Unlocking Persistent Motivation & Extreme Resilience | Ross Edgley | Andrew Huberman Transcript

Andrew Huberman interviews ultra-endurance athlete Ross Edgley on motivation, resilience, and the neuroscience of doing hard things

Andrew Huberman speaks with British ultra-endurance athlete Ross Edgley about the psychology and brain science behind extreme persistence.

Summary

Andrew Huberman hosts Ross Edgley, a British ultra-endurance athlete known for swimming around Great Britain (nearly 2,000 miles in 157 days), completing the world's longest non-stop river swim down the Yukon River (510 km in 56 hours), and numerous other extreme feats. Together they develop a new model of motivation — visualised as multiple spokes on a balanced wheel — arguing that different emotional drivers (obligation, fear of shame, love, anger, gratitude, absurdist purpose) each have different potencies at different moments, and that the ability to dynamically switch between them is what enables extreme persistence. Edgley describes in detail how he used each of these motivational sources across his swims, including racing to finish Iceland before the birth of his son. Huberman connects these experiences to neuroscience research on the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, the prefrontal cortex's role in the "winner effect," and the three-choice architecture of the brain (advance, hold, or retreat). The conversation also covers strength training for endurance, supplementation, stress inoculation, and the generalisability of resilience across different domains of life.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Introduction and the myth of Sisyphus

Ross Edgley: Sisyphus was one of the cleverest humans to ever exist in ancient mythology. He was able to outsmart the gods and he even chained up death at one point, which made the gods really angry because basically people were fighting wars and no one was dying. So there were no souls going into the underworld. Hades was really pissed off. Anyway, eventually Sisyphus dies and the gods are just livid. So they're like, "Look, we're going to punish you. What we're going to do is 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 Sisyphus 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. They've even coined the phrase that Sisyphus was the absurd hero. 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: 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 is nearly 2,000 miles in distance and took him nearly 157 days. He also swam 317 miles of the Yukon River continuously — non-stop — for 56 hours. He's run a full marathon pulling a full-size car, 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.

Today we explore and develop in real time what we can really 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 honour 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.

Ross Edgley's early life and intrinsic motivation

Ross Edgley, welcome.

Ross Edgley: Thank you so much.

Andrew Huberman: We're going to need a bigger chair. This feels surreal. So much of your teachings helped me across the Arctic Circle — jellyfish bouncing off my face, tongue coming off. I'm honoured 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, thought patterns, control of their own thoughts that people can explore and perhaps adopt to have a better, more enriched life. Take me back. You're 41 years old now, right?

Ross Edgley: I am.

Andrew Huberman: Let's do this in snapshot fashion. 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. 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. I was like, I kind of want to make it harder. So Dad caught me putting rocks in my backpack and walking up with it on my back. I just needed more of a challenge. Otherwise, it just wasn't fulfilling something inside of me.

And I think even now, fast forward 30 years, I'm still doing the same thing. When I come up with an idea for a swim, if I tell someone and they go, "Oh yeah, that sounds quite good," I go, "That's terrible." You're not shocked by it. But if I tell someone a swim idea 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? We all have an ego and we all want to test ourselves, but the feedback we get is often important too. So as a calibration point, if nothing else — if you could imagine you were hiking alone, do you think you would have been loading those rocks in just for you?

Ross Edgley: Yeah, I think I would. For me, 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. It was just something that I wanted to do, so that when I got home I'd be like, "Right, I was able to do that."

I think it's changed a lot though as well. Jumping a little bit to swimming around Great Britain — I did that when I was 32 years old, and for me it was very much ego-driven. I talked about Captain Webb, 1875, first guy to swim across the English Channel. He did it on beef broth and brandy and swam breaststroke because front crawl was considered ungentlemanly, so he just crushed it all the way across. It wasn't for charity, wasn't for anything like that. He just wanted to pioneer our understanding of swimming and human endurance. For me, swimming around Great Britain was exactly that. Looking at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it was feelings of accomplishment, prestige, recognition — all of those things. Ego-driven.

After that, that felt a little bit shallow. To just do it for records feels a bit fragile, a bit strange. Then it was the swim around Iceland, where the University of Iceland said they wanted to raise awareness around ocean conservation efforts, but also collect eDNA samples — environmental DNA samples that basically pick up if there's been a whale in the water, a seal, a Ross Edgley, whatever it is — to track the biodiversity around Iceland in a level of detail they'd never seen before. Upon hearing that, I was like, right, that feels like a better reason. It's not just records. That feels better. I did that when I was 40.

So it has been interesting. I think quite often sometimes it is intrinsically motivated, but then a little bit later, if I'm honest, it was ego-driven. It was extrinsic. I wanted to be the first person to swim around Great Britain. And then now, for various things that changed in my life, I think it's like almost moving up Maslow's hierarchy. I'm not going to quite say self-actualisation, but we're looking for something a little bit more than records.

Andrew Huberman: Staying with the roughly ten-year-old Ross Edgley — were you always very expressive? Did you have a lot of spontaneous energy? Have you always woken up ready to roll, or are you a slow grind into the morning?

Ross Edgley: Just let's go. I've always just been like that. I think I've got a handle on it now, but when I was young I was so competitive and such a bad loser. My dad was one of the very few people who actually understood how to manage me. I remember I did a school cross country — I think I was about 13 years old — and the guy who beat me deserved to win. He was a better athlete. He beat me fair and square, but I was livid. Afterwards I just wouldn't speak to anyone. I stormed off. I refused to go and pick up my medal. I said, "Second place is the first loser," and I started to run home. My dad just slowly got in the car and followed me all the way home just to make sure I was safe. He was like, "I'm just going to have to let him get it out of his system." I think it was 10 miles. By the time I got back home, I was like, "Maybe I'd overreacted there, Dad. I'm so sorry." And he just let me realise that on my own.

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 on the anterior mid-cingulate cortex. As a coping mechanism upon hearing about it, and the podcast you did with David Goggins, I thought about the anterior mid-cingulate cortex almost like weighing scales constantly — grit and quit, pain and purpose. If it's really painful, if your tongue is falling off and you're swinging across the Arctic Circle 114 days at sea, then you need a lot of purpose to tip those scales.

Carl Jung talked about your shadow self — a part of your psyche that you keep away from the public. Maybe you're aggressive, hypercompetitive, jealous, and you kind of tuck that away. Whereas Carl Jung and Jordan Peterson talk about that as a monster. It's not bad having a monster inside of you. It's bad when you can't put him back in the cage. So when swimming around Iceland, 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 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 ten-year-old, hypercompetitive side of me came out. I'm now just going to do this because people don't think I can.

So my question to you — does the anterior mid-cingulate cortex respond sometimes to your shadow self? Can you have a darker form of energy? Goggins, for instance, will speak to himself and be like, "Man up. Who's going to carry the boats?" Whereas me, sometimes I try to do it through gratitude, but sometimes I do find that darker form of fuel useful.

The anterior mid-cingulate cortex and the neuroscience of tenacity

Andrew Huberman: For those that might not have heard me talk about it before — or the David Goggins episode — just very briefly: the anterior mid-cingulate cortex is a 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 involve a piece of the skull being removed and they're awake, head fixed in a stereotax — 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, and I'm going to fight this challenge." So it's tenacity, willpower, etc.

The anterior mid-cingulate cortex is a very interesting structure because it receives inputs and outputs from many brain areas, including the amygdala, the memory centres, the dopamine reward system, the nigrostriatal pathway, and on and on. Despite what we know about it, it enlarges when people do hard things. It shrinks when people tend to shy away from hard things. Its activity and size correlates with success in doing hard things. You can build it up by doing hard things that you don't want to do.

We still don't really know the computations, the math that it's doing. We're not yet at the place in neuroscience where we can say, "The anterior mid-cingulate cortex computes prior notion of self with goal, with purpose, with fear, with anger, with love, and this is the computation that leads to persistence versus quitting." We don't know yet.

So it's not a total black box, 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 than the anterior mid-cingulate cortex recordings can tell us about you. In the future, we will have the technologies to unpack the computations with a lot of precision. There are people developing those technologies, but they're not there yet. So I want to be careful not to say things we don't know.

Here's what I was thinking coming into this podcast today. We can find posts on Instagram, full podcasts, books, and historical records of people that did very hard things for just about every different reason. So rather than a teeter-totter that goes from quitting versus persistence, I have this mental model that I'm wondering if you'll be willing to entertain with me today through your story. Imagine a beam of wood balanced in the middle, but another beam of wood 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. So you can imagine this as like spokes on a wheel, and it's balancing. As long as no side touches the ground for too long, you persist.

What I came up with is a name assignment for each of those spokes. 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. Take the time you need.

Andrew Huberman: You've taken my modelling and made it four-dimensional.

Ross Edgley: Well, three-dimensional. You're going to add the fourth dimension.

The spokes of motivation: "Because I said I would"

Andrew Huberman: So this is a little bit like a qualifying exam — and no, it's not an exam. This is for informative and entertainment purposes. But the cool part is it's not a movie. It's real. It's your life and the incredible things you've done.

So let's start with doing something because you said you would. No other reason. Just because you said you would, either to yourself or to the world. Forget what they're saying in response. Forget who it's for. Just: 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. I was just like, "You said you were going to do this." And even the Great British Swim, more so, because I told sponsors and everybody I was going to do it. My older brother Scott is amazing in that he can take a complex situation and really simplify it. We broke the record as we went around Scotland for the longest stage sea swim, and everyone celebrated. They were like, "This is amazing." And Scott was just like, "Yeah, but it's going to count for nothing unless you actually finish it." And I was like, "Do you know what? You're right."

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. And also, void of anything extrinsic, looking yourself in the mirror — Einstein said adversity introduces you to you. You realise the most honest version of yourself when you're in an absolute hole. 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 because I said I would — not because of how I'd be perceived publicly, but because of how I would think of myself when I looked in the mirror.

Andrew Huberman: On that swim or other times when you were pushing forward simply because you said you would — is that looping in your head? Along these very long journeys, your mind must go to all sorts of places, dark and light and everything in between. When you're getting into the water, does it feel cold? Or have you habituated?

Ross Edgley: By the end of Iceland, I think I just habituated that form of stress. Almost had 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 it before you can even put it on and then get in. By the end, you are just numb to it. Whatever's happened there — that habituation of the stress, whether my anterior mid-cingulate cortex has grown, whatever it is — by the end it still registers, but you don't have an emotional response to it anymore.

The spoke of fear of shame

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. We could call this fear — fear of shame. 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. Do you recall a time when fear of shame was a driving force?

Ross Edgley: Absolutely. Iceland — this is the easiest one to answer. Towards the end, we had 100 miles to finish, and basically the birth of my first child was due in a week's time. We had 100 miles still to cover. We had Hurricane Eron coming through the Atlantic. Over in Grindavík on the West Coast, there was a volcano that went off, spewing poisonous gas, so we couldn't get close to that. And over here, we had one of Europe's largest glaciers sending shards of ice as big as this table. The team was just like, "Ross, I'm so sorry. We're going to be here for two weeks in the harbour."

And I was like, "No, no, no. I'm so sorry. We need to go out. I need to be back for the birth of my child." Not only for my girlfriend — she's amazing, I've been with her 13 years — but the look on her face, the disappointment that was going through my head. And then also just knowing that I wasn't going to be there to welcome my son into this world. So that one, 100%, was fear of failure, fear of letting people down. I gunned it and finished the final 100 miles purely fuelled on that. The University of Iceland and 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?

Ross Edgley: I'm glad you picked up on that, because I think especially with sea swims, they are such a team event. In no way am I saying that to self-deprecate — it genuinely is, in that if we read the tides wrong or the weather, 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. It happened a few times.

Andrew Huberman: Actually backwards?

Ross Edgley: Actually backwards. Yeah. Up at the Pentland Firth on the Great British Swim — that's in the top of Scotland — you can be travelling at 10 knots if you get it right. That is almost the cruising speed of a dolphin. But you get it wrong, you're going backwards at 10. You could be Michael Phelps and you're still going backwards. So I genuinely say "we" because it's a team event. I'm just the one who has to get in the water.

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

Ross Edgley: Yeah. I've picked up loads. Hypothermia, rhabdomyolysis, cellulitis.

Andrew Huberman: What's cellulitis?

Ross Edgley: A skin infection. Basically, I picked that up in Loch Ness because it was fresh water. The wetsuit was chafing, it got so deep it turned infected. And if that gets in your lymph nodes or your bloodstream, it can be fatal. It was a really strange position to be in as well because it was a 56-hour non-stop swim. The water is about four degrees, barely above freezing.

Andrew Huberman: No stop for sleep.

Ross Edgley: No, non-stop. You can't touch anybody. No one can touch you. You can't touch the boat. You just swim for 56 hours. And towards the end, it was so strange because I had hypothermia — my core temperature, I could feel I was shaking from the inside, it was in my bones — but my skin was on fire from the cellulitis. So it was this strange attack on my physiology. But yeah, it recalibrates your perception of pain. 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 go, "Oh, that's not too bad. It doesn't smell infected. We're good."

Andrew Huberman: Do you believe in the Loch Ness monster?

Ross Edgley: Something touched my leg. Honestly. It was like a spiritual experience. And I think by that point — Nietzsche 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." 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 very gradually you were looking and your tunnel vision just got narrower and narrower. You were looking through the eye of a needle, and then it just went black. I remember waking up and my girlfriend and my mum were at the head of my hospital bed. I just looked up and went, "Ah — it's not gone well, has it?" And they were like, "No, Ross, it's not gone well at all."

So learning from that, going back to Iceland, having graduated in Loch Ness, I was like, "Look, 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. I've got unfinished business there.

Andrew Huberman: I've always wondered since I was a kid why they don't just drain Loch Ness and solve the Loch Ness monster thing once and for all.

Ross Edgley: I know, right? It's not good for the tourist trade though. 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.

Andrew Huberman: You seed the world with a few photos. That's clearly what happened — one or the other, or some combination.

Ross Edgley: I love that you brought that up, because swimming around Iceland at the start, I heard about elves and trolls and mountains that were trolls who didn't make it back before sunrise. All of these stories. I was like, "Oh, that's a cool story." Swimming around it, there is something in the water. There were events.

So I got a blót ceremony — it's almost like an ancient chief, a modern-day form of that. He basically gave me a blót ceremony where he blessed the swim. He said, "Ross, I think you'll die, but it'll be a good saga." That was the Icelandic sense of humour.

Andrew Huberman: That was the send-off.

Ross Edgley: That was the send-off. And even at the start, I did a swim and afterwards I'm looking up at the northern lights, towelling myself down. And this old Icelandic fisherman just comes out of nowhere. The first thing he says to me is, "They're probably deciding if you're going to live or die." I turned around and went, "I'm sorry?" And he goes, "The Valkyries." I said, "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 then starting the swim on the blót ceremony, they were talking about the Guardians of Iceland. 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 foreign king who sent a sorcerer dressed as a whale to come and invade Iceland. He came over to the west coast and there was this massive bull, and they said, 'You can't attack there.' That represented strength and power. Went over to the north coast — that was the Kingdom of the Eagle. The eagle saw them from miles off. The sorcerer was like, 'You can't attack there.' Went over to the east coast — that is the realm of the dragon, mainly because there are 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, they have the bull, the eagle, the dragon, and the giant. And they're saying really it's about respecting nature and everything.

Upon hearing that, I was like, well, that's a shot of adrenaline. And I wanted to quiz you on this — is it the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that deals with strategy and the story you're telling yourself? 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 towards the end, the story of Odin — in ancient Norse mythology, they believe in fate. You can't control your destiny. The only thing you control is your attitude towards it. So Odin had traded his eye for wisdom. He knew — spoiler alert — that he was going to be eaten by a giant wolf at Ragnarök. But he just charges into battle anyway. And I think by the time I finished the swim after 114 days, I was sitting 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. Nietzsche: "I know of no greater life purpose than to perish in attempting the impossible." All of that was going through my head.

The prefrontal cortex, the tube test, and the winner effect

Andrew Huberman: You asked about the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. There is a set of studies that I haven't talked about on my podcast before, but it's a solid literature in neuroscience, and it has to do with an experiment called the tube test. Do you know about the tube test?

Some years ago, people were interested in what drives persistence and winning in competition. They developed something called the tube test, done on mice. 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, and male-female pairings will do it too, but they tend to do this with male-male pairings. The tube is small enough so they can't really scratch or bite at each other. 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.

So you put two mice in and one tends to win and one tends to lose. And there are some interesting statistics that fall out whereby prior winning leads to future winning on average. Winners tend to be winners and losers tend to be losers over time, in a way that's independent of testosterone levels, independent of nutritional status, independent of body weight. So there's something else there.

A bunch of different laboratories have worked on this, measured brain activity in a broadscale 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. Then they do the following experiment. You take a mouse that was consistently a winner and you silence this particular region of the brain — 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. The amount of cortisol, the amount of testosterone — none of that stuff speaks to what's really going on. It seems that this top-down circuit from the prefrontal cortex to a bunch of other stuff is driving persistence to win under any realistic condition.

Again, you can't take a foetal mouse and have it beat an adult mouse. But all other things being more or less equal, activity in this area drives persistence and winning. And there are equivalent experiments in humans using virtual reality and brain scanners. You're clearly physically stronger than I am. I'm reasonably strong, but there's no way that stimulating my prefrontal cortex is going to let me beat you in a deadlift. But there's a world where, if we are otherwise within 10 or 20% of each other's abilities in something, whoever has the most activity in this brain region wins over and over and over again. And the converse is true too.

I find this amazing because the analog in humans is that this is a brain area involved in conscious strategy-setting. The particular strategy could be anger, could be love, could be wanting to get home to see your child born, could be hunger. The beauty of the prefrontal cortex is that it can learn lots of different strategies in lots of different contexts.

Ross Edgley: I love what you said there. And also for those who are losing — someone was recently 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'd won the point or lost the point. He was so stoic about it. So do you think it's the same — if you're losing and you don't react to it, you'll maybe be able to buck that trend?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, totally. I think one of the big macros that's going to emerge today is this notion of energy. The reason I asked about the ten-year-old Ross Edgley is I had a sneaking suspicion that he had a lot of energy. Having a lot of energy is great. Energy management on a backdrop of having a lot of energy — that's where things start getting impressive. Poor energy management on a backdrop of a lot of energy is, I think, what leads to the 27 Club — people who do incredible things and die, whether by virtue of their particular activity or by virtue of the excesses.

So energy management is clearly a piece of the ability to be the ten-year-old you and load more and more rocks, but not burn unnecessary energy. The efficiency piece is where these stories that we tell ourselves — "I'm doing this for so and so" — allow you to separate out all the other possible motivations for some period of time. Just being motivated is like a disregulated system. "Motivated to do blank because blank" — that's a well-managed energy system.

Outsourcing common sense — and the psychobiological model of fatigue

So most people would die for your levels of raw energy. But 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. Looking at Tim Noakes' central governor theory — the psychobiological model of fatigue — this idea of 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, before Loch Ness, I also did a swim in Lake Trasimeno in Italy. We got caught in a freak heatwave. Temperatures over 40°C, water temperature up to 34°. It was bath water. Rhabdomyolysis waiting to happen. 37 hours in, approaching 100 km, exactly the same happened. Body just started to shut down. I am just swimming. I'm so stubborn.

Looking at that psychobiological model of fatigue, I know that as soon as my brain — that hypochondriac — starts pulling the physiological handbrake, I just go, "No, no, no, no." I just put my foot down on the gas. So with my team, we talk about outsourcing common sense. I say, "Look, 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 you need to pull me out and you play that card, I will listen, because I can't keep putting myself in hospital." It's almost the opposite now — I need to be saved from myself.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. And that's trusting the team, who are amazing, because they are well aware that what we're trying to achieve is so ambitious. So they will allow you to play with the boundaries of common sense and sports science.

Ross Edgley: Jerk Kennedy — great friend of mine, one of the greatest ice swimmers ever — just understands hypothermia and the cold. There are so many times me and him have conversations and he's just like, "He's still good, he's still coherent." But there are other times where I wish I'd had Jerk there just to go, "Ross, you're done."

Andrew Huberman: It's interesting — we'll talk a little bit about addiction later, but I have some friends 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 isolation" or "don't let them talk their way back to their phone or back to a casino." With huge cash rewards if the person doesn't allow them to do it. You have to create incentive on the other side too, because some of these folks are really persuasive.

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. He's had a gambling addiction many times over in his life. Fortunately, he's not in it now. 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 of 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. What you describe — because it's an elected endeavour and because, provided you survive and make it home to your girlfriend and child, it's all good — it has a component of addiction, right? If you don't add the rocks, if you don't have the next swim — so how do you gauge what's too much? Every high achiever has to answer at some point the question: how much money, how many miles, how much fame, how many blanks before I'm satisfied?

Ross Edgley: That is such a good question, because I'm literally only as of the last year asking those questions. My son's now one year old and he's really forced me to ask them. Now when I'm proposed swims, the 21-year-old self, if somebody said, "Go do a swim through a volcano down in Antarctica," I'd be like, "Yeah, hold my beard. Done." Whereas now I've got to ask myself, is this worth it? Is it enough? Is it worth doing?

The only thing I know is — Victor Frankl talking about the meaning of life being 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. I do need purpose. Victor Frankl says that over fame, money, a human needs to wake up and ask: what is your reason for getting up in the morning? When I don't have a swim or something to train for, my girlfriend just says I'm like a caged animal. She sees me at home and so when people — she's amazing — when I left for Iceland, she's quite heavily pregnant, waving me off, and they said, "How are you letting him do this?" And she goes, "He would be terrible if he was still at home. I know he's happiest when he's out there."

Even swimming around Great Britain, so many people back on land — when Hester would come and see me and I was a hundred days in, I looked like a sea yeti werewolf, my tongue was falling off, I was chafing all over — people would say, "How's he doing? I've seen the wounds, I've seen his neck." And Ha would always reply, "I've never seen him so happy. He's having the best time."

Andrew Huberman: And she met you when you were already like this and doing this. You didn't spring this on her three years into a relationship?

Ross Edgley: No, no, no. And she's incredible. The Yukon swim — that was 510 km non-stop, 56 hours, although the entire expedition was about 70 hours. The entire team, including myself, didn't sleep for 70 hours because we had to actually get the boat to the starting point. I just remember swimming and there's just the silhouette of my girlfriend, and every 20 minutes she throws me a banana and I'm just like, "Thanks, babe." And she's just like, "No problem." I feel so fortunate. I'm just like, "Oh, thanks for accepting me. I know I'm a feral, weird boyfriend."

Andrew Huberman: You seem, as I would describe and sometimes describe myself, only partially domesticated.

Ross Edgley: That is so — when I turned up, I was still hairy from Iceland. I had jellyfish tentacles. I was literally chafing wounds. I arrived at the hospital — I made it back by three days for the birth of my son. As I arrived, nurses and everyone were like, "Oh my god, who is that?" And Ha was like, "Oh 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 says now, since we've been together 13 years, she just has to let go. Her barometer of worrying has completely changed. Because when you have — the Yukon was a great example — your perceptions of danger. There were so many times on the swim where black bears were fine. In the Yukon in Canada, they're a bit skittish. They look at you and I can almost feel my amygdala or circuitry looking and going, "That's okay." When the brown bears appeared on the side, they are just looking. 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." I turned to the guys in the Yukon and said, "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: You experienced that as well with shark diving. That rewired you. Is it fair to say?

Ross Edgley: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I don't want to shift this to a story of my adventures — they're in no way as bold and enduring as yours. But yeah, a few years back for my lab, we decided to record great white sharks in the wild and bring it to the VR lab. A friend of mine, a very accomplished photographer and videographer, Michael Mueller, convinced me to get dive certified and exit the cage and swim towards the sharks. There's a skill to doing this — you're not just cowboying it. I had an air failure on the hookah line the day before. So 2017 marked the deliberate end of me taking risks with my physical life.

But what I learned there, and from people like Cam Hanes and from spending time in Australia and with 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. The key takeaway being — whether it's jellyfish, spiders, snakes, birds, or in some cases people — locals have the key knowledge, and our ideas about what's dangerous or not are often wrong. So best to err on the side of: it's all dangerous.

Ross Edgley: 100%. And I love what you said there, because diving with great whites and tiger sharks myself — they have the ampullae of Lorenzini, where they pick up electrical impulses. 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. Whether that was because I was flinching, I acted like prey, whether it was my heartbeat or my breathing — they knew. And on the audio, they were like, "Ross, control your breathing. Ross, slow your heart rate." And sure enough, they all just came straight for me. They were like, "Ross, I'm not saying square up to it, but I'm not saying flinch and back away either." So as it came towards me, I was like, "Where can I help you?" And it sort of looked at me and there was a real form of communication — 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." Exactly the same with the bears in the Yukon. They were looking, and if there was a weakness, that is the law of the jungle — I would have been charged.

Threat assessment, brain circuitry, and the three choices

Andrew Huberman: All animals have their own sophisticated forms of intelligence. What you learn with the great whites before you go down there is they're going to come looming in slowly. There's a lot of tuna out there, a lot of seals and other things for them to eat. So they're not actively trying to hunt you. But if you run — swim away from them — they perceive you as prey. They're making a binary decision.

This is actually an important thing in terms of brain circuitry. I had a student who then went off and did a postdoc and now has her own laboratory in Switzerland — Lindsay Bhatt — who published some papers on threat assessment and response: how fear can turn to pausing, can turn to aggression. She really deserves the credit. There are these areas of the midline thalamus — basically square in the middle of the brain — that make the decision among three choices. You can go forward, you can stay in the same place, or you can retreat. And predators are also assessing: are they moving forward toward me? Are they staying still? Or are they retreating?

Lindsay has identified a number of those switches in the brain, she and others. And so the bears are probably paying attention to: is he moving forward toward me, or staying still, or retreating? You encounter a mountain lion along a trail — people will say, "Don't run. Get large." 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? Or you could play dead. These are life-altering decisions, and the computations are not super sophisticated.

This is no doubt relevant to everything we've been talking about — whether it's the anterior mid-cingulate cortex or the prefrontal cortex — in that brain areas will ramp up their activity and cross thresholds, after which circuits are set in motion. There's this kind of buildup of chatter that exceeds a threshold and then a certain action is taken or withheld. 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," "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? Retreating in this case would be quitting. And so it's sometimes fun to break things that are somewhat sophisticated — the psychological and the neurobiological — into: ultimately you've got three choices. You can go forward in life, or at any moment you can stop, or you can retreat or quit. And sometimes that's the life-saving decision.

Ross Edgley: 100%.

The spoke of love and affiliative drive

Andrew Huberman: Let's get back on the spokes for a moment. We've done three spokes already. "I said I would." "I don't want to disappoint." "I've got something I really want to be there for." How about: I'm going to do this because you said I couldn't. Because they thought I couldn't. I find this one to be very prominent in the online space. But it's also one that, as people get better and better and achieve more and more, they hear less and less. You have fuel when you're the underdog. When you win, they're no longer handing you that fuel. Has anyone ever said to you, "There's just no way," and that sparked something in you?

Ross Edgley: Absolutely — they just handed you a blank check. And throughout my career, that's become less and less useful because fewer people doubt me. And I'm almost like, "Oh." The Great British Swim was probably the biggest one. We were doing weekly vlogs on YouTube. The very first vlog we put out, the comments were just like, "He's far too big to be a swimmer. I think he's going to give up after 100 km. He's not going to even make it on the South Coast." All of them. And I read them. About 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 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 missed that. When we said we were going to swim around Iceland, everyone was like, "I think he can do it this time." And I'm like, "Where are the guys who were trolling me? I need them back."

Andrew Huberman: So are you moving dynamically between these things because one sort of loses its potency?

Ross Edgley: That is exactly the word I use. Anything that stimulates you — it's almost like going through your head, changing the TV channel. Sometimes something can work and it becomes so potent and you're swimming and you're like, "I'm swimming because people said I couldn't. This is amazing." But then the very next day you go to tap into that again and you go, "Well, maybe they've got a point." You need something else. I always say your reasons to continue need to be bigger than your reasons to stop.

And sometimes one of the most potent was — my girlfriend ended up sending me a picture of the scan, one of the first scans I ever saw of my son. I just woke up at 2:00 in the morning, cracked ice off my wetsuit, dived in, and I was like, "Oh, we're getting this done." Knowing which one to go to — and I think all great coaches know which buttons to push in the right moments. Sometimes I have to do it myself as well.

Andrew Huberman: So you've got "FU — I'm going to do this. You said I couldn't." Let's talk about the other one that Goggins talks about sometimes — even he talks about it a little bit differently than "f you." 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 — I'll die trying." But then at some point if that potency runs down, wouldn't it be wonderful to move to our love for something as motivation? Sometimes "f me" — like, "I am weak for even considering stopping." It's not a pleasant thought, but does it have potency for you?

Ross Edgley: I think it is. And to take that slightly further — sometimes there'll even be a part of my body that is failing. So it's not necessarily "f me," it'll be like "f you, right shoulder." I'll get angry at my body failing me. I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no. I'm taking you for a swim across the Arctic Circle. You're not stopping on me now." So it's not just me, but there will be parts of me that I get really angry at if they're failing me. Is that the same, do you think?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. And you teed up beautifully what I was going to get to, which is going to sit in a kind of uncomfortable place for some people listening. What you're talking about when you see an ultrasound of your unborn son and you want to meet him — you're talking about somebody that's of you. Let's be fair, your wife did significantly more of the work. But it's of the two of you, and it's of you. I could imagine that if you saw a picture of a family member's child that you'd told you would do this also, but at some point if I just show you a picture of a random baby and say, "Do it for this baby," I imagine it's not going to do a whole lot. Unless there's some other story attached to that about raising charity for that child, etc.

So this gets to a very important aspect of our wiring — one of the most fundamental aspects of our brain and our biology is we have to know the difference between us and not-us. And "us" starts with us as the individual, then it extends to our kin, to who we decide to affiliate with. 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 — 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. Mate or don't mate. Fight or don't fight. Quit or don't quit.

This is most visible — and we'll put a link to this — in a nature documentary where there's a lion being attacked by a pack of hyenas. 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 limits the lion population. They're not doing the math into the future — they've just learned this from each other, or it's hardwired. And there's another lion who comes along and enters the fight to protect the first lion. But the amazing thing is, just prior to this scene, those two lions were fighting each other and trying to kill each other. So there's a switch in the brain from "me just guarding the self" to "us versus them." And it's very dynamic.

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 hardwired stuff, it's your DNA. It's your child, or it's a child that you chose to adopt and raise, and so therefore it's your kid, and you would die before you would quit.

The strength of motivation — your example of your shoulder — you're like, "Uh-uh, you're not going to quit on me. You're not going to saw off your shoulder. You're coming with me." Your language actually encapsulates this idea that the dynamic concept of "me versus us versus them" is kind of what allows us to push through anything — whether it's a PhD thesis, medical school, parenting, whatever it is. The "us" with a little bit of "not us" — that is the stuff that drove human evolution, exploration, technology development.

Ross Edgley: I love what you said there. Do you find it's also the other way? The reason I bring that up is I lost my dad four years ago. The Iceland swim existed in this strange world — it wasn't just that my dad was my mentor and my coach, and then I'm losing my dad and becoming a dad myself. On the Iceland swim, as well as trying to get back for the birth of my son, I said when I wrote my book about Iceland that I want this to be almost a tribute to everything that my dad taught me and a letter to my future son.

Certainly swimming, not to get too deep or spiritual, but I would get goosebumps — it would invoke something visceral inside of me. I would imagine my dad sitting up there. He was a tennis coach, so he's playing tennis on the tennis court in the sky up in heaven, looking down. And I would imagine my dad up in heaven just looking down and, to everyone else up there, just going, "Yeah, that one right there swimming around Iceland — that one's mine." And that — I could just swim for another 100 miles thinking of that.

Andrew Huberman: For those just listening, I am nodding with big nods. What you're talking about here is the ability for humans to pull on this transgenerational understanding of "us." The "me" piece is important, but the "us" that really is an affiliative "us" is the most potent fuel in the universe.

The sad side of this — and it sounds like you had a good relationship with your father on balance, you light up when you talk about him — is that a lot of people have a very complicated relationship with their parents, or even a horrible relationship with one or both. 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.

If you think about the driving force of evolution — every species is trying to make more of itself and protect its young. In particular, its young. Once that's okay, then you can focus on other things. This is the deep reality of the primate brain, of which we are. Perhaps you a little bit more than the rest. I'm just kidding. You earned that joke by being so damn fit.

There's another piece of this. If people don't have that transgenerational pride and excitement and love to pull on, they have to look elsewhere. Jocko Willink has kind of been the football coach to a lot of guys that didn't play football — the military commander. He's a good friend of mine and he's every bit as kind and driven and cool as he comes across, even more so in person. But not everyone was in the military or played football. And yet he's there for you, encouraging you to be at your best through discipline. And there are other examples — Goggins, and you, and on and on. I think it's really helped a generation of men and women to believe in themselves and have an affiliative sense of drive, not just be a lone wolf. Andy Stumpf, DJ Shipley — there are too many names to rattle off. Cam Hanes, Rich Roll, and on and on. I really think that deep in our brains, below our unconscious, we're trying to check off these boxes of "be okay." Once we're okay, who close to us can we bring along? In your case, it was your shoulder, and then layer up from there.

Where Edgley stands now — and what comes next

Andrew Huberman: So these days you're sitting at a pretty high apex of what you do. Josh Waitzkin, who has been on this podcast — Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy, incredible chess champion, performance coach for the Boston Celtics — he said when you're trying to become the champion, you're trying to become the champion, but when you're a champion, you're trying to defend the championship, and the mindset is completely different. So where are you at right now? What's the next peak? Do you feel like you're defending something, or looking for the next big challenge? 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. My 21-year-old self, looking at 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." 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. 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." I remember I turned to Ha. I said, "Look, I should probably do the responsible thing. 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 try and swim around Great Britain?" And she looked at me and just sort of went, "I hate to say it, but you know, you might be 80 years old with loads of money and 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, if 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've got to a point where you could call it a career in inverted commas. And I think that's interesting because sometimes the idea of talking about money with these sorts of events is almost a dirty word. Whereas I always like the Japanese concept of ikigai — your reason for being, why 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. It needs to be all four. So often people will do these things and they forget the "what you can be paid for" and you almost become a martyr. Whereas with me, I'm really fortunate. To answer your question, if someone came along and said, "Do this swim, here's a check," I'm like, "Right." Going back to the "us" — 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: I don't think money is a dirty word, especially not in the context you're talking about — earned honestly through incredible endeavours, to serve your family. Having lived in Los Angeles for a few years now, it's an interesting place. There are a lot of success stories here and a lot of broken dreams too. 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.

One of the saddest things I ever saw was in a movie about Westside Barbell. There's this one scene where a guy who was training with Louie Simmons and those guys talks about missing his son's event because it was bench press night, and the regret that he still lives with. He was so driven by this particular goal that he missed some critical moment in his child's life and it still haunts him. Nobody wants to be that guy or gal.

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. My dad's a scientist and I loved science as a kid, and then when we had some friction, I resisted becoming a scientist. And then at one point I'm like, "This is ridiculous. I'm going to destroy my life for all the wrong reasons." I decided to become a scientist. Now we have a great relationship and we talk about science all the time. But the core component we're talking about here is our biological understanding of "us." Once we are well enough, then we can take care of others in our closest spheres, and then it can radiate out. If you can check the box of being okay and then some, you can do more and more for more and more people. Martyring oneself for everybody and not being able to take care of your family or yourself — that's not good.

Ross Edgley: 100%. Yeah. And I would put money down as one of the spokes certainly for swimming around Iceland. It was like, look, you complete this, you make money. Sometimes that got me through a few swims. Not as much as the other spokes we've been talking about, but it was there. You finish this, that's another world record, you can monetise that.

Andrew Huberman: I've said this before and I'll say it again — 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. Depending on where one lives and what their basic needs are, those numbers differ, but it can certainly buffer certain kinds of stress. End of story. And that's always been true. It will always be true. You should be paid for the work you love and that serves the world. That's the goal.

Dark energy versus light energy — and the neuroscience of frustration

You've talked before about dark energy versus light energy. "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, generative things versus just "f you" energy.

These are some of my favourite experiments, but their outcome is kind of dark but telling about human nature. Robert Heath was a neurosurgeon who had patients with electrodes embedded in many different places in their brain, and they could self-stimulate. Some stimulation areas would lead to feelings of drunkenness, others sexual arousal, others would make them giddy, others would make them tired. So he let them basically self-stimulate at will. Across all of them, the area of the brain that they preferred to stimulate the most — by a pretty impressive margin — was the area that 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.

It's a little dark, but telling, because it speaks to humans' desire to have a "me versus them" kind of feeling — frustration. That arousal drives all sorts of things whereby maybe otherwise we would become complacent.

Ross Edgley: I love what you said there, because when you look at the anthropology of humans, the history of humans, it's so interesting that people sometimes go to me, "Why do you do these swims? Why just put yourself through that?" And I go, "Well, I think humans have always had this idea 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 an Okugaki, a pilgrimage. You meditate under ice-cold waterfalls, drink green tea, and basically do a marathon a day in the mountains. The mountains were their church, and it was brutal — blisters, and you wear basically wooden sandals. It was horrible. You look at the Aborigines going walkabout. The Maasai tribe. We've always been doing something. So I think were they just hitting the button on frustration? Do you think that's tapping into exactly the same experiment?

Andrew Huberman: I do. I mean, I picked a hard career for me — science is hard, it's slow, it's gruelling, and then you have a breakthrough. I got very accustomed to that. But I think 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 re-up us. So I think all cultures have it. All careers have it. My friends who are visual artists certainly have it. Their torment is part of their fuel. And they run this dial that we're talking about — the different spokes on this thing that we haven't yet named. What we're talking about is tapping into drive and motivation but with a purpose, and the purpose can vary in time. I think all cultures have understood this. To some extent we're all sort of neuroscientists — it's just that some people look with more precise tools and give things names.

Living with the Yawanapi tribe — Ayahuasca and initiation

Ross Edgley: On that note, very quickly — there was another one and I wanted to get your opinion on this. I lived with the Yawanapi tribe in the Amazon jungle for a while. We did Ayahuasca for an entire week. It was this ceremony. I was 21 at the time, just finished kind of professional sports, never touched drugs or anything like that. Very much a dear-to-the-wilder-band substance list. And then for this documentary, they dropped me in the middle of the Amazon jungle and they were like, "Here, go — this is Ayahuasca." I didn't even know what it was. I was like, "What? Is it like alcohol?" And they were like, "A bit stronger than that."

I take it basically throughout the entire week. My first was like the worst trip ever. I did everything wrong. My friend Ruben — he works at Glastonbury, so he's done all sorts of drugs — I remember I was sitting there. First of all, I was sweating like somebody had thrown a bucket of water over me. Then my tongue swelled so it was bigger than my mouth. Then you projectile vomit — it just purges your system. At this point I'm like, "Right, I need out of this." So I turn and look at Ruben to my right. He's found a feather on the floor and he's licking it to taste the colours. 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 roller coaster, Ross. You can't get off. You can't fight it. You've just got to sit it out.

Fast forward through the entire week, and basically it was this self-discipline through self-discovery. There were various tasks we had to do. We caught a snake — this is going to sound so weird, I apologise now. You had to bite the tongue of the snake out of its mouth. They then explained 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. Yeah. Live snake. They open its mouth and you basically just tongue it.

Then when you've taken this vow of silence, you have to go through various different tasks. I had to climb a tree — I'm holding on to this tree maybe four metres in the air — and they just smack the bottom of the tree, and then fire ants 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 hornets' nest. You see where this is going. Bang — hit the hornets' nest. You just have to sit there and take the stings and not make a sound.

But what was so strange — and I love that you brought up that study — having completed all of that and been initiated with the Yawanapi 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. At the end of the ceremony, it was not euphoria, but I was like, "Wow, we did it." And it's so strange — I'm not advocating or recommending it to anyone — but it was weird that maybe I was just pushing that button in the brain. There are so many times in my life when I was pushing the button.

Social media, ego dissolution, and the "us versus them" circuitry

Andrew Huberman: I think a lot of people are more or less addicted to social media because of its ability to tap into mild anger and frustration-provoking circuitry — drama, "us versus them." That "us versus them" thing is at the core of our circuitry, and the more you can tap into it, the more engagement you can get from the brain. It's very powerful. 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 — the ego dissolution that's supposed to occur with those is supposed to make you feel less of a self-versus-other boundary. Connected to other beings, the universe, etc. It's supposed to dissolve the "me, us versus them" boundary, including humans to animals, humans to plants. That's a lot of the theory anyway.

Ross Edgley: Maybe I just need to do more psychedelics.

Andrew Huberman: Maybe not. These are powerful tools.

The neuroscience of choking under pressure

I want to talk about something for a moment — stakes. Not beef steaks, although those are wonderful too. There's a really cool study that came out in the last couple of years about 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.

Let's say you're playing billiards and we bet two pounds. Depending on how competitive we are and our relative skill level, somebody will win, somebody will not win. Now we bet £100,000. Now we're paying a lot more attention to how we're playing. It will likely bring out your best and my best. But let's say we bet two million pounds. At some point, when the stakes are extremely high, the motor cortex starts to recruit too much circuitry and we can't perform well. It's not that we can't do the thing — it's that too many commands are being sent into the system and we start incorporating musculature and connective tissue that normally needs to be excluded in order to have the precision of the shot.

When you're doing these long endurance events, it's slightly different because you can afford to have an imperfect stroke now and again and you'll still continue. But how much attention are you paying to your form and your desire to do things perfectly in a moment? And how much attention are you paying to the stakes — your reputation, your ego, your family? How much in mind are the stakes?

Ross Edgley: What's so interesting about what you said — for me, on the Yukon swim for instance, it's almost anticlimactic when you start it. It was the same with the Iceland one. It's not a heroic start. There's no dive. There are no fine motor skills. It's not like a 50-metre swim where everything has to be completely dialled in and if something goes wrong because the stakes are too high and you're hyperaroused, it all falls apart. It's not like that. It's knowing this isn't going to be over quickly. Even if I have a bad start, it's fine. I've got 100 days.

However, with that said, there are definitely times where the stakes are high, there are all these reasons both negative and positive, and things aren't going well. And there are times where I've gone, "Do you know what? Just swim for the enjoyment of it, Ross. Let's just remove everything else." And only now speaking to you, I realise 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 were times when I just went, "I'm not even looking at my watch. 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 that's where I'd go, "Ross, stop caring. We'll care tomorrow, but now just stop caring." Reduce the stakes in your head.

Circadian rhythm, sleep deprivation, and trusting your brain

Andrew Huberman: These swims are very long and can continue 50-plus hours. Do you notice that your motivation and 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, and it was crazy how I just never got that deep restorative sleep. Also, we were doing six hours on, six hours off. So it doesn't matter if it's 2:00 in the morning or 2 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 stormbound, I had the privilege of sleeping for eight hours, ten hours. And the next day it was like somebody just dialled up the brightness on the world again. I was like, "Things aren't so bad. This is okay. I can do this."

But sometimes, if you're not sleeping, circadian rhythm off, 24 hours of daylight, tide on, tide off — I was so aware that I couldn't trust my own brain. The neurotransmitters, chemical signals, they were all against me. Depleting serotonin, dopamine. You now have no motivation hormonally, chemically, biochemically. 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 grey. 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 a rainbow, the frozen fjord, the northern lights, swimming under the northern lights, looking up at the Valkyries. This is amazing. But 90% of the time it wasn't.

Andrew Huberman: They should have told us all in the third grade: don't believe any of your thoughts that occur between 2 and 5 a.m. I tell myself that all the time. I now don't believe anything my brain tells me between 2 and 5 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 — where you feel like "what's the point" is so that you can experience the point coming back into your mind. You realise, oh, there are going to be moments in life where I just think "what's the point," but there will be this moment ahead of it. The logic of it, the positive emotions associated with it, come back. And then you realise the brain tricks itself into thinking that what's happening right now is going to go on forever.

That to me was like the biggest insight. It came not from me but from my friend Ryan Soave, who's an incredible trauma therapist and helps addicts. He said, "If you can tolerate a certain amount of emotional discomfort for one second, then you can tolerate it for 10 seconds. If you can tolerate it for 10 seconds, you can do it for a minute, and so on and so on." He said, "But the problem is negative emotions make us feel, for some reason, like they're going to go on forever. Positive emotions don't have the same effect. We tend to think this is going to stop at some point and then we lose it — 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, there were 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 discussion. We just go, "You know what? I'm going to sleep. I'll see you in the morning." There's just no point arguing about it now because we can't trust ourselves.

I talk a lot about stoicism because I found on my swim that 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? 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. So it's salt water exposure. Basically, the human body is not meant to be in salt water for that long. It extracts all the moisture from your tongue. On the Great British Swim, for instance, about a week in, I remember they made this amazing soup — rich vegetable soup. All the team are tucking into it. I looked over and I noticed that mine had what I didn't know if it was pork or chicken. So I turned to the captain. I said, "Why haven't you got any pork or chicken? It's only in mine." And he just leant over and went, "Ross, that's not pork or chicken. That's your tongue." And it was falling off in the soup.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, brutal.

Ross Edgley: I know. But coconut oil — for anyone listening, if you find yourself in a similar situation — coconut oil acts as a barrier, maintains the moisture, and it grows back. It did grow back as well.

Everyday life, admin, and the limits of intrinsic motivation

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 badger yourself into doing that is absolutely trivial in somebody else's eyes? And if the answer is no, that's fine. Do you ever feel like "I don't want to do this again"?

Ross Edgley: Yeah. I think certainly if you spoke to my girlfriend — house chores and things like that, I'm terrible. I'm so messy. And for me, again, maybe it's related to dopamine, but I just need those big grand goals. Swim around Iceland. Swim the world's longest non-stop river swim. Yeah. Take out the trash. Do the washing up. I'm really bad at admin and basic stuff.

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

Ross Edgley: I'm just really bad at like admin and basic stuff. It goes back to what I said — if someone said, "Oh, swim the English Channel," I'm like, it's been done. Doesn't really appeal. And I think it's the same in life. If you said there's a record for taking out the trash, no one's ever taken two tons of trash — I'll be like, "Oh, hold my beer." So my girlfriend knows this. She knows how to push my buttons.

Andrew Huberman: Significant others everywhere are taking note.

Third-personing yourself — and the berserker state

A few minutes ago, you mentioned something that told me there are times when you can no longer advocate for yourself as "let's do this, I've got this." Your arm gives out. 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, 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" — you sort of third-person yourself and now you bring you along. And I think that's such an important tool for the times when there's no coach, there's no team, there's no goal in mind. It hurts like hell. You don't see the point. You've run out of "f you." You've run out of "f me." You've just run out. And you just have to transcend or exit yourself and just go, "Let's go."

Ross Edgley: 100%. And I love that you asked that, because certainly on the Iceland swim, I took such inspiration from the berserkers. For those who don't know — the berserkers, it literally means "bare shirts." They would be wearing sort of these bear shirts. These ancient Nordic warriors would enter into a battle-frenzied state where they were impervious to pain and fear. There were also wolf warriors who embodied the spirit of the wolf. They would bite down on their shields when running into battle. Now historians think they might have been using hallucinogenic mushrooms, others think it was ritualistic chanting and 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.

Certainly towards the end of the Iceland swim, I was lucky enough to speak to this 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 think entirely differently." Again — Samuel Johnson, 17th-century English writer: "Whoever makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." For me, certainly on that south coast, I was like, "Got to get rid of the pain of being a man. Just become a beast." No longer thinking of becoming that third person, but also just becoming wolf warrior, berserker.

Reading, tribes, and pain tolerance

Andrew Huberman: Do you like to read? It just seems like you know a lot about these ancient traditions and tribes.

Ross Edgley: I loved it. Yeah. This is going to sound really strange as well. 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. Just amazing athletes. But there was one particular guy in the tribe, and he was part Namibian but also part of the Kalenjin tribe — I hope I'm getting this right — which is basically an ethnic group specific to Kenya, and they produce more elite marathon runners than anywhere else. And he turned to me, sitting around this fireplace, and said, "Ross, do you know why people from the Kalenjin tribe are so good? Do you know why we're such great runners?" And I was like, "Yeah, altitude training." He went, "Nope." I was like, "Your diet?" "Nope." "Barefoot running, beautiful biomechanics, drilled from an early age?" "No." And I was like, "Right, go on then. Tell me." He says, "It's our pain tolerance."

"We have a tradition that when a boy is going into adulthood, we have him in front of the entire tribe. We take some mud — clay — we put it on his face, and then he has to stand in front of the entire tribe. The chief comes out and circumcises him — essentially with a bamboo shoot — in front of the entire tribe. He cannot flinch, cannot make any sounds. If the mud cracks on his face, then everyone in the tribe will be like, 'He's not desirable.' So he doesn't pass on his genes. So it's this idea that generation after generation, those where the mud doesn't crack are considered desirable, then mate, then pass on their genes, and their offspring do exactly the same. And what you're left with is just this incredible group of people with extraordinary pain tolerance."

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." But I think I'm fascinated — I love looking back through history and will take inspiration from anywhere and everywhere. Even that, if that is ritualistic circumcision — I've not done it with mud on my face, but I do find that stuff fascinating.

Andrew Huberman: The alternate response would have been, "Look, I totally respect your tradition. I spend a lot of time in cold water. I need all the insulation I can get." Is there anything like that that you found with pain tolerance? Are there studies around that?

Ross Edgley: Yeah. So on my list of things to discuss with you is the generalisability of resilience training. You know, this is a fascinating and still somewhat opaque area of science.

Andrew Huberman: On the one hand, we know 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, dopamine, and if the stress is long enough, cortisol — that are associated with a high-arousal painful stimulus. Also 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, getting stung by hornets, or experiencing a public circumcision and you can't flinch. Among other things, those are undoubtedly involved.

So then the question becomes: can our memory system and our prefrontal cortex apply a set of rules whereby in a different stressor, this negative arousal and pain — is it familiar to us? 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"? To some extent the data say yes, in particular about deliberate cold water exposure. But that's a unique one because, unless the water is very, very cold — and I'm so tired of seeing people do hyperventilation and then go into cold water and die, or videos of people jumping into ice holes and getting swept under — deliberate cold exposure with a shower or a cold plunge done safely allows people to 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 they can slow their breathing and grab hold of their mind and create a strategy to get through it. This is stress inoculation training.

The neurochemicals that are released don't change, but the inoculation piece is the familiarity and the ability to not further increase adrenaline through panic. So in that sense, yes. But it's also true that if you look at the cognitive behavioural therapies around phobias — public speaking phobia, for instance — people can use CBT or a beta blocker to successfully overcome that through progressive exposure. But it doesn't seem to translate to other stressful circumstances, perhaps because the adrenaline is kept beneath a certain threshold.

I believe — 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, pain tolerance translates. But people are coming in with a sort of set, probably genetic and experiential, predisposition. 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. Other people 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.

I'm not trying to dodge the question, but I think we should be very careful about the idea that any one particular type of training makes us tough. The cold water swimmer might have a hard time listening in a hard conversation where the feedback they're getting is not pleasant, but they might be completely stoic and just think, "This sucks, this sucks, this sucks, but I can calm myself through this. I can do this" — if they can understand that the same underlying mechanisms are taking place.

Ross Edgley: That makes a lot of sense. And I think cold water is a great training tool if done safely.

Strength training for ultra-endurance — and the strength reserve

Andrew Huberman: I want to ask you about your training, your physical training. One thing that's peculiar about you, at least to me, is that you're pretty heavily muscled for a guy that's supposed to float in the water. What does your training look like now when you're in between these super events?

Ross Edgley: A lot of strength training. When doing the sorts of swims that I do — these ultramarathons around countries — you're taking swimming and conventional sports science and moving outside of those realms. A lot of friends of mine who are amazing swimmers, Olympians, will ask questions like, "Around Iceland, was it a two-beat leg kick, a four-beat leg kick? Are you bilaterally breathing? What's your VO2? What's your lactate 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 mechano-transduction — 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. On my swims, it's not my lactate threshold, VO2, or technique that will stop the swim physically. It will be a ligament or a tendon, something that gives up.

Andrew Huberman: The chassis. Can't have the chassis break down.

Ross Edgley: Exactly. I joke that friends of mine from Loughborough University — Adam Peaty, the greatest breaststroke swimmer 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'm just there, migrating. That is what I'm doing. I'm not poetic in the water, but I just won't stop.

So I think strength training — and it's only now, because for so long in endurance it was a dirty word. Whereas now we're understanding that certainly the idea of general physical preparedness, or in your pre-season making the body physically robust enough to then endure the intensity or the volume that you subject it to later — a friend of mine at the English Institute of Sport had a great saying: "Sometimes you need to train to train." Before I can subject you to 150 km in the pool a week, we need to make sure the connective tissue is there and there's no weak part of that kinetic chain.

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 — six to 12 repetitions, close to or to failure — my runs suffer, recovery suffers. But I'm playing with the idea that pure strength training and endurance training might actually fit pretty well together. Is that your experience?

Ross Edgley: I personally think yes. Even when you're looking at Michael Johnson — he had that amazing running technique, but we now understand that even though that was potentially shortening his stride, it was increasing the amount of force he could generate through each foot. And we now know that's a greater predictor of speed as well. I think drilling down into your strength will help you generate more force per stroke, but also hold efficient biomechanics. I think that's overlooked as well. So I personally think they complement each other really well.

Andrew Huberman: How many days a week are you lifting at the moment?

Ross Edgley: Pretty much five days a week.

Andrew Huberman: And are you doing the same lifts on multiple days? Same muscle groups?

Ross Edgley: Quite similar. Yeah. I'm almost trying to do the Bulgarian training method, but for swimming with one rep max on pull-ups, if that makes sense. I'm very aware that the Bulgarian training method broke more champions than it made — you were going to lift heavy 365 days of the year, seven hours a day, and they were just breaking kids. But the one who could tolerate it was a world champion. Through so many years now, I do have quite a high 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. So I'm almost doing these still long aerobic sessions when swimming, but also almost spamming it with a Bulgarian-inspired strength training method 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. Even when we're doing plyometrics, you don't want to be doing a lot. Great friend of mine, Linford Christie — I still believe he's the oldest 100-metre champion. It took me a while when learning about speed and plyometrics because I always thought more was better, as is my nature. And Linford would be like, "Go home, Ross. You're actually drilling bad technique now. You're done." So in very much inspired by that, on my strength sessions, I'm making sure that everything is dialled in and they're perfect. They're 45 minutes long. Any longer and you're just drilling bad technique. You're not actually training strength anymore. Certainly not speed and power as well.

And one of the biggest things I've found recently is supra-isometric maximal holds. Before my heavier lifts — let's take pull-ups for example. I'm doing about 60 kilos at the moment clean. So what I'll do is sometimes put anywhere between 80, 90, 100 kilos on the weight and hold in an active hang for only three seconds. You're not trying to fatigue yourself. You're trying to switch on the central nervous system. Neural priming. Then jump down, take off the weight, put 60 kilos on, wait two minutes. So you're not fatigued, you're just switched on. And what I've found is then when I rip, I will just pull through 60 kilos. That's been one of the biggest things that has really helped.

Andrew Huberman: I feel like the Russians and the Eastern Europeans were certainly 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 this idea that the neural piece is so important. We think strength, we think muscles, we might think connective tissue, but the neural piece being so vital.

Do you mind if I ask — on those five 45-minute workouts per week, 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. 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: You have tree trunk legs, so you don't — and Dorian, obviously, trained them for years. You've trained them before.

Ross Edgley: Yeah, exactly. Any direct grip work or not so much?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. And I think 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. 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. And then equally the next day we'll do medicine ball slams, neural priming, and then speed pull-ups. And then equally we might do slightly bigger volume. So it's never just drilling the same thing. You're playing around with the different stimulus. The movements, the biomechanics are the same, but you're requiring a different training stimulus.

Significant others, worry, and the simplicity of expedition life

Andrew Huberman: I have a question about your significant other. It's interesting and wonderful that she supports you in these arguably very dangerous endeavours, and you guys have a child together, so she's clearly vested. A friend of mine who had a very high-risk, high-consequence job for many years said that his wife — who's been his wife throughout all of that and now into the current phase of his life, which is a lot less high-risk — said that if she didn't have to worry about him, she'd have to worry about a lot of other things. The brain, if it needs to worry, needs to worry about something, and if it needs to worry about something, it can't worry about a lot of other things. So I could imagine there's a certain advantageous piece to this.

Ross Edgley: I think there is. 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." With Sisyphus — pick up the boulder. I think that's absolutely true. And I don't want to say I'm a pleasant headache for her, but I do think certainly for me on the swims, people are like, "Oh, you know, it sounds brutal — 157 days at sea swimming around Great Britain." But I'm like, "But you've got to understand, I think I'm living like humans were always meant to live." 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.

Maybe for Ha as well — she would just see on the marine tracker that the boat was moving. So she'd wake up in the middle of the night and go, "Okay, he's moving," and then she'd go back to sleep. God bless her.

The full wheel of motivation — and the spoke of doing it for those who can't

Andrew Huberman: So we've got different spokes on the wheel of motivation, tenacity, and throughput. We've got "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. "F you" — because you or they said I couldn't. You sometimes hear that people can be very motivated to do something because others can't. You often see this on social media — somebody climbing a mountain because their child is sick, running a triathlon because somebody is impaired in some way. Is that one that you've touched into?

Ross Edgley: I would say that's probably less so out of my space, but it is there. You can do it because others can't. That's the sentiment. Yeah, it is.

I think on that note — I remember, and maybe this is tied to "us" as well — my dad, like I said, four or five years ago when we lost him, it was stage four cancer. Melanoma, skin melanoma. And I remember he had been diagnosed and it was basically stopping him from running and coaching. I got a phone call saying, "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, don't be upset. I won the point."

And I was like, "Right, okay. Amazing." An hour later, they then said, "Look, I'm so sorry, Richard. The tumours have spread. You now can't coach. We don't want you out on the tennis court on your feet for 12 hours a day coaching." And he literally did not skip a beat. He just looked the doctor straight in the eye and 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: My goodness.

Ross Edgley: And the very next day, just bandaged up his tumours and then just took to the court and continued to coach in a wheelchair. So I think to answer your question — having stories and examples and mentors and heroes like that, it was swimming going, "There will be a time maybe where I'm not able to do this, but like my dad, you will find a way to keep going." No matter how bad things are, my dad just took to the tennis court 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" is really about gratitude. Beneath that, parenthetically, it's "I can, and therefore I will." It's a gratitude for what we can do. Because if we're dead, we can't do these things.

Ross Edgley: 100%. I love what you said about gratitude. When we did the Yukon swim, the river team that we had — basically there's a famous kayak race that goes down the Yukon called Yukon River Quest. 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."

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. I've lived on this river for years. 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."

Larry had weeks to live. He then jumped on the boat. He's on the boat with his son, and for the next 70 hours was on the boat as I was 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 a few weeks later, after 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, a lump in my throat, goosebumps. And they just said, "You don't know — you gave him the last great adventure of his career." And he passed away shortly afterwards. And I suppose it's that particular spoke — when I was swimming, I was like, "How can I stop when Larry's over there?"

Andrew Huberman: He's not genetically related to you, but he becomes of you. You guys are a team. And this is like — 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.

I put a big question mark on one spoke. Like, I kind of wonder — just for entertainment purposes — is there ever a moment where you actually don't know why you're doing this right now, but you're just going to keep going? Like you 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. You don't have to do it. You could do any number of different things, but you feel compelled to do it. And it's a beautiful, inspiring, and I'll even say an important thing that you do. But do you ever step back and just go, "I have no idea, but I'm just going to keep pedalling here"?

The myth of Sisyphus — the absurd hero

Ross Edgley: I love what you said there, because — kind of. I don't know if this answers your question, but you're aware of the myth of Sisyphus?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Ross Edgley: So for those listening who don't know — Sisyphus was one of the cleverest humans to ever exist in ancient mythology. He was able to outsmart the gods and he even chained up death at one point, which made the gods really angry because basically people were fighting wars and no one was dying. So there were no souls going to the underworld. 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. What we're going to do is 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. They've even coined the phrase that Sisyphus was the absurd hero. 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. Sisyphus. Swimming Sisyphus. So you identify with Sisyphus. It makes perfect sense.

The science of smiling — and spirit animals

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. You've had some dark moments in your life.

Ross Edgley: Oh, for sure. Yeah. I just think — I love what you said earlier, although it's made me rethink it with the studies you mentioned — but just 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 — almost subliminal because they were so quick — of people smiling or frowning. And they basically found that those who were shown pictures of people smiling were able to go to exhaustion so much longer. So upon hearing that, I was like, I try to swim with a smile as much as possible. Otherwise I just find — Chris Williamson, a mutual friend of ours, said it best. 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, "Ah, you're a little so-and-so, Ross. Man up, what are you doing?" But after 114 days, I'm like, "Oh, don't be so mean." So I've tried that. 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? And so I've tried that, and I still do use some of that Goggins motivation, but sometimes I just need something that's a bit gentler.

Andrew Huberman: I've known David a while. I don't know him very well, but I've known him since before his first book. He sat in that very chair and shared a bit of what his inner process is. But clearly the "f me" but also the "f you" being a powerful tool. Dorian Yates talked about "f you" motivation being powerful, and he's in a very different place in his life now.

Ross Edgley: That's a great example. And I know he's a great friend of yours, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but it was certainly during the period — was it like the 1980s, 1990s — when it was Gold's Beach, string vests, sunglasses, 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?

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 ended up in a youth detention centre — 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." He had a big, strong "f you" energy to people who told him he wasn't going to be anything. Just the whole notion of these oppressive forces — real or imagined, and it sounds like they were very real in many cases. And he just decided that's the fuel. He became a six-time Mr. Olympia and, equally importantly, a happy person post-Olympia, mobile and healthy and all the rest. He's a wonderful person.

Ross Edgley: Almost two different people. When you look at Blood and Guts — 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. But now he is almost like a shaman. He's just like, spiritually — 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 "f you" energy. You just need to hit the right topic. He's still got it. Believe me, it's still very alive in him.

Ross Edgley: Sometimes what makes a great champion can make a bad human. And I say that sometimes with some of my swims — I know it's bad for my health, but it's good for my soul. And looking at some champions, I think it was Brendan Schaub when he was talking about Jon Jones, and he was just like, "Jon Jones is incredible, 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 in balance. It's a felt thing. It's not just a spoken thing. It's really a felt thing. And I've spent a decent amount of time with him in the context of his everyday life, and he's definitely winning the whole picture, as they say. And he works at it. It's not a default. Resisting negative forces and still keeping some "f you" energy in there.

You know, I grew up in the South Bay where Stanford's right there and Silicon Valley is right there, and you see this in the realm of science, entrepreneurship, technology. You see it in every domain. You see it in dance. We had Twyla Tharp on here, the great choreographer. She'll tell you stories of people that were incredible dancers and not balanced as humans. You'll see people who are both. And you'll see the people who quit because it was just too hard and they wanted balance.

You smile a lot. What's your spirit animal, man? Or do you have five of them? Let's do this. I like this game. If you're willing — what aerial, terrestrial, and aquatic animal do you just like and admire? You don't have to be like them. Don't worry. If you say you like the minnow, it's okay.

Ross Edgley: People often say I'm like a Labrador on amphetamines.

Andrew Huberman: You do seem very cheerful. Okay. So that's your terrestrial land animal. Let's just say the Labrador. You don't need the amphetamines.

Ross Edgley: Yeah. I think orcas — especially when I bulk up for a swim, because orcas are so big and chunky, but also mildly athletic as well. So an orca in the water.

And in the air — I think crows are misunderstood. And again, ancient Nordic mythology. When Flóki found Iceland, he used crows. He would send them off, and 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. The crows. Yeah. Beautiful.

Andrew Huberman: These are great examples. And the speed of your response tells me that this is true. I often think about this with people in my life. I need to spend a lot of time with them before I go, "That's their terrestrial animal." And always, always, always people want to know. And if it's an animal that they don't want to look like — for whatever reason, or that isn't tough enough if they're a guy, or graceful enough if they're a woman — then they're like, "Oh no, I wanted to be like a damselfish." And I'm like, "No, but don't you understand — have you ever seen the parrot fish?" So you can really get yourself into trouble with this one. Always best to let them answer.

Closing reflections — and what's next

Ross Edgley, you are a remarkable human — certainly for the physical feats that you've accomplished, but equally important for the teachings that you provide the world. Not just by example, but you're a real intellectual. An intellectual is by definition someone who can parse and communicate things at multiple levels of granularity. You're an intellectual. I love your command of literature and philosophy and just ideas and the natural world and the brain. This is one of the most delightful and awesome conversations I've ever had on this podcast, because you are so full of life. You are like mitochondria in action and it's infectious.

This is a conversation I'm going to return to many times over, and I'd love to roll out the opportunity to maybe create some visuals — we've never done this before — that could accompany some of the social posts and on the podcast. 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 run with these ideas. You are one hell of a human being. God bless your parents. God bless your wife, Hester. 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?

Ross Edgley: 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 bacteria.

Andrew Huberman: No. So these bacteria — they're not bacteria, they're parasites — go in through the urethra and then they live and they'll eat your nervous system and every one of your organs. Please don't do a swim down the Amazon. Paul Rosalie is going to kill me for saying this. Sorry, Paul. He's not going.

Ross Edgley: 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 apologising to everybody.

Andrew Huberman: So what is next?

Ross Edgley: We've got a few. I think it's so interesting — I'm almost like a mercenary, a hired mercenary for an amazing cause. 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 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. Thanks for expanding my consciousness and awareness of what's possible. You're the man, Ross. Come back.

Ross Edgley: Thank you so much. This has been awesome. Thank you.