The Jordan Harbinger Show - 255: Tommy Caldwell | The Push for the Path Upwards

Episode Date: September 24, 2019

Tommy Caldwell (@tommycaldwell1) has been called "arguably the best all-around rock climber on the planet" by National Geographic, and is the author of The Push: A Climber's Search for the Path. What We Discuss with Tommy Caldwell: How the confidence Tommy gained from climbing since age three transformed him from a shy, scrawny kid into a world-class athlete, author, and someone who can be interviewed on podcasts without fear. Tommy's tried-and-true formula for getting better at coping with scary, potentially life-threatening situations. How climbing is part endurance, part puzzle, and part chess strategy. The differences between sport climbing, free climbing, and free soloing. What it's like to get kidnapped by rebel extremists in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan when you're just trying to do a little climbing with your friends. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/255 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads. From Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies. An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter

breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiruality podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics. Find Conspiruality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. So I ran up behind them and kind of at the last possible moment,

watched him fall about 20 feet, hit this ledge, and then bounce off into blackness. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DePhilippo. Tommy Caldwell is a superstar in the rock climbing community. Since age three, Tommy's been traveling the world, challenging himself on impossible rock faces and climbs. Many other people wouldn't even attempt.

Most recently, he climbed the dawn wall of El Capitan at Yosemite National Park. This is literally an almost entirely flat rock surface. Watching this, watching these guys do this on Netflix, they've got the dome wall. This is like watching Spider-Man scale a skyscraper, except Spider-Man has more handholds than those guys did. It's just unbelievable. Before El Cap, Tommy lived in extreme childhood, and early in his career, he was even kidnapped by militants in Kyrgyzstan,

sliced off his finger as if free climbing wasn't hard enough already. Today's episode has some great stories and a really in-depth look at someone who is obsessed with a craft and has pursued it to mastery. I really enjoyed this conversation and I know you will as well. If you want to know how I managed to get all these amazing folks on the show and maintain relationships with hundreds of people for professional and personal reasons, check out six minute networking, which is free. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. The more people that know this stuff, I think the better off we all are. By the way, most of the guests on the show, they actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come

join us and you'll be in great company. In the meantime, here's Tommy Caldwell. I know you started climbing at age three and your dad was into it. And I'm wondering, your dad was an adventurous guy, as a big bodybuilder school teacher guy as per the movie. But you being born early, a little bit premature, do you think he did some of what he did to maybe toughen you up a little bit? Yeah, certainly. I mean, I think the fact that he had this scrawny little kid probably for a macho bodybuilder pained him greatly. And so he had to figure out a way to combat that. Now, I only say that, I guess, like half tongue and cheek. He was a school teacher as well as a bodybuilder. And so he thought a lot about how to take the kind of smaller self-conscious kids and

make them more confident. And rock climbing was his avenue for that. And I was this perfect test subject. Yeah. Yeah, I had no confidence. I was really, really naturally shy, really like mentally delayed when I was young. And climbing is what fixed it for me in a lot of ways. We had a good laugh watching the movie the other day because my mom was a special ed teacher and he said something like well I was mentally delayed probably up until now still yes that never leaves you yeah I'm wondering though like okay you're maybe not the best student at that age or at three you're definitely not a student at all but in early days you're maybe not the best student so having an outlet like climbing probably is one of the few things at that age that maybe you're really kicking butt yeah

Yeah, I mean, it worked for me because I started so young that I became good at it without having any metric to measure how good I was. So then when I had friends that got into it later, I was already the badass. And the fact that my dad was taking me into the mountains and exposing me to physically really hard things from a really young age meant that by the time I kind of got a bit older, I was actually really tough. I was small and I wasn't all that intellectual, but I could endure. Do you think that being small as stature is an advantage in climbing? Because I am never going to climb a mountain, hopefully, I don't think. Maybe I'll walk up one. But being small in stature seems like an advantage because you're pulling weight up with one or two arms, if you're lucky, maybe some feet, maybe some legs.

Like having a small, slight build seems like a good advantage. Yeah, for certain types of climbing and specifically climbing that has really small holds, it's good to be small. Like if you think about it, like a spider is a way better climber than an elephant, you know. Generally, yeah. Yeah, so the smaller, the better in a lot of ways. Except you can't carry as much stuff. Oh, yeah. When you're really small.

You can have a climbing partner that can carry all your stuff. Right. So I feel like that's where it's going to go in the future. The really small people are going to have the whole team that supports them and does everything else. Now that you're, I mean, you got a high public profile now. You can have like a climbing intern, right? Who just follows you around with your stuff? I probably could have.

Yeah. You should leverage that. Look into that. Yeah, totally. Yeah. The childhood looked pretty extreme. You were camping solo, which is kind of scary even now, but you're doing that what? How old are you when you were out in the woods by yourself?

I mean, I went a few miles from my house in Rocky Mountain National Park and camped solo starting at age nine or something. So, yeah, I was pretty young. I'm trying to think, I just had a kid six weeks ago. I'm trying to think like, okay, at what age will I let him walk into a park by himself with a tent and stay overnight. Yeah, it's funny. My dad always, I mean, still to this day, he talks about, he's kind of a curmudgeon.

He thinks society is, you know, these helicopter parents. And he's like the antithesis of that. He really wants you to have this self-reliance and independence. And so that's how I was raised. He encouraged that kind of activity, which gave me a huge sense of responsibility. I mean, climbing is all about risk management. I learned that really young. Was your mom not like, hey, maybe don't send him out into the middle of the woods?

alone to make a fire. Like, he can't even microwave macaroni and cheese. Maybe we should leave him in the garage. Yeah, there's definitely moments of that. I mean, so the one example that blows my mind the most is my dad likes to talk about the story of taking me when I was three winter camping. So we skied, like, a few miles into the mountains and dug a snow cave. Apparently, I was still in diapers during this raging storm.

And my mom does say that on that occasion, during this raging storm, that whole night, she was just up, you know, pacing around, like worried about. it. But for the most part, she just has full trust. I mean, what do you do if you have a husband and a child who are really into doing risky things? You learn to trust them. I don't know, Jen. What do you do when you have a husband that's into doing risky things? My kid's too young to be into risky things, but it's only a matter of time. Yeah. And know that your dad taught you a lot of lessons like, it's not what happens in your life, but how you react to it. For example, when you did 827 miles for your 100-mile challenge in school, and they literally didn't even believe,

believe you. That's heartbreaking, right? And you learned from an early age, not only can you do things other people can't, but that also maybe nobody will ever even believe that you're doing them. Yeah. I mean, the fact that I was really shy was an advantage in that way. I learned about personal satisfaction because I really didn't want to deal with other people. I just didn't like being around other people. Yeah. Has that changed? I mean, you seem really social right now. Are you just like, I can fake it? It has changed. Largely because of my wife, I'm married to one of the most social people in the world these days. And so, yeah, people are lovely. And it took me, you know, 30 years to figure that out. Yeah, that's all right. Late bloomer, no problem. I'm with you on that. Yeah,

it does seem like your dad built grit through like a combination of what most people would consider traumatizing experience and maybe a little encouragement along the way. That's a common question I get. Like, how do you get better at these kind of scary things? You just expose yourself to minorly traumatizing experiences on a slightly increased level day after day. And at some point, you get better at doing things that most people would consider majorly traumatizing. But to you, they only see minorly. Is there a line where you're like, okay, I'm never doing something like this? Because it seems, and we'll get into some of the things that you've done, especially with climbing, but are there things with climbing or maybe outside of climbing where you're like, no, I'm never going to do that.

That's too ridiculous. Well, both. Yeah. I feel like I risk myself enough climbing that I could kind of don't do things that are risky outside of climbing. Like, I'm not going to buy a motorcycle. That's kind of the main one that I talk about. But also a bunch of climbers about 10 years ago in Yosemite, got into wingsuit base jumping. Oh, yeah. And I was spending all my time in Yosemite, and that's, it's illegal there, but it's also kind of one of the best places to do it in the world. It's one of the safest places to do it in the world, actually.

And so it was very tempting to get into it at that time because you see all your friends flying around like birds, and it just looks amazing. And plus it's a pretty nice way to get down from the mountain afterwards. You don't wreck your knees as much. But I will say that the community of real core Yosemite climbers was there's maybe like 20 of them. And maybe 10 of them really got into serious wingsuit base jumping and only three are still alive. Oh, that's really bad. Yeah. That's horrible.

Yeah. 70%. Yeah. I'm not trying to make light of it, but when 70% of the people into something are expiring, doing that thing. There's like a heroin user control group that is probably doing better than that. Yeah. Yeah. And then out of the three that are still alive, you know, one is missing a leg. And yeah, I mean, it's just, it's bad. That's like adrenaline addiction to the point of a sickness instead of actually like, wow, look at what we're pushing the limits of. It's crazy.

Yeah. And I think of a lot of risky climbing. I wonder, you know, it's admired in a lot of ways, especially big Himalayan alpine climbing. Like in my culture, that's really in my culture. That's really in people that can go up and do these really hard mountains where you know you're up on the side of the mountain for like a week and you only have you know a small suit packet each day and you know like being able to endure that is really admired but i've started to look at it in ways as almost like a drug addiction like why is that so admired why you know most of these people it is really really dangerous i think big himaly and alpine climbs are kind of like wingsuit base jumping there's just so many unknown variables. And so that is another thing that I basically, at this point in my life,

say that I won't do. My buddy, David Roski, who's been on the show, I don't know if you know him at all. David Rowski, he summits things like K2 and Everest, but no oxygen. Right. And that's kind of crazy to me as well. Yeah. So I'm talking about like big, steep alpine faces. Like the typical climbing up the fixed ropes on Mount Everest or something, I see that as very much less dangerous. Yeah, he seems more measured. He's, like, not in a hurry to do things that might get him killed. He just wants it to be just hard enough where he's growing as a person. Yeah.

Which makes sense, right? Yeah, that's a good way to be. Yeah. Like, you don't need to base jump from, with the Red Bull dude who's, like, jumping from space, basically. You know, this? Yeah, yeah. It's like, you don't need to do that. No, I'm good.

I'm just going to go ahead and skydive. I'm fine. But, I mean, one really cool thing about climbing, though, is you do take things that seem really dangerous or, deadly and you figure out ways to make them safe. And oftentimes there is ways to make them safe. And that's kind of an empowering thing. Like if you can do things that seem improbable or impossible and make them doable, that's like in climbing that kind of opens up the world in so many ways. And you start to wonder how that applies other places in life. Yeah, I can imagine that solving a problem, which is essentially what a really complex climb seems to be like the Don Wall, where you're figuring it out like a puzzle,

that confidence must translate to other areas of your life. Yeah. I mean, so I was, really shy and didn't like to be social. I got good at climbing because I was so deeply into it and it did bring a lot of confidence into my life and because of that I've been able to sort of like take the opportunities that climbs like the Dom Wall presented and run with them like write a book and be on this podcast right now like this is never the kind of thing that I would have wanted to do or had the confidence to do if climbing had never been there to sort of like help me get there. As a teenager you started climbing in competition on these artificial walls. I think we've all seen those right, like at a climbing gym or on a cruise ship now, they're popular, these little, like, colored

fake stones are screwed into the wall. And you won this adult competition at age 13. Was that one of the first times you realized like, oh, I'm better at this than I thought? Did you have any measuring stick before then? There wasn't really measuring stick, because kids didn't climb back then. It wasn't a family activity. Most people considered it a sport for either kind of like adrenaline junkies or it was just so countercultural back in that day. So the fact that my parents did it with me was real odd. But it also meant that I gained skill at the age that nobody else did. And then it turns out that that small 18-year-old build actually lends itself really well to climbing.

So all those things came together at this competition that I entered, not thinking that I even had a chance. And then ended up winning it. And that was the, yeah, that was like the awakening. That was the moment where I was like, wow, I'm a climber now. This is what I want to do with my life. There's probably no way back then, though, to make a living as a professional climber, right? I mean, making a living as a climber is kind of a funny thing because living the life of a homeless person in the culture of climbing that I was in was actually very admired.

That meant that you were willing to forego any creature comforts in life to dedicate yourself 100% to climbing. And so you lived in caves and you ate the food off. of the people had left on the tables at the Yosemite cafeteria. And that's, yeah, that's nasty. That's kind of what you did. And so I spent a few years of my life out of high school, like dumpster diving and living on like $50 a month. And the thing about that is it was actually pretty lovely time.

I enjoyed it thoroughly. Life was simple. All I had to do was think about climbing. In the years since then, I have made what is more typically thought of as a proper living off climbing. But I don't think of the money part too much. I'm always like, man, life is nice when you don't have that much money because, you know, as long as you have enough to give you the basic amenities and be able to buy the things that are, you know, actually like mandatory for being healthy, you can live cheaply and it's pretty nice. Yeah, I would imagine, though, there is a line where

you're like, I don't want to eat hot dog bites off of the plate that has flies on it or like a squirrel got to it before I did and chasing him. These days, for sure. Like, I think, think anybody whose lifestyle improves it's hard to go backwards, especially with a family. Yeah. The wife might not be too thrilled if you've got little fits eating off of the cafe. Go get it. Let's run. Before they throw it away. Yeah. Although that probably would be a pretty successful technique. I think so. That's something your dad would come up with, right? Like, you can eat if you can chase down the person before they get to the garage game. Yeah. Yeah. Types of climbing, okay, the sport climbing, is that the one with the wall with the fake rock screwed into it? There's

different types of climbing that we're not really familiar with. Yeah, so sport climbing is essentially a wall that's usually between like 50 and 150 feet in length. You have pre-placed anchors. So somebody's actually drilled a hole in the rock and installed bolts that you clip into. So essentially what that does is it makes it so that you get all of the physical difficulty of climbing with none of the danger. Gotcha. So that might be an actual rock, the climbing wall type. it doesn't matter if it's wood or stone.

Right. So sport climbing could be outside or it can be on an artificial wall. Gotcha. Okay. And then there's the way that you climb, you use regular rocks that are naturally occurring in nature, but there's no assist from the ropes, right? You're not pulling up on anything. Right.

So I'm a free climber, which free climbing is actually a terrible term. Because everybody, when they hear that word free, they think no ropes. That's what I thought. You die. But what it means is that you are climbing the surface. surface in front of you and you have the ropes that are only there in case you fall. Free soloing is when you climb in without any ropes and if you fall, you die. That's like walking around in a mountain and hoping you don't get struck by lightning,

but carrying a giant metal flagpole with you the whole time. I feel like. I mean way more dangerous than that. Statistically much more dangerous, right? Yeah. Yeah. Free soloing is like you have to do everything perfectly or if you die. Yeah.

I don't need that kind of adrenaline. that's surfing covered in animal parts in blood. Well, adrenaline is another misconceived thing. Like, if adrenaline is happening when you're climbing, something is going wrong. So even free soloists don't do it for the adrenaline. They do it for the mastery. They're trying to actually control their body in a way

that they can do extremely risky things without having any adrenaline involved. That's a good point, because if you're starting to shake and vibrate and hyperventilate and panic, it's probably a great way. You wouldn't have a career very long as somebody who climbs to that. Right, you would. If you have that reaction, you're not going to be a free soloist.

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. I think gently falling or maybe not gently, but falling and not dying, that's probably the best way to learn how to climb better each time. Yeah, which is why sport climbing is really nice because, like, there's days when I go sport climbing where I fall 100 times in one day, and the rope just catches you and everything's good. Yeah, thank God for that. This dirtbag culture of climbing seems like something that would get old pretty fast. And I assume moving to Colorado and trying to get better at this, you start building a lifestyle and you start working on different skills. And I know you've done things like going to France and spending time and places where 100 plus people are dying just to work on like certain types of skills. You wrote about that. And I'm wondering, what is that? You're like climbing these caves and working on these skills that really you can only work on in these grottoes, I guess.

I'm trying to put a visual to this. Oh, so you're talking about like going to France, going to Chamonie. Yeah, that sounds right. Okay, so Shamani is sort of, you know, Europe's, you know, center stage for big alpine-style climbing. And, yeah, those mountains, like 100 people a year die. But those are the people that are pursuing a very risky form of, those are like the wingsuit-based jumpers of climber, you know. Or they're just the tourists that don't know any better. Because the thing about Shamanese, you can take a lift from the valley floor at 3,000 feet.

You know, you can be sitting in the cafe drinking cappuccino and 20,000. minutes later, you can be at 14,000 feet in the middle of the most gnarly alpine terrain in the Alps, and you can just basically step off the platform and fall to your death in a crevasse. So that's why so many people die. It makes the mountains too accessible. You don't have to get up there. Yeah, you've got to earn your way up there. That way you know you're not supposed to be there after a few steps, right? Right. So the mountains in the U.S. don't have lift access like that. So you do have to earn your way. And so a lot less people die. And that's very different than the style of climbing that I primarily went to France for. Like, I climbed those big mountains, but we were experienced

in big mountain terrain, so we weren't doing anything that was particularly risky when I was 14 years old with my dad. But really, we went to France because we wanted to go sport climbing, because that was the cutting edge of, like, physical innovation. Like, people were taking gymnastic skills and applying them to steep rock faces. And that was kind of a new thing. And it was exciting to us. And that's where it was all going down. A lot of people think climbing is mostly about strength or endurance, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Like watching the dawn wall, there's a lot of, maybe not chess, maybe that's kind of a bad analogy, but there's all kinds of fear management and risk management and you're managing your endurance, you're trying to think,

like, okay, there's this thing I either had to jump across and you tried that for a couple days, didn't work, and then he found a route underneath it. It's like a whole battle plan. There's so much more strategy involved, I think, that most people think of. Yeah, I think that's one of the things that really has attracted me to the specific style that I love of big wall free climbing because there's so many elements. You have to figure out how to live on the vertical wall and perform at a really high level and logistically, that's pretty complicated to fuel yourself and, you know, stay out of the sun and deal with storms. And then the actual climbing takes rehearsal much the way, you know, like a gymnastics routine would. And at a very high level, it'd be like an Olympic

level gymnastics routine. You have to execute it perfectly and able to be. You have to execute it perfectly. be successful. Yeah. So you do that on pitch after pitch after pitch of climbing and it's just a tremendous puzzle that I really love gathering those pieces and figuring out how to put them together. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Tommy Caldwell. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding. of the key takeaways from Tommy Caldwell.

That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger. com slash subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing from the show. And now back to our episode with Tommy Caldwell. What's like your least favorite part of it?

I know that's a dumb, potentially dumb question because you probably love everything. But there's got to be something. you go, you know, I hate pooping in a bag. Like, that's the worst. I really wish there was a way around this. I mean, when friends die. Oh, okay. That got dark. Yeah. Jeez. All right. Well, that makes sense. Which is common, honestly. I mean, I would probably have probably had 40 plus close acquaintances and our friends that have died in the years that I've been climbing. So that's a big part of it. We're trying not to go that dark. No, no, that's fine. I just, I was just kind of kidding of course that's the worst part i mean that should have been a really obvious answer to that

question sure right but if you weren't going with yes the death of people you know and love what's the second place you know what's really annoying about climbing is i think a lot of adventure sports you can take a season off like snowboarding for instance and you still have all those skills and you come back and you can still operate at a relatively high level in climbing if you want to climb well you have to just like constantly be at it training three four five days a week week and if you take a week off you lose so much what are you losing strength or like yeah you're losing strength and coordination and just like the feel of it you have to just be relentlessly dedicated to do it which in some ways i love that but in other ways i hate it sometimes i'm like especially these

days in life where i have a lot of other things threatening to get in the way of me training all the time it would be nice to not suck so bad yeah like you're climbing in those moments it'd be great to go to Disney World and not have to like climb Epicot Center to stay in shape. Yeah. Totally. So now when I travel around to cities, I look for climbing gyms. I go to climbing gyms every day and I have to stay on it. Or I just let it go for like six months or a year at a time and I'm just like screw it. I'm not going to be good at climbing right now. And then I'll have to take another four months to build back up. Jeez. Yeah. When you walk into gyms now, people must be like, whoa, aren't you that guy from that thing that I saw that one time? Yeah, it is somewhat hard to go to climbing gyms in that way. I make sure I go

like midday between like 11 and 3 p.m. because there's not many people in the gym then. Yeah. So if you want to catch Tommy at the climbing gym between 11 and 3, wherever he's got an event. Here's the story you're probably sick of telling, but I'm going to go for it anyway because it's super interesting. The Kyrgyzstan thing, this incident is a topic that's really familiar to me, unfortunately, getting abducted, not by Islamic militants, but, you know, getting kidnapped in general really sucks. I'm with you on that. You're 21 years old. Why are you, are you in Kyrgyzstan? Most people are like, well, that's your problem. Idiot went to Kyrgyzstan. Anytime you go to a place that ends in Stan, you're asking for trouble. Yeah, I guess that is part of the problem.

Maybe, yeah. I mean, I was into climbing in Yosemite and I wanted to get a little more exotic and remote. I mean, like going on expeditions to exotic places are, it's the fantasy, right? So Kyrgyzstan seemed like the perfect fit. It was in a place that was remote. The weather was good. there was big, unclimed walls there, and we wanted to explore, and then the North Face approached my girlfriend with this opportunity to go, and they would pay for the trip. And climbers hadn't been abducted really ever that I know of in these like Himalayan or sub-Himalayan regions back then. So it was like we went there even considering this as a possibility. Right. Yeah, you're thinking food poisoning or maybe like you get injured and you have to go home, not like. Yeah, we were certain the, the danger

that we were to encounter on the mountains were going to be the only dangers. Yeah, not the Taliban cloned IMU, right? Yeah, the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan. So were you on the border of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan then? Yeah, the borders are all really close together there. We're in Kyrgyzstan, close to Uzbekistan, also close to Tajikistan. Did you have any idea of this? I mean, you must have looked on the internet and people are like, oh, don't go there,

and you're like, eh, it says the same thing about every country now. Yeah, there was an element of that. So I think the year previous, some Japanese tourists had gotten involved in a little bit of civil unrest. And so there was a slightly elevated warning on the U.S. State Department website. It was actually just classified as a counselor information sheet. And so we saw that and we're like, what does this mean? Like, how do you read this? And so we started to look around like, what other countries in the world have this level of warning? And we came across Australia at the time at the same level of warning because of the Olympics. And so we're young, a little bit nice. We probably should have looked into it more. But we're like, well, people are still going to the Olympics. Yeah, well, Mexico has like a super high warning half the time. And people are like, yeah, a $97 flight. Yeah. See you there.

Yeah. And to be fair, what happened to us was very unique. Like, it was super unlucky. Like, people still go climbing there all the time, even though the dangers are much higher in a lot of ways than they were the year that we went. So what happened? You're hanging out sleeping in a cocoon on the side of the mountain. What are those things called? The port of ledges.

So is it literally exactly? Like it sounds like you have a ledge that's portable and you add it to the side of the mountain. Yeah, it's like a lawn chair or hanging cot that can hang from the side of the mountain essentially. It's a platform that you erect and you clip in and then. Yeah, so you're strapped into that thing. You're not going to like be dreaming and roll off the side of the mountain. Right. Yeah, you're tied in generally.

That saves me from a lot of future nightmares of being on a port of ledge and rolling off the side. Yeah, everybody finds that so terrifying, but it actually compared to like clinging on to the side of the cliff, It feels real nice to be in a portal edge. It feels super comfortable. I would say so, right? Like you're either spayed out like Spider-Man and you're like, finally, I can sit down. Totally.

It must be awesome at the end of the day to do that. Yeah. Yeah, so, okay, so you're on the portal ledge. Do you think you're dreaming when you, in the beginning of this? Like, how does this even begin? Yeah, so we were a thousand feet up, this wall called the yellow wall, camped in these portal edges. And at twilight, so like 6 a.m.,

we heard gunfire, which seemed odd being as how we were in the middle of this very peaceful-seaming valley. At first we didn't know that we were being shot at, but pretty soon they kept shooting, and bullets actually started to ricochet off this ceiling of rock above us. And so that's how we were captured. They came to the base of the wall. They shot up at us, and we knew that we had to go down.

We had a long telephoto camera lens that we could look down and see these guys with big guns, clad in army fatigues. I mean, I can't even believe they were able to accurately, or maybe they were aiming at you and they missed. I don't know. No, they had like sniper style rifles. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were able to be very accurate. Dang. Oh, good thing, I suppose, that they were able to do that because they could have missed and hit one of you. Jeez. Okay, so then what? I mean, you can't run away. You're on a mountain. You're moving at like, I don't know, how many feet per hour or something. If you try to climb up, you have to go down.

Right, we have to go down. We sent the oldest member of our expedition down first. We hoped that they were just going to rob us or something. But when he got down, they just said that we had to all come down. So yeah, we all went down and they took us back to our base camp that was like a mile away where they had slashed open of our tents. Do they not know tents have zippers on them? Yeah, they just hadn't bothered. They just took knives. Yeah, they had raided all of our food and we're like, okay, things are pretty serious. But then as we're kind of surveying this scene, a helicopter flew up valley. And, And the Kyrgyz military was basically coming into the valley at that time to combat the rebels, the rebels of the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan. And we were right there in the mix of it. And so, yeah, we essentially a small war broke out. You're in like a battle scene right now. But you want to get captured or you'd love to have the Kyrgyz military run in on you because then you're free, right? Yeah. I mean, that was our hopes.

But the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan had gotten to us first and taken us hostage. And so we were human shields on some level. They had also taken a Kyrgy's soldier hostage. She was the military outpost in that valley. He actually lived in that valley. They had killed some of his friends. So he had blood on his pants. We didn't know that they had killed his friends at that moment, though.

He started looking at us and he's like, we need to find ways to like attack these guys. He grabbed a tent pole and he's like, we need stab. You make all these like motions. Like we need to overcome these guys with big guns by attacking them with tent poles. And you probably thought that was a bad idea And he's like, you don't understand

They're gonna kill all of us But he couldn't really communicate that to you at that time Yeah, I mean he couldn't communicate it so articulately But he got the message across Oh so you knew that he, because you could see how scared he was I guess, right? Yeah, yeah I mean he was making motions like putting his hand across his neck Which you know obviously means death

Like somebody's gonna die But we didn't know if he meant us or what Yeah, oh man So then they're taking you around somewhere right What was their plan? We don't know really what our plan was. We think that they were going to try and take us into Uzbekistan. We probably would have ended up in some camp and held for ransom.

But what ended up happening is when the Kyrgyz invaded, we had to abandon everything, all of our food, warm clothing, and just basically run for it. So I had had one small bag, which I had six power bars in. The rebels brought their guns, and that's all we had. Pretty soon when that battle broke out, we were on like one hillside behind this boulder and the Kyrgy's military was on the other side and we're with that soldier. His name was Terrat and they shot him point blanked ahead. For about four hours, we had to kind of lay on his body behind this boulder as this battle

raged until it got dark and we're able to escape over this hillside. At the point of which they killed him, you must have been, what's going through your mind at that time? Because I guess they got rid of him because he was a soldier and knew the area and was maybe not as valuable as Americans. I mean, what was it? Well, I think once the battle broke out, they had to turn their guns towards the other Kyrgy soldiers. And if he was right next to you, he was going to attack them.

So they just knew that he was too much of a liability. Oh, geez. Laying on a dead body that was just murdered by the people that now have you, what are you thinking at that point? I mean, it's just so really intense. Like even today, I look back on it and it seems like I watched it through a mirror or something. It doesn't feel quite real. But there was this sort of like intense, really quick bonding of the four of us. Like we were all intensely aware of each other and trying to make sure that we were going to do everything we could to live through it.

You know, nobody was like freaking out or breaking down. We were just all very on point trying to do whatever we could. He must have been cold if you don't have your close. I mean, freezing, hungry. Yeah, I mean, at first during that battle, you don't notice the coldness because it's very intense. But over the next six a day period, because we're. hostages for six days. We were in and out of various stages of hypothermia, a lot of that time, because we were at 11,000 feet in elevation, we were often wet. It was like, there was an amount of

suffering involved, both physical and mental that was unlike anything I had experienced before. Yeah, that makes sense. I would imagine if you weren't a climber used to being already, you know, tossed into the snow by your dad, you know, in the middle of winter and whatever, the park to camp alone, you would have been even worse off, right? Yeah, yeah, no, that was. a huge part of it. I think ultimately we survived because we were climbers and we were used to that environment to a degree that even our captors were not. Like we were used to be on steep terrain. Yeah, it seems like after a while, I know a couple of the guys left you after a while to go, what, look for food or something like that? Yeah, we don't know. Yeah, two of our four captors just

disappeared night one. We don't know what happened to them. Jeez. And then how did you end up getting out of that situation? I mean, I know you're at this point starving. You'd been going through rivers and stuff like that. And what was your strategy, actually, to get away? So on our first night, Jason Singer, the guy who put the expedition together, who's actually an employee of the North Face, we're running from that battle scene when we got to this raging river. And we didn't know if the Kurgis military was pursuing us at this time. And we couldn't figure out how to get across this river. And the rebels were trying to push this big log across the river, and they kind of couldn't do it. And he, like, grabbed this log and jumped into the river. And it was like kind of getting swept away. And I was

like, what is he doing? He's going to get swept away. And he managed to pull this log across the river, and so then we could all climb across. And once we got to the other side, the soldiers looked at him and they're like, Soldad! They were like, or the rebels looked at him, and they were like, you're a soldier.

And he had done this very strategically. He's like, I wanted them to feel like we were helping them, like we were on their side, and then we were really tough. And that set up a huge amount of trust that probably ultimately helped us escape. So how did you escape? How did you finally?

get away from these guys. So we spent six days all getting very skinny and suffering a lot. And the two members, Jason and John, were thinking that we needed to find a way to overcome our captors, like steal their guns, shoot them, bash them over the head with rocks, throw them off a cliff, something like this. Beth and I, my girlfriend and I, we were the other two climbers. We didn't think that. We thought we should just try and outlast them.

But on this sixth night, the head captor, Abdul went back to our base camp to try and get some food. and the plan was for us to kind of beeline us straight up this really steep mountainside, and he was going to circle around with some food and meet us on top. And so we started climbing up this mountainside in the middle of the night under moonlight that ended up being real steep. And so our captor, our one remaining captor, who is like this 18-year-old hired mercenary, who was super scared, was the only one looking after us. And it became really obvious that this was our chance to escape.

So, you know, the plan, like I said, was for Jason and Jeff. on the two other members of our expedition to kind of guide him from below, and then Beth and I would be sort of pioneering the route above, and then they were going to look for a chance to push him off the cliff, but they could never quite do it. It's just like a hard thing to do, I guess. Yeah. And so when we got right near the top of the cliff, our one remaining captor kind of got excited about the prospect of being away from the exposure, and so he started to scramble ahead. And there was rain in the air, and we were already on the verge of hypothermia. I was like, if we get wet, we're probably done for it at this point. So I was like, I think our only chance

to escape this. All I did is I turned to my girlfriend and I said, I don't think they're going to be able to do this. Do you think I should do it? And she just like didn't say anything. So that signified to me that she had come around and she agreed with me. So I ran up behind them and kind of at the last possible moment, grabbed him and pulled him off the cliff and watched him fall about 20 feet, hit this ledge and then bounce off into blackness. At that moment, were you relieved? I feel like I'd have some mixture of relief and then also just like, like you said, it was surreal. I'm just wondering if it even sunk in right away, I guess. Yeah, no, there's no relief. It was like my immediate reaction was like the loudest noise you ever. It was like intense, just like, what have I just done?

I like ran up to the top of the mountain where I was no longer in the exposure and I just like curled up in a ball, just like grabbed myself. And I was like, what did I just do? And then the other members caught up with me and, you know, tried to comfort me as best they could. But we were, it was very urgent because we thought that Abdul was just around the corner. Oh, the guy who left to get food. Right. Oh, so you're thinking, what if he just saw that whole thing go down? Yeah. Yeah. So, we didn't linger, you know, maybe 30 seconds or something. And then we were off down the valley. Oh, my God. And so it was, it was very intense. Did you know where to go after that? I mean, how do you even, did you just backtrack? Yeah. So on a few days into our expedition, Jason and John had

gone on this long hike to try and get to a phone essentially, which, you know, they were going to get to this road that we knew was like 30 miles from our camp. And they had never made it to the phone. But what they did do is they came across a small military outpost that was down the valley that was just like a single, like one or two guys. And so they knew that that existed. And so our plan was to get to that. Imagine being stationed out there. That's like you just know nobody likes you back in your home base. If you're the two guys that have to sleep in that shack and nowhere. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of that in those mountains. Like, they just have a military presence.

Yeah, just looking for what, drug smugglers and Taliban-like guys? Yeah, I mean, ultimately, the IMU's mission was to pave an opium trade trail through those mountains. Politically, it's a little bit more complicated than that, but there's a little bit of that going on. Yeah, they wanted to fund their uprising. But, hey, if they get a bunch of money in the meantime selling drugs, no big deal, right? Right, yeah, they got to fund their revolution. Exactly, yeah. You're religious now, right?

You're Christian? Yeah, I would say loosely, yeah. Yeah. There's no really, like, tactful way to say that, I guess. Like, you're a man of faith. Sounds so ridiculous. Right, yeah. I aspire to believe more than I probably do in reality.

I think that's literally every person of faith ever, right? Right. Like, the Pope probably says the same thing when he goes to bed at night. Right, yeah. Does having faith ever give you pause, given that you were, like, kidnapped in Kyrgyzand by people who had blind levels of faith? Do you ever go like, oh, I better check myself on what I'm thinking? Yeah, I think faith is a very complicated thing, and it's the reasoning behind so much,

so many terrible things in this world that there's also a lot of great that can come out of it. So it's super complicated topic. And I do know that in Kyrgyzstan, when life seemed in peril and you start to think these deeper thoughts, faith is where you turn because you need comfort. I mean, I think almost everybody, even if you're not religious, you start to wonder if you should be religious. Sure. Yeah, I think if I was on a mountain with a bunch of my friends, and a couple of psychos with guns, I'd be like, okay, Jesus, I've been kind of a dick,

haven't paid much of attention to you, but if you're real, show up now, this is a good time. Yeah, and those thoughts can be helpful. Yeah, yeah, I would imagine you're sitting there freezing and hungry, you know, there's not, are these mountains, are they like grassy, or is it just, you're just on rocks? They're, like, desert mountains. There's grass, there's small shrubs, there's, like, juniper bushes, but really steep. Like it's all these steep like V-shaped valleys with these raging rivers down, running down them. Yeah, so there's no place.

You can't like go pick a bunch of berries. Like there's nothing like that. Yeah, no, there's not. We didn't. Down valley there was an apricot grove that we passed through very quickly after I had pushed Sheripov off the cliff. But we didn't. Yeah, you're like, I don't really have time for this right now. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll hit McDonald's on the way out of this hellhole. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think what happened in Kyrgyzstan gave you.

an idea of what you're really made of in a way that maybe made you a better climber. Oh yeah. Yeah, definitely. Like, I was kind of a mildly motivated sort of mediocre climber. On that trip to Kyrgyzstan, I was actually just like the hired rigor. I wasn't a professional climber at that point. I was just sort of like the tag along boyfriend. But that experience, like reset my bar for things like pain and suffering in a way that's very useful in climbing. Like when I'd go up into the mountains after that trip and things would get scary or painful, I'd always be able to think back to Kyrgyzstan, and it'd be like, this is nothing compared to what I experienced in Kyrgyzstan. And so that gave me this curiosity behind, like, what we can endure as humans. And so my curiosity to explore that has fueled so

much of what I've done since. Yeah, I can imagine, like, you're stuck on something, and you've tried it 40 times, and you're like, well, at least I'm not getting abducted and sold into slavery. Yeah. When you starve to death. Yeah, when you see something that dark, the rest of life looks real sunny afterwards. Yeah, sure. I feel like I'm like a really optimistic. like mostly very happy person after Kyrgyzstan in a way that maybe I wasn't. But it's interesting, not everybody has that kind of effect. Like some people go the other way. They have like serious PTSD problems and they spend their lives in fear after something

like that. For some reason, I went the other way. Part of that is my nature, but probably part of that is like the way I was raised. Definitely, I think part of it is the way you're raised. There's new science now that shows, hey, resilience. If you have PTSD, it's not that you're not resilient, but people who are very resilient do have, I guess, lower instances. I'd have to recheck this.

lower instances of the way that they think about traumatic experiences or the way that they process them. It's not like a matter of toughness. It's just a matter of how you frame the experience. Like you're used to going, wow, that was cold, I'm hurting, I'm sore. That was a growth experience. And a lot of people go, wow, I'm cold, I'm hurting, I'm sore. And this bad thing happened to me and they don't have like the language and they don't have like the circuitry to process it in the way that reframes it as something positive. Right. Yeah, exactly. The confusing part is I think a lot of people say if I want my kids to be resilient, I need to really protect them from trauma as a child. Whereas my dad had the opposite approach. He actually exposed me to trauma, but just like the

right dose. Right. I think that's key. It's got to be the right dose. Yeah, not like wake up at night with nightmares go to the psychologist trauma, but just like, yeah, he was cold for a night. He'll be fine. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It didn't like beat me with a stick every night. Yeah. Make me tougher. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Tommy Caldwell. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening. and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode.

That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you're listening to us in the Overcast Player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Tommy Caldwell. You do have either really bad luck or you're subconsciously seeking out experiences that'll make you tougher. Because you end up having one of the accidents that as a climber you just kind of can't have and continue. For some reason, you decide to do a remodel yourself and you freaking cut your finger off, man. Yeah. I mean, I think that's probably a big flaw within me is that I expose myself to more risk than I probably should.

Okay. So I was more careless than I probably should have been without knowing enough. about power tools and chopped off my, yeah, my finger. Yeah, and not just any finger, like one of the most important fingers that you use in climate. Yeah, I would say they're all pretty important. Okay, well, that's a, see, I'm a novice. Yeah, but the index finger isn't a good one to lose. Yeah, so what happens then?

What, you cut this thing off, they can't just sew it back on. I mean, I feel like you're doing science. Yeah, they tried. My dad showed up at the hospital with like a magazine cover and was like, look, he's good climber. You have to do everything you can. Oh, wow. And so they did. I went through, I think usually in my circumstance, they would have just been like, well, you're going to be fine without a finger.

And they just would have sewed up the stump and, you know, sent you home like a few hours later. For me, they tried to reattach it. I spent two weeks in the hospital, but it didn't work. So, yeah, they kind of did everything they can. And I had, I think I had this hope that they were going to be able to reattach it. But then at the end of the two weeks they came in and they're like, we've done everything we can. Your finger's dead. We're going to have to remove it for good. and then the doctor told me that he thought I should start thinking about what else I want to do in life. That's not a comfortable conversation at all.

I sometimes wonder if he strategically did that because that fueled me. Yeah? Did he know you? Honestly. I mean, he was a climber. The doctor who did the surgeries, I had two doctors. I had one that did the surgeries and I had one that was kind of like there for emotional support who kind of took me under his wing because he was a climber as well.

And that was the doctor that told me that I should think about what else I want to do. and I mean at first when he said that I was like oh you know like bummer but then he left the room and Beth my girlfriend she turned to me and she's like fuck that guy no idea and so I

went after climbing with this sort of passion that I didn't have before that makes sense it was really liberating actually because everybody thought that I would fail nobody thought I'd be a good climber anymore and I didn't really think I'd be a good climber anymore so when I started climbing

in it and I realized that I actually still could climb pretty well. I exceeded my own expectations and others. So each time I would get better, it was like, it was very liberating. And I could always do more and better than I thought. And it just started this flywheel turning that went. Got you some new momentum. Yeah. Yeah. I created this incredible momentum. And within a year, I was doing climbs that I hadn't been able to do without my finger. Really? Or with my finger. With your finger, yeah. That's amazing. So what do you do? Like, cutting off the tip, I would imagine the tip is full of like little, it's calloused all up and stuff. Like, did you kind of have to rebuild your nub for lack of a better word? Well, I don't, I don't use that finger for climbing, really. It's like too short.

Oh, okay. But I did have to use other fingers. And there was like some small injury type stuff that happened because my hand had to just readjust to the imbalances that are created by not having that finger. But mostly I just trained the same way I always did, but with just a little bit more fire and a little bit more strategy too. Like I've worked harder on specific finger strength building techniques. Like I did a lot of more like indoor hanging from a hangboard during this thing called a campus board, doing like weightlifting with my fingers and stuff

to try and make my finger strong. And it turns out specific finger strength scientifically is the best metric between like really good climbers and only mediocre climbers. Like the ones that are really, really good, it's all about the fingers. Did you try that grip strength thing that the mind pump guys?

We're using the mind pump studio. It's one of my favorite shows. I love these guys. But is that why that thing's hanging out? I showed up and they, like, put that thing in my hand, and they were all squeezing it. And they had me squeeze it. And they're like, oh, that's pretty good. Oh, that's all you got?

You probably crushed them and they're like, we don't want to admit it. Yeah, I don't think. I mean, the funny thing about climbing is it's all strength of weight ratio. It's actually more effective to be light than it is to just be real strong. Yeah, that makes sense. Because you can be pretty strong, but if you're 250 pounds, It's like unless you're really built in an inhuman Hulk way, you're not going to be able to do like a hundred pull-ups

or whatever the equivalent is that you're doing on that mountain. Right. Do you ever go to like the airport and you're pushing the elevator button, you're like, dang, that finger's gone. Let me switch. I mean, you're used to it now, right? But in the beginning it must have been like,

you hear about people who try to scratch an itch or the part of their body that's missing itches and you can't scratch it. Yeah, so the weird thing for me is I think when I, early on after I lost my finger, I think when I was shaving like the right side of my face, I would feel like there was dirt underneath

that fingernail that was no longer there. It was like this annoying sensation. So the body had to rewire the nerves a little bit. And so I had phantom sensation. I never had a lot of phantom pain. Like for some people it can be real painful. I never had that though.

So does it just go away? Because you can't scratch an itch that isn't there, right? Yeah, I think you're brain kind of figures it out in the end. It kind of rewires itself. I think I still do have those sensations at times, but now I associate them with being at the end of the nub instead of the finger that's no longer there. Oh, yeah. You just have to like remap it in your your brain. Yeah, but sometimes if I'm really stressed about something, I'll yeah, like try and press an elevator button or something with that finger that's no longer there. Autopilot? Yeah. Yeah. Like, dang it I'm late for my,

oh, what's the problem here? Oh, right. Yeah, sure. No finger. When did you start getting obsessed with the dawn wall, the subject of the movie? And we'll link to it in the show notes. It's really excellent flick. It's on Netflix. When did you start going, I'm going to do this actually previously impossible thing? So I got really excited about El Capitan specifically shortly after Kyrgyzstan and cutting off my finger. Actually a little bit before then, but I really got into it after those. And I wanted to find that limit of what I was capable of. It was all, it was an exploration of that. And so I went and I climbed all the existing roots on that wall. And then I started putting up new ones and I spent basically 12 or 14 years of my life just like becoming the expert of that wall essentially

got totally obsessed by it but I never none of the climbs ever took me like more than a month they all went down pretty easy and so I had this like burning desire to see how far I could actually take it and so since I was so experienced on that wall I knew that the faces that from afar look completely absurdly blank might actually be possible if you train for them enough so I sort of identified this root, which ultimately became the dawn wall to take on as a project. Like, all the other routes followed these crack systems, and this wall didn't have any crack systems. So to me, I was like, maybe this is possible.

Everybody else was like, that's stupid. Why would you even think about that? Like, there's no way that can be climbed. But since I had spent so much time on there, I was like, man, I could do something. I think that's what appealed to other climbers. Once I started to kind of piece together, I was like, a thing, this route actually might exist. It really started to spark the interest of other climbers because sort of blew their expectations out of the water. It's the most famous big wall in the world, this thing that everybody knew would

never be free climbed. There's a guy who says it might be possible. Yeah. It looks easier to climb a freaking skyscraper or a building or a brick wall that looks to someone like me flat than it does this section of rock. The section of rock, when I'm looking at Netflix and I'm looking close up, there's a little crack in there where I'm thinking, yeah, if I had a business. this card, maybe I could slide it in there and it would be, but you're grabbing on to things like that are credit card edge thick and you're holding yourself up on there somehow. Yeah, I mean, that's the appeal. Like, you have this 3,000 foot tall face and the holds are barely there. You wonder if there's enough there. So you spend all this time trying to figure out the path and, you know,

the difference between what's climbable and what's not climable is maybe like a piece of rock the size of a pinhead or something like that. And so you've, it's just this incredible puzzle. And so you spend all this time trying to piece together that puzzle and train yourself to be able to grab onto those small holds and then figure out all the logistics behind enduring the amount of time that it will take to live up there for, you know, 19 days, which it ultimately took to climb the route. And so, yeah, there's just so many things to get fascinated by. There's a huge element of memory.

And then there's the whole partnership side of it. I mean, I don't know. It's just a really cool, fascinating pursuit. So you're up there for weeks at a time. Are people sending things down, or did you have to carry all the water you were going to need the whole way up? We worked on the climb for seven years. And usually what we would do is we would go there at the beginning of the season, and we would fix a bunch of ropes to the wall.

We'd walk to the top, actually, and then repel down and attach these ropes to the wall, which is kind of like an elevator that allowed us to attach these ascenders to the rope and kind of commute around and work on the hardest sections of the climb. And so we were going up and down pretty constantly for like a month. And each time we'd go up, we'd bring more supplies. And we established a camp, basically, a third of the way up the wall, which became our base camp for the whole siege. And we'd pre-stashed it with a lot of equipment. And we would have actually had enough for our whole 19-day ascent.

But since it became a documentary film project, we had to sort of like share those supplies with the film team because they have to live up there with you. So we had to sort of like, it was actually an advantage in the end. Like they had to hire essentially a porter to recharge their camera batteries and kind of commute up and down these ropes. And we could use that porter and be like, can you bring some extra, you know, green M&Ms for us? Yeah, yeah. No brown M&Ms. That must have been, imagine who gets that job? They're like, so what we need is for you to go up and down this insanely difficult mountain.

But you have to carry a bunch of our stuff, including bags full of poop. Yeah, totally. No, there's actually plenty of takers. There's a lot of people who want the chance to live in Yosemite and make a little money. Yeah. Once the ropes are there, it doesn't take a whole lot of skill to go up and down. Sure. Like the difficulty lies within trying to free climb.

You know, if you're just descending fixed ropes, it's any relatively experienced climber can figure out how to do that. So you're spending years finding the way to go up this initially. How do you remember how to get up later on? That, to you, looks like a walk through my neighborhood does to me, right, being on that wall. because to me it looks like a flat rock. To you, it looks like it's a very clear map. Yeah, I mean, we spent an insane amount of time memorizing. And my partner, Kevin Jorgensen, was actually had an almost photographic memory for climbing movements from year to year.

Like, we spent our nights talking about the specifics of the moves in a way that would have made anybody who wasn't trying to climb the route with us totally baddie. I mean, we would spend hours and hours discussing the nuances of body, position and we had to memorize literally tens of thousands of maybe hundreds of thousands of small details and then trying to execute them perfectly. So that's one of the reasons it took so long. I can imagine. I'm surprised it didn't even take longer than that to go through and memorize and then do the whole thing. And in some places, you guys were stuck for like days on the same pitch, the same stretch of rock. Is that basically what a pitch is? Like a same section of rock?

Yeah, so ropes can really climb with a 3,000 foot rope. So what you have to do is break the big wall into pitches, which are rope lengths. And, you know, usually the ropes are 200 feet long. So you try and find stances or small ledges. But on that wall, there's not really ledges. So what we try and find is places where there's a big enough hold that we can let go with our hands. And we call that a no-hand stance. And so you map it out and you break it from one no-hand stance to the next into pitches.

There's 32 pitches. and the goal is to climb each one of those 32 pitches in order from bottom to top without returning to the ground. But if you fall on one of those pitches, you can return back to the beginning of the pitch. That's kind of like a brief overview of the rules of the game. Yeah, that makes sense. Right.

It's not like you don't have to do the whole thing in one stretch. You don't have to do all like you are able to reset. You just can't use the rope to pull yourself up. That's basically the main rule. I guess the that and don't die. Yeah. the main rules of this. Most people that I know who are obsessed singularly with things like this are often running from something in their life. Like were you kind of like, I'm going to focus

on this mountain because stuff behind me is kind of messy. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there was an element of that for sure. Like the girl that I mentioned in Kyrgyzstan, Beth, who I later married, my relationship with her broke up around the time or at the time that I decided to really take on the Don Wall as a project. And so, you know, like so many great endeavors. in life, they're fueled by failed relationships. Yeah, I feel you. I get it. Yeah, so there was definitely an element of that. So that's how it started

actually. I needed like a distraction from the like pain of that. But after a few years, I just got so fascinated in the project and, you know, I met my now current wife who was such an amazing human and so it really turned towards the positive towards the

exploring and sort of like that incredible journey that we were on pretty quickly. This whole thing though, turned into like the moon landing. You know, people were watching this all over the place, but you guys were stuck on the side of the mountain. So I remember Barack Obama and like Ellen and celebrities talking about this kind of stuff on Twitter, I think, at the time.

It blew up in the media, like it went viral in the media, strangely, like in a way that we absolutely didn't plan. There's no way we could have anticipated it. But the climb just became very dramatic. Like, we were using Instagram on our third. year. And I was pretty against it at first. I was like, man, this needs to be about us and kind of of our own journey. If we're thinking about telling this story to other people, it just like takes the soul out of it. But then people enjoyed it so much that a few years later, I was like, okay,

I kind of feel selfish for just wanting to keep this whole experience to myself. So we kept doing that. And so there was a way for the story to get out. And so on that seventh year where we ultimately became successful, a reporter from the New York Times named John Branch picked up the story, pitched it to the newspaper. I think it was a super slow news cycle or something. They picked it for the cover and people were really interested. And so they first, they just kind of gave an overview of what was going on. But then they did a profile on me another day, a profile on Kevin another day. They ran a huge photo spread another day. And then Kevin started to fail. And so then there's this whole like conversation about what's more important in climbing like the brotherhood and the

teamwork or personal success because I had the opportunity to go to the top and like leave or should I wait for him. And so it just became this very dramatic, long sporting event. It's kind of like, I think I've realized that, you know, the Olympics is an event, right? It lasts like a couple weeks or something. And so everybody gets involved. And so that gives a lot of time for people to learn about it, more people to get interested in it. Yeah, momentum builds up. Yeah. The fact that the climb took us so freaking long allowed that momentum to build. Yeah. And so by the time we got to the top, like every new source, you know, in the world, there was, you know, worldwide news. reporters in

Yosemite. There's like 10 news trucks. That's crazy. The president was tweeting about us. How aware were you of this happening while you're up there? Because you're not really, I mean, you're not checking your email every day. Or are you? You are.

So, yeah, we have a solar panel with us and you get pretty good 4G service. Ironically the best cell service in Yosemite Valley is from the side of Lcap. That's funny. So we saw it blowing up in the media. And at first we were like, whoa, this is crazy. And then pretty quickly, we were like, this is a bad distraction. Yeah. And so Kevin and I were like, okay, we will do like our normal Instagram update once a day,

but we're not going to like allow. I think right at the beginning we did an interview with the New York Times and another one with NPR and then we just cut it off. We're like nothing else. And then I dropped my phone off the wall. Did you drop it or did you throw it? Yeah, I dropped it. Okay.

Because I feel like, I'd be like, sorry I dropped it. Yeah. And so I didn't really have to deal with. reading any of the articles, which was super nice at that point. So we were aware. We could see it going on, but we didn't really have to deal with it, per se, until we got to the top. Do you think differently now about death-defying climbs like this now that you're a father?

Because I feel like I might take fewer dangerous trips now that I have my own son, who's in the room with us right now, being really good. Right. So a lot of the climbing that I do is pretty dangerous, and I think very heavily about that stuff as a father. The Donwall was like the perfect place for me because it actually wasn't. all that dangerous. The wall is super sheer. The ropes are strong. You can fall 100 feet and you don't hit anything. So it feels exciting. It feels like it should be dangerous. But if you think about it logically, it's not all that dangerous. So the effect is that that fulfills me, that fulfills

that adventurous need that it's very strong within me in a way that I feel like I can do as a father and be responsible. So that's why I love L. Cap these days. That's why I still, you know, I'm going to go there in a few weeks again and spend another season in Yosemite because it's the one place that is safe but really adventurous. And has great cell phone service. Yeah, and I can bring my family. They can camp and they love it there. Yeah.

Yeah. What do you want to pass down that you learned on El Cap? What do you want to pass down to your kids? Aside from technical climbing skills or outdoor skills, what did you learn on that mountain that you want your kids to know? Well, first, I'm not certain I want to pass down climbing. Oh, really? I mean, I don't know. The risky parts of climbing are kind of addicting, and I have a lot of friends that have died,

and I have some friends whose kids have died, and so I get to see that firsthand, what that's like. And so I don't know, but there is a lot of great things about climbing that, like, this want to dream big and be part of something that feels so grand and the ability to find grit and suffer through experiences and value growth. And, you know, there's so many things that can be really, really great for climbers that climbing does build.

And if I can keep them interested in the safe disciplines of climbing, like sport climbing and bouldering, that's just going to be all positive. Yeah. But the problem is, since I've been decent at the more dangerous disciplines of climbing, they might see that as an opportunity. And they'd have the tools to go there if they wanted. Sure. Yeah, like, oh, I want to make my dad proud.

I'm going to do something even more ridiculous than try to climb the dawn wall. Yeah. And in a way, the risky elements of climbing for people who know how to assess that risk are an easy way out. Like, you can go and do something that other people think is, really awesome and that gains you a lot of notoriety without having to put in that much work just because you're able to assess the risk. Whereas the real physical elements of climbing, like sport climbing and bouldering, you actually have to train your ass off and get really good.

And even then, you most likely will never be noticed. That crying sound you hear means we're running out of time. So what's next for you? Are you going to, you kind of killed your white whale, right? With the Don Wall. I don't know what you're thinking, but if I were in your shoes, I'd be like, Like, I'm good. I'm going to take it a little bit easy now, but maybe that's not in your nature. Yeah, I don't think taking it easy is in my nature. I mean, climbing's been great, but relatively self-serving. And I feel like I want to pursue things that have a little bit more purpose. So the last few years in my life has been trying to get comfortable with sharing my stories so that people can maybe, you know, hopefully find a little bit of inspiration from it. Yeah. These days, I'm actually getting into activism work. Okay.

And so who knows? Who knows? Well, that will take me. But, you know, trying to, and it does, it feels. more purposeful, like trying to figure out a way to make sure that humanity doesn't totally screw themselves over. It feels a little more valiant than, you know, climbing big rock faces. You got to do one to get the profile to do the other one, right? That's right. Yeah, I have no regrets, that's for sure. Tommy, thank you very much, man. It's been fascinating. Yeah, thank you. Thank you to Tommy Caldwell. That was really interesting. Man, what a fascinating guy. The movie is called The Dawn Wall, and it's on Netflix. And the book is called The Push available, where, wherever fine books are sold.

Links to all that will be in the show notes, and there's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. There are also worksheets for each episode, as you know, so you can review what you've learned from Tommy Caldwell. Those are at Jordan Harbinger.com in the show notes.

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