about exploring, my assumption was that, you know, the subtitle would be something like, why exploring is always amazing and you should always do more exploring. And I came away with a more nuanced take that, because there is this sort of the arrival fallacy, the idea that if you can just do, you know, there's this point off in the distance.

And if you can get there, if you can achieve this thing, you're going to be happy. And you get there and it's never the case. And so I come from my background as a runner. And it's like, man, if I could just run this fast or make that team, you know, I would be the human I always wanted to be. And then you do that and you're like, I think I can go a little faster. I wonder if I could do you. So I started to see the analogy there when I thought about exploration is that there was a danger in the pursuits, in my own sort of adventure travel pursuits. And then what I was starting to impose, my wife and I were starting to impose on our family that we're every trip we're trying to one up the previous trip. It's like, okay, we took our kids on a three-day backpacking trip.

now we're going on a four-day back-jacking trip. We took our kids on an alpine hot trip, hot-to-hot trip. So now we're going to take a trip that's a week long where we're carrying all our food. And, you know, the trip we did last summer was the hardest trip we've ever done. And my kids, they were then 9 and 11 for that trip. So it's not like I had learned my lesson and said,

I'm only going to, you know, I'm trying to turn inward and explore, you know, my interior landscape instead of putting us through these ordeals. I'm still trying to find the right balance because there is a thrill. There's a feeling that you get when you're taken to your limits where you don't know if you can do it and then you do it. It's addictive.

But there's also the sense, the danger that you end up never enjoying anything you do because you're always chasing the bigger, the harder, the more obscure. So the ending of the book was my acknowledgement and my almost reminder to myself that, Alex, there can be amazing feelings of exploration without forcing your kids to do, you know, death marches through the jungle. I've talked before about how important therapy has been in my life. Having someone who can help you see yourself more clearly, challenge your thinking, and support you through the hard parts

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new subscribers only, varies by plan. You may have heard me mention my new book a few times, and I can assure you you will certainly hear it a few more, but now we are offering some pre-order bonuses. One of them is the still point method, which I believe is the only systematic way to interrupt negative thought patterns often enough for them to change. There's a lot out there about what you should think and not think. But there's very little that gives you a small and portable system to actually do it. You get the guide to the method and three free months of a new app designed to help you implement it. There are other bonuses too. You can learn more and claim them at one you feed.net slash book. I love that part at the end of the book because

you are wrestling with this exploratory urge. You're a lot. with the urge to be content where you are. And I feel like this is a fundamental tension that sits at the heart of my life. There is some part of me that comes alive when I am somewhere new, when I'm doing something different. I can feel it.

It feels deeply right in a way. And it can become a constant search for something different. So my spiritual practice, my Zen practice is the exact opposite. I mean, the basic message is like, you could be fully content and happy with just sitting here staring at a wall, which I haven't quite figured out. I'm still working on all that, right? But that tension that you describe near the end of the book is one that I feel a lot. Yeah, I would say too for me, it's almost the fundamental tension that I'm trying to figure

out at this point in my life that my career has gone better than I could have expected. You know, I have a wonderful wife and two children. If you time machine back to 20 years ago and ask, Alex, what would be just an absolute, you know, plot out, you're an absolutely fulfilling career in life for you. What would allow you to sort of sit back and say, man, I did really good at life. I'd say, you know, and then you describe where I am now and it's like, Alex, you should be content. Why are you still striving? Like, you're comfortable. You can feed yourself. Like, you're professionally fulfilled. But it's like, as you said, there's a feeling of being alive when you're, when you're,

there's something to, like the ultimate cliche is like, it's the journey, not the destination. But it's a cliche for a reason that being on a journey is fulfilling in its own way, independent of the destination. And arriving at the destination, like, you got to have a destination that you're aiming for. But I don't want to just stop and say, hey, I'm here. You know, let's, right. Let's kick back on the sofa. Yeah.

But you're, but as you say, it's, the day. is that you never actually enjoy the things that you've been pushing for. It is definitely a balance, and I used to wonder about a resolution of it or which is the right one. And for me, I've just realized it's both. It's just, it just has to be both for me. They're both skills and parts of myself that I want to cultivate. And you bring up Paul Bloom at the end of the book, who's been a guest on the show. And his term motivational pluralism, I call it motivational complexity in my book. But it's, yeah, it's this idea. We just want lots of different things.

And that's what it means, I think, to be human to a certain degree. And we all have to figure out how to work with that in the wisest way possible. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think in terms of this idea of being able to hold desires in our heads at the same time, Oliver Berkman, who wrote the book, I think it was 4,000 Weeks, really one of my favorite sort of personal development or self-help books or productivity books ever. Because he was, you know, he's talking about getting your information. inbox to zero, which has been the bane of my adult's existence, frankly. It's like the major

source of unhappiness in my life or have lost sleep is like, oh my God, I have 2,538 emails that I haven't replied to. His productivity hack isn't like, here's a way you can get to inbox zero. And it's not also give up on your emails, just forget about it. Don't reply to all these people. These people aren't important. It's neither. It's just accept that you are going to live in this tension and don't let it dominate. Don't let it make you unhappy because you're never going to get to inbox zero, but you're always going to keep working on it and you're just going to have to learn to accept the messy reality. And so that's a hard, that's a hard truth to accept, but I think it's also a metaphor for what we're talking about, which is that we're always going to have both polls,

polls. Yeah. Oliver was one of the very first guests on this show 12 years ago. Amazing. Yeah, a great guy. And also, I would be remiss in not plug in my book at every possible opportunity. Listeners are like, please shut up about it. He blurbed the book, which was a big, a special moment for me because I just think he's so good. That's fantastic. Yeah, you know, I've recently, and this isn't intended as self-promil either, but I've recently started using Substack. And one of the great joys is seeing his little notes, you know, not full articles,

but he'll, you know, he'll share a thought. And I'm like, man, that guy, he's, he nailed it again. I love him. And I was about to say, man, what he's working on sounds really exciting, but I don't know if he wants anybody to know that. So I'm going to quiet down on that. Let's get further into your book, though. We've been talking around this a little bit, but a lot of the book is around a very well-studied, you call it a meta-choice between exploring and exploiting.

Talk through what that means and give us some examples in our own lives today. Sure. And so the first thing to say is exploiting is not like taking advantage of people. This is just a term of art in the exploring literature. Yes, thank you. You face a choice between exploring, which is trying something new, vetting off into the unknown, or exploiting, which is exploiting the knowledge you already have, sticking on the path, you already know where it leads and what it's going to give you.

And so the classic example that researchers use is, you go to a restaurant, you've been there before, you know that the burger's pretty good. Are you going to order the burger because you know it was good last time you had it, or are you going to try the special, which sounds interesting, intriguing, good. Might be better than the burger. It might be worse. If you order the special, someone else at the table, is probably going to order the burger and you're going to be like, oh, man, the burger looks good.

Why didn't I order the burger? So this is a dilemma we're all familiar with. It's like, do I stick with what I know or do I try the unknown, which might be better or might be worse? And once you start thinking about decisions this way, you start recognizing this dilemma in all aspects of life, you know, and it can be like, do I get engaged to my, you know, long time partner or do I keep swiping left or right or whatever it is to try and find someone better? In other words, have I found the best or do I venture back into the unknown? You can zoom out to a corporate strategy level and say,

should we be spending our resources advertising the product we've already got? Or should we be devoting more resources to R&D to try and develop a new product, which might be better than our current product, but which might actually be a flop? And so from the trivial ordering the burger all the way up to how societies allocate their resources, we're choosing between exploring and exploiting. And there's been this like 80, year journey from decision scientists and mathematicians and so on to try and figure what's the optimal answer to the explore exploit dilemma and the answer is it's impossible to say like first of all the math

is intractable but also it depends on the context it depends on time horizon and volatility and all these other factors so there's never a right answer but we have to be thinking about the real goal is to be conscious of the choices and understand when and why you're making a decision in one favor in one way or the other. Yeah, and I think you said this earlier, but I want to come back to it, that we can be very different in different aspects of our life. Like I've mentioned, I have a certain degree to do new things and do novelty, but when it comes to eating, I'm going to order the one that I like. You sort of talked about like context and all that. I think there's a risk context for me in that I have a narrower palette that I find acceptable. So it's a lot easier for me to

end up outside of it in like a situation where I'm like, that's disgusting, right? Probably not that, but, but I'm fairly narrow there. I get the same kind of pizza every time. You know, I'm like, no, don't go messing that thing up with like putting that on it or that on it. But I'm sure I am missing out on some different flavors that might be rewarding in a different way. Yeah. So a couple things. One is that our decisions about exploring. and exploiting are never just about, like, am I an exploring person or am an exploiting person? There's a lot of contextual factors, you know, and risk is distinct from desire to explore. So the example I would give is every summer I go on a canoe trip with a bunch of friends.

We paddle a whitewater river somewhere in northern Canada. And I love, you know, you're just totally off the grid for, let's say, a week. There's an exploring element to it. And you don't know what's around the next bend of the river. There are also rapids. the rapids are kind of fun and exhilarating to paddle through, but they're at the edge of our skill level. So, and among, you know, not to pat myself on the back here, but among the people I go canoeing with, I'm probably the most experienced at handling whitewater in the canoe.

I'm also the least likely to want to paddle any given set of rapids. We'll come to a set of rapids. We'll scout it. And, you know, there's a few people in the trip who will be 100%. They'll be like, let's do it. Load up the canoes. Let's go. And I'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I think we should portage this. And so I don't want to die. So I have very, and I don't want to be extracted by helicopter because we wrapped our canoe around a rock or whatever. So I have very low risk tolerance, even though I love exploring these builders. Whereas some of my friends, they're like, hey, I don't really care where we go as long as there's big, big rapids that we can crash down. So one example of the fact that the decision to explore isn't just about, are you willing to

explore? It's like, like you're saying, are you going to have a miserable time? because you're getting some palate experience that's just not fun for you. And so it may be that that's why you're pursuing your exploring in music rather than food. Right. And you say this, which I think is really interesting, which is that a single instance of exploring will likely yield a worse than usual outcome. Right. I might get the food that I really don't like.

but the collective effect of repeatedly breaking free of your usual routines will be better outcomes. Say more about that and put it in an example that we would all understand. You zeroed in on, I think, a really crucial point, a really key one. And so the best example I can give of that is, you know, as I said, Explore ExploExploit Dilemma, restaurant ordering is a great example. So in this brave modern world, we have huge data sets of how people order in restaurants. And so some Harvard scientists did an analysis of like, I can't remember it was like two million orders on a food delivery company from a food delivery company called Deliveroo, trying to understand how people decide where to order from. And there were a bunch of interesting insights from it.

One of which is that all else being equal, people are more likely to order from a restaurant that's been rated fewer times than restaurants have made more. Really? Totally the opposite of what I would have expected. But the data is pretty clear. So, you know, assuming that the genre is the same and the number of the start. rating is the same and the delivery time and the price is the same, then if one's been rated five times and one's been rated 500 times, more people will order from the one that's been rated five times because there's still the unknown there. There's the chance that this is the greatest

restaurant ever. We have a chance to learn about something. Whereas if it's been rated 500 times, you know that it's a 4.2 star restaurant. Well, I always assume that those five ratings are from their parents and I shouldn't trust them at all. And that's maybe why when people do, when people do, because there's a truth to that, when people do order from a restaurant that they've never ordered from before on average. And then you look at their ratings. It's like, oh, yeah, they got a subjectively worse meal. You're less likely to get a meal that you consider five star or four star when you order from an unfamiliar restaurant than when you order from one of your old favorites. So that's an instance of what you're saying, like a single shot, if you make a choice

to explore, the odds are you will be disappointed. And so that seems like a really powerful reason to say, well, let's not explore them. But if you then zoom out over time and say, how do people's ratings change over time, you see that if people continue to explore, over time, their average ratings creep upwards. Because every time you try a new restaurant, sometimes you get a dud and you say, I'm never going back to that restaurant. Sometimes you get a surprisingly good restaurant. You're like, I'm going to add this to my roster of usual restaurants. And so your roster gets better and better, only if you're willing to tolerate those occasional bad meals. And I think this is like a general truth about exploring, which is that if you just look at it as a single shot, you're like,

this is not the smart move. It's probably going to turn. There's a greater than 50-50 chance that I'm going to regret it. But if you average that over the course of a career or a life or whatever, then you're like, oh, I'm glad I took the chances and explored because even though I had four bad meals, I discovered that one restaurant, which has changed my life. I'm going to ask a question about that study to see if you know. Is there anything in there about frequency of orders?

Like people who order more often are more likely to explore. Because this ties a little bit to this idea that as we get older, exploration has slightly less benefit. And I often think about it in the sense of like, if I'm ordering out five days a week, then I'm going to take a flyer every once in a while. But if I'm doing it once a week, that's my once a week thing. I don't know. And I think the same thing about like vacation. Like if I had unlimited vacation, I would try all sorts of wild things.

But I've got, say you've got a one week window. You're like, well, I don't want this one week, my shot this six months to be terrible. Yeah. Is there a frequency bias in all of this? The answer to the question on the food studies, I actually don't think that's, they analyze that in the study, but it's a big, long study. So I don't remember. But I think your point is super important. And I was writing an article about exploring for, I think it was men's health.

And they were like, can you put this in a career context? Give an example of some of the advice you're taking. And the advice I was giving was like, be optimistic in the face of uncertainty. Take a chance on things. And so I was saying like, okay, let's say you're considering two jobs. And one of them is relatively stable. It's a kind of sure thing, but probably not exactly what you want to do and not great opportunities for advancement. The other is maybe it's a company that's less stable or it's less clear whether this is going to pan out and it pays less.

But there's a clear path that if you're not going to be able to progress to your dream position. And so being optimistic in the face of uncertainty would be take the choice with the best case scenario. My editor looked at this and said, yeah, but what if you need to pay the rent? How can you advise someone to take this swing for the fences if their financial security depends on? Okay, yeah, that's a good point. And so I need to contextualize this and say, say, if the context permits you to take that chance, then you should take that chance. And I think that's a really good thing to keep in mind that this is, again, it's never about always do this or always do that. And so if it's like, this is your one chance to order out this month and it's a special occasion and it's Valentine's Day and you're, you know, you're trying to impress your, your girlfriend.

And it's like, don't just close your eyes and pick because you're an exploratory kind of guy. There's situations that override the superficial attraction of exploring where you really want to make sure you're exploiting all the knowledge you've got to maximize that. Sometimes the single shot is more important than the long-term average. Right. And that's essentially what you're saying is that a single instance, if you've got a single instance, you might get a less than optimal outcome. All right, let's move on for now.

I want to talk about you describe meaningful exploration. So what does meaningful exploration mean to you? You said meaningful exploration, I will argue, involves making an active choice to pursue a course that requires effort and carries the risk of failure, what the mythologist Joseph Campbell called a bold beginning of uncertain outcome. So I think the easiest way to answer what meaningful exploration is, is to give an example of exportion that I consider not meaningful. Because what I realized when I was writing about what's great about new things is this could

describe scrolling social media. You're scrolling down TikTok. It's like, oh my God, I've never seen that video before. Who knew a cat could do that? You know, like, and I was like, that's not what I'm writing about here. This is not what I'm trying to glorify. So what does it mean to explore meaningfully? And there's a couple of things that I think become important.

You're not really exploring if you're not making a choice, if you're not following your own decision. If a choice is being fed to you by an algorithm, you're not exploring. You're being exposed to new things. And there's some really interesting and quite subtle neuroscience research that show, and actually education research, too, about the difference between being fed something and going out and discovering it for yourself. And so, you know, great teachers really try to create that environment where students can make a discovery for themselves. And it's not easy, right? Like there's a lot of information to learn. But this is that aspiration that it's not just a question of you open your skull up

and let people shovel stuff into it. There's a distinction I would make between actively exploring and passively exploring. Yeah. Say more about that. There's a couple ways you can think about that. One is imagine you're in the passenger seat of a car driving through a city, an unfamiliar city and you drive through or a part of the city you don't know. And you get to your destination and then someone says,

can you trace your route back through this city? Now, if you were the driver in that car, there's a decent chance you'd be able to trace your route back because you had to look around and pay attention, at least if you weren't totally glued to your GPS. If you were the passenger in the car, you saw everything, like you were looking through the same windshield, your eyes weren't closed, but you just didn't have to pay attention.

You were passively going through that city instead of actively. And I think that is a pretty good metaphor for being fed, titillating tidbits by social media algorithms or even these days like not to open a big can of worms but like having AI do things for you or teach you things that if you're not seeking out the answers and finding them it's being processed by your brain in a different way a different less lasting less effective way that's one aspect of meaningful exploration I think there there are others if it's a sure thing you're not really exploring if it's like it's just the mere fact that you're trying something new like if you're changing the channel on your TV

Sure, you're exploring the airwaves, but that's not really what we're talking about here. We're talking about taking a chance where the outcome could be better or could be worse and accepting that as part of the bargain. And so these are the kinds of things that then they raise the stakes, but they then make the outcome more meaningful, whether it ends up being a good choice or a bad choice. So we didn't really hit on this. And I just love to go back. If you were making the case for exploring more, and again, I get that you're

book is a, is a nuanced take on, it depends, right? All good complex arguments end up with it depends, so I apologize. Yeah, of course they do. I, I joke that my book, I could have just written, it's complicated and turned it into my editor. But if you were going to make the case for exploration, what are the benefits? Like, if I tend to not really explore much, why might I want to more? Like, what's in it for me? Yeah. So there's two ways of answering that question. a sort of instrumental way that it leads to better outcomes and a kind of value or psychological way of saying it feels good and it feels meaningful. And so we've been talking about ordering in restaurants and I've been focused on like,

well, if you order, if you explore enough, you're going to get better meals. And you might say, well, you know, like that's not a focus of my life. And that's fine. And so the instrumental argument that it leads you to, you know, develop better products for your company or whatever, whatever. It's a powerful one in some ways, but it's not the most powerful one to me. The most powerful one to me is that putting yourself in a position of taking some chances, trying new things, getting uncomfortable, risking getting lost, ends up correlating pretty well

with the extent to which people feel they're doing meaningful things in their lives. There's a body of research called the effort paradox, which is not exactly, it's a little bit neighboring to exploring, but I think related. And the effort paradox is basically asks, why do we do things that are nakedly unpleasant? So why do we climb mountains

is the classic example? It's like, well, there's a pretty good view on the top, for sure. But, okay, we've put a gondola to this top of the mountain.

Do you want to take the gondola? No, I want to climb to the top of the mountain. Like, the fact that it's hard is part of the attraction in the same way that people, you know, millions of people run marathons.

It's like, the goal isn't to get to the finish because the finish is literally like two blocks from the start, usually. You could walk there. The goal is to have traveled that journey ordering furniture from IKEA. There's research into the IKEA effect,

which is that people tend to value the furniture they've had to struggle with to put together more than if you just gave them that same piece of furniture already assembled. So there's this whole sort of suite of activities where we do them kind of because they're hard. And so the question is, why do we do that? And the answers are very, like there's a lot of different theories, a lot of different answers. But the one that I find most compelling, based on research from a guy named Michael Inslicht at the University of Toronto, is that people tend to find effortful things meaningful. Now, meaning is a somewhat complicated topic. I'm not claiming to know the meaning of life, but if you ask people, what were the activities that felt meaningful to you? They can answer that

question. And there's a pretty good correlation between things that were challenging that pushed them out of their comfort zone, that where they had to rely on their resources and make decisions and deal with, you know, the potential of failure. Those things start. not to be meaningful. And the extent to which people are willing to undertake effortful things and find meaning in it correlates also pretty well with how well they do in their jobs and how much meaning they perceive in their lives and how happy they are. And so that to me is a much more powerful argument than you might get a better meal at a restaurant. And so given that that effortful things tend to feel better and feel more meaningful, it's also sometimes hard

to get ourselves to do hard things or even want to do hard things, right? It's one of those like, we kind of know what's good for us, but yet we don't do it. A whole bunch of my book is on that whole question. But I'm curious from your perspective why some people seem to get it, right? Like they just keep pursuing things that are challenging and other people never really pursue anything challenging. Any ideas on why? And that's a, you can just say like it's complicated and we can move on. but it is complicated i'll say two things there is no like trick that makes challenging things easy

because if there was they wouldn't be challenging anymore if i had a trick that made it easy to do something to exploring then that thing is no longer exploring for me in the same way that let's say you take up running and you're like man it's really hard for me to go out and run one mile well five years from now it may be easy for you to run one mile you're no longer getting the same thing so that means that's why you need to be running two miles by that point or whatever the case so so the challenge never goes away, and if it does, you need to find another way of bringing back the challenge. Now, why do some people embrace that challenge? Look, I'm not an expert in this, but I think that that's primarily environmental. It's the result of a thousand experiences and chance encounters and, you know,

meeting a mentor at the right time or having a positive experience or a negative experience where someone yells at you because you didn't do the right thing and you're like, I don't want to take that risk again. And so I think people tend to get push down paths. And again, it can be different. People might be willing to take on hard things in one domain of their life because they've been encouraged to do so. And they might be totally unwilling to take a chance or to push hard in other domains of their life because they've received negative feedback. So look, there's a whole nature of nurture thing. But I really think it's something that is malleable and it's changeable and that isn't just like, well, I'm not a person

who does that kind of thing. I'd love to talk about five rules for exploration that. you came up with. And I'll just read the rule and then I'll let you elaborate on it and we'll kind of see where it goes. And maybe we get through all five. Maybe we don't. The first is explore, then exploit. So we've sort of talked about what those two are. But why is that order useful? Yeah. So there's some logic and there's some evidence. So the logic way of thinking about it is it's not that you should always explore or always exploit. They're both important. So how do you put them together, well, it makes sense that you should figure out what all your options are. You should really know what the terrain is, but you know, you should check out every path and have a kind of an

idea where they lead. And then you plunge down it and you go for it and you stop. So it's not useful to exploit if you don't know what your best option is. But conversely, exploring all the time isn't useful if you don't eventually decide this is the best option and this is the way I'm going to go. And so what's really cool is there's an amazing analysis by a guy named Dashan Wong at Northwestern, who analyzed thousands and thousands of career trajectories of film directors, scientists, and artists, and classified every moment of their career into whether they were exploiting or exploring and analyzed where their most successful parts of their career were. And there's this really clear signal that when people had a period of exploration of,

let's say, a few years, followed by exploitation, that's when they went on a hot streak. So I think it's a, it's logical, but it's also evidence-based. Yeah, I loved that idea of a hot streak where, yeah, you explore widely and then you kind of, I thought of it in the context of, as they do many things, musicians. And you'll see like certain musicians just like hit like a three-record hot streak where you're like, they just had it. And I think there's probably something to be said for them knowing how to both explore. and exploit, I think of the Beatles, right? You know, Paul McCartney is often thought of as like the safe beetle, but he was the one that was out getting into all the weird stuff, like particularly, right? So he was very exploratory. And you sort of see that a little bit in what he creates. There's a lot of

variation in it. So he was able to bring those explorations back into the sort of more conventional forms and then exploit what he'd learned or gained or been exposed to. Yeah. All right. Number two, seek the uncertainty sweet spot. Yeah, so this is, we all have a different comfort level. We talked about this earlier with, like, I say we're wired to explore, but the truth is, we are also, we're filled with trepidation by the idea of venturing into the unknown, as we should be, because it can be dangerous. And so there's psychological literature that goes back, you know, to the 1800s that

finds this sort of upside down U-shaped curve, where if things are too obvious and too easy, it's not engaging and interesting to us. And if things are super complicated and impossible, you know, unpardonable, you know, unpredictable, that's unpleasant for us. But in the middle, there's a sweet spot. And without belaboring the point too much, so there's logic. Of course, you want an intermediate level of uncertainty. But there's good evidence that our brains are wired to kind of, even from the point

where we're eight months old, you can do experiments, that babies can kind of figure out, oh, that's too, you show them a sequence of shapes. And if it's too simple, if it's just repeating, they're bored. If it's too complicated, they're bored. But if there's a repeating pattern, that that'll keep their attention. So there's this idea that we're wired to feel engaged by the level of complexity or uncertainty that teaches us the most about the world. And so it's a question of eight-month-old babies can do it.

But as adults, we're bombarded by other bosses telling us what to do or feelings of guilt or whatever. But if you can tune into like, what do I find interesting? All else being equal, what would I really be interested in pursuing? That's a good sign that your brain is recognizing that this is an opportunity to learn about the world. Yeah, there's a lot we didn't have time to go into about the brain as a prediction machine. We've talked about this on the show in several other episodes and that really what we're trying to do is reduce uncertainty and that that good feeling is in many cases the uncertainty being reduced. And again, we're not going to have time to get into it, but it's a great section

in the book. And then three, play more. Yeah, and again, this is this is me going around to all these researchers and saying like, so as adults, do we need to tell people to play more? And the answer being like, by definition, play is something that you do because it feels good. It's self-motivated. You don't have to be told to do it. You have to give yourself permission to do it. But it goes back. Is there a difference between playing and exploring? Yeah, yeah. So, and it goes back to what you're what you were just saying about this idea of the pleasure of reducing uncertainty. In exploring, we're heading out into the world, finding areas of uncertainty, and experiencing the pleasure of reducing them. We find out where that trail leads or what's over the horizon. Play is essentially the art of creating our own rules so that there is uncertainty. The key point in a good game is that we don't know how it's going to turn out and we get the pleasure of finding out. Or if you think about kids, one of the examples of what a researcher gave me is like, you take your kid to the playground. They're like, I wonder what it's like to go down that slide. They go down the slide a few times. Now they know it's not fun anymore. Now they want to know what it's like.

I wonder what it's like to go up the slide. And you're like, no, there's kids coming down. You can't do that. But they don't want to hear your crap. Right. They just know that there's an opportunity to learn about the world. They already know what it feels like to go down. So play is constructing the rules.

Exploring is going, finding the uncertainty in the wild. And so Playmore. You said something interesting before I cut you off, which was giving ourselves permission. Right. Yeah. So this comes back to the, you know, me asking. these researchers, should I issue this, you know, command that all people should play more? And they're like, you can't say, start having fun. But the reason adults maybe don't play as much as they could or should

is that they're busy paying the rent and doing the things that adults are expected to do. So to the extent that you can give yourself space to ask, what would be fun for me? That goes back to this idea of that's going to help you find your sweet spot. And it's hard. It's hard. We have, you know, as adults, we have a lot of responsibilities. And so it feels almost, sinful to be saying, oh, I just want to do what's fun. But if you can find space in your work life, in your personal life to follow that, to play, then that can be really powerful in terms of finding new paths. You might be the right person to ask about this, which is a tendency I've noticed in myself that I try and balance, which is I will do something that ideally should be

playful, is enjoyable. And then I will promptly turn it into a job by thinking I have to get good at it. Rock climbing is an example for me. I know you do some rock climbing. It's not like I go out and do it a lot. I'm mostly bolder and I'm not that great at it. But I noticed, I did it at a time or two and it was like, oh, this is interesting, this is fun. And then all of a sudden my brain was like, I need to get a coach and I need to start training. And all of a sudden, what should just be fun is now sort of a job. And I recognize on one level that there is enjoyment in the challenge of getting better, and there's something else in there that doesn't feel as helpful. And I'm just kind of curious your thoughts on that. I have the exact

same experience with rock climbing is that I took it up as an adult, and it was amazing to be like, hey, I'm learning something new. I'm doing something that's totally non-instrumental that is just about tackling this challenge. But then you start feeling like, okay, how do I get better? Why does that seven-year-old looks so easy doing this and how can I, you know, emulate that seven-year-old. And it's actually, again, in my sort of main athletic world of running or of endurance sports, it's, I think, one of the great kind of existential challenges of the sport is that people have all this wearable technology now, which, you know, in some critiques, turns exercise into like unpaid labor for these companies that are harvesting the data. But on a more sort of prosaic level,

it's just like now you're worried about exactly what your pace was every time you ran and how many how many kilometers you ran whether your cadence was right and whether like and so instead of just being like hey it's fun to be out in the woods running and it feels really good it's like oh no this this root is too hilly it's going to hurt my average pace this week and so I'm not going to get kudos I think it's a tough balance because I do think like you said there there is value and and meaning and fun in striving to be better. But I guess put it this way. My solution to the running conundrum for me personally in my particular situation and level of experiences, I run with a Timex watch the same model I had in 1990 that has no GPS, no monitoring, no heart rate, no nothing.

Because I know that I am susceptible to this desire to quantify and optimize and strive. And I will love it. And I will love it so much that I may end up strangling the thing that I love most about running. Yeah, that's well said. I think for me, the thing I've tried and key on is when do I start getting frustrated that I'm not getting better? And that's the point to me that I go, okay, hang on. We need to we need to readjust here because this is supposed to be enjoyable, right? This is not supposed to be another job. It's supposed to be enjoyable. And as soon as it starts not being hard, that's not what I mean. I mean like I'm getting mad at myself. that's when I go, all right, you know what, there's plenty of places where that operates. We don't need it over here. Yeah, I could be mad at myself without the help of any other activities. Exactly.

One more that I want to hit is minimize regret. It seems like the simplest device possible. Don't do things you're going to regret. But it's actually, this comes from the mathematical study of the explore exploit dilemma. Because like I said before, there's no single answer that, guarantees you will make the right choice in an explore-exploit choice. But what decision scientists find is that there's a heuristic, there's a sort of rule of thumb that works well to minimize regret. And regret in this mathematical formulation is the difference between how you hope things would

turn out and how they did turn out. And that is to be optimistic in the face of uncertainty. That is, you know, we mentioned this before. That is to choose the option with the best realistic upside. And in doing so, you won't always succeed, that failure is definitely a possibility. But that is what will reduce, I think, in the mathematical sense, but also in the sort of colloquial sense, it will minimize the extent to which you're looking back and saying, oh, man, I can't believe that. I wish I'd made another choice. Because even when it doesn't work out, you'll be able to look back and say, oh, but I understand why I made that choice. I was going for it. I went for it. It didn't work

out and that's okay. A simpler way to put that is, do you look back at the high school dance and say, man, I really regret asking that person out, asking that person to dance and they said, no, or do you regret all the times when you stood by the wall and didn't ask? And, you know, from the fullness of my mature adult life, I can say, man, I definitely regret all the times I didn't ask. Yeah. And in fact, I had way more of those. I can't even remember asking people to dance.

But you want to be doing the equivalent of just saying, what the heck, do you want to dance? Yep. Well, that is a great place to wrap up. You and I are going to go into the post-show conversation. and we're going to discuss 37%, which I think is the right answer to the explore-exploit dilemma. So we have an answer, folks. You're just not going to get it without coming to the post-show conversation. And we're also going to talk about should we use our GPS less?

I think about this a lot. Should I not rely on it so much? So listeners, if you'd like access to the post-show conversation to the thrilling answer of 37%, and if you want to support the show, which we really need, You can go to when you feed.net slash join. Alex, thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed the book. I've been looking forward to this conversation.

It has lived up to my expectations. Thanks so much, Eric. I really enjoyed the conversation myself. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget.

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If you've ever put your phone down and felt better almost immediately, and then picked it right back up 10 minutes later, you're not alone. Researchers around the world are finding that social media is making us less happy, and most of us already know this. The harder question is why we can't seem to stop. And that's exactly what Dr. Lori Santos is digging into on the Happiness Lab. She sits down with the authors of the 2026 World Happiness Report to unpack this year's biggest findings.

What's happening with young people's well-being, why the rest of us stay glued to our feeds even when we know better, and what the science says we can actually do about it. I'm a really big fan of Laurie's work on the Happiness Lab because she doesn't just tell you what the research says. She helps you figure out what to do with it. And that's the part that most people skip. Listen to the Happiness Lab wherever you get your podcasts.