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The Rich Roll Podcast
The Explorer's Gene: Alex Hutchinson On Humanity’s Drive To Seek The Unknown, The Science Of Uncertainty, & Why Effort Creates Meaning
02:24:47
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- [00:03]
Alex Hutchinson
Exploration is about accepting uncertainty and risk. By doing that on a regular basis, we end up doing difficult things and feeling like our pursuits have meaning. Listen to that inner voice telling you to try something and be willing to take risks in pursuit of something, because you never know what you might find.
- [00:22]
Rich Roll
When you think about it, the story of humanity is really a story of exploration. It's a trait unique to our species that compels us to reach higher and go further and boldly go where no man has gone before. To quote Star Trek. From early migration to space travel, and even engineering new forms of intelligence, our inclination towards exploration is undeniable. But what is this inclination all about? Why do we have it? Where does it come from? And how can we enrich our lives by cultivating it? These are questions Alex Hutchinson just couldn't shake. So this former elite track and field athlete and Cambridge trained physicist turned journalist and New York Times bestselling author of Endure, which I might add, is perhaps the best book ever written on the science of endurance. This is a guy who sought about finding answers.
- [01:15]
Alex Hutchinson
If all else is equal, we want to try something new and something different. We want to pursue the unknown. Exploration isn't just something that evolved from a freak genetic mutation 50,000 years ago. It's something that is a precondition of life. No one gets to Easter island because they were a little hungry. You have to be deliberately exploring. Get there.
- [01:37]
Rich Roll
He's here today to report not only his surprising discoveries, but also why you should care and how what he learned can better nourish our lives with meaning and satisfaction. All of which he details in his latest book, the Explorer's Gene. This is a great conversation. Also on the back end, we discuss lots of endurance science as well for all you endurance freaks out there. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Alex Hutchinson. Seven years, Alex. Seven years since we first did this.
- [02:14]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, my editor reminds me of that. How long it's been that? I've been in hibernation for quite a while.
- [02:21]
Rich Roll
I still think of that episode as one of the all timers. It was such a fantastic experience meeting you and the audience, you know, loved that episode. It still gets quite a few listens seven years later and I was reflecting back. I know we did it in New York City and I, I have this vague recollection of it being some kind of second story walk up. I can't remember whether it was a hotel room or somebody's apartment.
- [02:45]
Alex Hutchinson
It was a wework. You had rented a wework for like two hours or something like that. So you were passing through, I was passing through. And the fates aligned. And it was just, yeah, an afternoon we went into this random space and we had a two and a half hour conversation.
- [03:00]
Rich Roll
Back when podcasting was a little bit more simple and I was a traveling salesman with a case and a couple mics and trying to catch these things on the fly wherever I could, when.
- [03:09]
Alex Hutchinson
I was like, what is this thing? A pod, something? Sure, that sounds good.
- [03:13]
Rich Roll
Yeah, no, it was great. And I suggest or urge anybody who's watching or listening to this, who did not listen to that episode to go back and find it. It's episode 359, I believe. And in that episode we go much deeper into your background and all of that, which we'll probably short circuit a little bit today given the fact that we've already had that conversation. But it's great to have you here today on the cusp of your new book coming out, the Explorer's Gene. Your book Endure, I just shared with you, is one of my all time favorites. It's always been sitting on that coffee table over there, and I think to this day still is probably the seminal text on the science of endurance for at least for the layperson. I'm sure there's scientific journals that you've poured through that go into greater detail, but I think of it as sort of the high watermark in terms of understanding the physiology, the art, and the science of how to perform at your best in an endurance context.
- [04:18]
Alex Hutchinson
That's super, super nice to hear, Rich. And I think back to that conversation seven years ago, and the book was new. And it sounds funny to say this, but that conversation with you really helped me figure out what it was about. You know, you read a book and it's not until you hear what other people are taking from it that get a better sense. And so that really, I think, set the agenda for how I talked about that book in the years that followed. So I'm excited to find out what my new book is about.
- [04:46]
Rich Roll
Yeah, this is a new exploration, is it not? At the core of it really is kind of the evolution of you as a person that gets into some of the principles that you talk about in the new book, which is this idea that for a long time you're the Signs of Endurance guy. You're the go to guy with all the answers when it comes to everything from VO2 max to interval training in zone 2 and mitochondrial density and all of that. But after a certain amount of time it's like, okay, I think I need to Break out of this a little bit, or is there more in life for me to explore that will get me excited and kind of ignited? And so maybe it would be instructive to kind of walk us through that internal journey that you went on.
- [05:37]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, I mean, I guess if I was picking a moment or a kind of a fork in the road, it's like Endear did really well. Do I now write Endure 2? You know, the Revenge of the Science of Endurance and that, you know, and it wouldn't have been called Endear 2, but there are a lot of ways I could have gone down that path. And by any rational measure, it would have been the smart thing to do because Endear did well enough that I would have sold a bunch of Endear 2 just on the strength of Endear in terms of the other, the self branding. We live in this world, of course, where it's like, oh, and then I can do talks and I can do this and do that, and it all pointed in one direction, but I just couldn't make myself go in that direction.
- [06:23]
Rich Roll
Yeah, it's like the actor who's been typecast in a certain role or known for a certain character and wants to do something different. It's like that is human. Right. At some point it's like, okay, I've done pretty much everything I can do. It's like marginal gains from here on out in terms of what's going to pique your curiosity. But then balancing that against like the known known of knowing that if you put another book out, it's probably going to do well because you have this built in audience and you have this level of credibility. And this all gets to this idea that you explore in the new book, which is the explore exploit phenomenon. Can you explain what that is?
- [07:03]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, I mean, I think the classical explanation is you're sitting in your favorite restaurant and you know that the burger is great. And so usually you order the burger and then you see the server walking by with meatloaf, the special, and you think, well, maybe I should try something different. But you know, you love the meatloaf. So do you exploit all this experience you have with the burger? Rather you know you love the burger or do you take a chance on something that might be better or might be worse? And we face these decisions on small scales, like ordering in a restaurant, on large scales, like dating or like career choices, like where you write a book so it recurs everywhere. And there's no mathematical answer to what the right answer is. So there's this whole field across Many fields across, like biology, how animals forage, or corporate strategy R&D versus exploiting your current product lines. Everyone is trying to figure out the answer and there's no simple answer. So this is why it's a book and not a fortune cookie. Is that.
- [08:10]
Rich Roll
Yeah. And also people's sort of fundamental psychological makeup, their relationship with risk, their relationship with uncertainty, that toggles significantly person to person.
- [08:24]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. So there's a lot of individual variation. But then it's also What I think a point you're making here is that even if there was a formula, like, the formula probably points me to writing in Dear 2, but we don't necessarily want the formula. So what is the psychology? What is our wiring evolutionarily or in terms of the neuroscience? But my thesis at least, is that we are drawn to uncertainty. In a way, if all else is equal, we want to try something new and something different. We want to pursue the unknown.
- [08:57]
Rich Roll
We're drawn to it, but we also fear it. And we try to eradicate it out of our lives. That's why we go through the meatloaf, hamburger decision, hamster wheel, as if there is a correct answer that will make us feel better or will resolve that level of uncertainty that for whatever reason, makes us feel uneasy.
- [09:17]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. As soon as you make a decision, you open yourself up to the possibility of regret. Because if the decision doesn't go perfectly, you're going to say, well, I could have done that other thing. And what we often forget is every choice comes with the possibility of regret. And if we let ourselves get paralyzed by the fear of regret, then we're always taking the safest choice, always taking the one with the least uncertainty. And one thing we can say mathematically is that does not lead to optimal outcomes. If you never take a risk, never take a chance, never always try to stick with the safest choice, you will constrain your possibilities.
- [09:50]
Rich Roll
Yeah. But ironically, regret later in life usually gets served up in the form of the path you didn't take. You know what I mean? And I can't help but think about Dr. Ellen Langer at Harvard who always says, stop worrying about making the right decision, like, make the decision right. Which gets to the heart of, like, the regret piece.
- [10:10]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. I mean, I certainly don't look back and I can't think of any sort of bold decisions I've taken. Then I'm like, oh, I wish I had just stayed at home. The safe thing, I can certainly think of lots of, you know, the classic is, I wish I had asked that girl to dance or whatever, you know. Yeah, the. The fear of rejection is one example of this larger fear of getting it wrong, which prevents us from doing things that may in some cases, lead us to the best experiences of our lives.
- [10:37]
Rich Roll
In the context of this explore exploit paradigm, in your instance, it's basically this decision between exploiting this expertise that you've developed over many years that people seem to enjoy. There's an appetite for it. There's a lot of known knowns, there's not many unknowns, and there's security and comfort in that. You know, if you write a book on that subject matter, it's going to do well. You'll be able to pay your bills, all the like, versus this explore, you know, kind of compulsion or disposition. Like, I want to break out of this. I want to do something new. I want to, you know, tease out my curiosity and see where it will lead me. There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns that are exciting and perhaps scary as well. And so these two things are kind of butting up against each other. Right. And in the case of your decision to go on this sort of very meta exploration of exploration. Right. Like, it's sort of like the compulsion to explore, the human instinct to explore is like, it kind of folds in on itself a little bit.
- [11:50]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. I mean, it was such an irrational thing to me that I was like, maybe this is what I should write a book about, because I can't figure out why I want to explore. So maybe I should explore why I want to explore.
- [12:00]
Rich Roll
When did that kind of epiphany occur to you? When did you realize, oh, this is the thing that's nagging at me that I want to resolve?
- [12:09]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, it took a couple years. I think it was probably 2020 before I finally started to say to myself, actually, I think this is a book topic. And this sort of meta element of exploring why I wanted to explore dovetailed with a few other things that I'd been thinking of for a lot longer. I'd been thinking about the idea of going for a long run as a quest or a mission or an exploration. I'd been thinking in terms of Joseph Campbell's Hero's journey that it just seemed like such a natural fit. And I thought, is there something to say about that? But I didn't know what I wanted to say about that because that is more of a fortune cookie than a book. But then when I started thinking about exploring, I thought, this is a thing that's not just about my book, and it's not just about my Long run either. It's not just about one thing. This is a, you know, as we were talking about earlier with the Explore exploit dilemma, which is just one aspect of this that it's like this is a sort of fundamental thing that we're facing all the time in our lives and that we. I think a lot of people wrestle with in different ways. Some people are. It's not that nobody explores enough. Some people are so compelled by the desire to find out the unknown that they're never taking advantage of the things they learn. They're just moving from one thing to the next. And some people are stuck like a hobbit at home, afraid that they're going to miss dinner. And most of us are somewhere in the middle, wrestling. And so it struck me that this is such a big problem, there must be scientists who are studying this. So that's when I started to dip in. Yeah, this probably about five years ago. And at first I couldn't find any science. At first I was like, I was using the wrong search terms and stuff. I was like, this can't be right. Nobody's studying this. Or to the people that are studying it, it's just this really arcane mathematics that is not interesting to people. But gradually, as I tugged on threads, things started to move. And then by the end, it was like, oh, God, when do I stop the book? Everywhere I look, there's more interesting threads that are all part of this bigger dynamic of explore versus exploitation.
- [14:11]
Rich Roll
Hmm. So you try to answer this question through anthropology, through genetics and physiology, and through neuroscience. But fundamentally, like, we all. It's sort of like consciousness. Like, we know it's real, we don't know where it is or what exactly it is. Similarly, exploration is this kind of fundamental trait that is inherent to being human. Like, we all know this, right? Like, we, we have this thing inside of us. Like, we must go to that place we've never before. And like, why do we have that? And are we the only species that has it? Like, is that where this began for you? Or like, what was the kind of launch pad? And how did. How did you kind of dive into it and, you know, like in the very beginning, even define, like, what exploration is, like, what, you know, like kind of put some guardrails up on, like, what exactly we're talking about.
- [15:06]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, I should have put up the guardrails earlier to keep it narrow.
- [15:10]
Rich Roll
You had to go on an exploration before. You can't do that. You can't. Like, that's sort of an exploitive thing, right?
- [15:15]
Alex Hutchinson
You don't know where the boundaries are until you fall off the edge of the world and you're like, that's where I should have stopped. You know, There was a 2012 article in National Geographic by a journalist named David Dobbs that I think it was called Restless Genes that looked at the genetics of exploration. And you know, full credit to that article is really like, I look back at it now and it's like every time I thought I was discovering something new, I look back and I'm like, oh, he actually was on that thread too. So that article introduced me to this idea of an explorer's gene, which is the title of my book and which, you know, public service announcement to everyone. There is not an explorer's gene that determines whether you explore. But this idea that there was one particular variant in a gene that has to do with a dopamine receptor that had these far ranging effects on how ancient populations migrated. They still show up today. So you can see that some populations that migrated really far away from, from their origins, like to the southern tip of South America have a lot of this explorer's gene. Populations that stayed closer in Europe have less of it. And that was like, oh, so there is something more than just as you said, consciousness, whatever. We know there's something there. But for me as a, you know, I think of myself as a science journalist, so is there something we can grab onto beyond? Just because I'm not, that's not my, I'm not a social scientist. I need something quantifiable, something measurable. And that gave me something measurable that then it turned out not to be the basis of a book. Right. Like there's one. I have a chapter on this gene, but it's not a book because it doesn't explain everything. The more you dig at that, the more you realize it's incomplete. But that got me launched on the idea of maybe we can understand why we have this compulsion.
- [16:59]
Rich Roll
So talk a little bit about. It's not one gene, it's sort of a series of genes that interact with each other. This Dr. D4 gene, what exactly is that? How does it relate to dopamine processing? And then I guess thirdly, are you concluding that this is like a gene that compelled or continues to compel exploration? Or is it more a result of like natural selection? Like the nomadic exploring people who survived kind of naturally select for that genetic predisposition.
- [17:35]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, so there's a lot of, there's a lot in there. So let me, yeah, let me start with the, the big picture. There's this. So dopamine, I'm just going to say, is a very complicated molecule and one that I can't do justice to in one sentence. But it has to do with our desire for things and our prediction of how things are going to be. We get a hit of dopamine when something is better than we expect it's going to be. And so that's fundamentally a driver to sample the unknown. Because no matter how good something is, if you know how good it is, you don't get that dopamine hit.
- [18:10]
Rich Roll
And it's anticipatory, right? It's not like when you arrive at the destination and enjoy it as much as it is about the anticipation of that destination.
- [18:21]
Alex Hutchinson
The dopamine doesn't fire when you taste the sugar. It fires when you realize you see it there. You're going to. So it's driving you on. It's not about the destination. Dopamine is all about keeping you on the journey. And so we have various receptors for dopamine in the brain. And there's about 50,000 years ago, a random mutation in the gene for one of these dopamine receptors, the Dr.4 receptor, arose, which changed the sensitivity of the gene. It made it. If you obtained an unexpected reward, you would get a bigger hit than people with the regular gene. And so people with this gene variant, the current understanding is they basically get a bigger hit from trying something new. And so 50,000 years ago, as it happens, is roughly when humans started spreading around the world, because there'd been modern ish humans moving from Africa to Europe and back and back and forth for hundreds of thousands of years. Before that, the Neanderthals had been in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, but they just stayed there. They'd been happy where they were. You know, they'd expanded a little bit into Europe, but hadn't gone much farther. And then within a few tens of thousands of years, humans spread out and settled the entire globe. Like everything. I mean, I would say Easter island is maybe the smokingest of smoking guns to say there's more to it than just like, we're spreading because it's a little crowded here and I want to go. No one gets to Easter island because, you know, they were a little hungry and wanted to find, you know, you have to be deliberately exploring to get there because it's in the middle of nowhere. So sorry, I'm kind of wandering off track here. I guess the point is 50,000 years ago is an important time because that's when humans really started to spread rapidly. And what you find is if you there's this study in 1999 that plotted various groups of human populations around the world, estimated how far they'd had to migrate in the past 10,000 years from their original place, and then sampled their genes. Say, how much of this DRD4 novelty seeking variant do they have? And there was basically a straight line relationship where the farther they'd migrated, the more of this gene they had. Now, to your point, that doesn't mean that the gene made them explore. It could be that people just sort of were out there exploring. But some people who were wired to appreciate novelty and the unknown and risk they were able to thrive when they got to new places. So that question is still not answered.
- [21:01]
Rich Roll
Right. You can't really extract some kind of valid deduction from that. It's interesting and there's something there, but it's not conclusive.
- [21:11]
Alex Hutchinson
We don't know if that's driving people. But I will say that gene is also associated with adhd, which another complicated topic, but adhd, there's this thesis or hypothesis that it's adaptive to be like constantly seeking novelty and stimulation if you're a hunter gatherer. It's not adaptive if you're in grade four and they're telling you to sit down and shut up. But it's adaptive in some contexts, in historical contexts, and it's also linked to this DRD4 gene. And other animals have this DRD4 gene and some of them actually have similar variants that make some animals more receptive to novelty than others. And you see similar patterns in them. There's one study where they looked at islands off of Sweden, populations of frogs that had managed to make it off the mainland onto these tiny little islands. And they were way more likely to have the explorers gene than the mainland populations.
- [22:04]
Rich Roll
So this isn't inherent only to humans.
- [22:07]
Alex Hutchinson
This isn't inherent only to humans. But I guess where I would come down acknowledging the uncertainty of all the information is that but this gene particular gene variant, when it arose in humans, played a role in the expansion of the population and almost certainly plays a role in people's individual baseline attraction to novelty. Not in an on, off, 0 and 1 like I have the explorer's gene and you don't. It's more like we're somewhere on a spectrum of really attracted to, moderately attracted to novelty. And that explorers gene bumps people up a few points on that 100 point scale. The real thing I really hope people won't take from the book is that some people have it and some people don't. It's more like we all have wiring that predisposes us to seek novelty. And there are factors, both environmental, how you're brought up and genetic, that can tweak where you are on that scale.
- [23:08]
Rich Roll
It makes sense from a evolutionary advantage perspective. Like, obviously the paramount thing with any living creature is to populate and replicate. Right. And if spreading out advances that, then it would be advantageous to have a predisposition to do that for purposes of survival and thriving.
- [23:33]
Alex Hutchinson
And I think I would broaden the frame a little bit to say it's not just about exploring in the sense of finding a new place to live. It's exploring in terms of finding a new thing to do with rocks, or finding a new way of fishing, or all these sorts of things that trying something new is the way to just. So maybe a real world example in the modern world to say that the age of exploring is not dead. Because back to the restaurant example. So some scientists at Harvard did an analysis of, I think it was 1.8 million food orders from a food company called Deliveroo, which is, you know, the equivalent of Uber Eats or whatever. And so they were able to analyze how people decide what to order and how much they like their orders. And one of the key findings was, in the short term, exploring is a risk. If you try a new restaurant that you never tried before, you will likely rate it lower than if you try one, go back to one that you already know that you like. So it's like, why would I explore? Exploring gives me on average, a worse meal. But if you look over time, people's average rating as they order repeatedly from various restaurants, it climbs and climbs and climbs. And that's because, yeah, they're getting some duds, but they're also finding some better options which are better than their current exploit options. And so by exploring, by accepting those short term losses, they're getting better outcomes. And I think you zoom that out on evolutionary time and if you've got people who are like, no, I'm not just going to keep hunting in the same way. I wonder if we. Maybe this other animal is edible, maybe this mushroom is edible. Oops, that guy died. But eventually you discover better and better things. Right?
- [25:05]
Rich Roll
Right. So it's a very broad definition of exploration. Yeah, it's not just going where no man has gone before.
- [25:14]
Alex Hutchinson
My market researchers told me that if I only sold to people who were going to the moon, I would not be able to make the book work.
- [25:20]
Rich Roll
But you see, it played out everywhere. I mean, obviously writ large in terms of, like, we're going to colonize Mars and we're giving birth to new forms of intelligence right now. And. And as much energy and enthusiasm that is going into those pursuits, there's less sort of concern or putting on the brakes. You know what I mean? It's sort of like there's a lot of hand wringing and talking about, like, well, what is AI going to render for us in the future of humanity? But nobody's saying. People might be saying, like, hey, we shouldn't do this, but we're doing it. There's just no way around this is happening. There's just no way that anything is going to interfere with the development of this new technology. That's what we do.
- [26:06]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. You know, I mean, to take it out of the present moment, when I think back to debates about should scientists have participated in the development of the atomic bomb? And to me, I could never get upset at the scientists who developed the atomic bomb because if it was possible and within the scope of knowledge, someone was going to do it.
- [26:23]
Rich Roll
Somebody was going to do it.
- [26:24]
Alex Hutchinson
And I'd never really thought about it in terms of exploring, but I think that's fundamentally what I was recognizing, is that if there's a road, someone's going to take that road. You can't just sort of put up a sign at the road and say, don't go there, because if anything, that's catnip. That's going to attract people, not repel them.
- [26:39]
Rich Roll
Sure. I mean, if the history of humanity teaches us anything, it's that, like, we're going to do that thing and we're going to deal with the fallout and circumstances of it later.
- [26:47]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. Which is kind of a negative gloss on exploring, but it's absolutely on point. And I think it speaks to the fact that we kind of recognize this. We don't need the neuroscience or the biology to say if there's a road, we want to take it.
- [27:03]
Rich Roll
So we have this genetic piece. We have all the anthropology, the great human expansion you talk about, like the Polynesian cultures and the first people to go to Australia and all these sort of examples that kind of illustrate this predisposition that we have. And then there's the neuroscience component here, which gets into this idea of predictive processing. So explain that.
- [27:28]
Alex Hutchinson
And first of all, I apologize because this gets a little bit obscure for everybody.
- [27:33]
Rich Roll
People love neuroscience, though, and I think.
- [27:35]
Alex Hutchinson
This idea of predictive processing. I was making this case to my editor at Outside a little while ago. I did a piece on it. And we were talking and it's like, yeah, this is kind of hard to follow. And I was like, trust me, it's worth it. Because predictive processing is one of the big ideas in science of this generation, I think. And 10 years from now, everyone will be familiar with this idea, as obscure as it sounds. So it's worth digging into the mud a little bit and saying, what is predictive processing? And it's a grand theory of how the brain works. It's bigger than that. It's as big as you want it to be. It's a grand theory of how life exists if you sort of follow it down all the way to the bottom. And it relies on an idea called the free energy principle, which is this idea that the fundamental precondition of life, whether we're talking about amoebas or you and me, is to minimize surprise. If you're going to stay alive, you have to understand what's happening and what's about to happen in the world. If you can't minimize surprise, you're going to. As an amoeba, you're basically that you're not able to maintain a distinction between you and the rest of the world. You're just going to dissolve into nothingness. So that's a little obscure, but if you zoom that out and follow the train of logic, you end up with the idea that the brain is a prediction machine. The brain is trying to avoid surprise by predicting what's going on. And this is an idea with a lot of history. But basically, when I look around this room, the classical view is that there's a bunch of photons bouncing into my eyes. And then my brain is saying, oh, that must be a ladder. That must be a door. What the predictive view says is that I have kind of taken. I know kind of how the world works. I've looked around when I came in, now I know what to expect. And so my brain has a view, has an idea of what it's seeing. It's predicting the world. And only if something deviates from my predictions, it's checking its predictions. What my eyes are doing are just verifying that, yeah, there was a door there a minute ago. There's still a door there, there. And if something changes, if the door opens, then I will register and have to update my predictions. So this idea has a lot of depth to it, which we don't need to get bogged down in. What's relevant from our perspective is that if you accept the idea that your brain is its main desire in Life is to predict what's going to happen next. Then what follows is that we should go into the closet, turn off the lights, close the door, and never come out. Because in that nice, dark closet, we will always know what's happening next, which is nothing. And that's called the dark room problem in philosophy and in neuroscience. And it doesn't seem to suggest that we want to explore, and this was actually something that was debated for about a decade or about a decade ago is when it was posed and people were trying to argue, well, how can this be true? We don't want to lock ourselves in closet. In fact, we've done experiments where you ask people to sit in a quiet room and they'd rather administer electric shocks to themselves than sit alone in a room. And so it turns out that the resolution is you have to say you don't want to just know what's happening right now. You want to know what's happening next. You want to minimize surprise about the future, too. And to minimize. To understand what's coming down the pike, what's going to happen, what might come through that door there. We need to know as much as possible about the world. So a predictive brain is fundamentally wired to look around and say, what do I know least about whatever I know least about where is the greatest uncertainty? I need to go and resolve that uncertainty so that I make sure there isn't a monster behind that door. And so in this view, exploration isn't just something that evolved from a freak genetic mutation 50,000 years ago. It's something that is a precondition of life, that we have to go and find out what's over the horizon so that we know what's coming next and we can minimize our surprise.
- [31:41]
Rich Roll
Yeah, that feels very neat and tidy, but also, to me, like, feels a little bit lacking. And maybe that's because it doesn't account for this dopamine piece. Like, I just know from anecdotal personal experience. Like, and maybe I'm wired differently, and maybe that's why I'm a recovering alcoholic. But, like. Like the idea of, like, oh, there's something over there that's unknown. I gotta go over there. Not so that I can resolve uncertainty, but for the very reason that I don't know what's gonna happen. There's something intoxicating about that that perhaps is operating on a hormonal level in the brain.
- [32:15]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. So there are ways of understanding how dopamine fits into this picture of prediction. And so one of the roles for dopamine in that view is that it's basically encoding the precision of your prediction, how well you know something. But leaving aside the, you know, this stuff is still under debate and I'd be lying if I said I understood it well enough to say anything about it. But in the predictive processing view, what they argue is, or at least what some people, what some scientists argue is that the feeling of reducing prediction error is the feeling of feeling good. It's what we associate with a dopamine hit or whatever. It's the feeling of uncertainty going down. So you see something over there, you want to know what it's about. You go over there and what's exciting is the feeling of now I know what's here, that's what feels good. And it's on a hormonal level. It's all wired in through this complex system of rewards and hormones and neurotransmitters and things like that. But the underlying logic, the reason we're wired the way we are, is with the goal of resolving uncertainty. Now, that doesn't mean that we always act in ways that resolve uncertainty. And so one of the sort of explanations that I saw is you can think about hunger or about the taste of sugar, for example. Why do we crave sugar? On a fundamental level, it's because it's giving us, it's a source of calories. Why do we crave sex? On a fundamental level, it's because we're propagating the species. But we do both those things in the modern world in ways that don't achieve those goals. We eat sugar well beyond when we need calories, or we eat artificially sweetened things that don't give us any calories. We use birth control, some of us. So we're decoupling the underlying drive from how we actually behave. And the same thing is true with uncertainty. Why do we scroll through social media? It would be overly optimistic to say we're scrolling through social media in order to learn about the world and resolve uncertainty. But it's that circuitry, that circuitry that tries to get us to resolve uncertainty that then gets co opted by whether it's social media, whether it's canopy or whether, you know, whatever the case may be.
- [34:34]
Rich Roll
And modernity is a scenario in which these fundamental mechanisms which were kind of designed to serve us, we now serve them.
- [34:46]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, people talk about when is artificial intelligence going to take over? Well, I mean, the algorithms have kind of taken over in a lot of ways in terms of how we spend our leisure time and what we think of as entertaining. It's like, no, they're telling us what's entertaining, we're not discovering it.
- [35:07]
Rich Roll
Ah, Spring. Spring is in the air. The days are getting longer with that light lingering ever so longer every single day into the evenings. I gotta say, my outdoor training, my trail time, my CO mingling with nature, all of these things tend to grow longer too. But those extra demands on the body also demand a wee bit of extra attention to what I put in it to keep things humming along at their best. Now this is typically the point where an extended monologue on morning routines comes into play. A good morning routine. It's important, but ask yourself, are you serving it or is it serving you? AG1 is a long standing and hallowed aspect of that oh so important and previously mentioned routine because it does just that. It serves me first because it's the foundational nutrition supplement that takes all the guesswork out of meeting my daily needs, supporting my immune health and maintaining my energy levels. And two, it's simple, fast and easy. One scoop cold water. Done. When it comes to my health, I want something I can trust. And that's why I choose AG1. With science backed ingredients and real benefits, I can feel AG1 makes it easy to support overall wellness every day. And that's why I've been partnering with AG1 for so long. And right now, AG1 is offering new subscribers a free $76 gift. When you sign up, you'll get a welcome kit, a bottle of D3K2 and five free travel packs in your first box. So make sure to check out drink drink ag1.com richroll to get this offer, that's drinkag1.com richroll this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know, one of the things that I've learned over the years about therapy is that it's not all about crisis management or just about facing and working through your shortcomings. It is that. That. Of course it's helped me through all of my darkest, lowest and most desperate moments. But therapy actually really shines when you use it proactively as an essential tool to more positively navigate work, relationships, parenting, or yourself. To really grow and help you build a better, more authentic life that is healthy, purposeful and sustainable. In other words, therapy not as a red flag, but as a green green flag. Not just as triage to manage negative things, but as more of a Life Optimizer. And BetterHelp removes all the resistance and the excuses by simplifying the process and giving you access to choose from its platform of over 30,000 credentialed therapists. They've helped more than 5 million people worldwide. And you can easily switch therapists until you find the right fit. Discover your relationship green flags with Dutch visit betterhelp.com richroll today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp H-E-L-P.com richroll it's worth pointing out that you have a PhD in physics from Cambridge and you did a stint at the NSA in Washington D.C. where you were studying quantum computing. And there was an interesting announcement this week from, from Microsoft about their new Qubit chip harkening a new era of quantum computing and what that might augur. And I just thought like I have to, you're here. I gotta ask you what you think about this because I think it relates to these sort of uncertain kind of future outcomes for the human race.
- [39:02]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, I mean it was interesting. So my time in the quantum computing group of the NSA was from 2002 to 2004.
- [39:09]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I can't imagine how much has changed since then. And it was, you know, conceptually you understand this.
- [39:14]
Alex Hutchinson
Sure.
- [39:14]
Rich Roll
Better than most people.
- [39:16]
Alex Hutchinson
Well, by a grain of sand. What was interesting then is, you know, you'd sit through a lot of talks projecting the future timeline of what's going to, you know, when are we actually going to be able to build one? Because tens of millions of dollars were being devoted even 30 years ago to quantum computing. More than that, you know, probably hundreds of millions. And nobody really knew whether it was possible to build one because it was the case of unknown unknowns. Right. It's not that we knew what had to be done, but it was hard. We didn't even know how we would overcome some of these seemingly intractable barriers. And a lot of the estimates that I saw would be like, ah, sometime around 2030. We'll find out. Now I'm sitting here in 2025. I'm like, yeah, yeah, they were actually about right now, I guess what I think I would say within the last five years. To me that's when things have shifted from can we do this? To yeah, it's going to happen. And the Microsoft announcement, that's actually a model of quantum computing that I didn't even know people were still pursuing. They were doing this, I guess quietly. It's not one of the main models that people are working on. But so it just shows that there are a lot of different routes to get to these destinations and nobody really knows what's going to happen until you get There.
- [40:37]
Rich Roll
Yeah. So are you even capable of translating, in layperson's terms. How this very powerful new kind of, like, technological breakthrough might impact the world?
- [40:50]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, it's funny. I had a lot of argument. So I wrote a few articles about quantum computing. Not long after I. When I Early in my journalism career, not long after I left quantum computing. And I inevitably ended up getting into arguments with physicists like, you can't explain it like that. That's not exactly right. You cannot assume that people have spent seven years learning quantum physics. Before they explain it to them.
- [41:10]
Rich Roll
You have to understand all of these, like, you know, quantum physics paradoxes. Right. And predictability problems and everything in order to really understand it.
- [41:19]
Alex Hutchinson
So the way I would explain it is a classical computer. The computers we all use today, they're built on the idea of manipulating bits of data. A bit can be 0 or 1. And so there's these long strings of zeros and ones. That computers are flipping or multiplying or whatever, Manipulating and perform their calculations. The fundamental difference between a computer, a classical computer, and a quantum computer is that a quantum computer, instead of a bit, it has a qubit, a quantum bit, which can exist in a superposition. In a combination of 0 and 1 at the same time. And that the very hard part, from an engineering perspective. Is getting it to stay in that superposition. Because it's very delicate. And so it can be 0 and 1 at the same time. If you start combining bits, it can hold a very large number of values simultaneously. Now, how does that get you magical results? That's very hard to explain. It's a little more complicated than saying it's doing all these calculations simultaneously. But you can manipulate these bits in ways to make the. Use the very odd behavior of quantum mechanics. To be able to do calculations that are impossible from a practical perspective. The most sort of obvious or straightforward use of a quantum computer. Is that they can factor large numbers very quickly. So you can take a number with 100 digits and say, what are its two factors? And that's important because that is the fundamental basis of how our communications are encrypted on the Internet. So that's why I was working for the nsa. Because they were like, oh, crap. Well, first of all, wouldn't it be nice to break everyone else's encryption? And second of all, if someone builds one of these, they're going to break all of our encryption. Now, there are ways. There is quantum encryption that you can use to make sure that a quantum computer can't break itself. There are pathways forward.
- [43:12]
Rich Roll
There's an arms race.
- [43:13]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. It's not going to break the world. This is an interesting tool, but I don't see it as like artificial intelligence. Quantum computers aren't going to become conscious and start taking or take over all of our jobs or anything like that in the way of artificial intelligence. I think it's a more known pathway as to what they can do. It's just. They'll be really powerful and really interesting.
- [43:35]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I mean, my completely uninformed sense is it can take gigantic data sets, multiple gigantic data sets, synthesize them and create kind of predictive results from them. While also, like all of the discourse right now is about its ability to break encryption and what that means for crypto and that whole world. But that seems to be like, okay, yeah, but I'm sure there's a million other things that we haven't even thought of that is going to change as a result of this.
- [44:06]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, it'll probably be really good for things like drug discovery. Simulating the behavior of molecules to see how of theoretical molecules to see which ones might have desirable properties. And the fundamental reason for that is these molecules are quantum mechanical molecules. So the computer is inherently following the same laws as the molecules. But also, I mean, there was a very early quantum computer that was demoed, demonstrated maybe 15 years ago. And some of the problems they did is like, there's these classical math problems like the traveling sales problem or the wedding guest problem. How do you know Aunt Beth doesn't want to sit with uncle so and so, but needs to be at this table with that. And you get these problems, which are easy to explain but rapidly become totally intractable to solve. Mathematically, the quantum computer can tackle these sorts of problems in a different way. In a way that, if you were just using an ordinary computer, would require some insane number of classical computers to tackle.
- [45:02]
Rich Roll
And this may feel like a tangent, but it is a form of exploration to bring it back to what we were talking about, the imperative of the human race to, hey, we've got this new thing. We got to figure it out.
- [45:16]
Alex Hutchinson
Well, that's. You know, I bring up quantum computing in the book because this was a new thing in. It was basically. The idea was basically floated in 1985, but no one knew anything about it outside a very small circle until the mid-90s when a guy named Peter Shore figured out this idea that, oh, hang on, we could crack encryption with a quantum computer. And then people got interested in it.
- [45:40]
Rich Roll
But.
- [45:40]
Alex Hutchinson
So I was in grad school, I was doing my PhD in physics from 1997 to 2000. And so I was there, the place to do physics. It is, I would argue it is.
- [45:48]
Rich Roll
The storied history of Cambridge and physics.
- [45:50]
Alex Hutchinson
Is quite something, a very intimidating place to do physics. The condition to get a PhD at Cambridge is, you know, what they write on that little form is you have to create, or I can't remember the exact wording, but basically the creation of new knowledge. You have to say something new and that's exploring. And that was a very, I can remember at the time reading it and thinking, well, how do I, you know, how, how do I know how to create new knowledge? Like, if I, if I knew what, what, what needed to be done, I would, it would already be done. Like, how do I decide where to go? And so then while I was there, this idea of quantum computing was emerging and it was like, well, this was something that didn't even exist effectively three years ago when I was doing my undergrad. And so it was really interesting to see people grasp, grapple with a completely new idea and to think like, where did this idea come from? How did people come up with this idea in an indirect way? I don't know. Maybe it led me to decide that I didn't want to do physics because I was like, I don't know how to create new knowledge in physics. And some of my colleagues, I could see that their brains were wired in a way that was allowing them to explore the intellectual space in a way that I knew I was very good at solving problem sets that my professors said, you know, here's some physics that we know how to do. It's really complicated. Here's a problem it's going to take you seven pages of Greek algebra to solve. I could do that. But the problem of create new knowledge, I found that really daunting.
- [47:24]
Rich Roll
Right. Well, there's a, there's two things. There's a creativity to that and there's probably some sort of genetic or kind of like neurological predisposition to be able to do that. In the same way a great athlete has a preternatural high VO2 max or something like that. Some people are just wired for that and they probably end up at Cambridge for that reason. But you have a whole section in the book about the exploration of the mind and ideas and the importance of, of cultivating that. That idea of how do you come up with new knowledge requires space and patience and is detached from the kind of exploit aspect of this. How do you take all of these people, put them in a room and don't put any parameters on them and say, just go into your mind and come up with something new.
- [48:19]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. And I would say one of the things that I thought was interesting that came out of that area of research was the importance of breadth and of making connections between disparate fields. So you don't create new knowledge by going into the dark room, the closet, and locking yourself. You put yourself in a room with people who know different things than you. All of the physics places that I've been, all of the good ones, they really put a premium on trying to bring people together in different ways. So at Cambridge, there's a tradition that started a century ago with J.J. thompson, the guy who basically discovered the electron. Tea time, I think it's like 10, was it 10:30 and 3:00 every day, the entire building, hundreds of people go down and get subsidized tea. And if you want a little piece of cake, it's 10 pence. Or at least it was when I was there. And there's big tables and you sit down and it's basically random. So you're not just sitting with your lab mates. You might be sitting next to the technician who's been working there for 40 years, the senior professor, the visiting academic. And you talk about stuff. And sometimes you're talking about soccer, but sometimes you're talking about physics. And so you're bringing together different areas of knowledge. And there's a place in Canada called the Perimeter Institute, which was endowed with basically the BlackBerry money, hundreds of millions of dollars. It's a theoretical physics, one of the leading places, really thoughtfully designed. The building was built just for the physicists. And so you walk down the hallway and there's all these little nooks, just random in the hallway. There's a little blackboard and a nook and a comfortable chair. So that if you're walking down the hallway chatting to someone and you're like, oh, that's an interesting idea, you just move into this little nook and you start jotting on the blackboard because they're really trying to make sure that you don't just lock yourself in the office. And then if you look, there's these big data analyses of like scientific papers, patents, inventions, things like that, where the more they're able to bring together areas that haven't been combined before, the more likely you are to make a big disruptive innovation. That's the story of quantum computing. That's quantum mechanics and computer science came together. The fundamental ideas in both those areas have been around for 50 years. But it wasn't until the 70s and 80s that a couple of people brought them together and realized, oh, if we put these two together, two and two is five. Sure.
- [50:33]
Rich Roll
But in a capitalistic society that requires having a long view and a pretty healthy relationship with uncertainty. Uncertainty. It's sort of orthogonal to stock market demands. And I'm curious, it feels like those sorts of institutions or scenarios in which there is enough kind of funding to get people together and let them be without any kind of specific agenda isn't really so much a thing anymore. I mean, there's think tanks and I'm sure there's. At universities, there are these types of things. But. But given the fact that humanity is sort of facing existential crises in a variety of ways, it feels like a good time to have more of that going on right now.
- [51:19]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, this is a dynamic that's been around for a long time. So there's the Institute for Advanced Study which was founded in the 1930s and the idea was let's just let people, let's take the pressure off, let's let them just get smart people and let them think and talk to each other. And it was controversial because people, people are like, no, you need to kind of crack the whip now and then. You need to make sure they're producing useful things. But there's definitely been a trend in the last, let's say maybe since the 60s, the space race was a time when there was a lot of investment in basic R and D. But really ever since the Second World War, there's been this trend where the relevance or the importance of the cultural importance of kind of blue sky, let's figure out how the world works, how the universe works versus let's build a gadget that's going to be useful. They've kind of shifted order and importance to the point that now we're focused on gadgets. And there's a guy, I mean, we talked about the explore exploit dilemma. That terminology is mostly. Was made popular by a guy named James March who was a business thinker at Stanford in a paper in the early 90s. And his. He was interested in business and his basic thesis was that the rewards of exploration are delayed in time. They don't happen immediately and they're uncertain and riskier, whereas the rewards of exploitation, we see them right away and we know if it's going to work. And so as a result we systematically under invest in exploration. And in the corporate context that means we systematically undervest in R and D. And that happens on a societal Scale too. And the amount of money that the government spends devoted to basic research is significantly less than half of what it was in the 60s. And of the money that is dispersed, it's less and less risky. It's more and more okay, you've got 80% of the way there. You've already shown that it can be done. We'll give you money to finish it instead of go figure out what these electromagnetic waves are or whatever.
- [53:24]
Rich Roll
I suppose on some level, Google, Meta, Microsoft, make room for some of. I mean, you don't get a quantum computer unless you let people sit around and think and talk to each other and try to come up with new ways of approaching hard problems.
- [53:40]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. And even within the government structure. So I think the estimate I heard, and I can't verify these numbers, but that the NS was that the NSA was spending about $60 million a year on quantum computing in the early 2000s. This is decades before it was going to be useful. And I know what I was doing at the NSA was not building a quantum computer. We were doing basic quantum mechanics research. We were trying to basically understand, you know, that an electron can do all these wacky quantum mechanical things. It can be in two places at once. It can teleport. We know that a baseball can't. Where's the boundary between electrons and baseballs? And is that boundary fundamental? Is there some. Something we don't. This is still an open question. How do you know what defines the boundary between the quantum and the everyday world? And how do we figure it out? So we were asking basic questions under the guise or under the, not the pretense with the goal of helping to make a quantum computer possible, but so you can get basic research done even within the constraints of trying to do something useful. But it constrains things, it narrows the field of what's possible. And I would say as a big picture joining, I think your big picture societal critique is that it's harder and harder to find space for that. It's much more of a return on investment kind of culture. And even if there are various calculations, and you can take these calculations with a grain of salt, but there's calculations that every dollar of R&D that a government spends returns $8 downstream. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but it's too far. It's beyond the next election, it's beyond five elections from now. And so you're going to get people standing up in a press conference, reading and can you believe the government is funding the sex life of Squirrels or whatever. Things that sound ridiculous if you take them out of their context.
- [55:32]
Rich Roll
So, yeah, yeah. Just the way our society is structured, we don't really make room for, you know, extended horizons on things just because of the machinations of our economic systems. And I think there's also something about what that does to our relationship with self interest versus communal interest that is not in the grander interest of the race at large.
- [55:58]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. I'll just also say before we get too kind of like, oh, the olden days were so great. It's not like, you know, on the Savannah 1.5 million years ago, it was like, okay, you seven people, you figure out if we can figure out how to hunt the wildebeest. Like, this is a long. This is an ongoing tension. We're always struggling with our own immediate self interest, trying to see beyond that. It does seem like at some points in our history, we've done a better job than another point than others.
- [56:26]
Rich Roll
Well, to ground this back in the text and specifically the neuroscience piece here, talk a little bit about this idea of mental mapping and the impact of this on the hippocampus. I think it's super interesting.
- [56:41]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. So the study that I think a lot of people will have heard about is about 25 years ago, some neuroscientists studied London taxi drivers. And London taxi drivers at the time, I'm actually not sure if it's still the case. They had to. They couldn't use GPS to get around. They had to basically memorize the entire map of London.
- [57:01]
Rich Roll
Anybody who's been to London, that is no small feat.
- [57:03]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. They had not invented the grid system when they were laying out London. So what they found is that London taxi drivers have a bigger hippocampus than everybody else. And hippocampus is. It turns out to be the place that we store our mental maps. And that's a literal. This is not a. Not just a metaphor. We have. So I'm in a room right now. If I were to walk around in this room, when I walk near that door, certain neurons will fire. When I walk in the opposite direction, other neurons will fire, and it'll be repeatable every time I go to a given place in the room. There's one specific neuron in that hippocampal map that will fire. So we carry these maps. And so these London taxi drivers were actually having to build very big maps, so they got bigger hippocampuses. And there's been a long stream of research since then, sort of finding that people who navigate by forming mental Maps by kind of figuring out where everything is relative to everyone else, they tend to use their hippocampus. There's another strategy of navigation which you could call stimulus response, which is, I memorize that I have to go three blocks until the gas station. I turn right at the gas station, then I go to the top of the hill. So you're just memorizing landmarks. You don't really know where anything. You just have a sort of linear sense of how you get from point to point to point. And that's actually a quicker and more efficient way of navigating. But you can't take shortcuts or you can't. You can't get. You may know how to get from A to B and from A to C, but you don't know how to get from B to C because you don't know how those points relate to each other unless you have a cognitive map. And we all use both of these strategies through life, but the trend is we're using stimulus response, navigation more and more. And that's partly aided by the fact that we have our phones, our GPS with us, which just tells us, go to this point, go to that point, go to this point. You don't have to know how it fits together. And I don't want to overstate the evidence, but there's strong hints that this trend is leading to us to have smaller hippocampuses. Hippocampi. It sounds funny saying hippocampi, but having a smaller hippocampus. And there are other bodies of research that suggest that having a smaller hippocampus is a risk factor for all sorts of conditions like depression, Alzheimer's, ptsd. Correlation and causation are always hard to tease out. But if you connect those dots, what it suggests is that if you're not forming mental maps, in other words. And how do you form a mental map? You explore. The only way to form a mental map is to go places you haven't been before and then figure out how they relate to other places. To look around, not just to go, I'm going from point A to point B and then to point C, but to try and construct a map of where you are to understand where you are. If you're not doing that and if society is moving you away from that, the risk is that you're letting your hippocampus kind of. Of atrophy and that this may be associated with negative health conditions.
- [60:07]
Rich Roll
Does that also apply to the mapping or the synthesis of ideas that aren't necessarily related to anything? Spatial like taking, you know, kind of I'm imagining you, right? So you're somebody who in a kind of David Epstein range way, has all of these seemingly wildly differentiated kind of experiences and levels of expertise about endurance. But you're also a physicist and you're a journalist. You have a unique set of skills that all kind of come together to make you the perfect and perhaps only person who could write the explorer's gene. Right. Similarly, the idea of taking ideas or information that you have in the world and how does it relate to this other idea is a form of, of mapping. It's just not in the kind of GPS context. Does that still relate to the hippocampus? And then secondarily, maybe this is a different idea. It's not just kind of our spatial mapping that we've outsourced to our devices. There's all kinds of things that we're now kind of not really interested in paying too much attention to because they're always at our fingertips. And what is that doing to them? Brain writ large.
- [61:26]
Alex Hutchinson
Okay, so to your first question 100. The hippocampus isn't just mapping the world, it's mapping ideas. And there's some really neat studies that demonstrate this, showing that, you know, the way we map social relationships, it's on in some. There's one study that showed it's like how well you know a person and what sorts of positive or negative experiences you have with them. It's like a two dimensional map. And people are distant or close to you in the metaphorical sense, but as mapped on a map.
- [61:59]
Rich Roll
And you create archetypes of different people based upon all the people that you've met in the world. And kind of that creates predictability around behavior.
- [62:07]
Alex Hutchinson
And then you can then use that to say that person is like that person, like you just said, to my great pleasure and flattery that I'm like David Epstein. So it's like, like that in some way you're mapping the characteristics of people and you're saying those two people are in the same continent, maybe even the same country, whereas Alex and someone else are completely at opposite ends of this spectrum. And it's a metaphorical spectrum and it's not a one dimensional or a two dimensional. It might be a five dimensional spectrum, but it's mapped in your hippocampus. And they find that, that for instance, if you take rats and you disable their hippocampus, they can't make these conceptual shortcuts between ideas that A implies B and B implies C. They can't figure out that A implies C because they don't have a map of how those ideas relate to each other in this virtual space. So this is getting a little esoteric, but the takeaway is that on the one hand, some of the scientists I spoke to are like, so we don't need to worry about using GPS because we use our hippocampus for so many things that on its own, it's not going to have a big effect. But on the other hand, it means that if something does go wrong, if we are neglecting our hippocampus, it's not just that you're going to get lost on the way to the library, it's that you're going to have trouble connecting ideas with each other. And I guess to your second point, one of the critiques of social media or entertainment more broadly is this idea of algorithms always constantly telling us what. What. What to do next. And then it takes away the. The active exploration. The. The active part of figuring out what. Where I might like to explore. All I have to do is sit there and the next show comes up.
- [63:51]
Rich Roll
Yeah. So this idea of active versus passive exploration, which you, you know, kind of go into in detail in the book, how are you actively engaged in this exploratory, like, disposition versus sort of passively engaging in it. So imagine and you're on a cruise ship and you're just watching the world go by and you have examples of this throughout history versus the way you open the book and you're in Newfoundland and there's no trail markers and you gotta figure it out. Right. And the qualitative difference of those two types of adventure experiences.
- [64:26]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. And so what I struggled a little bit with is because there's sometimes a correlation between the physical aspect of active versus passive and the. I guess, yeah, the mental aspect. So because the examples I tend to give, it's like, well, what's the difference between watching a documentary about Mount Everest versus being guided to the top of Mount Everest versus being Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay and finding your way to it? There's a lot of differences. One is that in how hard it is physically, but fundamentally what the point I'm trying to get across when I talk about active versus passenger isn't about what was your heart rate or how heavy was the pack you had to carry. It's what decisions did you have to make, what risks did you have to run. And so I would say that you could hike to the top of Everest and it would be as physically demanding as it is for anybody. But if all you have to do is follow behind someone else's footsteps and make no decisions about, is this the right path? Is the weather good enough? Should we go now? You're having a fundamentally different experience, and I've certainly experienced this in terms of traveling on our own versus following well traveled routes with really detailed instructions, being with a guide or on a package tour. The difference isn't that the scenery is nicer in one place than the other. The difference is how engaged you are and what you're learning about the world. And so I guess I connect this then to this. There's a body of neuroscience research and of education research that shows that you can have one person trying to learn or learn about a topic, expose themselves, expose them to a bunch of information, and you can give the exact same information to someone else. The person who's deciding which page to look at or which direction to look is going to assimilate the information with different parts of their brain and learn it in a different way in a more effective way. It's not the same to be shown information as it is to discover it for yourself.
- [66:30]
Rich Roll
On top of that though, the deeper kind of point here is how do we pursue and enjoy our lives with a kind of deeper connection to meaning and fulfillment? So yes, there are these neurological, neurochemical things that are happening that we should really pay attention to and try to be active explorers rather than passive. But why is any of this important? To me, it feels like for a lot of people there's a crisis of meaning in their lives. And what you're really getting at beneath the surface, like expressly, but also implied throughout the book is like, this is a way to welcome a little bit more meaning into your life. And it doesn't have to be hiking up Everest. Like this is just reframing how you think about this idea exploration with ways to kind of easily invite it more into your life.
- [67:36]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, and I think so if I think about the, you know, this maybe wasn't delivered, but I think about the way I've structured the book. And I start with the anthropology, then the biology, then the neuroscience, and those are all attempts to sort of understand what's going on, but none of them are really satisfactory. And I think as I get towards the end of the book, there's a sense of which of like, okay, I tried these things and they're interesting, they tell us a lot, but it's not at the heart of the matter. And that I think the penultimate chapter in the book is about effort. And the idea that effort is associated with meaning. Something called the effort paradox.
- [68:12]
Rich Roll
Right now it's becoming a Michael Easter book.
- [68:15]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to emphasize again that it's intellectual effort too. You don't have to ruck to have meaning, although it's not a bad way of doing it. But let me start by saying the effort paradox is this idea that sometimes we value things not despite the fact that they're hard, but because they're hard. That, you know, and it's like the mountaineers who, you know, you could hike up the mountain or you could climb up this death defying rock face and they're like, well, they don't want to hike up the mountain, they want to climb up the rock face because it'll be so interesting to do that. And that is not just about mountain climbing. It's also about IKEA furniture. There's studies on the IKEA effect that people value furniture more highly if they've had to struggle with these, you know, infuriating instructions. So effort, effort is associated with meaning for reasons that are not obvious, that there's a lot of debate about it. And I think effort is maybe not even effort is kind of a proxy for something deeper, which is willingness to. This goes back to what we were saying right at the beginning. Willingness to accept failure, willingness to accept uncertainty. That if you do something where the outcome is preordained and there's no risk that it goes wrong, then there's no satisfaction when it happens because you knew it was going to happen the whole time. The first precondition of something feeling like a meaningful activity is that there's some risk that it might not go well. People talk about this in lots of different ways. Like the concept of flow. One of its characteristics is that it's at the borders of your capabilities. It's not so hard that you can't do it, but it's not so easy that you know you can do it. And so I think the effort paradox is kind of getting at that idea in one dimension of that idea, but that the broader idea which goes back to exploring is, you know, one way of defining exploring is you're taking the choice that is less certain and that might turn out worse. Whether you attribute that to the theory of predictive processing, that's on some deep seven levels, deep level, this is what we were meant to do. Or whether it's a psychological process of feeling like I took on something hard and I did it. Now I have gained more confidence in myself that I'm capable of doing hard things, it's going to change my trajectory going forward. Whatever the level of explanation you want to go with, I think this idea of getting off the beaten path really has power.
- [70:45]
Rich Roll
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- [73:37]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, I couldn't have put it better myself. Like, I 100% agree. And what I'll add is that this doesn't mean that life has to be an unremitting slog, that you always have to wake up and, you know, do the ice bath because that's what you hate. And, you know, or whatever, it's not George Costanza. Like, everything that seems good, you do the opposite. There's a lot of ways to explore, and it's on different dimensions. And it can change, you know, over the course of your life. Like, one of the examples I give in the book is just thinking about musical taste. Do you seek out new music or do you go back to your comfort music? And there were times and the Truden. You know, most people find all the music. You know, the music they love most is the stuff they hear when they're like 20 years old. And then it's a gradually constricting path. And that's certainly been true for me, for better or worse, but not universally. And there are times in my life when I've sought out interesting and challenging new music. And, you know, there are times in life, like when I had my kids and my career was really starting to become more complicated. I was just listening to the stuff that I got when I was in high school, and I didn't need to challenge myself in every way, at every point, at all times. So it's like there's a kind of curve I talk about in the book. Some people call it the want curve of, like, if something is too easy or simple or familiar, it's boring. If it's way too complicated or too hard, it's. And in the middle, there's that sweet spot. That sweet spot is multi dimensional. And people can find that challenge in different ways. But if there's no place in your life where you're facing uncertainty, and the uncertainty might be, will I hate this album? As opposed to will I die from trying to wingsuit off this cliff? But if there's no place in your life that you're facing uncertainty, then I think you're. You're missing an opportunity for meeting.
- [75:27]
Rich Roll
What do you make of people's sort of wide variations in their relationship with risk and uncertainty and adventure? Some people are just like, not for me. I'm happy on the couch. And other people just can't wait to get out the door and jump out of an airplane.
- [75:43]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, these differences are real, for sure. And when I talk to people about this book, there's definitely some people who. Who are like, that sounds really interesting, Alex, but I am not an explorer. And I'm like, no, you still need to buy the book, because exploring is very broadly defined, and your personal want curve can be very different. But it's like, I go on canoe trips with friends and have for many years, and we do whitewater, so we're facing rapids several times a day. And I have friends who are just nuts, like some of the people I paddle with. Hopefully, they won't hear me say this, but some of them are not as good at paddlers as I am. They're less competent than I am, but they're more willing to just head into the maelstrom of a rapid. And I'm like, do you realize the consequences? I'm going to portage this. And that's just so. I like to think of myself as a bold adventurer, but I'm scared out of my pants by these. So there's different ways that people in different dimensions. I've taken big risks in some parts of my life. I'm not willing to take big risks in other parts of my life. All that stuff. There's genetic elements, but there's also, of course, like, environmental. How did you grow up? Did you feel like life was one big risk, or were you totally secure? So I think there's all these things that can influence it. I think we can change. But I think also, there's nothing wrong with recognizing that I don't need to become the guy who charges down Class 3 rapids, Class 4 rapids without a second thought. There's no right or wrong. For me, the Class 2 might be plenty challenging, and I'm facing my fears and getting a sense of accomplishment. There's no absolute barometer of what kind of risks you need to take.
- [77:26]
Rich Roll
Yeah. So the real question is to ask oneself is, like, am I stretching myself enough so that I'm learning new things and growing and stimulating my brain and all of that, but nourishing the soul also by getting out there and. And trying things and bursting out of that, like, you know, protective comfort zone that we find so, you know, kind of difficult to transcend?
- [77:50]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. You know, it's interesting I face this with running because I've been running for a long time now, and in some sense, it's ultra familiar. But every race is still, like, I get. Every time I race, I'm driving to the race thinking, why did I sign up for this? What am I doing. And that's like the sign that it's like, yeah, this is right. You need to be here. It's a hill I have to climb every time. But I also, you know, I took up rock climbing about a decade ago, and I'm a complete novice, not terrible at it, but I take joy in how little I know about it and how every time I go, it's a new adventure for me because I'm so not good at it. Within the familiar and within the new, you can find that. But the common thread, there is a little bit of fear. Not sure how it's going to turn out and whether I'll. In the running context, it's like, will I be able to push myself the way I know I should be able to? What answers will I give when the question is asked?
- [78:50]
Rich Roll
Sure, yeah. The running thing is interesting. I mean, you're this elite track and field athlete who had a really interesting career as a 1500 runner. And I want to ask you this because I've been thinking about this a lot. We're very good at deluding ourselves or convincing ourselves that we're doing the hard thing when maybe we're really not. In the context of running or maybe endurance sports at large, or any sport, maybe. I'm curious on your thoughts about how we can kind of get trapped within a bubble. Like, certainly running is something you'll never master. It will always have something to teach you, and you can keep going back to that well to kind of learn more about yourself and the world and the outer edges of your comfort zone and your capabilities, et cetera. But it also can kind of hold you prisoner and keep you from growing in other areas, like to prevent you from exploring rock climbing, because you're very safe in this world. You kind of know what that pain threshold feels like. There's a predictability to it. Right. And you can convince yourselves and other people that you're a master of venturing outside of your comfort zone. But are you really like that actually has become your comfort zone? And so it works at cross purposes with all of these principles and ideas that you're talking about. And I'm imagining you can see this in all kinds of subcultures, like people who just continue to do Ironmans over and over and over again. And I'm sure they get a lot out of it. And there's a community piece, and it's very nourishing for a lot of reasons. So I'm not disparaging that at all. But I often think, like, okay, this sort of Learning curve starts to flatten, right? Like, how much more are you learning every year that you show up in Kona and perhaps you're short circuiting or shortcutting yourself from growing in other areas of your life. If you would be willing to kind of let go of this thing that really has become a comfort zone for you, even though everyone around you will tell you, like, oh, my God, how do you do that? It's so hard. So you're getting this external validation for it at the same time.
- [80:59]
Alex Hutchinson
I think about this a lot. It's precisely the dynamic that I was thinking about, which we talked about earlier when I was thinking about the book and the science of endurance. Do I try and do something outside the science of endurance? It was really hard moving out. You know, I had an area where I'd spent 10 years building contacts, and then I was. I thought I was a great journalist, you know, well respected. I'm phoning up people in the Explore space, and no one's returning my calls. They don't even want to talk to me. Like, you're nobody. We don't care. And it was really humbling and really challenging to realize that it was hard to understand these papers. And part of me is like, I kind of want to get back to the science of endurance now, where I can feel like I'm king of the castle. And I feel within running. There's a similar dynamic for sure, where when I've taken up other things, I've had this literal conversation with people after doing rock climbing or trying other stuff and going back and running a 5K and saying to my friends, saying, like, there is no other activity I could take up. Now, at this point in my life where I will ever get as competent as I am as I can be at running with a relatively minimal investment, I can show up at a 5k and not to pat myself on the back. I can do quite well.
- [82:13]
Rich Roll
You're going to win the Turkey Trots pretty much every time.
- [82:16]
Alex Hutchinson
I am not winning the Turkey Trot anymore, but I can do well enough that I'm like, wow, I must be a pretty special person. With no.
- [82:23]
Rich Roll
And that feels good.
- [82:24]
Alex Hutchinson
It feels good. But to your point, with no actual. I've put nothing on the line of myself. I've taken no risks. There's nothing. So I get a lot out of running, a ton. Like community and physical fitness and mental health, I think. But I don't get that exploration anymore. And sometimes I tweak it. Sometimes I go and I do an orienteering race or I Try something. I've run some cross country seasons because I hadn't done that in a while, so I ran mat. So I try to find some different way of challenging myself, but realistically, running does a lot for me, but it's not doing the exploring. I have to find that in other parts of my life. But I think to your point, it's very easy to delude myself into thinking that I'm such a brave guy for going and running a 5K. It's been 35 years. It's not a big deal anymore.
- [83:10]
Rich Roll
Yeah. What is the relationship between all of these ideas and. And curiosity? Because it feels like they're close cousins here.
- [83:20]
Alex Hutchinson
Some of the stuff that I write about, it comes from the curiosity literature. And I think it's ultimately, I think it's kind of similar words for the same concept. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a matter of definition, really.
- [83:32]
Rich Roll
I guess I would say, I mean, maybe that comes into play in a more practical sense when you think about parenting.
- [83:41]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. And, you know, so my kids are getting a little older now, but I would say so my kids are 8 and 11. And so they. Their young childhood really corresponded quite closely with the thinking and writing of this book. And so they really influenced that a lot. The way they were constantly or still are not interested in doing the same thing over and over again and always interested in something different. And they clearly have a drive for this intermediate level of complexity of like, they don't want stuff that they don't understand, but they don't want stuff that they already are familiar with. And. Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. The distinction between curiosity and exploring, I'm not sure I can articulate.
- [84:27]
Rich Roll
I guess what I'm getting at is, and you talk about this in the book, you're somebody who. You go out with your kids and your family and you're doing these kind of like pretty intense explorations, adventures, et cetera. And God bless your kids for being willing to do that.
- [84:43]
Alex Hutchinson
They're good sports.
- [84:44]
Rich Roll
Yeah. I'm imagining other kids who are like, no, I'm good. I don't want to do that. It feels very uncomfortable. That brings up parenting styles like how hard do you push a kid versus encourage or nudge? And then kind of, not unrelatedly, how do you foster and support your child's own unique kind of curiosities so that they can blossom into their own relationship with exploring.
- [85:15]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. I had a really interesting conversation with a Danish scientist named Mark Malmdorf Anderson, who basically uses this predictive processing theory we were talking about earlier to study, play, to understand how and why kids play. And so, of course, you know, because I had young kids, I was peppering him with questions about so. And he has young kids, too, or a young kid, at least two. How do you encourage this? What do we do? How do we support it? And his. The answer that he. One of the answers he gave, the one that I liked most was he's like, I try to say yes a lot. And I try to recognize that if something seems worth exploring to them, that's the sign. That's the sign that their brain is reducing uncertainty on that. That neuroscience level. But it's a sign that it's worthwhile. And it doesn't matter if it seems like a stupid thing to do to you. It doesn't matter if you know how it's going to turn out, if it's interesting to them. He's like, yeah, you want to dress up like that and do that and climb up that or go in there, let's do it. And I think that what he's trying to instill in them is an idea that I'm trying to cultivate in my own life and I think is a good idea, which is to. To be conscious of what you're interested in and what attracts your curiosity and follow that. And that's a really hard thing to do in the constraints of adult life. Right? It doesn't matter what you're interested in. You need to pay the rent and you need to do this and you need to do that. But if you can kind of start listening to that voice and say yes to yourself too, that I am interested in that topic. Or it would be fun to try rock climbing or whatever do would be.
- [86:48]
Rich Roll
Interesting to do study on the hippocampus psi hippocampuses of young children in different cultures. I'm thinking about, you know, the typical American child who's got the iPad and, you know, a little bit too early on the digital devices, and the Japanese kid who's like, you know, like walking to school and riding the bus in the subway at age 5 or what, you know, we've heard these stories, right? Like. Like that kid is doing some serious mapping at a very early age and like, you know, getting those neurons to, you know, fire and wire in a very certain way that, you know, the typical kind of North American child isn't.
- [87:29]
Alex Hutchinson
Oh, yeah. I mean. And so the scientists I spoke to who are worried about the hippocampus, they're terrified about what's coming for coming generations because no generation has ever been like current kids in terms of the extent to which they're guided around passively. But there's, you know, there's all sorts of interesting studies of, like, kids who walk to school versus they're driven to school. Ask them to draw the neighborhood and the kid who's driven to school, it's like, here's my neighborhood. It's a line. It's like, oh, well, that's not much of a neighborhood. And you can really see the differences in how they're assimilating the world around them. And so, like, for my kids, we live about a mile from our school, and we're lucky enough that it's. We live in a place where it's walkable to school. You know, they started school at age 4. And my role was, I work from home. We've got a car. I could drive you any day of the week. And I'm not gonna never. I'm not gonna drive you. Forget about it. Don't even ask. Can be minus 40. It can be a monsoon. I'm not driving you. And so they know the neighborhood in a way that I think some of their friends don't.
- [88:26]
Rich Roll
How old are they?
- [88:27]
Alex Hutchinson
They're now 9 and 11. Especially since I was working on this book, one of the big questions was like, when do we start letting them walk alone instead of walking with them? And, you know, at first it was like, they might get lost, something might happen. Then it was like, but we like walking with them. We want to have this time with them. And then we're like, kids, do you want to walk by yourselves? And they're like, no, we like you walking with us. So anyway, there's a lot of family dynamic stuff in terms of when to cut the cord, but they're now at a stage where, in fact, I flew here yesterday. So they were walking home from school by themselves.
- [89:02]
Rich Roll
Cool. The one section that I found myself wanting to be in this book that really wasn't. And I'm curious what you think about this is the exploration of one's own mind and past, like, in a know thyself way. Like, can you be curious and go on this exploration to, you know, kind of learn more about, like, why you do what you do and how you could perhaps do it better if you better understood something that happened to you when you were, you know, like, basically from a psychological perspective to, you know, kind of have a self. A level of self awareness and self understanding to then, you know, heal whatever is not, you know, functioning properly. So that maybe in Turn you have a better relationship with the outside world and exploration itself, and you're no longer that person who won't get off the couch.
- [89:58]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, that's a really interesting idea. And I think in some ways, maybe.
- [90:01]
Rich Roll
That'S its own book.
- [90:02]
Alex Hutchinson
Probably it's the scariest form of exploration of all. Right.
- [90:05]
Rich Roll
That's what I'm saying. This is the thing no one really wants to do, but is perhaps the most important exploration that somebody should entertain.
- [90:13]
Alex Hutchinson
And I'm the kind of person who tries to understand why I do things, and I find that I always have three different versions of why I've done something, and I don't know which one. I never know which one's right. You know, like, even for writing this book, like, did I do it because I was interested in exploring? Did I do it because I was scared of doing another endurance book? Like, and I think there's all awful.
- [90:42]
Rich Roll
Or, like, look what a badass I am. I can shift gears and write a badass book about something totally new.
- [90:48]
Alex Hutchinson
Did I do it to show off? Yeah. No. These are really hard things to.
- [90:55]
Rich Roll
I.
- [90:56]
Alex Hutchinson
Think, to nail down. And I think not introspecting about why you do things is the surest way to stay stuck on paths that you don't even know why you're sticking to those paths. So, number one reason that I wouldn't have written that is that I am not the right guide for that. That's a hard, hard topic, but I think it's an important one.
- [91:18]
Rich Roll
How do we think about exploration in our overly exploited world in which every nook and cranny has already been explored and there's images from Google Earth, you know, you can go see whatever you want to see. Like, how do you reframe people's relationship with exploration now that, like, there are no kind of unchartered territories anymore?
- [91:43]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. I mean, so one way, and the way that I've taken through a lot of my life is basically denial. Try and pretend, you know, take myself to places where I can pretend that no one has been there. It's a fun way of doing it. I love going to the serious backcountry where I cannot be reminded every 10 seconds that, you know, there's a sign or a trail or whatever where I'm having to rely on myself. But I think that that approach only takes you so far because. Because it's just not true. I mean, you're kidding yourself if you imagine that you're discovering the national park that you're hiking in. And so over the course of writing this book, I've had to think really carefully about the difference between. In the exploring literature, they call it firsting. Like the idea that what's significant is if you're the first to do this place, and in the modern world, no one's being the first to get to any place. So now it's the first person to hop on their left foot to the North Pole.
- [92:35]
Rich Roll
Yeah, we just create all of these firsts and these, you know, fkts and things like that.
- [92:40]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, I mean, I get it. I get it. I'm attracted to that idea, but I don't think it's the right way of thinking about it because it leads us down these increasingly esoteric paths where we're just trying to create ways of differentiating our experiences. And so I think, I guess where I'm trying to get to in my own head is the idea of exploring places because they're new to me and being really present in that exploration. So the danger that I have encountered in myself is I'm going to go someplace very few people go, and I'm going to set a really hard itinerary and I'm going to bust my ass to get to the end of that itinerary. And I'm going to put my head down and I'm going to hike or canoe or whatever the case may be until I. And I am going to set up my tent and I'm going to cook my meals and I'm going to get to the end. And then I did it. And I barely remember anything about the trip because my focus was on doing this thing that most people can't do. And I'm really trying to shift that to trying to be present in the moment. To be. I mean, I know that's an awful cliche, but to be looking around. So one of the ways I've been thinking about that specifically is the way I navigate. You want to get from point A to point B. You have your gps. You have, you know, waypoints. You're following that. You just get from point A to point B. A less efficient way of doing it is you look at the paper map and you think, okay, I need to be in that valley over there. That's across the river and to the left of that glacier. And then you navigate your way there. And as a result, you're having to look really carefully. You're going to have to figure out where the river is, where the glacier is, where the valley is, what's between you and there's. And it just changes your experience. I mean, I had this. I'm using that example because that's the difference between two trips I took two summers ago, and one summer ago I put away the gps. And so it's not that I'm discovering it anymore, but I'm trying to be more conscious of me seeing something for the first time and me not knowing what's around the corner in that next valley. And so I'm also, you know, there's a balance between safety and surprise. I want to do as much trip planning as I can so that I don't discover that I should have brought crampons. But I don't necessarily want to do that. Exhaustive planning. Both my wife and I are super planners in a way, so we would know exactly everything about the trail we're going on. Then it's like, well, we didn't even need to go. We already knew what was there. So there's ways of allowing things to be new without having to pretend that. That I'm the first human to have ever done this.
- [95:13]
Rich Roll
Yeah, yeah, yeah. My version of that is far less, you know, exotic, but probably something you do and have experienced yourself. Which is. My favorite kind of runs are when I travel to a city I've never been to, particularly if it's in a foreign country I've never been to. And you wake up that first morning and you've got some free time and you go out for a run. And I just. I never, like, look at a map, like going to a movie without seeing the trailer. Like, I just want to have an authentic experience and get lost on purpose and try to find my way back and see what I see along the way. And that's how you get a sense of your surroundings that way. And those are the most fun and nourishing experiences that you can have as a runner. I don't know. For me. And I think it gets to this other principle we've talked about. You have these five rules, and most of which we've talked about, but one we haven't is this notion of play.
- [96:12]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. And first of all, you're braver than I am. It's just like, I can't go for a run without a watch on.
- [96:19]
Rich Roll
You're such an interesting, curious guy because you're this physicist math guy. Right. So of course you're going to have checkboxes and you're going to Uber plan every single thing. But you're also this, like, creative guy who's not afraid to try new.
- [96:32]
Alex Hutchinson
Like, I'm fighting against. I have to have a Watch on. But it's a Timex from, you know, 19, 1995. It has no GPS or anything, but I have to have it on and I have to know roughly where I'm going. But, you know, I got into LA yesterday. I don't know LA at all. And I was trying to get that experience, so I just. I wanted to shake out the legs when I arrived. So I went.
- [96:50]
Rich Roll
This is an instance in which maybe you should have called me and I could have, like, sorted you out a little bit for maybe a better experience.
- [96:56]
Alex Hutchinson
But, you know, I wanted to experience smog for myself. But also, you know, I just went for a random run through the streets near my hotel. I entered, ended up at a taco truck, and I got a shrimp taco for three bucks. And it was great. And then I kept running, and it was just like. It was an exploration run. And maybe that wasn't the neighborhood that, had I done planning, that I would have stayed in or that I would have chosen to explore, but I went out and I had an authentic experience. I had a very authentic. Super authentic. No, no. But you're absolutely right. And I did the same thing this morning. I went on a sort of looping run. Just. I had a rough idea of where I wanted to go, but I went one way, came back a different way, had to double back occasionally. And it's like. So I know my neighborhood better than. Better than I would have probably two or three years ago, had I come here. I would have just sort of laid out a route and followed it. I'm trying to play, and you mentioned this idea of play. And the idea is basically that play is your best guide of what's worth exploring, that this is your deep circuitry telling you where the opportunities to reduce uncertainty are to find, to create, and to reduce it.
- [98:05]
Rich Roll
Why does play become such an elusive thing the older that we get? We get so calcified around this, and it feels like an indulgence that is verboten.
- [98:16]
Alex Hutchinson
I asked a whole bunch of people this, because another subtext in this book which we haven't really talked about is aging. Like, you know, and I'm in my 40s, and you get calcified in so many.
- [98:26]
Rich Roll
You talked about your music preferences.
- [98:28]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, so we did talk about that. But it's like, you could see that in so many dimensions of life. And so I kept asking people, so, like, you know, should I be trying to explore more? Should I be trying to play more? And the answers weren't as unambiguous as I might have guessed. Because there are some aspects of youth that you can't just decide to recapture. And one of them is ignorance. You can't unknow what you've learned through life. So one of the scientists I talked to, the example he gave was like, you move to a new city, you may know nothing about the city. And so every place that you go into is an opportunity to explore. But if you've lived there for five years, you know the rhythms of the city. And so if a new place opens up in your neighborhood and it's a hipster coffee shop, you know what hipster coffee shops in the city are like, you know, if you like them. So. So novelty. Because you can't recapture.
- [99:16]
Rich Roll
Remote.
- [99:17]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, yeah, you already know it, you can't unknow it. And being an adult, we already know a lot of things. And so there's no point in me exploring naively things that I've already explored and know I hate. And so we can't go back to that completely naive state. There's still a whole lot of world to explore. And this guy, Mark Malmdorf Anderson, who I spoke to, who's written a book on play, he's like, you can't tell people to play more. You can't just tell adults, hey, play. Because the definition of playing, or the underlying sort of assumption is that it's something that's fun. We do for its own sake. But the distinction then is maybe you don't tell yourself to play, but you give yourself space to play. One of the reasons, aside from the fact that they know a lot more, is that one of the reasons that adults don't play as much is that they're busy, they're constrained by the shackles of adult expectations and the need to make a living and stuff. So this goes back to what I was saying before about listening to your paying attention to your instincts of what might be fun, but giving yourself space to follow them. It's easy to feel self conscious about doing something that you're not already an expert at when you're 45 or 55 or 65, that at that point in your life, you're usually doing the things that you've picked out that you know you're good at. And it would be nice to kind of break out of that and say it's okay to suck. I go to rock climbing and there's like, you know, 8 year olds who are climbing upside down on the things that I can't even get up. That's okay. Yeah, I'm an old Guy.
- [100:46]
Rich Roll
But that changes as you get older too. Like, you go through these phases and through most of adult life, we don't want to do the things where we look stupid and we're all about, like, how are people perceiving us? And we're very hyper conscious of like, you know, things like status. And we have a distanced relationship with things like play because they don't make sense in any kind of transactional way. And that's the way our brain is. And then you get to a certain age and you're like, fuck it, I don't care anymore. And then you're like, fine to show up and be a total amateur and look foolish because, like, you have a healthier relationship with other people's opinions of you because you, you've lived enough life and you just, you know who you are and you feel, you know, fine about that.
- [101:32]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. And I think that's. I like to think that I'm approaching that zone, but I think we can all kind of try and approach it a little sooner, you know, why wait? Why deprive ourselves of that in mid adulthood?
- [101:48]
Rich Roll
Well, I'd like for you to take off your explorer's hat and put back on your science of endurance hat. But before we do that, just to kind of wrap this part of the conversation, like, maybe just lay out like what you want people to get out of this book and why it's relevant to the average person who's just living their life and trying to get through the day.
- [102:13]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. So I think the first thing I hope people will take away is that we really are wired to explore in some amorphous way that this feeling that something might be interesting over the hill, that is a human feeling, that is something you should respect in yourself and recognize and pursue. And that moreover, it's a useful feeling to follow. It's one that leads to good things, both in a. Going to get better restaurant meals eventually, if you explore because you're, you know, in a. In a tangible way, but also maybe more importantly, in a way that leads to feeling like you're doing something meaningful. That exploration is about accepting uncertainty and risk. And that by doing that on a regular basis, we end up doing difficult things, overcoming our doubts and feeling like our pursuits have meaning. And so why does this matter? In our current world, there are a whole bunch of structural forces that are making our lives easier and more predictable, that are eliminating uncertainty and also eliminating even the need to make decisions that we're being fed entertainment options, we're being, we're being told what to do in a way that takes away the active part of following our own interests. There's a bunch of different reasons that that is not going to be satisfying in the long term and may even be bad for us in a sort of very tangible neuroscience way, but certainly is a less satisfying way to live. So the sort of takeaway message is, listen to that inner voice telling you to try something and be willing to take risks in pursuit of something, because you never know what you might find.
- [104:14]
Rich Roll
Yeah. Beautiful. At the risk of underscoring what you already shared, what I love about it is that it's not about some big expedition that you're planning. It can be that, but really what you're talking about is a reframe on your lens on the world, because every day you're presented with opportunities to kind of indulge exploration from restaurant choices or, you know, what's on the menu, you know, very mundane things to those very broad things. But it's a perspective shift as much as it is anything else.
- [104:51]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. One of the ways to bring that about is, what if I'm wrong? What if I fail? Will it be so bad? And if the answer is no, then that frees you up all of a sudden to take all sorts of chances because you realize, and this is maybe goes along with what you were saying about as you get old enough, you don't worry about it as much. It's like, it's okay to fail. It's okay to take the wrong path and have to double back. I mean, not to go on a tangent, but after writing this book, I keep the gps. I'll check directions when I'm going somewhere in the car. But I don't do turn by turn by direct, turn by turn, directions. And so I was taking my kids to a birthday party the other day, and I got lost. I missed the turn. And they're like, well, Mommy uses ways. If you'd used way. Hey, Daddy, if you'd used ways, you wouldn't have missed that turn. And they told me this, like, six times. And I'm like, you know what? We're going to be on time for the party. You guys can just simmer down. I'm okay with this. I missed the turn. It's okay now. We've never been down the street. It's been nice to work.
- [105:50]
Rich Roll
I'm imagining that my kids are older. I'm imagining your kids as teenagers going, God, my daddy won't even use the gps.
- [105:57]
Alex Hutchinson
Like, you know, Mommy uses Waze. Shut up.
- [106:02]
Rich Roll
That's funny. So Alex, good news, bad news. Good news is you're still the science of endurance guy. Bad news is you're still. As much as you want to transcend this, it remains the case.
- [106:16]
Alex Hutchinson
I'm happy to be the science of. It's a privilege to be the science of union.
- [106:19]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I mean, listen, you know, in a world of like, you know, kind of fitness influencers and hot takes and latest, you know, sort of over extrapolated findings from weak data sets, like you are this incredible voice of reason grounded in, you know, evidence based findings and somebody who, when you talk about these ideas and you write about them, you're the most nuanced of anyone else who's kind of public facing. I mean, I'm sure there's scientists who do this, but in the sense that you are a journalist and you're trying to translate these very kind of complicated ideas for a mainstream audience, there's no one better than you when it comes to this, and I appreciate that very much.
- [107:08]
Alex Hutchinson
Well, those are super kind words and I really appreciate that. I guess I'll say the flip side of that coin is it means I'm never willing to tell anybody what to do because I don't know.
- [107:18]
Rich Roll
Well, the answer to every question is, well, it depends or it's complicated, you know, which isn't very satisfying. It's easier to scroll on Instagram and some guy's yelling at you, telling you that you need kind of cold water therapy and this is going to solve all your problems.
- [107:31]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, it's a curse. I wish I was wired in hoi to just. I had an editor at Canadian Running magazine once who was like, people want the Hutchinson method, just give them the Hutchinson method. I was like, there is no Hutchinson Method. Hutchinson doesn't know what the heck to do.
- [107:45]
Rich Roll
But much like Steve Magnus, I just think elite track and field runners are really good at appreciating the nuance. And something about the two of you guys, you're also really good communicators of the nuance here. And I'm always trying to provide the most accurate information and be a buffer against bad ideas and disinformation, or mainly not even so much misinformation as much as overly reductive information. Because all of these ideas, whether it's thinking about your VO2 max or fatigue resistance or vitamin D supplementation or how much zone 2 should I be doing? And like, should I use compression boots and does sauna work? Like, there's value and benefits to all of these things in the right context for the right person. At the right time, I'll jump in.
- [108:41]
Alex Hutchinson
And give my general take on all of those topics, which is that I've written about all of them because they're all interesting and they're all real and there's all, there's science all. None of them matter as much as people tend to think. None of them matters anywhere near as much as like, did you do something yesterday? Did you get out and exercise? Did you enjoy it? Because if you didn't, it doesn't matter what zone it was in. It's sort of paradoxical in that I spend all this time writing about these ideas, some of which are quite arcane and quite focused. None of them matter as much as they sometimes get portrayed to. They're minor details compared to. To getting out and doing some physical activity.
- [109:20]
Rich Roll
It's a curious quirk of the human condition though, this drive or this need that we have to just sort of be told what to do, you know, like, just tell me the thing that'll solve the problem and I'll go do it, you know, and there's something about opening up your phone and there's a guy who's looking right to camera who feels very confident about what he's sharing. That kind of satisfies us. And also perhaps it gets back to dopamine, right? Like, oh, I've got it now, I know the answer. And we love these little cherries on top of the sundae. And we're not so keen on the meat and potatoes, which is really unromantic and boring, which is basically like, if you want to be good at something, you're going to have to train a lot. You're going to be tired and you're going to have to do all of it. You're going to have to do a lot of zone two and a lot of threshold work and you're going to. It's not about the 4x4 Norwegian method. It's about like Steve and I talked about. It's like all kinds of different interval workouts and figuring out ways to stimulate your body in new and interesting ways that are always creating kind of these exercise induced reactions or responses that are going to make you better over an extremely long period of time. It must be periodized where you have to be patient and you have to fail and you have to have poor race results. Like all of it. Right.
- [110:44]
Alex Hutchinson
I would rather just order something that comes in a bottle and it'll make me better by tomorrow. It's much more satisfying.
- [110:51]
Rich Roll
So what is the kind of message that you want to share to the average endurance athlete, or perhaps even the very kind of elite level age group amateur who's looking for those additional gains. Like, I'm asking you to make a reductive statement here. Of course, I realize the irony in all of that. But when you kind of canvas the social media aspect of the fitness influencers, it's like, on the one hand, it's pretty cool that there are all these people who are sharing their fitness tips and knowledge. And it's kind of shocking and amazing that there's so much fascination with things like VO2 Max and Zone 2. Like when I wrote Finding Ultra in 2012, I was talking about Zone 2. It didn't really make much of an impact, I gotta say. But then when Peter Attia talks about it and like, you know, Sam Millan is on his podcast, it's like. And you hear about, you know, the Norwegians and like, suddenly it's like a mainstream thing. Like, everybody knows what Zone two is and everybody's talking about it and trying to figure out what it means. Like, it's. There's something really cool about that. I just think there's a lot of, like, misinterpretation or confusion around the value of understanding these things.
- [112:03]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, I mean, VO2 Max is another great example. Like, when I was writing about VO2 Max in 2009, 2010, it's like, I'd have editors been like, what is this thing? Where's the two go? What are you talking about? It was just a concept that was considered too arcane to even put in an article. And now VO2 max, it's like, people care about it. And on the one hand, that's really cool because as markers of Fitness Go, VO2 Max is a pretty good one. If you want to have some clinical test that predicts longevity, VO2 is actually. Does that mean that, I mean, you need to get your VO2 Max tested? No, I've had my VO2 Max tested twice in my life, and both of those were for, I don't know, three times in my life. And two of them were for reporting things. One of them was just for fun. Didn't influence my training in any way. It was just out of interest. So I think his point that Steve Magnus made in his conversation with you is a good one. That really, I mean, a suitable proxy is, how fast can you run a 5k compared to how fast you could run it, or a mile, or whatever the case may be compared to how fast you could run it five years ago that fitness is measured could Be measured by performance, measuring VO2 max, or knowing a precise zone to train in. These are. I mean, there are people who are ruining Olympics, who are. Who are paying attention to stuff. So I don't want to say it's. It's all meaningless, but it's next to meaningless unless you're already doing everything possible on the training side, that the precision, the idea that there's a magic intensity where, you know, if you do it right, you're getting the benefits, and if you don't do it right, you're not getting benefits. I think that is something I would really call caution, people about the idea that you're doing exercise wrong because you went slightly too hard or slightly too easy. It's a continuum, and it's a very flat continuum, I would say. Like, there's differences between workouts, but they don't change quickly. I have advice in terms of how I would structure training. If you're someone who wants to do endurance exercise, which is, I think, is a great thing, I would say, and, you know, following the sort of Stephen Seiler approach, the idea of doing, you know, 80% of your training relatively easily and 20% relatively hard, I think it's great. I don't think it's the only way to do it. But if someone was asking for my advice, I would say that's a pretty good place to start. How easy is easy? How hard is hard? Easy is conversational. Hard is. You can't converse. And, you know, you can take it way farther than that. But if you. If you do that and aim for, you know, trying to get at least, I don't know, a couple hours of that exercise accumulated over the course of a week. You're getting a lot of the available benefits without ever worrying about any of this terminology or these kind of other ideas.
- [115:07]
Rich Roll
I think being well informed and kind of understanding all of these things is fine. And there's plenty to read and to learn, if you're so inclined to do that.
- [115:17]
Alex Hutchinson
I wouldn't have a job if that.
- [115:18]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I mean, like, you've got a whole archive, and, you know, there's plenty. You can just read every single article you've ever written for the New York Times and outside, on top of your book, I think where it gets problematic is when neuroses develop around it, or to your point, like, you feel like you're doing something wrong if you're not doing it precisely in that way. And I think where things like VO2 Max and Zone 2 can lead us astray is when we have an unhealthy relationship to them, where we're kind of valuing the merit of our own relationship with exercise, using those as like, a proxy of self value.
- [115:54]
Alex Hutchinson
So, you know, as we're recording this conversation, I wrote an article on Zone 2 for the new York Times a couple days ago, and I really wrestled with how to kind of present the arguments, the physiological arguments in favor of Zone 2 versus the studies that maybe suggest Zone 2 isn't some magic. There's conflicting evidence at this point, I would say I don't really know what the final answer on zone 2 is, but one of the things I was worried about in the article is am I creating a straw man in my critique of it? Maybe everyone understands that it's just basically guidance. No one's taking it too seriously. Maybe I'm hitting something that doesn't need to be hit. And then the article came out, and I got an email from someone saying, thank God you wrote that. Yesterday. I was sprinting down a hill trying to stay in Zone two, because when you go downhill, your heart rate drops. So I was sprinting down to stay in, trying to stay in Zone two. I tripped and fell. And then as I was standing there with my watch beeping at me, I was bleeding and trying to walk home, and my watch kept beeping to say, you're outside of Zone two. You're outside of Zone two. And I was thinking, surely it doesn't have to be this precise. So reading your article was a great relief. And I thought, okay, no, it wasn't a straw man. People really have taken this. Some people have taken this message. Even though if you were to talk to Peter Attia. Well, Peter is pretty rigid about how strict Zone two has to be. But Peter Attia doesn't say, it's only zone two. He's like, you have to do VO2, max two and whatever. So the people giving the messages may feel like it's being nuanced, but people are receiving it in a way that it's like this is the recipe etched into a stone tablet of how I have to do it. It has to be exactly 136 beats per minute, my heart rate. And that's, as you say, it's a relationship with exercise that is probably not healthy or sustainable for most people. And I say this as someone who. I love data, like you said, I've got this physics background. I used to plot my training log. I used to keep track of average heart rate during temple runs, plot things in Lotus 1, 2, 3. Back in the 90s yeah, I'm sure.
- [117:55]
Rich Roll
You were a maniac.
- [117:56]
Alex Hutchinson
When we entered the GPS era, I stopped tracking any of that stuff because I realized I love the data too much. I would end up obsessing over it and the measurement becomes the outcome, and then it's no longer a good measurement because you're tricking yourself into thinking what matters.
- [118:14]
Rich Roll
It's not sustainable, and it undercuts that whole idea of play that you were talking about earlier. If you have a playful relationship with it, you're probably going to be more engaged over the long haul and kind of enjoy it more than feel like it's some burden where you're constantly thinking about spreadsheets.
- [118:33]
Alex Hutchinson
I agree. I will say I'll leave room for individual differences in what's fun.
- [118:37]
Rich Roll
Right.
- [118:38]
Alex Hutchinson
Like, there are people who, like I did, love the data and love playing with it and maybe can hold themselves in a healthier relationship than I could because I just wouldn't recognize that it would start to drive my training, that I would be in my training making decisions based on what it would look like in the data. Some people, they love the analytical side, and if they can find a way to keep that in balance, if that makes it fun for them, then that's great. But I think as a broader message, people who are getting obsessed with the data because they think that's the path to ultimate health and that they have to do it and that there's no alternative. That's unfortunate.
- [119:12]
Rich Roll
It's also a broader conversation around that whole optimized self kind of of movement right now where there's this idea that if you just dial in all of these variables, that perhaps you could live forever. And then the broader conversation about our relationship with death, it's like a whole thing. Right. But I will say I love understanding these things. And I think that you do an incredible job of explaining the nuances of them. And I think Peter Attia does a phenomenal job of really laying out the science. I think his conversations with, with Indigo, Sam Milan on Zone 2, the way that the two of you talked about VO2 Max gave me a whole new appreciation for how complicated that is. Those conversations are available. I would encourage everybody, if you really want to geek out, listen to Alex's conversation with Peter. It's fantastic. It's just when we develop an unhealthy relationship to those things and we like shiny new things, right? We want to find that thing that's going to be the differentiator. But these things all tend to be kind of 1% on top, and yet we want to indulge them more than we want to indulge the thing that's going to move us, the 90%. But there are some interesting things. My sense is that part of why you've transitioned or graduated out of this science of endurance career path is that became marginal gains in terms of how it was lighting you up in your curiosity and what you were learning. But there have been some interesting things that have occurred recently or developments. I had this guy, David Rochon recently. He's sort of the new guy on the scene who's breaking records in the ultra running world and trying all these wacky new ideas and sharing them transparently and doing it in a way that's very engaging. You want to root for this guy. It's really fun to see him try all these new things. And he came on here and he was talking about how the fundamental limiter is our ability to absorb carbohydrates and how he's studying competitive eaters and trying to figure out if he can just make his body absorb more of these per hour, he's going to have this advantage. Seems to be working bicarb ketones, all these sort of things. So how are you thinking about some of these? Maybe not. I don't know if these are new ideas, but he's really going deeper into them than anybody else that I've seen recently.
- [121:39]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, what I would say is maybe to zoom back a little bit is I had gotten into a rhythm of assuming that nothing worked because I'd written so many things. Even someone would come out and it has a double blinded, placebo controlled study shows it works. And I'd write an article about it and then this is going to be really exciting to see how this develops. And then five years later it's, it's like there's still been no other studies that brought this up. And I'd realized, oh yeah, there's, you know, sometimes things get published just because it was a lucky, lucky break. So electric brain stimulation is a great example of that where there was really good data. And I wrote about it in Endure. No one talks about that anymore. It just kind of faded away. So I was drifting towards the sort of danger zone of ultra skeptical.
- [122:24]
Rich Roll
Yeah, you're even getting a little buzzkilly in some of your pieces.
- [122:29]
Alex Hutchinson
And then super shoes came along, initially the Nike vaporfly and then a whole generation of super shoes. And they really do work. Running times got faster and so that was a reminder to me that sometimes things work, sometimes the hype is true. There'd been A billion shoes that had come down the pike with claims that this is gonna make you faster. Super shoes worked. And so that kind of forced me to open my. To sort of pry open my brain a little bit and say, let's stay open to the possibility of things working. And don't assume that I know before I do. And so right now, like, in running, times are fast. Times are incomprehensibly fast.
- [123:15]
Rich Roll
Even in the last month, a whole bunch of indoor world records, five world.
- [123:18]
Alex Hutchinson
Records or something, or five American records and a couple world records. And so stuff is going on. And so the question is, what are the ingredients of that? There are a lot of. But it's like a game of Clue, right? Like, you know, was it Colonel Mustard with the lead pipe, or was it the bicarb, or was it taking more carbohydrates in? What are the ingredients? And so there are some things that I so of things that I think are interesting in recent years. Super shoes definitely work. Hydrogel carbohydrate drinks.
- [123:51]
Rich Roll
Explain that.
- [123:52]
Alex Hutchinson
So Morton is the company that introduced this idea. And basically, the problem with carbohydrate, as David Roach will attest, although he's more immune to it than most, is that the body seems to want a lot of carbohydrates. You can't absorb it, and you will end up. If you try and take 90 grams of carbohydrate, most people will end up either diarrhea, vomiting, like. Like just bad news. You put it in. If you encapsulate the carbohydrates in a hydrogel, which in your stomach, basically in your stomach, there's this kind of gel. The carbohydrates are inside it. Your stomach doesn't even know the carbohydrates are there, so it doesn't know to get upset. It gets absorbed into your intestine. The hydrogel dissipates. You absorb the carbohydrates, so you can take in more carbohydrates without gastrointestinal distress. There is not perfect, but reasonably good evidence that this mechanism works the way they claim it does. And there's anecdotal evidence from a lot of athletes that this enables them to take more carbs than ever. Now, there are other carb formulations with tweaking the osmolality and things like that, stuff that I don't fully understand that also seem to be allowing athletes to get up to that level too. But engineered carbohydrate drinks, I think, are something that has moved the needle. You mentioned Sodium bicarbonate. Baking soda. That's been around for decades.
- [125:14]
Rich Roll
Yeah, that's like grandma stuff.
- [125:16]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. The story I always like to tell about baking soda is that in the 90s, when I was in college, it was banned. You couldn't ban baking soda itself because it's an ingredient. The technique of soda loading. The idea here is when you do hard exercise, your bloodstream, your muscles are getting more and more acidic as lactate rises, you dip baking soda as a base. It buffers the acid so you're able to push a little harder before you feel the burn. The technique was banned, but people did it anyway. And one time after indoor track meet, I took my teammate's water bottle by accident and took a swig right after a race. And it just almost made me vomit because it was full of baking soda. And that teammate then at the conference championships that year, he soda loaded before all four of his races and accumulated enough that he had diarrhea and had to drop out of the relay. And I was the alternate on the relay. So I got called up to the relay, ran a great race, got to stay on the relay. My first trip to nationals in college was because my teammate had put himself in the toilet with soda loading. So that was the problem with soda. Everyone knew soda loading worked, but it was just really unpleasant. Morton this hydrogel company a couple years ago started trialing a hydrogel version of baking soda. So you can take baking soda, it doesn't upset your stomach, but it still gets into your bloodstream. That it's hard to disambiguate what's causing it. But that seems to be a big factor in the times. And it used to be thought that it was just in things like 2 minute races like 800 meters. Now Kylian Journey is taking baking soda in ultramarathon races to go up hills and stuff like that.
- [126:45]
Rich Roll
Yeah. If you can just have that buffer, you'll be able to just maintain a higher pace longer than you would otherwise be able to.
- [126:54]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. And particularly if there's, you know, in a cycling race, there are certain. In a trail race, in an ultra, there are hills. So anything that's pushing you a little bit into that anaerobic, above your threshold, the baking soda will help you tolerate.
- [127:06]
Rich Roll
That and allow you to quicker acclimate to baseline after a hard effort.
- [127:11]
Alex Hutchinson
Right. So the rationale makes sense. I would guess that it's one of the things that's making people faster. And then just taking. You mentioned this with David Roach taking huge volumes of carbs, this has been going on in. So 10 years ago the official recommendations were 60 grams of carbs an hour is as much as the human body can handle. Then people figured out that if you combine different kinds of carbs, you can take a little more. So the recommendations increased to 90 grams. Now a lot of people in professional cycling, in ultra running and in other Sports are taking 120 grams. And sometimes you see people reporting even a little higher than that, 140 grams or something, which is more than double what was thought to be the maximum. There's still scientific debate as to whether people are actually able to burn this much or whether they're just managing to get it in their stomach and then pooping it out later or whatever. But cyclists are faster than ever, just like runners. A lot of people suspect that the carbs are a part of it, especially when you're talking about like multi day events. So if you're hammering for six hours, then you have to hammer again six hours tomorrow and so on. Then not getting into a big energetic deficit during the race may affect recovery. So those are some of the big things that jump to mind as like there's real stuff here.
- [128:32]
Rich Roll
What's interesting about Roche is he's kind of an explorer, right? He's going into unchartered territory. You know, track and field, cycling, these sports, they've been kind of the way they are for a very, very long time, which has allowed people to study what works and what doesn't. Ultra running is newer, you know, it's been around for a while and people have been running long distances. But I think what's new is bringing kind of scientific rigor to it in a new and interesting way. And one of the other things that David is doing and exploring is training for a race like that at, at basically emphasizing threshold work in a way that most ultra runners don't. And he's doing it on top of 15 years of base building. So it's important to think about it. Yeah, yeah, he's doing this on top of just this robust endurance engine that he's had for a very long time. But it is kind of contrary to traditional thought around how to perform at your peak in races up to a hundred miles.
- [129:42]
Alex Hutchinson
So I think one of the key things about ultra running is that it is essentially impossible. Not impossible, but very, very, very, very difficult to run randomized trials of like, okay, you run 100 miles like this, you 10 people run 100 miles. Now we're going to change something. You do it again tomorrow and now we're going to try at the third condition. So, so ultra running, if we're talking about seeking areas of greatest uncertainty, it's a wild west. I don't mean that in the sense that people are doing crazy things, but I mean, it's an unknown country because we can't test these things. And it's clear that. So you can draw conclusions about what works in a 10 minute effort and extrapolate them to 100 minute effort or a 2 hour effort around the marathon. Things start to get a little weird. Right, because the people you'd expect to win don't always win because their legs can't handle it. You mentioned this idea of fatigue resistance. You can measure someone's VO2 max and their lactate threshold and their running economy and get a really good prediction of how fast they can run a half marathon. But once you get out to the marathon, it's like, well, that guy may have had great running economy two hours ago, but now his running economy has declined much more than someone else's. So marathon is just the border of where, where all these extrapolations that work in a range, all the data we have about mile running tells us a lot about 5k running and 10k running too, but it tells us very little beyond the marathon. And so when you get well beyond the marathon, like 100 miles, it's like when they do studies of what predicts performance, it's like VO2 max lactate running economy. And as the race gets longer, those predictions get weaker and weaker. You get to 100 miles and it's like, like they're irrelevant.
- [131:24]
Rich Roll
All that's irrelevant.
- [131:25]
Alex Hutchinson
I mean, they're not truly irrelevant, of course they help, but statistically they're swamped by these other factors that may be like how much carbohydrate can you absorb or how delicate is your stomach, or.
- [131:39]
Rich Roll
What is the terrain, like, what is the humidity like? All tiny little variables become meaningful when you travel for that amount of time.
- [131:47]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah. And those variables, everyone responds to them differently.
- [131:50]
Rich Roll
But one thing we do know is that a really good middle distance track and field athlete can mature into an elite marathoner. We know that there is a directionality, but you know, an exceptional marathoner is unlikely to later distinguish themselves at the 400 meters. Like it doesn't work in the opposite direction. Right. And as, as marathon running matured, you see more and more very high level track and field athletes kind of graduate into longer and longer distances and then distinguish themselves at the marathon distance. And because ultra running is still sort of this wild west and maturing kind of subculture as it continues to mature. I think we're going to see elite track and field athletes at the middle distance not just stop at the marathon, but continue to progress, especially if prize money and purses, if there's money to be made in ultra running. And what happens when you have a legit world class runner who's been running at a very high level at various distances for most of their adult life, steps into the ultra running world. And I think there's just so much, much opportunity there to push the limits. And Roche will say this, he's like, I don't think we have any idea of what we can actually do at these distances yet. We're just at the beginning.
- [133:19]
Alex Hutchinson
It is interesting. As you said, there's been a real shift in the marathon. So two of the fastest women's marathons in history have been run recently by people who were Olympic 800 meter runners. And it used to be that there was one guy, Rod Dixon, who had been an Olympic 1500 medalist in New Zealand. Yeah. And then he won the New York marathon in like 1983. There's a famous picture of him holding his hands up after so and he was like, wow, a 1500 meter runner was good at the marathon. This is a freak. Now the fastest marathoners in the world, some of them have come from 800. And one theory about that is the shoes have made it more forgiving. So I can. My experience as a 1500 meter runner running a marathon marathon, it was awful. After 30k, after 20 miles, my legs were just hammered like just I was not even breathing hard, but my quads were just like, I have a bouncy middle distance stride. I'd like to think that if you put on some super shoes, these big cushioned shoes, I might have been able to handle the distance a little more. So the penalty for having a track background may be reduced. I still think ultra running may turn out to be a different beast to some extent. I think it's never going to be a bad thing to have like a high VO2 max like a 5k runner would have. But there's always been this question of like, could an Olympic marathoner or an Olympic 10k runner move up to western states and dominate? It's one thing to ask 100 mile road championships or something like that, but these races like western states, trail altitude, like as you said, there's all these other factors and I don't think we can take for granted that the best middle distance runners will be great. I think some of them might be Some of them will have those mix of characteristics that enable them to move up, but I think there will also be some thoroughbreds who try to move up and discover that, oh, wow, it's a different beast.
- [135:17]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I think that's accurate. I mean, Western states is very different from comrades or something. That's a road. These are different.
- [135:25]
Alex Hutchinson
Although it's a hilly one.
- [135:26]
Rich Roll
Yeah, yeah, that's true. Sort of like straight line thing. But I think it'll be interesting to see and just to like, play fantasy football. What happens if someone like Cole Hawker is just like, you know what? Like, I'm just gonna. I really just want to go right into ultra running now, you know, and I'm going to spend five years trying to figure out how to do this. Like just somebody who's like that good.
- [135:51]
Alex Hutchinson
Deciding from Nike in a helicopter. Helicopter dispatched. Put him in a burlap bag, take him to a room, and he will decide he wants to run the 1500 after all.
- [136:00]
Rich Roll
All right, I could talk to you forever. We got to wrap this up. But maybe just put a button on what you want people to kind of take away from all of this expertise you have in the endurance world as they try to wrap their heads around engaging with their own endurance careers in whatever capacity.
- [136:18]
Alex Hutchinson
Yeah, I mean, so first of all, I think, I guess, and this connects to what we were talking about earlier. It should be fun, it should be enjoyable. It's not punishment. In phys ed class, you don't go out and running because you did something wrong. So find an activity that you enjoy doing. Find a context in which you enjoy doing it, whether it's with people, without people, alone or down by the beach or in the mountains. Find something you like doing and do that on a regular basis. And that's kind of the prescription for staying active for a long time and maintaining consistency. And I think that's the prescription then in turn for performance. If you're interested in performance, you can force yourself to do something for a year or two. If you're like, I want to see how fast I can do a 10k. But if you can figure out a way of. Of finding the joy in it and not getting caught up in the pursuit of some hypothetical ideal training program that probably doesn't exist. That's what I wish for everybody. And I lament the training partners I've had who've started to worry that they're doing it the wrong way and gotten caught up and just eventually decided that they just want to go do something else.
- [137:33]
Rich Roll
What was your PR at 1500 meters.
- [137:36]
Alex Hutchinson
It was 342.43, which if you convert that with the World Athletics official points table is like 4.0 0.0 to the mile.
- [137:48]
Rich Roll
It's right on the rivet of breaking the four minute mile. You and Steve share more in common then.
- [137:53]
Alex Hutchinson
I don't think it's a coincidence entirely. Like I think if Steve or I had run 335 or whatever or three, you know, we might be doing something different. But there's something to do with discovering the love of something but not feeling like you've completed that task that makes you want to keep digging.
- [138:08]
Rich Roll
Yeah, that's super interesting. I asked you only because I just want to make sure that people listening understand that you know what you're talking about. Four minute miler guy who's telling you to go out and have fun.
- [138:20]
Alex Hutchinson
I'm 49 now and I still, I get as much satisfaction out of a hard workout now as I ever did. Probably more because I'm less neurotic about it. There's nothing more satisfying than the feeling of finishing a hard workout.
- [138:35]
Rich Roll
Yeah. Amen. The book is the Explorers Gene. You did a marvelous job on this book. Congratulations and it was a pleasure to have you here today. I appreciate it. Thank you.
- [138:45]
Alex Hutchinson
Thanks so much, Rich. This is a real pleasure.
- [138:47]
Rich Roll
Alex, we'll do it again soon. Maybe we don't have to wait seven years to do it.
- [138:50]
Alex Hutchinson
Awesome.
- [138:51]
Rich Roll
I'd like to have you and Steve here together. I think that would be really fun if we make that happen.
- [138:56]
Alex Hutchinson
I would love that.
- [138:57]
Rich Roll
All right, I'll work on it. Peace. Cheers. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page@richrole.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra Voicing, Change and the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power meal planner@meals.richroll.com if you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com sponsors and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner and other subjects. Please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page@richroll.com today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our Creative Director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis. And thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace Plants.
- [140:51]
Alex Hutchinson
Namaste.
- [141:04]
Rich Roll
It.