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

Andrew Huberman interviews ultra-endurance athlete and author 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 physical achievement.

Summary

Ross Edgley, a British ultra-endurance athlete known for swimming around Great Britain (nearly 2,000 miles in 157 days), completing a non-stop 510 km (317-mile) river swim down the Yukon River in 56 hours, and numerous other extreme feats, joins the show to explore the psychology and neuroscience behind extreme physical achievement. Together, the two develop a new model of motivation — visualised as multiple spokes on a balanced wheel — that goes far beyond simple willpower or a binary quit-versus-persist framework. Edgley draws on ancient mythology, stoic philosophy, Norse tradition, and his own near-death experiences to illustrate how different emotional fuels — obligation, fear of shame, love, anger, gratitude, and even the pure absurdity of the endeavour — can be cycled through dynamically to sustain effort over extreme durations. Huberman grounds these accounts in neuroscience, discussing the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, prefrontal cortical top-down circuits, the tube test in mice, and the neurobiology of the us-versus-them drive. The conversation also covers strength training for endurance, circadian effects on motivation, stress inoculation, visual focus as an arousal tool, Tim Noakes' psychobiological model of fatigue, and supplementation including caffeine, creatine, and alpha-GPC.

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 honor those who can't, to fight mental stagnation, and on and on.

What's so special about Ross, and another reason why he's here on this podcast in particular, is that 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, entitled How to Hero: Find Strength, Forge Resilience, and Fulfill Your Purpose.

Ross Edgley's Early Life and Intrinsic Drive

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 honored that you're here. I'm very curious about you and what you do and how we can hopefully translate some of that into actions that people can take, thoughts, thought patterns, control of their own thoughts that people can explore and perhaps adopt to have a better, more enriched life. 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 because 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 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 at 10, 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 I did when I was 40.

So it has been interesting. I think quite often sometimes it is intrinsically motivated, but then a little bit later, 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 almost like moving up Maslow's hierarchy. I'm not going to quite say self-actualization, but we're looking for something a little bit more than records.

Andrew Huberman: Staying with the roughly 10-year-old Ross Edgley — were you always very expressive? 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 as well, I've kind of 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. 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. And 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 when I got back home. This was after the cross country. I had blisters. I was tired. I was exhausted. But by the time I got home, I was like, "Maybe I'd overreacted there, Dad. I'm so sorry." And he just let me realize 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 — you know, broadcasting the anterior mid-cingulate cortex. For me, and this is a massive oversimplification, as a coping mechanism upon hearing that 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. And for anyone listening, I hope it helps as well: if you've got these weighing scales, 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.

But equally, 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 can be useful. It's not bad having a monster inside of you. It's bad when you can't put him back in the cage. 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 10-year-old, hypercompetitive side of me ended up coming out. I'm now just going to do this because people don't think I can.

So it's really strange — I'll use different parts of motivation. And I suppose my question to you, that I've wanted to ask since crossing Iceland, is: does the anterior mid-cingulate cortex respond sometimes to your shadow self? Can you have a darker form of energy? I know Goggins, for instance, will speak to himself and be like, "Man up. Who's going to carry the boats?" 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 Persistence

Andrew Huberman: For those that might not have heard me talk about it before — 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, et cetera.

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 centers, 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 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. 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. 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 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 call out each one by one.

Ross Edgley: This is awesome. Take the time you need to recall a time when — if and only if — you were calling on that particular emotion set, that motivation, and paint a picture for us.

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

Spoke One: Because I Said I Would

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 — why? Because you said you would. Have there ever been times when you've done something simply because you said you would?

Ross Edgley: 100%. That was Iceland. I was just like, "You said you were going to do this." And the Great British Swim, even 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 yourself. You realize 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? I realize 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, is it cold? Does it feel cold?

Ross Edgley: It gets easier the longer it goes on. By the end of Iceland, I think I just habituated that form of stress. Almost 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 the wetsuit before you can even put it on and then get in it. 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.

Spoke Two: 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 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 the birth of my first child was due in a week's time. We had hurricane Eron coming through the Atlantic. Over in Grindavík on the West Coast, there was a volcano that went off that was 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 harbor." And I was like, "No, no, no. I'm so sorry. We need to go out. I need to be back for the birth of my child."

Not only for my girlfriend — she's amazing, I've been with her 13 years — the look on her face, the disappointment that was going through my head. But then also 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. And I gunned it and finished the final 100 miles purely fueled 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. And it happened a few times.

Andrew Huberman: Actually backwards?

Ross Edgley: Actually backwards. Yeah. Up at the Pentland Firth on the Great British Swim, for instance — that's in the top of Scotland. You can be traveling at 10 knots if you get it right. That is almost the cruising speed of a dolphin. But you get it wrong, you're going backwards at 10. You could be Michael Phelps and you're still going backwards. So it genuinely is just such a team event. The Yukon, for instance, was a maze of countercurrents, whirlpools, log jams. There was a time when I was swimming and a log came back the other way, and the team in the Yukon were just amazing at reading the river. So I say "we" because it's a team event. I'm just the one who has to get in the water. Genuinely.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Because you can't be thinking about whether or not you're headed into certain danger beyond what you're already in. You need to be able to concentrate on your stroke, your breathing, your mental frame — like whether or not your toes are falling off. Have you been frostbitten on these?

Ross Edgley: Yeah. 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 swim. You can't touch anybody. No one can touch you. You can't touch the boat. You just swim 56 hours. And towards the end, it was so strange because I had hypothermia — 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, to answer your question, picking up a fair few of those. It's really strange that 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: Trophies for a sicko like you. Do you believe in the Loch Ness monster?

Ross Edgley: Something touched my leg. Honestly. I love all of it. It was so interesting. I got so — I don't want to say — yeah, it probably was. It was like a spiritual experience. And I think by that point, Nietzsche said, you know, whoever fights monsters should see to it that he doesn't become a monster himself. For if you gaze into the abyss too long, the abyss gazes back into you. And for me, swimming through Loch Ness, that was going through my head. I definitely stared into the abyss too long.

It was going well up until 56 hours, and then I just remember almost — it was very gradual — 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 mom 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 what you're saying about hypothermia — it's nice now knowing that with the Iceland swim, having graduated in Loch Ness, I was like, "Look, let's not become a monster. Let's not stare into the abyss too long."

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 keep wondering since I was a kid, why don't they just drain Loch Ness and solve this Loch Ness monster thing once and for all?

Ross Edgley: It's not good for the tourist trade though, you know? I mean, if it's real, how cool is that? And if it's not, what a remarkable way to increase tourist traffic to a location — you create a myth and a mystique, something that's dangerous but not so dangerous that people are afraid to go.

Iceland, Norse Mythology, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

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

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 that 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 — and he basically gave me a blót ceremony where he blessed the swim. He said, "Ross, I think you'll die, you know, but it'll be a good saga." That was the Icelandic sense of humor.

Andrew Huberman: That was the send-off.

Ross Edgley: That was the send-off. Even at the start as well, I remember I did a swim and afterwards I'm looking up at the northern lights, toweling 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, "I'm sorry, you've lost me. Please explain." And he said, "Well, we believe that the northern lights are the Valkyries — Odin's warriors, female warriors — and they're riding through the sky, and the shimmering is their shields and their swords, and they're taking the fallen back to Valhalla." And I was like, that's deep.

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. He 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.' He 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, '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.

And I think going around Iceland, that was just a shot of adrenaline. I wanted to quiz you on this actually — is it the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that deals with strategy and the story that 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.

Then even 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 what was really interesting, certainly 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, since you have an interest in neuroscience, I did return to — I haven't talked about them on my podcast ever — but it's a solid literature in neuroscience. It has to do with an experiment called the tube test. Do you know about the tube test?

Basically, you put two male mice into a tube and they want to fight. The tube is small enough so they can't really scratch or bite at each other, and one pushes the other one out of the territory. 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 — and this is where it gets interesting — 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 broad-scale way, and pinpointed this region of the prefrontal cortex — which in mice you can't really say is equivalent to our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, but at least has components of it. Then they do the following experiment. You take a mouse that was consistently a winner and you silence this particular region of the brain, or you lessen its activity, and it becomes the loser. You take the loser and you in real time increase the amount of activity in this particular brain region, and now it wins every time.

Here's what's wild: the amount of cortisol, the amount of testosterone — none of that stuff speaks to what could really be going on. It seems that this top-down circuit from the prefrontal cortex to a bunch of other stuff — these are clearly circuits, not just one location — is driving persistence to win under any realistic condition. Again, you can't take a fetal 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 you're going to stimulate my prefrontal cortex and I'm going to 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.

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 you want to get home to see your child born, could be you're hungry and you want to eat. 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 as well — if you're losing and you don't react to it, you'll maybe be able to buck that trend?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, no, it totally makes sense. I think there are several big macros today that are going to emerge, but one of them that clearly will emerge is this notion of energy. The reason I asked about the 10-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 10-year-old you and load more and more rocks, but you're not burning unnecessary energy. The efficiency piece is, I think, where these stories that we tell ourselves — like "I'm doing this for so and so" — allow you to separate out all the other possible motivations at least for some period of time. Just being motivated is like a dysregulated system. Motivated to do blank because blank — that's a well-managed energy system.

Outsourcing Common Sense: The Psychobiological Model of Fatigue

So most people would die for your levels of raw energy. But in keeping with this theme about how you dynamically regulate your energy — have there ever been moments along any of your conquests when you thought, "That's it, I'm done," but you had told somebody, "Don't let me quit"? You outsourced the management.

Ross Edgley: I'm really glad you asked that because it's almost the opposite. Looking at Tim Noakes' central governor theory, or 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 — this was before Loch Ness, and 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. It was 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 I actually, with my team, we talk about outsourcing common sense. I say, "Look, you know, and I don't say this proudly — it's a personality defect, I'm well aware of that — but I know I will swim till I put myself in hospital. And that's a bad thing, especially now as a dad." So I outsource that to my team and I go, "Okay, guys, if you tell me that you need to pull me out and you play that card, I will listen, because I can't keep putting myself in hospital."

It's almost the opposite now — I need to be saved from myself. Again, I don't say that proudly at all. But I'm very aware now, from metrics they have with my blood work and various things, I'm like, "Look, I can't do that again. Not now as a dad. I need to be more responsible."

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 me to sort of play with the boundaries of common sense and sports science. Jerk Kennedy, great friend of mine, one of the greatest ice swimmers ever — he just understands hypothermia, 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 an 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 and hopefully never will be again. But there were times when he had to offer his team tremendous amounts of money to not let him convince them to let him out of an isolation cabin for a couple 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 endeavor 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 many miles, how much fame, how many blanks before I'm satisfied? And the answer is clearly not concrete. It's a dynamic thing. So how close to dying do you have to get before you're like, "You know what, I'm going to chill and paint or something"?

Ross Edgley: This is such a good question because I'm literally, as of only the last year — my son's now one year old — he's really kind of forced me to ask those questions. Now when I'm proposed swims, the 21-year-old self, if somebody said, "Oh, you know, go do 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, with 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 with a reason for getting up in the morning. And when I don't have a swim or something to train for, my girlfriend just says I'm like a caged animal.

When I left for Iceland, she was quite heavily pregnant, waving me off, and they said, "How are you letting him do this?" And she goes, "A, he would be terrible if he was still at home. So I know he's happiest when he's out there." Even swimming around Great Britain — so many people back on land, when Hester would come and see me and I was 100 days in, I looked like a sea yeti werewolf. My tongue was falling off. I was chafing all over. And people would say, "How's he doing? I've seen the wounds. I've seen his neck." And Hester 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, no. And she's incredible. The Yukon swim, for instance — that was 510 km non-stop, 56 hours, although the entire expedition was about 70 hours. So the entire team, including myself, didn't sleep for 70 hours because we had to actually get the boat to the starting point. And I just remember swimming, and there's just the silhouette of my girlfriend, and every 20 minutes she throws me a banana. I'm just like, "Thanks, babe." And she's just like, "No problem."

I feel so fortunate. Swimming with gratitude, realizing — oh, thanks for accepting me. I know I'm a feral, weird boyfriend. I really appreciate this.

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

Ross Edgley: Absolutely. I mean, I was still hairy from Iceland. I had like jellyfish tentacles. I was literally just chafing wounds. And I arrived at the hospital — I made it back by three days for the birth of my son. As I arrived into the hospital, nurses and everyone were like, "Oh my god, who is that?" And Hester was like, "Oh, no, no, no. Unfortunately, that is the father of my child. He's feral, but he's safe."

Andrew Huberman: Is she a worrier by nature?

Ross Edgley: Yes. But she said since we've been together 13 years, she just has to let go. And I think it's really interesting because her barometer of worrying is completely changed. Because when you have — the Yukon was a great example, and I wanted to actually chat to you about this anyway — your perceptions of danger. So 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." And I am just swimming. I turned to the guys in the Yukon and said, "Guys, am I okay here? Because that brown bear is looking at me like I'm a dessert." And they pulled out — Andrew, it wasn't even a gun, it was a cannon — and they went, "Ross, if it gets too close, it'll end up in my freezer." And I was like, "Right, that's the response I wanted. Great." Carried on swimming.

Andrew Huberman: You experienced that as well with shark diving. That changed you, rewired you. Is it fair to say?

Ross Edgley: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: I don't want to shift this to a story of any of my adventures — they're in no way, shape, or form as bold and as 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 what I've learned from people like Cam Hanes and from spending time in Australia and from people who live in Montana like Andy Stumpf, is that our perception of what's dangerous in the wild is often a little bit cryptic and we can easily be misled. Oh, that little spider looks friendly, and that's the deadly one. Or that bear looks very large and looming, but it turns out that's not the one that will actively hunt you. 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 also tiger sharks myself — they have the ampullae of Lorenzini, where they pick up electrical impulses. Exactly to your point, what was so strange is the first time I dived with them, I'm always comfortable in the water, but it was so strange how the tigers and the great whites knew that I was the weakest diver. Whether that was because I was flinching, I acted like prey, whether my heartbeat or whether I was breathing — they knew. And it was so interesting. On the audio, they were like, "Ross, control your breathing. Ross, slow your heart rate." And I was like, "How does it know?" And sure enough, they 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. If there was a weakness, that is the law of the jungle — I would have been charged.

Brain Circuits, Threat Assessment, 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 are a lot of tuna out there, a lot of seals and other things for them to eat. So they're not actively trying to hunt you. But if you swim away from them, they perceive you as prey. They're making a binary decision. And this is actually an important thing in terms of brain circuitry.

I had a student who then went off and did a postdoc — she now has her own laboratory in Switzerland, Lindsay Schwarz, who published some papers on threat assessment and response. How fear can turn to pausing, can turn to aggression — very interesting work. 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 from me? The brain of all species is sophisticated in air quotes, but it has to make these decisions often with limited amounts of information. So these are more like switches than a continuum.

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, is he staying still, or is he retreating? You encounter a mountain lion along a trail — people will say, "Don't run. Get large." Okay. But at some point, if it gets close enough, you've got to make a decision. Are you going to fight it or are you going to run? Or you could lay and 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 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. And so the thoughts about "I just said I would, so I'm going to do it," "I want to get back and see my kid being born," "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.

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 lifesaving decision.

Ross Edgley: 100%.

The Spokes Continue: FU Energy, Love, and the Us-Versus-Them Circuit

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. And I've got something I really want to be there for. How about: I'm going to do this, I'm going to continue to do this, because you said I couldn't. Because they thought I couldn't.

I find this one to be very prominent in the online space. But it's also one that as people get better and better and achieve more and more, they hear less and less. So this is the great gift to the underdog — you have fuel. They're handing you fuel. But when you win, they're no longer — you've obviously done it. Then it turns to, "Well, they had all the right resources." Has anyone ever said to you, "There's just no way," and that sparked something in you? Like, now it's absolutely — they just handed you a blank check.

Ross Edgley: Exactly that. And I love what you said there because throughout my career that's become less and less useful because fewer people doubt me. And I'm almost like, "Oh." So the swim around Great Britain 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. What's actually interesting is I think it was like five years ago, I ended up going back and somebody had commented on all of these comments and gone, "Well, this didn't age very well, did it?" And I was like, "That made me feel so good."

But what's so interesting is once we swam around Great Britain, people stopped doubting me. And so I 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 to keep you going?

Ross Edgley: That is exactly the word I use as well. Anything that stimulates you — it's almost like going through your head, 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. And I think it's just like — your reasons to continue need to be bigger than your reasons to stop. And I love this conversation because we're identifying those different categories, those different spokes. Knowing that what might work one day might not work the other.

And then sometimes, for instance, one of the most potent was my girlfriend 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." It was different. And knowing which one to go to — I think all great coaches do that. They know which buttons to push in the right moments. And 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. F me for even — so it's not a pleasant thought, but does it have potency for you? Is that a source of continual pushing on the gas pedal?

Ross Edgley: I think it is. And to take that slightly further but slightly more specific — 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. Well, 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 that newborn son — that is him. He's of you, half 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 baby and I go, "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, et cetera.

This gets to a very important — and I don't think dark, but important to acknowledge — 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. It extends to who we decide — you can adopt, you can have friends, you can have a community. But 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 limit 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 other lion. But the amazing thing is, just prior to this scene, those two lions were fighting. They were 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. 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.

And so the strength of motivation — your example of your shoulder is: "You're not going to quit on me. You're not really of me right now, but you're enough of me that I'm going to keep you. You're not going to saw off your shoulder. F you — I'm going, and 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 in neuroscience, medical school, parenting, whatever it is.

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. And the Iceland swim existed in this strange world — it wasn't just my dad, he was my mentor, he was 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 as well — not to get too deep or spiritual or religious — but I was in my head, and this got me through so many dark times: I just imagined that Dad was sitting up there. He was a tennis coach, so he's playing tennis on the tennis court in the sky up in heaven, and he's looking down. And it was just — I would get goosebumps. It would invoke something visceral inside of me, primitive. I would imagine my dad up in heaven just looking down and just going to everyone else up there, "Yeah, that one right there swimming around Iceland — that one's mine." And that — oh, I just even now could just swim for another 100 miles thinking of that.

Andrew Huberman: For those just listening, I am nodding with big nods. I've heard you describe on other podcasts — you're running, running, running, you're exhausted, you see your son at the finish line, no caffeine, no injection of saline, and all of a sudden you've got a jetpack on.

Ross Edgley: Another cute baby at the finish line — probably not the same effect.

Andrew Huberman: Probably not the same effect. But what you're talking about here is the ability for humans to pull on this transgenerational understanding of "us" — the affiliative "us" — and it's the most potent fuel in the universe.

Now the sad side of this is that a lot of people have a very complicated relationship with their parents, or even a horrible relationship with one or both of their parents. And under those conditions, they have to look elsewhere. 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. Once that's okay, then you can focus on other things.

I've thought for a long while that 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 other things. 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. And for that I think we owe a debt of gratitude to all those folks. Andy Stumpf, DJ Shipley, Cam Hanes, Rich Roll — there are too many names to rattle off. But I really think that deep in our brains, below our unconscious, it's like we're trying to check off these boxes of "be okay." Once we're okay, who close to us can we bring along?

Where Ross Edgley Is Now: Purpose, Money, 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, you know, 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 do you feel like you're looking for the next big challenge that will raise you up? What's the next rock to put in your backpack?

Ross Edgley: I'm searching for it at the moment, and it's just got to tick a few different boxes. My 21-year-old self, 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. And the opportunity to swim around Great Britain came up, but the boat crew were like, "Look, we need a deposit on the boat, we need the crew and everything." And I remember I turned to Hester. I 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. You can buy loads of houses. But you're not going to be 31, 32 with the ability to swim around Great Britain. So I think you need to put it on the boat." That was my girlfriend. I was just like, "Thank you. I think you're right." So we did. It paid off, but I lost money swimming around Great Britain.

Whereas now — not to sound like a commercial mercenary — but I'm like, "You want me to do a swim, I need to be paid. I can't just keep doing this, otherwise it's a very expensive hobby." And I think now it is so lucky that I have got to a point where you could call it a career in inverted commas. And I think that's interesting as well because sometimes the idea of talking about money with these sorts of events — it's 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. But it needs to be all four. And so often people will do these things and forget the "what you can be paid for" and almost become a martyr.

So to answer your question, just to be so honest — if someone came along and went, "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 endeavors, 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 here too. And it's not uncommon to encounter somebody who's still so driven to make it and has not made it that they've essentially cashed in everything else.

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. And no one wants to be that guy or gal.

Ross Edgley: Nobody wants to be that.

Andrew Huberman: Money is a tool to allow, if I may, your son to be able to pursue what he finds most enriching. Something tells me he may be swimming with you at some point, but you'd hate for him to feel the pressure. 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 that are 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 and more for more and more and more people.

Ross Edgley: 100%. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Martyring oneself for everybody and not being able to take care of your family or yourself — that's not good. So I don't think you should feel any shame about your desire to make money. The more you make, the more people you'll be able to take care of.

Ross Edgley: There's this implicit assumption that with more money, you're just going to buy more stuff for you. But what about — you can do more stuff for the rest of the world. 100%. Yeah. So I would put that down as one of the spokes. 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. It was like, "You finish this, that's another world record. You can monetize 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 and extravagant 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 vs. Light Energy: The Neuroscience of Frustration and Drive

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 favorite 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. And 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 of the brain 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. 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: That is fascinating. I love what you said there because I think 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 what's called an Okugake — 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. It was brutal blisters, and yet you wear basically these wooden sandals. It was horrible. You look at the Aborigines going walkabout. The Maasai tribe. We've always been doing something. So I think that's so strange — were they just hitting the button on frustration and stuff like this? 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 grueling, 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. And 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. I consider you a neuroscientist from the perspective of your level of self-analysis as you do these things.

Ayahuasca, the Jamamadi Tribe, and Ritualistic Pain

Ross Edgley: On that note, very quickly — there was another one and I wanted to get your opinion on this because it's going to sound so strange. I lived with the Jamamadi tribe in the Amazon jungle for a while. We did ayahuasca for an entire week. It was a ceremony. I was 21 at the time. Just finished kind of professional sports and never touched drugs, psychedelics, anything like that. 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, "Is it like alcohol?" And they were like, "A bit stronger than that."

My first was like the worst trip ever. I did everything wrong. A friend of mine, Ruben, he works at Glastonbury so he's done all sorts of things. And 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. And 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 I look at Ruben to my right. He's found a feather on the floor and he's licking it to taste the colors. I was like, "You can't help me, can you?"

It was then 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 then basically it was this self-discipline through self-discovery. There were various tasks we had to do. We caught a snake. I'm so sorry. 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 meters in the air — and they just smack the bottom of the tree and then fire ants just disappear up the tree and they just start biting you. So you've done a week of ayahuasca, you've bitten the tongue out of a snake, and then you're holding onto a tree as fire ants are biting you. You get down, they immediately take you to another tree. There's a hornets' nest. You see where this is going. Bang. Hit the hornets' nest. You just have to sit there and just take the stings and not make a sound.

But what was so strange — and I love that you brought up this study — having completed all of that and been initiated with the Jamamadi 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, there was a — 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, Psychedelics, and the Us-Versus-Them Circuit

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-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, 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 the self-versus-other boundary. Connected to other beings, the universe, et cetera. It's supposed to dissolve the "me, us versus them" boundary, including humans to animals, humans to plants. 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 Science 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, depending on our relative skill level, somebody will win, somebody will not win. Now we bet £100,000. Well, 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 as well, in that it's not a heroic start. There's no dive. There are no fine motor skills. It's not like a 50-meter swim where everything has to be completely dialed in and if something goes wrong because the stakes are too high and you're hyperaroused — it's not like that. It's kind of knowing this isn't going to be over quickly. Even if I have a bad start, it's fine. I've got 100 days.

So for me, when it's ultra-endurance, less so. However, with that said, there are definitely times where the stakes are high. There's 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 realize that's maybe because it was just bubbling away, bubbling away, and we were getting close to that threshold where I would start to just recruit more and it would become deteriorating in terms of my technique. There 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."

Circadian Rhythms, Sleep Deprivation, and Trusting Your Own Brain

Andrew Huberman: Do you notice that your motivation, your energy, waxes and wanes according to your circadian rhythm?

Ross Edgley: So much so. Certainly at the start of the Iceland swim, because it was in the summer, we had almost 24 hours of daylight, 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 2:00 in the afternoon — when the tide changes, you get in. And I think just understanding that motivation was so closely linked to my circadian rhythm, and whether I just wasn't getting that deep restorative sleep. Sometimes if we got stormbound, I had the privilege of sleeping for eight hours, ten hours. And the next day it was like somebody just dialed 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 disrupted, 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. And that was just — you now have no motivation hormonally, chemically, biochemically. It was something else. Maybe it was the anterior mid-cingulate cortex. I don't know. But it's like discipline over motivation. You have no motivation today, Ross. This is disgusting. Your tongue's falling off. It's gray. I'm getting smashed by jellyfish. And then there was the odd time where it was nice to swim. You'd wake up, there would be 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 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. And you realize: 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 where the logic of it, the positive emotions associated, come back. And then you realize the brain tricks itself into thinking that what's happening right now is going to go on forever.

That to me was 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, and if you can tolerate it for 10 seconds you can do it for a minute, 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." 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 conversation. You 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.

And so I think that was just being really logical, rational. 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, it was about a week in and I remember they made this amazing soup — just this rich vegetable soup. All the team are tucking into it. It was amazing. But I looked over and I noticed that mine had — I didn't know if it was pork or chicken. So I turned to the captain. I said, "Why haven't you got any pork or chicken? It's only in mine." And he just leaned over and went, "Ross, that's not pork or chicken. That's your tongue."

And it was falling off in the soup. 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 Struggles and the Limits of 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" and you can't tell why?

Ross Edgley: Yeah. I think certainly if you spoke to my girlfriend — house chores and things like that, I'm so messy. I'm really bad. I'm really 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.

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

Ross Edgley: I'm just really bad at admin and basic stuff. It goes back to what I said — if someone said, "Oh, swim the English Channel," it's been done. It 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, so she might do that.

Andrew Huberman: Significant others everywhere are taking note.

Third-Personing Yourself: The Berserker Mindset

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. Let's go. Come on. You're going to bring the arm along like a member of your team. But in the moments where you're really down in the pit, it sounded as if you get outside of yourself and you're like, "We're going," because this is the middle of the night and you know you don't like this, but you now become a third person and 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 fuel. 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 as well 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 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, or maybe it was ritualistic chanting, breathing to get into this state. But whatever it was, they were no longer themselves. They were the spirit of that particular animal that they were embodying.

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, it's Samuel Johnson, the 18th-century English writer: "Whoever makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." And I think for me, certainly on that South Coast, I was like, "Got to get rid of the pain of being a man. Just become a beast." Just no longer thinking of becoming that third person, but also just becoming wolf warrior, berserker.

Reading, Ancient Traditions, and Pain Tolerance

Andrew Huberman: Amazing. 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 at one point, and he 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?" He goes, "Nope." I was like, "Barefoot running, beautiful biomechanics, and you drill that from an early age." He went, "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 basically going into adulthood, we have him in front of the entire tribe. We take some mud, like clay, we put it on his face, and then he has to stand in front of the entire tribe. The chief comes out, takes his tackle in his hand, circumcises him — essentially with like 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 then 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 this 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.

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

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

Andrew Huberman: Let me put it this way. On the one hand, we know that there's a very limited and well-defined list of chemicals — epinephrine, adrenaline released in the body; norepinephrine released in the brain from the locus coeruleus; dopamine; and if the stress is long enough, cortisol — that are associated with a high-arousal painful stimulus. And other things too — dynorphin, which is sort of the opposite of endorphin. In any case, you'll experience a rise in those whether you're getting into uncomfortably cold water, you're getting stung by hornets, or god forbid you're experiencing a public circumcision and you can't flinch. It's true, right?

So then the question becomes: can our memory system, our prefrontal cortex and our memory system, apply a set of rules whereby in a different stressor, this negative arousal, this pain — is it familiar to us? And can we then walk ourselves through it in a way that we understand: "Okay, this pain makes it feel like it's going to go on forever, but this too shall pass"? To some extent, the data say yes — in particular about deliberate cold water exposure. But that's a unique one because, done safely, people can get familiar with the experience of being flooded with adrenaline and the fact that the mind is in complete disarray for the first 20 or 30 seconds, and 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.

It's also true that if you look at the cognitive behavioral therapies around phobias — public speaking phobia, for instance — people can use cognitive behavioral therapy 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 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 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.

Andrew Huberman: Cold water is a great training tool if done safely.

Strength Training for Ultra-Endurance

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. Because I think it's so interesting that when doing the sorts of swims that I do — these ultramarathons around countries — you're taking swimming and conventional sports science and just 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 mechanotransduction — this idea that people think of strength training as just improving the strength of the muscles, but actually connective tissue, ligaments, tendons, they all get stronger as well. For me, that's why I strength train so much. On my swims, it's not my lactate threshold, VO2, or technique. It will be a ligament or a tendon, something that gives up, that will stop the swim physically.

Andrew Huberman: The chassis.

Ross Edgley: Exactly. Can't have the chassis break down. 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 am 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 don't have anything even close to your physical abilities, but a few years ago I decided that I would do two kinds of training. In addition to doing strength and endurance training and some sprints, it is more about the mental side. I was on a camping trip with my girlfriend for a birthday and we did a hike up Clouds Rest, which is one of my favorite hikes in Yosemite — about 14 miles up and back. Most anyone can do it with some level of endurance and physical ability. It's not grueling, but I had a sinus infection and it was her birthday and I've been there before. She hadn't been there before and I wanted to show her a great time. She's really physically robust and was just motoring up, and I was carrying a lot of water, granted, but I was struggling that day.

I decided at some point that I would just watch the process and see what the cycles are. And I noticed the cycles went from something like "f this, this really sucks, I'm going to just push against that" to "I would distract myself, I would think about something else" to "I would just sort of go into this kind of liminal state" — and then it would repeat. It would go back to "f this." And sometimes the time scale of those would be minutes and sometimes it would be tens of minutes. I thought, this is kind of interesting. It's like three things. It's not 20. It's three and they're on repeat.

So now when I run my longer runs, I think: okay, I'm either going to listen to something and distract myself, or pay attention to what's around me. Or there are some runs now that I do where I try and concentrate on every step and just try and make it as painful as possible to just try and build a resilience for each — because in a hard conversation, distracting yourself is actually not useful. So this is maybe where the translatability or non-translatability of stress inoculation needs more of a fine point. Maybe it should be: go out, do the thing, and really just concentrate on just how much it sucks for as many seconds as possible. And every time you forget it sucks, you failed for a moment. And then the other one would be: learn how to distract yourself, because there are conditions that are stressful where you want to distract yourself. I've got a friend who's a neurosurgeon and distracting himself during a stressful moment is the exact wrong thing to do.

Ross Edgley: That makes complete sense.

Andrew Huberman: So maybe my hope is that people listen to you around performance — and they should listen to you because you actually do the stuff. My runs are trivial for you and for most people, but I feel like more specific tools aimed at specific outcomes is kind of what the general public needs. So to become a better listener, learn to concentrate on the pain for long periods of time and not flinch.

Ross Edgley: 100%. But I love what you said there as well because this is something with the Royal Marines — a friend of mine who's a psychologist there was saying, and everyone listening will understand this, but when you're focusing on the outcome, if you're looking at the clock, if you're like, "How much further have I got to walk? Oh my god, is it — we still got 10 hours of walking?" — you're thinking of the outcome. He said, "You have to just focus on the process." For me, when I'm swimming, it's putting one arm in front of the other as efficiently as possible. Is it a high elbow catch? Are you finishing your stroke? If you focus on that, the outcome becomes inevitable. But by focusing on the outcome, you're not focusing on the process.

And I love what you said there because sometimes I just tune out and I want to be anywhere but there. I'll be thinking of the weirdest things — like my Christmas shopping list in my head. But sometimes I do really find just drilling back: don't watch the clock, don't look at the outcome, don't ask how far you've got. I don't want to know. And that's quite easy to do sometimes when sea swimming because you have no point of reference. You can't see land. So you are just swimming, immersed in your own thoughts.

And some of the weirdest swims I did — under the northern lights, you also get this phosphorescent algae. As you're swimming, the only way I can describe it is like you're swimming in a black hole. You turn to breathe, you see the northern lights, the Valkyries, their shimmering shields, and then you pull. And as you pull, this phosphorescent algae just lights up in your face. And there are moments like that where I'm like, "I don't want to be anywhere. I want to be so present. This is amazing." And then other times where I'm just, "I want to be anywhere but here." And it's having that psychological adaptability — just flick between all of them. Use whichever one you need at that moment in time.

Andrew Huberman: The spokes — just go to whichever one's going to get you through it. And you need loads of different ones. We don't yet have a name for it, but maybe we're sort of veering towards something akin to the different spokes on the tire of resilience or something like that.

Vision, the Cyclops Myth, and Arousal

I want to talk about vision and share with you something. I came in really excited to be able to share some of my favorite studies that hopefully would be of interest and perhaps of use to you and the listeners. Are you familiar with the myth of the Cyclops?

Ross Edgley: The guy with the one eye in the middle of his head. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: So there's this wild thing where animals with their eyes on the side of their head tend to be prey animals and they have panoramic vision. And animals with their eyes in the front can generate depth perception much better — stereopsis — and they tend to be the predators. There are some animals that can translocate their eyes to go from kind of panoramic to more focused vision.

When we move our vision — even though our eyes are fixed in our head — towards a particular virgin point, like a target, it raises our arousal and our ability to recruit energy, both physical and mental. People in the fight game know this. When we dilate our gaze, we relax. We come off the gas pedal a little bit. We can still do things, but because of the way that vision and time perception are linked, we can actually see more. Motion perception at the periphery gets better obviously because you're not looking through a soda straw. You're looking in kind of panorama. But you are less able to recruit a lot of energy to one location.

The myth of the Cyclops is in part about a creature who only has soda straw vision and therefore is constantly angry, and that anger is actually what leads to its demise. It can't see the big picture and so it can be defeated by something from the periphery.

Ross Edgley: I love this.

Andrew Huberman: What I'd like to know is — even with your head underwater, but maybe even in the routines of daily life — do you ever find yourself thinking about big picture versus soda straw view, tunnel vision versus kind of dialing as a dynamic process? Because people in martial arts use this as a way to slow or speed up time perception in order to control aspects of the fight. You're somewhat limited underwater in what you can see. But focusing just on the stroke in the moment is sort of the mental equivalent of the soda straw view. But if you don't keep the big picture in mind, that pain in your shoulder and the perception of it can grow to the point where it can become disabling. So there's some utility in being able to dynamically switch back and forth.

Ross Edgley: Now that you said that, I've never thought about it like that. I love the Cyclops myth. I'm using that. But I absolutely do that. On the Yukon swim, for instance, there were times where I just wanted to take everything in. I'm eating a banana. I'm like, "Wow." And I don't know whether that's switching on the parasympathetic nervous system. You are relaxed. You're enjoying it. This is all amazing. And then there were other times — like during the night when the temperature just plummeted — I was like, that is sympathetic nervous system. That is fight or flight. And I am not taking in anything. People would go to me, "Oh my god, Ross, did you see the moose? Did you see the bear?" I'm just like, "No, I am just staring at the bottom of the river." And at best, out of my peripheral vision, I'm just making sure that I've got a high elbow catch and I'm ripping through the water. I've just gone full Cyclops mode. And I've never thought about it, but that's exactly what I was doing.

Andrew Huberman: A friend of mine from a military group overseas told me that part of the training they receive in close-quarter combat — where they encounter somebody and realize it's going to be close-quarter combat and it's life or death — is that the mental set required to do that is recruited immediately in the presence of a real threat. But in training it, they have them actually contract their gaze. And he showed me. It was actually really eerie. He stared right at me and brought his eyes in, and you could feel his entire autonomic tone change. And then he stopped and said, "I don't like that feeling." I'm like, "Why?" He said, "Because it's — I'm not going to kill you, but it's this moment where you've deliberately crossed over to a point where you're going to try and kill this person." So it has a — it's a risky endeavor to go into these trenches. But this seems to be a hardwired aspect of animal visual systems, human visual systems.

I often think about how media is trying to recruit our absolute focus and get us to forget everything else so that we mindlessly trudge forward in anger. And how to overcome that. But then again, this is powerful. It's led to self-protection and protection of affiliates.

Ross Edgley: But it is the same with sharks as well — just about to attack, and then they roll back their eyes, protecting. But it's the similar in that their physiology when they're dialed in — you can see certainly with the great whites there was behavior where you were like, "We're okay," and then there were times where the much more experienced divers were like, "Ross, head on a swivel. I don't like that tiger shark." Every other behavior is excluded in favor of just predation.

Cuttlefish, Chromophores, and the Predator Switch

Andrew Huberman: The most dramatic and, in my opinion, cool example of this is in a species that you no doubt swam with millions of in the English Channel — the cuttlefish. Cuttlefish are cephalopods, like octopuses. I used to have these in my lab. They swim around with their eyes on the sides of their heads in this kind of benevolent but a little bit paranoid state where they have near 360-degree vision. They can see very far back because they are a prey animal. They have no skeleton to protect them — they have their cuttlebone to allow them to float, but they're basically a protein snack. But if they see something that they want to eat, their eyes translocate to the front. They completely change their patterns — it's not even camouflage any longer. They're chromatophores, and they become depth-perception-dependent hunters. I used to study this in my lab in San Diego and it's just a remarkable thing to see this sweet little cephalopod of an underwater benevolent little creature turn into a vicious killer. And the transllocation of the eyes happens first.

Ross Edgley: I love that. What I love about this is that it's again the berserker. It's this idea of like — nature leaves clues, and success leaves clues. Biomimicry. We've lost that. I think humans have lost certain things, but this is amazing — just to go, "I'm going to switch this on, like the cuttlefish." I love that. I'm actually going to next time I swim — I'll message you. I'm going to purposely do that as well. I always control all the variables on my swim. I know exactly my lane, the distance, the water temp, everything. And I'm just going to start experimenting with this.

I loved playing with caffeine on the Yukon swim. We were getting into the grams towards the end. And that again just enabled me to just be so much happier doing such a mundane task and looking at the bottom of the sea. But if I punch — just dark clouds, I'm struggling, my shoulders are hurting — 400 milligrams of caffeine, 15 minutes later, life's not so bad. I'm just ripping through the water. Do you find that you can almost biohack it?

Supplementation: Caffeine, Nicotine, Alpha-GPC, and Creatine

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Okay. There are stimulants like caffeine that are incredibly powerful in that way. I love caffeine. I have a high caffeine tolerance. Things like nicotine, which I've experimented with — the problem I have is that it really sets up a very quick dependence. I start to crave it and it's a quick up and down for me. Some people don't mind that. For me, it's not a great tool.

Ross Edgley: Faster than caffeine?

Andrew Huberman: Much faster. And maybe it's the way I'm doing it or the way I metabolize it. Occasionally I'll take like a milligram or two in a workout, but then I notice I get very tired post-workout in a way that I don't if I don't take it. So I prefer to keep nicotine — oral nicotine, so not smoking or vaping, dipping or snuffing, but like the lozenges or something — as an every once in a great while tool as opposed to an everyday tool. Caffeine is an everyday thing, unless I'm carrying some sort of respiratory infection, in which case I'd cut it out — which is probably half of the misery I experience while on that respiratory infection. It just makes it so much better when you come back.

Ross Edgley: Caffeine is a beautiful thing. I back it and it backs me.

Andrew Huberman: Anything else?

Ross Edgley: I think I've heard you talk about alpha-GPC as well.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, as a milder alternative to nicotine. The one advantage of alpha-GPC is that if you're going to work out late in the day and you need to sleep a few hours later, it does have a sort of quote-unquote stimulant effect, but it actually can increase the amount of REM sleep you get as opposed to messing with your sleep like a lot of stimulants. But if I do it too early in the day, then I notice I get that late afternoon crash. And so it's kind of quick up, quick down. I've played around with all the various things. Modafinil is too stimulating for me. It keeps me up for days. There's some other things that seem to work better. There's this prescription drug semax in small amounts. But again, these are — I find that if I use any of these regularly besides caffeine, it creates more problems than solutions. So I keep them as "when really needed" tools.

Ross Edgley: Yeah. And some good studies as well around creatine. I've become fascinated with this idea of almost — discipline and motivation is something you can supplement, if you know what to do with the right amounts. And I think with creatine, there are some good studies with sleep deprivation at the moment. Do you back those?

Andrew Huberman: The best evidence says that creatine puts water in your muscles, makes you stronger as a consequence. I've been taking it since I was like 17, with the occasional washout of a week or so for whatever reason, and then back on it — 10 grams a day for so many years now. But in addition to those strength-increasing effects due to water volume in the muscles, at least my understanding is that if you're mildly or severely sleep-deprived, you can partially rescue some cognitive function and some maybe even some physical vigor by taking 10 or even 20 grams of creatine the next morning. But of course, you need to sleep at some point and it's not a replacement for sleep. But yeah, I think creatine is great. I don't think there's evidence that it makes hair fall out or anything like that. It's inexpensive and seems safe. So I don't see any reason not to. Do you take it?

Ross Edgley: Yeah. Yeah. Although I didn't on the Yukon swim, and then the study came out. So that's why I'm even fascinated now with the next non-stop swim. I just think we can go further. We did 510 kilometers and I'm like, "Oh, there are things now that I've learned." Whether it's the tunnel vision, 20 milligrams of creatine — I think there's a bit of me that is just fascinated. I like to think of myself as a human guinea pig. And now, like I said, we didn't do creatine on the Yukon. Not to say I raw-dogged it, but there are certainly things I could do in addition, because we mainly did it on caffeine. I think alpha-GPC, cognizin as well, acetylcholine — I get on really well with that. I find it's a nicer focus, not just getting all jittery. Tyrosine, L-tyrosine as a precursor to dopamine, huperzine and the cholinergic pathway.

Andrew Huberman: You're clearly illustrating a very important point, which is one that has been hard for me to get out into the world because people tend to just grab on to whatever is going to satisfy their desire to do or feel something. And here's what I mean. I think it's important and wonderful to find what one can do with just great behaviors — trying to get the best sleep you can, nutrition, training, social connection, sunlight, all the things that now are kind of commonplace out there. Then perhaps one experiments with caffeine and no caffeine. Maybe creatine. Maybe only as a tool to use later when you want to level up. Figuring out what you can do without these supplements, I think, can be very useful.

And then at some point — and this is also true for PEDs, to be really honest — I've been honest about this for years. Since I started the podcast and had a podcast with Derek from More Plates More Dates, I've said, "Yeah, until age 45, I didn't touch any exogenous hormones whatsoever." And I got to a certain point and felt great, but then I wanted to experiment. So I started with what is for me a true microdose, plus taking hCG to maintain fertility, and it's been great. I haven't had to increase that dose much. I've played around with it a little bit, but I found that lower is better for me. Okay, to each their own, work with a doctor. But when I hear about people immediately getting on gear at age 20, 30, 40 in the absence of a clinical need, I'm like, "You'll never really know what you can do without it." Setting aside drug-tested sport where there are clear rules and regulations people should abide by — I just feel like to really have confidence in one's ability to train and do things, you need to figure out what you can do with just behaviors.

You're pretty heavily muscled. So people are going to default to that. They're going to assume that it came about through gear. And that's just an unfortunate thing that people do. So you want to talk about that for a moment? What's your response to that?

Ross Edgley: Yeah. It's actually — we can go through my blood work as well. I'd actually love to get your opinion on it. But I think for me, I'm just well aware that I'm a really strange swimmer. I started swimming really early on. I think at the age of like 13, 14, at the English Institute of Sport, they look at your parents and they just sort of go, "You're not going to grow anymore."

Andrew Huberman: They look at your parents.

Ross Edgley: Yeah. For sure. My parents weren't very tall. And I'm 41 now. I'm still waiting for my growth spurt. So they were like, "Look, Ross, it's not going to happen for you as a competitive pool swimmer." I was like, "Okay, fine." So I ended up playing water polo. I played for England Schoolboys. I played internationally. Loved that as well because it allowed me to use swimming, but also — not to say I like to fight — but it was just nice that in swimming, if I lost, I'd just be like, "Oh, well done. You beat me." Whereas in water polo, you can do something about it. You can get into a fight. You can scratch each other with your toenails.

Andrew Huberman: I heard they do that.

Ross Edgley: Oh yeah. I mean, famously it was Hungary versus the Soviet Union — I want to say Melbourne Olympics — and it was called Blood in the Water. They were basically at war. They drew each other in the semi-final and honestly, some of the pictures — people coming out covered in blood. The water turned red because they just went in there. Hungary won, I believe it was 4-0. Just brutal.

Andrew Huberman: Nowadays they'd probably stop it because it would offend people's sensibilities.

Ross Edgley: Yeah. But I loved it. Again, that's stress inoculation training. But to go back to the examples — then I played water polo and I remember I was playing for England Schoolboys under-18 at the age of 13. So I was the wrong side of puberty. I just got beaten up. Coach was just like, "Look, you need to get bigger, Ross. You need to get stronger." So I've been weight training since I was 13. And I think that, coupled with a period where I was fortunate — so many of my friends compete in World's Strongest Man. So I went through a period of just getting crazy strong, looking into that. I was lifting with the Stoltman brothers — World's Strongest Brothers. Tom Stoltman, three-times World's Strongest Man. Eddie Hall, first guy to lift half a ton, World's Strongest Man. So it was really interesting how I then went through years and years of strength training, hypertrophy, but then came back into swimming so much later. So I think that is partly why I've got the strange physique that I do. And it confuses lots of people because they're like, "You're not built like a swimmer." I'm like, "No, no, I'm not. But I'm 41. And if you look back over my sporting career, my strange résumé, there's a reason for my strange physique."

Andrew Huberman: And so you do a fair amount of strength training. Does that mean pure strength — training in the one to four rep range, not trying to grow your muscles, not going to failure but going close to it, lot of volume, frequent sessions? This is how I understand optimal strength training protocols.

Ross Edgley: Exactly that. And I'm a huge fan of Kyle Chalmers. So he's the current 50-meter freestyle world record holder. It was London 2012 — he was the golden boy of Australian swimming. Didn't quite perform how he wanted to. So fell out of love with swimming. Then COVID happened and he was just like, "I don't think I'm going to go back to swimming, but I like calisthenics, I like rock climbing." And he started doing that. Got really strong as well. And now we know there's a direct correlation between your one-rep max on pull-ups and your swim sprint speed. So Kyle now was drilling technique and doing honestly, Andrew, speed reps with 80 kilos between his legs. And he just got crazy strong — even holding like a front lever as well, because he was like, "That's kind of the same as swimming." So he taught himself this basically coming out of COVID. Somebody then joked and went, "Ah, there's a local swim guy — you should dust off the goggles and the speedos, just get in and see how good you are." And so for a joke he was like, "Ah, look, I'm going to turn up and see if I still got it." He got in and ripped a personal best. Everyone was like, "Oh." So he basically completely changed his training where there was a huge emphasis on strength, speed, and power. Now he's a 50-meter specialist, recently gone into the 100 as well.

But I think the one thing that I have taken from that is this idea of your strength reserve. So now I'm drilling my one-rep max on pull-ups, knowing that as that improves, then all of a sudden when I'm swimming — swimming being almost a unilateral form of a lat pull-down with each arm, every single stroke — the force that I generate is a smaller percentage of what I'm capable of because I have a larger one-rep max on pull-ups.

One of the best examples of strength reserve — Eddie Hall. Eddie went into a CrossFit competition. There was a record and it was basically 60 kilos on the bar. When you look at CrossFit as a poetic technique, sort of clean to the chest and then a push press. But because Eddie is Eddie Hall and because he's so strong, it was more akin to just a front delt raise, maybe an upright row. He just picked up the bar and just went one, two, just did it like that. And again, it was because he just had a crazy strength reserve. 60 kilos for him was so light because he was so strong. So that's the reason I still strength train now. It's this idea very much inspired by Eddie Hall and Kyle Chalmers — the strength reserve. When I'm training, my connective tissue is really, really strong. But also because my one-rep max on pull-ups is so strong, every single stroke is a smaller percentage of what I'm capable of.

Andrew Huberman: Interesting. 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, or am I setting myself up for additional frustration?

Ross Edgley: I personally think yes. Absolutely. I think 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. So I think drilling down into your strength — one, it will help you generate more force per stroke, but also even 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: Because I'm sort of off-season, pretty much like five days a week.

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

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 — they broke more champions than they made. They were like, "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, was a world record holder. Through so many years now, I am quite lucky that 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. And so I'm almost doing these still long aerobic sessions when swimming, but also almost spamming it with a Bulgarian-inspired training method of strength training as well.

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

Ross Edgley: The strength session itself can be 45 minutes long because it is just pure strength — your body's ability to generate force. And even when we're doing plyometrics, you don't want to be doing a lot. Great friend of mine, Linford Christie — I still believe he's the oldest 100-meter champion. It took me a while when learning about speed and plyometrics because I always thought more was better, as is my nature. And Linford would be like, "Go home, Ross. You're actually drilling bad technique now. You're done." So very much inspired by that, on my strength sessions, I'm making sure that everything is dialed in and they're perfect. They're 45 minutes long. Any longer and you're just drilling bad technique. You're not actually training strength anymore. Certainly not speed and power as well.

And I think one of the biggest things that I've found recently as well is supra-isometric maximal holds. So before my heavier lifts — let's take pull-ups for example. I'm doing about 60 kilos at the moment clean. And so what I'll do is sometimes put anywhere between 80, 90, 100 kilos on the weight. Hold in an active hang, only three seconds. So you're not trying to fatigue yourself. You're trying to switch on the central nervous system. Neural priming. Then jump down, take off the weight, put 60 kilos on, wait two minutes. So you're not fatigued, you're just switched on. And what I've found is then when I rip, I will just pull through 60 kilos. And that's been one of the biggest things that has really helped. And I'm lucky because I can train at home. I think doing it at a commercial gym, they're like, "Why has he got all that weight and he's dangling and then waiting two minutes and then doing?" But I'm very fortunate that I can do that.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. I feel like the Russians and the Eastern Europeans certainly were aware of the importance of the nervous system for training. But I think it's only in recent years that people like Pavel Tsatsouline and others have really brought to the United States and to Western Europe and Australia the idea that the neural piece is so important. We think strength, we think muscles, we might think connective tissue, but the neural piece being so vital.

Do you mind if I ask — if your split is such that on those five 45-minute workouts per week right now, 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 like, "Oh, he skips leg day." I'm like, "Yeah, I do. I don't need them."

Andrew Huberman: But you have tree trunk legs, so — and Dorian, I mean, obviously trained them for years. You've trained them before.

Ross Edgley: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's really frustrating to those of us that actually have to train our legs. Any direct grip work or not so much?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. And I think also what's really important for me is when people understand — they go, "Oh, so you train pull-ups five days a week." And it's like, yeah, but we're changing the stimulus as well. So some days it'll be really heavy. The goal is to do a heavy one-rep max or two to three rep max on pull-ups. That is the goal. And then equally the next day we'll do medicine ball slams, neural priming, and then speed pull-ups for instance. And then equally we might do slightly bigger volume. So it's never just drilling the same thing. You're just playing around with the different stimulus. The movements, the biomechanics are the same, but you're requiring a different training stimulus.

Relationships, Worry, and the Simplicity of Purpose

Andrew Huberman: I have a question about your significant other. It's interesting and wonderful that she supports you in these arguably very dangerous endeavors, and you guys have a child together so she's clearly vested. But a friend of mine who had a very high-risk, high-consequence job for many years said that his wife — who's been his wife throughout all of that and now into the current phase of his life, which is a lot less high-risk — said that if she didn't have to worry about him, she'd have to worry about a lot of other things. So I wonder — when you don't have one of these dangerous pursuits, does her anxiety tend to subside, or does it tend to then wick out to other things? Because the brain, if we need to worry, we need to worry about something, and if we need to worry about something we can't worry about a lot of other things. So I could imagine there's a certain advantageous piece to this.

Ross Edgley: 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 is absolutely true. And I don't want to say I'm a pleasant headache for her, but I do think certainly for me as well 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." In that I'm not spiking cortisol throughout the entire day. I'm not thinking, "Have I paid the mortgage? Have I taxed the car? I've got an email. Oh god." None of that. I wake up and life is so simple. I just wake up and I've got two questions: what is the tide doing, and what's for breakfast? That is it. And then I get in and every 20 minutes someone throws a banana over the boat and I eat it. Life is so good.

So I do think sometimes for me, yeah, it's really nice. And maybe for Hester as well — she wakes up and just goes, "Okay, he's still afloat." She looks on the marine tracker. When I was going around Iceland, she couldn't come out to the boat — she was heavily pregnant. So she would just see on the marine tracker that the boat was moving. 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: Reviewing the Spokes

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. Maybe also the love of your people, your life. "F you" — anger, because you or they said I couldn't. We covered that one. You sometimes hear that people can be very motivated to do something because others can't — you often see this on social media. Somebody who's climbing a mountain because their child is sick and they want to. Is that one that you've touched into?

Ross Edgley: I would say that's probably less so out of the space, but it is there. Yeah. 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 — I can talk about it now without getting upset, I think. Touch wood. But 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 he was an amazing tennis coach. He basically built tennis centers up and down the UK. He taught wheelchair tennis, visually impaired tennis. Sometimes he would take to the tennis court and blindfold himself so he could play visually impaired tennis.

And when he was diagnosed with cancer, it spread so much in his legs that it was basically stopping him from running and coaching. And I got a phone call and they said, "You know, 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 tumors 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. You can't." 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."

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

Andrew Huberman: My goodness.

Ross Edgley: And so I think to answer your question — having stories and examples and mentors and heroes like that, it was swimming, going: there will be a time maybe where I'm not able to do this. But like my dad, you will find a way to keep going. So I don't know if that's one of the spokes, but that was always a really, really powerful story that I always take with me. 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%. Yeah. I love what you said about gratitude as well. When we did the Yukon swim, for instance, the river team that we had in the Yukon — there's a famous kayak race that goes down the Yukon called Yukon River Quest. And I upon hearing about this, that's when I reached out to the team who do the safety for this particular thing. And I said, "Look, if you can kayak it, you can swim it, right?" And this team, just amazing Canadians, were just like, "Yeah, if you can escape the rapids, the bears, the wolves — yeah, in theory." So anyway, I was like, "Right, okay. Let's put together a team." They put together a team, but they were missing a few boats. And there was one guy, Larry, who was amazing. He basically turned around and said, "Look, I'll come, but you can have my boat, but I'm going to be on it." And they said, "Look, you are terminally ill. This is a terrible idea. The doctors have said you've literally got weeks to live." And he said, "No, no, no, no. 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. I was told this story. He's on the boat with his son, and for the next 70 hours 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 it was a few weeks later — 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 again, I suppose it's that particular spoke — when I was swimming, I was like, "How can I stop when Larry's over there?" He was just an absolute legend.

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. Like, if you really step back, what you do, Ross, with all due respect, is pretty absurd. It's absurd. You don't have to do it. You could do any number of different things. But you feel compelled to do it. And it's a beautiful, inspiring, and I'll even say an important thing that you do. It really is. But do you ever step back and just go, "I have no idea, but I'm just going to keep pedaling here"?

The Final Spoke: Sisyphus and the Absurd Hero

Ross Edgley: I love what you said there because — kind of — I don't know if this answers your question, but are you 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. And I think for me, 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.

Spirit Animals, Smiling, and the Science of Positive Affect

So you identify with Sisyphus. It makes perfect sense. What about your animal spirit? Not to get woo here, but you smile a lot. I don't know if that was always the case. I mean, you've had some dark moments in your life.

Ross Edgley: Oh, for sure. Yeah. I think I love what you said earlier, although it's made me rethink it with the studies that you mentioned. But I just think — 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.

Andrew Huberman: I'm not familiar with that study.

Ross Edgley: 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 because otherwise I just find — I think Chris Williamson, a mutual friend of ours, said it best because I'm a huge fan of Goggins and I've heard his stuff and I've tried it. So when I'm swimming, I'm like, "Ah, you're a little — Ross. Man up, what are you doing?" But after like 114 days, I'm like, "Oh, don't be so mean." 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. 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: Yeah. I've known David a while. I don't know him very well, but I've known him since before his first book. And I can tell you he's always been exactly the same outwardly — very kind, unbelievably driven. He sat in that very chair and shared a bit of what his inner process is, but it's a bit of a mystery what drives him internally, or anyone for that matter, in the moment to moment. But clearly the "f me" and 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 here. But it was certainly during the period — was it like the 1980s, 1990s — when it was Gold's Beach, stringed vests, sunglasses on, and these bodybuilders. Whereas he was in Birmingham, trudging through the snow. And he was just like, "Oh, if I've got to do this, I'm going to make sure that I win." Is that the case?

Andrew Huberman: There was that. But I think he learned to tap into it much earlier. I mean, he had a less than perfect childhood, so to speak. His dad died early. He ended up in a youth detention center — wrong place, wrong time kind of thing. And he was like, "I don't want to be like the rest of the people in here who seem to accept this fate." And he had a big, 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, it sounds like they were very real in many cases. And he just decided, that's the fuel. And he became a six-time Mr. Olympia, and equally importantly, a happy person post-Olympia, mobile and healthy and all the rest. He's a wonderful person.

Ross Edgley: Almost two different people. When you look at "Blood and Guts" — the DVD — 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 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, you know? And I say that sometimes with some of my swims. I'm like, "Look, I know it's bad for my health, but it's good for my soul." And I think sometimes as well — 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 mean, 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 really is a felt thing. It's not just a spoken thing. It's really a felt thing. And I've spent a decent amount of time with him 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.

So — 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. No one's going to think you less the man no matter what the answer.

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

Andrew Huberman: You do seem very cheerful. Okay. So that's your terrestrial. Well, 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.

Andrew Huberman: So an orca in the water. And in the air?

Ross Edgley: Oh, that's a great one. I think crows are misunderstood. And again, ancient Nordic mythology — when Flóki found Iceland as well, using crows. He would send them off and then 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: What's Next for Ross Edgley

I think you're spot on. And I do claim authority on this. I've been doing this since I was a kid. Ross Edgley, you are a remarkable human — certainly for the physical feats that you've accomplished. I will ask you in a moment what's next, but equally important for the teachings that you provide the world. Not just by example, but you're a real intellectual. An intellectual is by definition someone who can parse and communicate things at multiple levels of granularity. You're an intellectual. I love your command of literature and philosophy and 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.

And here today you've given us that. This is a conversation I'm going to return to many times over. And I'd love to roll out the opportunity to maybe create some visuals — we've never done this before — that maybe could accompany some of the social posts and on the podcast. Because you get the credit for doing all these things, but I really appreciate your ability and willingness to kind of 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 — they 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. He's not going.

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. So we've got so many different swims all over the world, and as soon as somebody says, "We need to raise awareness, ocean conservation, raise money," then I'm like, "Hold my beer. I know a guy." So I think you'll be the first to know. But we've got a few different ones, and as soon as they say, "Let's go," then I put my goggles on, load up on caffeine, and we're going to go and do it.

Andrew Huberman: I love it. Well, we had Greek mythology and now we've got Ross Edgley. So thanks for expanding my consciousness and awareness of what's possible. You're the man, Ross. Come back.

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