Books: The Explorer's Gene, Endure

Five stars. (★★★★★)

These two books by Alex Hutchinson have stuck with me, particularly The Explorer's Gene, which I listened to while hiking around Colorado in August. I keep returning to the "explore-exploit" dilemma - the choice between novelty-seeking and optimizing existing information - to understand how I'm acting, or how I should act, in different situations. The book is an incredibly wide-ranging research project full of insights on individual and group behavior. Endure was also good, if slightly less attention-holding. I listened to this one while walking around the Cannes-Lions conference in June. The basic premise is that the human body does a lot of behind-the-scenes regulation, explaining why we can summon reserves of energy in a crisis or get a burst of energy at the mere prospect of a sugar hit.