Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Cleared Hot Episode 75 - Mark Twight and Trevor Thompson

Episode Date: March 18, 2019

Mark Twight is a world-class alpinist, author, photographer, the founder of Gym Jones, an accomplished cyclist, and technical consultant and trainer to the big screen. His newest photographic project Refuge is a mix of photography across multiple genres: https://www.marktwight.com/REFUGE/1 https://www.marktwight.com/ Trevor Thompson is a former Navy SEAL, with multiple combat deployments and broad experience that ranges from SDV (SEAL Delivery Vehicles) to the Navy Parachute Team, also known as the leapfrogs. He is now a professional canopy sports athlete, photographer, and content creator.

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First, my good friend Mark Twight, who I met back in the early 2000s at a period of my life where I needed some of his insight and guidance when it came to exercise specifically and helping me with a routine that would assist in my removing my head from my ass when it came to rehab.

That is how we first came to meet, but he has much more to offer author He actually is an author, but he has much more to offer than that. I think most people would probably recognize his name from his experience climbing as an alpinist, world-class to say the least. He is also an amazing photographer. His newest book, Refuge, is sitting on my desk right now, and the pictures are, I would describe them as, often breathtaking.

It's a great photographer. He did some cycling for a while. He founded the gym Jim Jones. he worked in Hollywood on big screens and little screens and probably every size screen transforming people's bodies from whatever soft piece of donut eating flesh they were before to some chiseled individuals that looked pretty damn good on movies like 300 he worked with Superman fill in the blank the guy is a breadth and depth of knowledge across a variety of genres and subjects and I couldn't pass up

up the opportunity being in Salt Lake City to sit down and talk with him again. Joining us for our conversation is another good friend, Trevor Thompson, who we initially met when he was going through Buds as a student, and I was an instructor. And I do not remember him as a student, and he remembers me as an instructor, because they see only a few instructors, but I saw hundreds of students. We did not serve together directly, operationally, but we reconnected towards the tail end of both of our careers when he was a member of the Navy Parachute Team and I was augmenting the Navy Parachute Team. Found out we have a shared love of canopy sports and wingsuit flying, base jumping, skydiving, reconnected and it was great. He had a different

path in the military than I did inside of the SEAL community, but we got to experience mostly the same things. He got to do some stuff I would never want to do because I can't imagine being in a coffin for underwater for 14 hours, but I digress. He is out of the military now. You talked a little bit about where he began in life. I did not know that he had started in the art, or in the arts, I should say. He was pursuing that path before finding the military. I was actually surprised to hear that.

And post-military now, he is a professional canopy sports athlete, professional content, creator and developer, video and still. He's out there doing some pretty awesome shit. And he also lives in Salt Lake City with Mark. They are connected now. And I have no doubt that some pretty good ideas are going to come from that collaboration. And I'm going to shut up and let you guys enjoy episode 75 with Mark Twight and Trevor Thompson. Okay, got the red smoke. Smoke.

Okay, copy. West of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. Come on, wait a minute. I can't be. Copy, clear not. See, now we're podcasting. Yeah.

Perfect. Actually, you record an intro beforehand, so we can just launch, right? That's the beauty of it is I usually wait until the very last minute and then forget what I was going to say. Think of something to say, record the intro and then launch. Oh, yeah. For the power hour with Evan. Yes. You were rambling for sure.

I was rambling because to be honest with you, I was really trying to figure out the best way. I wanted to make sure what I said was extremely complimentary because I really liked the guy. And so, yeah, I explored more than one rabbit hole than I likely would have normally gone down. But it was important to me to at least cover the points that I did. And speaking of the power hour, let's do a power hour. And by that I mean, if we go over 60 minutes,

it's no problem whatsoever. We'll just call it. The power hour plus. Power hour plus. We tried to do with Evan. It was 80 minutes. but I actually think it was good to reduce that and set the timeline because I think we got, we didn't, we didn't spend too much time on the peripher.

We dove in pretty deep, pretty fast. And it was good. It's easy. I mean, no, he's not too tall, so you can get shallow really quick. He could be over his head underwater very quickly. I was going to talk, as we spoke early. I wanted to ask about climbing, but we're going to get to that. Let's dive into the mystery man here because you and I have spoken before.

We have. We have. Trevor, we were together last week. I said I wanted to do a podcast. And so here we are. This is the perfect... This is happening now. It's the perfect time for it last week.

I was going to say it's a perfect pairing, but three is not a pair. But both... But again, it's a prime number. It's modern math. You get to introduce yourself because, much like when I was talking about Evan, I will start rambling. So you give me the wavetops and then we'll dive deep. All right. So we're sitting here all together because...

I joined the Navy when I was 19. Go back. Where are you from? Have you not ever done this before? I'm trying. I was like, I was taking a backtrack with a little rabbit hole immediately. Okay, so let me just lay it on what he told me. He just said, birth is a good place to start. Pretty much. I can start there. Start from the beginning for us.

So I was born in Southern California. There we go. Grew up there, didn't go too far from there for a long time, and then moved to Chicago, and I was going to the school. of the Art Institute of Chicago, studying lithography, printmaking, and museum restoration.

That was 2006. So obviously this is after high school? Yeah, directly after high school. I had no intentions of joining the military growing up. Long family history in the military. Both my grandfathers were in, great-grandfathers, generations and generations back.

So it was a family thing, but no intention of doing that myself. War was in full swing and I felt like I wasn't getting a lot. Would it be rude of me to say which one? Both. Yeah, 06-07, for sure. 6-07, I was both for sure.

It's a good point though. It is. It is. Yeah. Because, you know, I don't know, you were both in the Navy and you all ended up in the desert. I just don't understand. It certainly wasn't dumb.

No. There's no greenery. Yeah. Well, not trees. Not trees, yeah. I didn't feel like I was getting a lot out of that program. I didn't feel like I was doing something that was going to accomplish a lot. I felt like they sort of sold me a bill that didn't fit what ended up being there.

This is at the art school. At the art academy, yeah, at the School of the Art Institute. That's no bash on the school. It's a great program and it's a great school. what I felt like I was going to be getting out of it was something that probably would have fit closer to an Italian artist commune where you're learning like a really specific kind of restoration romantic restoration artwork and very old world and that's not quite what was going on. They were pushing more of a gallery owner, gallery manager, modern outlook.

Have you always been into art? Oh, yeah. My mom studied art in college. My dad is a cartoonist now for the LA Times, and he was for the Daily News when I was growing up. And he's also a bronze sculptor. So there's a lot of art in the family. It was an easy transition for me to think, oh, I'm going to do this because I like it and I'm good at it. And surrounded by it. Yeah, and surrounded by it. And then it was that or music for me because I grew up. playing jazz and classical trumpet, teaching it as well as performing in LA. And that was because of the area that I grew up in. A lot of studio musicians, a lot of their kids. So basically everybody I grew up with now is a sound engineer or a studio musician. So instead, I went the art school route, didn't feel like I was getting something out of the program.

I was a decent athlete in high school and felt like I want to do something that's worthwhile. What's the hardest thing I can do? And that's what led me to, I'm going to join the Navy and go to Buds. The amount of naivety that was involved in that is extreme. Astronomical even. I have the same experience. You don't know what you don't know. But you actually had access to much more information than I did.

Oh yeah. I had access, but I think I was so far outside the circle of even understanding where that information was because I had no interest in it growing up that I didn't pursue the information that was there because I wanted to get into it immediately. Do you remember how you found out about the SEAL teams?

I think my earliest exposure to it was reading the LARP books by Larry Chambers as well as some of the SOG books by John Plaster and they mentioned the SEAL teams as a side. John Faster, the master sniper. Is the same guy? Maybe. I think so.

No, I believe that was a title of a book. You know what's interesting, no, you're talking about in 2006, 2007. You were reading books about Vietnam. Yeah. In the time period where the country was engaged in war on a two theater front. Yeah. You certainly did not use the tools available to you to gather information. No.

I did not use the Internet as my friend, nor anything else. But you actually might have gotten a better representation of what the community was looking back in that lens. In retrospect, I'm exceptionally happy that the lens that I was looking at it through was through straightforward, non-romanticized images from guys that lived the special operations lifestyle that formed the basis for what the entire special operations community really is. I'm glad that that's the lens I was looking at it through. because they don't make it sound easy. Yeah. Nor do they make it,

nor do they make it sound, in quotes, fun. And they had decades of time separating their experiences and then actually documenting their experiences. Yes. And I think there's some, I think there's value there to have time. There's no rose-colored glasses that they're looking through. They're looking straightforward

and wanting to recount this information because it was important. And I'm glad that that's how I saw it. And at least saw the, the community as a whole. I'm speaking from the Ranger Battalions all the through the SEAL teams. So you didn't like get all of your information from Charlie Sheen.

The documentary? Yeah. Which is 100% accurate. So seriously, you better watch out. Is there like a god mode on the gun? Or is that kind of a joke? It is. It's only to see through walls.

Yeah, it's to see through concrete walls. Okay. It's earliest generations. Everything about that movie is so catastrophically bad that it's amazing. They're running around with telemarketer headsets on. You're talking to each other. It's a science.

They're fielding call. It's like a call center. They just happen to be in another country. I watched it recently. The reality is they captured 60 years worth of experience in a 90-minute movie. And all of those experiences happened to, I think it was eight guys. Which Trevor and I can both attest to, that's not the case. Because you travel throughout your career and you navigate.

But these eight guys. guys, they got the big Mish. And the officer was like liaisoning with foreign intel agents at restaurants. It's amazing. It's hilarious because. But wait. You might hear of, you might hear or meet one guy that did one thing that's sort of like that one time.

One time in 20 years. Yeah. So I propose the next time we're together, we need to get one or two other guys with your background. And we should just like do a podcast while watching that movie. So I'm going to have to remark it now. I'm going to have to read Mark in. And I guess now this would be a good time to do it because this will force me to do it.

So I recently was on Rogan and he asked me about military movies. Yes. And I gave my opinion on a few. And I didn't know that they were going to cut that video up into smaller segments. And they did. And it's been viewed a few times. There are a few thousand comments. Most people calling me an asshole, which I have no defense against that.

Just like I resemble that remark or all of them. I don't think they realize that, like, I'm saying it lightheartedly. Perhaps I came off like an asshole. Regardless, I have had, I kid you not, hundreds of people reach out to me and say, please do more. So much like Joe does the MMA shows. Yeah. I'm going to do cleared hot tactical asshole shows.

And we are going to do exactly that because the more I thought about it, it's endless. Like my brother-in-law is a firefighter. Why shouldn't we sit down and watch backdraft together and discuss the tactical? technical discrepancies. You and I should sit down and definitely watch Cliffhanger because I'm sure that ice climbing is that. Military, police, fire, doctors, lawyers. Tactical assholes could go on forever. I will watch Cliffhanger with you gladly if we get to watch the IGR sanction first. Done. I think we watch. So the goal is 15 minute episodes. Yeah. We cut the movie up into pieces. Okay. Play a scene. Nice. We discuss.

We discuss how much of an asshole they are from a tactical perspective. Yeah. The only movie we can't discuss is Charlie Sheen's Navy Seals. Because it's a documentary. Because it's accurate. Yeah. I literally, I got driven to the point because people, and I'm sitting there thinking about it.

But Kurt's movie is fair game? Yes. Kurt's movie is fair game. We just have to get Kurt in with us to do it. I wonder if he would dissect his own movie with, I believe he would. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, hell yeah.

I mean, you're either SWAT or you're not. That'd be entertaining. I mean, and I know some police officers. I mean, tell me that they wouldn't have a good time sitting around dissecting that. Oh, yeah. And so I have to do it. And now that I've, this will launch, this episode will be out on Monday, I'm going to try to do one tactical assholes episode per month.

Okay. Perfect. Are you still here tomorrow? Because we should just double down immediately. Yeah, it'll be worth it. I got to get, I got to change some of the formatting. I need to get some wireless lavaliers because I'm going to dress up. to watch these movies.

Okay, then for sure. Then for sure, the, well, I, like, we're watching Errol Flynn's Robin Hood then, for sure. Yes. Because, yeah, we are. Yeah. Because I just, all I'll have to say is like, wow, I'm in the company of three archers. That was my fucking favorite movie growing up as a kid.

I'm in. Total. I had the whole final speech where he's fighting Guy of Gisburne on the stairs. Well, then we'll watch, it's the other guy, Kevin, what's his name? Oh, Hathner. Oh, yeah. Cocter. Men in tites.

We'll watch that one too. Deadly will join us for that because of the archery expertise. He'll wear tights as well. That's all on. That's on tape. I'm going to watch Navy SEALs through Night Vision goggles that make a noise when you flip them down. Oh, that's right. They don't because you're trying to be sneaky.

Oh, bad. For sure, at least get them, you know, the one that was like to the two into one, so you'll get motion sick every time you turn your head. For sure. Yeah. You know, it'll be fun. I'll dress up. Things will be on backwards.

The magazine might be in the gun backwards. The optic might be on backwards. It's hard to say. No, it's not. But here's what's crazy. I can give you examples of all of those things. There's a recruiting poster for the Navy. Two dudes in an Arctic environment standing there.

The guy has, I believe, an M4 with an aim point on the top of his rifle. Okay. It's on backwards. Perfect. It happens everywhere. There's just this lack of authenticity, authenticity and accuracy. And I can't think of anything more fun than making fun of that. That's pretty good.

And people will think I'm an asshole and that's okay. So there's a, we're all going to be assholes. Yeah. Tactical assholes. So circling back. I'm glad I didn't have any of that exposure joining the Navy. Yeah. Well, you wouldn't have known anyway until you got in, you'd be like, what's going on here?

Yeah. This isn't what I saw. Wait, wait, wait. Exactly. So boot camp isn't like full metal jacket. All I'm here to do... It might actually be for the Marine Corps. We just learned how to march and fold underwear.

I was... Yeah, yeah. No, you learn how to fold underwear and clean urinals. Yeah. You're a janitor. I tell you what, though, looking back... Because you're going to be either cleaning urinals or chip and paint once you wash out of buds, right? You ring the bell, you're chip and paint.

I will say this. Looking back, Navy boot camp, looking back many years, there were not a lot of things that I took from that and applied to the future career. But I will say, looking back, the diversity of individuals that showed up for that first day, that it was eight weeks, right? Yeah. Everybody needed that. Like, because that was the right, the molding of, you know, Instagram and social media and all that stuff didn't exist then.

But it was, hey, this me, me, me thing, get rid of that. Now you're going to become an element and you're going to become we, we, we. I mean, there were people, and I bet you had this same experience that you would hear them crying at night, sleeping. And I don't mean that in a pejorative manner. No, no, no. It's just, I was sitting there. I'm like, you're outside of that comfort zone. Yeah. Like some of these people never left their hometowns. Now, I say I didn't travel, but that means that I just wasn't traveling internationally in my mind now, right? Yeah, you were seeing parts of the U.S. I was still seeing parts of the U.S. There were guys that were in my boot camp class that never left their hometown of 10,000

people. So for them, though, I think that experience was essential. For them, that was, discipline they might not have been getting at home. It was structure. I think honestly for some of the people that I was there with, it was probably the most consistently they had eaten in their entire life. I mean, you know, you're getting economic spectrum, educational spectrum. How much of that did I use in the SEAL teams? Zero. However, that is just the, that's your buy-in. That's the chips come in, then that's what you're going to do. If you want to make your way to the extremely difficult test you have to take on the fourth week to become a SEAL. Granted, it's- which is push-ups.

Exceptionally. Extremely difficult. There was this one to. In a run. Okay. I think it was a mile. The filter is wide on the beginning end because we need many participants. Yes.

Yeah. You know, it's a great with like two bars. Everything comes through. Yep. Sometimes something gets stuck. We need volume. So yeah. Continue.

So get to boot camp, go through boot camp. At the time, they were just starting the segregation of everybody that was going be in a soft type unit into a boot camp class. So we had guys that were going to be divers or perspective divers, EOD techs, search and rescue swimmers, guys going to buds and guys that were going to the SWIC program all in the same class. I definitely did not have that experience. Which, I mean, I have no other lens to look at it through. It was good and bad. The good part was because of the segregation, at least all of our mindsets were the same. So you're not dealing with Joe Schmoe that understands he's only going to get a paycheck for breathing in your class, right?

Yeah, the people were driven. Everybody's driven. They want to be there. The bad part being... That's an M-O-S? Breathing? It is. Okay.

The bad part being you get treated as if you're trying to do something special. Which you are. You are. But you're getting treated that way by guys. that maybe aren't part of those programs. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. Okay.

They, you know, they're, they might be slightly jaded towards your chosen path. They might be slightly jaded by you experiencing people that had been in the profession that you want to do. Now, what's interesting looking back on it is that I recently spoke with a guy. Actually, Jeff Reed, the guy I was up mushing dogs in, in Alaska with. He and I and two other guys, I think, are the only guys that made it through that. boot camp class. Through buds, you mean? Oh yeah.

And I think we had 80 people, 90 people in my... It's a higher than average attrition rate? Yeah. Now we had a bunch of guys that were going to the diver and search and rescue programs so you can kind of eliminate them. So we had a slightly higher than normal attrition rate, but it's interesting looking back at that program, thinking, well, they're trying to create more seals or more SWIC guys.

And it didn't necessarily function the way they needed thought it would. What year was that? So that was, it was seven. So the mandate had already been given to graduate more dudes. I think it had actually, it was just prior to that? Well, I think it had been discussed for decades before. Yeah. I think the, no, but I think the mandate came down.

The mandate came down, but what I'm saying is I think before it became doctrine, where before it became pushed, it had always been a desire to increase throughput. Yeah. Because, you know, if you have 50 people who get out across the SEAL teams after 20 years and you replace them with 51 people from Buds, you're taking a huge net loss and experience. So they're trying to, you know, rapidly throw more people in there to aggregate that out. Yeah. But I think, and I don't remember what year this was, but it would have been around the time the Team 7 got stood up. Rick Smothers was running the program in Coronado.

And I think it was him who actually received the. The pedal to the medal doctrine. Yeah, the make it happen. Here, we need 500 dudes or whatever it was. Because I remember sitting in his office, and a guy named Jim Bowman from the Olympic Training Center was sitting in that same conversation and talking about, you know, how difficult it actually is to even get the numbers that were being graduated at that time, much less, okay, you want another 150 per cycle or another whatever.

But whatever. What they're realizing, I mean, I'm kind of peddling forward way far forward. I spent time on the jump team, so I got to see part of the recruiting and the Goodwell effort for the Navy. And the issue that it comes down to to get more team guys is recruiting. You still have to get some dude to volunteer. Yeah. Like whether or not you get somebody more athletic, they still have to volunteer.

I can tell you. That's the issue. Being on the instructor side of the house, they might have sent us more students. And there were, what would be the way to appropriately phrase this. There were discussions about throughput, but there were never mandates for us to deviate the standard, which is one thing at the end of the day I felt good at, or felt good about going home at the end of the night because. Like they wanted you to have an eye on, hey, we are trying to make this happen, but there was no disqualification. discussion of, hey, if somebody's not making it, just give them a little nudge. There was never any discussion of that.

The standards were the standards, which maintains the quality of the product. Yeah. And even if they had pushed on us and said, you guys need to get more people through, I can tell you as an instructor, I would not have. And I just would have waited until the boss would have home at night. And we would have had additional training. Extracurricular. Well, that's the one thing you could like, and again, I'm skipping forward to,

like one of Mark's new books is sitting on the table. there's a book, metaphorical book like that that does exist for seal training. Almost every day is in that book. And as long as you leave those pages alone, you're going to be fine. Yeah.

But even if the higher-ups change those pages, what they can't do is control the instructor staff at all times. And the instructor staff is the final gateway. It's not the three-ring binder. It's the people who are administering the curriculum and saying at the end of the day, you meet the standards or you don't,

I want to work with this. person or I don't because I understand the environment that I'm coming back from to try to impart knowledge of these students. And here's the deal is you show up on a Tuesday and you have to do log PT. That's what's ID'd in the book. Okay. Maybe log PT has a specific set of things that you have to participate in as a student. But how the staff tell you to do something or make you do a thing, that's where the gray area lies that you can mold the training to make sure that the standards remain the same.

And you can see that as a student. But there's a huge sort of history of momentum around those standards. Plus, as an instructor, you've become a Bud's instructor after you've deployed. I was there as rehab. As rehab. So you're coming back from the field

and all you're doing is looking at guys like, I don't, I'm not going to. I can't, I mean, and I would see, like, I mean, I could imagine this, like, you're seeing an individual, and they're not quite to the standard. You still don't want to send that guy out to stand beside guys that you care about. And worked with, you know, just a couple months before. And I can speak to a different experience than you had because you went through in the late 90s. When Buds was still difficult, yes. Yes.

Yes. And you went through in the winter, right? Of course. When it was snowing. It was snowing. That's okay. That's what I thought. Yeah.

But what I'm speaking to is I was impressed as well as glad in retrospect that the staff that were there were coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Yeah. That that was the information that was getting imparted that day one, week one, they were sitting there looking at us telling us this information like hey look this isn't a joke you know this isn't some game that you're playing it's 2008

we've had casualties there have been people that are six and a half seven years of war there are people that are dead red wings had happened two years prior yep like it was a real thing that you were getting involved in and I'm glad that I got to see that side of it because then you're told really, hey, this is what you're being expected to perform because of these things. It makes the, as an instructor going back there, it makes the stakes extremely real.

Oh, yeah. I tell you what, Mark, you made the point of, you know, talking about whether or not these, you would want these people to go back and work with your buddies. You have experienced that same insight into people's character and soul, but it was just through exercise. Because if you think about what Buds is, I mean, we're just suppressing. and depressing a human being, whether it's through exhaustion, removal of food, sand for sure, hypothermia,

exposure to the elements, all of these tools. And all we're trying to do is push them to their lowest spot possible. Repetition. And then here's your standard. Meet it. Are you going to cheat?

Are you going to meet the standard? You're going to quit? How many times have you seen that when it comes to exercise an incredibly difficult workout? And it's like, you watch somebody and you see them they're digging their own hole, right?

And they're putting themselves in the hole, And then you start, I mean, you start counting. You're like, huh, 13 in that set instead of 15, huh? And that gives you insight. And if you had to pick that person to go be on a belay with you on a mountain, six pitches up, you're like, no, no, no, no, no. Because if you're going to make that decision there in that moment, what else are you going to deviate on?

That's really all buds is. You say the same thing in the environments that you've operated into for the last, you know, however long you've been trained in people in that physical aspect. Well, and that's why you get hammered down as a class and as an individual on things that people in me relating it ask, well, that's weird. You know, say you show up eight seconds late for an, literally eight seconds late for an evolution.

Evolution being a run, a swim, whatever, it doesn't matter. And you get hammered. And hammered to the point of that evolution no longer exists. Now today's evolution is you're going to get hammered. And that's because if you can't perform the function of showing up on time, what else can you not do? Isn't it that if you show up eight seconds late, that means you're actually 10 minutes and eight seconds late? More or less.

Something like that. Like as the instructor staff rolls out, you need to be there as a class ready to go. And there's nothing that warmed my heart more than being a late class. Coming over the berm with a lovely, delicious, probably vanilla frappuccino with swizzle on it. And seeing the class in disrepair, like, oh, I've been waiting for this. My favorite beating to recount is from a two-mile open ocean swim where we showed up a little bit late.

What phase? First phase. Yeah, you're going to get hammered in first phase. Oh, man, it was terrible. They're like, all right, well, you guys want to show up three minutes late. That's fine. We're doing 300 smirfjacks in your wetsuits.

We got finished with that. That took, I don't know how long, half an hour. And then they tell us, oh, by the way, yeah, we're still doing the swim. and all of you are going to fail, which we're also going to count against you. It's not a big deal. Two people.

Two people passed. Me and my swim buddy, I think passed by like five seconds. And they looked at it as like, well, crap. All right, get out. Get out here.

See what you guys didn't see. Like, for one, as an instructor, barely passed. For one, as an instructor, I didn't understand the, like, as a student, I'm like, does eight seconds really matter? Because we did the same thing.

Like, our head counts off by one. Does it really matter? There's 150 people. Yes, it does. Yeah, And people are quitting left and right. So God knows where that dude went. Yes.

Well, then I go back as an instructor and it makes absolute perfect sense. Yeah. But what you didn't see and what I saw as the instructor staff, like when the entire class fails, we're like, God damn it. We can't count that swim. But let's tell them we're going to. Yeah. Okay.

So there's mechanisms as an instructor that I didn't know existed as a student. And you just have to learn how to navigate the scenes. Yeah. And I got to see that as a rollback. Which was entertaining to watch. So you're still in boot camp. Talk us through your Bud's journey. So still in boot camp.

When I was going through, we still had Indoc and PTRR. Yep. So now you're in Buds. They have since eliminated. Yeah. So you finish up boot camp. That takes eight weeks. Following that, we sat in the very first set of pre-Buds programming, which they were still

figuring out. I mean, it was kind of a mess. It was good to get a little more PT in, but as a military program, It was a bit of a mess at the time. I've talked to guys since that say it's running really well. Which it should be after a decade. You'd think. I would hope.

Frankly, it takes time and dealing with your bureaucracy like the Navy. You're going to have issues with hiring and scheduling and programming those kinds of programs, especially something with such dire consequences, which is reality. You're dealing with a job that has fatal consequences. So they were very... So shit matters. Yeah, they were very particular about what's going on. So it's going to take time to get it to function.

We went from there to Buds and went through Indoc and PTR, which don't exist anymore as far as I know. I think they've just been replaced by that program. They've been replaced by that program. At the time, those were built as stopgaps for people that had issues like teeth problems, eyesight, they needed LASIC, learning how to lift a log over your head, learning how to run with a boat. Because you don't just show up. And all of a sudden it's like, yeah, I know how to lift a Zodiac with a team of seven other guys.

That's just normal because you don't. You're going to fuck that up and you're going to drop down somebody, guaranteed. And they do. People get hurt in all those evolutions. So you learn how to do all the things. All the running, boots and pants,

how to get wet and sandy, how to be a sugar cookie, which means getting wet and covered in sand. It's critical to training. Wait, you know that. That's called a sugar cookie. It's a sugar cookie. I fucking love that.

Wet and Sandy. And feeling sweet. Well, here's the thing is Mark, you can do it wrong many number of ways. And they'll find a way. Hey, so why are your armpits not covered in sand? This is true. Go fix this. This is true.

For time. Yeah, that's a thing. So you learn how to do all these things all the way down to how to wear your uniform. And they're all measures to find out how common. you are at giving a shit. Yes. And things like your uniform is a great way to measure

whether or not somebody gives a shit. If you can't monitor your starched uniform for threads coming off of it, what the hell else are you going to get wrong in six months when you're handling a rifle next to somebody?

That's a legitimate concern looking back on it now for me. Yeah. Right. And the standards are almost impossible to meet. They are. And that's the point. Yeah.

You fail. What do you do? Is it a stumbling block or motivation? Yeah. Is it adding to your stress? Also another point of character exposed. Yeah. Okay, here.

You're confronted with the opportunity to treat this as one thing or the other. And then you do everything right and I still fail you. Can you deal with it? Can you use that as motivation? Do you get pissed and mouth? Like, it's amazing. Or you do everything right. The guy next to you does something wrong.

now you all fail. Because it is a team evolution. Or maybe let me just bring something up I saw recently where there's like some standards that have to be met within a particular organization because you're wearing a white shirt that says probie on the front of it. And then it comes time to take the test. And you pass and the guy next to you doesn't pass the test.

It doesn't actually, you know, I mean doesn't pass. Yeah, you can fucking pass test, physical test. Also known it is failing. Also known his failing. and yet both of you get member shirts. Now, I'd be pissed if I was a dude that passed, right? Because some motherfucker who failed actually got the same reward, quote-unquote, that I got. But it also basically delegitimizes the whole thing.

Doesn't it? Or am I just... No, it's... One of my favorite quotes... One of my favorite quotes is what you allow in your presence is your standard. So if the people who are sitting there overseeing that evolution, they can have all the standards written on the wall. I feel pretty good in this room right now.

Yeah. And standard number one is if you don't pass the physical test, you don't get fill in the blank. And then you stand there and two people fail and one person passes, but they all get the shirt or where it is. You just need to take a marker to that standard that's written down because it doesn't matter what you say. It doesn't matter what's written down. It matters what you do. And what you allow in your presence is your standard. Yeah.

So it completely erodes the integrity of the organization, in my opinion. and the people administering the test. And I think a common thread that you can see amongst... Making that very clear. I don't even know what we're talking about, but that's just my default stance. It is. Well,

in a common thread that I think you can see amongst all of us in the room is that kind of needing to function on a specific standard. And there's a very analog view in that. You're either passing it or you're not. And I'm guessing that everybody in this room, just making an assumption here, believes that it's a good thing to fail. I think it's essential.

I think if you don't fail, you're not doing anything that matters. Yes. Well, A, yeah. And you're not learning. Evolving. Well, and that's not on camera or on mic, but what you said to me the other week on the range about having a hard time because I hadn't been practicing because I didn't have time was,

oh, it's got to suck for me specifically. to be over your shoulder shooting arrows. And yeah, it did, but do you remember me saying that I'm glad that you were the one that was over my shoulder because that's my personality is I want somebody that's going to be able to ID everything that I'm doing wrong because I don't want somebody sitting there patting me on the back for fucking up.

Out of either. I actually wanted to hurt more. Out of ignorance that they don't know what to say or because they just are unwilling to hurt my feelings. To be critical. To be critical. I would rather somebody be critical because I'm not going to learn otherwise.

It's not going to happen. Well, if I haven't been practicing, guess who's the most aware of that? Yeah. I hear me. Oh, yeah. And so, yeah, if it gets to a point where, hey, let me check out your shooting.

In my head, I'm like, oh, shit. This is going to suck. But I want it to suck so much that I don't put myself in that position. But you don't not practice in the future. Yeah. And you know what drives me nuts about this scenario

with the two people get in the shirt or whatever it may be. I wouldn't accept the shirt. If I knew that I failed, I would give it back and say, you know what, if you were going to give me this shirt, you can go fuck yourself

because I actually don't want to be a part of this organization. Exactly. In fact, that would be for me the indicator. Like, oh, wow, sudden relaxation of standards because you want my monthly financial contribution to that you can keep your fucking lights on. I'm out because that's not interesting. Yep.

Or authentic. Seeing that at the end of Buds being a Buds student and then graduating SKT, six months after that, you get your bird, but then you ship to the team and you're brand fucking new. and it doesn't matter. It's like, hey, congratulations. You know where the trash is.

Make sure the beer's full in the fridge every Friday. Like, don't fuck that up. I was in that cycle my entire career. Yeah. I did two platoons and you're still a new guy. And I'm like, oh, I'm going to screen to go somewhere else. Shut up by the new again. Made it through.

Hey, what's up, new guy? I'm like, oh, this is seven years of this. Let's just continue. Made it through that. to Buds. Oh, hey, what's up? New guy instructor to the staff. I'm like, oh my God. It never ends. Got switched over to become an officer and the old, oh, hey, what's up?

Punk. I'm like, this is never going to end. But at the same time, I was like, yes. But what a great, what a great way to know shit. In retrospect, it's great to live a life that forces that to happen. There's no resting on your laurels. You either are leaning forward on your toes. Yes.

Or you're getting passed by. And if you, and if you understand there's, you're always new to somebody. It doesn't matter where you are. And there's, and there's, there's always somebody better. That was a critical portion of that as well. Absolutely. This is one of my climbing mentors, I guess, let's see, third.

And perhaps most important, this guy, John Bouchard. And I say most important climbing mentor, because he was really, really pretty far down the road. I mean, he's the guy who went to Europe, saw paragliders, get dude's paragliding, bought one, came back, took it apart, figured out how to make him. And we talked about it on the first podcast, actually. He was the guy developed the first elliptical wing.

but you know based on he's like oh I should read some books because I'm a smart guy and like oh well it would be better if the if the tips of the wing flew faster than the center that would be a good thing right anyway so he said exactly that everyone's a geek to someone yeah and there was one day I was out on my motorcycle and right and and on a sort of mountain-ish road a lot of corners et cetera and I was like riding I was thinking fuck I'm really fucking railing this thing this is awesome and and then you hit a bird and oh no and then some dude comes by me yeah cranking knee dragging and you probably felt like you were in second gear and i just kind of pulled over and

stopped and stood up and put the kickstand down and had a little moment of self-reflection and later i was talking with him about it and and he said that's what you do to people in the mountains that's what Deli does to people shooting a bow. It's a great thing. And I know you can speak to the same thing. Coming from our background, we get to meet, be around, and be taught by some of the best in their field. Yeah.

So often that you come away from being in the SEAL teams with the understanding that you're gonna be a fucking new guy and not be the best in the world at anything. Probably ever. Ever. Yeah. Well, and also the understanding that if you come to the point where like, you know what, I'm the best at everything that I do, you need to retire because you're just not self-aware.

Yeah, take a step back. Or you're not doing something new. Or you're not then again, not evolving as a person and growing as a person. Yeah. And if you're at that point where you realize, and this is for me, when I decided I'm not going to train people anymore, is because like I'm not learning from this. I can certainly do this and I can take money from this. but it's not helping me.

Like I'm not put into it. You can profit from it. You won't benefit from it. Yes. Perfect. So you have to talk. I know almost nothing about the SEAL team you went to. And I know there's some sensitivities around it. So describe it to whatever degree that you want to.

Just hold your breath and close your eyes. Yeah. And then I'll come back to you in 10 minutes. I know you went to an SDV team, which I know almost, I've seen an SDV in person one time and I immediately turned around and walk the other direction. It's like a unicorn, but like evil. Did I give you the because I used to do some of the core values speeches or like you sit down with the students and people would ask me about SDVs and I had one response Did I give this one to your class?

People say instructor stumph What do you think about going to sdb? Wait no shit. That's how they address you Scott was an instructor there. So he probably gave the SDV talk because he came from there People just in the core values ask me questions and they'd say instructor stump what do you think about SDVs? And I say If given a choice between SDVs and suicide blow your brains out. Yeah, because I think his talk to us,

when I got a sign there. I've never been in one, so I have no idea, and I would tell the students that, but I just say, it seems like you're underwater for a really long time, and I don't want to do that. I mean, I'll put it this way. You make your own choices.

I'll put it this way. In four and a half years, I accumulated 1,400 hours of dive time. That's a problem. That's a problem. Just do some math. Fuck. What's the longest dive you've ever been on?

Like 15 hours? That's not awesome. I think. Out of 14 hours? That's wet, like dry to dry. I think I've been on bag for like 12 hours or something. I can't even describe how exhausting that is. On bag.

I've lost like nine pounds, nine to ten pounds on multiple. Enough dives where I don't know how many I lost that much weight. So describe what an SDV is. So an SDV is a submersible that can hold a few seals and deliver them from platforms. But it's not watertight. No, no, it's a wet, it's a wet submersible, so you're on scuba of some sort for whatever the determine, like, the time is that you need to do to perform the functions that you're doing.

So you're basically, let me make that about as vague as possible. Okay. You're riding a steerable torpedo. You're in the torpedo. You're not, like riding. And think about this, too, from my understanding, the people up front are the only ones actually doing anything, right? So I'm on camera, so I'll just point it myself.

Yes, only the one doing anything. Yeah. We had an officer there. They are there. Yeah. For anybody listening. Saying things. Yeah, I'm sorry.

Yeah, you know that we can do that job by ourselves. No job can be done without the presence of an officer. I can say that having been done. Well, and thankfully, I had a chief sitting next to me, so. So, but what I'm trying to say is so there's a separation. So there's somebody up there driving. Okay, wait, wait, we had mechanical components behind us. Yeah.

It's a mechanical thing. Let me go back a little bit further Because I'm guessing Deeper These, okay Let me go No we're not going to you You're going to have to go deep on this one

I'm just going to go further I'm going to be like new guy okay So I'm guessing that said submersible Has limited range Yeah How does it get from wherever To close enough to be deployed Like it's a

Is it attached to a larger vehicle It's moving around under the water or You can describe it as a piggyback of sorts. You can describe it as a piggyback. Kind of like the space shuttle. Like a little baby parasite. Yes.

It's on there. Like a lamprey. If people are interested in SDVs, go to Google and put in seal delivery vehicle and I don't know if the information is accurate, but it'll give you a better perspective. I'm being so cagey because I have a whole bunch of NDAs and I'm just trying to be as vague as possible. But yes, go to Google. Do a quick search on your own.

And what you see may or may not be true, but there are a host of pictures online on how the thing functions and what it can or cannot attach to. It's a very interesting thing. I wouldn't have chosen that term. I didn't. I mean, I didn't choose to go there. I'm saying interesting because it's interesting as a thing. So the point I was getting to, though, is I wanted to talk about the difference between

what the people in front are doing and the people in back. So I'm shivering, but I know where we're going. Because you're looking at something. They're shivering and they don't know where they are. aren't they like basically in an underwater box? Yeah, you're in a coffin. It's not cool. No, it's cold.

It's not acceptable. That sounds horrible. It is horrible. I've been back there and I'm like, yeah, I'm glad I'm in front. I don't like this. I've heard of people like laminating magazines. Like what? Watching movies.

I mean, are we talking catheters at this point? Let's go deep. Catherers. So yeah, over-dick catheters. Oh, yeah, that's got one. Like, over-the-dick catheters or diapers. We wore semi-dry wet suits, which are 7-mill, so you can just piss yourself. It doesn't matter.

It's a wet suit. Is there a flow of water in the suit? There can be. Because pissing yourself in a suit that doesn't have a flow water is not cool. I'm going to push back against that. Well, actually talking about this day before yesterday with a good friend. Pissing yourself? Actually, it was wide awake?

Specifically, we were, I was talking about shitting ourselves. All right, if we're going to go here, I have a story. Because, God, I've seen these stories. We were with a mutual friend who's passed last year. And so I was talking with my friend Michael Kennedy about this. And about, because sometimes looking back, you can't remember. You can't imagine, okay, that actually happened. But if I'm describing it to you now, it will sound completely unrealistic.

So I was on a pretty big peak in the Himalayas in the winter. with a good friend named Jeff Lowe and on the approach to this peak we had gotten some kind of parasite so one of the we need a couple different choices of antibiotics in the first aid kit whatever so we choose doxycycline 10 day thing

and and but lo and behold like day two of this course of antibiotics the fucking weather gets good and the forecast is really good time to climb so January 87 we fucking launch on a peak that we think is probably going to take it I mean we take

I think we have 12 days of food and 15 days of fuel, something like that. Just two of us in the winter in the Himalayas, and it's, that right there should sort of set the scene. So this antibiotic is not a very powerful antibiotic for this particular parasite, unfortunately, so it made them kind of sleepy. They're just dormant. They're just dormant.

They're waiting. They're waiting. Oh, no. Yeah. And they're just getting angry and angry every day that they can't do their thing. So we're nine days up this route, and that morning, I start climbing off the belay, or off the anchors, and Jeff is, is, is, is, is blaying. And I'm just very few, maybe 10, 15 feet above him.

And he goes, oh. And I look down, I'm like, dude, what's going on? And he goes, he's having a moment. He's having a moment. And so he shits himself. Yep. And I'm like, and he tells me. I'm like, oh, man, what a drag.

Must have been the freeze drive from last night. Or the freeze stride from the previous eight nights. Whatever. So I keep climbing. I get to the top of the pitch, and I'm just like, thank God it's not fucking me, you know. And I'm like, set the anchors. And he starts coming up. And he's halfway up following this pitch.

And I'm like, oh. And the same thing. So the deal is you're like pretty high on a big peak in the Himalayas. were a little over 21,000 feet at that point. And so the first time I ship myself, I hang off the anchors and... The first time. And I cut my underwear out. Okay, because that's not...

Not the bottom of your shirt? No, that has no value for me right now. It's just like keeping everything there, and it's all messy. So you can get rid of it. Get rid of it. Okay. So the next layer, however, is an insulating layer. So when I ship myself the second time, I cannot cut it out.

And so Jeff gets up. there and we're both on this hanging belay pretty far you know pretty high on the south pillar nipsey and like look at each other same thing like oh oh oh and just explosive I mean it just horrible double dragon no no vomit no no vomit no no just just just just single single orifice engagement and and so we we we start doing some math and we're like okay we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna get dehydrated we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna get dehydrated. And we don't have enough fuel to melt enough snow to stay hydrated, nor do we have any more antibiotics in the first aid kids. Because we thought we'd like, because that's down

a base camp. It's there. Yeah. We can see it. And the weather's still good. Everything's not perfect. I mean, we're not in a great situation. But, you know, we decided, okay, we've got to go down. Yeah. Which takes two days. Oh, God. And we're still, and, and, and it's better than nine. It's still, it's better than nine. It's still happening. So, so we're So we're nine up, it took two down. I think from that point it was 48 repels to get down. And we're just so, fuck, I don't can't even remember, but it's everywhere. I mean, it's like, it's down the leg into the boot tops at this point.

And you're just leaving your little slice of America with Nipsey. No, no, no. Why don't you put your spare clothes on? Fully and, yeah, why not? Because they were not with us. Our spare clothes didn't happen to be with us. I'll put on my extra pants. Oh, those are there.

Oh, my goodness. Exactly. So we finally get down and we're like stumbling across the glacier. We're so fucking weak because we're, you know, having trouble eat, you know, any food is just kind of going right through. And one of the guys who was in our base camp, one of the Sherpas, he's like, he sees, you know, they've got a spotting scope and they know pretty much what's going on. So they come across the glacier with, you know, two glasses and hot tea, right? And that's the thing. And the guy rolls up.

I can't remember his name, but it was fucking hilarious. He like rolls up and he looks at us. And then he's apparently, you know, it's a little warmer. You know, when everything's frozen, it doesn't smell bad. Nope. But then you're down, lower elevation and things start. And he just is just like, oh, oh, fuck. Let's leave this teapot right here.

And I'm keeping it. I'm keeping a good 20 feet or whatever. And somebody said, you know, drop your packs and, you know, they grabbed the packs and carried him back to base can. I mean, we just crawled out. And that was our kind of departure. So peeing in a wetsuit to me, that just sounds like warm and glorious. for like about a couple of minutes.

I mean, I've seen shitting in a wet suit. I have too. I've seen the result of that. Okay. Yeah, it's nasty. It's on your back. It's everywhere. Because you think like, oh, you're already very little wet.

You're wet. And then you expel some more stuff and it just decides to go everywhere. It's like a duck patte as you're unzipping your wetsuit. It's terrible. In the body condom that you're wearing. So the whole thing about like, you know, insulation that you use in the high mountains is, you know, it's, it doesn't, it's, it's, it doesn't. It works better. They do say warm when wet, you know, about wool and some other sort of synthetic fabrics and that kind of thing.

But that's not totally true. Warm when wet, not warm when shit in. You should keep it dry. It's better if it's dry. Yes. Yeah. It just means that it's not actually stealing heat from you when it gets wet. But still, everything's better when it's dry and everything's better when it isn't covered in shit.

True. Technical climbing question. How are you supposed to take a shit 40 pitches up? Well, if in the mountains, when you have, so first thing, because you didn't ask about number one. I assume that had happened relatively at the same time. We'll do number one first. Okay.

Which is you need to have a zipper arrangement so that allows you to have a straight line. If you have a kink in the hose, when you put it back in, whatever didn't get past the kink is going down, is, you know, get your insulation wet. So the running joke was always four inches of insulation, two inches of dick, because it's cold.

And obviously there's like, you're trying to like reach in, fish it out around the harness. It's a terrible experience. It's cold out. And no, like there's just like, no, I'm not going out there. Yeah. You can pull all you want, but I'm not leaving. Yeah, it's blowing 20 miles an hour.

and it's negative 10 out. Yeah, exactly. So you just lean up against the wall or plant your feet and just... Well, it depends. So there's... Because first you have to have access to the hole, right?

So, and so there's two schools of thought. One is the through the crotch zipper, so a vertical zipper that, you know, goes from the chest all the way through the crotch up to the tailbone. But there, that means you're pulling laterally and then also trying to, you know, pull vertically to get your long underwear,

whatever insulation you're wearing underneath, pretty small hole if it's a third world situation you may or may not be on time so I always preferred the the sort of half moon zipper around the ass which separate from the the the vertical zipper and so you sort of unzip drop that the the main thing there is to pull that flap through so that nothing gets get touched and but but then you're operating with sort of a wider thing we know you whole year, bigger window, yeah. So you typically have a harness, which is

where the leg loops are detachable from the waist belt. You'd still be attached in the front, but you could detach the back. And that way you can get like a really big window. You can hang off the waist belt from the anchors and and then just let it rip, so to speak. And, you know, you want to get it done quick

because definitely cold sometimes. If it's, if the wind is blowing 20 and it's minus 10 and there's a little bit of spin drift. You don't really want to do it, but sometimes it's got to be done. Yeah. You don't want that shit confetti everywhere? No. And oftentimes, because you're eating, you know, you're like high altitude food, right?

And it's reconstituted, freeze-dried, you know, whatever, or you're eating stuff with a pretty high fat content because that helps you stay warm. One situation in the, in the, in Chamon, when Scott and I were did the first ascent of there goes the neighborhood, and we were a day late. the Pejasham, the mountain rescue guys, came looking for us with a helicopter on the morning of the... You were supposed to be back the previous night, and we were still up there. And they came by right about the time

that both of us were expelling. So we're both hanging off the anchors on this thing, probably like 65-degree ice slope where we chopped a ledge to a three-cheek ledge, I think we called it, because we got tired, and that meant, you know, four-butt. One butt-cheek was unhappy for someone. But we were hanging off the anchors when the helicopter came,

and it just had both had explosive diarrhea. Sounds like a common theme. But it's, and so they kind of came by, and we're like, you know, ass out, waving. Oh, God. And they flew away, realizing that we were alive and that they could not erase that from the hard drive. I'm done. I'm done with the shit, because it's all been expelled.

All right. It has been expelled. It has. Yeah. My stories weren't that good. It just involved a dry suit in Mexican food. That sounds, okay. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

All right. So this has always been a question of mine. So it's a dry suit. No water can get in. Should get in. Should get in. There's many ways you could sabotage yourself. I've seen many wet dry suits.

That's the second topic. My topic is, okay, I have gas inside. My body's creating gas. This is where my story was actually going to begin. Gas is a lot like water. Yeah. Do you just like make a balloon with enough Mexican food? All right, so I'll tell my story.

In my first spiltoon in a galaxy far, far away, we were doing OTH, which is over the horizon, where you get in these boats and you drive to nowhere. Right. Navigating it, and then as soon as you can't see anything, you come back. And we were wearing our dry suits. And you put the dry suit on, you have clothing on underneath. And I used to go either, you know, you jump off the pier, basically, and you can compress yourself into a ball

and kind of pull the seal around your neck and that gets all the air out. It expels all the air out. So a buddy of mine, this was on a Monday, guy in the platoon had gone hard in the paint, boozing, as we all did on days that ended in Y back then, and then got some suspect Mexican food. And I'm sorry.

I just had to go through the days of the week. Yeah. Yeah, okay. You did that math correctly. So we're transiting in this thing in forever. And he's, this is me, I might be messing the stripe a little bit. This is him telling me about the story. Okay.

And he basically said that he was just sitting there like the whole ride and just farting in his wet suit or his dry suit and just farting in his dry suit and keeps going and going. And there was a point where he was going to need to, you know, jump off the boat and they were going to swim in a little bit. And you're pretty buoyant with that dry seat because you can't get all the air out. Yep. But he said he jumped into the water and was basically like an umpalumpa because it was so puffy. So he went and grabbed his neck seal

No, no, no, no. Do the wrist, man. Do the wrist. So he went neck seal and immediately just started dry heaving and projectile vomiting and just, Buh.

So there is something about the high altitude, the one piece high altitude suit. You've been out there forever and you're starting to burn a little muscle mass so you got the fucking serious ammonia thing going on. And it is, and there's a weird bellows effect every time you move

and it's just like driving air up out of the neck of the suit and into your mouth. And you're just like, oh, I'm dying. Oh, I'm fucking dying. I'm dying. And then the peril thing to, you know, your, just like, I'm in a dry suit and I feel like I'm going to fart. I mean, I'd like, you go to third world country.

The greeting was always like, hey, man, how you doing? I'm like, farting with confidence. Because it's not always a thing. Like, man, I'm going to pinch this one off because I don't know what's happening. Because it might be humid. I don't know. We've gone down a deeper habit hole now. It's quite, yeah.

Well, it's 30 feet of intestine, generally. So we're going to hit, we're going to hit the end. So back to SDVs. Yeah. And the guys in the back doing nothing. They do nothing. Farting, obviously. They are.

And hopefully, you know, perhaps expelling the air through their wrist seal instead of the neck. Because he did not enjoy that experience, or at least that's what he described to me. Well, and we got to the point where we weren't using dry seats. We were using semi-drys for the stuff we were doing in just speaking. Speaking from my experience, doing the stuff that we were doing, you can pretty much perform any function with a semi-dry wetsuit that's fit for you. Yeah. So we had individually sized suits. Everybody had one made specifically for them just like you would have a ski racing suit made just for you.

Well, you should fit perfect. For most guys in the team, it's like you're a double XL. Go get that. For your specific purpose, it needs to be custom. Yeah. And we were wearing those suits, you know, every other day. for months on end. Again,

some scenarios. It's a problem. It's not awesome. So, yeah, we weren't wearing dry suits. Your skin must get so soft, though.

Yeah, buttery smooth. Did you come, yeah, talk to me about the prunny fingers you had coming out out for a 14-hour dive. Oh, my God.

So, I just thought of that. You just don't, you just don't. It's a whole other level of what can your brain function through? I've been on the edge of hypothermia a number of times

and it's compounded by being dehydrated because you're not thinking about, nor are you sitting there drinking water. You're just in water. Under water. Yeah. Well, and it's salt water everywhere, but not a drop to drink, as they say. It's for real.

And is the salt pulling moisture out of your body? Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's trying to equalize. It's trying to equalize. So it's yanking water out. So you get out of that,

you get out after a long, long dive and you're going to piss that scotch color. That's just reality. I would quit if you're pissing. I would definitely quit. If at that point, if you can even piss anymore. Yeah, when it's like molasses on the way out, it's also, I mean, not comfortable. No.

When it's. And for a frame of reference, the amount of weight that we were losing on those dives is a gallon of milk. Yeah. For volume. Think about that coming out of your body. You know, that's a regular thing. for what was going on. So a larger guy

would be less impacted by that than a smaller guy. Probably, yeah. But then you run into this reality, which is the thinner and leaner you are, the lower propensity you have to get a dive injury. So the leaner, the body,

the less adipose tissue you have. For the oxygen. For all the gases to get into. Yep. So adipose tissue has an easier time retaining gas. So if you are thin, thin and lean, which we were running around like triathletes at the team, and they told us to do

this and not drinking before, like, multiple days before dives, you run a lower risk of getting a dive injury. Because the chances of us getting a dive injury doing the profiles we were doing was hyper high, and I'm talking like one in four. So you guys were at the limits of the dive tables. We were literally at the limits. We were writing some of the newer tables. It's also not awesome.

No, not. And I've described this to some EOD techs and some friends. that are in other programs, and they're like, man, I can't believe they let humans do that. Because it's scary and it's... Fuck. It's outside of the realm of what you think would be manageable. But the reality is we needed...

It had to happen. Well, and the perfect place to test this is, of course, a volunteer force military. Why, yes. On people who've signed... On a bunch of type day guys that are willing to just do a thing. That won't say no until they cannot say no. And when they get to that point, they make the line on the table and say, don't go past this.

Yeah. Now, coming. Go right up to being able to say no. Yeah. Or to being able to not say it. Being unable to say no. Pull back two or three feet and then we'll draw the line there. But fuck.

As a place to be in retrospect, it was really cool. Yeah. Because I had zero idea of what SDV was. was and I'm glad that that's a thing that there's not a lot of information out there. You know, there aren't books and movies and all sorts of stuff. It's a really rad place and it's the last place that the SEAL teams are doing the frogman shit. You know, I got to lock in and out of submarines.

I got to do all sorts of just weird crap that harkens back to what the UDT teams were doing, recovering, you know, Apollo spacecrafts. Like, we were getting to do. some really experimental stuff and I still got to go to Afghanistan I still got to do the same shit that everybody else is doing. Yeah, I have an immense around of respect

I'm obviously a kid about it but an immense amount of respect for people who because you guys are basically putting your balls on a table and a guy would come out with a sledgehammer and you're like, yes again. Do it again. Thank you, sir. And like I said, I would have just quit.

Like the stuff you guys are doing was extremely hard. And when I showed up, guys at the team, I'll paraphrase what they said, but essentially they joked and said, yeah, so we don't really haze anybody here. The team does it enough. The job does that on its own. Sitting in this thing in the dark.

And if you think that you're not claustrophobic, I have a surprise for you. I'll snake a regulator into a cruise box and we'll show you how claustrophobia really works. Were you and I talking about locking out of torpedo tubes? That was you and I, right? Oh, yeah. We were telling Evan, the Black Rifle CEO.

He was just like, he was describing that, So the first person goes into a torpedo tube. A barklow is there too. Barclough was telling us this. Yeah. Okay. And I was laughing because I've done it.

Feet first. And then your diving gear gets shoved into your face. Then another set of diving gear gets shoved in and another human being comes in face first. Door closes. You can imagine the amount of light that's in this room. No, I can't because I believe it's none. Zero. Exactly and precisely zero.

Big goose egg. And your entire life is the air or oxygen source. coming out of that regulator while somebody in an environment that's warm and cozy is metering. Metering the pressure in the tube, flooding it, metering the pressure, opening the door, and then the guy facing out just pushes you out. Well, and here's the best part is... Can you even imagine that? Because I cannot. I would not want to do that. Let me mentally make this worse for you.

So you're coming at this from the idea of, oh, that's really shitty, and it is. And it's terrifying. But imagine it from the perspective of, and I've done this, sitting in one of those tubes, after five years of doing it, knowing, man, I've had this gear fail on me. The scuba gear that's in your mouth. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. See, now we've just added a layer of complexity to this scenario where I'm sitting here like, oh, and I could have the dive rig just fail while they're flooding it and changing the pressure. Because that takes time. And now you have to buddy breathe.

Do they smash the red button? You go out with a torpedo? I don't know. I've never seen the button. That would be sweet. I probably received the button. Yeah. So there's another receiving end of these.

There's actually a type of snow cave that we would dig in the mountains, which is called the torpedo tube. Because, so imagine you're sort of got snow continuously running down a very steep face. And it's too steep to accumulate deep snow. Let's say, it's like a rock face and you can get like... So you have like some inches of... Three or four feet, maybe. You know, but that means that you dig straight back into the slope until you hit rock and then you turn sideways and you dig a big tube like a gopher. Exactly.

So I'm about to describe my worst fucking climbing nightmare. This is this is where I need to have my face by the door or I will fucking freak out and, you know, and we'll all die. Because I have like so you. Oh no. I can like I can see the eyes right there. Oh, no. Like, they're bigger than, uh, so yeah, so dig straight in, hit the rock, you know, turn right or left or whatever, and you dig the tube. And then the least claustrophobic guy goes to the, to the back.

To the deep, dark recesses of the tube. Exactly. And so he'll be, you know, feet at the end of the tube and head forward. And then, and then if you're like a team of three, for example, then the other, you know, next guy gets in, you might put his feet in the first guy's face. And then the last guy comes in and he might put his feet. So now block the door because you want it to be warm in the cave and you can't have any air circulating. And the guy closest to the door figures out, you know, how to get out of his clothes and do a sleeping bag ever to get the stove out like the stove. Start melting snow.

And now you're like having this whole mechanical issue of, okay, there's the stove and he's melting snow and he's like, you know, filling water bottles and passing him back or making the soup or the dinner or whatever it is. and one night I was in a cave with Barry Blanchard down I mean in the Canadian Rockies and we were trying to climb this new route and we got up we got some anchors in the rock because you want to stay tied in in case it slides because it could it could all just go away so everything is always sort of tied in you can get a little bit lackadaisical and and then things usually go bad but so you want to stay tied in in and ideally to the rock. So we had some pretty good anchors in the rock and, and this cave and it just kept snowing all night. And so there's 2,500 feet of face above us, you know, which is accumulating all the snow and like it's coming down, coming down, coming down. And at some point in the night for me, it got like the air in the cave got too still. And I started freaking out. I'm like, oh, fuck, oh, fuck. I don't want to be in here. So you always have a shovel in the cave.

Like, nothing is ever outside. Everything is, and I sleep with a fucking shovel in my hand. If I'm in a tent, I sleep with a knife in my hand. Because if this, because if the, because if the, thinking is, yeah, you're not claustrophobic at all. Oh, fuck no. I mean,

if a tank is buried by like, you know, new fallen snow or avalanche, you need to have a knife to cut your way out because otherwise

you're not getting out. So, yeah, so there's always like, in one pocket, there's a knife, there's a lighter that's been in my hand

on a fucking shovel if I'm in a snow cave because I am not good with any of this shit. And so the air got really really still in the cave and I just like, oh fuck,

oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. And so I go to the entrance of the cave and I start digging. And I'm like, oh shit. Like I dig two or three feet and there's still more snow. And I keep going out the tunnel that had been the door and 12 feet of snow had accumulated

coming down his face. And now I'm thinking like, okay, we're fine. Now that we're here, we're going to have to get down tomorrow. And we have dug a snow cave in what has become the perfect avalanche. exactly you know the slope had accumulated so um with all the snow so the next morning you know and Barry's just like gives no shit gives no nothing you know I'm just like vibrating enough for both of us it's like well we're here already and so now I'm sleeping out by the new door you know I give myself a little slack on the next door like and did you give him a heads up on the new door or you just

oh no I just like because he's snoring like why wait the guy I need him to be fully cognizant in the morning I need him to get a good night's sleep I can afford freak out because he's getting good night's sleep and he's going to take care of shit. And so next morning, I mean, it gets light and I'm like, Barry, we're going to get the fuck out of here, man. Because there's no way we're going up. And so he's like, ah, wow, oh, that's really great. That's something for coffee.

And, you know, eat a little cave. Whatever. And we go, you know, dig a little bit more. He comes out. He looks out of the cave and he's like, oh, man, this is really bad. I go, yeah, it's been bad for a while. Wow, actually, you were asleep while I was getting back. I've been monitoring it the whole night.

Exactly. You've been closely monitoring inch by inch, other bugger. Anyway, so we pack everything and we get ready to go down. We're like, okay, we're going to have to, we'll repel off these anchors that are in the rock first, and then we'll see what happens. And all, I'd given myself a whole bunch of slack in the rope, and we were actually testing that, that time Blue Water had made some new ropes. I had this idea to make them, you know, we'll use two, but we'll make each one smaller.

So we had a 7.8 mil ropes, which were pretty light at the time. But a 7.8 mil rope, I'll... At that time, nobody was really climbing on anything that was smaller than 9, you know, or 8.8. And so Barry had this in the back of his mind when he pulled on the ropes to free them from the snow and the whole slope cut loose. And so Barry's watching me, as I've got all this slack in the rope. and I just disappear out of eyesight as the avalanche goes away from him he like loads the anchors

that are in the rock and they hold and I just just disappear and he's like holy fuck those ropes were too light they just broke and then anyway they didn't I just had like 15 feet of slack

and so I went 15 feet came apart on the rope and the avalanche went down and then Barry was just standing there He saw me stopped, but everything had run to the hardest layer of snow. So there was probably an eight or ten foot crown at the top of this slab that went. And then he just watched it. The crack propagated all around the cirque. And it was a gigantic.

And it went down. It was taken out trees, you know, 500 feet down when it had gathered enough speed. And it finally had hit that zone. And like, oh, well, I guess we're safe. now. Because everything's avalanche, and so now it's down to a hard, you know, surface sort of bed. And, and we, you know, wraps as far as the ropes, pulled the ropes from those anchors and continued down. Like, and the debris pile, it was fucking Dresden.

I mean, it was totally insane. Isn't it like a leading. But it all started with claustrophobia. Oh, gosh. Are those slides when they are big enough and they get enough speed? Isn't the leading edge have a wind associated with the front that can just knock you off your feet before the snow even gets there? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's been clocked, like the air blast ahead of the moving snow, they have been clocked at over 200 miles an hour.

Damn. And so there, you're not just getting moved. You're getting tossed. You would get ejected, yeah, for sure. You need a wingsuit. I don't think you're going to nail that start, but it's worth to try. And I've never been hit, you know, by the leading, that air blast ever. I've been caught in several avalanches.

I feel like most people that have been hit by that probably. they aren't here to tell the tail. I don't think they are, yeah. Yeah, because that's the kind of thing that like that distorts and bends steel structures. And that's like the full mountain slide. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's, to see the aftermath or something like that is impressive. Like, fucking mother nature. Just to hear that had to have been impressive. The noise associated with that? Fuck. Yeah. That's, that's sort of like, um, sphincter loosening noise.

And also tightening. It's simultaneously. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Anyway, let's... No, you just... No, there's no, there's tightening after everything.

You're just like... I mean, some... After you lose weight so you can run. Yeah. Well, no, there's certain noises like that in the mountains that are... I mean, if you've ever... Have you ever been hit by lightning or been close? Oh, yeah.

I feel like I've been close. I definitely not been hit, but I've been... I've been... I've definitely been close. Oh, under a mile. Yes. Oh. You're going to say under...

Listen, it was an emotional experience. Oh, okay. Yeah. I've had it 50 feet. Okay. It's an interesting sound. I had the guy standing next to me to get hit. That's fun.

So we have a winner. So what happened to him? Well, it's funny that you ask. What powers does he have now? I think he runs a gas station. But I'll go. We'll start with that one because the, well, the entertaining, the very, the short version, the entertaining one is,

We're at like, let's see, 1,200 feet below the summit of Nanga Parbat, which is 8,125 meters. So it's 265 or something like that. So we're somewhere over 25,000 feet on this peak and we get caught by the storm. And this is back in the point where I wasn't wearing a helmet in the mountains because it's just not cool. You look way cool in a headband. Well, headband and walk band. Exactly. That's the best way to go.

It's the best way to go. But I did have a baseball hack because I had a visor on it and that shielded the vent on my goggles. and, you know, kept that from getting packed up and so they wouldn't get fog. So there's brim on this hat. But also there's a metal button in the center of most baseball hats.

So we're up there. I've worn many under helmets. And, and, like, we're in this storm. And it's a thunderstorm. It's full on thunderstorm. And the sound, which is going, like, because the electricity is like a, sort of like a Jacob's ladder kind of thing.

And it's running. You're in the storm. Oh, yeah. Because most of the time, people experience this. They're on the ground. Yeah. And you're looking. No, high enough elevation that it's happening there.

Like airliner height. Yeah. Yeah. A storm that you would go through and feel the turbulence in. Yeah. Most people experience these things from thousands of feet below. Mark was outside. Below it and we're on the, yeah, outside of the air, I guess.

And so this like zzzzz, zzz. And I think they called it St. Elmo's fire. And as you could see, the electricity, like moving from rock to rock. And there's, and every time the accumulated enough energy and the thunder cracked, it was, this is when I say sphincter opening, that's full on right there. That's like bowel sort of like dilate. I mean, it's just horrendous. Perfect.

But Barry's looking at me and I'm just slapping my head. And we're up high enough that I mean, I was fairly well acclimatized, but there is some altitude related lack of clarity in one's mind. and I think I'm getting stung by bees I'm like over 25,000 feet in the fucking Himalayas and I think I'm getting stung by beast I'm just slapping my head like trying to get the bees off of me because there's like the electricity is accumulating

that metal button and just zapping my brain and and Barry's like what the fuck you do man I'm like there's bees there's bees and he goes dude hat button electricity oh fuck what an idiot I am and and that actually that actually that event actually went downhill from there, unfortunately. But when my friend Gary Baldwin got hit by lightning on Mount Rainier,

I was with, let's see, we were with Gary, Mike Long, and one of the, I want to say Peter Larson is the other guy that was with us. And we had tried to ski, you know, we went up to Camp Muir trying to ski down and got caught by this thunderstorm. So we're watching the lightning get closer and closer and we're running like motherfucker you know, we ski to the end of the snow and we're... It's time to leave. Yeah, and we're carrying the skis down through the panorama point or something trying to get back to paradise.

And the lightning's getting closer and closer and it's just louder and louder and louder. And it's like, I've been to a few rock concerts and this is louder than any of those. I mean, I don't know what Neil Young thinks he's about playing the loudest rock concert ever. Fuck that guy. This is, you know, way louder. and we just realized like, okay, it's, you know, it's going to happen. And the next lightning strike hits, and Peter and Mike are further back, they're carrying their skis over their shoulders.

Oh, no. So they both get burns on their hands from the metal edges and on their necks, from where the electricity goes to the metal edge of the skis. Because they were just on the periphery. The lightning bolt hits basically between them and Gary, and I'm in front of Gary. Gary gets launched in the air and it's loud as fuck. I mean, that's the, I don't think, you know, before or since.

Mike could account for the tenetist that I have. What? To this day, yeah. No, it's just, I'm not deaf, but it's just a ringing all the time. Yeah, it's just ringing all the time. So Gary gets launched in the air, you know, 10, 12 feet, whatever, lands on the rocks and starts fucking running. And I'm just like, oh, my God.

And I had, like, taken my pack off, which had a metal frame in it, like, gotten rid of everything metal. And I had, like, felt it, but not any electricity. Like, I had no damage of any kind. But he's running down and to the right, which leads to the Nisquale Glacier, which could not be a great place to be going to go running. And so I start chasing him. I think, oh, fuck, he zapped his brain. And I got to, like, tackle him and stop him before, you know, anything bad happens. And I'm trying to catch up.

I'm running behind him. and I'm trying to catch up, and he's shouting, he's fucking screaming. And I get close enough to hear what he's saying. And then I just stopped running, because he's running along. He's like, I've been hit by lightning. I've been hit by lightning. I'm alive. I'm alive.

He's just stoked. He was so fucking stoked. So we eventually get, and I just like, okay, he's fine, apparently. He's fine. He's just crazy. We get down to Paradise and go to the Ranger Station. We're like, ah, his foot's all fucked up. We might want to look at it.

And so what had happened, since the lightning had hit, actually didn't hit him, it didn't go through him. It was a ground strike right next to him. And so it'd run along the steel shank of his boot. It'd gone in at the ball. It was a three-quarter shank boot, rightly rotundo, as I recall. And so it'd gone in the front, run along the steel shank, and blew out the back. And so the whole back of his leather boot is torn open.

And these are like double-stitched thick leather boots. Yeah. A fucking hole burned through both socks. Whoa. And so then he became part of this sort of some kind of medical experiment afterwards because he had a microwave, no surface damage, but his foot was microwaved, essentially. The inside. The inside.

And he did full recovery and everything, but it was this like streak microwave burn so you could see the electricity, when in here, went out here, and everything in between is cooked. Whoa. Wow. And it was, I have more, you know, I've been in the Midwest a few times when there's been those weird storms and there's a lot of lightning and like wind and the clouds turn green and I am the scaredest motherfucker in the Midwest at that point. I know what that shit does!

I know what fucking happens. Not everybody goes, I'm alive afterwards and I don't really want to be. Oh, I imagine. Do you see it? Yeah, it's not like they're holding anything metal if they have a bow out there. Yeah. And the thing is like, you're okay, and if you're on flat ground, it's just like, okay, don't be the tall guy. Lay down. Yeah. And get rid of

and that's like in the mountains a lot of times. Like if you be caught by a storm, you know, you've got, oh, this entire rack of metal hardware. You've got all the shit. You basically need to tie it to the end of the rope and lower it away from you. As far as humanly possible for you. So it doesn't work like in Caddyshack where you just point the golf club in the sky. The hard stuff's not going to come down for another hour or so, right? Isn't that what you're supposed to say?

It would never do this to me. Man, I can't even imagine that. Yeah, no thanks. I'm sorry. I can't imagine fucking be in a total. A real torpedo two. A real torpedo two. I know. So how did you end your career?

So I ended my career by heading to the parachute team. So the war at the time, the direction it was going was slowing down to a tempo that I felt like I wasn't pulling my skill set away from the teams. So I could go ahead and make my way to the parakeet. parachute team because I had an interest in skydiving. I enjoyed skydiving a lot and that actually... How much jumping had you done prior to that with your particular... I think I showed up to the parachute team with four or 500 jumps. Which is a lot for a parachute team.

Most military jumpers after 10 years, I would say, would have maybe 100 jumps. Maybe. Yeah. And I had a few hundred base jumps at that point, too. They don't jump that much. It's an ancillary skill set. Yeah. Okay.

It was just a, it was a hobby for me. It was the hobby that I like to do. SDV happened to do a lot of jumping. We jumped more than I think any team except, East Coast guys at Bob Beach. So Andy, did you, were you base jumping while you were still in? Or is that something that came later? Post.

Post, okay. Actually, after, I put Trevor through buds. I don't remember him. I mean, I saw hundreds of students. Yeah. We reconnected when he. He was at the parachute team. Just an average size white guy, so easy to forget.

Well, you guys see eight instructors. I see eight classes of 80 students. Yeah. But we reconnected when he was at the parachute team, and I was towards the tail end of getting ready to get out, and I augmented the team for a year, and that's how we reconnected. Nice.

So I ended up going there based on the suggestion of Tim IG. He's like, hey, you like to skydive. There's an opening there. I heard there's an opening. Go for it. Go try out. And that ended up being an incredibly, awesome opportunity

in a couple ways. One that I didn't expect, which was it made the transition into non-military life, seamless. Well, you were interfacing with civilian life on a daily basis. Yeah. And it was full on big boy rules. Some, yeah, input that you were accustomed to.

Yeah. Let's say, because I would imagine like getting out after, I mean, I just know. from having stopped climbing sort of cold turkey, but I imagine getting out of the military after having certain experiences of becoming accustomed to them, a certain amount of stimulus,

that all of a sudden, if everything just goes quiet, and the tempo I'm still dealing with not having. Me too. It's been five years. I mean, I don't know. So I replace it with things. Yeah.

So what I do, I try to learn new stuff. I go find a different hobby. My wife loves it. I mean, you jokes, like, oh, we're on tour. Yeah. Yeah, that's like we're so used to being gone 200 days a year that you sit around for a couple weeks and you're not sitting around,

you're just not going somewhere for a couple weeks and it doesn't feel right. For me, it's not the tempo of the travel. It's the tempo of the experience and diversity of experience. Yeah. Because I get a lot of them at home, but I mean, I don't mind being on the road.

I've been out a little bit longer to you and I've spent far too much time on the road. But for me, it's that diversity of experience because we hit these training blocks, two weeks of diving, two weeks of jumping, two weeks of Land Warfare, two weeks, you're like, dude, this is awesome. Well, and I don't necessarily mean I just want to be living out of a hotel room. I mean, they're, they're connected.

Yes. You have these diverse experiences often. It makes you travel. Yep. And that's what I'm used to doing, and that's what I like doing, and that's what I was doing at the jump team even. I mean, I was actually thinking about this, Trevor, that since, you know, sort of we've known each other. like there's the dog sled trip and then that was so fun came back and then you're out building a bow and hunting hogs hunting hogs and we have like three other hunts on the calendar this year i mean it's oh yeah it racks and stack with you i'm sure you're doing jumping in between like there's all sorts

of other projects because it'll get uh it'll start getting less snowy down where those whatever's going on here's are yeah exactly way way less interesting we've got some books to pack ship out it's i'm getting really good and it's packing priority envelopes. Hey man, I do it. I do it every day at the house, yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty good at it. It's cool.

I'm glad you guys linked up. We were talking about this before. Took a while. Yeah, well, you had to move here first. I'm coming to... Actually, not really, because we tried... We tried during Turkey Buggy. During the...

Oh, did you guess? Which I didn't even know that was a thing. It's a thing. Other than... When you got a laugh, because you're like, oh, yeah, you're going to be down there from a... Yeah, I'll be here from this day to this day. here's my phone number

probably won't be able to reach me here's the radio channel I'm going to be on yeah the CB channel which we talked about in the little podcast which I just laughed because that's an Alaska thing

like I just had the flashback to you know hey all communication on you know in the Alps you know they actually have modern radios that work yeah you know where in you know Alaska

it's fucking CB radio still it's just like oh yeah with the guard channel for the you know the aircraft is this and the and you know there aren't that many places that you go where you have to have a radio that's getting monitored.

Yeah. And it's just a frank reality where there, I don't care if you're three miles from the road, but there are spots in Moab and there are spots in Alaska, there are spots in BC where you can put yourself in a deep, dark hole. Yep. And nobody will find you. Yeah. I mean, these Spanish dudes that we ended up rescuing in 95, the infamous rescue that, where we

had the highest landing ever, still to this date, actually, of a shinole helicopter. but uh yeah they must have done this before yeah exactly they those but these these spanish dudes they didn't have a CB radio you know the Park Service recommends it and they're we have a radio you know language issue this they didn't know that like FM AM you know that's a different deal and uh so they only had an FM radio and the only reason that the park service knew there was a fucking problem is because somebody somewhere and not even anywhere like they're you know they're like shouting for help on this radio and it's just going out into space in Alaska

somewhere and somebody happened to be monitoring like hundreds of miles away. Something like caught on a repeater. Exactly. No way. Yeah. And these guys are, you know, speaking Spanish and this dude not only intercepted the transmission by accident but also spoke Spanish.

Of course, these guys who were in trouble called the park service and said, hey, I think you guys got a problem. And how lucky are they that you guys were there ready to rock and roll, already acclimatized? Like there was so many things that came to play there where those dudes

were in a fatal scenario. Yeah. And the fact that some of them, that two of them got lucky. Yeah, two of them got lucky. Yeah, two of them got lucky. Yeah.

Blind luck. But, you know, often it's better to be lucky than good. Well, how about sometimes? I'd rather be good than lucky more days than not. I'd rather be both. Yeah.

You know, and I constantly say I want to be an asset, not a liability. And that's responding to the, I can't deal with luck. I can't mitigate luck and I can't mitigate some things that fall under luck. But I can be the dude that has a means of communication. Yeah.

But I can be that guy. That can actually influence the outcome of the situation. Exactly. And I mean, those poor fuckers, they were, you know, if that, if, you know, yes, many points aligned for those. I hope they've. Oh, yeah. They had the Swiss cheese model all figured out. Yeah.

It certainly sounds like it. They shot the arrow right through that thing. That's insane, man. And, you know, good for them. I suppose. It's a great story But we kind of linked up over the whole Or we tried

I'm like oh CB channel Whatever and I'm like out at the end of the mineral Bottom Road you know before you go down the hill And Moab and there's dudes like There's tarps everywhere laid out And he's packing fucking parachutes This year It was and Celine and I rolled up and she was going to go for a run

And I was going to ride and I get out there And I'm like I wonder if Thompson Parasports is out You know I don't even know if I knew your real name at that point. I wonder if IG handles is out here because I'm looking around and then I'm like, ah, there's a lot of dudes

and some of them look competent. It seems a little bit like a club that you don't just like walk up and start chatting to them anyway. And I was like, and it was sundown was coming so I needed to get on my, you know, role. And then we got back, and then kind of got back up and then it was,

Selena got back before me she was sitting and watched the whole thing because you know there's always entertainment yeah there's always entertainment well whenever we go out to do something you know I don't know if you know this but like a post exercise

beer actually spikes blood sugar better than most other sort of recovery beverages so that's always post marathon beer it's a thing it's a thing yeah and so so she was there watching this whole thing she's like what the fuck is going on but she'd seen you know heard like the

whom the crack of the it was nonstop I bet fucking nonstop I was staying at the airport or at the air strip at the bottom of mineral bottom all day every day

just oh my lord yeah and I've been going to turkey boogie for seven eight years now and man it is getting wild so there was

there was one thing I was riding down and I rode down to the bottom of the hill and then waited for Selena to come down because I was like, oh, check this out. And so there was an aircraft that flew over. Obviously, a bunch of people jumped out. And then I figured, okay, somebody had talked to somebody

because they're going to, like, we're going to free fall, and we're going to open and we're going to fly by the exit. And when we fly by the exit, the other guys are going to jump. And I was just like, okay, this is fairly coordinated. It's a thing. I guess. It's a thing. There's probably, I don't know, there's at least $27,000.

with the GoPro's involved. There is competency. There is competency happening there. Oh, no shit. No. To see that, like, okay, they exit at a certain point, they fly to this point, and then they open, and then they fly some more,

and then some other people start flying at a slower speed. There's some people out there pushing the leading edge, man. There's some really cool shit happening. And there's also some really scary shit happening. I think on the front leading edge, those are hand-in-hand, for example. Yeah, that was pretty gnarly. No, actually, let's say, let's say, I think the tree landing was a bit more gnarly than the tree exit that I saw recently.

You can speak more to that world than I can, Trevor. You're more connected than that than I am. Yeah, it's, I've always been, and I don't think I'll ever change my point of view in so much that I believe in the right for people that are base jumping to perform that activity. how they want to perform it. Yes. There is no governing body. There is no governing body yet. Maybe I should rephrase.

It will probably happen at some point, but I kind of... I defy you to wrangle that shit. Government motherfuckers. And so do... And I defy anybody to wrangle it, but it's a lot like... You know, I bet that climbers in the late 60s and 70s are like, this is never going to be controlled. where, you know, we're so far outside the box, like we're cowboys.

And I feel as though we, as base jumpers are operating inside of this area that's much like climbing sounds like it was around that era. And I'll say point taken, because I think you're right. There are governing bodies that now are involved in a lot of those aspects. It's the same thing with paragliding. Also, paragliding, I'm sure those people were initially saying, themselves, ah, we're going to have the air to ourselves forever. We can do whatever we want. We're not harming anybody.

And now there are so many ratings and insurance and all sorts of stuff involved. If you think about it, look at Loderbrunen. It's happening. That's what I'm saying. There's the Swiss Base Association. There's, I mean, I don't know if they're written down anywhere, but there's the, I mean, a code of conduct where you should learn where you should. And so there's the beginnings of it already.

It's happening. It's happening. And frankly, I'm glad that I've been involved in it at the time that I am because it's interesting to be around. It's fun to do. It's a little terrifying to watch and to be part of, but it's also

exceptionally gratifying to be involved in an activity that is so personally, responsibly driven. You are the start and the finish of the activity. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever the outcome is,

you are solely responsible. And I think a lot like... The jump is optional. The landing is not. That's what resonated to me reading essays from Kiss or Kill, some of the solo essays. Mm-hmm.

As a base jumper, I read a few of them and said to myself, like, I get it. Like, I understood... Now, there's a truncation in time there for base jumping, where we're performing an action that takes, you know, three to five minutes,

depending on the canopy ride, and a couple other factors. But you are hiking and you're doing all the other pieces that are involved. So, ostensibly you could be performing something that takes six hours to finish. But your headspace is there.

Talked about this, the time difference. The jump is microscopic in comparison to the investment of time. But you are putting your brain in that space for that entire period, especially if you've been doing it for long enough. Because I've climbed and, you know, I understand where that is. And with base jumping, it's the same way.

you know the impact of performing the function incorrectly. Yeah. The result could be fatal. Yeah. But I, and there's, so the, the first time I went to the Verdun to go climbing. Gorgeous place. Beautiful. Oh, man.

Jumping, there's great. Landing there's less great. True. Filmed that landing. I believe it was the first time I ever see. So Dominique Glez wear knee pads, like hard-shell knee pads. Yeah, I can see that. Like ankle braces.

Anybody listening, the landing area at Verdant is about the size of a goat path with golf ball to baseball-sized rocks. Yeah, this was probably prior to when that-30-degree slope-ish. You know, he landed in the creek bottom. Oh, he did. Oh, even worse. Yeah. So the rocks were bigger. Yeah.

No, it was fucked up. But what I realized at that point, because when you go climbing in the Verdone, You drive to the top and then you wrap in, pull the, you know, pull the ropes. Like four repels to get to the bottom, pull the ropes all the way. Yeah, because the only other way is, what, that two-mile hike, like, way out the bottom. Oh, no. It may be even further, but it's a long ways. But it's a long ways.

And so, so you go, you go in top down, which gives you no time to adapt psychologically to what you're about to do. Whereas when you're coming from the bottom, like you're processing. You're processing. Like every step is an incremental sort of adaptation or allows you the time to actually get used to the more vertical terrain. You go through the mental process. Exactly. So the activity is going to get harder. It's going to get more dangerous.

You're going to, you know, et cetera. But you're like approaching it in this sort of very slow and in a way that's easy for easy-ish for the mind to assimilate. Whereas going in from the top down, like it freaked me the fuck out. Like just going from totally flat ground, you wrap off the guardrail at the fucking overlook or whatever, you know, and it's dead vertical. And then it's,

you know, whatever it is, it's a thousand plus feet to the river. Yeah, it's about a thousand feet down to the river. And, and, and that,

like the, the fact that there's no, you know, time to adapt slowly in, in a cadence that I was used to, um, it made everything harder. Yeah.

And I think that the accessibility of some of that stuff, leads to people putting themselves in scenarios that they can't get themselves out of. Let's just say there are certain people who shouldn't be there. But because they can drive there. But it happens in a lot of, call it extreme sports, adventure sports.

Germany is a great example. The accessibility of the cable car on the wheel. Accessibility of the cable car for paraglider, speed flyers, wingsuit, base jumpers, climbers, skiers, there have been an exorbitant amount of fatalities per the volume of traffic in comparison to other places of similar difficulty. Yeah.

By volume, they're not gaining the amount of consequential, like fatal action and result because the people that are willing to work to get there understand what's happening. And they have to work to get there. But also because of the accessibility, you get that sort of group think mentality. It's like, well, all these other people are here doing it. The lemming mentality is real thing. It must be safe. You lower the barrier to entry enough.

You might have some issues in the long run. I've actually been on an odd side of that lemming piece where I've had a discussion with a friend on a base jump. The weather was marginal, not bad. But there was a group of people that, We had taken to that exit point. And we had a talk, the two of us and one or two other guys, and we decided we are going to walk down because if we jump, we will probably be okay because we can mitigate our emotional state.

And we have an understanding. And you have enough experience to figure it out to handle this marginal conditions. But chances are somebody behind us doesn't. and they'll think, oh, it's okay because. Yeah. And that was a very weird scenario to be in for me because that happened a lot faster than I really thought it would. Base jumping is a timeline that operates on a timeline that is so quick because people get in and get out and get hurt or get killed. I think we talked about this briefly the first time you and I sat down and I was talking about in terms of

jumping with your mentors. Yeah. It's one of the most dangerous things you can do because if your mentor sends it, you're going to send it. You're going to send it. If your mentor is there like, hey, we got this. You're probably going to go. I would imagine climbing's the same way.

You could probably get yourself into some deep water with water wings on before you realize you can't swim. Well, and you get to the point where it's, oh, shit, I'm three miles out to see. How'd that happen? I was just waiting in the water. So that's a different thing. Like, and for me, the flip side is, I mean, I always, loved climbing for the fact that it is self-regulating,

that it's hard to get into trouble because you're actually moving against gravity. Because by the, I mean, yeah, somebody can get hurt like falling off something from 15 feet up. You know, you can get off the ground and get hurt super easily. But, like, to get yourself into like a potentially sort of. To be 7,000 meters up on an 8,000 meter peak takes X amount of. Exactly.

Or to be 500 feet up on a, on a, on a, on a, you know, rock face or whatever it is. It's like there is a, and it allows your brain enough time to process the environment that you're in. Like, so if you don't belong there, you fucking know. You have the time to know. You get it like, it's speaking to you at some point.

And you physically may not be able to get there. And you, exactly. Whereas with the base thing. Cable cart. Hey, man. It's cable car. You're driving to the, you know, to the exit on the Verdone. You know, there's certain, you know,

There are things where it's like... Speaking of Verdun, you literally step over a railing. And where they wrap from to climb? That's where you jump from. That's it. Look at the high ultimate in Laudabrunen. When the ramp's out, you go and you get a brot and an espresso, and then you send it off a ramp that's held together,

which I believe to be... It's a downhill walk. Tape and rubber bands. It shakes as you're walking out on it. It's not sketchy at all. And it doesn't sound like it. It's just sitting there. And their barrier's entry is low.

There's no... There's a bar. There's nobody saying, hey, how many times have you jumped this? Yeah. And people, they go in. Now, for me, I like that the buy-in is zero. Because as an activity, that's what is exceptional about it. Because falling and using gravity and deploying a really big parachute and landing on a grassy field is wholly uninteresting to me.

It's the entire... You'd be jumping out of a plane kind of thing. Essentially. Yeah. It's the entire process to me of understanding. And, you know, granted, I have the buy-in of our background. Understanding the possibilities and the physicality involved there is what's interesting to me.

You know, having to think about all the possible outcomes and then mitigating as much as I can possibly mitigate and then performing the action as well as I can perform it. That's what's interesting to me. In potential emotional duress. Yes. I like the feeling on the exit because I have to eat. I don't want to be comfortable.

Yeah, I have to eat and control that feeling. Or you can lose it and it can control you. Absolutely. And I love being in that point. You know, and that it's unregulated and that people don't have to have any buy-in. You know, I often I don't like seeing dumb people die. I'm going to throw that out there, which is what happens when it's un- Wait, wait.

regulated but let me i'm gonna i'm gonna flip that on you i'm like i love seeing dumb people die clean up the gene pool now i wasn't gonna go there it's okay i said it for you yes saw in your eyes but it i mean love is a bit strong

i guess what i don't enjoy the present i don't enjoy being there when they choose to do that yes that's i guess what bothers me about i i guess i don't have if you want to go online And if you have a credit card and an internet connection, yeah, you can get everything that Trevor and I have to base jump. If you choose to do that, that's totally your choice. Please just inform me that you're about to do that so I can go somewhere else.

Yeah. Because I don't want to have to do with it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I remember hearing, actually, overhearing at some point. I was with Randy Rackcliffe. On a trip in the Canadian Rockies, we were both simulowing on the lower weeping wall, which is north of Banff's big, big astrosan waterfall. and some guys hiked up to the base,

which is five minutes from the road. And I heard one of them say, we should get out of here before something bad happens. And I hear this, and I'm just like, well, the only bad thing that's going to happen is to you. I'm going to be fine. Because I'm going to be fine, because this is kind of what I do.

But you're right. You don't want to be around it when it's a terrible, like, wet cantaloupe sound. Yeah. And clean up. Yeah. No, you call. It's someone else's job. That's mountain risk.

I don't want to have to make the call. That's like, you know what? Do dumb shit on your own time. Yeah. And actually, it's a shitty thing to make a joke about. However, sort of gallows humor, blah, blah, blah. Mark, you're a terrible person.

It's fine. Thank you. That's why we kept you over there. Yeah, you guys are over here. We're just deaths separating us. We survive in our old community on Gallo's humor. I think it actually provides longevity and perspective. Yeah.

Yeah, you can't sit there and focus on the things that, like when we were sitting around the dinner table, the last or the second of last night that we were hog hunting, and I was describing that I've either seen, been around or known, like, almost a half a dozen people that have had near drownings or have drowned. Really? Oh, yeah. Oh, I do remember you talking about that, yes. Yeah. Were you talking to Barclow? Yeah. I don't want to derail where you're going with this,

but if you had to pick what his favorite sport is to watch, what would you say it is? Well, I know, so it's not fun. This isn't a fun game for me because I know it. You know, Mark, low mark. Yeah, but I'm totally, like, I do. It's out there. I know, I'm just now I'm like, pick a sport.

Don't put it out there. We'll let you know. To watch. To watch. To watch other people. Now, I'm. On weekends. Now he's, now,

John can be kind of a cynical fellow sometimes. Yes, it's one of his most redeeming quality. Exactly. Which also... Along with the love of cats. We'll just leave that one floating out there. Okay. Because I...

You know... We'll have a side talk about this. Yeah. I mean, I can make a guess and then be told that I'm not right. And then you're not going to tell me what it actually is. So we're going to have to... We'll just float it. We'll get back to it.

Okay. So John Barclow. So you brought... up soloing. And like I was saying before, I wanted to talk about this all over the place. We're an hour of 47 in. Are we? Perfect. And power hour. Power hour can be a couple hours. But we finally got to the topic that we had mentioned before. This is awesome. Well, this one, this, so free solo, the documentary, just won an Oscar? Yes, it did. It did incredibly well. Yeah.

Jimmy Chin, Alex Honnold You said you haven't seen it You don't need to see it Because of spoiler alert he lived For anybody listening And obviously they made a documentary About him free soloing The Free Rider route on El Cap

What do people inside of the climbing community Do they ever talk about in the dock Just curiosity Who actually You know Freed Free Rider first? I believe I don't think they talk about or do they?

Who? her? No, now we're talking about something. I don't even know. Well, no, it's not, so now I can be, no, no, no, no. No, no, I'm wrong. No, no. I'm wrong. If, if anybody knows who did it, you would recognize a quote, no, it's not a problem. I have power to burn. That's my shit German accent. So it had been free solo. No, it had been free clime. Free climbed, okay. With ropes. A lot of rehearsal, but following. But, but, but, but it was the, it was one of the first. roots up the big part of El Cap. You know, there's some roots on the West Face that are a little bit shorter that have

been freclimed. But that, like, the big sort of feature, close to the, you know, the nose have been freed, obviously, by Lynn Hill. That's who you're thinking about. Which is why I, I don't think they mentioned. But Freerider was a different sort of thing. Anyway, I'm just. To the best of my knowledge, they did not discuss any prior anything.

Any prior, it was outside the purvey of what was going on. It was for sure. necessarily it would not have added to the story but but what are your thoughts on that i'm going to call it a feat that's something that i'm like i know the guy is alive i was watching the documentary sweating gripping my sofa yeah and like i was telling you before i totally understand why he does it i think all of us sitting in this room probably have a better understanding of why he chose to do that what does the rest of the climbing world think about those types of endeavors who gives a fuck I like that answer

I mean Yeah Because I mean And that would be my answer from You know Having solo a number of hard roots back in the day Not like that Yeah certainly

What's going through your mind in that solo I mean are you thinking about the fact There's no rope or are you just completely locked in on the problem at hand Totally locked in I mean there's there is like to get to the point where you are actually able to do that everything else has been excised from your from your mind. And that is quite a process to get to that point.

And I mean, and it's a, it's absolutely astonishing that Alex did that. But the history of climbing is littered with stories of guys, I mean, Paul Pruss, I mean, I don't think the guy is fucking climbed with the rope ever in the dole lights.

I mean, there's some wild shit out there. Crazy shit that has happened. Herman Bulls solo ascent of an 8,000 meter peak. So that's interesting thing. But if you look at it, you're just like, hey, he's hiking up a snow slope. Yeah, it's a pretty high snow slope. And, you know, it's killed a lot of people.

And that's a dangerous thing. But then if you look at, if you go back, you mean, you can search on the internet for a short little film called Cumbra, which is a film about Marco Piddi. Adreini soloing Serotore in Patagonia. And which is the hard route and it's, no, it's one of the most fucked up things you'll ever see. Turn that around and realize like, okay, so now, so he soloed it at the time and I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going with 87 for some reason. But he sold it at a time when, when that route, the southeast ridge of Ceritore had been climbed very few times.

and so he's up there by himself. He climbed it three times twice for the film and once to preview in an area which has notoriously bad fucking weather. People go down there and they spend four or five weeks and they get shut down and they can't climb anything because the weather's so fucking bad. So he was able to do it, I think, for that three times. And then you start looking around and now you go like,

oh, it was shot with the drone or is a dude hanging off a rope or this or that. And Padreini was down there with a guy named Fuller. Mariani. And Fulvio had a fucking camera. And he was also climbing without a

fucking rope. Good on Fulio. So that movie got made by two dudes sold. Like it's one of the craziest things if you know

about, like the situation that you will ever see. And the, you know, and technically it's not as difficult. And yes,

there are points of aid because this guy Caesar Maestri had like drilled the fuck out of it, you know, to make the first a sentence.

So he's clipping some bolts and this and that. But if you look at that and the situation that it's happening in, which is right on the edge of the Patagonian ice cap, and it's in the place, it's the very tip of South America. It's like some of the worst. Look at the macro view.

If you look at the map, back out and you see the Drake Passage. And dudes don't even want to put their boats through the Drake Passage because it's so fucked up. And that is like right next door. So this is all happening in a very, very savage environment. And I look at, you know,

sort of the free solo situation. And this is not taking anything away. But it is. Different. sanitized in a way and I don't mean sanitized like reduced of risk but it is you've

the harder and harder things get done in a reductionist manner so you will as you start eliminating the factors that keep you from you know that that might influence the difficulty of the task in order to focus

purely on the difficulty itself right so Padreini's doing that and he's just like I want a solaceratory because it's like as Reinhold Messner, I mean, it's the most radical mountain in the fucking world. You look at it and Messner described it as a, as a shriek turned to stone is how he described that thing. Excellent. Oh, it's so excellent.

And crazy, you know, some crazy fucking shit has happened on that mountain because of the way it looks and the attraction to it and the situation it's in. But then you want to go harder and harder, you have to start taking away the, in, the elements that you can't control. And then you start practicing. And if you think about like, so the Don Wall film, and they first free climbed El Cap and they were just like,

yeah, it took it. They were up there for seven days. And I was like, no, they were up there for seven fucking years. Yeah. Because that's what it took. You're projecting it to adapt to that level of difficulty on a physical and psychological level.

And so what Alex did with, by free soloing El Cap, it's a, it's the result of a very long adaptation to, to that. And hence when you, you know, you see him talking about it, it's not like that radical.

It's built on the shoulders of everything you're talking about. It's everything that came before done by other people, but then also like the incremental exposure, the stress inoculation, if you will. of working up to it of like okay how do you eat an elephant by the time there you go and that's exactly what you know happened with him and so it's a little bit more technical skill it's a little bit more exposure it's like oh now i've done this and now i'm done that and it's i'm a little bit closer i'm a little bit closer okay finally you know now i'm kind of ready the for me it's incredible that

Alex did that. I will you know that's and that's all I have to say about that. I think the bigger psychological trip

was with Jimmy and the other guys who were behind the camera because when you are in this situation and I find you know my friend Philippe Franjol who's cameraman

in Shawnee I mean he filmed Bruno Goovey when Bruno burned in I mean when he you know he took he made two successful turns on that on the Agrivert

and hit some black ice and then fucking went 900 meters. And he filmed the whole fucking thing. Everything when Francois Ricard died when we were in Bolivia, filming, pushing the limits. And he landed in Lake Titicaca too far offshore on the surface for a minute and 22 seconds. Everything is on film because you don't stop filming because they might fucking live.

Like you can't turn away. You can't turn the camera off. You can't look away. But what if you're filming, you know, the free solo situation, the dude just falls out of frame? So they show some of this. And so the cool thing about the movie, he made two attempts. He actually backed off on the first attempt. And one of the things he said was, and again, paraphrasing, he wanted less people around him.

The influence of the camera. And this is a- Yeah, the crux were the Boulder problem, I think it was. He actually talked to the cameraman and he said he wanted remote cameras because he didn't want one of his friends to have to watch that happen. Yeah. So they long-lensed it from, I'm assuming. The meadow or somewhere.

The meadow. But they're filming the guy. filming it and he cannot watch it. Oh, yeah. And he's just, he's like, I'm done. I'm never doing this again. He's losing his, and then I can only imagine Jimmy accepting that project. Yeah.

Putting the pieces together. Being good friends. Oh, I cannot. I mean, it's, Trevor and I, we've jumped together a ton, right? If something awesome happens and it didn't happen on GoPro, did it really happen? You know, is the, it's the skydiving version of the tree falls in the forest. Does it make any noise? Doing something cool in the air?

is not that hard. Coordinating it with other people to make it look seamless for the person doing it is actually really, really hard. Like the splitting the flag jump is a good example. Oh, man.

I wish people knew how difficult that really was. So were you on that also? He was holding the flag on the left side. I was holding the flag. And then I've been the wing suitor doing it. Yeah. Because, Andy, you posted that somewhat recently. Correct.

Yeah. And like, one of the best jump, best days, whatever. And I looked at that again. I was just like, oh, my friend, Andy's a, I was about three feet. over the top of that flag going as fast as I could. And we had a guy flying over the top of me filming. We had this many practice jumps.

We did one time practice jump. The first time that video I posted was our first attempt at it. Because the practice jump we did was with a much smaller flag. Okay. Yeah. And it, but we talked about it. And we could have done all of that, but capturing it safely and talking with miles, like, this is where I'm going to be, this is the end I'm going to take.

When I turn at it, you know that I'm going to be. So the only thing I was thinking was this is where I need to fly. All I was thinking was speed flight picture, speed flight picture, faster, faster, faster. I didn't think about miles. There was Jim was above us shooting down. So his canopy was above. So I had to go under that, over the flag, in between the two dudes. And it's, I mean, I was more worried about these guys than I was myself because I was just thinking about don't kill somebody.

Don't kill somebody. But, you know, Jim. I understood once I did jump with Jim. It's visually intense. Don't hit a human. Don't hit a human. Don't hate a human. Don't hate a human.

Oh, they're gone. So much that goes into that. Because the speed differential between the guys flying the flag. Everybody's dying. Is 150 miles an hour. Okay. And there's a tether in the front of the flag. Your neck would snap like a chicken bone.

Yeah. It probably would pull the two guys on the flag together. It would have been a dumpster fire at best. But, you know, the jump was. And then it'd fall into someone's yard. Yeah. But he had a camera on. Remy was on the right hand side, wasn't he?

No, T.J. TJ was on the right hand side. Jim was above Miles had a camera. The pressure was more on them to capture that happening. And I had a GoPro, which was where my Piov comes from. Yeah. Yeah, I look at what Jimmy took on doing that. Like, that guy had to go deep into the bottle the day after that was done.

Yeah, I actually really think he's a drinker. That's a strike against it. I'll, you know, next time I see him, I'll ask. but because it's it's it is harrowing and Andy we've done the first conversation we had that we recorded I talked about filming the the snowboard exit off the west face of the Iger yeah and that's just like okay I got I gotta film this but I kind of don't want to kind of don't want to or I was on the that we did two push pushing the limits pilots before we made the 35 mil version and one of those was we

got put out of the helicopter on top of the Closier de Portelais, and Dominique Clas jumped. And I was, for the second movie, I was actually doing all the behind-the-scenes stuff. So I actually had a video camera. I'm filming the guys filming the thing who's doing the thing, and he throws the orange,

and he gets the stopwatch. And, you know, he already knows, but he's got to do the, you know, base jump. He has to make the drama. Base jump theater. I don't think I'd throw an orange, would you, Trevor?

I'd throw rock. I like rocks. Rock's way more than oranges. They do. But you can see an orange. Correct, of course. Against, you know, against that background. Plus he already knew.

And plus he's like, you know, he's got one or two oranges. He can always eat one. Here's a deal. We can discuss this on tactical assholes. Orange versus Rock. Yes. Orange versus Rock. Exactly.

Exactly. Fuck. And if I get a, we get a VHS player. I can actually pull that. We can watch that footage. We'll get a VHS player. We're going to have to get it. The internet has everything we will need ever.

It's true. It's true. Yeah, the pressure of the behind the scenes, man. Some of your photography blows my mind, and I can't, like, you're doing the climb, but you're documenting the climb. Like, that's a whole other level of responsibility. But I don't, yeah, but it's not, it doesn't seem that way at the time. Maybe responsibility is the, the term, I don't know, maybe the term I would use would be weight on your shoulders or burdens. So there's two different things.

If we're doing, we're actually doing the hard climb and I'm there with a camera doc, I mean, and I'm participating in that and I'm just documenting it, it's one thing. when you're doing something for the specifically for the camera content project that's an entirely different thing i don't know i've been on both like i've documented and i've been on the backside of having to document things for commercial or other reasons and i think what mark's talking about is that when the cameras come out people can start moving their threshold of what they're willing to do they act weird yeah yeah yeah it's good and and then you with the person with the camera you realize that you are complicit in whatever is about to happen. Yeah.

And you kind of have to, like, okay, we need to have this conversation first. Like, how close, you know, what limit are we pushing here? You know, how close are we to, you know, because if you're, yeah, I'm going to go solo. I mean, there's some pushing limits too. There's some insane, I mean, I'd soloed something for that that I would never have done. Like I would never have thought of it first. without it being for a thing. I'm like, okay, after pushing the limits one, you know, yeah, you solved this thing and it was pretty cool looking, but now you've got to do better because it's the sequel.

Part D. Yeah. And so I never would have conceived of it and certainly never would have done it without the presence of the camera. So everybody is made this collective decision, but only one person is taking the risk. The risk. And that's a different sort of vibe, I guess. Well, it's an important discussion to have. I mean, I've had it a couple times with base jumpers that are all still alive,

the ones that I'm thinking of. And I've asked those guys because they've all performed stuff at exceptionally high technical level. Yeah, low margin with a lot of commercial exposure. A lot of it's been filmed. Yeah. And I've had the discussion because, frankly, I don't care what they think if I ask, which is have you performed jumps that you wouldn't have done

had they not been getting recorded? Yes, they have. 100% of them said they've not only performed jumps they wouldn't have done, but they've done it more than once. Yeah. And that absolutely terrifies me and makes me very happy to hear so that I keep that in the back of my mind so that I don't put somebody else in that scenario or I put myself in that scenario. But it's part of the good thing there is that they are cognizant of the fact that they are after the fact. Often they aren't during.

Okay. That's the danger. When you confuse gambling. That snowball rolls downhill. fast. When you compete gambling for risk, like I'll accept risk

I don't like to gamble with my life. Yeah. If you don't know the difference between the two, you're living in a very, very dangerous spot. Well, and I think it's

Nikki Lauda, like the F1 driver, he said that every time he hopped in the car, he had a 1 and 25 chance of, or a 25% chance of dying. Mm-hmm.

And he said he would never accept a single percentage point higher than that. I might get the number wrong. Okay. But he understood the risk involved in that sport.

He actually backed of a few races because of that, right? Yeah. By other conditions and stuff. Absolutely. He was acutely aware. And there was one when he got burned up in the car that he said, hey, I was chasing somebody like an asshole because he wanted to go after him instead of looking at the risk.

And he accepted more risk than he was really willing to do, which then turned into a gamble. Yeah. Okay. So I see, I see the difference. I think it's just like, for me, it's always like influence of the camera, not. influence of the camera, influence of the camera, not influence of the camera. And that's, you know, whether it's, I'd never made the risk gamble sort of thing. It's just like, am I doing this for the camera?

Yes. Okay. Now is it potentially beyond my capability? Gamble. Gamble. Right. Could you get away with it? Maybe.

It doesn't even have to be capability. It could be just desire. You know, you can have the desire to perform the function and that will get you through something that you obviously have the skill for. but if you have zero desire and then you're not thinking about what you're doing, that could get you killed.

But a lot of times what you're doing you are technically capable of. Capable of. I mean, I'm just thinking about this CERAC that I sold very high on Mont Blanc that was,

I mean, it would have been I think, I don't think I would have hit anything for the first thousand feet. You'd talk about on your way down? You had a really good track. And then it would have been, and then, you know,

whether what pizzas were left after any, because it would have been three or four total. It had been a Jackson Pollock for sure. Oh. I like that. Yeah. I mean, like,

unless you were in a snowsuit, probably keep you together. It would be like, you know, actually you too, because I, um, when my climbing,

my friend Philippe got killed, he went 700 meters and he actually, that his clothes held together. Wings, because he was, same thing. Yeah. Okay.

Well, if Wingsuit can do that, so as you can too. Exactly. And it's not, you know, just cartwheeling at that point, yeah, in the mountains. But when I think about that thing, I'm like, okay, technically it was so far within what I was able to do. Like, like, the technical limit wasn't anywhere, but it's also not a thing I would, there's no point to be there. It's like, yes, this is cinematic, but it's not an interesting, objective on its own.

So therefore, already the influence of the camera takes me to a point where I would never normally be. It would never go. Like hike by and I'm like, wow, that's fucking steep and rad. And holy fuck,

it's a long ways down. Okay, cool. But never would have gotten. So it is, it's theater from the start. And always for the camera, I mean, for me,

if Nikki Lauda said something like, yeah, if it's, you know, one point more than 25, you know, I'm not doing it. I mean, I would always choose stuff

because I always had like a very clear delineation. Okay, this is for the camera. This is for me. And anything for the camera, I'm going to choose something that looks good, but that is not on the cutting edge. Yep. Because you're going to have to do it more than once. Yes.

And it's like, I need to be able to do this over because, okay, there's, you know, they check the gate after they get the shot. And there's like, oh, there's a fucking hair. Okay, you got to do it again, you know. or somebody, the battery dies. You just pull to climb out of your ass. Exactly, which. And so on this, on that particular day, actually, I sold it.

And then they're like, uh, we need you to do again. I'm like, it was completely fucked. We need, I need to be tied in and we need to figure out a way to hide it. We need to make this look like there is no rope because I need a rope. Because I've already done it without it. Yeah. And you guys documented that and I don't give a fuck out, you know, if you over exposed, under exposed, there's a hair, you know,

the gate's not clean. I don't give a fuck. But I am not soloing it again because the conditions, like technically it's fine, but the conditions were fucked on the day that we went. And so we figured out a way like, okay, we get the white rope and I'm soloing on this ice

that is relatively white. And it's actually going up the leg of my pants tied to my harness. So that when you're watching it, you're not, if you accidentally see the rope because they couldn't remove it, then they're like,

okay we'll just we'll just do this tight from you know mid thigh up or whatever and the rope be hidden i mean i'm going to go for a terrible fucking fall i'm going to say that's a hell of a whippers oh no it would have been completely fucked plus not only do you fall really far but your pants get torn off and you might be upside down in a weird well you're certainly upside down at first for sure you're upside down yeah at first and then your pants get torn you know zippers whatever off and then you're going to get caught on the harness but still it's and and then you also want loop of slack so that you can have free leg movement. So it's going to be a big whipper.

But that was that situation. It's like, I already resold it, but I'm not going to do it again because it was fucked. And you guys need more than we're going to need to find a way to mitigate that risk and do it again. And it seems like with base, I just don't, you know, if things are happening at the cutting edge, there are likely things that you don't really want to repeat. I would agree Yeah But you see people

Repeating them Okay And well The odds will Catch up with that behavior at some point Yeah Andy have So

Right now we are in March of 2019 We had our first conversation July of 2018 Yep At that time Alex had just Passed Yeah we bury him in Arlington

Next month Wow Um And I'd be relatively not sober. Just to deal with it. Just to imagine why.

Yeah. Is he getting the horses and the whole thing? I do not know because he was cremated in France. Oh, okay. Okay, so you don't, yeah. Well, we buried a friend of mine with no, like, in a casket like that. Yeah, I don't know is the honest answer. I guess it's cremated, so there's no body to put into a coffin, you know.

Have you ever been, I sort of, I have a friend in his, um, he was a TFO guy He's been around and he's out now But his wife When they were living there She was actually doing a photographic project On those horses And so when I think it was

2012 Sometime I was there at Arlington visiting them And she said Oh we can go see the we can go to the stables We can go check out these horses And so I got to go And I saw the horse that

You know the riderless horse that carries. Well, no, that was the, I think his name is Sergeant York. And he was the rider's horse for Reagan's funeral. And to just realize, like, okay, these horses are like some of the most, you know, well-cared-for creatures. And I don't know what the condition of her book is, but it was pretty nice look behind the scenes there. But so in July, we were speaking about that, and you had made a decision to maybe skydye. but not base jump.

Correct. Because of psychological conditions, let's say, had changed. For sure. I mean, a lot of things had changed around that. Conversations with my wife, conversations with my kids, more a realization of where I am and the story arc of my life. Like it was a moment of, unfortunately, it drove a moment of, unfortunately, due to the cause.

Yeah. Unfortunately, that the moment of reflection or the time of reflection had occurred. But I'm assuming you're going to ask me what my decision is now or where I'm sitting No, actually, I'm just going to ask you if you have done a base jump since then. No. Because it was a while ago. I have not. Good for you.

I spoke to the guy who was there on the jump with him and he hasn't touched his wingsuit since that day. No shit. Yeah. Not the one you're thinking of. Well, the team guy. Yeah, no, I'm not surprised with him. Yeah. Because he's been at a few.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. But actually, both of them have. Yeah. All right, cryptic enough. Yeah. Both people that were in the area when Alex died have both been around a lot of fatalities. Yeah.

And I mean, and you see that it's just like high level climbing. Yeah. If you're in a sport like that for long enough and manage not to kill yourself, you're going to be around a lot of death. People who did. Yeah. I have my Stars and Striped Wing suit is in my office at my house. and every time I look at it, I see Alex. I see his smile, his laugh, you know,

and until I get to the point where that's not what I see, when I look at that suit, I can't do it. And if I'd never get to that point, then I'm done, as far as base jumping goes. I'm going to say good for you. And not because I don't, that I think you should stop. It's just like, okay, this is, that's actually a very real decision.

and something that you haven't not thought about. Yeah, it wasn't an easy one to come to. And it's something I toil with and I struggle with and his funeral will be extremely difficult. And it'll probably make me think more about him when I look at that suit. You know, it's funny, in my mind,

skydiving a base jumping are so detached. Like I could throw that suit on and go skydiving, zero problem whatsoever. Yeah. But just, I don't know. I don't know if I ever will again. No, because the base, you know, I mean, you've got to hike up.

you got to there's like you'll you would be spending a lot of time in your head with him correct oh yeah on the on the approach and I think that that that my sense is like if you if you take that journey a few times and then maybe you sort of adapt to it and and and and and have a relationship with it or not but but you need to do that approach in like like I think that's like that's if you go to the louder brilliant, you know, you go to the easy exits or whatever, the ones are easy to get to. Yep. That's not the experience I'm looking for. Exactly.

And it's not the thing that will transform you or heal you in a way, as if you could be healed. I mean, I don't mean that. I don't mean that. I don't understand. Yeah. But they could sort of resurrect the desire and that sort of thing. But I think it's the long walk that needs to happen. Because if you could, because you can get through that, then you can probably make the jump.

but if you can't handle the approach and you need to make that approach as long as fucking possible. So like I said, the jump is optional. Yeah. The landing is not. Yeah. And on that note,

we only have one more topic to discuss. Dinner. Oh. Doug is. Doug is. Hell, yes, gentlemen. What are we at for the power hour? Um, do you?

230, probably. Perfect. Something like that. I mean, shall we reconvene shortly for tactical assholes? Yeah, maybe in like 24 hours. I need to put some footage together

and get a projector so we can all watch it. I was going to say, because I have a projector. Like one of the little ones. Yeah, there was actually, there was not Ross. We have to take our time.

Gentlemen, we have to take our time because we need to bring it. Let us not rush. We need to bring it. The tactical asshole podcast. It needs to sting and cut.

deep. I think live hangar would be a good start because there's military things and climbing.

Honestly, I think Navy SEALs Charlie Sheen first movie. How could you not start with that? Are we going to repel from the ceiling?

Only if we have flight suits, MP5s, and handle bar mustache. Oh my God. I know. Can we make this happen?

Wait. Technically we could make it happen, but it's just who wants to. Yeah, exactly. I was just but we'll come back

to that because Dudley's going to die. if we don't feed him. He's had an emotional day. He's fidgeting. You absolutely, it has to start with that movie. I think it does.

Because everything after that, it's, everything should start with a Drager jump from 30,000 feet. If you're going to make fun of anybody, you better start with yourself, which is exactly what we would be doing. Oh, yeah. We'll double down. We will.

And honestly, Navy Seals has so many opportunities. Like, we're going to struggle to keep it less than 15 minutes. Oh, fuck, I can't even. Why would you limit yourself? Just an extended opener. It's like the power hour. It could be a, 115 minutes, but I'm just saying, I'm going to aim for 15 of high quality stinging commentary that people will likely be very upset about.

Holy fuck. It's going to be great. Okay, so there's a, you get to pick the climbing film. You can pick your own genre. So we need, then we need to do a, there's got to be a, I'm reminded of a, you know, a two-part episode of Miami Vice way back in the day when they. Which, of course, we can have a police officer come in and join us for the review of Miami Vice. Except the one thing that I'm thinking about is when they, and I wish, I think this guy's first name is Jim, but he was a national champion, Ipsic shooter at the time. Oh, I know what you're talking about.

And they, and they had him on, he was technical advisor, but they put him in front of the camera. And when he fucking throws down and drops these dudes, I'm just like, oh, that is fucking classic Ipsic stage right there. I think they've turned it into like a gift for a meme. Oh, I'm sure they have. It's like the best and only correct shooting ever performed on camera. Yeah, so there's movie Thief with James Con and there's some pretty good shooting in that. But this is like this is, you know, back in the day. But then there's, fuck, there's a more current one.

I think it's called Triple Tap is the name of the movie. It's so good because it is, it is one of the really, really good kids shooting in that. And it opens up. And it starts with, he's on his way. back from a practical pistol competition some shit goes down he's like oh I can solve this I have my thing and yeah and basically the timer goes off and he double taps everybody I like it and it's perfect you know and I'm just like you don't you guys you need to do this in slow motion the reason this is filmed in slow motion is because he is actually physically in real life operating his weapon so fast

that you don't understand what he's done it doesn't look cool yeah exactly Well, let us, I mean, let me remind you of a genre that I think is due of review, and that is anything Steven Segal. Have you even considered this yet? Well. Why, yes, I have. In fact, I have notes. Because he was Casey Ryback, under siege one and two, deserve to be reviewed for

tactical accuracy. Broken Arrow. However. Broken Arrow is Nicholas Cage. Don't confuse your fucked-up war movies. Yeah, I was going to say, don't confuse the fucked upness. So he falls into the seal genre and then also whatever that other crazy shit that he does. We can double down on guys that have done multiple seal movies like Michael Bean.

Well, the abyss. So I was going to have Barklow do a review of the abyss while wearing a hard shell diver helmet. And I would feed him cocktails through a straw. Through a straw. Yeah. Like, okay. So he's already in. So he's already in.

Evan would agree to do the Army side of the house. So we'll have an Army representative. It's endless. I mean, if we would get low on content. I'm tired of coming up with last minute desperate solutions to impossible problems created by other fucking people. That would be my favorite clip from Under Siege. Yes. Just happened to have it on my phone because Tommy Lee Jones is the man.

And not only that, he's got a pretty cool Walter in his hand when he's doing that scene. This is true. So that's what we have to look forward to, gentlemen. There will be another meeting of this roundtable, even though we're more of a triangle at this. So it's coming. Thank you guys for, this was awesome. Thank you.

I think we barely touched on what we were going to talk about. You kind of hit the tip of a couple little pieces. Yeah. Until next time, gentlemen. Until next time. I'm telling you. That is it for this week, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you again to BioWave.

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