Unlocking Persistent Motivation & Extreme Resilience | Ross Edgley

[Ross Edgley]
So 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." It's not going anywhere, but the struggle alone is enough to fill a man's heart.

[Andrew Huberman]
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 nonstop for 56 hours. He's run a full marathon pulling a car, a full-sized 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Thank you so much.

[Andrew Huberman]
We're going to need a bigger chair.

[Ross Edgley]
This feels surreal. 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Andrew Huberman]
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?

[Ross Edgley]
I am, yep.

[Andrew Huberman]
Let's do this in snapshot-ish fashion.

[Andrew Huberman]
Ten-year-old Ross, what's he doing? What's he thinking? What's his strength, and where is he struggling?

[Ross Edgley]
I think even as far back as 10, I was aware that I was just wired a little bit weirdly. My dopamine kind of works a bit differently. My family, we love going on hikes, and I never forget, at 10 years old, my dad was taking me and my two brothers on this huge hike, and it just wasn't enough for me, this hike. I was just like, "Ah, I kind of want to make it harder." So 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. And I think even now, looking ahead, fast-forward 30 years, and 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, "Right, that's terrible. 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." So I think even as far back as 10, I was aware that my brain was wired slightly differently.

[Andrew Huberman]
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? And no shame if it was. 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?

[Ross Edgley]
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 Dad. 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." And 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. And 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. Did it on beef broth and brandy, and swam breaststroke because front crawl was ungentlemanly-like, so he just crushed it all the way across the English Channel. Wasn't for charity, wasn't for anything like that. He just wanted to pioneer our understanding of swimming and human endurance. And 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.

[Ross Edgley]
After that, that then felt a little bit shallow. I was a bit like, "Ah," to just do it for records, that feels a bit fragile, a bit shallow. It feels a bit strange. And 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 in a level of detail around Iceland that we've never seen before." Upon hearing that, I was like, "Right, that feels like a better reason. It's not just records. That feels better." And that I did when I was 40. So, it has been interesting. I think quite often, sometimes it is intrinsically motivated, but then a little bit later, it told my hands off, it was ego-driven, it was extrinsic. I wanted to be the guy, the first person to swim around Great Britain. And then now, for various things that have changed in my life, I think it's almost moving up Maslow's hierarchy, that I'm not going to quite say self-actualization, but we're looking for something a little bit more than records, I think.

[Andrew Huberman]
Staying with the roughly 10-year-old Ross Edgley, were you always very expressive? You had a lot of spontaneous energy.

[Andrew Huberman]
And have you always woken up ready to roll, or are you kind of

[Andrew Huberman]
a slow grind into the morning, or is it, "Let's go"?

[Ross Edgley]
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, but when I was younger, I was so competitive and such a bad loser.

[Ross Edgley]
My dad, I remember, he was one of the very few people who actually understood how to manage me. And I remember I did a school cross country, I think I was about 13 years old, and 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, and afterwards, I just wouldn't speak to anyone, and I stormed off. I refused to go and pick up my medal. I said, "Second place is the first loser."

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
And I started to run home. And 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 let it 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, "Ah, maybe I'd overreacted there, Dad. I'm so sorry." And he just let me realize 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 apologize on where I'm speaking to you, but

[Ross Edgley]
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. And 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 from 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, there can be, Carl Jung talked 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 talking about, 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. And so, 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." And so then, that 10-year-old, that hyper-competitive side of me ended up coming out. I was like, "I'm now just going to do this because people don't think I can." So, it's really strange that I'll use different parts of motivation. And I suppose my question to you that I've wanted to ask since crossing Iceland is, does the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, does that 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 boats?" Everything. Whereas me, sometimes I try to do it through gratitude, but sometimes I do find that form of fuel-

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm

[Ross Edgley]
... useful.

[Andrew Huberman]
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, they 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, but... And they can talk, they're awake. Head is fixed in a stereotax, so they're not moving around, but... And 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." Okay, so it's tenacity, willpower, et cetera. And 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 midcingulate 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. And so, despite what we know about it, it enlarges when people do hard things, it shrinks when people

[Andrew Huberman]
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 midcingulate 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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,

[Andrew Huberman]
in particular to you, about the anterior midcingulate cortex, then the anterior midcingulate cortex recordings can tell us about you. Does that make sense?

[Ross Edgley]
It does, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, in the future, at some point, we will have the technologies to be able to unpack the computations with a lot of precision.

[Andrew Huberman]
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,

[Andrew Huberman]
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 wood. So, you can just imagine this is like spokes on a wheel, and it's balancing. And as long as no side touches the ground for too long,

[Andrew Huberman]
you persist.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
This is awesome.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
This is awesome. So, you've taken my modeling and just literally, like, two-dimensional, you made it, like, four-dimensional. This is...

[Andrew Huberman]
Well, three-dimensional, you're going to add the fourth dimension.

[Andrew Huberman]
Okay? So-

[Ross Edgley]
No pressure.

[Andrew Huberman]
No pressure. No pressure. So, this is a little bit like a qualifying exam and-

[Ross Edgley]
This is awesome.

[Andrew Huberman]
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

[Andrew Huberman]
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?

[Ross Edgley]
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 take a complex situation and just really simplify it. We broke the record, as we went around Scotland, for the longest staged 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,

[Ross Edgley]
looking yourself in the mirror. I think Einstein, when he said, "Adversity introduces you to you."

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
I think you realize the most honest version of yourself when you're 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
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[Andrew Huberman]
I realize along these very long journeys and expeditions, whatever you want to call them, these super challenges, that your mind must go to all sorts of places, dark and light and everything in between.

[Andrew Huberman]
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."

[Ross Edgley]
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 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 cingulate cortex has grown, whatever it is,

[Ross Edgley]
by the end, it still registers, but you don't have an emotional response to it anymore.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 want to 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?

[Ross Edgley]
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 Grindavik 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 going to be here for two weeks in the harbor." 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 going to 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 fueled on that. The University of Iceland, everything, and that was important, the eDNA samples, tracking biodiversity, paled in comparison to you're not going to be there to welcome your son into the world. So I just gunned it.

[Andrew Huberman]
I notice you say we whenever you talk about these expeditions, not I. Is that just your nature? I realize these are probably team efforts, but that's it.

[Andrew Huberman]
I think it's an important point.

[Ross Edgley]
I'm glad you picked up on that, just because I think especially with sea swims, 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Actually backwards.

[Ross Edgley]
Actually backwards, yeah. Up at the Pentland Firth on the Great British Swim, for instance, that's in the top of Scotland, you can be traveling 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 knots. You could be Michael Phelps and you're still going backwards. So it genuinely is just such a team event. Or the Yukon, for instance, as well. It was a maze, just kind 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 say we because it's a team event. I'm just the one who has to get in the water, genuinely.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah, because you can't be thinking about whether or not you're headed into certain danger beyond what you're already in. You need to be able to concentrate on your stroke, your breathing, your mental frame,

[Andrew Huberman]
whether or not your toes are falling off. Have you been frostbitten on these?

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah. I've picked up loads. This is strange, from hypothermia, rhabdomyolysis, cellulitis, picked up a fair -

[Andrew Huberman]
What's cellulitis?

[Ross Edgley]
Cellulitis is basically-

[Andrew Huberman]
Sounds like infection.

[Ross Edgley]
Exactly that, yeah, a 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 this really strange position to be in as well, because it was a 56-hour non-stop swim. The water is about four degrees, barely above freezing.

[Andrew Huberman]
No stop for sleep?

[Ross Edgley]
No. So, non-stop 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 how 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."

[Andrew Huberman]
Trophies-

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... for a sicko like you.

[Andrew Huberman]
Do you believe in the Loch Ness Monster?

[Ross Edgley]
Something touched my leg. Honestly, yeah.

[Ross Edgley]
It was so interesting. I got so

[Ross Edgley]
sort of...

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah, it 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 literally, I just remember, almost, it was very gradual, but you were looking, and your tunnel vision just got narrower and narrower until 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, "Ah, 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 were saying about hypothermia thing, it's nice now knowing that with the Iceland swim, having graduated in Loch Ness, I was like, "Look,

[Ross Edgley]
let's not become a monster. Let's not stare into the abyss too long."

[Andrew Huberman]
Did you go back and do that one?

[Ross Edgley]
Loch Ness, I want to. Yeah, I've got unfinished business there.

[Andrew Huberman]
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?

[Ross Edgley]
I know, right?

[Andrew Huberman]
It's not good for the tourist trade, though.

[Ross Edgley]
No.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
For sure.

[Andrew Huberman]
You create a myth and a mystique, something that's dangerous, but not so dangerous that people are afraid to go.

[Ross Edgley]
For sure.

[Andrew Huberman]
You seed the world with a few photo... Clearly, one or the other happened, right? Or some combination.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah. But I love that you brought that up as well, because swimming around Iceland, at the start, I heard about elves and trolls, and mountains with 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 blot ceremony. So, basically, it's almost like an ancient chief, a modern-day form of that, and he basically gave me a blot ceremony where he blessed the swim. And it was just amazing speaking to him. He said, like, "Ross, I think you'll die, but it'll be a good saga." The Icelandic sense of humor.

[Andrew Huberman]
That was the send-off?

[Ross Edgley]
That was the send-off.

[Andrew Huberman]
Dark.

[Ross Edgley]
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 toweling 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, 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 blot ceremony, they, again, and sorry if you know this, but they were talking about the guardians of Iceland.

[Andrew Huberman]
I don't know anything about... I know very little about Iceland.

[Ross Edgley]
Oh, so this story was amazing. So, 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 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

[Ross Edgley]
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

[Ross Edgley]
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, this huge battle. And Odin basically had 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? "There are, I know of no greater life purpose than to perish in attempting the impossible." And all of that was going through my head.

[Andrew Huberman]
You asked about the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, there is a set of studies that, since you have an interest in neuroscience and the anterior midcingulate 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?

[Ross Edgley]
No.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Got it.

[Andrew Huberman]
And one pushes the other one out of the territory. Space, who gets the most space is a very primitive but important feature of competition among animals, dogs, et cetera, right? 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. At the extremes, these things fall away, like one is starved or one is castrated, okay?

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 equivalent to our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, but at least has components of it.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Here's what's wild. The amount of cortisol, the amount of testosterone, 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,

[Andrew Huberman]
is driving persistence to win under any

[Andrew Huberman]
realistic condition.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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,

[Andrew Huberman]
activity in this area drives persistence and winning. And there are equivalent experiments in humans using

[Andrew Huberman]
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 entertain the other possibility. But there's a world where if we are otherwise within 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Conscious strategy setting, and the particular strategy could be anger.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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. The beauty of the prefrontal cortex is that it can learn lots of different strategies in lots of different contexts.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
It's a unique

[Andrew Huberman]
component of the circuitry in that way. So,

[Andrew Huberman]
when people tell me, "Yeah, I'm in mile 200 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.

[Ross Edgley]
But what I love about what you said there, and also as well, for those losing then as well, someone 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 he 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?

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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. 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-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... that's where things start getting impressive, right?

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 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 he's talking about how it happened, and it involved wildness. And you ask him,

[Andrew Huberman]
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-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... fast cars and being famous, and it wasn't well-managed in him. And he's still alive, but the excesses.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
So energy management is clearly a piece of the ability to

[Andrew Huberman]
be the 10-year-old you and

[Andrew Huberman]
load more and more rocks, but you're not burning unnecessary energy. So the efficiency piece is, I think, where these stories that we tell ourselves, like, "I'm doing this for so-and-so," you're able to separate out all the other possible motivations, at least for some period of time. Just being motivated is like a dysregulated system. So motivated to do blank because blank, that's a well-managed energy system.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
So most people would die for your levels of raw energy. But in keeping with this theme about how you 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.

[Ross Edgley]
I'm really glad you asked that, because it's almost the opposite. So looking at Tim Noakes' central governor theory or psychobiological model of fatigue, this idea how the brain and the body interact and will 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. Thirty-seven hours in, approaching 100 kilometers, 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, no." I 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 well aware of that. But I know I will swim till I put myself in hospital. And 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." And I think that's one thing. It's almost the opposite now, that I need to be saved from 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."

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
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. Ger Kennedy, great friend of mine, one of the greatest ice swimmers ever, so he just understands hypothermia, 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 I wish I'd had Ger there just to go, "Ross, you're done."

[Andrew Huberman]
It's interesting. We'll talk a little bit about addiction later, but

[Andrew Huberman]
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 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, you have to create incentive on the other side too, right? Because

[Andrew Huberman]
some of these folks are really persuasive.

[Ross Edgley]
It's me.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, we can be honest about who we're talking about here, because he's talked about it openly. David Choe 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 an isolation cabin for a couple months while he was sobering up, or give him his phone, in which time he became viciously addicted to playing Angry Birds 23 hours a day.

[Ross Edgley]
Good game.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah, exactly. Or Pokemon or whatever. So what you describe, because it's a 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? It's like, if you don't add the rocks, if you don't have the next swim, if you... So how do you gauge-

[Andrew Huberman]
... what's too much? Every

[Andrew Huberman]
high achiever has to answer at some point the question, how much money, how many miles, how much fame-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... how many blanks before I'm satisfied?

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And the answer is clearly not concrete. It's like a dynamic thing.

[Ross Edgley]
100%, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, 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."

[Ross Edgley]
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, go

[Ross Edgley]
swim through a volcano down in Antarctica," I'd be like, "Yeah, hold my beer. Done." Whereas now, I've got to ask myself, "Is this worth it? Is it enough? Is it worth doing?" I don't know. The only thing I know is with Viktor Frankl talking about 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, "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-

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm

[Ross Edgley]
... give me something to train for.

[Andrew Huberman]
And she met you when you were already like this.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And doing this. That's important.

[Ross Edgley]
It's so important.

[Andrew Huberman]
And you didn't spring this on her three years into a relationship.

[Ross Edgley]
No.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah.

[Ross Edgley]
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 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, "Oh, no problem." And I think it was that, that I feel so fortunate 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."

[Andrew Huberman]
You seem, as I would describe, and sometimes describe myself, only partially domesticated, so-

[Ross Edgley]
That is absolutely it.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah.

[Ross Edgley]
That is so... When I turned up as well, I was hairy from Iceland. I had jellyfish tentacles. I was 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."

[Andrew Huberman]
Is she a worrier by nature?

[Ross Edgley]
Yes, but she said since we've been together 13 years, and she says now she just has to let go. And I think it's really interesting because she, now, her barometer of worrying is completely changed.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
Because when you have... 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 black bears were fine 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 not skittish. They're just 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. And 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah.

[Ross Edgley]
But you experienced that as well with shark diving-

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah, I don't-

[Ross Edgley]
... as well. That's changed. That rewired you, is it fair to say?

[Andrew Huberman]
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 them 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

[Andrew Huberman]
deliberate end of me taking risks with my physical life. But what I learned there and what I've learned from people like Cam Hanes 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Oh, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 just likes to hunt humans, this kind of thing. And so, the key takeaway being whether it's jellyfish, spiders, snakes,

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
100%.

[Andrew Huberman]
Right?

[Ross Edgley]
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 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, 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."

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
So as it came towards me, I was like, "Where can I help you?"

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
And it sort of was like, it looked at me, and there was a real form of communication that is obviously non-verbal, and it sort of looked and was like, "All right. Okay, you know what you're doing. I'll leave you alone."

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah.

[Ross Edgley]
And it was so strange. Exactly the same with the bears in the Yukon.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
They were looking, and if there was a weakness, that is the laws of the jungle. I would have been charged.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah, 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 going to come looming in slowly.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
There are a lot of tuna out there, there are a lot of seals and other things for them to eat, so they're not actively trying to hunt you. But if you

[Andrew Huberman]
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 Sellay, who published some papers on threat assessment and response. How fear can turn to pausing, can turn to aggression, is 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, 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And predators are also assessing, are they moving forward toward me, are they staying still, or are they retreating? The brain 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-

[Ross Edgley]
Okay

[Andrew Huberman]
... than a continuum.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And Lindsay has identified a number of those switches in the brain, she and others. And so, the bears are probably paying attention to,

[Andrew Huberman]
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 it or 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 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 retreat, or do I quit?

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Retreating in this case would be quitting. And so,

[Andrew Huberman]
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,

[Andrew Huberman]
or quit, as the case may be. And sometimes that's the life-saving decision.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah, 100%.

[Andrew Huberman]
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[Andrew Huberman]
Let's get back on the spokes-

[Ross Edgley]
Yes

[Andrew Huberman]
... for a moment.

[Ross Edgley]
We've done three spokes already, haven't we?

[Andrew Huberman]
And then we'll plow forward. Yeah, so I said I would.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
I don't want to disappoint.

[Ross Edgley]
Yep.

[Andrew Huberman]
And I've got something I really want to be there for. So that's sort of what we touched on so far.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Andrew Huberman]
I find this one to be very prominent in the online space, but

[Andrew Huberman]
it's also one that, as people get better and better and achieve more and more, they hear less and less.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, this is the great gift to the underdog, right? You have fuel. They're handing you fuel.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
But when you win,

[Andrew Huberman]
you've obviously done it, then it turns to, "Well, they had all the right resources or said..." But how about this? Has anyone ever said to you, "There's just no way," and that sparks something in you, like, "Now it absolutely..." Like, thank you. They just handed you a blank check.

[Ross Edgley]
Is the best way to put it. Exactly that. And I love what you said there, because throughout my career, that's become less and less useful because less people doubt me. And I'm almost like, "Oh." So, 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, and 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 kilometers. He's not going to even make it on the south coast." All of them, and I read them. What's actually interesting is, I think it was like 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?" And I was like, "That made me feel so good." But what's so interesting is once we swam around Great Britain, people stopped doubting me, and so I miss that. When we said we were going to swim around Iceland, everyone was like, "Oh, I think he can do it this time." And I'm like, "Where are the guys who were trolling me?" "I need them back." But yeah, certainly around Great Britain, 100% going back to the spokes, that was a big one.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, are you moving dynamically between these things because one sort of loses its potency to keep you going?

[Ross Edgley]
That is exactly the word I use as well. Anything that stimulates you, it's almost like going through your head, like when you're changing the TV channel. And sometimes something can work, and it becomes so potent, and you're swimming, and, "I'm swimming because people said I couldn't. This is amazing." But 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. And I think it's just like, I always say your reasons to continue need to be bigger than your reasons to stop. And I love this conversation because we're identifying those different categories, those different spokes. And it's just knowing that what might work one day might not work the other. And then sometimes, for instance, one of the most potent was, Hester, my girlfriend, she ended up sending me a picture of the scan, and it was one of the first scans that I ever saw of my son. That, I just woke up 2:00 in the morning, cracked ice off my wetsuit, dived in, and I was like, "Oh, we're getting this done." So, it was different, and knowing which one to go. And I think as a coach as well, sometimes some of my friends who are amazing, like I said, Ger 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. And then sometimes I have to do it myself as well.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, you've got a, "F you, I'm going to do this."

[Ross Edgley]
Yep.

[Andrew Huberman]
"F you, you said I couldn't."

[Ross Edgley]
Yep.

[Andrew Huberman]
"I'm going to do it." Let's talk about the other one that

[Andrew Huberman]
Doggins talks about sometimes, but even he talks about a little bit differently than, "F me." Like, "F me. I'm going to do this." So, what I'm doing here is going to the polar opposite. "F you" is like, "You don't think I can do this? Watch."

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Like, "I'll die trying."

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
But then at some point, if that potency runs down, wouldn't it be wonderful to run to our, like, move to our love for something as motivation? But sometimes, "F me." Like, "I am weak for even considering stopping. F me for even..." So, it's not a pleasant thought, but does it have potency for you? Is that a source of continual pushing on the gas pedal?

[Ross Edgley]
I think it is. And to take that some, probably slightly further, but slightly more specific, but I don't know if it is this, but sometimes there'll even be a part of my body that is failing. So, it's not necessarily, "Fuck me." It'll be like, "Fuck you, right shoulder."

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
And I think, so it's that, that I will get angry at my body failing me. And I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no. I'm taking you for a swim across the Arctic Circle."

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
"You're not stopping on me now." So, it's like not just me, but there will be parts of me that I get really angry at if it's failing me.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
Is that the same, do you think?

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah. Well, no. And 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,

[Andrew Huberman]
you're talking about somebody that's of you, half of you.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Let's be fair, your wife did significantly more of the work. She gestated him, but

[Andrew Huberman]
it's of the two of you, and it's of you, right? I could imagine that if you saw a picture of a family member's child that you told you would do 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 going to 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Right.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And us, it starts with us as the individual, then it extends to our kin. It extends to who we decide. 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 this primitive brain structure that is essentially a set of switches. There's not a lot of thinking down there. It's forward, stop, or retreat.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Okay? It's mate or don't mate. It's fight or don't fight. It's quit or... Okay, and you got to eat or don't eat, right?

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
You don't really have a lot of options to kind of eat, right? So, this is most visible, I think, in a... 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

[Andrew Huberman]
who comes along and enters the fight to protect its

[Andrew Huberman]
other lion, right? Yeah. 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
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

[Andrew Huberman]
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

[Andrew Huberman]
hardwired stuff, it's your DNA.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
100%.

[Andrew Huberman]
And so the strength of motivation, I would argue, is not... We have this mental model of these spokes on a balance. But the

[Andrew Huberman]
interesting thing about your example of your shoulder is you're like, "Uh-uh, you're not going to quit on me. In fact, you're not really of me right now, but you're enough of me that I'm going to keep you." You're not going to saw off your shoulder, but 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 describe, but it's long in a different way. It lasts years.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
It's uncertain. Probably won't kill you as long as you have good lab technique, but it can

[Andrew Huberman]
do its damage psychologically, and it's-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm

[Andrew Huberman]
... pick any effort, medical school, parenting, whatever it is.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And this is true for men and for women. I don't want to cast this in a purely Y chromosome framework.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
So anyway, those are some thoughts and reflections, and I think your description of your shoulder as like, "Fuck you. You're coming with me," is pretty telling.

[Ross Edgley]
For sure. I love what you said there as well. Do you find it's also the other way? 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,

[Ross Edgley]
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 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 then 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 going to be like, "Yeah, that one right there, swimming around Iceland, that one's mine. Yeah." And that just, oh, 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
I mean, for those just listening, I am nodding with big nods.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
I mean, I've heard you describe on

[Andrew Huberman]
other podcasts, you're running, running, running. You're exhausted, exhausted. You see your son at the finish line.

[Andrew Huberman]
No caffeine, no injection of saline, but all of a sudden, you've got a jetpack on.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Another cute baby at the finish line, probably not the same effect.

[Ross Edgley]
Right.

[Andrew Huberman]
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-

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... when you talk about him.

[Andrew Huberman]
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,

[Andrew Huberman]
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. If you think about the driving force of evolution, right, it's like every species is trying to make more of itself and protect its young. In particular, its young.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Your young.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And once that's okay, then you can focus on other things.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
So yeah, this is the deep reality of the- ... primate brain of which-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm

[Andrew Huberman]
... of which we are.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Perhaps you a little bit more than the rest. I'm just kidding, man. 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

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
That's a great way to put it.

[Andrew Huberman]
Or the military commander.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Andrew Huberman]
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-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm

[Andrew Huberman]
... 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-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm

[Andrew Huberman]
...

[Andrew Huberman]
to believe in themselves and have an affiliative sense of drive.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Not just be a lone wolf.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And for that, I think we owe a debt of gratitude to all those folks. Andy Stump, DJ Shipley. There are too many names to rattle off, and forgive me because I'm missing a bunch of them. Cam Hanes and Rich Roll, and on and on. But I really think that

[Andrew Huberman]
deep in our brains, below our unconscious,

[Andrew Huberman]
it's like we're trying to check off these boxes of be okay.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Andrew Huberman]
And then layer up from there.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 jiu-jitsu guy,

[Andrew Huberman]
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,

[Andrew Huberman]
where are you at right now? What's 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?

[Ross Edgley]
I'm searching for it at the moment, and 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'd 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, 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, because I think sometimes

[Ross Edgley]
the idea of talking about money with these sorts of events, it's a bit of a dirty word. Whereas I always like your ikigai, the Japanese concept, saying your ikigai is your reason for being. Why do 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 the what you can be paid for, and you almost become like a martyr as well. You're not making any money. Ugh. Whereas with me, I'm really, really fortunate. So, to answer your question as well, just to be so honest, if someone came along and 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, money, it sounds bad, but that's become a thing as well.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah. I don't think money is 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. 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. I have tremendous respect for the endurance community and also for the strength training community, but one of the saddest things I ever,

[Andrew Huberman]
ever saw was, I love this movie about Westside Barbell, but there's this one scene where a guy who's

[Andrew Huberman]
training with Louie and those guys talks about missing something of his son's event because it was bench press night. And

[Andrew Huberman]
the regret that he still lives with.

[Andrew Huberman]
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-

[Andrew Huberman]
Money is a tool 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
My dad's a scientist.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 going to 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. So if you can check the box of being okay-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... and then some, you can do more and more and more for more and more and more people.

[Ross Edgley]
100%, yep.

[Andrew Huberman]
Right? Like, martyring oneself for everybody and not being able to take care of your family or yourself,

[Andrew Huberman]
that's not good.

[Ross Edgley]
No.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, I don't think you should feel any shame about your desire to make money.

[Ross Edgley]
Okay. So that can be a spoke on the thing.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 going to buy more stuff for you.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
But what about you can do more stuff for the rest of the world?

[Ross Edgley]
100%. 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 through 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
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, 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
End of story. And that's always been true, and it will always be true.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
You should be paid for the work you love and that 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
F you 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-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... versus just F you energy. These are some of my favorite experiments, but their outcome is kind of dark, but telling about human nature. Robert Heath was a neurosurgeon,

[Andrew Huberman]
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

[Andrew Huberman]
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, this 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 stereotax was totally useless, except they just really liked it. And it's telling, a little dark, but telling because it speaks to humans' desire to have a me versus them kind of feeling.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Like, ugh, frustration.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
That arousal, again, drives

[Andrew Huberman]
all sorts of things whereby maybe otherwise we would become complacent.

[Ross Edgley]
That's fascinating. See, and 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. We went on a, it's called an okugake, 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. And it was brutal, blisters, and yet you wear basically these, like, sort of wooden sandals as well. It was horrible. You look at the Aborigines go and 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? Like, do you think that is? Do you think that's tapping into exactly the same experiment?

[Andrew Huberman]
I do. I picked a hard career for me.

[Andrew Huberman]
Science is hard, it's slow, it's grueling, and then you have breakthrough.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 what we're talking about is tapping into drive and motivation, but with a purpose.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And the purpose can vary in time. And I think all cultures have understood this. To some extent, we're all sort of neuroscientists. It's just that some people look with

[Andrew Huberman]
more precise tools, right, and give things names. But I consider you a neuroscientist from the perspective of your level of self-analysis as you do these things.

[Ross Edgley]
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 Jamanawa tribe in the Amazon jungle for a while. We did ayahuasca for an entire week. It was this ceremony.

[Ross Edgley]
I was 21 at the time, just finished kind of professional sports and never touched drugs, psychedelic, 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 kind of 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 the worst trip ever. I did everything wrong. And it was actually explained to me. My friend, for instance,

[Ross Edgley]
Reuben, 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 was 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 Reuben 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 later explained to me, it's like getting on a rollercoaster, Ross. You can't get off. You can't fight it. You've got to just sit it out.

[Ross Edgley]
Fast-forward through the entire week, and then,

[Ross Edgley]
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 caught a snake. This is 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 speak.

[Andrew Huberman]
Live snake?

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah, live snake. Yeah, they open its mouth, and you basically just tongue it.

[Andrew Huberman]
I hate snakes. But I respect them and their right to live, but I do not like snakes.

[Ross Edgley]
Oh, no, 100%. I get it. I'm not proud of this. But then, when you've taken 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 Jaminawa 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 a...

[Ross Edgley]
Not euphoria, but I was like, "Wow, we did it." And it's so strange.

[Ross Edgley]
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 were so many times in my life when I was pushing the button.

[Andrew Huberman]
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. 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 LMNT 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 LMNT packet dissolved in it. I also drink LMNT 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. LMNT 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 LMNT, you can go to drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free LMNT sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack. 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

[Andrew Huberman]
circuitry.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Drama.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Us/them.

[Andrew Huberman]
Not to be ultra-repetitive, but this us/them thing is like, it's at our core

[Andrew Huberman]
of our circuitry.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And the more you can tap into it, the more engagement you can get from the brain.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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. That's a lot of the-

[Ross Edgley]
Wow

[Andrew Huberman]
... the theory anyway.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Maybe I just need to do more psychedelics. And maybe not. These are powerful tools.

[Andrew Huberman]
I want to talk about something

[Andrew Huberman]
for a moment, which is stakes. 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-

[Andrew Huberman]
We choke.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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

[Andrew Huberman]
two pounds

[Andrew Huberman]
per round of darts. I don't actually know the details of the game darts, so forgive me. But let's- ... or billiards. Let's make it simpler. Let's hit billiards. And we say two pounds. Okay. 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, et cetera. Okay. Now we bet 100,000 pounds.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Okay. Well, now we're paying a lot more attention to how we're playing.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
It will likely bring out your best and my best. We'll see who wins.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And we start incorporating musculature and a connective tissue that normally needs to be excluded in order to have the precision of the shot.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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

[Andrew Huberman]
are the stakes?

[Ross Edgley]
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. And it was the same with the Iceland one as well, actually, in that it's not a heroic start. There's no dive. 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. Even if I have a bad start, it's fine, I've got 100 days. 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, "Do you know what? Just swim for the enjoyment of it, Ross."

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
"Let's just remove everything else."

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
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 more, 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 chasing me and stuff. And that's where I'd go, "Ross, stop caring."

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
"We'll care tomorrow, but now just stop caring." Yeah. So it's reduce the stakes in your head.

[Andrew Huberman]
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?

[Ross Edgley]
So much so. Certainly at the start of the Iceland swim, because it was in the summer, we had almost 24 hours of daylight.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm.

[Ross Edgley]
And it was crazy how 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 2:00 in the morning, 2:00 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, 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 so bad. This is okay. I can do this." But sometimes, again, if you're not sleeping, circadian rhythm, 24 hours of daylight, tide on, tide 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 mid-cingulate cortex. 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 gray. I'm getting smashed by jellyfish. And then there was the odd time where it was nice to swim. You'd wake up, there would be rainbow, the fjord, frozen fjord, and I'd be like, "Ah, this is..." 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
They should have told us all in the third grade that don't believe any of your thoughts that occur between 2:00 and 5:00 a.m.- ... is one I tell myself all the time. Just don't believe it. Now, I don't believe anything my brain tells me between 2:00 and 5:00 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

[Andrew Huberman]
the logic of it, the positive emotions associated come back, and then you realize the brain tricks itself into thinking that what's happening right now is going to go on forever.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And that, to me, was the

[Andrew Huberman]
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

[Andrew Huberman]
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.'"

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And then we lose-

[Ross Edgley]
Fog

[Andrew Huberman]
... 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.

[Ross Edgley]
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 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 a... We'll just go, "Do you know what? I'm going to sleep. I'll see you in the morning." There's just, 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 swims, 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." Control the controllables, accept the uncontrollables. This feels better, 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
You said your tongue's falling off. What are you referring to? Your actual tongue falling off?

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Maybe you shouldn't have bit that snake, dude.

[Ross Edgley]
Do you think that's what it is? No, so it's saltwater exposure, basically. The human body is not meant to be in saltwater for that long, so it extracts all the moisture from your tongue.

[Ross Edgley]
On the GB swim, for instance, we sat, it was about a week in, and I remember they made this amazing soup. It was just this rich vegetable soup. All the team are 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 and said, "Why haven't you got any pork or chicken? It's only in mine." And he just leaned over and he went, "Ross, that's not pork or chicken, that's your tongue."

[Andrew Huberman]
Oh.

[Ross Edgley]
And it was falling off-

[Andrew Huberman]
Oh

[Ross Edgley]
... in the soup.

[Andrew Huberman]
Oh, brutal.

[Ross Edgley]
I know. But coconut oil, for anyone listening who finds themself in a similar situation, coconut oil acts as a barrier, maintains the moisture, you keep your tongue... And it grows back. It did grow back as well, so...

[Andrew Huberman]
All right, let's get real honest here, Ross. Is there anything in everyday life that you have to absolutely scruff yourself and

[Andrew Huberman]
badger yourself into doing that is absolutely trivial in somebody else's eyes?

[Ross Edgley]
Oh, I-

[Andrew Huberman]
And if the answer is no, that's fine. If you just show up to... Do you brush your teeth twice a day?

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
They're nice and white, so-

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... do you ever feel like, "I don't want to do this again," or

[Andrew Huberman]
do you ever think, "I don't want to do this," and you can't tell why?

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Ross Edgley]
I think, certainly if you spoke to my girlfriend, house chores and things like that, I'm so messy.

[Andrew Huberman]
She said to... No, I'm kidding. Just kidding.

[Ross Edgley]
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 non-stop river swim. Yeah. Take out the trash, ah. Do the washing up, ah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Is it because it's too easy or it's too hard?

[Ross Edgley]
I'm not sure. I'm just really bad at admin and basic stuff. It goes back to what I said. If someone said, "Oh, swim the English Channel," I'm like, "Ah, it's been done." It doesn't really appeal. And I think it's the same in... 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."

[Ross Edgley]
So my girlfriend knows this. She knows how to push my buttons, so she might do that.

[Andrew Huberman]
That's so good. If there was a competition.

[Ross Edgley]
I'd be pumped.

[Andrew Huberman]
Significant others everywhere are taking note. A few minutes ago, you mentioned something that told me that there are times when

[Andrew Huberman]
you can no longer advocate for yourself as like, "Let's do this. I've got this." Okay, your arm gives out, "Let's go. Come on, you're going to bring the arm along like a member of your team." But in the moments where you're really down in the pit,

[Andrew Huberman]
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

[Andrew Huberman]
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 yous, you've run out of fuck mes. You've just run out, and you just have to

[Andrew Huberman]
transcend or exit yourself and just go, "Let's go."

[Ross Edgley]
100%. Yeah. And I love that you asked that as well, because again, certainly on the Iceland swim, I took such inspiration from the berserkers. So for those who don't know, the berserkers, it literally means bare shirts. They will be wearing sort of these bare 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 have been using hallucinogenic mushrooms. Others think it was maybe 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 third person, but also just becoming wolf warrior, berserker.

[Andrew Huberman]
Amazing.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Do you like to read? It seems like you know a lot about these ancient traditions and tribes and-

[Ross Edgley]
Oh, I loved it. Yeah, I think, because this is going to sound really strange as well. So I lived in Namibia with the San Bushmen for a while. Amazing endurance athletes. 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

[Ross Edgley]
he was part Namibian, but he's also part of the Kurilgen 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 we were sitting around this fireplace at one point, and he said, "Ross, do you know why people from the Kurilgen tribe are so good? Do you know why we're such great runners?" And I was like, "Yeah, like, altitude training?" He went, "Nope." I was like, "Your diet?" And he goes, "Nope." And I was like, "Barefoot running, beautiful biomechanics, and you drill that from an early age." And he went, "No." And I was like, "Right, go on then, tell me." And he says, "It's 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.

[Ross Edgley]
The chief comes out, takes his tackle in his hand, circumcises him, which is essentially with like a bamboo shoot, you know, a blunt."

[Andrew Huberman]
Tackle, his penis.

[Ross Edgley]
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, "Mm, 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 mate, 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."

[Ross Edgley]
"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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Wow.

[Andrew Huberman]
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."

[Andrew Huberman]
But hey,

[Andrew Huberman]
your reply is up to you.

[Ross Edgley]
Wow. Is there anything like that that you found with pain tolerance as well? Are there studies around that?

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah, so, on my list of things to discuss with you is the generalizability of resilience training. This is a fascinating and still somewhat opaque area of science.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 negative arousal, pain,

[Andrew Huberman]
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?

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And to some extent, the data say yes, in particular about deliberate cold water exposure.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 happens and it's awful. But deliberate cold exposure with a shower or a cold plunge done safely,

[Andrew Huberman]
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 then 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?

[Andrew Huberman]
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,

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Progressive exposure to the thing, which basically means 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
So,

[Andrew Huberman]
I believe, and based on my limited amount of work with, but certainly conversations with 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Pain tolerance translates. But people are coming in with a sort of set,

[Andrew Huberman]
probably genetic and experiential predisposition.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And we see this. 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 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
The cold water swimmer

[Andrew Huberman]
might have a hard time listening in a hard conversation where the feedback they're getting is not pleasant.

[Andrew Huberman]
But they might be completely stoic and just think, "This sucks, this sucks, this sucks, but I can calm myself through this."

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
"I can do this," if they can understand that the same underlying mechanisms are taking place.

[Ross Edgley]
I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
I don't know if that's satisfactory.

[Ross Edgley]
No, no, no. That sounds... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
But if I were to answer any other way, it wouldn't be true to the data.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And I think cold water is a great training tool-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... if done safely. I wanted 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, what's that about? You do strength stuff too. What does your training look like now when you're in between-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... sort of these super events?

[Ross Edgley]
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, 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,

[Ross Edgley]
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 is 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, VO2 technique. It will be a ligament or a tendon, something that gives up that will stop the swim physically.

[Andrew Huberman]
Got it. The chassis.

[Ross Edgley]
Exactly. Exactly.

[Andrew Huberman]
You can't have the chassis break down.

[Ross Edgley]
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 and 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 preseason, making the body physically robust enough to then endure the intensity or the volume that you subject it to later.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
A 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's kind of where we're at, that general physical preparedness.

[Andrew Huberman]
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. Eight Sleep 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 Eight Sleep 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. Eight Sleep 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 Eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly five years now, and with each new iteration of Eight Sleep, 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 Eight Sleep, go to eightsleep.com/huberman to get up to $200 off their new Pod 6. Eight Sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's eightsleep.com/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, and 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 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 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 going to get to the top, because the hike is actually not that awesome along the way, but at the top, it's 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 just going to 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 going to 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

[Andrew Huberman]
liminal state, and then it would repeat.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
It would go back to, "F this." And sometimes the timescale of those would be minutes, and sometimes it would be 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

[Andrew Huberman]
all the spokes. It's three, and they're on repeat."

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
I was like, "This is pretty useful. I'm going to try and do this." And so,

[Andrew Huberman]
in other areas. So now, when I run

[Andrew Huberman]
my longer runs, I think, "Okay, I'm either going to 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 build a resilience for each."

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Because in a hard conversation, distracting yourself is actually not useful. So this may be where the translatability or non-translatability of stress inoculation needs more of a fine point.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
The reason I'm bringing this up here like this is I feel like the sports performance and the psychological performance community needs more refined tools.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... there are conditions that are stressful where you want to distract yourself. And then, I've got a friend who's a neurosurgeon, and distracting himself during a stressful moment is the exact wrong thing to do. Does that make sense?

[Ross Edgley]
It makes complete sense.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
My runs are trivial for you and for most people, but I feel like

[Andrew Huberman]
more specific tools with more aimed at specific outcomes, I feel like is kind of what the general public needs.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
So to become a better listener, learn to concentrate on the pain for long periods of time and not flinch.

[Ross Edgley]
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, we've still got 10 hours of walking," and 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 some of the weirdest things. I'll do my shopping list for my Christmas shopping in my head, and I'll just go somewhere completely different. But sometimes I do really find 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, 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. 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."

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
And then other times where I'm just like, "I don't 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-

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm

[Ross Edgley]
... just go to whichever one's going to get you through it, and you need loads of different ones.

[Andrew Huberman]
We don't yet have a name for it, but maybe we're sort of veering towards something kind of akin to the different spokes on the tire of resilience or something like that, or-

[Ross Edgley]
That's exactly that

[Andrew Huberman]
... 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,

[Andrew Huberman]
I want to talk about vision and share with you something. Again, I came in 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?

[Ross Edgley]
No.

[Andrew Huberman]
Like the guy with the one eye in the middle of his head.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
So there's this wild thing where

[Andrew Huberman]
animals with their eyes on the side of their head tend to be prey animals, and they have panoramic vision.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 more focused vision.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Right.

[Andrew Huberman]
We can still do things, but

[Andrew Huberman]
because of the way that vision and time perception are linked, we can actually see more.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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, and this was an area I focused on for a long time, but we won't go there. The myth of the cyclops is

[Andrew Huberman]
in part about a creature who only has soda straw vision,

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Oh, I love this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And so, yeah, 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?

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Now that you've said that, I've never thought about it like that. I love the cyclops myth. 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 non-stop 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, and I'm like, "Wow." And I don't know whether that's switching on the parasympathetic nervous system, you're relaxed, you're enjoying it, this is all amazing. And then there was other times, like for instance, 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?" 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 am 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
And I've never thought about it, but that's exactly what I was doing. Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
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.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 realize that it's going to 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 contract their gaze.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And he showed me, it was actually really eerie. Like, he stared right at me, and he brought his eyes into... And 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," he said, "I'm not going to kill you, but it's this moment where you've deliberately crossed over to a point where you're going to try and kill this person." And so it's a risky endeavor to go into these trenches, right? But this seems to be a hardwired aspect of animal visual systems-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... 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 mindlessly trudge forward in anger, and how to overcome that.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
But then again, this is powerful. It's led to self and protection of affiliate self.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm. 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, 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." I'm like, "What do you mean?"

[Andrew Huberman]
Every other behavior is excluded in favor of just predation.

[Ross Edgley]
100%, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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...

[Andrew Huberman]
It's not even camouflage any longer, their chromatophores, and they become depth perception-dependent hunters.

[Ross Edgley]
Wow.

[Andrew Huberman]
I used to study this in my lab in San Diego, and it's just a remarkable thing to see this sweet little hovel pod of an underwater little benevolent monkey turn into a vicious killer. And the translocation of the eyes happens first.

[Ross Edgley]
Wow.

[Andrew Huberman]
And so, it's a real thing.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
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..."

[Ross Edgley]
I love that. Yeah, what I love about this is that, again, it's the berserker. It's this idea of nature leaves clues and success leaves clues. Biomimicry and just going, "Right." But we've lost that. I think we humans have lost certain things, but this is amazing just to go, "Oh, I'm going to switch this on," like the cuttlefish. That's what I'm going to do. Yeah, I love that.

[Ross Edgley]
Next time I swim, 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, I've got my lane, I know the distance, I know the water temp, everything. And I'm just going to start experimenting with this. Maybe as well, I love, for me, and this is a whole other discussion, but even playing with caffeine on the Yukon swim. We were getting into the grams towards the end 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. But if I punch, just dark clouds, I'm struggling, my shoulders are hurting, 400 milligrams of caffeine, 15 minutes later, life's not so bad. I'm just ripping through the water. Do you find that you can almost, yeah, you can biohack. Yeah, okay.

[Andrew Huberman]
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. Things like nicotine, which I've experimented with, the problem I have is that it really sets up a very quick dependence.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Faster than caffeine, so a short half-life.

[Andrew Huberman]
Much faster.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And maybe it's the way I'm doing it or the way I metabolize it and so on. Occasionally, I'll take a milligram or two in a workout, but then I notice I get very tired post-workout-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... in a way that I don't if I don't take it.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, I prefer to keep nicotine as oral nicotine, so not smoking or vaping, dipping or snuffing.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
But,

[Andrew Huberman]
the lozenges or something are every once in a great while tool-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... as opposed to an everyday tool. Caffeine's an everyday thing, unless I'm carrying some sort of respiratory infection or something, in which case I cut it out, which is probably half of the misery I experience while on that respiratory-

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... infection.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
It just makes it so much better when you come back.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Caffeine is a beautiful thing.

[Andrew Huberman]
I back it, and it backs me, so.

[Ross Edgley]
I agree. Anything else? I think I've heard you talk about Alpha-GPC as well.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah, as a milder alternative to nicotine.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
The one advantage of Alpha-GPC is if you're going to work out late in the day-

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... 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-

[Ross Edgley]
Oh

[Andrew Huberman]
... mess with your sleep like a lot of stimulants.

[Ross Edgley]
Right. Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
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've played around with all the various things. Modafinil is too stimulating for me.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
It keeps me up for days. There are some other things that seem to work better. There's this prescription drug, Sunosi, in small amounts. But again,

[Andrew Huberman]
I find that if I use any of these regularly, besides caffeine-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... it creates more problems than solutions. So, I-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... keep them as when really needed tools.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah, and some good studies as well around creatine. I've become fascinated with this idea of almost

[Ross Edgley]
discipline and motivation is something you can supplement almost, if you know what to do with the right amounts.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
And I think with creatine, there's some good studies with sleep deprivation at the moment.

[Andrew Huberman]
Sure. Yeah.

[Ross Edgley]
Do you back those?

[Andrew Huberman]
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 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, is at least my understanding, is that if you're mildly or severely sleep-deprived, you can partially rescue some cognitive function and maybe even some physical vigor by taking 10 or even 20 grams of creatine the next morning.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
But, of course, you need to sleep at some point.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And it's not a replacement for sleep. But yeah, I think creatine's great. I don't think there's evidence that it

[Andrew Huberman]
makes hair fall out or anything like that.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And it's inexpensive and seems safe, so I don't see any reason not to. Do you take it?

[Ross Edgley]
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 nonstop swim. I think we can go further. We did-

[Andrew Huberman]
Oh, yeah

[Ross Edgley]
...

[Ross Edgley]
510 kilometers, and I'm like, "Oh, there's things now that I've learned."

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
Whether it's the tunnel vision as well-

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm

[Ross Edgley]
... with 20 milligrams of creatine. I think there's a bit of me that is just fascinated. I like to think of myself as a human guinea pig. And now, like I said, we didn't do creatine on the Yukon swim. Not to say I raw-dogged it, but-

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm

[Ross Edgley]
... I certainly, there are things that I could do in addition, because we mainly did it on caffeine. I think Alpha-GPC, Cognizin as well, acetylcholine.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
I get on really well with that. I find it's a nicer focus, not just kind of getting all jittery. Tyrosine, L-tyrosine.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah. As a precursor to dopamine, the Huperzine, 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 going to satisfy their 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 in forever, maybe only as a tool to use later when you want to level up. Figuring out what you can do without these, literally, supplements, I think can be very useful.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And then at some point, and this is also true for PEDs, right? If we're 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 for "More Plates, More Dates," I've said, "Yeah, until age 45, I didn't touch any

[Andrew Huberman]
... 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? To each 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-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... I'm like, "You'll never really know what you can do without it."

[Andrew Huberman]
Setting aside drug-tested sport, where there are clear rules and regulations people should abide by, 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
You're pretty heavily muscled, so people are going to default to that.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
They're going to assume that it came about through

[Andrew Huberman]
gear. And that's just-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... 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 when people-

[Ross Edgley]
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 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."

[Andrew Huberman]
They look at your parents?

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah, for sure.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, they believe in genetics?

[Ross Edgley]
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 Schoolboys, 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 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-

[Andrew Huberman]
Do you guys scratch each other with your toenails? I heard they do that.

[Ross Edgley]
Oh, yeah. Famously, it was Hungary versus the Soviet Union, I want to say Melbourne Olympics, and a famous event. It was called Blood in the Water, and they were basically at war,

[Ross Edgley]
drew each other in the semifinal, and honestly, Andrew, 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 four-nil, but just brutal.

[Andrew Huberman]
Whoa. Nowadays, they'd probably stop it because it would-

[Ross Edgley]
Oh, I think-

[Andrew Huberman]
... offend people's sensibilities.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah. It's still bad. Yeah, it was bad. But I loved it. Again, that stress inoculation training. But to go back to the examples, so then I played water polo, and I remember I was playing for England Schoolboys 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-

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm

[Ross Edgley]
... 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, 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."

[Andrew Huberman]
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, lot of volume? This is how I understand sort of optimal strength training protocols, frequent sessions and so on.

[Ross Edgley]
Exactly that as well. And I'm a huge fan of Cam McEvoy. 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, 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, speed reps with 80 kilos between his legs, and he just got crazy strong, even holding a front lever as well, because 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 speedo, just get in and see how good you are." And so for a joke, he was like, "Oh, look, I'm going to turn up and see if I've 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 100 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 pulldown 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Got it.

[Ross Edgley]
One of the best examples of strength reserve, I was talking about this earlier, 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, it's 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 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. Sixty kilos for him was so light because he was so strong. So, that's the reason I still strength train now.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
It's this idea, very much inspired by Eddie Hall, Cam McEvoy, 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Interesting.

[Andrew Huberman]
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,

[Andrew Huberman]
close to or to failure, I find that my runs suffer.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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

[Andrew Huberman]
setting myself up for additional frustration?

[Ross Edgley]
I personally think yes, absolutely. I think even when you're looking now at Michael Johnson, can you remember 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
And I think that's overlooked as well.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah, so I personally think they complement each other really well.

[Andrew Huberman]
How many days a week are you

[Andrew Huberman]
lifting?

[Ross Edgley]
At the moment, because I'm sort of off-season, pretty much five days a week.

[Andrew Huberman]
Okay.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And are you doing the same lifts on multiple days, or same muscle groups on multiple days?

[Ross Edgley]
Quite similar, yeah. So, I'm almost trying to do the Bulgarian training method, but for swimming with one rep max on pull-ups, if that makes sense.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
So, I'm very aware that the Bulgarian training method, they broke more champions than they made. They were like, "You are going to lift heavy 365 days of the year, seven hours a day." And they were just breaking kids and go, "Oh, 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.

[Ross Edgley]
For 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
How long are those workouts in the gym from when you walk in until you walk out?

[Ross Edgley]
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 want to 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."

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
"You're done."

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
And so, very much inspired by that, on my strength sessions, I am 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
Certainly not speed and power as well. And I think one of the biggest things that I found recently as well is

[Ross Edgley]
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, 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-

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm

[Ross Edgley]
... neural priming.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
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 it at 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..." But I'm very fortunate that I can do that because I can train at home.

[Andrew Huberman]
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 Tsatsouline 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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?

[Ross Edgley]
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."

[Andrew Huberman]
But you have tree trunk legs, so you don't... You and Dorian, he obviously trained them for years. You've trained them before.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah, exactly.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
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?

[Ross Edgley]
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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
So, some days it'll 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm. 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 that you guys have a child together, so she's vested, clearly. But a friend of mine who had a very high-risk, high-consequence

[Andrew Huberman]
... a 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Oh, I think there is.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah.

[Ross Edgley]
Because I love the work of Jordan Peterson when he's just like, "Life is suffering. Life is going to be horrible, so you might as well pick your suffering."

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
With Sisyphus, pick up the boulder. Do you know what I mean? That, I think, is absolutely true. And I don't want to see that I'm a pleasant headache for her, but I do think, certainly for me as well on the swims,

[Ross Edgley]
people are like, "Oh, it sounds brutal,

[Ross Edgley]
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 always meant to live, in that I'm not spiking cortisol throughout the entire day. I'm not thinking, 'Have I paid the mortgage? Have I taxed the car? I've got an email. Oh, God.'" 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 for Hester as well, in that she wakes up and just goes, "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.

[Andrew Huberman]
God bless her.

[Ross Edgley]
God bless her indeed.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, we've got

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Yep.

[Andrew Huberman]
Maybe also the love of your people, life. We could extend that in any way. "F you," like anger.

[Ross Edgley]
Yep.

[Andrew Huberman]
"Because you or they said I couldn't."

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
We covered that one. You sometimes hear that people can be very motivated to do something because others can't.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Right?

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
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're just

[Andrew Huberman]
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?

[Ross Edgley]
I would say that's probably less so out of the spokes, but it is there. Yeah, it is definitely there,

[Ross Edgley]
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 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 centers 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 had spread so much in his legs that it was basically stopping him from running and coaching. And I got a phone call, and they 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 tumors have spread. Now 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."

[Andrew Huberman]
Wow.

[Ross Edgley]
And the very next day, just bandaged up his tumors and then just took to the court and just played and continued to coach in a wheelchair.

[Andrew Huberman]
My goodness.

[Ross Edgley]
And so, I think, to answer your question, that 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah, so based on what you said, and it's a beautiful example, for those who can't, it's really about gratitude.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Beneath that, parenthetically, it's,

[Andrew Huberman]
"I can, and therefore I will."

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
It's like a gratitude for what we can do.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Because if we're dead- ... can't do these things.

[Ross Edgley]
100%. 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, River Quest it's called. And 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 going to 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, no. I've lived on this river for years." He said, "You can have my boat, but I'm going to be on it. I'm going to 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, hypothermia 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, 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, goosebump. I was just like that. And they just said, "You don't know. You gave him the last great adventure of his career."

[Andrew Huberman]
Amazing.

[Ross Edgley]
And he passed away shortly afterwards, and again, I suppose it's that particular spoke that when I was swimming, I was like, "I'm doing... How can I stop when Larry's over there?" And he was, oh, just an absolute legend, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
He's not genetically related to you, but he becomes of you, like you guys are a team.

[Ross Edgley]
Oh, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And this is like the... Anyway, I don't have a really well-developed framework for this, but I'm going to 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
I put a big question mark on one spoke. 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 going to keep going." Like, "I don't have an answer. Everything is great," or everything's... Just the absurdity of it all. If you really step back, what you do, Ross, with all due respect, is pretty absurd. It's absurd. You don't have to do it. You could do any number of different things, but you feel compelled to do it.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
But do you ever step back and just go like, "I have no idea, but I'm just going to keep pedaling here"?

[Ross Edgley]
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?

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah. So for those listening who don't, so 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. 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 the spokes?

[Andrew Huberman]
Perfectly.

[Ross Edgley]
Right? Sisyphus. Swimming Sisyphus.

[Andrew Huberman]
So you identify with Sisyphus. It makes perfect sense.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
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.

[Andrew Huberman]
You've had some dark moments in your life.

[Ross Edgley]
Oh, for sure. Yeah. I

[Ross Edgley]
love what you said earlier, although it's made me rethink it with the studies that you mentioned, but I just think 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Hmm. I'm not familiar with that study.

[Ross Edgley]
Oh. 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, I was like, I try to swim with a smile as much as possible, because otherwise I just find it's just... Like I said, I think Chris Williamson, a mutual friend of ours, 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. Man up, what you doing?" But after 114 days, I'm like, "Oh, don't be so mean." So I've tried, and Chris Williamson said it's almost like, what are you putting in your car? Both work. Is it diesel or is it petrol? Which one?

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
And so I've tried that, and I still do use some of that Goggin-esque motivation, but sometimes I just need something that's a bit gentler. Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
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,

[Andrew Huberman]
unbelievably driven.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
He sat in that very chair, and he shared a bit of what his inner process is. But,

[Andrew Huberman]
it's a bit of a mystery what drives him internally, or anyone for that matter, in the moment to moment, right?

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
But clearly,

[Andrew Huberman]
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-

[Ross Edgley]
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 bodybuilders, whereas 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-

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah, I don't want to speak for him

[Ross Edgley]
... resentment.

[Andrew Huberman]
There was that, but I think he learned to tap into it much earlier. He had a less than perfect childhood, so to speak. 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."

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And he had a big, strong, like, "fuck you" energy to people who told him that 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And he just decided, like, that's the fuel, and he became a six-time Mr. Olympia.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And equally importantly, a happy person post-Olympia, mobile and healthy and all the rest.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
He's a wonderful person and-

[Ross Edgley]
Almost two different people. When you look at, is it "Blood and Guts" is DVD?

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah.

[Ross Edgley]
Ah. The amount of times I used to watch that before I went training. Oh my God, his training partners, the intensity. It was animalistic. It was incredible.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah.

[Ross Edgley]
But now he is almost like a shaman. He's just like spiritually, like, it's just amazing seeing the two different people.

[Andrew Huberman]
He's definitely got it in balance. I will tell you, he's still got some "fuck you" energy in him.

[Ross Edgley]
Oh, right.

[Andrew Huberman]
Oh, yeah. You just need to hit the right topic.

[Andrew Huberman]
He's still got it. He's still got it. Believe me, it's still very alive in him.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah. Sometimes it's like what makes a great champion can make a bad human. 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 Schaub when he was talking about Jon Jones.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
And he was just like, "Jon Jones is incredible. Like, he's unbelievable, but there's not enough money to fill that void in his life." But that also driven to greatness. It's so strange, isn't it?

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah, I don't know Jon, and I'm not that versed in MMA, but certainly Dorian has the past victories plus life imbalance.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
It really is 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-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... in the context of his everyday life. And he's definitely winning the whole picture-

[Ross Edgley]
Amazing

[Andrew Huberman]
... as they say. And he works at it. He works at it. It's not like a default, right?

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
He works at it, resisting negative forces and still keeping some "fuck you" energy in there as this gets you.

[Ross Edgley]
Just in the back pocket.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah, I grew up in the South Bay, whereas like every... 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
You see it in every domain. You see it in dance. We had Twyla Tharp on here, the great choreographer.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
You see it that you... She'll tell you stories of people that were incredible dancers and not balanced as humans. You'll see-

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... people who are both, and you'll see the people who quit because it was just too hard, and they wanted balance.

[Ross Edgley]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
It's like, you smile a lot. Well, what's your spirit animal, mate? Or do you have five of them? I'll go, "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- ... 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
No one's going to think you less the man- ... no matter what the answer.

[Ross Edgley]
People often say I'm like a Labrador on amphetamines. So that-

[Andrew Huberman]
You do seem very cheerful. Okay, so that's your terrestrial animal. Well, let's just say the Labrador. You don't need the amphetamines.

[Ross Edgley]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah.

[Ross Edgley]
I think, orcas, especially when I bulk up for a swim-

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm

[Ross Edgley]
... because orcas are so big and chunky, but also mildly athletic as well. So, an orca in the water.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[Ross Edgley]
And in the air,

[Ross Edgley]
oh, that's a great one.

[Ross Edgley]
Hmm. I

[Ross Edgley]
think crows are misunderstood. And again, ancient Nordic mythology, when Floki found Iceland as well-

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm

[Ross Edgley]
... 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.

[Andrew Huberman]
Beautiful.

[Ross Edgley]
So, crows, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
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

[Andrew Huberman]
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 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 wanted 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?" You know? So, you can really get yourself into trouble with this one, so always best to let them answer.

[Ross Edgley]
You're right.

[Andrew Huberman]
I think you're spot on. And I do claim authority on this. I've been doing this since I was a kid.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, Ross Edgley, 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

[Andrew Huberman]
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. I love your

[Andrew Huberman]
command of literature and philosophy and just ideas and the natural world and the brain. I

[Andrew Huberman]
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, 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

[Andrew Huberman]
roll out the

[Andrew Huberman]
opportunity to maybe

[Andrew Huberman]
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

[Andrew Huberman]
you get the credit for doing all these things, but I really appreciate your ability and willingness to kind of 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?

[Ross Edgley]
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.

[Andrew Huberman]
No, so these 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-

[Ross Edgley]
Oh, it's even worse.

[Andrew Huberman]
And they'll eat your nervous system and every one of your organs. Please don't do a swim down the Amazon. Paul Rosolie is going to kill me for saying this. Sorry, Paul. He's not going. He's not going.

[Ross Edgley]
Penis-eating parasite.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah, the 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.

[Ross Edgley]
Amazing. 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, 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, I think you'll be the first to know, but we've got a few different ones, and as soon as they say, "Let's go," then I put my goggles on, load up on caffeine, and we're going to go and do it.

[Andrew Huberman]
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. Yeah. You're the man, Ross. Come back.

[Ross Edgley]
Thank you so much. This has been awesome. Thank you.

[Andrew Huberman]
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. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast, or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms, so that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Ross Edgley. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

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