Oct. 25, 2018 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:41:21
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Should I do headphones? | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| Yeah, I like headphones. | ||
| I kind of hate hearing myself that a lot, though. | ||
| Why, you sound good. | ||
| Why do you hate hearing yourself? | ||
| Dude. | ||
| Try to pull this sucker up, like, about a fist from your face. | ||
| Good to see you again, man. | ||
| It's been a long time. | ||
| It has been. | ||
| With a guy like you, it's always nice to see you're still alive. | ||
| You know, I'm doing my best. | ||
| Do you get tired of hearing shit like that? | ||
| Oh, I don't care. | ||
| I mean, I get it a lot. | ||
| Do you get tired of, like, the weirdness of, like, interviewing with people and they're like, you know, you know you could die. | ||
| Is this scary? | ||
| Yeah, that's alright though. | ||
| 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. | ||
| One of the weirdest parts of the film is when they're showing all the guys who have died from free soloing. | ||
| Yeah, though actually they didn't all die free soloing. | ||
| That's probably the only thing that I take slight issue with with the film. | ||
| It's slightly hyperbolic because two of them died base jumping and one of them died rope jumping. | ||
| They all were free solos, which is kind of what the film is saying, that they're all free solos who have died. | ||
| But they all died in the mountains doing mountain-related extreme activities. | ||
| Yeah, that doesn't make the story as good. | ||
| That's like poetic license. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It got sneaky. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Well, you know, I mean, they all were free solos, but yeah. | ||
| That's not the same, though. | ||
| Yeah, no, exactly. | ||
| The other way to look at it is that no free soloist has ever died doing anything cutting edge. | ||
| That's my favorite statistic. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| No free soloist has ever died doing hard soloing. | ||
| Basically, a few free soloists have died falling off an easy turn, or just falling off routine, or just falling off the mountain. | ||
| But none of them have ever died while doing something cutting edge, something that had never been done before, or something that was hardcore. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Do you think that's because when you're doing something that's a little bit easier, you relax? | ||
| I think that's probably part of it, but also I think part of it is just a numbers thing. | ||
| You spend so much time doing easy stuff and so little time doing really hard stuff that, you know, it's just statistics. | ||
| How important is it when you're free soloing to have that edge, to be really cognizant about how intense this is? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You know. | ||
| You know, fighters look at things that way, too. | ||
| At a certain point in their life, they don't want easy fights because they need to get challenged. | ||
| Otherwise, they won't train properly and then they wind up losing. | ||
| Yeah, you have to take it seriously. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like when you free solo... | ||
| It's funny, you saw the film, that's all exactly the level of preparation that went into it. | ||
| Do you take time off before a big free solo? | ||
| No, it's kind of the opposite. | ||
| It's sort of ramping up to it. | ||
| Right, but do you, is there any concern that maybe you haven't given yourself enough recuperative time, like, for the day of? | ||
| No. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You have to hit it right at the right moment. | ||
| 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... | ||
| No. | ||
| It's not even necessarily visualizing success. | ||
| For me, it's visualizing the experience. | ||
| Sort of imagining what everything will feel like. | ||
| Imagining what it'll like to place my foot on a hold. | ||
| Grabbing the sensations of it and the exposure of it. | ||
| Thinking through what it'll feel like with so much air around me and no rope. | ||
| Basically to make sure that nothing is surprising when I get there. | ||
| Dude, my hands are sweating just talking to you. | ||
| I'm not kidding. | ||
| Feel that. | ||
| Feel that. | ||
| Isn't that fucking gross, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's like clammy. | ||
| I realized it. | ||
| Like, when I'm talking to you, I'm thinking about you doing this, and my hands started fucking sweating. | ||
| Yeah, you start thinking about thousands of feet of air, and you're like, oh! | ||
| 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? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| 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. | ||
| When was the last time we talked? | ||
| How many years ago was that? | ||
| So long. | ||
| I feel like it was at least four, right? | ||
| Oh no, it was like six or seven. | ||
| Was it? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think it was like 2012 or something. | ||
| During that time, how much has changed in your life in terms of the way people perceive what you do and the amount of attention that you get? | ||
| I would imagine that having that alone time now... | ||
| Yeah, it's much harder. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, totally. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| I mean, I've tried to not let my life get busy over time, but it just sort of naturally happens. | ||
| Well, it's success. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| There's so many more demands. | ||
| People want to talk to you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When I reached out to you, I reached out to you a couple times, but I was like, this guy's probably getting fucked with all the time. | ||
| Like, someone's probably always poking at you, and you're just trying to get a foothold. | ||
| Like, literally. | ||
| Just trying to hold on. | ||
| No, I mean... | ||
| I appreciate all the opportunities I have now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's totally the other end of the spectrum. | ||
| Now, when you're doing this film tour, when does the film actually come out? | ||
| Oh, the film's like out. | ||
| It's in theaters, so you can go see it right now. | ||
| But you can't get it on iTunes yet. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is it strange, all this attention? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, well, I don't know. | ||
| In some ways, it's a natural extension of all the stuff I've had over the years. | ||
| You know, like having a 60 Minutes piece many years ago was a flurry of attention. | ||
| And so that kind of sort of prepared me in some ways. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, well, you've dealt with this your whole life. | ||
| Yeah, but I'm asking... | ||
| Yeah, but I feel like it comes with what I do. | ||
| I'm in show business. | ||
| You know, show business. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, that's fair. | ||
| You're a climber. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the most radical kind of climber. | ||
| Free solo. | ||
| When I think of what you do, I think of quiet tension. | ||
| Yeah, that's kind of fair. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, you're doing something wrong. | ||
| No, I still feel exactly the same way. | ||
| Yeah, that's always the challenge is to keep it relaxed. | ||
| 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, yeah, it's very different than my normal lifestyle, I guess. | ||
| But the thing is, you know, it's sort of an adventure, and it's an experience in its own way. | ||
| I've been kind of calling it an expedition film tour, because I've done a lot of expeditions in my life. | ||
| Like last winter, I went to Antarctica for a month, and it's not exactly the type of climbing I normally do, and I don't really like being cold. | ||
| But you're sort of like, oh, it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go somewhere. | ||
| You know, it was like going to Mars or something. | ||
| It was this totally outrageous experience. | ||
| We're climbing big rock walls in Antarctica. | ||
| You're just living on the glacier, and it's totally different, totally crazy. | ||
| Down on a glacier? | ||
| Yeah, we were just in a tent on a glacier for a month. | ||
| When you do that, how thick a pad do you use? | ||
| Really thick. | ||
| And a very, very thick sleeping bag. | ||
| Do you ever get warm inside of all that? | ||
| Yeah, in your sleeping bag. | ||
| It's a negative 40 degree sleeping bag. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty legit. | ||
| But anyway, I mean, so that kind of experience, you know, in some ways is very comparable to a film tour. | ||
| I'm like, this is going to be a once in a lifetime thing. | ||
| You just embrace it. | ||
| You go with it. | ||
| You know, it's different than the way you normally choose to live your life. | ||
| But that kind of makes it interesting. | ||
| You know, it's something new. | ||
| Well, I can imagine it would be very interesting. | ||
| The Antarctica thing sounds like a trip. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Were you traveling on an established corridor? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Some people had climbed in the region before, but we actually did tons of first ascents, like routes and summits that had never been climbed. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty cool. | ||
| Now, when you do something like that, do you map it out in advance? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You ski up? | ||
| Well, yeah, because you're living on a glacier. | ||
| I mean, you have to ski everywhere. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Yeah, it was cool. | ||
| I did a month wearing only ski boots or climbing shoes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Or my bedroom slippers around camp. | ||
| What did your feet feel like? | ||
| Actually, okay. | ||
| No, wearing really thick socks and then keeping everything as warm as possible, but... | ||
| But yeah, I mean, wearing climbing shoes in Antarctica is pretty chilly. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Actually, there's a film about that coming out in a couple weeks, I think, as part of the Real Rock Tour. | ||
| It's like a big climbing film festival thing or film tour that sort of shows around the world. | ||
| But so it's like a 40-minute short. | ||
| Or 30-minute short. | ||
| I haven't seen it yet, but... | ||
| Those shoes that you wear on a normal climb are very flexible. | ||
| Are those La Sportivas? | ||
| Is that what they are? | ||
| Yeah, that's what I wear, yeah. | ||
| They almost look like a sock with a rubber bottom to it where you could really kind of grip everything. | ||
| Yeah, it depends. | ||
| So some are super soft like that. | ||
| It depends on what you're trying to climb. | ||
| Some are really rigid so that you can step on really small holds and it supports your foot. | ||
| So like what I was wearing, free-soling all cap, is like quite rigid actually. | ||
| It's like a board, like a platform, so that you can put just the tip of your toe onto something really small and your foot will stay flat. | ||
| More like a mountaineering type of a boot. | ||
| Yeah, kind of, but still also very precise, because a mountaineering boot you think clunky and big. | ||
| A climbing shoe is like a ballet slipper, like precise and tight, but then also rigid sometimes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You basically have to use fewer muscles that way. | ||
| Are you starting a trend? | ||
| Are there other people that are following your footsteps now? | ||
| Actually, what do you think? | ||
| I think probably, yeah. | ||
| You think? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You honestly think that? | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is a special life. | ||
| So ideally, though, somebody would look at it and see that. | ||
| Like, this is somebody living a very intentional life or having chosen a certain path. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Not necessarily free-souling. | ||
| I mean, I would love to inspire people to live an intentional life that they care about. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I don't necessarily feel like people all need to go free-souling. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| Like, look at this. | ||
| Woo! | ||
| You could fucking wash your clothes on the sweat that's in my hands right now. | ||
| That fucking picture is insane. | ||
| We're looking at, what is the name of this photo, Jamie? | ||
| It's the Enduro Corner from El Cap. | ||
| That's actually, that's a movie poster, too. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| That is so amazing. | ||
| So that is not sitting in a cubicle. | ||
| That is not fluorescent lights. | ||
| Well, that is the end of a very long path that you have to choose and really cultivate. | ||
| You know, I mean, that's for me 23 years of sort of going in a, or 22 years or something, of going down a very specific path. | ||
| Very specific. | ||
| Do you have a different van, or are you still in the same van? | ||
| I'm in a better van than last time I was here. | ||
| Wow, nice. | ||
| Moving on up. | ||
| Yeah, I moved up. | ||
| That's pretty exciting. | ||
| And I have a house now. | ||
| Oh, you live like a real person, too? | ||
| No, I live in Las Vegas now. | ||
| Do you really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Why Las Vegas? | ||
| Dude, the best four-season climbing in the country. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| I love Las Vegas. | ||
| Yeah, there's climbing everywhere, and it's super accessible, and it's easy, and it's cheap cost of living, no traffic. | ||
| Everything is easy, but I love Vegas. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| Yeah, whenever I go to Vegas, I always look at the mountains outside of it and like, wow, they're right there and nobody even looks at them. | ||
| Yeah, from my driveway, you can see 2,000 foot walls. | ||
| I mean, you can be climbing on a 2,000 foot wall in a 25 minute drive, 20 minute drive. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of people like to run those mountains too, run those hills. | ||
| There's a lot of trail runners that live in that area as well. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| Yeah, the west side of town, you're like in the mountains. | ||
| I mean, I can go mountain biking, I can go hiking, I can go climbing all in 20 minutes. | ||
| Yeah, Vegas is kind of a misunderstood place. | ||
| Yeah, no, it really is. | ||
| Everyone just thinks the strip, but it's like, it's not really the strip. | ||
| It's like the mountains all around it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But Vegas is like in a bowl of mountains. | ||
| I mean, all sides of it are surrounded by mountains. | ||
| Well, Nevada in general kind of gets a weird map because of, yeah. | ||
| I know people think of the desert in Nevada, but really it's mountains. | ||
| I mean, it's like series of mountain ranges all the way across the state. | ||
| Yeah, it really is. | ||
| I have a buddy who lives in Reno. | ||
| He lives outside of Reno. | ||
| And if you went near where he lives, you'd be like, where are we? | ||
| Colorado? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Like Tahoe area? | ||
| Yeah, like Tahoe is right there and Truckee, like Donner. | ||
| I mean, there's a bunch of climbing areas right there that are great and freaking skiing all winter. | ||
| It's pretty cool. | ||
| How old do you know? | ||
| I'm 33. Do you feel any difference in the way your body responds to doing this on a regular basis now? | ||
| Maybe a little bit. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Let's go climb in the gym. | ||
| It'll be fun. | ||
| Now I'm like, oh, man, I want my green smoothie. | ||
| I want to get my night's sleep. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, I saw that you're not eating meat anymore and that you eat a lot of vegetables. | ||
| Do you get your blood work done or do you ever work with a nutritionist? | ||
| No. | ||
| Do you eat eggs? | ||
| Yeah, I eat eggs. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I have cheese and stuff. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| 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. | ||
| If someone hunted it, would you eat it? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, sometimes. | ||
| But the thing is, I just don't feel like I need to intentionally kill another creature for me to survive. | ||
| And so, if somebody was going to go hunting for me to eat, I'd be like, no, that's fine. | ||
| I'm just, you know, I don't need that. | ||
| But then, like on an expedition to Antarctica, I ate a bunch of random meat just because it's like, it's already there. | ||
| You know, the other team members have already brought it. | ||
| I'm sort of like, well, I'm hungry. | ||
| I'm going to eat whatever, you know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Molluscs? | ||
| Yeah, like clams and scallops. | ||
| They're incredibly primitive. | ||
| They have no feelings. | ||
| They don't feel anything. | ||
| There's an argument that could be made that plants communicate far more than molluscs. | ||
| Like... | ||
| Like oysters, mussels. | ||
| Barnacles. | ||
| They're real crunchy. | ||
| But there's a protein to them that's similar to an animal protein, but an incredibly primitive protein. | ||
| I mean, insect protein, I think, is sort of a potential future of humanity, too. | ||
| I'm not fundamentally opposed to eating insects, but they're rarely served. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Sometimes. | ||
| You do. | ||
| You stop and you eat something? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, you have to. | ||
| I mean, if you're coming for multiple hours. | ||
| Sometimes little bars or, you know, nut butter, a fair amount. | ||
| Nut butter, right. | ||
| Do you ever have those F-bombs? | ||
| Do you ever take those? | ||
| I don't know what that is. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Oh, they're great. | ||
| I have a whole box of them. | ||
| I'll give you some. | ||
| Yeah, it's called F-bomb, like fat bomb, but it's all like nut butter and oils, and it comes in a packet. | ||
| You just rip the top of the package off and squeeze it in your mouth. | ||
| I had three of them this morning. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| They're really good. | ||
| It's really healthy. | ||
| Is there one sitting around? | ||
| I do have them. | ||
| I do have them in the back. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Yes, that is it. | ||
| Tell Jeff there's a box of them in my office over there. | ||
| It's on the floor. | ||
| You know where the box is? | ||
| You can go run in and grab them. | ||
| Go run into that door, run into the office door, and sitting right in the front to the right-hand side, there's a box of them. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about, the nut butter-wise. | ||
| Yeah, I eat the shit out of those things. | ||
| I eat like three or four of them in the morning when I'm headed out the door with a cup of coffee. | ||
| That's a lot of fat, though. | ||
| That's just a lot of calories out there. | ||
| I'm doing this Sober October Fitness Challenge with my friends. | ||
| I've been working out, no bullshit, as much as five hours in a day because I'm trying to win this. | ||
| We have a WWE-style championship belt. | ||
| It says Intercontinental Champion Sober October. | ||
| Or intergalactic champion. | ||
| So the sober part though, does that mean you're not... | ||
| No pot, no booze, no nothing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh wow. | |
| Yeah, here's... | ||
| So you're just clean living for all of October and training your freaking brain out. | ||
| Yeah, well... | ||
| Do you need this huge knife? | ||
| Use this. | ||
| We're wearing these belts that measure your heart rate and they also quantify your performance, like how much calories you've burned and... | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Hey, you can take that. | ||
| That stuff's as shit. | ||
| What flavor is that one? | ||
| No butter. | ||
| Macadamia, pecan, sea salt. | ||
| Fantastic stuff. | ||
| I like the chocolate and sea salt one too. | ||
| Yeah, I'll look through and I'll sample each flavor. | ||
| Yeah, those are good. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| It's a real healthy, it's, you know, just what you, it's really what you need. | ||
| Actually, that's the ingredients. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, no, it seems awesome. | ||
| And you just smush them up and you tear the top and you just squirt it in your mouth. | ||
| Yeah, I do that climbing a lot. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's kind of a longer slow burn. | ||
| You can eat fat for sure. | ||
| Do you ever mess around with nootropics at all? | ||
| I've never even heard that word. | ||
| Nootropics are the building blocks for human neurotransmitters. | ||
| It's like they're supplements that enhance cognitive function. | ||
| Some of them are like standard, what you would get at like GNC. You wouldn't think of as a nootropic, but they're finding out they are, like creatine. | ||
| They're finding out creatine is actually a pretty potent nootropic. | ||
| It actually enhances cognitive performance. | ||
| But... | ||
| There's one called Alpha Brain that my company has. | ||
| I'll send a bunch of it to you. | ||
| There's another company called Neuro One that makes a great one. | ||
| You know who Bill Romanowski is? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| Former NFL player who took a lot of hits. | ||
| Is he Patriots? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
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Was he? | |
| He was mostly on the Broncos. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Savage, crazy animal. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| I wonder if it actually works. | ||
| Yeah, it does. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What is peak alpha flow state? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
|
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You have to dive into it. | |
| If you go to Onnit.com, all of the tests are available. | ||
| You can go over what it means. | ||
| There's another one called True Brain. | ||
| What is that guy's name? | ||
| He was a guest to the podcast. | ||
| Dr. Andrew... | ||
| No, that's Andy Galpin. | ||
| My point is, besides my company, there's a bunch of companies that make really good ones. | ||
| And they're fantastic if you have to give speeches or if you have to talk. | ||
| If you do any of the things that I do, like commentary on the fight. | ||
| I've always thought you just go straight cocaine. | ||
| You get all fired up. | ||
| You just give a great talk. | ||
| Anything you're like methamphetamines. | ||
| You just get all fired up. | ||
| That's a question I had for you, too. | ||
| How many people that are doing what you do are on either Adderall or they take things like beta blockers? | ||
| Honestly, I think nobody. | ||
| A lot of climbers smoke a lot of weed. | ||
| Nowadays, I don't even know what you do with it because you don't even have to smoke it. | ||
|
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No, you can eat it. | |
| Yeah, you drink it and stuff. | ||
| There's so many cannabis things now. | ||
| But no, I don't know. | ||
| I've never really done drugs. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, climbing is. | ||
| It's like a demonstration. | ||
| So did they have an event like in terms of like a pathway that you have to go through? | ||
| No. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I was watching something on YouTube where they had this climbing competition where they, like, ready, set, go! | ||
| And then they, like, shot up the side of this thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly. | |
| That's the speed climbing. | ||
| And this lady who's wearing a burqa, is she, like, famous or something? | ||
| No, I don't know, but there are a bunch of really strong Iranian speed climbers, and so I wouldn't be surprised if it's part of that. | ||
| She ran up like a spider. | ||
| It was crazy to watch. | ||
| Yeah, for whatever reason, speed climbing is really big in Eastern Europe, and then there are a couple really good Iranian speed climbers. | ||
| It's sort of its own little niche sport coming out of certain parts of the world. | ||
| Well, there's some strong genes over there in Iran, like a lot of great wrestlers. | ||
| I don't know if the woman you're talking about is from there. | ||
| I'm thinking of one specific dude who is so muscular. | ||
| Here it is, portrait in speed, Iranian speed climber. | ||
| Farnas, spell that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Esmailzadeh. | |
| I think you pretty much got that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wait, I want to see the video though. | ||
| I want to see your video really fast. | ||
| Yeah, see if you can find the video of her. | ||
| Because she's a fucking spider, man. | ||
| She just runs up the side of that hill. | ||
| Oh, he's going to browse the internet. | ||
| Yeah, so you can find a video. | ||
| Yeah, anyway, but so with the new Olympic-style climbing, I mean, obviously there'll be drug testing. | ||
| And with the World Cup, there's drug testing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's funny, but nobody really uses performance-enhancing drugs, I don't think. | ||
| You want some coffee or anything? | ||
| I'm good, thank you. | ||
| One World Cup climber had a medal taken away for having used recreational cocaine, and he was like, oh, I'm really sorry. | ||
| I'm sorry I did coke, but he was like, it was more for the partying than the performance. | ||
| There she is. | ||
| Look at her. | ||
| Dude, this lady's... | ||
| I mean, for a guy like you, is that impressive? | ||
| Play that from the beginning. | ||
| That's pretty fast. | ||
| That's not as fast. | ||
| I mean, if you watch some of the more elite times, it's faster, for sure. | ||
| Women or men? | ||
| Both, I think. | ||
| Women are faster than that? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| Well, you're the guy who would know. | ||
| To me, that's damn impressive. | ||
| Just look up a world record. | ||
| I mean, I think the male record is like 5 point something seconds or 6 seconds. | ||
| It's like something really, really fast. | ||
| Now, do they know this path in advance? | ||
| Yeah, so that's exactly the same route for everybody, always. | ||
| Same distance, same holds. | ||
| And so you basically memorize the sequence, and then you just perform it as fast as you can. | ||
| So here we go. | ||
| Here's the world record. | ||
| Oh, is this the... | ||
| So you stand on that thing? | ||
| Yeah, so the timer starts when your one foot comes off the timer on the ground, and then it ends when you slap the thing on the top. | ||
|
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Oh my god! | |
| Oh my god, that doesn't look real! | ||
| Yeah, look at that five point whatever seconds. | ||
| Oh my god, that doesn't look real. | ||
| Doesn't it look like he's just running like on the sidewalk? | ||
| It looks like it's flat, like he's on the ground, and they're faking it for the camera. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's totally. | ||
| Now, do these guys free solo or did they specifically concentrate on this? | ||
|
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No, no, I mean, imagine if you were free soloing like this, you would die for sure. | |
| I would think that beta blockers would be something that someone who free solos would want to look into. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know what that is. | ||
| Beta blockers are something that blocks your brain's production of adrenaline. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, you don't want to be mellow at that time. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| You don't want to be like, I'm so relaxed as I fall all the way to the valley floor. | ||
| You know, it's like you want to freaking hold on. | ||
| One of the things in the film was one of the guys who fell and I guess eventually died. | ||
| He was doing it and he fell and base jumped. | ||
| Yeah, with a parachute. | ||
| He called it free basing. | ||
| He sort of pioneered that sport as it were. | ||
| It seems like a good thing to have on your back. | ||
| Well, not really. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, a lot of people ask that. | ||
| They're like, oh, why don't you wear a parachute? | ||
| And you're like, well, it's basically this 10-pound training weight that doesn't really help you much. | ||
| That guy just jumped on purpose. | ||
| Yeah, this is... | ||
| Oh, whoa. | ||
| So this is on the Iger though, it looks like, I think. | ||
| And you can, yeah, so he's like jumping away. | ||
| He's getting a nice controlled opening. | ||
| He's like flying away from the cliff. | ||
| It's like everything is going right for him. | ||
| But imagine if one of his footholds just broke and he started pinwheeling down the wall. | ||
| It's like you'd never get the separation from the wall. | ||
| It would be a disaster. | ||
| Let's just watch extreme sports videos and I'll just commentate on them the whole time. | ||
| I'll just be like, alright, well this guy is surely gonna have a disaster. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, like bass jumping. | ||
| And even there are a couple older soloists. | ||
| I mean, in the film, Peter Croft is like a legendary soloist and he's a childhood hero of mine. | ||
| I don't want to say push in 60 because I'm not sure how old Peter is, but he's a distinguished gentleman. | ||
| He's living in the eastern Sierra. | ||
| He's climbing all the time. | ||
| He's loving life with his wife. | ||
| Actually, he's in Greece on a sport climbing vacation right now, just climbing for two months, just fun climbing with a rope, having a great time. | ||
| I look at somebody like Peter, and he was free-soling at the very cutting edge for 20 years, basically, and is still just a happy climber now. | ||
| But does he free solo anymore or just climbs? | ||
| Well, so it's funny. | ||
| So I had dinner with him a couple years ago. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, when you say that there's a number system that sort of rates what, like how difficult a free solo path is. | ||
| Well, no, that rates climbing in general, with a rope or without a rope. | ||
| It just rates how hard a climb is. | ||
| What is El Cap? | ||
| Well, so the route that I climbed is 512D, for whatever that means. | ||
| Or maybe it's 13A, depending on what you want to call it. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So the climbing grades are defined... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| In America, it's by the Yosemite Decimal System, and it's classification of terrain from 1 to 6. Yosemite Decimal System. | ||
| Yeah, Decimal System. | ||
| YDS. Other parts of the world have different systems. | ||
| In Australia, it's just open-ended numbers from 1 to 38 or something, where they get progressively harder. | ||
| Oh, there it is right here. | ||
| Climbing grade comparison. | ||
| Oh, so there's Yosemite, France. | ||
| That's interesting that one area... | ||
| They all do it differently. | ||
| Well, it's because climbing culture grew up in all different parts of the world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And climbing culture, I guess, is a big part of Yosemite. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| And LCAP is? | ||
| It's really complicated. | ||
| Yeah, but so LCAP is 12D or, you know, 5.12D or maybe 5.13A, which is the next grade up. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But so basically that means that it's elite. | ||
| Like, that's very difficult and something that, like, obviously an average person can't do. | ||
| But it's definitely not close to the physical limit of what's been done in the world. | ||
| But that's with a rope on and that's after, you know, years of practice and... | ||
| What's the physical limit? | ||
| Like, what is the peak of... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow, what a strange existence. | ||
| Yeah, it's really, really niche. | ||
| Yeah, it's very unusual. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, yeah, there's some sort of a primal satisfaction that comes from climbing something, right? | ||
| Yeah, there's an elemental quality, for sure, where you're like, this is something that just exists in the world, and you just... | ||
| Is this it? | ||
| This is Adam Ander, this Czech kid, climbing 15 feet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
God. | |
| Documentary coming out about it, I guess. | ||
| No, it's already out. | ||
| It's a short online. | ||
| It's called Silence? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, the route he put up he called silence. | ||
| But if this is the film, just scrub all the way to the very... | ||
| Oh, that's the trailer. | ||
| Yeah, but so you can see he's climbing feet first through some of it, and it's totally extreme. | ||
| So this guy, Adam Ondra, is for sure the strongest climber in the world right now. | ||
| Like physical? | ||
| Yeah, physically. | ||
| So he put up the world's first 15C and the first 15D. So he's basically pushed the edge of difficulty for the last several grades. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And he's just freakishly strong. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Is that something that you would have to be to do what he's doing? | ||
| Like a regular climber couldn't do what he's doing? | ||
| It's almost like acrobatic involved? | ||
| Yeah, look what he's doing right there. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So this is the world's first 15C. So slightly easier. | ||
| He did this several years ago. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| And then you hear him like, yeah, but that's why he has a rope, you know, and he tries that over and over and over. | ||
| But, yeah, he's an amazing climber. | ||
| He's really, he's like a polymath. | ||
| He's like, he's great at every discipline. | ||
| What else does he do? | ||
| Well, so he, um, have you heard of the Don Wall on El Cap? | ||
| No. | ||
| Um, so Tommy Caldwell, you know who he is? | ||
| Another professional climber. | ||
| No. | ||
| Um, he's, he's, he was, I don't know, yeah, he's basically one of America's best climbers. | ||
| He did this route called the Don Wall. | ||
| Which is also a film in theaters, or was in theaters last month. | ||
| It's sort of random that two big climbing films came out at exactly the same time, but it's just one of those freak things. | ||
| But so the Dawn Wall was considered the hardest climb in the world to some extent. | ||
| It's his thing. | ||
| It was a seven-year project for him up the right side of El Cap. | ||
| The thing I climbed was on the left side of El Cap. | ||
| He climbed something on the right side, which is much harder, but he was using a rope and put seven years of work into it. | ||
| Seven years. | ||
| Yeah, and then this guy, Adam Hunter, who we're watching a video of, he did the second ascent. | ||
| And he put like a month of work into it and repeated it. | ||
| And you're just like, whoa, he's really, really strong. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So when you see a guy do something like that, does that make you think about doing it? | ||
| Or do you go, that's only something that someone can do with ropes? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, there are whole categories of climbing that can only be done with a rope because the moves are way too insecure. | ||
| You fall off way too often. | ||
| How often did that guy fall off doing that? | ||
| Oh, like hundreds or maybe even thousands of times. | ||
| I mean, so for him to do something at the... | ||
| I mean, to climb at the very highest levels of human potential. | ||
| I mean, so think about a gymnast or something. | ||
| Is that him right there? | ||
| Yeah, that's him. | ||
| So he's free soloing. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| He has a harness on. | ||
| Yeah, he's got a rope right there. | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean, look at what he's holding. | ||
| He's only with his one finger. | ||
| No, well, I think his other one might be on too, but it's basically like a tiny, tiny, tiny edge. | ||
| This is the crux of one of the pitches on the Donwall. | ||
| That is so insane. | ||
| That guy could probably crush your head by just grabbing it. | ||
| Certainly, he has a certain ferocity. | ||
| He has an intensity where he can try with like 115%. | ||
| So I'm pretty sure if he grabbed your head and tried his hardest, it would just pop like a little melon. | ||
| Imagine the grip strength. | ||
| He's holding on to such tiny, tiny little things. | ||
| Yeah, he's very, very strong. | ||
| Wow, man. | ||
| So, a guy like that, when you see him do these paths, these paths are paths you can only do with a rope. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Does he free solo as well? | ||
| I don't think he ever has. | ||
| It's not really his thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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? | ||
| The rope catches you. | ||
| It's no problem. | ||
| But you have to trust those little things that you stick in the cracks to hold the ropes. | ||
| But that's like, I mean, that's, yeah, that's climbing. | ||
| What is he doing there? | ||
| He's counter-pressuring his leg into this crack to rest. | ||
| He's basically pushing his knee into the rock in order to relax his arms for a minute. | ||
| But his whole body is leaning backwards. | ||
| Yeah, so he's hanging upside down. | ||
| Basically, every muscle in his body is relaxed except for his calf, and his calf is forcing his knee into the rock, which holds him in place. | ||
| So he's just hanging there about one knee. | ||
| That is so insane. | ||
| That photo is so insane. | ||
| Yeah, that's a really efficient way to rest. | ||
| What? | ||
| To rest your arms. | ||
|
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|
Well, because it's really hard to hold on. | |
| Well, you know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, does he lift weights or anything to prepare for these things? | ||
| I don't know what he's doing. | ||
| He's on his own program. | ||
| But it's really climate specific. | ||
| He's mostly doing things with his fingers. | ||
| Yeah, he's pretty jacked. | ||
| Is that even him? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's a weird... | ||
| Yeah, it's the same route. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I've never seen that photo. | ||
| But I mean, I guess you just get jacked from doing that too, though. | ||
| Just constantly pulling yourself up. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| There's a climbing wall at this local kid's place, and I told my daughter I'd give her $100 so she could make it all the way to the other side. | ||
| It's pretty difficult. | ||
| And so she's become obsessed with trying to get over there to get $100. | ||
| That's definitely jacked. | ||
| I mean, look at that. | ||
| He's jacked! | ||
| Your daughter's going to wind up super ripped. | ||
| It's hard to do, man. | ||
| I tried to do it, and I couldn't do it. | ||
| I was like, wow, this is really hard. | ||
| It's difficult to do. | ||
| I bet if you tried a bit, just because you have such a background in movement and fitness and everything, I bet it wouldn't be that hard for you. | ||
| Yeah, I'm pretty heavy though for someone who's short. | ||
| That would be an issue is hanging. | ||
| I'm 200 pounds right now. | ||
| In theory, climbing should be more in your legs anyway. | ||
| You should be driving with your legs. | ||
| Because no matter what, your legs are always bigger and stronger muscles in your arms. | ||
| So that's always what drives you upward. | ||
| And then your arms should only be holding your weight in and keeping you balanced over your feet, basically. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| I can see that. | ||
| I mean, that's what's driving you forward and pushing the hole. | ||
| Controlling your opponent and manipulating your opponent and doing stuff with your legs. | ||
| Do you do anything to cross-train? | ||
| Like, not really, no. | ||
| No? | ||
| I mean, I do other mountain sports, a little, you know, mountain biking or skiing or things like that. | ||
| But you do it for fun. | ||
| Yeah, for fun. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, because you're constantly pulling? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I'm always pulling for my sport, so then I try to do a little bit of pushing and core just to make sure that things stay balanced out. | ||
| Now, is that something you talk to a physical therapist about, or...? | ||
| No, that's just, I mean, that's just basic physiology. | ||
| I mean, if you only pull, you have to push sometimes or else you wind up all imbalanced and injured. | ||
| Well, I saw that one of the things in the film was when you were recovering from your ankle sprain. | ||
| And, you know, you had said that you really hadn't been injured in years. | ||
| Then all of a sudden you have this girlfriend and she doesn't climb and you get injured. | ||
| Yeah, that actually is just freak. | ||
| Freak timing, bad luck. | ||
| Yeah, it's just unfortunate. | ||
| Because I think really it just shows that I've been really fortunate for 20 years that I've had very few injuries climbing. | ||
| And then, you know, at some point you just have a few. | ||
| I mean, that's just life to some extent. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, people step off stairs wrong and blow their ankle. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| The body's so fragile. | ||
| It's really amazing. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's funny, but it's so fragile, but then also so robust in some ways. | ||
| I mean, it's amazing what the human body can adapt to or withstand. | ||
| But then, yeah, and then some things just can't. | ||
| Yeah, that's why I was asking you about your age. | ||
| Like, as you get older, are you seeing a difference in the way you recover? | ||
| Are you seeing a difference in the way, you know, like... | ||
| What you feel like your potential is. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard to say. | ||
| I think, yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, those are the tough questions. | ||
| I mean, you know, I'm sure you think about that stuff too. | ||
| Well, as a fighter, a fighter at your age, 33, you said? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| That's when you start tailing off. | ||
| Like winding down. | ||
| 34, 35. When a fighter hits like 36, like yikes. | ||
| Is that old for a fighter? | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty old. | ||
| It's very rare. | ||
| There's only a few guys who've been able to compete at a world-class level past that. | ||
| In MMA, Randy Couture stands out. | ||
| In boxing, Bernard Hopkins stands out. | ||
| How old is Floyd Mayweather? | ||
| 40. He's 40? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is he still considered fighting at an elite level? | ||
| Well, you know, when he fought Conor McGregor, Conor McGregor was nowhere near his level because Conor McGregor wasn't really a boxer. | ||
| Yeah, he's not a boxer, right? | ||
| Yeah, and so Floyd just kind of worked him. | ||
| But he hasn't really fought at a world-class level for a couple years. | ||
| Because, you know, he beat Canelo Alvarez several years ago and he made Canelo drop a ton of weight. | ||
| When he beat Manny Pacquiao, Manny Pacquiao was quite a bit past his prime and had a shoulder injury. | ||
| So you're probably dealing with like three years or so since he's fought like real world-class competition. | ||
| When you say you made him drop a bunch of weight, how does that work? | ||
| He was very clever. | ||
| He wanted him to fight at a lower weight class. | ||
| Floyd started off his career, I want to say at 130, then he fought at 135. How big is he? | ||
| He's very small. | ||
| He's like 5'6", 5'7", maybe? | ||
| Maybe 5'7". | ||
| And tiny little hands. | ||
| Very small hands. | ||
| But apparently they hit very hard. | ||
| Well, he's not a knockout artist. | ||
| He's just a genius boxer. | ||
| Probably one of the best defensive... | ||
| If not the best, definitely top two or three defensive boxers of all time. | ||
| He's only been really hit hard to the point where he's been wobbled maybe like four times in his entire career. | ||
| It seems like that's the kind of boxer you want to be. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You don't want to be like the Rocky Balboa-style boxer that just gets beaten to death and then claws back. | ||
| You want to be boring. | ||
| Really. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, especially with boxing because the consequences are so grave. | ||
| If you hit a lot. | ||
| There's a horrible video that I put up on YouTube or on Twitter rather that I retweeted. | ||
| Someone sent me. | ||
| And it's boxers when they're young talking versus after injuries. | ||
| And you're watching and you're like, whoa. | ||
| It's stunning. | ||
| That's like NFL stuff too, I mean. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| I mean, people talk about that with climbing. | ||
| It's like, oh, it's such a dangerous sport. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think things like football and fighting, they creep up on you. | ||
| Like the injuries start to pile. | ||
| Well, but basically just even in practice, you are getting injured. | ||
| Constantly. | ||
| You know, and so it's, I mean, that's kind of messed up. | ||
| It's like just the price of entry is going to be, you know, freaking head injuries. | ||
| Yeah, I went to a football game the other day, a high school football game. | ||
| And when I was there, I had a really hard time watching it because everybody's cheering. | ||
| And I was talking to my friend. | ||
| I'm like, you're looking at brain damage. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's messed up. | ||
| These kids are getting brain damage. | ||
| And this is like a really nice private school where they pay a lot of money to get the kids into this program. | ||
| And then the kids are playing football. | ||
| They're all getting brain damage. | ||
| He goes, really? | ||
| I go, 100%. | ||
| I go, did you see that collision? | ||
| I go, that's brain damage. | ||
| That's definitely brain damage. | ||
| It might not be a lot. | ||
| They might be okay. | ||
| But how many of those do they do in a day? | ||
| How many do they do in a week? | ||
| How many a month? | ||
| How many in a year? | ||
| You're like, what a waste of human potential right there. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| I mean, the problem is it's such a grand part of our history and our culture. | ||
| Well, it doesn't really need to be. | ||
| I mean, football hasn't existed that long. | ||
| Yeah, no, I agree. | ||
| I mean, I don't watch it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's a dark 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? | ||
| Yeah, it's not good. | ||
| I would never want to pay to watch somebody hurt themselves. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, it's weird that that's culturally acceptable, but bullfighting is not. | ||
| That's where we draw a line. | ||
| Yeah, bull riding. | ||
| It's like they're freaking tasing the bulls. | ||
| Aren't they tying off their balls and they're doing all kinds of things? | ||
| They're doing some bad things. | ||
| People argue that the bulls have great lives. | ||
| They feed them well and they get a lot of exercise and they're very happy bulls. | ||
| And you're like, dude, I'm pretty sure they'd rather be roaming the open plains like inseminating cows. | ||
| Yeah, that's a weird justification. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We had a guy on Fear Factor once that was a professional rodeo guy, and his shoulder was like a topographic map. | ||
| He had so many scars in his shoulder, and he told me his shoulder would just pop out. | ||
| He could just pop it out left and right. | ||
| Just being destroyed. | ||
| Like gored by bulls? | ||
| Falling and getting it ripped apart, riding bulls. | ||
| Yeah, I just don't get that. | ||
| It just wasn't working anymore. | ||
| I mean, he had a bunch of surgeries and they tried to screw it back together and tighten things down, but it was just destroyed. | ||
| I'm sure a bull rider would look at free soloing and be like, what a crazy dude! | ||
| You know, everybody looks at another sport and they're like, that's crazy. | ||
| And honestly, I look at fighting and I'm like, that seems totally outrageous. | ||
| I'm like, why would you want some other dude beating you to death in a cage? | ||
| I'm like, that's crazy. | ||
| It is outrageous. | ||
| It is outrageous. | ||
| But if you can get good enough or you can avoid most of the damage. | ||
| Yeah, getting beaten on you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then to land the damage. | ||
| It's kind of the same. | ||
| But even landing the damage to a certain extent, you're like, oh, you're hurting somebody else for the pleasure of the crowd. | ||
| You're like, that's kind of messed up. | ||
| It's a very weird feeling. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How much do fighters, like, hold back? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, you don't hold back at all. | ||
| Well, that's what I'm saying, but so it's like you don't hold back at all, but then if you actually killed somebody, wouldn't you feel horrible? | ||
| It's very rare that someone dies in mixed martial arts, believe it or not. | ||
| Well, yeah, no, I mean, I know that, but it's possible. | ||
| It's definitely possible. | ||
| And it has happened, and it's sort of like... | ||
| It has happened very, very rarely in mixed martial arts, never in the UFC. But in boxing, it happens more often. | ||
| And one of the reasons why it happens more often in boxing is because you're only punching. | ||
| In MMA, you're taking people down. | ||
| Yeah, people are tapping out because they're panning in weird ways. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's also there's more options to defend yourself. | ||
| You're not just getting battered against the ropes. | ||
| They're also, nowadays, much better at stopping a fight when a fighter's clearly compromised, when they're really fucked up. | ||
| In the old days, they used to let guys just get battered. | ||
| They used to, you know, in boxing matches. | ||
| Yeah, that doesn't sit well with me. | ||
| I'm just like, ah. | ||
| But that's why I'm not a fighter. | ||
| Well, you're 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. | ||
| Well, did you see the Conor McGregor-Khabib Nurmagomedov fight where there's the big fight outside the cage? | ||
| Oh, is that the thing where the guy vaults out of the cage and starts brawling? | ||
| I was like, yeah, it's like WWE or whatever. | ||
| It was like when they start breaking tables over people. | ||
| Crazier than that because it was real. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I was like, this is totally outrageous. | ||
| But what's funny is... | ||
| It became chaos because a fight erupted outside of the parameters of the fight. | ||
| It was just more fighting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you'd seen fighting... | ||
| Yeah, like, this isn't what we paid for. | ||
| This isn't okay. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Everybody's like, fighting in the cage is fine. | ||
| This is lovely. | ||
| But he goes out of the cage. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| He's out in the wild. | ||
| He's out in the world fighting. | ||
| Isn't that kind of messed up? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's definitely messed up. | ||
| You're like, he's a professional fighter. | ||
| He's fighting. | ||
| That's what he does. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Listen, this is coming from someone who's been involved in this my whole life. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| I absolutely see all the arguments against it. | ||
| And yet you still want to go train and punch people in the face. | ||
| Well, I don't punch anybody in the face anymore. | ||
| I still choke people. | ||
| That seems totally fine then, huh? | ||
| Well, the thing about the jiu-jitsu aspect of it is you really can tap out and stop and you don't really get hurt. | ||
| The only time you get hurt training jiu-jitsu is accidental for the most part. | ||
| You're actually better off training with a black belt than you are with a white belt. | ||
| Totally, because, yeah, no, I get that. | ||
| Because they have more control. | ||
| Yeah, they'll be fine with you. | ||
| They'll just tap you. | ||
| Yeah, there's a white belt accident that kicks you in the face, and you're like, ah, I thought we were in the spark. | ||
| They're really strong, especially if you get a white belt that's like a crossfitter, a fucking jacked, really strong guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's like, I thought we were just grappling, and then his arm came out, and I don't know what to do with it, so I threw it away. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, a really unskilled guy who's extremely strong, who's learning technique, and is also like a spaz, is very dangerous to roll with. | ||
| So, yeah, you don't want to teach me jiu-jitsu is what you're saying. | ||
| Not me, but someone... | ||
| If you did it with me, we'd be fine. | ||
| But if you did it with someone who's a real beginner, who's, you know... | ||
| No, I'm saying I'm the strong beginner. | ||
| Yeah, but that's okay. | ||
| Very strong grip and no idea what I'm doing. | ||
| Just like, ah. | ||
| Yeah, but the real problem would be if we were both beginners. | ||
| That would be the real problem. | ||
| A strong spaz is not going to work against a black belt. | ||
| That's the learning curve for climbing, too. | ||
| You don't want two beginners going out and trying to climb a mountain together. | ||
| Yeah, I wouldn't worry about... | ||
| I would worry about that, like, if you're climbing, do you ever climb, like, is there a chain, like, one person in front of you? | ||
| 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 are you dependent upon the holes that they put in when they put those bolts into the cracks? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, because there's no footfalls. | ||
| Yeah, there's just nothing to hold on to. | ||
| It's too hard. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, wow. | |
| 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. | ||
| And how did you establish the one that you wanted to proceed on? | ||
| 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. | ||
| How many people have done it? | ||
| Well, free solo or free climb? | ||
| Free solo. | ||
| Free solo, I mean, nobody. | ||
| You're the only one? | ||
| Yeah, the only one. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's why there's the film and everything. | ||
| And nobody's ever even thought about it, you know, nobody's considered it. | ||
| It's not like something that people are trying to do. | ||
| Now that you've done it, are there other people that are considering it? | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| I mean, I think it's almost more the opposite. | ||
| Now that I've done it, people are like, whoa, I don't need to do that ever. | ||
| I mean, there's nobody even playing this game right now, really. | ||
| There aren't that many high-end free soloists right now. | ||
| How many are there? | ||
| 2 or 1 or something. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know if there are any others really right now. | ||
| There's this guy, Brad Gobright, an American guy who's been free-selling at a pretty high level. | ||
| But definitely, he's a really good friend of mine, so I'm not like slandering him. | ||
| But definitely at a very different level than, like he would never even dream of selling all-cap. | ||
| So he's sort of starting out? | ||
| Well, it's not that he's starting out. | ||
| I mean, he's a very good climber. | ||
| He's been climbing a long time, and he's done all kinds of very difficult things. | ||
| But in terms of free soloing, I think he just doesn't need to push it that hard. | ||
| So he's almost like he dabbles in free soloing? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you do free climbing, and then you also do the kind of climbing where you have to put in those posts and stand on them? | ||
| Yeah, or aid climbing, artificial climbing. | ||
| So I free climb, I aid climb sometimes. | ||
| I don't like to because it's too much work. | ||
| It's too much construction. | ||
| You're nailing things and standing on it. | ||
| It's like engineering. | ||
| But I do that because sometimes that's what it requires to get up big mountains. | ||
| And when you do that and you nail things and stand on them, do you take them out as well? | ||
| Yeah, the second person takes them out. | ||
| So the one person uses them to get up and then once the rope is secured above, then the second person joins them and removes them all. | ||
| And then you have all your gear back and then you're able to do it again for the next section. | ||
| How much weight is that stuff? | ||
| Well, it depends, but it can be a lot. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, how secure is that stuff that you're hammering in there? | ||
| It depends. | ||
| It depends. | ||
| I mean, there's certainly stories of people falling and ripping all the stuff back out. | ||
| Oh, Jesus! | ||
| But sometimes that's okay because if you're thousands of feet off the ground, you can take that 100-foot fall and not touch anything, and it's fine. | ||
| Oh, yeah, but still. | ||
| No, earlier this summer. | ||
| You're counting on the things? | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, it's all well-founded. | ||
| I mean, you just got to trust him. | ||
| Now, earlier this summer, I was talking about Tommy Caldwell, one of the best climbers in the country. | ||
| So the two of us did the speed record on El Cap earlier this year. | ||
| And so the two of us are tied together. | ||
| We're using a rope. | ||
| We're using equipment. | ||
| But where anything goes, you're cheating as much as you can. | ||
| It's just trying to get from the bottom of the cap to the top as fast as possible. | ||
| This is on a different route than the one that I free sold in the film. | ||
| And so we were trying to go sub two hours and we ultimately did it in 158 and it was pretty awesome. | ||
| We were really psyched. | ||
| But along the way, Tommy took a 100-foot fall at one point where he just... | ||
| I was talking about him with the whole 1-10 effort. | ||
| He was climbing something that's really, really easy, and he was probably giving an effort of like two, and he just slipped. | ||
| You know, and I was like, oh. | ||
| But anyway, he freaking whipped. | ||
| He fell like 100 feet just straight down the wall. | ||
| Didn't touch anything because El Cap is like a very clean vertical sheet of rock. | ||
| How long does it take to fall 100 feet? | ||
| I don't know, like several. | ||
| Yeah, several seconds. | ||
| 15 seconds? | ||
| No, no, no, no, like four or five or something. | ||
| But you accelerate very quickly. | ||
| That's one, two, three, four. | ||
| Yeah, long enough to be like, oh my god, I'm going to die. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| And it's a nap! | ||
| No, long enough. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| 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. | ||
| So when he's falling and you're realizing that you're going to get yanked by his fall, are you like digging into the rock? | ||
| Yeah, no, basically I was like, oh my god! | ||
| You know, I was like, brace yourself! | ||
| Like, I was in this position. | ||
| I was actually like facing out away from the wall, like facing out towards the meadow because I was in an open corner. | ||
| Like, if you look at the corner of the room, imagine one leg on each side facing outward, like pushed into this position because it's like... | ||
| I was about to have to untie my knot and retie it and do some things. | ||
| And so I was basically like all ready to do some things. | ||
| And all of a sudden I hear that he's falling and I was like, oh my God. | ||
| And then I was able to just sort of like stick in there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Jesus. | |
| But my point is just that taking big falls, I mean, if you trust your equipment and everything, it can be okay to take big falls like that. | ||
| You obviously try to avoid them because, you know, had he hit a ledge or something, then potentially he could have died. | ||
| But because it was clean there, it was okay. | ||
| So if he was in a situation where there was a slight angle and he fell that far, that's where it's really dangerous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, worst case scenario would be if he fell 100 feet and 75 feet down there was a ledge sticking out half the width of this table. | ||
| Because then you would just clip it, you'd break both your legs, everything would explode, and then you'd still fall. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you do if you fall and you break something and you're halfway 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. | ||
| So he's essentially just suspending for a while, waiting for them to get him? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh my god. | |
| Because it was already dark by then. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| It was kind of horrible. | ||
| But he's sort of recovered by now. | ||
| It's been five months or something. | ||
| So he's back at it. | ||
| Oh, he's climbing. | ||
| He's the manager of a climbing gym. | ||
| Well, I mean, it's two broken bones. | ||
| Yeah, it could be worse. | ||
| It just seems like... | ||
| No, it's super grim, though. | ||
| But that's an example of sort of worst case, you know, just bad luck. | ||
| Well, that's actually not worst case, right? | ||
| No, yeah, that's not worst case. | ||
| That's just bad luck, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The pain and swelling. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The life you choose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it's really, I'm like, that actually kind of makes me feel really bad. | ||
| Just because, like, that kind of thing is really close to home. | ||
| You know, it's like, because he's a friend, and it's just so, like, that's bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can only imagine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Do you think this is just your life forever? | ||
| No, I don't know. | ||
| I honestly, I'm not sure. | ||
| I don't think it's my path forever necessarily, just because there just aren't always bigger and harder things to do. | ||
| You know, I mean, LCAP represented sort of the end of this very long road for me. | ||
| I mean, I sold many, many things that were all sort of leading towards LCAP, and then I finally did that. | ||
| And at least right now, I can't really imagine anything more inspiring to me in terms of free swallowing. | ||
| I mean, there are plenty of other climbing challenges that I'm interested in. | ||
| Like I was just saying, doing the speed record is something that I did this summer. | ||
| But is this like winning a big hand in Vegas where you're just like, okay, we got all the money. | ||
| No, because that is too much luck. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's more like realizing a life dream and you're sort of like, okay, I've seen. | ||
| But I mean, it's a similar idea where you're like, okay, well, no, it's not even. | ||
| I mean, yeah, it's a bad analogy. | ||
| I was just thinking in terms of no more big, crazy risks. | ||
| Yeah, but that's the thing. | ||
| I was never seeing it as a big crazy risk. | ||
| I wasn't rolling the dice. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Now, you're still relatively young in terms of life itself. | ||
| Do you think maybe there could be something that you would enjoy as much as you enjoy climbing? | ||
| Well, I mean, so no matter what, I'll climb my whole life. | ||
| I mean, I freaking love climbing. | ||
| I mean, even on the foam tier, I'm climbing in the gym every day just for the movement of it, just to enjoy climbing. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I have a foundation that I've worked with for the last five or six years supporting solar around the world. | ||
| And so I could see putting more and more effort into that. | ||
| I mean, that's something that's satisfying in a way that climbing sort of isn't because it actually has a real tangible impact on the world. | ||
| You know, I mean, climbing is really fulfilling, personally. | ||
| But when it's all said and done, it's like, it's just me going rock climbing. | ||
| It doesn't really matter. | ||
| But at least working with the foundation, it's like actually doing something real. | ||
| What is your foundation? | ||
| It's just the Honnold Foundation, but we've been supporting solar. | ||
| I mean, if you want the longer version, it's basically, you know, I was looking for some way to do something positive in the world. | ||
| So I was looking to support environmental projects. | ||
| And then I was like, there's no real point in supporting environmental projects that don't also support solar. | ||
| It like increased standard of living that like help people in need. | ||
| And that sort of led me to solar projects, basically solar energy access. | ||
| And so that's what we've been supporting the last five, six years. | ||
| And so what do you do with this project? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's crazy, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there are a billion people on Earth living without access to power. | ||
| And, I mean, it's hard not... | ||
| I mean, I kind of see that as a waste of human potential to some extent. | ||
| Like, it's just an unfortunate thing to think there's so many people living without access to power. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy. | ||
| It is crazy, and it's really crazy in California that there's not more solar when you think about how often it's sunny here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, I mean, it's totally... | ||
| Though, I mean, at least it's growing very quickly in California, at least. | ||
| But, I mean, really, solar should be powering the whole Earth. | ||
| I mean, enough sunlight hits the Earth every... | ||
| I don't know the terms now. | ||
| It's every, like, 10 or 15 minutes, basically, to power the Earth for, like, the year, if you're able to harness all the energy. | ||
| It's kind of like, it's just such a cleaner, simpler way of powering the Earth, you know? | ||
| Yeah, it really is. | ||
| And, I mean, one can only hope that that's going to, it's going to keep, it's going to continue to evolve. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think it's the momentum of the current system. | ||
| It's very difficult for people to just abandon established ways of doing things, especially when we're so hooked on fossil fuels. | ||
| I know, but it's just such a bummer that the status quo is such a thing. | ||
| People are like, oh, that's the way we do it. | ||
| Let's just keep doing that. | ||
| And it's just weird because there's so many things in life that change so frequently. | ||
| I mean, the world is constantly changing. | ||
| You're like, let's just embrace the changes that matter the most and just do them faster. | ||
| Well, you're talking as a guy who lives in a van and climbs rocks. | ||
| And these business people that have thousands and thousands of employees and millions, if not billions of money, of dollars invested in these things. | ||
| Yeah, well, yeah. | ||
| That's the problem, is the momentum of the current system. | ||
| I know, it's just too bad. | ||
| Yeah, it is, but it's inevitable. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| It's inevitable that we will embrace it and change. | ||
| That's almost more frustrating, though, is because it's inevitable, and yet it's going to be dragged out so long. | ||
| You're sort of like, why can't people just embrace the inevitability of it and just move forward? | ||
| Well, I think they slowly are, but things like that take time. | ||
| I think one big thing is going to be if they can ever figure out a way to solar power cars as you're driving them. | ||
| So you never really have to concern yourself. | ||
| I don't think that'll ever be a thing. | ||
| Well, Fisker figured out how to do it with your stereo. | ||
| They figured out how to do it with your radio system. | ||
| That's a lot different than a car. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's like a lot less energy. | ||
| But it's just the roof panel. | ||
| The roof panel. | ||
| Didn't we... | ||
| They're a weird company, though. | ||
| That's the company that... | ||
| 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. | ||
| You watch them exploding. | ||
| That's pretty bad. | ||
| That's like, that's all bad all the way around. | ||
| Yeah, I think they've since fixed that, but yeah, it was a big flaw. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Speaking of bad decisions in auto manufacturing. | ||
| Yeah, the Pinto was a disaster. | ||
| It wasn't good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think what they're capable of doing right now, I think you're right. | ||
| I don't think you can power a car with solar panels completely. | ||
| I mean, you certainly can from your house. | ||
| That was their initial claim when they announced it, that it would power the whole car. | ||
| And everyone was like, that's bullshit. | ||
| Really? | ||
| No, that's definitely bullshit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It can't happen. | |
| Yeah, it can't happen at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Two years ago. | |
| Two years ago, they said they could power the whole car with the roof? | ||
| August of 2016. Huh. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm trying to find the... | |
| That seems totally outrageous. | ||
| Also, I mean, the future of cars is more like a smaller car with a glass roof, like Tesla style, where it's sort of an additional ad right here. | ||
| Solar roof will create enough energy to power the car. | ||
| No other vehicle sold in the U.S. has ever offered this capability. | ||
| Well, I mean, so that might be true if it just sat parked in the sun for 12 hours and then you drove home. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like if you left it in your driveway and you worked at night. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It charges all day and your commute's really short. | ||
| But the numbers totally don't work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you would know better than anybody if you're involved in solar. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But he'll go 20 plus days with just this thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he had to sleep with the batteries and things to make sure things stay warm enough. | ||
| But otherwise, I mean, because it's really cold. | ||
| It's funny because you put your laptops and stuff into coolers, like into ice chests, to keep them insulated enough to stay warm as opposed to cold. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| You know, because the outside temperature is so cold. | ||
| But it was cool though because, you know, that way we didn't have to run this like loud, stinky, annoying generator. | ||
| Like you just have your panels working full time. | ||
| Yeah, that's one of the weirder things about, like, Teslas. | ||
| When you drive it in, they're like, there's no noise. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So much more peaceful. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, but that's the future. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, and you don't hear the car that runs you over. | ||
| Well, you know. | ||
| No, but you still do, though, because something like 30% of the noise is the tires. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It's like you still hear cars. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's just so much more mellow. | ||
| You don't hear, like, an engine, like, ripping right by you. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's inevitable that we figure out a way that you can just power everything from solar, including cars, as you're driving them. | ||
| I mean, it only makes sense as the technology improves. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah, we'll see. | ||
| I mean, there's development in solar film sort of in windows. | ||
| So imagine an office building where the windows are all producing power. | ||
| So I mean, if you think about that with a car, if it's just like a glass dome over you, but it's all sort of producing power. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty amazing. | ||
| I have a watch that runs on solar power. | ||
| Yeah, but that's not a lot of power. | ||
| Yeah, but still, you don't really need any batteries for it. | ||
| It's a Casio. | ||
| I did when I was a kid. | ||
| I went like that. | ||
| Did you? | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty straightforward, though. | ||
| That's a small amount of power that it's drawing. | ||
| When you got involved in this, how much preparation did you do? | ||
| What was the motivation? | ||
| For the foundation? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, honestly, like I said, I was just looking to do something positive for the world. | ||
| Start exploring options. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Does most of your income come from sponsors and from public appearances? | ||
| It was mostly sponsors, and then it sort of has shifted into sponsors and sort of one-off things. | ||
| So, like, I published a book a few years ago, and so there's an advance from that. | ||
| Um, has made a little money, um, the, you know, random little things. | ||
| And then now it's also sort of split with like corporate speaking type commercial opportunities as well. | ||
| So sponsorship is still probably the biggest thing for me. | ||
| So like the North face being my biggest sponsor, um, and most important sponsor for me. | ||
| But then now it's sort of split between a bunch of different sources. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, it depends on what somebody needs, really. | ||
| It depends on what the organization is. | ||
| I've spoken to a bunch of venture capital-type firms about risk-taking or risk management. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So they just look at you as sort of an inspiration to mix things up for the company? | ||
| 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? | ||
| It's a smart move, too, for a company to just kind of vary the kind of input that gets to the employees. | ||
| Give them something that's kind of spectacular and interesting. | ||
| Now, when you look at the future... | ||
| Do you have a map of what you would like to be doing? | ||
| Are you just sort of enjoying your experience here? | ||
| Do you have grand plans? | ||
| I don't really have grand plans. | ||
| I mean, I've never really had a grand plan. | ||
| It's always been that I love climbing. | ||
| I want to do it well. | ||
| I want to push myself. | ||
| And I think that's kind of my grand plan. | ||
| I mean, I'm still trying to be a better climber. | ||
| I'm still... | ||
| 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. | ||
| So when you're doing all these climbs, you have a lot of time. | ||
| It takes time to do these things. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| So is this when you start thinking about these ideas? | ||
| About thinking about how much you enjoy being out here in nature? | ||
| Yeah, caring about the environment. | ||
| I mean, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| I mean, that sucks, you know? | ||
| Like, I don't want to see the whole forest die. | ||
| Is that an invasive beetle or is it a native beetle? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was nerve-wracking. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But it was also like you're around kindling. | ||
| You're basically in a big stack of dry wood before it gets lit on fire, and you're surrounded by it. | ||
| And if it hits... | ||
| Up there, it's, I mean, we've been evacuated where I live several times, twice, actually, and come close a couple other times. | ||
| And it's terrifying, because Southern California, when it goes, it goes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's just no stopping it. | ||
| No, I mean, that's, yeah, no, that's messed up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So this thing that you were doing in Antarctica, you're filming something there as well? | ||
| Do you do a lot of that now? | ||
| Well, for a trip like that, for an expedition, I mean, that was the North Face expedition, and so that's where they get a lot of their brand content. | ||
| And so it makes sense to film a trip like that. | ||
| And we were somewhere that nobody ever goes. | ||
| We were doing first ascents at peaks that had never been climbed. | ||
| So it kind of makes sense to document that to some extent. | ||
| But in general, I think I try to balance my just pure climbing with filming. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you. | ||
| You don't want to get to the point where you're filming everything. | ||
| You have GoPro on your head everywhere you go. | ||
| No, that stuff drives me crazy. | ||
| I'm not into that. | ||
| But when you're in the most beautiful place, you know, sometimes it makes sense. | ||
| Well, especially for someone like North Face, their whole company is about really suiting people up. | ||
| When you're in that sort of situation where you're filming these things, is it difficult to act normal, to be yourself? | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| If you saw Free Solo, you know that I only have one mode and that's just me. | ||
| Which, I mean, when I see the film, a lot of it, I'm like, oh, maybe I need to censor myself a little more. | ||
| Maybe I should be a little more thoughtful about what I say. | ||
| But, no, I mean, I'm pretty much always, I just do me. | ||
| And if people are filming or not, they just get... | ||
| I mean, I'm more mindful of profanity and a few things like that. | ||
| If I know that I'm being filmed or I know I'm being watched, then I try to be slightly more respectful. | ||
| Especially if I see kids in an audience, I definitely try not to curse. | ||
| But overall, I'm like, no, I just always stay in my mind, you know? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, I think that's the risk with filming. | ||
| I think with Free Solo, I think they did an amazing job of maintaining the character, the nuance, like not perverting it in any way. | ||
| No, I think so too. | ||
| I think it was amazing. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think they did a really good job of that. | ||
| And it's still sort of understated. | ||
| Even though it's like this spectacular feat, it's still sort of subdued in its own way. | ||
| It just sort of lays it out beautifully, lets you just sort of judge for yourself. | ||
| Well, it's impossible to be anything but spectacular. | ||
| So you don't really have to dress it up. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| Well, that's the beauty of filming anything in Yosemite, is that it's honestly just one of the most beautiful places on Earth. | ||
| It would be like putting a pretty dress on a Ferrari. | ||
| Leave it alone. | ||
| It's done. | ||
| You've already got it. | ||
| Have you ever thought about doing some live journal from the field or some sort of a podcast or something along those lines? | ||
| No, I mean, should I? Yeah. | ||
| No, that sounds like too much work. | ||
| Well, a podcast would be easy. | ||
| I don't know, but you have to be able to interview people properly. | ||
| No, you don't. | ||
| No. | ||
| You don't think? | ||
| My friend Bill Burr has a podcast where he just talks. | ||
| Is it good though? | ||
| It's fucking great. | ||
| But he's a comedian. | ||
| Monday morning podcast. | ||
| But you just sitting down, I mean, you could go off notes, you could go off of, and just, I think people would love that. | ||
| I've actually never thought about it. | ||
| I mean, in some ways, I do have strong opinions about a lot of things. | ||
| Like if I just ranted about environmental issues and solar and things that I care about, that actually would be kind of fun. | ||
| I think you'd have a significant impact too, especially if you have such a large platform now. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'll consider it. | ||
| That's the first time anyone's ever mentioned. | ||
| I'm sort of like, I can, you know, I'll think about that. | ||
| I'm notorious for trying to talk people into podcasts, but I really think in your case, it'd be a great idea. | ||
| I mean, you really... | ||
| You're like, I tell everyone to do it, but you should really do it. | ||
| Well, people get mad at me. | ||
| You keep telling people to do it. | ||
| But I think you, if you had a portable unit, like one of these MP3 players... | ||
| Well, I mean, a freaking phone. | ||
| I mean, you can just record on your phone, really. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Recording on your phone is very easy. | ||
| I mean, we've done a bunch of them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Maybe that's my future. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'll think about that. | ||
| I mean, that's interesting. | ||
| It'd be an interesting way to put it out there. | ||
| I mean, I think it's a great idea, man. | ||
| Huh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh. | |
| I'll help you. | ||
| I'll consider. | ||
| We'll help you get it out. | ||
| Yeah, you'll send me a little mp3 recorder. | ||
| We could definitely do that. | ||
| But we could also help you, like, I can promote it for you, put it on Twitter, let people know it's there. | ||
| Yeah, we'll see if I ever actually do anything like that. | ||
| But no, it's an interesting idea. | ||
| I mean, it's an interesting way to, like, share ideas better. | ||
| 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, | ||
| I'll talk to my executive director about that too. | ||
| I mean, that would be an interesting way to at least share the ideas that I care about. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's so cheap to do. | ||
| The idea of just sitting and recording. | ||
| Yeah, and it would be kind of cool. | ||
| You know, like you at the base of a mountain just talking about this and climbing and your personal thoughts in that moment. | ||
| I feel like it could be douchey, you know, but it'd have to be well done. | ||
| You'd have to be a douchebag for it to be douchey. | ||
| Well, that's the danger. | ||
| That's the danger. | ||
| You just never... | ||
| I mean, nobody thinks that they're the douche, you know? | ||
| Oh, well, do you think you'd become a douche? | ||
| Well, you just never know. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| When you're like, I'm just going to record monologues of me rambling about ideas, that's when you start to trend towards douchiness, perhaps. | ||
| Well, the good thing is, you could always review it or have your girlfriend review it. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| So you don't have to do it live. | ||
| Just, you know, and then she could say, okay, that part where you rant and rave about Diesel, you might want to yank that. | ||
| No, I mean, well... | ||
| Or maybe not. | ||
| Yeah, no, I feel strongly about it. | ||
| I'll rant and rave about diesel forever. | ||
| I'm like, that's just not the right way. | ||
| Man, imagine when electric trucks, you know, like long haul trucking, I'm like, oh, can't wait. | ||
| Well, Tesla's already on, they're on the ball with that. | ||
| Yeah, well, hopefully. | ||
| I kind of don't care who comes to market first with that stuff. | ||
| I just want somebody to start selling a lot of them. | ||
| You know, it's like, I just want the change to happen quickly. | ||
| It doesn't matter who does it or how. | ||
| It's like, it just needs to happen. | ||
| You've got a very significant voice right now. | ||
| I really think that you could make a big impact with a lot of people. | ||
| And the thing about these impacts, it's sort of like the butterfly effect, right? | ||
| You never know what it actually changes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, that's the positive way of looking at it, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I just think it would be cool, too. | ||
| Like, notes from wherever you are. | ||
| Just, I mean, you don't have to have... | ||
| The beautiful thing is, too, it doesn't have to have any kind of structure. | ||
| You don't have to have any time. | ||
| I mean, you could do one for 15 minutes if you want, and people will listen to it. | ||
| You could do it for an hour. | ||
| No, that might be a little micro hits, like little rambles for sure. | ||
| Do it as long as you want. | ||
| Like I said, the beautiful thing about things like this is that there's no real structure to it where you have to do something at a certain time. | ||
| You just decide. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You just make it count. | ||
| If, like, leading up to you free soloing El Cap, if there was sort of a documented audio journal... | ||
| Well, I mean, there's a freaking film. | ||
| I mean, just go watch the film. | ||
| Yeah, but people are getting it. | ||
| You're just whetting their appetite. | ||
| I mean, it's a beautiful film. | ||
| It's fantastic, but people like to absorb more stuff. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And it's entirely up to you what you want to share or don't want to share. | ||
| And especially if you do it this way, you don't have an executive producer, you don't have directors. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| With that, I definitely couldn't handle it. | ||
| It's like too much. | ||
| Just you. | ||
| Just you just talking about stuff. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| It's hard to imagine people would find that interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They would! | |
| I'm telling you, dude! | ||
| You'd be really surprised, I bet, though. | ||
| Tell them! | ||
| Tell them, Jamie! | ||
| I know people would be listening to it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tell them, Jamie! | |
| People I know would listen to you, for sure. | ||
| Oh, no, I appreciate that, but I'm slightly worried I'm going to miss my plane. | ||
| Okay, yeah, we've got to get you out of here. | ||
| But listen, thank you very much. | ||
| Thanks for being here. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| The movie's excellent. | ||
| Yeah, it's fun to chat again, because I remember last time I was on the show, it was a full experience for me. | ||
| It was one of the first times I'd done anything like that, and it was like... | ||
| It was pretty mega. | ||
| I was like, whoa, I have no idea what I'm doing. | ||
| This is so much. | ||
| And now I feel so much more comfortable and fun to chat. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| It was really great to see you again, too. | ||
| See what I'm saying? | ||
| It feels like coming of age to come back and chat again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah! | |
| Beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, it's really nice. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Very cool. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks, Alex. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny. |
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