a16z Podcast - Alex Honnold on Human Performance (part 1) – Where's the Limit?

Episode Date: July 11, 2020

Is there a limit to what humans can do? And if so, how do you know when you've reached it? Welcome to part one of a two-part series on human performance with professional rock climber Alex Honnold. Alex redefined the limits of what is possible by free soloing – that is climbing with no ropes or safety gear – a 2000-foot granite rock face in Yosemite, known as El Capitan. That feat  was documented in the award-winning film Free Solo. In this podcast, Alex, a16z general partner Peter Levine (who at age 59 is still an avid ice climber), and Das Rush discuss how technology and training have pushed the limits of what's possible and how to manage the mental preparation of any big endeavor, whether its building a company, reaching a new peak, or maintaining peak performance while aging.In Part 2, recorded last year as part of our a16z innovation summit, we share a fireside chat with Peter and Alex  about the risk, preparation, and fear around Alex's free solo.  Photo credit: Shawn Corrigan 

Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Doss, and this is part one of a two-part series with Alex Honnold on the future of human performance. As a professional rock climber, Alex has redefined the limits of what is possible by free solo that is climbing with no ropes or safety gear, a 2,000-foot granite rock face in Yosemite, known as Alcapitan, a feat that was documented in the award-winning film Free Solo. Part two is a fireside chat recorded last year as part of our A16C innovation summit. minute, general partner Peter Levine and Alex talk about the risk, preparation, and fear around his free solo. In this episode, I sit down with Alex and Peter, who at age 59, is still an avid ice climber, to discuss if there's a limit to human potential, how technology and training push that limit and often change the rules, and how to manage the mental preparation of any big endeavor, whether it's building a company, reaching a new peak, or maintaining top performance while aging. How do you guys think about human potential and unlocking human potential?

Is there ever a point where we stop asking, what's next? I think there are real limits to human potential. I mean, I think there is a point where humans can't actually do better, but we're not actually there yet in almost anything. So climbing is a really new sport in a way, so there's tons of room for growth and improvement in potential. I think marathoning, we're getting much closer to the limits of human potential in like their 100 meter sprint, squeezing out hundreds of a second here and there. I mean, it might happen, but we're getting close to the human limits. I think that there are sort of two factors. One is the human performance, and then there's all the equipment. I can tell you that ice climbing or even cycling, whatever, where equipment

really does matter, rock climbing as well. I mean, there's very sticky shoes now. The shoes that I free-sell at all cap in, they just sent a prototype and it's like, oh, slightly better, it's like, oh, slightly better. Right. So the equipment really does make a difference. And the question is, is at what point does the equipment sort of become the element of human performance to where it's not free climbing anymore, it's actually aid climbing because your shoes have suction cups on them. Ice climbing is so much easier now than it was 30 years ago because of all the equipment. The equipment is so much lighter, it's been tested in a lab and all that. The interesting thing when you think about human performance is somebody 5,000 years ago

had the same genetic potential that we do now in terms of athletic achievement. I mean, we have the same muscles, we have the same build. So given the same diet and training, they presumably would come out about the same athletically as any of us now. So then the real difference can be attributed a little bit to the technology

and then a little bit to psychology because part of it is when you start to know what's possible then people are able to push a little harder. I mean, that's like the Roger Bannister breaking the 4 minute of mile type stuff where it's like, this is the limit of human potential and then he does it and then everybody else breaks it right after because you're like, oh, it turns out it's possible.

Also, training has become a lot more systematic and a lot more programmatic. I mean, 5,000 years ago, yes, genetically we're the same, but... 5,000 years ago is a Greek-style jumping over cabs as they grew larger and larger? While farming in the morning and having to do whatever at night. Now, the training of a professional athlete is really a full-time job. And it's become so programmatic in a way that strives for excellence in every step of training. But that's a little bit different between sports. Some sports are much further in their training.

You know, climbing is still, that is very new. Like, I basically started training in a serious way for the first time this year, like with an actual program with the coach. And I've been a professional climber for 12 years, and this is the first year that I've actually had a little spreadsheet where I'm doing all the workouts. But for, say, Olympic lifters, weightlifting is maybe the most codified training thing there is

because it's so simple or so easy to quantify at all. But running and swimming to some extent are also pretty elemental, like basic human movement patterns. The training for running maybe isn't changing as much as in some sports. You bring up running, and there's a psychological aspect when somebody breaks through a barrier. And then there's the aspects of how we're constantly providing better equipment, better technology that helps and assists us in these things. And there was the Kenyan marathon runner, I think, Elio Kipchod, who was the first human, go under two hours, but they won't count it as a world record. Where's the line? Why was his not a credible accomplishment?

You had a car in front of him drawing like a line to show pace. He had a whole V of Pacers and front of him breaking wind. I mean, everything about it was like aerodynamics, pacing, and the shoes have an impact. It's like 10% on like the O2 max type stuff. The point is that he demonstrated that it's possible. And clearly there will be other runners who are more talented than him at some point. There will be 10 billion people on Earth soon enough. One of them is going to be pretty freaking fast and someone's going to break too. But that is getting very close to the human limits. I would maybe put money on humans never breaking 150 without augmentation in some way, without crazy technological changes or genetic changing. How do you think of that?

line with where it becomes like an unfair augmentation as opposed to something that we've naturally designed because it's like well what about biologically there was a famous Swedish norwegian skier cross-country skier who won tons of gold in like the 60s or 70s who had some kind of red blood cell where his skin was like purple because he has so much red blood cell and it's basically like he has a disease but it also means his aerobic capacity is through the freaking roof and so he dominated and you know odds are that with billions of people on earth people are going to have random mutation like that random changes. And sometimes it helps in your very specific sport. Yeah. Like for instance, I want to go rock climbing. Would it be like a fair modification if I said like, hey, I'm going to take your amygdala?

Now I'm going to climb differently. Is that fair? Because it's natural for you, but it's not for me. Well, it's arguably not natural for me either. It's like 10 years of practice, 10 years of conditioning. Like it's probably changed you over time because certainly 10 years ago, things were a lot scarier than they are now. Or just let's talk about rock climbing shoes. Like the rubber gets a little stickier, a little softer. So you're literally a gecko on the rock. But it's all part of the equipment. If you're going out and you're climbing, what would be the line where you'd say I won't use that equipment? Well, so to some extent, all of sport is defined by the rules by which people play the game.

And so, like with climbing, I've never taken any performance hands and drugs, but it's not like there's any drug testing. I mean, there is for Olympic climbing or World Cup climbing, but for me just going adventuring in Yosemite, if I want to take random pills that help me perform better, no one's going to care. I do, like, a protein drink mixed stuff after I work out sometimes. And some have a bit of creatine in or something. You're sort of like, oh, at what point is supplementing cheating or not? And really, that's all just defined by the rules, the governing body of your sport. You know, I mean, like the NFL, the NBA, whatever, have said that certain things are cheating, but others aren't, you know? It's actually interesting in climbing another parallel.

A long time ago, many of the rock climbs that are now done without a rope, there used to be this notion of aid climbing, where it was okay to actually use the rope and use slings to step in and pull yourself up, hammer nails in. in or whatever. I think it's a great point of the rules of the time. Because if we were sitting here 40 years ago, it would be perfectly reasonable to go stand in the equipment and use that as an aid to get to the summit where now it's... People are still doing it, but it's not, you know, once somebody breaks a new barrier and can do it without aid and without a rope and all that stuff, the rules actually get changed as human performance exceeds what was... thought of as impossible before.

I totally agree. So, you know, it would be interesting. I'm just throwing it out there. If somebody climbed El Cap and 50 years from now barefoot with no equipment, that might be the new... So climbers occasionally joke about that, that the ultimate style on rock climbing would be the barefoot naked free solo, where you just walk up by yourself and it's just your body, you climb the rock.

And also in climbing, there's something called on-siding, which is when you just walk up and climb something the first time with no preparation. And technically, it's better style. With me on El Cap, I spent two years working on it. I memorized every aspect of the climb, and then I was able to do it. But if some random kid was able to just walk up naked and climb it by himself without any work, that is arguably better style. I mean, there's like a certain purity to that level of accomplishment.

And I think it goes when you use technology, people almost view it as less of an accomplishment. Well, in some ways, that's why free solo is cool, is because you're not using all the extra stuff. Typically, when you climb on a cap, you walk up, you spend three to five days, you haul hundreds of pounds of gear up the wall. You have food and water and tents. You camp on the wall. And so to be able to walk up to that same wall carrying just a pair of shoes in a chalk bag in your hand and then be able to climb the same route, but with none of the equipment, you're like, it is a big step forward. And so arguably, if you're able to do that without the shoes in the shock bag, you're like, oh, that's even cooler. When it comes to these sorts of challenges, there's the physical preparation, which is kind of simple.

You can measure what your body's doing. And then there's this mental challenge, which is so much more nebulous. And so I think some of this question of technology and human capability is really the question of when you increase the amount of psychological challenge, you're turning up naked and barefoot, and you've not present. Preppped for the route. Yeah, when you're naked and afraid, like, you know. Does increasing that amount of what you have to overcome somehow make an accomplishment more impressive than when you're fully prepared and you're going into it and you have all those safety nets? As a professional outdoor sport athlete, I've been in tons of outdoor film festivals. And they're kind of two genres of outdoor film festival movies.

One of them is when somebody takes on a really big challenge, they work really hard for it and they overcome this thing. Another is when a rank beginner just goes out and bumbles their way through something. It's like this epic experience for them, but, you know, it's largely because they're unprepared. And it's kind of a pet peeve of mind to watch beginner films like that where it's framed as like, we overcame this crazy thing. And you're like, no, what you did is completely normal. You're just really bad at doing it. So it felt crazy for you.

And so I think that's an important distinction. It goes a little bit to that. So what's the level of accomplishment that you're reaching? Yeah. And I think it's great for beginners to go out and bumble through things. It's just not cool to then frame that as like, look at what we achieved. And that can even still be a good film or a good storytelling. but it's not actually close to the limits of human potential.

Partly why I find this so fascinating is it's so uniquely human. We all have those moments where we're tackling challenges and the fear kicks in. What is the key to being able to tackle the psychological challenges? I think setting an objective, setting a goal, and going and training and working to hit that objective absolutely unlocks human potential. And building a company is very much like that. it is not a linear up into the right line. There's a lot of ups and downs along the way, and those ups and downs are what I would argue

are the training regimen to building a company. Yeah, I think the big goal is the key for the inspiration. But the day-to-day operational side of it, like actually getting stuff done, you need to have smaller and more achievable goals. It's kind of ironic because El Cap is obviously such a big goal. But over the eight years, let's say, that El Cap was sitting out in front of me as this big goal, I probably burned through 150 other goals. that were more immediate things that I worked on month by month or week by week.

And of those 150, I probably failed on 50 of them, never actually did them. You know, I think that it's good to have that big inspiring goal in the distance, but in some ways that's just too big. 10 years ago, had I just been like, now I'm going to free sell a lot of cap. I wouldn't have known how to get there. The important thing was to have those 100 other steps to build up to it. Well, otherwise, one would likely go crazy, right? If you didn't have the intermediate goals, otherwise you're just failing for 10 years.

I think building company is very much the same way. Every entrepreneur wants to go create a large company, and that's kind of like climbing L-CAP. It's an aspirational goal. We want to be a world leader in what we're doing. But there's many steps along the way. You go hire the next person. You go build another line of code. You go hire a marketing group.

How many of the companies do you think are actually aspiring to be a global leader in it versus just aspiring to make a good product and then sell it to somebody? Our entrepreneurs come here with the idea that we're going to go swing for the fence. You may get a single, you may get a double, but at least you're trying all the time to have that objective. That's the way I play golf. You always swing it as if you're going to hit it in outer space. Do you actually play golf? No, I play golf twice and both times every swing.

I'm aiming for outer space, but I hardly ever hit the ball. Peter, you're investing in a lot of different technologies. And so as you're thinking about what we invest in, on some level, investment is really about unlocking human potential. So how do you think about that question of where you invest in order to unlock those sort of potential? Like, do you think of it that way? That sounds so classy when you frame it like that. I'm like, geez. I thought he was just trying to make money, you know?

I hadn't really thought about it that way. But when we invest, we do have frameworks by which we invest. We like to back the technical founder who has a passion for an idea. Often that's going to yield great product market fit. But unlocking their potential is also helping them to grow with the scale of the company. So they start out. There's a couple of people. and then part of our role and part of my job as a board member is to actually coach and mentor

entrepreneurs to become ever better at their job of being the steward of their organization. We see a lot of people who start out as a programmer. I've never managed anybody and have a great idea, but now I have to go manage a team of people and go deal with that. I mean, my own career is like that. I started as a programmer. Never managed anyone wore shorts to work every day the whole thing. And then I became a manager and a CEO.

And I would argue that having the opportunity to go do that actually unlocked my potential that I didn't know I had. Climbing seems like such a wonderful metaphor here because you might have in mind the summit when you stand at the bottom and you begin an endeavor. But the way that it unfolds is literally which handhold or foot hold you're taking next. And same thing with building a company. Is that the general approach that you found? Is that something you apply throughout your life? Over the years, my approach is becoming more process-focused, where I feel if the goal might be free-soling all cap, I feel like focusing on the process is actually the more sustainable way to do it long-term. Instead of being, oh, this is a big goal I want to do, you just be like, you know what, I love going climbing every day.

I love the grind. I love the training. I love being on the wall. I love the practice. And you just focus on that process. Finding meaning in the effort instead of the results. And then eventually the big goal sort of happen naturally. So I think the grind is very important, even as we think about entrepreneurs and working hard and spending. a long number of hours. But I also think that you have to be effective along the way while you're doing it. Just to spend a lot of hours doing something and not having success or meaning, you might as well not spend the hours doing it. I think there are a lot of people who say, oh, well, I work 15 hours today and I work Saturday and Sunday and blah, blah, blah. But nothing happened. That to me is not effective. Let's say an objective of a sales organization is to go out and

sell and bring in revenue. And if you spend a lot of time and the revenue doesn't come in, those are wasted moments where it doesn't ultimately result in the goal that you set out to do. So working hard, yes, but make it really super productive. To bring it back to running, I mean, cutting out junk miles. When you're just like, I'm out jogging at a casual pace. Like, that's not serving anything. Either you should be training with intensity or not training. And that's part of the reason that I don't really go out in solar easy routes for fun because it's junk mileage. It's not making me a better climber. sometimes you do it for fun, but for the most part, there's no point. My time is better spent

training in a more disciplined way. So translating that over to the entrepreneur side or to any endeavor outside of running or climbing, how do you know when you're putting in a junk mile? So I actually recently read a quote from some coach guy and he was like, the goal isn't to be sore. The goal is to see results is to improve. And so the only real way to know if your training is effective is keep track of it, to know if your numbers are changing, to know if you're performing to higher level. Because when you go to the gym and you come back and you're like, I'm really freaking sore. I had a good workout. You could do that for years and not actually get better, but you're just sore all the time. This is one of the things I freaken

hate about CrossFit. Because anyone that goes to a CrossFit gym is going to be sore afterward. You know, like if I went and did a thousand box jumps right now, I'm going to be sore. It's not productive long term. There are lots of ways that I can get sore. I can go freaking weed my grandma's garden all afternoon. I'll be sore. You know, but that's not effective training. That's not making me a better athlete. And so I think that the only real way to know is to quantify, to keep track. And for me, that means like weighted hangs. I'm hanging from a small edge with a bunch of weight on. Over the months, I can see that I'm adding more.

And if I'm not adding more, then I need to do something differently because I'm not getting better. So I want to talk about this question, I think, of measuring. How do you apply measurement to your own work? Do you wear the heart rate monitors? Do you do that? I don't measure in those ways. But so I've had a climbing journal that goes all the way back

to the beginning of my climbing, so 2005, every route I've ever climbed. So I can kind of tell grade-wise if I'm climbing harder, easier, and volume and the challenges that I'm setting out. And then concurrently, I always have a training journal. where I keep track of diet, keep track of training, keep track of volume. And I also keep to-do lists and make maps of the roots that I'm working on. Basically everything that accompanies, the actual climbing all goes in the training journal. And so for years, I was keeping track of hours of training in the training journal.

And in the last year or so, I've sort of scrapped that and switched to just keeping track of workouts. Because at a certain point, I'm like, well, who cares how many hours it is? I did it work. I don't really care about the time anymore. I care about the quality of the effort. With training, it's specific training milestones. Can I hang with more weight? when I first started training, I set a little benchmark where I could do seven second

hangs with 35 pounds added on a specific edge, 12 millimeter edge. And by the end of a month and a half of this training cycle, I was doing nine second hangs with 55 pounds. So I added 20 pounds of weight, added a couple seconds of hangs on the same size edge. And so quantifiably, my fingers are much stronger. And then that becomes a benchmark by which I can measure training and progress. I'm nowhere near a professional athlete. But for me, it's trying to keep my level of performance when you get to be older.

It's really hard to avoid injury. It's hard to keep a peak performance as you age. There are a lot of pieces to climbing where there are quantifiable elements of the efficiency of your climb, from belayer to climber, how quickly you transition. And the efficiency of a climber and the efficiency of a team is paramount to over. overall success and really getting to the next level. How do you think about aging and climbing and how do you think about aging and what you go out and do?

The decline over decades is very minimal to begin with and then it accelerates. And age adjusted, you just have to rationalize that you are older and you make an age adjustment for the thing and say, well, that's pretty good. So it kind of changes what you're benchmarking against. So I'm 34 and even at my age, I mean, I can accept the fact that physiologically I'm past my peak you know i mean human males are probably strongest 22 or something you're coursing with testosterone your muscles like can be the most developed so i've already begun the slow decline but climbing is so technical there's so many advances in training there's so many other ways to improve as

a climber it's not purely physical i actually just climbed the hardest grade that i ever climbed last month and i feel like i still have room for improvement in my training techniques and strategies and so there's many avenues for growth at a certain point i'll have to accept the fact that there isn't an easy way for me to get better it's now just a struggle to maintain what i have to have, and I'll just have to embrace that. So as you've gotten older, have you found that your shift has been a little bit from physical challenges to some of the more psychological or technical that you're approaching? Not yet, not yet.

Free Soling El Cap is largely a mental challenge because I actually had climbed El Cap physically without falling off of it as early as 2006 or something. So say 11 years before I did the free solo, I was physically capable of it. But it took me another decade to be mentally capable to believe that I could. But I do think that for climbers, generally, as you get older, people naturally transition into doing more expeditions versus sense, exploration, things that aren't quite as physically focused, but can still be solid contributions to the climbing world, still establish new routes, be a helpful steward of the climbing world, but just not be pushing yourself physically

as hard. And it's personally rewarding. Like years and years of doing this, even as a casual endeavor for me, I've gotten better at it. And so while strength may be declining, you may be able to do a lot of the same things because you are simply more efficient. To me, it's completely liberating. And it's the one place where I can forget about everything that's happening in the world. Because you have to be focused.

And I don't think about anything else when I'm up there other than what I'm doing. It's magical for me. We were talking about speed climbing on all cap. And we did the speed record on the nose. Sub two hours, big goal turns out that we were even. You think this can be faster? Oh, yeah, way faster. Like if you can sprint nine seconds, 100 meters, which is kind of the Usain Bolt level right now.

And then a two-hour marathon is at four-minute mile pace. Basically runners are sprinting at double the speed of an elite marathoner. It's like half the pace. And so then I applied that same for speed climbing. If you look at the way people climb Olympic speed walls, which are 15 meters, they can do it in about six seconds. And then I applied that out for a 900-meter wall of L-CAP. Guess how long it would take to climb L-CAP if you were climbing an Olympic speed pace? I did that.

an hour and a half or something? No, 12 minutes. No way. Yeah, 12 minutes. So, yeah, so we did sub two. We're like, oh, sub two, that's so remarkable. And then when I did the math, I was like, wait. So if we applied the same human physiology to like half the pace, you know, it's like, yeah,

it should take 12 minutes to climb L cap. So anyway, when you're saying human physiological limit, I think the human limit for climbing L cap is probably closer to 120 or 130 or something. Because even when we did it, we could have gone faster had we just done it a few more times. but we sort of hit the goal that we were happy with and moved on because there is a tremendous amount of risk involved and taking big falls and we both have other projects we are happy to not climb the nose anymore

but also I mean we only did it 12 to 15 times imagine if you did 150 times and it's just like second nature and it feels like running I mean you could get it pretty freaking fast at that yeah it kind of goes back to like how do you set the goal that you want to do and how much time you want to allocate to it which seems like such a fundamental question to how you get your potential Yeah, we were willing to commit a month to it. But imagine if we were willing to commit five years to it. Yeah.

It's like it would be a completely different thing. So last question here for you. Right now, where are you seeing other people push the limits of human potential or tackle something that really inspires you? You know, when you're talking about human potential, the entrepreneurial spirit, like I find that pretty inspiring. I think because it's so far outside of my normal experience, you know, I'm used to talking to athletes and talking about training and how can you squeak out a little more performance by changing your, diet and changing your training a little bit. You know, that's interesting. I mean, I do love it. I mean, that's what I do.

But it's not quite as inspiring as being somewhere surrounded by smart people who are tackling interesting problems. I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. Like, they're doing stuff that actually matters. You know, but I think that people always draw inspiration from outside of their own world. I mean, don't you think? I don't know. Absolutely.

Like, I draw a lot of inspiration from what Alex has done. The sub two-hour marathon is one of those things that I watch. I'm very inspired by athletic performance and what people are. able to do. And because I'm in this environment all the time, and it's just what I do day and day out. I look at all these other things like, wow, that's just unbelievable. So I think we all get inspiration from things that are a little outside our own realm that seem impossible because we're not in it. Great. Well, I want to say thank you so much for taking the time. Oh, thank you. Pleasure.