How to Set & Achieve Massive Goals | Alex Honnold

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

My guest today is Alex Honold.

Alex Honold is a professional rock climber.

He's best known for successfully free soloing, meaning climbing with no ropes or latching on of any kind, El Capitan, also called El Cap, which is a nearly 3,000-foot climb in Yosemite National Park.

It was also, of course, the topic and focus of the incredible movie Free Solo, which if you haven't seen, you absolutely should watch.

I've wanted to talk to Alex for a long time now.

I'm not a rock climber.

I've tried it a few times.

But I've been extremely curious to understand Alex's mental frame around learning and training and his broader philosophy on life.

My interest stems from the fact that Alex's free solo of El Cap and his other climbs make him one of the most accomplished and innovative athletes in all of history.

And of course, the free solo of LCAP is extremely high risk and high consequence.

Today we discuss how to envision and make progress towards your goals and how to merge the demands of daily work and family life with incremental training for spectacularly big or long challenges of any kind.

Alex makes clear that it's essential and possible to build your capacity to exert effort and how to do that in a regimented way so as to bring seemingly impossible goals within your reach.

We also discuss how coming to terms with one's own mortality is actually one of the best motivators for building a great life and why most people hide from that reality and as a result, end up living much smaller lives than they otherwise would.

We also discussed training, literally what to do to build strength and endurance, not just for sake of rock climbing, but just generally.

And that takes us into discussions about weight training, body weight training, running, hiking, and a bunch of other things that you can apply.

Even if you have zero interest in rock climbing, today's conversation with Alex Honold will definitely change the way that you think about your life, what you can make of it, and how to go about that.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.

And now for my discussion with Alex Honold.

Alex Honold, welcome.

Thanks for having me.

I think Free Solo is remarkable for a ton of reasons, but as a good friend of mine, who I think you know, Michael Muller, photographer, he said before I had seen the film, he said, It's wild because you're terrified as an observer the entire time, but you also know that Alex survives from the very beginning, which is a very unusual.

I think some people don't know that.

Some people watch the movie and they literally have no idea what it's about or what's going on, and they spend the whole move being like, oh my god, what's going to happen?

Okay, so I just spoiled it.

Oh, yeah.

Well, at this point, I'm like, nobody cares.

It's old news.

Well, it's a spectacular feat.

And we can go into that feat, but I'd actually like to drill in a little bit to just your process in general.

I'm sure that's changed over time, and feel free to talk about that.

But, you know,

I'm very curious about notions of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, right?

And I think free solo is also remarkable because you had cameras on you.

It was obviously to be recorded, and you knew you had cameras on you.

And yet, I always thought of climbing as kind of a solitary

or things that people do in small groups, kind of off the grid.

Things have changed now with social media, the way everything can be posted very quickly or even run live.

But when you think about sort of the work that you're doing in terms of progressing and goals and kind of milestones for yourself, how do you envision that?

Is this like a...

Do you have a diary?

Do you have a process where you sit back and you think, you know, what would be awesome for me to experience?

Would people like to see it?

What's the sort of balance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for you?

So basically, I think climbing is always intrinsically motivated.

I mean, since I started climbing when I was a child, I've always loved climbing.

I love the movement of climbing.

I love the feeling of it.

I love the whole experience, you know, just everything about it.

It's great.

But then, you know, now as a professional climber, obviously there is that extrinsic motivation as well where you're like, oh, this is how I make a living.

And so I think with the film Free Solo, you know, it was a really interesting balance of the two, where it's like, this is something that I'd love to do for myself.

And even if no one else in the world existed, I'd want to do this thing.

But then you also know that

if the film turns out well, which it did,

it's going to be great for your career.

It's going to be great for whatever.

And so there is that extrinsic motivation as well.

And so then you're always trying to parse out which part is which.

And

particularly with free solo, you don't want to be too extrinsically motivated because you don't want to get pushed into something that you're not prepared for that you shouldn't be doing.

Of course, you know, being even being intrinsically motivated, you can do something you shouldn't.

You know, I don't know.

I mean, but you're just constantly thinking about those things as a climber.

In order to free solo LCAP, did you memorize sequences?

Or is it more sort of like motifs where you kind of know that you're going to do any number of different things in a given pitch?

It depends.

So for the hardest parts, I memorize, like for sure, memorize every aspect of it.

But that's only the hardest part.

So that's maybe like a third of the route.

And then for the easiest third, and some of it is actually quite easy.

Some of it's like even a non-climber could climb small sections of the wall.

Like there are parts that are quite easy here and there.

You know, it's like

not the bulk, but so for the easy part is you just know that you can do it and you don't have to stress it.

And then the medium parts kind of like the remaining third of the wall.

You sort of remember, kind of like you said, motifs, like you might know the hardest part and you just kind of know that it's going to be fine, but you don't have to memorize it per se.

But certainly I knew the route very, very well.

You know, you just know all the things that you have to know.

You recognize not just holds, but like like visceral sensations.

Like this feels different.

Because I imagine conditions change, right?

I mean, weather conditions, heat on the rock, shadows on the rock.

Yeah, but not as much as you might think because

I was only climbing it in shade.

Like

in the springtime, that whole west side of the wall stays in the shade until 11 or noonish in the morning.

So you go at 4 in the morning and then you have sort of 8 hours of solid shade.

So normally, the temperature and the conditions feel relatively stable.

And you spend the whole season working on it.

So you kind of know that tomorrow is going to feel the same as it did today, roughly.

And so it's all within a relatively narrow band, particularly in the spring, which is why I did it in the springtime.

In the fall and the autumn, it's a little bit different because the sun is lower in the sky, so it gets sun much earlier, and it actually is way hotter, counterintuitively.

It's like colder when it's in the shade, but then hotter when it's in the sun.

And anyways, that makes it harder for climbing, obviously.

But when I freestall it all cap, I was spending three or four months a year in Yosemite every year, like, you know, a month or two every spring and every autumn.

And so you're spending four months a year in a place, you just know how it feels.

You know, it's like you're used to getting up that early, you're used to climbing on the wall, and you're just kind of like, oh, it's going to be another beautiful day on the rock.

And actually the day that I did the free solo Velcap, it was actually a little more humid and a little warmer than

would have been optimal.

You know, like it's not what I would have chosen, but that's just the way it was that day.

And I was kind of like, well, this is my day.

You know, you kind of just have to do the thing.

But it had been like overcast that night.

And you know, when it's cloudy at night, the lows don't drop as low.

And so I woke up and it was like kind of muggy-ish feeling.

I was like, it's not great for being four in the morning.

It was like, it feels kind of gross.

But I was like, this is my day.

And it was fine.

So you form a relationship with the rock.

You kind of like learn to recognize its different states when you did it and completed it.

Because I know you set out one day and then you called it a bunch of them.

Yeah, that was in the autumn.

That was the season before.

And basically the season was ending, like the storms are coming in the next week type deal.

And it was like the season is winding down.

It was kind of like, well, I should at least take a shot because I'd done a lot of prep and I felt mostly ready.

And it turns out I just wasn't ready, ready.

And so I wound up bailing.

But that was kind of my end of the season.

Like, I think I can squeak this in, knowing that if I couldn't squeak it in then, then I'd have to wait six more months.

And with the pressure, the film crew and all that stuff, knowing that there are all these people like working and waiting for you, you're kind of like, well, I ought to at least try to get this done because like all these people are waiting on me.

But as it turns out, I just didn't quite have it yet.

And then when I ultimately did do it in the spring, I was much better prepared, felt way better.

The whole experience worked out better.

So now in retrospect, I'm like, oh, I'm glad that it played out that way because

you know it was it was better but at the time it was you know I was like oh god I failed on this thing and all these people are watching it's embarrassing it's you know it's yeah it was it was all very stressful at the time yeah the external pressures have to be you know pretty pretty mighty when yeah when especially when they're your friends I guess one could imagine that like when it's just business you can just be like well it's just business but yeah you had a lot of friends up there with you for me the thing is is that if I'm gonna go climb the wall you know I start climbing at 4 30 in the morning or 5 or something so that means some of my friends to get in position at the top of the wall are getting up at like one in the morning and then hiking to the top of a mountain with a heavy backpack and if you're asking a bunch of your buddies to go hiking at one in the morning like you better live up to your end of the the thing you know like if you say you're going to do something you better actually do the thing because your friends obviously no one's complaining no one is pressuring me no one's but at the same time you don't want to bail like sure like it's pretty embarrassing if you tell someone you're going to do something then you just can't do it well they certainly wanted the outcome to be only one way and yeah and they were all super positive and supportive and it's all great, but you still can't help but feel that pressure.

Sure.

Well, it certainly worked out.

I'm curious, on a scale of one to 10, 10 being a total certainty, along that trajectory when you completed it, were there any phases where

you felt you had to improvise against the original plan?

You mean on the day of the actual completion?

On the day of the actual completion of the free solo and LPS.

No, on the day I was 100%, everything was perfect.

I knew exactly what to do.

It was all amazing.

But it took a really long time to get there.

You know, it's like literally years of building up to it and then months of preparation and everything.

But no, on the day,

it was perfect.

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When you climb, I'm curious where your mental horizon is.

I can make up a story as a non-climber that your mental horizon is always on just

the next

the next maneuver, just getting further up and further over.

Sometimes, of course, you have to go down and up.

But that your sort of time binning and your space binning is very, very close.

But do you ever go into states where you're sort of in automaticity?

I mean, we hear about flow, right?

But where you find yourself kind of maneuvering as opposed to being hyper-strategic about what's happening in the next five seconds, 10 seconds?

Well, I think the aspiration is to be in that flow state, whatever you want to call it.

You know, actually, I think even in the film, there's some quotes from me saying autopilot and things like, I'm aspiring to be on autopilot.

So I'm aspiring to not be thinking too much about it.

And that's, for me, at least, why it required so much practice was to be able to just do something almost by rote, you know, by through repetition, just to do the thing that you've practiced without having to think about it.

Because I think once you start thinking about it too much, you're just more prone to not just make errors, but just like get to get caught up in your own mind.

And

I don't know.

I mean, the aspiration was just to do the thing.

Like, no thinking about it, no hesitation, you know, no emotional

affect around it, to just do it.

Is the kinesthetic aspect of it big?

In other words, are you feeling your way through it as well as using vision?

I mean, I imagine that these things start to blend.

Yeah, I've actually never been asked something quite like that.

And in some ways,

I mean, the kinesthetic aspect is maybe the whole thing.

Like, I mean, it is kind of like dancing or something where you are just flowing over stone.

I mean, obviously, you're looking around and you're looking at your footholds and you're sort of placing your feet correctly that way.

But really, you're just doing doing sequences, you're just flowing, like your body is moving.

I mean, I think when you climb well, and particularly when you've rehearsed something and you know the climb really well, it feels like jogging or swimming or sort of other elemental movement patterns where it's just like your body doing what it's meant to do, and it feels great.

You know, it's like it's really nice.

Do you ever surprise yourself still?

Like that

in training things, you know, I'm surprised that worked out.

And then stick with that kinesthetic sense.

I've been listening to an amazing book by Twyla Tharp.

She's a choreographer.

She was a ballerina choreographer.

And she said that what distinguishes

virtuosity from mastery is that you start to surprise yourself.

I think you're certainly in that category of virtuoso.

How often does surprise come about?

For me personally, that's maybe my favorite moment in climbing is when you surprise yourself.

And this isn't so much with free-soling because with free-soling, you don't want to be surprised.

But with a rope on, you have moments all the time where you're sure you're about to fall because you're you're up against your physical limits or whatever.

And then you stick a move that you were sure you weren't going to.

And it doesn't happen that often, but when it does, you're like, oh, I exceeded my own expectations.

It's like the best feeling.

It happens from time to time.

In some ways, actually, I was telling one of my friends, I think that that might be one of the ways in which I see aging.

As I'm getting older as a climber, I think I surprise myself less often.

I think it's like a 24-year-old, you just don't know your own limitations that much and you frequently surprise yourself where I'm like, wow, I really outdid myself.

I really did something that I was sure I couldn't do, but I managed to do it.

And now as a recent 40-year-old, you know, like that happens from time to time for sure, but not all the time.

You know, it's like,

and now occasionally I have things where I was like, oh, I was sure I could do that.

And then I failed, you know, and you're kind of like, oh, you can blame conditions, you can blame whatever, but you're kind of like, oh, I really thought I would do that.

And I fell off anyway.

And you're like, damn it.

What's the role of aging and climbing traditionally and how you're experiencing it?

Like there are fields of science like mathematics where the stereotype is, you know, it's a young person's game.

And then there are fields like biology, which is a bit more incremental and people can have fantastic discoveries and long careers.

Those are academic cerebral

endeavors.

But we have our understanding of this for every sport.

For climbing, what's the lore for climbing and for free soloists in particular?

That it's an old man's game, it's a young man's game.

Woman's game, excuse me.

I don't think anybody calls free soloing an old man's game.

But no, but it could be.

But no, I think in general, climbing has more longevity than most sports, just because it's relatively low impact on your body.

It's very technique and movement focused.

And so it's not just pure physical strength.

That said, I mean, climbing is in the Olympics now, and the people winning the Olympics are all sort of 18 to 23-ish, you know, sort of same as gymnastics type of range.

So I think at the most elite levels of climbing performance, it's kind of similar to gymnastics probably.

But then to do interesting new things on real rock outdoors, I think there's a much wider latitude.

You know, it's like, and then even into your 50s and 60s, there are plenty of climbers who are leading expeditions to new places, developing new climbs, you know, doing things that are noteworthy and sort of meaningful for the climbing community, even though they're not necessarily cutting edge physically.

So I think there's a lot of

opportunity for climbing more than most sports.

And I think actually the other big thing with climbing is that in so many other sports, like think ball sports, you know, NBA, NFL, baseball, whatever.

It's kind of like if you don't make the team, then you're done playing forever.

Like you'll literally never play football again if you're not a professional football player.

Whereas with climbing, even if you're not playing at the highest level, you can still go climb all the time and you can still do cool climbs.

You can still do things that matter.

You can help teach.

You can do whatever.

And so you can kind of like stay in the game much, much longer.

You mentioned that climbing's in the Olympics now.

We see a lot of sports like skateboarding, climbing now in the Olympics.

And these were sports that traditionally were done, you know, people just go to where these things were done.

And it wasn't always recorded because there wasn't social media back then.

Well, more that there weren't smartphones, there weren't cameras.

It's like it's not even about the social, it's about whether or not you can record it easily.

So I'm guessing there's a big influx of young kids getting into this now.

Do you see the sport progressing faster?

And I'm also curious about the culture, whether or not, you know, like any time a sport is in the Olympics, the thing is like, oh, it's kind of quote unquote sold out.

Now it's going to change.

It's going to become more commercial.

So what's the culture within climbing about um about this big expansion what are your thoughts i mean personally i'm way into it i mean i was a kid that got into climbing into climbing gym and and it's changed my life for the better you know like i love climbing i think it's great you know i can certainly see the sort of commercial influx from the olympics or sort of like more mainstream adoption of climbing but that's kind of great because i mean most of my friends are sort of climbing industry adjacent professionals in some ways you know like they make they're like coaches or dietitians or setters like they they make the climbs that people climb on um

and so basically the bigger the industry gets the more people like that can make a living doing the thing that they love to do even if they're not necessarily sponsored professionals at the highest level so I'm kind of like you know a broadening industry is is kind of good for everybody and mostly I mean climbing's awesome like if people enjoy you know it's like why not get into climbing it's like certainly I mean I think it's better than most other fitness modalities you know it's like oh why do CrossFit when you can go rock climbing it's way cooler I mean it certainly seems way more fun that's for sure and you could do indoors or outdoors.

There are probably certain aspects you wouldn't want to do alone for safety reasons.

But I think when people ask, like, what do you worry about with climbing culture and all that kind of stuff, like with the Olympics and the mainstream appeal?

I'm kind of like, you know, if somebody wants to be a climber and only go to the climbing gym in a major city for their entire life, like that's great.

Like if they just want to climb plastic the rest of their life, that's still better than going to CrossFit or doing whatever else.

I'm like, that's cool.

Like, you don't have to go climb L Cap to be a climber.

I'm kind of like, people can do whatever they want.

And I think that's great for the sport.

And you are seeing standards rise very quickly right now sort of as a result.

Just like better access to gyms, more kids getting into it.

You just see talent rise faster.

I come across social media accounts of parkour kids every once in a while doing absolutely insane stuff in urban terrains, usually.

What's the crossover, if any, between parkour and climbing of the sort that you do?

There's a little bit, not that much, but climbers often, like competition climbing, like bouldering, which is in the Olympics, has definitely taken a slight turn towards parkourish sorts of moves like big run and jumps and like crazy swings and things like that and so some old school climbers complain that it's like gotten a little too jumpy that type of bouldering um

but i'm kind of into it i mean it's i don't know this is all very like inside baseball like how do you separate like basically at the highest level competitors are all very very strong so then how do you separate these different competitors who are all climbing an elite level and one of the ways is complicated movement like that like run and jumps and and coordination and things like that.

So I don't know.

I mean, I think it's cool.

I've actually met like a couple of professional parkour athletes who also climb.

And they are really good at very particular sorts of things.

I mean, it's amazing to see.

Yeah, I mean, I find a lot of what they do terrifying, but also awesome.

I can't help myself but watch.

And just the motivation to work it out, too.

Like it, you know, because some of these are truly make or break or make or die, at least in the, in the form they put to social media.

So I'm always curious what goes into that.

And having grown up skateboarding, I mean, you go around a city and you see stuff and you're like, oh, that would be awesome.

And so, I mean, just looking at a landscape, natural or urban landscape in a completely different way, I see a lot of parallels with climbing in the hardcore.

And also, you know, I think of you at, you know, certainly at the level and kind of parallel with a guy like Tony Hawk, who's been in the sport of skateboarding for a very long time.

He's an amazing ambassador for the sport as it's gone through its various peaks and valleys now in the Olympics.

So I think climbing and sports like skateboarding and surfing have a lot in common in this way-subculture, but then also gets popular.

Yeah, where they're kind of niche, and then they become kind of mainstream.

But then, even once they're mainstream, they're still kind of cool, you know, like skateboarding.

It's like definitely not like full punk rock anymore, but you're like, it's pretty cool, you know, like skateboarding still.

And it's not that common still, you know.

And that's the thing with climbing is: I'm kind of like, yeah, climbing's growing, it's becoming more mainstream.

It's just never going to be, you know, soccer or something, you know what I mean?

Like, it's always going to be slightly niche, slightly countercultural, because it's just, you know, it's just a smaller thing.

Like, it's just not playing basketball or something.

Yeah, I'm intrigued by the training aspects and some of the fitness aspects.

I agree that it, I'm having only done it a little bit, I mean, I've been to a climbing gym once or twice.

Yeah, I'm gonna have to say, yeah, I've gone up and down the wall a few times.

I've played for people a few times, but I am by no means,

you know, skilled at it.

It'd be fun to get into because I, happy birthday, by the way.

Just turned 40.

I'm turning 50 soon.

And I think more about,

I'm happy with my strength and endurance, but I think more about mobility now and also

climbing is great for that and and there's a lot of interesting literature on brain longevity and just maintaining your cognition and the strength of your of your distal body so toes and fingers believe it or not it's a correlate like toes and fingers

I've always thought that's just a correlation it's just a correlation because yeah I'm like because grip string is just a proxy for all like it means that you use your body a lot and so therefore you're probably you know like when I read those things about like if you have strong grip it means this and this and and this.

I'm like, no, if you have a strong grip, it means that you do stuff all the time.

And so, as a result of doing stuff all the time, you're probably sharper than somebody who doesn't do stuff all the time.

That's right.

So, it's a correlate.

At the same time, the motor neurons that control like trunk movements and contraction of the trunk muscles, like as you go out from the midline,

they're in layers in the spinal cord.

So, literally, like

the motor neurons that control like the core

sit closer to in the spinal cord to the midline.

And then, you know, across evolution, like, you know, we evolved from animals with fins and wings, and some of the same genes are used.

And eventually, you get motor neurons that control like fine motor movements like this.

And it is true that for some reason, the motor neurons that control the distal body, so toes and fingers, calves and forearms, are more vulnerable to age-related degeneration than the ones for the core.

So it is possible, we don't know yet, that by maintaining strength of the distal body, that you can actually preserve motor neuron and cognitive function.

I'm freaking I'm such

a good and that's why I was curious how climbers, provided they don't fall and kill themselves, how they age.

And there's other things here too, because like in some sports like football and rugby, people are getting their head hit a lot.

So

they don't tend to age well.

But I always thought of climbers, you know, in my time up in Yosemite, I'd see young guys like you and then I'd see these like old, like these old climbers.

And I was like, man, these guys are in incredible shape.

They're lean, they're lithe, they seem cognitively fresh.

So it seems like it's a sport where people hold on to their faculties pretty well.

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, I think,

you know, it's hard to say because there just aren't that many super old climbers.

And then a lot of the ones that come to mind, like sort of famous old climbers, you know, I mean, they die the same ways that everybody dies, you know, like cancer or heart disease or whatever, but like in their late 80s or whatever.

No, I mean, I think climbing is a great way to age.

I mean, I have a bunch of friends who are sort of 50s and 60s who are very fit.

Like actually, I mean, it comes to mind there's this friend of mine who's a philosophy professor at UNLV at the university, but he's incredibly jacked.

And I think he's 64 now.

I think he just became the oldest person to climb a certain grade, like 514, which is kind of an elite rock climbing grade.

But I think he's maybe the oldest person to have done that now.

But he once told me Samuel that he was at some hotel pool, like in Middle America, at like some conference or something.

And some kid asked if he could touch his abs because he'd never seen, he was like, are they real?

You know, like real.

Yeah, he's like a 48-year-old professor.

He's like shredded.

And some kid in the pool is like, can I touch those?

Is Is that real?

You know, like, I've never seen a thing like that.

It says a lot about him and about the state of our country.

Exactly.

This crisis of obesity that's very serious.

It goes beyond aesthetics.

Yeah, I've thought about getting into climbing.

I mean, it's

the problem I had is I tried to just raw strength it.

I just tried to pull up my way.

But obviously, that's foolish.

It's and you gas out really fast.

Yeah, that's a very common thing for adults.

I mean, especially men, especially somebody like you who's already fit.

And so you try to bring the tool you you already have to it.

And you're like, no, you got to drive with your legs, go technique, mobility.

Like, you know, I like to say that anybody that tries climbing should think of it as climbing a really, really steep staircase where it's like you're still walking up the stairs and you're using the handrail for balance, but you're not pulling yourself up the handrail.

And most of climbing is basically a steep staircase.

You know, I mean, especially outdoors and in climbing gyms, it's a little bit different because the wall is actually vertical.

But outdoors, the wall is almost always a little bit less than vertical.

So it's like basically you're on a very, very steep and technical staircase, and then you're using the handrail, like the handholds, to keep you balanced on the wall.

But your legs should always be driving you.

I still haven't done Half Dome.

Never?

You've done CloudsRest a bit before?

Run CloudsRest a bunch of times.

Run Clouds Rest, Ruck Clouds Rest.

But

Half Dome has those cables.

Yeah, yeah.

I never was organized enough to do the sign-up early enough in the second.

No, but just do it after the permits.

You know, the cables stay up all year.

So

when it's out of season, they take the uprights down, but the cables just sit there and you can can do it anytime.

It's actually way better to do it post, like after the season because there's no permitting, they're no people, and it's like super chill.

Okay, I definitely want to do it.

Yeah, just do it, do it off season.

It's way better.

My biggest concern is not that I'm going to fall, it's that someone above me is going to fall.

But when you're strong enough to just glance them off, you know, just like shrug them aside.

Possibly.

I did hear a lot.

Ideally, stop them.

Yeah, ideally stop them.

Yeah, I'd love to do it.

I've been going to US 70 since I was in my teens.

I love it up there.

I wouldn't say it's my second home, but it's heaven.

I mean, as you know.

And actually, one of the reasons I'm excited to talk to you, among others, is that I would like more people to get into the national parks

and really enjoy them because we have so many gems in Yosemite, the high country in Tuolumne Meadows to me is like, is heaven on earth?

Yosemite, I mean, is a crown jewel.

I mean, it's the, I think it's the best, best national park in the country.

Yeah, people forget it's only about a four-hour drive from the Bay Area or from Los Angeles.

It's pretty quick.

You go through a bunch of different landscapes and then boom, suddenly you're there.

Yeah, and it's like paradise.

It's incredible.

i'm curious about

things in free soloing that as a uninformed spectator we think oh you know that's the hardest part that's that's the most difficult thing but i imagine um

inside of the sport like any uh that there are things that are very difficult and maybe even perilous that we're not aware of.

Like what's some of the non-obvious aspects of free soloing, if they exist?

Because I always think, okay, you know, if I can imagine, oh, that's super tough, but that might be the

or less tough.

Usually there are these kind of hidden, I don't want to call them hidden dangers, but hidden dangers in a sport.

What are some things that the observer wouldn't be aware of?

Yeah, I'm not sure.

I'm not sure what the hidden dangers are.

I would say, though, that the obvious visual dangers, like for a non-climber just watching free soloing, I think they generally misperceive all the dangers and risks involved.

You know, they just see it and they're like, that's crazy.

That's whatever.

You know, and like whatever they're bringing to it is probably not the actual case.

Just because it's hard to visually tell what's challenging in climbing.

You know, you're like, that's a vertical wall.

But if it's like a nice crack going up a vertical wall, that's actually quite easy and secure climbing.

But then some of the other stuff, you know, if they're really small holes, you're trusting your feet.

I don't know.

I mean, it's just really hard to judge that stuff visually.

Like you have to do it to experience it.

But I think that...

That honestly the whole perception of risk around free-souling is maybe slightly misperceived by people.

So with climbing in general, like if you go climbing with a rope,

like if you're traditional climbing, like you're climbing with a rope and gear and you're going to climb half dome, let's say, when you start climbing from the ground, you go some distance before you put your first piece of gear in, because that's just kind of the nature of climbing.

You go for a ways and you put in some gear, you clip your rope into it, and then you're protected.

And then for whatever distance you're going, you're essentially free-soling to that point.

You know, like there's always risk involved in climbing because even if you have a rope on, depending how far you're going above your last piece of gear and, you know, what the terrain is like and whether or not the rock is good and all these other factors, you know, you're more or less safe.

And so I think people look at free-soloing as like this this binary, like if you don't have a rope, that's dangerous.

And you're kind of like, well, anytime you're climbing, there are dangers, or there could be.

And you're constantly evaluating those and trying to mitigate them.

And so I think that's the big misperception because easy free soling is probably like if I'm somebody, you know, who's like an expert rock climber or whatever, I've been climbing 30 years.

If I'm on an easy free solo, that's almost certainly safer than a very hard,

certain types of hard climbing with a rope on.

And most of my scariest experiences as a climber actually have been with a rope on because with a rope, you're much more willing to push yourself into unknown terrain.

Because you're kind of like, surely there'll be something good just around the corner.

And so you keep going around the corner and you keep not getting to good gear.

And you're like, holy shit, it's getting scarier and scarier.

Are we allowed to curse?

Sure, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, you know, like even at each other if you want to curse them.

Yeah, perfect.

But so a lot of my scariest experiences have been with a rope on because you're kind of like, I'm sure it'll get better.

I'm sure it'll get better.

And it keeps getting worse and worse.

And then pretty soon you're in some position where you're definitely going to die if you fall.

But you never would have climbed into that position if you didn't have a rope on because you're just so much more conservative when you're rope-like.

And when you're rope-less, you're kind of like if something seems wrong, you just go down, you know, because you're just not going to push that far.

I saw the movie Maru.

That was pretty intense.

Um, that I mean, that's an example of pushing really freaking far with a rope on.

You know, it's like because you have a rope, you're willing to just keep pushing into the own, pushing into the unknown.

But then you wind up in a position where you're like, this is pretty freaking extreme.

You know, it's like, I mean, you saw the film, it's it's all totally insane.

Yeah, it is insane.

And I feel like ice and snow bring a whole other dimension.

Um,

yeah, I think that, um,

in your sport and free soloing, like the idea from the spectator side is, you know, like these guys, like one fall and they're dead.

Right.

Um, I've heard you say before that's actually not true.

I mean, yeah, it's kind of

fall, but yeah, like, yeah, it's true that most places, if you fall off, you're going to die.

But like, when I started free soloing as a as a kid, not that I like started and then only did that, but on my first free solos when I was young, in the back of my mind, it always be like, if you slip, you'll die.

You know, and the reality is that there are tons of places where your foot can slip and nothing else moves.

You know, like your hands are locked on, you're holding on tight, and your foot slipped, and you're just kind of like, oh, my foot slipped.

And you keep climbing and it's no big deal.

I mean, there are also some places where if your foot slips, you're going to die for sure.

And the key is differentiating between those.

But I think when I started, you know, it was like, if anything happens, you'll die.

And as you do it more, you're actually like, No, I mean, a lot of things can happen and it'll be fine.

You just have to make sure that the wrong thing doesn't happen at the wrong time.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I was surprised to hear you say that,

yes, free soloists die, but oftentimes they die not free soloing.

They die doing other things.

I'm fascinated by this, not through a morbid fascination, but for a number of reasons.

So maybe you could elaborate on that a little bit.

Yeah, there's a quote in the film Free Solo where a friend of mine, Tommy Caldo, who's a very well-known climber, says something like, all the people who are big free soloists are dead now.

And it kind of implies like, you know, free soloing is dangerous and they all died soloing.

But the reality is that basically none of them died soloing.

Like one or two soulists have died soling.

Though my preferred statistic is that no one has ever died doing something cutting edge.

So like no one has ever died pushing the envelope like doing something extreme.

There have been a couple free solists who have died free-souling easy terrain, like just out doing something casual and maybe a hold breaks or maybe something happens.

Like it's impossible to know what because they die.

But then the bulk of other people who are sort of known for free soling have died either in parachuting accidents like wingsuiting or base jumping or one got swept out to sea by a rogue wave that's kind of a freak thing one died in a car accident you know just like things like you know it's basically just ways that people die so all that to say it's not clear that free soling is the most dangerous we have a friend um who unfortunately is dead now ken block who is a famous rally car driver and um

did uh with our photographer here at the podcast mike blaback and and film crews with dc did uh he developed he was one of the founders of dc like dc shoes dc skateboarding, et cetera, rally car.

Unfortunately, he died in a snowmobiling accident.

So something very like kind of conventional for his daily life.

He lived out in Utah.

Obviously a huge tragedy.

And then you go look at kind of people who do quote unquote extreme sports, for lack of a better term, and you find that it's fairly common for people who are at the peak of their

of a field, of a sport, to die doing something else that they really enjoy.

And you kind of wonder: like, are they pushing themselves or is it that they're just a little too relaxed?

Because as you said, rarely do free soloists die like in the most difficult aspects of the climb.

So maybe it's that letting go of the mental engagement.

Like there's a change in the threshold of what they consider dangerous.

So unless they need to be locked in, there's just some lack of attention to detail.

This is my way of trying to save your life, basically.

Anything you're doing besides free soloing, be very, very careful.

Rein it in?

Yeah, we need to do it.

No, I mean, I also would suspect that all the people that we're talking about are all just a little,

they're just bigger risk takers in general.

They're just more willing to do things like drive quickly and, you know, do whatever.

Just more willing to take risks in their life.

And I suppose sooner or later those things catch up with you.

Or they can.

Yeah.

Though that said, with free-souling, two of the world's best free soulists from the previous generations are still alive, you know, older men, just living their best lives, doing their thing.

Still free soloing.

Yeah.

Maybe not at like a super high level.

Maybe not pushing themselves hard, but yeah, like certainly could.

So um man named Peter Croft, he's a Canadian but has lived in the US forever.

He was like my childhood hero growing up and he's an incredible soul.

Actually, there's a film with him or a scene with him in the film Free Solo.

He's kind of like a they kind of frame him as like a mentor figure, though.

Honestly, he wasn't a mentor because I was too afraid to ever even talk to him because he was like such a personal hero.

But I mean, he's such a he's incredible.

He's a super nice guy.

And so I'm

we're both sponsored by the North Face now, so we're friends, we're on the same team, and so I've like hung out with him at events and things.

And I was having dinner with him once.

I was kind of like, oh, at what point did you kind of end the cutting edge free soling and he was like oh actually I did a couple of my hardest solos like in terms of grades like not necessarily the most cutting edge but kind of the hardest grades like within the last several years and I was like really and he'd still you know he's still just like kind of doing stuff and fit and he's psyched and and he's got to be

I don't know, I don't want to offend him, but he's got to be like mid-50s or like maybe 60.

Like, you know, he's,

yeah, and he's just still incredible.

He's still climbing all the time.

And even on his rest days, he goes down into the same climbing areas to hang out with his friends and chit-chat and like take his dog to the cliff and stuff.

So, you know, I look at somebody like him who's basically made an entire life of free-souling.

I'm kind of like, you know, if you do it carefully, you, you know, make good decisions.

I don't think it has to be sketchy.

How awesome is it that you're friends and co-workers with one of your childhood heroes?

Oh, it's the best.

That's actually, I think, one of the best things about being a professional climber.

It's so many of the people that I was.

that I looked up to as a kid, you know, are now our friends and peers and things.

And you're like, oh, it's so great.

It's wild.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You get to to like hang out with your heroes and you're like never would have imagined yeah no it's amazing there's some uh young kid out there now thinking the same he's like i'm too afraid to go up to alex and say hello uh and uh they should just say hello yeah i don't have much

in the same way that uh right yeah totally i mean in the same way that i was like so afraid to ever talk to peter when i was young and then ultimately now he's just another nice guy and we're friends we climb together it's great sort of like yeah anybody should just say hi you know it's like if they're at the if we're at the cliff like come chat.

You know, it's like we're all doing the same thing.

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Do most climbers, as they're coming up, if they have aspirations to be, you know, great free soloists or other types of climbers, do they tend to work and do other things?

Or is this like you're like all in?

It's lifestyle.

You live in a van.

I mean, you can do that also after achieving some degree of financial success.

We know you've done that.

We can talk about that.

But is it the kind of thing where you have to give up other aspects of life in order to get really, really good at it?

That's an interesting question.

I'm not totally sure because in some ways, though, it it depends what you mean by achieving success as a climber because if you're trying to climb the hardest grades or go to the Olympics or things like that, in some ways you're almost better off being a university student or something, like having a structured schedule that in some ways limits the amount of that you can climb.

Because

you know, I don't know enough about other sports, but I suspect this is akin to like powerlifting or something.

Where it's like if you're trying to be really, really strong, you kind of only need to do a little bit every couple days.

and then recover.

And so for a sort of elite physical training for climbing, you really only need, you know, say three or four hour sessions four or five days a week.

And then it's like, what do you do with the rest of your time?

And so, like, you may as well have a job.

And so, a lot of my friends who like write code for a living or, you know, do things like that are very, very strong climbers because of the

schedule that it allows, the structure.

That said, I think if you want to be a great free soloist or like a big adventure climber, you're probably better off living in a van and just doing the thing nonstop because for that, you're not trying to have that peak muscular performance.

You're trying to just learn a skill and do something all the time.

And so then, like, hours of practice, I think, matter more anyway.

Maybe we talk a little bit about recovery, as long as we're talking about, you know, number of hours that one puts in.

I'm sure your recovery looks different than it used to.

But

what do you do to recover between sessions?

Are you a big believer in sauna, cold?

Is it

just basically sleep?

No, I like push my three-year-old on the swings.

You know, like, that's how I recover.

Is I like play with the kids on the swings and

I try to, I mean, you know, I try to eat relatively well.

I try to sleep enough.

Like, I do all the basics for recovery.

But no, I mean, I basically just survive in between.

I was actually just joking with somebody that I think, you know, as a 24-year-old living by myself in a van.

I would have crazy days of climbing and then on a rest day, I would like binge-watch an entire season of some show while eating an entire flat of Oreos, just like never even leave the bed of my van.

And then the next day, go out and like do a speed record on something or just be like, oh my god, I'm so psyched.

And now I'm like, I'm definitely not doing that now.

Or at least, no, I haven't done that in forever.

Because I just don't have the time and don't have,

yeah, so I think now it takes a little more effort to recover and it's just a little slower probably.

So it's hard to say though, because a lot of that's just having kids and just having different demands of time and life.

But it sounds like climbers are pretty grassroots in their, in their training and techniques.

Like, you know, in a lot of other areas.

Yeah, I mean, I was living in a van.

I was basically like, you know, super low overhead, no, no team, no support.

I'm just living in a car doing the thing non-stop for, you know, a decade.

And so that's a pretty scrappy approach.

And I think that in the years since then, climbing is professionalized a little bit.

And there's a little more money, there's a little more support, and there's just a higher level of competition.

I think

it'd be harder to achieve things doing just that now.

I think you'd have to have a little more of a plan.

Yeah, I can't help but sense that hyperbaric chambers and red light and massage guns and all that are going to be making their way into the body.

Massage guns for sure are there.

Yeah, massage guns are there.

I try to like roll out every once in a while.

Even when I was living in my van, I would stretch and roll out and do those types of things because you just kind of have to stay supple.

Yeah, how do you feel?

How's your body feel?

Well, I mean, right now, I think pretty good.

I don't know.

Yeah, when I'm, I live in Las Vegas.

When I'm at home, I try to see this body worker in town once a week, Pat, sweet Pat.

He's the man.

And so.

You know, I think of that as kind of like a basic just taking care of, you know, making, it's like an oil change.

It's like making sure the engine runs smoothly.

And, and I think as a result of body work like that, I haven't had any major like overuse injuries in years.

And so, like, that's, that's pretty good for me.

Awesome.

Yeah,

maybe it's just because it's historically, it was what I knew, but I'm seeing so many parallels with skateboarding where like there was this time when no skateboarders lifted weights or did any kind of fitness.

Then that started to happen.

Actually, Danny Way, who jumped the Great Wall of China, he was kind of the first person in skateboarding to like, he would do like neck training because he had broken his neck surfing in Newport and he was doing like these um you know like the where you like swing the ball above your head he was doing core work and I remember back then thing I sort of left skateboarding

and I was thinking like that's weird like skateboarders are gonna just like really have a problem with this because it wasn't consistent with the culture now there are a lot of guys who who work out and take care of their bodies but

There are still a lot of guys who absolutely kill it.

They're incredible.

And their energy drink is like a beer.

And their quote-unquote nootropic is cigarettes and and they murder it.

They're super good.

And so I like these sports where it's like you can't get around just investing a massive number of hours doing it.

And then you can either take the kind of rock and roll track into it or you can take the kind of self-care track and sometimes people cross over.

But it works either way.

It really does.

Climbing still has that exact same thing going on where you can kind of go either way.

I do think, though, that the self-care track will obviously win out long term.

I mean, that's the thing with climbing and being in the Olympics and just the professionalism, all that.

I mean, obviously self-care is better for you long term.

Like, you know, everybody knows that.

That said, you still see a lot of very proficient climbers who, yeah, exactly, just kind of party, go hard.

I mean, because so much of climbing just comes down to effort when you're doing the thing.

Like, if you go climbing several days a week and you try your absolute hardest every time you're climbing, you're going to get pretty freaking good, you know, whether you...

do red light therapy or like any of the weird other stuff or not.

So it's like, I mean, it really just comes down to your effort doing the thing.

And so, yeah, I I mean, you could live.

And I mean, a lot of climbers, especially in the past, lived on a diet of, you know, cigarettes and coffee and freaking beer.

And, you know, you can, you can, you can get by that way.

Yeah, the 1970s, 80s approach.

It's not ideal.

It's not ideal.

A friend of mine, Tom Billieu, he is very successful in business.

He also has a podcast.

He was saying to me the other day, he goes, yeah, basically, when young people ask him, you know, how to get good at whatever, business or anything, he just tells them,

work as if smartphones didn't exist.

Meaning when you're bored, go work on the thing.

When you don't have anything, like if you get rid, I'm not encouraging people get rid of their smartphone, but I'm curious about your relationship to technology because I think nowadays, even though there are people training for the Olympics and whatnot, that it is very hard to

disengage from pressures of sponsors, pressures of just sheer communications, right?

And if you're coming up, this idea that you always have to be in contact with people, it limits the total number of reps that you get physically, but also mentally.

Because I imagine there was a lot lot of time sitting back in bed and thinking about climbing.

Just like I used to sit back in bed and think about experiments when I was in graduate school.

Now I'd probably if that's a good idea.

If the phone didn't exist, I'd probably be on my phone.

I used to think about experiments and figures and what would this work and that work.

So what are your thoughts on kind of a mental

engagement separate from climbing?

No, I think that's that's definitely a big thing.

I mean, I think I've thought in the past that in some ways I feel kind of lucky that I came up when I did in climbing, where it's like sort of pre-smartphone, pre-social, pre-you know, you just live in your car and you do the thing and that's it.

And that's your whole lifestyle.

I mean, currently, you know, I have all the social media accounts and things, but I don't have any of the apps on my phone.

I have a friend that manages it for me.

I like send all the content to her, but she posts stuff.

And so it's a nice way to sort of disconnect myself from scrolling aimlessly.

I don't really have the time anymore anyway.

You know, it's like I'd rather play with my kids than freaking scroll.

You know, it's like, but no, I mean, that's, that's tough.

I mean, I think it'd be hard to be a kid now growing up, like thinking that that's the norm, that you like have to be connected, that you have to be capturing everything, you know, documenting it and then sharing it and posting it and just all the stuff.

I've always felt like the thing about being a professional climber is that you just have to be a good climber.

Like first and foremost, the key to being a professional climber is being able to climb really well.

And like the most important thing is doing the thing.

And I just think when you get caught up in all the posting, sharing, streaming, all the whatever, that's not doing the thing.

But it's easy to conflate them.

And it's, I don't know.

Yeah.

No, I think it'd be really hard.

Yeah, I agree completely.

And the hidden secret is that if you want something interesting to show on social media, the key is to not be on social media so that you have something to bring to it.

It's just so hard to actually be good at something.

And this goes back to what we were just talking about with free soling and perceived risk and all that kind of stuff, is that it's really easy to make something look rad souling-wise.

Like, you know, I could climb, I could climb the outside of this building and it would look insane.

It would get tons of likes.

People would think it's cool, but it's not cutting the edge.

It's not cool.

It's not even hard.

Like, it's not, it's,

it's whatever.

But to actually do something that's cutting edge or newsworthy in climbing, it's pretty freaking hard.

You know, and the challenge with social and with public, all that kind of stuff, is that it's just so easy to,

I don't want to say to fake it because it's not like people are out there like trying to be duplicitous or like to trick you.

But it's just, you can get the same splash with none of the effort, you know, through social stuff, I think.

You're like, oh, I just did something easy and people thought it was amazing.

Let's call that good.

And you're like, well, that's just not good because it's easy.

It's freaking, you know, like it's not cutting edge.

It's not rat.

I mean, you clearly go after big, big goals.

I mean,

it's a giant goal.

I think it really stands, and I know you've been told this many times before.

So if it embarrasses you in a positive way, then great.

I mean, it stands as perhaps at least one of the most impressive physical feats in history because the risk-consequence scenario there was you fall, you can potentially die.

There may have been moments along the climb.

There were brief moments, brief moments.

And you're right above a ledge.

You're like, oh, wow.

Yeah.

So, okay, so, and it's, and it's so like you to point out those moments as opposed to all the other moments.

It really speaks to your mindset.

But I think that going after big things, I mean, you know,

you know,

building

rockets to go to the moon.

I remember when I was a kid, Danny Wade just had to jump the Great Wall of China to do it live.

Someone had died trying it on a mountain bike.

I remember thinking, I I watched it on a little screen this big, and I was like, I've known that guy since we're out of touch now, but for the most part, but since it was like 13, and he was always going after big things, jumping out of helicopters, you know, jumping the Great Wall of China, like, you know, and then there were people who just pushed themselves.

And so what I wonder is on a daily basis, when you climb,

do you ever just climb for fun?

When you climb, are you always working on something?

And

there's this famous scene in Free Solo, like more or less immediately after you got down from the climb, you're fingerboarding again, and like you're training, and you're enjoying your routine, which, by the way, is consistent with keeping the dopamine flowing for process as opposed to like the postpartum depression that many people experience after a big feed is completed, selling a big company, et cetera.

You avoid all that by doing exactly what you're doing.

But then, how quickly did your mind pivot to like, okay, what's next?

In the domain of climbing, because I realize you've had two children, you've got other aspects of your life.

But like, where's your mind in terms of where you want to take your life and your climbing?

Yeah, on the one hand, I set big goals, I guess, you know, something like Yell Cap.

But the thing is, I would actually say that's more the outgrowth of setting consistent little goals like all the time.

Like, I basically always have a running-to-do list of like, what am I doing tomorrow?

What am I doing today?

What am I trying to do this week?

And that extends to climbing as well.

With like, what are all the little things I can be doing?

Like, what are the little things I can tick this week?

You know, I have my climbing journal goes back to 2005 or 6 or something.

So, basically, everything I've ever climbed is logged with, you you know, difficulty and times and whatever.

And so I'm constantly trying to tick things as a climber, you know, just like to do new climbs that I haven't done before.

And so, I mean, I think like actually my day of climbing yesterday could be a good example of this.

So yesterday, my wife and I dropped off our older daughter at school, went to the cliff, did a day of sport climbing, and then picked up our daughter on the way home.

It's like a perfect day like that where you can kind of like make it all work.

And I'm not going to be able to go to that cliff very often this season just because of travel and work and life, basically.

So I don't want to have any big project there because I just won't have time to do it.

You know, I'm trying to set my goals appropriately where I'm like, oh, there's no point in trying to do something that would take me a month or two to achieve if I only have three days.

And so I had a goal for that day of trying to do this very particular little combination of routes that I hadn't done before.

It's just something new, something interesting.

It's not that hard.

But then we got there and it was, it was like the worst conditions.

It was like 86 degrees when you parked the car.

And so, you know, it's like you're trying to work out and like horrendously hot.

And it was also that kind of of monsoony so it was very humid so we got to the wall and it's like disgusting and I was kind of like well you know it's a training day like whatever and so I tried to do this new combination of roots ultimately I failed on I felt the very freaking top of the wall I was like so maxed and didn't do it I'll probably get a chance to go back on Monday and hope and I'll for sure do it then

but you know it's like a very small goal like this isn't cutting edge like big this isn't this isn't even cool at all like my friends won't even care like they'll think it's stupid but but it's nice for me to have a reason for me to try my hardest for that particular day of climbing.

And I think that the big goals come as a result of all those little things.

You know, like if day by day you're constantly doing something that's a little bit new, a little bit different, a little bit harder, you know, whatever seems like the appropriate challenge for that day.

I think that looking back at 20 years of climbing outside non-stop, that the big things have just come as a natural outgrowth of all those little things.

You do like enough little things all the time, and then every once in a while, something big happens.

And so, I don't know.

But I have to-do lists going back like years of like goals and all these aspirations.

And, you know, some years I only do half them.

Some years I do a third of them.

And then, you know, something like Freeselling LCAP sat on a list like that literally for years and it kept floating to the next year, to the next year.

Because you get into Yosemite, you look at the wall and you're like, nah, that's, you know, you're like, it's totally out of the question.

And so you just like punt to the next year.

And so,

yeah, I mean, sometimes the goals don't happen.

Sometimes they do.

But you kind of just have to let it play out.

You know, it's more like the day-to-day little challenges.

I love how matter of fact you are about it.

You are wired different.

You think, I mean,

well, maybe not.

I mean, because

like, and this is

a vastly

less high-risk, high-consequence endeavor, but like public speaking doesn't make me, it doesn't raise my level of cortisol or autonomic arousal at all because I've done so much of it.

Yeah, because you're super well practiced.

Yeah.

I mean, just, yeah.

So

sometimes I'll, you know, I'll think like, oh, I'm like a little more keyed up than I want to be and I know how to calm myself down.

Well, I'm actually, I feel the same way with public speaking now, but that's after years of practice because it used to be, it used to be so stressful for me.

Like, so, yeah, no, I was, I was.

Proof that your amygdala does work like totally.

No, I mean, exactly.

That's why I hate all this stuff.

It's like, oh, you're just wired differently.

Because I'm like, no, I know that, you know, like, yeah, public, like speaking in front of a class in school was like mortifying.

But now, after years of doing keynote speeches to like giant groups, I'm sort of like, no, now it's super chill.

But, you know, that's all learned.

Yeah, forgive me for saying you're wired different.

I think that, you know, when you did free solo, there were a number of news programs that like took advantage of the fact they put you in a brain scanner.

You know, this is my field of neuroscience.

You know, his amygdala might not be activated the same way as other people's.

But I would have thought, and I think it's the case now you confirmed, that it's really domain specific.

Like you've done so much climbing, you have so many reps there that you're familiar with the contingencies.

And so it's not that you can't experience fear, it's that you're not placing yourself into truly fearful circumstances climbing.

But the fact that public speaking was an issue means that your threat sensors and the amygdala and related circuits work perfectly fine.

With that particular scanning in the fMRI, they show you a bunch of black and white pictures and it's like whether or not that triggers the fear response.

And I was like, well, obviously looking at pictures isn't going to trigger my fear response.

But I'm like, had they thrown a snake into the fMRI with me, like that would have triggered my fear response.

You know, if there were like giant spiders like crawling over me, like that would probably would too.

And so I was like, no, obviously I feel fear.

I just, I'm just not afraid of black and white photos.

You know, right.

I was like, that's what they used?

Yeah, like angry faces and that kind of the faces.

It wasn't even faces.

It was like random stuff, like, I don't know, like a gun and then like a light socket.

You know, some things that are like neutral.

Something that...

I should have designed the experiment.

My lab used to work on the fear.

I think it was a standardized thing, I think.

Yeah, Yeah,

even.

Yeah, I'm not trying to be disparaging of the research.

My lab used to work on fear.

We used VR.

That's how I met Michael Mueller, our friend in common.

He took me down to Gualupe.

We did.

Two times, we went down there 2016 and 2017 doing cage exit diving with Great Whites, filming to get the VR.

And I'll tell you, in real life, it's a hell of a lot scarier than it is.

It's totally than in VR.

But along the lines of dying when you're doing the other thing, not the main thing, the cage exit part ended up being a lot safer.

I had an air failure while in the cage.

I was on that hookah line and I was alone in the cage when it happened.

And I'll tell you, that was a lot more terrifying than being out of the cage with the sharks because when you're out of the cage, you're on scuba and you have some degree of control over, you know, you can shoot for the surface.

When you're in the cage and you run out of air and you're alone,

you're just terrified and you're hosed.

No pun intended.

You're not hosed enough.

So, you know, it speaks to this thing that like when there's this big, scary thing and you're really locked in, you often miss the more trivial, seeming, but real danger that's close up.

But this is, I think, one of the things, one of the real values of climbing is I think that as a climber, you spend all your time thinking about risk and managing risk and mitigating risk and all those kinds of things.

And so I think that

I don't want to toot my own horn too much, but I do feel good at evaluating risks like that.

You know, like what is the actual dangerous thing?

Like what's sketchy about the situation?

And it just often isn't the thing that people are looking at.

You know, and that's what I was talking about earlier with like people watching video free soling or whatever else.

They're like, that's sketchy.

And I'm like, well, you know might be in some ways but probably not for all the reasons that you're thinking you know what i mean like the the obvious visual thing is probably not the the the big challenge and it sounds a little cliche but you're doing what you love you know it's it's interesting i think one of the biggest risks that um i think about now um

as i get older is

the

non-daily lethal risk of you know grinding it out in a job you don't like and then you know one day you wake up and you're like wow there's there's no time machine.

Like, I can't go back and get that vitality and that.

That's the work I have been doing.

Yeah.

And that's where I think this idea of doing what you love really counts.

Whether or not you have to live in a van and do nothing else or whether or not you can also go to school, but doing something that you love very, very much.

Yeah, either way you're going to die.

Either way, you're going to die.

And you may as well die having done a lot of things you're really excited about than die regretting all the things you didn't do.

Totally.

I mean, I think that that actually, that exact mindset really helped inform my whole climbing journey in a way.

It's like my father died when I I was 19 and he died of a heart attack, unexpectedly, just freak thing running through an airport at age 55.

And, you know, and I think for a young, for a teenager, that makes an impression where you're sort of like, oh, like this could end at any moment.

And actually, and both my grandfathers had just died like at roughly the same time.

So I think for an impressionable, you know, teen, you're sort of like, oh, everybody dies.

Like, do you get to do all the things that you want to do before you go?

And, and I think my father, my father was a community college professor, taught language.

And

he ostensibly lived a risk-free life,

relatively sedentary.

I mean, he traveled widely.

He was great.

But by any risk perception thing, you'd be like, oh, he's a professor.

He's fine.

And yet he still died young and probably would have preferred to do a lot of other things before he went.

I'm sort of like, you know, it's just a reminder that you got to do all those things.

Yeah, I want to talk to you about your philosophy on death and time and kind of life arc.

And you've already started.

So thank you for that.

Because I would say most of my friends who started families young are people who, these are male friends whose dads died young.

And so they had this very keen sense of the finite duration of life.

And, you know, Steve Jobs talked about this.

So like, you're, you know, very, and he died young.

He seemed to have some sense of how long he was going to live and really wanted to pack things in.

And I don't know why that was.

He was adopted, so I don't know if he even knew how long his parents lived, et cetera.

But barring accident or injury,

you know, we don't really know when we're going to die.

But sometimes I think we get the sense based on relatives.

And, you know, I can remember a time in my life when I,

of course, I knew I was going to die, but I lived in a way that I just, I felt like I had all the time in the world, despite pursuing things.

And I think with each passing year, I'm like, oh, wow, like the wall's coming.

It's winding down.

Yeah, like we got to get the show on the road.

And I've done things I wanted to do, but it's interesting that,

you know,

it does seem that like having a parent die has a has a profound impact yeah galvanizing effect on where you set that horizon you realize like today is part of an arc that has an end point and we know that but we often don't live into that realization yeah no i totally agree with that i mean and i you say we know that but i actually think that we don't talk about that enough you know what i mean i think most people live with a little too much open end because nobody wants to talk about death nobody wants to talk about you know like the consequences like because people think it's morbid or it's just not but the thing is like we're all gonna freaking die you know it's like are we gonna be proud of what we did before we died like I don't know I mean

yeah we'll see it's like kind of cliche to be like oh better to die young and you know burn brightly and all that kind of stuff but you know to some extent I think that's I think there's a middle ground where you're like it's better to try hard and do things that you're proud of and

you know either way you're gonna die I agree.

I mean, I think there is something interesting to this 27 effect.

You know, so many like rock and roll musicians die at 27.

It's their there quarter life crisis?

Yeah, quarterlife crisis.

I haven't heard of the quarterlife crisis.

You never heard of quarterlife crisis.

Like all my friends have gone through a quarterlife crisis.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

And when does it happen?

Well, at like 25, you know, 27.

Interesting.

No, I was just so focused on becoming a neuroscientist.

I didn't know what else I would do besides that at 25.

I think I was just so locked in.

But I've always been a little bit obsessive.

Have you always been a little bit like, whatever you're into, you're into?

I guess it's been climbing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was just lucky to get into climbing when I was 10.

So this is something that I've just been into forever.

So did you play Legos as a kid or do you have a- Yeah, and I was psycho about my Legos.

You were psycho about Legos.

Yeah, yeah.

Psycho.

Like I didn't have a bed in my room because I had Legos covered across the whole floor, basically.

I slept in a corner and I just had Legos all over.

Awesome.

Kind of psycho.

Do you see some of this in your kids?

Not quite that yet, but they're pretty young, so it's hard to tell.

But

yeah, we'll see.

We'll see.

I kind of think, you know.

It's all about having personality.

Like, do a thing.

Do it well.

Like, get excited about things.

I mean, there's just so many people on Earth and they all do different things.

Like you may as well be the person to do that one particular thing and just like really do it.

No, I agree.

That's the juice.

I mean, I mean, I think for some of us, like, I just know from my own life experience, I, like, I thought I was certainly going to just get into skateboarding.

Many of my friends became professional skateboarders.

got really good at or worked in the industry.

And early on, I was getting hurt and I realized I'm not very good at this.

And then when I finally plugged into academics and learning, I was like, this is the thing.

And I loved it.

And it, and then eventually I pivoted to this thing, which I didn't anticipate.

But I do think that going all in on something is a, it provides a really wonderful feedback loop that one can like you feel, it makes you feel alive.

Yeah, you're like doing a thing.

Especially when it's hard.

Yeah, especially when it's hard.

I've literally spent my whole life basically like all in on climbing.

And I'm still, I just, I just love going to rock climbing.

You know, it's like, I mean, I think that's really the goal of parenting is to help your kid find something that they're that psyched about, like something that they can commit to and something that will drive them, something they're passionate about.

And so, you know, I mean, we'll see with our kids, but it's like the idea is just to let them experience enough things that they can find

whatever gets them out of bed every day.

They certainly are in the right environment to flourish with it.

You mentioned that climbing's in the Olympics.

I could see, and I've observed in other sports where the parents are kind of more obsessive than the kid and then the kid burns out on it.

I read Andre Agassiz's book, Opium.

Yeah, that's basically a story of his dad pushing him to play a game he did not want to play.

Yeah, that's maybe the best sports memoir ever.

that's a great book.

Yeah, great book.

Yeah, his dad was like a boxer and basically trained him in tennis like a boxer.

Yeah, so it's sort of like the light-handed approach of, like, I think kids know.

I think, I mean, you kind of let them forage, right?

No, we're taking the light-handed approach for sure.

I mean, our kids will obviously know how to climb because that's what we do all the time.

But so far, we just go hiking.

Like, we haven't forced them to climb.

We have a little bit of a home gym at home, like a little climbing garage.

And so the girls can play on the wall whenever they want to, but there's certainly never any pressure to do anything.

I read, and please correct me if this is inaccurate, but that it was during college that you had some family members pass away.

And when you really leaned into just climbing more,

I think it's somewhere on the internet that you were climbing on Indian Rock, which is interesting to me because I went to graduate school in Berkeley and lived in Berkeley for a long time.

You went to Cal?

I went to Cal for my master's.

And then I lived in Berkeley even when I was a postdoc at Stanford.

I love Berkeley.

I was like, you went from Cal to Stanford.

Yeah, right.

The enemy, the enemy.

Yeah, it's like

born at Stanford, trained at Stanford, and still spent a lot of time at Berkeley.

I liked the culture in Berkeley then, and I liked the food.

So I used to take pizzas from the cheese board up to Indian Rock.

And so while you were climbing Indian Rock, I was eating and picnicking on Indian Rock.

It's amazing.

So would you just pull little solo journeys out there?

This is, by the way, folks, a big steep rock, but on one face, it's gradual.

It literally has like rock couches where couples go on dates and you eat some pizza and hang out and get an amazing.

And you overlooking the city.

Yeah, so you were climbing up the back of it, which is anything but...

Well, actually, I was mostly traversing the bottom of it.

There's tons of, like, basically, you can contour the whole base of the rock.

And so you can climb for, you know, a couple hundred feet basically without touching the ground.

So you just go back and forth doing laps.

And yeah, cool.

I mean, from where I was living at Berkeley, it was only, I don't know, like a 30-minute walk to Indian Rock or something.

So I basically wasn't going to class.

I was just strolling to Indian Rock and traversing the wall back and forth.

And then that's why I dropped out after one year at Berkeley.

So it's kind of like, I don't know why I'm at university if I'm not actually.

Actually, it's more complicated than that because that year I got into the youth worlds like a international thing and so I was gonna take the semester off to go to worlds and travel and climb a little bit and so now I've just taken you know whatever like third 35 semesters off or something you're on leave yeah exactly no I think I think after some point they were like you're done

yeah yeah I think they closed that but it worked out it worked certainly worked out yeah the thing that we find ourselves doing when

we should be doing something else in in the positive sense of it.

Like, I mean, that often is the thing.

Like it's that you're obsessed over.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just hard to know with that stuff though, because obviously for most people, they probably should get an education and get a job of some kind.

Like, even if you're a really passionate climber, I mean, most people probably aren't going to make a living as a professional climber because it's just too small an industry.

And, you know, the

depends on your level and everything.

I mean, I think I got kind of lucky.

I mean, in a lot of ways, I got lucky.

Also, just because I like soling, and it's like such a niche, and not that many people do it.

And the level just wasn't that high.

And so, you know, I sometimes joke, it's easy to be the best if you're the only one doing it you know it's like it's easy to compete as the only person in a field and you're kind of like well that makes it show and so you know i think i got lucky in a lot of ways like that and so yeah most people probably should finish university and and climb as they can that said i mean if you love doing a thing

it makes sense to maybe build your life around how you can do that thing as much as possible just because it keeps you energized and fired up and you know makes the rest of your life better i think it was ryan holiday that said that if you don't know what to do with your life and you're still trying to figure it out definitely stay in college.

Because, you know, there are all these tales of like Mark Zuckerberg leaving Harvard and Steve Jobs dropping out of Reed College and Alex Honnell leaving Berkeley and

eventually becoming the person that you are now.

But you had a direction.

There was another thing to lean into.

It wasn't just, oh, I don't like this.

I don't want to be.

Yeah, I mean, if you have nothing, then you drop out and you just go play video games in your basement or something.

Like that's obviously not.

That's not better than going to school.

Like you're better off going to school and broadening your horizons and doing whatever.

But yeah, I mean, I thought I was just taking some time off, and I thought that eventually I'd become a mountain guide or something, or like teach at summer camps.

Or I don't know, you know, because especially at the time, the climbing industry was so much smaller, there wasn't any money.

Like, I didn't think you could make it a living as a professional climber.

And so I thought it was just kind of a fun thing I was doing in the van for a while before I'd like find some kind of job or something.

And then thankfully, the climbing industry has kind of scaled at the same rate that

I did as a climber.

And so it all worked out.

Is it the case that you didn't have any monetary aspirations when you were doing it?

Like, it sounds like you didn't.

But did you ever have the conversation with your mom?

Like, you know, how are you going to make a living?

No.

Well, so, I mean, I mentioned that my dad died.

So my parents had just gotten divorced.

And so my dad had left enough for my sister and me to finish college.

And so I took that money and put it in bonds, which, like, I don't know what that is.

But, you know, so I was making like a couple hundred bucks a month in bonds.

And then I stole the family minivan.

Like I said, my grandparent, my two grandfathers had died before.

So like basically my mom had inherited this little car.

So she was driving my grandpa's car.

I took the family minivan.

I was making a couple hundred bucks in bonds.

And basically that just kind of covered any of the pressure, like the financial pressure.

Whereas that gave me enough of a buffer that I was like, well, for several years at least, I can just kind of like live in this minivan and see what happens.

And then after a couple of years, I was sponsored.

I was getting free product.

I was getting it like a very, very small amount of money, but some amount of money, which is enough to sort of justify the whole thing.

We're like, oh, companies are paying me to do this thing.

I should see how well I can do it.

And then it all kind of took off from there.

But yeah,

I mean, that's one of the ways in which I was very lucky as a climber.

You know, there was like just enough financial cushion that I could try to do the thing as much as I wanted for a couple of years and see how it played out.

And it just happened to work out well.

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It's going to sound like an odd question, but I'm very curious about this.

You've been in beautiful places, like just and you get a very different view of those places than most people.

There's a really great YouTube shorts of you hanging on by one arm during a climb, which itself is impressive to

the observer.

But then you take some moments and you like look around and you're just like checking out the scene.

You're clearly not looking at the rock that I know, even as a non-expert.

And so I'm wondering this.

I have reasons to ask.

Do you ever snap photos with your mind, your mind's eye?

Like, do you have clear recollection of like, oh, I'm going to snap a shot of this, like, keep this one in the middle of the day?

No, I can't remember.

No.

I mean, to me, it's more the living there day in and day out.

Like, you know, with free-souling our capital, let's say, I mean, I spent months on the wall, and it's like just every day, you know, you're going up before sunrise a lot of the time, so you're watching the sunrise over Half Dome, and it's like super beautiful.

And then you're going down at sunset, and you're watching the moon, and it's just, I mean it's just day in and day out it's the most beautiful place on earth in all these amazing conditions you know sometimes it starts snowing sometimes it's raining it's like there are clouds swirling and mist or whatever and you're just like oh it's amazing but I don't really remember any specific you know like a snapshot of that it's more just the overall you're like oh it's just this amazing place It's pretty pretty awesome experience.

Yeah, like the freaking, what is it, with Yosemite Falls, the,

have you ever seen the moon rainbow thing?

The firelight thing?

No, the firefalls is a different thing.

That's like with the moon and that's a different time of year.

In

like May or June, if you get a full moon,

oh, the moon bow, that's what it is.

It's like when Yosemite Falls will cast a moon bow, like you'll be able to see a rainbow from the moonlight in the waterfall when it's at peak water.

It's totally insane.

My wife and I went for a romantic walk to go look at the moon bow one season because you're just there and you're like, that's pretty cool.

You know, it's like it's a rainbow at night.

Amazing.

It's really cool.

We're going to send a lot of people to Yosemite by virtue of Clouds Rest and for the non-climbers.

I still still think it's crazy that you've climbed Clouds Rest more than once and never climbed Half Dome.

I've run Clouds Rest, rucked it.

I've done it.

I've probably done Clouds Rest at least a dozen times.

That is crazy.

And I love it.

You have to go past Half Dome, and Half Dome is the much more famous cousin that's closer and easier and kind of more spectacular.

Well, you have to drive past it.

So to be clear, I'm starting from Sunrise.

Oh, you're going from Tuala.

I'm going from Tuala.

Oh, I'm way less impressed.

Oh, okay.

Oh, I thought you had a coming from Group.

Because I was thinking to myself, I was like, you know, Clouds Rest is like 15 miles up and back.

It's like, it's not narrow.

The valley floor is really hard.

Going from the valley floor is here.

I actually don't know many people who come up from the valley floor anymore.

I've only had a lot of people.

People tend to start at sunrise and then go down Clouds Rest, kind of go down the spine of it toward Half Dome.

And then I know this because then recently.

Yeah, they're trails between them, and it's all easy.

That's so funny because you were talking about rucking a heavy bag up there.

And I was like, man, that is a hard walk from the valley floor.

Because I'm thinking everything from the valley floor because I spent so much time in Yosemite.

I'm starting at about 8,000 feet, finishing at about 10,000 feet.

Yeah, okay.

I'm so much less impressed.

Your daughters do this.

Not quite yet.

Your three and a half-year-old daughter.

That's what I was saying.

Like, I was like, wow, he's right.

Okay.

I mean, it's tough.

I mean, 2,000.

Yeah, no, no.

But it's still tough.

I mean, it's like a workout.

But going from the valley floor is really tough.

Yeah, that's brutal.

Because I had one season in Yosemite where, for whatever reason, I wasn't really motivated for climbing goals.

And I called it, I said that I retired and I was on a trail running season.

Though it's funny because I actually, I supported a bunch of my friends on things and I was bouldering with all my friends.

And so, you know, I said that I have a climbing journal.

And so by the end of the season, if you look through the journal, it would look like a normal season where like almost every day I was climbing with somebody, I was doing something.

And then by the end of the season, I actually did a couple of things that I was kind of proud of.

But the mindset going into it was like, I don't care.

I'm just here having fun.

I'm trail running and I'm supporting my friends on things.

And that's it.

And one of my big things that season was that I ran Clouds Rest from the valley floor.

But to me, that was like a triumph of trail running, you know, because that's like a pretty big.

Yeah, how long is that?

I don't know.

It's like.

5,000 feet or 6,000.

I don't know.

It's like so far.

Yeah.

Let's see.

It was like the hardest thing I'd ever run.

Yeah, you're probably going at least 3,000 to 4,000 feet from the valley floor up to the meadows and then another 2,000 up to when the valley floor is four and the top of clouds of this is 10 something so you're doing six yeah yeah so it's like okay for me I was like oh that's a that's a lot that's a trail run anyway yeah and you're bringing it and you're carrying water you get rapid yeah I just had like a little bottle and then you fill in the rivers and yeah I mean I don't consider myself a serious trail runner or mountaineer certainly but I

ever since I got my driver's license it was like Yosemite

you know and Glacier is amazing

you know I and I swear I'm not sent here by the National Park Service, but I think Glacier's got some incredible scenery that everyone should make it to.

Have you done a lot of climbing in Glacier?

Actually, I don't think there is that much climbing in Glacier National Park, but I've actually biked past on the way to Alaska for this random

journey I did.

Yeah.

But no, I haven't done much in there.

What are the,

if any, cultural differences or climbing in the United States versus in Europe?

It seems like, you know, like get guys in that train in the Alps.

I keep saying guys, but I want to be fair, not for political.

I'm not saying this for politically correct reasons, but there's a movie out very soon, actually, an IMAX movie.

I saw the trailer, too.

It was a friend of yours, a woman who's, what's she climbing?

She's climbing the El Cap.

Yeah, she's climbing to El Cap in a day.

Like, free in a day of this route called Golden Gate.

Yeah, actually, surprisingly, I'm in that film much more than I thought because I supported her on Easter for Attempts.

We're talking about Emily Harrington, who's also a professional climber, who, yeah, freed this route called Golden Gate in a day.

And the film's called a Girl Climber.

And I think it comes out 24th.

Yeah, isn't that like soon?

Yeah.

It's one day in an IMAX, but then presumably

and then some kind of theatrical release, but I think it'll be a relatively small theatrical release and then eventually stream and whatever.

But anyway, this film, Girl Climber.

Yeah, it's funny because she worked on this goal for a long time and I'd kind of forgotten that I basically supported her on each of her attempts because when you support somebody, I mean, this is kind of like crewing somebody's race or something.

You know, when you support somebody, it's basically a rest day for you.

You're like having a nice day.

You're supporting a friend.

It's like no pressure.

It's all really chill.

And so the days that I supported her her were all like you know i mean i remember them but they were just one day throughout a big season where i'd be working on other climbing goals like all the things that i'm working on and it's just like a fun day supporting a friend but then i went and watched the movie and it's like oh every time she drives the wall i'm like they're supporting her and i was like oh god i kind of forgot about all these things like a couple years ago and i don't know it was uh yeah it's funny seeing the film it's it's really it's really inspiring is the route that she took um particularly difficult?

What's the milestone that she achieves there?

She was the first woman to do that route in a day, free in a day.

That root's like a harder version of the Free Rider, the thing that I free-solid in the film Free Solo.

But yeah, I mean, honestly, I think the film does a good job of not trying to portray it as anything more than it is.

I mean, it's a very difficult climbing achievement, but it's not like it doesn't need support.

It's not the hardest thing ever done.

It's not the first time that, you know,

but it's very hard.

And if you watch the film, you see what makes it meaningful is the level of effort that she puts into it.

It's like it's hard for her.

She's a great climber and she puts a lot into it, a lot of herself into it, and eventually,

I don't want to, you know, spoiler, but eventually overcomes and like manages to do this thing that's really hard for her.

And I think that's, which in a lot of ways is, I mean, that's climbing in a nutshell.

It's like none of her really matters because like even freestyling on cap, I mean, you can walk around the back.

Like, you know, it's like, why put the years of effort into climbing the face when you can walk around the back?

Like, all of climbing is relatively meaningless.

And so ultimately, it's the effort that we put into it that, that, that has value.

And so I think that's, that's what the film Girl Climber does a really good job of: sort of like, oh, wow, she puts a lot into it and therefore gets a lot out of it for herself.

Awesome.

And I haven't seen it yet, but clearly for the observer, too.

I mean, I find it amazing that humans love to see other humans accomplish great feats.

I think they love to see the effort.

I mean, the accomplishment, of course, but it's like, but you love seeing somebody work really hard at something, try really hard, like face their fears, overcome, and then ideally achieve something.

But I think it's the effort that's so inspiring.

I mean, at least personally, I love to see other people try that hard because it's a reminder that I can try that hard if I want to.

No, I completely agree.

I had made this little list before we

started and

trying to just let my unconscious mind guide it more than I'm really scripting out carefully.

And it says

evil kinievil, because when I was growing up, everything was evil, can evil.

It turned out there were many of them.

It's a whole family.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A bunch of evil can evils.

The knievels.

The knievils.

Yeah.

And, you know, jumping, you know, whatever, you know, 50, maybe not 50 length to length, but semi-trucks.

And

I think, you know, there's the element of danger.

It's super impressive.

Danny Way growing up, because I knew that kid who's now a full-grown man, doing all sorts of crazy stuff to the point where he was starting to go after things that for skateboarders felt a little bit

kind of outside the box, like land speed records and things like that, you know, but jumping out of helicopters and certainly jumping the Great Wall of China, just engineering it from scratch was super impressive.

And then I've got you here and then

Hunter Thompson, you know, like the guy just, it was all about like how many drug experiences he could have.

And then his funeral was actually, he loved the town of Aspen.

He had his ashes exploded over the town of Aspen in a fireworks show.

So that's that's like going out the way the way you lived.

That is fitting.

Right.

So

I think you're absolutely right, however, that we love to touch into the amount of effort and training that's required.

And that's the Rocky movies.

That's pretty much everything.

And that's really where the work is.

Like that's the, that should be the inspiring part, right?

Because that's the part that women get adopted.

The Rocky training montage, that's the best part of the movie.

I mean, a lot of those films, the best part is the training montage where it's like cuts to the person working really, really hard for a long time, like getting swole.

And then you get to the actual them doing the thing.

And them doing the thing is cool, but it's like them getting ready to do the thing is often the part that you're like, that's so awesome.

I'm all fired up.

Totally.

It's the chasing chickens and all the weird stuff.

Speaking of which um for the non-climber what would be the the strangest um aspect to your training do you train your feet do you train your hands in ways that are unusual but it's probably the dangling from your fingertips that i think a non-climber would

i mean also i mean i think that's the type of thing that a non-climber just can't even interface with like they just can't hang from an edge you know it's like from a small it's like the training your fingertip type stuff uh yeah i mean i think the

Though, I mean, now there have been so many mainstream climbing things that I think people have a sense that that's what it is.

You like dangle on tiny edges and do pull-ups and all that kind of stuff.

Well, I think I follow an Instagram account that's actually informative.

It's a former Army guy who's a

rock climber.

And so it's mainly focused on pull-ups and things like that and touching into like how you if you change the speed of the initial one-arm pull-up, like learning to blast through the bar, like through and above the bar and let go and then catch it again generates a completely different sort of motor neuron adaptation response than like just doing a bunch of pull-ups or like slow one-arm pull-ups, like the ability to be ballistic, but and then also like the eccentric, like catch yourself in lower.

Um, and it seems to have a lot of parallels with climbing.

Maybe I should just get on a wall and climb.

It sounds like, uh, do you?

So I imagine that if you're bouldering, you end up doing all this stuff in the process of bouldering.

Yeah, actually, I was immediately like, so should I be going faster when I do pull-ups?

Because I've been like doing one arms at the end of a session, but like my one-arms are pretty slow.

You know, you just grab the bar and you just like struggle until you do a I mean, he talks about, you know, a lot of people can do a lot of pull-ups in full range, slow, concentric and eccentric but that they rarely ever get to like muscle ups or to one arm pull-ups at the kind of level that keeps pulling a ton of weight

because they there are a number of things that he suggests we can link to this account a lot of there's some training of forearms and brachialis and hands that's required but he said you know that not being able to generate enough force at the beginning because it is a reason a lot of people don't get to the the muscle up because with the muscle up you actually there's a little bit of a kip involved at least when one's first learning it and so people who are used to kind of dragging themselves in low low gear out of the bottom,

it's going to be a long while before they have the strength to do a muscle-up.

Whereas, if you can blast yourself out of the bottom, you sort of end up almost above the bar at some point.

I actually just started doing muscle-ups again, like a couple months ago in my little home gym.

And I was like, I haven't done a muscle-up since I was a teenager.

You know, it's like it's a kind of a gym feat when you're a kid just to see if you can.

And as an adult, it's just also living in a van, obviously, you can't do muscle-ups because there's nothing to muscle press.

Right, right.

You're like hanging from a little bar inside the van.

But, um, but yeah, I started doing it again.

I was like, oh, wow, it's so explosive.

I was, I was kind of like wow what a dude i was so psyched i could still do him well yeah then you don't need his help but i'll i'll send you to the discount so you can take a look he's got some interesting actions i did when i mean i was like oh i'm gonna chat with uber and i was like so what am i supposed to be doing oh we can talk about that that's the thing is like well because i've just been doing all the same training stuff for 30 years i mean and obviously i i I read all the books and you know all my friends are professional climbers so we talk about this kind of stuff all the time.

But there are a lot of things where you're always kind of as like a self-trained, self-coached athlete to some extent.

You're kind of like,

should I be doing this more?

Should I be doing this less?

Like, and

I was like training a bunch this summer and was really motivated.

And then I've kind of just, the pendulum has kind of just swung back to being like, do I need to do trainee stuff like the calisthenics, the extra workout stuff?

Or should I just go pure climbing?

Because to some extent, climbing, like if you want to be a good climber, you just climb.

Like if you have energy left over, you should just climb harder or climb more.

You don't necessarily need to save it for workout stuff and training stuff.

So, I don't know.

But yeah, what do you think?

Okay, well, I'm not going to tell you

how to change his training, especially before you take on a big, a big milestone.

I mean, all I can say is what,

and I don't have a degree in exercise physiology.

What I do have a degree in is 35 years of trying to get stronger.

I'm naturally pretty, pretty,

I would say like medium joints.

I'm not like real thick joints, like my bulldog, you know, like some of those guys that just have like naturally thick joints.

But I managed to keep in some endurance and some degree of

explosivity, but mostly strength and endurance have been the two main things.

To me, the thing that has just been the most beneficial is what Pavel Satsulin taught me when he came here, which is take a weight that you can maybe do six or seven, maybe eight reps with, and do three repetitions.

Set it down and just do many more sets and rest a long period of time if you have time to do that.

really work those fast twitch motor units.

You mean do the just do reps faster?

Well, no, not necessarily.

So if you take a weight that you could do maximum eight, like you'd fail somewhere between seven and eight repetitions.

You take the weight, maybe even add a little bit, and you just do three repetitions.

You don't go to failure, but you do many more sets.

So you might do, let's say, some sort of push-pull, so like a shoulder press of some sort, or

and then if you could get eight, you do three or four, but then you go do your pull-ups.

You might do your, you know, sort of ballistic pull-ups that we were talking about before.

I'm actually getting a lot of progress from those, like trying to blast through and past the bar and kind kind of catch it below.

I'm almost there.

I'm kipping too much when I do it.

So I'm doing it, but I'm kind of like throwing myself up there.

I'm not doing like a super controlled muscle up yet.

Soon, that's the goal.

But not training to failure seems to be really beneficial if you don't want to eat into your recovery too much.

There's something about hitting muscular failure that's great for generating hypertrophy, but it really...

According to Pavel, and I'm finding this too, it sort of teaches your nervous system to reach that static point where you can't move any longer, and it really eats into your recovery abilities.

So I'm able to now train muscle groups that I used to only be able to recover if I train them once or twice a week.

I can train them like three or four days a week and I'm making much more progress overall.

But there's no single set where I'm like grinding out that last final rep.

That's interesting.

So if, so like, so bench pressing, for example, like that's actually the only weight that I move around is I've

I bench, like when I'm at home and have like my own little home gym, I bench press like twice a week, let's say.

And I feel like it's like good for shoulder stability, health.

It's like nice to balance because as a climber, you're always pulling.

So it's like I do, that's my only pushing basically.

And so

I can do like, I normally do three sets of five or six.

It's just kind of like a basic something.

So you're saying I should do like six sets or like eight sets of three to set.

Yeah, maybe even maybe eight sets of three to four with slightly more weight, but don't go to failure.

And obviously have a spotter.

There are these horrible instances where people are benching at home and they don't have to.

Well, I only have dumbbells anyway.

Okay, perfect.

That's the best way to do it.

Yeah, it seems

like that's the type of thing, too.

Also, I kind of like the dumbbells because it seems more like so much of what I care about is shoulder stability and whatever.

And I'm kind of like, oh, it seems like dumbbells are good for that.

Yeah, barbell bench, I'm going to catch a lot of shit for this, but barbell bench press, there's a lot of ego involved.

Yeah, it's too showy.

I'm like, I don't know that shit.

I've never actually done a single rep max for barbell bench press.

Never been curious enough.

Because you don't have enough friends to help spot that.

I don't have enough friends, exactly.

You have like six guys.

I'm all alone, I'm studying, and I'm bench pressing alone in my basement.

Another reason to use dumbbells, but yet taking a weight that you could do seven or eight repetitions and doing three or four or maybe five, and then just setting it down and going doing something else, maybe for an opposing muscle group, and then coming back to it so that your total rest is somewhere.

I might try that particularly for the benching because I do actually get kind of sore from like, you know, it's just the same thing.

The sore sucks.

And you get really strong.

I never would have thought this because I came up in the

lineage of, I learned from Mike Menser, who was like a, he was an ex-bodybuilder, but then he trained Darian Yates, who won the Olympia many times.

And that whole philosophy was around doing one or two sets to absolute failure with forced reps and drop sets and all the stuff that builds a lot of muscle but makes you very sore.

And so Pavel sat right where you're sitting and he was just like, try this.

Find movements you can do safely, load up the bar and do far fewer reps, many more sets, and perhaps even divide those sets across two days during the week as you're already doing, as opposed to just training a muscle group once per week.

Do people do that?

Doing something once a week?

I only train my legs once a week, and I'm getting stronger most every workout.

But I sprint on a separate day, so that's kind of a leg workout.

Yeah, that seems like a leg workout.

I don't have great recovery ability, never have.

So it's.

And you know, I'm pushing 50.

What's that?

And I'm pushing 50.

And I didn't run from the valley floor.

Yeah.

Exactly.

I definitely have found that if I avoid going to muscular, momentary muscular failure, as it's called, far less soreness, far better recovery, and you get really strong, which is crazy.

You would think the opposite.

Yeah, do you think once a week is enough stimulus basically to like build?

If you do enough sets, but probably twice, you know, the data seem to show that the muscle protein synthesis is initiated after those workouts.

And then it takes anywhere from 48 to 72 hours before it, you know, it subsides.

I just personally find if I train my legs once a week, but then I sprint four or five days later, that's sort of two leg workouts.

Yeah.

You know, so it's really twice a week.

And then I do a push-pull day, and then I do a separate day for my arms and extremities.

and

that ends up training chest and shoulders and back again.

So it's really twice per week, one stretch.

You've done all your stuff basically twice a week.

But everything heavy, like really heavy, never going.

I don't think I've done above eight reps this year.

I'm stronger than ever, and I can run really far.

Which is so the two things I always thought those were.

Do you do a long run during the week or something?

I do one for me, very long run, which means an hour to an hour and a half of just running with a 10-pound weight vest.

Oh, wow.

Just to make sure the small stabilizing muscles are strong.

And also, because I I want to be able to just show up to Clouds Rest and just do it.

I don't want to have to train for things in life.

Yeah.

And I love, also, I love running.

I mean, just that low, that slow pace at first, just it sucks.

And then after about 20 minutes, you just like, I could go all day.

This is awesome.

I don't know.

That's been my regimen now for almost 35 years to train each muscle group once a week, directly, indirectly, a long run.

And I try and do one sprint run.

But again, I'm not going to tell Alex Honold how to train, but you might find

if you don't like getting sore and you want to get stronger,

you're hearing it from me, but it's really Pavel Satsulin that deserves the credit for this.

Yeah, no, I'll try that for sure.

Because particularly with something like benching, where it's like, I don't really care about pushing muscles, but

when you're peck or whatever this muscle is, you know, connecting your shoulders.

It's like

so sore, and then that kind of affects all your pulling as well.

And so you're kind of like, oh, you just don't need to get that sore doing something that's like a side activity anyway.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I'm guessing you're already getting it from your climbing, but I found that

anytime I'm doing pushing, which is basically

all the time,

making sure that I train like some rear, rear deltoid type thing where you're pulling, getting that smaller muscle on the back of the shoulders.

Because a lot of people, you don't have this problem, but if you look at a lot of people who lift weights, they just stand passively, their thumbs kind of point towards their groin.

Like they're kind of internally rotated.

They're rolling in.

Yeah.

Whereas if you look at people who kind of do like the Fonzie thing, like you want your shoulder, you want your thumbs, like if if you were just stand or sit naturally your thumbs pointing straight forward so you're looking like like I've met Mike Tyson and like he's like this but like he spent his whole life in that peekaboo stance right then you meet people like you or people who practice yoga regularly or the really like most impressive postures and physiques are the dancers right like Eric Jarvis was on this podcast he's a neuroscientist but he used to um he was accepted into the Alan uh uh is it Alan Avely Dance Company it was like you know elite dance company or you see like a Twilight Tharp who's in her 80s and like in she doesn't look like she's rigidly upright she's just upright and that's how i want to be when i'm in my 80s so hard well it's just she spends two hours a day in the gym seven days a week wow 5 a.m to 7 a.m

that is the and she's in her 80s that's and then three hard-boiled eggs and then she gets to work like yeah she's i'm like that's a healthy lifestyle she's and cognitively she's just so strong

you know yeah yeah no climbers definitely have issues with posture like that because if you spend your whole life just pulling, like, you know, climbing, if you just climb, you're just doing pulling things.

And so you wind up kind of like

you kind of wind up hunched.

I think it's because like you still use some of these muscles for pulling.

And so you just wind up kind of tight in different ways.

Yeah.

But yeah, so things like that.

They put you in a bridge pose and like in like spinal extension, those seem to be very useful.

Yeah, as I, again, I'm not an elite athlete or even a competitive athlete, but I find that doing things that just like a long, slow run, a sprint day, training heavy with weights, but being able to run for 30 minutes.

I mean, it's just, I don't think I need a degree in exercise physiology to just, it makes sense.

You're just, I'm trying to be upper end of average

at everything, but that's very different than what you're trying to do, obviously.

You're an elite athlete.

Yeah, but some of the stuff like running, like

I went for a one-hour run yesterday.

I've been trying to run one day a week, just like right for an hour once a week.

And then I try to do one kind of cardio adventure once a week, which is like climb a mountain or do something you know, anywhere from like two to four hours, let's say, but hopefully with like 3,000 plus feet of urt or something, just like go up a thing, kind of trot down.

And that's kind of enough to maintain cardio.

I mean, this is kind of like family lifestyle.

Because the thing is, like, when I was living in a van by myself, you're just doing that stuff on rest days all the time because you're kind of like, oh, I'm going to summit this new peak or like check out this hike or do whatever.

But now that I'm living in a place and, you know, taking kids to school and all that, it's like I kind of have to be a little more structured with just like, I'm going to go.

But so, yeah, now I'm definitely thinking about all this a little more.

it's like is this enough cardio is this you know is this work but I think that that lays a good foundation to be able to do things like I'm gonna be in Yosemite this season and you know I'm aspiring to climb stuff on all cap not free soling necessarily or not free solving at all but maybe some like rip sawing maybe some speed stuff maybe whatever but either way I just want to be able to climb 3,000 feet relatively quickly without being that tired and so it seems like for running or for mountain climbing it's like oh you just have to be able to do that kind of vertical without getting too fatigued yeah i think the one day a week long run

one day a week like 30 minute run at a faster clip, and then one day a week sprint training.

I mean, you're covering all bases there.

That's three days a week of running, though.

I'm like, I don't love that.

Yeah, but one of them is like 12 minutes long.

You warm up for three minutes.

Sprint training, 12 minutes?

Yeah, because

you warm up and then you run a 400, you know, and then you, you

walk a lap, you do a 200.

You walk a lap, you do a 100.

And like you're going not all out, all out.

But close.

Yeah, you can hurt yourself sprinting all out, all out.

We

had Stu McMillan, who's an elite sprint coach, trains a lot of Olympians and gold medalists.

And

yeah, running full speed is like how you hurt yourself.

You typically pop a handstring or something.

Are you at a track?

I prefer to do it at track.

Sometimes I'll do it in the soft sand.

And when I use a vest, I should say, and I have no sponsorship relationship to them.

A Morpho makes these vests that are like, like it looks, it's kind of funny to call it this, but it looks more like a kind of vest that, you know, you, you know, like a dress vest.

And it's got little ball bearings in it.

So it's not like one of those like police type vests.

Yeah.

And so that eight or 10 pounds, they make up to 12 pounds, I think, is just enough to give you some extra work on that long run.

And then on the day when you sprint, you feel like you have, you know, jet propulsion.

You know, I feel like that.

I realize I don't.

But totally.

I don't.

And then all the little stabilizer things, like you don't have any like

aching, like you're

you seem you seem like very balanced in terms of your overall structure.

That's one thing that I've really noticed about climbers.

Like you see guys that are in the gym.

I've spent a fair amount of time in gyms.

And there's this phenotype where they've got these big wide shoulders, wide back, and the whole thing.

And then they got like this little head and a little neck.

And you go, well, they're upper spawn.

They're not training their neck.

And it looks crazy.

I mean, I don't know if anyone has told them this, but they're like, you know, I walk by and I'm like, don't skip neck day, you know.

But,

you know, when a body is out of balance like that, like if you saw a giant dog with a tiny head and neck, you'd be like, that dog is crazy looking.

There are a lot of dog breeds like that where you're like, that dog, hard to believe it came from a wolf exactly so inbred so right that the healthiest version of something can move best is always fairly balanced it seems like climbers are very balanced no i think i think climbing is is one of the healthiest sports and like lifestyles and and also just it's so fun like going to a gym you hang out with your friends it's like it's mostly really chill you mostly hang out and chit-chat and like if you do a gym session you feel like you just went and hung out with your friends the whole time but then you also wind up fit and mobile and you know pretty strong and and so much of climbing is strength to weight and so you just wind up kind of like lean lean and not like a big gym gym bro kind of thing which i think is health here is one ages too like you you want to maintain muscle and hold on to muscle but there's all sorts of things associated with being heavily muscled where people end up with some kind of sleep apnea or pseudo sleep apnea because the neck is thick and it blocks the airwaves and you know sleep apnea is one of the biggest health risks.

People, not just heart attacks during sleep, but I mean, you're basically clogging all the blood flow and cleaning out of your brain that happens during sleep.

It's very, very common in bigger people, either either because they're fat or heavily muscled but it's one of the reasons a lot of bodybuilders thank goodness i've never put on that much muscle yeah well well you can clearly generate a lot of force doing what you're doing i'm curious how you deal with cramps when you're when you're on the rock like no you don't no you just don't you just don't really cramp you don't cramp

yeah not really i've never i mean sometimes you know if you're trying to climb all cap in a day like a like an 18 hour ascent or something uh like climbing with a rope but free ascents like basically if you're doing really long climbs some of my friends sometimes will cramp because you're like late into you know, post-12 hours into an athletic activity or just a little more likely.

But I never, I never have.

Pretty much in general, all my athletic performance is always a steady decline where I start and I'm doing great.

And then over the next, you know, 10 to 48 hours, I just slowly get worse at a relatively linear rate.

Except that normally...

Before sunrise of the next day, it starts to drop quite a bit more.

You know, like as you start getting close to 24 hours, you're like, I'm pretty fucking tired.

But then when the sun comes up, you've really

boosted back up again.

And so then you're pretty good again.

You just keep on the linear decline.

So these are all-night climbs.

Yeah, I mean, I've done a lot.

I've done quite a number of things now that are like more than 24-hour outings.

I mean, that's typically like climbing your mountain.

It's where you're like hiking and climbing and then hiking some more and climbing some more and doing whatever.

But yeah.

Generally, by 24 to 36 hours, you're just.

you're just a worse version of what you used to be.

Right.

You're just, you're just tired.

And risk goes up when you're sleep-deprived.

I mean, that's.

Well, like, where, yeah, judgment gets worse, uh

reflexes get worse, like everything is worse.

Sleep is is key.

But yeah, that circadian clock phenomenon where like you've been up all night, but then you start waking up again.

It's yeah, it's pretty incredible.

I mean, also some of it with outdoor stuff is that

just when you can see again, you know, it's like you've been going by headlamp for so long and typically by that point your headlamp is kind of dying.

You just don't see that well.

And then the sun comes up and you're like, thank God.

And it's not cold anymore.

You're just like the sun.

So you get this like breath of fresh air and then you just keep grinding.

Have you

ever had or do you have any kind of like leanings towards this like mystical experiences?

Like do you do you believe in any of that?

No, I've always been a fierce atheist.

Technically, I was race Catholic, so like I know religion a bit.

And I've just never, I've always been like, you know, it just doesn't make any sense to me.

I'm like, yeah, I'm strongly unreligious.

Though, I mean, I've been in so many beautiful places on earth and had so many, you know, what some would characterize as spiritual experiences, like feeling a oneness with nature, like a connection, you know, or just awe-inspiring beauty, you know, when you're somewhere and you look out and you're like, oh, the universe is so incredible.

This is like the world is a magical place.

So, you know, I'm certainly open to general spiritualism, I suppose, or,

you know, but no, I'm very opposed to organized religion, basically.

Biology is awe-inspiring.

Yeah, that's the thing is I'm like, I think there's enough wonder in the world and in the universe without adding all the layers of dogma, basically.

Like all the weird things that you don't really need to believe.

I can't help but tell you this because I find it fascinating.

I think you might find it interesting if not,

then forgive me.

Speaking of Berkeley, there was a laboratory at Berkeley that wanted to understand how geckos could walk up walls.

And for a long time, it was thought that it was like suction of some sort.

But then

it turns out they could do it in a vacuum, so it means it can't be suction.

It turns out they have these little pedals on their little fingertips.

And they can push those petals.

They're like feather

organized sort of like feathers.

They can push them so close to the surface that they're climbing that they use what are called van der Waal forces, which is the exchange of molecules between the surface and those petals.

And they're making and breaking those Van der Waal forces as they climb.

Really, it's like Spider-Man.

Yeah.

Magical Spider-Man.

So as they climb, they're exchanging molecules with the surface they're climbing, which I find absolutely amazing.

I realize that's not how you're climbing.

Well, I'm sweating all over the wall, so it's kind of the same thing.

There you go.

There's that guy.

Yeah, and I'm leaving skin behind.

You're like, oh, my tips, it hurts.

Well, you may not feel a kinship to them, but I have a feeling they feel akinship to you because they are world-class climbers.

And I just find it amazing that they've evolved some way to literally exchange molecules.

So, I mean, you spend a lot of time on the rock.

I'm sure that you're carrying some granite in you by now.

Yeah, for sure.

For sure.

No, that's cool.

I mean, you see a lot of creatures on walls like that.

You know, you see like little frogs wandering up and down.

I mean, even something like El Capita that looks like a 3 000 foot solid cliff i mean they're they're rodents running up and down the cracks they're there are frogs in there they're all kinds of birds they're bats it's like you see all these creatures roaming around you're just kind of like oh they're just living they're just up here doing their thing and you know i mean climbing is so relatively hard for humans and then yeah and then you're up there and like it's just it's just all part of the natural environment for all the other creatures I didn't realize there are frogs up there.

I've seen birds go by.

I think there are a couple clips in Freestyle where birds go by.

Yeah, they live in all the cracks off.

And when you put your hands in, birds will run down your arm and fly out of the crack and things like that.

And you're like, whoa.

It's startling.

Yeah, it's startling.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's, or it's very startling the first time and then, you know, less startling the subsequent times.

But you're always kind of like, oh, wow, a swift just ran down my arm.

That's wonderful.

I was like, it's cool.

Well, Alex, you've inspired and continue to inspire so many people.

And I think you hit the nail on the head when you said it's the effort involved.

You know, I think that many people might think it's the summiting and like standing on top of the rock.

And that those are moments that, thanks to you, we've been fortunate enough to to share and experience you know uh indirectly but uh clearly it's the effort involved and i i actually think that's uh why people are so intrigued by what you do um

in addition to the fact that it's in beautiful places and incredibly high risk high consequence it's like you it's so clear that you're regimented and you're and that you love what you do and that you put a ton of effort into it and the way you describe climbing with your friends i think is the best hook sales pitch for climbing ever like hanging out with your friends talking and getting better and physically healthier.

And it puts you in a place to go have bigger adventures and experience life more richly.

Let's also get you back sometime after this next big feat.

We can't talk too much about it.

Sure, it'll be amazing.

Awesome.

All right.

Well, we'll see you after that climb.

Cool.

Thank you.

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