Alex Hutchinson - We're Hardwired To Explore—And Risk
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All right, Alex, welcome to The Man Talk Show. How are you doing today? I'm good. Thanks so much for having me, Connor. Good, man. Likewise. Well, I'm excited to explore, no pun intended, I'm excited to jump into this topic. Let's start a little broad with what role has expansion really played within us as human beings? Why is it so important? And maybe why do you feel like it's dying out? Yeah, the temptation, of course, when I was writing a book on exploring was to have the subtitle be

how exploring makes us human or something like that. Because it really is fundamental. But of course, every book that is how X makes us human is a little bit too on the nose. To some extent, every living thing has an impulse to explore as a sort of precondition of being alive, that you have to be looking for new sources of sustenance and new ways to live. But there's something specific about humans. And if you look at

the way humans settled the globe in the last 50,000 years. There's a sort of inflection point where about 50,000 years ago, instead of the Neanderthals just kind of hanging around Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, suddenly

Modern humans went everywhere. They went to the Arctic, to the southern tip of South America, to the islands of Polynesia. And that coincides with a time when a new gene variant that affects our dopamine receptors appeared. And the dopamine receptors are involved in this sort of pursuit of novelty and the feeling of wanting to try something new, experience something different.

And so that is, you know, like I don't want to, you know, it's a very complex topic and behavior is very complex, but to me, that's maybe one way of saying that there's something specific about humans. There's something in us that was formed over, you know, the last 50,000 years of we are people who are looking for what's over the next horizon, both literally and metaphorically. And that's, that's still, you know, imprinted in us. Hmm.

I think it's fascinating. In the beginning of the book, you talk about the great expansion and moving out into the world. And I think there are these correlations between how we as a species have operated

over time and how we as individuals can thrive. And when we kind of go, I think at least, when we go against some of these natural species-oriented ways of being and we start to collapse on those, we suffer. We struggle in some way. And so I'd love to hear a little bit more about the great expansion because I do think that that would be interesting for people to know about. Yeah. I mean, so this great expansion, again, over the last sort of 50,000 years, we really, unlike any other species,

got to every part of the globe. And so that's the big picture, like how are human populations moving? What happens on an individual level, right? So it doesn't mean that everybody always has to be exploring, but you can think in the context of, for instance, you can look at this dopamine receptor gene that I was talking about that relates to exploring in modern hunter-gatherer populations.

And people who have the version of the gene that really drives them to explore more. If they're in a hunter-gatherer population, they thrive more. They tend to have more muscle mass, which means they're successfully getting more food. Whereas if in populations that have settled down into agricultures from the same tribal groups...

Those with the explorer's gene are in some cases less well-nourished. The same impulse that would make someone a really good hunter-gatherer sometimes then fits less well into the modern context, into seeing the crops are seeded and weeded and harvested correctly. So I think we often see this kind of tension, especially in boys in school who are

maybe try to have the impulse that would have made them really good hunter-gatherers, but maybe not so good at sitting at their desks all day long. There's a tension that's been around for all of modernity for hundreds of years. Then there's a new sort of tension

in this sort of age of, you know, iPhones and social media, where I think they're giving us, tapping into this feeling that we need to be exploring. And, and, and that's part of the reason that we're so into scrolling down, you know, to see what the next TikTok video is or whatever, is that it's, it's tapping into this circuitry that, that tells us that something new, if something is new and novel, that it's, it's good.

but it's not teaching us anything about the world. So there's a tension where there's less opportunity to explore. There's this opportunity to scratch that exploring itch that doesn't yield any of the benefits of exploration. You know what the next TikTok video is, but you haven't learned anything new about the world or the people around you. So there's less opportunity to explore in the modern world, but also forms of exploration that are maybe kind of circular and not productive. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because I definitely noticed that

One, I have that explorer part in me. I love going out in the world. I love adventuring. I love camping, hiking, getting lost in the wilderness. We moved onto this piece of land. We've got six acres and behind us is just, I don't even know, hundreds or thousands of acres of forest.

And when we first moved in, one of the first things that I did was I basically just wandered off into the forest behind the house. And I was like, I'm going to go for a walk. And my wife was like, okay. And she was outside. And instead of going down the driveway, I just took a left at the house and then walked into the backyard and into the forest. She's like, where are you going? I was like, I got to go explore this. I got to see what's behind our home. This is interesting. This is unknown. And for her, that was like, what are you doing? Yeah.

But I've kind of always done that. As a kid, I remember growing up, it was my favorite thing to go into our backyard and there was trees and bushes off to the side, sort of like a traditional backyard, and I would just venture off into the bushes and the trees. And in formative times in my life, throughout my development as a person, I've definitely ventured off. I remember multiple times

where I just, when I was living in Vancouver in British Columbia, I would just drive up in a couple hours and find a spot to go and hike and camp overnight and find places to go and explore and adventure. And even for my 40th, I went to the Isle of Skye and went hiking and kind of went back to my heritage and my roots. But I definitely can see that there's that part in me

And it's so funny that you're mentioning social media because I feel like I can tell when I need more adventure when my YouTube channel starts showing me just like dudes hiking in different places around the world. And I find myself watching, I'm like 10, 15 minutes into somebody hiking in Patagonia or Mongolia or something like that. And I'm like,

oh, that looks amazing. But talk to us a little bit about the correlation between, you're mentioning this like dopamine reward for some people and not others, or that there's a gene that sort of activates that. Talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, that's a really actually important thing to kind of clarify a bit.

So there's a gene variant that makes this dopamine receptor, DRD4, a little more sensitive to novelty, basically. You get a bigger bang for your buck. And so this is the explorer's gene that showed up about 50,000 years ago. And

Interestingly enough, it varies around the world. In the southern tip of South America, people have more of that gene because their ancestors migrated farther. Whereas in Sardinia or somewhere where people have been fairly stable for a long time, they have less of that. But the key thing, the really important thing is it's not that some people have an explorer's gene and some people don't. We all have the DRD4 gene.

What the variant does is just kind of turn up the volume a little bit. So some people have a louder version of the explorer's gene than others. So it's really not a case of like, that guy was born to explore and that guy was not. It's like humans were born to explore and some of us are called in a way that is useful for society, you

In the same way you want some people who are strong and some people who are fast and some people who are introverted and some people who are extroverted. You want some people who are really always pushing the limits, others who are kind of keeping the home fires burning. But we all have some element of this call for novelty that can manifest in different ways. It's like...

You and I, I think it sounds like are wired pretty similarly. There's just something about like heading into the forest that calls to me and I, you know, my backyard doesn't have the forest, but a block, a block away from me is a river valley with tons of forests. And I, I grew up here. I spent tons of time playing in that area.

sort of unstructured place as a kid. And now I love going back with my kids and reenacting those games. My kids are nine and 11, so I'm called for that. But there's other ways of exploring. There's other ways of pushing, and it can be, not to make it too broad a topic, but you can be exploring in the music you listen to and the food you choose to cook and the books you read and the ideas you think.

So there's ways of getting novelty that aren't just about the physical side of it or in your career path or in, you know, or in the, you know, the way you choose to navigate the world or, you know, your romantic life, which is maybe another question. But I think all of us, when I talk to people about exploring, there's definitely a lot of people will say like, oh yeah, I'm not like that. I know, you know, my friend is, my brother is, this person is whatever, but I don't explore. And yeah,

I think in most cases, if you probe them, they're like, "Yeah, but I really am always pushing the boundaries on the music I listen to," or whatever. People find ways of scratching that itch in some way. It does seem that exploring in the physical world and getting out into the territory of the unknown, like the real territory of the unknown of, "I don't know what that place is going to look like. I don't know how things are going to go. I don't speak that language."

has become a lot more confronting for people, it seems, as we get more insular, we get more online and digital and social circles collapse. It does seem like more people... And maybe, I don't know, it's interesting because I see people going to extremes, that some people are very afraid to adventure out and explore and then there's other people, it's like they can't stop doing that because they've made a business off of it and now they're just

traveling the world and doing the whole travel influencer vibe or something like that. So yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I do see people kind of pulling back on that. Do you think that social media and those types of pieces have had a net negative impact on our willingness to kind of get out into the unknown and start to explore?

I think there's conflicting. So, I mean, the answer is yes. And the reason is I think we have conflicting urges. So when I say that people are called to explore, that we're driven to explore, it's not so much that we necessarily like the feeling of being lost and alone and confused and scared. It's that we like heading in that direction and then having the feeling resolved, like not knowing what's around the next corner and then finding out what's around the next corner. So in a sense, our drive to explore is not a drive like...

In the literature about decision theory, we'll talk about an uncertainty bonus. When you're weighing up options, if there's something you don't know about, you're unconsciously putting a bonus on the choice that you know less about. But there's other people in that field who would say, actually, it's not an uncertainty bonus. It's an information bonus. What we're really drawn to is the opportunity to learn something. This is the circuitous way of answering your question, which is that

The era of social media or of the internet in general has given us a way of answering questions instantly. You're sitting at the dinner table. I wonder what that would be like. Well, let's Google. We'll find out what that is like. I wonder what the answer to that question is. And so in the context of travel, I think back to in the 90s when I finished university and went backpacking around Europe and I had

the let's go guide, I think, you know, all of Europe in one book. And so I would get to a new city and I'd be like, okay, which is the place I'm going to stay in? And what is the restaurant I'm going to go to? And I, you know, me and, you know, 2000 other dirt bags were reading the same book and going to the same place.

And so sure, there was adventure for me, but also I had a limited, you know, for each city, I had like two paragraphs. So then if I was there for two days, I was like, well, I guess I'm just going to have to find, and I had maybe a sketch map of the downtown, but not really detailed information. So there was still unknown. Now, if I, you know, when I go traveling, if I go to a city, I've got, first of all, like instant map all over the time. I've got Yelp. I've got, you know, a billion recommendations about where to go. And that applies even if I'm going, like I've gone on some pretty

like obscure hikes. That's kind of my thing or canoe trips. Like I really want to go places like off the beaten track where people don't go, but there's, it's still almost impossible to find a place where there is not 52 travel blogs that have been there and have posted their photos of the experience. And so, um,

What I've realized is there's kind of a tension between this desire for the unknown and this desire to resolve the unknown. And so we're now used to traveling in a way where I can go on a hike in the middle of the wilderness in Newfoundland, and I'll be like, oh, I think there's a waterfall around the corner up here because I saw it on someone's travel blog. So I'm robbed of the opportunity of having that discovery for myself because I've done so much research. So in a way, I'm like...

one of my resolutions is like, I'm not going to be quite so obsessive about researching, but it's hard to give that up because there's something reassuring when you're going traveling to be like, okay, I have that translation app on my phone and I've done enough research to know if I need crampons or, you know, we're trying to answer these questions for ourselves. So to get back to your point, I think that big trend has made people less comfortable with the idea of, no, let's really go where we don't know what's going to happen. Let's not like

free answer all our questions so that all we're doing is going through the form of this journey without any of the actual discovery. Yeah, it's almost as though there's a certain level of planning and preparation that most people deploy as a means of hedging against the unknown. It's like, let me be as prepared as humanly possible and know every step of the way so that there's not a lot of true wandering.

And I think that's interesting. When I went to Scotland, I didn't actually have a plan. I knew that there were some places I wanted to go see, but there was no schedule. There was no plan. I was just like, there's some landmarks I want to go see. There's no order to it. I'm just going to go and see what the land has to offer. And I would just literally drive around and find things. And I tried my best to not get caught in like,

the over-indexing of the Google Maps. Because the first time I went to Scotland, I took my wife and we drove around and I plotted every single step of the way. I mapped the entire thing out. And yeah, I wonder what your take... I know you talk about the unknown. Maybe speak a little bit to...

our relationship as humans to the unknown and how that kind of fucks us all up. Yeah. It's, it's interesting. Like you mentioned sky earlier, the Isle of Skye. So when I was in my early twenties, I was living in Britain and one Friday afternoon I was chatting with one of my friends and talking about how we'd always wanted to go to Scotland and

I'm like, well, why don't we just go? Why don't we go to the Isle of Skye and do some hiking? When do you want to go? I don't know. Should we go this weekend? Okay. So this is like Friday afternoon at five o'clock. We're like, okay, we bought a plane ticket for the next Saturday morning to fly up to Scotland. We figured out to get a train over to wherever it is on the West Coast.

and eventually figured out how to get the ferry over to Skye. So we had zero plan. We didn't have a guidebook. We climbed a mountain. I guess I borrowed a tent from a friend at the last minute, and it turned out the mesh on the tent was so coarse that...

midges could just fly right through. Oh, no. I'm from Canada. I've dealt with a lot of black flies, a lot of mosquitoes. Those things were just merciless. They just massacred us. I remember at the campground we were camping at, there was a public shower and I was just standing in the shower because it was the only place the midges weren't biting me. Anyway, all but just to say that was one kind of experience and the kind of experience that it sounds like you were having when you went to Scotland. The trend in my life has been to get

both at, you know, because more information is available and maybe just because I don't know, I'm, you know, getting older, getting quote unquote smarter about doing more preparation has been to prepare more and more. And one of the realizations that I've come to in the last few years, especially, you know, working on a book about exploring is like, there's something lost when I actually, when I could, I could write my trip blog

or my trip diary before I even left. I know exactly what's going to happen at every step. And the definition of a good trip is everything happened exactly the way I expected to. It's like, well, why did I even go? So I'm trying to get back to this, push the pendulum back a little bit to recognize that the uncertainty is actually... If you ask me to tell stories about things that happened on my trips...

It's not so much that it's always like bad stuff, although the bad stuff does make good stories. I think that what, what the real thing is, it's, it's things you didn't expect for better or worse or just, you know, or, or whatever. It's like when, yeah, I had no idea that this, you know, in this restaurant, the, that the waiter was going to invite us to just stick around and sing songs with his guitar for three hours in Greece or whatever. It's like the things you didn't plan and that are unique to you rather than just, you

checking off the book that's in to checking off the the suggestion from the guidebook that everyone when you're in this town you should see this and do this and eat this and think this i'm trying to get back to that because i really do think that uncertainty is it's i mean maybe on an evolutionary sense it's like it's fulfilling it's telling us we're learning about the world and this is why we're wired to to enjoy this but just on a pure experiential level it's like this is what's fun and meaningful and memorable this is and so it's i do think yeah i've i had i've

gotten to a point in my life where I'd pushed beyond the point of useful information to just like, let's hyper plan every moment of this experience. I do think that there's something wired within us. I mean, I talk a lot about how psychologically

when we try and hedge against the unknown or avoid the unknown entirely that we end up suffering to some degree. We don't take the risks that we want to take. We don't press ourselves into this space of the unknown where we test ourselves, where we face rejection, we face failure. That does something to us psychologically. It develops something within us psychologically.

And I think that with technology, it's been this very interesting paradox where on one hand, you're constantly seeing the unknown, right? Like, I mean, you just scroll through social media and there's just like a whole bunch of unknown videos, like what's going to come next? What's going to happen next? And there's this like little bit of dopamine hit that you get, this little bit of excitement, but it doesn't come with any real risk. It doesn't come with any real failure.

And so it doesn't actually develop us in the way that we crave and I think long for when we put ourselves into these situations intentionally of like, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know how this is going to unfold, talking to this person, adventuring in this space, etc.,

So do you think that there's merit in people finding more intentional ways of confronting or venturing into the territory of the unknown? Absolutely. And I think the distinction I would make is between kind of passive and active exploring. So are you required to make any decisions? Because are you really going to learn anything? You scroll through TikTok and maybe you learn some new memes or whatever, but...

And you don't, there is this feeling of there's, I don't know, you know, on some level, I don't know what the next video is going to be, or I don't know how it's going to, it's exciting to find out. So you're getting the dopamine hit, but it doesn't require you to do anything. It doesn't require any action on your part. So you don't get a chance to respond to uncertainty in a given way and learn that this was a good way to respond, or this was a bad way to respond.

It's like being the passenger in a car instead of being the driver in a car. You can drive through a city and you're looking through the same windshield, seeing the same things, but you ask the driver in the car to retrace their steps. They're going to do a much better job than the passenger in the car is going to be like, "I don't know. I think we passed some buildings. I can't remember." There's just a fundamental different experience.

I think I would connect this to the debate about risk and kids and bringing up kids. There's a psychology literature suggesting that one of the losses when you de-risk everything for kids is that they lose the opportunity to

confront risks with relatively small stakes. Is it okay to jump off this fence or whatever? And maybe they're going to break an ankle or something like that. It's not that there's not risks, but this is what they talk about scaffolding risks that you learn to handle larger and larger uncertainties so that when you lose your job when you're 28 or something like that, it's not the first time you've encountered a challenging situation and you have

set of behaviors and tactics and thought patterns to help you deal with uncertainty and challenge as opposed to having being cocooned. So anyway, yeah, I really think that both, yeah, that deliberately going out and experiencing actual uncertainty in the world is

as opposed to, you know, cosplaying it on your phone is a totally different thing. Yeah. I think, I mean, it's Jonathan Haidt's work on this, I think has been phenomenal with the development of kids and the anxious generation, some of the pieces that he's put out. But it's interesting because I've even seen that, you know, with my

four-year-old, I'm pretty risk encouraging, unknown encouraging, uncertainty encouraging. And we had my wife's parents here, her father and her mother. And our property, it's a big piece of land. But

But there's a lot of big rocks and we've situated them, right? So when you come up the driveway, on the one side, there's like this natural rock formation that's got like probably a seven or eight foot drop. It's just a drop. And on the other side of the driveway, we created just like using rocks that got blasted out from the foundation, this kind of like little makeshift rock wall that we had an excavator just like move some rocks over there.

And so my son loves to play on those. He loves to play the big blue stone rocks. And then we have one right beside the house as well on the back of the house. There's this big rock wall. And so you can stand out on the patio on the side of the house.

and there's this rock wall not too far off that my son likes to go on. And watching my wife's parents almost have an aneurysm. He's going to break his leg. He's going to fall. I was like, no, he's okay. He's all right. You should tell them and he can't play on there. I was like, no, he's okay. He knows that it's dangerous and he's testing his limits. And it's not so dangerous that

I mean, for sure, if he felt like he hurt himself, without question. But it's one of those things where I think we've gone through these generations of parenting in such a way where

where we have not taught our kids how to take proper healthy risks. And so the unknown and the uncertain is just terrifying. And I see this show up in work environments, political conversations, I mean, relationships so much, oh my gosh, in relationships that people can have

opposing ways of being within the uncertain. I mean, my wife and I, as you can imagine, have had like, that's been part of our exploration is that I'm very, let's take the risk, let's go out, let's adventure, let's explore. Part of when we got together, one of the things that I said to her is at some point, I want us as a family to go and travel for six to 12 months and to take our kids into the world. And for her, the idea of that was just like,

crippling and freezing, right? It's like how and why and logistically it's overwhelming. And so I do think that this is a real thing that we as a culture and society have kind of stripped out of how we are

raising people and encouraging a lot of young folks. And then I do think it's also a challenge that a lot of couples face in their relationship is you have two people that have completely different perspectives on exploration, risk, uncertainty, those types of pieces. So do you talk about any of that in the book, like how to mitigate that, how to work with that?

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a big topic. And I will say, like, you know, I have that dynamic with my wife, but it's actually the opposite way around. My wife is better at encouraging risk and taking the unknown, whereas I'm a bit more of a control freak.

But it's, it's one thing to intellectually understand my kids need to handle risks, but it's like, it's not like the, some of the risks are real, right? Like they, they go bike to school. It's like, there's some busy roads. They could get pegged by a cement truck and like, and that would not be like, oh, well, let's make another one. It's, you know, that's, that's a serious problem. And, and, uh,

I, and so I, I happen to live in the, in the same house that I grew up in. Like I took it over from my parents. So I have, so my kids are going to the same school that I went to along the same route playing in the same parks. So I have some real like generational context as to how things have changed and they've changed a lot. And interestingly, like,

I found myself trying to push my kids like, you know, when they were probably the, you know, four or five, six, like, Hey, do you want to walk over to your friend's house by yourself? I don't need to walk you. Like it's two blocks away, you know where it is. And they're like, no, no, we don't. I'm like, what are you?

Shouldn't you want to? So, but it's, there's an environmental context where it's like, or, you know, kids just go play on the street. You don't need like, you don't need structure. You don't need, well, there's nobody else there. Or if there, if there is another kid there, the kid has a parent supervising them and that parent feels uncomfortable. It's like, so then I feel like,

am I the bad parent that I just want my kids... So anyway, all I would say is just like, it's easy to say in theory, yes, I want my kid to be exposed to risks and I want to give them the opportunity to grow and learn these things. And then my kids started biking to school this year and we give them all the lectures and then we're watching out the window as they head out in the first day as they go on the wrong side of the street and blow through a stop sign. It's like,

this is literally like they're 15 meters from our door and they've already broken like the two most fundamental, like right side of the road stop signs that they've violated. And then we don't know what happens on the rest of the way to school, but they made it home and they've continued to make it home. So these are challenging. And we're, you know, in terms of how you negotiate these tensions, it's like, you know, communication and just like,

For me, it's like state my fears. Because sometimes if my wife is saying, come on, we can let them do this. What's the worst that happens? They make a big mess in the kitchen or whatever. So I state my fears. But they're going to get stuff all over the place if we let them do that by themselves. And then it's like, yeah, that does sound like a pretty crappy reason to not let them do something just because I'm worried about. So sometimes I think just by talking it through, by really putting your finger on what it is you're worried, like what is the

the scenario you're scared of, then it's like, oh, maybe that's not something I need to be scared of. Maybe if I have to clean up the kitchen because they use the blender wrong and things go all over the walls, it's like, I can live with that. Yeah. I also think at an existential level, the unknown and the uncertain is the territory of death. And I think at a very base level, what happens for a lot of people is they have to come into some type of contact with their relationship to death

whenever the unknown is present, you know, and sometimes that's more clear. Like I remember when I was on the Isle of Skye, I was doing this one hike

And I knew nothing about it. I just was like, oh, that's one of the hikes that I wanted to go do. And so I didn't know that there was an easier route and a harder route. And so I ended up on the harder route. And I'm basically on this foot and a half wide path that has a full drop off on the other side, a couple hundred feet. And I was like, oh, if I slip, I will die. And I

And I don't really like heights. And so all of a sudden, I found myself in this situation. I was like, I have to confront my fear of death in this moment. And so that's a very real thing.

tangible example, but I think at a subconscious or unconscious level, that's something that's usually in the background that happens with the unknown. I agree. And I think that's why bringing it out into the light and say, what exactly are you afraid of? Because if it's a question of letting the kids make something by themselves in the kitchen, they're not going to die. And so once you...

express openly, once you have to put into words what you're worried about, you realize that it's different than what was kind of in the pit of your stomach, what you were feeling that could go wrong. It's like, oh, actually, this is not such a big deal. Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about the distinction between exploration and exploitation. You write about this in the book. I think it's an important one. Yeah. Look, we've been talking in very positive terms about the power of exploration and exploration

I think when I set out on this journey, I would have expected that the book was going to be a

an ode to the powers of exploration. What I came away with was the realization that actually exploration is a super powerful force. It's great. It's productive, but it's not always the right choice. In the decision literature, there's this explore-exploit dilemma where in a lot of contexts, you're facing a choice between exploring a new path or exploiting the knowledge you already have to stay on the path you're already on. The classic example that researchers in the field always use is,

you're in a restaurant, you've been there before. Should you order the burger that you had last time, which was pretty good? Or should you order the special, which might be amazing? Or it might be last week's fish that they're trying to get rid of. And you have no way of knowing without ordering it. So do you stick with the known or do you swing for the fences and give it a shot? And we're all familiar with that sort of feeling of like in a restaurant, you try something new and then someone else at your table gets the thing that you got last time and you spend the whole meal being like,

oh crap, that burger looks good. Why did I get this horrible thing? But anyway, so that's a kind of simple example, but these kinds of choices recur frequently.

on every scale, right? Like from ordering at a restaurant to making career decisions, to getting married, to whether a company is investing in R&D versus marketing. So they occur all the time. And again, it's not that exploring is always the right choice. Sometimes exploring is absolutely the wrong choice. And in fact, in any given life or in any given context,

there's going to be times when exploring is the right thing to do, times when exploiting is, and there's going to be a sort of yin and yang or shift back and forth between these things. Do you talk at all about how people can sort of tactically face the innate fear that comes up around exploring? Because I think

sometimes people know that they need to take a little bit more risk. They need to explore in certain areas, whatever that area might be. It might actually be going out in the world and camping. It might be within the relationship sexually. It might be within their career. There's so many different areas. But I think fear oftentimes just roots people in. So any advice or sort of tactically insight on that front? Yeah. I mean, I think just a couple of things. One is to

Again, understand what the positive potential payoff is and understand what the negative. Like you can't make a rational decision. You're just going with your gut unless you're actually going to lay out like, what is the upside that I could see? And what if things go wrong? Like, is this a...

Let me give you an example. There's a principle in decision theory, which is called optimism in the face of uncertainty, that a good way to handle these sorts of choices is to consider not just what's the most likely outcome, but what's the best case outcome with a realistic chance, and you go for that. In other words, an example might be you're weighing two jobs or job options. One of them is pretty stable, reasonable salary.

But it's not going to go anywhere. You'll be kind of stuck in that position. The other is less stable, maybe a lower starting salary, but it has a potential pathway to what you think is your dream position.

And so the decision theory advice would be, you take the one with the option to go to your dream position because there's a chance it has the better upside. And if it doesn't pay off, you're less likely to regret having made that choice than if you stuck with the safe choice. Now, but the thing is,

That's a risky decision. And so the decision theory in the pure explore-exploit analysis, like go for the optimism in the face of uncertainty, go for the potential for the dream job. In the real world, you have to consider what is the upside versus what is the downside. And so if you're in a situation where you don't know whether you're going to be able to pay next month's mortgage payment or rent or whatever the case may be, and you have a family to support,

then the chance of getting your dream job is probably outweighed by the need for stability in that particular moment in your life. So this is, this is a, you know,

I had this conversation with an editor at Men's Health. I was writing something about explore-exploit and using this example of two jobs. She was like, yeah, but what if you really, really need the money? I was like, yeah, it's never just about one thing. The decision to explore or exploit, you have to situate that within the context of your life. Is this a situation where you could handle things going wrong? The general rule for exploring is that in

In the short term, it will probably, on average, actually, let me give you another example. From the restaurant example, we can actually evaluate people's ordering decisions by looking at food delivery data. So some scientists at Harvard did an analysis of like 2 million food orders from a company called Deliveroo, which is like Uber Eats.

And they can say, how did people order? When did they try something new? When did they go back the same? What did they rate it? And the basic conclusion is when people tried a new restaurant, one they'd never tried before, on average, they got a worse meal than if they'd stuck with their previous favorites. But in the long term, their average ratings went up because by exploring, they found some good restaurants, some bad restaurants. They dropped the bad ones. Whenever they found a new one, they added that to their regular rotation. So in other words, to make the leap to explore, you have to be willing to understand that it may

have a negative... In one particular case, you may actually get a bad meal. But if you take that interpretation to be, don't explore then because I'm probably going to get a bad meal, then you'll lose out on the long-term benefits of living an exploratory life, of being willing to accept some

some short-term losses in exchange for long-term gains. So sorry, that's kind of the cutest way of answering, but you have to think holistically about, is this a time or is this a context in which I can handle a short-term loss in exchange for the promise of potential long-term gains? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. It's almost as though

It's almost as though you need a larger data sample of taking the risk, exploring the unknown. It's like taking a couple steps off the trail and then getting stung by a bee. You could probably take that as like, oh, maybe I should go back on the trail, but you have to keep adventuring in. So I appreciate that. Tell us a little bit about the free energy principle. Yeah. So the free energy principle is basically a theory of

how the brain works and also just how humans are wired to, or how all living things are fundamentally wired. So it's a grand theory of everything. It's been around for about 20 years, and I would say it's emerging as the dominant theory in neuroscience. So I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about it in the next 10 years, let's say. Its fundamental principle is that all living things are wired to minimize surprise.

So, in order to continue existing as an amoeba or as a human, you need to be trying to predict what's happening in the world around you and you want your predictions to match up with reality. Because if your predictions don't match up with reality, if you think there is no lion behind that tree and there is, or if the amoeba thinks that there's food in one direction but there isn't, you don't survive. So, the whole fundamental principle of life is minimizing surprise.

The reason I was interested in this is because, and this is a very simple statement of it, it blossoms into some very complex math, which then ends up having surprising predictions about the way the world works and the way our brains work and so on. What I was interested in though is that this seems to be the opposite of everything I've been saying that we're wired to explore. Instead, the free energy principle is saying we want to minimize surprise. We hate surprise.

And this actually led to a sort of crisis in the field about a decade ago over something called the dark room problem. So the neuroscientists and the philosophers were arguing about this idea that if the free energy principle is true, we should want nothing more than to head into the closet, turn the lights off and lock the door. Then we're in this dark room and lo and behold, we're able to minimize surprise, but there's no surprise. We know exactly what's going to happen next, which is nothing. And so that should make us happy.

Now, in reality, we know intuitively, and there's also experimental evidence that being locked in a dark room is not fun. In fact, when people do these studies, if you just lock someone in a room as part of an experiment and say, oh, I have to go do something, and then you don't come back for half an hour. But it turns out there's a button on the desk which allows you to administer an electric shock to yourself. People will administer an electric shock to themselves over and over again rather than just sit there alone with their thoughts, which is

A little bit, kind of. Crazy. But anyway, all of us used to say, so what is the resolution to this? Are we wired to lock ourselves in the closet or are we wired to go out and explore? And the answer is basically that

When we talk about minimizing surprise, it's not just in the present moment. The best way to minimize surprise in the long term is to know how the world works, to understand which kind of trees have lines behind them and which don't and stuff like that. So then that gives you a drive when you're thinking more holistically about not just present surprise, but future surprise to say, no, I need to get out of this dark closet and figure out what's happening out there. I need to open doors that I haven't been down, walk down paths that I haven't visited,

learn about the world so that I can have a better prediction of how the world works and in doing so, be able to minimize my surprise. In the book, I basically talk about three different levels of explanation for why we're wired to explore. One is this sort of anthropological one of us, the great human expansion. Then there's the biological one about dopamine and that gene. Then there's the sort of neuroscience one of like, actually, it's even...

fundamentally wired into our species to need to, or into being a living thing is the need to go and learn about the world.

Yeah, it's like this very interesting paradox between the prioritization of safety and pattern recognition, and then being able to simultaneously spread out and venture beyond that safety and that pattern recognition. I remember I had a neuroscientist on years ago who said that your brain is just a pattern recognition machine, and it's trying to always move you towards patterns that are meant to keep you safe.

and that are meant to keep you in the realm of the known. And so there's part of us that is also designed to move us out of that. And that always kind of stuck with me. And then just as a side note, I also have a friend right now who's in a Traver Boehm, a buddy of mine, he's doing 49 Days of Darkness. He's intentionally put himself into, yeah, exactly. Intentionally put himself into 40. He did, I think he did 20 days before and then he wrote a book about it and he's put himself back in for 49 days. And I'm like,

Man, I mean, there's a whole thing there, but I'm like, good for you. That's venturing into the unknown for sure. As with great Olympic champions and stuff like that, there's always like, yeah, you're doing that to win the medal, but there's probably something else in there that's driving you to do that. But there was a great book called The Inner Clock.

last fall about circadian rhythms. One of the things the author did was to... Basically, there's an Airbnb somewhere in the Midwest, which is an old missile silo. She spent a week with all the lights off in this, just to try and understand how her various different circadian rhythms would end up evolving in the absence of any cues. I would say it did not sound like fun to me, but...

But yeah, for sure. I mean, in terms of this paradox you're talking about, yeah, like we're wired for pattern recognition for safety. And this desire for the unknown is part of that in a sort of more holistic way that we're wired to want to know what's around the next corner because it will allow us to recognize more patterns and to keep ourselves, to keep, if not ourselves individually, then ourselves as a community or as a species, as a society safer. Does that tie into the effort paradox that you write about? Yeah.

Yeah, the effort paradox, I think it does in an indirect way. The effort paradox is basically the idea that there are things that...

we value not in spite of the fact that they're hard, but because they're hard. So you might think, I'm willing to climb this mountain because the view at the top is amazing. And the F. Braddock says, no, that's not true. You want to climb the mountain because it's hard. And there's a million places where you can drive to get a view, but you're climbing this mountain because you want to engage in the challenge of

of doing it. Same reason people run marathons. You might start, "I want to get fit." But if you're running a marathon every year, you're not doing it to get fit anymore. You're doing it because you relish the challenge.

There's even something called the IKEA effect, which is when people order furniture from IKEA and assemble it themselves, which is, you know, I'm looking around in my room here and there's a lot of IKEA furniture. And I feel very self-satisfied about having put it together and it hasn't fallen apart yet. But yeah, they've done studies and people, if you ask how much people would sell their furniture for, it's like they will ask more for the furniture they've assembled themselves than if they got it pre-assembled. There's something about having craftsmanship.

grappled with it. So in other words, it's not that we're willing to put up with challenge in order to get to a goal. It's that we actually find the challenge satisfying.

They even find this kind of effect, this effort paradox in other animals. In birds, I think it was with starlings, you put three types of food that are color-coded at different distances from the bird. They learn that, man, you have to fly a long way to get the blue food. The red food is much closer. Then if you put all the foods at equal distance,

They'll prefer the one they used to have to fly farther for. They're like, that food was so good. It must be rare. Yeah, it must be. There's something about it that it tastes better when you've had to work hard for it. If you've hiked in the wilderness, you know how satisfying that dinner is, even if it's a gruel.

Man, this gruel is amazing. I can't wait to, I've had this phenomenon before. Like, you know, I remember some of the first, the first hiking trip I went on with my now wife, she cooked some of the meals and I was like, man, this camp curry is amazing. You got to give me the recipe. I'm going to have this every night. Get back to the city. And I tried to making it. I was like, this is disgusting. Why did I think this was good? It's like, oh, because I didn't hike 20 miles with 80 pounds on my back.

That's the secret ingredient to the recipe. Yeah, it's such a good reminder too, because I think that we often are so conditioned in modern culture to shortcut it. Find the hack, find the biohack, find the shortcut, find the way around. How do I just...

get myself to the goal and the result in the shortest distance possible and the least amount of effort and work. And I do think that that's something like, you know, sometimes people have asked me how I've had success with my business and the work that I do. And I'm like,

I just have grinded. There's nothing special about me. There's nothing special about what I do. It's just consistency, repetition, commitment and dedication, doing it over and over again, willing to fail more times than I'm comfortable with, and then learn from that failure. Just like, okay, that didn't fucking work. Let me go try something again. But that effort and that hard work

What I've come to experience is like, I've got this saying with my son that I, that, cause I try and drop these like little sayings with him. One is hard work is good work. And the other one is the joy is in the practice, you know, like the joy is in the practice. And for me, that has led me to where I am today. And, you know, I was an average student in academia, you know, that wasn't really anything, but like the grit and determination and the

the like joy that I've started to find in just doing hard shit and doing it consistently is, it's kind of stupid how enjoyable it is. You know, it's like, how is it, how is that so fucking enjoyable? You know? So anyway. And I think an important thing to mention, to say here is this is really intuitive. It's not what we think we, there's a disconnect between what gives us satisfaction and what we think will give us satisfaction. And that actually ties together incredibly,

exploring an uncertainty with effort, doing the hard thing. If you give people a chance to resolve uncertainty immediately or to live in uncertainty, people are inclined to be, no, no, no, I just want to know. Just tell me who the murderer was. Just tell me how the game ends.

But in fact, the experience we find most satisfying is to live in uncertainty and to not know how the game ends until the end of the game and to not know who the murderer is until the end of the movie. And similarly with hard things, if you're like, hey, do you want to do this the hard way or do you want to do it the easy way?

It's like, it seems totally irrational to say, well, let's do it the way that takes twice as long and is twice as hard. But in fact, so, you know, so Michael Easter, for example, his, his, uh, you know, the author of the comfort crisis and his newsletter is called two, 2% or something like that. And it's the stick is it's like studies have found that if there's an escalator and there's a set of stairs, 2% of people will take the stairs. And, uh,

There you go. And me too. Especially since I saw that stat from Michael, I'm like, hell yeah, I want to be in that 2%. Because boy, I'm not saying that when I get to the top of the stairs, I'm like, I'm so superior to all you escalators. But on some level, it gives me satisfaction. Yeah, I'm the guy who does it the hard way and I enjoy it and I appreciate it.

That's the effort paradox. It's not crazy. It's not irrational. There's lots of research on this. It exists. No one's 100% sure exactly what the mechanisms are. Why do starlings have it and humans? But why...

But we have it. And there's findings that people who do the hard thing and find that we tend to find hard things meaningful. It's like whether it's climbing a mountain, running a marathon, having kids, all these things that are hard also tend to rank high on the sense of meaning that we ascribe to them. And people who find meaning in doing hard things tend to have higher levels of happiness in their lives. And

accomplishment and sense of meaning. And it's like happy, successful, and feeling like my life has meaning. It's like, those are three pretty good boxes I'd like to tick. So I'll keep taking the stairs.

Yeah, it seems like I'm sure there's probably some research out there that shows the biological incentivization of doing hard things as a means of like propelling the species forward or, you know, that there's some benefit. I mean, you know, there's definitely a dopamine benefit and I would imagine a serotonin benefit to doing hard things. But yeah, it's like it's become a slogan that I've put into my family, right? It's like the Beatons do hard things. That's what we do. It's like, this is a hard thing. Okay, like, let's go. Let's go do that. And

I think it's interesting that as we've moved more and more

towards comfort seeking and ease and almost like complacency that a lot of the men that I see coming out, they're like, I need some hard things to face in my life because what ends up happening is that everything starts to collapse in and then all of a sudden these seemingly insignificant things are so overwhelming. And people just can't deal with just average everyday hard stuff.

because it just becomes this mountain. And then I think on the other side, when we start to strip

doing hard things out of our lives, we start to crave it. I just see a lot of men knowing internally, this is something I need to do. I know I need to do some hard things. I'm afraid to do it. I'm not putting myself in that situation. And then what ends up happening is that they end up looking for support from people that they've identified. Oh, you can do hard shit. Maybe you can help me to go and face some of this hard stuff. The hard conversation in my marriage,

venturing out of this nine to five mundane banal routine that I found myself in day in and day out, going to the grocery store, blah, blah, blah, blah. Maybe you can help me break out of this cycle and go and face some of the hardship that I know I need to face in order to feel some level of meaning and fulfillment in my life. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense in that it's like an intuitive feeling. You know something is missing if you're not being challenged. And that

For me, the laboratory has always been things like hiking or running where it's not metaphorical, right? You're doing a hard thing that you know it's hard. And when you've done it, you did a hard thing. And this is tricky, but my wife and I take our kids on pretty challenging backpacking trips. And we really wrestle with what's appropriate for them in terms of what we can ask of them because they're not choosing to go on these trips, but it's like,

By the end, they're always really psyched. And I feel like I can see into their souls of like, yeah, I'm a person who can do hard things.

And that they carry this wisdom back to school and in their interactions with other people or in the classroom or whatever. Not that everything becomes easy. And of course, my kids aren't grown up yet. So I don't know if I don't want, I should be cautious of giving like- They'll be calling me in 10 years. My dad used to make me go on these hiking trips and carry all this shit. I 100% guarantee they'll be telling those stories. I just hope they'll be telling it

With a sense of relish that they're secretly or overtly like, yeah, yeah, he made me do that. And look at me now, because it taught me that I could do hard things. We had a sailing. One of the first backpacking trips we went on was a complete fiasco. It was torrential rain like I have never seen before in a hiking trip. And we had misjudged how far, like we were hiking through a quagmire. And so we had like a 10-hour day. And I think my kids were like four and six, maybe.

10 hour day and then like, just like making a little bit of food at the end and putting up our tent in the mud and sleeping there. And so that became our catchphrase. It was 10 hours in the mud. Uh, that, you know, when things were going, whenever there was a tough moment, I would just say, kids, come on, 10 hours in the mud. Would you rather be doing this or that? And they'd be like, oh yeah, this isn't so bad after all. It's better than 10 hours in the mud. Well, good for you for keep going, like continuing to check out, man. You know, like I think sometimes people have those experiences and it's just like, that was fucking terrible.

I'm never going back to do that again. It was terrible. And we'd been debating on what route to take, like which should we go to stop at this campsite or should we push onto this nicer one that it's at the lake? And thank God we didn't go to the farther one because it took us 10 hours to get to the nearer one. So wild. Yeah. So wild. I mean, and I think the important thing is that in the beginning, those things suck.

You're pointing out that principle you were talking about before where you have one data point. It's like, first time we did this, here's the data point. It was shit. It sucked. Well, not that it sucked. Oh, it sucked. It's a stupid joke. I can just imagine frying kids. It's torrentially downpouring. That sounds like a mess, but you stay with it. And I think

I think that that's something that many of us can learn from and bring into our life.

Maybe we can just sort of, I would love for you to give some more like direct tactical insight in terms of how people can start to face and create some more exploration in their lives. Or if people are listening to this and they're like, actually, I do want to explore more. And maybe it doesn't have to be hiking or camping or an ultra marathon, but how can they start to approach some of these things in a way where it's tactical and they can do it with as much

joy as possible. Yeah. I think the first stage zero is to tap into what interests you. What are you curious about? Kids are pretty good at just following their instincts about what they want to do, much to our chagrin sometimes. They know what's interesting to them and they want to do it. Adults, much less so. You grow up and you're worried about

what is this going to do for my career? What are people going to think? What are, you know, and so we're, we're constrained by all these boxes. So if you're, if you're looking for like, how am I going to bring exploration into my life? Well, you know, you're absolutely right that it's like go hiking in the woods. It's not the right answer for everybody. Not everyone likes that. That's, that's fine.

So the hard question is the question you have to answer is, okay, well, what is interesting to you? What, where would you, you know, maybe you want to learn ballet. Uh, maybe, you know, like maybe you want to take up a language. Maybe you want to,

try a new role in your career. Maybe you want to try something novel in your dating life. I'll leave it generic there. But nobody can answer that for you. Nobody can answer that except you. And so one of the things from the predictive processing framework or the free energy principle framework is the idea that

a sign that you're in that sort of sweet spot of uncertainty where it's not too complicated to be intelligible to do pattern recognition, but it's not just totally predictable and boring is that that's what feels good. That's, that's where you have the sense. If someone says, how are you doing? And I, and I say, yeah, I'm feeling things are going good. What you're saying is that I am engaged in activities in my life that, that meet this criteria of a sweet spot of uncertainty. And, uh,

Sorry to digress too much. Eight-month-old babies have a good ability to tune into that sweet spot. You show them a series of shapes. If it's totally random, you can track their attention by looking at their gaze. When do they look away? If it's totally random, they look away pretty quickly. If it's totally predictable, they look away. That's boring. If it's intermediate, there's a pattern but not an obvious one, then they keep staring at this sequence of shapes. They're good at tuning into...

where is the opportunity to learn about the world, to find about, figure out new patterns? Adults are less good at it, but we just, it's a question of giving yourself space to ask like, what is interesting to me? What engages me? What makes me want to do more of this? And it sounds really obvious and really easy, but I don't think adults do that very much. Don't give themselves the space to, like one of the things I asked a lot of play researchers is like, so do adults need to play more? And Terence was like,

You can't tell people to play. Play is a self-motivated thing. Play is the thing you do when you're allowed to do what you want. So it's a question of giving yourself space to figure out what would feel like play or exploration to you and then doing that. So that would be my sort of level zero approach is you have to figure out what's interesting and fun and curious to you.

Well said. Well said, man. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And I really enjoyed this conversation. I think it's such an interesting topic and I'm glad that you wrote on it. So for everybody that's out there, definitely go check out The Explorer's Gene. It's a phenomenal book. Your work, I think, is really something that a lot of people can get some value from conceptually, understanding the world, and then the self as well, which is great. Where can people go to learn more about you and the work that you're doing?

Yeah, probably best place to find me is my website, which is alexhutchinson.net. I could not get .com. So I'm some kid in New Jersey got it like 25 years ago. But anyway, yeah, alexhutchinson.net. It's got links to my books, but also articles and social media and all that stuff. Beauty. And we'll have the link for that in the show notes. For everybody that's out there, don't forget to man it forward to this episode with somebody that you know will enjoy it. And until next week, Conor Beaton signing off.

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