Alex Hutchinson - We're Hardwired To Explore—And Risk
ManTalks Podcast
Connor Beaton
4.8 • 591 Ratings
🗓️ 9 June 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Talking points: genetics, culture, psychology, parenting
I'm the kid who's always running to see what's over the next hill, so I'm both grateful and excited to have Alex on the show. His latest book is incredible, and gets to the science of how we're actually happier with a little less predictability in so many parts of our lives. If you're someone whose life feels kind of listless right now, this is YOUR episode.
(00:00:00) - The “explorer gene”, dopamine, and the impact of modern tech on our ability to explore
(00:15:20) - Our relationship with the unknown, and how it messes us up sometimes
(00:25:04) - How the unknown can challenge relationships, and how to navigate that
(00:29:40) - The difference between exploration and exploitation
(00:35:54) - The “free energy principle” and the “effort paradox”
(00:52:52) - Tactical insights on amping up your exploration mindset
Alex Hutchinson is the New York Times bestselling author of Endure, a longtime columnist for Outside covering the science of endurance, and a National Magazine Award–winning journalist who has contributed to the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications. A former long-distance runner for the Canadian national team, he holds a master’s in journalism from Columbia and a Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge, and he did his post-doctoral research with the National Security Agency. He lives in Toronto with his family.
Connect with Alex:
-Website: https://www.alexhutchinson.net/
-New book: The Explorer's Gene: https://bit.ly/43JicFr
-Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sweat_science/
-Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sweatscience
Mentioned in this episode:
Self Worth
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right, Alex, welcome to the man talk show. How you doing today? |
| 0:17.5 | I'm good. Thanks so much for having me, Connor. |
| 0:19.1 | Good, man. Likewise. Well, I'm excited to explore, no pun intended, I'm excited to jump into this topic. Let's start a little broad with |
| 0:26.8 | what role has expansion really played within us as human beings. Why is it so important? And |
| 0:33.6 | maybe why do you feel like it's dying out? Yeah, the temptation, of course, when I was writing a |
| 0:39.3 | book on exploring was to have the subtitle be, why, you know, how exploring makes us human or something |
| 0:44.3 | like that, because it really is fundamental, but of course, every book, how X makes us human is a little |
| 0:49.5 | bit too on the nose. To some extent, every living thing has an impulse to explore as a sort of precondition |
| 0:56.4 | of being alive, that you have to be looking for new sources of sustenance and new ways to live. |
| 1:02.1 | But there's something specific about humans. And if you look at the way humans settled the globe |
| 1:08.1 | in the last 50,000 years, there's a, there's a sort of inflection point where about 50,000 years ago, humans, instead of in the last 50,000 years. There's a sort of inflection point where |
| 1:11.7 | about 50,000 years ago, humans, instead of like the Neanderthal is just kind of hanging |
| 1:15.8 | around Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, suddenly modern humans went everywhere. |
| 1:21.3 | They went, you know, to the Arctic, to the southern tip of South America, to the islands |
| 1:25.7 | of Polynesia. And that coincides with a time |
| 1:29.4 | when a new gene variant that affects our dopamine receptors appeared, and the dopamine |
| 1:35.1 | receptors are involved in this sort of pursuit of novelty and the feeling of wanting to try |
| 1:39.6 | something new, experience something different. And so that is, look, I don't want to, it's a very complex |
| 1:45.5 | topic and behavior is very complex, but to me, that's maybe one way of saying that there's |
| 1:51.9 | something specific about humans. There's something in us that was formed over, you know, the last |
| 1:59.2 | 50,000 years of we are people who are looking for |
| 2:01.8 | what's over the next horizon, both literally and metaphorically. And that's still, you know, |
... |
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