He Swam 1,367km Down New Zealand - 90 Days, No Wetsuit

Holy moly.

There-- Okay, I do have a lot of questions.

There's a whole bunch in there.

It's a fantastic story.

First of all, um, I just need to flag for you, I, I had Dylan Boucher on the podcast recently, who is the, um, [lip smacks] uh, the president of basketball operations for the New Zealand Breakers.

He used to be CEO of Basketball New Zealand.

And I shared a, uh, my hypothesis that I have, which is that if you want to have a boy grow up to be a competitive athlete, have multiple boys, that boys with brothers, uh, are...

Like so many people on my podcast are like, "I had three brothers," "I had two brothers, and we just pushed each other, and we were competitive," and rah, rah.

And so thank you for being an additional data point on my-

[chuckles]

... boys with brothers hypothesis of, um, e-extreme athletes.

Um, okay.

I, um, I, I, I have a bunch of questions.

You're in there, you're 100 meters in, you're feeling that, like, stop panic attack, you know, do I put my hand up? Do I not? If you can, you might not be able to articulate this, I recognize this, what was it that swayed you towards keep going versus put your hand up?

[sighs] This is a little while ago, so I can't remember exactly, but I have had situations like this that have followed since.

[clears throat] And it's a recognition of short-term pain versus long-term consequence.

And the short-term pain in that situation was I feel really uncomfortable.

I feel like I might not be capable of doing this.

But the long-term consequence of that is that I've given up and that that's gonna hurt me more in the long term than the satisfaction or the ease in giving up in the short term.

And that equation is something that I've come back to a lot, and I can't say exactly, but I suspect it was probably something like that that was going through my mind at that stage.

Can I just say on that, I'm so glad you said that because one of the things that I talk about a lot in the programs I run is the fact that we as humans tend to be absolutely terrible at assessing risk.

And the thing we're particularly terrible at is we put all of our effort, energy, and attention into assessing the risk of doing the thing, and virtually none of our effort, energy, and attention into assessing the risk of not doing the thing.

And so, for example, uh, if I have to have a hard conversation with you, I'll be like, "But what if he a-answers like this? But what if he yells at me? But what if he gets mad? But what if I destroy the relationship?" Or whatever.

And I don't put any of my curiosity into, "But what if I don't have the conversation?"

Mm.