El Capitan free soloist Alex Honnold clarifies that two climbers in Silence died from base jumping, not free soloing, and reveals his mental focus—visualizing movement over success—while fueling endurance with fat-rich nutrition like nut butter. He contrasts climbing’s long-term risks with rodeo’s irreversible trauma, citing Mayweather’s defensive boxing strategy as a parallel. Honnold’s Honnold Foundation tackles climate-driven forest fires by pushing solar energy adoption globally, from free U.S. installations to kerosene-replacing lanterns in East Africa. Skeptical of a solo podcast but open to raw, unfiltered storytelling, he reflects on returning to The Joe Rogan Experience as a "coming of age" moment, blending influence with authenticity. [Automatically generated summary]
It's funny, touring with the film, we've been doing Q&As every night, you get the same questions from the audience all the time.
And part of that is tiring, but then part of it, people ask the same questions because they're obvious, because everybody wants to know the same things, and I'm like, I understand that.
Like, if you got too calm and too relaxed, No, I think that is kind of the concern, for sure.
And I've noticed that for myself, anyway.
And I try not to do very much easy sawing anymore, because there is a certain complacency that over time, you know, you just do so much mileage on easy terrain, and then you're like, this is so easy, this is so easy, and then you slip and you die.
Well, the difference between a fighter, say, when they're not trained and not in camp and just their skill and what their body can do without going through a camp, It's probably only like 70% of what they are when they actually go through everything with full intensity,
eight weeks, two times a day, you know, physical therapy, massage, visualization, conditioning, all the things that make them who they are the day they step into the cage.
Well, so for me anyway, it was always sort of the opposite, because the real challenge of free soloing is the psychological side, the mental side of it.
It's not so much the physical.
Like, I don't necessarily have to physically perform at the absolute limit of what I'm capable of, but I have to mentally perform at that level.
And so, and the mental side of it comes so much from confidence and feeling, you know, feeling prepared.
And so, I don't know.
So when I, when I freestyle at El Cap, I kind of knew that I wasn't actually, um, like I'd probably already started to decline a little bit physically over the course of the season because the two months in Yosemite is just kind of grueling on your body.
Like all the time I spent going up and down on the wall and preparing, it's very, very tiring.
And so I kind of realized that I was starting to get sort of deeply fatigued.
You know, I was sort of a week away from like having started a slump of like, oh, I'm kind of pooped.
But the thing is, I knew that because of all that preparation, you know, psychologically I was as good as I was ever going to be.
So even if I was physically starting to be a little bit tired, it's like time to, you know, it's kind of the different curves.
Now, is your psychological preparation just you getting your mind into it?
Or do you have like specific techniques you use or a form of meditation or anything that you specifically concentrate on when you're visualizing success or...
Yeah, I start thinking about chalk and powder and that.
Shit like that.
God damn, dude.
Have you ever gone to, like, a sports psychologist, or have you ever, like, actively tried to coordinate a program for mental training or anything like that?
I mean, so with free-selling El Cap, I found that I needed to create enough space for, it's not so much mental training, but create enough empty time so that I was able to sort of process.
So I stopped responding to email, I erased my social media, it sort of freed up my life.
And then actually my girlfriend left for sort of the week ahead of time so that I was just totally by myself in my van with nothing going on, like no distractions.
And so that's not exactly, you know, mental training, but it was giving myself the free time that I could just sit around and think about things, you know, I could process like it in my own terms at my own time.
I'm very happy with the way my life has changed over time, but certainly when I look back at 10 or 12 years ago when I was just a single 20-year-old man living in a car, I had nothing going on.
If I had one interview in a month, I'd be like, well, it's a big month for media.
And then now on a film tour, it's completely outrageous.
So it did a month of festival circuiting, you know, earlier in the end of the summer, and then it came out in theaters at the end of September.
So it's right now, I think this weekend is its widest release.
It's like 400 theaters all over the country right now.
Wow.
And then, in theory, it's through National Geographic, so I think it'll be on television on the channel at some point, and then eventually it'll stream somewhere.
Yeah, because it should be sort of meditative and relaxing and quiet, but then obviously you're also sometimes straining your entire body, you know, like trying very hard physically.
Well, I remember one of the things you said to me the last time we talked was that it's very mellow because if it ever gets intense, something's gone horribly wrong.
But for a guy like you, my perception of a guy like you, who's that person who's doing that activity, then to sort of juxtapose that with this media tour type environment and dealing with all these people, that seems to me like it would be really annoying.
I mean, well, not really, because, I mean, they're photos of the formations, and people, like I said, had climbed some of them.
Some Norwegians had sort of pioneered the area and written a book about it.
But then, it's not until you get there that you can really decide what you're going to climb and how it looks.
I mean, ultimately, you have to look at the rock and see if it's climbable, and so you basically just have to ski up and then touch it and see what you can do and then try to climb it.
And then also, I don't know, you know, when you're climbing cracks, you put your foot into the crack and then you torque it sideways to like lock it into place.
And so the stiffer the shoe is, the more it can, you know, the more that you can lock the shoe into place as opposed to your foot.
Yeah, I think there's probably some people that look at what you're doing and young kids that think it must be...
You know, here's what I think.
Most people look at the path that the average person takes in life.
You know, oh, I'm going to sell cars.
I'm going to be an insurance guy.
And they look at it like it's death.
If they look at a kid, a young kid who's enjoying playing with his friends or doing sports or playing video games or reading comic books, and then you look at what could be the average path that the average person takes in life and sitting in an office all day under fluorescent and then you look at what could be the average path that the average person It looks like a slow, aching death.
But then I look at someone like you, I'm like, wow, this guy is living a special life.
Well, I think that's a very good way of describing it, a very good way of putting it, because I think you most certainly have influenced people in that regard.
But I think also people must be influenced in the sense that they see what you're doing is, man, there's moments that you must experience while you are climbing these incredible faces.
That are kind of magical.
When you're up there, you're a thousand feet up there.
The view is fucking spectacular and you're doing it.
And you get to the top of these things.
The rush and the feeling of accomplishment and the euphoria and just the glory of nature from that perspective.
I hate to say I'm getting old and everything, but I think, especially right now with the film tour, the amount of travel, I'm more intentional about my diet and stuff now and trying to get no sleep and things like that.
Certainly, 10 years ago, I could just eat a whole tray of Oreos and be like, all right, I feel great.
And I mean, even meat, so I mean, I gave up eating meat for environmental reasons mostly, like basically impact on the earth.
And so I'm not fundamentally, you know, like I'll eat meat from time to time, certainly for cultural norms.
Like, you know, I was in Japan earlier this year, and so I ate fish there a bit just because I felt like it was part of the sort of Japanese travel experience.
Molluscs are actually a good thing for people to look into that are vegan or vegetarian and they don't want to eat meat because they're actually more primitive even than vegetables.
But I would just imagine that, particularly as you get older, nutrition would be a major factor, making sure you get the proper amount of essential fatty acids and making sure that...
Because your brain must be...
You have to fuel your brain in terms of giving your...
Your brain, the building blocks for neurotransmitters and all these different things that you're using when you've got this intense concentration for many, many hours at a time.
And you're not eating when you're doing these things, right?
I kind of prefer that to gels or goo or whatever you want to call it because if that's just pure sugar, I'd kind of prefer to have pure fat.
Certainly for climbing, it's just not like running or cycling or something where your engine is burning nonstop where you kind of need to just pump sugar into it.
And during his day, you know, obviously sustained a lot of head injuries and wanted to find some sort of a natural way to replenish his brain function.
So he created this company called Neuro One.
And this is how I found out about nootropics, is through his product.
It's fantastic.
Great stuff.
It's just powder.
You put it in water, shake it up.
It actually has protein.
And a bunch of different neurotransmitters in it, but it's really good for enhancing function.
Well, AlphaBrain, my company, we had two double-blind placebo-controlled studies with the Boston Center for Memory that showed improvements in verbal memory, in reaction time, in peak alpha flow state.
I'm not totally interested, so I don't really know anything about it.
I don't know.
It's interesting because it's not like anyone's drug testing climbers unless they're competing at the World Cup level or it's actually gonna be in the Olympics in 2020. Climbing is?
So World Cup climbing breaks into three disciplines.
It's like lead climbing, which is like same as the indoor wall and then bouldering, which is shorter without a rope.
You know, you just climb 12 feet or whatever.
And then speed climbing, where it's like a preset course.
Everyone does the exact same course, but you just go as fast as you can, just against the timer.
And so normally those are three disciplines for the World Cup, but the Olympic format combines all three into one competition because they're limited by how many medals and whatever.
Because it's like a demonstration sport, they're just sort of, you know, it's smaller scale than some of the other sports in the Olympics.
But so, yeah, so basically climbing competitors just have to do all three disciplines and then see who wins.
But, I mean, I don't know if you'd want that, though, because the thing is, if you have an adrenaline spike, it's because something weird went on, and you probably want to.
Like, I've had a couple times where I, like, broke a hold off or something, like, all of a sudden your hold rips off.
And then you have that like superhuman surge of like and you grab back on.
So, yeah, I mean, the idea makes sense that if you're going to fall off a cliff, have a parachute.
The thing is that you need to be on a very specific kind of cliff, like what he was on, where it was overhanging, so that when he fell, he cleared the wall and he, like, floated out into space.
But the thing is, in Yosemite, all the walls are slightly less than vertical, in general, and so it means that you just tumble down the wall.
And the other thing is that even if you have a parachute, parachutes function as a wing.
They have a direction to them.
Air comes into them and you fly in a direction.
Which means that you have to be facing away from the wall when you open your parachute.
Or else you just fly right into the wall and crash.
So it basically means that if you fall off unexpectedly, you then have to track away from the wall, right yourself in midair, correct for everything, and then make sure you're facing the right way.
Basically there are a lot of things that have to go right for the parachute to help you.
Well, one of the things from the video when they were talking about all the people that have died, that essentially everyone from the past that was a free soloer is dead.
And you're saying there's other things that they were doing, like bass jumping?
And I was like, oh, Peter, at what point did you quit soloing at sort of an elite level?
You know, like, when did you sort of back off the grades?
And he was like, well, actually, I did want to, technically, by the numbers, I did one of my hardest free solos a couple years ago.
But it was like a sport route at his local crag.
So like a route that he would routinely climb for fitness that just happened to be a pretty hard number.
You know, like climbing grades are all sort of categorized.
And so...
He was like, yeah, technically one of my hardest solos was just recently.
But it's like a hard number, but not nearly as much of an undertaking as some of the big solos that he'd done in the past, like some of the walls that he'd soloed in Yosemite back in the day.
You know, and so he was like, oh, it's all just kind of how you define difficulty, you know.
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, climbing as a sport in the U.S. is sort of birthed from Yosemite.
I mean, the history of alpinism, or rock climbing anyway, certainly comes from Yosemite in the U.S. Is it just because the paths are so cool that it just drew people to it, or...?
Yeah, partially.
I mean, yeah, the summits are so striking.
And I think a lot of it also just had to do with just culture.
Because a big part of it was people from L.A. and the Bay Area who probably had some sense of classical alpinism from the Alps.
You know, people who had traveled to some extent and then wanted to, you know, climb other mountains.
And then they happened to live near one of the most iconic areas in the world.
And so then, I don't know.
But anyway, so it winds up being called the 70-decimal system.
But yeah, so basically it's categories of terrain.
So one being walking on a normal trail, two being scrambling a little bit, three being scrambling with your hands and feet up rocks, and then fourth class being sort of like climbing but easier, and then fifth class being actual rock climbing.
And so then, it was 5.1 through 9, depending on how hard things are.
You know, so 5.1 being pretty easy, 5.9 being pretty hard, like you're rock climbing now, and it's technical.
And then at a certain point, that system wasn't adequate, so they had to start adding, you know, 5.10, and then they subdivided into A, B, C, D, and then 5.11, A, B, C, D, and then 5.12.
And so now it's an open-ended system that right now goes up to 5.16, basically.
Well, right now, the hardest grade in the world is 15D, which is extremely hard.
I mean, it's totally crazy.
But so one guy, this Czech guy, has done one route that he called 15D. And so it hasn't been repeated, so it's not like an established consensus.
But there are several 15Cs in the world, and there are many 15Bs in the world.
Where is this 15D? It's in a cave in Norway.
That's kind of the interesting thing about climbing grades and climbing difficulties is that they're all spread around the world, the very specific cliffs, because it requires just the right combination of angle and holds.
There have to be enough things to hold on to, but not too many or else it's easier.
And so for an elite climber, they're basically searching the world all the time trying to find that right mixture of rock.
But it's also kind of elemental in a way, you know, because rocks are just out there and you're basically just going and exploring nature until you find the right kind of challenge.
And the thing, in some ways, it's really hard to do both at a high level.
And I think, or at least to some extent, it's hard to do both at a high level.
Because so for him, for him to climb something that hard, he needs that intensity, he needs that 115% effort.
But if you're trying to free solo, well, you definitely should never be giving anything even remotely close to 115% effort.
effort or else you will die for sure.
Because you're so close to that razor edge of failure when you're trying that hard.
But with freestalling, you have to always keep it sort of within your comfort zone because you don't want to die doing it.
So, I mean, I think that I've always sort of kept my personal, like on your personal barometer of effort, I sort of live between four and seven, let's say, or like, you know, three and a half and seven maybe, where it's like you're never too relaxed, but you're also never going to the absolute death.
Or sort of like in the four to six is a sweet spot where you're like, oh, I'm climbing, I'm having a good time, but I'm not like trying too hard and I'm not too relaxed.
But so somebody like Adam Onder or Tommy Caldwell, like I've climbed with Tommy a lot over the years.
He's a great climber.
And I've really seen this because he, like I've seen him just randomly fall off many times because he just like slipped.
He's like, oh, I'm so relaxed.
It's so easy.
And then I'm like, oh, I slipped.
And that's kind of like an effort of one where you're like your body is so relaxed that if anything happens, then you fall.
And with a rope on, that's fine.
In some ways, that's the more efficient way to climb because, you know, you're so relaxed most of the time that you're saving a lot of energy over all that.
Every once in a while when you fall, it's like, who cares?
No, I mean, for him, it's like, for him to be able to rest like that for one minute is an amazing way to rest your arms for a minute, but then it sort of saps your core and it makes his calf really tired, obviously.
That's something that they figured out fairly recently with grappling over the last like 10-15 years with jujitsu and things along those lines that your legs, it's really important to use mostly your legs when you're grappling.
And then the only real cross-training I do is just sort of like a push-up and core type routine, you know, like opposition training, just to maintain a healthy body.
But when you do have something like that and you feel sort of the vulnerability of your tissue and you think about like, hey, what if this happened halfway up some fucking insane path?
No, the bigger thing in the film, I have a back injury earlier where I get lowered off the end of the rope and fall.
I only fell maybe 10 or 12 feet, you know, sort of like the height of this room basically.
But I landed sort of like folded over this rock backward.
It was like totally horrible, like these jagged boulders.
And so I didn't go that far.
But I was like, oh, you know, I got worked.
And it was really sobering because it made me realize that if I fell from, you know, 40 feet climbing, you know, you could, it could be, yeah, I mean, it'd be a disaster.
You know, basically, it made me realize just how fragile my body is because I'm like, oh, I only fell little tiny ways and it like really hurt.
You know, it's like pretty bad.
I was like, man, if you fell much further, you could, you could, yeah, anything could happen.
That's like freaking watching NFL games with good defense and you're like, oh man, it's not the team you want to watch, but it's probably the better team.
But the thing about rock climbing is that it's basically a completely safe sport right up until some kind of accident may happen, and then you potentially die.
But so the thing is, you can basically climb at a high level for 50 years and never have any issues, or you could maybe die doing it.
But it's kind of a fundamentally safe sport for the most part, as opposed to what we're talking about, like fighting or football or things like that, or even mountain biking, where you're for sure going to get injured no matter what, just by playing the game.
Dude, I watched a rodeo from, like, very, very close, basically, like, from the commentator's box, like, above the pens for the 4th of July rodeo in Wyoming, like, two summers ago.
And that was something that I was like, this is messed up.
I mean, and I'm not, like, a huge animal rights guy, but I'm vegetarian, obviously, and I sort of care.
And I was like, oh, you know, you're kind of abusing these animals for sport.
And that's, like, that doesn't...
You sit that well with me.
But what was even worse is I was like, all these young men are getting worked just like for the entertainment.
It was totally like Roman Gladiator type stuff.
And I was just like...
And it's weird because it's so cultural, you know, because...
And, you know, I mean, I can empathize because obviously I'm doing something that's also sort of blood sporty to some extent.
And sort of for the same reason, you know, you're a teenage dude looking to do something interesting and engaging that'll hopefully get you laid.
You know, like you just want to, I mean, if you're from small town Wyoming and you're like, oh, I'm good at riding bulls, like that's for sure going to be your path.
And I'm like, oh, it's just too bad that that's your path.
I mean, we watched this guy get freaking thrown off this bull.
And he was fine.
He landed on the ground.
But then the bull freaking was charging him.
And the guy...
I've never seen human terror.
He basically just turned and ran as fast as he could.
But he ran straight into this post.
Head first into this freaking steel post.
Like the edge of the...
Because he just didn't, you know, it was like, the bull's coming at him, he like turns and runs, and he basically like knocks himself out against this pose, and thankfully the clowns distracted the bull, and then the pyramid, like thankfully there was a freaking ambulance basically parked on the other side of the fence from what he ran into, and so they basically like lift him over and put him straight on the stretcher and like take him away, you know?
But I was like, dude, and you know the crowd's all like, Yeah, and you're just like, that guy's messed up.
Everything about it made me feel kind of gross, you know?
Knocking someone out is one of the weirdest feelings.
Because part of you is happy that it's not you, but part of you is looking down at that guy that's just got flatlined, and you're like, whoa, that could have been me.
You know, because I feel like you kind of have to, like, go to the death, but then if you actually, like, punch somebody so hard they died or something, I mean, obviously you'd feel horrible, right?
That's the thing about climbing is there's this real elemental appeal to just you and the mountain and it's nature and it's beautiful and it's like very peaceful and calm.
It's like so different than having thousands of people screaming at you as you punch some guy in the face over and over.
It's like, dude, that's just, that's not my scene.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, so, yeah, when you climb up the rope, it's basically two people.
One goes out first and then brings up the second, because you're limited by the length of the rope, so basically one person goes out to the end of the rope, brings up the next person, that person climbs through, brings up the second.
So bolts and things are put in by the first ascensionist, so the very first person to have ever climbed the route.
But then everybody thereafter is able to just clip their equipment into the bolts or use pre-established anchors, things like that.
So all the routes are already established, and you can read a book that shows all the different routes.
So like El Capitan has something like 112 different routes of it.
And of those 112, only 15 or so of them can be free climbed, which is different than free soiling.
Free climbing meaning just using your hands and your feet.
And you're still using a rope.
You're still clipping into protection as you go, but you're only using your hand and your feet to get you up as opposed to like putting gear in and then pulling on the gear, which would be considered cheating.
So of the 100 routes on El Cap, you know, something like 90 of them, you have to pull on the hardware.
You have to like clip little ladders into it and step on, you know, you have to hammer pitons in and then clip into them and stand on them and hammer another piton and step on that.
So then there, yeah, something like 10 or 15 free climbing routes where you can climb it.
And so with my big goal of trying to freestyle El Cap to climb it without a rope, I was limited to just those 10 or 15 routes that are possible to climb just with your hands and feet.
Yeah, so basically, I just wound up doing the easiest one, because basically it's really hard to free climb El Cap by any means, and so the easiest one wound up being the most secure, the best one for me.
Yeah, well, I mean, I dabble in free-soling as well.
I mean, mostly I'm climbing with my friends, doing other things.
You know, I mean, I think most, almost all climbers only dabble in free-soling.
I mean, free-soling is sort of like one discipline of climbing.
Like, when we were talking earlier about the Olympics having multiple disciplines, you know, there are many types of climbing, and most climbers do all of them to some extent, and free-soling always represents sort of this small specialty, like, extra style.
And certainly back in the day when people were doing the first Estensive El Cap, I mean, it's something like 40 pounds or 50 pounds of iron hanging off them.
Nowadays it's all a lot lighter and you can use better gear, but yeah, I mean, it's a lot.
But that's kind of the appeal of free climbing or even free soloing is that you have nothing on you.
So the reason he fell so far is because we were doing this sort of complicated maneuvers.
Normally I would have a belay device on it.
Basically I would be attached to the rope earlier to like catch him.
But I'd taken my belay device off and I was just tied into the end.
So basically he fell on all the slack whipped through until it hit me at the end of the rope.
But so when he yelled, I basically had time to be like, oh my god, he's falling, like brace for impact, like knowing that in a second the rope is going to come tight against the end that I'm tied into and basically jerk me.
But then thankfully there's enough drag in the system that it didn't jerk me off the stance that I was on or else I would have gotten pulled like 50 feet across the wall and it was all messed up.
Well, dude, so, okay, same route, the nose of El Cap, which we were trying to do the speed record on.
This friend of mine who I actually previously held the speed record with, this older guy, Hans Florin, who actually wrote the book How to Speed Climb, that I learned how to speed climb from many years ago.
So he freaking, exactly what I'm describing, sort of worst case scenario, he took this 20, probably a 22 foot fall, but he was unlucky enough, which is totally fine.
He had a rope, he had gear, everything worked exactly the way it's supposed to.
He just fell a ways, which is normal.
But the bummer was that there was a little ledge probably twice the size of that box right there, like that little wooden box, just kind of this little thing sticking out from the wall about this far.
But basically he fell 20 feet, hit that, broke both of his ankles, and then went off at another two feet.
And so the rope caught him and, you know, the fall was exactly as expected.
All his gear held, everything's totally normal, except that he happened to hit that thing right at the apex of, you know, at the full force of his fall.
You know, I had that ledge been two feet below him, it wouldn't matter at all, he would have just hit it and jumped off into space.
But because he'd already fallen 20 feet, broke both his ankles, And then it was kind of horrible.
I was actually up higher on the wall that day.
I'd come in from above to just rappel in and work on something.
And I heard him yelling, but I thought he was just hooting and hollering like, hey, you know, how's it going type deal.
And then I like had climbed out to the summit.
And then when I'd hiked halfway back down, I got a voicemail from him saying, That, you know, being like, oh, hey, it's Hans.
I think I just broke my, my tip fib.
You know, and basically like, oh, can you, can you help or whatever?
He'd already called search and rescue.
And so rescue is already mobilized, but search and rescue in Yosemite, it's, it's really elite.
They're really fast, but it's still sort of by the books, you know, it still takes kind of a lot of time.
And so I was like, Oh, man, like maybe I should run back up and rappel down and like help my buddy rappel down the wall again or something.
Should I like get him out of here faster?
Just because when search and rescue is immobilized, it's like a long time.
And I was like, if he's in a lot of pain, that sucks, you know?
Yeah.
Though as it, I really hesitate.
I wound up calling search and rescue and talking it through with him to see if there was anything I could do to help.
But ultimately, I wound up just going down because there wasn't really anything for me to do.
Yeah, so he basically just sat on a ledge with two broken legs for, you know, six hours or twelve hours or something, and then eventually they managed to haul him up to the summit, and then I think they helicoptered him off the next morning.
That's, like, when you're sitting there, if you're sitting there hanging off a ledge like that with two broken ankles for six hours, I mean, that must be grim by the time they get to you.
Yeah, so I think he and his partner actually rappelled down 100 feet to a slightly bigger ledge so that he could lay on it and elevate his legs.
And then I think there were some other climbers around that gave him a jacket, you know, so he could sort of bundle up and, like, lay there and sort of manage.
But yeah, I mean, it seems extremely character-building.
When you think about your life and you think about the stuff that you do, is there a point where you feel like you won't do it anymore or a point where you feel like you won't free solo anymore or do you look at like your friend who you were talking about who's older who's still free soloing and doing difficult paths?
I was sort of training for this thing, and then I did it, and I'm just not sure if there's a bigger thing that's worth more effort.
As you see in the film, I have a relationship with my girlfriend, and she's great, and we have this nice life together, and there's so much else in climbing.
Maybe I'll never seek out big free soloing challenges again.
Well, so domestically, mostly it's just been my way of donating my money to other projects that support solar.
So domestically in the U.S., I've been supporting this group Grid Alternatives, for example.
And so, I mean, I've done a few installations with them in Sacramento, in my hometown, where basically a low-income family just gets a free home solar system on their house.
And so, it saves them the energy bills, but then also, in terms of, you know, carbon emissions, it's just, it's good for the planet.
You know, slowly greening the grid.
But, and then, the bigger, potentially the bigger impacts have been projects we've been supporting in Africa, which give access to, like, solar lanterns, solar lights, being able to charge cell phones.
Basically, like, small-scale systems, where it's just a panel, a battery, and a few LED lights, and a phone charger.
But those kinds of things can fundamentally change somebody's life because, you know, East Africa people can spend up to a quarter of their income on kerosene just to light their home, which is totally outrageous.
I mean, imagine spending that percentage of your income just to have light after dark.
You know, and like in equatorial regions of the earth, it's dark for 12 hours a day.
I mean, imagine if when the sun goes down, your productive hours are done.
You're just like, no, I'm just going to sit in the dark for 12 hours.
The thing that drives me absolutely crazy is that it's totally obvious that in 100 years the Earth will be run through solar and things like that because there's just so much energy spilling out of the Earth and it's free.
And so the technology is only improving, everybody's adopting it.
Like, in 100 years, no question, everything will be run from the Sun.
The thing that drives me insane is that there's so much resistance to it, from utilities, from consumer ignorance, from whatever else, but people just don't totally get it and sort of oppose to it.
And so, you know, half the world will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.
And you're sort of like, if you just embrace it and get there in 15 years instead of 100 years, all the arguments about climate change, all the arguments about environmental degradation, all those kinds of things would be mitigated to a large extent.
And you're sort of like...
Is there a downside to that?
You know, like, even if you don't believe in climate change, even if, you know, you deny all the science behind it, you think it's all BS, it's like, is there really a downside to just adopting the future sooner?
Yeah, it's like one of those things where you're sort of like, if it's going to happen eventually, let's just do it now and save all the freaking hassle getting there.
Many years ago, there was a big storm that hit the East Coast, and they had a bunch of cars parked at a dock, and they all exploded when the water hit them.
And they realized, wait, wait, wait, wait.
You can't get your things drenched in water.
Like, when the water hit a certain level, they had a severe flaw.
And so they burst into flames and exploded.
And there's this whole dock filled with these...
Fisker Karmas that blew up and they call them Karmas, which is even more hilarious.
I was just actually reading this business management book, but we were talking about the Ford Pinto with having freaking gas tanks too close to the back bumper.
It's basically your gas tank protected by an inch of plastic.
Yeah, speaking of exploding cars.
But that actually, I think, killed lots of people because they were actually put into production and then there are tons of accidents and the cars explode and you're just like, man.
But, I mean, the solar panels of today, I mean, I have a buddy of mine who does a lot of backpacking and he carries around this, it's like a foldable solar charger for his phone.
And he, you know, folds it up and lays it out and then puts a charger there and then he uses that charger to charge his phone.
Yeah, I mean, so I mentioned our expedition to Antarctica last winter.
So that's 24 hours of sunlight because you're in Antarctica in their summer.
And our entire expedition was run from solar.
And so we'd actually taken a generator and the other guys on the trip forgot oil for the generator, basically.
And so it wasn't going to work.
And so we're like, oh, I guess we'll have to try to use the solar, which had sort of been our backup system.
And actually, we ran the whole trip on solar and everything worked.
And so they were filming.
So there were a bunch of cameras, a bunch of batteries, laptops, backing up drives.
Wow.
And then they were flying a drone quite a bit for aerial footage.
It was all kind of beautiful.
So, I mean, they basically ran this whole operation off solar.
One of the camera guys, this guy Pablo, who's a good friend of mine, basically just had to wake up, you know, every two hours to move the panels around the tent as the sun tracks around the sky, you know, so that it's always in full sun.
It's like, if you imagine a city that's all silent electric cars with no emissions, I mean, imagine how much more pleasant the pedestrian experience is when it's not, like, diesel exhaust right next to you on the city streets.
And so I was going to start donating a significant percentage of my income to environmental nonprofits.
And then I decided that I should do it in sort of a public-facing way, in the form of the foundation, just because I felt like, you know, I'm never going to have nearly as much money as real philanthropic organizations, you know, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Like, I'll never have real dollars like that, but I do sort of have this platform, like some sort of public, you know, persona, whatever.
So I was like, well, at least if I donate things, I can sort of leverage that in the right way to contribute.
I don't know, basically to try and maximize the good that I'm doing.
And so, yeah, so then I just started researching organizations that I felt like were doing great work, and that led me to solar, basically.
So the public speaking things, uh, these, uh, corporate appearances, you just go and get, just talk to them about free solo climbing and Yeah, talk to them about climbing, talk about preparation.
Yeah, I'd like to think that it's a slightly more interesting talk than the average business speaker.
It's certainly more beautiful images.
If I give a nice slideshow and chat for a bit, it's beautiful, it's different, but I think that it still gets back to some of the same elemental issues.
How do you manage risk in your life and what's worth it and how do you choose?
Trying to grow the foundation, do something more significant through it.
I actually hired a full-time executive director this year, this woman who's running it for me, which is kind of awesome.
So we're actually sort of ramping it all up a little bit.
That was slightly in response to the film because I sort of figured that, you know, this is like a moment that I should try to take advantage of and use it to do something more positive.
And so that's all sort of exciting for me.
And it's definitely not a grand plan, but it's, you know, it's just sort of all incremental progress.
I mean, I spend most of my time in the most beautiful places on Earth.
I mean, I'm spending most of my time in national parks and public lands in general.
And so I'm in all these beautiful places and it's like, yeah, I mean, I care about them.
I want to...
You know, if I have a family someday, I want to be able to take my kids to these same places and have them appreciate the land in the same way.
I mean, yeah, so like Yosemite, the last five years, freaking the entire forest has basically died from pine beetles.
Well, all the pine trees have basically died because of pine beetles.
And so like just in the last five years, let's say, the Yosemite Valley floor has sort of transformed from like a dense pine forest to sort of this open oak forest.
It's a totally different character because all the pine trees have died and then they've been cutting them all down to reduce fuel load.
So they're basically logging trucks with pine trees leaving the park nonstop, which I totally support.
I'm not anti-logging the dead trees because you may as well use them if they're already dead.
I definitely don't want to see Yosemite Valley all burst into flames.
It makes sense.
But at the same time, I mean, you know, that's a real, that's a very direct result of climate change.
I mean, it's 10 years of drought in California combined with the shorter winters.
It's like you just have these beetles decimating the entire forest.
Well, I think it's invasive in that I don't know specifically with Yosemite, I could be wrong about this, but with a lot of the pine beetle problems in Colorado, it has more to do with a shorter winter and warmer temperatures, because normally the larva would die through the winter, like they would freeze.
But basically they're not freezing to the same extent, and so the population explodes and then you wind up with all the trees dying.
Yeah, we were there, and we were in Big Bear a few years back when they were having a real issue with it, and they were having real significant fire scares.
No, I mean, Yosemite was on fire for most of the summer.
It was crazy.
The whole southern part of the park was burning for months.
know i mean fire is a natural part of the ecosystem and that you know to some extent you're like that's normal but it's like it's not normal right now because the fuel load is so high it's like so dry it's just it's too much you know and i i just would love for my kids someday to be able to appreciate the park the way i have for so long and i just don't want to see it all burn yeah when i was when we were in big bear that's my feeling it was It was sad that you're seeing something that was probably this rich, green, lush forest that's now really weird, gray, and dry.
I mean, that's what's so, like, yeah, this is why I'm like, this is why we transition to solar sooner, you know, because it's like, if it helps at all with these kinds of issues, then it's like worth the effort, you know?
It's like, if it's going to happen anyway, it's like, you may as well just do it now.
Well that's what I was talking about earlier when I was asking like the difference between you when you're, I mean your love of this is your love of nature and of being in these beautiful national forests and public lands and experiencing these amazing environments.
But then sometimes that gets sort of perverted when you're filming everything and you've got people, everything becomes this sort of presentation and everything becomes professional.
We're just the voice notes from the phone, just talking into the voice notes from the phone, and you can make a podcast off that, and it's really easy to upload.
Sitting in your van afterwards and just talking about things you're working on with your foundation, talking about spectacular moments during climbs where you're seeing things and talking about what it's been like doing this tour.
Well, the reason why I'm saying this is because you have this very specific...
very unusual life and You also have all these ideas about the environment and have all these ideas about using it for positive reasons and and altruistic Yeah, hoping to frickin make the world a better place and having making an impact with your foundation I really think you could look you're the best thing with your foundation would be to make make it exposed to more people and it would most certainly do that and Yeah,
You have no idea how many people are going to hear you just from this podcast and the things you're saying about solar and people thinking about, like, yeah, maybe I can do something.
And then, boom, it just makes these little incremental steps and then they carry on momentum and you never know.
In a lot of ways, that's the nature of climbing too, where you never have to do anything.
You just find what inspires you.
You work towards it.
You do it when you're excited about it.
I'm totally into that kind of thing.
I've always contrasted climbing from other mainstream sports like that because with climbing, the objective is that you're always inspired by it and you do it whenever you're ready as opposed to having to perform on the right day at the right time.
I love that lifestyle where you're like, you know, today is my day or today is not my day.
And your specific vision, the things that you like to talk about, your specific message.
That's one of the things that people really, really enjoy about something like a podcast is that they know there's no one telling you what to say or what to do.
Yeah, you're following your heart.
Alex is sitting in his van, you know, drinking a cup of tea, just with an iPhone, talking.