How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks - Alex Hutchinson - #936

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Episode 46 to Episode 916, something like that.

**Alex Hutchinson** (0:07)
You had to do 900 more people before you were ready for this.

**Chris Williamson** (0:10)
It's very important. That was the level of tank emptying that I went through, just having a straight up conversation with you. 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.

**Alex Hutchinson** (0:26)
Yeah, I mean, exactly back at you, I've been thinking a lot in the days leading up to this interview of like, wow, 2018, things were very different for both of us. The conversation I had with you in 2018 was such a pleasant surprise. I'm glad to see that other people thought that your interview abilities were as good as I did.

**Chris Williamson** (0:48)
Yeah. Well, we'll see if I can keep you-

**Alex Hutchinson** (0:50)
No pressure. No pressure.

**Chris Williamson** (0:51)
I was going to say, so the pleasant uncertainty today abound, we'll see what I can achieve. You've got interested in explorers. Why? What's interesting about explorers?

**Alex Hutchinson** (1:03)
Yeah. I mean, what's not interesting about explorers? So where did this book start? I mean, since I was like five 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.
I wrote a book about endurance in 2018, and this is not intended as a gratuitous plug for that book. But 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. 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, I should start working on endure too, revenge of the science of endurance. 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. I got interested in my lack of interest. I wondered, why do I have this pull to do something new? 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? Actually, I'd like to know the answers to those questions. Maybe I'll research that and turn that into my next book.

**Chris Williamson** (2:23)
Yeah. It's the difficult second album, especially if you've had some success with what you did first.

**Alex Hutchinson** (2:28)
My editor was very reassuring to me. He kept telling me, second books are the hardest because this one was a struggle. This one was a year late.
I missed the deadline by year, which is not something that's usual for me. I'm usually a pretty good deadline hitter. I really struggled because first of all, there's expectations, there's living up to previous work. But also this topic is such a big one. When I say, I'm interested in exploration, it's like, you mean Christopher Columbus or whatever? Yes.
When you go to a restaurant, do you order the same thing or do you try something new? 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 the more threads I pulled, the bigger the topic got. Eventually, bless my editor, he was like, yeah, I think I can get you something by April. He's like, no, I'm going to need it by February 15th. I was like, thank God, he gave me a deadline.

**Chris Williamson** (3:29)
Okay. Why are humans drawn to explore then? What is it that's in us that causes this to happen?

**Alex Hutchinson** (3:35)
Well, there's two ways we can answer that question. One reason is we explore because it leads to good things.
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 utilitarian exploring leads to good things. The other way of answering 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? The reason exploring feels good is because 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. 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 scrolling through social media doesn't necessarily, it taps into 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's very satisfying. It's a route to meaning, I think.