How Adventure Changes Who Are You - Alex Hutchinson

episode 46 to episode 916, something like that. You You had to do 900 more people before you were ready for It's very important. Look, that was the level of tank emptying that I went through just having a straight up conversation with you. It's really um It's great. I was saying before we started, it's really cool to watch the arc of people who you get to collaborate with and how that sort of progresses over time. Yeah, it's I mean, exactly. Back at you. I I I was think I've been thinking a lot in the days leading up to this interview of like, wow, you know, 2018 things were very different for both of us and and the conversation I had with you in 2018 was such a pleasant surprise and I'm glad to see that uh other people thought that your uh your interview abilities were were as good as I did. Yeah. Well, we'll see if I can uh keep you. No pressure. No pressure. I was going to say sort of pleasant uncertainty today abound. We'll see. We'll see what I can achieve. Um, you've got interested in explorers. Why? What what what's interesting about explorers? Yeah. I mean, what's not interesting about explorers? I I you know, so where did this book start? I mean, since I was like 5 years old. I loved the idea of pretending that I was an explorer in the woods discovering things. But really, I think this book started actually around the time we spoke after my last book came out. Uh, I I wrote a book about endurance in 2018. And this is not intended as a gratuitous plug for that book, but the the the book did well and it was the culmination of about 10 years, let's say, of really focusing in on the science of endurance. Really narrowing and narrowing on an ever decreasing specialty. Um, and it did well enough that I was like, "Hey, cool. I can be the science of endurance guy for the rest of my life. I can coast on, you know, I should start working on Endure 2, you know, revenge of the science of endurance." Mhm. And there's a lot of reasons that that would have been a really smart thing to do, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it actually didn't sound that interesting to me. And I I got interested in my lack of interest. I wondered why why do I have this pull to do something new? And it connected with a lot of other areas of my life. Why when I go on vacations do I like to try and get as far away far off the beaten track as I can? Why am I always pulled to the unknown? And so I decided actually I'd kind of like to to know the answers to those questions. Maybe I'll write about I'll research that and turn that into my next book. Yeah, it's uh the difficult second album, especially if you've had some success with what you did first. My editor was very reassuring to me. He kept he kept telling me second books are the hardest because this one was a struggle. This one was uh it was a year late. Like I'll say that was I I missed the deadline by a year, which is not something that's usual for me. I'm usually a pretty good deadline hitter. Uh and I I really really struggled because it was first of all yeah there's I mean there's expectations there's living up to previous work but also this topic is is such a big one when you so when I say I'm interested in exploration it's like oh you mean Christopher Columbus or whatever and I'm like yes and and you know when you go to a restaurant do you order the same thing or do you try something new and on your career path and in your dating life and all these other so I suddenly realized that I was basically writing about the world and So, I could have event, you know, I could have the topic, the more threads I pulled, the bigger the topic got. And eventually, uh, bless my editor, he find I was like, "Yeah, I think I can get you something by April." And he's like, "No, I'm going to need it by February 15th." I was like, "Oh, thank God. He gave me a deadline." Okay. Why are humans drawn to explore then? What what is it that's in us that causes this to happen? Well, there's there's two ways we can answer that question. Like, one reason is we explore because it leads to good things. If you're uh if you're not just staying in the same sphere, if you're branching out, looking trying to figure out what's over the horizon, you will eventually discover better things and you will have better restaurant meals and a better career and you will find a better place to live and blah blah blah. So, a very sort of utilitarian exploring leads to good things. The other way of answering it is exploring feels good. It's like it's exciting to go somewhere new to discover something you haven't encountered before. And those two things go together, right? Like the reason exploring feels good is because in on an evolutionary level it led to good things. So it's in the same way that sugar is sweet and it leads us to seek calories. Uh exploring feels good and it leads us to expand our world and discover better ways of doing things. Those two things kind of in the same way that just because sugar is sweet doesn't mean we should always pursue the taste of sugar doesn't mean that we should always pursue novelty. Now that that scrolling through social media doesn't necessarily it it taps into that. um that circuitry, that desire for new things. It maybe doesn't teach us about the world, but ultimately exploring is good because it teaches us about the world and it and it's very satisfying. It's a it's a route to to meaning, I think. Yeah. The sort of adaptive reason for why humans need to explore. And I imagine as well that there's a big distribution when it comes to how exploratory people want to be because it wouldn't work for an entire tribe to just be full of people that want to climb up that hill over there. You need some people that going to stay behind and go, you can go up the hill. I'm I'm going to make sure that we don't all die. That's that's exactly right. Geneticists call this frequency dependent selection. And it's like there are if you look at human height, we've all kind of converged to a pretty similar range. there's a good height to be for a human, but if you look at things like introversion and extroversion or aggressiveness and things like that, it's actually good to have a a big mix of characteristics. You need some people with with some character characteristics and others with others. So exploring is absolutely one of those where and and you can see this in there's there's really neat data in for example in hunter gatherers where the the more exploratory people they thrive when you're when they're hunting and gathering and the more sort of I'm going to stay back and I'm going to consolidate what we know they do well when they're in for agriculture you know they they tend to be better nurse. So it's like and in any one society you need people who are pushing the boundaries but you also need people who are keeping the the fires burning at home. Does that suggest as more of the world has been explored that the world is now owned by the people who aren't explorers? Well I think a good example of that would be uh something like ADHD which maybe this is something we'll get into but the there's a gene that's linked to the desire to explore which is also linked to ADHD. And so we might say that gene was awesome 50,000 years ago when we were hunter gatherers and the world was unexplored and we were trying to figure out how things worked and where we could go. That gene is a pain in the neck if you're a 9-year-old boy sitting in school being told yeah please sit still for the next 10 hours. So there are certainly ways that in the modern world being a born explorer is like being uh you know a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. There's still lots of scope. I would argue one of the things that I end up sort of one of the conclusions that I came away with that I that makes me feel good is that actually there's still lots of scope for exploration in the world. Even though there's no continents to discover, there's a lot of ways that we can explore. So I think it's a matter of finding a way to harness your your inclination whether that's to to be really exploratory or maybe less so. All right. Talk to me about the genetics of exploration then. Yeah. So genetics is obviously it's it's a uh a fraught topic, right? So I want to be not here. Not here, Alex. You're among safe friends here. We've all taken the behavioral genetics red pill. Nobody's going to hear this except you and me, right? So this is okay. Precisely correct. Yeah. So about 50,000 years ago, humans started to spread out across the globe. So there there are various humans and human ancestors and various species that had come and gone and bounced around in Africa, Europe, Asia for hundreds of thousands of years. But about 50,000 years ago, things got serious and all of a sudden, humans started to spread everywhere to every habitable spot on the globe, literally. So, they're they're making it to Easter Island. They're making it to the southern tip of South America. They're making it to the Arctic. Another thing that happened about 50,000 years ago is that there was a a random genetic mutation to a dopamine receptor in our brains. So, a receptor called DRD4 that basically for the people who got this mutation, it it amped up their sensitivity to dopamine such that they got a bigger kick out of discovering something new or or unexpected uh of finding, you know, finding novelty. And it it's what's very interesting what one of the p nuggets of science that got me interested in this topic that that told me there's something more to say other than just like hey it's nice to discover new things is that if you look at populations around the world and you trace how far they've had to migrate they had to migrate to get to their current location over the sort of tens of thousands of years since they they left Africa. the farther that population had to migrate, the higher the proportion of the explorers version of this DRD4 gene, the one that makes people seek and and like novelty. And so at the southern tip of South America, you've got populations that are have, you know, 80% of them have this explorer gene. And you know, in parts of Europe, you've got places where people have, you know, 10 or 20% have the explorers version of the gene. So, this doesn't mean that everybody in South America explores and nobody in Europe does, but it's it's a it's a it's a sign that this behavior is wired into us somehow because we all have the DRD4 gene. So, we all have the same reward circuitry that makes us sensitive or attracted to novelty. It's just some people have a higher a bigger helping than others. So, I did a a huge DNA analysis uh at the back end of last year and I've run I knew that I was going to speak to you today. So I asked chat GPT to go through my DNA report. Uh yes, you have a variant of the DRD4 dopamine receptor D4 gene. Your specific result is CA for the DRD4 C8887A variant. If you had two copies AA of this variant, you would be more likely to respond to stimulants due to lower baseline dopamine activity. Since you have one copy CA, you are less likely to respond to stimulants. Interesting. So and you can you can wrap all So dopamine is super complicated, right? like it it it affects our lives in many many different ways. But you can think in of of novelty and you know drugs for example. So here's the thing with here's one way of thinking about dopamine is that it doesn't you don't get a hit of dopamine when something is good. You get a hit when something is better than expected. So that's part of the reason why it drives us to explore because if you go in a place where you have don't know what to expect, that's a great way to to find something that exceeds your expectations. But it also it's the same kind of thing that drives actually addictive behavior. You take a drug for the first time, it's wa it's better than you expected. You want to do that again. You take it for the 10th time, you know exactly what to expect. So there's no more prediction error. You don't get the dopamine hit. The only way to do that is to amp up the dose to to get more because then you can surprise yourself. So there's a connection between a lot of risk risk-seeking behaviors and a lot of addictive behaviors, gambling behaviors. So exploring is great, but it's it's it's a this this drive can be harnessed in productive ways. It can also lead us down some some uh less productive ways, let's say. What's the truth and the BS behind dopamine that you've learned? I think the biggest um misconception let's say about dopamine is that it's like the pleasure chemical that it it's it's what you get when you feel feel good and in fact this has been known for 20 or 30 years that it's actually you you don't get a hit of dopamine again when something is good you get it something when it's better than expected so it's about expectation so it's about wanting something more than having it when the the pleasure of having something that's like endogenous morphine basically endorphins um the pleasure of wanting something, dopamine is related to that, but it also like the brain repurposes the same channels for different communication. So, every time I I'll be honest, I I had hoped to have the definitive theory of dopamine. Like people, I'm going to tell you what dopamine does. Here it is. Here's the truth. Here's the myth. And I don't my impression after spending an awful lot of time talking to scientists and reading the papers is that even scientists aren't entirely sure the full story of dopamine right now. So, um, so the the the message I would hope people would take away is it's not just a pleasure chemical and that the dopamine fasting idea, you know, the idea that, oh, we get too much dopamine in in society today. It's one of those things where I think the scientific underpinnings of that are not solid. It doesn't mean I think the advice is bad to actually try and, you know, maybe not always, you know, be the rat pressing the button saying, "Give me more, give me more, give me more." But, uh, but dopamine is is a lot harder to pin down than that. How do you or how can people design their lives so that they use dopamine more effectively or so that they can get more dopamine without having to do something insanely extreme or get addicted to meth? Yeah. Which is which is always a good plan. Um, I think I would go back to that distinction I made before between exploring can lead you to learn about the world and exploring can make you feel good. And I would say the dopamine part, like I think when we talk about dopamine, we're using it as a shorthand for saying let's do the things that give us a rush that feel good. And often that's mediated by dopamine. I think it's worth being thoughtful about is this good feeling does it does it align with also teaching me about the world or teaching me about myself taking me in somewhere that's worth going? Um or is this just empty calories? Is the is this the equivalent of just tearing open sugar packets and pouring them down my throat? Or am I eating an apple which is giving me some nice sugar but it's also giving me a bunch of other things that are useful. So I I I know it's it's easy to beat up on, you know, like Tik Tok or whatever, um, and say, "Oh, we're just wasting our lives with or even technology in general, right? Of the last 20 years, we can say, oh, modern technology is is rotting our brains." I and I don't think that's that's true or fair. But I think there are times when I sit scrolling the internet where I really am just sitting there like the rat pressing the button saying, "Give me something else that surprises me. Give me something else that's interesting. this, give me something else that outrages me. And when I do that, I'm tapping into my exploring circuitry. I I'm tapping into my dopamine circuitry, but I'm generally not like I don't finish and I'm like, "Wow, I'm a better person than I was, you know, six hours ago when I sat down in in the chair." So, there are other ways of exploring, be it reading a book or even on the internet, seeking out deliberately something where you're like, I'm going to learn something. I'm going to tune in to Chris's show and I'm going to, you know, hear a great conversation with that nice Alex guy. um you know or what you know like I'm I'm joking here but it's not that we don't want to get those hits. It's just that it's great if they also are leading us in a way that that is worthwhile too. Can people become too addicted to dopamine? Is that something that you've seen? You know, there's a really interesting book by uh Anna Lumpkkey, Dopamine Nation, which really gets into the uh the addictive elements of dopamine. And and I uh it's a little embarrassing when I'm thinking of like one of the examples I remember from the books. There were a lot of of examples of people who were like addicted to masturbating and I just remember like whoa that's a rough that's that's a rough road to travel. I mean, how uncomfortable is that going to be after a while? Um, so yeah, I I think you can and I think at least an Olympi makes a pretty compelling case that this is really a case of being addicted to dopamine. I think addiction is it's a word that that uh it carries a lot of weight and sometimes gets like so look I'm a I'm a runner, right? And so there's a lot of discussions about is running addictive? Do people get addicted to running? Do those people who have to get up every morning and go for their run, are they addicted to the endorphins or the endockinabonoids or whatever it is, whatever it is. And it's like, well, do they feel worse if they don't go for a run? Yeah, they feel worse if they don't go for a run. So, in some neuro, you know, in some neurochemical sense, you could say they're addicted to it. When you if you talk to like psychologists about the definition of addiction, there's other criteria like is it interfering with their life? Like, are they neglecting their family? or there are kids sitting at home saying, "I wish I could have breakfast, but mommy had to go for a three-hour run." If that's the case, then it's an addiction that's having a negative effect. And that's what we usually mean by addiction. Not just that it's something that we like doing every day. It's like, I'm addicted to having breakfast. It's like, well, I need to have breakfast, but it's not like a problem in my life. And so, with dopamine, it's like, yeah, there are people who are masturbating nine times a day, apparently. So, I read in in this this book, and that's probably not good. Most of us, I think it's more just like we may get in these loops and these cycles where we're, you know, I I certainly know this feeling of like, oh, where did that hour go? I just sat here on social media and I don't that, you know, I had things I needed to do and that was not optimal, but I wouldn't say like I'm addicted to it or anything like that. It's just a a sub-optimal use of time. Is there some link between dopamine and our sense of the passage of time? That's interesting. I I think I I don't actually know the the uh I I will confess that I that that's not a that's not a top. I mean the passage of time is is is a super interesting topic with like effort and I know that when when the harder you run for example the more time slows down and they've done careful studies on that. I I would imagine dopamine might play a role in that but I I think there's also like probably other neurotransmitters but also just the psychological um perception. But yeah, like it's there's definitely a time warp when you when you're sitting at the internet and all of a sudden you're like, "What the hell? How did that how did that happen?" All right, talk to me about uncertainty. What's the role that uncertainty plays? Yeah, I think so. If we're trying to like define exploring, there are a few elements uh you know that that the and I think that the first and foremost one is the outcome of what you're choosing to do has to be uncertain. And you know the maybe you could also argue there needs to be struggle and some other elements like that. But the uncertainty is really at the core of what we're talking about. Um not not knowing what's going to happen. It's it's not even just like should I take the 50/50 bet or the 3070 bet. It's like I don't even know what the odds are. I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen if I go in this direction. Um, but the only way I'm going to find out is by taking, you know, taking the path to the right that I don't know where it leads. And you you can argue on in a number of different ways, including with like neuroscience that we're wired to pursue uncertainty, to like uncertainty, to, you know, and you could there's data sets on like how people order food from Deliveroo, like the the food delivery company. The Harvard scientists analyzed 1.6 to six million orders to figure out like how do we decide when which what we want. And one of the insights was that all else being equal, we tend to like if the ratings are equal, if the price is equal, we tend to have a bias toward things we know less about. Both in the sense that if if I've never tried this before, I want to try it. But also we look at two restaurants, they're the same, one has 100 ratings and and the other has 10 ratings. even if they they both are four-st star restaurants. It's like I'll go for the four the 10 the one that's only been rated 10 times because I know less about it. So uncertainty is attractive to us on in an intrinsic way. And the key point is that it's not that we love not knowing stuff. It's that we love knowing stuff. And by by being attracted to uncertainty, it draws us to the best possible ways of learning about the world because that's where if if you stick with the stuff you know, you don't learn anything new. Presumably, there has to be a sweet spot though. too much uncertainty would just feel like chaos. Absolutely. And so in some of the papers they they call it the I I I'm not I'm not really sure how to pronounce this. I'm going to go with the want curve. Although I think in Vienna they would probably say the vaunt curve. uh there's a a famous German uh psychologist pioneering German psychologist in the psychologist in the 1800s named Wilhelm Vunt and he proposed this idea this sort of stimulus response curve that's a very general phenomenon where it's like for any given stimulus if it's weak we don't really find it very interesting as it gets stronger we find it more and more compelling but if it gets too strong understandably we're like yeah we don't like that anymore and so for uncertainty there's a lot of evidence that that this is the case even with like you can take like eight-month old babies and show them like patterns of toys coming out of a box or whatever. And if it's super predictable, it's always the same toy they're like, "Oh, boring." And you can you can track their gaze to see if they're interested in. And if it's super unpredictable, it's like always something different. They find that boring. But if there's some sort of regularity that's un it's not predictable, but it's not crazy and you sort of feel like you could figure out the pattern. That's what we tend to find interesting. That's what this vunt curve is about. It's like an upside down U. You want to be in that sweet spot where it's like I don't know what's going to happen next. But it's not just gibberish. It's like, you know, this applies to music for example. They've done analyses. It's like if music is super predictable, this is why, you know, after the age of 10, we don't find Mary had a little lamb that interesting. If it's super predictable, we don't find it all that compelling. But if it's just random tones, we don't find that compelling either. There's a sweet spot, but that sweet spot depends on our experience, too. So, if you spend a lot of time listening to music or playing music or studying music, you start to prefer more and more complex and less predictable music because you're getting better at predicting what comes next. I remember learning about a study that was done showing the faces of different sheep, newborn babies. Have you seen this one? No. I'm like, where is this going? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, if you were to show me, are you, uh, 10, 15 sheep? Um, unless they were very obviously different, we'd probably go, "Yeah, that could have been the same one over and over again." Um, it seems that infants have the ability to discern between different animals and that this is a cognitive process that kind of drops away like our ability to move our ears. I think that all humans have the ability to move their ears a little bit, but again, the muscles sort of atrophy a little bit. Yeah. No, not with your fingers. You You can move them manually yourself. I'm trying to do it right now. I just feel like I I look like an idiot. Yeah, it's not working. Um and uh after you get to a certain age, I don't know what the threshold is. Maybe it's sort of 8 months, maybe it's a year and a half, something like that. This um ability to be able to discern between different sheep or different cows or something, it sort of falls away. And it kind of makes me think about this too that you have uh if if we can't discern between different sheep even if they are different the level of uncertainty doesn't cross a threshold even though there is uncertainty there is that we're not able to detect it and that it needs to be above a particular threshold for us to go ah yeah different sheep that'd be interesting and what's it's really interesting that this is something that that kids can tune into because I think one of the themes in the research that I was looking at is like kids are really good explorers and part of that is that they're able to follow their own instinct. I mean they don't they have no other guidance. They don't know what they're supposed to be interested in. So they look at what interests them and and so they are very sensitive. Kids seem to be very sensitive to this intermediate level of uncertainty. um as I said, you know, eight months old or whatever, they're able to tune into what is is a fairly subtle difference in the in the sort of predictability of patterns. And as we get older, a lot of things happen. So, I don't know whether it's like we lose that ability or we just get taught like, no, this is what you need to be doing between the hours of 10 and 12 on Tuesdays or whatever. And so, we're we're we're following for reasons that are sometimes good. we're we're we're we're following um patterns that are laid out for us by society and we maybe get less good at understanding what's interesting to us intrinsically and the the the problem is that what's interesting to us intrinsically is the best signal we have of that intermediate level of uncertainty of this is where we can learn about the world but so you know when I you know I have this general feeling that we should quote unquote try to explore are more like children. It's hard to articulate what that means, but part of it, I think, is trying to tap back into that um innate sensation of understanding what you what you find interesting or curious or or inexplicable like, huh, why did that happen? I I'd like to know. I'd like to follow that up as opposed to just following someone else's curriculum or following what the algorithm algorithm is suggesting to you might be interesting. Well, reducing down predictability is going to help, but a lot of people get locked into their routines. I often think about this sort of tension between the enjoyment of serendipity and uncertainty and the, you know, reduction in the speed of the passage of time when things are novel and intense. And then also on the other side, the thing that everybody's trying to do, which is be optimal. And by optimal, what you mean is refine down all of the degrees of freedom to a point where you know the best path through a regularly uh uh traverse terrain. Like this is a situation that I come up against typically morning. Uh it's going to work. What's the best route to go to work? Well, I actually don't want to go past that set of traffic lights because if I hit it wrong and I try to go right, it takes ages. Google Maps doesn't even account for that. So, I'm going to take this route. I'm going to work around it. So you end up with all of the degrees of freedom just like collapsing in on a very small number of very effective, very efficient, but largely unnvel and unstimulating and unertain or very certain uh pathways through life. And um yeah, I guess that's the sort of perennial curse of the optimizer that you end up with a uh uninspiring but quite efficient existence. I think this is one of the like great tensions of modern life that we're I mean it's and it's a it's a it's a one of the processes of adulthood and growing older is that we become more and more efficient. We know what we like, we know what we don't like, we know what works, we know what doesn't work and so we converge on this ever narrow narrowing set of options and the there's you know there's a big um movement or a big literature on habits uh and how to form better habits and there's a lot of good reasons for that. I'm a big habit guy myself, but the fact is habits are the antithesis of exploration and you know, you mentioned commuting and that's a a a great example. Uh there was a a two-day strike on the London Underground in I think it was 2014 and it was an optional strike so workers could show up or not show up which meant that some stations were open and some weren't depending on how many people showed up at a given station. So for 2 days, people had to kind of they could still take the tube, but they had to adapt and say, "Oh, my st station isn't open or my destination station isn't open. I have to find a different route or get off at a different place." So this is taking the, as you said, the the the epitome of an optimized habit. You follow this commuting pattern twice a day, every day of your working life. You know how to get to work. But what they found in a big anal they analyzed the Oyster card data and they found that of the most hyperreular commuters the people who always took the same route every workday uh after the two-day strike about 5% of them adopted a completely different commuting pattern and basically they'd realized oh actually if I get off one stop earlier I can you know do it it's a it's a five minute walk instead of a 10-minute bus ride coffee shop that I like. Yeah. or it's a be you know it's a beautiful I could take the boat along the canal and it's lovely. Um and so the the point is that even repetition repetition doesn't guarantee that you find the best the optimal solution and that even doesn't account for the fact that hey maybe it's nice to just change up your routine sometimes but it's like even if you're an optimizer even if you're like I want the best uh habit doesn't always get you there. Sometimes you need you need you don't want to explore every morning. Like you don't want to wake up for work and say, "All right, I'm going to invent a new way of tying my shoes and then I'm going to decide which parts of my body to cover with clothing and then I'm going to try and figure out a completely different way to get to work." Because you're going to be late for work every morning. But having some exploration, not getting totally calcified into your routines, I think um again going to going back to this theme, it's both fun and it can lead to better outcomes. What about effort? Talk to me about the effort paradox. Yeah. So, this is the the the downside of exploring in some or this might seem like the downside of exploring is that it is hard. Let's say you decide to you want to find a new way to work. The most likely scenario is that you're going to get lost or you're going to take longer. It's going to suck. That's I mean there's a reason you're taking the route you have been taking. So, and that's true I think in general of any exploratory choice. Going back to what we said before, it's by definition the outcome is uncertain. And in most cases, on average, it's actually going to be worse than what you already know. So like ordering in a restaurant, if you if you know what dish you like in that such and such a restaurant, and then you decide, h maybe I should try the the you know, the meatloaf or whatever, chances are it's going to be worse than what you already know you like. And so that seems like exploring sucks. It's it just brings you negative outcomes. Now, in the long term, by exploring, you're going to discover things that work out to be better. But there's another angle, which is that actually doing things that are challenging that that involve some struggle, getting lost now and then can actually be extremely satisfying. And so there's this idea of the effort paradox in psychology, which is that sometimes the harder we have to work at something, the more we like it. And whether that's, you know, running a marathon or whatever, people don't run a marathon because it's easy. They run it because it's hard. Like sometimes you may start I want to get in shape so I'm going to start running. But people who run more than one marathon they're they're actually they're attracted to the difficulty of it and you know you can extend that to like buying furniture at IKEA. Uh you can probably get a similar piece of furniture preassembled. Uh, but people have done studies of what's called the IKEA effect that if you've had to struggle with those, you know, pictographic instructions and figure out how that Allen key works and all that stuff. You put the coffee table together, you end up valuing that coffee table more highly than if you'd got the exact same coffee table just delivered to your door pre-assembled. So, there's something in us that values effort. What that is is is uh it's hard to pin down, but there's there are a few studies that have been emerging in the last couple years suggesting that putting in effort can is a is a source of meaning. People people can't define the meaning of life, but they can tell you when something feels meaningful. And doing hard things tends to feel meaningful. I wonder whether that plays into relationships sometimes, the uh classic I only want them if they don't want me dynamic. Oh man, that's an interesting uh an interesting proposition. or the, you know, the stormy relationships where it seems like you're having to work at it at all times. I mean, I think there's probably a little bit there that relationships that are too easy tend to get, you know, I I don't want to tar and paper people's or, you know, be negative about relationships, but if it's just totally without strife, without any tension, then it maybe feels a little boring and you you Well, it doesn't it doesn't even need to be tension or strife, right? effort, you know, if it's just always there and and I mean, look, I I peace is the most important thing in my life. So, for me, uh the more peaceful the better. But, um even within that, you don't want something to be again so predictable, no uncertainty, no intrigue. Um so, with this uncertainty and effort um sort of dynamic that's going on, how do you advise people to better embrace struggle? Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing to to to recog is is to just to recognize that just because something is hard doesn't mean it should be shied away from. And in fact, some, you know, it's like with with a hat tip to Michael Easter, who who's uh whose email list is called 2% because that's the percent of people who take the uh stairs when there's both the stairs and an escalator available. It's like you look at the stairs and you look at the escalator. It seems obvious that going up the stairs or going up the escalator is going to be a more pleasant and better experience. But when you take the stairs, I I I you know, I I don't think it's just me. It's like it's it's it's much more satisfying to have put in a little effort. and and recognizing that putting in effort is going to lead you to feel good is uh you know it does it doesn't make the effort go away but it helps you reframe it as something that's positive not negative. This is an opportunity for me to put in effort which is going to make me feel good as opposed to I'm obliged to take on something hard. Can that tying that back to your first uh book? Can that help us with resilience, endurance, suffering, hard times? I mean, I think it's it's almost a precondition that you if you're trying to push yourself, if you're trying to handle difficult times, if if you view every negative feeling as as a as a sort of disaster, as something that that is as a negative, then it's just a miserable experience and you're you're going to be inclined to quit earlier. And if you can reframe that and just and it's in the same way that one of the things I talked about in endure is the is the power of your inner monologue, right? Like if you're running a marathon and you're telling yourself, "This is so hard. There's no way I can do this. I better I'm going to drop out." That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because your ability to continue depends in part on on what your brain believes about your ability to continue. And if you can turn that around to um I can do this. This is that, you know, I've trained for this. it's I know it's hard, it's supposed to be hard, everybody else around me is feeling it the same way. This is part of the experience. Then that becomes a uh a performance-enhancing uh frame of mind. And I so I think recognizing that effort can be it it doesn't mean that it doesn't make it easy. It doesn't change how hard it is, but recognizing that it's not a symbol a signal that you're doing something wrong and that it actually can be something good. I think that that helps you endure it for longer. You're less likely to to quit on things. Have you thought about how people can avoid seeing all of life instrumentally if if everything is done in service of what you get out of it in the future, you actually end up spending all of your days uh delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification. It's like winning the marshmallow test over and over again every single day, but never cashing it out. Yeah. you've you've touched on one of the one of the big dilemmas and something that I really struggled with and that evolved as I was writing this book in my mind when I started thinking about exploring. I thought I'm going to write a book and the subtitle is going to be something along the lines of, you know, the case for why we should explore more or the case for more exploring. But as I got into it, I I I I started to have the thoughts that you've just expressed of like, oh wait, like it's like think of listening to music, for example. It's like most people tend to uh you find the music you love when you're young, when you're in your teens and 20s, and then most people tend to listen to less and less new music as as time goes on. And there's there's, you know, it's not totally irrational because you you've spent some time exploring now. You know what you like. So, but you might say that's a that's a shame. we should explore more. I'm not going to I'm not going to fall victim to this narrowing of my taste. I'm going to keep exploring new music. And I think that's great. But if you were to take that to extreme and say in fact I'm never going to listen to the same song twice because exploring is what it's about. Then it's that we can see on that's absurd on on the face of it, right? But it's that's that's the the the perspective of like always keep exploring, always keep looking to the future and never stop and like I really love this song. I'm gonna listen to it 17 times in a row on repeat uh even if my my wife kills me. Uh so you do have to stop and enjoy it. I think that's a really it so in a in a sense there's this idea in decision science called the explore exploit dilemma. And it is a dilemma. It's not like explore exploit. You should always explore. Whenever you come to the a fork in the road take the road less traveled. It's you've got to think about maybe now's the time to exploit to to take the music that I just discovered and and sit down and listen to it or to to to figure out what I I you know or maybe it's not maybe maybe this is a good time to explore but it's not it's a lot less obvious than I thought it was for precise precisely the reasons you said that yeah you if you never stop and enjoy where you got then I'm not sure that the exploring is super satisfying. How can people better navigate that explore exploit trade-off? Yeah. So, I went down a big rabbit hole on this. I I was like, I'm I'm a I I come from a physics background. I'm a quantitative guy. I want the formula that will tell me when to explore exploit. And you know, I guess I apologize for for chapter five in my book, which which kind of follows that tries to tries to follow that rabbit hole because there is a ton of like attempts to uh produce a formula. And it turns out the math is in any real world context, the math is is ridiculous and and becomes very hard to follow. But there are some big principles that I think that come out of the math but that also are practical in a in a in a like day-to-day scenario. One one concept is this is the idea of an uncertainty bonus that and this we we kind of do this intuitively but it I think it helps to think of it in terms of it consciously and this is when you're considering a decision you don't automatically opt for the one you know less about or the the the the unexplored road. But the less you know about an option that you give a a bonus that's proportional to how little you know about it. So you say all else being equal, I'm going to take the one that's that I know less about. Um, so so that that kind of helps to make sure you're you're you're not getting too calcified into that sort of set of habits you're talking about. It's not it's not the only factor you consider, but it's like I'm going to add a bonus if it's going to teach me something new or take me down a fresh path. And then the one other uh kind of heruristic that that I think is useful that this is a sort of approximate way of solving this explore exploit dilemma. It's it's something called the upper confidence bound algorithm. And that's the math version. And the way they translate that into regular language is optimism in the face of uncertainty. That you should be optimistic about uh the choices you make. And what that means in practice is that if you're choosing between options, you should take the scenario with the best case or the best realistic upside or the the best realistic best case scenario. So realistic is in there because it's like I'm not saying buy a lottery ticket because it's best case scenario is you're a millionaire because that's unlikely to happen. But for for uh for for scenarios that are realistic, it pays to be optimistic. So an example I I guess would be you're considering different job possibilities. One has a higher starting salary and is stable and so that's that's a real positive. The other maybe less money, a little less stable, but it has a pathway towards your dream job. It has a pathway to what you actually really want to be doing in the long term. It's it's all else being equal, it's probably worth taking a shot on that because that's the the uh the optimism in the face of uncertainty that I don't know how things are going to turn out, but that's the that's the being optimistic. If things do turn out, that's the one that'll make me happiest. And what the math shows is if you individual decisions, you all bets are off. It might turn out well, it might turn out poorly. But in the long term, if you're optimistic in the face of uncertainty, this will minimize your regret. This will minimize you looking back and saying I wish I had done that. And I think that makes intuitive sense as well as mathematical sense. It's like you don't look back and say uh you're more likely to look back and say I wish I had asked that person to dance than I really regret asking that person to dance and they said no. Yeah. Dig into regret minimization a bit more for me. Yeah. I I wasn't sure how how uh how mathematical to get. Regret in the mathematical sense is it's the difference between what outcome you got and the best you could have gotten if you'd made magically made all the right choices. Nobody has a crystal ball. So nobody can make all the right choices all the time. So but regret is like often the you know you can you can think of these sort of decision trees in as gambling games. In reality you know we may be talking about careers or dating decisions but it's like I bet $5 on this I bet $10 on that. which which you know which machine should I have bet on? And maybe the best you could have done in a series of 10 bets is getting a $100. And if if you get if you made a series of bets and ended up with $70, your regret is $30. Um so that's the mathematical way of thinking about it. And because nobody is perfect, nobody has clairvoyance. regret always increases, which is kind of a depressing thing to say, but there's no way of going through life without accumulating some regrets of thinking, uh, I kind of wish I had asked her to dance, not the other one. Um, we accumulate regret. But so the goal is not to eliminate regret because that's impossible, but to minimize regret. And the math shows that this kind of optimism in the face of uncertainty is one way of guaranteeing that over the long term your regret will will increase as slowly as is realistically possible unless you find the magic genie with the three wishes. Yes. Yeah. Very which I'm looking for. Yeah. You know like that would be nice. Uh so you know we sort of I guess talked about environmental lifestyle sort of external exploration. What have you come to learn about cognitive exploration thinking patterns our seeking of new behaviors our seeking of new information algorithms modern world stuff like that. Yeah. So, you know, when I initially started on this topic, I was like, I'm interested in exploring uh I think it's more than just about like the way I take my vacations or whatever. I think it's also about ideas, but it's like an it's an analogy. It's a metaphor. And what I was really surprised to discover is that actually no, it in your brains it's like the same thing. You when you're wandering through a town that you've never been to before, you are mapping it in your hippocampus. So you're forming cognitive maps. Like literally there are individual neurons that will light up when you go to a specific point on that map that are and and there are other neurons that will keep track of what direction you're facing and how close you are to the borders of that town. You're you're building maps in your brain. There's a famous study about London cab drivers that their hippoc campuses are enlarged. That's why because they are mapping a very complicated city. So their hippocampuses actually have to get physically bigger. So it turns out that the hippo campus isn't just a place for mapping uh like landscapes. It's a place for mapping ideas too and we keep track of ideas. And so this ideas that are close to each other or far away from each other. This is a physically manifested in the brain. And so you know one example is we keep track of our social networks in the hippocampus. And so you can think of like we know people. We have some sense of like hierarchy. Are they more powerful than us than less power or less powerful than us? And how well do we know them? Like are they close to us? And so that's a two-dimensional map. And people literally map their social networks in this in their hypo campus in this two-dimensional way. So all of this is to say that when we talk about different ways of exploring, exploring and exploiting um these really this is this is intimately tied to creativity and coming up with new ideas, expanding our cognitive maps of ideas. And so there's a bunch of there are a bunch of interesting findings that that that fall out of that about how we should mix exploring and exploiting to come up with better ideas. is in this context is exploration and curiosity the same thing similar thing related I think they're very very closely related curiosity is is a name for the drive that compels us to explore I would say and you know I'm not a dictionary guy but but that's that's how I would classify them and so I think curiosity um yeah a lot of the same discussion applies and exploration is what you actually end up doing once because of curios Desi you talk about humans becoming smarter but less creative. Yeah. So there's a there's a well-known effect called the Flynn effect and it's been like a century now. IQ scores keep going up gradually and so they have to keep rebalancing the scores every few years. Um there's a lot of debate about why this is probably just that the modern world requires a requires a lot more abstract cognitive you know abstract thinking than uh than it did to be a you know a hunter gatherer a long time ago or even a farmer. That's one effect. What's less wellknown is that there are similar tests that that assess creativity. There's once something a set of tests called the Torrance tests for creative thinking and they also have to reanormalize those scores periodically but that's because the scores keep dropping. uh kids are getting less creative. And so between about 1990 and 2008 there was a significant drop and after from 2008 to 2017 which was the next re reormalization there was a a much steeper drop and it's you know it's tempting to to oh like what happened between 2008 and 2017 let's see when did I get my first smartphone and when did social media r you know like um all of that is speculative but the the the fact is there's evidence evidence that creative thinking uh the ability to just come up with uh you know totally new ideas is maybe going down and and I should say that there's it's not just these tests of kids if you look there's been big analyses of patents and of scientific papers finding that the the number of breakthroughs or disruptive papers that really take a field in a different direction uh seems to be dropping. M I need to dig into some of your other stuff just for a moment. The cognitive thing sort of got me thinking. Um talk to me about recent data. You must have looked at this exercise, activity, physical activity and mental health. Like where are we at with that current world? Yeah, actually it's good timing. I wrote about that recently uh because there was a big study. There was a big skeptical study because so people like me I'm a I'm a you know health and fitness journalist. So I'm always like the best thing you can do for your mental health is is exercise. You know it'll cure your depression. It'll grow your hair back. It'll do all these great things. Um I try not to be a booster but it's it's hard not to. It's you know I I guess I'm a strong believer in the power of exercise. So there was a big review recently that said hang on h how good is the evidence really that exercise promotes mental health and the ev the overall conclusion is the exercise is pretty good but it's really hard to to tease out what so so for example there's a lot of studies that find that exercise can be as powerful as for depression can be as powerful as cognitive behavioral therapy or of anti-depressants It it depends on the population a little bit, but exercise really has powerful effects. But the question is, is it because there's more blood pumping to your brain or there's more uh you know, BDNF or other sort of brain chemicals being produced that promote the formation of good connections in between your neurons? Or is it because if you get in an exercise habit, you have a feeling of self-efficacy. You feel like, hey, I I I set this goal for myself and I'm I'm doing it. I'm I'm really doing something good for myself. and actually I'm meeting my friends there three times a week and I'm having some social interaction and so there's a lot of things that go along with taking up exercise and so it's not entirely clear um which of these are the are the key ones and what's doing what. So I think it's it's a very there's very strong evidence that uh uh exercise both maintains and promotes and and can actually sort of cure quote unquote not cure but ameliate uh mental health but we don't know exactly why or whether you could get the same thing out of joining a bridge club or or something like that. Yeah. How much of it is the pro-social getting yourself out of the house structure of your day? How much of this is uh I guess just straight up selection bias for who it is that who what's the cohort of people who are the sort of people that are prepared to do that. Exactly. And what about uh the link between exercise and brain health? Is that something else that's uh been sort of reassessed? I think the evidence is pretty strong that exercise either increases or slows the decline in the size of some brain regions. This is another topic I looked at recently where you look at it and you can find this. I can find studies that that make me feel really good. It's like exercise is going to make your brain super healthy for you know the no matter how old you get. But you can also find studies that that that don't find as strong an effect or that say, oh, it seems to maintain the size of this region of the brain but not that one. And those sorts of findings always give you pause because then it's like h there's no reason it should be selectively. So I excuse me. If I were summing up, my impression of the evidence is that exercise has actual positive structural effects on the brain which will in turn help ward off cognitive decline, delay or you know maybe even prevent depending on how long you can delay it or at the very least slow down cognitive decline. So I think that's you know when I'm getting out of bed on a cold winter morning that's that's one of the most powerful mo motivators for me. Um, I'd be, you know, the truth is the evidence is not like bulletproof at this point, but it's I find it I find it convincing enough to get me out of bed. Put it that way. If you were to lay at the feet of a particular style of exercise, what you think gives the most benefits to brain health? What would it be? Yeah, I'm hopelessly biased here. Like, look, I was a, you know, a former columnist for Runners World magazine. Um, and I've been a runner since I was 15. I think aerobic exercise that that's a doing my best to put aside my biases. I think aerobic exercise probably packs the biggest punch uh for brain health for for that we're talking for physical brain health and not necessarily for the mental health aspects where I don't think it's clear which is better. Um, I certainly try and do both like both uh resistance exercise and aerobic exercise and I also like playing like games that involve team orientation which I think is also a like another aspect of brain health is like are you using your brain during exercise? And there's a little bit of uh evidence that doing things like coordination games like juggling or you know playing football or basketball um that that's even better for your brain because you're using your neurons at the same time that all these growthpromoting things are happening. Uh so I would I would go with running but with such a small margin that the bigger factor I would say is whatever exercise you enjoy and are willing to do you're likely going to get a benefit. So, it's not like other forms of exercise don't have the benefits. What What's the truth on zone 2 at the moment? There was a period everyone was super into zone 2. That was the hot new goal in school. Now it's V2 max training and zone 2 is out the window. What's I imagine that this is a this is like a Kardashian getting divorced in your world. the the there will be more fads and they will be interesting. Actually, like zone 2 and V2 max are actually if you were if you were using modern buzzwords to describe the training of champion endurance athletes, you would say eh about 80% zone 2 and 20% V2 max. Um that's that's kind of what they do, I would say. So in terms of the zone 2 stuff, I think it's true that it's a very effective way of both getting fit for performance and also for metabolic health. Maybe more importantly, my main quibble with it would be I think it's been sometimes prescribed in an overly specific way. Uh that it's not like zone 2 is magic and zone 2.1 is nothing and zone 1.9 is you might as well not get out of bed. In fact, there's a new there's a new paper that just came out from a panel of experts in the last week or two that that among other things makes this point that they're saying that their consensus is like zone 2.5, zone 3.5, it's a continuum. Um, and so you don't need to stress about it. I actually I wrote about zone 2 for the New York Times, I don't know, last month maybe. um trying to make this point that it's like yeah it's good but don't don't you know you don't have to like be pricking your fingers to test lactate every two minutes to make sure you don't accidentally get out of zone two and I was thinking I was a little worried that I'd created a straw man I was like do people really believe that you have to be this precise and I got an email afterwards from someone who was saying thank god you wrote this morning I was out for my run and I was sprinting down a hill because I wanted to keep my heart rate high enough to stay at the magical zone two and I tripped and I fell. And as I was walking home bleeding, my watch kept beeping at me, telling me that I was outside of zone 2. And I was thinking to myself, there has to be a better way. And I was like, okay, it wasn't the straw, man. There are people who have taken this very literally that you have to be exactly at the magical zone 2. And I don't think that's correct. But the idea of I think this is like a a great misunderstanding is that endurance athletes train hard all the time. And in fact, it's like 80% of the time out there conversational pace having a having a laugh and and uh maybe not enjoy enjoying it in the way that the effort paradox allows us to enjoy it, which is that it we're doing a challenge. We're doing something somewhat difficult, but not killing ourselves. Then 20% of the time you go out and you try and find God by pushing yourself really hard, but uh but not all the time. Zone 2 is still king. Zone 2. Yeah, if if the the it it's the largest component it or somewhere near it is the largest component of the territory of zone 2. The territory in and around the blast radius of of zone 2. That that's right. If you can see it with your binoculars, you're doing okay. Okay, cool. Uh getting back to exploration, did you make any changes to your life after looking at this book? What what is this netted out practically? So there's there's the vague big picture things, but I'll give you a a a concrete practical thing, which is that I do my best not to turn on the turn turnbyturn directions in my in my car when I'm going out or even, you know, on my phone when I'm going for a walk. Um, this is for a couple reasons. One is that it's like, okay, like I'd like to be a little more present in my environment and be looking out the window instead of looking at my screen. But actually there's there's you know in the book I have a little bit of I spoke to some neuroscientists who are actually concerned about this who are actually concerned that just as London cab drivers have enlarged hippocampus because they've learned so much about their environment people who use what's known as stimulus response navigation that is who just follow like turn left here turn right there turn left and we can do that with you know with or without GPS their hippocampuses They're not using their hippocampus. They're using a different part of the brain called the codate nucleus. And that actually translates into different, you know, your hippocampus gets smaller and your codate nucleus gets bigger. And this over life when we're kids, we we're all we're all uh hippo campus. We don't know our way around the world. So, we're cognitive mapping everywhere we go trying to figure out where we are. As we get older, we learn to use this stimulus response approach because it's faster, it's more efficient, it's less prone to errors. But the problem is as as the world gets more and more optimized, as I can get into my car and just press a button and I never even have to know my own neighborhood, then we're not using our hypoc campuses as much. And that leads them to them being smaller. And there there is research and it's it's a chain of logic that isn't you know uh nobody has shown that turning on your GPS is going to make you get dementia but there is a chain of logic that people who rely mo most on stimulus response navigation have smaller hypocampus people have smaller hippocampuses are that is a known risk factor of conditions like Alzheimer's uh PTSD uh depression so I I don't want to oversell But I would say even with caveats, my takeaway has been I I look at I I figure out where I'm going. I look at the directions. I try and figure out understand where I'm going and then I turn it off until I until I need it. And so I don't use the turnbyturn directions. And that means I get lost sometimes. And that means I have my kids chirping me from the back seat saying like, "Mom, mommy uses ways. Mommy wouldn't have missed that turn. Why don't you use ways?" And I'm like, "Kids, we're going to be 90 seconds later than we would have." Like, simmer down and think about my hippo campus. Okay. Exactly. Think of the hippo campy. Yeah. So, that's Yeah, that's a concrete thing. What would you say to people who like the thesis that you're putting forward, but still are met with a degree of discomfort when it comes to the prospect of exploring novelty, uncertainty? No. [ __ ] you, Alex. I I quite I quite like my certainty. I don't want I don't want to. Where would you go sort of existentially, philosophically, mantra wise? Like, what can people use to rely on to help them feel more comfortable in their new world of exploration? Well, if this was at a cocktail party, I would say that's great. You're you're fine. Like, I'm not going to train. I'm not You don't need to. You do you. But if if if they were open to gentle nudging, the question I would ask them, I think, is are you doing anything in your life where you don't already know the outcome? Is there anything you do this today or this week or this month or this year that isn't the same as what you were doing a year ago or five years ago? Uh it cuz if not then when you think about it that way you might think huh you know there was a time in my life when every day I went to school or whatever and and learned something new or did something different or learned a skill or tried a game and and that's actually can be really rewarding. So, I would say if if you can't you don't have to go to the South Pole to be exploring, but if if you're not if there's not some area of your life where you're pushing into territory where you don't know how it's going to turn out, whether it's exploring new music or uh taking up a new hobby or wandering through your neighborhood through by a different group than you normally do, you know, these are all these are all steps on a on a very broad scale. scale uh and you can be anywhere on that scale, your your your want curve uh is different from everybody else's want curve and it will change throughout life. But if you're way on that left side of the want curve where everything is predictable, everything is the same, you've optimized everything to the point of of total predictability, um consider consider that you might enjoy a surprise now and that. Yeah, I have been trying over the last couple of months to live the philosophy that I don't necessarily know what's best for me all the time. I typically do. Yeah. But there's a degree of what do you say? Self-nowledge, self-management, lifestyle design, narcissism. It doesn't affect anybody else, but you know, it's just no, no, no, I know. I know what's I know what I want to order from Flower Child. I don't want to try that new thing. I know the best route to get to Gold's Gym at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday. And um yeah, I'm trying to as somebody that quite likes control, somebody that likes to reduce down uncertainty, uh I would say I have maybe like probably quite a lot of people, I love adventure, I have a lot of curiosity inside of me, but I also uh like control. I don't like to feel like stuff's out of control. I like order. I like structure. I like having a routine and uh these two things, you know, um the tension exists between the the ears. Yeah, there's a definite yin and yang. And I'm I'm like you. I must I'm actually I would describe myself as like a recreational optimizer. It's like no, seriously, I know how we should load the dishwasher. Like if you put that plate there, then we're not going to get as much water on that and there will be like I I've thought this through. I've gamed it out. I've performed the experiments. So don't load the dishwasher this other way. And there's a fun in the optimization, but but it is in tension with my my simultaneous desire to have adventures. So I would think I think of this in the context of like going on vacations. My my wife and I or my my family and I, we we do some some fun like backpacking. I do some canoeing where we're the goal is to get out and to be to have an adventure. And yet the in the instinct is also let's Google and see if we can find trip blogs from anybody else who's done this trip. We'll find pictures of every everything we're going to see there. We'll know exactly what to expect. We'll know whether we need to bring crampons. We'll know whether we need this or that. And we will be fully prepared for this. And then you go on the trip and it's like all right it's exactly what I expected. So hang on. Why did I come here if I already did all the research? these these these impulses are constantly at war and and and always will be I think and sometimes you just need to give a push. And so I it was interesting last summer my my we my family we did a hiking trip in the Pyrenees and my wife and I were both super busy leading up to it and we got there when we were like holy crap we actually didn't do our usual like obsessive level layer of research on this hiking route. M um it was awesome. So we each day we're like well let's figure out what's coming next cuz we don't know we didn't we didn't research it. So and then that's a lesson that I'm I'm trying to keep in mind that it's like yeah control and optimization are great but sometimes it's nice to just like who the hell knows? Let's see what happens. Alex Hutchinson, ladies and gentlemen. Alex, dude, you're awesome. uh whatever 7 7 and 1/2 years parenthesised uh on the show and yeah I mean the stuff that you write what is it runners what is it you write for runners walls I'm now an outside magazine so I I write about once a week for outside magazine on new research in in uh fitness endurance that kind of stuff yeah everyone needs to follow you on Twitter at sweat science it's you know if you like evidence-based exercise stuff you're awesome and uh new book why should people go and get it well they should explore the topic of exploring ing. I I hope it'll, you know, there's no magic formula, but I hope it'll encourage people to to find spaces in their life to uh to be surprised. Sick, Alex. I appreciate you. Thanks so much, Chris. 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