Jocko Podcast - 420: Pushing The Bubble Until Things That Are Totally Crazy Become Possible. With Alex Honnold

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

>Join Jocko Underground<ALEX HONNOLD is a professional adventure rock climber whose audacious free-solo ascents of America’s biggest cliffs have made him one of the most recognized and followed climbers in the world. A gifted but hard-working athlete, Alex “No Big Deal” Honnold is known as much for his humble, self-effacing attitude as he is for the dizzyingly tall cliffs he has climbed without a rope to protect him if he falls. Honnold has been profiled by 60 Minutes and the New York Times, featured on the cover of National Geographic, appeared in international television commercials and starred in numerous adventure films including the Emmy-nominated “Alone on the Wall.”Honnold is sponsored by The North Face, Black Diamond, La Sportiva, Ando and Stride Health and is a board member of El Cap Climbing Gyms. He is the founder of the Honnold Foundation, an environmental non-profit. And to this day, he maintains his simple “dirtbag-climber” existence, living out of his van and traveling the world in search of the next great vertical adventure.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 420 with Echo Charles and me, Jocker Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. I chalked both my hands and took a few breaths. I didn't think at all about my position or how I felt. I just carried forward on autopilot. Left hand crimped another side pull. Left foot jammed into a lower crack, somewhat sideways.

Right foot came up high by my waist and towed into a tiny scoop. The tension between my left hand and right foot created stability and a I raised my right hand up to a very small but down pulling crimp. My left hand palm down on the wall below me and I raised my left foot extra high onto a very sloping shelf. As soon as the foot was placed, I drove down with it and stood up the thumber cling with my left thumb. The hold was an upside down ripple, maybe an inch long and a few millimeters wide. So small that it would never qualify as a handhold except for the fact. that most of my weight was on my feet.

I placed my hand perfectly, my thumb going into the more sloping part in order to leave the better inch of space for my index and middle fingers to curl over. My right foot sneaked in and matched next to my left, and my left foot kicked out leftward to a slippery black knob. The whole route came down to the next four moves,

the hardest of the whole sequence. My right hand came into my left, and I removed my index and middle fingers, which had been stuck to the wall only by the tension between my right big toe and my left thumb. My right thumb took the fingers place on the good part of the ripple,

and my left hand shot out left to grab the sloping loaf. I squeezed it for all I was worth and moved my right hand back to the initial down-pulling crimp. I was in an iron cross fully spanned between the two holds, right foot through to the sloping dish, hips open, left foot across to a tiny chip, chalk my right hand, break it into the top of the loaf. Now I was set up for the karate kick, though I spent no time thinking about it.

My right foot came into the crucial small edge perfectly placed to provide counterpressure when I kicked my left foot across. I subtly switched the position of my left hand, making it feel slightly more secure as I squeezed my two hands together and crushed the loaf, as if on autopilot my left foot shot out perfectly perpendicular to my body, full extension, three feet to the left. It hit the far wall of the corner exactly where it needed to be.

What used to feel like a desperate falling kick now felt like an easy foot. placement my feet felt welded to the wall months of stretching paid off as I brought my left hand to the crack next to my foot my right hand switched to palming downward and I felt secure balanced between my left foot and my right palm I reached my left hand up to a big edge and I was done I was through the Boulder problem I felt the flood of elation or maybe just I was suddenly aware of the world around me again including the cameras fixed to the wall on either side of me I said something like oh yeah into the camera in front of me I started laughing

I romped up the final few easy moves to faint to the faint ledge above I stood on the ledge for a minute breathing hard exultant I knew that somewhere in the meadow 2,300 feet below and Mikey was watching me through the long shot. I pumped my fists over my head, facing the meadow, wondering whether they saw me. For once, I was somewhat glad that I had an audience. I felt like a hero. I still had 10 pitches up to 512B above me, but I felt like I'd cleared the final hurdle.

Now it was just cruising to the finish line. And that right there is an excerpt from a book called Alone on the Wall written by Alex Honnold with David Roberts. Alex Honnold is a rock climber and a legend in the climbing world who has accomplished amazing feats of climbing, free solo climbing, which is climbing with no ropes and no protection of any kind. And a lot of this by himself started with no fanfare in 2007. As a young climber, he free-soled. And again, that's no ropes, no protection. He free soloed Astro Man and Rostrum and Yosemite, which are two legendary climbs. And then a year later in 2008, he was the first person to free solo, Moonlight Bustrus,

moonlight buttress in Zion National Park. And he did that on April Fool's Day. And when it word got out that he had done this, some people thought that it was a joke That it was just an April Fool's joke because who would climb that without a rope? Well, he would and he did and he didn't stop there Also in 2008 he free sold the regular Northwest face of half dome Which is 2,000 feet of rock straight up out of Yosemite Valley He was the first person to do that as well and then he started getting a little bit more mainstream attention

He was featured in a movie called Alone on the Wall Which I saw when it came out some little rock climbing festival here in San Diego And it was it parts of it are hard to watch if you've been up at altitude before But he continued to climb continue to train continue to learn and and continue to accomplish feats and rock climbing. Eventually, on June 3rd, 2017, he made the first free solo scent of the free ride route up Yosemite's L-Cap, which is 3,000 feet, almost 3,000 feet of vertical granite jolting straight up out of the valley.

And that pursuit was captured in the Oscar Award-winning, movie called Free Solo by Jimmy Chin. And a few days later, he and another renowned climber, Tommy Caldwell, Caldwell broke the speed record up the nose of El Cap, completing in an hour, one hour, 58 minutes and seven seconds, the first people to do it under two hours. And he still hasn't stopped. He continues to push the envelope and rock and now alpine climbing.

He has a podcast called Climbing Gold. He has a charity organization, a master class, the Honnold Foundation, which helps people around the world that need access to solar energy and incredible things being done all the time by this individual. And it's an honor to have Alex here with us tonight to talk about his experiences and lessons learned. Alex, thanks for joining us, man. Awesome to meet you. Thanks for having me. That's the biggest intro of ever. heard I'm like I'm honored I I when we started talking about having you on and echo was not too

familiar with rock climbing and I just broke out the section of you doing the boulder problem in on youtube and he was like oh my god what is going on I said yeah this is this is the next level of it's the next level of human achievement and I've been whenever people ask me about this I think that that run up, free rider that you did. I can't think of a, of a bigger sort of physical human achievement for a human being to do. I don't know. I can't think of one. If I do, I'll let the world know.

But that was just an incredible thing to see. No, I appreciate it. Um, so I hadn't heard that excerpt. Well, I mean, obviously I wrote that excerpt at some point, but I hadn't, haven't thought about it since then hearing. I was like, oh, I'm kind of gripped. It's so exciting. It's all that like, like, that's the exact crux beta.

It's like, oh, I remember every move is like, oh, give me little tingles. How many, how many times did you do that move before you did it that time? So many. I mean, I practiced a lot. Like a hundred? Like a thousand? Yeah. Probably like a hundred or one.

I mean, I think I had a day where I repel down from the, summit and then did it 10 times in a row and then keep propelling you know a couple days like that but yeah I don't know a lot and more importantly I'd done every variation of it where I fail you know I tried every different permutation of like these feet but those don't work and then different feet and those don't work and then different hands and you know every version of it so I failed on like every other version and then practice the the correct way a bunch times as well the one that finally worked yeah well I mean you know you could make other ways work but you want to find the best way yeah you do it's

weird too when you because I saw the movie in the theater and you still don't get the sense I mean it gives you a good sense and but you just can't duplicate what 2,000 or 3,000 feet looks like in a theater you can't maybe I don't know I didn't see it in IMAX I mean yeah it's not the same as being there but it was very impressive yeah I mean seeing YSemite and IMAX I was like this is awesome yeah I didn't see it in an IMAX but man it's You can't just capture, like the ground is so far away that it's like the first time I went parachuting. When the ramp of the aircraft goes down, the ground is so far away that it's not, it's almost, you don't get that sense of height almost because it's so far away. And I kind of got that feeling when I was watching Free Solo in the theater.

I was like, man, believe me, like my palms are sweating like everybody else. but I was sort of like I've been there. I know what that thing looks like. I've walked around up there and you can't quite transmit it in any other media other than being there. Yeah, no, I agree. I think that even for a lot of people who come to Yosemite for the first time, it's hard to appreciate the sense of scale because they can stand in El Cap Meadow and look up at El Cap. But without really understanding the scale of it, they're just like, oh, that's a big piece of rock.

And then they see that, you know, if you use binoculars or telescope, you can point out climbers. up high and they're like oh my god that little tiny tiny speck of color is a person up there like that's crazy it is like yeah yeah because when you're up on the top of the cap you know the people are like little ants down below like i mean like dots like oh it's like tons little dots down there it's really big yeah yosemite is just glorious it's a glorious glorious glorious place then what's crazy too is as it's as it gets into like i would always go camping with my family up there. And it's be so crowded, right?

But even when it's crowded, it's not that big of a deal. Like there's a big crowd there and then you take four minutes of walking out. A quarter mile off the road and all of a sudden you're like, we're alone in the wilderness. We can die out here. Yeah. It's just an incredible place. Hopefully we don't hype too many people, many

more people to go there. No, I think we should actually. I'm strongly into the crowds there because basically I think that nobody cares about nature or protecting nature unless they have positive nature experiences. And I think Yosemite is such a great accessible place for people to be awe-inspired. You know, it's like... And the thing is, even when it is crowded, you can walk for 10, 15, 20 minutes, and you can see no one.

Because Yosemite is a huge park. And when we talk about it being crowded, we mean the main loop on the main road in the very center. But the whole rest of the park is totally empty. Like, I've done some very long day hikes there. Like, every couple years, I'll get a little bee in my bonnet to go out for an adventure and do, like, a 50-mile, like, solo day hikes sort of thing. Like big circuits around the park. And you can do some of those big loops and see, like, people the whole day.

Yeah. You're kind of like, everyone complains about crowding. You're like, if you get off the beaten path, it's very empty. It's like wilderness. As soon as my kids were old enough,

we started going a little bit more outside. And we have a hike that we do that we would not see anybody. Maybe we'd see one other person. We'd go out, hike out for the day, spend the night up on the mountain. It's kind of the opposite side of half dome. So you're kind of looking at half dome.

It's that area. But we'd see no one out there. And this is to be in the middle of the summertime. And so, It's big enough and challenging enough on some of those hikes out of there. You can be in switchbacks for two hours of switchbacks. But yeah, just amazing place. Incredible.

So look, your life has been very well documented in the movie. If you guys haven't seen this movie, just go see the movie. You're born and raised in Sacramento. You dropped out of college when you were not. You went to Berkeley for what? A year? Yeah, engineering at Berkeley for for you long enough to know that I shouldn't go to college. That's funny.

I was in the Navy and the Navy sent me to college. And when I got back to, you know, because I was in the SEAL teams and I'd go to college for three years. And when I got back, you know, guys would be like, oh, you know, would they teach you there? And I was like, it taught me never, ever, ever, ever get out of the SEAL teams ever. Because the SEAL teams is just such a fun job. And then you see what the rest of the world is like.

And you're like, no, I don't want to do that. Take me back to the same thing. Where did they send you to college? The University of San Diego. Oh, yeah, okay. So you were still at the same. Same place. Yeah, we're still here in San Diego, but you know, sitting in a classroom is was not conducive, especially going from a job where you're outside. I mean, I always joke like I ain't put on a shirt for work. You know what I mean? I was like a 35 year old man making $80,000 a year and I wouldn't wear a shirt like unless I really had to most of the time just walking around. You know, you're hanging out, prep and stuff and getting gear ready. It's just a great job. It's outside. You're doing fun stuff. Shoot machine guns, jumping out of airplanes, blowing things up. Like what else? would you want to do well for me what else would I want to do um so you dropped out of

college and you just went full van life climber mode yeah basically I mean that that obviously glosses over the the years of sort of existential like you know especially because when I started just climbing full-time being a professional climber was much less of a thing the climbing industry is way smaller there were way fewer gyms there were fewer climbers it was less obvious that you could ever make a living as a climber so I sort of thought I was just going to go climbing for a few years and see what happened. And I thought that maybe I'd become mountain guide or get into, you know, get into the industry in some way or like do something outdoors.

But then it sort of eventually translated into being a professional climber. But part of that is because the industry grew up sort of with me. I was going to say you, I'd say you got into the industry at this juncture. Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. For sure. Now I'm firmly entrenched, you know, now I'm establishment. But when I dropped out of college, there just wasn't that much of an industry. I mean, there was.

You know, there were the same outdoor manufacturers and things like that. But there was just way fewer people rock climbing. It was just less of a less of a thing. Yeah. Did you do contests? I did that rock climbing contest thing that was going on for a bit. Which one? Just the, when it was be televised on ESPN or something and it would be speed races.

Yeah, yeah, totally. It was more like an extreme sport type thing. Yeah. Did you do that? Not really. So I did youth competitions like, you know, same as like. Little League or soccer stuff or whatever. And I was fine.

You know, I did well in the regional stuff. I got second at nationals once, but that's only because the other really good kids that already aged out and gone on to adult competitions. And it was kind of one of those things where I was like, I was good, but I was never the best. And I wasn't dominating by any means. But, you know, I was fine.

And then, yeah, now basically it was never good enough to do the adult comps or go on to, because Europe has a really well-established World Cup competition scene. And so there have always been a lot of comps in Europe, but less so in the U.S. And either way, I just never quite had the talent for it. I was like, and you talk about like in the book and basically you started free soloing when you were a kid just like because you don't really want to talk to the other kids or you're too shy to talk to the other kids and say, hey, can I link up with you guys? Yeah, especially once I started traveling a little bit, like

living out of the van and going destinations. So like one of the places I started climbing was in Joshua Tree outside of LA. And at the time, like my then high school girlfriend was going to school in Southern California. So it was kind of like, oh, you go to Southern California, you go to Joshua Tree. Joshua Tree is also the sort of a birthplace of climbing in California. It's like has a lot of climbing culture, a lot of climbing history there. And so, you know, it's nice to sort of test yourself against these historic roots from the 60s and 70s and 80s. And so, you know, I wanted to go to a destination like Joshua Tree, but then you get there and you don't know anybody. And, you know, this is kind of like pre-cell phones, pre-social, pre-pre-like, there's a, you know, there's a little.

no easy way to connect with strangers plus all the super shot and kind of a kind of a loser and kind of a weird dude so it's a lot easier just to cruise around and you know climb things by yourself than to like walk around the campground talking to strangers you know that's a weird thing I I have a kids I've written a bunch of kids books and I have a kids podcast and I'll like take questions from kids and one of the questions I'll get you know it's like oh I basically like hey I don't kids don't like me and that kind of thing. And one of the things that I kind of say back to kids that are in that position is like being alone is okay.

Like it's okay to be alone and you can, it doesn't mean that you're bad. It just means that you haven't found anyone that you're going to get along with yet. Yeah. I'm just still hung up on irony of you writing kids books when you're surrounded by knives on this table. I feel like we're in like a CIA offsite sort of thing.

Like this black box with knives everywhere. You're like, yeah, I write kids books for fun. Holy shit. Well, yeah. The whole knife thing is, it just kind of got out of control. It started with one fake knife from Echo Charles, and then I tried to one up in,

and then we just ended up with this. We actually did, at one point, I brought a pistol, and then Echo was like, well, I don't know, that might be a bit much or whatever, so I guess we backed, we called a truce,

an arms truce. It's only bladed weapon, only edged weapons. Yeah, after the axe, too, That was like, okay, we've got to hit the brakes a little bit. Oh, I brought an axe there. No, someone sent an axe, I think. Okay.

Maybe you brought it. Yeah, because once we posted like a picture of like a couple knives on the table, then people are like, I want my knife on the table. Yeah, totally. Like books and knives, it's a really interesting contrast. Yeah, I guess, I guess it is sort of representative of my life in a way. Yeah, yeah. Books and knives, that's kind of, what's like I went to college.

When I did go to college, when the Navy did send me to college, I was an English major. Oh, yeah? And why? Why? Why does the Navy went? English major, blowing things up. Well, believe it or not, when you're in a leadership position in the military, you have to write a lot.

And you have to read a lot. So you get directives that come down and you have to be able to read those, almost like a lawyer, read to document. But they didn't let you take any creative writing classes. So I don't want you making anything up. Just doing nonstop reports. You're like adding little flourishes. Like, it's a very dramatic experience we had.

But I could turn my after actions report to a romance, You have to write all the time. You have to write awards. You have to write evaluations of your troops. And so I had been an officer. And so I was like, oh, I need to be good at this. And so that I just majored in English. And of course, everyone thinks how the, you know,

what are you going to do? What are you going to do with your English degree? What are you going to do with your English degree? You are you doing? Well, I don't know. I'm going to write things. Yeah. Wrote a bunch of books, including kids books.

So very strange. I know. It is a little strange. My mom was an English teacher too. So I don't know what that has. to do with anything. My mom was an English teacher and my dad was a history teacher. And you like books? That's not that big of a surprise. The weird thing is bro, I I did not read growing up. Like I did But you knew how to read. I knew how to read but I wasn't a reader you were growing up. You know kids now? I don't know how much of a reader you were growing up but some kids. Yeah some people just read. They read like crazy and I didn't. I was like outside throwing rocks at like

puddles, you know just banging sticks together like a like a crow magnet man. That was kind of that was kind of so my wife and I've been talking about this kind of stuff a lot because we now have an almost two-year-old and we're about to have our second child and so we're talking about parent you know I feel like parenting is just starting now that our daughter's getting old enough that you can actually parent a tiny bit yeah she's less of a blob and more of a real person that does stuff but it's interesting the you know what you're describing it's like how much is nature versus nurture and I feel like there's some basics there where it's like obviously you could read you know your parents if you're being raised by professors basically it's like you learn how to and I think I think about that with

with my daughter where even if she's not into climbing and she doesn't become a climber, that's fine. But she's for sure going to know the basics. She's going to know how to repel. She's going to feel comfortable doing all the things. And whether she chooses to or not, that's up to her. So I've been through this before. I'm really into jiu-jitsu. As you could see, you walked around my gym.

Like this jiu-jitsu has been a huge part of my life. And when my kids were born and then being raised by me, I wanted them to be into jih-jitsu. I wanted them to love jiu-too as much as I did. I wanted them to get the gifts of jiu-too that I got. and probably the same way you feel like you want your daughter to be able to have the same thing that you got out of climbing this amazing. No, that's the things. I don't know if I want her.

It's not that I want her to have it. I mean, it would be great if she does. But I just feel like there's a minimum threshold of competence that has to come because that's part of being in the family. But whether she chooses to be into it or not, that's up to her. If she's more into reading, that's fine. If she's into music, like great. I think the goal of parenting, I mean, I don't know.

You've raised four kids, but you tell me, but. But is to help your child find the thing that they love doing. But then there's certain things that part of being in the family is that she's going to be comfortable hiking outside. She's going to be able to repel off cliffs. Like that's just, I mean, you can't do family activities if you don't know how to repel. Yeah. It's you're walking a thin line, my friend. Because you're like, oh, they can, I'll support whatever they want to do as long as they're rappelling off of cliffs.

No, but you can be taking your kid to soccer every weekend. But then, you know, when you go on family outings, you're still doing family stuff. Yeah. In the same way, I suspect your family had a minimum. requirement of like you must be able to read and do well in school or do whatever. Yeah. It's like you've got to be minimum competence. And then beyond that, you can do whatever you want.

Yeah. It sounds like you've got it dialed because what I did was too much jujitsu. I pushed it too hard on them. And they went through a phase. Thank God. They're all like full on into jihitsu now. But they went, they, except for my son went, didn't go. He wasn't allowed to go through a phase of no jiu jihitsu.

My daughters went through a phase of no jih Tuditsu. My son was like, no. this is what we're doing. The minimum family standard for the boy was like six days a week of Jiu-Jitsu. That seems like a lot, really. It's too much. And really the key thing, and this is if there's any advice. And I used to look, we've been doing this podcast for I think seven years, seven, eight years.

And in the beginning, I wouldn't like give parenting advice because my kids were, what, 13, 15, whatever, nine. And I was like, the jury's not out yet. I might not know in a whole what I'm doing. I feel a lot more comfortable now putting this out and giving advice around raising kids. The main thing is, in this total common sense, unless you're an idiot parent like I was, is make things fun. If you make it fun, if they have fun, then everything is, they just want to do it more and then they get better at it. And then when they're better at it, they like doing it more because they are successful at it. It just becomes, it's just a better way to roll.

You don't want to be like like I was we would spend five hours on Saturdays and Sundays here at this gym training. No, slightly psycho. Slightly psycho. I'm like, I love climbing and I still don't think I'm going to push anybody quite that hard. Yeah.

And that's the cool thing is eventually, you know, the kids kind of will, they're watching you all the time and they'll see the joy that it brings you and they'll see what you've gotten out of it and how much you enjoy it. And they'll be like, oh, I want to try that too. And as long as you're not like, you need to do that again. You need to run that route again. Totally.

Don't go full cycle like I did. I don't recommend it. It's a really hard balance too because with your kids, you, let's face it, if I was like, okay, you can plot out the perfect life for your kid. You could probably do a normal person could go, okay, here's what you should do. And here's how you'll be successful and happy in life. according to what I think happiness is, you could probably plot that out pretty well.

Probably anyone could. But they're people. Yeah, they have their own thing. That's what I always say. I mean, even as a two-year-old, we're starting to see that with our daughter, which is kind of a fierce independent woman. You're like, you follow your heart.

You do what you want to do. Yeah, they're going to be, the way I explain it to adults now is they're going to be who they are, not who you want them to be. Totally. And the more you just open up your mind to that is the easier it's going to go.

I've had this idea that I think it would be a good book. I'll just give it to you because you obviously write books. You can have it. But it's a concept I've invented, I think, that I'm calling downstream parenting, where you just do everything with the current. You know, you just go with the current. Like everything that's like, chill, you know, within grounds of sort of safety and, you know, some basic constraints.

But every time I find myself trying to stop my daughter from doing something or wanting her to do a certain thing, I'm like, is it because I want her to do that thing? Or is it because she actually needs to do that thing? You know, I'm sort of like, you know what? If like if she wants to do something and it's not dangerous and it's not going to like cause harm to the property or whatever, then like let her do the thing. It's downstream. Just go with the current.

And part of that I think is because she's young enough that you can't reason with her anyway and like teacher things in exactly. So I'm kind of like, you know, why fight it all the time? Just like let it happen. Let it happen. Go with current. And the minimum standard that you talked about that can be used as well, especially it's really important. Just like in leadership, it's really important to explain to people why you need to do something. thing. So if you've got your daughter and you're like, hey, you need to know how to do this

stuff. Oh, why do I need to be able to, you know, repel up the cliff? Why do I need to be able to do that? And just, well, there's a couple reasons. Number one, you don't know what kind of situation you're going to be. And number two, like the confidence that'll bring you. Number three, the opportunities that this will give you and the access that you'll have to look. So you just have to have some reasonable things. Number three, the odds are she's going to have to rescue her doubt at some point gets into something weird. She's got to go run back to the garage and get a rope and sort them out yeah and then and then I was recently having a conversation where you know what if you can't what if you don't have a good why for instance like clean your room why why do I need to clean my room

and you say well and there's some legitimate reasons like well if you need to find something you'll be able to find it quicker if your room is clean or if there's a fire in the house and the the firemen show up and they're tripping and falling over your toys that could make it really hard for them and and those are both those are a little bit of a stretch and so in our case it's so you don't make habitat for the cockroaches okay there you get cockroaches well there There you go. Like, you just don't want like creepy corollies and all your stuff. So, so you can find legitimate reasons.

And then occasionally you find something where you don't have a legitimate reason. Yeah, but actually so I'm, I personally basically don't do anything. Like, so I leave like, I'm in my pajamas right now because I'm like, I'm staying indoors today. I just stay in my comfy clothes all day. And so basically at my house, I have my pile next to my bed of my outdoor clothes, which are really, really dirty. And then my indoor clothes, which are my pajamas. And I just alternate, you know, throughout the day. I go from my pajamas to my outdoor clothes, my pajamas again.

And my wife has just given up fighting on it. It's just like my two piles next to the bed. That's all I use and I use the same for like a month or two and it's totally fine. I'm sort of like I suspect that our children will get away with sort of the same routines because like I've already done away with like my family was that like you take out the trash every down trash day like even if it's not totally full and I'm like well that seems stupid because it's not full. And so now at our house you know some of the trash cans get emptied like once every six

or eight weeks or something because they never fill and you're like that's fine. I'm like you know my life is easier for it. Well, you're already in the place where I was going, which is downstream. If you don't, it's all downstream. If you can't give your kid a legitimate reason why to do something? Yeah, then don't do it. Then what's, then ask yourself, go look in the mirror and like, wait, is this just my ego that wants the room to be clean? Yeah, exactly.

If you're doing it for control, say, like, you're just telling them to do a thing because you want them to do the thing. You're like, that's dushy because you wouldn't want somebody else doing that to you. Yeah. It's like that it's like the golden rule of a two-year-old. You know, it's like, don't tell her to do something that I don't want to do. Yeah. Yeah. As you're pursuing rock climbing, you drop out of college, it's not really a, there's no real future in it at the time. How are you explaining that to people? How are you explaining that to your parents? How are you talking to explaining that? Was it the same thing that you just said like, hey, I'm going to do this for a few years and I'll figure something else out? Kind of. I mean, when I initially dropped out of college, it wasn't dropping out of college. I was just taking a semester off. And actually, at the time, I'd qualified for the Youth World Cup. So like this competition in, in, I got second at national. So I qualified for international. So I was, I was a, like, oh, I'll take a semester off. I'll go to Europe and do this competition. And then,

you know, and then travel around and climb a little bit. And then I just never went back to college. It was like, turns out traveling and climbing is, you know, was more of my thing than than class. When did you realize you were good? Oh, it's taken, I don't know. I'm like, it's taken a very long time. And even then, it's like, what is good? Because climbing is a really broad, broad sport. And so most of my friends and peers, who are professional climbers or serious climbers are sort of better than me at lots of other things or other aspects of it.

And so, you know, I still struggle with that. But I mean, obviously now I'd accept that I'm much better than average, but still way worse than most of my friends at many things. So you're kind of like, well, it's still always working on it. Did you, when you were trying to get better, when you were trying to improve, was it just based on like, hey, I'm looking at a route, I can't do it right now, I'm going to work until I can do this route.

And you're just doing that over and over again. Is that? Yeah, that's a big part of it. And then part of it is reading books, climbing history, you know, old school climbing media, like VHS stuff. Like, oh, that's cool. Somebody did this thing. You know, I mean, just basically, yeah, what you're describing, like inspiration of whatever kind leading you to push yourself into you can do that kind of thing. And when you're looking at, you go to Joshua Tree and there's a route that you try and climb and you can't climb it and you fail.

do you do you you go back a month later you go back a month later you go back a month later you go back a month later and finally you're able to pull this thing off yeah that's kind of the idea i mean the thing about climbing is that it's hard to know what failure means because you fall off roots all the time when you're climbing with a rope this is like normal climbing if you're like bouldering when you have pads or you're climbing and you know your protection that catches you that's kind of normal day-to-day like your bread-and-butter climbing i mean you fall off routinely like that's part of the process and so You only really fail if you give up and you walk away from it and you never come back. But falling off is fine.

That's like that's normal. It's just that, you know, like you don't characterize that as failing per se. You're just sort of like, oh, I'm still training. I'm still practicing. I'm still learning on this route. And then eventually you do it. So I mean, the mindset is always, I don't know, it's all sort of cliche. You know, like growth mindset sort of stuff.

But that's, but I think that's sort of an integral, you know, that's sort of foundational to climbing is that you're always, like anytime you fall off something, you're like, oh, that's fine. I'm like practicing. I'm learning. I'm refining the moves. I'm figuring it all out. And eventually I'm going to do it. And you could, when you were younger, could you track your growth or you're like, oh, four months ago I couldn't do this route and now I can.

I'm better now. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's always so much more fun than the support when you're at the beginning of the growth curve, you know, it's like you improve really quickly. And yeah, it's a little more painstaking now. Did you do, did you like exercise specifically? Did you start to do? fingerboarding in your bedroom or anything like that when you were younger trying to get better?

No, so actually, I mean, I grew up climbing before there were fingerboards, really. I mean, some people did, but it just wasn't a thing that you could just buy online like you can't know. I mean, there wasn't even online to buy them to buy the things. But yeah, I mean, you know, the most elite climbers still use tactics like that, but it wasn't normal enough for a suburban kid growing up in Sacramento to know about that, really. But I had a pull-up bar on my door frame. So through high school, I was doing 150 pull-ups before bed every night. It's just like this will make me a better climber in sets of like 10 20, 30 But in retrospect it didn't really make me a better climber

But I was able to do one arm pull-ups after that I was kind of like oh You do a shiller pull-ups I can attest that I was always really into pull-ups and would do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pull-ups And it did never translate it to my climbing I go climb with some of that actually knew how to climb and you just be a total idiot Yeah, your strength that means nothing just like any any sport you know you look at these sports whatever they are and you think oh that that I could probably do that no there's so much technique behind it it's totally ridiculous and climbing is well I think climbing is just one of those many sports that people look at it and they don't realize how how hard it is how technical it is yeah how much technique matters how much subtlety there is in the body position the movement how you place your

feet how you adjust your hips like yeah there's a lot to it yeah there's way more to it than sort of like boxing right boxing you think guys are just throwing punches but there's so much going on there. Jiu-Jitsu you look at and you go, oh, there's a lot going on and you can see that you don't know what's happening. Right? In Rockland, you're like, oh, hold on to that thing. Okay, I can, as a primate, I can understand what that means.

Kind of like as a primate, I can understand. I punch in the head. And it makes sense. An umapata in jiu-jitsu doesn't make sense to a primate. It's like one of those things. You go, this doesn't, I, there's something I don't understand. What is an umapata? It's just like a move with your body.

you're taking the person's arm and you're wrapping your legs around a certain way and moving your hips like it's a very complex move that you would never think of as a primate you wouldn't think of it as how to win a fight and it's the same thing with boxing you look at boxing oh they're just swinging you go if you have ever boxed against a good boxer someone that was like a golden gloves boxer or much less a pro or an amateur boxer like i've boxed against professional boxers you're an i'm an idiot right i just you're just getting touched like there's nothing you can do about it's it and yet people watch boxing go oh move your head a little bit punch them in the head you know it's there's so much going on and that's what that's why you know the my early experiences with climbing was like oh I can do a bunch of pull-ups I can do many pull-ups I will climb rock and it was like the most ridiculous pathetic thing I was telling you earlier I was climbing a rock out in Mission Gord with one of my buddies and I was like probably I don't know maybe 25 feet up, something like that.

And I'm coming over the top, like almost done. And it was a sloping kind of rock. And I am gonna fall. Like I am so freaking gonna fall. And I used my face and like chin and face to like secured smear on the rock and kind of inch my hands up more. And I was like, dude, I am dumb. I am really a dumb person.

Or you're innovative, you know? Yeah. The face smear is a new kind of technique. though everybody's done things like that when they get desperate enough start wedging their body into things and like oh god yeah yeah actually i ran into somebody at the base hell cap the season we were hiking down from from something and uh he was climbing a sort of notorious off with like a off-sized crack where his whole body's wedged in and uh and he just described an experience where he basically got and bowed and they wound up clipping off his helmet for protection like leaving his helmet behind wedged in the crack with the rope

slung around it as like well maybe the helmet will catch me if i fall which you're like the helmet not gonna get you like you're for sure gonna die but now I think of that as my sort of gold standard of you know the sort of low bar like things are going sideways but you just like leave your helmet behind his potential protection for like maybe it'll catch me it's like a freaking little plastic bucket you're like it's for sure gonna break you're gonna die not gonna work out well yeah that's not gonna save you scary uh as you're like like going moonlight buttress which again go on if you're listening to those go on youtube and just go look at moonlight and go look at what that freaking thing looks like.

How'd that come across? Like, what that's, what made that sort of like, this will be the first big one? Well, so that, I mean, it was a logical progression in a lot of ways. So the first like big solas edited, Asterman on the roster, those had actually been done in the mid-1980s by the Scott Peter Croft,

who's a famous Canadian climber and total legend of Yosemite. And so he'd been a personal hero forever. And so, There was kind of a roadmap as to how to do that. And those represented the edge of big wall soling at the time, really. Like those are kind of the biggest, hardest things. So this thing, Moonlight Butchus is only slightly bigger. It's like almost the same size as Asterman, like roughly 1,000 feet tall.

But significantly harder technically, like a harder number on it, you know, a bigger number. So it's harder. But the style actually is very similar. It's just one crack feature that splits this buttress straight up the middle. So even though it's harder, which means your forearms get more pumped, like your muscles get more fatigued, but it's still a similar style, like the still feels secure. Like if your bones are locked into the crack, like, you know, basically if you have the fitness for it, you don't feel like you're going to fall off.

You know, and that's an important thing when we're talking about free-selling is the differentiating between the different styles. Because if you're climbing a crack, it means that your fingers, your hands, or whatever, your feet are like wedged into the crack. And as long as you don't get too tired, there's really not a reason for you to fall off. And so, and fitness is relatively easy to build as a climber. whereas technique, you know, so, but contrasted against like, say, crack climbing, you have, like, face climbing or, like, slab climbing, where it's just a ball, kind of what you're describing

a mission gorge where you're just, like, crawling over the top of some rock. And so if you're imagining climbing something that's like a bald, smooth, blank rock, no matter how big your muscles are, it's still all about how carefully you position your toes, how carefully you balance, like, how well you move your hips, you know, like those are the things that you can practice for sure and you can improve that, but you just can't train the same way and you never feel safe doing it. You never feel secure. Like no matter how strong you get, it's still going to be really freaking scary. So anyway, Moonlight kind of hit that sweet spot where I was like, this is roughly the same

size of what I've done, just a little bit harder, but harder in a way that's secure and controllable. And that said, I'd also just come off several months of climbing in Indian Creek in Utah, which is home to these perfect splitter sandstone cracks, so like exactly the same style as what moonlight is. And so I just spent three months there where I'd basically done every hard thing in the desert at the time and was feeling like a boss on Stans.

I was like, oh, I feel good. And then, you know, but actually it was interesting though because I had sort of this nagging elbow injury at the time and had been climbing less than I wanted to be. You know, I wanted to just be going full bore but I was kind of hurting

and so I'd have to like rest a couple days and then I'd go out and do something really hard but then still be hurting. I was like, damn it, you know, it was really frustrating. And so it's kind of that good, combination of being kind of pent up and like antsy and chomping in the bit but also feeling really fit in a way and I mean I think part of that led to Moonlight where you're like I really want to

do something rad but I'm kind of hurting but I'm really good at the style right now and so then Moonlight was like the obvious thing the obvious thing and I'd done it with a rope and a partner two years before so I knew I could do it I'd done it first try with with this partner and you know like I knew that it was a beautiful inspiring like perfect root and like yeah right style and everything. Did you do it a few times before like immediately before? Yeah, so I went there by myself and then I spent two days working on it. And each day I basically climbed the whole route twice. And Moonlight is also really convenient in that there's a paved tourist trail that goes out the back, the Angels Landing Trail, which is like one of the most famous trails in the country,

or in Zion anyway. It's a really, really cool trail. But that goes up to the top of Moonlight. And so it's super easy to work because you just stroll up this path and then repel down the face. in the movie alone in the wall a guy says I don't know who it is but he says um the most mind-blowing thing in climbing ever when you climb when you climb that um this is a weird thing well at least from from the from outside the climbing world it's a weird thing so you climb rostrum you climb astroman you climb moonlight buttress and you tell one of your butt you basically tell your buddy that you climbed it and then he He kind of posts it on the interwebs.

And that's sort of it. Like no one took pictures of you. No, there's no video of it. Echo and I were talking about it yesterday. Like what is it about rock climbing? Like if I, if I posted on the internet today,

hey, everyone just wanna let you know, I squatted a thousand pounds. People would be like- I'd believe it. I don't know if that's hard or not, but I think you could. But the rest of the community would be like we want video. We want to see what you did.

We want to come and check the weights. Like we want to see that we want to measure the weights to make sure this is true. Can you squat a thousand pounds? No. Can anybody squat a thousand pounds? Yeah. Some people can. But, you know, it's a, it's.

Does the bar bend when you squat a thousand pounds? The bar definitely bounce. That's fucked up. Yeah. But it's, but here you are. You're achieving these things. And it sounded like, uh, moonlight buttress. There were some people that were like, oh, well,

you know, really like... Actually, people were skeptical, not of the climb, really, but because it was posted on April Fool's Day. You know, people are like, oh, that's a funny, fake news story. Right. And then they're like, wait, is that a real news story? Like, what the fuck? But nobody ever was like, oh, we don't think he did it.

Oh, so people don't question it. No, but I think climbing, I mean, there are a few things going on. I know what you mean. And that's starting to change a little bit for climbing as well, where I think if you posted like truly outlandish claims, nowadays people would sort of expect video evidence or something or at least like a GPS track or you know depending on what exactly you're doing but I mean the nature of climbing is that you're normally doing the climbs in remote places without service without people I mean particularly

with so long you know by definition you're by yourself so you know I mean you are really are just taking people at their word I mean that's a big part of climbing but part of it is also that if people don't believe you you can just go do it again you know if the rock is still there the in the same way that if someone doesn't believe that you lift it a thousand pounds you're like oh I can just do it again tomorrow or if not lift a thousand you could at least lift like 950 or something and be like you know it's close enough that you can imagine that on a peak day I did what I said I did yeah except for it's well that's a little messed up because close enough on a free solo is no no but but what I mean with with close enough is that you know people can see you so long other routes they can see that

you could do you know I mean in my case I mean especially now I've done I've done a lot of souling And I think maybe I counted this. I have a list on my phone actually of things that I've done that are sort of first, like what you're describing with, you know, Moonlight and Halftone and things like that. And so I've done something like 35 routes that were sort of like first or things that had been done before. And of those I filmed on roughly a third of them or like went back and took photos on them later

or like in the case of El Cap with the film Free Solo. You know, we actually, it's a full on documentary film and they shot the real thing. But so, you know, there's maybe a third of the things I've done that there's evidence for. and then there are the other two thirds that there's no evidence. But, you know, occasionally somebody would see you or you occasionally pass people on the route. Like as you're climbing, you just climb over other people. And they're just left being like, shit. Like, what a day?

You know, like, that's crazy. That must be the craziest thing in the world being able to see 2,000 feet up on a wall to have Alex roll on by. Like, can I pass you guys? Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, it's funny. What was the climb where you borrowed somebody's chalk bag? Yeah, that was on the nose. Yeah, I forgot my chalk bag.

What a bot. But yeah, but I got it back to him. I left it on the tree for him at the top. So you got it back on, you know, four days later, whatever, when he got to the top. You mentioned that too. You mentioned it real quickly. Reenactment, right?

Which I didn't even being, like I said, like a rock climbing sort of adjacent fan guy, I didn't realize that when I was watching alone on the wall of the movie, that those were reenacted. Yeah, though, I mean, a reenactment, I don't know if that's even, because you are up there soloing again. You know, it's like you're, yeah. The difference is just that you're only soloing key parts of the route and you know, you're soloing the things.

Typically you're choosing the parts of the route that look the coolest, but feel the most secure the things that you can do on command because anytime you're doing it for a camera, you have to wait for the camera guy to get in a position and you're like hanging there. And then they're like, hold on, got changed batteries. And you're like, okay, tick-tock, talk. You know, like, I'm getting pumped. You know, and then they're like, oh, hold on, got to change lenses. And you're like, tick-tock, tick-tock. You know, like, I'm, my arms are tired.

So, you know, it's not like you're exactly reenacting. Like, it's not like it's fake. I was going to say it's not like you're not doing it because you're there. Whatever you're seeing, like you are seeing photos and video of free-soling, but it's normally construed or you're sort of portrayed as like, this is the real thing. And you're like, well, this is actually the day that we had the crew and went back and shot it. Though that's not the case for the film Free Solo, which is like an actual documentary where we did the real thing. And there are a couple other films like that were, like, occasionally it makes more,

sense to shoot the real thing. But most of the time it makes more sense to just go and do it whenever it makes sense for you weather-wise and fitness-wise and conditions-wise and then to go back and shoot whenever it's convenient for the whole crew. This feels like the kind of thing that would make me, I don't get mad, but this feels like that's the kind of thing that would make me mad. Like I get done with something awesome. They're like, hey, you got to do it again because we didn't get a good shot. Well, that's the nature of being a professional, though. Yeah. Because being good at doing the thing just makes you a good climber. Being a good professional climber it means that you can then tie back in and do it again and like get the crew up into position

and like deal you know i mean to me that's like that's the nature of being a professional well the also in in these various movies they'll talk to the camera guys or i've seen documentaries about the guys that we're making the movies and they'll all feel kind of the same way that i feel they'll be like dude like you don't have to do this section or uh can you do that but they don't really want to ask you and they don't feel comfortable asking they don't want to put like it they don't feel good about it either Well, this is, yeah, that's the challenge of shooting any of this kind of stuff, is that the crew doesn't want to be there. You don't want the crew to be there. Everybody feels uncomfortable, depending.

And that's why typically when you're reshooting something, you choose the parts that are the most secure, you know, basically the safest. Because you don't want to traumatize the crew. Like, you don't want to fall on a, you don't want to die on a work day. You know, like, I might be willing to risk death for my personal projects, but I'm not going to risk death to, like, get the, get an ad for a jacket or something. You know, you're like, whatever. I don't know. You know, I'm up there like shooting photos of a chalk bag or whatever. And you're like, yeah, isn't this a great shot?

You're like, no, I'm not going to risk. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, I'm not taking any risk for that stuff. It's wild. I was watching, I was watching you climb the Phoenix, right? And you grab this photographer dude like morning of like, hey, you want to go shoot me? I'm going to go do some climbing. He's like, okay.

And then you repel down into the Phoenix. And then like, hey, can you just haul all my stuff back up? And he has like an image of him pulling up everything, your rack, your harness and everything about your chalk bag. And this dude is, you can see, he's camera shake. His camera. Does this make him not a professional? It's like camera shaking.

It was like freaking. But what was weird about that was like you repelled down. The rope is already on you. It's like a perfect top rope scenario for you to do all your stuff and climb up there. But it's like, no, I'm going to do this. Sometimes you choose the challenge. Yeah, you choose the challenge. But I mean, that's another interesting example, though, because sometimes you film on things because it's more convenient for the experience itself.

Because like if I wanted to free solo the Phoenix, but I didn't have somebody with me, didn't have somebody shooting, let's say. Then it means I would repel down, tie all my stuff to the rope. And the rope would just be kind of dangling behind you. And that would totally compromise the nature of the experience because you know that if you fell off, you could just jump back and try to catch the rope. And maybe you would, maybe you wouldn't. But either way, you would feel like there's a potential. You're one of the few people in the world that like takes comfort in the fact that, well, if I fall, I can. can possibly jump backward and catch a 10 millimeter rope.

Yeah. But I mean, there are stories of people catching ropes like that and, you know, it can't happen. It would require a degree of luck and you'd burn the shit out of yourself. But, but you'd probably, you could potentially survive that way. And so it would just change the nature of the experience. And there are several solas that I've done that I took photos or video on because I wanted somebody there, like actually a different route in you somebody called Cosmic Debris. There's still photos of it. Actually, the guy Mikey, who you mentioned in the excerpt from my book who was shooting the long shot and free solo he um he's a photographer and i've worked in a ton over the years but he i recruited him once to shoot photos of me on this crack

because it's basically a crack to nowhere it just goes up this blank wall and then just ends and so if you were free soloing you just get to the top and be like well no i just have to climb right back down and it's really really hard actually it's the hardest thing that's ever been sold in you somebody grade wise uh like technically and so you know i asked him to basically go up there and like get into position with a rope and his camera ahead of time and then I could just show up whenever I wanted climb it and then when I was done we would just repel down together and you're like oh it just makes the whole experience more doable and you know I probably could have rigged some other way to do it totally alone but it just kind of makes sense to have your buddy there would take a picture yeah this is Mikey in the down in the meadow when you're climbing who's I can't look at the camera he's looking away gosh uh half dome that was like the next obvious thing? Yeah, yeah, basically it was. So Haphton was the next obvious step

because it was bigger and sort of more rad, like more intimidate, like just bigger and more onspiring. But actually it's graded technically easier than Moonlight. So the difficulty grade is technically easier, though the style, as it turns out, is much less secure and sort of more difficult in the way. But basically just felt like the next big thing.

You know, it's only a little bit harder than the Rostrum and Asterman, but it's, but it's like having the two of them stacked on top of each other. It's like really big. 2,000 feet. Yeah. And also, I mean, it's 2,000 feet high, but it's 2,500 feet above the valley floor. So you're like 4,000 feet up above Yosemite. It feels very airy.

No, you're up there. It's pretty mega. Bro, 30 feet. Sounds pretty big to me right now. Yeah. Well, honestly, the difference between like 50 feet and 1,000 feet doesn't start to matter that much because, like, you know, if you fall more than 50 feet or so, you're to die yeah but um i got to go to the book on this one this is so now you're like 1800 feet

up something you're almost the top you have a little bit of a situation we'll say you say you say i climbed into the upper crux feeling good about doing things legit and then i ground to a halt i'd expected to find some sort of different hold or sequence from the one i'd used two days earlier which had felt pretty desperate but perhaps I'd done it wrong this time in the same position on the same holds I realized there were no better options I had a moment of doubt or maybe panic it was hard to tell which although I'd freed the pitch maybe two other times the year before I could remember nothing of the sequence or holds perhaps because there aren't any it's very chromatic writing I'm like oh god

A gigantic old oval carabiner hung from a bolt about two inches above the pathetic ripple that was my right hand hold. I alternated back and forth, chalking up my right hand and then my left, switching feet on marginal smears to shake out my calves. I couldn't make myself commit to the last terrible right foot smear I needed to snag the jug. I'd stalled out in perhaps the most precarious position of the whole route. I considered grabbing the beener with one pole I'd be up and off Taurus oblivious laughter spilled over the lip tons of people were up on top I was in a very private hell I stroked the beaner a few times fighting the urge to grab it but also thinking how foolish it would be to die on a slab sliding and bouncing almost 2,000 feet to my death when I could so easily save myself My calves were slowly getting pumped. I knew I should do something soon since treading water was only wearing me out.

Down climbing never occurred to me. I was going up. It was just a matter of how high one way or another. But now real fear seized me. Once again, I took a deep breath, studied the holds in front of me, and tried to think rationally about what I had to do. Although I never wanted to be on that slab in the first place, I had to find out of finish what I'd started without invalidating my assent. Finally, I compromised. I kept my hand on the

pathetic ripple, but straightened my right index finger just enough for the tip of my last pad to rest on the bottom of the oval. My thought was, if my foot blew, I could snatch the beener with one finger and check my fall. I smeared my foot, stood up and grabbed the jug. No problem. I was delivered free from my little prison where I'd stood silently for a good five minutes and I hadn't cheated by grabbing the beaner I took the final five seven slab to the summit at a near run 20 or more hikers sat on the edge of the prepos Witnessing my final charge But no one said a word no yells no pictures nothing

Maybe they thought I was a lost hiker maybe they couldn't conceive of where I'd come come from or maybe they just didn't give a shit when I mantled onto the actual top I was met with a flood of humanity a hundred odd people spread across the summit plateau tourists ate lunch next to me they made out took scenic photos people everywhere it was so weird yeah so uh half dome you can you can you can hike up half dome like a normal person can hike can can get permits and hike up half dome and they got these cables that you can kind of go up in between so there's normal people up there that was written pre-permaning system oh okay that's why it's funny because i mentioned it's a zoo now it was no no so it used to be a zoo and now with the

permits it's way less zooy yeah because nowadays it's rare to see so many people on top at any given time because the their permits uh-huh but anyway yeah hearing that i was like oh i kind of forget because there've been permits for quite a long time now but yeah back then it was just free-for-all and so the cables would get packed and there'd be so many people on top which is it got slightly dangerous and so they instituted the permitting system. So yeah, and I bet people didn't even like comprehend what it just happened. Like you just show up. They kind of like, oh, it's, yeah, it's funny because when you climb a half dome with a partner in

climbing gear and you have all your gear jangling on your harness as you get over the top, and then when you get over, people are like, oh my God, you know, how many days do you spend on the wall? That's incredible. Like, what do you do? But when you talk about free solo, you know, I don't even have a shirt on. I've got like nothing. I'm just sort of like, ha, you know, people are like, that guy looks psycho.

Like kids don't make eye contact It's like who's that guy? You know it's like a whole different vibe That's that's that moment right there right where you're like kind of not feeling the next move really is what it is And it's if you don't if you've never done any rock climbing what you're doing with your feet I don't think I've ever even felt freaking the way it's supposed to feel like when I've rock climb So what you're doing, Echo Charles, is you, you're taking your foot. You got, like, rock climbing shoes on, but there's very little to, it's not like a step. It's not even like an edge.

It's just, like, smooth. It's like a blank ripple. Yeah, and you're just kind of. I'm looking around the table for something like comparable, like ripple-wise. Just, but it's just. Like this right here. Tiny. No, I was like, I was trying to think about, like, this part of the lens.

Oh, damn. You know what I mean? Like, not on the edge, but like on the part that's just slightly slanted. We're like, oh, if you just, and because climbing shoes are, you know, really tight with, like, a precise edge to them, and they have rubber this, like, stickier than the normal shoe. And so if you just imagine putting your big toe against that ripple and, like, pushing against that and then sort of balancing just right. It's like, it's all. Yeah, but that's what I'm saying that that's a style of climbing that, you know, you can practice and you can prepare for. But no matter how strong you are, it doesn't make it feel any easier.

Yeah. You know, it's like, so it's a tough thing. Like, it's a tough style of free solar. Because no matter, you know, it always feels a little on edge. You're like, what if my foot slips? Yeah, because, I mean, what's the term you use, blow, if your foot blows out? Yeah, if you blow a foot. Like that sometimes happens, right?

Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah, it happens if you wait or wrong. Like, you'd like to think that there's a degree of control to it where, like, you only blow your foot if you're inattentive in how you place it, or if your shoes are old, or if the friction's bad, or if, you know, there's a lot of freaking variables. And so then you're sort of like, well, you know, but it feels random because you're like, oh, I thought it was good, my foot blue. You're like, oh, oops, why must have placed it poorly or something, but, you know, it doesn't help if you're dead.

No. And then, so you get done with this, and again, this is just like your work. You're like, you told your buddy like, hey, I free sold half to, by the way, yesterday, or whatever. And then he posts it somewhere on the interwebs, and then people kind of catch what you're doing. Yeah, I kind of forget how all this stuff played out, because, I mean, so that was in 2008, which feels like a long time ago now and that was like pre-social I don't have a smartphone yet there was no easy way to disseminate information around climbing like that and so you know I did it my friends knew about it at some point you know I like obviously told a few people like the I'd

climbed the wall with a partner two days before with a rope to practice it to you know see if it was doable and so so he knew that I was you know at least toying with the idea I mean he you know he was kind of like oh why are we going up here to practice like obviously he kind of had a sense of it And so I texted him when I was done just so you wouldn't be worried. And, you know, text like the people I was climbing with the next day. It would be like, okay, let's go do, you know, whatever. And I don't really know how it spread from there. But then the next year, we filmed the movie alone on the wall,

which is what you saw in film festivals and things that toured with Real Rock. And it went on the Banff Mountain Film tour thing. So it kind of toured internationally. And so I feel like the real, you know, the half dome free solo sort of became a big thing, sort of a year and a half later. You're already over it. Yeah, by then I'd already done a bunch of other solo. It was a bunch of, you know, been on a couple expeditions.

Yeah, it was like ancient history by then. Dang. And then you had to go back and reenact it. Yeah, yeah. But that's fine because that was just like two days of two days of work on half done basically. Look, like I said, I would make me mad. I'm getting mad for you right now. Apparently it doesn't make you mad at all.

Like, I'm not, well, can you imagine a better place to work? You know, I'm sort of like, oh, I'm going up with three of my good buddies to go can. but one of the most beautiful places in the world and this is what I do for a job. You're like, this is awesome. You know, just and then the part, and so this is the thing that I think people don't, don't totally get and there's a lot of these films like alone on the wall when you're like, that's such crazy free-souling. What you're seeing is the safest and most secure stuff on the whole route.

Like you're not seeing any of the stuff where I actually think I could fall. You're seeing the stuff that, you know, I feel totally comfortable doing on command and weird weather, you know, like, just whatever when the guy tells you that it's time to go, you're like, okay, I can go. So whatever you're seeing is like the chocker, you're like, chill stuff. So just imagine the not chill stuff. In the book, you talk about the fact that that the move that I just read, you're like, you didn't do that again. You didn't reenact that one for the camera. You're like, hell no. Yeah, hell no. Or if I was going to, I mean, I'm sure I could do that again

if I had to, but if I went up there again, I would make some major marks with chalk all over, be like, left foot, right foot, left foot, and like be positive of like, this is exactly how I do it every time. And that's a big part of the difference in my process between the halftime experience and then later free selling L-CAP. Because like that passage you read in the intro with the Boulder problem on L-Cap, that was perfectly executed where I knew exactly what to do.

So I was sort of able to go into autopilot and just do it. Whereas on Haphton, you're up there all self-conscious the whole time being like, is this the right way? Am I, is this the right foot? Should I try a different foot? But that feels even worse.

I should try and even different. You know, it's like you're just doing different stuff and it's like you're panicking. Yeah, well, even when you're climbing Haphton, I read this part, but you like got a little lost and turned around on the route itself, which is a little crazy.

Yeah, it's because I intended to go one way. And then I got up there and I just wasn't feeling that great. And I was sort of like, oh, I knew that there existed an easier way that bypassed one of the cruxes in the middle of the wall. But I'd never actually gone the easier way, but I was like, oh, I'll figure it out. And then it turns out I totally overshot the easy way and did a bunch of stuff that was unfortunate. But that was a whole different experience because then you think you're just lost in the

middle of this 2,000 foot wall. And you're like, holy shit. You know, like you're seeing no signs of human passage. They're like bushes in the cracks. And you're kind of like, you know, am I like totally lost appearance? Yeah, but eventually I found my way back to the route. And eventually if you could sit, you mentioned the book, like, well, I could sit here and wait till some more climbers and yell at him and like get some help if I had to. And then it's the way you described getting helicopter rescued.

It seemed like you would rather die. That's the way. You didn't say that in a book, but it seemed like you would rather die. The deepest of shame. Yeah. I mean, that's the interesting thing with free-selling and Yosemite in particular, because Yosemite is quite popular. I mean, they're tourists, they're climbers, they're folks around.

And so you could always yell for help. You could always just sit down on a little ledge. And that's the thing with free-soling is that if you slip and fall, you're going to die for sure. But if you just suddenly had a change of heart and you're like, you know what, I'm not into this, like I can't do it or something, you could find a little stance here or there. You know, like the slab pitch that I'm describing on a half-dome, it starts off of this little ledge feature sort of half the size of this table, let's say.

So you could just go sit on that little ledge and just sit there carefully for like a day or two and wait for somebody to get you. And in the grand scheme of survival situations, like you'd be fine. You know, you'd shiver through the night and in a day or two someone to collect you and it'd be better than dying. Yeah. It'd be deeply embarrassing and sort of a, you know, it'd be a hard thing to overcome confidence-wise, but you'd be alive and then be fine.

Yeah. And then when you've got this carabiner that you can kind of grab onto, and no one's really watching. And it's like you're either going to die or make it, but I'm going to hold the line. Yeah, but then the whole rest of your life, you'd be like, yeah,

I free solo at half dome mostly sort of, except for that one key move where I skipped the hardest move on the route. You know, it'd be weird because you spend the whole rest of your life being like, oh, this thing that I did that I'm really proud of, almost, but I'm not that proud of.

I'm actually kind of deeply ashamed of, please don't tell anyone. You know, it's like, it's the alternative also big, you spend the rest of your life, which is about five seconds tumbling. I know it'd be terrible. But I know it's just, yeah, it's a predicament though.

Because it's something that you're like, this could be, you know, one of the crowning achievements of your life so far. Or it could be this like deeply embarrassing thing that you don't want to talk to anybody about. You're sort of like, oh, I got an over my head and then it all went sideways. Kind of like, I don't know.

What about El Cenderro luminoso? Do you like that? Echo Charles? How was that? Well, you know, not bad. This one again. Now this one looks like a little tiny freaking holes. This isn't as much as much crack activity, is it?

No, no. But it's a whole horrifying, man. Well, an important distinction is that Sandero is limestone. So it's a different type of rock. So it's like these porous solution pockets. It's all these little holes. And so actually it's way more featured than the Yosemite. Everything we've talked about, so actually not everything.

So several of the things we've talked about so far have been on granite. So it's basically like smooth, blank faces with cracks on them through them. And then Moonlight Butchers is sandstone, but that's also just a pure crack. Cindero is just a whole different thing because limestone is like a different type of rock. It's porous. It has like different types of little nooks and crannies in it. And so I don't know.

I mean, Cinderro though is actually harder than any of the other ones that we've been talking about technically. And it's just kind of bigger and harder. I mean, Cinderra represented a whole different step. And also it was many years later and I was a much better climber. This is now like 2014. Yeah, yeah. I saw Sanderra, though, as part of the lead up to free selling L-CAP. Like there were three routes, basically.

Like, I wanted to sell L-CAP. As soon as I sold it half to them, like in 2008, L-CAP was the obvious next thing. I was like, I should do that because it's the next big. But it just was too hard and too daunting and, like, too far beyond. And so I kind of had three other hard walls that I wanted to do leading up to L-CAP. And Senderra was one of them, and then the other two were never filmed,

or got photos or anything. They're just these two random routes that you haven't heard of. But they're also, one of them I did with almost no prep because I ran out of freaking propane in my van and the drive up into the mountains to get to the place was so heinous and windy

that I was like, there's no way I'm going to drive back to town to get more propane and then drive back up here. I was like, I'm just going to not eat dinner and then climb it tomorrow and then leave for good

because I was like, I don't want to drive there. Where was that? That's in the needles. It's this place in the high Sierra. between Fresno and Bakersfield It's kind of like in the middle of nowhere It's like these really nice granite spires

That are like tucked away in the mountains And it was really hard Yeah it's really hard It's like the same as any of the other ones Yeah it's hard it's like a 10 or 12 pitch 12b But it's really really technical granite Did they film Luminoza live or did you reenact it?

No so they I think there were people there When I did it But this was like pre-documentation filmmaking. I think the filmmakers were uncomfortable. Everybody was kind of like, well, just let you do your thing. And so I actually sold that with a little daybag on because I needed food and water and I needed my shoes so I could hike down off the summit of the mountain. Cinderleuminoza climbs this sort of tower feature. And so normally you climb it and then you

repel the tower with two ropes. But if you don't have a rope, then I scrambled back to the to the wall of the mountain behind it and then continued on to the summit of that mountain. So another like, I don't know, 500 feet or 1,000 feet or something of like kind of bullshit junk. climbing to get to the top of the mountain. And then you can hike down the other side of the mountain on like a normal tourist trail. But so my free solar experience was like a little unusual and I have a little bag on. I've got food and water. I've got supplies, you know, because climbing with a backpack, you know, it's like what,

two or three pounds or something of extra weight, which represents almost nothing in the grand scheme of, you know, as a percentage of mass. And so, but obviously it looks way worse in film. And so they didn't want to shoot like a long shot of me up there with my little daybag, like going to school. You know, so then later when we went back and filmed on it, you're just up there in your t-shirt looking like a hero. God.

And they're like, oh, what a great. What a great shot. You know, like, yeah, it looks way better. Everybody's happy. It's, like, makes a great film. It's freaking psycho to look at. Yeah. Yeah, that one especially, the things, like, so filming on Cendaro,

I don't think I, I didn't do the crux again. I didn't do a couple of things. But the sections that I did do are still 512. They're still, like, sort of elite rock climbing. And they look, I mean, they look, yeah, like, the footage still looks insane. It looks heinous. Yeah.

And there's like a massive wind like it's super windy, which also, you know, I'm just already uncomfortable. And then there's a super strong wind blowing. And I'm like, this does not look cool to me. I mean, it looks awesome to me, but it looks horrifying. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But that's, I mean, that's the nature of filming in mountains. You know, sometimes it's cold.

Sometimes it's windy. It's just like you're in the mountains. Yeah. And so you said as soon as you climbed half down, you were, you knew that L.CAP was going to be somewhere in the future. Yeah. El Cap was always kind of a life dream. for sure. I mean, it's just, I mean, you've seen it. Have you seen it? What? L-CAP. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've been to Yosemite. No, I've never been there, but I've seen it on. Oh, no,

you guys see it in person on me. Oh, yeah, in real life. Yeah, when you see it in real life, I mean, it's just so, it's so mega. It's all inspiring. It's grand. It's vast. It's like, it's everything. You're just like, wow. And so, you know, I was spending maybe three months a year in Newsemody in my van. And, you know, it's like your whole life revolves around El Cap, basically. It's like you drive past every day, you look at it. You're like, that's so epic. So, yeah, I mean, it was always the big goal. Is there, I mean, also like at some point, a journalist had written an outside magazine like a speculative piece, like the race to free soloing all cap. I mean, it was like an obvious

challenge for climbing. Who was in the race? Well, me and, I mean, the guy that wrote the article was sort of speculating between me and Dean Potter. I don't know if you remember him, but he's not deceased, but he was also a very talented free soloist and he was, uh, was bass jumping a lot and had kind of, you know, I sort of fondly called him the dark wizard because he had a lot of sort of dark arts, like, you know, base jumping. And he was just sort of a dark broody soul. Yeah, for sure. But, but he was certainly capable of something like that. You know, he was never quite there, but he certainly, I mean, I know he thought about it. Like, he was, he was interested for sure. So the race was you too. Yeah, or, I mean, or who knows who else?

because I mean, anybody that has free-souled a little and climbing Yosemite has at least thought about it as like a magical, like, wouldn't that be crazy? You know, but it's an obvious possibility. When you are thinking about doing this, what's like the driving thing that's making you want to do this? That would be so cool.

I mean, you know, it's just the obvious challenge. I mean, it's hard to describe how important Yosemite is to climbing his. and climbing culture and you know climbing mythology and then L cap is sort of central to that and there's been so much climbing history written on the walls of Lcap like I mean just the first son of L cap was groundbreaking at the time as the the most difficult biggest big wall in the world and then you know I guess what which was which was a whole like a it's a different it's a totally different thing it's a totally different thing took him 18 months of effort and you know

40 days on the wall and drilling all these bolts it's like a whole process it's almost it was almost like a construction You know in a way. You're just like literally drilling holes into the wall. Yeah, but but crazy because at that point, ropes didn't hold falls. So I mean, that's a big, uh, that's a big thing. I mean, they had ropes and the ropes would help, but if you took a big fall, there's like a legitimate chance the rope would break. Nowadays, that's not a thing. Nowadays, that's a climbing rope, uh, you know, unless something crazy happens that you could fall the whole length of the rope and it's totally fine. And, and the rope absorbs enough force that you won't even be hurt. You're just kind of be like, oh, boingy, you know, like a little bouncy. It's like totally chill. But back then, sort of like, oh, you don't even have a real harness. The rope's not going to catch a fall. It's all pretty adventurous up there. But yeah, so, you know, there's been so much climbing history written on El Cap from the first ascent to the first in a day ascent, to the first free ascent, you know, to like all

these big milestones in climbing have occurred on El Cap. And so it makes sense that as a, you know, mid-20s, like hungry young man, like, looking to do something cool. you're like, oh, that's the place to do it. So you started thinking about that in 2008. And now 2009, 2010, 2012, 14, you know, you're doing these other things and you're just progressively getting better. Can you feel yourself getting better?

Are you getting stronger? Are you just getting more technical? No, it's so slow. I mean, I'm sure, I don't know. I assume that you've been the same with all the sports and things that you do. It's like you improve so slowly that you never really realize how much better you've gotten. Uh-huh. You're just kind of like, I mean, in climbing, you just basically feel like you suck every day.

Because climbing is mostly failing. You know, you're always trying things that are just past your limit and you're always failing. And so every day you mostly fail. And then every once in a while you have experiences of great success where you're like, oh, I did a thing that was hard for me. Like, I'm proud of myself. But mostly you just, it's just the grind, you know? You just go climb and you get worked and you feel tired and, you know. Yeah, it's weird.

In jiu-jitsu in particular, you're like, you're getting so much better, but you don't know it. Like me right now would kill me six months ago or maybe a year ago because when you get better you don't improve quite as much Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course in the beginning, but but you definitely are improving over time and if you ever have someone that like stopped training and you keep training like they're just in a totally different world you can annihilate them Totally So as you're climbing and as you're improving but you can't really perceive that you're improving at what point do you start to contemplate like for real? Oh, this is on the map. Yeah, it's it's it's a Yeah, it's a good question. So, I mean, I think that I could break it down is from, so 2008 I sold a half dome and I'm like, I'm going to solo cap next. And so starting in 2009, it was kind of like, this is the year.

Then I got there and I was like, this is not the year. It's like totally insane. It makes you want to poop when you think about it. You're sort of like, oh, geez, like there's no chance I'm soloing that this year. And then I kept kind of hoping that it would just feel easy at some point that, you know, I kept hoping that I would improve enough that I would look up with the wall and think that that looks easy. like I can just do that. And, you know, so the years roll by. And I am doing harder things and I'm getting better and I'm going on expedition.

You know, I'm doing all these other things that I'm proud of in climbing. But every year, you look up at all cap and still just think that looks totally impossible. And so starting in basically in 2015, I realized that it was never going to look easy. You know, I was like no matter how good I get. Well, I realized two things. One, I realized that I was never going to get good enough that it was just going to look easy. Because I kept kind of thinking that I might just hit certain grades in climbing, like, reach certain difficulty levels

where like if I could climb that grade then it would look easy and I was like that's just one I'm never gonna hit these grades two even if I did it's not gonna look easy it's still cap it's still it's still be insane and so I realized that if I wanted to do it I would have to just put the work specifically

into the climb itself and like basically do all the prep work as if I was going to even though I wasn't sure if I could or not you know sort of act as if I was going to with the uncertainty there of knowing that like maybe I can't but I'll at least do all the prep work find out and that started in 2015 yeah and sort of by happy coincidence um jimmy chin chai vasarelli

the co-directors of free solo approached me that same year uh about doing a feature film project uh they didn't know anything about o cap and you know i kept my cards very close to the chest on that stuff because it's all sort of it's it's weird like you don't really talk to your friends about that stuff but um wait wait why don't you talk to your friends about this stuff because everybody tells you you shouldn't do it. And it makes everybody deeply uncomfortable. And nobody really wants to know about it ahead of time. Like you don't want to put that burden on somebody.

Like, oh, I'm going to go do this thing. I might die tomorrow. You know, it's like it's better than not to know. They feel bad because they didn't, oh, I should have said something. I should have told them this or that. Like I thought he looked sketchy. I should have said something. And you're like, no, it's not on you, you know.

God, I feel that way about like fights. Like I've had friends that have done mixed martial arts fights or where I've been like, man, I shouldn't have let them go. I should have said something. And so yeah, if they died, ooh. Yeah, it'd be like, oh, geez. Yeah, it's just better not do it. But then the other thing about it is that if you tell your buddy, like, I'm going to do this thing tomorrow.

And then you hike up there and you're like, you know, actually it's kind of cold and I just don't feel it today. You know, like for whatever reason, I don't want to do it. But then you're like, oh, but I don't want to have to go back and then tell my buddy that I bailed because then he's going to think I'm like, dude. Even though your buddy doesn't want you to anyway. But you know what I mean? It starts adding all this psychology to it that you just don't need. It's better just to feel like it's totally on you. You go up.

If you're not feeling it, you walk back. There's like no second guessing. The psychology of that. Yeah, that is, that's kind of crazy. You know what's interesting. I've talked about the psychology of in special operations, right? So like my last deployment to Iraq, the special operations guys, which is me, my seals, we kind of got to choose what missions we were going to do.

Like, oh, there's a mission. Oh, there's a bad guy or there's an area we want to go to. It's my decision. I'm literally saying, okay, we will go do this. And the burden that you have from that is like, oh, someone gets hurt or someone gets killed, that was 100% on me. That was your decision. The conventional forces, oftentimes, they're getting told like, hey, you're going to go do this. And so when that leader gets told, hey, you're going to go do this.

They're going to do it. If someone gets hurt or killed, they were just kind of executing. And there's like a different burden and a different psychological burden that you have when you're, depending on what situation you're, in and yeah I could see that the thing like this here you're you're choosing to do it you don't want to have the burden of any other mindset or any other pressure of like well you know Fred's really going to think I'm a week if I don't do this today or whatever they got on even they all got set up for me to do this and then I didn't do it well that's the hard thing with filming is because if there's a whole crew you know like with filming free solo there'd be you know six or eight people involved in like

getting up on the wall, getting to the summit, rappelling into position. And if you get up and you're like, you know, I just didn't sleep that well and I don't really feel it today. But you know the eight of your buddies set their alarm for 3.30 so they could hike to the summit of a mountain and repel in.

You're kind of like, man, I'm doing a big disservice to the team if I don't show up and perform. So then you're sort of like, but then you don't force it either. Because if it's not your day, it's not your day. And you can't force that. Yeah, it's weird in Free Solo. You can see that they're all not wanting to do.

They're not wanting to apply any of that pressure to you whatsoever. Yeah. Gosh. Yeah, because they're all... I mean, they're in a super tough spot because, like, they don't want to pressure me. There's this whole weird mirror mirroring effect with filming, where if you're doing something difficult

and there's a film guy near you filming it, like, you know that they're uncomfortable because, you know, I mean, they're a climber as well. They're watching something that they know is hard and they're like, holy shit, this is kind of intense. And so you want to make it look as effortless as possible. Like, you want to look in control because you don't want to freak out your buddy.

But then you don't want to climb differently because you're like trying to look smooth and in control. And so it's this whole back and forth mirror where you're like, I want to look good so I don't scare them because I know they're scared, but then, you know, it's all bad, basically. But that's why in the passage that you read at the beginning when I do the Boulder problem, when I mentioned that their cameras on the wall, those were both remote operated cameras that they had sort of rigged up as a special

system so that I wouldn't have to deal with having an operator on the wall there. Yeah. Yeah, because you're, trying to mirror for them that you're calm and they're trying to do the same way. Yeah, exactly. Because they don't want to look like, oh my God. Yeah, because if I look over and I see my buddy crying, I'd be like, oh shit. Today is not my day. Like Mikey who's down in the valley, who's filming, he's like turning away and he's just like, can't look at the camera. That would probably make you super uncomfortable if you could have seen that at the time. Super sketched out. I've done,

I've done a lot with Mikey because Mikey has been Jimmy Chin's photo system for a bunch of different things. He's got a poker face for when it's up close. Actually, Well, no, so I've done a couple of shoots with Mikey where he was holding the lights for Jimmy. And he literally just was looking away the entire time. He would hold the light in the correct position. All the settings are correct, but he just, like, wouldn't watch the shoot at all.

He's like, I don't need to see this. He's like, it's pretty funny. But he's an elite climber himself. And I've also been on expeditions with him and stuff. Like, notably, we were together on this trip in Greenland year and a half ago, which was also like a TV expedition thing. And so he's a hard.

Hardcore climber that like knows how all this stuff works, but basically when he's working, you know, when he's filming, he's just like, I don't need to see it like unless I need to watch. I'm not going to. Yeah. That's how he deals with it. Yeah. Yeah, I remember doing this, this crack for Jimmy Chin shot this feature for National Geographic, The Magazine that I was on the cover of actually. There's a photo from from Hafton. But so Mikey was like holding the lights for all these different photos and he just like didn't. just like covered his eyes for the whole shoot. It's like totally crazy. Yeah, I think, I think when you were on Joe Rogan, you were talking about, you know, he's like, how do you do this? How do this? And you're like, for me, it feels like I'm walking down

the sidewalk. That's what you said, like something along those lines. Some things. It's not always quite that solid, but aspire to you anyway. Yeah. And I was like, I try to put that in perspective because you know, we all have little skill sets that we have what we're good at.

And it seems real easy to do that thing. And yet at the same time, even the things that you're good at, sometimes you mess up. So Mikey's probably thinking, could it be the time. Though you rarely mess up the thing you're good at on the day that you're not supposed to mess up. You know what I mean? Like, I think there is a distinction, like when you're on, you're really on. Yeah, and you've, you've likely subconsciously or consciously gotten to a point in your life where you know how to be on. And this, I need to be on right now.

Because again, with fighters, there's some fighters that they look great in practice and they do great in practice. And game time, they don't bring it. They mess up. They make mistakes. They get psyched out. And there's some people that they're the opposite. Like they do okay in training and they're like, man, I don't know if he's always going to do. And they just bring their a game and crush.

And yeah, you probably have done enough things where you're like, oh, yeah, I need to do this right. And also being able to recognize I'm not. I can't do this right now. Now's not the day. Now's not the time. I need to stop. I think that's one of the interesting things that differentiates climbing from a lot of other sports is that, you know, with fighting, you have to show up on the day of the fight and

you have to perform at your best. But with climbing, you show up and you're just like, no, today's not my day. And you come back the next week or you come back the next day. Or, you know, you basically just, you get to choose your timing. And I always think about that with ball sports. You know, when you're like, it's Sunday. I have to play. You're kind of like, what if I don't want to play on?

Sunday. I would have I want to play on Tuesday? You know, it's like, what if my knees still kind of achy and I want to chill for another day? Yeah, it's like with climbing, you can always choose your best day and then you can really make your days count. Yeah, the worst is the Olympics. Oh, dude. It's been four years, eight years or whatever preparation and now you feel like, I got a stomach ache on game day. You're a leg gymnast or whatever. And you got to go out there and do the best. No, four years of periodized training where you've been like doing some crazy cycle up and down for four years and you're like, this is my peak. And you're like, yeah, but actually, I think I ate something weird, you know? My stomach kind of hurts.

Yeah, it's like that's crazy to me. Yeah, I mean climbing is is so chill by that You know, but by that comparison I want the stakes obviously you're like you have to choose your day because you could die yeah I wonder if you've become like hyper sensitive to how you feel just through Whereas like a a wrestler or a gymnast that's just been like no, it doesn't matter how I feel I just need to go perform Whereas you're like you know what today's you probably could rate each of your days and subconsciously like yep today I'm feeling good and it's when when you watch the moment movies and when you write about it in the book you're like you can you know when you're feeling good yeah actually i wonder about that because uh you know i've never done any other sport well enough to really know but i've noticed like with climbing training like actually so during the free solo movie tour um like you know the film came out i was doing this crazy you know six month like press tour like nonstop events and at the

time i had a pretty structured training plan um and i was i was like training in the gym and and it was like the only thing that kept me saying through the whole six months of like in just crazy Hollywood stuff but I noticed that when you know with nonstop travel like different different climbing jam in a different city every day sort of thing and my climbing performance was pretty erratic depending on sleep and whatever but when I would do the extra things like weighted pull-ups and like weight sort of things my numbers are pretty consistently good that you know no matter how tired you are you can still just like lift a heavy-ass weight maybe not like absolute peak performance but in general you can kind of hit your gym numbers.

But my climbing performance was all over the place because, and as I found out from the coach I was working with, I think it has more to do with the, let's see, can I repeat it correctly? Basically just that there's a coordination element to it. Like, you know, firing your muscles at the right time. Because climbing is such a complicated movement. It's not just like, flex your muscles. It's like so many different muscles working in concert. And like basically it's really complicated.

The more tired you are, like that stuff just doesn't fire the same way. And so as a climber, all that to say that I think as a climber, you are very attuned to like how your body feels. And as a climber, when you get injuries, they're all on your fingers and like little tiny where you're like, oh, I feel a tiny, tiny little tweak in my finger. And it's like you look at the NFL or something and people have like a broken femur and they're like getting taped up and going back in. Yeah, they're taking like six Vicodin's and getting a bunch of tape and they're like finishing

the game. And you're like, holy shit. Because as a climber, you're like, I think my one knuckle is like a little swollen. I just can't quite hold that hold quite right. You're like, I got to take a rest week. You know, it's like, and it makes you feel super light duty compared to other sports. Because, like, you know, people are training through like the craziest things. But it just, it just doesn't work that way.

You just can't. Especially not when you're freaking life's at stake. Yeah. And you're not, if you're not free soloing, you're probably not as, I mean, I've assumed not as concerned. Like if you're just going to do a normal rock climb and you're not. feeling that great. You're like, oh, okay, my knuckles is a little sore, but I'll power through it. It's no big deal. Yeah, though actually, even that, you often don't power through because your fingers are so delicate, basically, like, basically the tools of the trade are so delicate. It'd be like a pianist, you know,

like if they start to feel like some pain in their fingers, they're like, ooh, I should probably ease off that because I just won't be able to do my thing. If, like, you know, basically any kind of pain tendons, ligaments in your arms or fingers, you're pretty, pretty mindful of because if they get out of control like you're kind of hosed for a while like if if you injure a finger you're like out for a while i'm gonna show you later some picture of some jiu jitsu people's hands and fingers oh all broken and like twisted crazy because especially people that compete with the uniform on with the geon the jit to key everything is grabbing and squeezing and like it's guys hands look so gnarly the meow brothers you've seen their their hands like it's famous pictures of just hands that every knuckle is like

Lowland, it's, it's, it's crazy. But their life doesn't depend on being able to hang on. They'll make adjustments. Though they do get all messed up, don't they? It's like life doesn't depend on, but they're getting punched in the face or something, aren't there? Yeah, and well, and when you get into mixed martial arts, yeah. In jiu-jitsu, there's no punching.

There's just like choking and breaking arms and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, just a broken arm. It's a little more mellow. So this is all that, actually, though, so that's another thing that I think differentiates climbing from a lot of these other sports is that with climbing, it's like, yes, the stakes are very high that you could die. I mean, with free-soling, you could die. But, you know, I've gone, I've been a climber for 28 years,

and I've had, like, almost no injuries. And I feel like a lot of these other sports, you know, it's like, you're getting kind of messed up all the time. I think about that with outdoor sports, like, mountain biking, where it's like, if you're a serious mountain biker, like, you're breaking a collarbone, like, every couple years. You know, it's like, you're getting injured all the time. Yeah.

And if you're a professional mountain biker, like, you're having a major surgery, like, every four years, for sure. Like, mountain biking is, when I watch mountain biking, I'm just uncomfortable. Yeah, it's great. But so with climbing, it's like, you're not going to have any of those injuries, your whole career, but you're always facing that risk of death. And to me, I kind of prefer it that way, where it's like, yeah, the consequences are there. You have to stay attentive.

You're like, you could die, but at least you're not freaking getting shoulder surgery every couple years. And like, you know, I'm like, man, I don't know. I think it's a nice way to live. Dude, those mountain bikers go after it, too. like the downhill mountain bikers that are just bombing. And when you wipe out with a bike, I mean,

that just adds this whole freaking apparatus into your wipeout that just sucks. I mean, if you fell and you were rock climbing and you fell, even if you were roped up, but you had, you were holding a bicycle with you. You have the bicycle tied to you

and it's just swinging past with you fall. It's freaking awful. It's like when you fall at ice climbing and you have like pointy things on every, you know, you have crampons on, you have ice tools, you have like all these,

pointy things swinging around and you're like oh my god yeah trying to stay clear of everything yeah the ice climbing you know they sell ski poles and they have like little ice climbing yeah whip it's yeah the little point on the yeah and you're like well what if I fall yeah because when you fall skiing you're just it's just a disaster right it just everything's everywhere well those are for a very specific application like extreme steep skiing where you have to self-arrest and stuff but no for the average person on the slope they should not have a freaking ice stool on the end of their ski pole like Jack noted. No, if you're just out at the resort,

you should not have a spike on the annual ski pool. It's like some poor snowboarder hits you at full speed and it dies. And it goes through their helmet. Well, everything that we're talking about, though, it actually plays out in free solo because you're all, what is it, 2017? You're all in the run up going through all the drills, doing all the prep.

And you go, you go, you go and you start the climb and you get what 500 feet up and you're not feeling it and you walk away. Yeah, actually, so it's funny you read that excerpt from half-dome because actually did exactly what we were describing on halftone. I got, yeah, 500 feet up basically to the free blast labs to this like blank section of rock.

And there are bolts in the rock so that people climb with ropes can clip the rope in. And so I got up there and there are no handholds and I was like, I'm not feeling it started just grabbing the bolts. And so you're still climbing without a rope. You know, you're still 500 feet up. Yeah, still 500 feet up. It's like if you fall, you're still going to die. But by holding the bolts, it makes the difficulty much, much easier because you suddenly have things to hold that keep you balanced and it's like way more chill. And so, you know, I cheated by using the bolts, got

across the slab and then cheated a bit further and then and then climbed another 400 feet of easy terrain to get up to this big ledge system where they're fixed lines that go back down to the ground from there. And that's like a normal aspect. Like that's part of L-Cap that everybody uses that all climbers use. And so, yeah, it's funny. It's not like I climb 500 feet. And I was like, cool, I want to go down. You know, I still had to go up another 500 feet to get to the weight that you can get down.

But I just, like, cheated the way I was thinking about cheating on halftone. It's just, like, a way to escape the wall. Free blast, the way it looks, it's basically a few hundred feet of what we were talking about earlier where you just don't get the full security. Yeah, yeah, it's just totally blank. I mean, so the crux moves of the free blast lab, like the hardest section. there are actually no handholds at all and it's just this three foot move sequence where you're just standing on your big toes and if your foot slips you're going to die but you know it's low angle so it's like

it's less than vertical and it's like just tiptoeing across a wall which is balanced in your big toes like but so and that's why I bailed because I'd sprained my ankle earlier that season in a climbing fall and my foot had been kind of swollen and I was kind of swollen in the shoe and and also that time of year it was early November. It's just really cold out and dark. And you're required to climb that early because you're trying to get to some of the upper stuff before it goes into the sun. Whereas in the springtime, because the sun is higher in the sky, the wall shades itself longer. And so you have better conditions for a longer amount of time. But in the fall, because the sun is so low, like as soon as the sunrises, you're just baking. So it means you have to start way before sunrise. So anyway, it's like

basically conditions felt a little bit stacked against me and I couldn't feel my feet. And it was kind of chilly. And then And then suddenly you have to trust your life to this big toe. And you're like, I can't feel my big toe. And it's freaking dark and it's scary. You're like, no, at this. Like, this is not my thing. At the time, though, it was very disappointing. I felt like a total failure.

You know, we were just like, oh, the whole team is up here and I let them down. I really wanted to do this thing. Though it's funny because now in retrospect, I'm glad I bailed because then I went home and I did a bunch of PT in my ankle, trained all season, came back the next spring, spent two more months working specifically on the route. And then when I finally did it, it felt like a total boss and it was great. You know, so like, you know, it's the classic thing where where what feels like a failure

at the moment, you know, in hindsight, you're like, oh, it only took me six more months of effort and it wound up being a much better experience in the long run. So I'm kind of like, you know, what's six months of effort when compared to like a, compared to like the thing you were going to be most proud of your whole life probably. And the confidence level after you work an extra six months is just going to be that much higher. And actually, and it was good for. for me and the film crew to have a bit of a dry run. Because actually that was the first time.

And this sounds stupid, but just hiking up to the base L cap with no rope is a bit of a big mental step. And so just having done it once before, you're like, okay, well, at least I remember what it's like to walk up to the wall and just put on my shoes, tie my shoes, and start climbing. Because it's really different than the normal routine, which is laying out the rope, getting all your gear ready, like talking to your partner. You know, it's like normally there's a whole process before you start climbing

all cap. And when you go there to free solo, you're like, oh, this, This feels different. You know, it feels a little heavier. You use the term autopilot when you're talking about some of those really hard moves. And even when you're talking about just like you'll get into a mode where you're just autopilot, you just know what you're doing and you do it. Is that what you're striving for during training?

Not so much during training. That's what I aspire to during performance for sure. I mean, though actually, now that you mentioned, I'm like, maybe it would be better if I was a little more like that in training. but for me it's really hard to access that 100% effort like you know that's that's like flow state that's like out of body experiences whatever you want to call it you know and I think that's true across all kinds of sort of elite sports performance but I think it's pretty hard to tap into that 100% like I'm giving it everything I have and I mean it's probably possible for me to do that while training on the board or something you know like I have a little gym in my garage and I train

but man it's hard to care that much like when you're in the garage You know, your friends are there, you're listening to music. You know, it's all pretty chill. And like you try your hardest, but on sort of a superficial level, like, oh, I'm trying hard. You're not like trying the hardest you've ever tried in your life. It's funny when people are going to compete in jujitsu, then they've never competed before. They're like, oh, what should I get ready for? I'm like, you get ready for someone to be going harder than anyone has ever gone at you before.

And for you to be using muscles in a way that you've never used them before. So what you're saying is actually 100% right. You get into competition and people are going completely insane psycho and where, you know, if you and I are training and like you start to get a position on me, oh, cool, I'll abandon that. Go to something else. No. If we're in a match, like I am never going to abandon anything until you break me. And it's such a different. Yeah.

It's a death match. And so it is very hard to push someone that hard in training. In fact, from... And you probably shouldn't because you get injured. Right. Yeah, for sure. It's like the stakes are too high that way. For sure.

Because like that's the things you don't really want to train with that kind of intensity because, you know, I know that I mean, you'll burn out, you'll get injured. It's just a lot. Like you can't, like, not every game can be the Super Bowl, you know, or whatever. Whatever sports metaphor you want, but... Are you going autopilot like when it's like, okay, this is kind of an easy area and I'm just kind of autopilot through this. I don't have to think about it too much.

much and then are there areas where you're like I need to pay attention to what I'm doing right now no okay so actually that's it that's an interesting question in some ways it's almost like two different autopilets because yeah you're right that on the easy terrain there is you know I go into autopilot but that's more like a mindless climbing because on easy terrain and in l cap the free sole of l cap kind of breaks down is like a third easy a third like medium and a third like hard cutting edge sort of and so the easy terrain you know you can like think about your buddies you can think about what you're having for lunch, you look at the weather, you look at the birds. It's like it's lovely. And you can just kind of trust your body, just climb because it's quite easy. And then

the moderate terrain, you can do a lot of that mindlessly as well. But typically on the moderate pitches, there'll be at least some sections where you have to like pay attention. But then on the hardest stuff, I sort of aspire to a different kind of autopilot where it's not like mindless climbing. It's more like perfect, thoughtless climbing. You know what I mean? I don't know. It's a hard distinction to make. But that's kind of the good autopilot. where you're performing perfectly, but you're just not distracted by anything else. Yeah.

Yeah. The idea of thinking about when you're walking down the stairs or up the stairs, I think is it you that use that example, Echo Charles, like if you, you can walk up the down stairs like a hundred times, but if you think about while you're walking up the stairs, you're more apt to like trip up yourself.

Yeah, fall down. Or it happens to people when they're speaking, where they're trying to speak in a certain way so they're thinking about what they're saying and it jams them up and they're stuttering and making mistakes and all that. Whereas you know what you're going to say, you've done this bunch of times.

You need to not think about it and just do it. I mean, again, any sports like that, if you're on the free throw line in basketball with the state championship on the line. You don't want to think about the mechanics that your free throw. That's not the time to be like, okay, straight back and bent arms.

And you know, it's like you just want to do the thing that you're there to do. Exactly. And that's the autopilot. Yeah, that's the good autopilot. We're talking about. Do what you know how to do. You do whatever you've done in practice a million times and you don't think about it.

Just do it. Monkey mind. Yeah, actually, I think about it a lot for, I thought that a good analogy for the climbing, for like the bolder problem, let's say, on Nal Cap. I compare it to gymnastics because I think that a gymnastics routine, it's like you practice the routine over and over and over. But then once you're doing the routine, I mean, I don't know gymnastics at all. But I imagine that elite gymnasts aren't thinking about the routine at all when they're doing it

because it's such complicated movement. and it's so fast that they're just executing. And then afterward, they can sort of replay it and think like, oh, I should have done something differently or not. But while they do it, I presume that they're just doing it. You know, they're not, they're not self-conscious about it at all. They're just performing. And I would venture to guess that if they start thinking about the routine,

it's going to freaking land on the face. It's going to be a problem. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, like halfway through your back and spring or whatever. You can't be like, am I tucked right? Like, no, you just, you just do it. I had a thing so in the military there's something called no go criteria no go criteria means we're not going so oh we were expected that we would have

aircraft to support our movement to the target we don't have the aircraft that's no go criteria we're not going totally we don't have whatever resupply that we're expecting so therefore we're not going or it's like 50 mile an hour winds and we just can't jump in or do whatever yeah so we have no go criteria so I used to joke around Kind of joking, but also kind of serious. That for me, I had go-go criteria, which is we're going, right? This was like my attitude, like, we're going. And that was sort of just to get over, oh, there's been a little hiccup.

Hey, listen, guys, we're going. But then there was also this thing of, hey, we didn't get the aircraft. We got some other intel now. Oh, the supply, resupply that we expected isn't it? Like things would start to add up. And I felt as if sort of like the universe. was telling me yeah that this is not your day this is not the day yeah and I had no problem being like oh yeah there's three things that are gone wrong we're not doing

this yeah and I think that it's important to know that sometimes you got to push and sometimes you got to pay attention to what the universe is trying to tell you totally what's happening no I totally agree otherwise yeah issues you want to you never want to be like duty you don't to like give up to you don't want to give up prematurely that said There's certain times where you just shouldn't be doing the thing. You know, like, yeah, it starts to rain. You're like, it's not my day.

I'm like, that's fine. That's, that's nature. Both in reading the book and then watching, I've watched a bunch of movies with you in it, obviously over the last couple weeks. But when you're going, it's real obvious. Like, just the way you carry yourself, when you're going, it's like, oh, yeah, he, you could see.

When you're getting out of bed, you're like, oh, yeah, he's going. And you can, it's pretty clear that you're amped and hyped. And there's probably not much that would turn you away from. making this happen. Yeah, I mean, it takes, I mean, yeah, for me personally, it's like hard to totally turn on. And then once you're like on and doing it, it's sort of hard to turn back off to you. Like once you're psyched, you're like, okay, it's go time. I'm doing it.

And then, I mean, basically exactly what you're describing like, you know, your go-go. You're kind of like, then it takes a lot to switch back to no-go. But I don't know. I mean, yeah, free-soling is just an interesting. And I think it's important for anyone listening to this who doesn't climb. There's an important distinction here between free-soling and climbing. general because you know everything we're talking about with like elite performance and like all this go I mean this is for free soloing the most cutting edge things that I've done in my life

but in general for climbing I just go climb every day or five days a week you know it's like if it's raining if it's windy you're like yeah it's fine I mean if you have a rope you have protection it's worth climbing in adverse conditions it's worth sort of pushing into discomfort just because you know it's good for you in the long term and or whatever it's just a beautiful day to go out and do some climbing you know it's not like all climbing is extreme but we're just talking about the most cutting edge free sewing. Yeah. There's definitely, if you're just listening to this and it sounds interesting,

but you don't want to die. Go to go to the gym. Go to a climbing gym. I mean, I started to climbing gym. Everybody goes to a climbing gym. Normally climbing is super chill, super safe, really fun and social. You hang out with your friends on a sofa. You all boulder a little bit.

It's like it's really quite enjoyable. I think if this is your first introduction of climbing, you're getting a very like sort of the wrong look at like the most intense, most hard for. Yeah. This is not like climbing for me, I think of, yeah, I think of going to the, going to the gym, but also even at Yosemite. Cool. We would go up with my kids who would be, you know, six, nine and whatever, and they'd be

scrambling up the rocks and be roped in and be, like, it's really fun. And there's little problems to figure out. And they get to learn the ropes and everything. So, yeah, there's a whole. It's fun. It's safe. They're normally a lot of snacks involved, a lot of chill time. It's like, it's a pretty recreational sport, really.

You know, I mean, when I started climbing when I was 10, my dad would take my son. sister and me to the climbing gym. And he wasn't a climber, but they just read about it opening in the newspaper. And they're like, oh, this would be cool because I love climbing on stuff. So I thought I liked the gym. And yeah, we would go for several hours. There would be snacks. You know, we would take our time.

We would top ropes and things. Everyone would have a good time. And then we'd go home. It's like total suburban fun. It's like going to do laser tag or something, you know? So I think that when we're talking about like extreme free zoling, you know, it sort of belies the fun of of climbing. And that's it.

I mean, even though I've, you know, I guess made a career out of doing this extreme free soloing, whatever, I'm still going, climbing normally, what, like 300 days a year. And then I have one or two, you know, extreme high performance days, which I think is probably similar to most other sports where you spend most of year training and practicing and doing whatever else. And then you have the occasional moments of hopeful excellence, where you, like, try your best to do the thing that you're trying to do. We definitely hope for excellence when you're out there.

Yeah, but you just never quite. Well, but I mean, I'm sure with fights and stuff where it's like you train the whole year and then you have your one fight where you're like this is my moment and you like hope that you're going to do your best, but you know, but you find out. It's like the one time of year that you test yourself against your training. The getting to the top of L cap now you're the I mean like you said, this is the the most iconic wall and now you just knocked the shit out of the park. How long did it take for that to sink in? A little bit. I don't know. I mean, well, you know, the crew, my friends were all psyched. I was psyched. I mean, we were really psyched immediately. So this is an example of being a professional.

So I summoned it all cap. I was obviously psyched. We did some interviews and things. I actually trained that afternoon because I was on this like routine. I didn't want to break the routine. It's funny because I summoned it and I felt so good. I was like, I could do it again. I'm so amped.

I feel like a champion, you know? And then I went down and tried to do my normal afternoon training on the hangboard. And I was objectively very tired and, like, didn't perform that well on the board. And I was sort of like, maybe I shouldn't try to get it. I am a little tired. You know, it's the classic. You're just so psyched. You're like, I can do anything.

And then you actually start training. And you're like, I couldn't do anything right now. I'm pretty tired. How little pizza. Yeah, exactly. No, actually, by sheer happy coincidence, the next day, or maybe the day after was Sunday. And you know, they do a crazy brunch spread at the Yawani, which is like the fancy hotel. and none of us were staying there,

but they do this insane brunch that you can show up for. And I didn't eat in dessert in like six months or something, and then we all went to the Ywani had like, you know, Nutella French toast. And like we all just did the all you can eat brunch

and just gorged on like eggs and pancakes and, you know, whatever. It was like a perfect sort of decompression, like party after. Because I mean, the crew was also incredibly stressed all the filmmakers and we all had been working very hard at it. Yeah, that must have been one of the biggest all-time collective size of release.

Yeah, totally, totally. But no, so what I was going to say, though, is that this is where being a professional comes in. So I did the climb. We all gorged at the buffet. And then I think I spent the next five days in a row up on L-Cap filming. So, I mean, it was like, did the climb. It was like, this is a life achievement. And then we spent five more days out there, like shooting close-ups of things,

shooting, like moving ropes around, like shooting. You know, because if you watch it. Like the little handholds. Yeah, exactly. All the little handholds that get cut in, like the little footholes, the close-ups of things. Even some of the soling, like, we shot some of the still. photos because there was an article on National Geographic magazine. They shot

like a VR like a 360 thing just like things that accompanied the film. Basically we did all the other stuff. Oh and like you know in the film there's an aerial shot of me summiting but it's illegal to fly a helicopter in Newsemit and they went all the way to the head of the park service in Washington DC trying to get permission to fly

drone. Never got permission. It's illegal to use drones in the park which is great which I think is an appropriate rule. But in this case but so in this case though it would have been a lot better to fly drone. but so as it turns out the legal flight ceiling for Yosemite is either one or two thousand feet above the rim

of the valley and L-Cap is the rim of the valley so basically using a Cineflex like a giant long lens in a helicopter a thousand feet above L-CAP they were able to shoot it like normal and it's technically legal but very much outside the like we kind of knew that that was well I had nothing to do with this like

you know but the the crew kind of knew that that would burn some bridges at the park because that's very much outside the scope of of what you're supposed to do in a national park as it should be but you know they tried every other way and they were like we need aerial footage and so basically the very last thing we did we did five more days of filming we did whatever and then i resold the last 600 feet um like two or three times in a row for the helicopter as like our last thing and then we all like wrapped and then we all fled the park

but again this makes me super mad dude this every time i hear you about you reenacting stuff and it makes me mad and get frustrated i get mad like dude i can't I cannot imagine being like, hey, Brooke, can you just get that one more time? Yeah, totally. Hold on. Take off your harness and get it again. Oh, talk about a burden. Yeah, so I did some of the posing.

So, like, I don't want to give the wrong idea that, like, the film is faked or posed or anything because it's not. I mean, they have a long shot of me doing the entire climb and it's all. But then we went back and reshot some of the sections or reshot stills. So some of the things I did that when we were back posing, I had like a little tiny, like a belt basically underneath my pants. And so for a couple of the shots, I had a rope going down my pant leg

and then like in a big loop of slack going out of the frame. And so then you could do like a bunch of stuff and still be, you could still be attached. But with this sort of catastrophe system where if you fell, it would rip your pants off

and you'd get caught by basically like a seatbelt or on your waist. And so like you would survive but it would be catastrophic. You know, like your pants would tear off. Like everything would be bad. And you'd be like, ow.

You know, it'd be super painful. But you wouldn't die at least. But so there were a couple sections of the route that I did you know, like six times in a row over and over with this giant like death loop of slackout. I'm kind of like, like this isn't that much less scary than just solar.

You know, I was like, this is kind of extreme. Were you miced up on the real one? For, from the Boulder up or something, basically at a certain point I put on a mic. Like when I pass on the crew somewhere. So I actually was listening to music off my phone for a lot of it because that's like, I like to do that when I'm sulling, but you can't really do that when you're miced

because they're not going to license a bunch of like, 90s metal and stuff. And so he licensed a bunch of tool like you know, Metallica. Because you're breathing and the boulder problem. You can hear yeah, that I forget if I was miced for the boulder or not.

Well, whatever they did, it definitely adds the hype. But I was also miced for tons of other climbs. So they have tons of audio of me just trying hard climbing. It's like who knows like what it's from. But yeah, I was mic for part of it. But part of it I wasn't miced for it because I kind of didn't want the,

Like I didn't want to wait you know like you have a like a transmitter on you the whole time like you have extra stuff You feel the cable on you It's just like another thing that you're sort of like I just don't want like don't feel like I got caught up in a cable You know and Jimmy Jim Moore wasn't like quipping a diva dude Yeah, totally No I mean they're you know that's the hard thing is that They didn't want to compromise the climate experience He seemed like he seemed like you know

He handled it as good as a human being could handle Yeah he certainly did it You do what you got to do. I mean, he's a climber, and he totally understands the, you know, he doesn't want to compromise my climbing experience. He also wants to make a great film, and he doesn't want to compromise the ethics of it all, you know, wants it to be real. I mean, yeah, it's super hard.

It's a hard film to make. I mean, you know, so they actually kept me incredibly well insulated from the, like, most of what I know about the filmmaking process I sort of learned afterward during the tour because we were all doing events together and, like, talking about the cinematography. and talking about all the stuff. You know, that was all just sort of the Hollywood tour. But during the process, they kept me incredibly well insulated from the whole production side of it.

So I would stay in my van by myself. Production would all be in a rented house, like, doing their own thing. And, you know, they're up until, like, midnight dumping footage and erasing cards and, like, changing lenses and packing bags and doing all the stuff. And they're, like, working. And then getting up at, like, freaking three to hike up the mountain and repel in. And meanwhile, I'm just, like, chilling in my van. You know, just, like, doing my thing.

But that's kind of how it had to be because it had to be the real, you know, like I had to just be working on my climbing project and they just had to be documenting. But, yeah, I mean, it's a crazy. It was a whole crazy process. So going back to like when did it set in that you, you, I mean, obviously you understand the freaking, the gravity of the situation of you making it. But then you make it, is it still like, how long? it take before you're like damn I I'm kind of like I'm kind of legendary right now I'm kind of a legend right now well so in the climbing scene you kind of knew immediately like this is a big deal for climbing but you know nobody could have guessed that the film so the film wasn't released

until 2018 the next year and then even then the film is released but you know it's a it's a documentary about rock climbing like who knows how that's going to do but then did really well at film festivals and then it did then a theatrical release was better than expected and then it went bigger than expected, and then it went to IMAX, and then it freaking won an Oscar. And so the whole, you know, it kind of snowballed, basically. And by the time we won at the Oscars,

you're sort of like, this might be kind of a thing. You're like, holy shit. Like, this is really taken off. But, you know, but before that, I mean, whoever would have guessed that climbing would be so mainstream like that. You know, it's like you just, I mean, there was no real precedent for that. I mean, there's, yeah, nothing.

Yeah, I never would have guessed. Did you, how about like financially? Did your financial world change dramatically or was it a slow build? I would say it changed dramatically after the film. I mean, it's hard to say in one way it didn't change at all because I was already, I already was making what I needed and I was already doing exactly what I wanted. So in terms of lifestyle, like nothing changed at all. But in terms of, you know, financial security and freedom and taking care of the family,

yeah, it's totally insane. Because like corporate speaking, I'm sure you know all that kind of stuff, like making appearances and giving talks and like doing public things. I mean, once you're like, you're the guy from the movie, you know, you're like, yeah, cool, you can go give talks about being the guy in the movie. I mean, like, man, there's been a lot of, you know, a lot of like CEO kind of folks that are like, oh, yeah, you're the guy that freestyle in Yellowstone. And you're like, oh, man.

You're like, but you're like, yeah, yeah, no, I'm the freestyle guy in Yellowstone, the place with the geysers, you know, it's cool. Yeah, yeah, have you been there with Buffalo? It's nice. Like big herds, big herds of Buffalo. When was it that you did the speed record? That was 2018, 2019? It was like the next year.

Oh, it was the next year. Okay. Yeah, I think so. There's like a competitive drive. You're a mellow dude, but there's obviously like a little thread of competitiveness that walks through you. Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you also part of it is if you think that you can do something that other people

can't do, it's almost like an obligation that, you know, you have to do it, no? I mean to me I do feel that a little bit with climbing history climbing whatever It's like there are certain things that I feel like I'm better suited for and and just frankly better at than than than some others in climbing I'm sort of like oh I feel an obligation do the things that I'm able to do How much of it is just you got the perfect genetic makeup for this? Let me give you an example Some people are really explosive right they got like Explosive like they're meant for wrestling right they're just super explosive some people have really

What is it slow twitch muscles and they're really good at endurance I'm really weird have you ever heard a medium twitch muscle? Hmm Well it's like it's a newer thing. Yeah, it's in between that's kind of what I have I was never like a the fastest sprinter and I wasn't The best at the endurance but what I would do really good is put on a rucksack with weight in it and be able to go like pretty much indefinitely Bill for the freaking arms and arms service. Yeah, yeah. No, like, legitimately like that's and I was about to say the army and then I was like, fuck.

I don't want to get stabbed with one of these knives. I was like, fuck the Navy. And then like, uh, I don't need to sleep a lot. Uh, so for the job that I went into is like, oh, this is. You found your calling. Yeah. It was so nice to like be able to have some of the things like if you need to sleep all the time and you're in the military, much less the seal teams like it's going to be a lot harder on you. Whereas if it's.

not that big of a deal then cool so you know you mentioned earlier like oh there's people that are better at this part of this type of climbing and that other type of climbing and this other type of climbing whereas you're the type of climbing like you're going to go 3,000 feet no rope like that's what you're doing do you feel like you're the like your genetics are built for that I don't know I mean what what you know what genetics make you good so I think that if I have any natural gift for climbing. I think it's actually just more of a like my psych, my desire for, my love of it. Because I mean, I don't really have any physical gifts. You know, nobody in my family is an athlete. Like nobody's, nobody's gifted in any way. You know, I was never winning competitions. I was

never, I was never great in that way. But what I've always had is I just love freaking climbing. You know, like, and I've loved climbing enough for almost 30 years now that I've been willing to do it five or six days a week. Like a couple of my friends have said, I would never make this claim for sure, but a few of my friends have sort of are, and it could be true that I've maybe done more climbing than almost anybody else on earth because I favor these big endurancey sort of things. Like I like doing a lot of climbing, and I've been doing that nonstop for, you know, 20 or 30 years now. You know, I'm like, that is a lot of freaking climbing. And as it turns out, I think that type of mileage, like that volume is maybe one of the most important things for free soloing.

because in order to free solo, and it might not be necessary. I'm sure other people could take a different path to success as a solist. But for me, it's hard to free solo without feeling confident on rock, and it's hard to build confidence on rock without just a ton of time on rock,

like feeling consistent, feeling, you know, just feeling at home in vertical terrain. And so I think that having that passion for climbing has probably been the most important thing for me. It's like being willing to practice all the time for many, many years. Yeah, I was watching your masterclass.

And one of the things in your master class, you're talking about your half crimp is weak or it was weak. And you identified that. It's much better than it used to be. And what was funny was I was thinking about my entire climbing career of being a total loser or climbing, but you're like, yeah, I was weak at this. And I was like, that's the way everything felt to me when I'm trying, climbing.

I'd be like, no, this is all horrible. So you have a weakness. What did you do about it? Oh, well, yeah, I trained it. It's gotten better over time. I mean, basically certain grips, like, I mean, this is like way too niche for a mainstream audience, but basically there's certain types of ways that you hold your hand that I used to be, I used to think that there was like something about particular types of holds that just forced my hand open.

You know, I was like, there's something wrong with that hold. But then come to find out, it was that there's something wrong with my hand, you know, that it's just really weak. I was like, oh, that's too bad. You know, it just turns out that it's not the shape of the hold is that I'm very weak in this kind of in-between grip. And so, but that in-between grip is what you typically use on a hand-and-a-hand. board like on a training tool and I've now trained more consistently for for many years which is funny because I guess it's been like at least five or six years now that I've been like

training more and and I am much stronger in that position now and so like that type of hold now feels totally normal to me where I'm like oh it turns out there's nothing wrong with the rock I just had to get my fingers a little stronger there's another good quote that masterclass and it's actually both you and Tommy kind of say it together or one of you starts at the other But you guys talk about like one of the one of the benefits of climbing is being quote spiritually uplifted in the midst of complete disaster and physical hardship. And it's like that right there is such a good thing for humans, right? To go through hard things.

And to come out of them uplifted because sometimes they're hard things that just break you down and then leave you sort of traumatized. And that's, I mean, Tommy and I actually talk about this a lot. Tommy just spent a couple weeks for their kids' school vacation at our place in Vegas. And so I've been climbing with them last couple weeks and playing with the family. And it's like all been great playing with the kids. But we talk a lot about the idea of sort of elective hardship is what he likes to phrase it.

But, you know, having the sort of luxury to be able to choose to do hard things. Because, you know, if hard things are being forced upon you, it's like not necessarily the best growth opportunity. But if you're in a comfortable enough place in life that you can choose to do hard things, you know, on occasion, things that push you outside your covers, those that, things that challenge you in the right ways, then yeah, those can be some of the biggest growth experiences of your life, I guess. But, but, you know, it's all about the right challenges. Yeah, and how often do the elective challenges become unelective challenges

halfway through, right? I mean, that happens. Yeah. I mean, I have a, like a bit of a family joke sort of that all my rest day hikes always wind up in some sort of unplanned scramble. you know, there's always like ropeless climbing at the end of one of my hikes. Because like, you know, and it's not always true, but it does seem to happen that my rest day hikes, you know, where I'm like, I'm going to go check out this other place or like,

look at this thing and they almost always wind up with like, oh, and then I had to climb over this thing or, you know, and then like, you know, I once descended, I live outside of Las Vegas. Have you, have you climbed to Vegas ever? No. You never been there? Like, Red Rock Canyon is like this big famous. They're basically the 3,000 foot sandstone walls like just outside of town. I have been to Red Rock and but I've climbed there.

Yeah, it's really pretty. It's beautiful. It's a destination. But so those big mountains have like canyneering routes and pretty technical descents off some of them, like full on like what you imagine Utah slot canyons where you do, you know, 15 repels and like swim through pools of water and stuff. Anyway, so some of my rest of hikes have ended in canyons and things like that by accident. We were like, oh, I was hiking and I was out of food and water and I was just trying to get back to the car.

And then I had to downclown 15 repels and then and then climb across these pools and stuff because I don't want to swim because you're like in the middle. You're like, this is crazy. But yeah, but that's the kind of elective challenge that you're like. Like, you know, yeah, you often get in over your head and it becomes more than you expect. But it's still by choice. Yeah. When does it get too hot to climb in Vegas?

Actually, it never really gets too, too hot because there's a mountain above town that goes to 12,000 feet. Oh, okay. So you can climb, you know, eight or nine thousand feet in the summer in full shade, good wind. It's like, you know, basically it's, I mean, I live in Vegas for a reason. It's the best climbing in the country. Yeah, no, I remember when you first moved to Vegas and I read an article about, You're like explaining why you move there and you're like oh there's just climbing everywhere Yeah everybody just thinks of the strip and they're like why would you go to Vegas and you're like yeah the strip is is crazy

But just outside of town is the best climbing in the country The strip is actually even worse is when you go like four blocks off the strip Yeah and it's like they're really sad like like like like industrial sort of it's horrible It's depressing. Yeah it's really grim it's like but the mountain access in Vegas I think is the best in the country I mean the it's insane like Like from the suburban edge of town, like you can be in full on like cookie cutter suburbs, houses with like grocery stores next to you. You can drive 15 minutes to a trailhead.

And then you can like run or bike for 15 minutes and you can be in the middle of nowhere where you're never going to see a soul. And then, you know, with like an hour of scrambling and hiking, you can be back in some canyons where you're like, I'm going to die alone out here and no one will ever find my body. It's like it's crazy. I mean, in a way that that's hard to experience like anywhere. Like all the famous sort of mountain cities in the U.S., like, you know, Salt Lake City or Denver or things like that.

Most of those, if you live in town, you have to drive for like an hour to get to like the real nature part. Like you can't be in the middle of nowhere. And even then there's so many people that, you know, the trailheads are crowded, the backcountry is crowded. It's like, I don't know. Vegas is insane. How has your process of domestication come along? I mean, how long did you live in a van for? I live in a van by myself basically for 10-ish years.

And then I had a different van for another five-ish years, sort of maybe 15 years on and off in the van. and then I bought a house with my now wife and now we have an almost two-year-old and yeah domestication is strongly on on track I'm domesticating for sure and you're not losing your mind too bad no it's funny you know sometimes I'm like should I be more upset about this or like should I be chafing but I kind of like it like my daughter's great I'm having a good time I'm training I'm climbing I feel like I'm still able to do all the big climbing adventures that I want I think part of is that my hunger is way diminished for it. And part of that, I'm like, oh, is that because I'm losing my fire?

Am I losing that at my edge? But I think part of that is because I've done many of the things that I want to do. And I'm just kind of like, you know, if there was like a longer list of classic roots around the Western U.S. that I hadn't done, then, you know, I'd probably be more excited. But I'm like, I don't know, I've done a lot. You know, I'm sort of like, I've done a lot of the things I want to do. And I don't know, I like, I like dadding. I like training at home.

I'm just like, I don't know, it's fine. You say you're like dadding? Yeah, dadding. Yeah, it's like burp. Hell yeah. Well, you're already done dadding almost. Yeah, I'm almost done. Yeah, I'm almost done.

Yeah, and hopefully, like I said, hopefully people can learn from my mistakes there. So I don't. And not train their kids for six hours a day in jihitsu. You're like, weirdly, every time I punch my kid in the face, you get upset about it. So I just, you know, I didn't even break his arm. It just felt like it was going to break.

I'm like, I don't know what he's so pissed about. You kind of, in the 10 to, 15 years living in your van, I would say you must have pretty much mastered like the minimalist life style. Yeah, for sure. Though it doesn't feel like you're, you're basically just, you know, the goal is always to climb as much as possible. And so you're doing whatever is required to climb as much as you can. And nothing else matters, really. And so it's not like you're embracing minimalism to be a minimalist. It's just that you don't need anything. You know, I mean, that's kind of, it's like you're a true minimalist because you're like, whatever. Just don't need it. Yeah.

People are like, oh, you know, living in a van is that hard? You're like, well, I mean, the van, yeah, I mean, it's nicer to have a shower or something in your house. But it's hard to beat the backyard. Because with a van, it's like you just open the door and you're in the most beautiful places. And if the weather gets bad, you go to the next place. And it's like you're just sort of floating between the best destinations and the whole Western U.S. all year long. You're like, it's kind of amazing. It's not a bad gig.

Yeah, it's a really, really nice gig. I mean, I do still sort of fondly miss that, you know, and you're deep in daddy. You're changing diapers and my wife's pregnant right now. And it's like a lot going on at the house. And you're sort of like, man, I used to just sit in the van by myself doing nothing all day on a rest day. It's like that sounds nice. And what about the Honnold Foundation that you, I think when you talk about it, you went to a trip to Chad. And that was sort of the inspo behind that.

That was part of it. I mean, yeah, the trip to Chad was my first trip to Africa. was like in 2009. But really, so the Honnold Foundation supports community solar projects around the world. And basically it's like we give grants to community nonprofits that then use solar to sort of better their lives in various ways and around the. So it's been over 10 years of supporting solar projects around the world. And so I started the foundation, I guess, in 2012-ish, so a little more than 10 years.

And I basically just want to do something positive for the environment. You know, I mean, as a climber, you're just outdoors nonstop. and I was worried about climate change, worried about environmental degradation in general, and just sort of like, you know, you want to do something useful for planet Earth. But I also sort of realized that there's no point in helping the environment that doesn't help humans as well. I mean, so like that expedition to chat in particular, you see human population is living in just the, I mean, just the grim, just abject poverty, you know, the grimest condition. In a way, it's almost not even fair to say poverty because, like, there's no market economy at all.

know, it's like not fair to say they're poor because like there's money doesn't even factor into their lifestyle at all because there's nothing to buy because they're so remote and so rural. It's like, you know, it's just people hurting goats in the desert and just surviving. And, you know, a handful of climate expeditions to places like that and realizing, you know, I mean, I was reading a lot of sort of environmental nonfiction and just nonfiction in general. And, you know, there's something like a billion people on Earth without access to, to power. And, you know, I mean, basically there are a billion people on Earth. in poverty that are sort of you know I mean the the world is constantly getting richer and sort of

you know progressing getting more comfortable except for the sort of billionish people who are largely left behind and you know I just felt like if I was going to be supporting environmental nonprofits like putting money toward the environment it had to help that those billion people as well so anyway that's basically where the hono foundation came from and like and that's just about getting power to these people yeah sometimes power I mean sometimes that means light like if you're in rural places in Africa it's like realistically the grid is never going to get there it'll never be cost effective so like solar power lantern solar power and home systems sometimes that means more robust systems you know like refrigeration in rural places like

like agricultural processing you know a bit you know there I mean there are limitless things that people use power for and so I mean now so last year the Honolprenation well actually the last couple years we will have given over two million grants to different organizations around the world. And normally the grants range from like 50 to 200K, let's say. And, you know, so it's not like huge money. It's like relatively small scale projects. But that can be enough to like completely transform somebody's life because I mean, especially when you're in rural villages in Africa, I mean, if you get light for the first time, like that's a big deal. Because in, I mean, I mean, you know, in the tropics, it's dark for 12 hours a day.

And so, you know, if you suddenly have an extra four or five productive hours a day, I mean, that's a big deal for kids going to school for people, for people just living, you know, just like having a nice life or like having a light is a big deal and then like having a radio having a refrigerator like having basic you know appliances anyway yeah the projects vary the scope varies we're we're trying to do as much as we can I don't know I'm just I'm just rambling it's like it's just there's this crazy pipeline of projects that we get so many applications so what I was trying to say was that we can vet the applications by the the projects that have the most sort of win-win, like added benefits,

where it's like, oh, you're using solar to do this thing. That's also good in this other way. Like, there's also a workforce development component or, like, it's also the local people learning skills to do such and such services systems. It's like we kind of get our pick of the litter with the projects that we're funding because there's such a huge demand.

And, you know, in realistically, we just can't fund that, you know, like we don't, I'm a climber. Like, I don't make that much. I'm not like a tech billionaire. So I kind of wish I was because it'd be nice to distribute the money better. But yeah, so anyway, we can choose, like, the most win-win sorts of projects. Yeah, and even, you know, doing civil affairs projects overseas when I was in the military,

like $50,000, $100,000 invested into a community. That's like a massive game changer. Yeah, it's a massive game changer. So that's awesome. What does your day look like, like, you know, not today, but like what's a normal day look for you, look like for you right now? Well, so right now, my wife is due with our second child in six weeks. So where I'm kind of settled at home, it's also like,

It's the holiday season. There's been a lot of folks and family coming, and it's like chill at home. So I've been in this routine at home where I'm climbing outdoors at this cave that I've been climbing out, trying this hard project, like this route that I can't do.

And I've been trying for two months. Still haven't done it, but it's really hard. But, and so I go to the cave one day. I train in like a home gym one day, and then I rest one day. And my rest days are sometimes like supplemental workouty stuff, like, you know, shoulder PT stuff. And sometimes run a little bit,

sometimes just bed rest just depends on how worked I am from the other two days. So basically it's a three-day cycle that just repeats ad nauseum for the last two months. And then when the baby's born, are you, I mean, do you have other projects that you're looking out in the next years? This year, so the last two years were both sort of built around these big summer expeditions that I went on. So two summers ago, I went on a six-week trip to Greenland, which became a TV show for National Geographic, which actually comes out pretty soon. in February, I think. And then this summer, I did a two-month bike tour to Alaska with Tommy Caldwell. So we biked like 2,400 miles, and we climbed big walls along the way. And it was, it's funny that with the Greenland trip, my wife and I were like, you know what, six weeks away

from the family. It's too long. Like, not going to do that again. That was too much because we were in the most remote part of Eastern Greenland, like totally out of touch, like six weeks away. It was a lot because we had the new baby. And so we're like not doing that again. And then the next summer I'm gone for two months. We're like, five. It was like kind of a botch. And then that trip, you know, my wife's now pregnant and our daughter is like a year old and it's all sort of. It's like a lot. So anyway, but that's also going to be a TV show for National Geographic probably next year or something whenever they finish making it. But so what I'm saying is the last two years have been sort of focused on these big, big expedition TV project and things.

And then, you know, as much personal clients as I can fit around family and everything as well. This year, I think it's unlikely that I'll do a big expedition like that just because the T's, TV schedule, like the things are being released this year. It doesn't really make sense to do another one straight away. And I don't know if I quite have the appetite for it because the two-month bicycle trip to Alaska, as it turns out, it took me several months to recover from and like to regain fitness from. And I kind of dug myself into a whole biking 2,000 miles.

Like, as fast as we could do a lot, like we just got kind of work. How much training did you do for the bike part? Literally not. I did 100 mile ride just to make sure that I could. And then, but I do have a bit of a biking, not base, but I've done a couple of bike tours back in the day and uh and for several years before i was living on my van i didn't have a car so i was biking a ton and so i have a little bit more of a biking base than than other things but um but no i got so crushed it was terrible it was terrible so in recovery mode yeah so it's taken a while

yeah that's the thing and honestly like so i'm i'm 38 now and i don't consider myself old yet but i am like recovery is slower than it was in my mid-20s and it's hard to say how much of that is age and how much that is like having a young daughter and like you know just family stuff and just a different lifestyle and whatever yeah but um but i'm sort of like a lot of the recovery like recovering from the bike tour i would have thought like oh maybe like a month maybe two and you know it's more like maybe three until i actually feel better and i'm kind of like yeah in the grand scheme of things like that's fine you know what's three months but but it would have been nice to recover in three weeks you know well when you mentioned that base thing right because i remember when i like going through seal training like you run you run

so much. You run just going to eat is six miles a day. So just just running to the it's like a mile to the chow hall and then a mile back. So you do that three times a day. So just without any part of the training you're running six miles a day. So you basically that's totally crazy. Yeah, yeah. Why not uh, why not sleep a little closer to the, because then you wouldn't get the benefit of running. So but you build up this base where, you know, when I was, I wouldn't run for four months or whatever for whatever reason or it wouldn't run for a month. He's just go out and run and just make it happen. But then you know, a lot. or you're like, yo.

All of a sudden someone puts a watch on you and you're like, all right, let's, we're going to run four mile time run. You're like, oh, yeah, no problem. And you're like, yo, what happened? What happened to my quote unquote base? Yeah. It ain't there no more. It's funny to say that because actually, so I said that I've been hanging out with Tommy.

How old is Tommy? He's eight years older than you? I think he might be 70. He might be 45. Maybe he's 44. I think he's 45. But anyway, yeah, he's a bit older. And he actually tore his Achilles last year.

So he went through like a year and a half recovery process because he re-reptured two other times. So basically he tore his Achilles three times and it was the whole process to like get it better. And so and that's part of the reason we did the bike adventure together because he'd been biking a lot as part of his PT and he was all fired up on biking. And he was chomping at the bit to have a huge adventure because he has two kids who are, you know, 10 and seven. And so he hadn't done any big trips basically since he had his family. And then he was overcoming this injury and he was biking a lot. He was like, I'm fired up to do something epic. And I was kind like I've been doing expeditions every year and I'm a little more tired and I was like

man I'm just not quite at the same level that he is for like this this kind of adventure I was like this is this is a lot but how do how do you heard his Achilles sometimes people hurt their Achilles they're like I was grabbing a bag of groceries and my Achilles blew out no he took this kind of epic fall climbing I mean it was a normal leaf fall where a rope caught him but he came into the wall one foot and the foot that hit the wall ruptured the Achilles ruptured and he said he immediately was like oh you know my Achilles just ruptured and then and it had to like hop all back down to the mountain. But yeah, it was like when you watch the video,

it is like a normal lead fall, sort of, but he like swings in all crazy, leading with one foot and then hits the wall one footed. And you're like, oh, God, you know. Like I think even if his Achilles hadn't ruptured, I think it would have hurt his ankle a bit, you know, because like you're hitting the wall pretty hard with one foot. But swinging in all.

But once again, rock climbing is safe. It's for the family. Yeah, yeah, no, it's totally safe. You'll be good to go. It's totally safe. Though he was doing something very difficult, like kind of cutting edge. Yeah.

Exactly. And if you're doing that kind of climbing, yeah, there's a higher probability. And even still, he wasn't really hurt. I mean, the thing is he's had like Achilles issues. His Achilles were tight. He's a middle-aged man. You know, he probably should have been stretching a little more. But no, I was going to say, though, that with the two of us talking about base, like, so the two of us have been climbing together a ton. And both of us have always had a good endurance base climbing, like good stamina. And I think both of us are trying to be like, I'm not sure if the base is, like, quite what we thought it was, you know? Like you've always just counted on it being in the bank and now we're like, I think our accounts are empty. You know, we've got to like start rebuilding some endurance. And like, so both of us are kind of like rebuilding some climbing, like some base climbing fitness that that we've always just sort of counted on.

But we're like, it could be better maybe. Yeah. It's wild watching you guys do that speed run up, El Cap, the way you guys are just freaking breathing like you're sprinting. Yeah. Yeah. Though, I mean, it's still objectively very slow. It's still two hours to do 3,000 feet of vertical. Like, you know.

I was thinking about that too. Like if I was going to go for a run right now and it's like, hey, this is a, we're going for a run. It's 3,000 feet of vertical. You're like, oh, that's like, that's a kick in the nuts run. Kind of, but you could probably run that in 45 minutes maybe. Yeah. Or like something like that.

It still is a gut check. Yeah. You know, it'd be hard work for sure. But okay, well, you want a fun thought experiment? So, I mean, this is also really niche, but an interesting thing to think about. So I wrote up an article about that no speed record at some point. I was on a plane and didn't have internet, but just doing back of the envelope math,

I was like, okay, if you compare elite sprinting to elite marathoning, so 100 meter sprint to the marathon, and you compare the times, like, so I did all the math on meters per second. And so basically the marathon pace is roughly half of a sprinting pace. So I was like, okay. So if you take the two hour nose ascent, which is kind of comparable to the marathon,

and then there's actually a World Cup speed climb, which is a 15 meter vertical wall that people, the world record for men is like roughly five seconds. So it's kind of similar to the 100 meters sprint. And I was like, so if you take the same half that pace, and when you watch World Cup speed climbers climbing, it looks like a monkey or something. It looks totally insane.

Yeah, it's totally insane. It's incredibly fast. But I was like, so if you took physiologically, though, if you took half that pace and you applied it to L-Cap, how long do you think it would take to climb L-CAP? I don't know. What's the math? Is either eight or 12 minutes?

I forget. But yeah, so it's like basically, 10 minutes to climb on cap. So I concluded my article with like, you know, while we're very proud of two hours and we tried hard and it's a good effort, we're sort of like it's very far from the physiological limits of like the conceivable like what somebody could do on a, you know, on a 3,000 for a wall. I think that that somebody could go down to like 145 or an hour and a half at some point. Obviously you can never go down to 10 minutes because there's gear in this rope and there's safety considerations and, you know, you're still climbing this crazy wall. But I was kind of like,

ah, the physiological limits are much further. Well, you've done a lot, but it sounds like you're not even close to where he could be. But that's exactly. That's exactly. I know. I'm like, after 20 years of effort, all I've learned is that I'm so far from what I could have been. I should have been training harder the whole time. Well, there's a clip in the movie, one of the movies when you make that and you're on the phone with Tommy, I think his wife.

And she's like, are you going to cry? And you said, no, that feeling is past. I feel like we suck and should have done better. And that's where you're basically at. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, awesome stuff. Are we up to speed?

Does that get us up to speed? That basically gets us to modern life. I mean, I guess us to the holiday season, just trying to build some fitness. I don't know. Yeah. It's interesting, I was saying the TV, the expeditions that I've done the last two years. I mean, both of those, I think, will release this year, which in some ways buys me, as a professional climber, it buys me like a year or two of having to actually do anything

in a way because there's, like, content coming out. Like, there's a movie coming out. Like, I think February for the Greenland piece. and then potentially later in the fall for the Alaska expedition with Tommy. And so it takes some pressure off feeling like you have to do something that year or create something cool.

But that basically means that I can just keep grinding away at the schedule that I've been on. This sort of like three day, which I'm kind of into because I've been really enjoying myself and it's a nice way to stay with the fam and be at home and just grind. Because I love just climbing two on, one off, two on one off. Like I could do that the whole rest of my life

and be happy. and it's interesting. I'm curious to see if I'm going to improve a lot from it or not because in a way, just like grinding away and training. Like my arms have basically been very sore for two months straight now. I'm kind of like eventually I'm going to get much stronger, you know, I think. I don't know if it'll take two months or four months or six months, but I like doing it and I don't mind waiting, you know, just wait and see like how it plays out.

So I'm pretty psyched. In a way, having the films come out gives me sort of this buffer to just like keep training indefinitely while the new child comes. and we just like keep settling into home life. So I don't know, we'll see. Do you have, I mean, it's less glamorous than being like, I just roam the West Coast and do cutting edge free solos whenever I want. But I'm like, I still really like it.

You know, it's like it's a really nice. I don't know. Do you have a way of measuring like pragmatically your strength? Like do you do finger hang for this amount of time with these two digits and yeah, hangs with weight is like one simple way. It's basically weightlifting, both hangs. And then also like training boards like, you know, steep boards where you're like doing bolder problems for certain grades.

like that's an easy way to sort of measure. But also a big part of it is the sensations of like, how do you feel when climbing? Because there are times when you feel kind of weightless and you're just like, oh, like, I feel great. And then there are times when you're like, I just kind of suck, you know? Like to me, it's the sensation of doing something you didn't think you could do. Because like often you'll pull on two holds and you'll look up and you're like, there's no way I could make it at that hole.

There's no way I could catch that. But then you try anyway and then occasionally you stick something that you're sure you you couldn't do. And to me, that's like the best feeling in climbing. And you're like, I knew I couldn't do it, but I tried anyway. And I did. It was a miracle. You know, like, that's so cool.

And two months into this cycle, do you feel like you can hold more weight when you're hanging and you feel improvement right now? Yeah, objectively nothing great yet. Like, getting there, getting there, we'll see. How's your diet? Are you getting enough protein? Yeah, I think so. I've been doing all kinds of diet, like experimentation and playing around.

And, yeah, I think it's good. I've been, like, sleeping enough, you know, very healthy, clean lifestyle you know the baby goes to about a seven we're in bed at like 830 it's like it's all pretty yeah it's all uh but that's it's funny because it's daddy yeah dadding dad and dad yeah well that's the thing is it sounds so boring but i kind of like it's like it's a great lifestyle and yeah allows me to climb like the way i want i don't know yesterday uh because because i was coming here to chat with you today uh like today would have been a day at the cave but i was kind of like oh i won't be in town so yesterday i climbed is a day three but day three is always kind of

useless because you're so tired from the first two days. So I went with my wife to like a beautiful sunny wall and we just climbed like a bunch of roots. My wife's very pregnant right now. So she just was climbing on top rope and like just having fun in the sun. And I was like, man, it's so fun to just go to a cliff that we haven't been to in a while and just climb tons of roots. You know, I did like 15 routes yesterday or something. And so kind of like a fun volume day just to like see how you feel and just have fun climbing. How long is the session in the cave? In the hard cave that I'm going to. Normally like, I don't know, six hours or less or something.

But the thing is you aren't actually climbing the whole time because you like you drive there, you hike up, you get to the cave. Basically I do six routes in a day, like two warmups and then four hard things. Then I go home is like the aspiration. Or maybe sometimes five routes. Like one warm up and four hard things and then go home. And that's where you're at. That's all I do.

And that's the thing. It's a grind because it's like you just go, you fail and then you go home. And like my last day up there, I went up and it was freezing cold. like bitterly cold and so I failed because I was too weak but I also failed because my skin felt like glass because like with you know it was like zero percent humidity and and freezing cold and so it means that your skin like feels incredibly dry and hard and you like can't even interface with the rock like you can't even touch it it's like it feels glassy and so then you're kind of like like well I failed because I'm weak but I also failed because I can't even freaking feel my

fingers or toes and I can't even touch the rock and you're just like Jesus and then you go home feeling totally worked are you seeing some progress though Well, I've kind of seen negative progress on my cave project, but it's hard to say because the conditions have gotten way worse. But no, I've seen progress on the board. Like, I don't know, I think it's the right path. But this is always the challenge with training for a long time is because you start to second guess the path a little bit

where you're like, oh, am I on the correct? You know, it's like, because I assume with like all the weightlifting and things that you do, if you're just like grinding for months at a time, you're not going to see big PRs while you're grinding. But then if you take some time off and you chill, then you're probably going to feel a lot better. Yeah. And so I'm kind of at that point where it's like you don't want to give up on the process

Because you think it's the right process. Yep. I was literally just talking about this yesterday. Like everyone says these days like trust the process, trust the process. And you're like, cool. And so you're like, I'm going to do what I got to do every day. I got to set up my schedule. I got to be disciplined about it.

But occasionally you've got to take a step back and be like, yo, you're making progress. Yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. Yeah, but you got to know the time frame of like how much, like how long are you willing to work or like wait for it. Yeah. Because sometimes that progress is so slow.

Yeah. And yet the path you're on. is the correct path exactly but it still is like a rough actually so on the lead up to free selling out cap I had an experience like that where I was like grinding for months and all my friends were telling me that it was like the bad path but all of my friends are sort of professional rock climbers where they care about performance like they're trying to climb hard grades and I wasn't really trying to climb the hardest grades because I was trying to free sell outcap in a few months which isn't the hardest grade you know it's it's

rated 512 or you know 13 minus or whatever so like the rating is oh but not like not cutting edge by any means and so I was doing this tremendous amount of volume and and as a result was tired all the time and so I was never really performing at my my physical limit let's say and so my friends are all like oh you should be rusting more so you can perform right your limit but I was kind of like that's not really the point like that's not what I'm training for and I kind of like stuck my gun stuck to the path but then you know several months into it by by sheer whatever like part of being a professional climb or like had some work stuff or something.

For whatever reason, like, took a break for several days because I had, like, something going on. And then came back and felt like a total hero. Like super math. Yeah, I had basically one day outside where I was like, it's working. I feel amazing. And then I went back to just, like, grinding for a couple more months.

And then was in Yosemite, just grinding. And then basically peaked for the climb and then was done. You know, it was like, okay. You know, but basically felt like I was sucking for six months, except for one day that was like a signpost that, like, you're doing okay. And then the climb itself. How much time did, how much, how many days did you,

rest before? I don't even know. Not that much. I mean, I was kind of like day on, day off. And it was interesting because I actually had done all the prep work was like, okay, I'm ready, I'm fired up, and then it freaking rained. So like I was going to do it, but then it rained. The forecast was bad and, you know, rain that day. And then I wanted to repel the entire wall again to make sure that nothing got wet. And, you know, I had chalk marks on key holds here and there, like sort of marking left foot here, right? Like, you know, because on a crack up a blank wall like it's hard to remember if it's like your left finger in there your right finger in there but sometimes it's like critical which which way you do things so a lot of it was like marked with chalk

and the chalk washes off it for rains and so I wanted to make sure that hadn't rain too much because even though I hadn't rained that much down valley like or up valley in my van you never really know a mile or two way it could have just dumped on the summit and just like pressure wash the entire upper pitches and so so then I went and repelled the whole wall to like double check everything and it was all fine everything was dry my chalk was there but then your tie from freaking repelling the entire wall so then you're like okay you need another rest day I mean this is the challenging thing with free-soling is that like you want to sort of strike while the iron's hot but then you know but then life gets in the way and you're kind of like

then you got to start the whole cycle again I don't know anyway so yeah I took a rest day and then and then went the day after but it was like I'm all fired up and then a rain then you actually don't get to go for another like three days or something got to grind and you got to rest echo Charles over here is a big proponent of rest days monitor resting. Yes. You could say what you want. We know what's happening over there.

Does that get us up to speed now? Are we good? I think we're good. I think we're good. Sorry, I'm just a ramble. No, it's all good. If people want to find you, look, I've mentioned alone on the wall. We mentioned Free Solo.

Like, if you haven't read this book, if you haven't watched those movies, just go watch them. They're awesome. They're awesome. Stories, it's awesome to see, again, what I think is, I don't know what could be a harder feat by a human being, but this is right up there. Somebody wants to hit me up on social media

and tell me what was a more impressive feat? I'm all yours, I'm listening. But check out the movies. You're on the interwebs, AlexHonald.com. You got your own podcast. Indeed. Climbing gold. And you bring on people from history,

talk through trips that you've done yeah this year i think we'll be focusing on the the olympics again okay climbing gold we originally created it because of the because climbing joined the olympics in 2020 for Tokyo though that happened in 2021 because of COVID but um but basically we created the podcast because we're like this is a moment for climbing you know going to the Olympics for the first time feels like a big thing and could be a big thing for the sport um and so this year i think we'll be focused on the Olympics again right on yeah we'll see right on so tune into that you're on instagram you're on Twitter, you're on Facebook at Alex Honnold.

It's H-O-N-N-O-L-D. You're on Masterclass, too. Indeed. Got to mention that. Echo Charles, you got any questions? Yeah, I got some questions. What is crimping? Crimping? Half-crimping? Is that? What's the term?

It's just the way you hold your hand. It's like a half. It's like the way you hold an edge like this. Yeah. But yeah, crimping just refers to how you hold your fingers on an edge. So what's half crimping? Half crimping means that. So full crimping, imagine this is, oh, here I'll use the edge of the knife. This is, this is like a good edge.

So full crimping is with your thumb over your fingers, like crimping. Half crimping would be just your fingers halfway like this. And then open hand would be like this, like draping off of it. Like dangling. Okay. All right. And I notice your hands like, you know how like in jihitsu, right? If you're the gekeye guy, you get like crooked fingers, knuckles, whatever.

cauliflower ear, right? Is this like, and it's actually not your hand. It looks like it's your fingers that are like real. muscular. Yeah, but I don't think they're actually muscles in your fingers. I think my fingers are just kind of fat. Just big. Are they? Would they? Do you think, I mean, you've been climbing since 10 years old. Yeah, I think

I think I probably would have had pretty big hands just by nature because my dad and my grandpa have like big hands. But also I think your connective tissue gets bigger. Yeah. It's like cranking sideways on your fingers nonstopping cracks. Like I think you get, though I'm going to bet you have some big all hands too. No, I know. Yeah. It's like

you have significant hypertrophy in your fingers. Yeah, I've noticed. Yeah, probably. Yeah, yeah. Impressive. But, I mean, if you saw, like, a stone mason that worked their whole life, just like chipping stone, you'd be like, yeah, they're going to have some big old mitts.

Yeah. It's just hard work with your hands. But also probably some percentages is probably callousing and stuff. You know, you probably sand it all off. It's just like extra skin. Sit off the fingers. Well, no, I mean, yeah, your tips are like your, oh, yeah, because you like so much. Yeah.

Well, I mean, that's why, like, you know, I was joking, but crimping the edge of this knife, like, I can't actually feel this that well. Yeah. You know, it's like. I mean, this isn't sharp, though. Not very. If you don't know this, Echo Charles, like, rock climbing is a painful sport.

Rock climbing is freaking painful. Yeah. Moitai, do you know what moitai is? Yeah, like kickboxing. It's like kickboxing. That is a painful sport too. Because you're getting kicked in the head all the time. You're getting kicked in the legs.

You actually, you do things to dead in the nerves and your shins. It's, but it's a very, very painful sport. But rock climbing is also like just, there's pain you have to contend with. The rock climbing's painful in a way that feels kind of light duty compared to like combat sports where you're like getting hit. Climbing hurts in a way where you're like,

oh, your skin hurts and like the tips of your toes hurt. And when you're in the sun, climbing shoes are really tight black rubber and it's like your toes will be burning. And so it's like your fingers and toes are burning and uncomfortable and just like you're holding. I mean some climbing holds are literally like the edge of some of these knives.

Like the back edge of this knife would be like something that you're just pulling as hard as you can. It feels like it's cutting your fingertips. It's just like it's painful, but in a way that's like very unglamorous, you know? It's not like it punch in the face. Yeah. It doesn't seem like it should be that painful, but you're like, man, it just, you just, you're like, ow. It is freaking painful.

It's, I'm here to tell you it's freaking painful. So like gloves, that's like, is that a big no-no? No, you just can't because you lose the sensitivity. Oh, yeah. Like, yeah, I mean, if you think grabbing tiny little things, it just tears the gloves. Like it's better, better to have the skin. Makes sense. It'd be like trying to play guitar with gloves.

Yeah. It's a non-starter. Yeah, yeah, uh-huh. I mean, in extreme cold, like, I have climbing in gloves. Like, I've done two expeditions to Antarctica, and normally I would climb all the easy terrain in gloves, because if it's easy enough, it doesn't really matter. But then normally, when you get to the hard stuff,

you basically pull your gloves off with your teeth and then, like, climb bare-handed for a bit and then try to put your gloves back on. Oh, yeah. You know, it's like, but, I mean, it's how you try to save your skin if you're in, like, sub-zero temps. You know, it's like, it's a bit, it's pretty unpleasant to climb into rock climbing in Antarctica. What else is that with Charles?

You watch movies? Yeah. What's your gym? Cliffhanger. You ever watched that one? Dude, bro, Cliffanger. I forgot about Cliffanger. Come on.

Actually, so, fun fact. So, Cliffhanger is loosely based on, on a real story. On, like, real events in Yosemite. And actually, my podcast, coming gold, we did deep dive into that whole story. Like this, in the 1970s plane carrying $2 million to the marijuana, crash landed in a lake in Yosemite. Oh, yeah, that's right? It's in Valley Uprising, right?

Yeah, it's in Valley Uprising. So we did this deep dive where we interviewed all the people involved because a bunch of climbing. A bunch of climbing, like, dirtbag guys that are, like, living in a tent with, like, no possessions, all hike into the back door and come out with, like, bails and bails of marijuana, which they then dry and then sell. And so then all of a sudden, a bunch of climbers, like, driving sports cars and, like, going to Europe and, like, do it all. Anyway, it's a classic story. But, yeah, that was.

That's all I got. That's all you got. Yeah. That was it. That was it. Come on. It's good to meet you. Yeah.

Alex, any closing thoughts, man? No, no. Just a pleasure chatting. You know, just what it's seen. I mean, I do my podcast, like, in my actual closet, in my house. It's like a tiny little thing, and I just look at a wall, and I'm like, maybe I need more climbing accessories and, like, cool stuff. Yeah. You know, it's like, it sets a mood.

Like, there's a real mood in here that my closet lacks. Well, this one definitely started. This used to be the maintenance closet, and it was half this size. And then we recorded it in the maintenance closet for a while. And then eventually we, once we had that little desk over there with a bunch of crap, uh, getting piled up on it. The podcast place was a little too small, so we made it this big.

But what's crazy is you go and talk to, you know, like when you did your Hollywood tour and you'd go to whatever major broadcast network and they've got 12 people in the back room like looking at you through the glass and all these cameras and everything, they don't, more people listen to this than that,

which is nuts, right? Freaking Echo Charles with his $1,000 worth of equipment, presses record and more people listen to this than listen to whatever that major broadcast is. So echo Charles does the work of 12 men is what you're saying. Oh, see, my man right here. He knows, bro. That's when you know.

I don't know. I doubt it. Well, I thought he was going to chime in earlier when you were talking about, you know, the guys are prepping cameras and downloading cards and scrubbing guys like, oh, he's going to, Echo's going to chime in with how hard his job is. And, you know, I'm just over here climbing freaking L.Cat, right? That's what's happening. Rigan Echoes just press and record.

That's the way it's going down. Anything else, though? I don't know, a pleasure. Awesome. Actually, I want to look around the gym a little more after this. I ask you questions. Oh, yeah, what if you jumped in the Gid Jitia, you would have automatic advantage with your hands? No, but I'm pretty, I don't want to hurt my fingers.

You wouldn't do it. Oh, yeah, they twist them all up. Yeah, that's true. Even if I go to like a massage parlor, I'm always like, don't touch my hands. You know, when people are like, oh, I'm going to crack your knuckles. I'm like, no. I don't know. Because, like, at any given time, you know, I always have one finger that hurts a little bit in some way.

And you're always, like, kind of like, taking care of a few things. I'm like, no, nobody mess with my hands. Do you ice your hands or anything like that? Do you do any kind of protocol on them? No, I get like bodywork once a week and stuff like that, but no, like hand stuff. That's crazy. Like a guitar player, right? Where it's like, it's like so critical.

I don't like to get my hands wet, actually because you don't want to get your skin soft. You know what I mean? Like if you get all pruny, like if you're in a hot tub, I always hot tub with my hands out of the hot tub, which I know this sounds totally stupid, but that's actually pretty common for because it makes your skin so soft. And like you can't, you can't grab the edge of a knife with soft skin. I have a weird, I have a weird, like, similar phobia of like lotion oh yeah yeah no I'm a hard now like with our daughter my wife has to

apply all like creams and lotions and things I'm like I do not touch any I'm 100% with you I'm like I'll change diapers I'll do all the things I just not doing the lotion it's like when my wife's out of town I'm just like well bad news she's not in any of the things you want on her until you get back that's the other weird thing you're to fight about kids like the first kid you're like boiling the boiling the freaking bottles and making sure that the Caps had been, by the year, like, I got four kids. By the fourth kid, it was like, I think it'll live. Like, it's just like eating mud.

By the fourth one, you're like, if the first one doesn't feed him, I guess he'll just be hungry. Exactly. I'm tired. That's the way it goes down, man. Awesome, man. Well, hey, thanks for joining us, man. After watching you and following you and seeing you for so many years, it's really awesome to sit down here and talk to you. And thanks for inspiring so many people and sharing your experiences, your lessons learned.

And thanks for what you're doing. every day to help people around the world and make the world a better place, man. Appreciate it. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it. And with that, Alex Honnold has left the building. After another, what's it been, hour and a half of talking, hour? Sure.

We should have just kept, I don't know, you just, little other topics come up and you just carry on with trying to learn and trying to understand. And he's asking questions about stuff. And I think maybe he felt like he didn't want to interview me. me when we were actually on the podcast. So, but man, very,

very cool. And, you know, man, really just like the, it's not too often you get to meet someone that's at the pinnacle of their world, you know,

they're at the pinnacle of their world, doing things that no one's done before. By the way, no one's done since. You know, people just rogering up to just go jump on that gig again. And I'm just super nice, super humble, super good dude, man. Awesome.

Yeah, I think that it was, or one thing that stood out that was interesting after hearing it and then thinking about it more was, you know, how he was talking about, hey, I don't want to get, he's like, I'd rather stare death in the face and not get hurt every day, you know? You know, that's better. I remember thinking, dang, I think I'm literally the exact opposite. I'd rather get, like, sprained fingers and, you know, this and that and not have to stare death in the face every single, you know.

But at the same time, what that illustrates is like, okay, this guy obviously thinks and looks at things like in a way different way than maybe me or at the very least me, but I think most people are like that. I'd rather get bumps and bruises than have to look at death like life or death like that. But it kind of offers like, okay, this is a different way of looking at things. If I look at, since I don't look at it like he looks at it, What am I missing in life or whatever? Like, what am I missing here?

And then so when you listen up, you can kind of find out things that you never would have really thought about, ways to look at stuff. Yeah, it is interesting too. Like when we got to, we were just downstairs and we were all looking at our hands,

looking at each other's hands. And like, his hands are mutated. Yes. Like, he kind of denied it in here a little bit. Yeah. But then down there, your tendons grow, right? And he's been doing this since he was 10 years old.

thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of pressure. So his hands are definitely music. I wanted to like, like, give him things to squeeze. Like give him like tests. You know what I mean? Yeah. Right? Yes, sir.

I want to give him like, like, hey, here's a grip strength test thing. I want to do that. I want to try this. I want to see how long. So I kind of wanted to see what that was all about. I was going to be like, hey, because, you know, when he first came up, I was like, hey, good to meet you, whatever shook my hand. He didn't like squeeze my hand.

He didn't do nothing. it was normal and then it wasn't until he was talking I was like freaking you know how you can tell like I said and I kind of mentioned it where it's like okay jiu jitsu guy this guy's been in jiu jitsu he's been in all the hard battles you're gonna see on his body you're gonna see remnants of those battles his ears his hands his face a lot of the time um and him bro he's in the same exact boat so it's like okay but where's his where are those battles where is he wearing them and then you look at his hand and it's actually not really his whole hand it's just his fingers when you look at it like this part of his hand, like look at Dean Lister's hand.

It's his whole hand. It's like a freaking abnormally huge, like two mitts, right? Him, Alex's hand is like normal, but his fingers are all, like, to me, they look like big muscles on his fingers. Yeah. But, and it makes sense, too, where you're just holding, because like, consider this. So when I got, when I got real more into lifting weights, right, and I have a twin brother, genetically identical. And I got into lifting for, like, years after, you know, like after college and stuff like that. And then I remember, and he kind of stopped a little bit.

And I remember, this was after years, maybe five, six, seven years. I remember, like, we made a fist. And he made a fist next to mine. And his fist was, like, way smaller than mine. His whole fist, but I'm like, oh, this is just from just lifting, you know? So it, like, happens. Now, Alex Honnold is the same exact thing. It's just his fingers, though.

Yeah. So they're like all huge. Way more. Starting at 10 years old. Yeah. Yep. Very impressive. You know, I was getting neck surgery.

And the doctor. You have to go through the doctor. He's got to tell you the risks. And he's like, hey, you know, you could get paralyzed. You could get killed. You could whatever, right? Tell me all these things. I go, doc.

I mean, one of the chances. What are you talking about? Like how many, I said, how many sides are on this dice? Like 10,000? Mm-hmm. And he goes, like, 200. And I was like, hmm, I wish I would have asked that to Alex. Like, when you're doing the, the boulder problem.

at 1,800 feet. Like, obviously, there's mistakes that could happen. Like, how many times would you have to do that? How many sides are on the dice where you, like, go to kick your foot across and it catches on your pant leg for a half second, and that's it. You know, whatever the case may be.

So, and, yeah, man, the margin of error like how big is that box you know when you read the book definitely read the book he talks about that like about how different situations his mindset is like

yeah the margin of sure it's a catastrophic result but the margin of error like he could make a lot of mistakes before something goes wrong but also it's hard to translate when you put your shoe your rock climbing shoe

on the rock like I said, I'm beyond, I'm below a novice in rock climbing. I've like done it and had fun, whatever. But I, it never felt like secure to me. Like I can't imagine being 500 feet with my foot on a ripple and that's got all my body weight. Yeah. It also shows you, and we did talk about this a little bit, but like the amount of technique that is involved. is it's just like every sport, man.

It's like every sport is so reliant upon technique. And if you don't have technique, well, not every sport, but there's so much technique to most sports. And some, like we talked about, some of them are real obvious that there's technique. Some of them you don't see the technique. Boxing, you don't, look, if you know boxing, you know how much technique is involved.

If you don't know boxing, it just looks like you're slugging it out with another human. Then you go get in a ring with somebody that knows how to box. You're getting worked. Work climbing, like I said, I thought, man, I can do freaking 200 pull-ups and a workout. This would be no problem.

Free, I was pathetic when I started rock climbing. Pathetic. It was weird. And actually, we were just talking downstairs. We were talking to that big dude who rock climbs. Grant. Yeah. And Grant's like, yeah, you know, I get a big pump on my arms.

And Alex is like, well, look, you've got the same basic size fingers as me. You have to hold 200 and whatever pounds. Yeah. And I only have to hold 162 pounds. Imagine you and I do a deadlift contest. And I have to deadlift 135 and you have to deadlift freaking 315 for reps. Who's going to win? Well, I'm going to win.

I only have to deadlift 135. It's like, of course. So, man, so much stuff going on. Very cool to see what the human being is capable. love the mindset it was interesting too he said his advantage when he said psych I thought he's gonna say psychological no he's like psych like fired up he's like the psych because I want to climb I want to do it all the time I want to try hard problems I want to figure them out that is his biggest advantage yeah how glorious is that

my biggest advantage is I'm just freaking really into this yeah super psyched about this so very cool the human being capable a lot of things. Let's see what we're capable of. Let's push the envelope a little bit. Def Reset. How's the Def Reset going for you? Well, good.

I'm on the path. If that's what you mean, look, am I doing the actual Def Reset. Well, actually, I am. Okay. You have to write anything down. I got to write stuff down, right? Check the boxes.

Yeah, I don't have that thing. But if I, when I go through the list of stuff I've got to do, I've been doing that. Yeah. Get up early. You know I've been getting up early because you text me. I'll text you right back right there in the morning. Don't you?

You like that, don't you? Yeah. But anyway, it's going well. Thank you for asking. I did a little workout with K-Dog the other day. Got on film. Nice. Have you done any of Jason Kleepa's workouts yet?

No, but... Good little MacKons, bro. Throw them in there. I know. Throw them in there. Yeah, I want to... So every time I do mine, like, you know how, like... So I'll do rounds.

I told you what I do. And I do rounds and I write it on the wall with chalk. You know, like each round or whatever. So I'll take a picture of the chalk rounds. And I'll send it to Jason. I'll be like full credit today, six rounds, full credit. And he'll be like, bro, get on the app. Don't I'll give you this and that.

And I'm like, cool, cool. But I never got around to it. I will though. Yeah. But yes, I will. I hear good things. Yeah. They're, they're good freaking workouts.

And they're not, you know, what's cool about them? They're actually really good for death reset because they're like, complimentary to whatever you're doing. They're like, oh, for 13 minutes, whatever, nine minutes. Like, you're going to do something, you're going to get a good workout. One of my deaf reset. set things is 100 burpees a day yeah and yeah let's just say it's not fun every day it's full credit I that's like a like that's such a good benchmark that and even the way you

structured is actually really good when you're like hey get 100 burpees or what's the 10 minutes of burpees yeah or 100 berkeys whichever one right which everyone right yeah exactly right well we're all we all got it going on um Chris Pratt's been getting getting his death reset Which is cool getting after it but so many people Stepping up making changes doing the right thing eating clean fuel just awesome the deaf reset.com check it out Jocko fuel you know we got what you need here's a I got greens creatine and throw a hydrate in there This is like a tasty tasty tasty little treat that gets you the triple threat yeah the triple production. Have you done that before?

Not with the greens, but my normal daily, not a good daily, every single morning is the creatine with, with hydrate. With hydrate? Yeah. Greens too. I'm just saying, if you want to give that a crack, you look, bro, I'm not, I don't like, I'm not wanting to eat no broccoli.

You know what I'm saying? I understand. So get the greens in. Anyways, joccofuel.com, check it out. Mulk. We got joint warfare. We got what you need to fuel your system. There's new coffee mold, by the way. You never mentioned that. Are you into that?

Because you never were into coffee. So coffee's not my jam. Yeah. As we like to say. Yeah. That being said, I taste tested it because I'm putting it out there. So I'm at least going to see what it tastes like. And it tastes freaking good.

So my daughter, she's 10, by the way. She was like, you didn't tell me you got new coffee milk and she had been drinking them. I was like, there's caffeine in that thing. 95 milligrams of caffeine. That's still caffeine. And you know, I'm not giving my 10 year old caffeine yet, you know. But she's just pounding them. Apparently she's like oh you did it because she likes coffee the flavor of coffee

She like drinks decaf coffee not all the time today I'm like all right sister but she approves of this even though she can't do it anymore I kind of ban her and she's unhappy about that but hey honestly people layf like anyone that's into coffee Jamie like people just freaking love they love that new milk the milk coffee What is it sweet cream coffee? Yeah, that's what it is it tastes good It's got 95 milligrams caffeine 30 grams of protein. This is basically the best freaking breakfast a human can have.

Am I wrong? You're not wrong. Am I wrong? Right, because it's a thing. Like people will be like, yeah, I'm on this freaking, I'm on the path.

I'm doing all this stuff. I start my morning with coffee, but they get the one from wherever with all the creamy, latte, venty, like all the stuff into the caramel, macchi or whatever it's called. And it's bro,

it jams your whole shit up. It's like 500 calories on that one. Sugar, yeah, and so you're off the path. Just right in the, like, As you start your day, you start your day off the path right there.

See what I'm saying? No reason for this. No reason for that anymore. Sure. There you go. Check out the new coffee. If you like coffee, you'll love this. You'll love it.

You can get this stuff at Wawa at the vitamin shop. G&C. Military commissaries, Afees, Hanifur, dash stores in Maryland, Wakefern, shop right. H.E.B. down in Tejas. Thank you, my people, in Tejas. For getting after that H. H.E.B.

crushing. Same thing with Meyer up in the middle. Midwest, crushing. Thank you. Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Sheels, and small jams. If you want to sell, if you are at a gym or you go to a gym or you own a gym, email JF Sales at joccofuel.com, get jocco fuel to your people. That's what we're doing. OriginUSA.com, by the way, if you need American-made stuff, which you do, if you want to support America, if you want to support American communities, if you want to support freedom in the world, Go to origin USA.com and get some goods.

By the way, we got some good stuff that actually might not be on the website yet, but it's like it's there. We got like a jacket. You know the kind of little puffy jacket that everybody wears around, you know, around the world? Yeah, sure. Like it's just the standard wear. Like, hey, California, New York, Arkansas, it doesn't matter where I go,

people are wearing this type of jacket. we have one now. It's freaking perfect. It's so good to go. Yeah, so we got that. We made a vest with it too. Yeah. Wait, is there, does that style have like a name?

The closest I'd say is maybe people call it like a puffy jacket. Just puffy jacket. But it's the typical, the big outdoors companies make them. Yeah, yeah. And everybody wears them. Yeah, I dig it. So if you want one that's not made by slave labor, If you want one that doesn't ruin the environment by dumping a bunch of chemicals into the ocean

If you want to support freedom For human beings in the world Go to origin USA.com check it out jeans by the way Yes sir Jeans How many pairs of jeans you have? Me? No people people in the world Two pairs? It's a lot well I don't want everybody shoot I don't know I have a

I don't know date maybe you got eight pairs of jeans? Yeah, all in origin jeans. All in the rotation. What is that a lot? There's a lot. That's a lot. Yeah. Oh, bro.

Yeah, yeah. But okay. Hey, look, you might not need eight pairs of jeans. Like I go, Charles has it going on in this world. Hey, I know a guy. We're all good. Hey, that's what we're doing. Making stuff in America.

Check it out. Hunt gear, training gear, T-shirts, boots. Just go to OriginUSA.com. Check it out. Get some freedom. It's true. Also, Jocko's Store. It's called Jock's Store.

So, do you. Discipline equals freedom we're representing on this path, whether you're on the deaf reset or not, even though you are. You want to represent on the path. I want to wear your shirt or hat or hoodie or shorts. By the way, we got shorts. And we have socks coming. Come on, bro. A lot of, some of us choose to represent on various levels.

Okay. I'm saying that socks. That's just one level. Check. And available from soap on there. Some good stuff on there. Check. Jocococor.com.

There's also a shirt locker, which is like, hey, if you want a new design every month, you can sign up for. the subscription you get a cool new design every month it's relevant there's layers on these designs people seem to like it check it out uh it's called the short locker yeah check out also if you need some steak which you do yes you do need steak check out colorado craft beef dot com and also check out primal beef dot com this is the best steak you're going to get out there and you know you need steak boy is there anything better than a good steak it's very hard to find something it's very hard to find something better than a good steak and if you want to get the best steak go to primal beef.com go to colorado craft beef.com get some steak let's go also subscribe to the podcast also

subscribe to jaco underground jocco underground.com we just got done recording one of those so check that out we answer your questions we talk about some adjacent topics that's what we're doing over there we got a youtube channel subscribe subscribe to the youtube channel subscribe What is it? Click, like, subscribe. Yeah, like. I think like share. Like share subscribe.

Hey, check out our YouTube channel. We put stuff on there. Origin USA. Check there's out. Jocco Fuel. Check theirs out. Eschalong front. Check there is out.

Psychological warfare. Flipsidecanvas.com. Dakota Myers got cool stuff for you to hang on your wall. Books obviously covered a book today all alone on the wall by Alex Honnold with David Roberts. Freaking good. book check it out the new version has the entire uh assent of l cap in there so it's just it's just a crazy awesome book to read also i've written a bunch of books about leadership i've written a bunch of kids books too way the warrior kid one two three four five kids books also miching the

dragons also extreme ownership dichotomy leadership have echelon front it's a leadership consultancy, we solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details. I'll do something live right now for you. Jack Daniel, you know Jack Daniel? Yeah, I know. I heard great thing. He just sent me, uh, he just sent me an email.

I'm going to read it to you. It says, impact. We're echelon front, a leadership consultancy. We teach leadership lessons learned on the front echelon of combat, thus the name. These leadership lessons were often written in blood. Our mission is to pass on those lessons so that they do not have to be rewritten in more blood. End quote. When I tell that to clients, I emphasize that I know that sounds extreme.

However, while what they do in their human endeavor may not be life or death, what their people are doing 40 plus hours a week isn't just a job. It's their life. Furthermore, in some instances, your ability to implement some of the lessons we teach could be the difference between life and death. And then Jack forwarded a real world example. And I'm not going to go into it just for the privacy of the client, but a client was in a real world life and death situation. They resorted to the principles that we teach at Eshlam Front and got the problem solved. And life was saved. That's what we do. Eschlonfront.com.

If you want to know about our leadership consultancy, you can find out about it there. We also have an online training platform. These leadership lessons that we teach can keep you alive, as I just mentioned, in critical moments, can keep your family alive, can keep your friends alive. Hopefully you don't need it for that. Hopefully you can just use it to increase your profit, take care of your people, build your relationships, do better at work. Go to extreme ownership.com for our online training. Also, if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help out their families, Gold Star Families,

check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's Mighty Warriors.org. Don't forget about heroes and horses.org, where Micah Fink is taking our troops into the wilderness so they can find themselves again. and also Jimmy May's organization beyond the brotherhood.org.

If you want to connect with Alex, he's on the interwebs, Alex Honnold.com. He's on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at Alex Honnold. And I'm on there as well. I'm at Jocco Willink. Echo is that Echo Charles? Just watch out for the algorithm. Just be careful of it.

It doesn't come with a warning sign, by the way. When you log into social media, it doesn't say warning. This could waste your entire freaking day. say that but it doesn't it just shows you something that you really want to see that's what it does doesn't say a warning it just says hey this is something you really want to see and if you move your finger from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen it's gonna show you something else you really want to see and if you do that over and over again there goes three hours of time don't let

that happen thanks once again to Alex Honnold for joining us awesome to meet you man very cool and also thanks to the men and women in the military around the world right now. The world is a volatile place right now and you are standing ready to protect us. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret

service, and our park rangers. Hadn't talked about them. I kind of include them when I say all first responders. When I say law enforcement, yeah, I'm talking about you all park rangers, but I'm also thinking about right now talking to Alex.

The park rangers, I've been going to the state parks and national parks with my family for a long, long time and have been helped out in minor ways, right? Maybe directions, maybe people got stung by stingrays at some state beaches and whatnot. Sir, it happened. You know what I'm saying? Maybe we could use a little extra water out on a hike. So we get some, we've got some help along the way. So thanks to all of you and all other first responders for what you do. You keep us safe here.

and we are thankful for that. And to everyone else out there, I got one more quote from Alex Honnold. I think it's applicable to all of us. He said, my comfort zone is like a little bubble around me, and I've pushed it in different directions and made it bigger and bigger

until these objectives that seem totally crazy eventually fall within the realm of the possible. And look, you don't need to risk your life. You don't have to free solo L-Cap or half-dome, But I think it's safe to say and then we can all push a little further out of our comfort zone Take some risks get uncomfortable push the envelope and basically get up every day and to some extent Please go and get after it and until next time Zeko and jaco out