Ross Edgley Is A Human Poseidon: Lessons From The World’s Longest Non-Stop Swim

Ross Edgley is a world-renowned extreme adventurer, author, and the star of National Geographic’s “Shark vs. Ross Edgley” This conversation explores Ross’s superhuman feats of endurance, including his recent 510km non-stop swim down the Yukon River. We discuss his unique physiological abilities, training with the Hemsworth brothers, and his race against sharks. He shares his philosophy on finding purpose through struggle and reveals how he consumed 40,000 calories in 24 hours. Ross is a force of nature. And this conversation is an adventure. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Bon Charge: Use code RICHROLL to save 15% OFF 👉 boncharge.com LMNT: Get a FREE Sample Pack with any drink mix purchase 👉drinkLMNT.com/RICHROLL On: Enter RichRoll10 at the checkout to get 10% OFF your first order 👉on.com/richroll Whoop: Personalized insights that help you reach your goals 👉join.whoop.com/roll AG1: Get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs 👉drinkAG1.com/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  I move in water, but I'm doing it through rivers and oceans. With swimming how I do it, it's more akin to like an expedition. It's like climbing Everest versus running a marathon. I can't just do a swim. You know, it's got to be a really long one. It's got to be a hot one. It's got to be a cold one. There's got to be some metrics that make me excited. No one's actually pushing the boundaries like this in sports with cellulitis, hypothermia, hyperthermia. If you're going to try to improve yourself in any sort of way in the water, just go and learn from the apex predator. There's probably clues. Sharks taught me how to swim. That voice in your head knows all of your weaknesses. Every time it was going, "Stop, Ross, stop. Pull that physiological handbrake." I went, "No, no, no.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Let's keep going. Let's keep going." Look, get my goggles, I'm in.

• 0:54Rich Roll?

  My guest today is Ross Edgley, a real-life Aquaman of Poseidon-like gifts, who is redefining the limits of human endurance with his many world-first feats of water-bound adventure. Since we last spoke with Ross about his most notable record-breaking swim, a 1,780-mile circumnavigation of Great Britain. That was episode 408, in case you missed it. Ross has gone on to continue pushing even further into the realm of the superhuman. Most recently, he completed the world's longest river swim, a mind-bending achievement in not only endurance, but also sleep deprivation and cold tolerance,

• 1:39Rich Roll?

  in which he swam an astonishing 510 kilometers, that's 317 miles, nonstop, down the Yukon River in just 62 hours, battling 9 degrees Celsius water. That's 48 degrees Fahrenheit. Wildlife hallucinations, forest fires, you name it. He faced it and overcame it. From attempting the world's longest pool swim in Mallorca to braving the icy waters of Loch Ness for 52 hours, Ross is a guy who just continually raises the bar on human possibility. And he does it all with this beautiful trademark smile that is now on full display

• 2:20Rich Roll?

  in his new Hulu Shark Week special, Shark vs. Ross Edgley, where you can witness firsthand his childlike glee in action.

• 2:30Rich Roll?

  I've got a couple more things I would very much like to mention before we dig into this one, but first, let's acknowledge the awesome organizations that make this show possible.

• 2:43Rich Roll?

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• 3:27Rich Roll?

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• 3:50Rich Roll?

  Okay. Ross's combination of physical prowess and scientific knowledge with a deeply philosophical approach to what he does is both fascinating, it's unique, his energy is infectious, and I think you're gonna love him. So, let's take the plunge. Enjoy.

• 4:11Rich Roll?

  All right, so, just a few days ago, five days ago? Yeah. Only five days ago, you finally successfully completed one of your attempts to do a series of the longest swims ever. This was the world's longest river swim, up in the Yukon, where you swam 510 kilometers, 317 miles, over 62 hours. For context, that is the equivalent of swimming the English Channel 15 times. Without stopping, without aid, without sleep, without touching land, without touching another human being or a boat. Yeah. Get the fuck out of here.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, it sounds good when you say it like that.

• 5:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it's pretty incredible.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think this one, because obviously the swim around Great Britain was a staged swim. But I've just been fascinated by this idea of a nonstop continuous swim. I think it just takes your mind and body to a completely different place. And when looking on a map, there's just not many places you can do that. You need a fast river, you need the wildlife to be relatively friendly. Ideally, not so cold that, you know, it's tolerable. And basically, upon my research, I just kind of stumbled across the River Quest, which is where every single year people will kayak and paddle and there's a canoe race and it's in the Yukon in Canada. And I just looked at it and I was just like, well, look, in theory, if you can kayak it, you can swim it, right? So I reached out to this team in Canada and they equally were just as curious as me.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  And they just said, yeah, yeah, in theory, you need a lot to go right. The glacial lakes are melting and everything like this, but in theory it's possible.

• 5:56Rich Roll?

  Were you looking at other rivers? What were the other places that were in contention?

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, there was, I mean, there's loads of others. Even when you start looking at the Nile, but the Nile, you kind of get all sorts of bacteria, viruses, not necessarily fast flowing enough as well.

• 6:09Rich Roll?

  You want that nice current.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  You do, oh, this is exactly it.

• 6:13Rich Roll?

  It's a huge difference.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And I know I'm chatting to the right person here because you take swimming, but then you move it outside of the realms of conventional sort of swimming. And so it's less of a swim, it's more like the GB swim, it was a sailing exercise, you know, with a bit of swimming thrown in. You need to pick up ocean currents, tides and everything. It was the same with the river that, yeah, you have the river flowing with you. So everyone says, oh, that sounds nice. It's like, oh, yeah, but then there's whitewater rapids. If you go down the wrong route, you're all of a sudden going into a log jam. Like, there's all sorts of things that can go wrong. So it was a very different swim. I've never actually done a river swim before, so this was my first.

• 6:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we should mention that this comes on the heels of a couple of attempts that you've made at setting some records that didn't go so well, right? So it's not like all you do is go out and break world records. Like you had two attempts to break the record for the world's longest lake swim, which is basically, what do they call it? Like still water, non-current water or something like that?

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Exactly that, yeah.

• 7:14Rich Roll?

  And you made some interesting choices around locations for that. The first being this lake in Italy where you show up and it's just boiling hot, right? And they had had a bunch of floods and they were in the midst of a heat wave.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:26Rich Roll?

  And so that didn't go so well.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  It didn't, no. And this is kind of the first time, I suppose, a public is speaking about it in some ways, but you'll know that when you organize an athletic adventure, you fly people out, we've got camera crews, we've got boats booked. In Italy as well, because of the different councils and districts and things, you have to get permits to swim in that lake at a particular time. So we got hit by a freak anti-cyclone sent from the Sahara Desert, but it didn't matter. Like the Italian authorities were like, no, no, no, you go on those days that you've paid for, or you don't go at all. And I was like, but there's a heat wave, like people were dying. And they were like, well, no, you go. So to be completely honest and transparent, a lot of them were done for charity. That was the primary reason. So I knew that we had to attempt something.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  But in Tres Amino, for instance, and Rich, you'll know, when you get into like even a pool, 28, 27 degrees, and it's a bit fresh, you know, you get in there, you go, oh, I best get moving. I walked in and in the shallows, it was 36 degrees. That's almost a jacuzzi. I waited, it was a bath.

• 8:28Rich Roll?

  There's no way you were going to be able to break the record in water that warm. I went back and re-watched the video that you made about that experience. And even, you know, the night before, two nights before, you were pretty frank about the cards were not lining up for success here. Like there were crew members who were stuck in Amsterdam. There was all kinds of, you know, sort of disasters brewing. But you still ended up, how far did you swim? You still swam 70 kilometers, right?

• 8:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, so 70, which was the route between two islands, but when you added all the sort of wiggle room as well, it was upwards to 100. And weirdly, I think that's... That's one that I'm quite proud of and genuine, we've literally just been speaking about this because this is so nice coming back after four or five years to see you again because at the grand old age of 38, I finally feel like I'm maturing a little bit. But it was so interesting that I was so intrinsically motivated for that one. So afterwards, I think previously I would have been absolutely gutted. It was very black and white for me. You either get a record or you don't. Whereas for me, after Tressamino, it was so different.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Afterwards, after I was sort of let go from hospital, I had pretty bad RABDO, I'm creating kinase, so enzyme in the blood basically from muscle breakdown. You know, it's sort of dangerous at 4,000, you know, at 10,000, people are ringing an ambulance, like that's pretty serious. Mine was at 19,000. They were like, there's, there's no way, you know, you're going to be out of hospital in, in two weeks. But amazingly, again, we have all the medical reports, it was brilliant that they just set me free about three days later and we're just eating pizza and gelato. It was amazing.

• 10:06Rich Roll?

  You have a number of superpowers, but among them, I know you always talk about how like you're not talented and you don't have, you know, like we're going to get into it, but there are a few highlighted superpowers that you have, not the least of which is something about your bone marrow that's been tested that promotes incredibly rapid healing.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, this was strange. Yeah, so recently filmed a documentary, shark documentary that comes out on Disney Plus, all for Shark Fest on National Geographic and it's called Shark versus Ross Edgely. And they wanted to basically analyze my body compared to that of four specific sharks. And we'll get onto that in a minute, but what was really interesting is the MRI scan, when they scanned my body, they looked and my, my bone marrow was essentially glowing on, on this report. And they said, Ross, we don't want you to panic. And I was like, right, that's not a good way to start a conversation. They said, but we only really see this in newborn babies and sometimes people with cancer as well, because the bone marrow is just hyperactive, basically just trying to produce stem cells, anything for rejuvenation, regrowth, anything. And it says yours is glowing and we don't know whether it's sort of nature versus nurture.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  We don't know if it's responding to how much stress you put on the body or it's something that you actually have. This is purely anecdotal, but I then spoke about my mum who had two hip surgeries. They said, you're going to be out for months. She was back playing tennis within the month, literally weeks later. So it's kind of weird. In a way, I think when superpowers were handed out, it would have been nice to have had height, strength, speed.

• 11:39Rich Roll?

  But the ability for your body to rapidly repair itself is a superpower in the athletic context because it allows you to train very hard and bounce back. And it is in the moments between when you're stressing your body that you make those gains. And so to the extent that you can perform that physiological activity more quickly than the average athlete or average human, that's going to allow you to progress more quickly.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  I appreciate it. It's only just now that I'm sort of realizing that. I mean, a good mutual friend of ours, Chris Morgan, Olympic swim coach, absolute legend, and he was with me in Mallorca, where again, we attempted a long swim, didn't quite go to plan with, again, heat stroke, various other things. But what was so interesting is immediately afterwards, Chris sort of identified this, and we just started training biceps. We're in the gym the next day, and he was like, well, most athletes, there'd be a period of recovery. Whereas he was saying, because we're staring down the barrel of the Yukon, I think we lean into this. It's an adaptation. So in the end, we ended up turning it into just this mammoth training week. And what was so strange is in the Yukon, that theory and philosophy kind of proved right. I got out, and although I'm nursing injuries from the White Water Rapids and various things, my shoulders were absolutely fine.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  It was so strange.

• 12:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and you just showed me the injury behind your knee that you suffered in the Yukon that you shared on Instagram to everyone's, you know, aghast. And it's remarkable how much it has healed in just four or five days since then. So there's proof right in front of my eyes that you're pretty good at that part of it. But in any event, you have this semi-fiasco situation in Lake Trazamino, and then you try again in Loch Ness.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 13:19Rich Roll?

  Oh, it was the other way around. Loch Ness was first.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was right.

• 13:22Rich Roll?

  Okay. Loch Ness, that was 2022?

• 13:24Speaker 00

  That was right.

• 13:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, okay. Again, with this aim of swimming 100 miles and having to pull out at, what, like 49 miles or something like that?

• 13:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, again, very similar. And again, just to sort of be so honest and transparent, it's amazing how you need, you can be the best athlete in the world, but when it comes to anything adventure-based, you just need the stars to align. I'm a huge fan of like Kylian Jorinet, for instance, and the way that he... Talks about almost like the spirituality of his sport and trail running in the mountains. I think it's amazing, you know, that sometimes he just says, not today. It's not meant to be. And I think that's something, again, at thirty eight, I feel I'm maturing a little bit. But we were preparing for Loch Ness. Everything was going amazing. It was all planned. Again, it was for ocean conservation. And then all of a sudden, the Queen died, actually, that particular week. So in England, everything was just shut off. They were like, you do not do anything. It's a mourning period for the nation.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  So absolutely respectfully, I said, we need to do that. But then a swim in Loch Ness where it's already freezing. It's five degrees, it's just above freezing. It was just going into the British winter. And then because of Loch Ness as well, it's just this kind of, it's about as long as the English Channel. It's this long funnel. So when the wind picks up as well, you're getting, you know, like five, ten foot waves in a lake. So again, knowing that that would be the case, but knowing that it was for ocean conservation. I just said, the record will be nice, but you have to do something, Ross. You know, you've got to try something. So almost knowing that you were heading into what was going to be a really, really rough swim. I'd still probably do the same thing now.

• 14:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, I appreciate that. Like you show up and you do it no matter what. Like, that's what you're here to do, right?

• 14:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:59Rich Roll?

  The idea that I think is so powerful behind that speaks to the difference between being extrinsically motivated and intrinsically motivated. Like, if you're doing it for the love and because this is who you are versus, well, I'm not going to do it because there's too many variables that are pushing up against the possibility of breaking the record.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Hmm, that was exactly it, yeah, yeah. And I think that was probably one of the biggest differences in the last few years. Because I have to say, like, the GB swim for me was very much eighteen seventy five, Captain Webb, in English Channel, first guy to swim across the English Channel. And we talked about it before, but Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It was feelings of self-accomplishment, prestige, world records. It was very much there up, up the Maslow's hierarchy, which is now. Records are nice, they absolutely are, I'd be lying to say if it wasn't. But a lot of the swims now are just rooted in sports science. We're uncovering so much. So even after Tressamino and Loch Ness, I was pretty beat up. But then my nutrition sponsors, PhD, turned around and James Morton, who is the nutritionist for Team Sky, he was like, this is fascinating. We've got so much data, you know, that no one's ever done before.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  No one's actually pushing the boundaries like this in strokes and sports with cellulitis, hyperthermia, hyperthermia. So it was with that that I was like, wow, we are contributing something to sports science as well as the charity element as well. So I think going forward, all swims, if it contributes something to sports science, ocean conservation, then I'll put my goggles on.

• 16:27Rich Roll?

  Is there any important revelations that you've divined from this data dump? Like what has the data told you about your own relationship with performance? And where you might improve or kind of what has gone sideways in the past?

• 16:41Speaker 00

  I think one of the biggest ones is challenging this idea of 120 Gs of carbs every hour on the hour. So for all the listeners, you know, there's this idea that, you know, previously it was like 80 grams of carbohydrates every hour on the hour for any endurance sport. They're pushing the upper limits and there's even been studies done where they're looking at competitive eaters. And there's an adaptation within their stomachs where they're saying, hang on, endurance athletes could actually learn from competitive eaters here. Because so often as well, people listening, if you do an Ironman, an ultra marathon, it's not your lactic threshold, VO2, running biomechanics, gait analysis. That's not what will stop you. It might be just gastrointestinal distress, something literally your stomach implodes. So it's this idea of training your stomach. So one thing that we were doing at Liverpool John Moores University with James Morton is that 120 Gs of carbs every hour on the hour.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  But on top of that, using MCTs as well, so median change high glycerides, on top of that, so coconut oil essentially from MCTs, forcing that on top to seeing how many calories, how many energy substrate can you actually force through the digestive system? And not just tolerate, but assimilate at the same time. And that's been amazing, I think, you know, that going back to that idea of a superpower is just my ability to eat.

• 17:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this is on my list of Ross's superpowers. Your ability to intake enormous amounts of calories is unparalleled. Like you're taking in 15,000 calories a day when you're doing these events.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:05Rich Roll?

  And to your point, not just being able to shove them down your throat. But assimilating them like without gastric distress.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:13Rich Roll?

  And that is the thing like you, I mean, fells, even the best of the Ironmans out there and the ultra marathoners, like there's a point where you can no longer tolerate any calories without throwing up or, you know, all these sorts of things. And then that derails the performance.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  It's exactly that. And I think one, and this is strangely one of the, the experiments that I was sort of not necessarily proud, yeah, proud of maybe. But again, we've got this shark documentary, Shark versus Ross Edgely. One of the things we were competing against four different sharks. And specifically there was the tiger shark. This is, this is my spirit animal. So tiger sharks, because of their unique shape of their mouths, they can just chow down on anything, whale carcasses, turtle shells, just anything. And what's incredible is they'll just go miles and miles across these oceans, like just deserts, just barren wasteland, like not eating anything. But then as soon as they get to something like a whale carcass, they can just chow down and put away silly calories. So when we're in the Bahamas, we had this almost like half the size of this table. And it was like a giant lollipop. And we went down and we fed it to one of the tiger sharks

• 19:11Speaker 00

  and they bit down on it and took out this huge chunk. And then we were able to measure that chunk with Mike Heit House, one of world leading experts when it comes to tiger sharks. And he said, right, if this was actually whale blubber, that would be 25,000 calories in one bite. So then they said, Ross, we want to replicate this to see how you could actually do this idea of famine and feast like a tiger shark. So at Loughborough University, fasted for 24 hours, basically just stuck me in a heat chamber. I was exercising for 12 hours, just in saunas, dehydration. So a lot of muscle glycogen and, and just dehydration, essentially. And then after that, they just said, Ross, eat just tiger shark bulk. We want to see how much you can put on. And in 24 hours, I put away 40,000 calories.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  And put on 22 pounds. It was amazing.

• 19:58Rich Roll?

  40,000 calories. What do the world champion eating competition guys think?

• 20:03Speaker 00

  I don't know. I want to look into, and genuinely, people are saying, Ross, I seriously think you need to consider a creature.

• 20:08Rich Roll?

  Because people were losing their minds when Michael Phelps was sharing his diet when he was at the peak of his abilities. And I think it was 10,000 calories then.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:17Rich Roll?

  Right? So you just 4X that? One sitting? And is this something you think that you're born with? Or that you've trained? You've created an adaptation for?

• 20:27Speaker 00

  I think it was a bit of both. Like, my mum's an amazing cook. So like, even actually for this event. So immediately afterwards, worth noting, it was all done under medical supervision. So I want to say, oh, yeah, we had burgers and fries. But no, no, no. Initially, it was very much, okay, hydrate, electrolytes. Look at that. They were taking blood work to make sure everything was correct. But then, after a certain point, and you know, to get those sorts of calories cleanly, in inverted commas, is impossible. You can't put away 40,000 calories of, you know, broccoli and rice. So it just got dirty. And it was just, oh, I mean, I think one of the things I was most proud of, eight litres of custard. So you have like, you know, those, you know, those cinnamon. Custard, for me, it was like, I was hungry, but I also needed something slightly hydrating. And then just double cream, seeing that off.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  Ah, rich, it was amazing. And by the bed as well, you have those cinnamon loaves, which are meant for like families to share and tear. I just had four of those. So I'd just like, I'd wake up and just dip that in custard, put a litre of custard away, and one cinnamon loaf, and then just fall back asleep.

• 21:28Rich Roll?

  Oh, my god.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  It was amazing.

• 21:30Rich Roll?

  When you're in the midst of these very long swims, how many calories are you able to take on when you're in that state of exertion?

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Um, that we were pushing that 120 g's of carbs, but with about 10 to 15 grams of MCTs on top of that as well. We could tolerate more, but that was what I was assimilating. And that's what we found at Liverpool John Moores University. When I was done on the various tests, they were like, this is what you're assimilating. We know you can eat more, Ross, but this is what your body's actually processing.

• 21:57Rich Roll?

  So how many calories an hour would that translate to?

• 22:00Speaker 00

  Oh, it's a good question. So I think if there's 100, I can do some quick maths, 120 g's of carbs, if there's four calories of carbs per gram, and then nine per fat.

• 22:10Rich Roll?

  Somebody can do the math, but it's like, it's like in the realm of, I don't know, 500

• 22:14Speaker 00

  It is, yeah, it is.

• 22:15Rich Roll?

  Right, where in endurance sports, it's often said, like, you should take in 200 to 250 an hour, like, that's the max that the human body can actually tolerate and assimilate.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  But do you know what's really interesting about this as well is they also did tests on me where they look at, and any athlete, anybody, anybody listening, you have a genetic predisposition to, I've used fats as carbs as a fuel source. And it was really interesting that they were like, Ross, you're so carb adapted, so you need to eat every 15 minutes, otherwise your blood sugar, you just crash, you need to keep fueling up. It's almost like doing the Le Mans 24 hour race, but in NOS, in a car. He's just like constantly like that. They were like, you need a big diesel engine. So like, you need to become more fat adapted. So for everything that I've just said there, and it makes a good story, you know, the 40,000 calories and everything like that. But what was really interesting is, is James Morton was saying to me, no, no, no, but Ross, you do need to become more

• 23:07Speaker 00

  fat adapted. So I was doing a lot of fasted sessions. And this goes back actually, like genuinely, I love yours and Chris Williams' podcast, it was amazing. And I know you said, Ross, you've got to slim down, dude. You're swimming like a brick. So I genuinely did for Mallorca, for the Mallorca swim, I slimmed down. But so many fasted sessions. And I think what's so interesting, again, you know, for me, sort of late in my career now, but I'm still learning because I can eat, I can suffer, I can struggle. But they were like, no, no, no, but we need you to become fat adapted. So a lot of fasted sessions where I was trying to encourage my body to use endogenous fat already stored on the body, rather than being so reliant on carbohydrates.

• 23:43Rich Roll?

  It's interesting because that's just one strategy for becoming more fat adapted. Another one, which is one that I've used over the years, is to just really double down on the zone one and the zone two. So you're in that aerobic state of exertion and your body, you know, the more hours that you spend training that way, the more fat adapted you become because you, your body is becoming more efficient at that lower exertion level, right? But that's something you're doing all the time. I mean, when you're doing these swims, you're in zone one, zone two, your heart rate can't be that elevated.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  No, no, it's exactly that.

• 24:21Rich Roll?

  But for some reason, you're burning glycogen as fuel.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  It's exactly that. James was saying, it's very interesting, Ross, even at low, low intensities, you're carb adapted. You have to go so low to actually tap into that fat adaptation. So it was really interesting that for me, I was always training harder. That was my thing. And actually, sometimes even during my zone two sessions, if I'm being honest, looking back, I was kind of redlining a little bit because for me, I was like, I'll just suffer. So it was, it wasn't zone two, it was zone three. So it was glycolytic, it was slightly anaerobic. And that's been one of the biggest things.

• 24:49Rich Roll?

  Slow it down.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 24:51Rich Roll?

  Slow it down and slim it down, dude. This is my thing. And I say this with love. You know, you have an extraordinary physique. I suspect there's some level of attachment that you have to this physique.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Oh, no.

• 25:03Rich Roll?

  And certainly, it creates a lot of intrigue and interest because it is world-class, dude. But as somebody who comes from a swimming background, and I'm sure Chris Morgan has told you this as well, like, dude, somebody who is their own best guinea pig, who, you know, you're studying sharks. Well, let's look at the best ultra-distance swimmers in the world. Let's look at their physiques. Let's look at how they train.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:26Rich Roll?

  These people are incredibly lean. All of that added muscle on your shoulders and your arms and your lats creates a lot of power. You can generate a lot of power with that.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:37Rich Roll?

  But ultimately, when you're looking at doing multiple-day swims, these things become liabilities, right?

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Do you know, and actually, interestingly on that, this was fascinating as well, that again, the MRI revealed actually that my slow twitch fibers have a slight tendency to hypertrophy at the same time. So that was what was really interesting. They said that Ross, although it looks like you're big, strong and powerful, it's actually an element of your slow twitch fibers actually hypertrophy. You sort of see it in cyclists, you know, cyclists who are kind of got big legs, but they're endurance athletes. And it's that hypertrophy of slow twitch fibers. You see it again, German volume training, you know, so with a lot of the sort of bodybuilders of old, they have that muscle density and maturity. And it's because of the sheer volume that they've done, there is a slight hypertrophy of their slow twitch fibers. It's rare, it's not very common, but it does happen. And looking

• 26:25Speaker 00

  at my MRI, they said, that's kind of what it is. You look like it's maybe fast twitch fibers, which are kind of bigger in diameter. But it's not. It's a hypertrophy of slow twitch fibers.

• 26:35Rich Roll?

  The real propellant is the level of mitochondrial density that comes with building a gigantic aerobic machine, right? So have you looked at like what that looks like for you?

• 26:46Speaker 00

  I need to. This is the next level. And this is what I mean. At 38, it's so interesting because there's still layers. Yeah, that's hopefully next.

• 26:55Rich Roll?

  So you have these two lake attempts to, you know, break the world record for longest lake swim. Neither of them go to your liking. You find yourself more recently in Mallorca, getting ready for this Yukon swim, and you announce that you're going to go for the longest pool swim attempt, right? You make a big show of it on social media. We're going to circle back to that. But the goal here is to swim 360 kilometers, 223 miles. And you're in this pool in this beautiful part of the world. I don't know what the water temp is in that pool, but you know, it's not as warm as the lake in Italy, but it's not as cold as Loch Ness either, but probably a little too warm

• 27:38Rich Roll?

  for you to be able to be at your peak.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. We discovered the hard way. Yeah, yeah, it was exactly that. I think what was so interesting about the Mallorca swim, and genuinely, I'll probably do it again, is just like you wouldn't do. We ended up doing 140 kilometers.

• 27:55Rich Roll?

  Right. Which is like, I mean, you swam 140 kilometers in a pool.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:00Rich Roll?

  It's like, come on. And the first day, you were, this was staged, like you were going to sleep at night, right? But the first day you did 50 kilometers.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:08Rich Roll?

  Which is insane.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  And speaking to Chris about this, it was so interesting because how do you train for something like the Yukon? How do you train for a nonstop swim? It's so interesting that in terms of periodization, there's not much scientific literature on it. So you have to push the boundaries. You're really playing with adaptation, that, you know, sort of stress adaptation. It's such a fine line. And I think... We could have pushed on after the 140 kilometers. We could have probably gone for the record. I definitely wouldn't have been in a state to do the Yukon afterwards. So that's why genuinely I say, I sit here before you four years later, Rich, mature. With my kombucha.

• 28:43Rich Roll?

  Well, there was a bigger goal at play, right? You're not going to capsize or jeopardize the Yukon goal by pushing too hard in the pool in Mallorca.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:51Rich Roll?

  But what made it interesting for me was the fact that, okay, this is, this is literally the third thing in a row that you've made a big to do about, where you fell a little bit short. And I'm wondering kind of what that did to your mental state going into the Yukon, because what made the Yukon swim different is that there was no announcement, really. There was no live streaming. There was no, you know, sharing of lots of Instagram stories about what was going on. It was this thing that just kind of happened. And then when it was done, then you kind of showed up again and said, this is what we did. So, so you had a different relationship to how you were kind of sharing this journey.

• 29:32Rich Roll?

  And if I had to guess, I would imagine like, hey, listen, I, you know, I was, I was like talking a lot before. Now I need to like get to work, right?

• 29:40Speaker 00

  There was definitely an element of that. I think interestingly, we couldn't in the Yukon because there was just literally no signal. So we couldn't have said, we're going to do live updates because we just couldn't. There was no signal. But with that said, even if there was signal, I think it was exactly what you're saying. If I'm being completely honest, I think when there's a camera, especially if it's for a charity, or even not even if it's just social media, for me, for whenever I feel an obligation, whatever, to talk, to address the camera, to do, to do something.

• 30:09Rich Roll?

  Well, and you're good at it and you like it. You're a showman. You're showing at heart.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  Oh, I think there was an element of that. And I love that you said that because I think you hit the nail on the head better than I've been trying to articulate in my own head, that it was like, this needs to be done for different reasons. It needs to be very intrinsic. You know, you just need to be alone with your own thoughts, with your team, no expectations, no ideas from the outside world. And as a result, if I'm being completely honest, it was a different kind of swim. It was amazing. It was so, I was just so present and there was never a camera on me. So whether the whole thing was filmed, but I was, I never addressed the camera, not once. And I think going forward, it's really interesting that that approach now. Although, like you said, I am a little bit of a showman. Ah, I think I probably will probably do the Yukon approach a little bit more.

• 30:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah. A couple of interesting factoids about this Yukon swim. The water temp was nine degrees Celsius, forty-eight Fahrenheit. I mean, that is cold water, man. Chris told me it climbed up to twelve point nine, which is fifty-five. Still really cold. You were eighty-three miles from the Arctic Circle. So there's no night, right?

• 31:21Speaker 00

  No.

• 31:21Rich Roll?

  I mean, it gets dark a little bit, but you don't really get that blanket of darkness.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  No. Which was strange. I think it really played with your senses and your circadian rhythm as well. At two o'clock in the morning, it is just bright. Again, Chris, absolutely hero. He kayaked hundreds of miles with me by my side. There was a point on the second morning where the sun just was not coming up over the mountains. Hypothermia was setting in. You don't shake in your hands. It's you're shaking from your core. I could feel it in my stomach and I knew if I didn't do something then it was basically just gonna physiologically implode. The swim wasn't gonna happen. So we'd done all of that, but the Yukon was still asking more of us. So I ended up punching like six hundred milligrams of caffeine and just from two o'clock till seven o'clock, when the sun eventually came over the mountain. Oh, I can't wait to show you footage.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  My technique was ugly. I was just windmilling and it wasn't necessarily for propulsion. It was just trying to keep myself warm. And then on top of that, I remember once that caffeine had sort of died down, Chris turns to me and he's kayaking and he hadn't slept as well. And he just turns to me and he said, Ross, can I be completely honest with you? And I'm eating a banana on my break. I turned to him and I said, yeah, yeah, Chris, what's up? And he goes, oh, I'm tripping out. I went, oh, good, me too. What are you seeing? And he goes, oh, the seven dwarves are over there just chopping wood. And I went, ah, cool. I mean, they friendly? He goes, yeah, yeah, they seem friendly. I was like, ah, cool. Goggles back on, we just carried on. So it was knowing that you're in the trenches, but despite it playing with your senses,

• 32:54Speaker 00

  circadian rhythm, you had someone there.

• 32:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Rich Roll?

  By Chris, we mean Chris Morgan. We'll talk a little bit more about him in a minute, but this is a guy I've known for 30 years. He's the former Olympic coach for the Swiss Olympic swimming team, coached at Harvard, amazing guy, but he's in your boat the entire time. So he's having his own sleep deprivation thing, right?

• 33:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:31Rich Roll?

  So it's not like he's trading off with someone else and people are taking shifts.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, yeah, he is in the trenches. What he did in terms of kayaking would be considered a huge expedition alone. It's just the fact that he did it in complete support of some strange Englishman swimming. But it was what he did was incredible. And yeah.

• 33:52Rich Roll?

  By the rules of open water swimming, in case we didn't already make it clear, or people don't truly appreciate or understand what we're talking about here, you're not allowed to touch land, touch another human being, touch the boat. So you're not sleeping. It's not like you're crawling onto the shore and taking a nap and getting back in. Like you are swimming the entire time without touching anything except the water. You're fed by people throwing food at you or dangling it with a pole or something like that. You're completely on your own in freezing cold water. Your wetsuit, it feels like you finally, you had some wetsuit issues, but you finally really figured out the wetsuit thing.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  Ah, we didn't, we didn't. So again, full transparency, it was amazing. The wetsuit was incredible, no chafing.

• 34:41Rich Roll?

  Seven mil?

• 34:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, seven mil with greater mobility around the shoulders. And to this day, I don't know if my bum is in the wrong position or the toilet flap was in the wrong position, but basically just, I think we were like five hours in and I went to the toilet, unzipped the flap.

• 34:58Rich Roll?

  I was gonna ask how that works.

• 34:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. Not successfully is essentially the answer. Went to the toilet five hours in and I was like, that's just not evacuated what it needed to at all.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  Fifty six hours, I was just.

• 35:13Rich Roll?

  In the suit.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  Baking in the sun. And then afterwards.

• 35:18Rich Roll?

  That must have created a terrible rash.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  But I've healed, I've got good bone marrow. But then honestly afterwards, like the medics were amazing, Dr. Tom, one of the medics was just incredible, the entire team. Chris as well, and they're cutting up the wetsuit to try and get it off me because the chafing is a little bit bad and my skin's a little bit raw. And as I can, I'm just like, guys, I'm full transparency, I'm so sorry for whatever you find. In this wet suit. And then what was so bad as well, we had like the, the team out there, these Canadians were just amazing, like big, manly. Like Canadian, and even some of them had to excuse themselves. They're like, that's smelly, it's just, I'm so sorry. And I was like, oh god.

• 35:56Rich Roll?

  Chris said when it was done, they took you to the hospital in Dawson City, you know, which is just a small little town, right? So it's not like some giant hospital or anything like that. And Chris literally had to cut the wetsuit off of you with, with like medical scissors. Revealing, you know, god knows what was inside there.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, we are bonded now. He has seen something. But that's the reality. I think it's so good to talk about that as well, because I think sometimes people see. The GB swim, the Yukon, and like, oh my god, that was incredible. It's like, no, no, no. Like, the reality of setting a record like that is. Swimming in your own excrement for fifty six hours.

• 36:35Rich Roll?

  Who had the record that you eclipsed? What was that record?

• 36:39Speaker 00

  This was interesting, actually. So I believe it was in the Danube, but it, it gets a little bit strange because obviously there's dams and things there. So it wasn't necessarily sort of non-stop because you'd had to got out. So.

• 36:51Rich Roll?

  You have to climb over the locks.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, to get out. Because it's just, that's what it is. Whereas with the Yukon, it was truly unbroken. You know, it was, there was no dams, there was nothing, no bridges. We just, it was truly in the water.

• 37:03Rich Roll?

  But if you have like an exceptional current, then you're getting the benefit of that.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Oh, for sure. Yeah, for sure. And I think that that goes back to what we were talking about as well before, that it's so nice to have this blueprint in many ways because now, as I said before at the start, the goal is different bodies of water. So the river one's nice to tick off, but.

• 37:22Rich Roll?

  You've been very clear that this quest isn't to break the record for the world's longest swim. It swims with an S, right?

• 37:30Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 37:30Rich Roll?

  So I don't know if you're ready to talk about that yet, but you know, we saw the pool attempt. We saw two lake attempts. We now have the river attempt. I assume you'll try to go back and best those pool and lake attempts. But what we're still waiting for is the ocean attempt.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think what's really interesting is it's all weather windows. So with the Yukon, we had to go now because that's when the river was basically at its fastest. Things were melting and stuff. So there's a few different locations and we are just literally waiting and watching. And if Mother Nature, Poseidon, whatever it is, sort of goes, here you go, Ross. I'll go, thank you.

• 38:08Rich Roll?

  But you're ready to jump when that moment arrives.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  I really am. I think the Yukon was amazing, but like, and I'm not sort of downplaying it, but it was, it was a training swim in many ways. So we've got, we've got a few more.

• 38:19Rich Roll?

  But you're not going to tell us what that is yet.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  Oh, no, because there's literally, there's so many options. I'm not even being sycotic. There's so many. So if I was to say like one, but it might be super sycotic because we might get like a anti cyclone from the Sahara Desert again and we'll jump in. So yeah, you'll be the first to know though.

• 38:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I hope so. I hope so. Hallucinations, you suffered that like lesion on the back of your knee, but nothing like what happened to the back of your neck from the Great British Swim.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 38:45Rich Roll?

  So Chris told me it was a combination of an improved wet suit, but also like lanolin and desitin, right?

• 38:52Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 38:52Rich Roll?

  Which is like what babies use for their bums.

• 38:55Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 38:56Rich Roll?

  Like a zinc oxide, right? That, that kept you from not chafing, chafing up too much.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  Which was fantastic. I mean, you could.

• 39:02Rich Roll?

  How's that neck look on the back there?

• 39:03Speaker 00

  It's not too bad, isn't it?

• 39:04Rich Roll?

  You still have a scar?

• 39:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, you can see, that, that was Loch Ness though. That was the cellulitis. So that was what was weird because the chafing, I would say the chafing was worse on the GB swim, but it was cellulitis in Loch Ness, which is just a bacterial infection. But if it gets in your lymph nodes or your bloodstream, it can be fatal. So that was basically what stopped Loch Ness. We still felt relatively fine, but they were like, oh, that's cellulitis. You, you don't play with that. So I'm becoming a bit of an expert in all these weird.

• 39:32Rich Roll?

  These weird disease, yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 39:34Rich Roll?

  Well, it's a good thing you weren't doing this in the Amazon or something like that. You pick up some parasite or some crazy, you know, bug. How long do you think that you were hypothermic during this swim?

• 39:44Speaker 00

  Oh, I don't, we were, we were just playing with the boundaries, you know? I don't know, because obviously no one can touch me. And this was what was so interesting with our medics on board, that they were like, wow, like usually we can diagnose, we can test, we'd put a thermometer in your mouth. And it was just purely kind of communication. And even on that note though as well, and he was amazing, Dr. Tom, but he, he's a friend and also an amazing medic, but he was sort of going between the two because there was times when he wanted to, to chat, but I was like, but no one can get me out of this mess other than me. So if I stop and just start describing my symptoms, cold's just going to start getting in. So there was sometimes where I was just like, I just have to get myself out of this. Exactly.

• 40:23Rich Roll?

  But were you shivering? Like, what was your experience of the cold?

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, hypothermia, essentially, you're not generating enough heat, you know? Your body's losing more heat than it can generate. And I think shivering in your hands and your arms, that's fine. It's, it's when it's in your core, like your, your body actually is, is shivering. So at that point, again, the support team was just going, but I saw often I say, like, it's such a team sport. And I think people sometimes think I'm sort of self-deprecating and stuff. It absolutely isn't. At, at those particular points, it could not have been done without the team we had there. And when I was shouting out, we then changed feeding strategies to every 15 minutes more regularly. And we went from energels and various things like that to just like, I'm talking scalding hot porridge oats. Like, this is a, a dilemma and a situation I hope nobody listening finds themselves in.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  But when you're so cold, when you're so sleep deprived after 50 hours, they would say, how hot do you want the porridge? And I was like, oh, I mean, as hot as possible. And they were, they were handing me, and it was literally scalding. You could see it just piping. But I was just faced with a dilemma. It's like, do you scold your taste buds in your throat, but it will warm you up from the inside? And when you've made peace with the fact, you're like, I'm not stopping. So there are your two options. Pick one. Then we obviously just the scalding throat.

• 41:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How did the tongue do this time? I mean, it's not salt water.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Good.

• 41:46Rich Roll?

  So it's not like, you know, falling apart into your vegetable soup like it was.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  Do you know what, on this one, the tongue was fine. The tongue didn't.

• 41:54Rich Roll?

  Didn't disintegrate.

• 41:55Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 41:57Rich Roll?

  So, talk to me about the mindset, like when you're on hour fifty, this is a sixty-two hour swim, no sleep, so the mere kind of just drudgery of putting one arm in front of the other, I assume there wasn't a lot of visibility in the river either, right? When you're looking down and you're swimming, there's not a lot of stimulus there. So, how are you occupying your mind? Like, what is, what's going through the noggin?

• 42:21Speaker 00

  It's so strange, because it's almost like a TV channel, you know, like a streaming channel, where you just literally flick in the channel, and anything from minute to minute to hour to hour that you can tell yourself to get through, you do. I mean, I think it was interesting, like, there was, there was about five kilometres where this huge eagle was just tracking me, and I turned to the guys on the boat, and I was like, "What is going on?", and it was just hopping from tree to tree. And they said, "Look, I think it knows you're too small to be a bear, you're too big to be a salmon, but what happens with the salmon is they kind of wait for them to just stop flapping around because they're exhausted, and then it will come down, and it will just start eating." I was like, "Oh, okay." So, I'm just swimming, and this eagle-

• 43:00Rich Roll?

  I cannot stop moving. The eagle is gonna swoop down, and, yeah, wow.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  And I was speaking to the Canadian media, they were amazing, so supportive, and they were like, "Oh, we heard you had some motivation in a visitor." I was like, "Oh." It was motivation, but certainly having this massive, and they are huge, I'd never seen one before in real life, it's a pterodactyl, it's massive, and just having this thing look at you like your breakfast, I was like, "Oh, this isn't good, is it?" And then the same as well, chafing wounds, and then all of a sudden, it was really weird how it completely coincided with, you know, the chafing of wounds and stuff, with the increase in seeing, you know, a lot of black bears, no grizzlies, but a lot of black bears, and people-

• 43:41Rich Roll?

  And a couple moose, right? Chris told me that, uh, maybe it was on the third dawn where two moose crossed right in front of you?

• 43:47Speaker 00

  It was amazing, yeah, the wildlife, and then it's the same. Chris went to the toilet at one point, took a bucket into the woods, and then all of a sudden just saw these giant wolf prints as well, and heard noises. So, he said it was the quickest time he's ever gone to the toilet. When you're out there, I get, I've researched so much about the Yukon, being there in person, it is different, it is, it is the Wild West out there.

• 44:11Rich Roll?

  You've talked a lot about- How we're also much more capable than we allow ourselves to believe. The 40% rule of the special forces. And you're certainly, you know, out there pioneering the outer edges of human capability and going to battle with that inner resistance. But you must have those moments where you think, I can't go any further. Like, I've gone as far as I can. So what is it specifically that you tell yourself or that you do to get you over that hump and keep moving?

• 44:45Speaker 00

  This was actually a slight issue, actually. Because, and we spoke to experts at Loughborough University and Liverpool, John Moores University back in the UK. Because, talking about central governor theory, this idea that, or psychobiological model of fatigue as well, this idea that your, your brain is a hypochondriac and it's going to pull that physiological handbrake. So when you are 40 hours in, all of a sudden, the brain's picking up on all these, these cues. You're carb depleted, you're sleep deprived, neurotransmitters are completely, like, fried, adrenal fatigue, everything. So it's getting you to quit, pull that physiological handbrake. And it's so interesting, speaking to other athletes, how that voice in your head knows, like, you're, all of your weaknesses.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  So we go on a 100 miler right now and that voice will be going, oh, Ross, you know, remember the chafing in your back of your legs? That's pretty bad, could be cellulitis again. Remember what happened in Loch Ness? And it's asking things, the same, which, oh, Rich, how's that ankle? Oh, God, you know, like, how'd you know about the ankle? So it's so weird, but I, for whatever reason, and I don't say this proudly, but the, the experts were saying, you, you have an ability to turn that off, but not in a good way. Because with Loch Ness and Tres Amino, you knew you were never going to do it. So you just switched it off. Every time it was going, stop, Ross, stop, pull that physiological handbrake. I went, no, no, no, let's keep going, let's keep going. And they were like, in most people, we would say, no, you are more powerful than your own mind allows you to believe.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  But when you end up with heat stroke, rhabdo, hypothermia, they're saying, Ross, actually, pay attention to those voices a little bit more. Which is something that I think I'm a lot better at, genuinely, because even in the Yukon... We got to that, that 510, we turned to the team and we just sort of said, "That feels good. Do you want more?" "Yeah, we maybe, yeah, could we push more?" That, for me, it was the perfect swim. I didn't serve three days in hospital. As a team, we enjoyed ourselves. It was perfect. Why, why want more? It was, it was done.

• 46:46Rich Roll?

  Other than the conditions and the preparation that you put into it, was there something else different about this that allowed you to finally eclipse a record?

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Oh, I think the team. Yeah, as a team, we have been through so much. My girlfriend, my brother, signing Chris, Jer Kennedy, one of the world's greatest ice swimmers. He was expedition leader on this as well. He'd been with Intressamino. I love Jer, he's amazing. And the amount of time sometimes, Intressamino, when I was swimming with heat stroke, I look back at videos and I was like, "That's not swimming." I'm just flapping my arms. But Jer just knows exactly what to say when he's there, just going, "Oh, Ross, you're doing great. Split time's looking brilliant." I was like, "No, it wasn't."

• 47:28Rich Roll?

  No matter what.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. But he knows when to push and pull. So I think it was the perfect coming together of, and I don't want to sound too deep, but like, even the Yukon, if things had gone wrong, if the sun hadn't risen on that second morning, it wouldn't have been done. It's quite simple. If it was overcast, it wouldn't have been done. The way that the sun, I spoke to Chris about this, but Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and at the base of that pyramid of human needs, just food warmth and sleep. And I was there. It was so primitive. You could have offered me a fancy car, a million pounds. I was like, "I just want the sun. That's all I want." That was what was so interesting, that, to answer your question, it was just the, it was the kind of coming together. We would have done Loch Ness and we would have done Intressamino

• 48:12Speaker 00

  had the conditions been right, but, you know, that's, that's the nature of adventure swimming.

• 48:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it came together. At hour 60, though, wasn't there a forest fire out of the blue all of a sudden?

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:23Rich Roll?

  Like, right at the very end?

• 48:25Speaker 00

  We thought we'd seen everything. Yeah, the Yukon had thrown everything at us. And then all of a sudden, yeah, right at the very end, fire, which we managed, literally just gets back to Whitehorse and then Rhodes and everything were closed. It was, it was that bad. It was getting that big. And again, it was just maybe a signal, the Yukon going, "Ross, you are done. Take the win."

• 48:44Rich Roll?

  Chris told me that, uh... Had the water been a little bit warmer, or you know, had you been not as cold as you were, he thinks that you could have swum all the way to Alaska. He was like, I really, he's like, this guy is a freak of nature. Like, I seriously believe that he could have very easily kept going.

• 49:03Speaker 00

  Oh, that's nice of him. Yeah. Do you know what? It's interesting. The conditions are so variable in the Yukon. I said, it's almost like a Rubik's Cube in a minefield set inside a maze. It just changes. And the team that we had out there, they were incredible. They do the River Quest every year, which is the kayak race. And so the way that they read the river, they're able to go, Ross, we need you left, we need you right. No, not down that one. That's a log jam. We need you right. Just navigating me through. And it was so interesting that immediately, as I got out of hospital, I caught up with the team. We were all at a bar. And the first thing that Liam, one of the captains, one of the drivers said, I said, Liam, I gave a big hug. I said, thank you so much. He looked me dead in the eye and he went, oh, we can go further. And I went, oh, I know.

• 49:46Speaker 00

  My girlfriend's like, no, no. So, yeah.

• 49:49Rich Roll?

  Poor Hester, the secret sauce in all of this. This poor woman. She's had to live through all of it. Like, you're never home. Like, you guys must have quite an amazing relationship. I mean, she was on the team. She was there through this whole thing.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  Oh, Rich. I mean, she, yeah, she's incredible. Yeah. I think what's interesting is you have to, you have to outsource common sense. So you can't trust your own thoughts. When you're completely sleep deprived, you need to look at someone on the boat and know that they're making decisions for you, and they're the right decisions. Even though you're thinking logically, you're not. And then on top of that as well, she's just almost like that, like a compass of common sense. I sort of look at her and she knows. And if I'm not acting right, she will pick up on it. And I think the other thing about that as well is, for anyone listening, if you're doing something similar, it's knowing the right people that you can be vulnerable around as well. Like, there were so many times where I was just in pieces, like tongues coming off, like necks falling off,

• 50:44Speaker 00

  like GB swim, lock nest. And there's those people around who you can just be vulnerable with, and that's okay. You know, that they are completely there for you and supporting. And yeah, I've been with Hester, oh, I should get this right, I think 12 years. And yeah, she's amazing.

• 51:00Rich Roll?

  The other thing Chris told me was that if if all three team members, Hester, Chris, and Dr. Tom agreed that you needed to stop, that they were gonna pull you out.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. At the end, it was it was getting like that. Yeah, that all three of them, I can still see their faces now if I shut my eyes. And they were very closely looking at me and monitoring me. And I think there's an element, you know, that when you are in the Hurt Locker, but beyond that, you're trying to convince yourself, but those who really know you are looking at you going, it's not got much more. We're playing with the boundaries of common sense and hypothermia here.

• 51:34Rich Roll?

  What does it mean to you? What does all this mean?

• 51:36Speaker 00

  Do you know what's interesting is trying to get a bit philosophical with it, because I asked myself the same question, like, it's like, why do I continue to do these things? And I think when you look at the myth of Sisyphus, you're aware of Greek mythology, and Sisyphus was was one of the the most intelligent men to ever live. And he kind of outsmarted the gods, and the gods were really annoyed about this. So what they did is they said, okay, Sisyphus, what we're gonna do is gonna, we're gonna doom you to basically roll a boulder up a hill for eternity. And as soon as the boulder gets up to the top of the hill, it just rolls back down. So for eternity, you're just doomed to just struggle. But it was Albert Camus, the French philosopher, who said, but this is interesting, because if you imagine Sisyphus was able to outsmart the gods one more time, and he was able to do this, if you imagine him smiling. So as he's rolling the boulder up a hill

• 52:20Speaker 00

  and back down, he's enjoying it. He's taking control over it, this eternal struggle. And what I love here, Albert Camus said, the struggle alone is enough to fill a man's heart. And that that really struck a chord with me. And I think kind of that thread goes through philosophy and psychology, Jordan Peterson, you know, the the meaning of life is to pick up the heaviest load you can carry it. Viktor Frankl, the meaning of life is to give life meaning. And so when you start looking at that, for me, the pursuit of a nonstop swim, it might be impossible, it might be never ending. But in many ways, it's my boulder. It's the struggle alone is enough to fill my heart.

• 52:55Rich Roll?

  And the carrying of it. Gives you meaning. And if you had to define that meaning, what would that look like? How do you put words to what that meaning is?

• 53:05Speaker 00

  I think it's just the relentless pursuit of sports science. So even though you're rolling the body, you're just collecting data the whole time. So I think it's that, that when all is said and done, we're probably going to end up with the most comprehensive study of ultra endurance in swimming than anywhere else. And I think that will be, that'd be a pretty cool legacy to leave behind.

• 53:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You mentioned Sisyphus with a smile on his face, which brings us to your third superpower, which is your ability to smile, you know, throughout these experiences. Like, you're somebody, you know, at least as far as I can tell, who's pretty good at equanimity. Like, in the midst of these incredibly challenging situations, you're always kind, you always have a smile on your face, you're always present with the fact that you're the one who volunteered for this and recruited all these people to join you. And you treat them with respect and with grace. And that's not an easy thing to do when you're as depleted and as exhausted and in as much pain as you are. And I think that's a real credit to

• 54:09Rich Roll?

  your character. Like, and I think it's also something that keeps you afloat when you're ready to quit, right? To be able to smile in those situations is an indicator of like gratitude, I think, on some level. And also not taking yourself or what you're doing all that seriously.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  I think-

• 54:28Rich Roll?

  Is that fair?

• 54:29Speaker 00

  I appreciate you saying that, because I think so often athletes will talk about sort of manning up and gritting your teeth. And I think that's fine. It definitely works for some people. I've found that it's not quite sustainable for three days. You can grit your teeth for maybe 12 hours, certainly a marathon. But when it starts going over three hours, I've found it doesn't, doesn't quite work. You have to just swim with gratitude, you know, because even not only sort of psychological spirituality and stuff, I think it's just in terms of like your biochemistry as well. To grit your teeth for three days during sleep deprivation, when you're swimming through bacteria and all sorts, it's just your biochemistry. It's just not gonna work. So I think there's, I think there's kind

• 55:13Speaker 00

  of how I was raised, but also there's probably some sports science in it that I've tried in the past. It's like, oh yeah, that'd be cool. Just grit your teeth. And then I'm like, oh, it doesn't work.

• 55:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's not really your disposition either.

• 55:26Speaker 00

  It's not.

• 55:29Rich Roll?

  I know that training for something like this goes through phases and it's periodized. But if you can, you know, kind of describe or characterize like what a typical day of training looks like for you for, you know, getting ready for something like this or a cycle, maybe.

• 55:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it got really boring. Towards the end, we were swimming for 10 to 16 hours a day. I was, I was just literally turning up at a pool with a picnic on the side.

• 55:55Rich Roll?

  I mean, 10 to 16 hours of swimming a day, that's, that's gotta be like 30 kilometers, right?

• 55:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:00Rich Roll?

  30,000 meters.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Just, just literally just up and down. And sometimes at Loughborough University, it was always so funny, like good friend of mine in here, like Adam Peaty going for his next Olympics.

• 56:11Rich Roll?

  And, you know, I was. That guy's a beast.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  He's unbelievable. You look at him and, and I joke so often.

• 56:16Rich Roll?

  Does he train at Loughborough?

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:18Rich Roll?

  Oh, he does.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's so funny because.

• 56:20Rich Roll?

  World record holder on the hunter breaststroke.

• 56:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. And just like the greatest breaststroke in the world's ever seen. He's just, he's just amazing. And, and Melly's coach as well, but she was an amazing swimmer as well. And just incredible coach. But you look at Adam, you know, and he is a makoshark. He is lean. He's just tall. He's broad. You know, and then I'm just in the lane next to him, eating sandwiches and croissants. And it's just such a contrast. But Adam, yeah, he is, he is amazing. But being at Loughborough, it is so interesting to train there with some incredible swimmers, all going to the Olympics. Whereas I am, yeah, I am a basking shark, a whale shark at best compared to them.

• 56:56Rich Roll?

  And what do you learn from them? What does Peaty tell you?

• 56:58Speaker 00

  One of the biggest things that I've done, I think, in the last, I want to say like two years is really just fell in love with swimming because with swimming, how I do it, it's more akin to like an expedition. It's like climbing Everest versus running a marathon. So when people sort of say, oh, you're a swimmer. I'm like, oh, I am, but I just mean I move in water, but I'm doing it through rivers and oceans. You can't compare me to a portmimer. They're incredible. But trying to learn from them, I think it's made me so much more efficient. It's almost like comparing Kipchoge to Edmund Hillary. You know, they're so different. Yeah, they're both on feet, but they're so different. And I think, but learning and falling in love with swimming as a sport, I was a huge fan as well.

• 57:42Speaker 00

  I love Brett Hawke, you know, his podcast. I love that. We've just been talking about, I'm obsessed with the 50 freestyle as well. Can't wait to see like Ben Proud, Manadu, Cam McAvoy. I can't wait to see what happens there. So I've really fallen in love with sport of swimming in a pool. And it's kind of made me better as a result, even though swimming, it's not the determining factor. It's like we said, resilience, mental, feeding strategies, but trying to become a better swimmer.

• 58:08Rich Roll?

  You made a video a while back where you got in a flume and, you know, kind of teed up against

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Stephane.

• 58:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like a great European sprinter. Yeah.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  He's amazing. He just broke, he, oh, don't quote me on this. I think he just broke three masters records at the nationals, I think.

• 58:25Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  He's incredible.

• 58:41Rich Roll?

  All of which brings us to sharks, because the greatest swimmers are the most efficient swimmers. And there's no swimmer more efficient than the shark. Maybe the dolphin, but like sharks are pretty good, right?

• 58:52Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:53Rich Roll?

  So walk me through how you got involved in this whole Shark Week thing.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  Oh, this is amazing. So, yeah, Shark Fest, National Geographic. Basically, some of the chiefs there, Janet and Tracy, just amazing. We were chatting about the GB swim when I swam around Great Britain. And there was a period where we were going around the top of Scotland. And I was just kept company by a basking shark. This basking shark was looking at me, kind of going, oh, you're not a shark. You're not a seal, not quite sure what you are. But, you know, nothing really swims around the top of Scotland. So it ended up keeping me company for essentially two days. Then the basking shark ended up going, I assumed, to Iceland. And I went around the top of Scotland and went back down the other side. And it was just this encounter that when I was swimming with a basking shark. It looked at me and was like, what are you doing? Like, you're taking 20 strokes to my one tail flip.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  You know, I was so clumsy as a result. And it was just this idea of if you could follow in the footsteps of shark, try and biomimic them, learn from them, what could we uncover? So, speaking to Janet and Tracy at National Geographic, and we basically just said, wouldn't it be amazing to try and pitch you against sharks? You're almost doomed to fail. You know, it's not gonna work. But the spectacle alone will serve as a Trojan horse to bring shark science to a completely new audience. I said, look, I'm in. Get my goggles, I'm in. So, we tried to swim as fast as a Mako shark, world's fastest shark, polaris out the water like a white shark, the ones off South Africa that just jump out of what propel seals, try to eat as much as a tiger shark,

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  and then finally, a hammerhead shark, because of its unique shape of its head, is able to just turn on a dime and just withstand so many G-forces. So, they put me up in an RAF fighter pilot plane to see if I could withstand as many G-forces as a hammerhead shark. And it's all in this documentary that comes out on Disney Plus for Shark Fest. It's amazing.

• 1:00:43Rich Roll?

  And what did you learn? Like, I don't wanna spoil it for anybody, but what did you take away from this experience? Like, what did you? Did you figure out the shark's secret? And can that secret be incorporated into your life and performance, Ross?

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Genuinely, yeah, no, genuinely.

• 1:00:58Rich Roll?

  Are you becoming a shark?

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  Genuinely can. So, Alison Towner, one of the world-leading experts in white sharks, she's amazing. And the polaris, for instance, which I wanted to chat to you about.

• 1:01:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we're gonna talk about it. I know you have. I got a lot of, I got a lot of input on this, but go ahead.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  So, you have experience with monofins. Now, this was completely new to me. I'd never used a monofin before in my life. And I remember my first ever session, I put it on, and it was completely different. The locomotion, understanding hydrodynamics, how to move. It was completely different. And I polaris out the water, and I managed to kinda get out to my, like, my trunks. And I turned to Alison, and I said, how was that? And she's studied white sharks off South Africa. And this always stuck with me. She goes, that's not bad for a naked shaven ape. And I said, what do you mean? And she goes, you've got this clumsy skeletal system and you are like forty, forty-five percent muscle at best. Where she said, white sharks, they're sixty-five, upwards of sixty-five percent muscle. They have this flexible cartilage and these propulsive forces that all go through the tail. So they are just launching themselves out.

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  So it was trying to understand that and take this clumsy skeletal system, this naked shaven ape, and trying to jam my feet into a monofin and become a shark. It didn't obviously go as well as a white shark, but it sort of changed my understanding. I've sort of said since sharks taught me how to swim, but they really did. And, and I mean, same question, monofin, it's so different, isn't it? Which, which you sort of pioneered with Chris, right?

• 1:02:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the monofin, for people that don't know, is a gigantic flipper. You insert both of your feet into it, they're locked in. And these fins come in a variety of stiffnesses and materials, et cetera. And it's fascinating when you put one on and you swim, because you can generate so much torque and propulsion underwater. And, and it allows you to swim at speeds like you just can't even imagine. Before, but it's also very tiring, like it uses your entire body. It's something that will quickly exhaust you. And you would think like, oh, well, somebody who has really strong legs is going to be really good at this. But all the force is generated from the core and the back, right?

• 1:03:03Rich Roll?

  So it's, it's about like pressing your chest down as much as it is about bringing your feet up or pushing them down. When you're trying to go as fast as possible, it almost creates like an, an invisible like line through the water where the undulation is so subtle, because the torque down and up is, is quite rapid. So the range of motion becomes very narrow. And when you look at a shark or a dolphin, I mean, a shark, the fin goes side to side. The dolphin, it goes up and down, but they're, they're varieties of the same thing, right? You watch them swim through the water, they're unbelievably efficient and you can't understand how they're going so fast, because it doesn't look like very many things are moving, right?

• 1:03:44Rich Roll?

  And what you learn from that is that it's efficiency of motion and making the water work for you. In the most hydrodynamic way possible, that's going to create the most amount of acceleration and speed. And the monofin is a great way to test that because anything that is out of whack, well, you'll quickly know right away, like, this is not working for me. Like, it brings everything into focus. Like, you can't get away with anything when you're wearing one.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  It's so true. But on that note as well, I love that you touched upon there, that you're reducing drag forces as well. So when you look at a shark, especially a Mako, they are so streamlined. So not only have they got these propulsive forces at the same time, they've just reduced drag so much. And it was at Loughborough University, where they did a 3D model scan of my body and compared it to that of a Mako. I knew I was bad, but it was horrendous. And when they even, not only that, they said, look, if you were traveling at the speed of a Mako, this would be your energy expenditure as well. Because I just had, like, when you look at it, there was just red lines all around my head, my shoulders, even my bum as well. It was just like, it was terrible.

• 1:04:50Rich Roll?

  Where you're, where you're just losing energy, or energy is being expended that's not moving you forward.

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And to go back to your point, actually, previously, which was like, yeah, there's probably certain, an element in my youth where it's like, oh, I kind of like, you know, benching, bicep curling, big weights. Whereas looking at that, I was like, oh, God, that is terrible. And certainly, that's one thing for the Yukon that I really tried to focus on. That it was just like, the Yukon and long swims do not care if you've got big biceps and chiseled abs. You know, you need to be fat, Ross, and hydrodynamic.

• 1:05:19Rich Roll?

  So this Polaris jump, basically, you get, you shared it on Instagram, like, you're underwater with this monofin on, and you propel yourself upward and see how much you can breach your body above the surface of the water, right?

• 1:05:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:05:33Rich Roll?

  You're pretty good.

• 1:05:34Speaker 00

  Aw, you're kind.

• 1:05:35Rich Roll?

  You're pretty good. I have seen fin swimmers completely breach, like, all get all the way, get their entire body out of the water, including the fin. Like, that's what's possible. I think people can get up to like, three meters out of the water.

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I want to say, I think the world record, I think it's an Egyptian guy, and it's incredible. But again,

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  Watching, it's not human. The fin swimmers, they completely changed their biomechanics. It's just-

• 1:06:03Rich Roll?

  It's a whole different thing.

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  Completely.

• 1:06:05Rich Roll?

  And it's a sport, which I did not know. I guess like a short history lesson, working my way up to like how I got introduced to this. I came up as a swimmer in the late eighties, arrived at Stanford at the very early days of when swimmers, for the very first time, were pioneering and experimenting the underwater dolphin kick. And swimmers were beginning to realize that they could actually go much faster underwater in a streamlined position on their back, doing a dolphin kick. They could swim much faster this way than they could on the surface, swimming freestyle or any other discipline. And there were a handful of athletes who realized they were quite good at this and really doubled down on it.

• 1:06:49Rich Roll?

  The most famous example being this guy, Dave Berkoff, at Harvard. It's still called the Berkoff Blast because nobody was better underwater than this guy with his underwater dolphin kick. He was a hundred backstroke specialist. And at the time, there were no rules around what you could or couldn't do with this underwater dolphin kick. So he went to the Olympics in Seoul and swam the entire hundred backstroke underwater. You know, he came up to take a breath and flip turn at the 50 meters and swam all the way back underwater. Not only him, basically the entire heat of the finals of the 100 meter backstroke. You can, I'm sure you can find it on YouTube. The Seoul, you know, Seoul Olympics, like 100 meter backstroke. And world records were broken. It was crazy. So they ended up having to change the rule, like, well, we can't have this.

• 1:07:34Rich Roll?

  We can't just have swimmers seeing how long they can stay underwater. So they changed it so that you have to surface at 15 meters. But to this day, it's set in motion, you know, a new way of swimming, which prioritized the dolphin kick. So now it's all about power off the walls. How quickly can you generate force with that dolphin kick? And, you know, get up to speed before you have to break the surface. And there are athletes that are extraordinary at this. And the ones that are the best tend to be, you know, the ones that find themselves atop the podium. So this is something that was kind of happening when I was still competing. And then after I was done competing, done with college, you know, in law school, graduated law school.

• 1:08:18Rich Roll?

  I'm in California, I'm in Northern California, I'm studying for the bar exam, and I'm doing it also with Pablo Morales, who I'd swam with, multiple world record holder, NCAA champion, you know, like, one of the most decorated swimmers of all time, right? And Pablo was friends with this guy called John Mix. John Mix was a former, I think he was a water polo player, and he had recently spent time in Europe, and he was traveling all around Europe, and he discovered this thing that he had no idea existed, which was called competitive fin swimming. So apparently, especially in Eastern European countries, in China and in Russia, at a very

• 1:09:00Rich Roll?

  early age, when a young athlete shows prowess in the water, they make a determination, is this person going to be a competitive swimmer, or a water polo player, or are they going to go into this thing called fin swimming, which is competition in a swimming pool, wearing a monofin. At all distances you would see in a typical swim meet, from 50 meters all the way up to the 1500 meters. And there's all kinds of varieties here. There's the apnea, like the 50 meters where you're just underwater the whole way, there's plenty of them where you have a center mount snorkel, so you can breathe while you're under, you're just beneath the surface, and then there's ones where they actually have a small oxygen tube, where they swim the 1500 meters entirely underwater, holding an oxygen tube in front of themselves.

• 1:09:43Rich Roll?

  So like, he, his mind's blown, right? And he realizes, like, nobody in America has ever heard of this thing, and he comes back and he creates a prototype for a monofin. And this becomes the very first product at a swim apparel company called Finis. You know Finis, right? So this is how Finis started. John Mix started Finis, and it started with a monofin. And he started giving out these monofins to competitive swimmers, for them to train with, because, as you know, nothing will develop your core, like, swimming with a fin. Like, it's unbelievable, it's so stiff, right? And John decides that he wants to put together for the very first time, a team to

• 1:10:27Rich Roll?

  travel to Hungary to compete in the world championships of fin swimming. And Pablo, he was an equity partner in Phinis from the very beginning. So he goes to Pablo. It comes to me and we kind of cobble together a small group, like a ragtag Bad News Bears team.

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  That's what Chris said.

• 1:10:46Rich Roll?

  To go to this world championships and compete with this mono fin, right? And I hadn't swum in years, but in addition to Pablo, we had Jenny Thompson, who was like this unbelievably, she was the most decorated female Olympian of all time, like multiple world records, et cetera. Misty Hyman, who won gold in the 200 meter butterfly in Sydney, she was on the team. It was like 12 of us or whatever. And Chris Morgan, this guy that we've been talking about, was one of those guys, right? So this is how I met Chris. And for a brief period of time, I think we only had like a month to get ready for this thing, and none of us had ever worn one of these fins. So we're training, we're trying to figure out how all of this works.

• 1:11:28Rich Roll?

  And we show up with no idea like how to do this, except like, these people have Olympic gold medals, you know, it's crazy. And we just got our asses completely kicked.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 1:11:40Rich Roll?

  But it was amazing to go to this meet and see like, the 50 meters, the 50 meter apnea, these guys dive in, I mean, I can't, I don't know what the world record is offhand, but it's some crazy number. And they dive in and it creates this wave that goes down the pool. And all the timers who were standing at the other end of the pool just get drenched when that, it's like a tsunami that slowly moves down the pool and then just hits the wall on the other side and creates this big splash.

• 1:12:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05Rich Roll?

  Like, it is wild. And these people have like a level of expertise with this thing that, you know, was really quite stunning.

• 1:12:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're so, as a spectacle, it's incredible, isn't it? Yeah, it's exactly that. It was the first time, again, because of the shark documentary, actually tuning in and looking at them. It's insane. Like, again, we humans as naked apes can do that. It was incredible. Is it you or Chris who has the American record still?

• 1:12:31Rich Roll?

  Oh, it's definitely not me. I don't even know. Chris would know. If Chris had an American record, he'd be aware of that, I guess. I don't know. And what was funny is, I mean, we had a great time. There's crazy stories from that experience, but it's not like we came back and then that created a foothold upon which something meaningful could build. I mean, Phineas then became this huge, you know, corporation that to this day is one of the biggest swimwear, you know, companies in the world for competitive swimmers. But it didn't, it didn't instigate like an interest in fin swimming, you know? I don't know what it's like in the UK, but still, I think a lot of swimmers train with these things, you know, versions of these things. But we went and like, there would be these handmade fins made out of fiberglass that were tapered just right. And each event has a different type of fin with a different level of stiffness.

• 1:13:16Rich Roll?

  Like, it gets really intricate and complicated and complex, like, in a really fascinating way.

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  It really does. Because it was exactly that, that when I started sort of exploring this idea of polarizing out the water, I just sort of rung up a few companies and just went, I need a mono fin. And they said, ah, okay, brilliant. Okay. So what sort of stiffness? What sort of texture? What sort of materials? I was like, I, just a mono fin? So it was exactly that. And I actually went for one of the stiffest ones just straight off the bat, because I was like, I just need the most powerful. And oh my God, that's almost like going into the gym for the first time and saying, I want to squat. And them just saying, okay, cool. Put 250 on the bar and see how you do. My God, the next day, just ached in places that I never have before. I think that's what's so interesting as well. I mean, I spoke about him before, but I love Brett Hawke and what he's doing for, for

• 1:14:03Speaker 00

  sprinting, specifically in swimming. I think we're still uncovering things right now. It's like, just the strength and conditioning of swimming. And, and that, again, this is what the shark documentary sort of taught me, that Mother Nature did a pretty good job. So if you're going to try to improve yourself in any sort of way in the water, just go and learn from the apex predator. There's probably clues.

• 1:14:23Rich Roll?

  So they pit you with a Mako.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:26Rich Roll?

  The Mako swims something like 80 miles an hour, right? You're not going to win this race. So what is, how does that? How's that work?

• 1:14:33Speaker 00

  This was it. So I was at Loughborough University immediately.

• 1:14:35Rich Roll?

  I don't care what monofin you're wearing, you're not going as fast as the Mako.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  No, no. And that was it. So immediately upon hearing this, this was so interesting because I just thought like an athlete, like a sports scientist. So the very first port of call was I'm going to Loughborough University. I turned up at Loughborough University. I start speaking to all of the experts from British Swimming. And I'm like, look, I need to swim as fast as a Mako shark. And it was so interesting that they treated me like a human swimmer. Obviously, that's as they should. So I am drilling months and months. And I'm trying to go from long distance swimming to being a sprinter. You know, everything, even in the gym, there's a strong correlation between your pull up strength and your swim speed as well. So I'm like, I think I worked up to 75 to 80 kilos, one rep max pull up. And I'm working, working out. And this is months and months and months. And I am shaving off like tenths of a second until I actually just sat there. And there was almost this epiphany that it was

• 1:15:23Speaker 00

  like, what am I doing? Like, I'm so far from this. I need to, need to think like a shark, not just swim. I need to think like a shark. And the way that sharks on long migrations will look at tides, currents, water columns, their physiology will pick up oceanic cues, like changes in temperature, salinity. I was like, that's what I need to do. So there was this amazing tide just off Wales in the United Kingdom. And you get this crazy compression of the tide. So for six hours a day, it comes through, six hours goes back. So if you could time it perfectly at peak tide on a spring tide, you could essentially have 10 knots going with you. I was like, that's what I need to do. So I took all of that training from the British English Institute of Sport. And then I went to

• 1:16:04Speaker 00

  Wales, like I said, and we timed it perfectly. And Rich, you'll understand this as an amazing pool swimmer yourself. You understand when you're swimming the tiles and the lane ropes going past. And you're like, oh, that's quick. But when you're swimming in 10 knots on a spring tide, oh my, you feel like Poseidon. Every stroke I was pulling, I was overtaking like five houses. I was like, I am amazing. I'm invisible. But then obviously the tide changes and you're going backwards. So it's so humbling. But there was this idea of not just swimming like a shark, but thinking like a shark at the same time as well. So we. I think in the end, we got a quarter Mako, but that was with every single

• 1:16:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:43Speaker 00

  technological advancement and help from the ocean I could. Still woefully bad.

• 1:16:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The meta-message really is, is making the water work for you.

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  Is exactly.

• 1:16:54Rich Roll?

  And as a very muscled guy, it's easy to fall under the illusion that the way to get better is to get stronger and to just force your way through the water, which is a cross-purposes with the speed that's otherwise accessible. The people who really know how to feel it and where they're finding, you know, where, because when you're, when you're entering your arm, you're looking for the still water. If you pull shallow, that water's already moving. Like, it's not gonna propel you forward. It's like, but there's an otherworldliness to like trying to find that eddy that you can grab onto that's gonna move you forward the best. And it's not about how strong you are. It's like, how much can you extend your shoulder? And how much can you like rotate your hips and like, you know, corkscrew

• 1:17:36Rich Roll?

  it so that you're creating your own eddy that's pushing the water behind you? And these are things that have nothing to do with how many pull-ups you can do.

• 1:17:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. It's so true. And I think, especially in swimming, because it's so kinesthetic, proprioception, that feel of the water. If I'm out for a week, I get back in and I'm like, it's like I've forgotten how to swim. You know, but it's true of any sport. I think when people say running, it's like, we've been able to run since we were infants, right? It's like, no, but it's a skill. Like, it's energy efficiency, like just drilling that. So it's amazing the amount of times where people don't actually drill the skill of what they're doing. Because I run. I've been doing it since I was an infant. It's like, well, you might be overstriding, four foot striking, heel strike. There's so many variables. And with swimming, that's been one of the biggest things. Again, like I said, I'm such a fan of swimming now, such a sort of student of it. And like Cam McAvoy, some of his underwaters, for those who say Australian 50 meter, amazing. The way he's sort of changed his career around.

• 1:18:29Speaker 00

  But his catch phase, he just catches like an impossible angle. Or Ben Proud as well. James Gibson, his coach, who was an amazing swimmer himself. But Ben Proud, some of his clips just go crazy viral because his attention to detail. I think with Cam McAvoy as well, he'll do, I hope I'm not, I'm getting this right, so I apologize if I'm not, but he might do like three kilometers in an entire week. That's it, which for swimmers, you're like, that's crazy. That's such low mileage. It's like, no, but you don't understand of those three kilometers. It's so crazy, purposeful at speed, race pace. And I think that's what's so exciting at the minute for swimming where we're at.

• 1:19:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's pretty cool. Are you going to be in Paris to watch them swimming?

• 1:19:09Speaker 00

  I would love to, you know, like, I think UConn was the main thing. Now I'm recovered and not in hospital. I would love to go for the 50 freestyle men's and women's. Oh, my God, I'd love to be there. It would be amazing.

• 1:19:19Rich Roll?

  The Shark Week thing isn't your first outing with National Geographic. You were, you were a member of the Limitless crew that went on some crazy adventures, which brings up like your relationship with Chris Hemsworth and his brother Liam and the training that you guys did together. But before we get into that, like, how did the Limitless thing come together? Was that just Chris saying, like, you got to be part of this?

• 1:19:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh, he, yeah. Chris, essentially, I think when you're doing athletic adventures that are a little bit out there, whether it's ice swimming, climbing a rope, dangling from the Blue Mountains, that there's probably not many people whose name comes up who could probably help. So me and Chris were just sort of chatting. He sort of reached out and it was just, I think, what's amazing about the Hemsworth gene pool is from Luke, Liam and Chris. And then even actually, when you look at Chris's kids, Luke's kids, it's obscene that the gene pool needs to be studied. It's just, it's just ridiculous. And with Chris, I think, especially with the rope climb, because he was Thor size, because he was getting big for Thor. So his training made absolutely no sense.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  Because on the one hand, you had Marvel and everyone saying, right, you need to look like the god of thunder. And he's like, cool, got it. But then for Limitless, it's like, right, we need to dangle you 100 foot from the Blue Mountains and we need you to climb a 50 foot rope. And it's like, those two don't work together. Like, that's not going to work. So what he did specifically on the rope climb was just incredible. And then not only that, again, you know, body fat being insulating. You need body fat. Some of the greatest ice swimmers have an abundance of it. It's amazing. Chris had none because he was the god of thunder. So we took him from the heat of the Australian summer and just went, here you go. Here's the Arctic Circle. This is ice swimming. And I think it was just, it was a testament to his physiology, his psychology.

• 1:21:07Speaker 00

  But that was one of the best things I've ever been part of because I'm so often just involved in myself and an event. And to be there for somebody else, but also to see. Chris just applied. It was really quite special. We all speak as a team, like what happened in Norway for the ice swim. It just hasn't been done before. You don't take someone from Australia and throw them in the Arctic. So you just don't do it.

• 1:21:29Rich Roll?

  And to get to do it with Darren Aronofsky at the helm, one of our, you know, most brilliant living directors.

• 1:21:36Speaker 00

  Do you know what? The thing is about Darren, he's a beast as well. Like, so people don't understand, his ice swimming as well, he'd done a little bit before Norway, but we were on a lunch break in Norway and it was Aaron, one of our friends, it was his birthday. And I was like, guys, we've got to go swimming. And everyone was like, I've not got any swim stuff. I'm like, we just strip down to our underwear, we go run in and we just go and smash some waves. And Darren was literally the first to volunteer. He was like, I'm in. Darren's a beast as well. Yeah. I trained with him in New York as well.

• 1:22:03Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did?

• 1:22:03Speaker 00

  He's a specimen. Yeah. I know.

• 1:22:06Rich Roll?

  Because you don't think of him as being an athlete.

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:09Rich Roll?

  It's just this huge brain with like this unreal facility for creativity.

• 1:22:14Speaker 00

  Is exactly it. And it's so weird. I mean, you're so right. I've never felt so dumb as when I speak to Darren. Because he just speaks on a level with like fear and philosophy. I just sit there, I'm like, oh my God, I just float for a living. Whereas when we train, he is a specimen, you know, there's this, there's no quit in him. Some of the drop sets, we did blood restriction training as well, some of the drop sets, he just won't give up. He's a beast. Yeah.

• 1:22:38Rich Roll?

  The blood restriction training, are you talking about Katsu? That takes us back to Chris Morgan again. This is his whole thing, you know? Which is a very interesting, I mean, he is like an evangelist of this. And I know that you've played around with it. What is it?

• 1:22:52Speaker 00

  So I started using it first for my rehab after my shoulder surgery, because essentially you're not lifting any heavy weights. There's no mechanical tension. So after shoulder surgery, I had to completely rest and wait for the cartilage to repair and regrow. So as a result, I needed a new training stimulus, something that wasn't mechanical tension. I couldn't be lifting weight or even metabolic stress. So lots of high volume. I couldn't do that either. So that kind of led me down the route of looking at different rehab tools. And one of the things was blood restriction training. Which is just this idea of, it's got many applications, but what I used it for is, say you are attaching it to your bicep and we start doing bicep curls, you do 20 reps, 10 seconds rest in between for five sets. What's interesting is the body sort of goes,

• 1:23:34Speaker 00

  hang on, if you're restricting the blood, there's no blood coming to the biceps. So if there's no blood coming to the biceps, there's no oxygen. If there's no oxygen, we're going to have to turn off the slow twitch fibers and only target the fast twitch fibers. So as a result, you just get this crazy burning sensation in the fast twitch fibers, which also increases your body's ability to just accumulate and tolerate lactic acid, which also spikes hormones at the same time, growth hormones specifically. So it's weird how it kind of targets muscle fibers, but at the same time, it's almost altering your biochemistry in a way. And it's a completely different training adaptation to just shifting heavy weight.

• 1:24:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're essentially putting these straps around different appendages, right?

• 1:24:13Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:24:13Rich Roll?

  Tightening them up. And this is a tradition that's not new. It's rooted in Japan, right? There was a pioneer of this who believed in it and evangelized it. And Katsu is, is the sort of brand that I guess Chris and Steve Munatonas now are at the helm of, right? Yeah.

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was exactly it. So it's funny, it's a tool. And if people say, do you use it all day, every day? I'm like, no, no, it's just, it's just to have in your back pocket. It's the same way that slow, low intensity training, high intensity training, German volume training, these are all tools. You know, you just need to know when to use them.

• 1:24:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How did you first get connected with the Hemsworth brothers?

• 1:24:53Speaker 00

  I think it was just because, like I said, with Limitless, there's not many people who you approach who have experienced ice swimming and climbing a rope the height of Everest. So it was kind of, Chris just reached out, we ended up speaking. I was a massive fan for ages.

• 1:25:08Rich Roll?

  He just reached out and he's like, what are you doing? I need to understand, like...

• 1:25:12Speaker 00

  Kind, kinda, kinda, yeah. And then I was out in Byron for so long. And yeah, we just have these just training camps sort of out there, like Luke Zocky, his, his actual strength and conditioning coach and one of his best friends is amazing. And then, and then, like I said, It's so strange, and like I said, they genuinely, that gene pool needs to be studied. Because Luke, you know, the oldest Hemsworth and Liam, they... What's interesting about them, I think it's their work capacity is one of the biggest things. That we will catch up and train and I'll go, hey guys, oh, have you trained today? Or do you feel okay? And they'll go, no, no, no, we've not trained today. I'll go, okay, cool. Okay, so we'll do like an hour, two hour session. They're like, yeah. And then as we're training, I'll find out that they've just been surfing for six hours. But they don't class that as training?

• 1:25:57Speaker 00

  I'm like, oh my God. So it's just, yeah, they are just, I think Craig and Leon, so their, their parents, I think they've got, I hope I'm right in this, but Danish, Netherlands, you know, they've got some Viking DNA somewhere. Cause they all just...

• 1:26:13Rich Roll?

  Well, something's going on because all three of those guys are absolute animals. And I know Luke a little bit. I've spent a ton of time in that, in that area in Byron. So I know, I know all those characters, right?

• 1:26:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:26Rich Roll?

  I know Ben at the Jenny, you know, like we, we have a lot of friend overlap from my time spent there. I keep waiting for our visits to overlap. I think you're due for a return this winter.

• 1:26:36Speaker 00

  I did, and I just missed you last time. I love Benny, by the way.

• 1:26:38Rich Roll?

  When were you, when were you there?

• 1:26:39Speaker 00

  Uh, last year for, uh, Luke and Chris's 40th. Oh, Chris's 40th, Luke's 39th.

• 1:26:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah. I had the pleasure of going over to Luke's house and having him put me through a workout, which was a whole experience. Yeah. So Luke is Chris's official trainer, or maybe he trains all three of them. I don't know.

• 1:26:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:58Rich Roll?

  But then when you get introduced, how did that work between you and Luke? And, you know, was your input like on an official level or were you just a friend like there training with those guys? Or what was the nature of that relationship? Because there's been a lot written about like, you know, Ross Edgley, you know, helped Chris get ready for Thor and, you know, we saw what, you know, what Chris's physique looked like.

• 1:27:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:22Rich Roll?

  In the lead up to playing that role.

• 1:27:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I think that's very much Luke Zocky and also just Hemsworth genetics. Like it's literally like, I mean, I actually arrived, cause I had shoulder surgery as well. So I actually arrived quite late onto the set of Thor. So when I arrived...

• 1:27:38Rich Roll?

  But in Byron, in the lead... Lead up to Thor though, also.

• 1:27:40Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 1:27:40Rich Roll?

  You were there for a long time and you guys were training together like daily.

• 1:27:43Speaker 00

  We were, yeah, but specifically rope climbs. And I think that's what's so amazing, like as a team, like there's just no egos. So if it's like, okay, today is rope specific stuff, then everybody goes, cool. Listen to Ross, you know, but equally if they say, okay, today is body weight conditioning. That's something Zokki is so good at, just general physical preparedness. Like he's an absolute beast. So I'm like, okay, cool. You take the session. And I think that's what's so interesting. And then if we go surfing, I'm like, right, I know nothing. So it's amazing that, and you'll know this because of the, the nature of people in Byron, there's just no egos. And so whoever is taking that session, someone will have a speciality. And then equally, if we're on a tennis court out there with Pat Rafter, everybody shuts up and we do as we told and Pat Rafter just rains down aces on us.

• 1:28:25Speaker 00

  You know, so it's interesting how if it's ice swimming, swimming or rope climbing.

• 1:28:30Rich Roll?

  You're the guy.

• 1:28:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. If it's anything out of that, or burgers or cheesecake, anything out of that. No, no, no, that's not my domain.

• 1:28:38Rich Roll?

  Speaking of cheesecake, what, what are we doing about your diet, Ross? Come on.

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  I cleaned it up.

• 1:28:43Rich Roll?

  I know that there's a certain pride in all the donuts that you eat and all this garbage.

• 1:28:47Speaker 00

  I cleaned it up.

• 1:28:48Rich Roll?

  But I'm telling you, you know, you're on the cusp of 40 and there will be a moment where your metabolism is gonna, you know, turn on you a little bit. And I want to get you ready for that so that you don't have to suffer the downside consequences of that.

• 1:29:02Speaker 00

  No, no, yeah.

• 1:29:03Rich Roll?

  And maybe you might be a little bit better at fat adaptation if you weren't like, you know, eating such awful stuff all the time.

• 1:29:11Speaker 00

  I know, I know, genuinely I am, because I do think there's definitely an element of, no, no, but I also think I am a little bit better. Maybe it's my fault, but you know, when I'm swimming, I'll post the tray of donuts and things like that. But honestly, since four, five years ago, since you introduced me to kombucha, I do have more vegetables. Genuinely, I do. I'm not, honestly, Benny always, again, mutual friend of mine at Ritz, but Benny always has me in stitches. When I go over to Byron.

• 1:29:35Rich Roll?

  Benny Ben Gordon.

• 1:29:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They, he'll constantly just be there just going, oh, Ross, this is, this is called broccoli.

• 1:29:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:42Speaker 00

  Here's a carrot.

• 1:29:44Rich Roll?

  Ben Gordon, we should say, is an unbelievable drummer for a metal band called Parkway Drive. And they tour the world, they have a huge fan base, but he also happens to be the proprietor of the Byron General Store, which is, which is basically where you gotta go if you wanna eat healthy food. Like, it's just, you know, all the best stuff, right? So it's, it's kind of like the must, you know, like breakfast stop-in every single day. And that was grown out of, like, his own kind of journey into well-being, from a place where he was, like, riddled with anxiety, performance anxiety, like, going to these huge venues. And part of his drumming, I know you know this, right? Like, he has

• 1:30:26Rich Roll?

  this massive drum kit, like, imagine Neil Peart from Rush, right? And the stage elevates it, and it's in this, like, it's in this, like, structure, like this scaffold, that's the word I'm looking for.

• 1:30:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:38Rich Roll?

  And then it elevates up, and then it rotates 360 degrees, and he's playing his drum solo upside down. And he does this in front of gigantic crowds. And apparently, there was a time in which this produced a lot of anxiety for him. And he went on this, like, kind of, journey to figure out how to live his life in a more, kind of, like, stable and balanced way, which led him to meditation, and to healthy eating, and all these things. And the, the General Store is really his expression, like, his offering to everybody else as a reflection of that.

• 1:31:07Speaker 00

  That's, yeah, that's exactly, I never thought about it like that, but that's exactly what it is. I, I love hanging out with Benny, because he's just got such a, a calming, sort of, he just, he's the best. And then, yeah, and then-

• 1:31:17Rich Roll?

  And now he's a dad.

• 1:31:18Speaker 00

  He is as well, yeah. But, oh, and the waffle fries as well. I know I just said I'm gonna eat healthily, but the waffle fries at the General Store, and the muffins, oh my god, they're amazing.

• 1:31:28Rich Roll?

  When you were there, you were also doing a lot of swimming, though. You were putting in the time for a swimming adventure that wasn't meant to be, right? Like, I, I know what it is, I don't know if you're, you wanna say what it was, but like, that kind of got deferred, right?

• 1:31:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:41Rich Roll?

  I have a sense that maybe we're gonna be seeing that-

• 1:31:43Speaker 00

  I think we might. So I'll keep it under wraps-

• 1:31:45Rich Roll?

  Near future.

• 1:31:46Speaker 00

  Because it might, yeah, it might come full circle. But, yeah, again, it was just a, a training camp out in Byron. Again, Chris was just amazing, because the amount of times I'd just be like, Chris, I just need a pool to swim in. And he'd be like, mate, just knock yourself out. So I would just be swimming up and down in his pool. And then Elsa as well, his wife, she's amazing. Sometimes, if they were having family dinner, you know, they have this amazing casserole or pasta dish, and they'd just, basically just take a, a bowl out and leave it on the side of the pool. For me, as I'm swimming, so as I'd pop my head up every 1K, I'll be like, oh, thanks, guys. And I'll just keep swimming as they're having family dinner.

• 1:32:20Rich Roll?

  Incredible stuff. Incredible.

• 1:32:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:24Rich Roll?

  What are we supposed to learn from you, Russ? What do we take away from these things that you've done that would be helpful in our own civilian lives?

• 1:32:32Speaker 00

  I'm still trying to figure that out myself, but I think, like I said, coming back to the idea of purpose, I think that's the biggest thing. And actually, we were chatting to the team just earlier, and I just think it's this idea of like, everybody's got something that they could do. And when you look at the history of these humans, the anthropology of these humans, we've always been sort of going on these journeys of self-discipline for self-discovery, you know, whether it's the Japanese monks going on an okugaki, the Yama Bushi monks of Japan, whether it's Aborigines going on walkabout, we've always been doing something. And I think, you know, recently, I'm a huge fan of Ned Brockman. I loved, it wasn't what he did, it's how he did it across Australia, Russ equally across Africa.

• 1:33:13Rich Roll?

  Russ Cook, the hardest geezer.

• 1:33:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh my God. Again, it wasn't what they did, it's how they did it that I just love. And then Ned's going for the record at the moment for 1,000 miles.

• 1:33:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think he's gonna be the fastest person to run 1,000 miles on a track.

• 1:33:27Speaker 00

  That was it, yes.

• 1:33:27Rich Roll?

  But it's centrally located, so that way, you know, people can come and join him, and it can be like a participatory kind of thing.

• 1:33:34Speaker 00

  I think it's amazing. And when I hear stories about that, and I look at people like that, I'm like, yes, that is, we're essentially doing exactly the same. There's a common theme throughout all of it, that, you know, as a tribe, if we were sitting there, there'd always be one in that tribe dating back to caveman times who would just say, what's over the horizon? Like, what is it? That wanderlust gene? There'll be something that that person that would go, do you know what? We're gonna stay here, we're gonna make a family, but you, you disappear over that mountain. And I think that's it. I think looking at guys like Russ and Ned, I'm just sort of trying to do my own sort of aquatic version. But anybody listening, I just think it could be anything, as long as it resonates with you, whether it's rowing, cycling, just pick a route, something. And yeah, that idea of self-discipline for self-discovery.

• 1:34:18Rich Roll?

  What is the weakness that shows up? That you really need to work on in your life, not in your swimming per se.

• 1:34:26Speaker 00

  Cheese cage.

• 1:34:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we have your diet. We talked about that. I'm talking emotionally. I guess where this is coming from is I hear that and I believe you. And I think that's laudable and beautiful and inspirational in all the best ways. But this goes back to your relationship to all of these events and kind of what they mean. Right. And I've seen too many people who use events like this to run away from certain things in their life, rather than towards some greater level of self-actualization at the tippy top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Right. So for being really honest, like I can admit that it's that I can use like endurance sports to hide from certain things that are uncomfortable and be celebrated for that.

• 1:35:12Rich Roll?

  When I know when my head hits the pillow that, you know, maybe there's some other things in my life that could use a little bit more attention, or maybe things are out of balance a little bit. And I'm just curious about like how you think about that equation.

• 1:35:25Speaker 00

  I think one of the biggest things, like to be completely honest and transparent about that, I think one of the biggest things was it's become an amazing job, like in reality. And I love the Japanese philosophy, the ikigai. So your ikigai, your reason for being, why you get up in the morning, your purpose, again, coming back to purpose, but that made up of four things, what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, but the fourth one, what you can be paid for. And I think that's what's so interesting because I know exactly what you're saying, that I think sometimes talking about philanthropy and charity and various other things, that's absolutely right, but you also need to be paid for it as well at the same time. So to be completely honest, there is a commercial aspect as well in that everything that I've done, it does work as a business, a very, very strange business, granted, but it is

• 1:36:10Speaker 00

  a business and it's something that I really enjoy. So if I was running away from anything, it'd probably be an office job. Whereas like in terms of business, I love the marketing of it, I think as well, which comes back to what you said, that the showmanship as well, but it's just putting something out into the world. I suppose very similar to the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, when Adamson, Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott, everyone was going to the South Pole to uncover something. But when they came back home, they were publishing their books and contributing to geology and science. There's an element of that as well, which is just this idea of it is a strange business, but it is a business as well. And I think too often. People probably don't want to say that because it's it's commercial, you know,

• 1:36:54Speaker 00

  you don't want to say it, but but the reality is is um it it has become my strange job to just float very far.

• 1:37:00Rich Roll?

  But that's a really beautiful thing to celebrate, that you can marry how you make a living with those prongs of Ikigai, like this thing that brings you joy, this thing that has meaning for other people, uh, there is a self-serving aspect to it, but there's a service aspect to it as well. Uh, and we live in a capitalist society, we all have to make a living, uh, and, you know, it's not something I'm unfamiliar with because I feel, you know, so blessed to be able to do this thing and to support my family in doing it. It's an absolute joy that marries like a passion that I have with something that is giving back to other people, but also, you know, supports me economically. So I I I get that completely.

• 1:37:40Rich Roll?

  But I guess in saying that, it then begs the question of the challenge that scares you most, like what's lingering out there on the horizon, maybe it's in the far future, doesn't necessarily have to be in the near future, that is like, yeah, I'm not ready for that one.

• 1:37:58Speaker 00

  I don't, yeah, I don't know. Are we talking professionally or personally?

• 1:38:02Rich Roll?

  No, I I I'm talking about, yeah, like in your endurance endeavors, your your athletic endeavors.

• 1:38:08Speaker 00

  I'm not sure. I'm still yet to find it. I think that's what it is. Yeah, I will, I I think I will, but I think one thing that the Loch Ness and Tressamino has taught me is um you're kind of bulletproof if you're okay with the outcome. You know, so even if it doesn't go well, there's nothing to be fearful of because what's the worst that can happen? You know, you've got an amazing team around you. So I think that was one of the biggest things that, yeah, we finished and the and certainly when I was like 21, it was black and white. If I failed, I failed. You couldn't speak to him, I'd have been in a terrible mood. Whereas with this one, we finished and my entire team around me just went, we're getting pizza. I went, yeah, let's get pizza. And and it was actually, it was interesting, friends of mine at the Royal Marines, one

• 1:38:53Speaker 00

  of the psychologists there, he was amazing, he was talking about, uh, when he'd speak to some of the guys going through Limpstam through their 32 weeks training, and some of the young recruits would be like, I have to make it through training, like this, this, I have to make it. If I don't, I'll be a failure. I'll go home. I can't look at my mom and dad in the eyes. The psychologist there said, yeah, in so many ways, it is the most important thing in the world. Like when you're in it, you have to make it through. There's no such thing as failure. You have to make it. It's so important. Don't even think of failure. But when it happens, it's not that bad. And I think that's the thing with Loch Ness and Tres Amino. When we were in it, I was like, nothing else matters. I have to make it to the finish line. We have to raise lows for ocean conservation, for records. We have to achieve everything. It needs to, it needs to do in crazy numbers in terms of visually for the charity.

• 1:39:34Speaker 00

  That, that is success. But then when it didn't happen, immediately you just flip a switch and go, ah, it was just a swim.

• 1:39:41Rich Roll?

  Hmm. That's a healthy relationship with it. Cause it's about, it's about the doing, not about the result.

• 1:39:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39:48Rich Roll?

  It's about detaching from the result, which is of stoic virtue. But it also speaks to this thing that I've heard you talk about before, this idea of eudemonia.

• 1:39:57Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:39:58Rich Roll?

  Can you explain what that is?

• 1:39:59Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yeah. So again, when I was searching for reasons why I tried to do what I do, I came across Aristotle and he coined this phrase, which was eudemonia. And he said that happiness was kind of a bad word because it sort of gave the impression that you should just be happy. There should be no struggling or suffering. And he said, well, that's, that's kind of wrong because you should have to sacrifice struggle and suffer in order to actually fulfill something, this sense of accomplishment. He said, in many ways, it's almost like if I gave you a million pounds, you'd be happy. Of course you would. It's a million pounds. Whereas if you wrote a book, started a business, ran an event, won a million pounds, earned it. That's not happiness. That's eudemonia. It's very different. And I think one thing that the GB swim taught me, and I didn't realize that at the time,

• 1:40:44Speaker 00

  but walking onto land for the first time in 157 days, that, that was eudemonia. I wasn't happy. It was eudemonia. It was happiness with fulfillment. And I think ever since the Yukon was. Similar. I was like, oh, that is, that's not happiness. That is eudemonia. That is years and years of training that have manifested itself in, in a particular event. So, yeah.

• 1:41:05Rich Roll?

  Happiness is the activity. Happiness is an activity. It's this way of doing things rather than the product of having done it.

• 1:41:13Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah. While addressing that idea of sacrifice and struggle, you know, rather than just being happy without any of that. Aristotle was like, no, no, no, you have to struggle. You have to suffer. That's what will produce eudemonia. Won't produce happiness, will produce eudemonia.

• 1:41:27Rich Roll?

  Hmm. What are some of the other Stoic principles or Greek ideas that swim around in your head when you're in the Yukon?

• 1:41:37Speaker 00

  I think there's a fair few, not necessarily even principles, but the story of Marcus Aurelius. I mean, what I love about Marcus Aurelius is what he wrote was never meant to be a bestselling book. It was just his diary. It was just his musings, you know, and he had gone through wars, like assassination attempts. He wasn't, according to his written accounts, a very well man, but he just lived to just an incredible age, outlived so many people, a lot of his enemies, and it was just his outlook on life. And I think that was one of the biggest things that certainly when swimming through the Yukon with, you know, your leg bleeding and neck falling off while still nursing the, your own toilet in your wetsuit, it was just this idea, do you know what, what would Marcus Aurelius do? So it wasn't necessarily principles.

• 1:42:20Speaker 00

  It was the story of, of Marcus Aurelius that I think, yeah, when you know about that, that's, that's really quite impressive.

• 1:42:26Rich Roll?

  What do you think people don't fully understand when they hear your story or they try to imagine these things that, that you've done? Or you read the press that gets written about these adventures that you've been on. Is there anything where you're like, they don't really get it, or they're not, they're missing this piece, or what people don't see is this?

• 1:42:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think, I literally haven't done a podcast in like, three years, really, you know, so, so I think a lot of people, especially after Loch Ness and Tressamino, because I was in hospital after both of those. So on social media-

• 1:43:00Rich Roll?

  Not as long as you were supposed to be.

• 1:43:04Speaker 00

  But there was, I don't want to say speculation, but people were sort of saying, you know, what went wrong? And there was ideas that were going around, whereas it's nice to actually just speak about it so freely now, which was just like, the conditions weren't right, but we tried our very best. And I think.

• 1:43:16Rich Roll?

  And also, it's an example, sorry, I don't mean to step on your words, but it's like, it's a way of modeling that failure is the path to success. You have to be willing to fail. And then it's your relationship with that that dictates how you move forward. And to, you know, look in the rearview mirror and learn from it, rather than say, well, you know, oh, I can't do it, or to flog yourself. Like, I've seen you try these really hard things, they don't work out, and then you just move forward on to the next thing with a smile on your face. And I think that's powerful for people to see.

• 1:43:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, you know, I really appreciate that, because I think one of the biggest things that those swims taught me as well is, no event exists in a vacuum. You have to consider it in its relationship to other events as well. So if I'd have stopped after Loch Ness, if I'd have stopped after Tres Amores, or if I'd have stopped after Mallorca, you could have called them a failure. But because of the Yukon, because I kept going, they all became lessons. I think that's what's so interesting. Anybody thinking about any particular event in their life, if they think it's a failure, no, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It depends what you do next that will determine what that actually was.

• 1:44:21Rich Roll?

  I think you're pretty good in the cold. I think you might have a little issue with heat adaptation, though. So whatever you do next, probably stay away from the warm water.

• 1:44:31Speaker 00

  That's good advice.

• 1:44:32Rich Roll?

  But maybe not as cold as the Yukon. Can you just find like, maybe just 60 degrees Fahrenheit, something like that, you know?

• 1:44:40Speaker 00

  No, genuinely, I know, my girlfriend will be so happy that you said that. I think that's the other thing, though, as well. It's just this idea of just daring to be great, you know, every single time. And this is, this is probably, it's certainly a personality defect, but I can't just do a swim, you know, it's got to be a really long one, it's got to be a hot one, it's got to be a cold one, there's got to be some metrics that make me excited. And maybe as I mature, I might stop doing that. But for me, again, even the shark shows, it's like, if you're going to swim against a shark, has to be a white shark, you've got to swim as fast as a mako, you've got to eat as much as a tiger shark.

• 1:45:12Rich Roll?

  Right. But this will run its course at some point, right? Because you'll reach that place where it's like, you can't continue to always top what you've done before. And if you're using these to fill a God-sized hole in your soul, you're gonna face an existential reckoning, my friend.

• 1:45:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, no, no, I completely, no, no, I agree. But unfortunately, I do think I'll be sitting here, we'll be doing this podcast at 100 years old and I'll be going rich.

• 1:45:38Rich Roll?

  Good, you're a very happy-go-lucky guy. It's not like I'm worried about you. I almost feel like just a little bit of a big brotherly kind of like...

• 1:45:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, which I appreciate. For those people listening, they won't know, but like after the GB swim, I was just swept away with media and everything like that. And it was amazing and I don't regret anything, it was brilliant. But genuinely, you were one of the first to, if not the only person who actually, after the whole podcast, I'll never forget this, and I want to say this publicly, but as a big brother, you just took me to one side and we went for kombucha, you took me out for vegan meal, and you said, Ross, oh, as a bit of a big brother, I feel a little bit protective and I just want to say, a lot of people will ask you what's next and pull you in all directions, take time for yourself, like deconstruct, write a book. And that was some of the best advice I've ever got. So publicly, I've said it, but publicly, I want to say thank you so much because it was a whirlwind and you were a big brother and a voice of reason at a time that was particularly crazy. So thank you.

• 1:46:32Rich Roll?

  That's very sweet of you to say, I appreciate that, thank you. Yeah, I love you, buddy. I think what you're doing is really powerful and inspirational. And in addition to, or maybe more important than what it is that you're doing, I think it's the way that you do it, like you talked about Ned and Russ and the way that they kind of comport themselves while they do these crazy things. I think that's of equal importance, if not more important, than the actual feats themselves. And I think to see you, you know, do it with a smile on your face and treat your team members with, you know, respect and grace and to invite, you know, people like ourselves to join along and to feel welcome, you know, and to provide us a window into, you know,

• 1:47:14Rich Roll?

  kind of what's happening, has been really fun to watch unfold. And so I'm your biggest fan, dude, and if there's anything I can do to put wind in your sails, I'm right there for you.

• 1:47:25Speaker 00

  Aw, thank you. Next shark swim, you can come along, monofin.

• 1:47:28Rich Roll?

  I would love to do that. I'd love to strap a monofin back on.

• 1:47:31Speaker 00

  Yes, done.

• 1:47:33Rich Roll?

  I had one, it's so funny, I had, I had one that I got that was Russian-made. I had it forever and I used to let my kids play around with it in the pool. I think it got cracked at some point or I don't think I have it anymore. But I'm gonna have to dig into my photo albums and try to pick out some pictures of Chris and I from back in the day and send them to you.

• 1:47:54Speaker 00

  That will be amazing.

• 1:47:55Rich Roll?

  It's cool. And Chris is, he's like a full-on team member for you now, right? Like he's been instrumental in helping you.

• 1:48:03Speaker 00

  What he did in the Yukon was, like I said, people would consider how far he kayaked and everything, an expedition in itself, like an extreme one at that sleeve deprivation, everything. And he just did it selflessly in support of the swim. And so that's why I love platforms like this because, you know, I get to actually shine a light on the team. It's such a team event. So, yeah, time and again, unfortunately, he has adopted a small English brother.

• 1:48:28Rich Roll?

  I love the way the universe works too, that this guy that I've known for so long has now found his way to you and has become this, you know, really important team member. And, you know, guy supporting you is really cool.

• 1:48:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is cool.

• 1:48:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah. We did it, dude. How do you feel?

• 1:48:41Speaker 00

  Ah, that's really good.

• 1:48:43Rich Roll?

  Do we do okay?

• 1:48:43Speaker 00

  It took four or five years to come out.

• 1:48:45Rich Roll?

  No, I know. I check in with you all, when are we gonna do this? When are we gonna do this? Are you gonna be in Byron?

• 1:48:50Speaker 00

  I know, I know. I really wanna hook up when we're in Byron. I love that place.

• 1:48:54Rich Roll?

  I do too. It's a very special place. It's become like my favorite place to go. I really, it's a really unique, cool place.

• 1:49:03Speaker 00

  It's weird because I was chatting to Benny about that because, again, not to sound too deep, but like the spirituality of Byron, because it was a place where women would go to give birth, isn't it? Because obviously Byron Bay. So the people saying like, there's a powerful Aboriginal energy and...

• 1:49:16Rich Roll?

  It feels like a vortex.

• 1:49:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it really does. Yeah. And it's, yeah, honestly, I go and I just leave like recharge, just think, it's just, yeah, the people there, it's pretty amazing.

• 1:49:27Rich Roll?

  All right, well, cheers. We'll share a kombucha in Byron at some point.

• 1:49:31Speaker 00

  Done, next podcast.

• 1:49:32Rich Roll?

  All right, buddy. Love you.

• 1:49:33Speaker 00

  A mono shit. Love you, brother.

• 1:49:46Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. This show just wouldn't be

• 1:50:26Rich Roll?

  possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media

• 1:51:09Rich Roll?

  assets courtesy of Daniel Solis. And thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.

• 1:51:27Speaker 00

  Namaste.