Alex Honnold, free solo climbing legend, contrasts the sport’s Olympic evolution—combining bouldering, speed, and difficulty with meticulously adjusted routes—against its gritty past of hitchhiking and mail correspondence. His recent Guyana expedition, filming for National Geographic while climbing uncharted 700-foot sandstone walls, highlights climbing’s intersection with survival skills, like indigenous porters’ efficiency or malaria risk management. Skeptical of Tesla’s and GM’s battery repurposing, he praises Rivian’s modular approach and Amazon’s 100,000 van orders for future grid storage. Balancing extreme physicality with longevity, Honnold dismisses hyperbaric therapy and CBD but credits high REM sleep and bodywork for his resilience. His Climbing Gold podcast, now extended beyond the delayed Olympics, bridges climbing’s history and modern athleticism, proving the sport’s enduring adaptability and cultural depth. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, I don't know if you remember, but you went off for quite a long time and like, you should do a podcast, you should do a podcast, and sure enough, it's like, yeah, I did a podcast.
The idea is that we wanted to—well, I mean, as you can imagine, climbing is a very broad sport, starting from sort of classical alpinism in the Alps and mountain climbing.
Now to Olympic climbing, where the people who win the Olympics this summer, most of them are super young and they're basically like gym kids, sort of like gymnasts who just train indoors nonstop.
And so the podcast is sort of an exploration of this spectrum of full adventure to full athleticism and like where climbing has moved in between.
You see what I'm saying?
Mm-hmm.
I don't know, because, you know, when I grew up as a, like, I was one of the first climbers in America to sort of grow up climbing in a climbing gym.
And so that's part of the reason I wound up as a professional climber is I sort of had access to better training facilities than, like, the generation before me.
And now we're looking at the next generation who's going to the Olympics.
And it's, like, even more of that athletic background.
And it's, like, you know, it changes the sport.
And so a big part of the podcast that we started was basically to see how it changes the sport.
And to try to...
You know, save some of the best stories of climbing.
So, in the World Cup circuit for climbing, like, they're already established climbing competitions in the world, and normally they do three different styles.
You know, speed climbing, difficulty, and bouldering.
So, difficulty and bouldering are basically just like how high you can climb up a wall before you fall off.
Difficulties with a rope and bouldering is without a rope, but smaller walls.
And then speed climbing is naturally just how fast you can climb a set course.
So you're climbing with a rope and you're climbing say a 15 meter, say up to like a 50 foot wall and they set a very, very difficult course and then everybody basically falls as they get higher.
Ideally, if setters have done a good job, then it means that the world champion or whoever wins will wind up making it to the top and everybody else will fall progressively lower.
And the world champion, if he does make it to the top, clearly someone else is going to come along that's maybe a little bit better than him in the future.
Yeah, so they're professional route setters that do that.
And so they're sort of internationally certified for competitions.
And there's a whole art to the route setting.
And that's a big part of what we explore in this podcast leading up to the Olympics is like, you know, who are the international organizing committees that choose these people?
And like, who makes the route?
And like, are the routes fair?
You know, it's things like that.
I mean, the routes are, they try to be fair.
But it's interesting because...
In a given competition, the root setters are aware of who the competitors are going to be, so if one of the women is much taller than the rest, they kind of have to bear that in mind a little bit to keep the roots kind of fair.
who's going to make it into finals, let's say, say like the top six climbers, top eight climbers in the world, you have like a rough sense of who's going to make finals.
And then I think the setters try to differentiate the finalists in some way, you know, like basically find things that separate their strengths and weaknesses.
I'm actually not sure what the format is for the Olympics, but they normally do some kind of super final thing where they make a harder route or they change it in some way.
And then eventually they count back on time.
Or they also count back to semis and qualifiers.
Like, whoever got higher on the previous rounds of the competition.
You know, they look back at your cumulative points, basically.
Because actually there are a few very sort of famous stories of some of the best climbers in the world having World Cups taken away for testing positive for weed and stuff.
I mean, if there were drugs that vastly improved your recovery, that probably would be performance enhancing because it would allow you to train at a higher volume.
But even anabolic steroids, I'm not sure if they actually help for climbing because it's so much about strength to weight ratio.
And I've heard that, and I don't know if this is true, but that some steroid use affects tendons and ligaments.
Like you wind up with damage to connective tissue.
What it does generally, at least I'm not really an expert, but what it's been explained to me is the muscle tissue gets too strong for the tendons and the ligaments.
And so the idea is that you're growing muscle at a ridiculous rate because you're taking steroids.
But generally it's guys who are like power lifters and bodybuilders.
I don't think that would apply to climbers because you're not putting on massive amounts of muscle.
So the idea is that you're pushing heavier and heavier weights because your muscles are growing at this extraordinary rate but that your tendons can't keep up.
So that same principle though is actually a very common problem for beginner climbers.
It's like if you're an 18 year old man who gets into climbing in the gym It's really easy to get stronger biceps, but the connective tissue, like the tendons in your forearms, like basically the tendons that control your fingers that go down your forearm and touching your elbow, takes a very long time for those tendons to get stronger.
So it's really easy for your muscle to get stronger and then basically pull your tendons off.
It's actually pretty common for sort of beginner climbers to sort of outpace their development and then injure themselves in different ways.
I mean, if you were really serious about like, I'm young, but I want to be elite, like you would probably do sort of a regimented finger training cycle as you go.
Whitney Cummings is dating a guy who's into climbing, and he's a climber, and she had it on her Instagram today, she was making fun of him, that he's watching videos of girls climbing.
She's like, should I be concerned about this?
Like, what's going on here?
Like, in these, you know, climbing sort of competitions.
So people are watching technique.
They're watching what did this person do wrong and trying to gather information and learn from it, I guess.
Yeah, a friend of mine had a squirrel expert on his podcast, my friend Steve Rinella, and this squirrel expert was talking about these squirrels climbing and they, apparently squirrels only, the females only come into estrus for like six hours a year.
It's like a very...
Maybe multiple times a year, maybe once or twice a year, but the period, the window is very small where you can breed with them.
So the competition is very fierce and a lot of times males will throw other males out of trees.
So squirrels can fall like 70, 80 feet and just bounce off the ground with no damage.
So I actually once walked up to a cliff, like a huge overhanging wall, like this giant, like imagine like an overhanging, like leaning, it's almost like an amphitheater, like a huge thing.
It's a local sport wagon sack.
And I walked up, we were the only people at the wall.
We looked up and there was a squirrel attempting to surmount the cliff.
You see squirrels run up and down trees and vertical cliffs sometimes, but not massively overhanging ones.
These are big basalt blocks, big overhanging things.
Basically, there was no way the squirrel was going to make it.
It had more than 100 feet to go.
And we just stood there transfixed, being like, that squirrel's gonna die for sure.
Like, there's no chance it's gonna make it up this cliff.
And it was, like, skittering, you know, it's, like, holding onto these blocks, and, like, its feet are all...
It's, like, trying its best.
It made it about 20 feet further, and then it fell.
And we were like, oh, the squirrel fell off the cliff!
And then, uh, sure enough, it stuck this, like, there's one tree growing at the base of the cliff, and with, like, this one little limb sticking out, and the squirrel fell probably 25, 30 feet, and then hit, like, one little twig and basically landed on it and ran into the tree.
And it was like total, I mean basically like kind of hit it, you know, as the tree bends, the squirrel just like skitters away and like made it into the tree and stuck the landing.
We were like, that was incredible!
But like we're just standing there like, did anybody see that?
It's like anytime you have nature experiences where you see animals basically fall, you know, basically when you see animals struggle in their natural habitat, you're like, that's cool.
And we were actually admiring the bighorns, like, oh, they're moving so great, because we were having a really hard time getting up this big mountainside.
It's like really big, challenging boulders, and we're like, this is so difficult.
And then we're like, look, those bighorns, they're so graceful.
And then one of them fell down and just tumbled down the rocks, and we're like, oh!
That's funny, just the other day I was like hiking up a mountain and we passed some bighorns and then we were like strolling uphill and we followed cat tracks for probably half a mile up.
So our, I mean, because we were there, I mean, it's a whole, like, complicated naturally graphic TV thing.
So we were there with a biologist.
We're, like, studying these endemic species of the tapuies.
There's, like, this whole interesting natural history component to it, or sort of biology component.
But we were just trying to climb this mountain that had never been climbed before.
So the priority is obviously just to get up it, to, like, find these species of frogs, to, like, do all the things that are important for the TV show.
But then, because I was there, I was like, oh, you know, on the side, I can at least do something that I'm proud of in climbing that's also pretty cool.
And so you're like in these crazy positions where you're dangling from your arms, but you feel safe doing it because the rock's so good and the holds are so good.
And anyway, so it's on these things called the pooies, which are like these big, quercetic sandstone walls that stick out of the jungle.
And so if you imagine a huge, raised area of land that, because it's in the jungle, has been massively eroded by the constant rain over the last 40 million years...
So now you wind up with all these slender towers and mesas.
Yeah, and so you see these pictures where you're like, it's so beautiful, and you're like, yeah, for 30 minutes a day, you know, and the rest of the time, you're just in the water, yeah, getting to work.
Yeah, so that's the stuff I was reading while we were there.
So it's, like, this huge bed of sandstone, which then gets metamorphosed, like, compressed into quartzite, so, like, really, really hard sandstone.
And then, you know, the Andes...
So you have Gondwana, like, one of the megacontinents that predates Pangaea, I think.
Really?
Like, yeah, so, like, you know, if you imagine all the continents on Earth were once sort of combined.
So South America and Africa, you know, fit together at the horn.
Mm-hmm.
And so, this rock is most similar to rock in parts of Africa, actually.
And so, part of what makes the biology there so interesting is that the creatures on the summit of some of the tapuies are more closely related to creatures in Africa than they are to the ones in the jungle below them.
Wow!
Because the summits have been separated for so long.
Because the top of those islands, basically, they've been separated from the jungle below for so long that they more closely resemble where they came from in Africa than the creatures that live in the rainforest below.
They don't exactly know what they did or what their culture was all about, but they had these heads that they left behind, these sculpted, gigantic stone heads that resemble African people.
The stuff in Guyana, though, is on a totally different scale.
The stuff that I'm talking about, I think the Tapuys have been eroded away, like isolated for 40 million years or something, which far predates humans.
And then I think the rock itself is like 1.5 billion years old.
It's funny because, I mean, you saw the pictures, it looks like islands, and, you know, early explorers thought that they must be islands or something, but it's actually just the eroded remnants of what was once like a giant, you know, elevated plateau.
It's just like scrappy little iPhone pics of like, here we are on this crazy...
You know, because you're like in the clouds, you're in the mist.
It's like kind of grim and it's raining.
But then the summit is like this totally wild...
So like all those plants are incredibly well adapted to this harsh environment.
And they're really high rates of carnivory, like plants that eat things because there's basically no soil.
One of the books I read said that described it as a rain desert.
Like you think of a desert normally as having...
Lots of soil but no water and there you have infinite water but no soil because it's a stone surface that's getting rained on so much that it washes all the soil away.
Yeah, so we were with this biologist who was trying to do an elevational transect of the river basin that we were in.
So basically starting from the rainforest, where the frogs are pretty well known, and then going up through the cloud forest, which is kind of as you gain elevation to the actual wall.
And then the species all change as you gain elevation, which is kind of normal.
And then the things on the summit of the Tupuis, on the summit of the stone island, are completely different again.
And so he was basically doing research on how the different species...
Yeah, it took a very long time to walk through the jungle to get there, and then no one had ever been to this wall before, so cutting a trail up to the wall was totally insane.
Yeah, so I was in, you know, all synthetic clothing and synthetic sleeping bags, so I was warm enough, but then you're just laying in a puddle, like a little puddle of water, because, you know, the bottom of the hammock, it all sags to the bottom, so it's all just pooling, and you're sort of like, oh, man.
So like an outfitter in Guyana had hired a bunch of Amerindian porters, so the local indigenous folks, like basically all the men from this last village that we hiked out of, like all hiked into the jungle with us and helped carry things for the team and the film crew and everything.
But so the logistical sort of operator and country had, you know, provided rations for the trip.
But it was basically just Top Ramen for the whole trip.
Um, they had some little freeze-dried, I mean, we just didn't have, you know, we brought a bunch of snacks, um, you know, and I'm normally vegetarian, but on that trip I was eating, like, salmon jerky and just whatever, like, team snacks that we brought.
Um, but, yeah, I mean, when we were at the wall, so, so, that kind of logistical support was when we were trekking through the jungle both ways, but when we got to the wall, you couldn't really establish a camp because we were, like, right on the side of a cliff, and so we were all just kind of dangling on the side of the cliff, and so we were taking care of ourselves more.
Yeah.
But so then we were eating trail mix for basically breakfast and lunch, and then a couple bars, things like that, like energy bars, and then having freeze-dried dinners at night, and that was just like our whole scene.
Basically, we did like a week or 10 days of just kind of like trail mix and bars and...
It was kind of a grim, you know, we were like, well, really, you know, really hurt for a salad or something.
Well, so funny enough, I made it back to Georgetown, the capital, and we were staying in, like, the nice hotel in Georgetown or whatever, and I got the worst food poison in my life in town.
I was kind of like, oh, man.
Yeah, yeah.
But when I got home, I was like, oh, sweet, like, crunchy vegetables and things, you know, like, it's so nice.
The camping off the cliff thing, that is the one that freaks me out the most when I watch those images or see videos of people that are climbing that pause in the middle of the face and set up a camp and they have, like, a little hammock thing.
Well, so, like, where we were at the base of the wall was, like, pretty solid.
But the thing is, the base of the wall, it's not, like, flat ground comes up to a cliff.
It's, like, a steep talus field where all the chunks of the cliff have fallen off over the years.
And then that steep talus gets overgrown with, like, bushes and shrubs and, like, roots and things.
And then bromelia, it's, like, all these crazy plants that just kind of stick together.
So we were camping on this, like, really steep hillside.
But technically, there were plants.
So, like, my hammock was strung between two trees.
But they were, like, pretty scrabby little trees.
And you were kind of, like...
Huh, if the whole thing fell off the cliff, you'd be like, but you don't, but it seems unlikely to happen, because you're kind of like, realistically, the load that your hammock's putting on the tree is a lot less than the load that the wind does, you know, when it's storming or something.
So you're kind of like, ah, I think it's fine, and you just sort of evaluate the risk, you know?
Yeah, so I met him in New York for this thing for Real Magic because he was talking about maybe doing a climbing thing And I was totally into teaching him how to climb the outside of a building, basically, because it's one of those things that people would assume there's a trick to it, but in some ways it's actually easier just to learn how to do it well enough that you can just do it rather than do a trick.
You know what I mean?
Because that's kind of the whole thing with the ice pick, is people assume there must be a trick to it, but you actually just do this crazy thing.
You just learn how to do it right.
And so I went and climbed with him a few times, and he gave me a tour around town, and we chatted and stuff.
I don't know.
I was totally into it.
His whole scene, I was like, such mind over matter.
I was like, wow, he has got a strong mind for just making himself do things that other people would think are impossible.
Like, we had to stop because I hit a nerve and then we did it again.
So it hit a nerve, and then there was one point in time where after we did it, he was concerned that maybe blood was pooling up in a weird way, so he had our medic look at it.
So we stopped twice, right?
We stopped once, and I put it back in again, and then we go all the way through, and then after it came out, we had to stop again, and then one of our guys had to look at it, because it was just bleeding in a weird way.
He was worried that it was creating a hematoma, and it could be...
Yeah, if you ever watch the show, you know, Reeler Magic, whatever, it's really good, but in one of them, like, he puts the ice pick through his hand, and then he pulls it out, and he's like, look, see, it's fine, and it's like, and it looks totally fine, like, it's not bleeding, you know, it's because your hand is so elastic or whatever, but I asked him about it, you know, I was like, oh, what's the deal with that, because you pull out, you know, it's like, is it a trick?
And he's like, no, you pull it out, and as long as you're holding your hand above your heart, it doesn't bleed for a little bit.
He's like, but then when you put your hand down, obviously it bleeds, because you have fucking a hole through your hand, and I was like, oh, Jesus.
Like, when you watch the David stuff, it's like, if you were putting an ice pick through his arm and he was just screaming, like, if he was just sobbing the whole time, you'd be like, I don't want to watch this.
Dude, so fun fact about his card tricks, I don't know if he'd be...
So, he took me to lunch once and did a whole thing of card tricks, and I was totally...
I love magic, and I think it's cool.
Obviously, they're all tricks, but I was like, this is incredible.
The execution's incredible.
I was totally into it.
I was super impressed.
And then, at the time, I was dating this girl in New York really briefly, and a couple days later, we all went to the climbing gym together, because, like I said, I was kind of encouraging him to do some climbing thing.
And then we went to lunch again, and he basically did the same set of card tricks for this girl that I was dating, but having already climbed for like an hour or two.
And it was funny, because his execution in the card tricks was...
It was noticeably worse for me.
I could tell that he was doing all his tricks worse once his arms were totally wrecked from climbing for two hours.
Basically, his fingers and his forearms were totally wrecked.
That actually made me appreciate how difficult the tricks are even more.
I was like, oh wow, if your fingertips hurt and your muscles are wrecked and it's hard for you to hold your arms steady, then it's very hard to fan the deck evenly and to pick cards properly.
It made me appreciate just how much skill is involved in what he was doing.
It's pretty cool.
You know, basically to see somebody do something at their peak and then when they're also totally wrecked and then to see kind of the overlap, you're like, oh, this is actually quite hard.
It was, these two guys would go together, and they would, you know, and the idea was that they would help each other out, but his feet, he always walked barefoot, everywhere.
I'm kind of not into that, because, I mean, you know, there are probably a billion people on Earth that basically don't have access to footwear.
You know, like, there are a billion people on Earth who do that just because that's how they live.
Right.
And, dude, it's funny because I've been thinking a lot about this kind of thing because, you know, having just spent the month of February in Guyana, we had all these Amerindian porters helping us carry all the stuff in for the show.
And I was thinking a lot about survival shows in the U.S. because it's so popular to be like, oh, we're surviving in the woods.
And you're like, dude, there are at least tens, if not hundreds of millions of humans on Earth that basically live in survival shows like that.
I'm going to wander into the woods with my machete.
I'm going to cut some stuff down and make myself a little shelter.
I'm going to start a fire, even though it's raining.
It's like, whatevs.
And being on this trip and watching the Amerindians and just how easily and effectively they could live relatively comfortably in the jungle, it made a total mockery out of reality TV-style survival stuff.
Because we'd get to a new camp zone, and you'd see eight or ten guys just fan out with their machetes and chit-chat.
An hour later, there's a camp erected with a fire going and water boiling and they've all changed clothes.
They're all clean.
They're all happy.
They're dry.
They're having a good time.
And you're like, they just made a village with just a machete.
It's totally insane.
And then you watch survival shows where it's like, he will now do such and such.
And you're like, come on.
Somebody doing that for a show is just so different than people doing that literally every single day for their life.
Well, so the way Bear Grylls tells it is more that the first several seasons of the show was basically like surviving where it's like everybody's just out in the bush like doing the hard thing and it's kind of grim and then basically said over time you just realize that the show is as well received either way like basically people enjoy the entertainment of the show regardless and he's like you don't need the whole crew to suffer you don't need to suffer like nobody needs to be out there like getting worked and wherever for nine days when you can make a good show in two.
Well, and so anyway, but now his new show, though, basically has just taken a different track.
Because ultimately, the, what's the thing, Running Wild Burger, the thing he does now is basically just take other people out and, like, have an experience with them.
And it's basically just a format for interviewing, like, interesting people.
I mean, that's the thing is, like, all this, like, survivory stuff, you know, it's like, when you go into, like, indigenous villages in the Amazon, like, they want refrigeration, they want electricity, they want direct TV. Yes.
Actually, this village we were in, the guy was like, I want DirecTV.
And we were kind of like, well, you need power first.
You need connectivity in some way.
You need any kind of infrastructure.
But it's like people want solid wooden floors.
They want medicine.
I mean, communication.
I mean, there's so much.
I just think it's a little weird to celebrate the survivory stuff where it's like, oh, you should toughen yourself up and get back to nature.
And you're like, yeah, that's cool.
But the vast majority of people that live that way are actively seeking a slightly more comfortable and slightly more secure lifestyle.
No, our porters were mostly wearing wellington boots, you know, like rubber boots.
And then there were a handful that were just barefoot and you'd be like, oh dude, we're like five days from a village in the middle of nowhere and you're just like trekking barefoot through the mud.
Though the jungle is actually a more hospitable environment for going barefoot than a lot of places.
I mean, you know, it's not like my show or anything.
I was just there to climb this wall.
What is the show called?
I think it's Nat Geo Explorer.
I think Explorer is like the series.
I mean, you know, we'll see.
But no, I was just there as a climber to climb this new wall.
And just because, you know, on a personal level, it's like an incredible life experience to have a trip like that put together where you get to go somewhere totally wild, learn about an incredible place, like, you know, yeah, climb on new rock.
Honestly, I mean, my last couple years, you know, I had like the whole crazy free solo film tour, which is like a year of crazy travel and work.
And then a year of COVID, which is also, you know, really different with like no expeditions, no travel.
And so I hadn't really done like an overseas climbing expedition in that way in a couple years.
And it felt good to get back to...
Just to remember that there are hundreds of millions of humans on Earth that live in completely different ways that it's hard to even remember if you're not reminded of it from time to time.
This whole, like, oh, we should get back to our roots, back to nature, all that kind of stuff.
Because it's like, people who live in nature, full stop, I mean, they might appreciate it.
They might love nature in its way, but they still want a lot of the stability of modernity.
You know what I mean?
There's a reason that people have developed power grids and communication infrastructure and all those kinds of things.
It's because it makes life safer and more comfortable.
And on the whole, humanity has embraced all those things.
So, you know, I kind of hate the backward looking, like, oh, we should just get back to our roots, you know, like the Thoreau style, you know, like, you know, get rid of all this stuff.
You're like, no, like, we have all this stuff for a reason.
I mean, the subsistence lifestyle, though, is just so on edge.
You know what I mean?
Like, through all of human history, most subsistence, you know, basically human groups that live in that way are always, you know, like one famine away from death, basically.
Actually, it was dark and we didn't have headlamps, so I would take our backpacks with an iPhone and walk down to sort of scout the path and then dump our stuff and then go back and pick him up and then carry him down.
That's a very good thing, because they didn't do that in California.
It was one of the problems with California's lockdown, is that it's nonsensical.
And, you know, when they were trying to pretend that it's science-based, If it's science-based, you would know that the science says that COVID dies almost instantly in contact with sunlight.
It's also the reason why brown folks and black folks have a much harder time with COVID with vitamin D levels.
Like, my friend is a doctor and he said that he was working in New York City and some of the patients that he had that were black people, he would test them and they had indetectable levels of vitamin D. That's interesting.
See, because vitamin D is one of the rare things that we actually require sunlight to generate.
And the reason why black people have it, obviously, is when you're from really hot climates, your body actually needs to be protected You're getting plenty of vitamin D, but your body's protected from the dangers of the sunlight with more melanin.
So the darker skin gives you less vitamin D, but you're getting plenty because you're outdoors and a lot of your skin is exposed.
I took it for all the times that we were in populated areas around the villages.
But then once we were at the wall...
And we were...
Because basically once we were camped on the wall, we didn't even have any porters around us anymore because we were sort of separated from like the main camp.
We were just like at the wall.
So there wasn't enough of a population base around for us to worry about mosquitoes.
Because the thing is they have to be getting the malaria from somewhere.
So if you're in the full-on middle of nowhere where there are no other living things around, there wouldn't be malaria because there's nothing to carry the malaria.
Yeah, the stagnant water breeds the mosquitoes, but then the mosquitoes have to get malaria from somebody that's carrying the virus, and they can transmit it around.
I'm sure it must exist, but, you know, again, I don't know.
Like, I've gone to Morocco three times, spent a month each time, never even thought about it.
But I've also been in the mountains, you know, climbing mountains and things like that, but...
Yeah, I mean you should look at it case by case because you know like I did a month-long expedition in Chad and technically like if you looked at a global health thing you know Chad is a malarial zone because the the southern part of Chad is like near the Congo it's like sort of you know tropical but the whole rest of it is full-on desert like there's no water and so you know we were in the deserty part and it's like obviously you're not worried about malaria the whole time.
Knock on wood, I don't think I've had any parasites or anything like that.
But the trip to Chad, I had the worst stomach stuff going on the whole trip, but I think we were drinking sort of dirty water and the food was kind of weird.
And so I was basically sick the whole time, but I think it was like normal sick.
So on this trip in the jungle, we were using iodine a little bit, using SteriPens mostly, and then untreating, just having a bunch of it untreated, depending on circumstances.
Rainwater?
Yeah, rainwater.
And then some of the creeks and rivers that we were passing when we were in the middle of nowhere, It's actually pretty crazy.
The water runs brown.
There's so many tannins in it, like the organic material from the biomass of the jungle.
The water actually runs kind of like black-brown water.
But tea-colored, even though it's just clean, it's not like sediment inside the water.
It's like the water is just brown.
But apparently tannins make them more acidic and make it slightly better for drinking.
Justin had a gnarly one that lasted more than a year.
Yeah, they didn't know what it was.
Because, you know, he was deep in the Congo, and they think he might have gotten some sort of unrecognized parasite, or undiagnosed parasite, or, you know, undiscovered.
Yeah, so far we've been interviewing some of the biggest names in climbing and then sort of drawing out specific themes.
So like basically getting the best stories from some of the best climbers to speak to specific aspects of climbing.
And it's all, you know, it's being produced.
So like we're editing it afterward, we're cutting things together, adding sound effects and stuff.
But basically, trying to tell very specific stories about, like, how the sport started, how different aspects of it came to be.
You know, we're trying to be a bit of an educational resource for people who are interested in climbing but don't totally know where it's come from or, like, what's happening with it.
You know, because basically, with climbing going to the Olympics, there's, like, this huge influx of attention in climbing.
And, like, I mean, I went to the climbing gym here yesterday.
And I have this experience more and more when I go to the gym.
It's like tons of very passionate climbers, but they all started climbing like three years ago or four years ago, and they started climbing in the gym.
And it's just such a different world culturally than where climbing came from in the past.
And so it felt like an important time to tell some of those stories and kind of bridge that gap a little bit.
And this guy was just absolutely absorbed with climbing his whole life and never gave a shit about making any money and all he cared about was making these routes and then writing these routes down.
He had these insanely detailed handwritten notes that he kept in boxes.
He had like stacks and stacks of these notes of all these different places that he climbed and then it's also interesting watching because spoiler alert towards the end of the movie he's really old and he can't I mean you look at his body it's incredibly frail and he he just They're still pretty fit for a 90-year-old.
Yeah, I met him at several different events, like, toward the end of his life, basically, you know, as an 87-year-old or whatever.
Like, yeah, and it's pretty amazing.
You'd be like, whoa, it's the Fred Becky.
But, I mean, obviously, I've climbed tons of his roots all over the country.
It's like, yeah, I mean, he's a visionary for lines.
But, I mean, but that's exactly what we're trying to sort of preserve through Climbing Gold through the podcast that we've been working on.
It's like...
So, you know, I mean, he had that first ascent vision.
Our second episode, which is out right now, is with this woman, Joanne Uriasti, who lives in Las Vegas, who basically put up all the classic roots in Vegas.
So she was kind of like Fred Becky on a local scale, where she's lived in Vegas her whole life.
And now, Vegas, like Red Rock in particular, is a global climbing destination.
People come from everywhere to climb there because it's incredible rock.
But in the 70s, no one was interested because they thought it was like, it's the desert.
It's too hot.
It's too sandy.
They're like, who cares?
Like, let's go to Yosemite.
Let's go somewhere good.
And so she and her husband sort of had the run of the place.
And they basically put up all these incredible routes, which are now extremely popular.
Like, on a typical weekend day in Red Rock, you know, in the canyons, there's probably no joke, a hundred different parties of climbers climbing on different routes of theirs scattered throughout the canyons.
All those climbers are all, you know, they all started climbing in the gym in LA like three years ago, basically.
I mean, people coming to Vegas, like, a lot of them are road tripping up from LA. A lot of them started climbing within the last few years.
And they're climbing these routes.
And, you know, they're having an incredible adventure on the route.
They're like, this is rad.
We're, like, climbing this big wall in the canyons.
It's cool.
But they never really think, like, who put the bolts in?
Like, who did this the first time?
You know, because now when you climb a lot of the routes in Red Rock, they're, like, buffed in chalk.
Like, all the holds are, like, have, you know, chalk all over them.
And it's like really obvious where to go and how to climb them and they're like really clean and safe.
But when they first got put up in like 1974, they were like wild, full-on adventures and largely done by this woman, Joanne.
And so our second episode is like interviewing her and sort of exploring what it takes to do First Ascent and what it takes to have that vision of like, we're going to go somewhere totally different and do things that no one's ever done before.
I started, I guess, in university or maybe even in high school.
I mean, it's all in the episode.
And that's what's so crazy is that when we're talking to these old school climbers who have done incredible things over the last 50 years, they all started with these outrageous stories of like, oh, I hitchhiked across the country to go climb this one mountain with a buddy who I'd corresponded with by mail.
Things like that.
Because it's such a different world than nowadays where it's like, oh, I went to the climbing gym for a birthday party and I liked it.
And then even also just pop culture type stuff, you know, I mean, something like film like Free Solo, like obviously popularized a little bit or films like Valley Uprising or The Dawn Wall or like other sort of relatively mainstream climbing films that reach a broad audience.
They just bring more people into the sport.
And then because climbing gyms have become so much popular, there's a venue for all those people to try it.
The idea of that, you know, because you need a lot of grip strength or something like that.
The nogi, which is what you do like rash cards usually or shorts and t-shirts, is a lot of like gable grips and hand grips and learning how to grip your hands together as opposed to gripping other people's stuff, gripping the clothes.
But the jiu-jitsu guys find it like a great supplemental exercise for hand strength.
The whole idea is, you know, Using your own body weight.
It is funny that climbing has been around for so long as a human activity, but then as a sport and now as a popular sport, it's experienced this renaissance.
Well, I imagine, you know, skateboarding, snowboarding, other sports have gone through that, but I was slightly too young to realize that that was happening when they happened, you know, because I was like a little kid when skateboarding was getting cool.
And, you know, and snowboarding, I think, has arguably gone full circle and it's just like not cool anymore.
Yeah, well, I mean, think of, like, Western, like, each year it's kind of like, oh, you know, the resorts didn't open until super late, they closed super early, they have kind of bad snow.
It's like, there have been a bunch of, like, pretty bad years in the last decade, you know?
Yeah, well, so funny enough, so while I was in the jungle, so I came out and I had like a mountain of email and I had an email from my utility in Nevada that was like entitled, you know, could what happened in Texas happen here?
It's like, I mean, realistically, it should be tied into both, and then you'd actually have a national grid, and the whole system would be more stable.
Well, that's why people say climate change instead.
Because it's more like...
Extremes.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, where it's like when you get your whole season's rainfall and two big storms that basically dump a ton of rain, that's not good for anybody.
Even if the numbers wind up like, oh, we had this much rain this season, but it all came at once and it washed the whole mountainside away, you're kind of like...
Well, not just that they pay me, but also it's a little bit of the design ethos behind it.
Basically, Rivian has a second life application in mind for their batteries.
They design the battery packs knowing that eventually they won't be in vehicles anymore and that they will be used for, say, grid-scale storage and things like that.
One of the projects that Rivian is working with my foundation on is this microgrid in Puerto Rico.
The idea is that So Rivian has 100,000 electric delivery vans ordered from Amazon already.
So in theory, they're providing 100,000 vans to Amazon for electric deliveries.
And so the way you design those battery packs matters because, you know, in 10 years, you're going to have to reuse them for something, either recycle them or reuse them for something else.
And like Rivian's put a lot of thought into how it will eventually reuse its batteries.
And, you know, I don't really know about Tesla batteries.
And I would just assume that GM is probably like that's almost certainly not built into their brand in the same way.
You know what I mean?
GM is just kind of like, oh, the Hummer is a brand that people already care about.
Let's just revamp it with electricity now because it's cooler.
The way they've done it, I know what you're saying, but the way they've done it is more in some ways of an expression of the possibilities of technology.
Because they've incorporated all sorts of, like it can crab walk.
Well, I mean, actually, if anything, I'm saying this more because I've worked with Rivian through their whole design process is that, you know, I've done photo shoots with them where we were driving like the prototype truck.
And so it's all like a carbon fiber frame.
Like it's not the real production, like metal truck.
It was pretty crazy because the engine still had a lot of get up and go.
It still feels like a rocket ship, but the seat belts were held on by Velcro.
It's all just ornamental to make it look good for an auto show.
None of it's road safe or legal or anything.
We're just using it for photo shoots on outdoor roads.
It's pretty crazy.
One of the shoots we did, all the electronics were being controlled by an iPad and there was an engineer laying down behind the seat in the back using the iPad to keep the suspension working and keep everything working properly.
Because it's like a model one-off demonstration.
I don't know that much about cars, but you assume that something that's not in production yet is for sure like that.
It's like some mock-up model until it's actually being built properly.
As soon as you start on new features like that that don't technically exist yet, you know that there's some engineer in the backseat frantically pushing buttons, being like, come on baby, work this time, work this time!
And apparently, the energy storage capacity of this particular type of battery, whether or not it actually exists or it's vaporware, is substantially better.
Because the new Tesla Plaid, which is their new Model S... Why is it plaid?
And so this company, I read an article about it actually this morning, and this company is going to, they'll be able to swap out your battery in 90 seconds.
So is this it?
Modular battery swapping.
And so it just kind of puts it back in place and then you're good to go.
So like you'll pull into a place, they'll take out your battery, deliver 100% charge in minutes.
I'm kind of into it, though, because I feel like if everyone just keeps pushing as hard as they can at the thing they're interested in, you do wind up with good ideas, you know?
But in Porsche's defense, they have been at the front lines of making cleaner exhaust fumes to the point where the 911 Turbo, if it moves through, like I saw this on Top Gear, they were saying that if it went through a polluted place, like whether it's downtown LA or Calcutta or whatever.
But, yeah, it was, well, yeah, definitely the most insane thing I've ever seen because, like, I don't, you know, I don't know any car collectors.
I was like, what the fuck?
This is insane.
The tour that we had from one of his helpers basically gave us this pretty cool tour of the garages.
He said it was something like 167 cars, 187 motorcycles, and it's through all of human history.
It's like from 1890 type or 1905. But my takeaway was that there were so many interesting false starts and sort of dead ends in technology where you have like a steam engine car.
And then the ones that I keep thinking about are the 1950s like jet turbine cars.
They were like cars with jets in them from the 50s.
I mean, there are plenty of great things about internal combustion cars and like, you know, I drive one, you know, it's like mobility is important, but you're sort of like, it would be interesting if humanity had taken a fully different path down that road.
But Elon was talking about Tesla's idea, Nikola Tesla's idea, of Westinghouse put the kibosh on it, but he wanted to develop these towers to broadcast electricity the same way radio waves were broadcast.
The only thing that feels a little slow to me is virtual reality, because I assumed that would be way ahead of, it's pretty cool right now, but I assumed it would be, like, impossible to detect by now.
That it would be, like, you put this thing on, and you'd be like...
Isn't it funny that even a guy like you, who has done all these experiences, loves climbing, still like the climbing Everest, like, fucking, what's that all about?
Unidirectional treadmills, essentially, you have a halo around your waist, and it's got these cables that connect you to this circular post that goes around you.
And then on you...
On the ground, rather, what you're standing on is this circular treadmill that's self-propelled.
But if you get to a point where a game like that, if you have an omnidirectional treadmill and it comes with some sort of gun that feels like a gun that has some heft to it and you can actually shoot things.
For people who are just gamers, who, like, would love to go to the, you know, the amusement park or whatever it is, or arcade, and put money in and play Dance Dance Revolution.
They got obsessed with it, and they lost, like, shitloads of weight because it's cardio.
Yeah, well, the VR thing, if, you know, we're supposed to be doing this year, it would be more like a film that, you know, it's less like a game and you're just, like, watching something in VR. So you don't move at all?
Well, you can move as much as you want, like, looking around, you know.
But basically, you're sort of experiencing a climb from, you know, a bird's eye view where you can either watch somebody climbing through the frame or, like, look at the mountains and see the exposure and see the scenery and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, though it can't be hovering because that's the thing, what you're talking about with software.
For VR, for like full 360 video, you can't really do it from, you kind of have to have it on a wall, I think.
So it's like bolted in place to be more stable.
Because I think the challenge of like watching things in VR is that people get really motion sick if the whole frame of reference is moving nonstop.
So, ideally, you have the filming sort of stationary and then interesting things happening around you so that you feel like you're stable when you're watching it, but you can see other things happen around you.
You know what I'm saying?
Because, like, if you did POV in VR, it would make you super motion sick because then when you're the viewer, everything would be rushing all around you at all times.
You'd be like, holy shit, I feel like I'm gonna die, you know?
There's a company called Sandbox and they have these warehouses set up and you do these VR experiences and they have this one that I'm obsessed with called Deadwood Mansion.
And I had third place in the world at one point in time in this zombie killing game.
It's fucking wild, man.
You're in this Zombie experience where you're in this haunted house and zombies come falling out of the ceiling.
They come running at you.
There's rats that run at you.
You have to shoot them.
It's wild shit.
But it gives you a taste of what it's going to be like.
Yeah, I suppose if you're working security or something, you're just like at a desk and you just like have, you know, you have one earbud in, you're just like listening to a show, it's under the desk and you're just like, uh-huh, uh-huh, sign the form, uh-huh.
They're like, oh, I'm working through this thing, and when I finish it, I set it down.
You know, like, that kind of, like, there's a satisfaction in, like, working through a thick book that a Kindle...
I mean, in some ways, the Kindle feels like this insurmountable thing, because it's like you have the whole complete works of Shakespeare on there, and you're like...
You literally could be clicking away at it for the rest of your life and never actually finish anything, and you're like, damn.
Well, what's really scary is that the technology that we're utilizing, whether it's with solid state drives or hard drives or what have you, if something happened, if there was like an immense solar flare and it killed the grid or it killed a large percentage of the population, we could conceivably lose most of human knowledge.
If you think about what we have written down versus what we have stored in our minds, the disparity is astronomical.
There's very little stored in our minds and so much on hard drives that if something big happened, some huge reset, super volcano, that kind of shit, asteroid impact that kills 50% of the population.
Because I feel like most things right now are still written down in physical form.
I can see what you're saying like 20 or 30 years from now, you would expect that if digital devices were wiped out, that humanity would lose an immense amount of knowledge.
But right now I'm sort of like, oh, I feel like we're still sort of on the edge where like most things that are really important still get written down in physical form in some way.
But I think the real thing would be all of the information in regards to how they constructed these solid state drives, how they constructed these motherboards.
Well, there was also a long history of robbing these tombs and robbing these sites and a lot of money, especially when you're dealing with extreme poverty and you can dig a hole in the ground and find a fucking golden sarcophagus that's worth more money than your family will ever spend for the rest of your life.
You're out like digging an irrigation ditch in your field or something, you find a golden sarcophagus, you're like, Well, some of the stuff that they found in Egypt, some of the most spectacular shit, they really did just find.
You know, like where they found Tutankhamen, where his site was, I think it was a kid that was carrying water, noticed that there was this weird sort of curved, sharp edge.
And so he starts kicking it and moving it around, and then they realize, like, hey, this is a...
An actual stone that was carved and put into this position and then they clear it out more and next thing you know they discover the tomb of King Tut.
Yeah, but that's the thing about the Library of Alexandria, is that that could conceivably be, like, all the information that we have about Bitcoin, or about, you know...
I feel like when we were talking about societal non-starters and interesting paths that technology goes, I kind of think that cryptocurrency is maybe not going to be one of the winning paths, but we'll see.
I know, but it's incredibly energy intensive to do something.
It's like you're basically reinventing a system in a more energy intensive way, which doesn't really make sense because in general, most technologies get more and more efficient.
Because all the data processing, all the number crunching, basically the amount of power and infrastructure required to make it work is far more than currency, you know?
No, those guys don't even notice anything happened.
I mean, they were like, oh, it was really bright for a day and whatever, and then they go back to, like, planting their cassava fields and they just, like, live their normal life.
I read a study out of, I think it was out of, I think it was Jerusalem, where they've done, they're doing these intensive hyperbaric studies where they take people and they put them in hyperbaric chambers on a regular basis.
You know, these rich oxygen environments.
And they found that they, you know, the way they determine biological age, Is the length of your telomeres.
And they've determined that through this hyperbaric chamber therapy, they were able to reduce people's biological age by 20 years.
Because this is a fairly recent study, and it's a fairly new discovery.
So they're trying to figure this out.
And hyperbaric chambers they've used in the past, like I know fighters have used them for injuries.
I know that people that have broken bones, they found that it heals things quicker.
In these oxygen rich environments and then some people have used them for those.
But as far as like health and wellness, the use of them is I think it's pretty recent that people started using them just for elective health and wellness type situations where you're just trying to improve your health.
Because that's the thing, if you're in a restricted calorie state for your whole life, it means that you're lacking the energy to go running or play in the mountains.
All the things that I care about, obviously, you couldn't do in that kind of restricted calorie state.
I'm still kind of with the good ideas, things that I think at least are good ideas.
I'm like, oh, that'd be cool, and I'll do this thing, and it'll be interesting.
I mean, and I am sort of following the natural progression of, like, you know, doing the podcast.
It's like, now you're talking about it, and you're sort of sharing.
I'm supposed to be doing commentary for the Olympics, so it's actually not unlike your whole scene.
Where it's like you talk about fighting and then you like talk to interesting people about, you know, it's like, you know, as you wind up being sort of like a spokesperson for your sport in some way.
And I'm like, and I'm great with that if it means that I still get to climb as much as I want.
And, I mean, I think I am actually in a good position to be a bit of a spokesperson for it because I do kind of come from a different generation of climbers.
I am more, by nature, I kind of prefer the adventurous side of climbing.
Like, I like the big, you know, sort of adventurous endeavors in the mountains, which really speak back to sort of the history of climbing.
You know, like, those are the places that climbing came from, and so it is easy for me to talk about that kind of stuff.
And yet I also, you know, try to train in a modern way and train in gyms, and, you know, I kind of know the elite, you know, modern athletic side of climbing as well.
So I don't know, you know, I'm happy to be able to talk about both, you know.
And I think there's a line in the film where I'm like, oh, I hadn't been injured in years and then I got injured a couple times in a couple months after I started dating my now wife and stuff like that.
But so Pat's like this incredible body worker, and I see him as regularly as I can when I'm in town, and I really think that's actually helped quite a bit.
It's like getting the oil changed, basically, whenever you can.
Yeah, so I mean, I think that basically having a home, you know, eating well, getting body work down, all that kind of stuff, like good healthy lifestyle, like I don't think I've had any injuries.
Yeah, there's this for educational stuff, so school kids can just have a smartphone and then go to world-class aquariums and stuff like that and experience crazy...
Like, this morning I did this, like, shoulder mobility stuff and, like, opposition stuff, sort of like, you know, push-up, handstand-y type, like, shoulder stuff.
No, I'm sure he learned it from some book, but I just hadn't really seen it applied in that way.
I mean, it's totally stupid, but it's just moving your arms in different ways and shoulder mobility.
But because my shoulders are not great at that kind of thing, it feels useful for me because that's a personal weakness.
I mean, so much of climbing is identifying your personal weaknesses and working on those.
Because, like, what's good for some people isn't going to be useful.
Like, I don't do that much stretching, and it's because I'm naturally, like, moderately flexible.
And, you know, being extremely flexible doesn't help that much as a climber.
But if you were extremely tight, it would be a hindrance.
You know, and so I kind of fall in the middle ground where it's, like, it's not really worth putting a lot of effort into because it's not going to give me that much more of a gain.
I mean, it does open up all kinds of technique that a normal climber wouldn't be able to do.
But, you know, the thing is, me being relatively tall and relatively flexible, I can get most of the way there without actually being able to do the splits.
And it'd be like a lot of work for me to do the splits.
Yeah, on the other hand, though, I'd probably be able to use those same footholds because I'm taller, you know, because they're a certain length apart.
Like, you know, really, if you're short, you kind of have to make up for it in a lot of ways like that.
There's a picture on my Instagram of me with a straddle leaning all the way forward, like flattening my chest out on the ground with my legs out like this.
I don't know if you've ever been in suburban Vegas, but it's really big with suburban housewives and stuff.
I theorize that people are into hot yoga because they sweat so much, they feel like they did something, and they're like, oh, I went to a workout class.
But you're like, no, you just freaking stretch for an hour.
I'd much rather just stretch on my living room floor.
I went with my wife, and at the end, there were too many people in the room, and it was, like, too hot.
And then everyone sweat so much that it became, like, humid in a way that was, like, crazy.
Like, there was a cloud at the top, and everyone was, like, about to die.
And I just remember the end of the class, my wife just being, just laying on the mat, just, like, shallow breathing, like, trying to survive, basically, for the class to end, you know?
I was like, dude, we're all just gonna die in here.
The key to learning how to stretch properly, though, is little incremental pushes through pain and breathing exercises.
Most people get to this where they're like...
And they're like...
And then they back off.
But you gotta learn how to...
You gotta learn how to just slowly ease into it, and then you gotta learn how to just deeper, and then deep, and then hold it, and it just takes, it's just, you have to be consistent, too.
Honestly, well, it's kind of new, and it's, like, good for everything, and I'm like, anything that's good for everything, I assume is, like, you know, good for nothing.
I did a podcast with the CEO of Whoop the other day because they're the title sponsor for my podcast.
It's a classic style.
You're doing podcasts about podcasts or whatever.
We were talking about REM sleep because the Whoop tracks your sleep stuff.
And it was a bit of a weird, like, personal, I don't know, it was like a moment of enlightenment almost.
But apparently, I get significantly greater percentage of my sleep in REM sleep than average.
And it's funny because every day the app says, like, your REM sleep is much higher percentage than whatever.
Like, you must be making up for, you know, mist or something.
But like, it's just always super high and apparently that's the REM sleep is the stage of sleep that, you know, sort of gives calmness and like, you know, mitigates anxiety and things like that.
And I am sort of like, it is interesting if I'm like, maybe my whole thing in climbing just comes down to the fact that I'm a naturally really heavy REM sleeper, you know, and I just like, my mind is always kind of calm because I get like an extra, you know, 15% of my time in REM sleep every night.
There's also, I think, something that comes from...
There's something that comes from...
When you are accustomed to doing things that are physically taxing and you've done it since you were little, I think you have more calmness and you're more mellow period.
Also, I just think you're exerting a lot of energy.
I think one of the things that stresses a lot of people out, I believe your body has certain requirements just from an evolutionary perspective.
Our bodies were designed to run away from predators, to fend off enemies, to do whatever we had to do to survive in terms of trekking and doing things.
And for most people, they don't use their body like that at all.
And I think this extra energy manifests itself as anxiety, as depression, as bad feelings because you're just like, ugh, because your body's just not getting what it deserves.
Totally.
What it needs or what it requires.
Your body is constantly doing that.
So your body's gotten what it's required since you were 10. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, like, you know, that fight or flight response, like what you're describing, the, like, fleeing from predators.
I mean, I think that is kind of a root of anxieties, like modern life, like things trigger fight or flight that shouldn't necessarily, you know, it's like stress at work and your boss or whatever, and it, like, triggers that same thing.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, it is true that in my life at least, the things that trigger fight or flight are like legitimate life or death sorts of situations where it's like, oh, you know, you are about to fall off a cliff or like, oh, you know, like the storm is coming and you're out in the middle of nowhere and you're like, I'm about to get worked.
You know, it's like typically when I feel that kind of major anxiety, it's like for a real reason.
And I mean, it is interesting.
Yeah, I mean, it is appropriate that way.
It's like the correct outlet for that kind of stress.
And also, most of the guys that I've met that do what you do, and I don't know if I've met anybody that does exactly what you do, but guys that climb a lot, they're pretty chill.
Well, dude, I think part of that is because you get worked by nature so often that then when you're in sort of normal life, everything feels pretty relaxed because you're kind of like, oh, I'm physically comfortable.
I'm fed.
I'm hydrated.
I'm like, you know, my body is fine.
I'm not about to just get hammered by nature, you know?
Yeah, that's my philosophy about really difficult exercise.
It's really important because it makes other things seem easy.
I think we have just like a standard base level of stress.
And when you artificially impose a higher base level electively, like whether it's through climbing or other kind of exercise, whatever you're doing, it makes the rest of life seem easy.
Dude, I had earlier this year, There was a winter storm warning for Vegas.
It does snow in Vegas sometimes, and the mountains especially get snow.
There was a winter storm warning for this storm coming through, and I'd climbed like 20 days in a row basically or something, and I wanted to use the storm day to try to hike this one section of the traverse that I'm trying to do of all these peaks.
I figured I would take advantage of a non-climbing day to do the one walking section to figure out where the route goes.
And so I went out in this crazy storm.
And when I started, it was like snowing a little and I was like in crazy wind.
It's really cold.
And I was trying out these new like waterproof layers just to see how...
Actually, I wanted to try them out before the jungle to see if they'd be good jungle layers.
And so I go up into the mountain.
Anyway, long story short, I get completely...
Completely worked.
It turns out visibility is nothing.
I didn't know where I was going.
I get lost in the mountains.
And it wound up being basically too difficult of terrain to travel through in the snow.
Because I had sort of taken it for granted, but in Red Rock on those mountains, you walk on these exposed sandstone slabs all the time.
But when you cover them in six inches of snow, it's really kind of horrifying.
You can't just walk up the slabs anymore.
It's now a total tobogganing deathtrap where you're going to slide down.
So I was like...
Anyway, so I go up quite a ways.
Eventually, I just had to give up and turn around, but I'm now 2,500 feet up this mountainside.
Then I turned around, and then it all was way more socked in.
I couldn't even see my tracks anymore because everything's filled in and visibility is nothing.
I had a Garmin watch on, so I kept looking at the little track on my watch being like, am I to the left or the right of the track that I came up?
Yeah, but like sliding over things or tripping on rocks.
It's really steep hillside with like, and you're stepping through, you know, say six or eight inches of fresh powder, but underneath it's still like loose rocks and cactuses and things like that.
So it's like, you know, the terrain is, it's not like a snow base or something.
It's like you're just stepping through it and falling over.
Anyway, so I fell into cactuses a bunch of times.
And so the thing is, I was totally hypothermic, completely wet, totally worked.
And my hand had all these cactus thorns in it.
And my other hand was too numb to manipulate anything.
So I wound up biting the biggest thorns out and then just left the rest of them because I just couldn't use my hands and just keep staggering down the mountain.
Anyway, eventually I made it back to the car, made it back to the house, and then I had my wife pull all the thorns out because I couldn't really use my hands.
I was so worked.
But I was kind of like, but that was like my rest day adventure.
You know what I mean?
That's like, I mean, it turned out being, it turned out being way more.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I was hoping that it was going to go better than that and it didn't really work out.
But that is kind of the point that when you take on that elective love, you know, I was like, I had a goal that I wanted to piece together this section of a hike.
It didn't work out that way.
I wound up, you know, building a bunch of character instead.
But, you know, you're just like, that's just a normal day out.
You know, it's like when you're adventuring in the mountains, sometimes, sometimes those winter storm advisors actually happen, you know?
No, I mean, all three of my neighbors are seven-year-old ladies that have lived in the neighborhood since it was first built in 1989. It's pretty classic.
Yeah, and more professional climbers are sort of moving.
It is the best four-season climbing in the country.
It's for sure the best climbing in the country.
Wow.
So there's definitely a reason for climbers to live there.
And I think the climbing scene in Vegas is actually even more robust than I know because I'm constantly at the cliff and I meet someone and I'm like, oh, where are you from?
And they're like, we live here.
And you're like, really?
And that happens consistently that I meet people, you know, and we're just like out at the cliff climbing.
And you're like, you live in town?
I've never seen you or heard of you before?
And you're, you know, like you just live here too.
You know, or certainly like LA especially, you're like, oh, well, LA, you know, the city of downtown LA has a certain population, but there's so many people living within a two-hour drive that it's like, it's this crazy bowl, you know?
You know, last time I talked to you, I was in that studio and it was during the free solo tour and I had to leave because I was like going to the airport.
And I was super late because we always chat so freaking long.
And it was like an hour to LAX from there or something with traffic.
And my driver canceled.
Basically, the driver got there, saw that it was supposed to be going to LAX and just bailed and drove away.
So then I had to wait for another driver to come.
I was using Lyft.
And then another driver gets there and I'm now like fully going to miss my flight.
And I was like, dude, I'm going to miss my flight.
If you can get me to LAX, you know, basically in time for my flight, you'll get the tip of your life.
Anyway, the dude was like, he was, I was like either Bangladeshi or like, I think he was Bangladeshi or something.
Basically, he was like Indian driver and was like, It was like setting a fish loose in the sea.
He was like, you want me to do what?
And then he basically just like drove in the shoulder and did like anything.
He got me to LAX in like half an hour.
It was totally incredible.
It felt like I was driving in Bangalore or somewhere.
And this was, unfortunately for the people that were fighting, it was a heavyweight title fight.
So imagine being a giant person, which you're already had a hard time with cardio anyway, and then being at 7,000 feet above sea level, and more cardio requirements, and then pollution.
Your body really needs a lot of time to acclimate to 7,000 feet above sea level.
Like months.
And this first guy, Fabrizio Verduem, he did it for months, but Cain Velasquez only did it for a couple weeks.
I think he had like 11 days, actually.
Somewhere in that neighborhood of a couple weeks.
I don't remember exactly, but they were saying, when you talk to actual experts, you're almost better off coming in right before the event.
Then, you know, whereas you can get all the work and do the hard cardio leading up to that and then have the, you know, you're going to be diminished because of the altitude.
But at least your body has gone through the hard work.
So they want you to train for the couple hours that you're training.
be that at low altitude and then so like a lot of guys will fighters will train down in the valley and then drive up to Big Bear in California because because you can make that trip in a day in a couple of hours and so they live up there And where do they fight, though?
Well, it depends on where they're fighting, but even if they're fighting in Vegas, there's still a cardio benefit to sleeping at altitude.
Yeah, and taught me how to use it, which is super helpful.
And explained how to do all the levels.
And then his team is doing all the post-production and editing and dealing with everything.
And he sort of approached me about the idea of doing it as lead up to the Olympics.
We called it the climbing gold.
And it was going to be just a look at the competitors and kind of the state of climbing as it goes into the Olympics.
And then when the Olympics got pushed, we kind of found that we had the extra time to go a little bit deeper into real climbing.
Like, what are, you know, like, what is bouldering?
Like, who does first ascents?
Like, who puts the route up first?
Like, why does that matter?
You know, and then in our first episode with this guy, Peter Croft, who's like a personal hero of mine, is about vision and sort of inspiration in climbing.
Like, why does one generation's vision end and another generation surpass it?
You know, like, Basically, why can the last generation of climbers not see past into what the next generation is going to do?
I mean, it's just interesting because Peter was an incredibly talented climber and he kind of took free soloing to a certain level.
And I basically started at the level that he ended at and then took it to a different level.
But now I'm sort of like, you know, I wouldn't say that I'm necessarily at the very limit of my vision, but, you know, I'm close.
Like, doing El Cap and the Film Free Solo, all that kind of stuff, definitely represents the edge of what I consider possible.
But then already now I see sort of Olympic competitors who are just physically so much more gifted that, in theory, they'll have a totally different vision.
Anyway, so those are the sorts of ideas that we've been exploring.
It just seems like a good time for it.
And there's nothing like that in climbing podcasting right now.
I mean, there are a handful of sort of long-form interview podcasts, kind of like what you do in climbing, where they chat with interesting climbers and tell long stories.
But it's not edited down to be thematic.
It's not explaining the sport in an approachable way.
And so the idea was always to have sort of a limited run, like 10 to 20 episodes leading up to the Olympics and sort of explaining the sport in a way that people can access.