The Science of Exploration |Alex Hutchinson

26:49Because I think one of the best pieces of advice to follow in terms of exploring is to trust your instincts as to what you think is interesting. Because your brain has this fine-tuned mechanism to try and look for areas of uncertainty or the unknown, as we were talking about this earlier. Your brain is, that's one of its fundamental purposes is to look for areas where there's rich opportunities to learn. So if your kid says, I'm curious about that, you might think, well, that's stupid. You should be curious about calculus because then you'll get a good job. It's like, no, you should trust their instincts about what they're curious about and let them follow those roads.

27:26So after writing this book and looking at all the research, I'm really curious to hear what changes you made in your own life and maybe in your parenting style to really tap into this curiosity and exploration. I talked to a researcher in Denmark who studies play in the context of these new brain theories. And I was asking him, like, come on, buddy, give me some tips. You've got young kids too. What do you do with them? Because we all struggle with balancing risk with opportunity, right? Nobody wants their kid to be falling off the top of the playground or falling in the raging river or being abducted by the guy in the white van or whatever.

28:01And his main advice was just that he tries to say yes as much as possible. And so I've that tries to respect. So if his kids think something is worth pursuing, he doesn't try and superimpose his adult perspective on that. It's like, if they think that sitting in the backyard and piling up sticks is a great way to spend six hours on a Saturday, they should do that. Maybe they're going to be an architect, maybe not. Who cares? The point is right now they find that interesting. So I've really tried to embrace that. But in my own life, these are very amorphous things. I was hoping when I started this project that I would come out with the formula of when to explore, when to exploit.

28:47Because exploring isn't always the right choice, right? If you do nothing but exploring, that's the classic. It's like a dating, for example. You're always wondering if the next date will be better than the one you're with. Well, 50 years from now, you're going to be like, ah, maybe I should have settled down with someone at some point. So you need to know when to exploit, when to take advantage of the information you already have. And there's no good formula for that, despite the attempts of many scientists. But I'm definitely trying to leave myself open to actually following some of those mental rabbit holes of like, when I get interested in something, hopefully not just to the extent of clicking on a bunch of links.

29:28But yeah, if I'm interested in some music, let me get that album. Let's listen to the whole album. Let's see what that's about, as opposed to just moving on to the next thing immediately.

29:41As the weather finally cools down, I'm swapping in the pieces that actually get the job done. Warm, durable, and built to last. And Quince delivers every time. Quince has all the fall staples you actually want to wear on repeat, like 100 % Mongolian cashmere sweater starting at just$60, classic fit denim, and real leather and wool outerwear that looks sharp and holds up. I've actually got my eye on their suede trucker jacket. It's perfect for layering, and it hits that balance of casual but still put together. What I like about Quince is they partner directly with ethical factories and top artisans.

30:13By cutting out the middlemen, you get premium quality at half the cost of similar brands. And it's not just clothing. I love their sheets. They have items like bedding and travel accessories. Quince has really become a go-to for me across the board. Same here. Everything I grabbed from Quince has held up and it doesn't wreck my budget. Layer up this fall with pieces that feel as good as they look. Go to quince.com slash charm for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash charm. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash charm.

30:51Think you're the only one struggling with performance issues in the bedroom? You're not. And now there's an easier way to fix it from home. That's where Rex MD comes in. It's an online telehealth service that helps men get real FDA-approved medications straight to your door. Everything's done online. No doctor's office, no waiting rooms, no awkward conversations. Here's how it works. First, share your symptoms, health history, and goals through a short quiz. Then, a U.S. licensed provider reviews your information and prescribes medication, if appropriate. Your treatment gets sent to you with free two-day delivery.

31:24It's that easy. And RexMD team is there for ongoing care. Just send a message. What I love about Rex MD, total discretion, private consultations, and direct-to-door delivery in discreet packaging. No pharmacy trips needed. Plus, it's care that you can trust. FDA-approved medications tailored to individual needs. Over 475 ,000 men have chosen Rex MD, with over 50 million tablets prescribed and delivered. This isn't just about performance. It's about feeling secure in yourself and your relationships again. Don't put your love life on hold. take back control of your confidence and intimacy. Get up to 95 % off treatment with Rex MD.

32:04Visit rexmd.com slash charm. That's rexmd.com slash charm. See full details and usage at rexmd.com. Prescription required. Results may vary. What we've noticed in our clients is there is this paradigm around uncertainty. So a lot of our clients will come for coaching because they've encountered an area of their life, whether it's dating or career, where there's an immense amount of uncertainty that's leading to anxiety. And that anxiety creates fears and a lot of things that negatively impact your behaviors and your thoughts about yourself, self-worth. And what's so interesting in our immersive experiences, especially is once we get them through some exercises that walk them through the uncertainty and show that the outcomes that were creating anxiety are very rare if ever to happen.

32:53So let's say someone rejecting you socially or someone throwing a drink in your face at a bar for asking them for their phone number. A lot of these heightened emotions that come with uncertainty. Once you recognize that those outcomes are very unlikely to happen, then it like flips and they get excited about chasing uncertainty in their life and putting themselves more into uncertain situations to experience that, to learn what it's like to feel that uncertainty. And then they'll come back to us years later and be like, oh man, I'm so happy that I took that course and went out with you in Las Vegas to explore talking to strangers because that led to a huge leap in my career and a startup idea that I'd been kicking around for years.

33:28So what's going on with that uncertainty and that paradigm shift from, okay, it's so much uncertainty, I'm frozen, I'm stuck, to now I'm chasing uncertainty and I'm excited to explore it fully. It goes beyond just recognizing that the negative outcomes are rare. I would actually say the negative outcomes are important. They're part of the game and you have to learn to embrace them. So one of the examples, so one of the classic illustrations of the explore-exploit dilemma is, I mentioned before, restaurant ordering. You go into a restaurant, you order the dish that you know is okay, but you need to take a chance.

34:01So for like half a century, scientists have been talking about this. But now in the modern era, we can actually look at big data of how people order in restaurants. So some scientists at Harvard took data from a couple hundred thousand customers of a delivery service called Deliveroo. So a food delivery service that's bigger in Europe. And they analyze their ordering patterns. So to say, how often do they go back to the same old restaurants? How often do they try new restaurants? And what happens when they do that? Is exploring this wonderful thing that brings them happy joy and wonderful meals?

34:33And the answer is in the short term, no. Actually, when they try a new restaurant, on average, they rate that meal lower than if they go back to a known restaurant. So exploring comes with a cost. And it's not getting the drink thrown in your face, but it is like, ah, I really did not like this vindaloo or whatever. But the flip side of that is that over time, people's average ratings, the more they order, the more their average ratings of food go up. They drift upwards because over time, as they explore, they're finding some dud, some restaurants they don't like, and they're leaving those behind and never going back.

35:08And they're finding some restaurants they like more than the ones they knew, and they're adding those to the rotation. So without the failures, without being willing to have some bad meals, you never discover the places that have better meals. And so I think this is like, not to be too grandiose about it, but it's like a rule for life. If you're not failing, if you're not having some negative outcomes, if you're not getting the proverbial or the figurative drink thrown in your face, that almost guarantees that you're missing out on chances to find stuff that's better than what you're doing now.

35:37So you should, when you do have, when you see uncertainty, you know that's an opportunity, like you were saying. And then when things do go wrong, you embrace that uncertainty and sometimes you get a negative outcome. You should say, this is a sign I'm doing things right to some degree. I mean, look, if you're getting drinks thrown in your face every night, you're not doing it right. But the negative outcomes are an important precondition to getting improved outcomes. It's funny. It goes to the same way of how we express ourselves as well. We could do that safely. We could do that with what we know works or gets the job done.

36:14Or we can find new ways to express this, to get our message out there farther from the language we use to the clothes that we wear. And certainly if you're exploring yourself an expression of fashion, there's going to be maybe days where maybe you overshot it. You maybe wore something and everyone's like, Uh, that's just, that's not you. But again, um, it helps you find out what, what does work, what makes you feel incredibly good when you're wearing it. And even things that people, other folks may not vibe with, but you feel incredibly good with it. Well, then you're going to, you're going to change how it is perceived in other people by how well you feel in wearing it.

37:07And I think that's a super example of the ways in which exploration is not just about Christopher Columbus or about climbing Mount Everest, that there's a lot of dimensions on which you can be exploring things. And all of us need to find some of those dimensions where we're exploring and pushing our limits, whether it's physical or mental or creative or emotional. I've been fortunate to spend some time traveling through Europe with my wife. And one of our favorite things to do is first the digital exploration of, okay, what are some spots you want to check out based on some short form videos that the algorithm tells us about?

37:41And of course, you explore a little bit of Tokyo or Paris online, and then it starts feeding you all these other recommendations. And we'll map some spots in different neighborhoods that we want to explore. But what's been really funny as we look back on these trips, almost nine times out of 10, the meals that stand out the most or the experiences that stand out the most are the ones where we stumbled into exploring ourselves versus relying on the digital explorers before us who created these nifty little short form videos to tell us this is the best place to get steak frites in Paris. And this is the best sushi in Tokyo.

38:15we always laugh. Our favorite spots are the ones that we explored on our own, just getting lost in the neighborhood and stepping into a new environment instead of the ones we relied on that digital exploration. That phenomenon is, you know, it's even, it's pre-digital too. Cause I can remember backpacking through Europe in the nineties. And of course I had the lonely planet and the rough guide and you'd go from city to city. And it's like, okay, which place got like two stars? Okay. We got to go to, you know, the not too expensive, but still recommended. Definitely going to that one. And then you look around and it's like, okay, maybe these aren't the same people I saw in the last city, but they're basically the same people.

38:49We're all the same. We're all ticking off the same boxes. And some of those boxes are pretty cool to tick off. So it's not that you never want to go to any place that other people recommend, but I'm 100 % with you that the real joy is sort of wandering through the street and ending up in a place where nobody else is speaking English. And you're like, okay, so I'm not just here because this place was not built to serve people like me who are looking for the illusion of a genuine experience. This is actually just a place where people in the neighborhood go and I'm going to eat here. And it's like, no, this is what the food is like.

39:21And sometimes I can remember I was backpacking through Spain and we were in a small seaside fishing village and we went to this little restaurant and we were way off the beaten track. So I was like, this is awesome. The menu is totally in Spanish. I didn't speak any Spanish. I was like, I'm an intrepid explorer. I'm willing to try anything. I just pointed at something on the menu. I had no idea what it was. I thought, I'm such a cool guy. An hour and a half later, my meal finally arrives, but we're starving. Basically, the guy had gone to, I think he might have gone out in his boat or something and caught an octopus because what I had ordered was boiled octopus.

39:59On my plate was this entire boiled octopus with no seasoning. I always finish my plate, but I could not finish this. I was eating for like an hour. I was completely stuffed. it tasted gross. So I was like, look, this is an example of where maybe a recommendation would have helped me, but being willing to, I don't regret being willing to try it. It's just a recognition that sometimes if you're, if you're just going by yourself, you have to risk the chance that you're just going to get a whole boiled octopus on your plate. And it's not going to be that good. I feel so much comes out of that experience versus collecting the knowledge through the digital exploration or the guidebook, or your word of mouth from friends and referrals versus you actually going through that experience and recognizing now, okay, well, now I know exactly what octopus is in Spanish and I'll steer clear of that on the next menu.

40:47So I do a fair amount of backcountry travel, like backpacking and canoeing. And it's very difficult to find any place where there aren't at least a few people who've done video logs or blogs with photos about it. And so it's like, oh, thank God, I know what's coming on this. Now I can plan properly. I know whether I need to bring crampons or whatever. Uh, but on the flip side is there's no more surprises. You, you know, there's no more like coming around the corner and seeing this amazing waterfall. Cause you're like, oh yeah, this is the one that I saw on the block. So there's something lost.

41:17There's nobody is trying to pretend that we're discovering the world that knew, like we understand the whole world has been seen, but there's a feeling of discovering something from yourself that is different from having it spoon fed to you. And there's also a gratification that comes with mental and physical effort that is tied to how our brain works. So what's going on there where we're putting this mental and physical effort into exploration that leads to this payoff or the paradox around effort? There's a misconception that the effort or the difficulties that are required in order to get somewhere are the price we pay.

41:52So like you climb to the top of the mountain and it was really hard to climb there, but it's all that negative side was worth it because you get to the top of the mountain. And I think that's actually the wrong way of thinking about it, that the effort that is required to get to the top of the mountain is actually a crucial part of what makes it worth going up the mountain. If there was an escalator that led to the top of the mountain and you could just step on the escalator and go up there and stand, you'd get the same view, but you'd be like, there's nothing special about that. So this is what psychologists call the effort paradox, the fact that even though effort's supposed to be a negative, we actually value things more highly in a lot of cases when they're hard.

42:31And there's even research on Ikea furniture, for example. The Ikea effect is that if you order a piece of furniture, you order that coffee table and you spend time wrestling with those stupid instructions and the little Allen keys and stuff and you put it together, and then someone asks you, hey, how much to buy that coffee table off you? You'll ask for a higher price than if you had gotten the exact same coffee table pre-made for you. That somehow having struggled with it makes it more valuable to you. And I think it's a nice reframing to remember. When something is hard, you have to remind yourself, this is what's making the whole experience meaningful to me and worthwhile.

43:06Well, you brought up a very good philosophical point, which is the fundamental question of what life is about. And there's going to be a lot of people who are on the side of it's about struggle and what you make out of that struggle. And there's a lot of people who think it's about avoiding struggle and staying comfortable as much as possible. And our religious texts explain these ideas fully. Yeah, this question of the meaning of life is clearly not one that I can solve in a simple manner. So I spoke to one of the psychologists who works on the effort paradox, and I was asking him about this, like, what is the goal?

43:51What is our point? And he has developed what he calls the meaningfulness of effort scale. So it's a way of assessing people to find out how much effort, how much meaning they derive from when something is hard. So some people, if something's hard, they're like, yeah, this is really important and meaningful to me. Other people don't feel the same way. And so one of the questions I asked him was like, okay, okay, but like, what do you mean by meaning of life? What is the meaning of life? And he's like, dude, I don't know what the meaning of life is. And nor does anybody I ask. Nobody can define it, but everyone understands what we're asking.

44:29They can tell you which activities are more meaningful or less meaningful. Bringing up a kid is meaningful, even though it's hard. You know, eating a bag of popcorn is not meaningful, even if it's tasty. So we have a sense of which things give meaning in our lives, even if we can't articulate them. And what he has found is that people who derive meaning from taking on challenge, whether that's bringing up kids or climbing mountains or launching a business or whatever the case may be, those people tend to actually score higher on ratings of happiness. They tend to end up with higher incomes, so more professional success, greater mental health.

45:08So this idea that gaining meaning from doing hard things, it has some empirical support in the sense of making people happier.

45:38and no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com. Next up is a little song from CarMax about selling a car your way. You want to sell those wheels. You want to get a CarMax instant offer. So fast. Want to take a sec to think about it. Or like a month. Want to keep tabs on that instant offer. With OfferWatch. Wanna have CarMax pick it up from your driveway? Wanna get it, touch it. You wanna do it? So, wanna drive? CarMax. Pickup not available everywhere.

46:19Restrictions and fee may apply. So looking at dopamine, which obviously is a core driver of all this, there's this popular phrase of a dopamine detox and people looking to get away from devices and things that simulate dopamine in their lives. what do you recommend in terms of strengthening this exploration and this curiosity and how can dopamine influence it this idea of like dopamine detox or dopamine fasting it's it's fascinating because you read about it it's like this kind of makes sense there's not a lot of i would say there's not a lot there's no neuroscience behind the idea that you need to detox from dopamine but understanding the role that dopamine plays and also trying to avoid getting kind of enthralled to the easiest dopamine hit, I think is actually a useful way of thinking about things.

47:07So I think the important thing to understand about dopamine is it's not like the pleasure chemical, which is what scientists originally thought back in the 70s and 80s. They thought it's like when something feels good, it's because you've got to hit a dopamine. Dopamine is really about predicting the experience you're going to have. And you get to hit a dopamine when something is better than you expect. Not just when something is good, but when it's better than you expect. So think about that in terms of taking a drug, for example. You take a drug for the first time, and I'm not recommending this, but you take a drug for the first time and you get this feeling that you didn't expect.

47:38And so you get a big surge of dopamine, which is a way of your brain's way of saying, do this again. But the next time you take the drug, you kind of knew what it feels like. So it's not as much of a better than expected feeling. And by the 20th time, you know exactly what you're going to expect. So you no longer get any dopamine hit at all from taking the drug. So you have to raise your dosage. And that's how one of the ways that addiction, the cycle of addiction starts, you have to keep raising the dosage in order to keep doing something that's better than expected. So what's a better way of getting these stimuli that are better than expected or different than expected?

48:11It's to do things you haven't done before. It's to keep looking for opportunities of testing your limits in new ways so that it remains surprising and good. I have this debate with my kids that I make them waffles for breakfast a couple of times a week, and they're my favorite waffle recipe. They love the waffle recipe. They want it every morning. And I'm like, you can't have it every morning. Not because I'm not capable of making it every morning. And it's actually a pretty healthy recipe. It's all like cottage cheese and eggs and stuff. So in some ways, I would be happy for you to have it every morning.

48:43But I want you to enjoy it in six months as much as you enjoy it now and in a year because it's a pretty convenient recipe and I don't want to have to come up with a new breakfast. So it's like, I'm giving it to you twice a week because I want there still to be novelty and not just to be as expected. Every morning I get up, get my waffle. So I don't know. That's the waffle theory of not dopamine detox, but of just being mindful about ways of preserving surprise. That goes along with, well, it's not really a new term, but a term that has sort of been brought back and it's now edging its way into the mainstream, which is this idea of vril, this zest for life.

49:24And that when you're depleting your dopamine, it's cutting out and limiting that vril. And when you allow that dopamine to build up, it's used to turn into vril, to have that zest for life and that excitement. It's like the rats in the experiments where they can hit the cocaine lever. You just hit it over and over again. That's not satisfaction. That's not the meaning of life. It doesn't matter how great the supposed stimulus is going to be. If you're doing it over and over again, it's going to lose its attraction. Yeah, I think a powerful way to look at it is everything we're talking about here is illustrating all these different ways that you can engage dopamine.

50:08It could be physical, it could be mental, it could be consuming. So I think it's more about adding variety to the ways in which dopamine is interacting with your brain than just relying on the one way that seems to work for you every single day to lose its impact. You can't keep going back to the well over and over again. The world is a complex place. There's a lot to discover about it, and it can be very satisfying. There's not one path or one way you should explore, but the more you open yourself up to put yourself in situations where you don't know the outcome. You know, another example or metaphor for this is like sports.

50:48The point of sports is not to know what the final score was. If sports was nothing but box scores, it would not be that exciting. It's to be in that situation where you don't know what's going to happen. And if you're cheering for one team, it's not that interesting, even if your team is ahead by 50 points, right? Like it's engaging only to the extent that you don't know how it's going to end. And you kind of want that in all your activities that you don't know what the outcome is going to be. So in wrapping this up, I know you have five rules that came out of the research in the book for yourself.

51:23I'd love to share those with the audience. Let's put the air quotes around rules. Five, let's say principles, even though I called them rules in the book. The first one I think, or the first one was explore then exploit. And that's going back to this idea that there are times when you should be exploring and gathering wool, looking around. And there are times when you should be exploiting. There are times when you need to knuckle down, get up early and do the work. And there's some really interesting research. I won't go through the whole spiel on it, but there's some really interesting research saying that best combination, the best way to actually be productive and accomplish things is to have a period of exploration followed by a period of exploitation.

52:05And this is logical, right? The exploration is a time when you discover, you cast your net as widely as possible to figure out what you want to focus on. And then you have to eventually stop wandering around, pick a topic, pick a goal, pick an idea, and work hard on it. So explore, then exploit is rule number one. The second one is to look for the uncertainty sweet spot. So I've been saying, isn't it wonderful when you don't know what's going to happen? and you should seek out opportunities where there's a lot of uncertainty. That approach has its limits. So it's like, if you were to say, hey, Alex, why don't you read this dictionary in Norwegian?

52:48You're not going to know anything about what's going on. Isn't that going to be exciting? And I'm going to say, no, it's not going to be exciting because I have no freaking idea what's going on. So if we go back to this idea of wanting to learn about the world, there's a sweet spot of uncertainty that maximizes your ability to learn about the world. If there's no uncertainty, if life is very simple, if everything's simple, you're not going to learn anything. But if it's super complicated, if it's the dictionary in Norwegian, you're also not going to learn anything because you can't make head or tail of it.

53:20So you're looking for intermediate uncertainty, stuff where you don't know what's going to happen, but you kind of have a sense of the patterns and the possibilities. And this is kind of actually a segue to rule number three. Rule number three is play more. And the reason I say play more is that the sense of play, the sense of fun, the sense that you want to do something because it's interesting, that is probably the most reliable guide we have to this uncertainty sweet spot. So how do you find this intermediate zone of uncertainty? You listen to that eternal voice that says, this is interesting.

53:54This is worth pursuing. I'm curious about this. Because you're not going to be curious about something that's too complicated and you're not going to be curious about something that's too easy. So it's easy to say, play more. And for our kids, we can say, all right, you guys can play all afternoon. But for adults, what play more means, you can't just force yourself to play. You don't just buy a model train set and sit on the floor and hope that that works. But you have to give yourself time and space away from the responsibilities that we all have, whether it's with family or career or whatever.

54:26Give yourself some room consciously to just sort of do something because it's fun. The fourth rule is minimize regret. So regret in this context is actually a mathematical concept. It's the difference between the outcome you got and the best outcome you could have gotten if you'd made all the right decisions. So you can think about this in gambling terms. This is one of the ways they study explore-explore decision-making is you're choosing different slot machines or whatever. And if you magically knew always which bet was the right one to make, you would make a certain amount of money. And regret is, with the choices you made in real life, not being clairvoyant, how much did you miss by.

55:10And you're always going to have regret. This is actually a fundamental rule of life, right? As you go through life, you're going to make decisions. And sometimes you're going to be like, man, I kind of wish I'd made that other decision. So it's not about eliminating regret, but it's about minimizing regret. And one of the best ways to minimize regret is to embrace what scientists actually call optimism in the face of uncertainty, which is to look for the the best realistic upside. So whenever we're facing choices, we kind of have a range of like, yeah, is this one I might, let's say I have a 40%, somewhere between a 40 to 60 % chance of getting a good outcome.

55:52And this other one, I have, let's say a 20 to 70 % chance of a good outcome. I know we don't think about this, but just for the point of illustration, there's these kind of error bars where we don't know how things are going to turn out. And what the math of optimal decision-making tells us is that you should take the one that has the top of their error bar, the one that has a chance of turning out well. So this is a little abstract. So let me say it in a different way. Let's say you're considering two different job opportunities. One is pretty stable, decent starting salary, not a lot of opportunity for advancement, but it's a good solid job and it'll pay the bills.

56:33The other is maybe less stable, less starting salary, but there's a plausible path of advancement that will lead you to the job you actually really want, your dream job. And what optimism in the face of uncertainty means is take the second job, take the one that gives you a chance of getting where you want to go, take the chance, even though it might end up not panning out because that'll minimize your regret. You'll always wonder whether you could have made it if you take the safe job that doesn't have that upside. Sorry, that's a little bit of a complicated one to explain. It's super helpful.

57:06And I know many in our audience have had that exact choice between jobs and might be sitting with it right now. It's worth thinking about and just pursuing. And the last rule is embrace the struggle, which is really going back to this effort paradox we were talking about before, that understand that when things are hard, let's say you take the uncertain job and it doesn't pan out and you're back on the hunt for job. When things are hard, that's part of what gives the pursuit meaning. And I think that mental framing is important because the feeling we get or the meaning we ascribe to our experiences depends a lot on the framing we give to it.

57:41And so if you're telling yourself, this is hard, it sucks, those words help create your reality. Whereas if you're telling yourself, this is hard, this is good, this is the struggle I want to be on, that makes it a much more positive experience and helps maybe motivate you to keep pushing. Well, thank you for stopping by to motivate our audience and share these great insights with them. Where can they find out more about you and the book? First of all, thanks so much for having me. This has been a fun conversation that has pushed me in some interesting directions. I have a website that is alexhutchinson.net, and that has links to basically social media and things that I write as a journalist.

58:23I write once a week for Outside Magazine, so I have columns there too. But yeah, alexhutchinson.net will get you all your Alex Hutchinson needs. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Adrian. Thanks, John.

58:45What a great interview. And now comes the part of the show where we showcase one of our X-Factor Accelerator members. Take it away, Boris. My name is Boris. I'm a senior software engineer. I was born in Europe and moved to the United States 10 years ago. There was a time when I was lacking sense of community and belonging. I chose the Art of Charm program because I wanted to advance my career and build a personal circle of people with similar values. The program made me view people around me as doors to new opportunities. That person at a conference can refer you to your next job. That stranger at a coffee shop is a gateway to your new hobby.

59:27That passenger on a train is your significant other if you make the move. I recommend to take a step and sign up for the Art of Charm program. I will see you at the AUC Family Reunion. Thank you, Boris. It was a pleasure and an honor working with you two, and good luck to all your future endeavors. If you've gotten value out of this or any of our podcasts, head on over to your favorite podcast player and rate and review the show. It will mean the world to us, and it helps others find the show. all right before we head out a huge thank you to our producers michael harold and eric montgomery until next week go out there and make it epic yeah i remember you you were the bad boy you threw your love away like you were just a toy and you saw the world You're solving another tragedy Cause you had your taste Of black all weeks today Yeah, but I remember you Oh, yeah, I remember you Yeah, but I remember you I remember you