The Explorer's Gene: Alex Hutchinson On Humanity’s Drive To Seek The Unknown, The Science Of Uncertainty, & Why Effort Creates Meaning

27:07But you see it played out, you know, everywhere. I mean, obviously, writ large in terms of like, we're gonna colonize Mars and we're, you know, giving birth to new forms of intelligence right now. And, you know, as much energy and enthusiasm, you know, 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 gonna render for us in the future of humanity? But nobody's saying, like, people might be saying like, hey, we shouldn't do this, but like, we're doing it.

27:42Like, there's just no way around. Like, this is happening. Like, there's just no way that anything is gonna interfere with the development of this new technology because that's what we do. 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 gonna do it. Somebody was, yeah. 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 gonna take that road.

28:20You can't just sort of put up a sign at the road and say, don't go there, because that's, if anything, that's catnip, that's gonna attract people, not repel them. Sure, I mean, if the history of humanity teaches us anything, it's that like, we're gonna do that thing and we're gonna deal with the fallout and circumstances of it later. Yeah, which is kind of a negative gloss on exploring, But yeah, you know, 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 wanna take it. So we have this genetic piece.

28:53We have all the anthropology, the great human expansion. You talk about like the Polynesian cultures and, you know, the first people to go to Australia and all these sort of examples that kind of illustrate like this predisposition that we have. And then there's the neuroscience component here, which gets into this idea of predictive processing. So explain that. And first of all, I apologize because this gets a little bit obscure for everybody. People love neuroscience though. And I think 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 like hard to follow.

29:33And 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 this idea, 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.

30:20If 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, 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.

31:06What 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. 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.

31:45What'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 for about a decade or about a decade ago is when it was posed and people were trying arguing, well, how can this be true?

32:25We don't want to lock ourselves in closets. 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?

33:00Whatever I know least about, where's 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. 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.

33:38Like 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 the idea of like, oh, there's something over there that's unknown. Like, I gotta go over there. not so that I can resolve uncertainty, but for the very reason that like, 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. 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.

34:18But 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 wanna 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 on a, and it's on a hormonal level.

34:58It's all wired in through this, it's not 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 a source of calories. Why do we crave sex? On a fundamental level, it's because we're propagating the species.

35:40But 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 cannabis, or whether, you know, whatever the case may be.

36:21And modernity is a scenario in which these, you know, fundamental mechanisms, which were kind of designed to serve us, we now serve them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, people talk about when is artificial intelligence gonna 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.

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42:05It's worth pointing out that you have a PhD in physics from Cambridge, and you did a stint at the NSA in Washington, DC, where you were studying quantum computing. And there was an interesting announcement this week from Microsoft about their new qubit chip hearkening a new era of quantum computing and what that might auger. And I just thought like, I have to, you're here. I gotta ask you like what you think about this because I think it relates to like these sort of uncertain, you know, kind of future outcomes for the human race. Yeah, I mean, it was interesting. So my time as a, in the quantum computing group of the NSA was from 2002 to 2004.

42:46Yeah, I can't imagine how much has changed. And it was, you know. But conceptually, you understand this. better than most people. 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 happen. 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 a case of unknown, unknowns, right?

43:22It'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, yeah, sometime around 2030, we'll find out. Now I'm sitting here in 2025, I'm like, 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 gonna happen. And the Microsoft announcement, it's actually a model of quantum computing that I didn't even know people were still pursuing that, like they were doing this, I guess, quietly.

44:03It's not one of the main models that people working on. But so it just shows that there's, there are a lot of different routes to get to these destinations and nobody really knows what's gonna happen until you get there. Yeah. So, are you even capable of translating in layperson's terms how this very powerful new kind of like technological breakthrough might impact, you know, the world? Yeah. It's funny. I had a lot of arguments. So, I wrote a few articles about quantum computing not long after I, early in my journalism career, not long after I left quantum computing. And I inevitably ended up getting into arguments with physicists.

44:39Like, you can't explain it like that. That's not exactly right. And it's like, you cannot assume that people have spent seven years learning quantum physics before you explain it to them. You understand all of these like, you know, quantum physics paradoxes, right? And predictability problems and everything in order to really understand it. 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 zero or one. And so there's these long strings of zeros and ones that computers are flipping or multiplying or whatever, manipulating and performing their calculations.

45:15The fundamental difference between 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 and a combination of zero and one at the same time. And 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 zero and one 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.

45:56But you can manipulate these bits in ways to 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?

46:36And second of all, if someone builds one of these, they're gonna break all of our encryption. Now there are ways, there's quantum encryption that you can use to make sure that a quantum computer can't break it. So there are pathways forward. There's an arms race. It's not gonna break the world. This is an interesting tool, but I don't see it as like artificial intelligence. quantum computers aren't gonna 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.

47:12Yeah, 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 like, I'm sure there's a million other things that we haven't even thought of that is gonna change as a result of this. Yeah, it'll probably be really good for things like drug discovery, simulating the behavior of molecules to see how the, you know, of theoretical molecules to see which ones might have desirable properties.

47:56And 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 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, 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.

48:27The 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. And this may feel like a tangent, but it is a form of exploration, to bring it back to what we were talking about, like the imperative of the human race to like, hey, we've got this new thing, we got to figure it out. Well, and that's, you know, I bring up quantum computing in the book because this was a new thing. And 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 nineties when a guy named Peter Shore figured out this idea that, oh, hang on, we could crack encryption with a quantum computer.

49:15And then people got interested in it. But so I was in grad school, I was doing my PhD in physics from 1997 to 2000. And so I was there. At the place to do physics. It is, I would argue it is the place. The storied history of Cambridge in physics 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, you know, that's exploring. And that was a very, I can remember at the time reading it and thinking, well, how do I know how to create new knowledge?

49:54Like if I knew what needed to be done, 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 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 wanna do physics because I was like, I don't know how to create new knowledge in physics.

50:27And I, you know, some of my colleagues, I could see that they had, 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, they, here's some physics that we know how to do. It's really complicated. Here's a problem. It's gonna 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. Right, well, 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.

51:16In the same way, a great athlete has a, you know, preternaturally 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, you know, cultivating that, that like 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. Like, how do you take all of these people, put them in a room and don't like, you know, put any parameters on them and say, just, you know, go into your mind and like come up with something new.

51:56Yeah, 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, at least 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.

52:36I think it's like 10, was it 10.30 and three o 'clock 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're sitting, 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.

53:03And so you're, you're, 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.

53:31You 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 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. And that's the story of quantum computing. That's quantum mechanics and computer science came together. The fundamental ideas in both those areas had 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.

54:09Sure, but in a capitalistic society, that requires having a long view and a pretty healthy relationship with uncertainty. It's sort of orthogonal to stock market demands. And I'm curious, like, 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, you know, at universities, there are these types of things. But given the fact that humanity is sort of facing existential crises in a variety of ways.

54:51Like, it feels like a good time to have more of that going on right now. 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 were 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 60s was, the space race was a time when there was a lot of investment in basic R &D.

55:31But 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 gonna 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 nineties. And he was interested in business.

56:09And 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 gonna work. And so as a real result, we systematically underinvest in exploration. And in the corporate context, that means we systematically underinvest in R &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.

56:50It'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. I suppose on some level, Google, Meta, Microsoft make room for some of it. 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. Yeah, and even within the government structure. So I think the estimate I heard, and I can't verify these numbers, but was that the NSA was spending about$60 million a year on quantum computing in the early 2000s.

57:31This 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 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?

58:04So 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, you know, 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 a much more of a return on investment kind of culture where, and even if, you know, 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.

58:51Whether 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 know, you're going to get people standing up, you know, in a press conference reading. And can you believe the government is funding, you know, the sex life of squirrels or whatever? Things that sound ridiculous if you take them out of their context. So. Yeah. 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 versus communal interest that is not in the grander interest of the race at large.

59:35Yeah. I'll just also say before we get to 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 ongoing tension. We're always struggling with our own immediate self-interest and trying to see beyond that. It does seem like at some points in our history, we've done a better job than others. Yeah. 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.

1:00:17I think it's super interesting. Yeah, this is, so the study that I think a lot of people will have heard about is about 25 years ago, So 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 couldn't use GPS to get around. They had to basically memorize the entire map of London. And anybody who's been to London, that is no small feat. 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.

1:00:56And that's a literal, this is not just a metaphor. 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.

1:01:39There'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 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.

1:02:14And 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, you know, 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.

1:03:03Correlation 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 atrophy.

1:03:40Yeah. And that this may be associated with negative health conditions. 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 like wildly differentiated kind of experiences and levels of expertise, you know 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?

1:04:25Similarly, like the idea of like, you know, taking ideas or information that you have in the world and how does it relate to this other idea is a form of mapping. It's just not in the kind of GPS context. Does that still relate to the hippocampus? and then secondarily, and 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 the brain writ large? Okay, so to your first question, 100%, the hippocampus isn't just mapping the world.

1:05:10It's mapping ideas. And there's some really neat studies that demonstrate this showing that 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. 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. And then you can then use that to say, that person is like that person.

1:05:49Like you just said, to my great pleasure and flattery that I'm like David Epstein. It's 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, 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.

1:06:33They 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, you know, 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 it's not 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, you know, if we are neglecting our hippocampus, that it's not just that you're going to get lost on the way to the library, it's that you're gonna have trouble connecting ideas with each other.

1:07:06And I guess to your second point, one of the critiques of social media or entertainment more broadly is this idea of algorithms constantly telling us what to do next. And that it takes away the active exploration, the active part of figuring out where I might like to explore, all I have to do is sit there and the next show comes up. Yeah. Yeah, so this idea of active versus passive exploration, which you 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 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?

1:07:57and the qualitative difference of those two types of adventure experiences. 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 Tenzin 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.

1:08:41It'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.

1:09:28The 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 gonna 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.

1:10:07On 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 like, 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, like 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.

1:10:59And it doesn't have to be hiking up Everest. Like this is just reframing how you think about this idea exploration with ways to, you know kind of easily invite it more into your life. Yeah. And I think, so if I think about the way, 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.

1:11:37They 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. Right. Now it's becoming a Michael Easter book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to emphasize again that it's intellectual effort too. You don't have to rock to have meaning, although, you know, 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, this death defying rock face.

1:12:20And 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, 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 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.

1:13:15The 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.

1:13:52whether 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

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1:15:56Joseph Campbell sort of says it all and he kind of recurs throughout the book. So if neuroscience isn't your thing or anthropology isn't your thing, Like this is a guy who sort of took a 10 ,000 foot view of the human condition and extracted this archetype of what it means to live a purposeful life. And it basically means embracing bold unknowns and thinking about struggle, not as a bug, but as a feature. And this is the journey we all must go on to live a purposeful, meaningful life. And at the same time, everything about modern society is telling us the opposite, remove all uncertainty, live a secure life.

1:16:43You want comfort, you want luxury. These are the things you should aspire to. And struggle is something that you should remove from your experience. And so in our materialistic sort of culture, like these are our God heads and we organize our lives around them. we make career decisions around them, and they're completely, you know, kind of contrary to all of these things that we know actually drive us towards happiness and, you know, connection and the things that, you know, we really deep down beneath all of that, we're really all kind of like driving for. Yeah, I couldn't have put it better myself.

1:17:20Like, 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 trend, 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.

1:17:59And 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.

1:18:36If it's way too complicated or too hard, it's awful. And in the middle, there's that sweet spot. That sweet spot is multidimensional. And people can find that challenge in different ways. But if there's no place in your life where you're facing uncertainty, and then certainty might be, will I hate this album as opposed to, will I die from trying to, you know, wingsuit off this cliff? But if there's no place in your life that you're facing uncertainty, then I think you're missing an opportunity for meaning. What do you make of people's sort of wide variations in their relationship with like risk and uncertainty and adventure?

1:19:15Like some people are just like, you know, not for me, like I'm happy on the couch and other people just can't wait to get out the door and like jump out of an airplane. Yeah, these differences are real for sure. And when I talk to people about this book, there's definitely some people 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.

1:19:50So 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 as paddlers as I am. Like 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 gonna portage this. And that's just, so I like to think of myself as a bold adventure, 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.

1:20:28All 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, like, I don't need to become the guy who charges down class three rapids, class four rapids without a second thought. There's no right or wrong. For me, the class two 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.

1:21:07Yeah, 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 trying things and bursting out of that like protective comfort zone that we find so kind of difficult to transcend. Yeah, it's interesting. I faced 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?

1:21:50And 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, I took up rock climbing about a decade ago and I'm a complete novice. I'm 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. Yeah. Within the familiar and within the new, you can find that. But the common thread there is a little bit of fear. I'm not sure how it's gonna 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?

1:22:28What answers will I give when the question is asked? 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 wanna ask you this because I've been thinking about this a lot. We're very good at like diluting ourselves or like convincing ourselves that we're like, doing the hard thing when maybe we're really not. And 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, you know, running is something you'll never master.

1:23:10It 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 like exploring rock climbing because you're very safe in this world. Like 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?

1:23:47Like that actually has become your comfort zone. And so it works at cross purposes with like 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, like the 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, like, how do you do that?

1:24:36It's so hard. So you're getting this external validation for it at the same time. 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. I had an area where I'd spent 10 years building contacts. And then I thought I was a great journalist, well-respected. I'm phoning up people in the explore space and no one's returning my calls. They don't even wanna talk to me. They're like, you're nobody, we don't care.

1:25:10And 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 wanna 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.

1:25:50I can show up at a 5K and not to pat myself on the back. I can do quite well. You're gonna win the turkey trots pretty much every time. No, 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 - And that feels good. 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 to, you know, I've run some cross-country seasons because I hadn't done that in a while.

1:26:32So I didn't run that. 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. And I think, 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. What is the relationship between all of these ideas and curiosity? Because it feels like they're close cousins here. Some of the stuff that I write about is it comes from the curiosity literature. And I think it's ultimately, I think it's kind of similar words for the same concept.

1:27:11Yeah, I mean, I think it's a matter of definition really. I guess I would say. I mean, maybe that comes into play in a more practical sense when you think about parenting. Yeah. And, you know, so my kids are getting a little older now, but I would say, so my kids are eight 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, always interested in something different. And they clearly have a, you know, 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.

1:28:01And yeah, I mean, yeah, that's a good question. The distinction between curiosity and exploring, I'm not sure I can articulate. I guess what I'm getting at is, and you talk about this in the book, like you're somebody who you go out with your kids and your family and you're doing these, you know, kind of like pretty intense, like explorations, you know, adventures, et cetera. And, you know, God bless your kids for like being willing to do that. They're good sports. Yeah. Like I, you know, I'm imagining other kids who are like, no, I'm good. You know, like, I don't want to do that. It feels very uncomfortable.

1:28:32That brings up parenting styles. Like how hard do you push a kid versus like encourage or nudge. and then kind of not unrelatedly, like how do you foster and support your child's own unique kind of curiosities, right? So that they can blossom into their own relationship with exploring. Yeah, I had a really interesting conversation with a Danish scientist named Mark Malmendorf 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 too.

1:29:17How 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 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 gonna turn out. If it's interesting to them, he's like, yeah, you wanna dress up like that and do that and climb up that or go in there?

1:29:51Let'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 that I think is a good idea, which is 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, oh, I am interested in that topic or it would be fun to try rock climbing or whatever, do it.

1:30:28It would be interesting to do a 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 five or, you know, that we've heard these stories, right? 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.

1:31:11Oh yeah. And so the scientists I spoke to who were worried about hippocampus, they're terrified about what's coming for coming generations. Cause 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, that's not much of a neighborhood. And you can really see the differences in how they're assimilating the world around them.

1:31:42And 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 four 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. It could be minus 40. It could be in 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. How old are they now? They're now nine and 11, especially since I was working on this book.

1:32:11One 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'll, you know, 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, you want to walk by yourselves? And they're like, no, we like you walking with us. So anyway, there's a lot of like family dynamic stuff that 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.

1:32:43Cool. The one section that I found 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 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 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.

1:33:36And you're no longer that person who won't get off the couch. Yeah, that's a really interesting idea. And I think in some ways maybe that's - That's its own book probably. It's the scariest form of exploration of all, right? That's what I'm saying. It's like, this is the thing no one really wants to do, but is perhaps the most important exploration that somebody should entertain. And I'm the kind of person who tries to understand why I do things. And I find that I can, 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.

1:34:11You know, like even for writing this book, Like, did I do it? Cause 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. Or like, look what a badass I am. I can shift gears and write a badass book about something totally new. Did I do it to show off? Yeah, no, it's, these are really hard things to, I 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.

1:34:55Like that's a hard, hard topic, but I think it's an important one. 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 can go see whatever you wanna see. Like, how do you reframe people's relationship with exploration now that like, there are no kind of uncharted territories anymore? 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 that, take myself to places where I can pretend that no one has been there. It's a fun way of doing it.

1:35:35I love going to the serious back country where I cannot be reminded every 10 seconds that there's a sign or a trail or whatever where I'm having to rely on myself. But I think that approach only takes you so far 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.

1:36:14So now it's the first person to hop on their left foot to the North Pole. Yeah, we just create all of these firsts and these FKTs and things like that. Yeah, I mean, I get it. I get it. I like, I love, 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 gonna go someplace very few people go and I'm gonna set a really hard itinerary and I'm gonna bust my ass to get to the end of that itinerary.

1:37:04and 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'm 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, to, to be present in the moment, to be, I mean, I know that's a, that's an awful cliche, but, 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 waypoints, you're following that, you just get from point A to point B.

1:37:40A 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. 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.

1:38:23And so I'm also, you know there's a balance between safety and uh surprise i 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 and then it's like well we didn't even need to go we already knew what was there so there's ways of of allowing things to be new without having to to pretend that I'm the first human to have ever done this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My version of that is far less 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.

1:39:14And 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. I just like going to a movie without seeing the trailer. Like I just wanna 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 talked about like, you have these like five rules and most of which we've talked about, but one we haven't is this notion of play.

1:39:53Yeah, 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. You're such an interesting, curious guy because you're this physicist math guy, right? So of course you're gonna have check boxes and you're gonna Uber plan every single thing. But you're also this like creative guy who's not afraid to try new, like you're a paradox. I'm fighting against it, I'm fighting against it. I have to have a watch on, but it's a Timex from, you know, 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.

1:40:24I 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 - 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, 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 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.

1:41:00But I went out and I experienced some of it. I had a very authentic, super authentic, but 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 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.

1:41:47Why 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, you know, is verboten. I asked a whole bunch of people this because, you know, another subtext in this book, which we haven't really talked about is aging. Like, you know, and I'm in my forties and And you get calcified in so many, you talked about your music preferences. Yeah, 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, should I be trying to explore more? Should I be trying to play more?

1:42:20And the answers weren't as unambiguous as I might've 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.

1:42:55So you can't - Novelty becomes very remote. 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 go back to that completely naive state there's still a whole lot of world to explore and this guy Mark Malmendorf 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 The definition of playing or the underlying sort of assumption is that it's something that's fun.

1:43:35We 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, 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, you know, 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.

1:44:11That 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, eight-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. But that changes as you get older too. Like you go through these phases and through most of adult life, like we don't wanna do the things that, where we look stupid. And we're all about like, how are people perceiving us? And we're very hyper-conscious of like, things like status.

1:44:43And 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've lived enough life and you just, you know who you are and you feel fine about that. 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.

1:45:23or not, you know, why wait? Yeah. Why did we deprive ourselves of that in mid adulthood? 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? 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.

1:46:13That 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 you're going to get better restaurant meals eventually if you explore because you're you know in a tangible way but also maybe more importantly in a way that leads to 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?

1:47:00In 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 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 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.

1:47:55Yeah, 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 what's on the menu, very mundane things to those very broad things, but it's a perspective shift as much as it is anything else. 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.

1:48:54It'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 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, mommy uses Waze. But if you'd used Waze, hey, daddy, if you'd used Waze, you wouldn't have missed that turn. And they told me this like six times. And I'm like, yeah, you know what? We're going to be on time for the party.

1:49:25You guys can just simmer down. I'm okay with this. I missed the turn. It's okay. Now we've never been down on the street. Isn't it nice to work on the street? I'm imagining that my kids are older. I'm imagining your kids as teenagers going, God, you, but my daddy won't even use the GPS. Like, you know. Mommy uses Waze. Like, stop. 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 wanna transcend this, it remains the case. I'm happy to be the science of, I mean, it's a privilege to be the science guy. Yeah, I mean, listen, in a world of like, kind of fitness influencers and hot takes and latest sort of over extrapolated findings from weak data sets, like you are this incredible voice of reason, grounded in evidence-based findings.

1:50:22And 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'm not sure there's scientists who do this, but like in the sense that you are a journalist and you're trying to, you know, translate these very, you know, kind of complicated ideas for a mainstream audience. Like, I mean, there's no one better than you when it comes to this. And I appreciate that very much. Well, those are super kind words and I really appreciate that. I guess I'll say the flip side of that coin One is it means I'm never willing to tell anybody what to do because I don't know.

1:50:59Well, the answer to every question is, well, it depends or it's complicated, 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 gonna solve all your problems. Yeah, it's a curse. I wish I was wired in a way to just tell, I had an editor at Canadian Running Magazine once who was like, people want the Hutchinson method, just give them the Hutchinson method. And I was like, there is no Hutchinson method. Hutchinson doesn't know what the heck to do. But much like Steve Magnus, like I just think elite track and field runners are really good at appreciating the nuance and something about the two of you guys, like you're also really good communicators of the nuance here.

1:51:43And 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 two 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 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 science to all of them.

1:52:33And 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 getting out and doing some physical activity. 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.

1:53:12You 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 like it gets back to like dopamine, right? Like, oh, I've got it. You know, 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 wanna be good at something, you're gonna have to train a lot, you're gonna be tired and you're gonna have to do all of it.

1:53:50You're gonna have to like do a lot of zone two and a lot of threshold work. And you're gonna, it's not about the four by four 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 and new and interesting ways that are always creating, kind of these exercise induced reactions or responses that are gonna 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? I would rather just order something that comes in a bottle and it'll make me better by tomorrow.

1:54:30It's much more satisfying. So what is the kind of message that you wanna share to the average endurance athlete or perhaps even the very kind of like elite level age group amateur who's looking for those additional gains. Like I'm asking you to like make a reductive statement here, of course, I realize the irony and all of that. But like 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.

1:55:14Like when I wrote Finding Ultra in 2012, I was talking about Zone 2. It didn't really make much of it bad, I gotta say. But then when Peter Atiyah talks about it and like, you know, Sam Milan 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 2 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. Yeah, I mean, VO2 Max is another great example.

1:55:47Like when I was writing about VO2 Max in, you know, 2009, 2010, it's like, you know, I'd have editors been like, what is this thing? Where's the two go? What are you talking about? Like, 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, I mean, as markers of fitness go, VO2 max is a pretty good one. Like if you wanna have some clinical test that predicts longevity, VO2 is excellent. Does that mean that, I mean, do 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, oh no, three times in my life.

1:56:27And 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. But fitness is measured, can be measured by performance. Measuring VO2 max or knowing a precise zone to train in, these are... I mean, there are people who are winning Olympics who are paying attention to stuff.

1:57:12So I don't want to say it's all meaningless, but it's next to meaningless unless you're already doing everything possible on the training side. The precision, the idea that there's a magic intensity where 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 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. There's differences between workouts, but they don't change quickly.

1:57:51I have advice in terms of how I would structure training if you're someone who wants to do endurance exercise, which I think is a great thing. I would say, and you know, following the sort of Steven 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 can take it way farther than that. But if you do that and aim for 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 this terminology or these kind of other ideas.

1:58:48I think being well-informed and, you know, kind of understanding all of these things is fine. And there's plenty, you know, to read and to learn if you're so inclined to do that. I wouldn't have a job if that. 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 two 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.

1:59:35So, as we're recording this conversation, I wrote an article on zone two for the New York Times a couple of days ago. and I really wrestled with how to kind of present the arguments, the physiological arguments in favor of zone two versus the studies that maybe suggest zone two isn't some magic, you know, there's conflicting evidence. At this point, I would say I don't really know what the final answer on zone two 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? You know, maybe everyone understands that it's just basically guidance.

2:00:09No one's taking it too seriously. Maybe I'm, you know, 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 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.

2:00:42So 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, you know, 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.

2:01:13And 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 backer and I used to plot, In my training log, I used to keep track of average heart rate during tempo runs, plot things in Lotus 1, 2, 3 back in the 90s. Yeah, I'm sure you were a maniac. 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.

2:01:55It'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 gonna 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. I agree. I will say I'll leave room for individual differences in what's fun, right? Like, there are people who, like I did, love the data and love playing with it. and maybe you can hold themselves in a healthier relationship than I could because I just would 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.

2:02:35Some 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. it. It's also a broader conversation around the whole optimized self kind 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, you know, and, you know, then the broader conversation about our relationship with death, you know, it's like a whole thing, right?

2:03:11But 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 Atiyah does a phenomenal job of really laying out the science. I think his conversations with Indigo San 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. Like those conversations are available. Like I would encourage everybody, if you really wanna geek out, like 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?

2:03:52We wanna find that thing that's gonna be the differentiator, but these things all tend to be kind of 1 % on top. And yet, we wanna indulge them more than we wanna indulge the thing that's gonna move us the 90%. But there are some interesting things, like my sense is that part of why you've kind of transitioned or graduated out of this science of endurance kind of career path is that became marginal gains in terms of like, you know, how it was lighting you up and 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.

2:04:33He's sort of, you know, the new guy on the scene who's like 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. Like you wanna root for this guy, you know, 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 like our ability to absorb carbohydrates and how he's studying competitive eaters and trying to figure out if he can just like make his body absorb more of these per hour, like he's gonna have this advantage, seems to be working, bicarb, ketones, all these sort of things.

2:05:09So how are you thinking about some of these, maybe not, I don't know if these are new ideas, but he's sort of really going deeper into them than anybody else that I've seen recently? 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, you know, even something, you know, 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 I'd be, this is gonna be really exciting to see how this develops. And then five years later, it's like, there's still been no other studies that I'd realize, oh yeah, there's, you know, Sometimes things get published just because it was a lucky, lucky break.

2:05:51So electric brain stimulation is a great example of that where there was really good data and I wrote about it in Endure. No one's talks about that anymore. It just kind of faded away. So I was drifting towards the sort of danger zone of ultra skeptical. Yeah, you're getting a little buzz killy in some of your pieces. 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 out down the pike with claims that this is gonna make you faster.

2:06:35Super 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. Even in the last month, a whole bunch of indoor world records. Five world records or something or five American records and a couple of 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 you know what are the ingredients and so there's some things that i've so of things that i think are interesting in recent years super shoes definitely work hydrogel carbohydrate drinks um explain that so morton is the company that introduced this idea and basically the problem with carbohydrate as 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.

2:07:46You 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 it's just bad news. You put it in, if you encapsulate the carbohydrates in a hydrogel, which in your stomach, it 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 how 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.

2:08:18There 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. Yeah, that's like grandma stuff.

2:08:57Yeah, the story I always like to tell about baking soda is that when I was in the 90s, when I was in college, it was banned. And you couldn't ban baking soda itself because it's the technique of soda loading. The idea here is when you do hard exercise, your bloodstream, your muscles are getting more and more acidic. Once lactate rises, baking soda is a base. The 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 an indoor track meet, I took my teammates water bottle by accident and took a swig right after a race.

2:09:28And 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 it 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 uh got to stay on the relay got my first trip to nationals in college was because my teammate had put himself in the toilet with uh so that was the problem so everyone knew soda loading worked but it was just a really unpleasant morton this hydrogel company a couple years ago started trialing a hydrogel version of baking soda.

2:10:03So 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 two minute races, like 800 meters. Now, you know, Killian Jornet is taking baking soda in ultra marathon races to go up hills and stuff like that. 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. Yeah, and particularly if there's, you know, in a cycling race, there are surges.

2:10:39In 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 that. And allow you to, you know, quicker acclimate to baseline after a hard effort. 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.

2:11:15Then 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.

2:11:49a 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. What's interesting about Roche is he's kind of an explorer. right? He's going to uncharted territory, you know, track and field, cycling, these sports, they've been kind of the way they are for a very long time, which has allowed people to study what works and what doesn't.

2:12:30Ultra 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 kind of like 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 make that distinction. Yeah, he's doing this on top of like, just this robust endurance engine that he's had for a very long time. But it is, you know, kind of contrary to traditional thought around like how to perform at your peak in races, you know, up to 100 miles.

2:13:23So 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 gonna change something. you do it again tomorrow. And now we're going to try the third condition. So ultra running, if we're talking about seeking areas of greatest uncertainty, it's a wild west. Like, 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 a hundred minute effort or a three hour, two hour effort.

2:14:10Around the marathon, things start to get a little weird, right? Because the people you'd expect to win don't always win because they just, 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 all these extrapolations that work in a range, you know, 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.

2:14:50And so when you get well beyond the marathon, like a hundred 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 a hundred miles and it's like, they're irrelevant. 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, you know, how delicate is your stomach? How? Or what is the terrain like? What is the humidity like? Like all tiny little variables become meaningful when you extrapolate over that amount of time.

2:15:28Yeah, and those variables, everyone responds to them differently. 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 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 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 distinguishing themselves at the marathon distance. And because ultra running is still sort of this wild west and maturing kind of like subculture, as it continues to mature, I think we're gonna see elite track and field athletes at the middle distance, not just, you know, stop at the marathon, but continue to progress, especially if, you know, prize money and purses, you know, if there's money to be made in ultra running.

2:16:33And what happens when you have like a legit, like, you know, world-class runner who's been running, you know, at a very high level at various distances for most of their adult life steps into the running, in the ultra running world. And I think there's just so much like, you know, the opportunity there to like push the limits. And Roche will say this, he's like, I don't think we have any idea of like what we can actually do at these distances yet. We're just at the beginning. It is interesting. Like, 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 like Olympic 800 meter runners.

2:17:11And it used to be that there was one guy, Rod Dixon, who had been a great 1500, 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, it was awful. After 30K, after 20 miles, my legs were just hammered.

2:17:48Like just, I was not even breathing hard, but my quads were just like out of 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 gonna 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?

2:18:30It's one thing to ask the 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'll 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. Yeah, I think that's accurate. I mean, Western States is very different from like Comrades or something, you know, like that's a road, you know, these are different.

2:19:07Although it's a hilly walker. Yeah, yeah, that's true. But it's sort of like straight line, you know, that thing. But I think it'll be interesting to see. And just to like play fantasy football type, like what happens if like someone like Cole Hawker is just like, you know what? Like, I'm just gonna, I really just wanna go right into ultra running now, and I'm gonna spend five years trying to figure out how to do this. Like just somebody who's like that good. There will be a SWAT team from Nike in a helicopter, dispatched, put them in a burlap bag, take them to a room and he will decide he wants to run the 1500 after all.

2:19:41All right, I could talk to you forever. We gotta wrap this up, but maybe just put a button on like 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. 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. It's not, you know, you don't go out and running because you did something wrong. So find an activity that you enjoy doing.

2:20:19Find a context in which you enjoy doing it. You know, whether it's the with people, without people, alone, or, you know, 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 wanna see how fast I can do a 10K. But if you can figure out a way 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.

2:21:02That'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 wanna go do something else. Yeah. What was your PR at 1500 meters? It was 342.43. Yeah. Which if you convert that with the World Athletics official points table is like 400.02. It's right on the rivet of breaking the four minute mile. So I will - You and Steve share more in common than - I don't think it's a coincidence entirely. Like I think if Steve or I had run 335 or whatever, 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 wanna keep digging.

2:21:49Yeah, that's super interesting. I asked you only because I just wanna make sure that people listening understand that you know what you're talking about. Like this is a four minute miler guy who's telling you to go out and have fun. 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. Yeah, amen. The book is The Explorer's 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.

2:22:27Thanks so much, Rich. It was a real pleasure. We'll do it again soon. Maybe we don't have to wait seven years to do it. I'd like to have you and Steve here together. I think that would be really fun. Yeah, I haven't seen it. Can we make that happen? I would love that. All right, I'll work on it. Peace, cheers.

2:22:52That'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 at richroll.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 at 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.

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2:24:32Plants. Namaste.