March 30, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:04:42
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast. | |
| Check it out. | ||
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day. | ||
| Joe Rogan Podcast by night. | ||
| All day! | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Good to see you again, man. | ||
| Yeah, good to see you. | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| I'm just living. | ||
| I'm doing the same stuff as always. | ||
|
unidentified
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Just living? | |
| Crawling giant shit that freaks people out? | ||
| Yep, yep. | ||
| That's what I'm trying to do. | ||
| What is the latest? | ||
| What have you been up to? | ||
| I know you're doing a podcast now, right? | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| Do you feel certain satisfaction? | ||
| I do. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, I mean, you have an interesting perspective and you have a fascinating life. | ||
| Yeah, actually, we don't really get into it that much. | ||
| I don't actually talk about myself very much. | ||
| It was sort of leading up to the Olympics. | ||
| You know Climbing's in the Olympics this year? | ||
| No, I did not. | ||
| Yeah, so climbing's in the Olympics for the first time this summer, and so the podcast was supposed to be sort of a primer leading up to the Olympics. | ||
| More as like, here is the state of the sport leading up to this singular moment in climbing. | ||
| But then the Olympics got cancelled last summer, well pushed. | ||
| And so then we decided to sort of go a little deeper in backstory stuff, since that's the first season that's basically premiered right now. | ||
| So did you record them all in advance? | ||
| No, it's ongoing. | ||
| We've done 10 of them, and now we're going to do the ones leading up to the Olympics over the next four months or whatever. | ||
| So we've got kind of a structure planned out, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, preserve some of that adventure. | ||
| Oh, that's great. | ||
| What are the events in the Olympics? | ||
| Like, how is it measured? | ||
| It's a combined format. | ||
| 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 the first one is how high you can climb before you fall off? | ||
| Yeah, basically. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| 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. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because it just gets to a point where no one can complete it? | ||
| You just get pumped out of your gourd, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then they're going to make it more difficult? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They set different routes for every competition. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And how does a route get established? | ||
| Does it get established by someone like yourself who understands the difficulty levels? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How does it... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, they do? | ||
| I mean, at least try. | ||
| Or if they know that most of the... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is it possible that if everyone made it to the top, that they would just go on based on how much time it takes you to get to the top? | ||
| Like what would they do then? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sometimes they do like a super final. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| There's no drug testing in regular climbing. | ||
| No, no, there is. | ||
| Oh, not in the Olympics. | ||
| Yeah, in the Olympics, of course. | ||
| And in the World Cup circuit there is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Weed? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, no. | |
| But climbers who don't even care, you know, they just enter the competition. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Am I allowed to tell stories about this out here? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| Classic Chris Sharma story. | ||
| He was the most famous and best climber in the world for a whole generation, basically. | ||
| He sort of won a World Cup by fluke. | ||
| He just entered and he won. | ||
| He was like, yeah, because he's the best climber in the world. | ||
| But then I think they took it away for weed. | ||
| And he's like, well, yeah, of course. | ||
| It's so dumb. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean, not like he cares, because he's the best in the world. | ||
| He still won. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, once you win, you win. | ||
| I mean, it's not like he's taking steroids. | ||
| A couple of Spanish competitors had a medal taken away for cocaine, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| He had some kind of statement about using it to relieve the stress of the heavy training volume, all that kind of stuff. | ||
| Basically, he was like, oh, it's just partying on the side. | ||
| And you're like, yeah, obviously it's not performance enhancing. | ||
| That's recreational on the side of his training. | ||
| I wonder what would be performance enhancing, other than anabolic steroids, what would be performance enhancing for climbing? | ||
| Would it be something that makes you hyper-focused, like a Ritalin or something like that? | ||
| I honestly am not sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| How do you hold someone back? | ||
| I know you're not really training climbers, but if you were, how would you hold a young person back? | ||
| Is there an established training protocol for beginners? | ||
| Yeah, it depends. | ||
| But yeah, there are some now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like finger boards? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| You'd be progressively loading your fingers in sort of a systematic way and trying to make sure that you don't exceed a certain rate. | ||
| Are there programs like that where a young climber can find online? | ||
| Yeah, there are. | ||
| There's several. | ||
| I mean, that's an interesting thing about climbing and going to the Olympics. | ||
| It's like the sport is changing. | ||
| You know, there's more knowledge. | ||
| There's more coaching available. | ||
| There's more information about it. | ||
| There are a lot of different training protocols. | ||
| There's way more information out than there was, say, when I started 25 years ago. | ||
| Yeah, people watch videos. | ||
| 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, and I think more and more they're just watching the competitions just to see who wins. | ||
| In the same way that people watch other sports, they're just like, oh, who's the best climber in the world? | ||
| I mean, that's going to be the appeal of the Olympics. | ||
| It's going to show the best climber in the world. | ||
| I guess, also, you're really into climbing. | ||
| You just want to watch people do it, too. | ||
| Yeah, you want to see greatness. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Yes, see mastery. | ||
| Like anything else, like watching people play chess. | ||
| Well, that might be a little more boring, because that's pretty slow. | ||
| But the people who love chess like watching people play chess. | ||
| Maybe, but I think that there's a dynamicism, like a movement to it. | ||
| It'd be like watching ballet or something, where you're like, oh, this is an incredible movement. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, it's like... | ||
| Well, I like watching people play pool, and people have often said, like, why are you doing that? | ||
| But to me, it's like I like watching it. | ||
| It's like I play pool, so when I watch pool, I think the same thing would hold with climbing. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| You like climbing, so you're watching people climb, and someone who's really good specifically, too, would probably be inspiring, right? | ||
| Yeah, though I think that climbing might have a more elemental appeal than something like pool, let's say. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Because anybody can appreciate the athleticism, the movement, and the grace, and sort of the way in which people climb. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| But with pool, if you don't know the rules, you'd be like, why didn't you just put the ball in the hole? | ||
| It's so much easier. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, why is he using that pointy stick? | ||
| That's stupid. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And with chess, like, if you don't understand. | ||
| Yeah, if you don't know the rules of chess, you're just like, knock them all off the board and walk away. | ||
| You know, you're like, dude. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| Climbing is very universal. | ||
| It's got a primal appeal. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, we were once arboreal. | ||
| That is exactly where we came from. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So funny you mention that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, especially something completely rare, like watching a squirrel fall from a cliff. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Like, I watched a bighorn fall down a talus field once. | ||
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unidentified
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Whoa! | |
| 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! | ||
| Even the bighorns have a hard time. | ||
| There's a gnarly series of photographs that this guy took of a mountain lion encounter with a bighorn and they both wound up dead on the highway. | ||
| They fell off a cliff or something? | ||
| Yeah, the mountain lion attacked the bighorn and they both went off the side of the cliff and landed on the highway. | ||
| You can find that because it's a fairly famous series of photographs because it's so intense. | ||
| That kind of makes you sad, though. | ||
| It is sad. | ||
| Sad for the bighorn, sad for the mountain lion. | ||
| Yeah, it's sad. | ||
| Sad for the driver, who's like, holy shit. | ||
| It's like two large animals fall out of the sky. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| Oh, jeez. | ||
| So they're both leveled on the side of the highway, and there's quite a few photos. | ||
| The blood coming out of the horn is where his horn came off. | ||
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unidentified
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Jeez. | |
| So his horn came off from the impact, and you see it there? | ||
| Bighorns don't lose their horns like a deer does, and then the mountain lion dead, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's kind of a small mountain lion. | |
| He's got in his mouth the fur from the bighorn. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Isn't that wild? | ||
| That is... | ||
| Oh, that's so gnarly. | ||
| Bones poking out. | ||
| I mean, that is a fucking giant fall. | ||
| Does it say where? | ||
| I think it's in California. | ||
| No, no, Utah? | ||
| Montana? | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Geez. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Fighting on the mountain fell to their immediate death. | ||
|
unidentified
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Geez. | |
| Man, that's wild. | ||
| That is... | ||
| Also, well done Googling that so quickly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a fairly famous series of photographs because it just shows you how difficult life is for those animals. | ||
| I'm like, now do you take a moment of silence for that poor mountain lion? | ||
| For both of them. | ||
| Poor big one. | ||
| I'm like, oh, that's kind of dark. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A friend of mine, my friend Josh, had an encounter with a mountain lion just two days ago. | ||
| He was on a ranch in Northern California and he saw these deer just take off. | ||
| They just hauled ass out of there. | ||
| And he was 100 yards away from what he described as a 200-pound mountain lion. | ||
| He said it was the biggest mountain lion he's ever seen in his life. | ||
| Has he seen many? | ||
| Because I've never seen one. | ||
| I've seen tracks everywhere. | ||
| I've been around mountain lions a ton and never seen one. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen two, but the ones I saw were small. | ||
| I saw one that looked like it was pretty far away. | ||
| It was like small dog size. | ||
| Not small dog size, like 50-60 pounds. | ||
| And the second one was basically the same size. | ||
| The second one though, one of them I saw in the mountains of Colorado. | ||
| And the second one I saw was in Santa Barbara. | ||
| And it was on the street. | ||
| Like full suburbia. | ||
| Yeah, full suburbia. | ||
| That's the funny thing about mountain lions. | ||
| Yeah, they eat dogs. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh wow. | ||
| And like big, fresh, in the snow, you know, cat tracks. | ||
| Obviously there are mountain lions around, but I've never seen one. | ||
| Probably because they're always right behind me. | ||
| They're always looking at you. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| This guy's crazy. | ||
| I was going to eat that dude, but I wanted to watch him climb. | ||
| Yeah, I wish. | ||
| I wish. | ||
| How often are you doing these free solo climbs? | ||
| You know, I'm working on things. | ||
| Yeah, fairly frequently. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I was just on this expedition in the jungle in Guyana. | ||
| It was like a National Geographic TV show thing. | ||
| And I free-solid the wall we put up. | ||
| Just because the type of rock we were on, no one's ever soloed a wall like that before. | ||
| So I felt like since we were there, I felt almost an obligation to do it just for this climbing history. | ||
| You're like, oh, if you're there and you have the opportunity, you kind of have to. | ||
| Now when you see something like that, do you make a route first with ropes, always? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| That's pretty cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it wound up being totally insane climbing. | ||
| Like, really cool. | ||
| Like, this overhanging wall of 600-700 feet high. | ||
| You know, like, dangling. | ||
| It was kind of the best style of climbing to solo because it felt secure. | ||
| Like, it's the type of climbing where you feel safe. | ||
| Like, it's a very, very good rock, so anything you hold onto, you know, is solid and it's not going to break. | ||
| And it also lends itself to these sort of striations in the rock where you can, like, wedge your hand in and, like, feel really secure. | ||
| secure. | ||
| But also, it's incredible exposure because it's really steep. | ||
| Like, because you're in the jungle, you can only climb stuff that's overhanging because anything that's, like, less... | ||
| Anything else accumulates, like, water and dirt and winds up with plants all over it. | ||
| Like the only stuff that's really climbable is the stuff that is sheltered from the rain so that it doesn't have plants on it. | ||
| So it's difficult just by nature. | ||
| Yes, it's difficult because you're hanging. | ||
| 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 you're just like, what a crazy place. | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| But then when you get to the very edge, you have to somehow make your way. | ||
| And that's a bummer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That seems like the most gnarly part of it. | ||
| It actually probably, in terms of risk, it probably was. | ||
| The final 20 or 30 feet of getting onto the top, it's all rotten soil and loose rocks. | ||
| Yeah, it wasn't ideal, but... | ||
| How do you decide which way to go when you get to something like that? | ||
| Just what's the most likely path to success? | ||
| Yeah, so in that particular case, we had already established the route. | ||
| Because it was this TV thing, we'd already climbed it. | ||
| We'd put ropes up it. | ||
| We'd worked on it. | ||
| The camera guys had gone up and down. | ||
| We'd camped up on this ledge to look for these frogs. | ||
| We'd done this whole experience. | ||
| So for the free solo, I already had a pretty good sense of how I should tackle that part because we'd already been sort of living up there a bit. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But I'm like, what do you do in February? | ||
| You know, that was my February. | ||
| So these frogs, like the idea is to, is it really an excuse to climb? | ||
| Or is it like, do you really, are you really there for the frogs to check out these weird species? | ||
| It's a little bit of both? | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm like, I know this is a long-form show. | ||
| Do you want to, like, go deep into it? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Because it's actually really interesting. | ||
| So, all right, long-form. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| So, okay, the trip was, the trip is crazy. | ||
| I mean, we can just talk about the whole time. | ||
| I read freaking eight books while we were there because it's the jungle and, you know, it's the tropics, so it's dark from six to six every day. | ||
| It's like 12 hours of dark. | ||
| And we're in our own little hammock, so I was just in my cocoon, like, reading books every day. | ||
| Like a headlamp? | ||
| Yeah, I have a headlamp because you have nothing else to do. | ||
| It's raining and you're just in your own little personal cocoon just reading. | ||
| I read Natural History of Guyana, Natural History of the geology. | ||
| Have you seen the movie Up? | ||
| The Pixar or Disney movie? | ||
| The cute thing with the flying house and the balloons? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So you know that's all modeled on where they fly to the big rock things with the waterfalls? | ||
| Those are tapuies, which are real things in South America. | ||
| That's in Venezuela, Guyana, and the northern part of Brazil. | ||
| Or if you've seen the new Point Break they filmed down there on the same rock features. | ||
| I didn't see that. | ||
| You're not missing anything. | ||
| No? | ||
| It's really bad. | ||
| But a lot of my friends worked on it, so it's cool. | ||
| And it is an incredible climbing place. | ||
| Out of respect for Patrick Swayze. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, you didn't miss anything. | ||
| I actually fell asleep watching it on a plane. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, really? | |
| When you fall asleep during an action movie, you're kind of like, come on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But the climbing in it is cool. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you know Angel Falls? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's one of the biggest waterfalls in the world. | ||
| Here, pull up a picture of Angel Falls. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| Dude, that's a Ryman. | ||
| That is wild. | ||
| God, that's so beautiful. | ||
| It looks fake. | ||
| Yeah, it does look fake. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| I'm pretty sure that one is a Ryman. | ||
| If you look to the left of the one you were just on, we climbed this little wall to the left of it. | ||
| Can you go back to that one, Jamie? | ||
| Because, like, if I was a dummy, I would think someone built that. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| So if you could pan that photo to the left, though, obviously you can't because it's not in the frame. | ||
| We climbed this little mountain to the left. | ||
| And so this is a really famous peak because the summit of it marks the boundary between Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana. | ||
| It's used as, like, the marker to separate those three countries. | ||
| And so we were climbing this sort of little bastard stepbrother next to it. | ||
| But, you know, that peak, though, had never been climbed and was, like, new to science for the different species of frogs and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| If you're an explorer and you've stumbled upon that you would think that that was like a structure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, it's so square and flat on the top. | ||
| And some of them did. | ||
| Like, European explorers that first came into the region had all kinds of names, like the White Cathedral and things like that. | ||
| Like, that tower. | ||
| They're just a bunch of... | ||
| Wow, look at that one. | ||
| Click on the one your cursor's on, Jamie. | ||
| That's so wild. | ||
| Oh, actually, so again... | ||
| So, actually, you see on the left side of that, there's, like, the hint of a little thing in the distance? | ||
| I'm pretty sure that's the thing we were climbing. | ||
| The thing to the left that's, like, just starting to appear out of the clouds. | ||
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the peak that we climbed. | ||
| God, it's so beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| Except, to be fair, the sun only comes out. | ||
| So we were there in the dry season, and it rained like eight hours a day, and we were in the clouds nonstop. | ||
| It was totally grim. | ||
| And that's the dry season. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's so wild, man. | ||
| Like, really, if I stumbled upon that, I would think someone built that. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's totally incredible. | ||
| Wait, so I didn't even get to the cool part of it. | ||
| Oh, so, yeah, asking about the geology. | ||
| Yeah, like, how does something like that form? | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You see what I'm saying? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's like this totally incredible... | ||
| I mean, it's just an interesting part of Earth. | ||
| Are you aware of the Olmecs? | ||
| Do you know what the Olmec civilization was? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's quite a mystery. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's not the Easter Island stuff? | ||
| No, no, that's different. | ||
| This is the Olmecs. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And where were the Olmecs? | ||
| In South America. | ||
| Oh, yeah, it says Olmecs. | ||
| Yes, South America, Mexico, Central America. | ||
| And there's a lot of them. | ||
| And these images are very African-looking faces. | ||
| And they don't really know what the history of them were. | ||
| And they think some of them existed in the neighborhood of 6,000 years ago. | ||
| But, you know, when you're looking at stone, it's hard because they carbon date the stuff that's around the stone as they unearth it. | ||
| But it doesn't really necessarily give them an accurate sense of when it was constructed. | ||
| It just gives an accurate sense of how... | ||
| The sediment that eventually covers it. | ||
| 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 like ancient, ancient. | ||
| It's incredible rock. | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| It's just so wild, the way it formed, the look. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, yeah, totally. | ||
| So this is what the summits look like. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| I have a bunch of photos like that on my phone. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh wow! | ||
| So for any of the vegetation to live there, they basically all have different strategies where they're rooted straight to the stone. | ||
| And then they eat bugs and things. | ||
| They eat insects. | ||
| Or they eat other plants. | ||
| Lots of plants that grow on plants. | ||
| It's just like a whole crazy web of life that's really different than what you expect normally. | ||
| It's weird because it's so abundant. | ||
| It's an unusual form of life, but it's everywhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That's so rich and green. | ||
| Yeah, though, actually, I bet in that photo, if you pan the photo a bit to the side, there'd be big expanses of bare rock. | ||
| Because the summit's like, yeah, there are little pastures and things. | ||
| It's almost like alpine meadows if you go into the mountains in the northern hemisphere. | ||
| There'll be high tundras and things where it's like, yeah, it feels really lush, but then there's also a lot of exposed rock. | ||
| Because when the sun comes out, you know, you're at seven to nine thousand feet in the tropics. | ||
| So it's really intense UV exposure and it dries things out instantly. | ||
| So it's really hard, hard climatic conditions for life. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| And so these organisms, these creatures that live up there, they're closely resembling creatures that live in Africa. | ||
| And so that was part of what you're studying. | ||
| 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... | ||
| You know, basically what the deal is. | ||
| And it's really difficult to get there, too, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then just, yeah, it was crazy. | ||
| And you guys are sleeping in hammocks, so do you have, like, some sort of canopy above the hammock? | ||
| Like, how do you have it set up? | ||
| Yeah, just a little hammock and then a little rainfly, just like a tarp above it. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| But it took me a while to sort of dial in my scene. | ||
| I was basically sleeping in a puddle for a lot of the time. | ||
| Yeah, and I'm sure your books were soaking wet too, right? | ||
| No, no, everything's in your little dry bag. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's true. | ||
| But you keep your stuff in your dry bags and keep it all organized. | ||
| But it is true that your clothing, once it got wet, is just wet. | ||
| Just wet, yeah. | ||
| I mean, it dries in your body. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Does the synthetic stuff act like merino wool acts? | ||
| Like, do they have that dialed in, where even when you're wet, you can still stay warm? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it maintains all the insulation without, even when it's wet. | ||
| What company do you use for that stuff? | ||
| The North Face. | ||
| I've been sponsored by the North Face for a long time. | ||
| Well, they're really dialed in with that shit, right? | ||
| Yeah, but all synthetic clothing. | ||
| I mean, it's all good. | ||
| When it comes to mountaineering, hiking trips. | ||
| So, this trip, how long were you there for? | ||
| Are we there a month? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Or like four weeks. | ||
| A month sleeping in a hammock in the rain. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| But you guys are used to living out of a van, so you kind of roughed a little bit. | ||
| But a van is like a small little apartment. | ||
| It's actually pretty comfortable. | ||
| You're dry. | ||
| You're cooking for yourself. | ||
| It's a pretty good scene in the van. | ||
| The hammock was a little more grim. | ||
| What were you guys eating out there? | ||
| Did you have to bring a month's worth of food? | ||
| No, so we had local sort of logistical support. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Dude, the hike out was so grim. | ||
| They'd cook like a bucket of maybe 20 packs of Top Ramen, and we'd get ramen. | ||
| And then whatever was left over, they'd save, and then in the morning they'd reheat, and we'd get ramen for breakfast. | ||
| And you're just like, oh man, Top Ramen for breakfast and dinner. | ||
| What about protein? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Get out of there and have real food. | ||
| 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. | ||
| In the hot shower. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's pretty cozy. | ||
| You should try. | ||
| Oh, how dare you. | ||
| No, honestly, you're always so tired anyway, you're just like, oh, at least I get to lay down and relax. | ||
| It's nice. | ||
| But you don't freak out in the middle of the night and just think, oh my god, I'm dangling off the side of a fucking cliff a thousand feet in the air. | ||
| At a certain point, you're just like, if you fall, you just relax. | ||
| I mean, you sort of commit to it. | ||
| When you go to sleep, you're totally committing to like, alright, this all had better work, this is a better hold. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And if you actually think that you're in danger, then you keep a backup line, you stay tied into other things, stuff like that. | ||
| Well, sometimes you don't. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| No, that is not what we had going on. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| It's gnarly. | ||
| Describe it for the people that are just listening. | ||
| We're looking at what looks like a greenhouse that's fucking just hanging off the side of a cliff. | ||
| That's a hotel. | ||
| That's like a Swiss glamping option or something. | ||
| A thousand dollar hotel room dangling from the side of a Peruvian mountain. | ||
| No, but that is like strictly for an Instagram influencer type shit. | ||
| That's for assholes. | ||
| Yeah, no, I'm not into that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Good. | ||
| You and I are on the same page. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| That looks like death. | ||
| The thing for me, I find that very contrived because it's like, if you're going to stay in a hotel, stay in a hotel. | ||
| Have running food. | ||
| Where do you get your running water in there? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But the thing is, when you have to stay on the side of a cliff, then you do it in the nicest way you can. | ||
| There's a hotel, I think it's in Iceland, that's constructed entirely of ice, and people go there just to say they were there. | ||
| What is Iceland? | ||
| So, I mean, isn't the whole society made of ice? | ||
| It seems like it should be, but it's not. | ||
| Iceland's more green, and Greenland's more ice, right? | ||
| Yeah, so there's this, it's a luxury hotel, and when you go inside of it, the entire hotel is constructed. | ||
| Who do we know that went in there, Jamie? | ||
| Was it a guest? | ||
| Or did I talk to somebody about it? | ||
| No, that says it's in Sweden. | ||
| Oh, it's in Sweden? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe I'm wrong. | |
| There's a couple of them. | ||
| Maybe there's more than one of them. | ||
| Maybe I just fucked it up. | ||
| There's five isotels in Scandinavia. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Really? | ||
| There's a top five, so there's more than that. | ||
| There's no chance I'd stay in it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| No, I shouldn't say that. | ||
| I might stay in an isotel. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| On the one hand, I'm like, that's dumb. | ||
| On the other hand, I think if I saw it, I'd be like, that's incredible. | ||
| Yeah, I just... | ||
| The sleeping inside of it has got to suck. | ||
| It would be really well-insulated. | ||
| I mean, just like an igloo. | ||
| I guess, but still, it would suck. | ||
| What if you have to pee in the middle of the night? | ||
| Yeah, you're sleeping on a block of ice. | ||
| Dude, have you never camped on snow? | ||
| Camping in snow is amazing, because if you have to pee, you just pee, and your pee burrows its own little tunnel straight down into the snow. | ||
| I did an expedition to Antarctica, and I was peeing out the same back flap of my tent every night, and your little pee tunnel just gets... | ||
| Deeper and deeper. | ||
| I think it went to the center of the earth by the end of the trip. | ||
| It's like going just deeper and deeper into the glacier, and you're like, it just goes forever. | ||
| Yeah, I've camped in cold climates before. | ||
| It's not comfortable. | ||
| It's not nice. | ||
| Oh, if you have a good sleeping bag and a good pad, it's pretty cozy. | ||
| You're just used to things that are less comfortable than most, I think. | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| Cozy in your perspective. | ||
| But I get it. | ||
| But this ice hotel, my friend who stayed in it, I can't remember who told me they stayed in it, they did it one night just to say they did it. | ||
| They were at their kids, too. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| I know David. | ||
| Yeah, he's great. | ||
| Yeah, dude. | ||
| For him, an ice hotel is like a normal thing. | ||
| He'd probably just lay there on the ice the whole time just to see if he could. | ||
| Just to see if he could. | ||
| He's a strange person, right? | ||
| Strange and powerful at the same time. | ||
| A very unusual human being. | ||
| Dude, I met with him years ago now because he was... | ||
| Did you see his real or magic documentary? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| I would totally encourage you to watch it. | ||
| But basically, it's all these sort of magic tricks, except they aren't actually tricks. | ||
| They're just like... | ||
| I'm allowed to curse, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| These fucked up things that he does that people assume must be magic but aren't. | ||
| He puts an ice pick through his hand. | ||
| I put an ice pick through his arm. | ||
| Oh, well, there you go. | ||
| That's like the same kind of like... | ||
| He made me. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I'm like, come on, man. | ||
| What are we doing here? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And you're like, you hope it's a trick. | ||
| There you guys are. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| Dude, exactly. | ||
| Ta-da. | ||
| Dude, he bought me an iPhone randomly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| It was one of those classic things. | ||
| I forget. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, it's just mostly his mind. | ||
| Mostly the ability to deal with uncomfortable feelings. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like the ice pick through the arm. | ||
| 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... | ||
| I'm like, come on, man. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I was like, that's not much of a trick. | ||
| That's messed up. | ||
| But one of the things that he showed us was there was a guy that was famous back in the day for putting swords through his body. | ||
| The guy would run... | ||
| Like the whole way? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| The whole way through his organs. | ||
| Like a really, really narrow sword? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they got progressively larger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Until he got progressively deader? | |
| Is that how he died? | ||
| Do you remember, Jamie? | ||
| No. | ||
| I feel like that's how it ended up going. | ||
| He got cocky. | ||
| Yes, he got cocky. | ||
| Or he sneezed halfway through and just lacerated. | ||
| Eventually made his way to a broadsword size. | ||
| It was really weird to see, though, because there's video of this guy. | ||
| And there's photos. | ||
| Video? | ||
| Is there video? | ||
| I've got video of it right here. | ||
| Yeah, this guy slid right through his organs. | ||
| Oh, jeez. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So look at this. | ||
| Oh, jeez. | ||
| I mean, they just puncture his lung with a fucking sword. | ||
| I mean, this is not a trick. | ||
| This is when you watch action movies and people get shot or stabbed a bunch of times and you're like, that's so unrealistic. | ||
| Like when you watch John Wick, you know, and he gets shot like 27 times. | ||
| Like apparently people can actually take quite a beating and just keep going. | ||
| Or they can get one small... | ||
| Look, they're going right through his fucking... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dude. | |
| Oh my Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, right through his organs. | ||
| And look how he just sits there. | ||
| And I guess... | ||
| And who's this doctor who's good enough to poke a sword strap through him? | ||
| He's not really a doctor. | ||
| Well, but he must be... | ||
| He'd be an incredible... | ||
| Maybe he works in a deli. | ||
| What year is this, Jamie? | ||
| Does it say what year this is? | ||
| What are the things on his forearms, by the way? | ||
| Oh, so now he's going into an x-ray machine to make sure that... | ||
| So this guy had scars all over his body from the times that he did this. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| Yeah, yikes. | ||
| That's a fucking fairly thick blade. | ||
| Like, definitely bigger than a pencil. | ||
| The doctor's examining it. | ||
| Looks good, and now he's going to eat. | ||
| Except it's all going to fall out the hole. | ||
| Yeah, it's going to score it out. | ||
| That's a hard looking man. | ||
| Imagine having a conversation with that dude. | ||
| I bet he has a very weird way of looking at things. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| He died at 36. Well, there you go. | ||
| He looked like he was 50 already. | ||
| Fill the holes. | ||
| I wonder how painful that is. | ||
| I mean, it's got to be pretty painful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Painful as fuck. | |
| Yeah, you would assume. | ||
| How could it not be? | ||
| Fucking piercing your ear is painful. | ||
| I've never pierced my ear. | ||
| I'm too afraid. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| You're too afraid to pierce your ear. | ||
| No, I just don't want a hole in my ear. | ||
| So did he die from that, Jamie? | ||
| I'm double checking on how he died. | ||
| You need like a team of researchers that you're just like pulling up, like checking facts. | ||
| I know, it's all Jamie, one-handed Googling. | ||
| Like a wizard. | ||
| He moved to Switzerland and was granted a license to perform without the ability to speak to the public. | ||
| I don't know, that sounds strange. | ||
| A license to perform without the ability to... | ||
| Oh, maybe like if you performed, you had to talk to people? | ||
| Like, they had mimes back then, though, no? | ||
| Maybe you had a break character or they get mad at you? | ||
| But that seems like so maybe he couldn't say it. | ||
| He was like, ow, it hurts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they're like, I don't know. | |
| This is so silly to even have a thing like that. | ||
| To be fair, the act is less inspiring if the guy screams in pain the whole time. | ||
| Because then nobody wants to watch. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| I mean, the same guy doing the same thing, screaming like he's being tortured. | ||
| That would be sick. | ||
| I mean, it'd be the same for David Blaine. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I wouldn't do it. | ||
| I'd stop. | ||
| It says in 1948, he was alleged, he was instructed by voices to eat a steel needle. | ||
| And two days later, it was surgically removed. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think he got cocky. | ||
| It's fair to say he might have some weird things going on. | ||
| Yeah, he was probably trying to kill himself and couldn't believe he kept surviving. | ||
| Yeah, he was laying on a bed. | ||
| I guess they didn't know he was dead. | ||
| And then they finally got a doctor to check him. | ||
| Turns out he'd already been dead for a day. | ||
| Yeah, it sounds a little... | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| We need like three more research interns. | ||
| Googling his whole scene as fast as they get. | ||
| Because they're like, wait, none of that makes any sense. | ||
| And this was because of swallowing a needle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| He said he thought he had guardian angels. | ||
| He said he was telepathic. | ||
| He could heal people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he didn't heal himself very well. | ||
| Or maybe he did. | ||
| That's how he survived so many, you know, being impaled so many times. | ||
| I guess you can just do it, though. | ||
| It can be done, you know, because they're fairly small holes, although they do go through the length of your entire body. | ||
| I mean, you just think you'd get infected. | ||
| I think that's part of what that video was, was him proving to doctors that it wasn't all fake. | ||
| Because that's what it says. | ||
| He proved to Zurich doctors that his act wasn't based on fakery. | ||
| Why do I get so uncomfortable just talking about this? | ||
| I'm breathing heavy. | ||
| Maybe you need to practice a little bit. | ||
| Have somebody start putting needles through little parts of your arm. | ||
| There's just something weird about people that are willingly hurting themselves and causing themselves pain. | ||
| No, I kind of agree with that. | ||
| I do find it slightly. | ||
| But David, very well-adjusted man, it seems. | ||
| Very well-adjusted. | ||
| Very friendly. | ||
| Super friendly. | ||
| Nice guy. | ||
| And his card tricks are legitimately mind-blowing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, what he's doing is a challenge, you know? | ||
| You know what it's like? | ||
| He's like, he's got the fine motor skills that we have for tying our own shoes. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| But for a deck of cards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, when he can just cut to the 27th card or whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And he's like, let me just cut this deck. | ||
| And he's like, oh, there's card number 24. And you're like, what? | ||
| And he really can do that. | ||
| Yeah, when he's in practice. | ||
| He's done it so many times that he has that. | ||
| You know that? | ||
| Because there is that feeling that you have when you tie your shoe where your hands just communicate so fluidly. | ||
| That's what people strive for in jiu-jitsu. | ||
| In jiu-jitsu, you strive. | ||
| That's actually what my coach, Eddie Bravo, he uses that as an example. | ||
| That when you tie your shoe, you don't think about tying your shoe. | ||
| You just tie your shoe. | ||
| And in a certain situation, you'll flow into a technique. | ||
| A technique will happen, and it'll happen. | ||
| And because your repetitions, you've hit them so many times, it'll just be so fluid. | ||
| And so for David, it's got to be like that, but with, like, the very tips of his fingers. | ||
| I know. | ||
| For somebody like me with, you know, very callous, I can't even imagine feeling anything that well. | ||
| Like, I want to see decks of cards, I just, like, crumple them all together. | ||
| I'm just shoving them, like, is it shuffled? | ||
| You know, like, I can't even manipulate them that well. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine, right? | ||
| Like, your hands have to be, like, super rough, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, normally pretty rough, and then also just really calloused on the tips. | ||
| I mean, often, you know, I can pick up, like, hot things and, like, not really notice it quite the same way or, you know, things like that. | ||
| Oh, of course. | ||
| I mean, if you're grabbing, like, grabbing a very coarse rock all the time, it's like you have to wind up with really calloused fingertips. | ||
| Of course, yeah. | ||
| But so then something like manipulating the edge of a card, it's like I can't even imagine feeling it. | ||
| Have you seen, there was a guy that was on this television show called Dual Survivor, and he was known for walking, is that what it's called? | ||
| Dual Survivor, I think? | ||
| One of them goofy survivor shows. | ||
| That's the sequel, The Soul Survivor? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, he never wore shoes. | ||
| So the bottoms of his feet were thick. | ||
| Like a giant, thick, fat piece of leather. | ||
| See if you can... | ||
| That kind of thing, though... | ||
| Yeah, there's one of the bottom, the middle image. | ||
| You can see the bottom of his foot is just, like, this disgusting... | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, that's just their day-to-day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not a survival thing. | ||
| Like, that's a freaking Tuesday. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, at least, like, Survivorman used to actually do it. | ||
| But then there was the other guy. | ||
| What was the other guy's name? | ||
| The other guy who was the other show? | ||
| The guy who was the British handsome fellow who was in the... | ||
| Bear Grylls. | ||
| Yeah, Bear Grylls. | ||
| What's his show called? | ||
| Well, he's got one now called Running Wild with Bear Grylls, which I know because I did it with him last year or two years ago. | ||
| Which actually is cool, but that's more like an interview-style show where he takes people on experiences. | ||
| But don't you go to a... | ||
| Oh yeah, Man vs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wild. | |
| Is that what it is? | ||
| That was his original. | ||
| But the thing about him is people got mad because they found out he would go to a hotel at night. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| So that was a different thing. | ||
| So I actually talked to him a bit about it while we did the thing. | ||
| So originally he was just doing the full. | ||
| And I think maybe his show predated the Survivor Man thing. | ||
| No, it didn't. | ||
| I think it may have. | ||
| No, it definitely didn't. | ||
| I'll tell you why. | ||
| Okay, you sure? | ||
| Because Les Stroud is a friend of mine and he's been on the show. | ||
| And the reason this show with Bear Grylls was created is because Les wouldn't fake things. | ||
| Les refused to go. | ||
| They wanted to do things to set things up for him to make it look like it was more difficult than it is. | ||
| And he didn't want to do any of that. | ||
| He filmed everything himself. | ||
| The entire Survivorman show. | ||
| What network is Survivorman? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| But it was the same people that were producing it. | ||
| They go, well, we'll show you. | ||
| And then they went and did this other show. | ||
| And then he got busted for sleeping in hotels. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That sounds like what I would say if I got busted. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Just a wild environment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so it's like taking, like, he took Obama out into, like, a reserve in Alaska, you know, to, like, wild places or something. | ||
| Imagine if you took Obama somewhere and Obama got killed by a bear. | ||
| Dude, I think there were Secret Service snipers ready to shoot at Grizzly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's a pretty cool gig. | ||
| Once you leave, you get Secret Service protection for life. | ||
| But do you want that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Do you want people following you around? | ||
| With a gun everywhere? | ||
| And like a walkie and stuff at all times? | ||
| Yeah, but that's the problem is that people legitimately want to kill you. | ||
| Yeah, that's the real bummer. | ||
| Do you want to have a lot of people that want to kill you your whole life? | ||
| That sucks. | ||
| Yeah, I understand what you're saying though about that guy walking around barefoot, but I think he's like a serious survivor guy. | ||
| And I think in his eyes, you don't want to depend on shoes. | ||
| So he's developed his feet to the point where he could walk on hot rocks and walk everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, the thing is, though, that people who actually don't have shoes all want shoes. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Not necessarily. | ||
| Mostly, though. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I totally understand what you're saying. | ||
| But my friend Steve Rinella spent some time with an indigenous tribe in South America when he filmed his show Meat Eater. | ||
| And they actually, they either offered them shoes or let them try on shoes. | ||
| They didn't want them. | ||
| And these guys, it's the weirdest shit ever. | ||
| Have you seen what happens when someone grows up living and walking in the forest barefoot? | ||
| Their feet splay out like a hand. | ||
| Have you seen it? | ||
| Yeah, I know what you're talking about. | ||
| See if you can find... | ||
| I forget the name of the tribe. | ||
| It's escaping me. | ||
| But they live deep in the jungles of South America. | ||
| And he spent a bunch of time with them hunting and fishing. | ||
| And they eat a lot of monkeys. | ||
| Which is really crazy. | ||
| They cooked and ate a monkey on the show. | ||
| And that's their preferred food. | ||
| They actually enjoy monkeys. | ||
| And they eat all these other... | ||
| You know, birds and whatever creatures they can find. | ||
| They do a lot of fishing and they do a lot of bow and arrow fishing. | ||
| Yeah, the folks we were with were doing the same thing. | ||
| And they had different arrows for shooting fish versus shooting game. | ||
| I was like, oh, that's so interesting. | ||
| It's like these barbed things for fish. | ||
| And I was like, I never even thought about shooting fish before. | ||
| I was like, oh, this is cool. | ||
| This is what their feet develop and start looking like. | ||
| I feel like that might be an unusual photo. | ||
| No, there's a bunch of them like that. | ||
| This is what Rinella described. | ||
| This is what he described to me, and then we started finding photos of these when he was on the show talking about it. | ||
| We went and looked at them. | ||
| Are those from him? | ||
| Because I see you have... | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| I'm like, are you sure that that... | ||
| That's not from his page. | ||
| I tried to find something like that, but that's what we've looked at every time. | ||
| I was like, because those feet look like they just have some vitamin deficiency type weird bone thing going on, you know? | ||
| I don't think it's... | ||
| I think it's from actively gripping the ground. | ||
| Like that. | ||
| You know how your hands sort of splay out? | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| From grabbing. | ||
| We're so used to our toes being in shoes in what you would call a cast. | ||
| There's a lot of different feet of different humans that live like that walking around barefoot that you can see that splay out like that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So it's soft? | ||
| Yeah, because it's kind of muddy. | ||
| I mean, there are thorny things, but it's not the desert. | ||
| It's not like sharp rocks and cactuses and things. | ||
| And so this show, is it aired? | ||
| No, it'll be in the fall, I think. | ||
| And so you're there for a month filming this? | ||
| How many episodes is it going to be? | ||
| No, it's just one episode. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, it's cool. | ||
| It sounds amazing. | ||
| It sounds pretty wild to see. | ||
| I can't wait to watch it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Well, I understand your distaste for people that are kind of posing, too. | ||
| Yeah, it's not distaste for posing. | ||
| I hate glamorizing. | ||
| I hate looking backward too much. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's freaking great, you know? | ||
| Well, we have all this stuff for a reason because human beings have a deep fascination with innovation. | ||
| And some of it, you could argue, makes our lives less happy, though. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| When you get to social media, when you get to constantly staring at screens, when you get to living in cubicles off of fluorescent lights. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| There's an argument about it. | ||
| Yeah, that kind of nitty-gritty stuff. | ||
| Perhaps social media makes your life less rich. | ||
| But having a power grid, having communication, having a roof, having roads, all those things are incredible. | ||
| And if they bring extra attacks on our attention, then so be it, basically. | ||
| And then it just requires discipline to not fall into those traps. | ||
| And also, you know, an understanding of the path that you choose can lead to deep disappointment if you decide to live that cubicle life. | ||
| Like, understand that this is not normal for people. | ||
| This is somewhat close to cubicle life, actually. | ||
| This is, first of all, completely voluntary. | ||
| No, of course. | ||
| I mean, the actual feeling of, like, we are inside this tiny little thing. | ||
| Yeah, we are inside a weird thing, but you've seen the new one. | ||
| You're one of the rare people that's seen the new one, which is a little bit bigger. | ||
| But have you ever seen Werner Herzog's documentary, Happy People? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's Life in the Taiga. | ||
| It's about people that live in Siberia. | ||
| Well, they're not, they can't be happy people. | ||
| They're very happy. | ||
| You'd be shocked. | ||
| I mean, that's the point of the film, I guess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The point is, these people are trappers and hunters and, well, there's no gathering, really. | ||
| But they're hunters and fisher people. | ||
| And they live in the taiga, which is a... | ||
| Yeah, like the tundra. | ||
| Yeah, of Siberia. | ||
| And it's like this incredibly... | ||
| Harsh environment and they rely on dogs and sleds and they make their own skis. | ||
| Most of these guys have snowmobiles and they have a trapping run that they go from one place. | ||
| They have these cabins that they have set up with plastic windows. | ||
| Are they the indigenous people of that area? | ||
| No. | ||
| Are they like Russians? | ||
| They're Russians, yeah. | ||
| And they're really happy. | ||
| It's really weird. | ||
| You see them all together laughing, and there's very few instances of mental health issues, and they live this subsistence lifestyle. | ||
| It's... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sure, or one broken leg away from death. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Especially if you're in the woods, right? | ||
| You might not make it out. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, where we were in the jungle, totally. | ||
| You break your leg and it's like, oh, it's a six-day walk to civilization. | ||
| People carrying you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that happened to Ashley Judd. | ||
| Did you hear about that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, just like last week. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, she was in the Congo and she was doing some stuff in the rainforest with the pygmies. | ||
| And she fell. | ||
| I think she fell, like tripped over a log and snapped her leg. | ||
| And it was a harrowing experience to get her out. | ||
| And I think she almost lost her leg. | ||
| Yeah, it was a big deal. | ||
| Do you know how many days or like how far they had to carry her out or like what happened? | ||
| It was a long journey, and I'm pretty sure she might still be in the hospital. | ||
| She was fucked up, though. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And they said that she may be crippled for life, and she came very close to losing her leg. | ||
| And they showed pictures of it. | ||
| I wonder if that's happened before, where an A-list celebrity actor or actress loses a limb in a terrible accident. | ||
| Seems like it was really... | ||
| Almost the first. | ||
| She was almost the first. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| I'm like... | ||
| There must be some examples of that, but that seems unusual. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was a horrible accident. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Became paralyzed with her neck down for the rest of his life. | ||
| But see if you can find photos of Ashley Judd's leg. | ||
| Because she was in the Congo. | ||
| One of my good buddies, Justin Wren, he runs a non-profit where they go to the Congo and build wells. | ||
| We actually help support it. | ||
| It's Fight for the Forgotten. | ||
| It's this incredible thing that he does where he's got malaria three times doing it. | ||
| He spends months and months at a time. | ||
| They're carrying her out here. | ||
| Yeah, so they had these poor dudes. | ||
| Those guys are not very stout either. | ||
| Skinny little fellas. | ||
| Yeah, but I bet they're very strong. | ||
| I bet they're strong as fuck. | ||
| That's the whole thing. | ||
| In all parts of the world, you just wind up like... | ||
| Look at her leg. | ||
| Look at how they have it strapped together. | ||
| She's fucked. | ||
| I don't know how long it took her, but I'm pretty sure it was like... | ||
| It said 55 hours just to get... | ||
| To a hospital or something? | ||
| To get checked, I think. | ||
| Dude, 55 hours. | ||
| 55 hours with a broken leg. | ||
| You know those guys were going in shifts every 30 minutes of carrying a full grown woman. | ||
| They're just like, oh man. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's tough. | ||
| Rough on her. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I once had to carry a partner for four hours out from the mountain after he broke his heel. | ||
| But that's a lot different than 50 hours out from the jungle, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because we could actually see the road, but it's just four hours of hiking to get there. | ||
| How did you carry him on your shoulders? | ||
| Yeah, just piggybacked. | ||
| Just carried him. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Took a long time. | ||
| So you had to go, like, little stops. | ||
| Yeah, but the thing is, realistically, it was really difficult terrain. | ||
| You know, a couple thousand feet of, like, vertical loss down this mountainside. | ||
| Like, crazy rocky and stuff. | ||
| Was the environment really cold? | ||
| Would it be easier to leave in there and come back? | ||
| It was really cold, but also, I mean, but he would have just had to come out eventually. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, yeah, we could have left him until morning, but then we'd both just be, like, cold and tired and still have to do the same thing. | ||
| You know, it's better just to, like, do it in the dark and get down eventually. | ||
| But, yeah, it was really cold. | ||
| That was in Red Rock outside of Las Vegas. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, it's, like, home area now. | ||
| It gets cold as fuck out there at night. | ||
| It gets very cold. | ||
| You live in Vegas now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did we talk about that the last time? | ||
| Yeah, I would have been living there like a year or two last time we chatted. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But now I'm like, I fully just live in Vegas. | ||
| I'm totally into it. | ||
| Vegas is weird with the lockdown, the quarantine. | ||
| It's come back to life now. | ||
| I haven't been to the strip at all. | ||
| At all? | ||
| Since you've moved there? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| For all of COVID. Oh, all of COVID. Yeah. | ||
| We drove right at the beginning of lockdown. | ||
| We drove the strip like right when it was all happening and it was completely empty like ghost town. | ||
| And then it had all the flashing neon signs saying like, wear your mask and we'll get through this together. | ||
| And I was like, this is the beginning of a zombie movie. | ||
| There's like no one on the street and there are all these like apocalyptic lights still going like, stay safe. | ||
| We'll see you on, you know, next time. | ||
| And you're just like, dude, I just wanted to see a zombie come running out of like the entrance to the Bellagio or something. | ||
| I was like, this is crazy. | ||
| Yeah, we got to the door of Zombieland. | ||
| That's what we got. | ||
| We didn't get into Zombieland, but we got to like, oh, I can see where Zombieland is. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| We almost knocked on the door to Zombieland. | ||
| Weird shit, man. | ||
| But it was weird. | ||
| Vegas was particularly strange because it relies entirely on tourists. | ||
| That's the entire business, is people visiting Vegas and going and gambling and doing all that stuff. | ||
| The first couple events that we did with the UFC there were no crowd. | ||
| And you would drive around in Vegas and you'd see no one. | ||
| No one on the streets. | ||
| The occasional car. | ||
| And I'm like, God, this seems so strange. | ||
| Around the Strip, I bet. | ||
| But where I live in suburbia, over on the west side of town by the mountains, it feels pretty normal. | ||
| I mean, traffic's a little lower, but it's basically just people living and, like, getting food and doing their thing. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Like, for the climbing community in Vegas, you couldn't even really tell that COVID was a thing, you know? | ||
| Because the governor of Nevada explicitly allowed out to recreation throughout lockdown, so it's like you're still able to go hike and climb. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So why can't people go outside? | ||
| I know. | ||
| That kind of bummed me out with all the locking down public beaches and stuff. | ||
| It's like, yeah, it makes sense that you don't want people congregating in big crowds necessarily. | ||
| But it's like, if you're going to lock down, you have to do it sustainably in a way that people can actually live that way. | ||
| And going outdoors is kind of one of the best ways to make it sustainable. | ||
| Because people can spread out. | ||
| They can still feel happy. | ||
| And you get vitamin D, which is one of the best things to combat COVID. Yeah. | ||
| They found that 84% of the people in the ICU with COVID had insufficient levels of vitamin D. Only 4% had sufficient levels. | ||
| Is that what's true in the normal population? | ||
| Are most people just deficient of vitamin D? Most people are deficient. | ||
| It's a giant problem with people in general. | ||
| They think it's a giant contributing factor to low immune systems. | ||
| Weakened immune systems because of vitamin D is apparently a huge issue. | ||
| We're just not designed, first of all, to wear clothes. | ||
| To be indoors all the time. | ||
| Second of all, to be indoors. | ||
| We evolved to be outside. | ||
| Actually, I think really pale people like us probably do need clothing. | ||
| Because if we're outside all the time, my skin would be in trouble. | ||
| Well, we're pale because our ancestors lived in Europe. | ||
| They moved to a climate from Africa. | ||
| Yeah, where they needed clothing. | ||
| Yeah, that's what's weird. | ||
| It's like we're just basically like a solar panel for vitamin D. That's the reason why we're white. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| Because we needed more vitamin D than we can get. | ||
| Oh yeah, I see what you're saying, totally. | ||
| Yeah, that's what it is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is it true that the dark-skinned folks generate less vitamin D? Yeah, from the sun. | ||
| Yeah, from the sun. | ||
| 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 never even thought about that. | ||
| To me, how important it is for darker skin people to supplement with vitamin D. It's a huge issue. | ||
| And just most people need vitamin D. If you're living indoors all the time, it's tough. | ||
| It's a hormone too. | ||
| That's what's weird about vitamin D. It's not really a vitamin. | ||
| It's a hormone. | ||
| They call it vitamin D, but it's an actual hormone. | ||
| It's responsible for a lot of different things in the body. | ||
| Not just your immune system, but it's brain function. | ||
| It's responsible for muscle tissue development. | ||
| There's a lot going on with vitamin D. I've never even thought about it that much. | ||
| I know you're a vegetarian, but do you supplement? | ||
| Do you take vitamins at all? | ||
| Not that much, actually. | ||
| The last couple months I've been thinking Athletic Greens. | ||
| Do you know what that is? | ||
| Oh, I love that stuff. | ||
| Yeah, I'm pretty into it. | ||
| I know it's really good. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| Actually, they sponsor my podcast, and so I started using it because I was like, oh cool, they're getting on board with the podcast. | ||
| But now I've gotten really into it, I think. | ||
| It's like one of those classic things that feels really helpful, and the more I do it, the more I'm like, I think This might be helping. | ||
| It's super legit. | ||
| I mean, they've worked on the same formula for over 10 years. | ||
| This is the 53rd iteration of Athletic Greens. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I kind of like that. | ||
| They're just constantly improving it rather than rolling out different products. | ||
| It's just like, this is a good product that just continues to get better. | ||
| I respect that. | ||
| I love that stuff. | ||
| I bring those travel packs with me everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, I did for the jungle. | ||
| Every morning I would take my travel pack to Adleta Greens and then my malarone pill for malaria. | ||
| Oh, the malarone pills. | ||
| Did that stuff fuck you up? | ||
| I didn't notice anything. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| And so then I stopped taking it for like the week or two. | ||
| So is that how it works? | ||
| Mosquitoes only exist if there's a population of humans? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| There were still mosquitoes, but they just wouldn't have malaria. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I see. | |
| 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. | ||
| Oh, so it's a what came first, the chicken, the egg type deal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, it's kind of true for all diseases that plague humanity is they're found more in villages and towns and around population centers. | ||
| But if you get out in the middle of nowhere, there are not enough people to... | ||
| To host the virus, you know? | ||
| And it's all stagnant water, right? | ||
| That's where the mosquitoes are coming from, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So is that stuff that you were taking, is that like a prophylactic? | ||
| Does it prevent you from getting it, or is it a treatment? | ||
| I think it's both, actually. | ||
| Oh, so if you did get stung with a mosquito that had it, and you were taking that stuff? | ||
| You would take that, yeah. | ||
| Oh, wow, that's great. | ||
| I think. | ||
| I didn't know that much about it. | ||
| There was a team doctor on the trip, and he basically just told us, like, do this. | ||
| But it didn't fuck you up at all? | ||
| I didn't notice anything. | ||
| But it could have been the Athletic Greens, you know? | ||
| Maybe, right? | ||
| Keep you on track? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| What was the stuff? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Meflo... | |
| Mefloquent. | ||
| That's the stuff that Justin ran. | ||
| That gives you the crazy dreams and stuff? | ||
| Justin, my friend who I was telling you that runs Fight for the Forgotten, he took that Mefloquent stuff and it fucked him up. | ||
| And he was taking way more than he should be taking. | ||
| Apparently he didn't realize it until it was too late. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard of other types of malaria meds that are really hard on you. | ||
| Supposedly what we were taking is the most low impact and then we only took it just for the periods where we thought we really needed it. | ||
| And you didn't feel anything from it? | ||
| Didn't notice a thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's great. | |
| People say they get crazy dreams, but I never remember my dreams anyway, so I was like, I didn't get, you know... | ||
| I've wanted to bring my kids to Africa. | ||
| You definitely should. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I want to bring them there, but I'm worried about the medications. | ||
| I've done... | ||
| Oh, I wouldn't stress it. | ||
| I've done, I don't know, probably 10 plus trips to Africa and never taken malaria meds there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Depends where you're going. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| And so I've gone to... | ||
| Well, also, I'm always going to mountainous zones or places in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| But basically, if you're going to the middle of nowhere, you don't really have to worry about malaria that much. | ||
| Yeah, but I would want to bring them where animals are. | ||
| I'd want to bring them... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'd want them to see... | ||
| No, that'd be fine. | ||
| I mean, yeah, I've done safari stuff a couple times. | ||
| And you don't have to worry about malaria at those places? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I never have. | ||
| I mean, like... | ||
| The other place I want to go to is Egypt. | ||
| Do they have malaria in Egypt? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Have you ever got any funky diseases doing these crazy journeys of yours? | ||
| Well, I've gotten sick. | ||
| No, I've never gotten anything crazy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Normal parasitic sick? | ||
| No, I don't think it was a parasite. | ||
| Dirty water sick? | ||
| No, I mean, I took Cipro with antibiotic and was fine eventually. | ||
| Now, when you drink water out of those places, do you bring those little iodine tabs, or do you use a SteriPen? | ||
| Yeah, it depends on the place. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Did you drink the brown water? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you were cool? | ||
| I mean, so far so good. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| One of my partners on the trip came home and thought he had a parasite, so then I was really paranoid about having a parasite for a couple weeks. | ||
| I haven't checked, and I think it's all good, so we'll see. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Totally unknown to science. | ||
| Yeah, and so they gave him, he had like, I don't know how many different treatments, and then Eventually they got it dialed in. | ||
| That stuff is tough because even the treatments are kind of hard on you. | ||
| So it's like the parasites having some impact, the treatments have some impact. | ||
| It all kind of upsets your gut. | ||
| It wrecked his body. | ||
| It wrecked everything. | ||
| His hormone balance was fucked. | ||
| Everything was fucked. | ||
| Huh? | ||
| For a long time. | ||
| Like, for more than a year. | ||
| His health was fucked. | ||
| That's what I'm trying to avoid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Yeah, well, he said he got it from bathing. | ||
| He said he got it from bathing in the river. | ||
| He's pretty sure that's how it got him. | ||
| Not drinking? | ||
| No. | ||
| How did it enter his body, though? | ||
| It could be just little holes, little scratches. | ||
| The same thing with staph infections, right? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| That'd be a tiny little parasite. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I mean, your body absorbs things through the skin, right? | ||
| Your skin's an organ. | ||
| Like, who knows what kind of weird parasites we're talking about here. | ||
| But it got into his brain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is heavy-duty stuff, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's why I typically don't go to the jungle. | ||
| It's all about the mountains and, like, deserts, you know, big rocky places. | ||
| But this particular trip is just such a unique, you know, wonder of the world, basically, to climb rocks like that sticking out of the jungle. | ||
| It's just so crazy. | ||
| Is that what you look forward to the most, like going to these sort of uncharted places and climbing these structures? | ||
| Kind of. | ||
| I mean, I've put up new routes on all seven continents. | ||
| It's cool to go to new places and experience the world, basically. | ||
| And sort of experience the richness of the world. | ||
| Because there's so many crazy things like that where you're like, who knew that this sort of thing existed on Earth? | ||
| It's nice to experience that. | ||
| Which is why you need a podcast to talk about these things. | ||
| Yeah, like I said, my podcasts, I don't talk about those things. | ||
| But that's crazy. | ||
| That's such an interesting aspect of your life. | ||
| Yeah, well, perhaps once we run out of all the content that we're trying to cover, then we'll just start telling crazy stories. | ||
| So mostly what you're trying to cover is the content of the sport itself. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm sure you've seen the documentary Dirtbag. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| You've never seen that? | ||
| What's it about? | ||
| It's about a famous climber. | ||
| About a guy who, they called him a dirtbag because he just sort of like slept anywhere he could and just wanted to climb constantly. | ||
| Which, who though? | ||
| Let's put it. | ||
| Fred. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| Did you ever meet him? | ||
| Yeah, I've met him and... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I know Fred Becky. | ||
| I haven't seen the... | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| Do you want a CBD drink? | ||
| This is actually for you if you'd like it. | ||
| No, I'm okay, thanks. | ||
| I don't know what would happen to me. | ||
| Oh, it's not psychoactive. | ||
| It's just 25 milligrams of CBD. It tastes good. | ||
| What happens to you? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've never had CBD. Really? | ||
| It's great for inflammation. | ||
| It's got B vitamins. | ||
| If you've got aches and pains. | ||
| I'll take a sample and see what happens. | ||
| Yeah, tell me if you like it. | ||
| Actually, is it bubbly? | ||
| I kind of hate bubbles. | ||
| Yeah, it's bubbly. | ||
| I don't like bubbles. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's mine. | ||
| It's got my face on it. | ||
| Does it really? | ||
| Yeah, look. | ||
| Here's my face. | ||
| That's your face? | ||
| Yeah, I designed it. | ||
| This is you? | ||
| Yeah, this flavor is... | ||
| I know it's not the best drawing of me. | ||
| I don't know how to see the resemblance, but... | ||
| Well, it's me as a pineapple. | ||
| Oh yeah, Flaming Joe. | ||
| It's jalapeno and pineapple. | ||
| That's rad. | ||
| You got UFOs? | ||
| You got the whole thing? | ||
| Yeah, the whole deal, man. | ||
| There's a bow and arrow in there somewhere. | ||
| Classic. | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| There's an arrow shooting a pineapple. | ||
| Yeah, classic. | ||
| No, I don't like bubbles. | ||
| You don't drink beer or anything? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Do you drink alcohol? | ||
| No. | ||
| Don't drink alcohol. | ||
| Don't drink soda. | ||
| Yeah, don't really drink much. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Just water? | ||
| Yeah, basically. | ||
| You're a boring motherfucker. | ||
| I know. | ||
| No wine? | ||
| Nothing? | ||
| No. | ||
| Though, I mean, I'll probably drink wine when I'm old or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I'm going to do it. | ||
| You're going to wait. | ||
| Pull up the documentary of Fred Becky. | ||
| It's really good, man. | ||
| And I watched it on a whim one night. | ||
| I was just flipping through iTunes, and I just saw it. | ||
| I was like, what is this? | ||
| And then I watched a preview of it, and I'm like, I'm fascinated by people that are really into a thing, whatever that thing is. | ||
| Yeah, Iconic class. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, when you think of it, I mean, because he was still climbing as a 90-year-old, and you're sort of like, it was pretty impressive. | ||
| I mean, he was still going into the mountains at like 85. Oh, yeah. | ||
| And they filmed that. | ||
| They filmed him doing that. | ||
| It's just that he couldn't do the things that he used to be able to do, but he still loved them. | ||
| He still loved to do those things. | ||
| And, you know, he had to accept at certain points in time that he just couldn't do it anymore. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, it's just, yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| How old is Joanne? | ||
| She's 70 now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh wow. | |
| Or turning 69 maybe. | ||
| And how old was she when she first started climbing? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So I kept going and I got a lesson. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So the birth of the climbing gym, you think that's responsible for the escalation of the sport? | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a huge part of 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. | ||
| There's an access point for the sport. | ||
| And people find it really challenging in terms of an exercise. | ||
| Yeah, but also really fun. | ||
| It's like all the challenge of doing CrossFit or something, let's say, but with maybe more of a social element and also just more hanging out. | ||
| It's more chill and easier in a way than something like CrossFit. | ||
| But still like great, you know, full body workout and toning and all that. | ||
| Yeah, and the social aspect is a big factor too, right? | ||
| When you go to a boulder gym, most people are just laying on the pads like chit-chatting. | ||
| And then every once in a while you get up and you try the boulder problem and you try really hard and then you have to rest again. | ||
| So, I mean, it's fundamentally a relatively chill and social sport, you know, when you're in the gym like that. | ||
| There's a lot of jiu-jitsu guys who got into rock climbing as a supplemental activity. | ||
| That's funny, because I know climbers that go the other way. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| I know climbers that get in jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Yeah, there's a small contingent of high-end climbers that got in jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Because it is kind of the same stuff with hands and grappling. | ||
| Especially with the gi, I would imagine. | ||
| Is that the holding on? | ||
| The kimono? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They like that idea of it too. | ||
| It's like adult gymnastics, but more fun and more relaxed. | ||
| And slightly more cool. | ||
| Especially right now, it's like going through a cool moment where people are like, oh, that's a fun, new, sort of edgy thing, but not too... | ||
| Because when I was a kid, it was edgy, but it was too edgy because no one knows what it is and they all think it's weird. | ||
| Now it's edgy in a cool way. | ||
| And you're like, oh yeah, let's go do that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's really weird, right? | ||
| Because it's such a primal activity. | ||
| And that's why we did the podcast. | ||
| That's exactly the thing. | ||
| It is interesting because real technical rock climbing has been going on for more than 100 years. | ||
| But, and you know, mountain climbing predates that. | ||
| And then, like you said, as a human activity, and people have climbed trees forever for sustenance, you know, or to escape predators or whatever else. | ||
| I mean, you know, it's like, yeah, I mean, climbing is deeply ingrained in humans. | ||
| And yet, right now, it's really cool. | ||
| And you're like, all right, you know, it's like, it's an interesting time to explore it. | ||
| It's crazy how things happen like that, where they just catch fire. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, it's in the public zeitgeist and Totally. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Nobody really does it now. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think if you actually look at numbers, snowboarding has gone way back down. | ||
| That's kind of interesting. | ||
| So would they ski instead of snowboard? | ||
| Well, I think snow sports in general are kind of suffering because there's no snow. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Oh, because of global warming. | ||
| 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? | ||
| That's interesting, because I've been going to Park City. | ||
| And they're so expensive. | ||
| Park City has been pretty consistent, yeah, consistently snowy. | ||
| No, like Tahoe. | ||
| I mean, I'm from Sacramento and California, so I know Tahoe pretty well. | ||
| But the snow line is now sort of more like 7,000 feet instead of 6. Like the lake is at 6. And now it's like you kind of expect snow going from 7 up. | ||
| And you're kind of like, you know, it is slowly sort of drying out. | ||
| It's like the resorts just don't have the kind of snow you'd expect. | ||
| You know we got hit with a giant snowstorm here, right? | ||
| In Austin? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Dude, that was while I was in the jungle. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| 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? | ||
| And I was like, what happened in Texas? | ||
| Then I do a little Googling. | ||
| I was like, Jesus, what happened in Texas? | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Yeah, that all happened while I was away. | ||
| And I was like, wow, that's momentous. | ||
| It was a wild week trapped at home. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I have a 1995 Land Cruiser that's built to drive over anything, so I got around. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And there were a few stores that were open, but the majority of the roads were mostly empty. | ||
| But wasn't power out and everything? | ||
| My power was not out, but some power was out. | ||
| It depends on where you were. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| It's some power would come on and go off again. | ||
| They'd cycle it like every few hours. | ||
| But it was a weird experience, like lines at the supermarket to get in. | ||
| Like we had to wait in line an hour. | ||
| Is that a COVID line or is that an apocalypse line? | ||
| It was apocalypse line. | ||
| It was like people were thinking that this snowstorm was going to continue for a week. | ||
| And you're, you know, below freezing for a week. | ||
| In Austin? | ||
| In Austin, yeah. | ||
| Does it normally snow in Austin? | ||
| You wouldn't think so. | ||
| Very rarely, but it snowed once this year and it was cute. | ||
| And everybody's like, yeah, it snowed because it was only snowing for a day. | ||
| And then it snowed for a fucking week and it was, you know, zero degrees outside. | ||
| And everybody's like, holy shit, this is not good. | ||
| There were apparently four minutes plus from the power grid completely going down. | ||
| Because the power grid is not established to deal with a week of that kind of cold. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just not designed that way. | ||
| And it's weird that the Texas power grid is its own grid. | ||
| It's like, why isn't it tied into the east or the west? | ||
| You know, it's totally stupid that it's independent. | ||
| Because it's Texas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They want to be independent. | |
| I know, but like, that's so weird because, I mean, all systems are more robust when they're tied into more things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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, hopefully now they'll recognize that it's possible for it to freeze for a fucking week. | ||
| But the concept of global warming is interesting because it's like, yeah, overall it is warming. | ||
| 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... | ||
| They're starting to build these electric exploring vehicles, like electric adventure vehicles, which is pretty interesting. | ||
| There's a company called, I think it's called Rivian. | ||
| Yeah, Rivian. | ||
| Dude, I'm sponsored by Rivian. | ||
| Oh, you really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, cool. | |
| Yeah, and Rivian, they support my foundation, like work that my foundation does with solar. | ||
| I've never seen one in the wild. | ||
| Well, it's because they don't exist yet. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| They're shipping to customers in like two months or Oh, interesting. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, Rivian. | ||
| Did you see... | ||
| There it goes. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| What does it say? | ||
| What's the tagline? | ||
| Keep the world adventurous forever. | ||
| That's a dope looking truck. | ||
| That's a dope-looking series of rocks right there. | ||
| You're so into it. | ||
| It's so funny. | ||
| Yeah, so these pickup trucks are fully electric. | ||
| Yeah, so I've driven them for photo shoots. | ||
| It's like, dude, so awesome. | ||
| Yeah, imagine. | ||
| So great. | ||
| I drove my Tesla here. | ||
| Tesla is apparently... | ||
| Their Cybertruck goes into production very soon. | ||
| And there's another... | ||
| Oh, GM. GM has... | ||
| They used to have that stupid Hummer, and now they reinvented the Hummer, and it's an electric, incredible, off-road adventure vehicle. | ||
| Is it actually commercially available yet? | ||
| It's not, but it's going to be, and it has a thousand horsepower, and it has a full skid plate underbelly. | ||
| It's fully designed for legitimate off-road use. | ||
| I'm like, I think I'm more into Rivian. | ||
| Of course, they pay you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They're connected to Amazon, right? | ||
| Amazon is one of the... | ||
| Investors. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Not founders. | ||
| Basically, Amazon has just pre-ordered a shitload of vans because they need electric vans. | ||
| And so just right there, you know that eventually there'll be a pipeline of 100,000 used van batteries going offline in like 10, 15 years or whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| 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. | ||
| It's a completely redesigned thing, though. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But do you need a thousand freaking horsepower in an offered car? | ||
| It's like a tank, you know? | ||
| You don't, but the idea is that it can do things because of that horsepower that perhaps it wouldn't be able to do. | ||
| Like go up a vertical wall. | ||
| Yeah, literally. | ||
| If you hit it with enough speed. | ||
| Well, it can crab walk. | ||
| It's designed as a feature. | ||
| What that means is like in certain things where it's almost impossible to gain traction, this thing can actually go like this and crab walk. | ||
| It's actually like you can set it. | ||
| It's a crab walk setting. | ||
| And you press it and it'll do the crab walk thing for it. | ||
| See if you can find that it's pretty wild. | ||
| The video of Hummer 2021 Hummer crab walk. | ||
| They're not released yet, but I think they're really soon. | ||
| And then another thing I want you to look up after that, Jamie, there's a new startup that I think is Austin-based that has developed... | ||
| A new kind of battery, or they're in the process of developing a new kind of battery that has a 1,500 mile range to it. | ||
| So this is this thing. | ||
| So this is what it looks like. | ||
| See, it's not outrageous looking, but they have two different models, and one of them, the roof comes off. | ||
| So the entire top of where the passengers are comes off. | ||
| So this is obviously CGI. Yeah. | ||
| So when it gets to... | ||
| I guess we'd have to watch the whole thing. | ||
| So when it gets to some place where it's having a difficult time... | ||
| See how it's doing that? | ||
| It went sideways to get through that little path. | ||
| Did it actually do that? | ||
| It was hard to tell. | ||
| Like, that's the kind of thing that no human driver, though, would ever try to take their truck through something like that. | ||
| Oh, they definitely do, though. | ||
| These people do this for fun. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| This is all CGI. Like, I'll believe that stuff when someone's actually driving their real Hummer. | ||
| Because also, that's not even... | ||
| That's for sure just a post-truck, you know what I mean? | ||
| You sound like a Rivian sports spokesperson. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's just like a one-off like model. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Especially something that has that much technology. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Where it's actually brand new. | ||
| 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! | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Like when Elon Musk had the new Cybertruck. | ||
| Yeah, with the windows. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| See if you can find this startup because what they're going to be able to do is instead of charging your battery... | ||
| You know, it goes to 1,500 miles and then they can swap it out in 90 seconds. | ||
| And it's got 15,000 miles of range or 1,500 miles of range rather, which is pretty incredible. | ||
| I'm all for better solutions to this problem, you know? | ||
| 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? | ||
| What is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't get that. | |
| It's crazy. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But does it mean plaid like the material? | ||
| It's just what he calls it. | ||
| It doesn't look plaid. | ||
| This is the company? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Ample. | ||
| 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. | ||
| If nothing else, at least their CGI looks way better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because obviously none of this actually exists yet either, so it's like modeling, but at least it looks really good. | ||
| The problem is with a lot of this stuff is I've met a lot of these startup guys, and they want to sell it so hard. | ||
| Not this particular, but other technologies. | ||
| You're just like, hey, how much of this can you do, and how much of this are you just trying to get funding for? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| I mean, like, Teslas are great, and they've done, like, great things for, you know, like, I'm... | ||
| Realistically, the faster humanity can transition to electric, or basically transition away from fossil fuels, the better. | ||
| And so it's like the more interested people with good ideas, the better. | ||
| Porsche has developed fuel for their internal combustion engines that is completely clean and has less environmental impact than electric cars do. | ||
| What's the clean? | ||
| I mean, what do you mean? | ||
| I have zero idea. | ||
| I just glanced at this. | ||
| I read the first paragraph of this new fuel that they've developed. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Porsche's working on synthetic fuel to make internal combustion cars as clean as EVs. | ||
| It's a hydrogen-based fuel. | ||
| Be ready for testing in 2022, including the new Porsche 911 GT3 Cup race car. | ||
| I'm pretty sure that so far biofuels and things like that haven't really lived up to the hype. | ||
| Yeah, that's why they're doing this. | ||
| It is one of those things where you're like, oh, if it totally plays out and it works, then great. | ||
| Let's move forward with it as quickly as possible. | ||
| But you're kind of like, yeah, it seems like electricity is probably the better option overall. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Who's making the air cleaner? | ||
| The air's cleaner coming out than it is going in. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| It's pretty wild, yeah. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| Their ultimate goal is to develop internal combustion engine fuel that is just completely clean. | ||
| So there's no impact. | ||
| Speaking of this kind of thing, I did Jay Leno's garage the other day. | ||
| I don't know if you've ever met him or seen it. | ||
| Yeah, I've done it. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty classic. | ||
| Yeah, it's awesome. | ||
| And did you tour the garage and stuff? | ||
| I'm like, yeah, it's totally insane. | ||
| He's got 11 of those garages, by the way. | ||
| Well, what do you mean? | ||
| He's got 11 buildings. | ||
| Yeah, but they're all connected, right? | ||
| But he's got more of them. | ||
| Like, I don't know if you've saw all of them. | ||
| That guy has the most insane fucking car collection I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When like turbine engines were like a cool new thing for aerospace. | ||
| And they're like, let's do it in a car. | ||
| And you're like, well, that obviously didn't play out because I've never seen like a jet car going by me on the highway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But, you know, I think it's cool that humans have explored so many different avenues like that. | ||
| You know, it's like when you have a new technology, you kind of have to try every different version of it and, like, see what actually works. | ||
| You know, Henry Ford had made hemp fenders and hemp-bodied cars in the early 1900s. | ||
| It's kind of too bad that it didn't take off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a demonstration where he's bouncing a hammer off of them. | ||
| Because have you ever fucked with hemp? | ||
| Have you ever felt like... | ||
| I've eaten a little bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The wood itself, it's incredible. | ||
| Where it's really light like balsa wood, but it's really hard like this table. | ||
| It's hard like oak, but really light. | ||
| And they can make hempcrete, like a concrete... | ||
| With, like, ground-up hemp that is supposed to be incredibly fire-resistant, really has high insulation values. | ||
| But for cars, like, I don't know why it didn't take off. | ||
| Probably because of the problems with marijuana illegalization back then. | ||
| You needed a tax stamp to grow hemp. | ||
| of the prohibition, but they developed this, and there's a cool video of him demonstrating the durability of these fenders. | ||
| I think it's a Model T, and he's got a fucking hammer, and he's bouncing it off of this fender. | ||
| See if you can find that, because it's pretty wild to see, but that was one of the false starts of innovation that just, for whatever reason... | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Never kick back up again. | ||
| Or think of early electrics. | ||
| The very first cars were split with electrics, but then battery technology wasn't there and it just wasn't. | ||
| Well, sure, and then there was a documentary called Who Killed the Electric Car? | ||
| Well, but that was in the 90s, but I mean like 1905. The original cars were... | ||
| How interesting the world would be if it had gone all electric at the beginning instead of having a century of internal combustion engine cars. | ||
| I mean, think of like urban air pollution and stuff if there had just never been internal combustion cars. | ||
| Not that I'm like condemning that because obviously, you know, for tractors and all kinds of uses, you know... | ||
| Diesel, yeah. | ||
| Well, yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| No, it is... | ||
| You know, I actually talked to Elon about Tesla's idea of broadcasting electricity through the sky. | ||
| That was one of the things... | ||
| Oh, this is it? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| His hemp car from 1941. So, this was a car that... | ||
| I guess it's not a Model T. Like, what is that? | ||
| It's a 1941, I mean. | ||
| Some... | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| But look, he's bouncing a fucking hammer off of this... | ||
| Whatever this thing is made out of. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Pretty crazy, right? | ||
| Also, I'm like, how have you seen this before and how do you remember it? | ||
| Me? | ||
| Oh, I don't know, man. | ||
| Also, I mean, that video only has 6,000 views. | ||
| You're like, that's weird. | ||
| My memory is weird. | ||
| It's good and terrible at the same time. | ||
| Sometimes I forget people's names. | ||
| It's like a junk drawer. | ||
| You just have all kinds of shit in there. | ||
| That's a good way to describe it. | ||
| It's a perfect way to describe it, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is that possible? | ||
| It is possible. | ||
| But, he goes, it would have made electronics impossible. | ||
| It would have ruined the idea of computing and all the other things that we developed through electronics. | ||
| Because you have to think of back then, electricity was just the lights. | ||
| You just basically had the lights on and you had like a refrigerator. | ||
| Like, if you even had a refrigerator back then. | ||
| Yeah, not yet. | ||
| So, his idea would have been great, but if it had been implemented, it would have completely stifled the concept of electronics and computers. | ||
| Yeah, I understand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All that shit in the air would have just cooked everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh. | |
| Or computing would just be a totally different thing. | ||
| Yeah, they would have to figure a new way around it. | ||
| Really, really fast abacuses. | ||
| Like, you know, steam tubes moving things up and down on the counter super fast. | ||
| It's really wild how relatively fast things have moved. | ||
| Because in our lifetime, we recognize that things move fast, but they seem normal. | ||
| It seems normal to have an iPhone. | ||
| Honestly, it feels slow as it happens in your life, doesn't it? | ||
| It's like, oh, you know, like, doesn't it a little bit? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Yeah, it's not quite there. | ||
| I'm supposed to be shooting a VR climbing thing this year. | ||
| I'm pretty psyched for it. | ||
| I think it'll be cool. | ||
| Does one exist currently? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| So the guy that I'm working with it on shot an Everest VR experience. | ||
| So, like, he went to the Summit of Mount Everest in VR, and it's these totally incredible episodes. | ||
| And that's actually, because I'd always felt like it wasn't that cool. | ||
| And then he sent me the headset and his episodes, like, the content that he'd made, and was like, watch this. | ||
| And then I did it in my living room, and I was, like, I was fully blown away. | ||
| Super immersive. | ||
| Which is pretty impressive in a way, because, you know, I'm, like, a pretty discerning viewer of climbing content, you know? | ||
| And I was still fully into it. | ||
| I was like, this is... | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| And I've read so many books about Everest and things in my life. | ||
| But then to do the VR experience and actually feel I'm there, I was like, this is incredible. | ||
| Anyway, so I was like, I'm on board. | ||
| I'm totally going to do a project with him. | ||
| Did it make you want to go to Everest? | ||
| I mean, yeah, a little. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I was like, oh, it's pretty cool. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, it's like, I would be, I mean, I like climbing things, and you know, if it's the tallest thing to climb, you're like, oh, that's cool. | ||
| I'm just sort of turned off by the crowd, you know, the popularity, the like, it's just too commercial, basically. | ||
| You know what, I think I lied to you. | ||
| I don't think this has any bubbles in it. | ||
| Oh, no? | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| No, it's fine. | ||
| Drank it. | ||
| Yeah, it's all part of your plan. | ||
| How do I not know? | ||
| It doesn't have any bubbles in it. | ||
| Also, hadn't you just drank the other one? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I just assumed it had bubbles in it. | ||
| Or maybe you're so desensitized to bubbles. | ||
| I assumed it was carbonated. | ||
| Yeah, I just drink so much carbonated stuff. | ||
| You just don't know the difference. | ||
| I don't think it's carbonated. | ||
| It sounded carbonated when you opened it. | ||
| Does it? | ||
| That's true. | ||
| It did have that satisfying like... | ||
| Right. | ||
| But if you look at how it comes out, it doesn't come out like bubbles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
See? | |
| How's it look in the cans? | ||
| This is mildly carbonated. | ||
| Oh yeah, it's bubbly as fuck. | ||
| I know, but it doesn't taste carbonated. | ||
| It doesn't look like juice. | ||
| No, that just means that your throat is so desensitized to bubbles, you can't tell the difference. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| You've been drinking too many bubbles. | ||
| You know what it is? | ||
| I drink Zevia a lot. | ||
| No, I don't know what that is. | ||
| I don't like bubbles, yeah. | ||
| It's a soda that's sweetened with Stevia. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's really good for you. | ||
| It's like, you know, I mean, it's not as good for you as water. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, this water's pretty good for me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But it's pretty close. | |
| It's pretty close. | ||
| You're in the neighborhood. | ||
| Stevia is, you know it's stevia. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, of course. | ||
| Natural sweetener. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, it's carbonated, but very mildly. | ||
| There's a rumor there's a new Apple headset coming out that's going to be lighter than an iPhone. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It might make viewing these things easier, better, I don't know the word that would be, but less cumbersome. | ||
| But isn't the issue really, yeah, immersiveness is the issue, and also programming. | ||
| The real issue is getting people to develop these experiences. | ||
| To make the content. | ||
| Yeah, to make the content. | ||
| Which right now I think is pretty hard. | ||
| Because I don't think... | ||
| The market for something like Call of Duty is spectacular, right? | ||
| So many people play those kind of games. | ||
| Or Fortnite. | ||
| I mean, these markets are immense. | ||
| But the markets for VR are relatively small, comparatively. | ||
| But that's also because nobody has the headsets yet. | ||
| I mean, that's so chicken and the egg. | ||
| Because once there's great content, more people will get it. | ||
| But which has to come first? | ||
| Well, we've had headsets for years, though. | ||
| We've had. | ||
| We had the HTC Vive three or four years ago. | ||
| We have Oculus now. | ||
| Just today, I just saw that Doom 3 is now available in VR on PlayStation. | ||
| How dare they? | ||
| How fun does that sound? | ||
| I mean, I bet it's crazy. | ||
| These motherfuckers. | ||
| Can you play multiplayer? | ||
| You're a bunch of people bumping into each other. | ||
| Well, you know what you do? | ||
| You get a unidirectional treadmill. | ||
| Have you seen how they do that? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| Pull that up, Jamie. | ||
| VR with a unidirectional treadmill. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, have you ever... | ||
| Do you run at all? | ||
| I mean, I have, yeah. | ||
| There's a thing called Air Runner where you are... | ||
| It's like 15% harder. | ||
| In my old studio, I had one. | ||
| It's 15% harder than running on a treadmill because you're actually propelling the treadmills that are keeping up with it. | ||
| Excuse me, 15% harder than regular running, not just running. | ||
| Running on a treadmill is a little bit easier than regular running. | ||
| So this idea of these omnidirectional treadmills... | ||
| These people are on these things, and you're actually moving them. | ||
| See how that guy's running? | ||
| See how it works there? | ||
| So you're running into this VR world shooting things. | ||
| I wonder if gamers will be less into it if they actually feel worked after playing for an hour or two. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sure. | |
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Because if you're actually running through all those games for like two hours, you'd be like, oh my god, I'm so pooped. | ||
| It really depends on if the juice is worth the squeeze. | ||
| So if you have a game that is as wild as Doom, right? | ||
| Especially the new Doom. | ||
| What number is the new Doom? | ||
| They stopped calling it numbers again. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Who was the dude that we had on that was the Doom guy that worked on Doom and he showed us like the most immersive... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hugo? | |
| Yes. | ||
| Hugo Martin. | ||
| Hugo Martin came in here and it's so wild. | ||
| It's so gory and crazy. | ||
| You're pulling heads out of people and stuff. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But if it has heft to it, then you get worked after an hour of playing. | ||
| Yeah, but then you get in shape. | ||
| Like, you know how people play Dance Dance Revolution? | ||
| Do you know a lot of people lost a lot of weight playing that game? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's famous for it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Because you're doing this fucking... | ||
| Actually, my in-laws have been playing VR games, something called Beat Saber, I think. | ||
| We're basically using the lightsaber to cut blocks, but it's kind of the same deal where there's a lot of movement. | ||
| It's pretty classic to see my father-in-law sweating, chopping blocks in virtual reality. | ||
| And it keeps you in shape. | ||
| John Carmack, speaking of Doom, he actually designed Doom, the original Doom for id Software. | ||
| He worked for Oculus when the last time we saw him and came into the studio. | ||
| He gave us an Oculus and showed us he's an expert at this thing. | ||
| He's a martial artist, too. | ||
| And so he's really got great hand-eye coordination. | ||
| And he has his ramped up to expert level. | ||
| And so he's... | ||
| These fucking things are coming out of me constantly. | ||
| He's going around like this. | ||
| I'm like, my God. | ||
| He's like, it's actually quite a workout. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, I think so. | ||
| It's like you're shadowboxing in the air against five people. | ||
| That's what it looks like. | ||
| There's another thing they do, too, that's... | ||
| Speaking of shadowboxing, they have these boxing games. | ||
| And that's one of those that Dana White was advertising recently. | ||
| Not even advertising, just saying that he did it. | ||
| So you put on... | ||
| The Oculus headset and you have these little hand things that you hold on to. | ||
| No, you need the headset to constrict so it feels like you're getting punched in the head over and over. | ||
| Right, haptic feedback. | ||
| But you do get a flash of white when you get hit. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| When the glove hits you, you flash the light. | ||
| So it actually would kind of feel like it? | ||
| Kind of, without the pain. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But the workout is intense because you're really throwing your hands like you're boxing someone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So will they see your hands reach up and grab all the rocks? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| They would see me climb through the frame, basically. | ||
| They'd be able to watch an entire climb from a certain perspective. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So like the perspective of a drone? | ||
| Like something hovering and watching? | ||
| 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? | ||
| But if we... | ||
| Like, a lot of people get really motion sick in VR. Like, my wife is, like, full hard no, like, won't do VR. Like, 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. | ||
| Because this is... | ||
| You're actually moving around. | ||
| So you have a haptic feedback vest. | ||
| You have the headsets on. | ||
| And they give you plastic guns. | ||
| And then you're running around shooting zombies. | ||
| And you bump into each other and shit. | ||
| Like my whole family does it. | ||
| This is like the new version of laser tag. | ||
| It's like, why do you laser tag when you can actually do crazy zombie killing missions? | ||
| Yeah, and it's pretty graphically intensive. | ||
| Like, when the zombies attack you, you see red. | ||
| Like, when they scratch at you, you see splatters in front of your face. | ||
| Like... | ||
| The idea is that they're getting you. | ||
| And you feel it in your chest because you have a haptic feedback vest on. | ||
| I didn't realize that haptic feedback was so far along and so developed. | ||
| It's not that good. | ||
| It's not that cool yet. | ||
| But you feel like you get zapped. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| It doesn't hurt, but you're recognizing that something's happening, and it just sort of accentuates the experience. | ||
| Yeah, it's all like Ready Player One soon. | ||
| Yeah, that's coming. | ||
| That's coming, man. | ||
| That's coming, without a doubt. | ||
| And then we're fucked. | ||
| Or then that'll be the norm, and then the cool thing will be to do things in real life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And be like, oh shit, that guy actually climbs? | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That guy touches real rock? | ||
| Doesn't that hurt his fingers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He hugs real people. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| But the things that have real physical limitations, you're actually under the influence of real gravity as opposed to just flying around. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| Yeah, I'm analog. | ||
| I'm an analog guy, man. | ||
| I'm not out there in your digital world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's coming. | ||
| It took me a really long time to get a smartphone and, you know, I was like a total late adopter and I'm like, I'll probably be late. | ||
| Was David Blaine the guy who got you your first smartphone? | ||
| No, not first. | ||
| I think he got me my second. | ||
| I think, I forget what the deal was, but I think I met him and he was like, what is that? | ||
| Because I pulled out some like ancient, you know, thing and he was like WTF and he just like went to the Mac store and got me a phone. | ||
| Why were you carrying around a flip phone? | ||
| Well, no, I just, it may have even been a smartphone, but it was like really old. | ||
| You know, I don't know, we were like having lunch and I was like, oh yeah, this thing is like a piece of junk. | ||
| And he was like, I'm going to fix that. | ||
| And he just like fixed it. | ||
| It's funny though, because in classic magician style, he didn't like make it appear. | ||
| He just went to the Apple store and was like, ding. | ||
| And then he made it appear. | ||
| Did you want that? | ||
| Well, we were doing errands around New York City and it took him like 20 minutes. | ||
| Apparently, there was some VIP Apple thing. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| He just walked in and it happened. | ||
| I was like, I'm crazy. | ||
| Really? | ||
| There's a VIP Apple thing? | ||
| Apparently. | ||
| Or at least at the one store in downtown Manhattan or something. | ||
| Oh, maybe he's got like a guy or something. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| But you're not broke. | ||
| Like, is that something that you wanted but didn't go ahead and buy? | ||
| It was like a while back and I just, you know, I don't know. | ||
| It's like, I don't care. | ||
| You should see my phone right now. | ||
| What kind of phone do you have? | ||
| Show me. | ||
| What do you got? | ||
| Everyone makes fun of it now, but it's the original. | ||
| It's the old SE. No, no. | ||
| That's like the 5 or the 6 or something, I think. | ||
| These are great. | ||
| Well, the case is for mountain biking, but no. | ||
| But the phone is just like... | ||
| You know what's great? | ||
| It's so easy to text on. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| It's really easy to use one-handed. | ||
| And the main thing for me is that it stays under my leg loop on a harness like it fits in your pocket. | ||
| It's so little. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Look how little. | ||
| When you see the screen, the screen is smaller than my thumb. | ||
| Well, I mean, there you go. | ||
| See? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, it's easy to use. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Super easy to use. | ||
| But how's the battery on this thing? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Actually, I started... | ||
| It's been really suffering recently. | ||
| But I think it's... | ||
| Because I started using a Whoop because they also sponsor the podcast. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And I think the Whoop kills the battery more because it's constantly... | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Because it's using Bluetooth all the time. | ||
| Also, that thing's ancient as fuck. | ||
| And Whoop is designed for like new phones. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, Whoop is designed for the Ferrari phones and I've got the... | ||
| Yeah, you've got an Edsel. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| You know, you should get one of the Minis. | ||
| I know, I've thought about it. | ||
| I've thought about it. | ||
| But then I'm like, it still works. | ||
| Like, why bother? | ||
| Oh, you're one of those guys. | ||
| Well, I'll just wait until it dies. | ||
| You know, I waste not one night. | ||
| Oh, look at you. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| But they recycle those. | ||
| Yeah, I'll get there eventually, I guess. | ||
| You could sell it to somebody who's not into Whoop. | ||
| Dude, so classic story, two days, three days ago or something, I was climbing with a friend of mine in Red Rock. | ||
| We were doing this big solo link-up where we traversed like a bunch of peaks and we were both soloing by ourselves. | ||
| And he'd been making fun of my phone all day. | ||
| He had like the brand new 12 Max Plus Mega Pro or whatever it's called. | ||
| You know, it's like a small iPad or whatever. | ||
| It's like this giant phone. | ||
| And like crazy camera, looks great, whatever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we were down climbing this route, so we were traversing. | ||
| I've been working on this traverse of the whole Red Rock Range. | ||
| You've been to Red Rock, right? | ||
| Outside of Vegas? | ||
| I've only driven by it. | ||
| Dude, you've never gone hiking in Red Rock? | ||
| All your time in Vegas, you've never hiked in the mountains there? | ||
| Dude, you've got to do it once. | ||
| Dude, I'll do it. | ||
| Actually, when you're in Vegas, text me. | ||
| I'll take you on an adventure in Red Rock. | ||
| Take me on an adventure, dude. | ||
| The thing about Vegas is usually when I'm there, I'm just there for the fights. | ||
| It's usually a six to seven hour experience that I'm commentating. | ||
| One day was eight because we had 15 fights. | ||
| But this past weekend, it's like six. | ||
| But they're in the evening, right? | ||
| Go out in the morning, do a little nature thing. | ||
| It'll keep you nice and relaxed. | ||
| I usually fly in in the morning, especially during COVID. And then I fly and I land at like one. | ||
| The first fight's at four. | ||
| That's how it usually works. | ||
| Well, if you ever have time, hit me up and we'll do an adventure in Red Rock. | ||
| Next time there's no COVID, I'll fly on a Friday because I'll probably wind up doing a gig out there. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| When COVID's... | ||
| When everybody's... | ||
| Yeah, when it's chill. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So anyway, Red Rock, all these peaks, beautiful peaks. | ||
| I've been working on a traverse of all the peaks, like up and over each one type thing. | ||
| It's like a fun backyard project, so I'm going to... | ||
| It's quite challenging. | ||
| It's really complicated terrain with crazy fluted sandstone towers and how you get over one to the next and how you connect them. | ||
| A friend was doing a little section of it with me just to piece together some of the fun climbing. | ||
| We were down climbing this classic route so the two of us are both soloing. | ||
| And we had, like, summited the peak via the other side. | ||
| And we were coming down this, like, classic route that people normally climb. | ||
| It's, like, a really famous climbing route. | ||
| And there was this woman climbing up below us. | ||
| And my friend was like, oh, damn it! | ||
| His phone just fell out of his pocket. | ||
| His giant new 12-plus Mega or whatever. | ||
| It fell out. | ||
| It bounced off the wall. | ||
| And this woman caught it, like, 30 feet below him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| She was, like, climbing. | ||
| She had, like, just placed a piece of gear. | ||
| You know, she has a rope and everything. | ||
| It's all normal. | ||
| And it just, like, bounced. | ||
| And then she just snagged it out of the air. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Saved his phone for him. | ||
| And then as we down climbed, she just gave it right back to him and then we just carried on. | ||
| Belly's badass. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It was really impressive. | ||
| I would want to be friends with her. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| That's like a person who comes through in the clutch. | ||
| Dude, it was very impressive. | ||
| But, you know, my takeaway was that... | ||
| It helps to have a phone that doesn't fall out of your freaking pocket because it's so big. | ||
| You know, I was like, my phone's never just falling out. | ||
| Well, it seems like he's got a stupid case or just not handling his phone correctly. | ||
| I think his pocket was just a little tight and then it's just a big phone, you know? | ||
| So it's like easy to like put it in, but it's not quite all the way in. | ||
| And then, you know, when you're down climbing, obviously you're moving your legs a bunch and it just fell out. | ||
| I have the middle ground. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have the regular one. | |
| That's the regular 12. Oh, this is... | ||
| Yeah, but look at that. | ||
| Yeah, it's quite a bit bigger. | ||
| Yeah, this guy could live inside yours. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Mini, though, is pretty close to yours. | ||
| It's slightly larger, but it's all screen. | ||
| That's probably what I'll go to eventually. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I might as well wait for this to die. | ||
| The main complaint about the Mini is the battery life is horrible. | ||
| Oh yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was sad. | ||
| But I mean, I'm sure it's better than yours. | ||
| That's actually probably true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, me too. | |
| Yeah, that's funny. | ||
| It's horrible battery life. | ||
| It's twice as good as what you have, but it's horrible. | ||
| It probably is literally twice as good as what you have. | ||
| I will see. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm sort of, I mean, everything keeps working, and so I'm like, you know, why mess with something that works? | ||
| Yeah, I think the battery is like, I think you could use it full stop all day. | ||
| Like, you could play four hours of video on it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| And it'll eventually die. | ||
| Whereas these things are like eight hours or something. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who's going to watch eight hours of video on the phone? | ||
| Assholes! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I guess. | |
| Well, it's just like, that's a lot of time on your phone. | ||
| People that hate their job and they pretend they're working and just watch YouTube all day. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And you barely paid attention. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of that going on in this life. | ||
| That makes me a little bit sad. | ||
| I mean, I know you're right, but you're also kind of like, that's too bad. | ||
| It is, well, especially coming from a guy like you that does exactly what he wants to do with his life. | ||
| You know, that's where you see people living unfulfilled lives. | ||
| It's kind of sad. | ||
| This morning at a hotel, I was reading my book. | ||
| You know, I was eating by myself and just like reading. | ||
| And the server came over to be like, what are you reading? | ||
| It's so interesting to see someone reading a book, not on their phone. | ||
| I was like, huh. | ||
| It makes me slightly sad in a way, but also, you know, I was like, yeah, I'm reading this book. | ||
| Fate of food. | ||
| Someone could be reading a book on their phone too. | ||
| Does that make you sad? | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| It's funny because I've tried to get into e-reading stuff like the Kindle or on the phone. | ||
| It doesn't really take. | ||
| Because I feel like there are so many other distractions right there. | ||
| It's hard to really get immersed in your book when with a double click of your thumb, something more exciting pops up. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I get what you're saying. | ||
| With the phone, I get what you're saying. | ||
| I like Kindles because they have that flat white surface where it really does look like paper. | ||
| I forget what the technology is called, but it looks great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| You can store a hundred books. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| No, it is definitely, like, it makes sense, it's practical, but I just find that I read more with physical books. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, at a certain point, you just have to use the medium that works for you and just go with it. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| The tactile feedback. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And honestly, the sense of progress. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's true, right? | ||
| It's like infinity. | ||
| Whereas if you're working your way through a library cabinet or a shelf. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's kind of satisfying to be like, oh, I finished this stack of books. | ||
| And also with books that I give to my friends afterward, give to other people, you pass them around, share the ideas. | ||
| But with the Kindle, it's like, yeah, you have all of human knowledge on one tiny... | ||
| I mean, eventually we will have probably all of human knowledge on like one little tiny tablet, you know? | ||
| But it's just, it's almost like too much. | ||
| It's overwhelming. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you think that's true right now? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| No. | ||
| I think most things are in digital form, particularly most things pertaining to digital forms. | ||
| Yeah, and business, like all things business or digital. | ||
| How about the entire economy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You bet some of that's written down. | ||
| You hope. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| But you're not doing it and I'm not doing it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But presumably, whoever is doing it wrote down an instruction manual just in case. | ||
| Well, Jamie's more technologically astute than both of us. | ||
| Matt, maybe. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Yes and no, but... | ||
| If it's written down, one person maybe wrote it, what language is it in? | ||
| Is it legible? | ||
| Do they write it in pencil? | ||
| If it gets wet, does it turn into pulp and now it's gone? | ||
| How many of these books are available and where are they stored? | ||
| We still don't know what was lost in the Library of Alexandria. | ||
| What kind of things disappeared? | ||
| We're never going to be able to figure back out again. | ||
| Where did those heads come from? | ||
| They probably lost the instruction manuals for the pyramids. | ||
| Well, they did. | ||
| Literally, the Library of Alexandria, that's where they believe they stored the historical works of how the pyramids were constructed. | ||
| Because there's really no work anywhere that depict... | ||
| I believe there's some hieroglyphs that depict one or two methods of moving stone. | ||
| But that's it. | ||
| But, you know, when you get something like the Great Period of Giza, it's 2,300,000 stones. | ||
| They're way between, I think, 2 and 80 tons. | ||
| I think the smallest ones might be like a half a ton. | ||
| And the largest are like 80 tons in the King's Chamber. | ||
| Some of them, they cut from a quarry that was hundreds of miles away. | ||
| Like, what did you do? | ||
| Who fucking mapped this out? | ||
| How did you get it so perfect? | ||
| And we don't know. | ||
| We have to guess. | ||
| Armies of human labor. | ||
| Not just that, because you can get armies of human labor and you're not going to get that kind of precision. | ||
| Because if you're off even slightly when you get to the top of the 2,300,000 stones, you're going to be way off. | ||
| Then you wind up with a balcony. | ||
| You're like, oh, that one sticks out a little bit. | ||
| You're like, damn it. | ||
| You're like, no, no, it's a design feature. | ||
| Well, not only that, it was originally covered in smooth limestone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That eroded away? | ||
| Well, they stole it when they built Cairo. | ||
| You know how the outside of the pyramid is all jagged and fucked up? | ||
| That's not what it was. | ||
| It was completely smooth. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah, it was completely smooth. | ||
| And then, you know, people don't respect the past. | ||
| Or they're like, look at this giant pile of rock that we can use to build our home. | ||
| They're like, perfect. | ||
| Somebody already piled it here for us. | ||
| It wasn't a pile of rock at the time, though. | ||
| It was a smooth surface. | ||
| Well, totally, but if it's not fulfilling a purpose and you're like, a better purpose would be building my home. | ||
| You can see how that stuff gets pilfered. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Dude, could you imagine? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then that little kid's like, yeah! | ||
| No, they probably killed that kid. | ||
| Shut your mouth! | ||
| You don't know shit. | ||
| I mean, probably did, actually. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Honestly, if it goes, it goes, you know? | ||
| You're like, uh... | ||
| 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. | ||
| We'll see long term. | ||
| I think it's growing in popularity. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But it's decentralized. | ||
| Sure, it's decentralized. | ||
| But it uses way more material. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| How so? | ||
| 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? | ||
| I don't know if that's true. | ||
| I think it is. | ||
| Because I think all currency requires data crunching now. | ||
| Not like crypto. | ||
| Because, I mean, the whole thing about blockchain is you have a crazy... | ||
| I mean, that's the whole point. | ||
| But all banking. | ||
| Almost all currency. | ||
| Well, but banking, though, would exist. | ||
| It's just ones and zeros and hard drives. | ||
| But banking, the whole financial sector would exist, whether it's on normal currencies or cryptocurrency. | ||
| Because either way, banking and trading and all that kind of stuff would be happening in something. | ||
| But I'm just talking about printing money and distributing money versus generating cryptocurrency. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've heard estimates that that sounds right, but you have to print paper currency, which means you've got to use water. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's a whole lot of, yeah, it's almost double. | ||
| According to the thing I'm looking at right now, it says the energy use of fiat versus crypto is double what Bitcoin is. | ||
| Yeah, that would make sense to me. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| I wonder what... | ||
| That's everything. | ||
| Electrical grid and all that. | ||
| It's a lot. | ||
| Like per unit of currency or whatever? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| But either way, if the power goes out and they can't figure out... | ||
| I mean, all crypto's gone forever, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If the power goes out, if hard drives stop working... | ||
| I mean, there's going to be people that remember how to build houses. | ||
| There's going to be people that remember how to make it. | ||
| I mean, there's ways to build generators that work off of the flow of rivers. | ||
| Like my friend Steve Rinell that I was talking about earlier, he has a cabin in Alaska, and the electricity is powered by water flow from a river. | ||
| I mean, that's all. | ||
| People are going to remember how to do that kind of stuff. | ||
| Presumably the people that wrote the algorithms for blockchain, Bitcoin type stuff, some of them probably remember how to do that again too. | ||
| Some of them might not make it. | ||
| We're talking about half the population is dead. | ||
| Wait, are we doing zombie apocalypse? | ||
| We're doing some sort of a natural disaster. | ||
| I thought we were doing solar flare that wipes out electronics. | ||
| Solar flare is going to kill a lot of people. | ||
| Oh, you think? | ||
| Like the big ones? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Something big, like some sort of hypernova in a distant galaxy. | ||
| How about we do two-thirds of the people? | ||
| Just to make it more edgy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's scarier. | |
| And then a third come back as zombies. | ||
| Well, if we do two-thirds of the people, the problem is what third lives? | ||
| The ones that were all in their bunkers. | ||
| The ones that were all in their, like, prepper hole. | ||
| The ones that are walking around barefoot developing thick calluses at the bottom of their feet. | ||
| 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'm not talking about those guys. | ||
| I'm talking about the fake guys that are out there glamping. | ||
| Preppers, those guys, they probably won't make it, ironically. | ||
| People will come and pillage their prepper caches. | ||
| I just think that we do have a lot of our knowledge in these digital forms that if we had to reinvent society again... | ||
| According to people that study history, we know that human beings have survived multiple extinction events. | ||
| There's been many times. | ||
| Maybe humans have? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Human beings got down to, I think it was 7,000 people at one point in time, after a supervolcano in... | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Uh, where was that? | ||
| But you're talking about like original human populations that are coming out of Africa type stuff. | ||
| Yeah, 60,000 people. | ||
| 60,000 years ago, rather. | ||
| Somewhere in that range. | ||
| Human beings got down to about 7,000 people. | ||
| Um... | ||
| I want to say it was New Guinea, somewhere like there. | ||
| There was some massive... | ||
| The Toba. | ||
| Where is it? | ||
| Catastrophe? | ||
| Is that the one you're talking about, right? | ||
| I think so, yeah. | ||
| How many years ago was that? | ||
| Did you put it up on the screen? | ||
| 75,000 years ago? | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| Yeah, 75,000 years ago, people got down to like almost nothing. | ||
| How human beings almost vanished from the earth 70,000 years ago. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Click on that. | ||
| Though it also is labeled the controversial catastrophes, which... | ||
| It's NPR. I trust NPR. All of 7 billion human beings on earth. | ||
| Keep scrolling, keep scrolling. | ||
| Supervolcano, Toba. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| 70,000 BC, a volcano called Toba, Sumatra, that's where it is, in Indonesia, went off blowing roughly 650 miles of vaporized rock into the air. | ||
| It's the largest volcanic eruption that we know of, dwarfing everything else. | ||
| And scroll down. | ||
| So the idea is that human beings got down to, I think, in the neighborhood of 7,000 to 10,000 people. | ||
| The part on top, one study says it could have been as low as 40 reproducing adults. | ||
| Or breeding pairs, which means 80 people, I guess. | ||
| But either way, they know we got down to a very low number. | ||
| And they know that this volcano, this super volcano eruption did happen. | ||
| And they also know that this is not uncommon. | ||
| Well, it is kind of uncommon if it happened 70,000 years ago. | ||
| No, but it's not when you think about 4.6 billion years of Earth. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| But if you think of human history and certainly our lifespans, if it happens once every 75,000 years, you're like, oh, we're good. | ||
| We're good. | ||
| Your kids are good. | ||
| Yes, your kids are good, probably. | ||
| But relatively speaking, society, it's entirely possible that society could get hit. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| One of these things. | ||
| Yellowstone, you know about Yellowstone. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| They have thousands of earthquakes a year. | ||
| That's why you have Elon on here talking about making humans multi-planetary. | ||
| Yeah, what do you think about that? | ||
| I'm into it. | ||
| Climb rocks on Mars? | ||
| I would totally go. | ||
| You would climb rocks on Mars? | ||
| If he'll send me, I'll go. | ||
| Get him on here again. | ||
| Tell him I'm willing to go. | ||
| How many years would you be willing to stay? | ||
| It used to be that they thought you'd have to stay there for the rest of your life. | ||
| Now they think they can get you back in a couple of years. | ||
| I'd be willing to go for the rest of my life later in my life. | ||
| You know, like as a 70-year-old or something, I bet I would. | ||
| I'm into exploration like that. | ||
| Just full, interesting new places. | ||
| Yeah, but maybe you'd be like Fred the dirtbag guy and you'd want to be climbing when you're 85 years old. | ||
| Maybe, but I think if I felt like there was something useful I could contribute by going to Mars, I would definitely go. | ||
| Because I do think that that is sort of the future of humanity, going to different places. | ||
| It'd be pretty wild. | ||
| You'd be able to climb a little higher without Earth's gravity holding you back. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I need all the help I can get. | ||
| Especially at that age, you know? | ||
| I like the way you think, Jamie. | ||
| Yeah, maybe that's the move. | ||
| When you get older, you go to Mars for climbing. | ||
| Low gravity places. | ||
| It's fucking easy. | ||
| But by the time we get people to Mars, they'll probably extend lifespans. | ||
| Pretty far. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| They're doing some weird shit now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fucking wild. | ||
| I mean, but does that wind up having health... | ||
| Implications? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I don't think they know. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| They're just like, whoa. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| 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. | ||
| See if you find that study. | ||
| I mean, I have the study, but it's literally the study. | ||
| I'm trying to dig through it to find the... | ||
| Hyperbaric oxygen therapy increases telomere length and decreases immunosenesis in isolated blood cells. | ||
| Pretty interesting shit. | ||
| I'm like, that's what I read for fun at night, you know? | ||
| I think this was from 2020. Yeah. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| September 3rd, 2020. And is that the one from Israel? | ||
| I mean, look at the names on it. | ||
| It certainly seems like it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tel Aviv, yeah. | ||
| Weird shit, man. | ||
| You know, so you gotta imagine that. | ||
| And there are plenty of, like, normal ways to extend life. | ||
| Like, you know, severely restricted calorie diets. | ||
| You know, like, basically being fasted forever. | ||
| You know, you can extend rats' lives by, like, double or something. | ||
| Yeah, isn't that wild that the more food you eat, the shorter your life is? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I might be fucked because I eat like a pig. | ||
| It's a real issue. | ||
| Better, you know? | ||
| It's all balance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I know. | ||
| Do you want to be hungry and live longer or just full and happy? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, arguably full and happy. | ||
| Yeah, arguably. | ||
| Certainly you want a full and happy life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I do kind of wonder sometimes, if I was a painter or something, I was just sitting inside thinking up crazy ideas and drawing or whatever. | ||
| It might be worth only eating 600 calories a day and living to 150. Or seeing if it works out that way. | ||
| Do you anticipate a time where climbing is no longer interesting to you and you want to pursue other things? | ||
| Or do you ever feel in any way that you are a prisoner to your earliest passion? | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| No, because I still love it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's really cool that you're going to do commentary for the Olympics. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, we'll see because this year is unusual since Japan doesn't really want foreigners to come. | ||
| So we'll see how it all plays out. | ||
| Could you do it remotely? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Though that really takes a lot of the appeal out of doing commentary for the Olympics if I'm just watching a live stream and talking about it. | ||
| Well, what if you're on one of those Buffalo Wild Wing screens, big giant fucking 50-foot screen watching it, like sitting in... | ||
| I mean, it might be okay. | ||
| Yeah, it's better than nothing for sure. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| No, I mean, I'm excited to participate in any way because I think it's such an important moment for climbing. | ||
| It's cool to just be part of that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're a spokesperson for climbing. | ||
| You're not just a climber. | ||
| Do you feel like added responsibility because of that or do you just welcome it because you love climbing so much? | ||
| Yeah, I just welcome it. | ||
| I just love climbing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| One of the things that came up in Free Solo, and I guess just as a reality of later in your life, is that you started getting injured. | ||
| No, that was actually just bad luck in Free Solo. | ||
| Was it really? | ||
| Yeah, because literally since the film, I've had zero injuries of any kind. | ||
| That's crazy! | ||
| I'm pretty sure. | ||
| 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 no, a lot of that's just a fluke. | ||
| Just dumb luck. | ||
| Yeah, it's just a fluke of time. | ||
| Well, that's good to hear. | ||
| Yeah, and part of it is because since I've lived in Vegas, I see a dude for body work in town. | ||
| Actually, I'll come and shout out to Pat, my buddy Pat. | ||
| He's the man. | ||
| Shout out to Pat. | ||
| Yeah, he listened to your show a bunch. | ||
| He sucked. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It keeps the engine running well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you live in a house now? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| My God. | ||
| I know, crazy. | ||
| What is that like? | ||
| No, it's nice. | ||
| It's comfortable. | ||
| There's a shower. | ||
| There's a bathroom. | ||
| You can poop anytime you want. | ||
| Do you watch TV? Oh, we don't have a TV. Whoa, of course you don't have a TV. But we have a computer. | ||
| I mean, watch stuff on the computer. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't have a TV? I've never owned a TV. Wow. | |
| It just means that it makes me a little more strategic about my digital media. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Because if I want to watch something, I can download it and watch it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But only by choice. | ||
| And it's only going to be that appealing because you're watching on a little screen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I kind of like the little screen, though, because it sits right in front of you. | ||
| The thing is, you need a big screen because it sits way across the room. | ||
| But if you have your laptop on your lap, then you don't need a big screen. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| Like, hey, those virtual reality things that the Samsung created that slide into, like, a... | ||
| It's like a phone. | ||
| Samsung had a VR situation. | ||
| Well, that's the Google Cardboard. | ||
| They're literally a cardboard box that's designed for a smartphone. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They did it, too. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| There's a real simple thing, right? | ||
| 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... | ||
| Go to the Great Barrier Reef or whatever. | ||
| And fry your retinas and kill your vision real quick because it's all inches in front of your face. | ||
| Yeah, so do you do other stuff to supplement your climbing like any other kind of working out or stretching or anything like that? | ||
| Yeah, stretch. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then some core and then some stretching. | ||
| I mean, it's all, like, basic, normal stuff. | ||
| Did you go to a trainer to teach you this stuff or did you learn it from books? | ||
| No, just, I mean, it's all basic bodyweight exercises, so it's like... | ||
| But, I mean, I have read some books about it. | ||
| You know, all of my friends at Professional Climbers have obviously talked to everybody about it. | ||
| You sort of hear best practices. | ||
| The shoulder mobility things that I was playing with today... | ||
| I actually just learned from one of the other climbers on the jungle trip that I was just on. | ||
| One of the climbers was a Venezuelan guy named Fuco that trains basically the Venezuelan World Cup team. | ||
| And so he had a bunch of sort of like new school training exercises and things. | ||
| And I was like, oh, that's cool. | ||
| So I started doing, you know, his workout technique. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like... | |
| And this is just something he developed for himself? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is it one of those things where if someone was extremely flexible, would it be possible for them to reach areas, particularly with their legs? | ||
| Yeah, if you can just easily do the full splits. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm kind of like, eh. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I don't know, because I've stretched a lot and I can't do the splits. | ||
| You know, so I'm like, I don't know. | ||
| I bet you could. | ||
| I mean, can you do the splits? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can do the splits? | ||
| Yeah, I don't even have to warm up. | ||
| I can do the splits. | ||
| Look at that lady. | ||
| Yeah, so that, exactly, that's the kind of thing. | ||
| That's what I'm talking about. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, you have to be able to stretch really far. | ||
| But I would imagine you being taller, and also, if you were as flexible as her... | ||
| Yeah, it would help. | ||
| It's not that hard, man. | ||
| I could help you with that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I could help you with that. | |
| No, I'm interested. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I can do that. | ||
| You're a supple man. | ||
| Yeah, well, I've been doing martial arts since I was a little kid, and I never stopped. | ||
| Yeah, see, that's... | ||
| Wait, that's you? | ||
| That's me. | ||
| Dude, WTF. Yeah, I can do all that shit. | ||
| Still. | ||
| Dude, is the one on the left you? | ||
| Below that is me, but that's an easy stretch. | ||
| That's me from when I was like 29. How old are you now? | ||
| 53. Oh wow. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| 29. Respect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just keep going. | ||
| The thing is to just keep doing it. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| A lot of people, their life gets in the way. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| But I don't ever allow that... | ||
| As an option. | ||
| I don't ever allow like long periods of time where I don't work out or long periods of time where I don't stretch. | ||
| So that's the thing with climbing is that I would never allow a long period without working out like hand stuff or arm stuff. | ||
| The stretching is like so peripheral where you're like, yeah, it helps a little, but it's not required. | ||
| And so, I don't know. | ||
| Actually, I just started stretching again because I'm trying this project in Vegas like this thing I want to do. | ||
| And basically, I couldn't really get my foot onto this one foothold easily. | ||
| I mean, I could get it up there, but I had to kind of lurch and sort of fall back sideways a little bit. | ||
| And I was like, oh, I need to limber up a little bit. | ||
| And now that I have a purpose for it, I'm like, okay, then it's fun to start doing my stretching again. | ||
| Have you ever tried hot yoga? | ||
| Yeah, I hate it. | ||
| I hate it. | ||
| It's really popular in Vegas. | ||
| 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 hear what you're saying, and I understand why you would think that, but it's very difficult. | ||
| It's not just you're sweating because you're stretching. | ||
| And you're not just stretching. | ||
| You're definitely working out. | ||
| It is really hard to do. | ||
| Especially if you do like... | ||
| I know Bikram's a douchebag, but his classes... | ||
| It's not even his... | ||
| The thing about that guy is that sequence of postures has been around for thousands of years. | ||
| Yeah, I've never done Bikram Yoga. | ||
| I've done a conventional yoga class in an incredibly hot room and it's just kind of like flow, you know? | ||
| Yeah, it depends on what you're doing, how you're doing it, and who's teaching it to you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's, like, way too hot. | ||
| You get accustomed to it, though. | ||
| You do. | ||
| Yeah, it's like 105 degrees and you do 90 minutes. | ||
| You get accustomed to it. | ||
| I remember the first time I did it, I was like, this is the craziest fucking thing I've ever done. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| But then, after a while, I was doing it two, three times a week. | ||
| My other bummer with that is that I normally do yoga as part of the day. | ||
| And if you do the hot yoga like that, you have to shower. | ||
| You have to go home. | ||
| You have to change. | ||
| It's like its own thing that has to kind of stand alone because it's like an experience. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| And you definitely need electrolytes after that too. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| You can't like do that and then go get your groceries on the way home and like run a bunch of errands because you're like a total disaster. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| I would always shower and even then I would go to the supermarket to grab some lunch and I'd be drenched. | ||
| You just keep sweating, even though you dry off and you just start sweating again because your body's like, what the fuck did you just do? | ||
| I don't normally sweat that much in exercise. | ||
| I'm not a big sweater. | ||
| The first time I did high yoga, I was like, oh, I'm sure I'm not going to sweat that much. | ||
| You start the class and you're like, yeah, it's not that crazy, not that crazy. | ||
| Then I was like, oh, I'm sweating. | ||
| It's like running down. | ||
| Then pretty soon it's dripping off my nose and pooling. | ||
| I was like, I'm sweating like I've never sweat before. | ||
| I was like, this is fucking disgusting. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty radical. | ||
| There's one when you're standing on one leg and you're extending your other leg backwards and then you're leaning your body in a straight line. | ||
| I think it's like standing stick pose or something like that. | ||
| I forget what it's called. | ||
| But it's dripping off my face and dripping off my arms. | ||
| But it's so gross because then the whole mat's so wet and then you're like slipping and sliding and you're just like, oh man. | ||
| It's a little gross, but the benefits are tangible. | ||
| You really develop a lot of strength and flexibility and stability of your joints. | ||
| It's really good for your knees. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if I saw that it helped performance, I'd get on board. | ||
| Because I'd be like, oh yeah, you're gross for an hour. | ||
| You take a shower or whatever. | ||
| If it's worth it, then I'm into it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It might be what I'm lacking in my stretching. | ||
| I stretch to, like, a point where I'm like, this is comfy and it's keeping me fine, but I hardly ever, like, push my stretching, you know? | ||
| It's painful. | ||
| I did it today for 45 minutes. | ||
| Oh, yeah, jeez. | ||
| Yeah, I do my workout, and then I did 45 minutes of stretching. | ||
| I want to see the splits. | ||
| I'm like, that's awesome. | ||
| You can stop me doing that. | ||
| Well, yeah, but that's only when you're 29. No, the bald one was not me 29. Well, yeah, yeah, I know. | ||
| That was like two years ago. | ||
| Yeah, I can do it right now. | ||
| Classic. | ||
| It's just a thing where you just keep doing it. | ||
| As long as you keep doing it, you maintain flexibility. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that's me like a week ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You just got to keep doing it. | ||
| I don't think I can do that. | ||
| You could. | ||
| You definitely could. | ||
| I certainly could build up to it, obviously. | ||
| You might not be able to do it right now, but you definitely could. | ||
| There's a real benefit to that because the more pliable your tissue is, the more range of motion you have, I think the more you can alleviate injury. | ||
| I think it's got to be one of the reasons why I can still do the kind of workouts that I do in terms of martial arts stuff because... | ||
| I didn't for a while. | ||
| I did, like, jujitsu doesn't require the same kind of flexibility. | ||
| And for a while, I wasn't even doing that. | ||
| I was just lifting weights. | ||
| And then I went from that to kickboxing again, and I noticed I was pretty stiff. | ||
| I was like, there's a lot of, like, my movements weren't as fluid anymore. | ||
| And then I started stretching out again and got it all back. | ||
| So, there's a range of motion that you just don't have if you're not stretching. | ||
| I'm like, I feel like I should start stretching my back and stuff. | ||
| I always have my shoulder stuff. | ||
| Right? | ||
| When people start talking about flexibility, I feel the same way. | ||
| Instantly, it's like, gosh, should I stretch? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's funny because I'm pretty much always sore from something. | ||
| I mean, I go climbing six days a week or something, so I'm always a little achy or sore. | ||
| And especially right now with the stuff I'm working on in Vegas, I'm sort of alternating leg day and arm day. | ||
| Basically like hard climbing, which is more in your arms, and then sort of adventures like what I was talking about, traversing all the mountains. | ||
| That's like more in your legs because ultimately you're just going up and over all these mountains. | ||
| And so on any given day, I'm always kind of like, oh, my legs, my back, my feet, whatever. | ||
| That's why I'm surprised that you've never fucked around with CBD. It's really good for inflammation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's really good for sore muscles. | ||
| There's a bunch of topical stuff that... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I know what you're saying. | ||
| It's good to be skeptical like that, but it really is good for inflammation. | ||
| Some people, they find it good for a lot of different things, like psychological things. | ||
| I'm so untroubled by that stuff that I'm just like, whatever. | ||
| You're so mellow. | ||
| When you were talking about climbing, free soloing the face of a fucking mountain, it's mostly mellow. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| I know, but that's... | ||
| Well, if it wasn't mellow, you wouldn't want to do it. | ||
| Your state of mellowness in the face of insurmountable, impossible heights. | ||
| Dude, so funny random thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| Yeah, it was one of those weird things because, you know, I've literally spent years with people doing interviews being like, what's the secret? | ||
| What's the thing? | ||
| Like, how do you do this, you know, totally insane seeming thing? | ||
| I'm like, maybe I'll just sleep really well and then I'm really relaxed as a result. | ||
| You know, it's like, it's kind of interesting. | ||
| It is interesting. | ||
| It's like you're born for it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, I mean, yeah, possibly. | ||
| Or you never know Chicken and the Egg because maybe it goes the other way. | ||
| Maybe because I'm in such high anxiety situations all the time. | ||
| But I don't think so because it subjectively feels very chill. | ||
| Everything I'm doing feels relaxed. | ||
| When you go back, what age did you start climbing? | ||
| 10. So you probably don't remember before 10. No, I literally don't. | ||
| And before that, I mean, I still love climbing on things. | ||
| You know, I was like climbing the school buildings and trees and all that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, totally, because you're just so accustomed. | ||
| Anything you've done for 25 years is going to feel pretty relaxed when you do it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you've sort of evolved. | ||
| That's an interesting way to look at it. | ||
| It is kind of true. | ||
| I mean, I have been... | ||
| 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. | ||
| It really does completely make sense. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a pretty... | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No idea where I am, full mountainside. | ||
| I keep falling down. | ||
| You were falling? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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? | ||
| It's just easy living in the desert. | ||
| You're like, it'll be fine. | ||
| It'll be fine. | ||
| And then you're like, no, it was not fine. | ||
| It was totally crunk. | ||
| That's pretty crazy. | ||
| And that does speak to what we're saying. | ||
| Like, if you're doing that kind of shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that's just like a normal day, you know? | ||
| Like, that's not even like the crazy, like, oh, I thought I was going to die. | ||
| I was just like, I was just deeply uncomfortable and like sort of on edge for, you know, a while. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When I got home, my wife was like, this is the most worked I've ever seen you. | ||
| Like, it was totally like a wet dog that's been beaten too hard, you know? | ||
| But I was like, I need a hot shower. | ||
| I need like towels. | ||
| I need hot soup. | ||
| I need you to get the tweezers out and do some work. | ||
| But you probably felt amazing once you were back home, right? | ||
| And you did have a hot shower, except for your hands. | ||
| I think I was kind of worked for, I think I just lay down the rest of the day basically. | ||
| I was like, oh, what have I done? | ||
| But didn't you feel happy that you were home? | ||
| Well, yeah, no, totally. | ||
| That's the whole thing with all these types of climate experiences is then you're just so glad. | ||
| I mean, because we live in just like normal little suburban house, you know, but you're like, there's a bathroom with hot water. | ||
| It's so great. | ||
| I was like, yeah, it doesn't take much to feel very comfortable. | ||
| Do people in your neighborhood recognize you? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, wow, that is classic. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty funny. | ||
| Actually, one of them just had to move into a home, which is kind of sad. | ||
| Oh, that sucks. | ||
| Yeah, she had like a stroke or something. | ||
| That sucks. | ||
| Death comes for all of us. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| The climbing community in Vegas, is it a pretty robust community? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So it's kind of a, that's the weird thing about Vegas. | ||
| You wouldn't realize it, but it is very small in terms of the outside area, like a small town-ish area. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, what do you mean? | ||
| How many people live there? | ||
| Like two million people live in Vegas. | ||
| In Vegas? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| But you're in the outskirts, right? | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| I live in suburbia, but it's like, no, I mean, it's all just Vegas. | ||
| Oh, it is? | ||
| I mean, almost all the climbers live on the west side because that's where the rock is. | ||
| And that's where like Red Rock and all the cool limestone is. | ||
| And so most of the climbers live on one side of town. | ||
| But still, I mean, it's just suburbia. | ||
| You know, it's like, yeah, I think it's two million people living in the basin. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| It's a pretty big town. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think of Austin as being pretty small and Austin is basically 2 million people too. | ||
| Austin is a million in the city and then a million in the outside areas. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| I wonder... | ||
| Yeah, I just wonder how it feels like... | ||
| I mean, the other thing about Vegas is there's literally nothing else around for hundreds of miles. | ||
| So it's like the people that live in Vegas are the only people around. | ||
| Whereas there are... | ||
| How far away is San Antonio and stuff? | ||
| I forget. | ||
| An hour-ish. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| So that's kind of the thing is that... | ||
| 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? | ||
| It blends. | ||
| LA, there's no line between LA and Orange County and Orange County and San Diego. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, exactly. | |
| It's all just mass. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Massive human beings. | ||
| It's sprawled into like a mega city that you're just like, oh, it's just too much. | ||
| It's so, so too, I didn't realize how much it was too much until I came here. | ||
|
unidentified
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Dude. | |
| Or like your old studio in the hills or what's it called? | ||
| In the valley, whatever, that was like north. | ||
| I mean, that's like totally, you know, you're like, it's LA, but it's actually like an hour drive away in crazy traffic with millions more people. | ||
| And you're like, where the fuck is it? | ||
| There's no end. | ||
| Dude, actually, fun story. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Did you get nervous though? | ||
| No, I was like, basically I was like, if he feels safe, I feel safe. | ||
| I was like, you do whatever you want. | ||
| It's like, you take me. | ||
| I forget where he said he was from, but it was like Indian subcontinent. | ||
| And he just went. | ||
| Old school. | ||
| Like, dude. | ||
| And fully like, Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like, driving on the sidewalk type. | ||
| Like, anything goes. | ||
| Like, I was thinking of it recently because, you know, I was just on this trip to the jungle. | ||
| And the driving in Georgetown, like, the capital of Guyana, it really felt like that, where it's kind of fish in the sea. | ||
| Everyone's kind of doing their thing. | ||
| Like, all the stoplights are out, so people just kind of, like, figure their way through the intersections. | ||
| Nobody hits each other, but it all feels kind of weird. | ||
| You know, and I was remembering, yeah, driving from your studio in full, like... | ||
| Action movie, like, totally insane drive. | ||
| The craziest I've ever driven in is... | ||
| I wasn't driving, but I was being driven. | ||
| It was in Mexico City, where they don't give a fuck about traffic lights. | ||
| It doesn't mean a goddamn thing. | ||
| People are running red lights left and right, and I was like... | ||
| Dude, is this normal? | ||
| He's like, my friend, this is Mexico City. | ||
| Yeah, exactly, exactly. | ||
| Anything goes. | ||
| Anything goes. | ||
| Just like, the intersections were just, at rush hour, we had done the UFC weigh-ins, and then we were headed back to the hotel. | ||
| It was essentially rush hour. | ||
| And the intersections were fully jammed up 100% of the time. | ||
| People were just trying to make their way through it. | ||
| No, it's like two schools of fish going through each other. | ||
| That's the thing, it's just full, like nobody hits. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| No, it wasn't? | ||
| No, it wasn't efficient at all. | ||
| Sometimes it is. | ||
| Sometimes it's amazing how everything just kind of like swarms through and it all kind of works and you're like, it's a miracle. | ||
| Maybe in some places, the place I was at in Mexico City, that was not the case. | ||
| It was also weird too because the elevation was very high. | ||
| I think it's like 7,000 feet above sea level. | ||
| But the pollution was fucking insane. | ||
| Like we were flying into it. | ||
| It was like there was a fire. | ||
| I put it on my Instagram because it was so nasty. | ||
| I was like, this is great. | ||
| And I had a headache the entire time I was there. | ||
| And I was like, do I have a headache because of pollution? | ||
| Or altitude. | ||
| Or altitude. | ||
| Like, I didn't know. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| I've never flown in Mexico City. | ||
| I have heard that it's pretty insane, though. | ||
| Pretty intense. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Dude, presumably they go early for that kind of thing and spend some time getting used to it. | ||
| I'm glad that you said that. | ||
| One guy did and he won and one guy didn't and he lost. | ||
| And the guy who lost is known for having spectacular cardio. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And he wound up fucking up. | ||
| But did he lose because he just got punched in the face too hard? | ||
| No, he got tired and he never gets tired. | ||
| He got there two weeks before or the other guy was there months before. | ||
| Really? | ||
| But two weeks you think would still be enough to sort of traumatize? | ||
| No, they say two weeks is that you're better off like two days than two weeks. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, your body doesn't really acclimate. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, you still will have been on your own program. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because, you know, there's two schools of thought when it comes to high altitude training. | ||
| Some, when it comes to fighting at least. | ||
| The current school thought is you should train at low altitude but sleep at high altitude. | ||
| They used to think you should train at high altitude because we train at high – but now they think, no, because your workload is not as great. | ||
| Yeah, you can't work your muscles as hard. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, but Vegas, though, is like 2,000 feet or like 1,500 or something. | ||
| But it's not about the requirement of Vegas. | ||
| It's about having higher red blood cell count, so you have, in general, greater cardio. | ||
| Oh, is that true, though? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it is true. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why a lot of people, like, big-time teams come out of, like, Denver has a really good big-time team. | ||
| There's a good team elevation, and Trevor Whitman's team is up there, too. | ||
| And Jackson Winklejohn, which is in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is, I think, 5,000 feet. | ||
| It's quite a few camps where they work at a higher altitude and they seem to be pretty successful. | ||
| I'll be doing that this week because I'm supposed to be climbing Mount Whitney this week, which is like 14.5. | ||
| It's like the highest peak in the U.S. So I'll sleep in the van at the highest point I can around Vegas, which is like 8,400 feet. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| It's like at least something. | ||
| Basically sleep at altitude a couple nights to acclimatize a little bit so when you go mountain climbing you don't feel quite as bad. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's fine for climbing, but I think for a heavy endurance sport, I think it won't either really be acclimated. | ||
| Well, also, if I was trying to set a record in climbing, then I'd have to go live at 10-12,000 feet, exactly what you're describing. | ||
| But if I'm just trying to get by, then yeah, you can just spend a night or two at 8 and hope that you feel good enough. | ||
| When you set out to do your podcast, did you have a format in mind? | ||
| Did you see yourself doing it for a long period of time? | ||
| How long did you think about it before you got into it? | ||
| So my podcast is with this guy, Fitz Cahal, from Duck Tape Then Beer, who does this podcast called The Dirtbag Diaries. | ||
| And so he's a professional. | ||
| He's done this a long time. | ||
| So he brought all the technical expertise and sent me the equipment and everything, sent me the mic. | ||
| That's convenient. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So yours is more produced. | ||
| Yeah, it's much more produced. | ||
| And that's the intention. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then once you've done that, do you anticipate continuing it for years? | ||
| No, the idea was just to do this one-off thing, but I'm sure as you know, you just never know where it's going to go. | ||
| Are you enjoying it? | ||
| Yeah, I've really been enjoying talking to the guests because so many of them are personal heroes of mine. | ||
| Like, people I've looked up to my whole life are like, oh. | ||
| And then some of the stories, like I was telling you, the woman, Joanna Riosti, the first ascensionist in Vegas. | ||
| Like, hearing her stories, I was like, this is crazy. | ||
| So I find it, like, really personally inspiring. | ||
| You know, like, it excites me to go out and climb other things just because I'm like, wow, like, I can't believe she was doing that in the 70s. | ||
| Like, it's so wild, you know? | ||
| Like, it keeps me excited about it. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what is it called again? | ||
| Tell everybody. | ||
| Climbing Gold. | ||
| Climbing Gold. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's available everywhere? | ||
| Everywhere. | ||
| Spotify, Apple, wherever you do podcasts. | ||
| Well, listen, man. | ||
| Thanks for being on here again. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| It's always fun to talk to you and sit down with you. | ||
| We just did three hours, believe it or not. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, it's already four o'clock. | ||
| Is it really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| It's always the experience. | ||
| It's the Joe Rogan experience. | ||
| You never know where it's going to take you. | ||
| Well, it's always fun talking to you, my friend. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Great to see you. | ||
| I want to see the splits now. | ||
| Yes, okay. | ||
| I'll show you right now. | ||
| Bye, everybody. |
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