The Rich Roll Podcast - The Color Of Everything: Cory Richards On Big Peaks, Being Bi-Polar, Healing From Trauma, PTSD, & Alcoholism

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Cory Richards is a renowned National Geographic photographer and artist behind the iconic avalanche selfie that graced the magazine’s 125th-anniversary cover. This conversation explores the paradox of achievement and healing through Cory’s raw lens on mental health, trauma, and the persistent need to matter. From teenage homelessness to becoming the first American to summit an 8000-meter peak in winter, Cory reveals how our greatest strengths can become our most binding prisons. We peel back the layers of our stories and the vital distinction between external validation and true self-acceptance. Raw, vulnerable, and illuminating, this conversation is both a warning and a light for others. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors:  NordicTrack: The best home fitness equipment & more  👉 nordictrack.com/rich-roll  On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style 👉on.com/richroll Birch: For 25% off ALL mattresses and 2 free eco-rest pillows 👉BirchLiving.com/richroll Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF  👉gobrewing.com Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

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Just the fact that we're sitting here. I am. That's all I really know. Corey Richards' life has borne witness to the color of everything, an apt title for his recently released memoir, which happens to be, in my humble opinion, among the very best books I have read this year. Most know Corey as a world-class high-altitude climber and National Geographic photographer and adventurer of the year, Corey successfully summited Everest without oxygen

and was the first American to scale an 8,000-meter peak in winter, an expedition in which he survived a death-defying avalanche, his epic self-portrait of which, taken in the immediate aftermath, graced the cover of National Geographic magazine's 125th edition. But Corey's most daring feat isn't scaling treacherous mountains.

It's surfing the peaks and the valleys of his turbulent, unquiet mind. So the photograph that you're talking about feels as if I'm looking at myself asking for something. But I didn't know what it was. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Corey's story is about madness and living madly to escape madness. From itinerant youth to salvation and art and the outdoors,

it's a journey from hopelessness and desperation to moments of peace, the occasional flirtation with transcendence and the color of everything in between. We are mechanisms of the stories we tell. And what if that story isn't fucking true? What if I've been telling the wrong story the whole fucking time?

And what is the true story? Welcome. Thanks for having me. You're among friends here. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming here. As I mentioned to you before the podcast started, I was profoundly impacted by your book, which we're going to talk about today. I think it's a remarkable work of art and candor in service to a greater issue that

is urgent in our times. And I just wanted to recognize you for that. It really is a magnificent book that you've written. Thanks. Yeah. And I want to just say, first, before we even get into any of it, that I see you. I feel like I see you. And in the process of seeing you, I feel seen in the reading of your book. That is the, and I, it's, you know, I think I started writing it for me and you're familiar with this process, but the biggest gift that I've gotten was when people say, I feel so seen in it. And to me, that's, there's no greater accolade that I could ask for coming out of it. So thanks for voicing that. Yeah. It's a, it's an exercise or a demonstration of the universality in the specific,

because as they say in AA meetings, the facts of your experience are very different than mine, but it's the interior emotionality that I relate to. I'm not bipolar. I haven't scaled 8,000 meter peaks. Like the things that you have done and your childhood and your upbringing, all very different from mine,

but the openness and the humanity and the courage and the vulnerability and the honesty that you brought to every single page made me able to deeply relate to you as a human being and to your story. And there is something beautifully universal in what you're expressing. Thank you. But also like, I think that is also one of the things that you do really well is you make the extraordinary ordinary. And when you make the ordinary

extraordinary, that's when everybody comes together, right? Because the ordinary is extraordinary. Just the fact that we're sitting here. If you're paying attention and you're noticing, you can slow down enough, right? Yeah, in LA that's a challenge. On the 405. That's a challenge anywhere. Yeah. And as you kind of recursively reflect upon

over the course of the book, like wherever you go, there you are. It doesn't matter if you're in LA or in Nepal, like you're bringing your brain with you. Yeah. You can't get it out of your head. So this conversation might be a little bit different from some of the other ones that I've done.

Like I kind of purposely avoided doing a big research deep dive and opening up a million tabs and reading all this stuff about you. Like I just read your book and I've sort of been marinating in that. And I kind of wanna just be present with you and see what comes up. But I do want to read you just some notes that I took on my, like just on my note app as I was going through the book. And if I was to

like give you a blurb or a review, maybe it would sound something like this. So I'm just going to read it to you. All right. So this book, like these are just bullet points that I made, but I felt like your book is like this postmodern Siddhartha story. It's very much a hero's journey, but it also has the drapings of a mental health treatise, like interwoven throughout. You're continually going back to research and studies about mental health and healing protocols and your personal experience kind of layered in with what you've learned in all the reading and the practitioners that you've spent time with. And the message also goes something like this, sex, drugs, rock and roll, and neither giant mountains nor great adventures

are a match for the cravings of a hungry ghost or the insanity reaped by trauma unhealed because you simply cannot outrun or outclimb the unquiet mind. It must be reckoned with. And because an acute mental health disorder isn't some cute puppy dog thing or cause, it's instead a fucking beast that left unhealed leads only three places, insanity,

institutionalization, or death. It's also about identity and delusion and denial and death and summits and high highs and low lows and adventure and confusion and clarity. All these stories told with profound honesty and vulnerability, which gives the reader, us, permission to talk about deeper shit, to grapple with what lurks in the dark as you show us a path to hope and growth and light and love and healing and wholeness.

I wish I had you to write the blurb. We'll just erase the other ones and just be like a treatise by Rich Roll. Yeah, yeah, no, thank you so much. Does that capture it? Is there anything you would push back on? No, I think that's it. I mean, I think everything you said,

it was meant to be about mental health. It was never meant to be about Everest or climbing or I had to wrestle with the publisher to make it more real. And actually this all initially came from when I was still working for National Geographic. They were like, hey, we want you to write a memoir and we want you to write,

we'll get a ghostwriter and all this stuff. And I met the ghostwriter and his name's Matthew Clam, brilliant writer. And that kind of fell off the table for a number of different reasons. And then I sent him some chapters a few years later and he's like, there's no way I'm writing this. Your voice is so specific and unique.

There's no way anyone else is gonna capture that or compliment that. This had to be you and you alone. With reading it too. They were like, who do you wanna read it? And I was like, nobody can read this for the audio book. It has to be in the same way that you read yours. But I had to lobby for that.

They were like, oh, we have other people for that. And I was like, what? Yeah. How could you let somebody read something that's so deeply personal? You know, we have the gift of voices that aren't grading, at least hopefully. But yeah, I just couldn't imagine somebody

talking about my childhood, reading my childhood out loud that wasn't me. The book defies what might be expectations held by somebody who doesn't know your story well or sees this image on the cover of a beautiful mountain and conjures an expectation that this is gonna be a John Krakauer type adventure novel. And maybe that's what Random House

or your editors were looking for. The hero's journey without the dark night of the soul, so fully painted perhaps. It's fine, you've got low lows. We need a three act structure here. But like, does the low low have to be that low or that honest? At times they were like, do I,

and I've heard this also, people are like, I feel like I shouldn't be in this room with you. You know, like I'm looking at something that is so reserved for most people, so locked away that it's almost uncomfortable. But I felt really strongly that those low lows are what actually, and the high highs are what actually make it relatable in some ways.

It's what offers that pathway to connection. When somebody is willing to say, this is how bad it was without making it a victimhood story. Yeah. It's not a victimhood story. It could easily veer into that if you're not careful, but you, you definitely crafted it in a way where you don't walk away with that sensibility at all. Like there's an ownership and a responsibility that you're, that you're taking. That makes me happy to hear, because again, like I, and I think I even say it towards the end, I think I did start writing it from a place of victimhood. In fact, I know I did because I had rehearsed the story in my head enough that even though I could say I'm not a

victim, the actual truth of it, I still very much did think of myself that way. How did you traverse that and get to a greater sense of clarity? You said something, you know, it's, it's the, what you can't start with the, what you have to start with the why, and then you have to question the why from the inside. Right. And, and I always refer to that as the where, and I think over the writing of it, I started like, where am I like truly where am I? And so there was a deconstruction that took place over the process where I started to get more and more and more honest

about my contributions, how I had fed into things, how I manipulated the world around me to either deal with pain, to get what I wanted. And it was just, if there's one thing that it was, it was, and I'm not trying to celebrate myself here. It was just a willingness. In fact, it was really,

really not comfortable, but it was a willingness and a sort of an insistence, a self-insistence that if it didn't feel authentic, I took it out or I changed it. And there were moments where I was like, you know, I wrote something about my brother and my mom, she read a version of it and she's like, is that true? And I looked at it and I was like, it's not. It's your preferred version of the truth as opposed to the objective reality. Yeah, or as close to the objective reality as you can get.

We should probably contextualize this a little bit for people who have no idea who you are. I don't quite know how to do that other than to take us back to the beginning, but maybe you can paint a picture or produce a portrait that will allow people to feel grounded in who you are and what your story is. Sure. So I think top level, top tier, you start with, okay, these are the things that people know. So I photographed for National Geographic Magazine for about 12 years. And I worked concurrently as a professional athlete, focusing primarily on climbing and high mountaineering and alpinism. So Himalayan climbing. Now we'll back up.

I was born in Salt Lake City. I grew up in the mountains. I started skiing when I was two, climbing when I was five. My parents met at Alta, where my dad worked for 30 years on the ski patrol. My brother then went on to work there for about 20 years. So we have a 50-year family history there.

And so we were, so we were brought up in the mountains. I was not good at team sports or ball sports. And we- Probably not with coaches. No, I, oh my God, it was terrible. There's a big authority thing here. Huge authority thing. And so my mom took me to see a psychologist when I was one, which you can start to plant the seed of this narrative of mental health complications or even the story of brokenness right there. early and it was getting straight A's. And during this time period, there was a sort of a proliferation of violence between my brother and I that then became abusive that I fed into in many ways. And we can get into that. And so two years after going into high school, when I was 12, I had ended up dropping out and I was put in a psychiatric unit because it was clear by this

point that I was definitely had clinical depression. Um, and there was some anxiety. And so basically we got to a bottom point where I ended up in the primary children's hospital psychiatric unit. How old were you at that time? I was 14 at that time, I think. And 13 or 14, I'd been on Prozac for a year. And it was there that then I was sort of carted off to an eight month inpatient outpatient rehab facility for wayward teens, basically, called Lifeline. And it was based on the 12 steps. And bear in mind, this is in Salt Lake City. So there was a heavy Mormon bent to this or at least an undertone of it.

And I ran away three times. And on the last time my parents sort of hands up were like, okay, you know, and I'm 15 by now. And so I ended up on the street. I really use the word homeless carefully because while I had no place to live, my squatting days were limited, my time in parks and without anything was,

they were very limited. But so I was on the street for lack of a better term. And yeah, and then it was through climbing that I sort of started to find myself again, but that took several years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's this idea that you reconnecting

with the mountains and nature and the outdoors becomes this incredible salve to this confusing pain that was driving you in wayward directions. But the idea that basically at 13, you're out of the house and you're bouncing around in institutions and running away and out of school. And it's just like, it is insane that you even survived that and landed in some place of normality. And it's interesting that these experiences that you had as such a young person with your dad teaching you how to climb and these like, basically it sounded like every weekend

you're in the car and you're going to the mountains and this is what we're doing. You kind of rediscovering that becomes this incredibly healing thing that takes you back to yourself on some level. And then ultimately much later on in your life becomes its own trap. Well, yeah. And I think it was also, you know, you've talked a lot about sort of that feeling

of being on the outside looking in. And certainly as there was more and more violence in the home, there was a sense of not belonging. It was nobody's fault, right? Trauma is often what you don't experience as much as what you do. And so while there's this violence taking place, I'm thinking to myself, why am I not being protected? That's this internal story. So there's this story of not mattering that starts to sort of bubble up. And climbing in the outdoors, at least initially, gave me a place where there was a sense of belonging because it, it, it stood outside of social demands or anything. I just belonged. You know, it's like that thing where you're in nature and you boil it down. You are nature. You are an ape. You, you belong.

And so it gave me a sense of belonging when I didn't have any. Prior to that though, on the idea of trauma often being something that's absent as much as something that occurs to you, clearly you had emotional needs that went unmet, right? And you're kind of general about like, you say others violence, there's dysfunction in the household, but you're not casting anyone as the villain.

You're pretty vague about whatever your conflict was with your brother and your parents' behavior, et cetera, other than to say there's dysfunction here and you develop, because you're not having a certain emotional need being met that makes you feel safe and loved, you're seeking attention, You're seeking that notion, that idea of feeling like you matter.

And the only way to do that at that time was to fight and create chaos because attention is the equivalent of love. And that was the best that you could hope for at that time. Well, that's the best that any of us knew. And I'm making some assumptions here because I'm not a clinician. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a psychic. Like I don't have those, those letters behind my name. So I'm making some assumptions and I, and I admit to that

in the book that I don't, I'm trying to connect the dots the best I can, but for whatever reason, it could be postpartum depression that my mom suffered through. There were insecure attachments. And so both my brother and I found mechanisms by which we could get the attention that we so badly craved, even though my parents were doing everything they knew how to do, right?

Yeah, I mean, your mom is like taking you to therapy. Like she's trying to solve this problem. She's like out of a place of love. She's like, how do I help this kid? I don't have the tools to like manage what the hell is going on. And that's the thing. They were doing everything they knew how to do.

So that's why there's no blame. There's no, like I see it clearly and there's no blame towards my brother either. It's just that when emotional needs are met, we find wildly effective coping mechanisms and adaptations to get those needs met. So he learned that if he picked a fight, then he got attention.

And I learned that if I picked a fight, I actually became the victim because he would beat the shit out of me. And so- I get the sympathy. I get the sympathy and he gets the ire and how fucked up is that? You know? So, but early on, especially through the teenage years. And I think for a long time, it was like, Oh, my brother did this to me instead of really taking full accountability of like,

yes. And like, it was still my coping mechanism too. So I became an agent of chaos and to use your words, acting out in order to get that attention, those needs met. And yet there's also a lot of beauty in that. There's an undercurrent of creativity and curiosity that I think is, it was, that was really beautiful. There's still this self-preservation kind of gene inside of you though, because when you're, you can call it homeless, you can call it whatever you want, you're bouncing around, you're couch surfing, you're kind of blowing in the wind out there

as this young kid, but you still kind of make sure that you're eating and you get these kind of odd jobs here and there. Was there a specific moment where you kind of locked in on getting back out into nature and did that math in your mind? Like, oh, this is what I've been looking for. This is what is going to lead me out of the, you know, morass of my mind when you were still in that kind of young state. I don't, I want to say yes. I want to say that I was that intelligent. I think, you know, it was a I want to say that I was that intelligent.

I think, you know, it was a more subtle intelligence that led me back to it. The truth is there was no one defining moment. And I think there often isn't. I just think there was enough darkness that there was sort of a grasping for anything. And certainly after I got put back in the hospital, after I had sort of run away from this rehab and two years later, all of a sudden I'm back in the psychiatric hospital

and they recommend, we're sitting in this therapist's office, classic therapist's office, there's tissue boxes and snot stains on the chairs, all this stuff. You talk about the smell and the fluorescent lighting and all the kind of institutional trappings of those places, like, ah, it's the worst, man.

It's so, oh. This is where you go to get better. And it's like the worst environment, least conducive to that. It's the least conducive environment to healing I've ever been in. And, you know, we're in this family sort of therapy session and I'm 17 now and the therapists go,

well, there's this really great program called Lifeline that we think your son should go to. My parents just, they're like, did you read the fucking file? Like this kid has been there. Yeah, that's what you had been doing. That was the best advice they could come up with. That was the best advice. That was the best advice they could come up with. That was the best advice.

That was the best advice they had. So it sort of hints at like some of the stuff that's sort of broken in the institutional psychology system that we live in. But then what happened was I sort of moved, well, not sort of, I moved to Seattle and I became deeply Christian for a moment. Yeah.

And that's actually- Yeah, well, I needed a place to belong, right? I felt completely out of, who was I? I didn't matter. Nobody cared. My parents were trying, but I mean, they did care obviously, but that was my interpretation. And so this moment of spiritual, what would I call it?

There was like this spiritual gravity that pulled me in to this Christian community. And in that moment, that was when, in that moment of calm, I think that's when I really started to be curious about the outdoors again. And had you been formally diagnosed up to that point? Yeah, when I was in Lifeline, yeah, when I was in Lifeline, they diagnosed me as bipolar. I think it was 14 or 15 when I got that label. And it was so heavily medicated that I just remember I, you know, I would sleep under

the table. Any chance I could get when we do school, I had no interest in school at this point. I would literally just curl up under the table. And again, at some point, there's nothing a therapist can do. Were you on a battery of different medications to try to figure out what was gonna work and what wasn't working?

Well, we went through Paxil, Zoloft, all of the SSRIs that were out at the time. And they all had some effect, but basically we landed on Depakote, Valproic acid and Bupropion or Welbutrin. And I stayed on those really without monitoring for 26 years. But initially the doses were so high that, you know, I put on a lot of weight.

We weren't getting exercise. We weren't getting sun. Again, these healing environments that are questionable, especially in the troubled teen industry, that they're healing anything, if not causing far more trauma. Again, we're doing the best we can. And so I was just, I was kind of drugged out for a little while. What inspired the move to Seattle? Was there not an opportunity to kind of move back home or had that card just been played out at that point?

I think that card had been played out. We had tried that after Lifeline. I had been in this sort of state of semi-homelessness. I got taken in by family, family friends in McCall, Idaho. And I turned 16. I took my GED and I moved back home and we tried, we tried, but it just didn't work. And thankfully my parents had been kind enough because I, I was working, they got me a car. It was this old Subaru, 1989 Subaru or something. So I was mobile. And, uh, and then I got fired from like my third job. I was working at Patagonia and they're like,

you're just flirting with, with girls,'re like, you're just flirting with girls. You're just coming in and getting paid to flirt. You're fired. And so I had this Christopher McCandless moment of I'm gonna drive to Alaska. And I ended up with my aunt and uncle for a short time. I left, I drove around again. I got super depressed, couldn't find another job.

And that's when I ended up back in the hospital the second time. And that was when my ended up back in the hospital the second time. And that was when my parents, finally it was like this revelation. They're like, what do you need? What do you need? Not necessarily what do you want, but it was this moment of feeling for the first time, like somebody had considered

what I actually thought I might need. And I said, I wanna go back to Seattle. And so I ended up with my uncle there. That's what drove me there. That's what got me there. And that's where the outdoors starts to really kick in for you. Right, because we're around Mount Rainier

and I got a job at REI and my uncle started saving. He was like, I'm gonna take half of every paycheck. Yeah.. He was like, I'm going to take half of every paycheck. Yeah. And I was like, all right. Yeah. For rent, for food. Little did I know he was holding it away. And then he said, I'm going to give it back to you if you choose an experience to go do. That's an incredible gift that he gave you. I mean, that is an inflection point in your life. Huge, huge.

It was one of the most formative moments of my life and I cannot give my aunt and uncle enough credit for A, taking in a 17 year old when they already have three kids, right? Young children. Maybe they just wanted me as a babysitter, live-in babysitter, which is fine. Yeah, but you're erratic. You're like, you're not like-

I'm not a stable human. Yeah, you're not at the top of the list, you know, for babysitting at that time. For an au pair. This is an incredible act of generosity. Huge act of generosity and love. And that was the moment of Christianity. That was the moment of getting three jobs and so

there's all this this huge gift that they give and then okay we're gonna give this money back what do you want to do you know my dad had this group of climbing partners that were all late 50s at this point but i kind of came up with a harebrained idea that maybe they'd want to go into the Alaska range, into the Ruth Gorge. And unsurprisingly now, in hindsight, they all said yes. They were like, of course, let's do that. And so we flew in and I asked my mom to borrow a camera. And she let me. And that's the beginning of the photography part of the story.

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Like, it's not set up for success here. Like it's shocking that you crawled your way out and made your way into the world in the way that you did because this appears to be a relatively, you know, kind of dead end situation. And I think people look at you and they see your face on the cover of National Geographic and they see the, you know, adventurer of the year and these peaks that you've climbed and these incredibly stunning photographs that you've taken, many of which are in this amazing new book, Bipolar, which we're going to talk about. And it's easy to just kind of create a mental framework of where you came from and who you are. And, you know, I'm aware

of some of the criticism around your book. Like you will be repaid for your vulnerability with criticism in the form of self-indulgence or because you're a handsome guy too, which makes you a target, that you're just privileged or something like that. And your story is like, you don't have to read very many pages into your book to realize that this is not a story of privilege

in any way, shape or form. Like it's shocking that you made anything of yourself. Well, again, thank you. I'm gonna sit with that. Thank you. I have a really hard time still just taking that on. I really do. Two things, males who drop out of high school

before 15 or before have some ungodly chance of dying, right? They're just the death rate. They're the young death rate for people who pursue that path is incredibly high. And so I am very, very lucky. I'm also very lucky that I was born a white male middle-class in America. There's absolutely no argument against that. So when we talk about privilege, I acknowledge that. What I will stop and say and try to be very clear about is privilege in terms of mental health is access and resources, but mental health itself does not give a shit

what color or gender you are. That does not equate. It does matter, potentially, your socioeconomic background and status. Because in poverty, there is more abuse and violence. And in more abuse and violence, there's more trauma, which begets more. But to think that we could lay this story off at the feet of privilege, that I could do what ended up happening because I was a white man is just not true. That's just not what the numbers say. Did I have a leg up because of the access to care? You bet. There's no argument there.

But when we have the conversation about mental health, to start throwing around the word privilege is quite frankly, just uninformed. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, I understand that. I think that was well said. In hearing you say that, I think privilege is maybe the wrong word to use

to properly understand this. But yeah, like let's acknowledge, there is privilege at play here, but it doesn't tell the full story. Yeah, and I don't hear you saying that. I don't see here you having that criticism. I just think that's a, because it is easy to be like cool, cold white guy,

great story, cool man. Like you went to the mountains. Handsome guy with cool tattoos. Right, exactly. But that's the mountains. Handsome guy with cool tattoos. Right, exactly. But that's the problem. Flirts with girls at the Patagonia store, you know, rough dude. Yeah, rough.

Your life has been so rough and you just need to peel back one layer. But I think that's a reminder too for, it can be a reminder for all of us that compassion in its fullness is omnidirectional. It's very easy to extend compassion to people who we actually think are somehow below us or have it harder than us. That's easy. Extending compassion towards people who have a different situation or we might view as above us, whether that's economically, racially, gender wise, but extending that same compassion is incredibly difficult.

But that's what real compassion is. And it's dropping the idea that because you look a certain way that you don't have deep, deep, deep internal struggles. In fact, oftentimes you might have more. We're not prone to be compassionate about people who have more or more hands, all those things, right?

In fact, we make a sport of trying to take them down a peg or judging them. For sure. So the camera is in your hands. The other story that needs to kind of be stripped back is perhaps a false notion that you took a photograph and then like just your life opened up to you. Yeah.

It was amazing in the book, like how many thousands of photographs you took and this kind of persistent submitting to all the magazines and all that kind of stuff. Even once you figured out like, oh, I really like this and I think maybe I'm good, you're just submitting all the time and it's just nothing but rejection forever. It's all rejection. It's so funny.

I remember sitting with my dad and I was like, I think I want to, I think I want to pursue photography. And he was just kind of silent. And he's like, he didn't say it's a bad idea. He just said, I think that's a, that's a really big uphill battle. He just said, I think that's a really big uphill battle. And my dad is a man of few words, beautiful words usually, but he chooses his words carefully. And I think that, again, like you point out, there's this idea that, yeah, I started taking pictures and I was immediately good at it. No, there were thousands, tens of thousands of pictures that were taken before anything got noticed or anything got published. It was an experience of rejection at first. And that was challenging. That was really, really challenging to just be rejected. But, but, you know, there's a story where I'm submitting

them and, um, I was submitting them to Patagonia. They were one of my first clients and all of the slides had this like little, the date and time burned into it. That's how little you knew. That's how little I knew. Like those old like Kodak Instamatics when we were kids. Yeah, yeah and the photo editor, Jane Sievert, she's like, yeah, you can turn that feature off.

You don't have to do that. She was kind about it though. She was kind. Yeah. And she said, keep submitting. So you have this opening like, oh, well now I know somebody there and they said, keep submitting.

Like that's all I need. Yeah. It's like you get that taste and we've all had that experience where something inside of us, whether we're learning something new, we're reading a book, we're experiencing something

and there's this click where it, where it, it just, it's something that happens in your brain is so ineffable. And it's this moment where you go, oh, that's it. And you, and so that little invitation, keep it coming, keep it coming. There's an invitation and you go, I'm going to do this. And sometimes it's a really bad decision. And sometimes it takes years before there's any kickback or feedback or success in it. And it took years. Yeah. Meanwhile, you go to Salzburg, you go and study photography like in Europe. Well, so I had, when I was Christian, I was going to be a youth pastor and I went to this, I think it was called Simpson College in Redding, California. And I did the whole campus tour and I was so fired up about

Jesus at the time. Like, I mean, that was my life, you know? And I was like, well, I've had this, I was perfecting my narrative at the time. I have this really tortured past. So who better to be a youth pastor, right? I can lead these wayward teens towards Jesus. Nothing wrong with Christianity. There's, you know, of course we can have our critiques, but I actually hold a very high value around it because it changed my life. But something about that choice felt flawed. And instead I wrote, but I had terrible SAT scores. SAT scores. You know, I had a GED. And so I just, I basically wrote like a short essay to a tiny school in Billings, Montana called Rocky Mountain College. And, you know, basically begged for admission. And I was there for about a year and a half. And then I begged to leave. And so I found this study abroad program in Salzburg.

Yeah. But this is the self-preservation thing, right? Despite the fact that you're kind of out on a limb, like you're trying to take care of business. Like you realize like I need to go to school. You know, I've got a GED, what's available to me? And you're making it happen. Trying really, really hard.

And with a lot of failure and a lot of ups and downs, you know, cause then now there's this idea that now stuff's sorting itself out. And it kind of was, it kind of was, cause now I had climbing, I had these anchors, I had faith, you know, so, and I could kind of keep a job. So yes, things were sorting themselves out.

And where's mom and dad and bro? So my brother and I hadn't spoke, we didn't speak for years. There was one incident where right before I went into the hospital, it was what precipitated me going into the hospital. The second time was, you know, we got in a all out brawl on the front lawn. And so we kind of swore each other off for, for a lot, for a lot of years actually. And, um, and mom and dad are, look, they're just, they're just fucking thrilled that I want to go to school at all. So they're doing anything. They're like, thank God this child is not like a full blown addict on the street. We have a lifeline. So we're gonna give, we're gonna try to provide as much opportunity as we can.

But they also knew that because I was deeply, deeply volatile, it was not going to be a smooth path. And on top of the volatility, where are you at during this time with respect to drugs and alcohol? I mean, there's more than dabbling that's going on when you're a kid bouncing around. Yeah. And there's some,

you know, risky sexual behavior. There's all kinds of, you know, things that accompany the sort of semi homeless runaway teenager. I mean, there were a lot of things. I think chapter eight is one of my, if I can call it a favorite chapter, but it, you know, it kind of talks about a very dark experience when I'm on the run and end up squatting in this house. And what unfolds, I try to handle with care and grace, but it, you know, in hindsight, I think it really affected me. And it was a sexual experience that-

It's incredibly raw and vulnerable. Yeah, I mean- That you told that story. It was rough. And also I land somewhere in the middle with it. Yeah, and you signed up for it and you participated in it willingly. Willingly.

And it would be really easy to look back and be like, well, this terrible thing happened to me. But again, it's like, no, I was present. I showed up and I don't wanna go back and sort of give away my agency. But to your point, there was hypersexuality as it relates to bipolar two and even ADHD, well, and bipolar is really, really common,

especially when there's sort of a core belief of a value deficit. And because sex and sexuality is a sort of an, it's like intimacy light. It can be intimacy full blown in its healthiest expressions, but it's kind of trying to matter and be valued and be desired. And so sexuality was one that wasn't just dabbling. I went full on into that at a very young age. And it's continued throughout my whole life to be a, you know, if we talk about primary addictions or addictions later on, you know, like that, I would say has been always my primary addiction. primary addictions or addictions later on, you know, like that I would say has been always my primary addiction. Drugs and alcohol, I loved being around them. And I did quite a bit.

I used quite a bit, but I wasn't, there was, again, there was a self-preservation. There was a governor that was inside because I was very very scared of them and partly because I've been told that because my brain was essentially fragile that if I did these things that I would inevitably go crazy like into pure psychosis and and I was likely anyway so I was horrified of going too far with them, but I really wanted to be a part of them because I saw the community. I saw a community around them.

Like it was cool. My sense also is that this is an outgrowth of the inner kind of chaos agent. And although drugs and alcohol were problematic at times, it wasn't your primary malfunction. No, not a primary malfunction. What's that? Number five.

What was that? That movie, number five alive. You know, anyway, my primary malfunction, if I had one was a misunderstood, how do I even want to say that? Was there a primary malfunction? Dude, I was just fucked up. I don't even know how to say it, you know?

Help me understand the lived experience of being bipolar. I mean, when I grew up, it was called being a manic depressive. And I have borne witness to people in full-blown manic states. I've been around it. It's a scary experience. But I can't say that I fully understand what it feels like.

And when you talk about hypomania, I have some relationship with depression, but not the depths to which you've experienced it. But I'm not sure I know really what hypomania is or walk us through what it feels like and what it is. So what it is, there's basically two levels. Again, this is the way I understand it. There's mania and there's hypomania. Mania is full-blown manic expression, i.e. you're blowing through bank accounts, you are selling houses,

you're basically in a state of psychosis. And it can go so far that you stop making sense at all. You're going so fast, you can feel a deep connection to everything, you are seeing auras, you're seeing all sorts of things. Now, you look at this from a shamanistic perspective, maybe this is what people were experiencing all the time. And maybe in a container, it's not always totally bad. Who knows? In the mental health space, mania is dangerous, right? Because you are not in control of your faculties. Hypomania is different.

It sits right below that, where you get all of the benefits without the immediate danger. So when you're cycling up, you'll be very, very social, very effective. You don't need a lot of sleep. You can take on information wildly effectively. It can be very, very pleasant. Sounds fucking awesome. Yeah. It's like euphoric. It is euphoric. And mania can feel euphoric too. It's like, did you see the movie Limitless? Yes. Okay. With Bradley Cooper, that's hypomania. Like you cannot be stopped. You're dialed in. You're dialed in. If it tips into mania, the wheels start to go off, but it doesn't even have to do that.

The wheels will come off at hypomania anyway. There's an inevitable crash. It will come because you're exhausting all of your nervous systems to try to regulate. And how long does that state last for? It depends. I mean, it's person to person, but it doesn't, mania tends not to last too long

because you're spinning off so much energy. Hypomania can last a little longer because again, you're sustaining some. But as soon as you start to like, just not sleep at all, you're staying up for days on end, you're nearing the end. Right, so like week, 10 days you're talking about, like that's a long time. It's a long time. And I honestly, I would be dishonest if I said I knew the exact number. I just don't know how long it can last. Yeah, I don't know. And it's always

followed by, it precipitates this crash and you go into a dark hole of depression. It's necessary. Your body's trying to regenerate and all of your serotonin and dopamine, they've been completely wiped out. So it's similar to what happens when people take too much, something like MDMA, that, you know, suicide Monday kind of feeling is when you're just depleted and, and that can go into, you know, suicidal depression. What I experienced it as, you know, when I was 13 and I was sitting there and I was like, what is going on? I couldn't sleep. I mean, it was moody, but I was an insomniac, highly, highly irritable, I was an insomniac, highly, highly irritable, very distractible.

And then one night I was in the family den and it was just as if my brain sped up so fast that I couldn't make sense of anything. Like the thoughts were coming so quickly that it's like trying to catch fragments. You know, a thought becomes a sentence, becomes a word, becomes letters to the point where if you almost like you're in the matrix and you're just watching letters fly by and it's so disorienting for me. And then it was these flashes. I'd close my eyes and it was like this,

you know, it was loud, but there's no sound. There's, it's so disorienting to the point where I just started. And then I was just weeping. I was just weeping. And I'm standing in our family's den basically. And I was so horrified because I just didn't know. I didn't know. And at the same time, that's this tip over into where you start to have really, really low depression. Because then the point is, now you're having sort of, what I always experienced was more mixed episodes

where once it gets to that point, you're also getting depressed, right? And then it was like, I just want to fucking die. And how long would those episodes go for in your case? I mean, they could happen intermittently throughout, you know, the day where I would just have to, I didn't know it was, I was kind of like, and then, but it would take, you know, a week or two weeks.

But it was also during those times that I'm like completely ditching school and going and doing acid in the park with sort of like this carefree, like I don't, you know, like zero future forecasting, zero. That's why people blow through whole bank accounts because they just lose the capacity to understand where's this going, you know? What is the latest science tell us or not tell us about what brings this on? Because it seems like it visits from time to time, like in an unmedicated state, but I don't know that I understand if anyone understands, like, are there things that you

can identify where you're like, oh, we're headed in that direction and this is gonna happen? Or does it just happen? I found that once I've started to really be more embodied and paying attention to what my body's doing, I'm aware, I'm hyper aware of, oh, my thoughts seem fast right now. That's curious. Okay, then that's my cue to be like, how am I sleeping?

What's my sleep doing? Once I start to notice a couple things stacking up, I don't want to eat. My thoughts are a little elevated and I don't want to sleep or I don't need to sleep or I can't sleep. That to me is an indication that I'm cycling up. And usually what precipitates that is a period of high stress and unregimented living, right? Where I'm off a routine, I'm not exercising, time is being eaten in all sorts of different directions. The demands are high. And so in some ways, it's almost like my body's reaction to step into the role that it needs to. But then, you know, if I'm being mindful, that's when I'm like, oh shit, things are, this could go sideways. But it's taken, it took me into my late thirties. I knew I carried this diagnosis from the time I was 14, but it wasn't until my late thirties

that I really started taking it very seriously. And are you on a medication now that works for you? Yeah. I take Lamotrigine, which is one of, Lamictal is the brand name. It's one of the most effective, low impact, high efficacy, bipolar management medications that there are. And I went through periods where I was like, fuck this. In fact- Is it that thing where you're like, I just feel dulled out. I want to get off the medication. Or you feel so good that you're like, I don't need this anymore. And that can be another indication of cycling up where you're like, I don't need this.

I think we are a heavily over-medicated country. I think we're a heavily over-medicated world. I think some of the things you've talked about, we try to address the symptoms rather than the root cause. And I'm an advocate when and where it really has been, you know, there's been some curiosity about, does this help, you know? And so it's a yes and for me. Sure. sure. Back to the photography. Yeah. So tiptoe me up to your first sort of breakthrough with this where it occurred to you like, oh, maybe I can do this.

This is working for me. Well, I kept climbing and I kept, so after the, I was working at a gear store at this point and after the Alaska trip, before I went to Salzburg, I went back to Denali the next summer. I saved up and climbed Denali. And then I went straight to Peru and climbed in Peru. And I was just funding these with, you know,

you're living on scraps. You know how it is. You're living out of a truck. And I had this folder of images. So when I went to Salzburg and I met Andrew Phelps, he looked at him and he's like, these are, you know, there's something here. I don't know what he really saw,

but he encouraged me. And then it was this, that summer, I ended up living in basically a broom closet in Chamonix and I was climbing with two guys, Stian Hagen and Jamie Stryken on the North face of the Guy de Midi. And I took a picture and I knew that picture, I knew I'd done something.

And that was the first picture that ever got published. But that was in 2000, I think it was 2004 that I had my first published image. So I've been taking pictures for five years before I had one image published. The guy in Salzburg though, this is another inflection point. Huge. He becomes sort of a mentor. He helps you understand the difference between a good picture, a great picture and a transcendent picture. He gives you technique and form, but in sort of an

offhanded way, he just says, you should keep doing this. It was sort of a throwaway comment, but it's again, sort of like the woman at Patagonia. It was like just enough encouragement to keep you locked in. Just enough, right? But it's like with some of your coaches, right? When you expect them to do something, a big gesture, oftentimes it's the more subtle gesture that has the most impact. Have you like stayed in communication with him? Did he, so he has seen everything that you've done? We talked to him the other day. Yeah. Yeah. He's, um, you know, cause when I was 20, he was like 33, 34, he felt miles older than me. And now I realize, you know,

we're basically essentially in the same age demographic now. And so we, yeah, we communicate, we talk a lot about, we don't really talk about photography anymore. I was with him the other day, like, like a couple months ago and I'm sitting there and I realized, I was sitting at dinner with him in Salzburg and, and I looked around and I realized, oh shit, it didn't even occur to me to bring a camera on this trip. Not that I thought about it and I left it behind.

It didn't even occur to me to bring it. And that was, well, I mean, well, I'm sure we'll get to that point, but it was so interesting to be sitting. Because you're just so present in your experience, right? You don't wanna have anything in between you and experiencing the presence of the moment, right? Well, yeah, right. I thought you talked about like, you can confuse taking photographs

for being present in a particular moment, but in truth, it's not that. It is a creative act. Like you're participating in that moment, but being fully present in a lived experience is something qualitatively different. Well, it was that moment where I was sitting with this guy who started photography. I realized I didn't have a camera with me in Europe at all. And I realized, holy shit, photography's done. Here's the guy that started it and it ends here too somehow.

Has it though? I don't know. Who knows? Yeah. You know? Yeah. That's a story too. I'm done with photography just as much as I am a photographer. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Good, good call. Fuck you. Right. Yeah. So what is the difference between a good photograph, a great photograph and a transcendent photograph. How do you describe in words what makes a truly transcendent photograph so timeless and fantastic? I mean, the way I describe it is there's, yeah, there's four kinds. There's bad photographs, which are most, there's good photographs, which are a solid understanding of light and composition. They're interesting. They draw you in a little bit, but that's the kind of stuff that you see on,

you know, hotel walls that are, you know, you're like, oh, that's a good picture. Then there's great photographs, which are really articulate. They show this strong understanding of composition, light, serendipity, moment, all of these things. And they're really, you know, you see a lot of those in photojournalism. There's something about them that really draws you into a

deeper emotional experience. And those are, I think, a lot more rare because they require more education. They just, you're so much more versed in the lensing and how to layer things or how to capture a moment and also which photo to choose to get, that you put out into the world. And then transcendent photographs, which I think are the highest calling of photography are these ones that are so powerful that they, it's almost like they punch you. And the examples that I use in the book are like the Napalm Girl by Nick Ut, where it's this, even thinking about it, this pain of this naked Vietnamese girl running. On fire.

On fire in horror, you know, or Eddie Adams, you know. That's the. The judge jury executioner in Saigon where the guy's literally in the moment of shooting a Viet Cong in the head. And you just. They have so much less to do with composition

and lensing and all of it, right? All of it. It's just the indelible moment captured perfectly that says way more than what you're actually seeing in the image about the world, humanity, what have you. And I think usually those photographs have to do more with humans, usually. They're just, there are great wildlife photographs,

but there's something about for me, at least where people, you know, what's your, what's your favorite animal to photograph? Well, humans are the wildlife photographs are generally more majestic or tragic, but, and they can be transcendent, but, but it's those moments of humanity. And oftentimes it's in its worst expression that shake you, you know. The photograph of the surfer from this past summer, Gabriel Medina, what's his, I can't remember his last name, but where he's, you know, he's levitating and his board is perfectly lined up. He just looks like a Jesus-like figure.

Right, right, right. I mean, that's pretty epic. I don't know, does that fall into the category of transcendent or great? It's definitely great. It's absolutely great. I'm not sure that it's transcendent. Can we judge those in the moment? It's only years later that we can make that call.

Yeah, they're more time capsules. Or the photograph of Trump with the assassination. I mean, that's a pretty indelible image of our moment. That says a lot. Absolutely. And I would, all politics aside, that photograph is, it's powerful, man. It is a moment in time that will,

and so that could be transcendent. But again, you make a good point. I don't think you can judge. We can't really know. You can have an inclination. I think, you know, the surfer is a epic sport moment that represents sort of this global coming together to celebrate sort of the human triumph of sport.

Is it transcendent? Does it say anything deeper about the human condition? I don't know. Yeah, I don't, to me, not, but then again, remember, like it's all subjective. Sure, sure. Like some people are gonna hate this book and that's okay, right?

And some people are gonna go, oh, this is really great and that's okay. Same with photographs. But there are some that we can agree upon. Yeah, like the monk on fire. What is your relationship to your most iconic, most famous photograph, which is basically a selfie? It is.

Right? Yeah, it is a selfie. Of all the like epically, you know, kind of intentional photographs that you've taken where you're like, you line it up perfectly and you've got the light and all of that. Like the most resonant and perhaps transcendent is the one that captures, you know,

a very unique moment in your life that I think does speak to the human condition and our relationship with life and death. I mean, so the photograph that you're talking about comes at as, well, the book starts there and kind of ends there, but comes back to it in the middle, but it's, you know, it comes in Pakistan, middle of winter. We've just climbed this mountain called Gashabrim 2, and we've just been in an avalanche. And I'll leave a little bit up to the imagination there, but it, we were but it was about an hour after the avalanche,

a long time people were like, directly after the, it wasn't that, it wasn't right after, it was about an hour later. We were walking down towards base camp and I just, you know, I had all this, I could feel all this ice frozen on my face and in my beard and the avalanche was still very present with me. And I was still very much in a state of shock.

And I just, I felt the urge to turn the camera on and take a picture of myself. That was the picture that was, that's talk about inflection points. That was when like life just changed that moment. And I have so much gratitude for it. And I hate it at the same time, but it's mostly gratitude, but it's so emblematic of something that is so

begging to be addressed in me, but I didn't really know it at the time. But I think maybe that's what people see is this sort of, I don't want to get too poetic about it and too flowery, but I look at it now and I've had experiences with it. And I can talk about the circumstances in those where I'm looking at it and it feels as if I'm looking at myself asking for something, but I didn't know what it was. When I first saw the image, it's like, oh, this is a guy on the precipice of dying and he's reflecting upon his own mortality. In learning about your story and reading your book,

now when I look at it, I have a totally different experience, which is I see a little boy crying for help. There's a desperation and a sadness in it, crystallized in this moment that very much is a before and after moment because in the wake of, you sort of buried the lead, which was like, you were buried in an avalanche.

Literally, like you almost did die. You and the two people you were climbing with all buried in an avalanche. Very well could have died. In the wake of that though, all buried in an avalanche, like very well could have died. In the wake of that though, that brings to the surface all this stuff that you've worked so hard to compartmentalize and repress that perhaps you've convinced yourself is in the rear view

because now you're this mountaineer and you're this adventure and you're working for National Geographic and you're making money and people know who you are, and all of that need for- Validation. Meaning and validation, it's all being met, right? So you're like, this is what I've been waiting for

my entire life. And then you get smacked and you realize like, it's not actually it, that's the illusion. And there is all this stuff deep down in here that is now kind of roaring up and I'm gonna have to deal with it. You know, it took 12 years to deal with it, 14 this year, where I'm pausing

because it's really easy for me to get wrapped into a, um, a rehearsed narrative here. So I want to be, I don't want to do that. That photograph was in the moment, I think, and I've talked about it a little bit, I just in other interviews and the book, I think I was trying to just get away from it all, but I don't really know. It was just, it was reflexive. And so to say that I knew what was happening would be dishonest. To say that it's clear to me now that I was asking for something. Might be an applied meaning. I don't know. But to your point, there was a little boy that was really scared. Really, really scared.

Not just in the moment, but really scared of, I think, if you really want to get metaphysical about it, what was coming. Because this was the point where I got lost under the photograph. I got buried under the photograph because with it, now there's all this added attention. Now there's real in a small container, right? And I say fame with a lowercase f here, like fame within a community, right? And for a moment, we are celebrated as some of the best climbers in the world, right? And for a moment we are celebrated as some of the best climbers in the world, right? Whether you agree with that or not is inconsequential. That was the attention that we were getting. So it was easy to just not pay attention to it. But if, as I started to

understand trauma later on in life, and I, and as I realized that there was actual acute PTSD, which I still have a hard time giving myself permission to actually have experienced, if you see it from that lens, if you see it from that angle, all of a sudden you see all of the childhood trauma, all of the violence, all of the chaos, all of it being displayed in this single image. Because I had learned that

my mind is scary. So the best way for me to not go crazy is to go do crazy shit, right? And I learned that, at least I had a narrative, I don't really matter. So I'm going to prove to the world that I matter. And here's proof that I matter. And then there's all of the violence and stuff that are like little seeds of trauma planted all through this big fertile field. And then you take an experience like an avalanche, it's like just dumping water and fertilizer all over it. And that's what acute PTSD is. It's just this explosion of trauma. It's usually kicked off by a single event, but people who have a lot of developmental trauma are more likely to have acute PTSD, right? And so that moment is that where you're dumping water

onto it. It's literally the moment. And that's what you're seeing, I think. We're brought to you today by a very exciting sponsor, Go Brewing. I am sober. I don't drink. And I devoted so many episodes of this podcast to the unreal benefits of an alcohol-free lifestyle. Why? Because even if you don't have issues with booze and suds, no amount of alcohol is good for you. At a minimum, it wreaks havoc on your sleep and produces a hangover that destroys your energy, your mood, and your focus. At a minimum, it wreaks havoc on your sleep and produces a hangover that destroys your energy, your mood, and your focus. At worst, it turns your whole life upside down. But no longer does

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So further disorienting is the fact that this photograph ends up on not only the cover of National Geographic, but the 120th, 125th anniversary of the magazine. So it's like a special edition of this already highly prestigious magazine. So you being amongst this team of three, you were the first, and I think only American to summit an 8,000 meter peak in winter. So there's the accomplishment as a climber and then there's the accomplishment as an artist. And you layer those things on top of this traumatic incident that's bringing up all this other stuff, right? So you are going back into the world and being celebrated for this and getting invited to conferences and people want to talk to you and you're on stages and you're being celebrated as an athlete and as an adventure athlete and as an artist at the same time. Well, you're also trying to make sense of this experience that you just had and its relationship to all this other stuff

that you haven't actually dealt with. Like it's a time bomb, dude. I've never heard it described in that term. It was a time bomb. It was a time bomb because then there's the stress of all and the adrenaline of all the good stuff that's happening, right? Which is pushing those buttons of feeling like you want to matter.

Right? Exactly. Like now I do matter. And all these people are telling me that I matter. And your dopamine is like going crazy. It's going nuts. Because now you belong. You're part of this special club.

This is what you always wanted. And now you're here. And now you're here. You've arrived. So the idea that you'd have to actually pay attention to anything that was really internally happening is, you know, it's just clouded by everything else. And coupling that with then I go and get married, right?

Which was its own added stress. And I thought it was what I was supposed to do. And all the, you know, she was beautiful and a yoga instructor and just a kind person and had all these great, you know, she was beautiful and a yoga instructor and just a kind person and, uh, had all these great, you know, benefits and, and attributes. So I did that. And then immediately, immediately, immediately the attention of it all, um, started to seep into my behaviors. And I started to just notice like, wow, I just feel even more disconnected. And that's when I started kind of like drink more because fuck it, it's time to

celebrate. And then I was on the road more. And that's when all of the hypersexuality stuff starts seeping back in. And then I'm hiding, then I'm under this mountain of shame as this newly married guy who has all this success starting to cheat and starting to lie about it and starting to do. So now there's this massive disconnect between what people are seeing and the reality of what I'm living. And there's the shame that's built in between that, that it's just this, it's a time bomb. Yeah. It's a powder keg. It's waiting to explode. And how long was that fuse?

Like what actually caused it to finally explode? It was more like a cluster bomb, right? Right. Like there were things that exploded first and then I thought I was dealing with it. And then like, you know, the first thing to go was, I mean, it was just anger. It was so much anger. There was rage that I don't even think I dealt with until really this past two years.

And then there was, the first thing to really come out was like the cheating. Yeah. And that was about four years into the marriage. And it was the end of the marriage. And also, you know, if I look back, if I look back at pictures, I was gaining weight and I didn't drink, you know, you've been very open about how you drank. I didn't drink quite as, it wasn't like binge drinking as much. It was like advanced medicating where I would come home from these hyper stimulating experiences climbs

whatever they were assignments where I felt really I was the guy I was the you know the guy on on set um and I come home and I'd have nothing to do and so again it's time to celebrate take the gas off you know and I go out and like I'd have a beer for lunch and then I'd have or maybe two but then it's happy hour call somebody else go out to happy hour have a couple for lunch and then I'd have, or maybe two, but then it's happy hour, call somebody else, go out to happy hour, have a couple more, you know, and I've had five drinks. Then, and then it's dinner time, you know, so you crack a bottle of wine or you have whatever. And then, you know, that's two or three more. And then it's time for your, for your nightcap, right? And so by the end of the day, you're having 10 or more drinks. I was never highly, of course I got very much blackout drunk, but that was rare. One of the things that I really admired you talking about that you've been

open about is the DUIs. And one of my greatest regrets, I have very few regrets, but one of my greatest regrets is driving when I was under the influence like that and the irresponsibility and sort of the invincibility that I felt. And that's something that all you can do is say you're sorry to everybody. Cops didn't get involved. No accidents or anything like that.

Yeah, that's some decent self-medication, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's every day. There's the travel in the hotel rooms and the anonymity that comes with that that leads your brain to start entertaining behaviors you probably shouldn't indulge. It's a whole hole of darkness, that thing, right? I mean, you've had Johan Hari on here.

Sure. Love that guy. And one of the things he says is like, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you, it's the cage you live in. And then what I love, he says, the opposite of addiction isn't sobriety, it's connection. And when I look back, as much attention as there was,

I was so disconnected. I felt so incredibly isolated. And the way to solve that isolation is through substances and sex. And the hiding of that in the same way that you hide drinking becomes a loop of shame. And that cycle of shame

is the driving force behind continuing. Sure. Yeah, because the shame is so painful, it has to be numbed. And especially when the outside vision is so fucking different. Right. That plays into this fraudulent imposter syndrome thing,

which makes you feel even worse. It just basically ratchets up and ratchets up, ratchets up. It gets worse and worse and worse. On Johan Hari's point, I always push back on him on this a little bit. I feel like that idea, I think there's truth in that idea that the opposite of addiction is connection. But that binary, I have a big problem with that. Like I feel like for people that aren't really addicts, connection can be a solution to like addictive behavior. But if you're like a full-blown alcoholic

or addict or gambling addict, you can surround yourself with people and connect with them. But this is not going to disabuse you of your malfunction entirely. It's like that idea. He always tells the story of the, I've told this before on the podcast. So people, the rats in the park and the cocaine and all of that. And it's like, well, then when you put friends around them, they don't want cocaine anymore. And it's like, well, if that actually worked with human beings, all you'd

have to do is surround the cocaine addict with a bunch of cool people and friends. And he would stop doing cocaine. We all know that that's not, that's not what happens. Like, I love that. Like, you know, you click in, but then you get into these really interesting, cool points where I would argue that the strength and power of AA or NA is the connection. Sure. So you're surrounding yourself at that point. That's your rap park. It's not surrounding yourself with cool people

outside of that. But there's more to it. For sure. I guess I push back on the reductive aspect of just saying this is what it is. For sure, and as you know, like my whole thing here is about avoiding binary thinking in some ways.

It's not so reductive, it's not so simple. I just like being curious about what the solve is, and I think a huge piece of it is connection. being curious about what the solve is. And I think a huge piece of it is connection. Feeling connected. Like when I eventually started to sort this out and I started going to AA, what I felt was again, like when I had started going to church,

which of course I'm not Christian anymore. I'm, you know, I'm one of those guys that says I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual and people can gag how much ever they want. But when I started going into the rooms and participating, what I felt was accepted and belonging. Like I felt a deep sense of belonging. And I think for me, at least,

that was the primary driver of my sobriety for a long time. And it was the most meaningful part of it. I think the self inventory is very clearly an amends and service, obviously. Yeah, there's the inventory, there's the amends, there's the spiritual connection. I mean, it's a spiritual program, there's service,

there's these other things, but fundamentally it is community-based, it's about the community. So I get that aspect of it, I'm not discounting it. I'm just making the case for it being a little more complicated than- It's way more complicated than- And I would say in the same breath,

and I'm curious what you think, I love the work that Gabor Mate does, where he basically traces adult dysfunction back to childhood trauma, whether it's addiction or whatever kind of, you know, maladaptations, you know, we all make as a result of things that happen to us. But I would probably push back a little bit

on those who use that in a overly reductive way to say that like, well, all alcoholism, anybody who's an alcoholic, for example, it can always be rooted back to, you know, X, Y, and Z that happened to them as a kid. Maybe that's true. I don't know. Is there a genetic piece? Is there something that gets passed down? Well, it's not the alcoholism that gets passed down generation to, it's not the alcoholism that gets passed down generation to generation. It's the trauma. It's the trauma and the behavior, right? Yeah, yeah.

It instills within that person the need to behave in that way. But I often think like, is that reductive also? Like, I'm not a clinician. My guess is that it is reductive a little bit. I think, again, we're talking about so many contributing factors. And ultimately, I think it's know, again, we're talking about so many contributing factors and ultimately it's, I think it's an interesting question, but I don't think we're going to live in a trauma-free world, at least not for the next 500, 600 years until we start living in the age of Aquarius or whatever you want to, you know, like, and I don't think that it actually is really all that. In some ways, I don't think it's all that meaningful of a question, not your question,

but the inquisition is it all trauma-based because guess what? If you're fucking addicted, it doesn't matter. It like, yes, you can go back and trace to that and yes, you can work on that, but if you're addicted and the best way for you to stay safe is abstinence, who fucking cares? You know what I mean?

Well, that's the thing with AA. So I'm with you, I'm with you. It's so practical because it's not about looking in the rear view mirror and trying to make sense of the why. It's about like, what are you doing today? And here's what you need to do in order to move forward. I think there is value in looking in the rear view mirror

once you've achieved some stability with your sobriety to try to understand your past and to identify wounds that remain unhealed so that you can, so that you can work towards healing them. And that's really like the latter part of your book is, is about this very thing. Well, and that's, I mean, again, it's like, the other thing that, that I think is, can be complicated about AA is it's not looking in the rear view, but often one of the things that I found hard for me is that it felt like at times the environment would be about re-litigating or rehashing trauma.

You know, you're in these rooms and everybody's telling their nightmare stories. And I'm like, and that to me felt at times like people were still chained to the identity of their trauma. If that's your process, by all means, I get it. If that's what's working and it keeps you safe, keep doing it. I think for me, there was a moment of curiosity where I was like, wait a minute, do I need to keep telling this story? You know, because the identity that I had around addict and addiction was one that was deeply shame-based.

and addiction was one that was deeply shame-based. And so it just, it felt to me like perhaps I was perpetuating my own, I was reinforcing the cage. Does that make sense? Yeah, I understand that. I mean, that's a common relationship or perspective that many people have with AA. I mean, I would share or offer a different lens, which is this idea that shame can't survive the light.

And when you're telling your story, you're exposing all of this to the light, which is like an antiseptic to that shame that you might still be harboring. And once you've made peace with it, it no longer triggers you. And part of sharing your story is to say, we will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it

because it doesn't own us anymore. Like here it is, like it's out here and I can laugh at it or whatever because I've done the work and it no longer holds that power over me. And the reason that I share it is A, to remind myself, this is where I came from because my brain wants to tell me everything's fine

and I don't need to worry about this shit anymore. And secondarily, or perhaps more importantly, because it's of service to the newcomer who's in there for the first time and has never heard anybody get up and tell such a crazy fucking story and can identify their own emotions. Like again, to that place

where we began this conversation, the facts of our experience are different, but we have a shared emotional relationship to it. And you tell that story because maybe there's somebody in that room who's gonna hear something that you share that they've never heard before that's gonna allow them to plant their feet in that room

and take the next step towards sobriety. I think I just got taken to the mat. I mean, no, no, and I will also acknowledge, you know, that I think I would be disingenuous or dogmatic if I didn't say that there is something to be deconstructed about the idea of getting up and saying, my name is this, and I'm an alcoholic or an addict. Like, are you not further entrenching yourself in an identity or a

story that no longer serves you? This program has been instrumental in my life and it still is. And I feel fine about that. And I understand why it isn't for other people. And I don't have any judgment about how people get sober and stay sober. But the larger issue also is a big theme in your book, which is the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and the power that they hold over us. And this is something I think about a lot, and I'm doing some writing on myself, but this notion that human beings are storytelling machines and stories are how we make sense of the world and ourselves. But we all tell ourselves stories about who we are, what we're capable of, what happened to us,

what our future might look like. But these are just stories. And those stories are only as powerful as we allow them to be. And none of them are actually true, right? They have a relationship to the truth. They're neither false nor true. Exactly.

And, you know, memory is very unreliable and those stories are formed by memories that perhaps are not objective in nature, right? At all, they can't be. So it's in service to the self to like, try to deconstruct those stories and to see what's true and what is serving you and what isn't serving you and what's keeping you stuck. And I think where I related so deeply to your book and your story is the way in which these stories of success and identity can also

entrap us and become their own prisons, right? So you are a photographer, you're a national geographic explorer, you're a mountaineer, you're all of these things, right? And what's confusing and complicated about it is those things saved your fucking life. Totally. And they gave you this incredible life, this aspirational life that so many people

would just kill to have, right? Right, right. And yet, these are the very things that are holding you back and keeping you stuck in a story that is basically just enhancing your wounding and keeping you stuck from the healing that will ultimately make you whole. Because all of these things, they're great, right? And I'm not casting aspersions on any of them. And I see myself in this very same story. They are serving that childhood need that went unmet

to feel like you matter. Look at me, look what I've done. All these people are out in the world and they're saying, look at Corey, like he's amazing, right? And it feels really good. And you do feel like you matter, right? So that need is finally getting met.

But- Is it a flawed need? The hole can never be filled, right? Like the hungry ghost cannot be sated. So the more that you receive that, the more you become dependent on it for a sense of self. And it distances you from the ability to love yourself independently and to, you know, have a relationship with yourself

that isn't contingent upon external validation or anything external other than this internal, you know, animating force of self-love. Amen. Did I get that right? Amen. Amen. There's no, I mean, we'll add to it, but there's nothing to add to that in so many ways. You could end it there. Like truly that is the, um, and I don't want to end it there, by the way, I'm just saying like, that is you encapsulated that the whole message of this in so beautifully and so articulately, like that is, that's it, 100%. We are mechanisms of the stories we tell. And the way I always refer to it is there's data that is sort of as close to truth as you can get. There's just hard data.

And then we interpret that data, right? There's an experience. The table is hard. It starts when we're really little and we just start taking on that data. And then we start to form a rough framework of a story around that. I fall down, my knees bleed, right? That is what happened. But also now you're building a sense of meaning around what it means to exist relationally in the world to everything around you. And so there's data and then you start the stories and then the stories form the meanings and then the meanings form the beliefs, right? And then you come up with these strong beliefs that then inform or reinforce the stories and they're self-reinforcing to the point where they become what we call identity, right?

And all of this happens unconsciously. Totally unconsciously. Our brain on an unconscious level is selecting things that happened to us, memories of things that occurred and making a decision that these are the important things and it will then select other things that have occurred and it'll create this matrix.

And that matrix helps tell that story and ultimately craft that identity that becomes calcified until you're at a point where you don't even question it or wonder where it even came from in the first place. Exactly, and then you're saying, I am Corey. I am Rich. That is a huge, huge story. Massive ball of yarn.

And we're also applying, and everybody has that. That's why everybody is sort of this, we are all truly equal in that way. And we all have, in my experience, very similar experiences of forming stories, right? But the stories themselves, as you pointed out, can become very, very problematic over time if we're not courageous. And I do believe it takes a lot of courage to start questioning which stories are generative and which are corrosive. Because what it asks of us or what it asked of me, I'll say,

is that I stopped the hard binaries. It demanded, it demands continually that I live somewhere in the middle, not in ambiguity, but in curiosity. And I make space for the fact that it's not as clear as I want it to be. And that my ideas of truth are actually at times very subjective and paradoxical and hypocritical. I mean, we're all walking paradoxes, right? We're all massively hypocritical by our very nature. This is where

it gets interesting and tricky. You know, this is where the book, this is when the, in the writing process, it really started to come alive for me because I started to figure out, oh, this is what I've been trying to fucking say. It isn't one thing. I mean, you're this guy who, who, you know, It isn't one thing. I mean, you're this guy who, you know, basically is smoking cigarettes like a chimney and yet somehow was able to summit Everest without oxygen. Well, Adrian Ballinger, who's one of the world's greatest mountaineers, like struggled, like there's that, right? But you're also the same guy who in 2021 on Dolly Geary, like backed out from an expedition where a lot of money was spent around a documentary. And there were a lot of people involved and a lot of anger and a lot of frustration and a lot of judgment against you for pulling the rip cord under the rubric of like mental health, right? And I don't know if those wounds are even

healed. I mean, the wounds that, you know, relate to the other people that were involved in that story. Like this is the same person, but perhaps those experiences, those more difficult moments are the ones that allow you to kind of, that motivate you to deconstruct the truth of these stories and the identity that's crafted around them.

But how do you have these heightened experiences and come down from the mountain and say, am I a mountaineer? Am I done with the mountains? I'm done with photography. How does that arise? And what does that relationship look like for you now? Well, it's like you mentioned earlier,

you start getting the adoration and the accolades and all of it. It's a bottomless well, right? It's a bottomless hole. And so you need more and more and more to fill it up. And so in my case, I tried to do the same thing, but more dangerous and harder and at a higher level over and over and over again.

Because you're on that hamster wheel. You're on the, yeah. So once you get that affirmation for climbing a mountain, the next one has to be bigger and the next one has to be bigger after that. And harder and more dangerous. And you're just, yeah, it's like a heroin addict. Like you're chasing that original high,

you're never gonna get it. You're never gonna get it. And this identity as a high Alpine mountaineer become, like, as I said earlier, they become these traps and it's no different than somebody who does Ironmans. Like they discover triathlon, it changes their life. They find a community there. They feel so nourished.

They feel healthy. They're back in their body again. They have this transcendent experience crossing the finish line at an Ironman. But rather than learn from that and move on to the next thing that allows them to grow, you stay stuck. And then year after year,

you're just doing Ironmans and doing, it's like, yeah, maybe you go a little bit faster. Maybe you go to this race or that race or whatever, but ultimately it becomes an impediment to grow. It becomes this blind spot as opposed to the accelerant that it once was. And you could see this in any community or in any movement.

Any place where you're being asked to perform at a high level and you are rewarded for that performance, I think it's almost necessary that you keep going back to the well for a little while. It's human nature. It's human nature, because the thing that feels really good

is all the external love. We, and I will speak for myself, I have been really, really great at mistaking attention for love. And it's this, oh, I'm getting attention. So I'm, so I must be loved. And so you cross that finish line and, and there's so much, um, transcendence around it that you revisit it. I see this with psychedelics all the time too. You go back to it over and over and over again, and you think you're learning something new and maybe you are, maybe I don't want to take that

away from people, but ultimately you're not becoming more humble. You're building hubris, right? And crafting a new identity, a whole new identity around it. And then you suddenly you're wearing a big hat and you got like a costume on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you're, and you're, and you got like a costume on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you are that guy and you see it all the time. I mean, you live in Venice. Yeah, I live in Venice and you got the flat room house. You could throw a stone.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And you're wearing your mala and your linen and you're the Topanga guy. Look, those are my friends, right? Yeah, mine too. And it's- I know these are my people. They're my people.

But I also can recognize that. And I say that as someone who can recognize that proclivity in myself. For sure, I've done it. And I still am doing it in some way. I'm sure I'm just trying to be more careful about those stories because like you said, there's this moment where I just, I let it all go.

How did you do that? Well, so often there's a story that we self-discover through, we have this moment, we transcend, and then we achieve. And for me, it was very different. The moment of achievement came in a very different form. After Everest in 2016 with Adrian, where I'd done it without oxygen, had I been paying attention, I would have seen that like I had kind of tapped out, but I kept going. And then five years later, after another Everest climb, after a second Everest attempt on a new route that hadn't been climbed ever, COVID happened. And I went to Dhalagiri, which is the seventh highest mountain in the world. And I'm so happy we talked

a little bit about what cycling up into hypomania looks like earlier, because now this is a kind of the real life. This is where the rubber hits the road. So we flew to Nepal. I was with Topo, my climbing partner, a guy named Tommy Joyce, Carla, Topo's partner, girlfriend, and Kellen. And we were making a film about my dad who's got cancer. He's still with us, but he, And we were making a film about my dad who's got cancer. He's still with us, but he, and it was sort of a dry run for Everest, this new route on Everest that we were gonna try again. And we got to Nepal and I noticed I was just very emotional.

Like I was very teary at things. And then I would like, and then I wasn't sleeping and I thought I was jet lag. I wasn't hungry. And I was just sort of like, my thoughts were a little fast, but I was just like, this is just jet lag. This is just travel. And then we go to base camp and we fly to base camp.

This is interesting. There is a direct link to depression and altitude and higher suicide rates at altitude. I don't know if that applies acutely, but it sure does feel like that sometimes for me where I get far more moody as soon as I start going high. And we were at base camp. We were all exhausted. I got more exhausted, but I couldn't sleep. You know, we had to really carve out this, this base camp area cause we were at the bottom of the Northwest Ridge. So there's no established base camp there. And I got sick. I thought maybe it's COVID. It's not COVID. And then the team, I was,

I was sick in my tent and the team decided to go try to find a route onto the lower Northwest face. And I was in my tent and I just started, I felt that cycling up where the thoughts were just so fast that I couldn't keep track of them. And I was reading, I forget, I was reading a book. Anyway, there was a passage about love. And I just started weeping, like uncontrollably weeping. And the thoughts were just so, so fast and I couldn't keep up with them. And then it was that flashing sensation behind my eyes again. And I just erupted. And I was, I've, yeah, I mean, I, I was screaming as loud as I could

screaming as loud as I could into my sleeping bag, balled up. And it was horrifying. It was so, so scary. And I couldn't make sense of it, but there was this deep inner knowing that at least for now, because you called me out on this earlier, at least for now, this piece of my life had exhausted itself. The climbing, the photography, the identity of all of this was somehow, it was wrung out.

It was done. I couldn't do it. It was over. And yet here I am like screaming at the top of my lungs and sort of reciting mantras and having wild sort of daydreams of dying, but also success. And just, it was so disorienting. And I tried to calm myself down and it sort of abated for a minute. And then, and then the team came back at the end of the day and I've been crying for hours, just hours and hours and hours. And I went into the tent and I was like, I'm done. And they all looked at me like, what do you mean you're done? And I'm like, I'm, I'm done. You know, what do you mean? And I said, I'm not going to climb anymore. You mean like this mountain? I'm not going to climb anymore. You mean like this mountain? I'm not going to climb anymore. I don't want to take pictures. I don't want to do any of it. And it was this moment of like, just shock, just shock. And they're like, what are you going

to do? And this is, it sounds crazy. And yet here I am four years later i was like i'm gonna move to la so there was truth in it there was there was clear direction how do you parse the hypomania from the deeper truth message like could it not just have been this idea that you're not going to climb anymore or take pictures? Could have that just been a manifestation or a symptom of the mania impulse? Yes, it could be. And it likely presented that way. But this is one of the things that I think is so interesting. And there's a moment actually in your book where you talk about this, where both things can be true. The hypomania might be influenced by the stress of the deep inner knowing

that this is not working anymore, right? And at the same time, the hypomania might be informing wildly erratic decision-making. They can be concurrent, and yet they can also be true even if they are erratic. And this is kind of the hard part about mental health, pulling it apart. You talk about a moment where you're completely out

of gas, you're on a training ride, you're riding home and you start basically levitating and you have a moment of connection with the divine, right? And it changes you. It really fucking changes you. And you even know, well, maybe this is just like complete deprivation. I have no sugar in my system. My blood sugar is gone, right? But maybe it's something deeper or maybe it's both. And maybe that's why people use deprivation to achieve spiritual levels. All I'm saying is it's not either or.

Both can be accurate and true. And as it turns out, so then the next day, does that make sense? I just want to say, yeah. Yeah. And I think on top of that, in terms of both things being true, what's both true is the idea that the responsible choice is to back out if you're mentally not in a good place to handle this because the stakes are high and death is on the table and there are other people involved. And what's also true is all these people have followed you, the Pied Piper, all over the world to this place to great expense and time and all the like on the promise that you're gonna do this thing together, you're gonna make this movie

and for you to just pull the rip cord and say, not only am I not feeling good and I'm gonna get off this mountain, like I'm never doing this. Yeah, yeah. And so, Joyce goes on to say in the New York Times, and I, you know, it's like, this could not have been easy for you to read.

I think he figured that he could leave and go back to being a quote, mental health advocate, Joyce, the filmmaker wrote in an email. Corey had to create a new narrative that protected his ego from his ever-present fear that he doesn't matter. You know what? He wasn't wrong entirely. Not no. Not no. That was a very astute observation. And part of that came from the fact that he had been making a film about me and about my family. And I had shared very clearly that I felt a deep value deficit and a need to

matter in the world. So he's not wrong. What was troubling to me in that, and I write about it a little bit, is not that he said that at all. And I hold, my God, I love the guy still. I really do. He is a powerhouse and wildly talented it was more that I had expressed for so long that these things were real in me and they were very much a part of me and yet when it when the rubber hit the road and the monster came out of the dark and showed its head in a very very tangible way that people just couldn't understand. They couldn't make space for it. Because conceptually, when we talk about mental health issues,

it's very easy to be like, yeah, yeah, I understand you struggle. It's very, very different to watch somebody, as you said earlier, experience mania, hypomania, depression. It can be so confusing for loved ones and friends around them because it doesn't seem to make sense. And yet, the decisions I was making, while they seemed erratic, ended up being some of the best decisions I could make.

So again, as you pointed out earlier, one thing that appears to be very negative can also be very positive in the same moment. It's the old Taoist, good news, bad news, who knows, right? And so when I walked away, which again, I take full responsibility. Like you said, I was a Pied Piper, follow me around the world, make this film, let's do this thing. When I walked away, people were furious, especially Tommy and Topo. And they made it very clear that they were furious. I think that anger has abated over time. I did not feel like I was trying to go back and create this new identity or fall back into a mental health advocacy identity to matter. But I felt like actually this moment was where I started

finally to understand. Somebody asked me the other day, like, when did you start to really understand your bipolar diagnosis? And I would say when I came back from Dahlagiri in 2021. Because? Because I sat across a desk from a psychiatrist and for the first time, I actually took on the information because it was so evident that there was something, like, I don't know why it finally sunk in. He just looked at me and he goes,

Corey, if you don't get this under control right now, it's probably going to get worse. And that's where all that fear that I had picked up as a child, I'm going to be crazy screaming at trees. It all came flooding back in. He's like, you know, in my mind of what I was hearing him say is that might happen. That might happen. You could lose all of this if you don't get this under control. And at the same moment, in that same moment, you know, I'd come home and I faced so much backlash and there was this very, very hard email sent to my parents

that sort of accused me of this massive manipulation. And then on top of that, the brick through the window with Nat geo yeah and the scandal and the scandal there that ended up making you have to part ways with them yeah so that was a lot of chaos dude there's a lot of chaos it's not like oh i i had an epiphany and i walked away from these things like there's a lot of wreckage right that was contributing to and i had just gone through a pretty pretty rough breakup and I'll leave that to the reader

to read about the Nat Geo thing. But like, yes, these pieces of my identity were already being stripped away. And to come back and then be sort of a key. And the other thing I just want to point out really quickly is like this high level climbing for me had become like year long meditations on my, on mortality. I was constantly thinking about dying all the time in my visualizations and everything. So I was living in this fight, flight, or freeze.

I'm basically living in my amygdala constantly and I'm overtrained. I'm undernourished. I'm catabolic. All of it is going sideways for basically a couple of years in advance. The Nat Geo things happened. I go through this breakup. I end up in a highly stressful situation below this big face. Of course, I'm going to have an episode. And then I come home. There's this sort of accusation of manipulation. You know, I'm hiding behind mental health. Like I was like, fuck it, I'm calling it in. And that's when, I don't call it a suicide attempt as much as I was, it nearly happened, you know. And I always, I've said this many, many times. It's not that you want to die, it's just that you don't want to live in the pain.

It becomes unfathomable to wake up the next day and go through it again and again and again. And that's when the psychiatrist was like, this will kill you. Or it certainly can if you don't get it under control. This is what my wife would call your great dismantling and your divine moment.

Yeah, there is. Crisis is the point of growth. Yeah, yeah. And hence begins a new story for which caution flags must be thrown. Because as you kind of point out and talk about in the book also, we can craft an identity around our own

innate brokenness just as much as we can around our accomplishments. And I think that you're absolutely right. And they can exist concurrently. Again, it can be at the same time. That's what's so confusing around it, is we can harbor stories of brokenness at the same time that we're trying to mend those stories with other stories of accomplishment. Look at me, look at what I can do. But there's also, sorry to interrupt. No, no, no. In the same way you can be like, look at me, I climbed all these mountains. You can also say, look how fucked up I am now. Like I'm more fucked up than everyone. That's a different way of

getting attention and validation, right? And I'm more fucked up than everyone. That's a different way of getting attention and validation, right? And I had done that throughout my life. Even as I started to talk about mental health, I learned all the words. I learned how to talk about it and articulate it. And I knew it through and through conceptually. I knew the conversation of trauma. And then I

learned that if I shared in certain ways, especially with women, I could hijack connection. You know, then you're the vulnerable guy. You weaponize trauma speak. Exactly. You weaponize, you trauma dump, you trauma bond. You're literally leveraging trauma to try to fix trauma. Right. And I will be the first to admit that that is a just speak for myself. I used addiction as a way to be special at times. I used my, well, I'm in so bright, you know, I'm in AA. It was a way for me to stand out. It was emblematic of my deep brokenness. And what another great way to get attention. What another great way to matter. way to matter. I'm this fragile guy, you know, care for me, pay attention to me. Look at this story of my fucked upness balanced against my triumph, all stories, all stories that are all working and some now not working and falling apart, you know? And then I started to really dive in when, you know, in the process of writing where I started to dive in and go, wait a minute, like, is this story of brokenness actually the base story of all of it? And what if that story isn't fucking true? What if I learned something really early on

that I've stuck with and clung to that I thought made me special, that actually amplified shame at times. And it's just not true. What if I've been telling the wrong story the whole fucking time? And what is the true story? For me, it's gonna sound cliche. And I don't want it to. I want to say something more profound here, but maybe the simplest thing is the truest. I am. That's all I really know.

I am. I wake up. I am. And my brain loves to spin narratives that guide me through the day. And of course it does. That's its job, right? It spins narratives to protect me. It creates identities and ideas in order to guide me. But at the end of the day, I just am. And the more I can go back to that story, the more calm and peace I find within myself. The rest of it is helpful at times, but it can also be really harmful. And in the I am moment, when you have that, when you're there, when you connect to it, when I connect to it, there's the sense of ultimate awareness of things around me, because I'm no longer clouding my perception with all the stuff that's distracting me. Does that make sense?

Sure, I'm reminded, I can't help but think of Tom Shadyac's documentary, I am, and he was in here recently, so he's on my brain. I mean, it's a similar story and message that he shares. And this is how you conclude the book with this idea around I Am. But that notion comes from thousands of years of spiritual tradition, the Vedic tradition,

from Hinduism and all these things. Judaism, Christianity. It's anchored in- It's ubiquitous. It is ubiquitous. Different phraseology is draped around it. But in essence, it's this idea of oneness and the universality of the human condition and this disabusing of this notion of specialness as a path to anything other than separation and suffering, right? Yeah.

So it's one thing to talk about these ideas Conceptually. From a place of intellectualization and another thing to actually feel them from a heart-centered place. And a lot of healing has to take place to traverse that crevasse, right? Nice. Well played. What are some of the modalities that have been most helpful for you? I mean, you talk in the

book, there's a lot, you've done a lot, right? So what's worked, what hasn't, what have you found most helpful? So, I mean, look, action, activity, finding a reasonable outlet does work to a degree, right? So long as when you realize you're chasing it so far, you stop and have the wherewithal to go, well, wait, why do I need to go to the extremes? That's the first thing. But having an activity that you really connect with, being outside specifically is so, so important. As far as therapy is concerned, I've tried everything from CBT to EMDR to TMS, everything, everything under the sun. They all have very specific impacts. Some people respond better

than others. And then I've tried psychedelics. And I will say this, I don't think psychedelics are a panacea. And I hate when they're framed that way. I think it is absolutely a disservice to the community at large. I think they require a lot of special care and attention. And I don't think that having a big trip at Burning Man is necessarily therapeutic. It's okay. It's a great experience. I just don't think it's the same thing as doing it with set setting and intention. What I will say is that psychedelics did help me. When we talk about heart-centered feeling and experience, it's real, but it's very ineffable. It's very hard to put words to. And what psychedelics did for me and psychedelics coupled with meditation and building a strong community here, a strong community of men, what all of that did for me was start to allow me to actually feel, like tangibly feel from my chest where I was actually out of my head. And I can do it at any moment now. It's hard to stay there. But where you're actually experiencing the world, not through thoughts, but through something so much bigger than thought. And it literally is a sensation that comes from here. So the heart is not a metaphor. The heart is essential in emotion processing. It sends signals up the vagus nerve to the brain, which starts emotion

processing. There is so much going on in here. And yet, because of all of the conceptualization, all of the intellectualization, all of the hiding behind the knowledge and all of the action, I had completely forgotten that this existed. It was just a word. It was, it was completely a metaphor. So meditation, I think therapy is very helpful. I think if, if psychedelics are, if you're curious, I think being very, very intentional with them help community has been one of the biggest things for me. Like I said, especially men. Tell me about this men's group. I am part of a men's group. I've been doing it for three years now. You know, we use some modeling where we start to understand where our time is going, but really time and energy is going.

Of course we bounce like business ideas off of each other. It's a support group in some ways, but beyond that, it's more of a, it's a group of men who have made the agreement to align on integrity, vulnerability, and authenticity to unburden ourselves from the isolation that so often comes with the masculine identity that we've been taught in our culture. And this sort of idea of individual exceptionalism and that the idea that our primary been taught in our culture and this sort of idea of individual exceptionalism and that the idea that our primary value is in provision and divorcing ourselves from these ideas and coming together over our real emotions

in a safe space that allows us to not navigate the world with anger and pain, but release some of that with each other in the container that masculinity can create for the safety of brotherhood. And I, you know, we get together every other Monday. I'm in two groups. I co-facilitate one.

We have Sundays together where, you know, we sit around, barbecue, just hang out. That's informal. So we do this three months chunks. Every quarters, you know, we sit around, barbecue, just hang out. That's informal. So we do this three months chunks. Every quarters, you know, we read a book. And that can be sort of the, you know, the basis of discussion. We do exercises like one quarter can be writing your eulogy and you can write it from the perspective of anybody. One could be a quarter on a masogi, which is doing something that really, really scares you and challenges you, and you can write it from the perspective of anybody. One could be a quarter on a Masogi, which is doing something that really, really scares you and challenges you.

So if you, Rich, were to come to me and be like, I'm gonna run an ultra, that's my Masogi. I'd be like, bullshit, that's not your Masogi. That's the comfort zone. That's your comfort zone. You already know what that looks like. Your Masogi might be not running an ultra. You need to sit down and not work out for six months. Right. See what that

feels like. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the basic framework of it. And it's really about, you know, it's about learning how to be loved outside of the idea of accomplishment and provision. This is the Holy grail. This is the golden chalice. I mean, we are, of course, it's not unique to say that we're living in a world of, it is a mental health epidemic that we're living through right now. You can almost just reflexively say that. And I think it's important to say

that there's an acute and specific aspect of mental health that challenges men, particularly young men who are in search of meaning, who are on social media and all the messaging is sort of hustle porn or outwork the next person, be strong, all these sorts of traditional tropes around masculinity and what it means to be a man in this world, right? And I think you and I can sit across from each other

as two people who have played it out, right? Like, what does it look like on the other side of that? And how do you feel, right? To report back and say, there's more to be learned here, right? And there's a different way. And I'm in the process of trying to navigate that. Like, it's not easy, you know, to let go of these patterns and identities

and stories and to really grok and embrace this idea that you have value outside of your ability to provide or your accomplishments in the world or the external validation that you receive. Like, can you stand on your own two feet and love yourself and feel that love is not a transactional thing that you're out there trying to seek to make you feel whole, but it's something universal to all of us that doesn't need to be earned. Yeah.

It's fucking hard, man. It's so fucking hard. And the messaging, even with the best, you know, look, I don't love the words patriarchy and feminism, but I'm going to just basically, I'm going to briefly touch on them because I think they polarize people. As I learned about like the toxic expressions of patriarchy and how that's trapped men, specifically reading books like The Will to Change by Bell Hooks.

I don't want to talk about it by Terrence Real. Like these books that, and learning about feminism as well, I really started to unravel where so much of my anger came from. I really started to unravel where so much of my anger came from. And it felt like this incredible and unreachable point of shut up and do. And then what I found was when I started to speak, so there's this base level of patriarchal thinking, which is shut up and do. Be strong, sort of bottle the emotions, toughen up.

And certainly there's a place for that in the world, right? And we need some of that as in masculine sphere. But at the same time, as I learned more about it and I see how much the world demands that of young boys and how we grow up into it, I started to see also that when we express, when men are asked to be vulnerable and then we express specifically around frustrations around all of it and being confused, and oftentimes we're met with, well, stop being fragile. Well, that's just reinforcing ground level patriarchal thinking. You'll just pivot back to. Exactly. You just told me that my actual expression, my truce expression, even if it goes counter to what your, you know, your experience as

a woman or whatever, you just told me it's not welcome. That's my experience right now. And then what I think is also interesting is that so many people don't realize, and bell hooks was so good about pointing this out, that patriarchy is a system that we are all responsible for and all feeding into. Men tend to reap the socioeconomic and power-based rewards, right? But it's a system that we're all contributing to. And for example, like I love Scott Galloway. I think so much of what he has to say is really interesting. I watched him on a podcast the other day and he was saying, you know, get your shit together, do this. Like, and I really agree with it. Like kind of like find your purpose, go out into the world.

And then he ended with, because the truth is women want a man who makes as much or more than them. He had me right up until that point. He's not wrong, but he just reinforced what is. I understand. I think he would say in his defense, he would say, I'm a social scientist,

and this is what the studies and the data reveals. So I'm just trying to basically tell these young men the way that it is and what the data says, and not that that's the way that it should be, or that there aren't exceptions to that. Right. But if that's the soundbite on social media. Right. This is what women want. This is what women want. Yeah, I understand. I understand what you're saying. I'm not saying, he's absolutely right. He's 100% right. But in that way, that's where women in a system

that we've been fighting so hard to make equal, if that's still their driver and their desire, well, then they're feeding back into the system because then men are going to continue to seek that in order to achieve that. And it's just going to keep it going. So we have to, all I'm saying is yes. And let's, let's be more creative about what can be. Yeah. I think to your point, like it's, it's risky to be vulnerable and listen, the word vulnerability has almost lost all its meaning because there's so much performative

vulnerability on social media. Yeah. It's sort of like, what does that actually mean? What is real? And I can wholeheartedly say that the authenticity and the vulnerability that you bring to this book, it's indelibly real. I can just feel it. But I'm curious, when you're writing it, are you thinking, you've been saying,

is this real? Is this true? Is this not? Am I being honest? Like you're asking yourself those questions, which I think is part of what it means to be genuine and authentic. But in an environment where vulnerability

has been commodified, it creates confusion. And then on top of that, you have the men who summon the courage to be vulnerable and to your point, like are then punished for that or it's not received in the spirit in which it's given, which is only going to reinforce the old behavior that led to the need for the sort of confessional vulnerability in the first place. We're in a cycle. We are. And we're also in a cycle of victimhood. And I think that's perpetuating this. And this relates to mental health,

but our culture seems to be rewarding victimhood. And the question for me and something I've really been wrestling with is what are the mechanisms to honor what happens when terrible things happen to us, but not stay stuck in victimhood. And there is a certain element of victimhood that comes with like this sort of like poor white man trope. I don't believe in that. Don't give me that. But also there's a lot of victimhood and everything's fucked. And the world is sort of, I have all this trauma and the world is sort

of out to get me. And it's like, I'm not saying that's not true, but we cannot ask the world to accommodate for our trauma. Our trauma is our responsibility to address. It's not an excuse for your behavior. No, it can't be. It can't be and it shouldn't be. And I don't like the word should and shouldn't, but it, look, man, the world's hard knocks, hard knocks. And I'm sorry, I'm so sorry for people to go through it. I look all around me in Venice

and I see people on the street and I'm like, God damn, that is just pure trauma expressed, right? And that might be beyond repair. I like to think that it's not, but for most of us, it's not the world's responsibility to accommodate us. No, it's your responsibility. And I think, you know, listen,

I could talk to you all day. I can wind this down. I mean, maybe this is a good way to do that by, by talking a little bit about what you would say to the person who's been listening to this and is starting to identify something unhealed within themselves that might be producing maladaptive behaviors in their life? How does one begin to make sense of what that is and take that first step on the journey towards healing it? First of all, pay attention to, again, this word drives me nuts, but pay attention to your triggers.

Triggers are the most powerful internal compasses we have. When stuff bothers you, when you get triggered, whether it's in a relationship, whether it's in society, culture, that is your first indication that something is unresolved or unhealed. Because when it is resolved in my experience, it doesn't trigger you that way.

You pay attention to it, you notice it, but it doesn't dysregulate you. So the first most important thing is don't avoid your triggers. Engage with them. Turn into them. Look at them. Embrace them.

Because that is where all the information is. And nobody can heal that for you. Nobody. Look at your triggers. Love them. Because they are pointing you in the direction of your wholeness and your healing. The other thing that I would say is, you know, if you're chasing, if it feels, if there's a sense of fatigue and you're just going, going, going, it would be worth asking what's driving the extreme behavior, right?

We're always like, well, if I do this next thing, and you've talked about it a lot, if it's worthwhile to stop and go, is the next ultra, why am I doing it? And when I answer this, am I lying to myself? Is it truly honest? Because I just love the experience. And we're so good at lying to ourselves.

We are the best at lying to ourselves. Or another way of framing it is, are you running towards something or away from something? And generally- Or are you just running? Maybe I'm just fucked up. Like, yeah, I'm just, I think it's like pretty much running away from things most of the time.

It's rare that you're running towards it. We don't wanna run towards the hard thing. Right. We'll dress a hard thing up as running towards something. But in fact, it's running away from what we really should be looking at. That's 100% it, you know? Or can you just run?

Can you just run for fun? Can you just run because it feels good? You know, metaphorically and physically. Right, right, right, right. So, because I mean, I think here's the thing, like the stories, you start to unravel them, you start to look at them, you start to just unpack them. And the more honest you get, the more painful it can get,

but also the more peace you feel. And the more you do that, or the more I've found that I've done that, like we talked about a little earlier, like it is, and I've said this before, but it's worth repeating. It is so fucking profound that we wake up in the morning. That, you know, I have the mathematical probability of existence tattooed on my hand. Whether or not it's accurate, I don't really give a shit. It's a reminder that this is from the beginning of time,

13.8 billion years ago, something big happens, and it sends 10 to the 80th atoms careening, toppling over each other, and becoming this shit, this stuff, right? Imagine every single thing that had to happen on that chain that happened exactly as it did. All the way back through every ancestor that didn't die in your lineage back to our evolution and all the way beyond that.

How many things had to line up for rich to be rich? That is absolutely astronomically mind-blowing. The fact that you woke up this morning, took a breath, and were like, I'm going to go do a thing called a podcast. It is so special. And the more we pay attention to how much shit is wrong and how broken stuff is, the more stuff is broken. So the reframe is, you have a body at all. There's always gratitude in that moment. And that's so much of what I hear you saying is the shift towards gratitude is the ultimate reframe. It doesn't mean you don't have headaches

and life doesn't suck sometimes, that you have a body at all that gets to have headaches and gets to go through divorces and gets to be bipolar. How fucking cool is that? Beautifully put. fucking cool is that? Beautifully put, very true. And also so abstract that it's difficult for me to go, yeah, man. You know what I mean? It's like, cause it's so vast. It's like the difference between look at those two people and there's a billion people. Like it's so vast and incomprehensible that I find myself detaching from the emotional resonance of what you just shared. Like that's my struggle, right? And this is why, you know, listen,

I've said it a million times, like gratitude doesn't come easy. It's like, I have to like exert a lot of effort to like feel even the slightest flirtation with it. And what you shared helps, but it's also like everything inside of me is like fighting against that. Like, fuck off with you and your fucking vast, you know, like mathematical equation of the universal probability. Right. And that's fair. And I was there for a long time. Honestly, I didn't even know what gratitude meant until I was 39. I truly did not know. All I'm saying is that I've gotten to a place and it's true,

fuck off with it. It's okay. But once that moment happens, and I know you know it, even though it's conceptually difficult, once that moment happens, you never forget it. It is, I don't know how else to say it than you woke up. That is miraculous. You're here with all of it. That is astounding. I think we did it. You're like, I still don't buy it, but I think we did it. No, I think we did it.

We did the podcast. Yeah, yeah, we did it. I feel great, man. I think it was pretty good. I think I had a great time. Are there any parting thoughts that you wanna leave people with about the book? Like, what do you want people to get out of your story in the way that you told it?

And there's one thing I forgot to mention about the way that you write. Like, you have a very idiosyncratic style. Yeah. It's a very unique writing style that I love, but it's almost like in the stories that you tell, they're not linear, they're their own abstractions. They're like Picasso versions of the story

or a collage, like a melange. Yeah, it's a collage of portraits. Like each sentence is a photograph and these photographs aren't taken exactly one after another. And you assemble them to create a narrative like this pastiche that evokes like a sense memory that allows you to kind of understand what happened,

but you're sparing us all the details to make it like a technicolor, like 1080p image. Right. Well, first of all, I'm not like a trained writer. I don't, so... Thank God. Thank God. I read a lot when I was writing and there were pieces that I liked. And of course, as you read, you start to emulate the reading that you're, that you're doing. And then, and it took, I think a year and a half before I was like, Oh, this is me. This is, this is my voice. And it is idiosyncratic and some people will probably hate it and that's okay. But I liked the sensor, the sense memory kind of idea. I just

felt that it was more honest to what was happening inside. I was trying to write what was in my, not the experience. It's the way memory works. You don't remember everything about what that hotel room looked like. You only remember that one thing that was on the bedside table or what have you. Yeah. You remember the curtain for some reason that imprinted. So yeah. I mean, well, I'm happy you enjoyed it. And I also, um, I think what I want people to get from this is right. What you said right at the first is like, you, you see me, but more, more important is that you feel seen. That's, that's what I want people to get. I want people to go, Oh wow. I think differently about my brother with bipolar, or I think differently

about, you know, mental health as a whole, or I think differently about my brother with bipolar or I think differently about mental health as a whole or I think differently about my role as a man or a woman. But more like I just feel seen. I feel somehow more whole. Like I'm not alone in this. Even if, like you say, the experiences are different, the internal texture is really similar. Well, I felt less alone reading it

and even more less alone spending the afternoon with you. So thanks, buddy. Thanks, man. This was great. I appreciate it. Yeah, it's a real accomplishment. It's a work of art. It's an act of service.

It's a beautiful offering that you've created and you should be very proud. Thanks, man. Cheers. Cheers. Peace. We're brought to you today by On. Visit on.com slash richroll. That's on.com slash richroll. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation.

To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com slash sponsors. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books,

the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets, courtesy of Daniel Solis. And thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.