Unlocking Persistent Motivation & Extreme Resilience | Ross Edgley

So Sisyphus was one of the the cleverest humans to ever exist in ancient mythology. He was able to outsmart the gods and he even chained up death at one point which made the gods really angry because basically people were fighting wars and there were no no one was dying so there was no souls going to the underworld so Hades was really pissed off. Anyway eventually he dies and the gods are just livid so they're like look we're gonna we're gonna punish you and what we're gonna do is we're gonna make you roll a boulder up a hill for eternity and just as it gets to the top of the hill it's gonna roll back down and you're just gonna do that for eternity just this like absurd like completely thankless task but then it was Albert Camus the philosopher who said he was able to outsmart the gods one more time and that's if you imagine that Sisyphus was smiling and this is the part I love he said because the struggle alone is enough to fill a man's heart and I think for me they've even coined the phrase that that Sisyphus was the absurd hero and I think for me swimming sometimes I'm like this is Sisyphus this is my boulder you know it's not going anywhere but the struggle alone is enough to fill a man's heart. Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Ross Edgley. Ross Edgley is a British ultra endurance athlete who has accomplished such feats as swimming around Great Britain which by the way is nearly 2,000 miles in distance and it took him nearly 157 days. He also swam 317 miles of the Yukon River continuously meaning non-stop for 56 hours. He's run a full marathon pulling a car, a full-size car by the way, and he's done 30 marathons in 30 days and much more. All of that is of course super impressive but the reason Ross is a guest on this podcast in particular is because both he and I wanted to discuss brain circuits and the psychology that allow humans, any humans, to engage and build up their mindset for motivation. So today we explore and develop in real time what we really can say is a new model of motivation to do hard things, one that includes all the possible sources of drive to prove others wrong, to celebrate life, out of love, out of anger, to honor those who can't, to fight mental stagnation, and on and on. What's so special about Ross and again another reason why he's here on this podcast in particular is because not only has he accomplished all these incredible things but he has the most incredible level of curiosity. He absolutely wants to understand the underlying neural machinery and psychology of motivation, what's allowed him to do hard things, what can allow you to do hard things in different contexts of life, and in doing that Ross brings forward new ways of thinking about brain plasticity and how to reshape your brain in order to make yourself better. I should also mention that Ross has a new book out, one that I am personally excited to read and to listen to, and it's entitled How to Hero, Find Strength, Forge Resilience, and Fulfill Your Purpose. You can find a link to that in the show note caption. Before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my conversation with Ross Edgley. Ross Edgley, welcome. Thank you so much. We're gonna need a bigger chair. This feels surreal. I mean we were just talking off air, weren't we, that so much of your teachings helped me across the arctic circle, just jellyfish bouncing off my face, tongue coming off. This feels very weird. I'm honored that you're here. I'm very curious about you and what you do and how we can hopefully translate some of that into actions that people can take. Thoughts, thought patterns, control of their own thoughts that people can explore and perhaps adopt to have a better, more enriched life, which is obviously the purpose of it all. Take me back because I've read about you. I've read about your accomplishments. I have smatterings of things that you've done and why, but you're 41 years old now, right? I am, yep. Let's do this in snapshot-ish fashion. Ten-year-old Ross, what's he doing? What's he thinking? What's his strength and where is he struggling? I think even as far back as 10, I was aware that I was just wired a little bit weirdly. You know, my dopamine kind of works a bit differently. My family, we love going on hikes. I'll never forget, at 10 years old, my dad was taking me and my two brothers on this huge hike. It just wasn't enough for me, this hike. I was just like, ah, you know, I kind of want to make it harder. Dad caught me putting rocks in my backpack and just putting it on my back and then walking up because I needed more of a challenge. Otherwise, it just kind of wasn't fulfilling something inside of me. I think even now, looking ahead, fast forward 30 years, I'm still doing the same thing. When I come up with an idea for a swim, if I tell someone this idea and they go, oh yeah, that sounds quite good, I go, alright, that's terrible. You know, you're not shocked by it. But if I tell someone a swim and they go, well, that's impossible, that's ridiculous, like swimming around Great Britain, swimming around Iceland, I'm like, that's the one. If people are just like, that's absurd, I'm like, then that's the idea. I think even as far back as 10, I was aware that my brain was wired slightly differently. If you don't mind me asking, was the idea of putting rocks in your backpack in part to show others that you could do more? Like, and no shame if it was, I mean, I think we all have an ego and we all want to test ourselves, but the feedback that we get is often important too. So as a calibration point, if nothing else. So let's say you were hiking alone, hopefully you weren't hiking alone at 10, but if you could imagine you were, to the best of your abilities, do you think that you would have been loading those rocks in just for you? Yeah, I think I would. I think for me, again, being so self-analytical, it was always an intrinsic motivation. The process was its own reward. There wasn't really anything extrinsic. If anything, I was keeping the rocks secret. I didn't want my dad finding out. When he found them, he was just like, right, take them out. I'll give you some food or something that's actually functional. So I was actually hiding them from that. It was just something that I wanted to do, that when I got home, I'd be like, right, I was able to do that. I think it's changed a lot though as well. I think, again, sort of jumping a little bit to swimming around Great Britain, I did that when I was 32 years old. I spoke about it at the time that for me, it was very much ego-driven. I talked about Captain Webb, 1875, first guy to swim across the English Channel. I did it on beef broth and brandy, and on breaststroke because front crawl was ungentlemanly, so he just crushed it all the way across the English Channel. It wasn't for charity. It wasn't for anything like that. He just wanted to pioneer our understanding of swimming and human endurance. For me, swimming around Great Britain was exactly that. It was looking at Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It was feelings of accomplishment, prestige, recognition. It was all of those things, ego-driven. After that, that then felt a little bit shallow. I was a bit like, you know, to just do it for records, that feels a bit fragile, a bit shallow. It feels a bit strange. Then it was the swim around Iceland where the University of Iceland said, we want to do something to raise awareness around our ocean conservation efforts, but also as well, if we could collect eDNA samples, so environmental DNA samples that just basically pick up if there's been a whale in the water, a seal, a Ross Edgley, whatever it is. We could track the biodiversity and a level of detail around Iceland that we'd never seen before. Upon hearing that, I was like, right, that feels like a better reason. It's not just records. That feels better. That I did when I was 40. It has been interesting. I think quite often, sometimes it is intrinsically motivated, but then a little bit later, it was ego-driven. It was extrinsic. I wanted to be the guy, the first person to swim around Great Britain. Then now, various things have changed in my life. I think it's almost moving up Maslow's hierarchy. I'm not going to quite say self-actualisation, but we're looking for something a little bit more than records, I think. Staying with the roughly 10-year-old Ross Edgley, were you always very expressive? You had a lot of spontaneous energy? Have you always woken up ready to roll? Or are you kind of like a slow grind into the morning? Or is it, let's go? You know, just let's go. I've always just been like that. I think as well, I've kind of got a handle on it now. When I was young, I was so competitive and such a bad loser. My dad, I remember, he was one of the very few people who actually understood how to manage me. I remember I did a school cross country. I think I was about 13 years old. I came second. The guy that beat me deserved to win. He was a better athlete. He beat me fair and square. But I was livid. Afterwards, I just wouldn't speak to anyone. I stormed off. I refused to go and pick up my medal. I said, second place is the first loser. I started to run home. My dad just slowly got in the car and just followed me all the way home, just to make sure I was safe. But he was like, I'm just going to have to get it out of his system. I think it was 10 miles when I got back home. This was after the cross country. I had blisters. I was tired. I was exhausted. But by the time I got home, I was like, maybe I'd overreacted there, dad. I'm so sorry. He just let me realise that on my own. Like I said, I think I've got a bit more of a handle on it. But equally, and this is something I actually wanted to quiz you about, because I love your work that you've been talking about, broadcasting the anterior mid-cingulate cortex. For me, and this is a massive oversimplification, so I'm going to apologise where I'm speaking to you, but as a coping mechanism, upon hearing that and the podcast that you did with David Goggins, I thought about the anterior mid-cingulate cortex almost like grit and quit, pain and purpose, like weighing scales, constantly like this. For anyone listening, I hope it helps as well, that if you've got these weighing scales, pain and purpose, if it's really painful, if your tongue is falling off and swinging across the Arctic Circle, 114 days at sea, then you need a lot of purpose to tip those scales. But equally, sometimes you can talk about ocean conservation, all the amazing things that we were doing it for. But equally, Carl Jung talks about your shadow self, a part of your psyche that you keep away from the public. Maybe you're aggressive, hyper-competitive, jealous, and you kind of tuck that away. Whereas Carl Jung and Jordan Peterson are talking about how that is a monster. It can be useful. It's not bad having a monster inside of you. It's bad when you can't put him back in the cage. When swimming around Iceland, again going back to that anterior mid-cingulate cortex, pain and purpose, there were some people online who were just like, this is stupid. He's never going to do it. I even had media partners as well just going, oh Ross, this has been good, but maybe we wrap this up now. I don't think this is possible. Then that 10-year-old, that hyper-competitive side of me ended up coming out and was like, I'm now just going to do this because people don't think I can. It's really strange that I'll use different parts of motivation. I suppose my question to you that I've wanted to ask since crossing Iceland is, does the anterior mid-cingulate cortex respond sometimes to your shadow self? Can you have a darker form of energy? I know Goggins, for instance, will speak to himself and be like, man up. Who's going to carry the boat? Whereas me, sometimes I try to do it through gratitude, but sometimes I do find that form of fuel useful. For those that might not have heard me talk about it before or the David Goggins episode, just very briefly for our listeners, the anterior mid-cingulate cortex is this brain region that my colleague at Stanford, Joe Parvizi, discovered when he was stimulating in humans. He's a neurosurgeon. When stimulated, people report verbally, because these experiments literally have a piece of the skull removed, they're stimulating with an electrode. I've seen these sorts of experiments, not those exact ones, and they can talk, they're awake. Head is fixed in a stereotax, so they're not moving around. They'll say, it feels as if there's a storm coming, but I am going to lean into it. I feel like there's a major challenge of some sort coming, but I'm going to fight this challenge. It's tenacity, willpower, et cetera. There's a lot more to it, but that's just in case anyone hasn't heard us talk about it or others talk about it before. The anterior mid-cingulate cortex is a very interesting structure because it receives inputs and outputs from many, many brain areas, including the amygdala, including the memory centers, including the dopamine reward system, the nigrostriatal pathway, and on and on. Despite what we know about it, it enlarges when people do hard things. It shrinks when people tend to shy away from hard things. Its activity and size correlates with success in doing hard things. You can build it up by doing hard things that you don't want to do, et cetera, et cetera. We still don't really know. No, I think it's fair to say we don't know the computations, the math that it's doing. We're not yet at the place in neuroscience where we can say, ah, the anterior mid-cingulate cortex computes prior notion of self with goal, with purpose, with fear, with anger, with love, and this is the computation that leads to persistence versus quitting, deliberation versus assuredness. We don't know yet. So it's not a total black box, as we say, but there's still a lot that's not known. And in fact, I think we can start to understand more about tenacity and willpower, at least at this point in history, by talking to people like you, in particular to you, about the anterior mid-cingulate cortex than the anterior mid-cingulate cortex recordings can tell us about you. Does that make sense? It does. Yeah. So in the future, at some point, we will have the technologies to be able to unpack the computations with a lot of precision. There are people developing those technologies, but they're not there yet. So I want to be careful to not say things that we don't know, but here's what I was thinking coming into this podcast today. So we can find posts on Instagram, full podcasts, books, and historical records, and on and on of people that did very, very hard things for just about every different reason. And so rather than a teeter-totter that goes from quitting versus persistence, I have this mental model that I'm wondering if you'll be willing to entertain with me today through your story, whereby let's imagine a beam of wood balanced in the middle, but another beam of wood that's at a right angle to that. So it looks like a cross. Also, balanced in the middle. And then another beam of wood and another beam of woods. You can just imagine this as like spokes on a wheel and it's balancing. And as long as no side touches the ground for too long, you persist. And so what I came up with is a name assignment for each of those spokes. And so if you're willing, I thought it might be informative and fun for me to just call out each one of these one by one. This is awesome. Take the time you need to recall a time when if and only if you were calling on that particular emotion set, that motivation, and paint a picture for us. This is awesome. So you've taken my model and just literally like two dimensional, you made it like four dimensional. This is- Well, three dimensional, you're going to add the fourth dimension. So no pressure, no pressure. So this is a little bit like a qualifying exam. And no, it's not an exam. This is for informative and entertainment purposes. But the cool part here is it's not a movie, it's real. It's your life and the incredible things you've done. So let's start with doing something because you said you would. No other reason, just because you said you would, either to yourself or to the world. Forget what they're saying in response, forget who it's for, but just why? Because you said you would. Have there ever been times when you've done something simply because you said you would? 100%, that was Iceland. Yeah, that I was just like, you said you were going to do this, or even, and the Great British Swim, I think more so because I told sponsors and everybody I was going to do it. And it was my older brother as well. He's amazing in that he can just kind of like take a complex situation and just really simplify it. We broke the record as we went around Scotland for the longest stage sea swim. And everyone celebrated, they were like, this is amazing. And Scott was just like, yeah, but it's going to count for nothing unless you actually finish it. And I was like, do you know what? You're right. And so I think, yeah, that so often it just came down to that void of records and everything. It's like, you'll look like an idiot if you don't finish this. You said you were going to do it. It's important to yourself. And also as well, void of anything extrinsic, looking yourself in the mirror. I think Einstein, when he said adversity introduces you I think you realize the most honest version of yourself when you were in an absolute hole. And I think self-respect that I would know if I had quit and I actually could have finished it. So yeah, I think probably all of them. I've done it because I said I would, not because of how I'd be perceived publicly, how I would think of myself when I looked in the mirror. I'd like to take a quick break to acknowledge one of our sponsors, David. David makes protein bars unlike any other. Their newest bar, the bronze bar has 20 grams of protein, only 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. I have to say, these are the best tasting protein bars I've ever had. And I've tried a lot of protein bars over the years. These new David bars have a marshmallow base and they're covered in chocolate coating and they're absolutely incredible. I of course eat regular whole foods. I eat meat, chicken, fish, eggs, fruits, vegetables, et cetera but I also make it a point to eat one or two David bars per day as a snack which makes it easy to hit my protein goal of one gram of protein per pound of body weight. And that allows me to take in the protein I need without consuming excess calories. 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Often there aren't clear symptoms of prediabetes early on so people don't tend to look into it. But the fact is that metabolic health is shaping how your body functions every day whether you feel it or not. Tracking your glucose with Lingo can help you see how food, activity and stress impact your glucose throughout the day. I personally have used Lingo and it's been an invaluable tool for improving my metabolic health. If you would like to try Lingo, Huberman Lab listeners in the US and UK can save 10% on a four-week plan. Just visit hellolingo.com slash Huberman for more information. Terms and conditions apply. Again, that's hellolingo.com slash Huberman. On that swim or other times when you were pushing forward simply because you said you would, is that looping in your head? I mean, I realized along these very long journeys and expeditions, whatever you wanna call them, these super challenges, that your mind must go to all sorts of places, dark and light and everything in between. When you're getting into the water, is it cold? Does it feel cold? Or are you like, oh, I've been here before, this isn't cold? It gets easier the longer it goes on. By the end of Iceland, I think I just habituated that form of stress. Almost like a stress inoculation training. At first, when you're trying to habituate like the sleep deprivation, the cold, you wake up and if you've left your wetsuit out, you have to crack the ice off the wetsuit before you can even put it on and then get in. By the end, you are just numb to it. And whatever's happened there, that habituation of the stress, whether my anterior mid-cingulate cortex has grown, whatever it is, by the end, it still registers, but you don't have an emotional response to it anymore. So let's pick a different one. Not just because you said you would, but because you don't want to disappoint, which is different, right? You don't wanna carry the shame of someone else mirroring to you that you said you would do something and you didn't. So we could call this fear, fear of shame. And no one likes to talk about these darker energies that can drive people, but we'd be lying if these weren't powerful motivators for people throughout history. So do you recall a time, could be any time, when fear of shame was a driving force? Absolutely, Iceland, this is the easiest one to answer. So towards the end, we had 100 miles to finish, basically. And I was basically, the baby was due, the birth of my first child was due in a week's time. We had 100 miles still to cover. We had Hurricane Erin coming through the Atlantic. Over in Grindervik on the West Coast, there was a volcano that went off that basically was spewing poisonous gas. So we couldn't get close to that. And over here, we had one of Europe's largest glaciers that was just sending shards of ice as big as this table. And the team and everyone was just like, Ross, I'm so sorry. We're gonna be here for two weeks in the harbour. And I was like, no, no, no, I'm so sorry. We need to go out. I need to be back for the birth of my child. Not only for my girlfriend, she's amazing. I've been with her 13 years. The look on her face, the disappointment, that was going through my head. But then also as well, just knowing that I wasn't gonna be there to welcome my son into this world. So that one, 100% fear of failure, fear of letting people down, Iceland. And I gunned it and finished the final 100 miles. Purely fuelled on that. The University of Iceland, everything, and that was important, the eDNA samples, tracking biodiversity, paled in comparison to you're not gonna be there to welcome your son into the world. So I just gunned it. I notice you say we whenever you talk about these expeditions, not I. Is that just your nature, or is it, I realise these are probably team efforts, but that's it. I think it's an important point. Do you know, I'm glad you picked up on that, just because I think especially with sea swims, that they are such a team event, and in no way am I saying that to self-deprecate. It genuinely is, in that if we read the tides wrong or the weather or whatever, then I'm going backwards. You can be the best swimmer in the world. You get the tides wrong in Iceland, you're going backwards. And it happened a few times. Actually backwards. Actually backwards, yeah, yeah. Up at the Penland Firth on the Great British Swim, for instance, that's in the top of Scotland. You can be travelling at 10 knots if you get it right. That is almost the cruising speed of a dolphin. But you get it wrong, you're going backwards at 10. You could be Michael Phelps, and you're still going backwards. So it genuinely is just like such a team event. Or the Yukon, for instance, as well. It was a maze, just kind of of these countercurrents, whirlpools, log jams. There was a time when I was swimming and a log came back the other way. And the team in the Yukon were just amazing at just reading the river. So I genuinely, I say we because it's a team event. I'm just the one who has to get in the water, genuinely. Yeah, because you can't be thinking about whether or not you're headed into certain danger beyond what you're already in. I mean, you need to be able to concentrate on your stroke, your breathing, your mental frame, like whether or not your toes are falling off. Have you been frostbitten on these? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've picked up loads. This is strange from, you know, hypothermia, hypothermia, rhabdomyolysis, cellulitis, you know, picked up a fair- What's cellulitis? Ah, cellulitis is basically- Sounds like infection. Exactly that, yeah, skin infection. But basically, I picked that up in Loch Ness because it was fresh water. Basically, the wetsuit was chafing. It got so deep, it turned infected. And then if that gets in your lymph nodes or your bloodstream, it can be fatal. It was a really strange position to be in as well because it was a 56-hour nonstop swim. The water was about four degrees, barely above freezing. No stop for sleep? No, no, no, so nonstop swim. You can't touch anybody. No one can touch you. You can't touch the boat. You just swim 56 hours. And towards the end, it was so strange because I had hypothermia. So my core temperature, I could feel, just I was shaking from the inside. It was in my bones. But my skin was on fire from the cellulitis. So it was this strange attack on my physiology. But yeah, to answer your question, picking up a fair few of those, it's really strange that it recalibrates your perception to pain. And swimming around Iceland, there were times when I was really cold and I was like, it's not as bad as Loch Ness. I'm still okay. I'd look at wounds around my neck and everything and I'd go, oh, that's not too bad. It doesn't smell infected. We're good. Trophies for a sicko like you. Do you believe in the Loch Ness monster? Something touched my leg, honestly. I love all, it was so interesting. I got so sort of, yeah, probably was. It was like a spiritual experience. And I think by that point, was it Nietzsche who said, whoever fights monsters should see to it that he doesn't become a monster himself. For if you gaze into the abyss too long, the abyss gazes back into you. And I think for me, swimming through Loch Ness, that was going through my head. And I definitely stared into the abyss too long. It was going well up until 56 hours. And then I just remember, it was very gradual, but you were looking and your tunnel vision just got narrower and narrower. You were looking through the eye of a needle and then it just went black. And I remember waking up and my girlfriend and my mum were at the head of my hospital bed. And I just looked up and I just went, oh, it's not gone well, has it? And they were like, no, Ross, it's not gone well at all. So I think learning from that, to go back to what you're saying about hypothermia thing, it's nice now knowing that with the Iceland swim, having graduated in Loch Ness, I was like, look, let's not become a monster. Let's not stare into the abyss too long. Did you go back and do that one? Loch Ness, I've got unfinished business there. I keep wondering since I was a kid, why don't they just drain Loch Ness and solve this Loch Ness monster thing once and for all? I know. It's not good for the tourist trade though, you know? I always think if it's real, how cool is that? And if it's not, what a remarkable way to increase tourist traffic to a location. You create a myth and a mystique, something that's dangerous, but not so dangerous that people are afraid to go. You know, you seed the world with a few photo, like that's what they clearly, one or the other happened, right? Or some combination. Yeah. I love that you brought that up as well, because swimming around Iceland, at the start, I heard about elves and trolls and mountains were trolls that didn't make it back before sunset and sunrise. All of these stories. I was like, oh, that's cool. That's a cool story. Swimming around it, there is something in the water. There were events. So I got a block ceremony. So basically it's almost like an ancient chief, a modern day form of that. And he basically gave me a block ceremony where he blessed the swim. And it was just amazing speaking to him. He said like, Ross, you know, I think you'll die, you know, but you know, it'll be a good saga. The Icelandic sense of humor. That was the send off? That was the send off. Even at the start as well, I remember I did a swim and afterwards I'm looking up at the Northern lights and I'm sort of towering myself down. I'm like, this is unbelievable. And this old Icelandic fisherman just comes out of nowhere. And I just hear his voice. And the first thing he says to me is, they're probably deciding if you're going to live or die. And I turned around and I went, I'm sorry. And he goes, the Valkyries. I said, I'm sorry, you've lost me. Please explain. And he said, well, we believe that the Northern lights are the Valkyries, Odin's warriors, female warriors, and they're riding through the sky. And the shimmering is their shields and their swords and they're taking the fallen back to Valhalla. And I was like, that's deep. Okay. Then, like I said, starting the swim on the block ceremony, they again, and sorry if you know this, but they were talking about the guardians of Iceland. I don't know anything about, I know very little about Iceland. This story was amazing. So they, we basically started on the West coast and they said, Ross, you're aware that you're swimming in the kingdom of the bull. I said, what do you mean? And they said, well, the story goes that basically there was a king, a foreign king who sent a sorcerer dressed as a whale to come and invade Iceland. Came over to the West coast and there was this massive bull and they said, right, you can't attack there. And that represented strength and power. Went over to the North coast. That was the kingdom of the eagle. They turned up, the eagle saw them from miles off. The sorcerer was like, you can't attack there. Went over to the East coast, over the East coast. That is the realm of the dragon, mainly because there's loads of waterfalls and dragons like fast flowing water. And then bang on the South coast, the realm of the giant, the whale, the sorcerer came there and was like, whoa, you can't attack there either. And then disappeared. So when you look on the crest of Iceland, so often, than they have the bull, the eagle, the dragon and the giant. And again, upon hearing that, I was like, well, that's a cool story, but it's a little bit deeper. And they're saying, really, it's about respecting nature and everything. And I think going around Iceland, that was just a shot of adrenaline. And I think what was weird, and I wanted to quiz you on this, actually, because upon hearing stories of this, I don't know, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is it the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that deals with strategy? And it's almost the story that you're telling yourself. So when I'm swimming around, I'm like, this is the kingdom of the bull. And I almost made it poetic in my head. And that actually got me through a few swims. And then even towards the end, as well, like I said, about trying to make it back home, the story of Odin. So in ancient Norse mythology, they believe in fate. They believe that you can't control your destiny. And the only thing you control is your attitude towards it. So Odin, basically Ragnarok, being the Norse apocalypse, where basically the gods fight the giants in this huge battle. And Odin basically traded his eye for wisdom. So he knew, spoiler alert, that he was going to be eaten by a giant wolf. But he just charges into battle anyway. And I think what was really interesting upon hearing this, certainly by the time I finished the swim after 114 days, I was sat there thinking, you need to finish, you need to get back for the birth of your son. But equally, if the ancient Nordic gods are watching, this is what they would want. Again, Nietzsche, what is it? I know of no greater life purpose than to perish in attempting the impossible. And all of that was going through my head. You asked about the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. So there is a set of studies that since you have an interest in neuroscience and the anterior mid-cingulate cortex that I did return to, I haven't talked about on my podcast ever, but it's a solid literature in neuroscience and has to do with an experiment called the tube test. Do you know about the tube test? You might like this. Some years ago, people were interested in what drives persistence and winning in competition. So they developed something called the tube test and it's done on mice. But then we'll talk about the human analog. And basically you put two male mice into a tube and they want to fight. It's just what male mice want to do. Female mice will do it too, by the way. Female male pairings will do it too, but they tend to do this with males, male-male pairings. Put them in the tube, but these fights are not such that the tube is small enough so they can't really scratch or bite at each other. And one pushes the other one out of the territory. You know, space, who gets the most space is a very primitive but important feature of competition among animals, dogs, et cetera, right? You know, who gets space? So you put two mice in and one tends to win and one tends to lose. And there's some interesting statistics that fall out whereby prior winning leads to future winning on average, right? So winners tend to be winners and losers tend to be losers over time in a way. And this is where it gets interesting. That's independent of testosterone levels, independent of things like nutritional status. I mean, at the extremes, these things fall away, like one is starved or one is castrated, okay, right? Body weight, these sorts of things. So there's something else there. So a bunch of different laboratories have worked on this, measured brain activity in a broad scale way and pinpointed this region of the prefrontal cortex, which in mice you can't really say is like equivalent to our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, but at least has components of it. And then they do the following experiment. You take a mouse that was consistently a winner and you silence this particular region of the brain or you quiet its activity, you lessen its activity and it becomes the loser. You take the loser and you in real time increase the amount of activity in this particular brain region and now it wins every time. Here's what's wild, the amount of cortisol, the amount of testosterone, the amount like none of that stuff speaks to what could really be going on. It seems that this top down circuit from the prefrontal cortex to a bunch of other stuff, these are clearly circuits, not just one location in the brain, is driving persistence to win under any realistic condition. But again, you can't take a fetal mouse and have it beat an adult mouse, right? But all other things being more or less equal, activity in this area drives persistence and winning. And there are equivalent experiments in humans using virtual reality and brain scanners and this kind of thing. It's hard to do the experiment. You're clearly physically stronger than I am. I'm reasonably strong, but no, you absolutely are, right? So there's no way that you're going to stimulate my prefrontal cortex and I'm going to beat you in a deadlift. I just know this. It's okay. We don't even have to like entertain the other possibility, but there's a world where if we are otherwise within, you know, 10 or 20% of each other's abilities in something that whoever has the most activity in this brain region wins over and over and over again. And the converse is true too. So I find this amazing because the analog in human is that this is a brain area that's involved in conscious strategy setting, conscious strategy setting. And the particular strategy could be anger, could be love, could be you want to get home to see your child born, could be you're hungry and you want to eat, you want others to eat so they can survive. You know, I, the beauty of the prefrontal cortex is that it can learn lots of different strategies in lots of different contexts. It's a unique circuit in that component of the circuitry in that way. So when people tell me, yeah, I'm in mile 200 of the, of a race in the desert and I want to quit. And I just have this thought and I push clearly that's a prefrontal cortical top down type thing. That's a real thing. There's a physical substrate to it from mice and it's been shown in other species too, but it's clearly there in us. But what I love about what you said there, and also as well for those losing then as well, there was somebody recent was talking about Roger Federer and they said, if you watched his matches and turned the sound off and couldn't see the score, you wouldn't know if you won the point or lost the point. He was so stoic about it. So do you think it's the same as well? If you're losing that, if you don't react to it, you'll maybe able to buck that trend. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, it totally makes sense. So I think that there are several big macros today that are going to emerge, but one of them that clearly will emerge is this notion of energy, right? The reason I asked about the 10 year old Ross Edgley is I had a sneaking suspicion that he had a lot of energy. You know, some people just have a lot of energy, right? Having a lot of energy is great. Energy management on a backdrop of having a lot of energy, that's where things start getting impressive, right? Poor energy management on a backdrop of a lot of energy is I think what leads to the 27 club. People who do incredible things and die, whether by virtue of their particular activity or by virtue of, I heard this in this wonderful documentary that everyone should see, which is The Defiant Ones, which is about Dre and Jimmy Iovine and development of like beats and the story of hip hop. And there was a guy in NWA who we don't hear about much anymore, who clearly was extremely talented, but he had a really bad accident. And you ask, and he's talking about how it happened and involved wildness. And you ask him, they were like, what do you think happened? And he just goes, the excesses. It was the excesses of all that energy pouring in money and drugs and fast cars and being famous. And it wasn't well managed in him. And he's still alive, but the excesses. So energy management is clearly a piece of the ability to be the 10 year old you and load more and more rocks, but you're not burning unnecessary energy. So the efficiency piece is I think where the stories that we tell ourselves, like I'm doing this for so-and-so you're able to like separate out all the other possible motivations, at least for some period of time. Like just being motivated is like a dysregulated system. So motivated to do blank because blank, that's a well-managed energy system. So most people would die for your levels of raw energy, but in keeping with this theme about how you regulate, dynamically regulate your energy, have there ever been moments along any of your conquests when you thought that's it, I'm done, but you had told somebody, don't let me quit. You outsourced the management. I'm really glad you asked that because it's almost the opposite. So looking at Tim Noak's central governor theory or psychobiological model of fatigue, this idea how the brain and the body interact and we'll pull the physiological handbrake to stop you from going to complete exhaustion. Upon hearing this and studying this, this was before Loch Ness and also I did a swim in Lake Trasimeno in Italy. We got caught in a freak heat wave, temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius, water temperature up to 34 degrees. It was bath water. It was rhabdomyolysis waiting to happen. 37 hours in, approaching 100 kilometres, exactly the same happened. Body just started to shut down. I am just swimming. I'm so stubborn, and I think what's really strange is looking at that psychobiological model of fatigue, I know that as soon as my brain, that's a hypochondriac, starts pulling the physiological handbrake, I just go, no, no, no. I'll just put my foot down on the gas. So actually, with my team, we talk about outsourcing common sense. I say, look, you know, and I don't say this proudly. It's a personality defect. I'm aware of that, but I know I'll swim until I put myself in hospital. That's a bad thing, especially now as a dad. So I outsource that to my team and I go, okay, guys, if you tell me that you need to pull me out and you play that card, I will listen because I can't keep putting myself in hospital. I think that's one thing. It's almost the opposite now that I need to be saved for myself. Again, I don't say that proudly at all, but I'm just very aware now from metrics they have with my blood work and various things. I'm like, look, I can't do that again. Not now as a dad. I need to be more responsible. Yeah. And that's trusting the team, who are amazing as well because they are well aware that what we're trying to achieve is so ambitious. So they will allow me to sort of play with the boundaries of common sense and sports science. Jerr Kennedy, great friend of mine, one of the greatest ice swimmers ever. So he just understands hyperthermia, the cold. And there's so many times me and him have conversations and he's just like, he's still good. He's still coherent. But there's other times where, you know, I wish I'd had Jerr there just to go, Ross, you're done. It's interesting. We'll talk a little bit about addiction later, but, you know, I have some friends, a couple who've been on this podcast who've talked openly about the fact that they were bad addicts and they needed to literally assign somebody the job of don't let them talk their way out of, you know, an isolation or don't let them talk their way back to their phone or don't let them talk their way back to a casino and this kind of thing. And with huge cash rewards, if the person doesn't allow them to do it, that's pretty much it. You have to create incentive on the other side too, right? Because some of these folks are really persuasive. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, we can be honest about who we're talking about here because he's talked about it openly. David Cho was on this podcast some years ago, extremely talented artist, amazing human being, blessed to call him a friend. And he's had a gambling addiction many times over in his life. Fortunately, he's not in it now and hopefully never will be again. But there were times when he had to offer his team tremendous amounts of money to not let him convince them to let him out of like an isolation cabin for a couple months while he was, you know, sobering up or give him his phone in which time he became viciously addicted to playing Angry Birds 23 hours a day. Good game. Yeah, exactly. Or Pokemon or whatever, you know? So what you describe because it's an elected endeavor and because provided you survive and make it home to your girlfriend and child, it's all good, right? But it has a component of addiction, right? I mean, it's like, if you don't add the rocks, if you don't have the next swim, if you, you know, so how do you gauge what's too much? I mean, every high achiever has to answer at some point the question, how much money, how many miles, how much fame, how many blanks before I'm satisfied? And the answer is clearly not concrete. It's like a dynamic thing. A hundred percent. So like how close to dying do you have to get before you're like, you know what, I'm going to chill and paint or something? Is such a good question because I'm literally as of only the last year. So my son's now one year old. And so he's really kind of forced me to ask those questions. Now when I'm proposed swims, the 21 year old self, if somebody said, oh, you know, go do swim for a volcano down in Antarctica, I'd be like, yeah, hold my beard. Whereas now I've got to ask myself, you know, is this worth it? Is it enough? Is it worth doing? I don't know. The only thing I know is with, you know, Viktor Frankl talking about, you know, the meaning of life is to give life meaning. Jordan Peterson saying the purpose of life is to pick up the heaviest load and carry it. All of those things resonated so much with me that I do need purpose. And Viktor Frankl says that over fame, money, just a human needs to wake up. What is your reason for getting up in the morning? And when I don't have a swim or something to train for, my girlfriend just says I'm just like a caged animal. She sees me at home. And so when people, I mean, she's amazing. And when I left for Iceland, she's pregnant, quite heavily pregnant, waving me off. And they said, how are you letting him do this? And she goes, oh, he would be terrible if he was still at home. So I know he's happiest when he's out there, even swimming around Great Britain as well. So many people back on land when Hester would come and see me and I was 100 days in, I looked like a sea yeti werewolf. My tongue was falling off. I was chafing all over and people would say, oh, how's he doing? I've seen the wounds. I've seen his neck. And Hester would just always reply it. I've never seen him so happy. He's having the best time. And again, I don't say that necessarily in a proud way, but I just know I just need purpose. Whatever it is, give me something to train for. No, no. She's incredible. Like the Yukon swim, for instance, so that was 510 kilometers nonstop, 56 hours, although the entire expedition was about 70 hours. So the entire team, including myself, didn't sleep for 70 hours because we had to actually get the boat to the starting point. And I just remember like just swimming and there's just the silhouette of my girlfriend, and every 20 minutes she throws me a banana and I'm just like, thanks, babe. And she's just like, no problem. And I think it was that, you know, that I feel so fortunate, you know, just swimming with gratitude, realizing that I'm just like, oh, thanks for accepting me. I know I'm a feral, weird boyfriend, so I really appreciate it. You seem, as I would describe and sometimes describe myself, you know, only partially domesticated. So that is absolutely, yeah, that is so, when I turned up as well, I mean, I was still, I was hairy from Iceland. I had like jellyfish tentacles. I was like, just literally chafing wounds. And I arrived at the hospital, so I made it back by three days for the birth of my son. So as I arrived into the hospital, nurses and everyone was like, oh my God, who is that? And Hester was like, oh no, no, no. Unfortunately, that is the father of my child. He's feral, but he's safe. Is she a worrier by nature? Yes, but she said since, you know, we've been together 13 years and she says now she just has to let go. And I think it's really interesting because now her barometer of worrying is completely changed. Because when you have, I mean, the Yukon was a great example. And I wanted to, actually, this is great because I wanted to chat to you about this anyway, but just your perceptions of danger. So there was so many times on the swim where, you know, black bears were fine, you know, in the Yukon in Canada. They're a bit skittish and they look at you. And I can almost feel my amygdala or circuitry, whatever it was, was looking and going, that's okay. When the brown bears appeared on the site, they are just looking, they are not skittish. They're just like looking at you going, you're not a salmon, but you're not a bear. I wonder what you taste like. And I am just swimming. I turned to the guys in the Yukon and they were amazing, the support team. I said, guys, am I okay here? Because that brown bear is looking at me like I'm a dessert. And they pulled out, Andrew, it wasn't even a gun. It was a cannon. They went, Ross, if it gets too close, it'll end up in my freezer. And I was like, right, that's the response I wanted. Great. Carried on swimming. But you experienced that as well with shark diving as well. That's changed, that rewired you, is it fair to say? Yeah. I don't want to shift this to a story of any of my adventures and they're in no way, shape or form as bold and as enduring as yours. So, but yeah, a few years back for my lab, we decided to record these great white sharks in the wild, bring it to the VR lab. And a friend of mine, a very accomplished photographer, videographer, Michael Muller, convinced me to get dive certified and exit the cage and swim towards the sharks. And there's a skill to doing this. It's not like, you're not just cowboying it, but I had an air failure, not out of the cage, on the hookah line the day before. And there's a whole story there. So 2017 marked the deliberate end of me taking risks with my physical life. But what I learned there and what I've learned from people like Cam Haines and from spending time in Australia and from people who live in Montana, like Andy Stumpf, is that our perception of what's dangerous in the wild is often a little bit cryptic and we can easily be misled. Like, oh, that little spider looks friendly and that's the deadly one. Or that bear looks very large and looming, but it turns out that's not the one that will actively hunt you. It's actually the somewhat smaller one that is just likes to hunt humans, you know, this kind of thing. And so the key takeaway being whether it's jellyfish, spiders, snakes, birds, or in some cases people for that matter, locals have the key knowledge. And our ideas about what's dangerous or not are often wrong, so best to err on it's all dangerous. It's 100%. And I love what you said there as well, because again, diving with great whites and also tiger sharks myself, they have the ampullae of Lorenzini where they pick up electrical impulses. And I think exactly to your point, what was so strange is the first time I dived with them, I'm always comfortable in the water, but it was so strange how like the tigers and the great whites, knew that I was the weakest diver. And whether that was like I was flinching, I acted like prey, but whether my heartbeat or whether I was breathing, it knew. And it was so interesting on the audio, they were like, Ross, control your breathing, Ross, slow your heart rate. And I was like, how does it know? And sure enough, they just all just came straight for me. And they were like, Ross, I'm not saying square up to it, but I'm not saying flinch and back away as well. So as it came towards me, there was, where can I help you? And it sort of was like, it looked at me and there was a real form of communication that is obviously nonverbal. And it sort of looked and was like, all right, okay, you know what you're doing. I'll leave you alone. And it was so strange, exactly the same with the bears in the Yukon. They were looking and if there was a weakness, that is the laws of the jungle, I would have been charged. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, I mean, all animals have their own sophisticated forms of intelligence. What you learn with the great whites before you go down there is that they're gonna come looming in slowly. There are a lot of tuna out there, a lot of seals and other things for them to eat. So they're not actively trying to hunt you. But if you swim away from them, they perceive you as prey. They're making a binary decision, right? And this is actually an important thing in terms of brain circuitry. Again, I had a student who then went off and did a postdoc. She now has her own laboratory in Switzerland. Lindsay Sillay, who published some papers on threat assessment and response, how fear can turn to pausing can turn to aggression is very, very interesting work. And she really deserves the credit. We can put a link to those papers. But there are these areas of the midline thalamus, like basically square in the middle of the brain, that basically make the decision. Among three choices, you can go forward, you can stay in the same place, or you can retreat. And predators are also assessing, are they moving forward toward me? Are they staying still? Or are they retreating? The brain is very, of all species, is sophisticated in air quotes, but it has to make these decisions often with limited amounts of information. So these are more like switches than a continuum. And Lindsay has identified a number of those switches in the brain, she and others. And so the bears are probably paying attention to, you know, is he moving forward toward me or something else? Is he staying still, or is he retreating from me? They have to know if it has something to do with them. And you have to do the same. You encounter a mountain lion along a trail. People will say, well, don't run, get large. Okay. But at some point, if it gets close enough, you've got to make a decision. Are you going to fight her? Are you going to run, right? Or you could lay and play dead. So these are life-altering decisions, so to speak. And the computations are not super sophisticated. And this is no doubt relevant to everything we've been talking about, whether it's anterior mid-cingulate cortex or prefrontal cortex, is that brain areas will ramp up their activity and cross thresholds after which circuits are set in motion, right? So there's this kind of buildup, there's names that don't matter right now for this, but there's this kind of like buildup of chatter that exceeds a threshold, and then a certain action is taken or withheld. And so the thoughts about, I just said I would, so I'm going to do it. I want to get back and see my kid being born. Gosh, I would feel such shame if I didn't do this. These are different paths into the same sets of, do I go forward? Do I stop? Or do I quit? Retreating in this case would be quitting. And so it's sometimes fun to break things that are somewhat sophisticated, the psychological and the neurobiological into ultimately, you got three choices. You can go forward in life or at any moment, you can stop or you can retreat, or quit is a case maybe. And sometimes that's the life saving decision. A hundred percent. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. I'm excited to share that AG1 has just launched their newest formulation, AG1 Pro. 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AG1 is giving away a free bottle of omega-3 coenzyme Q10 with your first subscription. Again, go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to get a free bottle of omega-3 coenzyme Q10 with your first AG1 subscription. Let's get back on the spokes for a moment. Then we'll plow forward. I said I would. I don't want to disappoint, and I've got something I really want to be there for. That's sort of what we touched on so far. How about I'm going to do this? I'm going to continue to do this? Because you said I couldn't, because they thought I couldn't. I find this one to be very prominent in the online space, but it's also one that as people get better and better and achieve more and more, they hear less and less. This is the great gift to the underdog. You have fuel. They're handing you fuel, but when you win, they're no longer... You've obviously done it. Then it turns to, well, they had all the right resources. How about this? Has anyone ever said to you, there's just no way? That sparked something in you. You're like, now it absolutely... Thank you. They just handed you a blank check. It's the best way to put it. Exactly that. I love what you said there, because throughout my career, that's become less and less useful because less people doubt me. I'm almost like, oh. The swim around Great Britain was probably the biggest one, and I love that because it went on YouTube. We were doing weekly vlogs. The very first vlog that we put out there, the comments. I read through all of them because I was so excited. I was like, oh, this is going to be brilliant. Comments were just like, he's far too big to be a swimmer. I think he's going to give up after 100 kilometres. He's not going to even make it on the south coast. All of them. I read them. What's actually interesting is, I think it was five years ago, I ended up going back and somebody had commented on all of these comments and gone, well, this didn't age very well, did it? That made me feel so good. What's so interesting is once we swam around Great Britain, people stopped doubting me. I miss that. When we said we were going to swim around Iceland, everyone was like, I think you can do it this time. I'm like, where are the guys who were trolling me? I need them back. Yes, certainly around Great Britain, 100% going back to the spokes. That was a big one. Are you moving dynamically between these things because one loses its potency to keep you going? That is exactly the word I use as well. Anything that stimulates you. It's almost like going through your head when you're changing the TV channel. Sometimes something can work and it becomes so potent and you're swimming. I'm swimming because people said I couldn't. This is amazing. Then the very next day, you go, right, I'm going to tap into that again. You go, well, maybe they've got a point. Do I need to finish this? You need something else. I would say your reasons to continue need to be bigger than your reasons to stop. I love this conversation because we're identifying those different categories, different spokes. It's just knowing that what might work one day might not work the other. One of the most potent was my girlfriend. She ended up sending me a picture of the scan. It was one of the first scans that I ever saw of my son. I just woke up two o'clock in the morning, cracked ice off my wetsuit, dived in, and I was like, oh, we're getting this done. It was different and knowing which one to go. I think as a coach as well, sometimes some of my friends who are amazing, like I said, Jerr Kennedy, Chris Morgan, Olympic swimming coach as well, they'll know which buttons to push of mine in the right moments. I think all great coaches do that. Then sometimes I have to do it myself as well. You've got a F you, I'm going to do this. F you, you said I couldn't. I'm going to do it. Let's talk about the other one that Dawkins talks about sometimes, but even he talks about a little bit differently than F me. Like F me, I'm going to do this. What I'm doing here is going to the polar opposite. F you is like, you don't think I can do this? Watch. I'll die trying. Then at some point if that potency runs down, wouldn't it be wonderful to move to our love for something as motivation, but sometimes F me, like I am weak for even considering stopping. F me. It's not a pleasant thought, but does it have potency for you? Is that a source of continual pushing on the gas pedal? I think it is. To take that some probably slightly further, but slightly more specific, I don't know if it is this, but sometimes there'll even be a part of my body that is failing. It's not necessarily F me. It'll be like, F you right shoulder. I think it's that, that I'll get angry at my body failing me. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm taking you for a swim across the Arctic Circle. You're not stopping on me now. It's not just me, but there will be parts of me that I get really angry at if it's failing me. Is that the same, do you think? Yeah. Well, no. You teed up beautifully what I was going to get to, which it's going to sit in a kind of uncomfortable place for some people listening. I just want to give that warning, but it's reality. Because what you're talking about when you see a scan, an ultrasound of your unborn son, and you want to meet the newborn son that is him, you're talking about somebody that's of you, half of you. Let's be fair. Your wife did significantly more of the work. She gestated him, but it's of the two of you and it's of you. I could imagine that if you saw a picture of a family member's child that you told you would do to this also. But at some point, if I just show you a picture of a baby and I go, do it for this baby, I imagine it's not gonna do a whole lot, okay? Unless there's some other story attached to that about you're raising charity for that child, et cetera, et cetera. So this gets to a very important, and I don't think dark, but an important to acknowledge aspect of our wiring, which is one of the most fundamental aspects of our brain and our biology is we have to know the difference between us and not us. And us, it starts with us as the individual, then it extends to our kin. It extends to who we decide, you know, you can adopt, you can have friends, you can have a community, but it's the ability to tap into motivation for us versus not us, even in the absence of competition is extremely powerful. And it's rooted in the hypothalamus, like what this primitive brain structure, there's essentially a set of switches. There's not a lot of thinking down there. It's forward, stop, or retreat, okay? It's mate or don't mate. It's fight or don't fight. It's quit, okay, and you gotta eat or don't eat, right? You don't really have a lot of options to kind of eat, right? So this is most visible, I think, and we'll put a link to this. There's a beautiful illustration of this that's very brutal, which is a nature documentary where there's a lion being attacked by a pack of hyenas. This is real. And they're trying to tear its testicles off. They have an awareness that if they tear off its testicles, it's unlikely to mate in the future and potentially limit the lion population. And they're not doing the math into the future. They've just learned this from each other or it's hardwired, okay? Many animals do this, right? And there's another lion who comes along and enters the fight to protect its other lion, right? But the amazing thing is, and then they ward off these hyenas and it's brutal and they're getting shredded up and they protect their testicles as they're doing it. But the amazing thing is just prior to this scene, those two lions were fighting. They were trying to kill each other and rip off each other's testicles. So there's a switch in the brain from me just guarding the self to us versus them. And it's very dynamic. You can expand this out. Now, humans have this ability to say, my country, my team, my whatever, and it can transcend all sorts of boundaries and you can make it purely cognitive. But when you get down to the real like hardwired stuff, it's your DNA, it's your child, or it's a child that you chose to adopt and raise. And so therefore it's your kid and you would die before you would quit. And so the strength of motivation, I would argue, is not, we have this mental model of these spokes on balance, on a balance. But the interesting thing about your example of your shoulder is you're like, uh-uh, you're not gonna quit on me. In fact, you're not really of me right now, but you're enough of me that I'm gonna keep you. You're not gonna saw off your shoulder, but you're like, you're kind of like, F you, I'm going and you're coming with me. And your language, I'm not capturing it exactly right, actually encapsulates this idea that the dynamic, and it is dynamic, concept of me versus us versus them is kind of what allows us to push through anything, whether it's a PhD thesis in neuroscience, which is not as you described, but it's long in a different way, it lasts years, it's uncertain, probably won't kill you as long as you have good lab technique, but it can do its damage psychologically. And it's, pick any effort, medical school, parenting, whatever it is, the us, not versus them, but us with a little bit of not us, that is the stuff that drove human evolution, exploration, technology development. And this is true for men and for women. I don't wanna cast this in a purely Y chromosome framework. So anyway, those are some thoughts and reflections. And I think your description of your shoulder is like, fuck you, you're coming with me is pretty telling. For sure, I do, I love what you said there as well. Do you find it's also the other way that the reason I bring that up is, I lost my dad four years ago and then the Iceland swim existed in this strange world of, it wasn't just my dad, he was my mentor, he was my coach. And then, so I've lost my dad and then I'm becoming a dad myself. And on the Iceland swim as well, as well as trying to get back for the birth of my son, I said, when I wrote my book about Iceland, I said, I want this to be almost a tribute to everything that my dad taught me and a letter to my future son. And certainly swimming as well, not to get too deep or spiritual or religious, but I was, in my head, this got me through so many dark times. I just imagined that dad was sitting up there, he was a tennis coach, so he's playing tennis on the tennis court in the sky, up in heaven, and he's looking down. And the me, it was just, I would get goosebumps. It would invoke something visceral inside of me, primitive, that I would imagine my dad up in heaven, just looking down and just to everyone else up there, just go and be like, yeah, that one right there, swimming around Iceland, that one's mine, yeah. And that just, oh, I just, even now I could just swim for another 100 miles thinking of that. So that was something I used as well. So would you say with that exact, yeah. It goes both ways. I mean, for those just listening, I am nodding with big nods. I mean, I've heard you describe on other podcasts, you know, you're running, running, running, you're exhausted, exhausted, you see your son at the finish line, no caffeine, no injection of saline, but all of a sudden you've got a jet pack on. Another cute baby at the finish line, probably not the same effect. Probably not the same effect. But what you're talking about here is the ability for humans to pull on this transgenerational understanding of us. So it's like the me piece is important, but the us that really is an affiliative us is again, it's the most potent fuel in the universe. Now, the sad side of this, and it sounds like you had a good relationship to your father on balance. You light up when you talk about him. You know, the sad thing, and actually I think there's been some remedy in the online sphere is that a lot of people have a very complicated relationship with their parents and, or even a horrible relationship with one or both of their parents. And under those conditions, they have to look elsewhere to not just be a lone wolf. It's important to be able to be a lone wolf, but it doesn't take you the full distance. And I know there are a number of sayings about this, and people will be like, there's no I in team and these kinds of things. Yeah, and those phrases are important, but what we're talking about here is very primitive circuitry. Like if you think about the driving force of evolution, it's like every species is trying to make more of itself and protect its young, in particular, it's young, you're young. And once that's okay, then you can focus on other things. So yeah, this is the deep reality of the primate brain of which we are, perhaps you a little bit more than the rest, I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. You earned that joke by being so damn fit in the endurance and strength stuff, so I can jab a tiny bit. But there's another piece of this, right? Which is if people don't have that transgenerational pride and excitement and love to pull on, they have to look elsewhere. And for a long while, I've thought that Jocko Willink has kind of been the football coach to a lot of guys that didn't play football. Or the military commander. I mean, dude is, first of all, he's a good friend of mine, and he's every bit as kind and driven and cool as he comes across, even more so in person, but he does not disappoint. But not everyone was in the military or played football, and yet he's there for you, encouraging you to be at your best through discipline and other things. And there are other examples and Goggins and you and on and on. And I think that it's really helped a generation of men and women to believe in themselves and have an affiliative sense of drive, not just be a lone wolf. And for that, I think we owe a debt of gratitude to all those folks. Andy Stumpf, D.J. Shibley, there are too many names to rattle off, and forgive me, because I'm missing a bunch of them. Cam Haines and Rich Roll, and on and on. But I really think that deep in our brains, below our unconscious, it's like we're trying to check off these boxes of be okay. Once we're okay, who close to us or that we consider close to us, can we bring along? In your case, it was your shoulder. And then layer up from there. So these days you're sitting at a pretty high apex of what you do. And Josh Waitzkin, who has been on this podcast, Brazilian jujitsu guy, incredible chess champion, performance coach for the Boston Celtics, he said, when they're trying to become the champion, you're trying to become the champion. But when you're a champion, you're trying to defend the championship. And the mindset is completely different. So where are you at right now? What's like the next peak? Or do you feel like you're defending something? Or do you feel like you're looking for the next big challenge that will raise you up? What's the next rock to put in your backpack? I'm searching for it at the moment. And it's just, it's got to tick a few different boxes, I think, because it does feel like that. I think my 21 year old self, like I said, Maslow's hierarchy, I just needed feelings of accomplishment, prestige. Even if someone said, you're not going to earn any money from this Ross, at 21, I just go, yeah, but I get the record, right? And they go, yeah. And I'm like, well, that's enough. That's all I need. I actually lost money. Looking back, really irresponsible. I didn't have a house and I had enough money to put down for a deposit on a house. And the opportunity to swim around Great Britain came up, but the boat crew were like, look, we need a deposit on the boat. We need the crew and everything. And I remember I turned to Hester. I mean, again, this is how lucky I am. And I said, look, I should probably do the responsible thing, right? I'm 32 years old, get a house, get a mortgage. That would be the smart thing to do. Or do I take that money, put it on a boat and a crew, and I try and swim around Great Britain. And she looked at me and she just sort of went, ah, I hate to say it, but you might be old, 80 years old with loads of money and everything. You can buy loads of houses, but you're not going to be 31, 32 with the ability to swim around Great Britain. So I think you need to put it on the boat. That was my girlfriend. I was just like, thank you. I think you're right. So we did, it paid off, but I lost money swimming around Great Britain. Whereas now, not to sound like a commercial mercenary, but I'm like, you want me to do a swim? I need to be paid. I can't just keep doing this. Otherwise it's a very expensive hobby. And I think now it is so lucky that I have got to a point where you could call it a career in inverted commas. And I think that's interesting as well. Cause I think sometimes the idea of talking about money with these sorts of events, it's almost, it's a bit, you know, of a dirty word. Whereas I always like, you know, your ikigai, the Japanese concept saying, you know, your ikigai is your reason for being. Why'd you get up in the morning? Made up of four things. What you love, what you're good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. But it needs to be all four. And I think so often people will do these and they forget that what you can be paid for. And you almost become like a martyr as well, you know, and you're not making any money. Whereas with me, I'm really, really fortunate. So to answer your question as well, just to be so, so honest, you know, someone came along, went do this swim and here's a check. I'm like, right, going back to the us. Then I'm like, amazing. That helps my son and any future kids that we want to have as well. So it's a money, it sounds bad, but that's become a thing as well. Yeah, I mean, I don't think money's a dirty word, especially not in the context that you're talking about, earned honestly through incredible endeavors and to serve your family. And having lived in Los Angeles for a few years now, it's an interesting place. You know, there are a lot of success stories here. There are a lot of broken dreams here too. And it's not uncommon to encounter somebody who's still so driven to make it and has not made it that they've essentially cashed in everything else. You know, I have tremendous respect for the endurance community and also for the strength training community. But one of the saddest things I ever, ever saw was I love this movie about West Side Barbell, but there's this one scene where a guy who was doing the, who was training with Louie and those guys talks about missing something of like his son's event because it was bench press night. And the regret that he still lives with, I don't know if his son, I can't remember if his son passed or if they're out of touch, I don't know. But in any case, he was so driven by this particular goal that he missed some critical moment in his child's life and it still haunts him. And no one wants to be that guy or gal. Nobody wants to be that. And nobody wants to be that. And I think that, you know, money is a tool to, you know, to allow, if I may, your son to be able to pursue what he finds most enriching. Something tells me he may be swimming with you at some point, but you'd hate for him to feel the pressure. Yeah, my dad's a scientist and I loved science as a kid. And then when we had some friction, I resisted becoming a scientist. And then at one point I'm like, this is ridiculous. I'm like, I'm gonna destroy my life for all the wrong reasons. I decided to become a scientist. And now we have a great relationship and we talk about science all the time. But the core component that we're talking about here is our biological understanding of us. And once we are well enough, then we can take care of others that are in our closest spheres. And then it can radiate out. Like, so if you can check the box of being okay, and then some, you can do more and more and more for more and more and more people. 100%, yep. Right? Like martyring oneself for everybody and not being able to take care of your family or yourself, that's not good. So I don't think you should feel any shame about your desire to make money. Okay, so that can be a spoke on the thing. The more you make, the more people you'll be able to take care of well. There's this implicit assumption that with more money, you're just gonna buy more stuff for you. But what about you can do more stuff for the rest of the world? 100%, yeah, yeah. So I would put that down as one of the spokes. Certainly swimming around Iceland, it was like, look, you complete this, you make money. So sometimes that got me for a few swims. Not as much as the other spokes that we've been talking about, but it was there to identify. It was like, you finish this, that's another world record. You can monetize that. So yeah, let's put that down as one spoke as well. Great, I've said this before and I'll say it again that. Money cannot buy happiness, it's true, but it can certainly buffer certain kinds of stress, and anyone who says different probably has a lot of it, so, you know, that's just reality, and depending on where one lives and what their basic needs are and extravagant needs are, et cetera, those numbers differ, but it can certainly buffer certain kinds of stress, end of story, and it's always been true, it will always be true, you should be paid for the work you love and it serves the world, that's the goal. You've talked before, and I'm very interested in this notion of dark energy versus light energy, you know, FU energy is powerful, but there's this assumption that it drains us more quickly than I love you energy, and I think that's true because of the relationship to dopamine and other chemicals to love and positive, like, generative things, versus just FU energy, these are some of my favorite experiments, but their outcome is kind of dark, but telling. Robert Heath was a neurosurgeon, and he had patients with electrodes embedded in many different places in their brain, and they could self-stimulate, and some stimulation areas would lead to feelings of drunkenness, others, sexual arousal, others would make them giddy, others would make them tired, and so, he let them basically self-stimulate at will, and it wasn't a ton of patients that had this, as you can imagine, but across all of them, the area of the brain that they preferred to stimulate the most, by a pretty impressive margin, was the area of the brain, it turns out to be the midline thalamus, where they would experience mild frustration and anger, they found it to be incredibly arousing, incredibly motivating, incredibly useful in a way that sitting in the chair with their head in a stereo tax was totally useless, except they just really liked it, and it's telling, a little dark, but telling because it is it speaks to a human's desire to have a me versus them kind of feeling, like frustration, that arousal, again, drives all sorts of things whereby maybe otherwise we would become complacent. That's fascinating. See, I love what you said there, because I think when you look at the anthropology of us humans, the history of us humans, it's so interesting that people sometimes go to me, why do you do these swims? Like, why just put yourself through that? And I go, well, I think humans have always had this idea of kind of self-discipline for self-discovery. You look across different cultures, whether it was the Yamabushi monks of Japan, for instance, I actually lived with them for a little bit. It's called an Okugaki. It's a pilgrimage. You meditate under ice-cold waterfalls, drink green tea, and basically do a marathon a day in the mountains. The mountains was their church. It was brutal, blisters, and you wear basically these sort of wooden sandals as well. It was horrible. You look at the Aborigines going walkabout. There's the Maasai tribe. We've always been doing something. So I think that's so strange that were they just hitting the button on frustration and stuff? Do you think that is? Do you think that's tapping into exactly the same experiment? I do. I mean, I picked a hard career for me. Science is hard. It's slow. It's grueling. And then you have breakthrough. And so I got very accustomed to that. But I think that we all kind of crave that, but shy away from it too. It's exhausting if there isn't some sort of reward loop in there to kind of re-up us. And so I think all cultures have it. All careers have it. My friends who are visual artists, they certainly have it. Their torment is part of their fuel. And they run this dial that we're talking about, the spokes on this thing that we haven't yet named that maybe we'll name at the end, that you'll name at the end. I think it's, what we're talking about is tapping into drive and motivation, but with a purpose. And the purpose can vary in time. And I think all cultures have understood this. I mean, to some extent, we're all sort of neuroscientists. It's just that some people look with more precise tools and give things names. But I consider you a neuroscientist from the perspective of your level of self-analysis as you do these things. On that note, very quickly as well, there was another one, and I wanted to get your opinion on this. Because I, again, this is going to sound so strange, but I lived with the Jamunawa tribe in the Amazon jungle for a while. We did ayahuasca for an entire week. It was this ceremony. I was 21 at the time, just finished kind of professional sports and never touched drugs, psychedelics, anything like that. Very much adhered to the WADA banned substance list. And then for this documentary, they dropped me in the middle of the Amazon jungle and they're like, here you go. This is ayahuasca. I didn't even know what it was. And I was like, what? So it's kind of like makes me giddy. Is it like alcohol? And they were like, a bit stronger than that. I take it. Basically throughout the entire week as well. My first was like the worst trip like ever. I did everything wrong. And it was actually explained to me. My friend, for instance, Ruben, he works at Glastonbury. So he's done all sorts of drugs. And I remember I was sitting there. First of all, I was sweating. It's like somebody had thrown a bucket of water over me. I was sweating that much. Then my tongue swelled. So it was bigger than my mouth. I was speaking like this. And then you projectile vomit. So it just purges my system. At this point, I'm like, right, I need out of this. So I turn and I look at Ruben to my right. He's found a feather on the floor and he's licking it to taste the colors. I was like, oh, I was like, you can't help me, can you? It went so wrong. That was the first night. It was then it was later explained to me. It's like getting on a roller coaster, Ross. You can't get off. You know, there's no you can't fight it. Just you've got to just sit it out. Fast forward for the entire week and then basically it was this, again, sort of self-discipline through self-discovery. So there was various tasks that we had to do. We basically had to we we caught a snake. It's going to sound so weird. I'm so sorry. I apologize. Now you had to bite the tongue of the snake out of its mouth. They then explained to us that you have now got the wisdom of the snake, but you cannot speak. If you speak, the spirit of the snake will hunt you for the rest of your life. So the next 48 hours, you cannot live snake. Yeah, yeah. Live snake. Yeah. They open its mouth and you just you basically just tongue it. I hate snake. But I respect them and their right to live. But I do not like I get I get I'm not. But then when you take in this vow of silence, you then have to go through various different tasks. So I had to climb a tree. I'm holding onto this tree, maybe four meters in the air, and they just smack the bottom of the tree and then fire ants just disappear up the tree and they just start biting you. So you've done a week of Ayahuasca. You've bitten the tongue out of a snake and then you're holding onto a tree as fire ants are biting you. You get down. They immediately take you to another tree. There's a hornet's nest. You see where this is going. Bang. Hit the hornet's nest. You just have to sit there and just take the stings and not make a sound. But what was so strange, so strange, and I love that you brought up this study, is having completed all of that and been initiated with the Jamunao tribe, the feeling that I had afterwards, whether it was Ayahuasca induced, whether it was the pain, I don't know, but it was just cathartic. It felt good that at the end of the ceremony, there was not euphoria, but I was like, wow, you know, we did it. And it's so strange. I'm not advocating or recommending it to anyone, but it was weird that maybe I was just pushing that button in the brain. Listening to that study, there are so many times in my life when I was pushing the button. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are vital for the functioning of all cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking Element makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. My days tend to start really fast, meaning I have to jump right into work or right into exercise. So to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes, when I first wake up in the morning, I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an Element packet dissolved in it. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors. In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So if you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. I mean, I think a lot of people are more or less addicted to social media because of its ability to tap into mild anger and frustration-provoking circuitry, drama, us-them. I mean, not to be ultra repetitive, but this us-them thing is like it's at our core of our circuitry. And the more you can tap into it, the more engagement you can get from the brain. It's very, very powerful. And it can be used to benevolent ends, fighting evil, this kind of thing. But it's interesting because the psychedelics, I've never done ayahuasca, but certainly psilocybin and others, like the ego dissolution that's supposed to occur with those is supposed to make you feel less of self versus other boundary, connected to other beings, the universe, et cetera. It's supposed to dissolve the me-us versus them boundary, including humans to animals, humans to plants. I mean, that's a lot of the theory anyway. Maybe I just need to do more psychedelics. And maybe not. These are powerful tools. I want to talk about something for a moment, which is steaks, not beef steaks, although those are wonderful, too. So there's a really cool study that came out in the last couple of years about why we choke. Why we choke. It's a study in a non-human primate, but it certainly has relevance to humans because there's been an analog study done in humans. So here's the idea. Let's say you're throwing darts and we bet two pounds per round of darts. I don't actually know the details of the game darts, so forgive me. But let's billiards. But let's make it simpler. Was it billiards? And we say two pounds. OK, you'll perform your best. I'll perform my best depending on how competitive we are, depending on our skill level, relative skill level. Somebody will win. Somebody will not win, etc. OK, now we bet 100,000 pounds. OK, well, now we're paying a lot more attention to how we're playing. It will likely bring out your best and my best. We'll see who wins. But let's say we bet two million pounds. At some point what happens, and they've done the brain recordings to support what I'm about to say, at some point when the stakes are extremely high, the motor cortex starts to recruit too much circuitry and we can't perform well. It's not that we can't do the thing. It's that too many commands are being sent into the system. And we start incorporating musculature and a connective tissue that normally needs to be excluded in order to have the precision of the shot. When you're doing these long endurance events, it's slightly different because you can afford to have an imperfect stroke now and again or pretty often, and you'll still continue. But how much attention are you paying to, A, your form and your desire to do things, quote unquote, perfectly in a moment? And how much attention are you paying to the stakes? Like what's at stake here? Your reputation, your ego, your family, your whatever. How much in mind are the stakes? What's so interesting about what you said? I think for me, like on the Yukon swim, for instance, it's almost anticlimactic when you start it. It was the same with the Iceland one as well, actually, in that it's not a heroic start. There's no like dive. It's not. There's no fine motor skills. It's not like a 50 meter swim where everything has to be completely dialed in. And if something goes wrong because the stakes are too high and you're hyper aroused, it's not like that. It's kind of knowing this isn't going to be over quickly. You know, even if I have a bad start, it's fine. I've got 100 days, you know. So for me, when it's ultra endurance, less so. However, with that said, there's definitely times where the stakes are high. There's all these reasons, both negative and positive, and things aren't going well. And there's times where I've gone, you know what? Just swim for the enjoyment of it, Ross. You know, let's just remove everything else. And only now speaking to you, I realize that's maybe because it was just bubbling away, bubbling away. And we were getting close to that threshold where I would start to just recruit. And it would become deteriorating in terms of my technique. There was times when I just went, I'm not even looking at my watch. I'd say to the crew, don't even tell me what speeds I'm doing. I'm just going to swim. I'm just going to enjoy being out here. Because it is a privilege to be swimming over the Arctic Circle with dolphins, you know, chasing me and stuff. And that's where I'd go, Ross, stop caring. Just, you know, we'll care tomorrow, but now just stop caring. Yeah. So it's reduced the stakes in your head. Interesting. These swims are very long and, as you said, can continue 50 plus hours. Do you notice that your motivation, your energy waxes and wanes according to your circadian rhythm? So much so. Certainly at the start of the Iceland swim, because it was in the summer, we had almost 24 hours of daylight. And it was crazy how I just I never got that deep restorative sleep. Also, as well, we were doing six hours on, six hours off. So you're working with the tide as well. So it doesn't matter if it's two in the morning, two in the afternoon, when the tide changes, you get in. And I think just understanding that motivation was so closely linked to my circadian rhythm and whether I just wasn't getting that deep restorative sleep. Sometimes if we got storm bound, I had the privilege of sleeping for eight hours, you know, 10 hours. And the next day it was like somebody just dialed up the brightness on the world again. And I was like, things aren't things aren't so bad. You know, this is OK. I can do this. But but sometimes, again, if you're not sleeping circadian. room, 24 hours of daylight, tied on, tied off. I was so aware that I couldn't trust my own brain and that neurotransmitters, chemical signals, they were all against me. Depleting serotonin, dopamine. And that was just, you now have no motivation, hormonally, chemically, biochemistry. It was something else. Maybe it was the anterior midsingular cause. I don't know, but it's like, it's discipline. You have no motivation today, Ross. This is disgusting. Your tongue's falling off. It's grey. I'm getting smashed by jellyfish. And then there was the odd time where it was nice to swim. I mean, you'd wake up, there would be, you know, rainbow, the fjord, frozen fjord. And I'm like, ah, this is, you know, the northern lights, swimming under the northern lights, looking up at the Valkyries. This is amazing. But 90% of the time, it wasn't as well. They should have told us all in the third grade, the don't believe any of your thoughts that occur between two and five a.m. is when I tell myself all the time, just don't believe it. I don't believe anything my brain tells me between two and five a.m. And I think they also should have told us that one of the great reasons to get to a point with something, anything, physical, cognitive, emotional, et cetera, where you feel like what's the point, is so that you can experience the point coming back into your mind. And you realize, oh, there are going to be moments in life where I just think, like, what's the point? But there will be this moment ahead of it that the logic of it, the positive emotions associated come back. And then you realize the brain, it tricks itself into thinking that what's happening right now is going to go on forever. And that to me, it was like the biggest insight. It came not from me, but from my friend, Ryan Suave, who's this incredible trauma therapist and he helps addicts. And he's been on this podcast before. And he said, if you can tolerate a certain amount of emotional discomfort for one second, then you can tolerate it for 10 seconds. And if you can tolerate it for 10 seconds, you can do it for a minute and so on and so on. He said, but the problem is negative emotions make us feel for some reason, like they're going to go on forever. Positive emotions don't have the same effect. We tend to think this is going to stop at some point and then we lose, it's like grasping fog and it goes away. I don't know what that is. I don't have an explanation for it, but it is a diabolical feature of our wiring. It is. And that is such a skill in that moment when the dark clouds are over you to be like, I can't trust myself. And also even as a team as well, there was times where, you know, we're caught in a storm. I didn't swim as far as I needed to that day. I'm angry at the team because they put me in against the tide, all sorts of things. And we almost had a rule that exactly to your point, between those periods, you don't argue. You don't try and have it. We'll just go, you know what? I'm going to sleep. I'll see you in the morning. There's no point in arguing about it now because we can't trust ourselves. And so I think that was just to be really logical, rational. I talk a lot about stoicism because I found on my swim, sports psychology can only take you so far. But when I started reading about Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, I was like, well, this is more applicable, you know, control the controllables, accept the uncontrollables. This feels better, you know, because with sports psychology, it's prehab, rehab, conditions are perfect and that's easy. But what are you doing when your tendons in your shoulder are falling off, your tongue's falling off? And I'm like, stoicism helps me a little bit more. You've said your tongue's falling off. What are you referring to, your actual tongue falling off? Maybe you shouldn't have bit that snake, dude. I think that's what it is. Saltwater exposure, basically, you know, the human body is not meant to be in saltwater for that long. So it extracts all the moisture from your tongue. On the GB swim, for instance, it was about a week in and I remember they made this amazing soup. It was just this rich vegetable soup. All the team were tucking into it. It was amazing. So full of vegetables, nutrients. But I looked over and I noticed that mine had, I didn't know if it was pork or chicken. So I turned to the captain, I said, why haven't you got any pork or chicken? It's only in mine. And he just leant over and he went, Ross, that's not pork or chicken, that's your tongue. And it was falling off in the soup. But I know, but coconut oil, for those, for anyone listening, you find yourself in a similar situation, coconut oil acts as a barrier, maintains the moisture, you keep yourself, and it grows back. It did grow back as well. All right. Let's get real honest here, Ross. Is there anything in everyday life that you have to absolutely scruff yourself and badger yourself into doing that is absolutely trivial in somebody else's eyes? And if the answer is no, that's fine. If you just like show up to, do you brush your teeth twice a day? They're nice and white. So do you ever feel like, I don't want to do this again? Or you just, do you just, do you ever think I don't want to do this? Like, and you can't tell why. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think certainly if you spoke to my girlfriend, you know, house chores and things like that, I'm so messy. I'm so bad. I'm so bad. I'm really messy. And for me, again, maybe it's related to dopamine, but I just need those big grand goals. So it's just, yeah, swim around Iceland, swim world's longest nonstop river swim. Yeah. Take out the trash. Do the washing up. Is it because it's too easy or it's too hard? I'm not sure. I'm just really bad at like admin and basic stuff. It goes, goes back to what I said. If someone said, I'll swim the English channel. I'm like, it's been done. You know, it doesn't, doesn't really appeal. So, and I think it's the same in, in like, if you said there's a record for taking out the trash, no one's ever taken two tons of trash to the, I'll be like, Oh, hold my beer. So my girlfriend knows this, you know, she knows how to push my buttons. So she might do that. That's so good. If there was a competition, significant others everywhere are taking note. A few minutes ago, you mentioned something that told me that there are times when you can no longer advocate for yourself. It's like, let's do this. I've got this. Okay. Like your arm gives out, let's go. Come on. You're gonna bring the arm along like a member of your team. But in the moments where you're really down in the pit, it sounded as if, and I don't want to put words or thoughts into your mind, but it sounded as if you get outside of yourself and you're like, we're going, because this is the middle of the night and you know, you don't like this, but you now become you sort of third person yourself. And now you bring you along. And I think that's such an important tool for the times when there's no coach, there's no team, there's no goal in mind. It hurts like hell. You don't see the point. You've run out of fuck you's. You've run out of fuck me's, you know, you've just run out and you just have to transcend or exit yourself and just go, let's go. A hundred percent. Yeah. And, and, and I love that you asked that as well, because again, certainly on the Iceland swim, I took such inspiration from the berserkers, you know? So, so for those who don't know, you know, the berserkers literally means bear shirts, they will be wearing sort of these bear shirts, these ancient Nordic warriors who would enter into a battle frenzied state where they were impervious to pain and fear. There was even as well, wolf warriors as well. So there was the berserkers, but the wolf warriors embodied the spirit of the wolf. They would bite down on their shields when run into battle as well. Now, historians, some think they might've been using hallucinogenic mushrooms. Others think it was maybe a ritualistic chanting, breathing to get into this state, but whatever it was, they were no longer themselves. They were the spirit of that particular animal that they were embodying. And I think certainly towards the end of the Iceland swim, I was lucky enough to speak to this again, sort of like an old chief. And he said, Ross, you need to stop thinking like a swimmer. You need to become a berserker. You need to just get in there and just think entirely differently. Again, it's Samuel Johnson, 17th century English writer. Whoever makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. And I think for me, certainly on that South Coast, I was like, got to get rid of pain of being a man, just become a beast. And I think it was that as well. Just no longer thinking of yourself becoming that, but also just becoming wolf warrior, berserker. Amazing. Do you like to read? It seems like you know a lot about these ancient traditions and tribes. I loved it. Yeah, I think because this is going to sound really strange as well. So I lived in Namibia with the Sam Bushman for a while. Amazing endurance athlete. We were covering a marathon a day, barely any water for an entire week. I remember all we had, we shared a porcupine between us as well. Just amazing athletes. But there was one particular guy in the tribe and he was part Namibian, but he's also part of the Curlegin tribe, which I hope I'm getting this right. But it's basically an ethnic group that's specific to Kenya and they produce more marathon runners, just elite marathon runners than anywhere else. And he turned to me and was sitting around this fireplace at one point and he said, Ross, do you know why people from the Curlegin tribe are so good? Do you know why we're such great runners? And I was like, yeah, like altitude training? Nope. I was like, your diet? And he goes, nope. And I was like, barefoot running, beautiful biomechanics. And you drew that from an early age. And he went, no. And I was like, right, go on then, tell me. And so this is our pain tolerance. So we have a tradition that when a boy is basically going into adulthood, we have him in front of the entire tribe. We take some mud, like clay, and we put it on his face. And then he has to stand in front of the entire tribe. The chief comes out, takes his tackle in his hand, circumcises him, which is essentially with like a bamboo shoot. His penis circumcises him in front of the entire tribe. He cannot flinch, cannot flinch, make any sounds. If the mud cracks on his face, then all of a sudden, everyone in the tribe will be like, he's not desirable. So he doesn't pass on his genes. So it's this idea that he said that just generation after generation, knowing that those where the mud doesn't crack are then considered desirable, then pass on their genes, and their offspring do exactly the same, exactly the same, exactly the same. And what you're left with is just this incredible group of people with their pain tolerance. I mean, with that, as we were sat around the fire, he pulled out a knife and was like, Ross, do you want to run faster? I was like, I'm good. I'm good. But I think I'm fascinated to answer your question. I love looking back through history and just will take inspiration from anywhere and everywhere, even if that is ritualistic circumcision. I've not done it with mud on my face, but I do find that stuff fascinating. Wow. The alternate response would have been, look, I totally respect your tradition. I spent a lot of time in cold water. I need all the insulation I can get. But hey, your reply is up to you. Wow. Is there anything like that that you found with pain tolerance as well? Are there studies around that? Yeah. So, I mean, on my list of things to discuss with you is the generalizability of resilience training. You know, this is a fascinating and still somewhat opaque area of science. I mean, you know, let me put it this way. On the one hand, we know that there's a very limited and well-defined list of chemicals, epinephrine, adrenaline released in the body, norepinephrine released in the brain from the locus coeruleus. We can even get specific about locations and circuits. Dopamine. And if the stress is long enough, cortisol that are associated with a high arousal, painful stimulus. And other things too, right? Dynorphin, which is sort of the opposite of endorphin in any case. You'll experience a rise in those, whether you're getting into uncomfortably cold water, you're getting stung by hornets, or God forbid, you're experiencing a public circumcision and you can't flinch. It's true, right? I mean, among other things, right? There are many, many other molecules and things happening there, but those undoubtedly are involved. So then the question becomes, can our memory system, our prefrontal cortex and our memory system apply a set of rules whereby in a different stressor, this thing, this like negative arousal, pain, is it familiar to us? And can we then walk ourselves through it in a way that we understand, okay, this pain makes it feel like it's going to go on forever, but this too shall pass, right? And to some extent, the data say yes, in particular about deliberate cold water exposure. But that's a unique one because first of all, unless the water is very, very cold and God forbid, people don't jump into an ice hole. I'm so tired of seeing people either do hyperventilation and then go into cold water and die, water of any kind and die, or videos of people jumping into ice holes and getting swept under. It's really, it happens and it's awful, but deliberate cold exposure with a shower or a cold plunge done safely, people can get familiar with the experience of being flooded with adrenaline and the fact that the mind is in complete disarray for the first 20 or 30 seconds and that it can slow their breathing and grab hold of their mind and create a strategy to get through it or get out of it, whatever. This is stress inoculation training, right? The neurochemicals that are released don't change, but the inoculation piece is the familiarity and the ability to not further increase adrenaline through panic. So in that sense, yes, but it's also true that if you look at the cognitive behavioral therapies around phobias, for instance, public speaking phobia, people can use cognitive behavioral therapy or a beta blocker for that matter to successfully overcome that progressive exposure to the thing with, you know, it would basically means like not that much adrenaline. Okay, that's too much. Let's repeat this a few times and just kind of let them move through that. But it doesn't seem to translate to other stressful circumstances, perhaps because the adrenaline is kept beneath a certain threshold. So I believe, and based on my limited amount of work with, but certainly conversations with the, you know, the tier one operator community and the use of cold water in all military branches, at least in the US as a tool for building up stress tolerance that, yeah, it translates, pain tolerance translates, but people are coming in with a sort of set, probably genetic and experiential predisposition. And we see this, you know, I knew kids growing up whose pain tolerance was too high and they did really dumb stuff and they're missing fingers or they're dead, right. Or they needed extreme consequences before they adjusted their behavior. Other people, they were around the corner when the discussion of of a firecracker came up, and they probably experienced too much anxiety in too many different domains of life. So I'm not trying to dodge the question, but I think we should be very careful about the idea that any one particular type of training makes us tough. The cold water swimmer might have a hard time listening in a hard conversation where the feedback they're getting is not pleasant, but they might be completely stoic and just think, this sucks, this sucks, this sucks, but I can calm myself through this. I can do this, if they can understand that the same underlying mechanisms are taking place. Is that, I don't know if that's satisfactory. No, no, no, that sounds, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if I were to answer any other way, it wouldn't be true to the data. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think cold water is a great training tool, if done safely. I want to ask you about your training, your physical training. One thing that's peculiar about you, at least to me, is that you're pretty heavily muscled for a guy that's supposed to float in the water. So, like, what's that about? I mean, you do strength stuff, too. What does your training look like now, when you're in between sort of these super events? A lot of strength training, because I think it's so interesting that when doing the sort of swims that I do, these ultramarathons around countries, it's, you're taking swimming and conventional sports science and you're just moving outside of those realms. For instance, a lot of friends of mine who are amazing swimmers, Olympians, sometimes I'll ask questions like, oh, around Iceland, was it a two-beat leg kick, a four-beat leg kick? Are you bilaterally breathing? What's your VO2? What's your lactic threshold? I'm like, no, no, no, no. When you're caught in an Arctic storm and you are just windmilling, none of that matters. Strength training, especially with mechanotransduction, this idea that people think of strength training as just improving the strength of the muscles, but actually connective tissue, ligaments, tendons, they all get stronger as well. For me, that's why I strength train so much, because on my swims, it's not my lactic threshold, it's my VO2 technique. It will be a ligament or a tendon, something that gives up, that will stop the swim physically. Got it, the chassis. Exactly, exactly. You can't have the chassis break down. Exactly that. So it's almost, I joke, but friends of mine from Loughborough University, Adam Peaty, the greatest breaststroker the world has ever seen, he is amazing. He is poetic in the water. He is a Mako shark. It's just beautiful to watch him. I am a chubby whale at best. I am just there, I'm just migrating, basically. That is what I'm doing. I'm not poetic in the water, but I won't stop. So I think strength training, and it's only now, because for so long in endurance, it was a dirty word, strength training, whereas now we're understanding that certainly the idea of general physical preparedness or in your pre-season, making the body physically robust enough to then endure the intensity or the volume that you subject it to later. Friend of mine at the English Institute of Sport had a great saying. It was like, sometimes you need to train to train. Before I can subject you to 150 kilometers in the pool a week, we need to make sure the connective tissue and everything, there's no weak part of that kinetic chain. So I think at the moment that that's kind of where we're at, that general physical preparedness. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, 8Sleep. 8Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. 8Sleep just launched the Pod 6, which is their most advanced sleep system. The Pod 6 is half the size of their previous models. It's 20% faster with its cooling and heating, and it has nine times as many sensors for tracking your sleep. The reason why 8Sleep is so effective at improving your sleep quality and duration is because it helps control your core body temperature. And the reason for that is that in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your core body temperature has to drop by about one to three degrees. And to wake up feeling completely refreshed and energized, you actually want your body temperature to be increasing in the final hours of your sleep. 8Sleep automatically regulates the temperature of your bed throughout the night and is monitoring your sleep and dynamically adjusting the temperature of your sleep environment, so you get the maximum amount of deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep. I've been sleeping on an 8Sleep mattress cover for nearly five years now. And with each new iteration of 8Sleep, it gets better and better at figuring out what my body needs in order to get the best possible night's sleep. And of course, it provides me excellent data about just how much deep and rapid eye movement sleep I got. If you would like to try 8Sleep, go to 8sleep.com slash Huberman to get up to $200 off their new Pod 6. 8Sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's 8sleep.com slash Huberman to save up to $200. I don't have anything even close to your physical abilities, but a few years ago, I decided that I would do two kinds of training. I'd love your thoughts on how I can improve this. In addition to doing strength and endurance training and some sprints and this kind of thing, it is more about the mental side. I was on a camping trip with my girlfriend for her birthday and we did a hike up Clouds Rest, which is one of my favorite hikes in the Yosemite. It's about 14 miles up and back. And most anyone can do it with some level of endurance and physical ability. It's not grueling, but I had a sinus infection and it was her birthday and I'd been there before. She hadn't been there before and I wanted to like really show her a great time. And she's really physically robust and she was just motoring up. And I was carrying a lot of water, granted, but I was struggling that day. And I decided at some point that I would, I knew I was gonna get to the top because the hike is actually not that awesome along the way, but at the top is just majestic. You're above half dome. It's so awesome. You could run it. I've run it in the past and I highly recommend it. It's just a fantastic, fantastic hike for anybody. But along the way, I realized I was really struggling. So I decided I would just walk. I had this thing where I'm like, I'm just gonna watch the process and see what the cycles are. And I noticed the cycles went from something like, F this, this really sucks. I'm gonna just push against that, to I would distract myself. I would think about something else. And then I would just sort of go into this kind of like liminal state and then it would repeat. It would go back to F this. And sometimes the timescale of those would be minutes and sometimes it would be like tens of minutes and so on. And I thought, this is kind of interesting. It's like three things. It's not 20. It's not like all the spokes. It's like three and they're on repeat. I was like, this is pretty useful. Like I'm gonna try and do this. And so I, in other areas. So now when I run, my longer runs, I think, okay, I'm either gonna listen to something and distract myself, music, et cetera. Pay attention to what's around. Or there are some runs now that I do where I try and concentrate on every step and just try and make it as painful as possible to just try and like build a resilience for each. Because in a hard conversation, distracting yourself is actually not useful. So this is maybe where the translatability or non-translatability of stress inoculation needs more of a fine point. The reason I'm bringing this up here like this is I feel like the sports performance and the psychological performance community needs like more refined tools. So maybe it should be go out, do the thing and really just concentrate on just how much it sucks for as many seconds as possible. And every time you forget it sucks, you failed, right, for a moment. And then the other one would be learn how to distract yourself because there are conditions that are stressful where you wanna distract yourself. And then like I've got a friend who's a neurosurgeon and distracting himself during a stressful moment is like the exact wrong thing to do. Does that make sense? It makes complete sense. Okay, all right, cool. So maybe my hope is that people listen to you around performance and they should listen to you because you actually do the stuff. My runs are trivial for you and for most people, but I feel like more specific tools with more aimed at specific outcomes, I feel like it's kind of what the general public needs. So to become a better listener, learn to concentrate on the pain for long periods of time and not flinch. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. But I love what you said there as well because this is something with the Royal Marines, a friend of mine who's a psychologist there. And he was just saying, and everyone listening will understand this, but when you're focusing on the outcome, if you're looking at the clock, if you're like, how much further have I got to walk? Oh my God, is it, you know, we've still got 10 hours of walking stuff. You're thinking of the outcome. And he said, you have to just focus on the process. For you, Ross, when you're swimming, it's putting one arm in front of the other as efficiently as possible. Is it a high elbow catch? Are you finishing your stroke? And if you focus on that, the outcome becomes inevitable. But by focusing on the outcome, you're not focusing on the process. And I think for me, when my mind drifts sometimes, I come straight back to focus on the process as well. But I love what you said there because sometimes I just tune out and I want to be anywhere but there. And I'll be thinking of the weirdest things. Like I'll do my shopping list for my Christmas shopping in my head, you know, and I'll just go somewhere completely different. But sometimes I do really fine just drilling back. Don't watch the clock. Don't look at the outcome. Don't ask how far you've got. I don't want to know. And that's quite easy to do sometimes when sea swimming because you have no point of reference. You can't see land. So you are just swimming immersed in your own thoughts. And some of the weirdest swims I did was under the Northern Lights and you also get this phosphorescent algae. So as you're swimming, the only way I can describe it is like you're swimming in a black hole. Like you turn to breathe. You see the Northern Lights, the Valkyries, their shimmering shields. And then you pull. And as you pull, this phosphorescent algae just lights up in your face. And there's moments like that where I'm like, I don't want to be anywhere. I want to be so present. This is amazing. And then other times where I'm just like, I want to be anywhere but here. And it's having that sort of psychological adaptability to just flick between all of them. Use whichever one you need at that moment in time. The spokes just go to whichever one's going to get you through it. And you need loads of different ones. We don't yet have a name for it, but maybe we're sort of veering towards something kind of akin to sort of like the different spokes on the tire of resilience or something like that. It's exactly that. Something like that. I'm not trying to be poetic here. I'm not a Brit nor am I Scottish, so I can't seem to nail the nomenclature. But I want to talk about vision and share with you something. Again, I came in like really excited to be able to share some of my favorite studies that hopefully would be of interest and perhaps of use to you and the listeners. So are you familiar with the myth of the cyclops? Like the guy with the one eye in the middle of his head? So there's this wild thing where animals with their eyes on the side of their head tend to be prey animals and they have panoramic vision. And animals with their eyes in the front can generate depth perception much better, stereopsis and so on, and they tend to be the predators. And there are some animals that can translocate their eyes to go from kind of panoramic to like more focused vision. There are a lot of ideas about the myth of the cyclops, but when we move our vision, even though our eyes are fixed in our head, towards a particular vergence point, like a target, it raises our arousal and our ability to recruit energy, physical energy and mental energy. People in the fight game know this. When we dilate our gaze, we relax, we come off the gas pedal a little bit. We can still do things, but we are actually, because of the way that vision and time perception are linked, we can actually see more. Motion perception at the periphery gets better, obviously, because you're not looking through a soda straw, you're looking through in kind of panorama. But you are less able to recruit a lot of energy to one location. There are a lot of examples of this in the animal world that I could spell out in this scenario I've focused on for a long time, but we won't go there. The myth of the cyclops is in part, okay, is in part about a creature who only has soda straw vision and therefore is constantly angry, and that anger is actually what leads to its demise. It can't see the big picture, and so it can be defeated by something from the periphery. I love this. And so, yeah, I thought you might like this. I thought you might like this. So what I'd like to know is even with your head underwater, but maybe even in the routines of daily life, do you ever find yourself thinking about big picture, soda straw view, tunnel vision versus kind of dialing as a dynamic process? Because people in martial arts use this as a way to slow time perception down or speed it up in order to control aspects of the fight. You're somewhat limited underwater into what you can see, but like you said, focusing just on the stroke in the moment is sort of the mental equivalent of the soda straw view. But if you don't keep the big picture in mind, that pain in your shoulder and the perception of it can grow to the point where it can become disabling. So there's some utility in being able to dynamically switch back and forth. Now that you've said that, I've never thought about it like that. I love the cyclops myth. I love, I'm using that. That's amazing. But I absolutely do that. So on the Yukon swim for instance, so that was the world's longest nonstop river swim just down the Yukon. And there were times where I just wanted to take everything in and I sat there and I'm eating a banana. I'm like, wow. And I don't know whether that's switching on the parasympathetic nervous system, you're at leisure, you're enjoying it. This is all amazing. And then there was other times, like for instance, like during the night and the temperature just plummeted, I was like, that is sympathetic nervous. That is fight or flight. And I am not taking in anything like these amazing scenes. People would go to me, oh my God, Ross, did you see the moose? Did you see the bear? You know, so I'm just like, no. I am just staring at the bottom of the river and at best out of my peripheral vision, I'm just making sure that I've got a high elbow catch and I'm ripping through the water. I've just gone full cyclops mode. Like that is what I'm doing. And I've never thought about it, but that's exactly what I was doing. Yeah. And I don't know, I'm trying to think of another example where I've done that, but certainly swimming, that is exactly what I do. You know, there's times when I look head above the water, having a banana, taking it all in, in Iceland, looking at the fjords. And then there's times where it's just like, no, no, no, no. It is just, you are dialed in, cyclops mode. Yeah. A friend of mine, who's from a military group overseas, I won't say which, told me that part of the training that they receive in close quarter combat, where they encounter somebody and they realise it's gonna be close quarter combat and it's life or death on the line, is that the mental set that's required to do that is recruited immediately, right? In the presence of a real threat. But in training it, they have them actually, like contract their gaze. And he showed me, it was actually really eerie. Like he stared right at me and he brought his eyes into it. And you could see his, you could feel his entire autonomic tone change. And then he stopped and he said, I don't like that feeling. I'm like, why? He's like, because it's, he said, I'm not gonna kill you, but it's this moment where you cross, you've deliberately crossed over to a point where you're like, you're gonna try and kill this person. And so it has a, you know, it's a risky endeavour to go into these trenches, right? But this seems to be a hard- hardwired aspect of animal visual systems, human visual systems. I often think about how media is trying to recruit our absolute focus and get us to forget everything else so that we like mindlessly trudge forward in anger and how to overcome that. But then again, this is powerful. It's led to self and protection of affiliate self. But it is that. It's the same with sharks as well, when just about to attack and then they roll back their eyes protecting. But it's this, I suppose, similar in that their physiology, when they're dialed in, you can see, certainly with the great whites, there was behavior where you were like, we're okay. And then there was times where the much more experienced divers were like, Ross, head on a swivel, I don't like that tiger shark. How about, what do you mean? Every other behavior is excluded in favor of just predation. Yeah. I mean, the most dramatic and in my opinion, cool example of this is in a species that you no doubt swam with millions of them in the English Channel, which are the cuttlefish. Cuttlefish are cephalopods like octopuses. I used to have these in my lab and they swim around with their eyes on the sides of their heads in this kind of like benevolent, but a little bit paranoid state where they have near 360 degree vision. They can see very far back because they are a prey animal. They have no skeleton to protect them, right? They have their cuttlebone to allow them to float, but they're basically a protein snack. But if they see something that they want to eat, their eyes translocate to the front. They completely change in their patterns of, it's not even camouflage any longer. They're chromophores and they become depth perception dependent hunters. I used to study this in my lab in San Diego and it's just a remarkable thing to see this like sweet little hufflepod of an underwater little benevolent monkey turn into a, like a vicious killer. And the translocation of the eyes happens first. And so this is, it's a real thing. Yeah. It recruits all sorts of machinery in the brain and body. And it also just shuts down like, nope, this is not time to do anything else except I love that. Yeah. What I love about this is that it's again, it's the berserker. It's this idea of like nature leaves clues and, you know, success leaves clues. Biomimicry and just going, right. But we've lost that. I think, you know, we humans have lost certain things, but this is amazing just to go, I'm going to switch this on like, you know, the catfish. That's what I'm going to do. Yeah, I love that. I'm actually, I'm going to, next time I swim, I'm going to, I'll message you. I'm going to purposely do that as well. I always control all the variables on my swim. So I know exactly, you know, I've got my lane. I know the distance, I know the water temperature, everything. And I'm just going to start experimenting with this. Maybe as well, I love like for me, and this is a whole other discussion, but even playing with like caffeine on the Yukon swim, we were getting into the grams towards the end, you know, of the swim. And that, again, it just enabled me to just be so much happier doing such a mundane task and looking at the bottom of the sea. If I punch like just dark clouds, I'm struggling, my shoulders are hurting. 400 milligrams of caffeine, 15 minutes later, that life's not so bad. This is, I'm just ripping through the water. Do you find that, that you can almost, yeah, you can biohack, you can, yeah, okay. There are stimulants like caffeine that are incredibly powerful in that way. I love caffeine. I have a high caffeine tolerance, so I can do that. You know, things like nicotine, which I've experimented with, the problem I have is that it really sets up a very quick dependence. Like I start to crave it, and it's a quick up and down for me. Some people don't mind that. For me, it's not a great tool. Faster than caffeine, so short half-life. Much faster, and maybe it's the way I'm doing it or the way I metabolize it and so on. Occasionally, I'll take like a milligram or two in a workout, but then I notice I get very tired post-workout in a way that I don't if I don't take it. So I prefer to keep nicotine as oral nicotine, you know, so not smoking or vaping, dipping, or snuffing, but you know, like the lozenges or something, or everyone's in a great while tool as opposed to an everyday tool. Caffeine's an everyday thing, unless I'm carrying some sort of like respiratory infection or something, in which case I cut it out, which is probably half of the misery I experience while on that respiratory infection. It just makes it so much better when you come back. Caffeine is a beautiful thing. I back it, and it backs me, so. I agree. Anything else? I think I've heard you talk about Alpha-GPC as well. Yeah, as a milder alternative to nicotine. One advantage of Alpha-GPC is if you're gonna work out late in the day, and you need to sleep a few hours later, it does have a sort of quote-unquote stimulant effect, but it actually can increase the amount of REM sleep you get as opposed to mess with your sleep like a lot of stimulants. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if I do it too early in the day, then I notice I get that late afternoon crash, and so it's kind of quick up, quick down. I mean, I've played around with all the various things. Modafinil is too stimulating for me. It keeps me up for days. There's some other things that seem to work better. There's this prescription drug, Sanosi, in small amounts. But again, I find that if I use any of these regularly, besides caffeine, it creates more problems than solutions. So I keep them as when really needed tools. Yeah, and some good studies as well around creating. I've become fascinated with this idea of almost discipline and motivation is something you can supplement almost if you know what to do with the right amounts. And I think with creatine, there's some good studies with sleep deprivation at the moment. Do you back those? The best evidence says that creatine puts water in your muscles, makes you stronger as a consequence. I've been taking it since I was like 17 with the occasional washout of a week or so for whatever reason, and then back on it. 10 grams a day for so many years now. But in addition to those strength-increasing effects due to water volume in the muscles, at least my understanding, is that if you're mildly or severely sleep-deprived, you can partially, partially rescue some cognitive function and maybe even some physical vigor by taking 10 or even 20 grams of creatine the next morning. But of course, you need to sleep at some point, and it's not a replacement for sleep. But yeah, I think creatine's great. I don't think there's evidence that it makes hair fall out or anything like that, and it's inexpensive and seems safe, so I don't see any reason not to. Do you take it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although I didn't on the Yukon swim, and then the study came out, well, I certainly read it much later, and so that's why I'm even fascinated now with the next non-stop swim. I just, I think we can go further. You know, we did 510 kilometers, and I'm like, oh, there's things now that I've learned, that whether it's the tunnel vision as well, with 20 milligrams of creatine, I think there's a bit of me that is just fascinated. I like to think of myself as like a human guinea pig. And now, like I said, we didn't do creatine on the Yukon. Not to say I raw-dogged it, but I certainly, there are things that I could do in addition, because we mainly did it on caffeine. I think alpha-GPC, cognizant as well, acetylcholine. Like I think I get on really well with that. I find it's a nicer focus, not just kind of getting all jittery tyrosine, L-tyrosine. Yeah, as a precursor to dopamine, and Hooperzine, and the cholinergic pathway, you're clearly illustrating a very important point, which is one that has been hard for me to get out into the world, because people tend to just grab onto whatever is gonna satisfy their like desire to do or feel something. And here's what I mean. I think it's important and wonderful to find what one can do with just great behaviors, right? Just great behaviors, trying to get the best sleep you can, nutrition, training, social connections, sunlight, all the things that now are kind of commonplace out there, and people know. Then perhaps one experiments with caffeine and no caffeine. I tried caffeine, I'm never going back, okay? Maybe creatine first time and forever, maybe only as a tool to use later when you wanna level up. I mean, figuring out what you can do without these literally supplements, I think can be very useful. And then at some point, and this is also true for PEDs, right, for just being really honest. I've been honest about this for years, although some people argue I've only been coming clean about this recently, but since I started the podcast, and I had a podcast with Derek from More Plates, More Dates, I've said, yeah, until age 45, I didn't touch any exogenous hormones whatsoever. And I got to a certain point and felt great, but then I wanted to experiment, so I started with what is for me a true microdose, plus taking HCG to maintain fertility, and it's been great. And I haven't had to increase that dose much. I've played around with it a little bit, but I've found that lower is better for me, okay? Teach their own, work with a doctor. But when I hear about people immediately getting on gear at age 20, 30, 40, in the absence of a clinical need, I'm like, you'll never really know what you can do without it. You know, setting aside drug-tested sport where there are clear rules and regulations people should abide by. Like, I just feel like to really have confidence in one's ability to train, to do things, you need to figure out what you can do with just behaviors. You're pretty heavily muscled, so people are going to default to that. They're going to assume that it came about through gear. And that's just, it's an unfortunate thing that people do that. So you want to talk about that for a moment? What's your response to that? Would you? Yeah, yeah, it's actually interesting. We can go through my blood work as well. I'd actually, whether we do it on air or off, it would be amazing to get your opinion on it. But I think for me, I'm just well aware that I'm a really strange swimmer. So I started swimming really early on, I think at the age of like 13, 14, at the English Institute of Sport. They look at your parents and they just sort of go, all right, you're not going to grow anymore. You know? They look at your parents? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So they believe in genetics? For sure, yeah. My parents weren't very tall. And I'm 41 now, I'm still waiting for my growth spurt. And so they were like, look, Ross, it's not going to happen for you as a competitive swimmer, competitive pool swimmer. I was like, okay, fine. So I ended up playing water polo. I played for England school boys, played internationally, loved that as well because it allowed me to use swimming, but also not to say I like to fight, but it was just, it was nice that in swimming, if I lost, I'd just be like, oh, well done, you beat me. Whereas in water polo, you can do something about it. You can get into a fight. You can kind of- Do you guys scratch each other with your toenails? I heard they do that. Yeah, I mean, famously, it was Hungary versus the Soviet Union. I want to say Melbourne Olympics. And famous event, it was called Blood in the Water. And they were basically at war, drew each other in the semifinal. And honestly, Andrew, like some of the pictures, just people coming out covered in blood, the water turned red because they just went in there. Hungary won, I believe it was 4-0, but just brutal. Nowadays, they'd probably stop it because it would offend people's sensibilities. Yeah, I mean, it's still bad. But I loved it, again, that stress inoculation training. But to go back to the examples, and then I played water polo. And I remember I was playing for England school boys under 18 at the age of 13. So I was the wrong side of puberty. So I just got beaten up. Coach was just like, look, you need to get bigger, Ross. You need to get stronger. So I've been weight training since I was 13. And I think that coupled with a period as well where I was fortunate, so many of my friends compete in World's Strongest Man. So I went through a period as well of just getting crazy strong, looking into that. I was lifting with the Stoltman brothers, World's Strongest Brothers, Tom Stoltman, three times World's Strongest Man, Eddie Hall, first guy to deadlift half a ton, World's Strongest Man. So it was really interesting how I then went through years and years of strength training, hypertrophy, but then came back into swimming so much later. So I think that is partly why I've got the strange physique that I do. And it confuses lots of people because they're like, you're not built like a swimmer. I'm like, no, no, no, I'm not, but I'm 41. And if you look back over my sporting career, my strange resume, there's a reason for my strange physique. And so you do a fair amount of strength training. Does that mean pure strength, like training in the one to four rep range, not trying to grow your muscles, not going to failure but going close to it, a lot of volume? This is how I understand sort of optimal strength training protocols, frequent sessions and so on. Exactly that as well. And I'm a huge fan of Cam McAvoy. So he's the current 50 meter freestyle world record holder. It was London 2012. He was the golden boy of Australian swimming. Didn't quite perform how he wanted to. So fell out of love with swimming. Then COVID happened and he was just like, oh, you know, I don't think I'm going to go back to swimming, but I like calisthenics. I like rock climbing. And he started doing that, got really strong as well. And now we know there's a direct correlation between your one rep max on pull-ups and your swim sprint speed as well. So Cam now, he was drilling technique and doing honestly, Andrew, like speed reps with 80 kilos between his legs. And he just got crazy strong, even holding like a front lever as well. Cause he was like, that's kind of the same as swimming. So he taught himself this. Basically coming out of COVID, somebody then joked and went, oh, there's a local swim gala. You should dust off the goggles and the speed and just get in and see how good you are. And so for a joke, he was like, oh, I'm going to turn up and see if I still got it. He got in and ripped a personal best. Everyone was like, oh. So he basically completely changed his training where there was a huge emphasis on strength, speed, and power. Now he's a 50 meter specialist, recently gone into the hundred as well. But I think the one thing that I have taken from that is that idea of your strength reserve. So now I'm drilling my one rep max on pull-ups, knowing that as that improves, then all of a sudden when I'm swimming, swimming almost being a unilateral form of a lat pull-down with each arm, every single stroke and the force that I generate is a smaller percentage of what I'm capable of because I have a larger one rep max on pull-ups as well. Got it. One of the best examples of strength reserve, I'll talk about it later, but Eddie Hall. So Eddie went into a CrossFit competition. I forget the name of the award, but there was a record and it was basically 60 kilos on the bar. When you look at CrossFit as a poetic technique, sort of clean to the chest, and then it was a push press. But because Eddie is Eddie Hall and because he's so strong, it was more akin to just a front delt raise. Maybe an upright row, but he just like picked up the bar and just went one, two, just did it like that. And again, it was because he just had a crazy strength reserve. 60 kilos for him was so light because he was so strong. So that's the reason I still strength train now. It's this idea very much inspired by Eddie Hall, Cam McAvoy, the strength reserve. When I'm training mechanotransduction, my connective tissue is really, really strong, but also because my one rep max on pull-ups is so strong, every single stroke is a smaller percentage of what I'm capable of. Interesting. I love to run and I love to lift. And I find that if I'm lifting in sort of middle rep range, so six to 12 repetitions, two or two failure, I find that my runs suffer, recovery suffers, but I'm playing with the idea that pure strength training and endurance training might actually fit pretty well together. Is that your experience or am I setting myself up for additional frustration? I personally think yes, like absolutely. I think even when you're looking now at Michael Johnson, he had that amazing running technique, but we now understand that even though that was potentially shortening his stride, it was increasing the amount of force he could generate through each foot. And we now know that's a greater predictor of speed as well. So I think that's so interesting that drilling down into your strength, I think one, will help you generate more force per stride, but also as well, even hold efficient biomechanics. And I think that's overlooked as well. Yeah, so I personally think they complement each other really well. How many days a week are you doing, are you lifting? At the moment, because I'm sort of off season, pretty much like five days a week. Okay, and are you doing the same lifts on multiple days? Or same muscle groups on multiple days? Quite similar, yeah, yeah. So I'm almost trying to do like the Bulgarian training method, but for swimming with one rep max on pull-ups, if that makes sense. So I'm very aware that the Bulgarian training method, they broke more champions than they made. They were like, you are gonna lift 365 days of the year, seven hours a day. You know, and they were just breaking kids and go, all right, that one's broken, that one's broken. But the one who could tolerate it was a world champion, was a world record holder. I, through so many years now, I am quite lucky that I do have quite a high work capacity. So work capacity, your body's ability to perform and positively tolerate training of a given intensity or duration. And so I just respond really well to just being flogged with volume. And so I'm almost doing these, still long aerobic sessions when swimming, but also almost spamming it with a Bulgarian-inspired training method of strength training as well. How long are those workouts in the gym from when you walk in until you walk out? The strength session itself can be 45 minutes long because it is just pure strength. Your body's ability to generate force. And even when we're doing plyometrics, you don't wanna be doing a lot. A great friend of mine, Linford Christie, I still believe he's the oldest 100-meter champion. It took me a while when learning about speed and plyometrics because I always thought more was better, as is my nature. And Linford would be like, go home, Ross. You're actually drilling bad technique now. You're done. And so very much inspired by that on my strength sessions, I'm making sure that everything is dialed in and they're perfect. They're 45 minutes long. Any longer and you're just drilling bad technique. You're not actually training strength anymore. Certainly not speed and power as well. And I think one of the biggest things that I found recently as well is supra-isometric maximal holds as well. So before my heavier lifts, let's take pull-ups, for example. I'm doing about 60 kilos at the moment clean. And so what I'll do is sometimes put anywhere between 80, 90, 100 kilos on the weight, hold in an active hang, only three seconds. So you're not trying to fatigue yourself. You're trying to switch on the central nervous system, neural priming. Then jump down, take off the weight, put 60 kilos on, wait two minutes. So you're not fatigued, you're just switched on. And what I found is then when I rip, I will just pull through 60 kilos. And that's been one of the biggest things that I've found has really helped. And I'm lucky because I can train at home. So I'm able to do that. I think doing a commercial gym, they're like, why has he got all that weight? And he's dangling and then waiting two minutes and then doing it. But I'm very fortunate that I can do that because I can train at home. Yeah, I feel like the Russians and the Eastern Europeans certainly were aware of the importance of the nervous system for training. But I think it's only in recent years that people like Pavel Sutsulin and others have really brought to the United States and to Western Europe and Australia, et cetera, that this idea that the neural piece is so important. We think strength, we think muscles, we might think connective tissue, but the neural piece being so vital. Do you mind if I ask if your split is such that on those five 45-minute workouts per week, right now anyway, are you doing pull-up work every day of those five? Are you pressing every day? Are you squatting every day? So bad, I do skip leg day. I just don't need them for my swims that I'm doing. So often I say, make your body an instrument, not an ornament. And sometimes people are like, oh, he skips leg day. I'm like, yeah, I do. I don't need them. But you have tree trunk legs, so you don't. You and Dorian, I mean, he obviously trained them for years. You've trained them before. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it's really frustrating to those of us that actually have to train our legs. But any direct grip work or not so much? Yeah, yeah. And I think also what's really important for me is when people understand they go, oh, so you train pull-ups five days a week. And it's like, yeah, but we're changing the stimulus as well. So some days it will be really heavy. The goal is to do a heavy one rep max or two to three rep max on pull-ups. That is the goal. And then equally the next day we'll do medicine ball slams, neural priming, and then speed pull-ups, for instance. And then equally we might do slightly bigger volume. So it's never just drilling the same thing. You're just playing around with the different stimulus. The movements, the biomechanics are the same, but you're requiring a different training stimulus. I have a question about your significant other. It's interesting and wonderful that she supports you in these arguably somewhat or very much dangerous endeavors. And you guys have a child together, so she's vested clearly. But a friend of mine who had a very high-risk, high-consequence job for many years said that his wife, who's been his wife throughout all of that and now into the current phase of his life, which is a lot less high-risk, high-consequence, said that if she didn't have to worry about him, she'd have to worry about a lot of other things. So you can't answer for her, but I wonder whether when you don't have one of these dangerous pursuits, does her anxiety tend to subside or does it tend to then wick out to other things? Because the brain, I say this, I ask for multiple reasons, because the brain likes to, if we need to worry, we need to worry about something. And if we need to worry about something, we can't worry about a lot of other things. So I could imagine there's a certain advantageous piece to this. Oh, I think there is. Because I love the work of Jordan Peterson when he's just like, life is suffering, life is gonna be horrible, so you might as well pick your suffering. You know, with Sisyphus, pick up the boulder. That, I think, is absolutely true. And I don't wanna see that I'm a pleasant headache for her, but I do think, certainly for me as well, on the swims, people are like, oh, it sounds brutal, 157 days at sea, swimming around Great Britain. But I'm like, but you've got to understand, I think I'm living like humans were meant to live, like in that I'm not spiking cortisol throughout the entire day. I'm not thinking, oh, have I paid the mortgage? Have I taxed the car? I've got an email, oh God, you know, none of that. I wake up and life is so simple. I just wake up and I've got two questions. What is the tide doing and what's for breakfast? That is it. And then I get in and every 20 minutes, someone throws a banana over the boat and I eat it. Life is so good. So I do think sometimes for me, yeah, it's really nice. And maybe, maybe for Hester as well, in that she wakes up and just go, okay, he's still afloat. She looks on the marine tracker, like when I was going around Iceland because she couldn't come out to the boat, obviously she was heavily pregnant. So she would just see on the marine tracker that the boat was moving. So she'd wake up in the middle of the night and go, okay, he's moving. And then she'd go back to sleep. God bless her. God bless her indeed. So we've got different spokes on the wheel of motivation, tenacity, and throughput. We've got, because I said I would, simply because I said I would, we've got for others, in particular for others that you affiliate with strongly first, and once that box is checked, you can think about the other others. We've got out of love, the pure joy of doing the thing. Maybe also the love of your people, life. We could extend that in any way. F you, like anger, because you or they said I couldn't. We covered that one. You sometimes hear that people can be very motivated to do something because others can't, right? You often see this on social media, in fact, and it's a very moving thing to see somebody who's climbing a mountain because their child is sick and they just running the, doing the triathlon because somebody is impaired in some way and they want to, there's something there. Is that one that you've touched into? I would say that's probably less so out of the space, but it is there, yeah, it is definitely there that you can do it because others can't. That's the sentiment. Yeah, it is, yeah. I think on that note, I remember, and then maybe this is tied to us as well, and I can talk about it now without getting upset, I think, touch wood, but my dad, like I said, four or five years ago now when we lost him, it was stage four cancer. So it was melanoma, skin melanoma. And I remember he had been diagnosed, and he was an amazing tennis coach. He basically built tennis centres up and down the UK. He taught wheelchair tennis, visually impaired tennis. Sometimes he would take to the tennis court and blindfold himself so he could play visually impaired tennis. And when he was diagnosed with cancer, it spread so much in his legs that it was basically stopping him from running and coaching. And I got a phone call, and it said, dad's fallen over, he's taken a really bad fall, come to the hospital. So I ran to the hospital, and he was there, blood all down his face. I am choking back the tears, trying to be strong. And I was like, dad, what have you done? And he goes, no, no, no, don't be upset. I won the point. And I was like, right, okay, amazing. An hour later, they then said, look, I'm so sorry, Richard, the tumours have spread. You can't coach. We don't want you out on the tennis court on your feet for 12 hours a day coaching. You can't. And he literally did not skip a beat. He just looked the doctor straight in the eye, and he just went, that's not a problem at all. We've got a great wheelchair tennis coaching system down there. I'll just get one of the wheelchairs. And the very next day, just bandaged up his tumours, and then just took to the court and just played and continued to coach in a wheelchair. My goodness. And so I think, to answer your question, having stories and examples and mentors and heroes like that, it was swimming, going there will be a time maybe where I'm not able to do this, but like my dad, you will find a way to keep going. So I don't know if that's one of the spokes, but that was always a really, really powerful story that I always take with me, that no matter how bad things are, like my dad just took to the tennis court just in a wheelchair, just didn't skip a beat. Yeah, so based on what you said, and it's a beautiful example, for those who can't, it's really about gratitude. It's beneath that, parenthetically, it's I can and therefore I will. It's like a gratitude for what we can do, because if we're dead, we can't do these things. A hundred percent, yeah. I love what you said about gratitude as well. So when we did the Yukon swim, for instance, the river team that we had in the Yukon, basically there's a famous kayak race that goes down the Yukon. And I, upon hearing about this, that's when I reached out to the team who do the safety for this particular thing. And I said, look, if you can kayak it, you can swim it, right? And this team, just amazing Canadians, were just like, yeah, in theory, if you can escape the rapids, the bears, the wolves, yeah, in theory. So anyway, I was like, right, okay, let's put together a team. They put together a team, but they were missing a few boats. And there was one guy, Larry, who was amazing. He basically turned around and said, look, I'll come, but you can have my boat, but I'm gonna be on it. And they said, look, you are terminally ill. This is a terrible idea. The doctors have said, you've literally got weeks to live. And he said, no, no, no, no. I've lived on this river for years. He said, you can have my boat, but I'm gonna be on it. I'm gonna be steering the boat. So everyone reluctantly was like, fine. Again, Larry had weeks to live. He then jumped on the boat. I was told this story. He's on the boat with his son. And for the next 70 hours, we're swimming down the Yukon. I am swimming, hurting, shoulders are hurting, hyperthermia seeping into my bones, everything. And every time I look, I just see the silhouette of Larry and he's just cheering me on, just going, let's go. And I look over and I was just like, oh, like how can I stop when I've got Larry out here? We finished the swim, broke the record, we celebrated. And then it was a few, we put the documentary out on YouTube. His son messaged me and was just like, just so you're aware, Larry's in hospital. Every single doctor and nurse has been made to watch the documentary on YouTube. He's so proud. And I was just like, oh, I had tears in my eyes, like a lump in my throat, goosebumps. I was just like that. And they just said, you don't know, you gave him the last great adventure of his career. And he passed away shortly afterwards. And again, I suppose it's that particular spot that when I was swimming, I was like, yeah, I'm doing it. How can I stop when Larry's over there? And he was, oh, just an absolute legend, yeah. He's not genetically related to you, but he becomes of you, like you guys are a team. Oh, yeah. And this is like the, anyway, I don't have a really well-developed framework for this, but I'm gonna try and take some notes and diagram this and we can kick it back and forth after this and come up with something. Because I feel like you're this shining example of all these different moments of accessing the different spokes on this wheel of resilience. I put a big question mark on one spoke. Like, I kind of wonder, just for entertainment purposes, is there ever a moment where you're like, I actually don't know why I'm doing this right now, but I'm just gonna keep going. Like, I don't have an answer. Everything's great or everything's, like just the absurdity of it all. Like if you really step back, like what you do, Ross, with all due respect, is pretty absurd. It's absurd, you don't have to do it. You can do any number of different things, but you feel compelled to do it. And it's a beautiful, inspiring, and I'll even say an important thing, that you do what you in particular do. It really is. But do you ever step back and just go like, I have no idea, but I'm just gonna keep peddling here. Do you know what, I love what you said there, because kind of, and I don't know if this answers. your question, but you're aware of the myth of Sisyphus? Yeah, so for those listening who don't, Sisyphus was one of the cleverest humans to ever exist in ancient mythology, was able to outsmart the gods, and he even chained up death at one point, which made the gods really angry because basically people were fighting wars and no one was dying, so there was no souls going to the underworld, so Hades was really pissed off. Anyway, eventually he dies and the gods are just livid, so they're like, look, we're going to punish you, and what we're going to do is we're going to make you roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, and just as it gets to the top of the hill, it's going to roll back down. And you're just going to do that for eternity, just this absurd, completely thankless task. But then it was Albert Camus, the philosopher, who said he was able to outsmart the gods one more time, and that's if you imagine that Sisyphus was smiling. And this is the part I love. He said, because the struggle alone is enough to fill a man's heart. And I think for me, they've even coined the phrase that Sisyphus was the absurd hero, and I think for me, swimming sometimes, I'm like, this is Sisyphus, this is my boulder, you know, it's not going anywhere, but the struggle alone is enough to fill a man's heart. Does that answer the question as one of us folks? Perfectly. Right? Sisyphus. Swimming Sisyphus. So you identify with Sisyphus, it makes perfect sense. What about your animal spirit? Not to get woo here, but you smile a lot. I don't know if that was always the case. I mean, you've had some dark moments in your life. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I just, I think, I love what you said earlier, although it's made me rethink it with the studies that you mentioned, but I just think, you know, the science of a smile, there was one particular study where they had cyclists cycle to complete exhaustion, and then they showed them these cues, and they were almost subliminal as well, because they were so quick of people smiling or frowning. I'm not familiar with that study. And they basically found that those who were shown pictures of people smiling were able to go to exhaustion so much longer. So I think upon hearing that, you know, I was like, I tried to swim with a smile as much as possible, because otherwise I just find it's just, like I said, I think Chris Williamson, you know, a mutual friend of ours, like he said it best, because I'm a huge fan of Goggins, and I've heard his stuff, and I've tried it. So when I'm swimming, I'm like, oh, you're a little bitch, Ross, you know, man up what you're doing. But after like 114 days, I'm like, oh, don't be so mean. So I've tried, and Chris Williamson said it's almost like, you know, what are you putting in your car? Both work. Is it diesel or is it petrol? Which one? And so I've tried that. And I still do use some of that Goggins-esque motivation, but sometimes I just need something that's a bit gentler. Yeah. I've known David a while. I don't know him very well, but I've known him since before his book, the first book. And so I can tell you, he's always been exactly the same outwardly, very kind, unbelievably driven. He sat in that very chair and, you know, he shared a bit of what his inner process is, but it's a bit of a mystery what drives him internally or anyone for that matter in the moment to moment. Right. But clearly, he talked about the fuck me, but also the fuck you being a powerful tool. Dorian Yates talked about fuck you motivation being powerful, and he's in a very different place in his life now. But that's a great example. When they talked about, he was saying, and I know he's a great friend of yours, so please correct me if I'm wrong here. But it was certainly during the period. Was it like the 1980s, 1990s when it was gold's beach, stringed vests, sunglasses on and these body was where he was in Birmingham trudging through the snow. And he was just like, oh, if I've got to do this, I'm going to make sure that I win. Is that the case? There was that. Yeah. I don't want to say there was that. But but I think he learned to tap into it much earlier. I mean, he he had a less than perfect childhood, so to speak. I mean, his dad died early. He had ended up in a youth detention center, wrong place, wrong time kind of thing. And he was like, I don't want to be like the rest of the people in here who seem to accept this fate. And he had a big, you know, strong like fuck you energy to people who told him he wasn't going to be anything. Just the whole notion of these oppressive forces, real or imagined. It sounds like they were very real in many cases. And he just decided, like, that's the fuel. And he became a six time Mr. Olympia. And equally importantly, a happy person post Olympia, mobile and healthy and all the rest is a wonderful person and almost two different people. When you look at is it blood and guts is the amount of times I used to watch that before I went training. Oh, my God, his training partners, the intensity. It was, you know, it was animalistic. It was incredible. You know, but but now he is almost like a shaman. He's just like spiritually. Like, it's just amazing seeing the two different people. He's definitely got it in balance. I will tell you, he's still got some. Fuck you. Oh, yeah. You just need to hit the right topic. He's still got it. He's still got it. Believe me, it's still very alive. Sometimes it's like what makes a great champion can make a bad human. You know, and I say that sometimes with some of my swims, I'm like, look, I know it's bad for my health, but it's good for my soul. And I think sometimes as well. But looking at some champions, I think it was Brendan Shaw when he was talking about John Jones and he was just like, John Jones is incredible, like he's unbelievable. But there's not enough money to fill that void, you know, in his life. But that also driven to greatness. It's so strange, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, I don't know John and I'm not that versed in MMA, but certainly Dorian has the past victories plus life in balance. It really is. It's a felt thing. It's not just a spoken thing. It's really a felt thing. And I've spent a decent amount of time with him and in the context of his everyday life. And he's definitely winning the whole picture, as they say. And he works at it. He works at it. It's not like a default, right? He works at it. Resisting negative forces and still keeping some fuck you energy in there. It's good too. It's just in the back pocket. Yeah. You know, I grew up in the South Bay where it was like Stanford's right there and Silicon Valley's right there. And you see this in the realm of science, entrepreneurship, technology, you see it in every domain. You see it in dance. We had Twyla Tharp on here, the great choreographer. You see it that she'll tell you stories of people that were incredible dancers and not balanced as humans. You'll see people who are both and you'll see the people who quit because it was just too hard and they wanted balance. It's like you smile a lot. Well, what's your spirit animal, man? Where'd you have five of them? Oh, but let's do this. I like this game. I like this game. I'm not into astrology, but I like this game. If you're willing, what aerial, terrestrial and aquatic animal do you just like and admire? You don't have to be like them. Don't worry. If you say you like the minnow, it's okay. You know, no one's going to think you less the man, no matter what the answer. People often say I'm like a Labrador on amphetamines. So that- You do seem very cheerful. Okay. So that's your terrestrial animal. Let's just say the Labrador. You don't need the amphetamines. Yeah. I like orcas, especially when I bulk up for a swim because orcas are so big and chunky, but also mildly athletic as well. So an orca in the water and in the air. That's a great one. I think crows are misunderstood and again, ancient Nordic mythology. When Floki found Iceland as well, using crows, he would send them off. And then all of a sudden, if they came back, there was no land. He'd send another crow off. It came back. There was no land. Sent another one. It doesn't come back. There's land that way. Beautiful. It's a crows. Yeah. Beautiful. These are great examples. And the speed of your response tells me that this is true. I often think about this with people in my life. I need to spend a lot of time with them before I go, that's their terrestrial animal. And always, always, always people want to know. And if it's an animal that they don't want to look like for whatever reason, or that isn't like tough enough, if they're a guy or graceful enough, if they're a woman is often the response. Then they're like, oh no, I want it to be like a damsel fish. And I'm like, no, but don't you understand like the parrot fish? And they're like, I look like a parrot. I'm like, no, have you ever seen the parrot fish? So you can really get yourself into trouble with this one. So always best to let them answer. I think you're spot on. And I do claim authority on this. I've been doing this since I was a kid. So Ross, actually you are a remarkable human for certainly the physical feats that you've accomplished. I will ask you in a moment what's next, but equally important for the teachings that you provide the world, not just by example, but you're a real intellectual. An intellectual is by definition, someone who can parse and communicate things at multiple levels of granularity. That's an intellectual. You're an intellectual. You're command of literature and philosophy and just ideas and the natural world and the brain. I mean, this is, I will go on record saying this is one of the most delightful and awesome for me conversations I've ever had on this podcast because you are so full of life. No surprise there. You are like mitochondria in action and it's infectious. And I drank a little caffeine here and this morning, but man, like fuck caffeine, nicotine, get yourself some Ross Edgley people. And here today, you've given us that. This is a conversation I'm going to return to many times over and I'd love to roll out the opportunity and maybe like create some visuals. We've never done this before, but create some visuals that maybe could accompany some of the social posts and on the podcast, because you get the credit for doing all these things, but I really appreciate your ability and willingness to kind of like meet in the middle on these things and then run with these ideas. You are one hell of a human being. God bless your parents. God bless your wife, Esther. Your son's a lucky kid and I'm guessing that he moves a lot and the future is bright. What's next? What are you going to do? And not swim in the Amazon. Yeah. So for those listening, we've been talking about various other swims. I was running them by Andrew and we've identified, I believe we called it dick eating and bacteria bacteria go in through the urethra. So that's the entry point. And then they live. No, they're not bacteria. They're parasites. And they live. And they'll eat your nervous system and every one of your organs. Please don't do a swim down the Amazon. Paul Rosalie is going to kill me for saying this. Sorry, Paul. He's not going. He's not going. Penis eating parasite. Yeah. Penis will go first, but then all the rest and you won't be sitting there stoic with mud on your face. You'll be wondering why the heck you did this and apologizing to everybody. We've got we've got a few. I think it's so interesting. I'm almost like a mercenary, a hired mercenary for an amazing cause. So so we've got so many different swims all over the world. And as soon as somebody says we need to raise awareness, ocean conservation, raise money, then I'm like, look, hold my beer. I know a guy. So so I think, you know, you'll be the first to know. But we've got a few a few different ones. And as soon as they say, let's go, then then I put my goggles on, you know, load up on caffeine and we're going to go and do it. I love it. Well, we had Greek mythology and now we've got Ross Edgley. So thanks for expanding my consciousness and awareness of what's possible. You're the man, Ross. Thank you so much. This has been awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Ross Edgley. To learn more about him and to find a link to his new book, How to Hero, find strength, forge resilience and fulfill your purpose. Please see the links in the show note caption. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five star review and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. 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