Unlocking Persistent Motivation & Extreme Resilience | Ross Edgley

The Absurd Hero

0:00So Sisyphus was one of the cleverest humans who ever existed in ancient mythology, was able to outsmart the gods. And he even chained up death at one point, which made the gods really angry because basically people were fighting wars and no one was dying. So there was no souls going to the underworld. So Hades was really pissed off. Anyway, eventually he dies and the gods are just livid. So they're like, look, we're going to punish you. And what we're going to do is we're going to make you roll a boulder up a hill for eternity.

And just as it gets to the top of the hill, it's going to roll back down. And you're just going to do that for eternity. Just this like absurd, like completely thankless task. But then it was Albert Camus, the philosopher, who said he was able to outsmart the gods one more time. And that's if you imagine that Sisyphus was smiling. And this is the part I love. He said, because the struggle alone is enough to fill a man's heart. And I think for me, they've even coined the phrase that Sisyphus was the absurd hero.

And I think for me, swimming sometimes I'm like, this is Sisyphus. This is my boulder.

0:54You know, it's not going anywhere. But the struggle alone is enough to fill a man's heart.

Introducing Ross Edgley

1:00Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

1:09I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Ross Edgley. Ross Edgley is a British ultra-endurance athlete who has accomplished such feats as swimming around Great Britain, which, by the way, is nearly 2,000 miles in distance, and it took him nearly 157 days. He also swam 317 miles of the Yukon River continuously, meaning nonstop for 56 hours. He's run a full marathon pulling a car, a full-size car, by the way, and he's done 30 marathons in 30 days, and much more.

1:43All of that is, of course, super impressive. But the reason Ross is a guest on this podcast in particular is because both he and I wanted to discuss brain circuits and the psychology that allow humans, any humans, to engage and build up their mindset for motivation. So today we explore and develop in real time what we really can say is a new model of motivation to do hard things, one that includes all the possible sources of drive, to prove others wrong, to celebrate life, out of love, out of anger, to honor those who can't, to fight mental stagnation, and on and on.

2:17What's so special about Ross, and again, another reason why he's here on this podcast in particular, is because not only has he accomplished all these incredible things, but he has the most incredible level of curiosity. He absolutely wants to understand the underlying neural machinery and psychology of motivation, what's allowed him to do hard things, what can allow you to do hard things in different contexts of life. And in doing that, Ross brings forward new ways of thinking about brain plasticity and how to reshape your brain in order to make yourself better.

2:47I should also mention that Ross has a new book out, one that I am personally excited to read and to listen to, and it's entitled, How to Hero, Find Strength, Forge Resilience, and Fulfill Your Purpose. You can find a link to that in the show note caption. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my conversation with Ross Edgley.

3:19Ross Edgley, welcome. Thank you so much. We're going to need a bigger chair. This feels surreal. I mean, we were just talking off air, weren't we, that so much of your teachings helped me across the Arctic Circle, just jellyfish bouncing off my face, tongue coming off. This feels very weird. I'm honored that you're here. I'm very curious about you and what you do and how we can hopefully translate some of that into actions that people can take thoughts, thought patterns, control of their own thoughts that people can explore

3:50and perhaps adopt to have a better, more enriched life, which is obviously the purpose of it all.

Childhood and Intrinsic Drive

3:57Take me back because I've read about you. I've read about your accomplishments. I have smatterings of things that you've done and why, but you're 41 years old now, right? I am. Yep. Let's do this in snapshot-ish fashion.

4:1210-year-old Ross, what's he doing? What's he thinking? What's his strength and where is he struggling? I think even as far back as 10, I was aware that I was just wired a little bit weirdly. You know, my dopamine kind of works a bit differently. My family, we love going on hikes and I never forget at 10 years old, my dad was taking me and my two brothers on this huge hike and it just wasn't enough for me, this hike. I was just like, ah, you know, I kind of want to make it harder. So dad caught me putting rocks in my backpack and just putting it on my back

4:43and then walking up because I just, I needed more of a challenge. Otherwise, it just kind of wasn't fulfilling something inside of me. And I think even now, looking ahead, fast forward, you know, 30 years, and I'm still doing the same thing. When I come up with an idea for a swim, if I tell someone this idea and they go, oh yeah, that sounds quite good. I go, all right, that's terrible. You know, you're not shocked by it. But if I tell someone to 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. You know, if people are just like, that's absurd.

5:14I'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. If you don't mind me asking, was the idea of putting rocks in your backpack in part to show others that you could do more? Like, and no shame if it was. I mean, I think we all have an ego and we all want to test ourselves, but the feedback that we get is often important too. So as a calibration point, if nothing else. So let's say you were hiking alone.

5:47Hopefully you weren't hiking alone at 10, but if you could imagine you were to the best of your abilities, do you think that you would have been loading those rocks in just for you? Yeah, I think I would. I think for me, again, being so self-analytical, it was always an intrinsic motivation. The process was its own reward. There wasn't really anything extrinsic. If anything, I was keeping the rocks secret. I didn't want my dad finding out. When he found them, he was just like, right, take them out. I'll give you some food or something that's actually functional. So I was actually hiding them from that.

6:17It was just something that I wanted to do, that when I got home, I'd be like, right, I was able to do that. And I think it's changed a lot though as well. I think, again, sort of jumping a little bit to swimming around Great Britain. I did that when I was 32 years old. And I spoke about it at the time that for me, it was very much ego-driven. I talked about Captain Webb, 1875, first guy to swim across the English Channel. Did it on beef broth and brandy and swam breaststroke because front crawl was ungentlemanly like. So he just crushed it all the way across the English Channel.

6:50It wasn't for charity. It wasn't for anything like that. He just wanted to pioneer our understanding of swimming and human endurance. And for me, swimming around Great Britain was exactly that. It was looking at Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It was feelings of accomplishment, prestige, recognition. It was all of those things, ego-driven. After that, that then felt a little bit shallow. I was a bit like, oh, you know, to just do it for records, that feels a bit fragile, a bit shallow. It feels a bit strange. And then it was the swim around Iceland where the University of Iceland said,

7:21we want to do something to raise awareness around our ocean conservation efforts. But also as well, if we could collect eDNA samples, so environmental DNA samples that just basically pick up. If there's been a whale in the water, a seal, a Ross Edgley, whatever it is, we could track the biodiversity and a level of detail around Iceland that we'd never seen before. So upon hearing that, I was like, right, that feels like a better reason. It's not just records. That feels better. And that I did when I was 40. So it has been interesting. I think quite often, sometimes it is intrinsically motivated.

7:54But then a little bit later, it told my hands off. It was ego-driven. It was extrinsic. I wanted to be the guy, the first person swimming around Great Britain. And then now, for various things that changed in my life, I think it's like almost moving up Maslow's hierarchy that I'm not going to quite say self-actualization, but we're looking for something a little bit more than records, I think. Staying with the 10, roughly 10-year-old Ross Edgley, were you always very expressive? You had a lot of spontaneous energy.

8:25And have you always woken up like ready to roll? Or are you kind of like a slow grind into the morning? Or is it, let's go, you know? Just let's go. I've always just been like that. I think as well, like I've kind of got a handle on it now. But like when I was young, I was so competitive and such a bad loser. There was my dad, I remember. He was one of the very few people who actually understood how to manage me. And I remember I did a school cross-country.

8:55I think I was about 13 years old. And the guy, I came second. The guy that beat me deserved to win. He was a better athlete. He beat me fair and square. But I was livid. And afterwards, I just wouldn't speak to anyone. And I stormed off. I refused to go and pick up my medal. I said, second place is the first loser. And I started to run home. And my dad just slowly got in the car and just followed me all the way home, just to make sure I was safe. But he was like, I'm just going to have to let it get it out of his system. I think it was 10 miles when I got back home. This was after the cross-country.

9:25I 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. Like I said, I think I've got a bit more of a handle on it.

The Anterior Mid-Singulate Cortex

9:40But equally, and this is something I actually wanted to quiz you about because I love your work that you've been talking about, you know, broadcasting the anterior mid-singulate cortex. For me, and this is a massive oversimplification, so I'm going to apologize on where I'm speaking to you. But as a coping mechanism, upon hearing that and the podcast that you did with David Goggins, I thought about the anterior mid-singulate cortex almost like grit and quit, pain and purpose, like weighing scales, constantly like this. And for anyone listening, I hope it helps as well, that if you've got these weighing scales, pain and purpose, if it's really painful, if your tongue is falling off and swinging across the Arctic Circle, 114 days at sea, then you need a lot of purpose to tip those scales.

10:23But equally, sometimes you can talk about ocean conservation, all the amazing things that we were doing it for. But equally, there can be, Carl Jung talks about your shadow self, you know, part of your psyche that you keep away from the public. Maybe you're aggressive, hyper-competitive, jealous, and you kind of like tuck that away. Whereas Carl Jung and Jordan Peterson talking about, you know, that is a monster, you know, 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.

10:53And so when swimming around Iceland, again, going back to that anterior mid-singulate cortex, pain and purpose, there were some people online who was just like, this is stupid, he's never going to do it. I even had media partners as well just going, oh, Ross, this has been good, but maybe we wrap this up now. You know, I don't think this is possible. And so then that 10-year-old, that hyper-competitive side of me ended up coming out. I was like, I'm now just going to do this because people don't think I can. So it's really strange that, you know, I'll use different parts of motivation.

11:26And I suppose my question to you that I've wanted to ask since crossing Iceland is, does the anterior mid-singulate cortex, does that respond sometimes to your shadow self? Can you have a darker form of energy? I know Goggins, for instance, will speak to himself and be like, man up, you know, who's going to carry the boat and everything. Whereas me, sometimes I try to do it through gratitude, but sometimes I do find that form of fuel useful. For those that might not have heard me talk about it before or the David Goggins episode, just very briefly for our listeners,

11:58the anterior mid-singulate cortex is this brain region that my colleague at Stanford, Joe Parvizzi, discovered when he was stimulating in humans. He's a neurosurgeon. When stimulated, people report verbally because these experiments literally have a piece of the skull removed. They're stimulating with an electrode. I've seen these sorts of experiments, not those exact ones, but, and they can talk, they're awake. Head is fixed in a stereo attack, so they're not moving around. But, and they'll say, it feels as if there's a storm coming, but I am going to lean into it. I feel like there's a major challenge of some sort coming and, but I'm going to fight this challenge.

12:32Okay. So it's tenacity, willpower, et cetera. And there's a lot more to it, but that's just in case anyone hasn't heard us talk about it or others talk about it before. The anterior mid-singulate cortex is a very interesting structure because it receives inputs and outputs from many, many brain areas, including the amygdala, including the memory centers, including the dopamine reward system, the nigrostriatal pathway, and on and on. And so despite what we know about it, it enlarges when people do hard things. It shrinks when people tend to shy away from hard things.

13:06Its activity and size correlates with success in doing hard things. You can build it up by doing hard things that you don't want to do, et cetera, et cetera. We still don't really know. No, I think it's fair to say we don't know the computations, the math that it's doing. We're not yet at the place in neuroscience where we can say, ah, the anterior mid-singulate cortex computes prior notion of self with goal, with purpose, with fear, with anger, with love. And this is the computation that leads to persistence versus quitting, deliberation versus assuredness.

13:40We don't know yet. So it's not a total black box, as we say, but there's still a lot that's not known. And in fact, I think we can start to understand more about tenacity and willpower, at least at this point in history, by talking to people like you, in particular to you, about the anterior mid-singulate cortex, then the anterior mid-singulate cortex recordings can tell us about you. Does that make sense? It does, yeah. So in the future, at some point, we will have the technologies to be able to unpack the computations with a lot of precision.

14:13There are people developing those technologies, but they're not there yet. So I want to be careful to not say things that we don't know. But here's what I was thinking coming into this podcast today. So we can find posts on Instagram, full podcasts, books, and historical records and on and on of people that did very, very hard things for just about every different reason. And so rather than a teeter-totter that goes from quitting versus persistence, I have this mental model that I'm wondering if you'll be willing to entertain with me today through your story,

14:49whereby let's imagine a beam of wood balanced in the middle, but another beam of wood that's at a right angle to that. So it looks like a cross, also balanced in the middle. And then another beam of wood and another beam of wood. So you can just imagine this as like spokes on a wheel and it's balancing. And as long as no side touches the ground for too long, you persist. And so what I came up with is a name assignment for each of those spokes. And so if you're willing, I thought it might be informative and fun for me to just call out each one of these one by one.

15:24This is awesome. Take the time you need to recall a time when if and only if you were calling on that particular emotion set, that motivation, and paint a picture for us. This is awesome. So you've taken my modeling and just literally like two-dimensional, you made it like four-dimensional. Well, three-dimensional, you're going to add the fourth dimension.

15:48No pressure. No pressure. No pressure. So this is a little bit like a qualifying exam. And no, it's not an exam. This is for informative and entertainment purposes. But the cool part here is it's not a movie. It's real.

Motivations for Hard Things

16:02It's your life and the incredible things you've done. So let's start with doing something because you said you would. No other reason. Just because you said you would, either to yourself or to the world. Forget what they're saying in response. It's forget who it's for, but just why? Because you said you would. Have there ever been times when you've done something simply because you said you would? 100%. That was Iceland. Yeah. That I was just like, you said you were going to do this.

16:34You know, or even, and the Great British Swim, I think more so because I told sponsors and everybody I was going to do it. And it was my older brother as well. He's amazing in that he can just kind of like take a complex situation and just really simplify it. We broke the record as we went around Scotland for the longest stage sea swim. And everyone celebrated. They were like, this is amazing. And Scott was just like, yeah, but it's going to count for nothing unless you actually finish it. And I was like, do you know what? You're right. And so I think, yeah, that so often it just came down to that void of records and everything.

17:07It's like, you'll look like an idiot if you don't finish this. You said you were going to do it. It's important to yourself. And also as well, void of anything extrinsic, looking yourself in the mirror. I think Einstein, when he said adversity introduces you to you, I think, you know, you realize the most honest version of yourself when you're in an absolute hole. And I think self-respect that I would know if I had quit and I actually could have finished it. So, yeah, I think probably all of them I've done it because I said I would, not because of how I'd be perceived publicly, how I would think of myself when I looked in the mirror.

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19:52Just visit hellolingo.com slash Huberman for more information. Terms and conditions apply. Again, that's hellolingo.com slash Huberman. On that swim or other times when you were pushing forward simply because you said you would, is that looping in your head? I mean, I realize along these very long journeys and expeditions, whatever you want to call them, these super challenges, that your mind must go to all sorts of places, dark and light and everything in between.

20:23When you're getting into the water, is it cold? Does it feel cold, or are you like, oh, I've been here before, this isn't cold? It gets easier the longer it goes on. By the end of Iceland, I think I just habituated that form of stress, almost like stress inoculation training. At first, when you're trying to habituate the sleep deprivation, the cold, you wake up, and if you've left your wetsuit out, you have to crack the ice off the wetsuit before you can even put it on and then get in. By the end, you are just numb to it. And whatever's happened there, that habituation of the stress, whether my anterior mid-singulate cortex has grown, whatever it is,

20:59by the end, it still registers, but you don't have an emotional response to it anymore.

Navigating Fear and Danger

21:05So let's pick a different one, not just because you said you would, but because you don't want to disappoint, which is different, right? You don't want to carry the shame of someone else mirroring to you that you said you would do something and you didn't. So we could call this fear, fear of shame. And, you know, no one likes to talk about these darker energies that can drive people, but we'd be lying if these weren't powerful motivators for people throughout history.

21:36So do you recall a time, could be any time, when fear of shame was a driving force? Absolutely. Iceland, this is the easiest one to answer. So towards the end, we had 100 miles to finish, basically. And I was basically, the baby was due, the first, the birth of my first child was due in a week's time. We had 100 miles still to cover. We had Hurricane Erin coming through the Atlantic. Over in Grindavik on the west coast, there was a volcano that went off that basically was spewing poisonous gas,

22:07so we couldn't get close to that. And over here, we had one of Europe's largest glaciers that was just sending shards of ice as big as this table. And the team and everyone was just like, Ross, I'm so sorry, we're going to be here for two weeks in the harbour. And I was like, no, no, no, I'm so sorry, we need to go out. I need to be back for the birth of my child. Not only for my girlfriend, she's amazing. I've been with her 13 years. The look on her face, the disappointment, that was going through my head. But then also as well, just knowing that I wasn't going to be there to welcome my son into this world. So that one, 100% fear of failure, fear of letting people down, Iceland.

22:40And I gunned it and finished the final 100 miles, purely fuelled on that. The University of Iceland, everything. And that was important, the eDNA samples tracking biodiversity paled in comparison to you're not going to be there to welcome your son into the world. So I just gunned it. I notice you say we whenever you talk about these expeditions, not I. Is that just your nature? Is it, I realise these are probably team efforts, but that's it. But I think it's an important point. Do you know, I'm glad you picked up on that, just because I think especially with sea swims, that they are such a team event.

23:13And in no way am I saying that to self-deprecate. It genuinely is in that if we read the tides wrong or the weather or whatever, then I'm going backwards. You can be the best swimmer in the world. You get the tides wrong in Iceland, you're going backwards. And it happened a few times. Actually backwards. Actually backwards. Yeah, yeah. Up at the Penland Firth on the Great British Swim, for instance. That's in the top of Scotland. You can be travelling at 10 knots if you get it right. That is almost the cruising speed of a dolphin. But you get it wrong, you're going backwards at 10 knots.

23:44You could be Michael Phelps and you're still going backwards. So it genuinely is just like such a team event. The Yukon, for instance, as well. It was a maze, just kind of these countercurrents, whirlpools, log jams. There was a time when I was swimming and a log came back the other way. And the team and the Yukon were just amazing at just reading the river. So I genuinely say we because it's a team event. I'm just the one who has to get in the water, genuinely. Yeah, because you can't be thinking about whether or not you're headed into certain danger beyond what you're already in.

24:19I mean, you need to be able to concentrate on your stroke, your breathing, your mental frame, like whether or not your toes are falling off. Have you been frostbitten on these? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've picked up loads. This is strange from, you know, hypothermia, hypothermia, rhabdomyolysis, cellulitis, you know, picked up a fair... What's cellulitis? Cellulitis is basically... Sounds like infection. Exactly that, yeah, skin infection. But basically, I picked that up in Loch Ness because it was fresh water. Basically, the wetsuit was chafing. It got so deep, it turned infected.

24:51And then if that gets in your lymph nodes or your bloodstream, it can be fatal. It was a really strange position to be in as well because it was a 56-hour nonstop swim. The water was about four degrees, barely above freezing. No stop for sleep. No, no, no. So nonstop swim. You can't touch anybody. No one can touch you. You can't touch the boat. You just swim 56 hours. And towards the end, it was so strange because I had hypothermia. So my core temperature, I could feel just I was shaking from the inside. It was in my bones. But my skin was on fire from the cellulitis. So it was this strange attack on my physiology.

25:25But yeah, to answer your question, picking up a fair few of those, it's really strange that it recalibrates your perception to pain. And swimming around Iceland, there were times when I was really cold and I was like, it's not as bad as Loch Ness. I'm still okay. I'd look at wounds around my neck and everything and I'd go, oh, that's not too bad. It doesn't smell infected. We're good. Trophies for a sicko like you. Do you believe in the Loch Ness monster? Something touched my leg. Honestly, I love all of it.

25:56It was so interesting. I got so sort of, I don't want to, yeah, it probably was. It was like a spiritual experience. And I think by, you know, that point, was it Nietzsche who 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 I think for me, swimming through Loch Ness, that was going through my head. And I definitely stared into the abyss too long. It was going well up until 56 hours. And then I just remember, it was very gradual, but you were like looking and your tunnel vision

26:29just got narrower and narrower until you were looking through the eye of a needle. And then it just went black. And I remember waking up and my girlfriend and my mum were at the head of my hospital bed. And I just looked up and I just went, oh, it's not gone well, has it? And they were like, no, Ross. It's not gone well at all. So I think learning from that, to go back to what you're saying about hypothermia thing, it's nice now knowing that with the Iceland swim, having graduated in Loch Ness, I was like, look, let's not become a monster.

27:00Let's not stare into the abyss too long. Did you go back and do that one? Loch Ness, I want to. I've got unfinished business there. I keep wondering since I was a kid, why don't they just drain Loch Ness and solve this Loch Ness monster thing once and for all? I know, right? It's not good for the tourist trade, though, you know? I mean, I always think if it's real, how cool is that? And if it's not, what a remarkable way to increase tourist traffic to a location. You create a myth and a mystique, something that's dangerous, but not so dangerous that people are afraid to go.

27:31For sure. You know, you seed the world with a few photos. Like that's what they clearly, one or the other happened, right? Or some combination. Yeah, I love that you brought that up as well, because swimming around Iceland, at the start, you know, I heard about, you know, elves and trolls and mountains were trolls that didn't make it back before sunset and sunrise, all of these stories. I was like, oh, that's cool. That's a cool story. Swimming around it, there is something in the water. There were events. So I got a block ceremony. So basically, it's almost like an ancient chief, a modern day form of that.

28:04And he basically gave me a block ceremony where he blessed the swim. And it was just amazing speaking to him. He said like, Ross, you know, I think you'll die, you know, but, you know, it'll be a good saga. You know, the Icelandic sense of humor. That was the send-off? That was the send-off. Even at the start as well. I remember I did a swim and afterwards I'm looking up at the Northern Lights and I'm sort of towering myself down. I'm like, this is unbelievable. And this old Icelandic fisherman just comes out of nowhere and I just hear his voice.

28:35And the first thing he says to me is, they're probably deciding if you're going to live or die. And I turned around and I went, I'm sorry? And he goes, the Valkyries. I said, I'm sorry, you've lost me. Please explain. And he said, well, we believe that the Northern Lights are the Valkyries, Odin's warriors, female warriors, and they're riding through the sky. And the shimmering is their shields and their swords. And they're taking the fallen back to Valhalla. And I was like, that's deep. Okay. Then, like I said, starting the swim on the blot ceremony, they, again, and sorry if you know this, but they were talking about the guardians of Iceland.

29:07I don't know anything about, I know very little about Iceland. This story was amazing. So we basically started on the West Coast and they said, Ross, you're aware that you're swimming in the kingdom of the bull. I said, what do you mean? And they said, well, the story goes that basically there was a king, a foreign king who sent a sorcerer dressed as a whale to come and invade Iceland. Came over to the West Coast and there was this massive bull. And they said, right, you can't attack there. And that represented strength and power. Went over to the North Coast. That was the kingdom of the eagle.

29:37They turned up. The eagle saw them for miles off. The sorcerer was like, you can't attack there. Went over to the East Coast. Over the East Coast, that is the realm of the dragon. Mainly because there's loads of waterfalls and dragons like fast flowing water. And then, bang, on the South Coast, the realm of the giant. The whale, the sorcerer came there and was like, whoa, you can't attack there either. And then disappeared. So when you look on the crest of Iceland, so often they have the bull, the eagle, the dragon and the giant. And again, upon hearing that, I was like, well, that's a cool story. But it's a little bit deeper.

30:09And they're saying, really, it's about respecting, you know, nature and everything. And I think going around Iceland, you know, that was just a shot of adrenaline. And I think what was weird, and I wanted to quiz you on this, actually, because upon hearing stories of this, I don't know. And please correct me if I'm wrong. Is it the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that deals with strategy? And it's almost the story that you're telling yourself. So when I'm swimming around, I'm like, this is the kingdom of the bull. And I almost made it poetic in my head. And that actually got me through a few swims.

30:40And then even towards the end as well, like I said, about trying to make it back home, the story of Odin. So in ancient Norse mythology, they believe in fate. They believe that, you know, you can't control your destiny. And the only thing you control is your attitude towards it. So Odin, basically Ragnarok being the Norse apocalypse, where basically the gods fight the giants, this huge battle. And Odin basically traded his eye for wisdom. So he knew, spoiler alert, that he was going to be eaten by a giant wolf. But he just charges into battle anyway.

31:12And I think what was really interesting, upon hearing this, certainly by the time I finished the swim after 114 days, I was sat there thinking, you need to finish, you need to get back for the birth of your son. But equally, if the ancient Nordic gods are watching, this is what they would want. Again, Nietzsche, what is it? I know of no greater life purpose than to perish in attempting the impossible. And all of that was going through my head. You asked about the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. So there is a set of studies that, since you have an interest in neuroscience and the anterior mid-singulate cortex that I did return to,

31:47I haven't talked about on my podcast ever, but that it's a solid literature in neuroscience. And it has to do with an experiment called the tube test. Do you know about the tube test? You might like this. Some years ago, people were interested in what drives persistence and winning in competition. So they developed something called the tube test and it's done on mice, but then we'll talk about the human analog. And basically you put two male mice into a tube and they want to fight. It's just what male mice want to do.

32:17Female mice will do it too, by the way. Female-male pairings will do it too, but they tend to do this with males, male-male pairings. Put them in the tube, but these fights are not such that the tube is small enough so they can't really scratch or bite at each other. And one pushes the other one out of the territory. You know, space, who gets the most space is a very primitive but important feature of competition among animals, dogs, et cetera, right? You know, who gets space? So you put two mice in and one tends to win and one tends to lose.

32:48And there's some interesting statistics that fall out whereby prior winning leads to future winning on average, right? So winners tend to be winners and losers tend to be losers over time in a way. And this is where it gets interesting. That's independent of testosterone levels, independent of things like nutritional status. I mean, at the extremes, these things fall away. Like one is starved or one is castrated, okay, right? Body weight, these sorts of things. So there's something else there. So a bunch of different laboratories have worked on this, measured brain activity in a broad scale way,

33:19and pinpointed this region of the prefrontal cortex, which in mice you can't really say is like equivalent to our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, but at least has components of it. And then they do the following experiment. You take a mouse that was consistently a winner and you silence this particular region of the brain, or you quiet its activity, you lessen its activity, and it becomes the loser. You take the loser and you, in real time, increase the amount of activity in this particular brain region, and now it wins every time.

33:51Here's what's wild. The amount of cortisol, the amount of testosterone, the amount, like none of that stuff speaks to what could really be going on. It seems that this top-down circuit from the prefrontal cortex to a bunch of other stuff, these are clearly circuits, not just one location in the brain, is driving persistence to win under any realistic condition. But again, you can't take a fetal mouse and have it beat an adult mouse, right? But all other things being more or less equal, activity in this area drives persistence and winning.

34:25And there are equivalent experiments in humans using virtual reality and brain scanners and this kind of thing. It's hard to do the experiment. You're clearly physically stronger than I am. I'm reasonably strong. But no, you absolutely are, right? So there's no way that you're going to stimulate my prefrontal cortex and I'm going to beat you in a deadlift. I just know this. It's okay. We don't even have to entertain the other possibility. But there's a world where if we are otherwise within 10% or 20% of each other's abilities in something,

34:58that whoever has the most activity in this brain region wins over and over and over again. And the converse is true too. So I find this amazing because the analog in human is that this is a brain area that's involved in conscious strategy setting. Conscious strategy setting. And the particular strategy could be anger, could be love, could be you want to get home to see your child born, could be you're hungry and you want to eat, you want others to eat so they can survive.

35:29You know, the beauty of the prefrontal cortex is that it can learn lots of different strategies in lots of different contexts. It's a unique circuit in that component of the circuitry in that way. So when people tell me, yeah, I'm in mile 200 of a race in the desert and I want to quit and I just have this thought and I push. Clearly that's a prefrontal cortical top down type thing. That's a real thing. There's a physical substrate to it from mice and it's been shown in other species too, but it's clearly there in us.

36:03But what I love about what you said there and also as well for those losing then as well, there was somebody recently was talking about Roger Federer. And they said if you watched his matches and turned the sound off and couldn't see the score, you wouldn't know if you won the point or lost the point. He was so stoic about it. So do you think it's the same as well if you're losing that if you don't react to it, you'll maybe be able to buck that trend? Does that make sense? Yeah, no, it totally makes sense. So I think that there are several big macros today that are going to emerge, but one of them that clearly will emerge is this notion of energy, right?

36:36The reason I asked about the 10-year-old Ross Edgeley is I had a sneaking suspicion that he had a lot of energy. You know, some people just have a lot of energy, right? Having a lot of energy is great. Energy management on a backdrop of having a lot of energy, that's where things start getting impressive, right? Poor energy management on a backdrop of a lot of energy is I think what leads to the 27 Club, people who do incredible things and die, whether by virtue of their particular activity or by virtue of, I heard this in this wonderful documentary that everyone should see, which is The Defiant Ones, which is about Dre and Jimmy Iovine and development of like beats and the story of hip hop.

37:17And there was a guy in NWA who we don't hear about much anymore, who clearly was extremely talented, but he had a really bad accident. And you ask, and he's talking about how it happened and involved wildness. And you ask him, you know, they were like, what do you think happened? And he just goes, the excesses. It was the excesses of all that energy pouring in money and drugs and fast cars and being famous and it wasn't well managed in him and he's still alive, but the excesses.

37:51So energy management is clearly a piece of the ability to be the 10-year-old you and load more and more rocks, but you're not burning unnecessary energy. So the efficiency piece is, I think, where these stories that we tell ourselves, like I'm doing this for so-and-so, you're able to like separate out all the other possible motivations, at least for some period of time. Like just being motivated is like a dysregulated system. So motivated to do blank because blank, that's a well-managed energy system.

38:25So most people would die for your levels of raw energy. But in keeping with this theme about how you regulate, dynamically regulate your energy, have there ever been moments along any of your conquests when you thought, that's it, I'm done, but you had told somebody, don't let me quit. You outsourced the management. I'm really glad you asked that because it's almost the opposite. So looking at Tim Noakes' central governor theory or psychobiological model of fatigue, you know, this idea how the brain and the body interact and we'll pull the physiological handbrake to stop you from going to complete exhaustion.

38:59Upon hearing this and studying this, this was before Loch Ness and also I did a swim in Lake Trasimino in Italy. We got caught in a freak heat wave, temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius, water temperature up to 34 degrees. It was bath water. It was rhabdomyolysis waiting to happen. 37 hours in, approaching 100 kilometers, exactly the same happened. Body just started to shut down. I am just swimming. I'm so stubborn. And I think what's really strange is looking at that psychobiological model of fatigue, I know that as soon as my brain that's a hypochondriac starts pulling the physiological handbrake, I just go, no, no, no, no.

39:37I just put my foot down on the gas. So actually, with my team, we talk about outsourcing common sense. I say, look, you know, and I don't say this proudly. It's a personality defect. I'm well aware of that. But I know I will swim till I put myself in hospital. And that's a bad thing, especially now as a dad. So I have, I outsource that to my team and I go, okay, guys, if you tell me that you need to pull me out and you play that card, I will listen because I can't keep putting myself in hospital. And I think that that's one thing.

40:08It's almost the opposite now that I need to be saved from myself. Again, I don't say that proudly at all, but I'm just very aware now from metrics they have with my blood work and various things. I'm like, look, I can't, I can't do that again. Not now as a dad. I need to be more responsible. Yeah. And that's trusting the team who are amazing as well, because they are well aware that what we're trying to achieve is so ambitious. So they will allow me to sort of play with the boundaries of common sense and sports science. Jer Kennedy, great friend of mine, one of the greatest ice swimmers ever.

40:41So he just understands hypothermia, the cold. And there's so many times me and him have conversations and he's just like, he's still good. He's still coherent. But there's other times where, you know, I wish I'd had Jer there just to go, Ross, you're done. And it's interesting. We'll talk a little bit about addiction later, but, you know, I have some friends, a couple who have been on this podcast who've talked openly about the fact that they were bad addicts and they needed to literally assign somebody the job of don't let them talk their way out of a, you know, an isolation or don't let them talk their way back to their phone or don't let them talk their way back to a casino and this kind of thing.

41:19And with huge cash rewards, if the person doesn't allow them to do it, that's pretty much it. You have to create incentive on the other side too, right? Because some of these folks are really persuasive.

41:31It's me. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, we can be honest about who we're talking about here because he's talked about it openly. David Cho was on this podcast some years ago, extremely talented artist, amazing human being, blessed to call him a friend. And he's had a gambling addiction many times over in his life. Certainly, fortunately, he's not in it now and hopefully never will be again. But there were times when he had to offer his team tremendous amounts of money to not let him convince them to let him out of like an isolation cabin for a couple months while he was, you know, sobering up or give him his phone.

42:07In which time he became viciously addicted to playing Angry Birds 23 hours a day. That's a good game. Yeah, exactly. Or Pokemon or whatever, you know. So what you describe, because it's an elected endeavor and because provided you survive and make it home to your girlfriend and child, it's all good, right? But it has a component of addiction, right? I mean, it's like if you don't add the rocks, if you don't have the next swim, if you, you know, so how do you gauge what's too much?

42:41I mean, every high achiever has to answer at some point the question, how much money, how many miles, how much fame, how many blanks before I'm satisfied? And the answer is clearly not concrete. It's like a dynamic thing. A hundred percent. So like how close to dying do you have to get before you're like, you know what, I'm going to chill and paint or something. It is such a good question because I'm literally as of only the last year.

43:14So my son's now one year old. And so he's really kind of forced me to ask those questions. Now, when I'm proposed swims, the 21 year old self, if somebody said, oh, you know, go do swim through a volcano down in Antarctica, I'd be like, yeah, hold my beard. Whereas now I've got to ask myself, you know, is this worth it? Is it enough? Is it worth doing? I don't know. The only thing I know is with, you know, Viktor Frankl talking about, you know, the meaning of life is to give life meaning. Jordan Peterson saying the purpose of life is to pick up the heaviest load and carry it.

43:45All of those things resonated so much with me that I do need purpose. And Viktor Frankl says that over fame, money, just a human needs to wake up. What is your reason for getting up in the morning? And when I don't have a swim or something to train for, my girlfriend just says, I'm just like a caged animal. She sees me at home. And so when people, I mean, she's amazing. And when I left for Iceland, she's, you know, pregnant, quite heavily pregnant, waving me off. And they said, how are you letting him do this? And she goes, oh, he would be terrible if he was still at home.

44:19So I know he's happiest when he's out there. Like even swimming around Great Britain as well, so many people back on land when Hester would come and see me and I was 100 days in, I looked like a sea yeti werewolf. You know, my tongue was falling off. I was chafing all over and people would say, oh, how's he doing? I've seen the wounds. I've seen his neck. And Hester would just always reply, I've never seen him so happy. Like he's having the best time. And again, I don't say that necessarily in a proud way, but I just know I just need purpose. Whatever it is, give me something to train for. And she met you when you were already like this and doing this.

44:53That's important. It's so important. And you didn't like spring this on her three years into a relationship. No, no, no, no, no. And she's incredible. Like the Yukon swim, for instance. So that was 510 kilometers, nonstop, 56 hours. Although the entire expedition was about 70 hours. So the entire team, including myself, didn't sleep for 70 hours because we had to actually get the boat to the starting point. And I just remember like just swimming and there's just the silhouette of my girlfriend. And every 20 minutes she throws me a banana and I'm just like, thanks, babe. And she's just like, no problem.

45:25And I think it was that, you know, that I feel so fortunate, you know, just swimming with gratitude, realizing that I'm just like, oh, thanks for accepting me. I know I'm a feral, weird boyfriend. So I really appreciate this. You seem, as I would describe and sometimes describe myself, you know, only partially domesticated. So, you know. That is absolutely it. That is so it. When I turned up as well, I mean, I was hairy from Iceland. I had like jellyfish tentacles. I was like just literally chafing wounds. And I arrived at the hospital. So I made it back by three days for the birth of my son.

45:56So as I arrived into the hospital, nurses and everyone was like, oh, my God, who is that? And Hester was like, oh, no, no, no. Unfortunately, that is the father of my child. But he's feral, but he's safe. Is she a worrier by nature? Yes. But she said since, you know, we've been together 13 years and she says now she just has to let go. And I think it's really interesting because she now her barometer of worrying is completely changed. Because when you have, I mean, the Yukon was a great example.

46:27And I wanted to actually, this is great because I wanted to chat to you about this anyway. But just your perceptions of danger. So there was so many times on the swim where, you know, black bears were fine, you know, in the Yukon in Canada. They're a bit skittish and they look at you and I can almost feel my amygdala or circuitry, whatever it was, was looking and going, that's OK. When the brown bears appeared on the site, they are just looking. They are not skittish. They're just like looking at you going, you're not a salmon, but you're not a bear. I wonder what you taste like. And I'm just swimming. I turned to the guys in the Yukon and they were amazing, the support team.

46:58I said, guys, am I OK here? Because that brown bear is looking at me like I'm a dessert. And they pulled out, Andrew, it wasn't even a gun. It was a cannon. They went, Ross, if it gets too close, it'll end up in my freezer. And I was like, right, that's the response I wanted. Great. Carried on swimming. But you experienced that as well with shark diving as well. That's changed. That rewired you, is it fair to say? Yeah, I don't want to shift this to a story of any of my adventures. And they're in no way, shape or form as bold and as enduring as you are.

47:33So, but yeah, a few years back for my lab, we decided to record these great white sharks in the wild, bring it to the VR lab. And a friend of mine, a very accomplished photographer, videographer, Michael Muller, convinced me to get dive certified and exit the cage and swim towards the sharks. And there's a skill to doing this. It's not like, you know, you're not just cowboying it. But, you know, I had an air failure not out of the cage on the hookah line the day before. And there's a whole story there.

48:03So, 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 Haynes and from spending time in Australia and from people who live in Montana, like Andy Stumpf, is that, you know, our perception of what's dangerous in the wild is often a little bit cryptic. And we can easily be misled like, oh, that little spider looks friendly and that's the deadly one or that bear looks very large and looming.

48:37But it turns out that's not the one that will actively hunt you. It's actually the somewhat smaller one that is just likes to hunt humans, you know, this kind of thing. And so the key takeaway being whether it's jellyfish, spiders, snakes, birds, or in some cases, people for that matter, locals have the key knowledge. And our ideas about what's dangerous or not are often wrong. So best to err on. It's all dangerous. And I love what you said there as well, because, again, diving with great whites and also tiger sharks myself, they have the ampullae of Lorenzini where they pick up electrical impulses.

49:18And I think exactly to your point, what was so strange is the first time I dived with them, I'm always comfortable in the water, but it was so strange how like the tigers and the great whites knew that I was the weakest diver. And whether that was like I was flinching, I acted like praying, whether my heartbeat or whether I was breathing, it knew. And it was so interesting on the audio. They were like, Ross, control your breathing. Ross, slow your heart rate. And I was like, how does it know? And sure enough, they just all just came straight for me. And they were like, Ross, I'm not saying square up to it, but I'm not saying flinch and back away as well.

49:52So as it came towards me, there was, where can I help you? And it sort of was like, it looked at me and there was a real form of communication that is obviously nonverbal. And it sort of looked and was like, all right, okay, you know what you're doing. I'll leave you alone. And it was so strange. Exactly the same with the bears in the Yukon. They were looking and if there was a weakness, that is the laws of the jungle. You know, I would have been charged. Yeah. I mean, all animals have their own sophisticated forms of intelligence. What you learn with the great whites before you go down there is they're going to come looming in slowly.

50:28There are a lot of tuna out there. There are a lot of seals and other things for them to eat. So they're not actively trying to hunt you. But if you swim away from them, they perceive you as prey. They're making a binary decision, right? And this is actually an important thing in terms of brain circuitry. Again, I had a student who then went off and did a postdoc. She now has her own laboratory in Switzerland, Lindsay Sillay, who published some papers on threat assessment and response. How fear can turn to pausing, can turn to aggression. It's very, very interesting work and she really deserves the credit.

50:59We can put a link to those papers. But there are these areas of the midline thalamus, like basically square in the middle of the brain, that basically make the decision among three choices. You can go forward, you can stay in the same place, or you can retreat. And predators are also assessing, are they moving forward toward me? Are they staying still or are they retreating? You know, the brain is very, of all species, is sophisticated in air quotes, but it has to make these decisions often with limited amounts of information. So these are more like switches than a continuum.

51:29And Lindsay has identified a number of those switches in the brain, she and others. And so the bears are probably paying attention to, you know, is he moving forward toward me or something else? Is he staying still or is he retreating from me? They have to know if it has something to do with them. And you have to do the same. You encounter a mountain lion along a trail. People will say, well, don't run, get large. Okay. But at some point, if it gets close enough, you've got to make a decision. Are you going to fight or are you going to run? Right. Or you could lay and play dead. So these are life-altering decisions, so to speak.

52:04And the computations are not super sophisticated. And this is no doubt relevant to everything we've been talking about, whether it's anterior mid-singulate cortex or prefrontal cortex, is that brain areas will ramp up their activity and cross thresholds after which circuits are set in motion. Right. So there's this kind of buildup. There's names that don't matter right now for this. But there's this kind of like buildup of chatter that exceeds a threshold. And then a certain action is taken or withheld. And so the thoughts about, I just said I would, so I'm going to do it.

52:34I want to get back and see my kid being born. Gosh, I would feel such shame if I didn't do this. These are different paths into the same sets of, do I go forward? Do I stop? Or do I quit? Retreating in this case would be quitting. And so there's not, it's sometimes fun to break things that are somewhat sophisticated, the psychological and the neurobiological into ultimately you got three choices. You can go forward in life or at any moment you can stop or you can retreat or quit as a case may be.

53:05And sometimes that's the life saving decision. A hundred percent. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. I'm excited to share that AG1 has just launched their newest formulation, AG1 Pro. AG1 Pro takes the clinically backed AG1 formula, which is a blend of vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and adaptogens, and adds three important new ingredients. Creatine monohydrate, calcium HMB, and zinc carnosine. Each serving has five grams of creatine monohydrate to support muscle strength and performance, as well as brain health.

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The Power of Underdog Fuel

54:21Let's get back on the spokes for a moment. We've done three spokes already, haven't we? Then we'll plow forward. Yeah. So I said I would. I don't want to disappoint. Yep. And I've got something I really want to be there for. So that's sort of what we touched on so far. How about I'm going to do this? I'm going to continue to do this because you said I couldn't. Because they thought I couldn't. You know, 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.

54:58So it's, you know, this is the great, you know, gift to the underdog, right? 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. But how about this? Has anyone ever said to you, there's just no way? And that sparked something in you like, now it absolutely, like, thank you. They just handed you a blank check. Is the best way to put it.

55:29Exactly that. And I love what you said there because throughout my career, that's become less and less useful because less people doubt me. And I'm almost like, oh. So the swim around Great Britain was probably the biggest one. And I love that because it went on YouTube. We were doing weekly vlogs. The very first vlog that we put out there, the comments, and I read through all of them because I was so excited. I was like, oh, this is going to be brilliant. Comments were just like, he's far too big to be a swimmer. I think he's going to give up after 100 kilometers. He's not going to even make it on the South Coast. All of them. And I read them.

55:59What'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 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, oh, I think you can do it this time. And I'm like, where are the guys who were trolling me? I need them back. But yeah, yeah, certainly around Great Britain. The 100% going back to the spokes, that was a big one.

56:31So are you moving dynamically between these things because one sort of loses its potency to keep you going? That is exactly the word I use as well. Anything that stimulates you, it's almost like going through your head, like when you're changing the TV channel. And sometimes something can work and it becomes so potent and you're swimming and I'm swimming because people said I couldn't. This is amazing. But then the very next day you go, right, I'm going to tap into that again. You go, well, maybe maybe they've got a point. Do I need to finish this? You need something else.

57:01And I think it's just like I would say your reasons to continue need to be bigger than your reasons to stop. And I love this conversation because we're identifying those different categories, those different spokes. And it's just knowing that what might work one day might not work the other. You know, and then sometimes, for instance, one of the most potent was Hessa, my girlfriend. She ended up sending me a picture of the scan, you know, and it was one of the first scans that I ever saw of my son. That I just woke up two o'clock in the morning, cracked ice off my wetsuit, dived in.

57:32And I was like, oh, we're getting this done. So it was different and knowing which one to go. And I think as a coach as well, sometimes some of my friends who are amazing, like I said, Jer Kennedy, Chris Morgan, Olympic swimming coach as well. They'll know which buttons to push of mine in the right moments. I think all great coaches do that. And then sometimes I have to do it myself as well. So you've got a FU. I'm going to do this. Yep. FU. You said I couldn't. Yep. I'm going to do it. But let's talk about the other one that Dagens talks about sometimes, but even he talks about a little bit differently than F me.

58:12Like F me. I'm going to do this. Like, 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. Like I'll die trying. But then at some point, if that potency runs down, wouldn't it be wonderful to run to our love, like move to our love for something as motivation? But sometimes F me, like I am weak for even considering stopping. F me for even like, so it's not a pleasant thought, but does it have potency for you?

58:43Do you, is that a source of continual pushing on the gas pedal? I think it is. And to take that some, probably slightly further, but slightly more specific. I don't know if it is this, but, but sometimes there'll even be a part of my body that is failing. So it's not necessarily fuck me. It'll be like, fuck you right shoulder. And I think, so it's that, that I'll get angry at my body failing me. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm taking you for a swim across the Arctic circle. You're not stopping on me now. So, so it's like, not just me, but there will be parts of me that I get really angry at if it's failing me.

59:17Is that the same, do you think? Yeah, well, no. And, and you teed up beautifully what I was going to get to, which it's going to sit in a kind of uncomfortable place for some people listening. I just want to give that warning, but it's reality. Because what you're talking about when you see a scan, an ultrasound of your unborn son, and you want to meet the newborn son, that is him.

59:41You're talking about somebody that's of you, half of you. Let's be fair. Your wife did significantly more of the work. She gestated him, but, you know, but, but it's of the two of you and it's of you, right? I could imagine that if you saw a picture of your family member's child that you told you would do this also. But at some point, if I just show you a picture of a baby and I go, do it for this baby, I imagine it's not going to do a whole lot. Okay. Unless there's some other story attached to that about you're raising charity for that child, et cetera, et cetera.

1:00:13Right, right. So this gets to a very important and I don't think dark, but an important to acknowledge aspect of our wiring, which is one of the most fundamental aspects of our brain and our biology is we have to know the difference between us and not us. And us, it starts with us as the individual, then it extends to our kin. It extends to who we decide, you know, you can adopt, you can have friends, you can have a community. But it's the, the ability to tap into motivation for us versus not us, even in the absence of competition is extremely powerful.

1:00:50And it's rooted in the hypothalamus, like what this primitive brain structure, there's essentially a set of switches. There's not a lot of thinking down there. It's, it's forward, stop or retreat. Okay. It's mate or don't mate. It's fight or don't fight. It's quit or, okay. And, and you got to eat or don't eat, right? You don't really have a lot of options to kind of eat, right? So, so this is most visible, I think in a, and we'll put a link to this. There's a beautiful illustration of this.

1:01:20That's very brutal, which is a nature documentary where there's a lion being attacked by a pack of hyenas. This is real. And they're trying to tear its testicles off. They have an awareness that if they tear off its testicles, it's unlikely to mate in the future and potentially limit the lion population. And they're not doing the math into the future. They've just learned this from each other or it's hardwired. Okay. Many animals do this, right? And there's another lion who comes along and enters the fight to protect its, its other lion, right?

1:01:53Yeah. But the amazing thing is, and then they ward off these hyenas and it's brutal and they're getting shredded up and they protect their testicles. But the amazing thing is just prior to this scene, those two lions were fighting. They were trying to kill each other and rip off each other's testicles. So there's a switch in the brain from me just guarding the self to us versus them. And, and it's very dynamic. You can expand this out. Now humans have this ability to say, you know, my country, my team, my whatever, you know,

1:02:25and it can transcend all sorts of boundaries and you can make it purely cognitive. But when you get down to the real, like hardwired stuff, it's your DNA, it's your child, or it's a child that you chose to adopt and raise. And so therefore it's your kid and you would die before you would quit. And so the strength of motivation, I would argue is not, we have this mental model of these spokes on balance, on a balance. But the, the interesting thing about your example of your shoulder is you're like, uh, you're not going to quit on me.

1:02:59In fact, you're not really of me right now, but you're enough of me that I'm going to keep you. You're not going to saw off your shoulder. But you're like, you're kind of like F you, I'm going and you're coming with me and your language, I'm not capturing it exactly right, actually encapsulates this, this idea that the dynamic and it is dynamic concept of me versus us versus them is kind of what allows us to push through anything, whether it's a PhD thesis in neuroscience, which is not as you described, but it's long in a different way.

1:03:30It lasts years, it's uncertain, probably won't kill you as long as you have good lab technique, but it can, it, you know, it can do its damage psychologically. And it's, it's a pick any effort, medical school, parenting, whatever it is, the us, not versus them, but us with a little bit of not us. That is the stuff that drove human evolution, exploration, technology development. And this is true for men and for women. I don't want to cast this in a purely Y chromosome framework. So anyway, those are some thoughts and reflections.

1:04:00And I think your description of your shoulder is like, fuck you, you're coming with me is pretty telling. For sure. I do. I love what you said there as well. Do you find it's also the other way that the reason I bring that up is, you know, I lost my dad four years ago and then the Iceland swim existed in this strange world of, you know, it wasn't just my dad. He was my mentor. He was my coach. And then, so I've lost my dad and then I'm becoming a dad myself and on the Iceland swim as well, as well as trying to get back for the birth of my son.

1:04:30I said when I wrote my book about Iceland, I said, I want this to be almost a tribute to everything that my dad taught me and a letter to my future son and certainly swimming as well. Not to get too deep or spiritual or religious, but I was in my head. This got me through so many dark times. I just imagined that dad was sitting up there. He's a tennis coach. So he's playing tennis on the tennis court in the sky up in heaven and he's looking down and to me, it was just, I would get goosebumps. It would invoke something visceral inside of me, primitive that I would imagine my dad up in heaven, just looking down and just to everyone else up there, just go and be like, yeah, that, that, that one right there swimming around Iceland.

1:05:09That one's mine. Yeah. And that just, oh, I just, even now I could just swim for another a hundred miles thinking of that.