Simone Stolzoff

And as we get older, we get more refined, we get more calcified in our ways, and we can do more exploiting.

But that being said, we all need both.

And this is true in biological systems.

So there's this great study about ants who are foraging food, and they need to do some exploiting if they find a food source, but they also need to do some exploring and peel off so that they're not overly dependent on that one food source.

And I think it's a great analogy for life.

Even though as you get older, you have more responsibilities, you might be doing more exploiting.

You might know the order that you like from the restaurant or exactly how you want your days to go.

If you get too fixed, if you're too attached to one particular vision of your life, it's like balancing on a really narrow platform and you're susceptible to being blown over.

And the best part of Pandora was every so often you'd stumble upon an artist that you'd never heard of before that you fell in love with.

It comes back to our desire for certainty and for an easy explanation how the world works.

And so I'll give one example from Wall Street.

So there's a study by this researcher named Katie Milkman, and she was looking at stock pickers who were wrong in the previous quarter.

And it roughly broke down into two groups.

There were people who were wrong that were part of the consensus.

So lots of people were also wrong with them.

And then there were people who were wrong who went out on a limb.

And what she found was that in the next quarter, the people who went out on a limb were more likely to double down on their erroneous prediction than people that were part of the consensus.

So imagine you're like a flat earther.

A lot of your identity is probably tied to this opinion because it's countercultural.

It's swimming upstream.