Ross Edgley

The episode begins with Ross Edgley giving Joe Rogan an 18-year-old single malt Scotch whisky, and that gift sets up a story from Rogan about turning down money to keep his word. Rogan says he had a celebrity whiskey deal lined up that he was told would be worth a lot of money, and that the brand offered to let him help design the product. He wanted to make it with Buffalo Trace first. As he tells it, Buffalo Trace said their whiskey takes about eight years in a barrel and that this is the only way they do it, which he accepted as the reason their whiskey is so good.

Rogan says the whiskey he was offered was good, and his friends thought so too. Then he tasted 18-year-old Scotch and decided he could not honestly call the deal's product his favorite. He credits an earlier lesson from a writer he worked with on NewsRadio. That writer showed him how to drink whiskey properly, over a large ice cube, and offered to buy him a $200 serving of whiskey. The next line in the transcript corrects this to “200 pounds”; the purchase was a serving of whiskey, not a drinking glass. Rogan says getting out of the deal cost him an unknown amount of money. He also admits he might have lied if he were broke, but says he is not willing to because he has money. Both men then praise Scottish and Irish whisky-making, with Rogan saying people in Scotland are willing to wait 18 years for that taste.

There's no substitute for time.

The interview proper starts with Edgley's 60-hour nonstop swim in Loch Ness, which raised money for ocean conservation. He notes that it had been seven years since he last spoke to Rogan, after his swim around Great Britain. He describes his work since then as a strange career trajectory, if it can be called a career. He says the Loch Ness swim went well until around the 60-hour mark. Then he began hallucinating and seeing things, and his vision narrowed until everything went black.

Basically, the only way I can describe it is you're looking through the eye of a needle.

Edgley puts the blackout down to hypothermia combined with cellulitis. He explains cellulitis as a skin infection, which Rogan calls a staph infection. Edgley says the infection came from the wetsuit and was reaching his bloodstream. When Rogan asks why he caught it in Scotland, the reason Edgley gives is attributed to others ('they think'): the loch is fresh water. Rogan points out that this was on top of three days without sleep, and that a runner can stop for a nap while a swimmer cannot. When a photo comes up, the two of them note that the infection covered Edgley's back and neck.

Edgley describes a contradiction in how his body felt. His skin burned from the cellulitis while his bones and internal organs felt like they were freezing and shivering. Rogan mentions the common claim that people with hypothermia feel hot and want to take their clothes off shortly before death. Edgley says he felt exactly that, but adds that the cellulitis was probably part of the burning feeling.

His support team pulled him from the water. Edgley says he was unconscious for about 13 hours, a figure he attributes to others ('they think'), and that he drifted in and out of consciousness, remembering only small parts. The first clear memory he describes is waking in hospital with his mother and girlfriend by the bed. He says they looked disappointed and that he apologized.

Rogan raises the Loch Ness Monster, which shows how little weight some of the claims carry. Edgley says something touched his leg in the water. Rogan reminds him he was hallucinating, and Edgley agrees, saying he is not the best person to ask. He also admits he did not know about the risk of cellulitis before the swim. He says he only became an expert afterwards, and that now he would research freshwater dangers compared with saltwater ones beforehand, for example by putting the question into Perplexity.

I became an expert afterwards.

A year later, Edgley did another charity swim, in an Italian lake that the transcript spells 'Lake Tresemino'. He says that because of Italian bureaucracy he had to swim on one specific day, and that day fell in a heat wave. He describes water at 36 degrees Celsius, which Rogan's team converts to 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit, and compares it to a bath. He also says 'they' told him it was the hottest month ever recorded in Italy, and that he swam past fish that had been boiled alive. In the transcript, Edgley says he now had 'hypothermia, so heat stroke'. In context, he means heat stroke, the opposite of his Loch Ness hypothermia.

Edgley says the Italy swim gave him heat stroke and rhabdomyolysis, which he describes as muscle breakdown. Speaking as a sports scientist, he explains it through creatine kinase (CK), an enzyme in the blood that he says signals muscle breakdown. His rough reference points, all hedged with 'might' or 'maybe', are:

About 80 at rest; maybe 300 after a hard workout; about 1,000 after a marathon; possibly 4,000 to 5,000 after an ultramarathon; at 10,000, he says, medical staff rush you to hospital because they worry about your kidneys working overtime to filter it out. He says his reading was 19,000.

Edgley stresses that this level of breakdown is unusual in swimming, which is not weight-bearing because the body is supported by water. He says his kidneys coped and he was out of hospital within a few days. The CK scale is his own off-the-cuff summary, not a cited clinical reference, and the transcript does not say whether the 19,000 reading came from Italy or another swim. The exchange about it is confused: when Rogan asks whether the rhabdomyolysis happened in Iceland or Scotland, Edgley says 'certainly in Iceland, but in Italy' before clearly placing it in Italy.

You shouldn't have this amount of muscle breakdown.

Edgley argues that living through these conditions, after studying them only in theory, helped prepare him for his roughly 1,000-mile swim around Iceland. He admits it sounds 'a little bit twisted', but says that once he had felt hypothermia, rhabdomyolysis and cellulitis himself, he knew what they were when they happened.

So as a result, I kind of turned up in Iceland as this kind of bulletproof swimmer

He says Iceland was just as hard, and a photo shows chafing on his shoulder, which prompts Rogan to compare his physique to Wolverine. Edgley says he did not get cellulitis there. The explanation the two settle on is that salt water does not have the bacteria levels of fresh water. That is their working theory in conversation, not a claim backed by evidence in the episode.

Edgley answers the question he says he is often asked, why he does these things, by pointing to anthropology. He argues that people in many cultures and countries have long used self-discipline as a route to self-discovery. His examples are Japan's marathon monks, who he says do almost a marathon a day over a thousand days across seven years, and the Mexican runners from the book 'Born to Run'. The transcript spells the runners' name 'Taramaru'; their usual English name is Tarahumara. Rogan adds that they run barefoot or in homemade sandals cut from retreaded tires. These are passing references, not detailed accounts.

we've always been doing this idea of self-discipline for self-discovery

His main personal example comes from a documentary he made with a tribe in the Amazon (the transcript spells it 'Jamanao'). He says it was about 20 years ago and that he spent a week doing what the transcript spells 'Irawaska'. He also says he was 21 at the time, which may not fit with his 'about 20 years ago', and the conversation does not resolve this. As he describes it, the week ended with an initiation into manhood. A snake was killed, he had to bite out its tongue, and he was then told he had the wisdom of the jungle but could not speak for 24 hours.

During that vow of silence, Edgley says, he climbed about four meters up a tree, naked. People hit the base of the tree and he was covered in fire ants. He was told that if he made a sound, the snake's spirit would haunt him for the rest of his life, and if he stayed silent, he would be blessed with the jungle's wisdom. He says he was bitten many times, including on his genitals, and that he went along with it because he was young and impressionable. Rogan jokingly says he would have refused, then admits he would have done it too, especially caught up in the ritual. When Rogan asks whether this was the start of all the 'self-torture', Edgley says it might have been and jokes that the conversation has turned into therapy.

I was young and impressionable. I didn't question it, so I did it.

While Edgley talks, Rogan searches online and reads out results live. One headline says men got high for at least a month from a cobra bite on the tongue. Another report, about a man in India, says a Russell's viper bit his tongue during a ritual an astrologer had told him would stop his nightmares. The report says he was copying the snake's flickering tongue when it bit him, and that a priest then cut his tongue with a knife, which only made the pain worse. Edgley reads out the man's name, which the transcript renders inexactly.

Rogan reads that Russell's viper venom usually causes cardiovascular complications, abnormal blood clotting and renal failure. Edgley describes renal failure as the kidneys shutting down and compares it to rhabdomyolysis. According to the report, the man was rushed to a medical center and probably had surgery for the cut on his tongue. Rogan later reads that the snake kills 60,000 people a year in India. Edgley questions whether that is the same snake, and both note that the snake in Edgley's Amazon story was not a Russell's viper. These are search results read aloud mid-conversation, so the episode does not verify them.

The rest of the passage is commentary, not evidence. Rogan wonders whether the venom could just be rubbed on the tongue instead. He then imagines a three-day vision of God speaking from a serpent's tongue, which is clearly a hypothetical, not something anyone reports experiencing. Edgley separates his own experience from these cases: his snake was already dead when he bit its tongue, and he jokes that his 'seemed friendlier'. Rogan guesses that life in parts of India is hard enough that people will try anything, and continues with a description of river pollution and plastic waste.

This part of the interview is personal storytelling. The medical details come from Edgley's own account, often attributed to unnamed others with phrases like 'they think' and 'they said'. His CK figures are approximate and hedged. His memory of Loch Ness comes from a period when he was hallucinating and drifting in and out of consciousness, which he admits. The explanation that fresh water caused the cellulitis and salt water prevented it is conversational reasoning. The Indian snake-bite material, including the 60,000 deaths figure, is unverified search results read live. The transcript also contains transcription errors in place and group names, so spellings like 'Lake Tresemino', 'Jamanao' and 'Irawaska' should not be taken as accurate.

This part of the conversation starts with the host's disbelief at footage of rivers so full of plastic that "you don't see any water at all." He describes seeing people dump their rubbish straight into such a river and asks how it reached that point, saying "Like, is there no adults in the room?" No data, location or source for the footage is given.

The talk moves abruptly to pictures of someone with necrosis of the tongue, apparently from deliberately letting a snake bite them. Later the speakers call this case "strange because it's voluntary." The host explains the danger of rattlesnake bites: besides the chance of death, the venom "also rots all the fucking tissue around where the bite is." As evidence he recalls a man who posted his case online in the early days of the internet, tracking his arm from the bite to "like eight surgeries later." He gives this from memory and names no source.

Edgley tells a story from living with Evenki reindeer herders in Siberia. He uses it to argue that "we've become too civilised. We kind of have civilisation over survival." He says the herders rely on reindeer for meat, milk, butter and other products. To stop males in large herds from fighting, they perform what they called "a form of semi-castration" so the animals become "slightly more docile." The host guesses it is done with the teeth, and Edgley confirms: the herders grab the reindeer from behind and bite the testicles. Edgley says he did it himself when offered the chance, adding, "I'm not proud of it."

The host says he understands why herders do this, comparing it to gelding horses, but would not take part, and "I won't even do that to my dogs." He describes a vet who suggested neutering his mastiff, Johnny Cash, would be responsible. He asked why she wanted the dog's body not to produce testosterone, and whether "there's a narrative" or she profits from it. Neither question is answered with evidence in the conversation.

He contrasts her with a Los Angeles vet he calls "a dog whisperer." According to the host, this vet said that a dog kept behind a fence will not produce unwanted puppies, and told him: "If you're a responsible dog owner, don't get your dog fixed." When the host suggested neutering might prevent cancer, the vet reportedly called that "complete horseshit." The vet said dog cancer most likely comes "from really bad food." These health claims are second-hand, recalled from a past conversation, and come with no studies or figures. The host's broader remark that "not a lot of animals get cancer" is also unsupported. He immediately gives a counterexample: Tasmanian devils, which he says have a transmissible cancer spread by biting each other.

The host adds that Huberman neutered his bulldog, felt bad about it, and began giving the dog testosterone. Edgley appears to confirm this from his own conversation with Huberman. Edgley then asks whether it is true that sharks don't get cancer, mentioning "crazy immune systems," and the host agrees. Neither speaker gives a source, so this stays an unchecked aside.

Edgley describes diving with great white sharks off Tasmania. The speakers say the females stop growing in length at some point and "just get bigger," and one describes the animal as "It's just a submarine with teeth." Edgley says he was told sharks have the ampullae of Lorenzini, which let them pick up electrical signals: a fast heartbeat, twitching, whether you "look like prey."

On a dive to about 40 feet with experienced divers, he says the sharks "immediately knew that I was the weakest link" and swam towards him. His companions urged him to stop "breathing so heavy and acting like prey." When one shark came straight up to him, he held his ground, and it moved on. He calls this a nonverbal exchange "across species" in which the shark was "downloading data on me," picking him out of ten divers. The host offers a simpler explanation: the others had done it many times and probably had very low heart rates, while for Edgley it was new. Both agree that panicking might have been fatal. The idea that the shark sensed his heart rate is Edgley's interpretation of what he was told. It was not measured.

The conversation then turns to fatal and near-fatal attacks:

The host says a friend of Adam Greentree's in Australia was killed while spearfishing when he came out of a crevice in the reef and a shark mistook him for food. The host calls sharks ambush predators. Edgley says that with tiger sharks off the Bahamas, it is often enough to let them see your eyes. But he was told to keep his "head on a swivel" because they came up behind him, and he says that if he had not turned around he "wouldn't be speaking to you now." The host says tiger sharks are a real problem for surfers in Hawaii. He plays a video of a tiger shark slamming into a fisherman's kayak far offshore and notes that an inflatable would likely have been fatal. Edgley relays what expert friends told him: white sharks are curious and their taste buds are in their throats, so they may nip a person and then realise "you weren't a seal," though by then the person is bleeding out. Bull sharks, by contrast, are described as simply aggressive. The host recalls a man in Florida who has stopped spearfishing because, he said, bull sharks are now "all over the place" off the reefs.

The host rejects campaigns against shark fin soup. He argues it is inconsistent to eat animals he calls "sweet and kind," such as cows and veal, while refusing to eat predators, and says "monsters should be on every menu." This is an opinion with no conservation or population figures behind it. The only support offered is the anecdotal reports of more bull sharks.