this is Joo podcast number 420 with Eko Charles and me Joo willing good evening Eko good evening I chocked both my hands and took a few breaths I didn't think at all about my position or how I felt I just carried forward on autopilot left hand crimped another side pull left foot jammed into a lower crack somewhat sideways right foot came up high by my waist and towed into a tiny scoop the tension between my left hand right foot created stability and I raised my right hand up to a very small but down pulling crimp my left hand palmed down on the wall below me and I raised my left foot extra high onto a very sloping shelf as soon as the foot was placed I drove down with it and stood up the Thum thumber cling with my left thumb the hold was an upside down Ripple maybe an inch long and a few millimeters wide so small that it would never qualify as a handhold except for the fact that most of my weight was on my feet I placed my hand perfectly my thumb going into the more sloping part in order to leave the better inch of space for my index and middle fingers to curl over my right foot sneaked in and matched next to my left and my left foot kicked out leftward to a slippery black knob the whole route came down to the next four moves the hardest of the whole sequence my right hand came into my left and I removed my index and middle fingers which had been stuck to the wall only by the tension between my right big toe and my left thumb my right thumb took the fingers place on the good part of the Ripple and my left hand shot out left to grab the sloping loaf I squeezed it for all I was worth and moved my right hand back to the initial down pulling crimp I was in an iron cross fully spanned between the two holds right foot through to the sloping dish hips open left foot across to a tiny chip chalk my right hand break it into the top of the loaf now I was set up for the karate kick though I spent no time thinking about it my right foot came into the crucial small Edge perfectly placed to provide counter pressure when I kicked my left foot across I subtly switched the position of my left hand making it feel slightly more secure as I squeezed my two hands together and crushed the loaf as if on autopilot my left foot shot out perfectly perpendicular to my body full extension 3 feet to the left it hit the far wall of the corner exactly where it needed to be what used to feel like a desperate falling kick now felt like an easy foot placement my feet felt welded to the wall months of stretching paid off as I brought my left hand to the crack next to my foot my right hand switched to palming downward and I felt secure balanced between my left foot and my right palm I reached my left hand up to a big Edge and I was done I was through the boulder problem I felt the flood of elation or maybe just relief I was suddenly aware of the World Around Me Again including the cameras fixed to the wall on either side of me I said something like oh yeah into the camera in front of me I started laughing I romped up the final few easy moves to faint to the faint ledge above I stood on the ledge for a minute breathing hard exultant I knew that somewhere in the meadow 2300 feet below Mikey was watching me through the long shot I pumped my fists over my head facing the meadow wondering whether they saw me for once I was somewhat glad that I had an audience I felt like a hero I still had 10 pitches up to 512b above me but I felt like I'd cleared the final hurdle now it was just cruising to the finish line and that right there is an excerpt from a book called alone on the wall written by Alex Honnold with David Roberts Alex Honnold is a rock climber and a legend in the climbing World who's accomplished amazing feat of climbing free solo climbing which is climbing with no ropes and no protection of any kind and a lot of this by himself started with no Fanfare in 2007 2007 as a young climber he free soloed and again that's that's no ropes no protection he free soloed astroman and rostrom and yose which are two legendary climbs and then a year later in 2008 he was the first person to free solo moonlight bustus moonlight buttress in Zion National Park and he did that on April Fool's Day and when it word got out that he had done this some people thought that that it was a joke that it was just a April Fool's joke because who would climb that without a rope well he would and he did and he didn't stop there also in 2008 he free soloed the regular Northwest Face of half doome which is 2,000 feet of rock straight up out of Yus Valley he was the first person to do that as well and then he started getting a little bit more mainstream attention he was featured in a movie called alone on the wall which I saw when it came out some little rock climbing Festival here in San Diego and it was it parts of it are hard to watch if you've been up at altitude before but he continued to climb continue to train continue to learn and continue to accomplish Feats in rock climbing eventually on June 3rd 2017 he made the first free solo asent of the free ride route up yose's lcap which is 3,000 ft almost 3,000 ft of vertical Granite jolting straight up out of the valley and that Pursuit was captured in the Oscar award-winning movie called free solo by Jimmy chin and a few days later he and another renowned climber Tommy calwell Caldwell uh broke the speed record up the nose of elcap completing in an hour 1 hour 58 minutes and 7 Seconds the first people to do it under two hours and he still hasn't stopped he continues to push the envelope and rock and now Alpine climbing he has a podcast called climbing gold he has a charity organ ganization a master class the hanold foundation which helps people around the world that need access to solar energy and incredible things being done all the time by this individual and it's an honor to have Alex here with us tonight to talk about his experiences and Lessons Learned Alex thanks for joining us man awesome to meet you thanks for having me that's the biggest intro I've ever heard I'm like I'm honored uh I when we started talking about having you on and Ekko was not too familiar with rock climbing and I just broke out the section of you doing the boulder problem uh in on YouTube and he was like oh my God what is going on I said yeah this is this is the next level of it's the next level of human achievement and I've been whenever people ask me about this I think that that run up uh free riter that you did I I can't think of a of a bigger sort of physical human achievement for a human being to do I don't know I I can't think of one if I do I'll I'll let the world know but that was just an incredible thing to see no I appreciate it um so I I hadn't heard that excerpt well I mean obviously I wrote that excerpt at but ien about it then hearing I was like I'm kind of gripped so exting it's all that like that's the exact Crux bet was like I remember every move I like oh it gives me little tingles exciting how how many times did you do that move before you did it that time so many I mean I practiced a lot like a hundred like a thousand yeah uh probably like a hundred or more I mean I think I had a day where I repelled down from the summit and then did it 10 times in a row um and then keep repelling you know a couple days like that mhm but yeah I've done it a lot and more importantly i' done every variation of it where I fail you know I tried every different permutation of like these feet but those don't work and then different feet and those don't work and then different hands and you know every version of it so I failed on like every other version and then practiced the the correct way a bunch of times as well the one that finally worked yeah well I mean there you know you could make other ways work but you want to find the best way yeah you do it's weird too when you cuz I saw the movie in the theater and you still don't get the sense I mean it gives you a good sense and but you just can't duplicate what 2,000 or 3,000 feet looks like in a theater you can't maybe I don't know I didn't see an IMax IMax it uh I mean yeah it's not the same as being there but it was very impressive yeah I mean seeing eity in IMAX I was like this is awesome yeah I I didn't see it an IMAX but man it you you can't just capture like the ground is so far away that it's like the first time I went parachuting when the when the ramp of the of the aircraft goes down the ground is so far away that it's not it's almost you don't get that sense of height almost cuz it's so far away and I kind of got that feeling when I was watching uh free solo in the theater I was like man and believe me like my my Palms are sweating like everybody else but I was sort of like I know I've been I've been there I know what that thing looks like I've walked around up there and I you can't quite transmit it in any other media other than being there yeah no I agree I think that even for a lot of people who come to you for the first time it's hard to appreciate the sense of scale because they can stand in elcap meow and look up at elcap but without really understanding the scale of it they're just like oh that's a big piece of rock and then they see that you know if you use binoculars or telescope you can point out climbers up high and they're like oh my God that little tiny tiny Speck of color is a person up there they're like that's crazy it is yeah yeah cuz when you're up on the top l cap you know the people are like little ants down below like I mean like dots like tons of little dots down there it's really big yeah Yos is just glorious it's a glorious glorious place and what's crazy too is as crowded as it gets in like I would always go camping with my family up there and it's be so crowded right but even when it's crowded it's no it's not that big of a deal like there's a big crowd there and then you take four minutes of walking out a quart mile off off the road and all of a sudden you're like we're alone in the wilderness we can die out here yeah it's it's just an incredible Place hopefully we don't um hype too many people any more people to go there no I I think we should actually I'm I'm strongly into the crowds there because I basically I think that nobody cares about nature or protecting nature unless they have positive nature experiences and I think eity is such a great accessible place for people to be all inspired you know it's like and the thing is even when it is crowded you can walk for 10 15 20 minutes and you can see no one cuz e is a huge Park and when we about it being crowded we mean the main loop on the main road in the very center but the whole rest of the park is totally empty like I've done some very long day hikes there like every couple years I'll get a little be in my Bonnet to go out for an adventure and do like a 50 mile like solo Day hike sort of thing like big circuits around the park and you can do some of those big loops and see like four people the whole day yeah you're kind of like everyone complains about crowding you're like if you get off the beaten path it's very empty it's like Wilderness as soon as my kids were old enough we started going a little bit more outside and we we have a hike that we do that would we would not see anybody maybe we'd see one other person we'd go out hike out for the day spend the night up on the mountain it's kind of the opposite side of half doome so you're kind of looking at half doome it's that area but there we'd see no one out there and this is to be in the middle of the summertime and so yeah it's big enough and challenging enough on some of those hi hikes out of there you can be switchbacks for two hours of switchbacks uh but yeah just amazing Place incredible um so look your your life has been very well documented in the movie if you guys haven't seen this movie just go see the movie you're born and raised in Sacramento you dropped out of college when you were not you went to Berkeley for what a year yeah engineering at Berkeley for for long enough to know that I shouldn't go to college that's funny I was in the Navy and the Navy sent me to college and when I got back to you know CU I was in the SEAL Teams and I go to college for 3 years and when I got back you know guys would be like oh you know what what they teach you there there and I was like it taught me never ever ever ever get out of the SEAL Teams ever cuz the SEAL Teams is just such a fun job and then you see what the rest of the world is like and you're like no I don't want to do that could take me back to where where did they send you to college the University of San Diego oh yeah okay so you were still at the same same place we still here in San Diego but you know sitting in a classroom is was not conducive especially going from a job where you're outside I mean I always joke like I I ain't put on a shirt for work you know what I mean I was like a 35y old man making $80,000 a year and I wouldn't wear a shirt like unless I really had to most of the time just walking around you know you're hanging out prepping stuff and getting gear ready it's just a great job it's outside you're doing fun stuff shoot machine guns jumping out of airplanes blowing things up like what else would you want to do well for me what else would I want to do um so you dropped out of college and you just went full van life climber mode yeah basically I mean that that obviously losses over the the years of sort of existential like you know especially because when I started just climbing full-time being a professional climber was much less of a thing the climbing industry is way smaller there were way fewer gyms there were way fewer climbers it was less obvious that you could ever make a living as a climber so I sort of thought I was just going to go climbing for a few years and see what happened and I thought that maybe I'd become Mountain guide or get into you know get into the industry in some way or like do something Outdoors um but then it sort of eventually translated into into being a professional climber but part of that's because the industry grew up sort of with me I was going to say you I'd say you got into the industry at at this juncture yeah yeah no for sure for now I'm firmly entrenched you know now I'm establishment but but when I dropped out of college there just wasn't that much of an IND I mean there was you know there were the same outdoor manufacturers and things like that but there's just way fewer people rock climbing it was just less of a less of a thing yeah did you do contests remember that rock climbing contest thing that was going on for a bit I mean which one just the when it was be televised on ESPN or something and it would be speed races it was more like an extreme sport type thing yeah did you do that um not really so I did youth competitions like you know same as like little league or soccer stuff or whatever um and I was I was fine you know I I did well on the regional stuff I got second in Nationals once but that's only because the other really good kids had already aged out and gone on to adult competitions and was kind of one of those things where I was like I was I was good but I was never the best and I wasn't wasn't dominating by any means but um you know I was I was fine and then yeah now basically was never good enough to do the adult comps or go on to because Europe has a really wellestablished uh World Cup competition scene and so there have always been a lot of comps in Europe but less so in the US and either way I just never quite had the talent for it I was like and you talk about like in the book and basically you started free soloing when you were a kid just like cuz you didn't really want to talk to the other kids or you're too shy to talk to the other kids and say hey can I link up with you guys yeah especially once I started traveling a little bit like living out of the van and going to destinations um so like one of the places I started climb was in Joshua Tree outside of LA and um and at the time like my then high school girlfriend was going to school in Southern California so it was kind of like oh you go to Southern California you go to Joshua Tree Joshua tree is also the sort of a birthplace of climbing in California it's like has a a lot of climbing culture a lot of climbing history there and so you know it's nice to sort of test yourself against these historic roots from the 60s and 70s and ' 80s and so you know I wanted to go to a destination like Joshua Tree but then you get there and you don't know anybody and you know this is kind of like pre- cell phones pre-social pre like there's no easy way to connect with strangers plus I was super shy and kind of a kind of a loser and kind of a weird dude so it's a lot easier just to cruise around and you know climb things by yourself than to like walk around the campground talking to strangers you know that's a weird thing I I I have a kids I've written a bunch of kids books and I have a kids podcast and I I'll like take questions from kids and one of the questions I'll get you know it's like oh I basically like hey I don't kids don't like me and that kind of thing and and one of the things that I kind of say back to kids that are in that position is like um being alone is okay like it's it's okay to be alone and you can it doesn't mean that you're bad it just means that you haven't found any W in that going to get along with yet yeah I'm just so hung up on the irony of you writing kids books when you're surrounded by knives on this table like this I feel like we're in like a CIA offsite sort of thing like this black box with knives everywhere you're like yeah I write kids books for fun holy [ __ ] well yeah the the the whole knife thing is it just kind of got out of control started with one fake knife from Echo Charles and then I tried to one up him and then we just ended up with this we we actually did did at one point I brought a pistol and then Eko was like well I don't know if that might be a bit bit much or whatever so I guess we backed to we called uh a truce an arms truce it's only bladed weapon only edged weapons yeah after the axe too that was like okay we got to hit the braks little I brought an axe too no someone sent an axe I think okay maybe you brought it yeah cuz once we posted like a picture of like a couple knives on the table then people were like I want my knife on the table yeah totally totally it's like books and knives it's really interesting contrast yeah I guess I guess it is sort of Representative of my life in a way books and knives that's kind of I like I I went to colge when I when I did go to college when the Navy did send me to college I was an English major oh yeah and and why why does the Navy want an English major blowing things up well believe it or not when you're in a leadership position in the military you have to write a lot and you have to read a lot so you get directives that come down and you have to be able to read those almost like a lawyer reads a document but they didn't let you take any creative writing classes they're like don't AR you making anything up just doing non-stop reports you're like adding little flourishes like CU a very dramatic experience we had um I could turn my after actions report into romance novel uh you have to write all the time you have to write Awards you have to write evaluations of your troops and so I had been an officer and so I was like oh I need to be good at this and so that I just majored in English and of course everyone thinks how the you know what are you going to do what what are you going to do after yeah what are you going to do with your English what you do with your English degree you idiot I was like well I don't know I'm going to eventually wrote a bunch of books including kids books uh so very strange I know it is a little strange my mom was an English teacher too so I don't know what that has to do with anything my mom was an English teacher my dad was a history teacher and and you like books that's not that big of a surprise the weird thing is bro I I did not read growing up like I did not but you knew how to read I knew how to read but I wasn't a reader you know kids now I don't know how much of a reader you were growing up but some kids yeah some people just read they read like crazy and I didn't I was like outside throwing rocks at like puddles you know just banging sticks together like a like a crom magnet man that was kind of that was kind of so my wife and I have been talking about this kind of stuff a lot cuz we now have an almost two-year-old and we're about to have our second child and so we're talking about parent you know I feel like parenting is just starting now that our daughter's getting old enough that you can actually parent a tiny bit she's less of a blob and more of a real person that does stuff but it's interesting the you know I mean what you're describing it's like how much is nature versus nurture and I feel like there's some Basics though where it's like obviously you could read you know your parents if you're being raised by a professors basically like you learn how to and I think I think about that with climbing with my daughter where even if she's not into climbing and she doesn't become a climber that's fine but she's for sure going to know the basics she's going to know how to repel she's going to feel comfortable doing all the things and whether she chooses to or not that's up to her but so I I've been through this before um I I'm really Jiu-Jitsu as you can see walked around my gym like this Jiu-Jitsu has been a huge part of my life and when my kids were born and then being raised by me I wanted them to be into Jiu-Jitsu I wanted them to love Jiu-Jitsu as much as I did I wanted them to get the gifts of Jiu-Jitsu that I got and probably the same way you feel like you want your daughter to be able to have the same thing that you got out of climbing this amazing no that's the thing I don't know if I want her it's not that I want her to have I mean it'd be great if she does but I just feel like there's a minimum threshold of confidence that has to come because that's part of being in the family but whether she chooses to to be into it or not that's up to her you know if she's more into reading that's fine if she's into music like great I think the goal of parenting I mean I don't know yet you've raised four kids but you tell me but but you know is to help your child find the thing that they love doing but then there's certain things that part of being in the family is that she's going to be comfortable hiking outside she going to be able to repel off cliffs like that's just I mean you can't do family activities if you don't know how to repel yep that's you're you're walking a thin line my my friend cuz you're like oh they could I'll support whatever they want to do as long as they're repelling off of cliffs no but you can you can be taking your kid to soccer every weekend but then you know when you go on family outings you're still doing family stuff yeah in in the same way I suspect your family had a minimum requirement of like you must be able to read and do well in school or do whatever you know it's like you've got to be minimum competence and then beyond that you can do whatever you want like blow things up it sounds like you've got it dialed because what I did was too much jiujitsu pushed it too hard on them and they went through a phase thank God they're all like full-on indu jitu now but they W they except for my my son went didn't go he wasn't allowed to go through a phase of no Jiu-Jitsu my daughters went through a phase of no Jiu-Jitsu my son was like no this is what we're doing the minimum family standard for the boy was like very high six days a week of Jiu-Jitsu that seems like a lot maybe it is it's too much and and really the key thing and this is if there's any ADV and I used to look we've been doing this podcast for I think seven years seven eight years and in the beginning I wouldn't like give parenting advice because my kids were what 13 15 whatever nine I was like the jury's not out yet I might not know in a whole what I'm doing uh I feel a lot more comfortable now uh putting this out and and giving advice around raising kids uh the main thing is and this total Common Sense unless you're an idiot parent like I was is make things fun if you make it fun if you they have fun then everything is they just want to do it more and then they get better at it and then when they're better at it they like doing it more because they are successful at it it just becomes it's just a better way to roll you don't want to be like like I was we would spend five hours on Saturdays and Sundays here at this Gym training no slightly psycho they slightly psycho slightly psycho I'm like I love climbing and I still don't think I'm going to push push anybody quite that hard yeah and and that's the cool thing is eventually you know the kids kind of will they're watching you all the time and they'll see the joy that it brings you and they'll see what you've gotten out of it and how much you enjoy it and they'll be like oh I want to try that too and as long as you're not like you need to do that again you need to run that route again totally Don't Go full psycho like I did I don't recommend it it's a really hard balance too because with your kids you let's face it if I was like okay you can you can plot out the perfect life for your kid you could probably do a you know a normal person could go okay here's what you should do and here's how you be successful and happy in life according to what I think happiness is you could probably plot that out pretty well probably anyone could but they're people and they're they're yeah they have their own their own thing that's what I I I always say even as a two-year-old we're starting to see that with our daughter which she's kind of a fierce independent woman you're like you follow your heart do you do what you want to do yeah going to be the way I explain it to adults now is they're going to be who they are not who you want them to be the more you just open up your mind to that is the the easier it's going to go actually I had this idea that I think could be a good book I'll just give it to you because you obviously write books you can have it but um but it's a concept I've I've invented I think that that I'm calling Downstream parenting where you just do everything with the current you know you just go with the current like everything that's like chill you know within grounds of sort of safety and and you know some basic constraints but every time I find myself trying to stop my daughter from doing something or wanting her to do a certain thing I'm like is it because I want her to do that thing or is it because she actually needs to do that thing you know I'm sort of like you know what if like if she wants to do something and that's not dangerous and it's not going to like cause harm to the property or whatever then like let her do the thing it's Downstream just go with the current and part of that I think is because she's young enough that you can't reason with her anyway and like teach her things in exactly so I'm kind of like you know why fight it all the time just like let it happen let it happen go with current and the minimum standard that you talked about that that can be used as well especially it's really important just like in leadership it's really important to explain to people why you need to do something so if you've got your daughter and you're like hey you need to know how to do this stuff oh well I why do I need to be able to you know uh repel repel off a cliff why do I need to be able to do that and just well there's a couple reasons number one you don't know what kind of situation you're going to be and number two like the confidence that'll bring you number three the opportunities that will this will give you and the that you'll have to so you just have to have some reasonable things number three the odds are she's going to have to rescue her dad at some point gets into something weird and she's got to go run back to the garage and get a rope and sort him out yeah and then and then I was recently having a conversation where you know what if you can't what if you don't have a good why for instance like clean your room why why do I need to clean my room and you say well and there's some legitimate reasons like well if you need to find something you'll be able to find it quicker if your room is clean or if the there's a fire in the house and the the firemen show up and they're tripping and falling over your toys that could make it really hard for them and and those are both those are a little bit of a stretch and so in our case it's you don't want to make habitat for the cockrides you get cockes in kind of like you just don't want like creepy crawlies and all your stuff so so you can find legitimate reasons and then occasionally you find something where you don't have a legitimate reason yeah but actually so I'm I personally basically don't do anything like so I leave like I'm in my pajamas right now because I'm like I'm staying indoors today I just stay in my comfy clothes all day and so basically at my house I have my pile next to my bed of my outdoor clothes which are really really dirty and then my indoor clothes which are my pajamas and I just alternate you know throughout the day I go for my pajamas to my outdoor Clos my pajamas again and my wife is just giving up fighting on it it's just I have my two piles next to the bed that's all I use and I use the same for like a month or two and it's totally fine and I'm sort of like I suspect that our children will get away with sort of the same routines cuz like I've I've already done away with like like my family was to like you take out the trash every day on trash day like even if it's not totally full and I'm like well that seems stupid because it's not full and so now at our house you know some of the trash cans get emptied like once every six or eight weeks or something because they never fill and you're like that's fine I'm like you know my life is easier for it well you're already in the place where I was going which is yeah Downstream this what I'm saying it's all downam if you can't give your kid a legitimate reason why to do something yeah then don't do it then then what's then ask yourself go look in the mirror and like wait is this just my ego that wants the room to be clean for control sake like you're just telling them to do a thing because you want them to do the thing you're like that's douchy cuz you wouldn't want somebody else to doing that to you yeah yeah it's like it's like the Golden Rule the 2-year-old you know it's like don't tell her to do something that I don't want to do yeah yeah uh as you're pursuing rock climbing you drop out of college it's not really a there's no real future in it at the time how are you explaining that to people how you explain that to your parents how you how how you talking to explaining that was it the same thing that you just said like hey I'm going to do this for a few years and I'll figure something else out kind of I mean when I initially dropped out of college I wasn't dropping out of college I was just taking a semester off um and actually at the time I'd qualified for the Youth World Cup so like this competition in in uh I gotten second in National so I qualified for international so I was like oh I'll take a semester off I'll go to Europe and do this competition and then you know and then travel around and climb a little bit and then I just never went back to college I was like turns out traveling and climbing is you know was was more of my thing than than than class when did you realize you were good uh it's Tak I don't know I'm like it's taken a very long time and even then it's like what is good cuz climbing is a really broad broad Sport and so most of my friends and peers who are you know professional climbers are serious climbers are sort of better than me at lots of other things or other aspects of it and so you know I still struggle with that but I mean obviously now I'd accept that I'm much better than average but but still way worse than most of my friends at at many things so you're kind of like well still always working at it did you did you when you were trying to get better when you were trying to improve was it just based on like hey I'm looking at a route I I can't do it right now I'm going to work until I can do this route and you're just doing that over and over again is that yeah that's that's a big part of it and then part of it is reading books climbing history you know old school climbing media like VHS stuff where you're like oh that's cool somebody did this thing you know I mean just basically yeah what you're describing like inspiration of whatever kind leading you to to push yourself until you can do that kind of thing and when you're looking at you go to Joshua Tree and there's a that you try and climb and you can't climb it you fail do you do you go back a month later you go back a month later you go back a month later and finally you're able to pull this thing off yeah that's kind of the idea I mean the thing about climbing is that it's hard to know what failure means because you fall off Roots all the time when you're climbing with a rope this is like normal climbing if you're like bouldering when you have pads or you're climbing with ropes and you know you have protection that catches you that's kind of normal day-to-day like your bread and butter climbing I mean you fall off routinely like that's part of the process and so you only really fail if you give up and you walk away from it and you never come back but falling off is is fine that's like that's that's normal it's just that you know like you don't characterize that as failing per se you're just sort of like oh I'm still training I'm still practicing I'm still learning on this route and then eventually you do it so I mean the the mindset is always I it's all sort of cliche you know like growth mindset sort of stuff but that's but I think that's sort of an intrical you know that's sort of foundational to climbing is that you're always like anytime you fall off something you're like oh that's fine I'm like practicing I'm learning I'm refining the moves I'm figuring it all out and eventually I'm going to do it and you could would you were younger could you track your growth though you're like oh four months ago I couldn't do this route and now I can I'm better now yeah yeah I mean it's always so much more fun in a sport when you're at the the beginning of the growth curve you know it's like you improve really quickly and yeah it's a little more painstaking now did you do did you like exercise specifically did you start start to do fingerboarding in your bedroom or anything like that when you were younger trying to get better um no so actually I mean I grew up climbing before there were fingerboards really I mean some people did but it just wasn't a thing that you could just buy online like you can now um I mean there wasn't even online to buy to buy the things but uh but yeah I mean you know the most elite climbers still use tactics like that but it wasn't normal enough for a Suburban kid growing up in Sacramento to to know about that really but um but I had a pull out bar in my door frame like so through high school I was doing 150 pull-ups before bed every night it's just like this will make me a better climber in sets of like 10 20 30 but um in retrospect it didn't really make me a better climber but but I was able to do one arm pull-ups after that I was kind of like all you do a Sher pull-ups I can attest that I was always really into pull-ups and would do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pull-ups and it did never translate into my climbing I go climb with somebody that actually knew how to climb and you just be a total idiot like your strength it means nothing just like any any sport you know you look at these Sports whatever they are and you think oh that that I could probably do that no there's so much technique behind it it's totally ridiculous and climbing is well I think climbing is just one of those many sports that people look at it and they don't realize how hard it how technical it is yeah how much technique matters how how much subtlety there is in the body position the movement how you place your feet how you adjust your hips like yeah there's a lot to it yeah there's way more to it than it sort of like boxing right boxing you think are just throwing punches but there's so much going on there Jiu-Jitsu you look at you go oh there's a lot going on in it you can see that you don't know what's happening right and rock like oh hold on to that thing okay I I I can as a as a primate I can understand what that means kind of like as a primate I can understand I punch punch in the head and it it makes sense an an Uma plada in Jiu-Jitsu doesn't make sense to a primate it's like one of those things you go this doesn't I I there's something I don't understand what is an Uma PL it's just like like a a move with your body where you're taking the person's arm and you're wrapping your legs around a certain way and moving your hips like it's a very complex move that you would never think of as a primate you wouldn't think of it as how to win a fight and it's the same thing with boxing you look at boxing over they're just swing you go if you have ever boxed against a good boxer someone that was like a Golden Gloves boxer or M much less a pro or an amateur boxer like I've boxed against professional boxers you're an ID I I'm an idiot right I just you're just getting touched like there's nothing you can do about it and yet people watch Boxing go move your head a little bit and punch him in the head you know it's there's so much going on and that's what that's why you know the my early experiences with climbing was like oh I can do a bunch of pull-ups I can do many pull-ups I will climb Rock and it was like the most ridiculous uh pathetic thing I was telling you earlier I was climbing a rock out in in Mission gour with one of my buddies and I was like probably I don't know know maybe 25 ft up something like that and I'm coming over the top like almost done and it was a sloping kind of rock and I am gonna fall like I am so freaking gonna fall and I I used my face and like chin and face to like secure and smear on the Rock and kind of inch my hands up more and I was like dude I am dumb I am really a dumb person or you're Innovative you know the face smear is a is a new kind of technique though though everybody's done things like that when they get desperate enough start wedging their body into things and like oh God yeah yeah actually I ran into somebody at the bassell cap this season we were hiking down from from something and uh he was climbing a sort of notorious off with like a offsize crack where his whole body's wedged in and uh and he just described an experience where he basically gotten bouted and wound up uh clipping off his helmet for protection like leaving his helmet behind wedged in the crack with the Rope slung around it as like well maybe the helmet will catch me if I fall which you're like the helmet's not going to freaking catch you like you're for sure going to die but now I think of that as my sort of gold standard of or you know the sort of low bar of like things are going sideways would you just like leave your helmet behind as as potential protection be like like maybe it'll catch me it's like a freaking little plastic bucket you're like it's for sure going to break you're going to die not going to work out well yeah that's not going to save you scary uh as your like like going Moonlight buttress which again go on if you're listening to this go on YouTube and just go look at Moonlight but and go look at what that freaking thing looks like uh how'd that come AC like what that's what what made that sort of like this will be the first big one well so that I mean it was it was a logical progression in a lot away so um so the first like big solos I did astran and the rostom those had actually been done in the mid1 1980s by this guy Peter Croft who's a famous Canadian climber and total Legend of e and so he'd been a personal hero forever and so there was kind of a road map as to how to do that and those represented the edge of big wall soing at the time really like those were kind of the biggest hardest things but so this thing Moonlight butus is only slightly bigger it's like almost the same size as astran like roughly 1,000 feet tall but significantly harder technically like a harder number on it you know bigger number so it's harder but the style actually is is H very similar it's just one crack feature that splits this but straight up the middle so even though it's harder which means your forearms get more pumped like your muscles get more fatigued but it's a but it's still a similar style like the it still feels secure like if your bones are locked into the crack like you know basically if you have the fitness for it you don't feel like you're going to fall off you know and and that's an important thing when we're talking about free sing is the differentiating between the different styles because if you're climbing a crack it means that your your fingers or your hands or whatever your feet are like wedged into the crack and as long as you don't get too tired there's really not a reason for you to fall off and so and fitness is relatively easy to build as a climber whereas technique you know so but contrasted against like say crack climbing you have like face climbing or like slab climbing with just a bald kind of what you're describing a Mission Gorge where you're just like crawling over the top of some rock and so if you're imagining climbing something that's like a bald smooth blank rock no matter how big your muscles are it's still all about how carefully you position your toes how carefully you balance like how well you move your hips you know like those are the things that you can practice for sure and you can improve that but you just can't train the same way and you never feel safe doing it you never feel secure like no matter how strong you get it's still going to be really freaking scary so anyway Moonlight kind of hit that that sweet spot where I was like this is roughly the same size what I've done just a little bit harder but harder in a way that's secure and and controllable and then that said I'd also just come off several months of climbing in Indian Creek in Utah which is like home to these perfect splitter Sandstone cracks like exactly the same style as what Moonlight is and so I just spent three months there where I'd basically done every hard thing in the desert at the time and was feeling like like a boss on S you know I was like oh I feel good and then you know but actually it was interesting though because I had sort of this nagging elbow injury at the time and had been climbing less than I wanted to be you know I wanted to just be going full bore but I was kind of hurting and so I'd have to like rest a couple days and then I'd go out and do something really hard and but then still be hurting I was like damn it you know it's really frustrating and so it's kind of that good combination of being kind of pent up and like antsy and chomping at the bit but also feeling really fit in a way and I think part of that led to Moonlight where you're like I really want to do something Rad but I'm kind of hurting but I'm really good at the style right now and so then Moonlight was like the obvious thing the obvious thing uh and I'd done it with a rope and a partner uh two years before so I knew I could do it I'd done it first try with with his partner and you know like I knew that it was a beautiful inspiring like perfect route and like yeah right style and everything did you do it a few times before like immediately before yeah so I went there by myself and then I spent two days working on it um and each day I basically climb the whole route twice M so and and Moonlight is also really convenient in that there's a pave tours trail that goes up the back the uh the the Angels Landing Trail which is like one of the most famous trails in the country or in Zion anyway it's a really really cool Trail but that goes up to the top of Moonlight and so it's super easy to work because you just stroll up this path and then repel down the face uh in in the movie alone on the wall a guy says I don't know who it is but he says um the most mind blowing thing in climbing ever when when you CL when you climb that um this is a weird thing well at least from from the from outside the climbing world it's a weird thing so you climb rostrom you climb astroman you climb Moonlight buttress and you tell one of your bu you basically tell your buddy that you climbed it and then he kind of posts it on the the interwebs and that's sort of it like no no one took pictures of you no there's no video of it I eeko and I were talking about it yesterday like what is it about rock climbing like if if I if I posted on the internet today hey everyone just want to let you know I squatted a th000 pounds people would be like I believe it I don't know I don't know if that's hard or not but I think you could but the rest of the community would be like we want video we want to see we want to see what you did we see you know we want to come and check the weights like we want to see the we want to measure the weights to make sure this is true can you squat 1,000 lb can anybody squat 1,000 lb yeah some people can but you know it's say it's does the bar Bend when you SC thous the bar definitely bouns it's [ __ ] up yeah but it's but here you are you're doing you're achieving these things and I it sounded like uh Moonlight buess there were some people that were like oh well you know really like actually people were skeptical not of the clim really but because it was posted on on uh April Fool's Day what you know people were like oh that's a funny fake news story and then and they're like wait is that a real news story like what the [ __ ] but nobody ever was like oh we don't think he did it people don't question it no but I think climbing I mean there are a few things going on I know what you mean and that's starting to change a little bit for climbing as well um where I think if you posted like truly outlandish claims nowadays people would sort of expect video evidence or or something or at least like a GPS track or you know depending on what exactly you were doing but I mean the nature of climbing is that you're normally doing the climbs in remote places without service without people I mean particularly with soing you know by definition you're by yourself so you know I mean you are really are just taking people at their word I mean that's a big part of climbing but part of it is also that if people don't believe you you can just go do it again you know the rock is still there the in the same way that if somebody doesn't believe that you lifted 1,000 pounds you're like oh I can just do it again tomorrow or if not lift 1,000 you could at least lift like 950 or something and be like you know it's close enough that you can imagine and then on a peak day I did what I said I did yeah except for it's well that's a little messed up because close enough on a free solo isn't but what I mean with with close enough is that you know people can see you so on other routes they can see that you could do you know I mean in my case I mean especially now I've done I've done a lot of soling and and I think maybe I I counted this I have a list on my phone actually of of things that I've done that are sort of first like what you're describing with u you know Moonlight and half doome and things like that and so I've done something like 35 roots that were like firsts or things that had been done before and of those I filmed on roughly a third of them or like went back and took photos on them later or or like in the case of elcap with the film fre solo you know we actually it's a full-on documentary film where they shot the real thing but so you know there's maybe a third of the things I've done that there's evidence for and then there are the other two-thirds that there's no evidence but you know occasionally somebody would see you or you occasionally you pass people on the route like as you're climbing you just climb over other people and they just left being like [ __ ] like what a day you know like that's that's crazy that must be the that must be the craziest thing in the world being 2,000 ft up on a wall and have Alex Roll On by like can I can I pass you guys yeah yeah no I mean yeah it's funny what was the climb where you borrowed somebody's chalk bag yeah that was on the nose yeah yeah I forgot my chalk bag what a bot but yeah but I got it back to him I left it on the tree for him at the top but so he got back you know four days later whatever when he got to the top you mentioned that too you mentioned it real quickly reenactment MH right which I didn't even being like I said like a a rock climbing sort of adjacent fan guy I didn't realize that when I was watching alone on theall the movie that you those were reenactments yeah though I mean reenactment I don't know if that's even because you are up there so long again you know it's like you're the difference is just that you're only soling key parts of the roote and you know you're soing the things typically you're choosing the parts of the roote that look the coolest but feel the most secure the things that you can do on command cuz anytime you're doing it for a camera you have to wait for the camera guy to get in position and you're like hanging there and then they're like hold on got to change batteries and you're like okay Tick Tock you know like I'm getting pumped you know and then they're like oh hold on got to change lenses and you're like tick tock tick talk you know like I'm my arms are tired so you know it's not like you're exactly reenacting like it's not like it's fake it's just I it's not like you're not thing whatever you're seeing like you are seeing photos and video of freeing but it's normally construed you're sort of portrayed as like this is the real thing and you're like well this is actually the day that we had the crew and went back and shot though that's not the case for the film free solo which is like an actual documentary where we did the real thing and there are a couple other films like that where like occasionally it makes more sense to shoot the real thing but most of the time it makes more sense to just go and do it whenever it makes sense for you weatherwise and fitness wise and conditions wise and then to go back and shoot whenever it's convenient for the whole crew this feels like the kind of thing that would make me I don't get mad but this feels like the the kind of thing that would make me mad like I get done with something awesome they're like hey you got to do it again because we didn't get a good shot y well that's that's the nature of being a professional though yeah it's like being good at doing the thing just makes you a good climber being a good professional climber means that you can then tie back in and do it again and like get the crew up into position and like deal you know I mean to me that's like that's the nature of being a professional well the also in in these various movies they'll talk to the camera guys or I've seen do iies about the guys that were making the movies and they'll all feel kind of the same way that I feel they'll be like dude like you don't have to do this section or uh can you do that but they don't really want to ask you and they don't feel comfortable asking they don't want to put like it they don't feel good about it either well this is yeah that's that's the challenge of shooting any of this kind of stuff is that the crew doesn't want to be there you don't want the crew to be there everybody feels uncomfortable depending and that's why typically when you're re-shooting something you choose the parts that are the most secure you know basically the safest M because you don't you want to traumatize the crew like you don't want to fall on a you don't want to die on a work day you know like like I might be willing to risk death for my personal projects but I'm not going to risk death to like get the get an ad for a jacket or something you know you're like whatever I don't know like you know I'm up there like shooting photos of a chalk bag or whatever and you're like yeah isn't this a great shot you're like no I'm not going to risk yeah exactly I'm like I'm not taking any any risk for that stuff it's it's wild I was watching uh I was watching you climb the Phoenix right and you grabbed this photographer dude like mourning of like hey you want to go shoot me I'm gonna go do some climbing he's like okay and then you repel down into the Phoenix and then like hey can you just haul all my stuff back up and he has like an image of him pulling up everything your rack your harness and everything but your chalk bag and this dude is you could see he's camera sh he cam does this make him him not a professional he like camera shaky it was like freaking but what's weird about that was like like you repel down mhm the Rope is already on you it's like a perfect top rope scenario for you to do all your stuff and climb up there but it's like no I'm going to do this and sometimes you choose the challenge yeah you choose the challenge but I mean that's another interesting example though because sometimes you film on things because it's more convenient for the experience itself because like if I wanted to free Sol of the Phoenix but I didn't have somebody with me didn't have somebody shooting let's say then it means I would repel down tie all my stuff to the rope and the Rope would just be kind of dangling behind you and that would totally compromise the nature of the experience because you know that if you fell off you could just jump back and try to catch the rope and maybe you would maybe you wouldn't but but either way you would feel like there the few people in the world that like takes takes comfort in the fact that well if I fall I can possibly jump jump backward and catch a 10 mm rope yeah but I mean there are stories of people catching ropes like that you know it can happen it would require a degree of luck and and you'd burn the [ __ ] out of yourself but but you'd probably you could potentially survive that way and so it would just change the the nature of the experience and there's several solos that I've done that I took photos or video on because I wanted somebody there like actually a different uh rout in you somebody called Cosmic debris there there still photos of it actually the guy Mikey who you mentioned in the my the exer from my book who was shooting the long shot in free solo he um he's a photographer and I've worked with him a ton over the years but he I recruited him once to shoot photos of me on this crack because it's basically a crack to Nowhere it just goes up this blank wall and then just ends and so if you were free soing you would just get to the top and be like well now I just have to climb right back down and it's really really hard actually it's the hardest thing that's ever been soing you somebody grade wise uh like technically and so you know I asked him to basically go up there and like get into position with the rope and his camera ahead of time and then I could just show up whenever I wanted climb it and then when I was done we would just repel down together God and you're like oh it just makes the whole experience more doable and you know I probably could have rigged some other way to do it totally alone but it just kind of makes sense to have your buddy there with take a picture yeah this is Mikey in the down in the meadow when you're climbing who's I can't look at the camera he's looking away gosh uh half doome that was like the next obvious thing yeah yeah basically it was so halone was the next obvious step because it was bigger and sort of more rad like more intimida like just bigger and more onping but actually it's graded technically easier than moonlight so the the the difficulty grade is technically easier though the style as it turns out is much less secure and and sort of more difficult in a way but um it basically just felt like the next big thing you know it's only a little bit harder than the roster man astran but it's but it's like having the two of them stacked on top of each other it's like really big 2,000 feet yeah and also I mean it's 2,000 ft high but it's 200 feet above the valley floor so you're like 4,000 ft up above e like feels feels very airy you know you're up there you're like oh this is it's pretty Mega bro 30 ft sounds pretty big to me right now yeah well honestly the difference between like 50 ft and 1,000 ft doesn't start to matter that much cuz like you know if you fall more than 50 feet or so you're going to die yeah but um I got to go to the book on this one this is so now you're like 1,800 feet up something you're almost the top you have a little bit of a situation we'll say you say I climbed into the upper Crux feeling good about doing things legit and then I ground to a halt I'd expected to find some sort of different hold or sequence from the one I'd used two days earlier which had felt pretty desperate but perhaps I'd done it wrong this time in the same position on the same holds I realized there were no better options I had a moment of Doubt or maybe Panic it was hard to tell which although I'd freed the pitch maybe two other times the year before I could remember nothing of the sequence or holds perhaps because there aren't any it's very dramatic writing I'm like oh God a gigantic old oval Carabiner hung from a bolt about 2 in above the pathetic Ripple that was my right hand hold I alternated back and forth chalking up my right hand and then my left switching feet on marginal smears to shake out my calves I couldn't make myself commit to the last terrible right foot smear I needed to snag The Jug I'd stalled out in perhaps the most precarious position of the whole route I considered grabbing the [ __ ] with one pole I'd be up and off Taurus oblivious laughter spilled over the lip tons of people were up on top I was in a very private hell I stroked the [ __ ] a few times fighting the urge to grab it but also thinking how foolish it would be to die on a slab slide in and bouncing almost 2,000 ft to my death when I could so easily save myself my calves were slowly getting pumped I knew I should do something soon since treading water was only wearing me out down climbing never occurred to me I was going up it was just a matter of How High one way or another but now real fear seized me once again I took a deep breath studied the holds in front of me and tried to think rationally about what I had to do although I never wanted to be on that slab in the first place I had to finish what I'd started without invalidating my Ascent finally I compromised I kept my hand on the pathetic Ripple but straightened my right index finger just enough for the tip of my last pad to rest on the bottom of the oval my thought was if my foot blew I could snatch the [ __ ] with one finger and check my fall I smeared my foot stood up and grabbed the jug no problem I was delivered free from my little prison where I'd stood silently for a good 5 minutes and I hadn't cheated by grabbing the [ __ ] I took the final 5 S slab to the summit at a near run 20 or more hikers sat on the edge of the prep preus witnessing my final charge but no one said a word no yell no pictures nothing maybe they thought I was a lost hiker maybe they couldn't conceive of where I'd come from or maybe they just didn't give a [ __ ] when I mantled onto the actual top I was met with a flood of humanity a 100 odd people spread across the summit Plateau tourists ate lunch next to me they made out took Scenic photos people everywhere it was so weird yeah so uh Half Dome you can you can hike up Half Dome like a normal person can hike can get permits and hike up Half Dome and they got these cables that you can kind of go up in between so there's normal people up there though that was written pre permitting system so that's why it's funny because I mentioned how crowded it was no no so it used to be a zoo and now with the permits it's way less zooy yeah because nowadays it's rare to see so many people on top at any given time because the they permits um but anyway yeah hearing that I was like I kind of forget because they've been permits for quite a long time now but yeah back then it was just free-for all and so the cables would get packed and there'd be so many people on top which is it got slightly dangerous and so they instituted the perming system but so yeah and I bet people didn't even like comprehend what it just happened like you just show up they kind of like oh it's yeah it's funny because when you climb half doome with a partner in climbing gear and you have all your gear jangling on your harness as you get over the top then when you get over people like oh my God you know how many days do you spend on the wall that's incredible like what do you do but when you top out free soling you know I don't even have a shirt on I've got like nothing sort of like like H you know people like that guy looks psycho you know like like kids don't make eye contact you know it's like like who's that guy you know it's like a whole different VI um that's that's that moment right there right where you're like kind of not feeling the next move really is what it is and though it's if you don't if you've never done any rock climbing what you're doing with your feet I don't think I've ever even felt freaking the way supposed to feel like when I have rock climb you're so what you're doing Echo Charles is you you're taking your foot you got like rock climbing shoes on but there's very little to it's not like a step it's not even like an edge it's just like Smooth it's like a blank Ripple yeah and you're just kind of I'm looking around the table for something like comparable like Ripple wise just but it's just like this right here tiny no I was like I was trying to think about like this part of the lens you know I mean like not on the edge but like on the part that's just like slightly slanted like oh if you just and cuz climbing shoes are you know really tight with like a precise Edge to them and they have rubber that's like stickier than than normal shoe and so if you just imagine putting your big toe against that Ripple and like pushing against that and then sort of balancing just right it's like it's all yeah but that's what I'm saying that that's a style of climbing that you know you can practice and you can prepare for but no matter how strong you are it doesn't make it feel any easier you know it's like so it's a it's a tough thing like it's a tough Style the free solo because no matter you know there's it always feels a little little on edge you're like what if my foot slips yeah cuz I mean what's the term you use blow if your foot blows out yeah if you blow that sometimes happens right yeah I mean you know yeah it happens if you wait it wrong like You' like to think that there's a degree of control to it where like you only blow your foot if you're inattentive in how you place it or if your shoes are old or if the friction is bad or if you know they're with a a lot of freaking variables and so then you're sort of like well you know but it feels random because you're like Oh I thought it was good my foot blew you're like oh oops well I must have placed it poorly or something but you know it doesn't help if you're dead no and then so so you get done with this and again this is just like your word you're like you told your buddy like hey I I I free sold half by the way yesterday or whatever and then he posts it somewhere on the interwebs and then people kind of catch what you're doing yeah I kind of forget how all this stuff played out cuz I mean so that was in 2008 which feels like a long time ago now and that was like pre-social I didn't have a smartphone yet there was no easy way to disseminate information around climbing like that and so you know I did it my friends knew about it at some point you know like obviously told a few people like the I'd climbed the wall with a partner two days before with a rope to practice it to you know see if it was doable and so um so he knew that I was you know at least toying with the idea I mean he you know he was kind of like oh why are we going up here to practice like obviously he kind of had a sense of it and so I texted him when I was done just so you wouldn't be worried and um you know texted like the people I was climbing with the next day to be like okay let's go do you know whatever um and I don't really know how it spread from there but then but then the next year we filmed the movie alone on the wall which is what you saw in film festivals and things that toured with real Rock and and it went on the the BAM Mountain film tour thing so it kind of toured internationally and so I feel like the real you know the half doome free solo sort of became a big thing sort of a year and a half later you already over it yeah by then I'd already done a bunch of other solos a bunch of you know been on a couple Expeditions yeah it like ancient history by then dang and then you had to go back and reenact it yeah yeah but that's fine because that was just like two days of two days of work on half basically look like I said it would make me mad I'm getting mad for you right now and apparently it doesn't make you mad at all like I'm no well can you imagine a better place to work you know I'm sort of like oh I'm going up with three of my good buddies to go camp at one of the most beautiful places in the world and this is what I do for a job you're like this is awesome you know just and and then the part and well so this is the thing that I think people don't don't totally get and is a lot of these films like alone on the wall when you're like that's such crazy free soing what you're seeing is the safest and most secure stuff on the whole route like you're not seeing any of the stuff where I actually think I could fall you're seeing the stuff that you know I feel totally comfortable doing on command in weird weather you know like just whatever when the guy tells you that it's time to go you're like okay I can go so whatever you're seeing is like the chill stuff so just imagine the not chill stuff in the book talk about the fact that that the move that I just read you're like you you didn't do that again you didn't reenact that one r that pitch you're like hell no yeah hell no hell no or if I was going to I mean I'm sure I could do that again if I had to but if I went up there again I would make some major marks with chalk all over be like Left Foot Right Foot left foot and like be positive of like this is exactly how I do it every time and that's a big part of the difference in my process between the the half experience and and then later fre selling all cap CU like that passage you read in the intro with the boulder prom on El Cap that was perfectly executed where I knew exactly what to do so I was sort of able to go into autopilot and just do it whereas on half you're up there all self-conscious the whole time being like is this the right way am I is this the right foot should I try a different foot but that feels even worse I should try and even different you know it's like you're just doing different stuff and it's like you're panicking yeah well even when you're climbing half to I didn't read this part but you like got a little lost and turned around on the route itself which is a little crazy yeah it's because I had int to go one way and then I got up there and I just wasn't feeling that great and I was sort of like oh I knew that there existed an easier way that bypassed one of the the cruxes in the middle of the wall but I'd never actually gone the easier way but I was like I'll figure it out and then it turns out I I totally overshot the easy way and and did a bunch of stuff those was unfortunate but that that was a whole different experience because then you think you're just lost in the middle of this 2000 foot wall and you're like holy [ __ ] you know like you're seeing no signs of human passage there like bushes in the cracks and you're kind of like you know am I like totally lost appearance yeah but eventually I found my way back to the route and eventually if you you could sit you mentioned the book like well I could sit here and wait till some more climbers and yell at them and like get some help if I had to and and then it's the way you described getting helicopter rescued it seemed like you would rather die that's that's the way you didn't say that in the book but it seemed like you would rather die the deepest of shames yeah that' be no I mean that's the interesting thing with free soling and eity in particular because e is quite popular I mean they're tourists they're climbers they they're folks around and so you could always yell for help you could always just sit down on a little ledge um and that's the thing with free soing is that if you slip and fall you're going to die for sure but if you just suddenly had a change of heart and you're like you know what I'm not into this like I can't do it or something you could find a little stance here or there you know like uh the slab pitch that I'm describing on half do it starts off of this little Le ledge feature sort of half the size of this table let's say so you could just go sit on that little ledge and just sit there carefully for like a day or two and wait for somebody to get you and and in the grand scheme of survival situations like you you'd be fine you know you'd shiver through the night and in a day or two someone would collect you and it'd be better than dying yeah it'd be it'd be deeply embarrassing and and sort of a you know it'd be a hard thing to overcome confidence wise but but you'd be alive and they'd be fine yeah and then when you've got this Carabiner that you can kind of grab on to and no one's really watching and it's like you're either going to die or make it but I'm gonna hold the line yeah but then the whole rest of your life you'd be like yeah I free solid have to mostly sort of except for that one key move where I skip the hardest move on the route you know it'd be weird because you spent the whole rest of your life being like oh this thing that I did that I'm really proud of almost but I'm not that proud of I'm actually kind of deeply ashamed of please don't tell anyone you know it's like it's the alternative also being you spend the rest of your life which is about 5 Seconds tumbling yeah I know it'd be terrible but I know it's just yeah it's it's a predicament though because it's something that you're like this could be you know one of the crowning achievements of your life so far or it could be this like deeply embarrassing thing that you don't want to talk to anybody about you're sort of like oh I got an over my head and then then it all went sideways kind of like I don't know uh what about El Sendero luminoso you like that Echo Charles how was that well you know not bad this one again now this one looks like little tiny freaking holdes this isn't much much crack activity is it no no but it's um horrifying man well an important distinction is that cero is uh is limestone so it's a different type of rock so it's um it's like these porous solution pockets it's all these little holes and so actually it's way more featured than theity everything we've talked about so actually not everything so several of the things we've talked about so far have being on granite so it's basically like Smooth blank faces with cracks on them through them um and then Moonlight buts is sandstone but that's also just a pure crack cero is just a whole different thing cuz limestone is like a different type of rock it's porous it has like different types of little nooks and crannies in it and so I don't know I mean CER though is actually harder than any of the other ones um that we've been talking about technically and it's just kind of bigger and harder I mean cero represented a whole different step like it was and also it was many years later and I was a much better climber this is now like 2014 yeah yeah I saw cindera though as part of the leadup to free selling Al cap like there were there were three routs basically like I I wanted to Sol LC cap uh as soon as I so it half them like in 2008 LC cap was the obvious next thing I was like I should do that cuz it's the next big but it just was too hard and too daunting and like too too far beyond and so I kind of had three other hard walls that uh that I wanted to do leading up to cap and cero was one of them and then the other two uh Were Never filmed or got photos or anything they're just these two random roots that you haven't heard of but they're also one of them I did with almost no prep because I ran out of freaking propane in my van and the drive up into the mountains to get to the place was so heinous and windy that I was like there's no way I'm going to drive back to town to get more propane and then drive back up here I was like I'm just going to not eat dinner and then climb it tomorrow and then leave for good cuz I was like I don't want to drive there where was that that's that's in the needles it's uh this place in the high sea area um out between Fresno and Bakersfield just kind of like in the middle of nowhere it's like these really nice Granite spes that are like tucked away in the mountains and it was really hard yeah it's really hard it's um it's like same as any of the other ones yeah it's hard it's like a 10 or 12 pitch 12b but it's really really technical Granite did they film um luminos or live or did you reenact no so they I think there were people there when I did it but this was like pre- doumentary film making I think the filmmakers were uncomfortable everybody was kind of like let's just let it you do your thing and so I actually sold that with a little day bag on because I needed food and water and I needed my shoes so I could hike down off the Su of the mountain Cinder luminoso climbs this sort of tower feature and so normally you climb it and then you repel the Tower with two ropes but if you don't have a rope then uh I scrambled back to the to the wall of the mountain behind it and then continued on to the summit of that mountain so another like I don't know 500 feet or 1,000 ft or something of like kind of [ __ ] jungle climbing to get to the top of the mountain and then you can hike down the other side of the mountain on like a normal tour Trail but so my free solar experience was like little unusual and they have a little bag on I've got food and water I've got supplies you know cuz climbing with a backpack you know it only it's like what 2 or 3 lbs or something of extra weight which represents almost nothing in the grand scheme of you know as a percentage of mass and so but obviously it looks way worse in film and so they didn't want to shoot like a long shot of me up there with my little day bag like going going to school you know so then later when we went back and filmed on it you're just up there in your T-shirt looking like a hero like oh what a great what a great shot you're like yeah it looks way better everybody's happy it's like makes a great film it's freaking py go to look at yeah yeah that one especially the things like so filming on cero I don't think I I didn't do the Crux again I didn't do a couple of things but the sections that I did do are still 512 they're still like sort of elite rock climbing and they look I mean they look yeah like the footage still looks insane it looks heinous yeah and there's like a massive wind like it's super windy which also you know I'm just already uncomfortable and then there's this super strong wind blowing and I'm like this does not look cool to me I mean it looks awesome to me but it looks horrifying yeah yeah yeah but that's I mean that's the nature of filming in mountains you know sometimes it's cold sometimes it's windy it's just like you're in the mountains yeah and and and so you said as soon as you climbed half do you you knew that ELC cap was G to be somewhere in the future yeah elap was always kind of a life dream for sure I mean it's just I mean you've seen it it's have you seen it what El Cap you've been to e no I never been there but I've seen it on you guys see it yeah when you see it in real life I mean it's just so it's so Mega it's so it's inspiring it's Grand it's it's vast it's like it's everything you're just like wow and so you know I was spending maybe three months a year in e in my van and you know it's like your whole life revolves around elcap basically it's like you drive past every day you look at it you're like that's so epic so yeah I mean it was always the the big goal is there I mean also like at some point um a journalist had written an outside magazine like a a speculative piece like the race to freeing all cap I mean it was like an obvious challenge for climbing who who was in the race well me and I mean the guy that wrote the article was sort of speculating between me and Dean Potter I don't know if you remember him but he's not deceased but he was also a very talented free soloist and he uh was Bas jumping a lot and had kind of you know I sort of fondly called him the dark wizard because he had a lot of sort of dark arts like you know base jumping and and he was just sort of a dark Broody Soul yeah for sure but but um but he was certainly capable of of something like that you know he maybe he was never quite there but he certainly I mean I know he thought about it like he was he was interested for sure so the race was you two yeah or I mean or who knows who else because I mean anybody that has free sold it a little on climing has at least thought about it you know as like a magical like wouldn't that be crazy you know it's but it's an obvious possibility when you are thinking about doing this um what's like the driving thing that's making you want to do this that' be so cool I I mean you know it's it's just the obvious challenge I mean it's hard to describe how important yed is to climbing history and climbing culture and you know climbing mythology and then elcap is sort of central to that and there's been so much climbing history written on the walls of elcap like I mean just the first Asen ofal cap was groundbreaking at the time as the the most difficult biggest big wall in the world and then you know I guess what which was which was a to like a it's a different it's a totally different thing what they did back then yeah yeah totally different thing it took him 18 months of effort and you know 40 days on the wall and drilling all these bolts it's like a whole process it's almost it was almost like a construction project you know in a way you're just like literally drilling holes into the wall and but but crazy because at that point ropes didn't hold Falls so I mean that's a big uh that's a big thing I mean they had ropes and the ropes would help but if you took a big fall there's like a legitimate chance the Rope would break nowadays that's not a thing nowadays A climbing rope uh you know unless something crazy happens like you could fall the whole length of the rope and it's totally fine and and the Rope absorbs in a force that you won't even be hurt you'll just kind of be like oh boingy you know like a little bouncy it's like totally chill but back then sort of like oh you don't even have a real harness the rope's not going to catch a fall it's all pretty uh it's pretty adventurous up there but but yeah so you know there's been so much climbing history written on Al cap from the first Ascent to the the first in a day Ascent to the first free ascent you know to like all these big milestones in in climbing have occurred on El Cap and so it makes sense that as a you know mid 20s like hungry young man like looking to do something cool you're like oh that's that's the place to do it so you started thinking about that in 2008 and now 2009 2010 2012 or 14 you know you're doing these other things and you're just progressively getting better can you feel yourself getting better are you getting stronger are you just getting more technical no it's so slow I mean I'm sure I don't know I assume that you've been the same with all the sports and things that you do is like you improve so slowly that you never really realize how much better you've gotten you're just kind of like I mean in climbing you just basically feel like you suck every day because climbing is mostly failing you know you're always trying things that are just past your limit and you're always failing and so every day you mostly fail and then every once in a while you have experiences of great success where you're like oh I did a thing that was hard for me like I'm proud of myself but but mostly you just it's just the grind you know you just go climb and you get worked and you feel tired and you know yeah it's weird in in Jiu-Jitsu in particular you like you're getting so much better but you don't know it like my me right now would kill me six months ago or maybe a year ago cuz and when you get better you don't improve quite as much as used in the beginning but but you definitely are improving over time and if you ever have someone that like stopped training and you keep training like they're just in a totally different world you can annihilate them totally so as you're climbing and as you're improving but you can't really perceive that you're improving at what point do you start to contemplate like for real oh this is on the map yeah it's yeah it's a good question so I mean I think that I could break it down is from so 2008 I so a half do and I'm like I'm going to Sol cap next and so starting in 2009 it was kind of like this is the year then I got there and I was like this is not the year it's like totally insane it looks you know I was like makes you want to poop when you think about it you're sort of like oh jeez like there's no chance I'm sing that this year and then I kept kind of hoping that it would just feel easy at some point that you know I kept hoping that I would improve enough that I would look up at the wall and think that looks easy like I can just do that and you know so the years Roll by and I am doing harder things and I'm getting better and I'm going on Expedition you know I'm doing all these other things that I'm proud of in climbing but every year you look up at o capab and still just think that looks totally impossible and so starting in basically in 2015 I realized that it was never going to look easy you know I was like no matter how good I get it well I realized two things one I realized that I was never going to get good enough that it was just going to look easy because I kept kind of thinking that I might just hit certain grades and climbing like reach certain difficulty levels where like if I could climb that grade then it would look easy MH and I was like that's just one I'm never going to hit these grades two even if I did it's not going to look easy it's still all cap it's still it'd still be insane and so I realized that if I wanted to do it I would have to just put the work specifically into the climb itself and like basically do all the prep work as if I was going to even though I wasn't sure if I could or not you know sort of act as if I was going to with the uncertainty there of knowing that like maybe I can't but I'll at least do all the prep work and find out and that started in 2015 yeah and sort of by happy coincidence um Jimmy chin and chai vasarelli the the co-directors of free solo approached me that same year um about doing a feature film project uh they didn't know anything about o cap and you know I kept my cards very close to the chest on that stuff CU it's all sort of I it's it's weird like you don't really talk to friends about this stuff but umit wait wait why don't you talk to your friends about this stuff because everybody tells you you shouldn't do it and and it makes everybody deeply uncomfortable and nobody really wants to know about it ahead of time like you don't want to put that burden on somebody like oh I'm going to go do this thing I might die tomorrow you know it's like it's better for they feel bad because they didn't oh I should have said something I should have told them this like I thought he look sketchy I should have said something and you're like no it's not on you you know God I feel that way about like fights like I've had friends that have done mixed martial arts fights or where I've I've been like man I shouldn't have let them go I should have said something so yeah if they died yeah you'd be like oh jeez yeah it's just it's just better not to but then but then the other thing about it is that if you tell your buddy like I'm going to do this thing tomorrow and then you hike up there and you're like you know actually it's kind of cold and I just don't feel it today you know like for whatever reason I don't want to do it but then you're like oh but I don't want to have to go back and then tell my buddy that I bailed because then he's going to think I'm light duty even though your buddy doesn't want you to anyway but you know what I mean it starts adding all this psychology to it that you just don't need it's better just to feel like it's totally on you you go up if you're not feeling it you walk back there's like no second guessing the psychology of that yeah that that is that's kind of crazy you know what's interesting I I've talked about the psychology of um in Special Operations right so like my last deployment to Iraq the Special Operations guys which is me my seals we kind of got to choose what missions we were going to do like oh oh there's a mission oh there's a bad guy or there's an area we want to go to my it's my decision I'm literally saying okay we will go do this and the burden that you have from that is like oh someone gets hurt or someone gets killed that was 100% was your decision the conventional forces often times they're getting told like hey you're going to go do this and so when that leader gets told hey you're going to go do this they're going do it if someone gets hurt or killed they were just kind of executing and there's there's like a different different psycholog that you have when you're depending on what situation you're in and yeah I could see that the thing like this here you're you're choosing to do it you don't want to have the burden of any other mindset or any other pressure of like well you know Fred's really going to think I'm I'm weak if I don't do this today or whatever they got all even they all got set up for me to do this and then I didn't do it well that's the hard thing with filming is because if there's a whole crew you know like with filming free solo there'd be you know six or eight people involved in like getting up on the wall getting to the summit repelling into position and if you get up and you're like you know I just didn't sleep that well and I don't really feel it today but you know that eight of your buddies set their alarm for 3:30 so they could hike to the summit of a mountain and repel in you're kind of like man I'm doing a big disservice to the team if I don't show up and perform so then you're sort of like but then but then you don't want to force it either because if it's not your day it's not your day and you and you can't force that yeah it's weird in free solo you can see that they're all not they're Notting to apply any of that pressure to you whatsoever yeah gosh yeah cuz they're I mean they're in a super tough spot because like they don't want to pressure me there's this whole weird mirror mirroring effect where with filming where if you're doing something difficult and there's a film guy near you filming it like you know that they're uncomfortable because you know I mean they're a climber as well they're watching something that they know is hard and they're like holy [ __ ] this is kind of intense and so you want to make it look as effortless as possible like you want to look in control because you don't want to freak out your buddy but then you don't want to climb differently because you're like trying to look smooth and in control and so it's this whole back and forth mirror where you're like I want to look good so I don't scare them because I know they're scared but then you know it's it's all bad basically but that's why um in the in that that passage that you read um at the beginning when I do the boulder problem when I mentioned that their cameras on the wall those were both remote operated cameras that they had sort of rigged up as a as a special system so that I wouldn't have to deal with having an operator on the wall there yeah yeah cuz you're trying to mirror for them that you're calm and they're trying to do the same thing CU they don't want to look like oh my God yeah because if I look over and I see my buddy crying I'd be like oh [ __ ] today is not my day like Mikey Who's down in the valley who's filming he's like turning away he's just like can't look at the camera that that would probably make you super uncomfortable if you could have seen that super sketch I've done I've done a lot with Mikey because Mikey has been uh Jimmy Chin's photo assistant for a bunch of different things he's got a poker face for when it's up close actually well no so I've done a couple shoes with Mikey where he was holding the lights for Jimmy and uh and he literally just was looking away the entire time he would hold the light in the correct position all the settings are correct but he just like wouldn't watch the shoot at all he's like I don't need to see this he be like it's pretty funny dang he just but he's he's a he's an elite climber himself and and I've also been on Expeditions with him and stuff like notably we were together on this trip in Greenland a year and a half ago which was also like a TV Expedition thing and and um and so he's he's a hardcore climber that like knows how all this stuff works but basically when he's working you know when he's filming he's just like I don't need to see it like unless I need to watch I'm not going to dang yeah that's how he deals with it yeah yeah I remember doing this this uh this crack uh for um Jimmy chin shot this this feature for for National Geographic the magazine that that I was on the cover of actually there's a photo from uh from half but so Mikey was like holding the lights for all these different photos and he just like didn't just like covered his eyes for the whole shoot it's like totally crazy yeah I think I think when you were on Joe Rogan you were talking about you know he's like how do you do this how do you do this and and you're were like it for me it feels like I'm walking down the sidewalk that's what you said like something along those lines some things it's not always quite that solid but but a Spire two anyway yeah and I was like I try to put that in perspective CU you know we all have little skill sets that we have what we're good at and it seems really to do that thing and yet at the same time even the things that you're good at sometimes you mess up so Mikey's probably thinking could be could it be the time though you rarely mess up the thing you're good at on the day that you're not supposed to mess up MH you know I mean like I think there is a a distinction like when you're on you're really on I know yeah and you've you've likely subconsciously or consciously gotten to a point in your life where you know how to be on and this I need to be on right now cuz again with Fighters there's some Fighters that they they look great in practice and they do great in practice and game time they they don't bring it they mess up they make mistakes they get psyched out and there's some people that they're the opposite like they do okay in training and they're like man I don't know if's how they bring their aame and and crush and yeah you you probably have done enough things where you're like oh yeah I need to do this right and also being able to recognize I'm not I can't do this right now now's not the day now's not the time I need to stop I think that's one of the interesting things that differentiates climbing from a lot of other sports is that you know with fighting you have to show up on the day of the fight and you have to perform at your best but with climbing you show up and you're just like today's not my day you come back the next week or you come back the next day or you know you basically just you get to choose your timing and I I always think about that with Ball Sports yeah you know when you're like it's it's Sunday I have to play you're kind of like what if I don't want to play on Su what if I want to play on Tuesday you know it's like what if my KNE kind ofy and I want to chill for another day like with climbing you can always choose your best day and then you can really make your days count yeah the worst is the Olympics oh dude it's been four years eight years or whatever preparation and now you like I got a stomach ache on game day you're leg gymnast or whatever and you got to go out there and do the best no four years of of periodized training where you've been like doing some crazy cycle up and down for four years and you're like this is my Peak and you're like yeah but actually I I think I ate something weird you know my stomach kind of hurts yeah it's like that's crazy to me I mean climbing is is so chill by that you know by that comparison but the stakes obviously are like you have to choose your day because you could die yeah I wonder if you've become like hyper sensitive to how you feel just through whereas like a a wrestler or a gymnast has just been like no it doesn't matter how I feel I just need to go perform whereas you're like H you know what today's you you probably could rate each of your days and subconsciously like yep today I'm feeling good and it's when when you watch the movies and when you write about it in the book you're like you can you you know when you're feeling good yeah actually I wonder about that because uh you know I've never done any other sport well enough to really know but I've noticed like with climbing training like actually so during the free solo movie tour um like you know the film came out I was doing this crazy you know six-month like press to her like non-stop events and at the time I had a pretty structured training plan um and I I was like training in the gym and and it was like the only thing that kept me saying through the whole six months of like in just crazy Hollywood stuff but I noticed that when you know with non-stop travel like different different climbing jamm and a different city every day sort of thing and my climbing performance was pretty erratic depending on sleep and and whatever but when I would do the extra things like weighted pull-ups and like weight sort of things my numbers are pretty consistently good that you know no matter how tired you are you can still just like lift a heavy ass weight maybe not like absolute Peak Performance but in general you can kind of hit your gym numbers but my climbing performance was all over the place because uh and as I found out from the the coach I was working with I think it has more to do with the let's see can I can I repeat it correctly basically just that there's a there's a coordination element to it like uh like you know firing your muscles at the right time like because climbing is such a complicated movement it's not just like flex your muscles it's like so many different muscles working in concert and like basically it's really complicated the more tired you are like that stuff just doesn't doesn't fire the same way and so as a climber all that to say that I think as a climber you are very attuned to like how your body feels and as a climber when you get injuries they're all on your fingers and like little tiny where you're like oh I feel a tiny tiny little tweak in my finger and it's like you look at the NFL or something and people have like a broken femur and they're like getting taped up and going back in yeah they're taking like six bikins and getting a bunch of tape and they're like finishing the game and you're like holy [ __ ] you know because as a climber you're like I think my one knuckle is like a little swollen I just can't quite hold that hold quite right you're like I got to take a rest week you know it's like and it makes you feel super light duty compared to other sports because like you know people are training through like the craziest things but it just it just doesn't work that way you just can't especially not when your freaking life's at stake and and you're not if you're not free soloing you're probably not as I mean assume not as concerned like if you're just going to do a normal rock climb and you're not feeling that great you're like okay I get my Knuckles a little sore but I'll power through it it's no big deal yeah though actually even that you often don't power through because your your fingers are so delicate basically like basically the tools of the trade are so delicate it'd be like a pist you know like if they start to feel like some pain in their fingers they're like oo I should probably ease off that because I just won't be able to do my thing if like you know basically any kind of pain in tendons ligaments in your arms or fingers you're pretty pretty mindful of because if they get out of control like you're kind of hos for a while like if if you injure a finger you're like out for a while I'm going to show you later some picture of some Jiu-Jitsu people's hands and fingers oh all broken and like Twisted because especially people that compete with the uniform on with the ghee on the jiujitsu G everything is grabbing and squeezing and like it's guy hands look so gnarly the Meow brothers you ever seen their their hands like it's famous pictures of just hands that every knuckle is like swollen it's it's it's it's crazy but they their life doesn't depend on being able to hang on they'll make adjust though they do get all messed up don't they it's like life doesn't depend on but they're getting punch in the face or something aren't they yeah in well in in when you get into mixed martial arts yeah um in Jiu-Jitsu there's no punching there's just like choking and breaking arms and stuff oh yeah yeah yeah just a broken arm show it's a little more mellow so this is all that that actually though so that's another thing that I think differentiates climbing from a lot of these other sports is that with climbing it's like yes the stakes are very high that you could die I mean with free soing you could die but you know I've gone I've been a climber for 28 years and I've had like almost no injuries and I feel like a lot of these other sports you know it's like you're getting kind of messed up all the time I think about that with outdoor sport it's like mountain biking where it's like if you're a serious mountain biker like you're breaking a collar bone like every couple years you know it's like like you're getting injured all the time yeah and and if you're a professional mountain biker like you're having a major surgery like every four years for sure biking mountain biking is when I watch Mountain baking I'm I'm just uncomfortable crazy so but so with climbing it's like you're not going to have any of those injuries your whole career but you're always facing that risk of death and to me I kind of prefer it that way where it's like yeah the consequences are there you have to stay attentive like you could die but at least you're not freaking getting shoulder surgery every couple years and like you know like man I don't know I think it's a nice way to live dude those mountain bikers go after it too like the downhill mountain bikers that are just bombing and when they and when you wipe out with a bike I mean that just adds this whole freaking apparatus [Music] if you and you were rock climbing and even if you were roped up but you had you wereing a bicycle with you just you have a b TI to you swinging past awful it's like when you fall ice climbing and you have like pointy things on every you know you have crampons on you have ice tools you have like all these pointy things swinging around and you're like oh my God trying to stay clear of everything yeah the ice climbing you know they sell ski Poes and they have like little ice climbing yeah Whip It yeah the little point on the and you're like what if I follow because when you follow skiing you're just it's just a disaster right it just everything's everywhere well those are for a very specific application like extreme steep skiing where you have to self rest and stuff but no for the average person on the slope they should not have a freaking ice to at the end of their ski pole noted yeah yeah no if you're just out at the resort you should not have a spike on the end of your ski po it's like some poor snowboarder hits you at full speed dies goes through their helmet well everything that we're talking about though it it actually did it plays out in free solo because you're all what was it 2017 you're all in the in the runup going through all the drills doing all the prep and you go you go you go and you start the climb and you get what 500t up and you you're not feeling it and you walk away yeah actually so it's funny you read that excerpt from from halone because I actually did exactly what we were describing on halone I got yeah 500 ft up basically to the free blast labs to this like blank section of rock and and there are bolts in the Rock so that people climbing with ropes can clip the rope in and so I got up there and there no hand holds and I was like I'm not feeling it and started just grabbing the bolts and so you're still climbing without a rope you know you're still clet up yeah still 500 ft up it's like if you fall you're still going to die but by holding the bolts it makes the difficulty much much easier cuz you suddenly have things to hold that keep you balanced and it's like way more chill and so you know I cheated by using the bolts got across the slab and then cheated a bit further and then uh and then climbed another 400 feet of easy terrain to get up to this big ledge system where there fixed lines that go back down to the ground from there and that's like a normal aspect like that's part of El Cap that everybody uses that all climbers use and so yeah it's funny it's not like I climb 500 feet and I was like cool I want to go down you know I still had to go up another another 500 ft to get to the weight that you can get down um but I just like chea way I was thinking cheting on half it's just like a way to escape the wall free blast the way it looks it's basically a few hundred feet of what we were talking about earlier where you just don't get the full security yeah yeah it's just totally blank I mean so the Crux moves the free blast lab like the hardest section um there actually no handholds at all and it's just this three foot move sequence where you just you're just standing on your big toes and if your foot slips you're going to die but you know it's low angle so it's like it's less than vertical and it's like just tip toeing across the wall which is balanc in your big toes it's like but so that and that's why I bailed because I'd sprained my ankle earlier that season um in a in a climbing fall and my foot had been kind of swollen and I was kind of swollen in the shoe and and also that time of year it was early November it's just really cold out um and and dark and you're required to climb that early because you're trying to get to some of the upper stuff before it goes into the sun U whereas in the springtime because the sun is higher in the sky it Shades it the wall Shades itself longer and so you have better conditions for for a longer amount of time but in the fall because the sun is so low like as soon as the sunrises you're just baking so it means you have to start Way Before Sunrise so anyway it's like basically conditions felt a little bit stacked against me and I couldn't feel my feet and it was kind of chilly and then and then suddenly you have to trust your life to this big toe and you're like I can't feel my big toe and it's freaking dark and it's scary you're like no at this like this is not this is not my thing at the time though it was very disappointing I felt like a total failure you know you're just like oh the whole team is up here and I let them down I really want to do this thing though it's funny because now in retrospect I'm glad I bailed because then I went home and I did a bunch of pt on my ankle trained All Season came back the next uh spring spent two more months working specifically on the route and then when I finally did it felt like a total boss and it was great you know so like you know it's the classic thing where where what feels like a failure at the moment you know in in hindsight you're like oh it only took me six more months of effort and it up me a much better experience in the long run so I'm kind of like you know what's what's 6 months of effort when compared to like compared to like the thing you're going to be most proud of your whole life probably and the the confidence level after you work an extra six months is just going to totally it's so much high and actually and it was good for me and the film crew to have a bit of a dry run where because actually that was the first time and this sounds stupid but just hiking up to the Basel cap with no rope is a bit of a big mental step and so just having done it once before you're like okay well at least I remember what it's like to walk up to the wall and just tie put on my shoes tie my shoes and start climbing because it's really different than the normal routine which is laying out the Rope getting all your gear ready like talking to your partner you know it's like normally there's a whole process before you start climbing all cap and when you go there to free solo you're like oh this this feels different you know it's like feels a little heavier the you use the term autopilot when when you're talking about some of those really hard moves and even when you're talking about just like you'll get into mode where you're just autopilot you just know what you're doing and you do it is that not is that what you're striving for during training uh not so much during training that's what I aspire to during performance for sure I mean though actually now that you mention I'm like maybe it would be better if I was a little more like that in training but um but it's for me it's really hard to access that 100% effort like you know that's that's like Flow State that's like outof body experiences whatever you want to call it you know and and I think that's true across all kinds of sort of elite Sports Performance but I think it's pretty hard to tap into that 100% like I'm giving it everything I have and I mean it's probably possible for me to do that while training on the board or something you know like I have a little gym in my garage and I train but man it's hard to care that much like when you're in the garage you know your friends are there you're listen to music you're you know it's all pretty chill and like you try your hardest but on sort of a superficial level of like oh I'm trying hard you're not like trying the hardest you've ever tried in your life it's it's funny when people are going to compete in Jiu-Jitsu and they've never competed before they're like oh what should I get ready for I'm like get ready for someone to be going harder than anyone has ever gone at you before and for you to be using muscles in a way that you've never used them before so what you're saying is actually 100% right you get into competition and people are going completely insane psycho and we're you know if you and I are training and like you start to get a position on me oh cool I'll abandon that and go to something else no if we're in a match like I am never going to abandon anything until you break me it's such a different yeah it's a death match and and so it is very hard to push someone that hard in training in fact for and and you probably shouldn't because you get injured right you know it's like the stakes are too high that way for sure cuz like that's the thing is you don't really want to train with that kind of intensity because you know I I know that I mean you'll burn out you'll get injured it's just it's just a lot like you can't like not every game can be Super Bowl you know or whatever whatever Sports metaphor you want but are are you going autopilot like when it's like okay this is kind of an easy area and I'm just going to kind of autopilot through this I don't have to think about it too much and then are there areas where you're like I need to pay attention to what I'm doing right now no okay so actually that's a that's an interesting question in some ways it's almost like two different autopilots because yeah you're right that on the easy terrain there is you know I go into autopilot but that's more like a Mindless climbing cuz on easy Terrain and and El Cap the freeo of ELC cap kind of breaks down as like a third easy a third like medium and a third like hard Cutting Edge sort of and so the easy terrain you know you can like think about your buddies you can think about what you're having for lunch you like look at the weather you look at the birds it's like it's it's lovely and you can just kind of trust your body to just climb because it's quite easy and then the moderate train you can do a lot of that mindlessly as well but typically on the moderate pitches there'll be at least some sections where you have to like pay attention but then on the hardest stuff I sort of aspire to a different kind of autopilot where it's not like Mindless climbing it's more like perfect thoughtless climbing you know what I mean I don't know it's it's a hard distinction to make but but that's kind of the good autopilot where you're performing perfectly but you're just not distracted by anything else yeah yeah the idea of thinking about when you're walking down the stairs or up the stairs I think I think is a you that used that example Echo Charles like if you you can walk up down the stairs like a 100 times but if you think about while you're walking up the stairs you're more apt to like trip up yourself fall down or it happens to people when they're speaking where they're trying to speak in a certain way so they're thinking about what they're saying and it jams them up and they're stuttering and making mistakes and all that whereas you know what you're going to say you've done this a bunch of times you need to not think about it and just do it I mean this again any sports like that if you're on the on the free throw line in basketball with the state championship on the line you don't want to think about the mechanics of your free throw that's not the time to be like okay yeah straight back and bent arms and here you know it's like you just want to do the thing that you're there to do exactly and that's the autopilot that yeah that's the good autopilot when you just do what you know how to do you do whatever you've done in practice a million times and you don't think about it just do it monkey mind yeah actually I think about it a lot for um I thought that a good analogy for for the climbing for like the the boulder problem let's say on on NOC cap um I compare it to gymnastics because I think that a gymnastics routine it's like you practice through routine over and over and over but then once you're doing the routine I mean I don't know gymnastics at all but I imagine that Elite gymnasts aren't thinking about their routine at all when they're doing it because it's such complicated movement and so fast that they're just executing and then afterward they can sort of replay it and think like oh I should have done something differently or not but while they do it I I presume that they're just doing it you know they're not they're not self-conscious about it at all they're just performing and I would venture to Guess that if they start thinking about they're the routine freaking land on their face it's going to be a problem yeah for sure yeah like halfway through your back handspring or whatever you can't be like am I tucked right like no you just you just do it the uh I had a a thing so there in the military there's something called noo criteria no go Criterion were not going so oh we were expected that we would have aircraft to support our movement to the Target we don't have the aircraft that's no go criteria we're not going totally we don't have whatever resupply that we expecting so therefore we're not going or it's like 50 mph winds and we just can't jump in or do whatever yeah so we have no go criteria so I used to joke around kind of joking but also kind of serious that for me I had go go criteria which is we're going right this was like my attitude like we're going and that was sort of just to get over oh there's been a little hiccup Hey listen guys we're going but then there was also this thing of hey we didn't get the aircraft we we got some other Intel now oh we the the supply resupply that we expected isn't like things would start to add up and I felt as if sort of like the universe was telling me yeah that this is not your day this is not the day and I had no problem being like Oh yeah there's three things that are going wrong we're not doing this yeah and I think that it's important to know that sometimes you got to push and sometimes you got to pay attention to what the universe is trying to tell you about what's happening no I totally agree otherwise you want to you never want to be like dudy you don't want to like give up to you don't want to give up prematurely that said there are certain times where you just shouldn't be doing the thing you know like yeah it starts to rain you're like it's not it's not my day like that's fine that's that's nature both in reading the book and then watching I I've watched a bunch of uh movies with you in it obviously over the last couple weeks but when you're going it's real obvious like just the way you carry yourself when you're going it's like oh yeah he you could see when you're getting out of you're like oh yeah he's going and you can it's pretty clear that you're amped and hyped and there's probably not much that would turn you away from making this happen yeah I mean it takes I mean yeah for me personally it's like hard to totally turn on and then once you're like on and doing it it's sort of hard to turn back off too like once you're psyched you're like okay it's it's go time I'm doing it and then I mean basically exactly what you're describing like you know your go go you're kind of like then it takes a lot to switch back to noo but I don't know I mean yeah free soling is just an interesting and I think it's important for anyone listening to this who doesn't climb there's an important distinction here between free soling and climbing in general because you know everything we're talking about with like Elite Performance and like all this go I mean this is for free soling the most cuttingedge things that I've done in my life but in general for climbing I just go climb every day or five days a week you know it's like if it's raining if it's windy you're like yeah it's fine I mean if you have a rope you have protection it's worth climbing in adverse conditions it's worth sort of pushing into discomfort just because you know it's good for you and long term and or whatever it's just a beautiful day to go out and do some climbing you know it's not like all climbing is Extreme but we're just talking about the most Cutting Edge free soling yeah there's definitely if you're just listening to this and it sounds interesting but you don't want to die that's go go to the gym go to a Climbing gym I mean I started in a Climbing Gym everybody goes to a Climbing Gym normally climbing is super chill super safe really fun and social you hang out with your friends on a sofa you all Boulder a little bit it's like it's really quite enjoyable I think if this is your first introduction climbing you're getting a very very like sort of the wrong look at like the most intense I apologize this is not like climbing for me I think of yeah I think of going to the going to the gym but also even at yosee cool we would go up with my kids who would be you know 6 n and whatever and they'd be scrambling up the rocks and be roped in and be like it's really fun and there's little problems to figure out and they get to learn the ropes and everything so yeah there's a whole it's it's fun it's safe there normally a lot of snacks involved a lot of chill time it's like it's a pretty recreational sport really you know I mean when I started climbing when I was 10 uh my dad would take my sister and me to The Climbing gym and uh and he wasn't a climber but they just read about it opening in the newspaper and they're like oh this would be cool because I L climbing on stuff so I thought I'd you know like the gym and and yeah we would go for several hours there would be snacks you know we would take our time we would top R up some things everyone have a good time then we go home it's like total Suburban fun it's like going to do laser tag or something you know so I think that when we're talking about like extreme freeing you know it sort of belies the fun of climbing and and and that it I mean even though I've you know I guess made a career out of doing this extreme free soing whatever I'm still going climbing normally what like 300 days a year and then I have one or two you know extreme high performance days which I think is probably similar to most other sports where you spend most of your year training and practicing and doing whatever else and then you have the occasional moments of of hopeful Excellence you where you try your best to do the thing that you're trying to do we definitely hope for excellence when you're out there but you just never quite well but I mean I'm sure with fights and stuff where it's like you train the whole year and then you have your one fight where you're like this is my moment and you like hope that you're going to do your best but you know but you find out it's like the one time of year that you test yourself against your training the getting to the top of lcap now you're the I mean like you said this is the the most iconic wall and now you just knocked the [ __ ] out of the park uh did you how long did it take for that to sink in a little bit I don't know I mean well you know the crew every my friends were all psyched I was psyched I mean we were we were really psyched immediately though so this is an example of being a professional so I summoned all cap I was obviously psyched we did some interviews and things I actually trained that afternoon because uh because I was on this like routine I didn't want to break through routine it was funny cuz I summoned it and I felt so good I was like I can do it again I'm so amped I Feel Like A Champion and you know and then I went down and tried to do my normal afternoon training on the hangboard and I was objectively very tired and like didn't perform that well on the board and it was sort of like maybe I shouldn't try it again I I am a little tired you know it's the classic you're just so psyched you're like I could do anything and then you actually start training and you're like I couldn't do anything right now I'm pretty tired but how about pizza yeah exactly no actually um by sheer happy coincidence the next day or maybe the day after was uh was Sunday in y they do a crazy brunch spread at the Yani um which is like the fancy hotel in in none of us were staying there but they do this insane brunch that you can show up for and I hadn't eaten dessert in like 6 months or something and then we all went to danani had like you know Nella of French toast and like we all just did the all you can eat brunch and just gorged on like eggs and pancakes and you know whatever it was like a it was a perfect sort of decompression like party after cuz I mean the crew was also incredibly stressed all the filmers and we all had been working very hard on it yeah that must have been one of the biggest all-time Collective size of relief yeah totally totally but no so what I was going to say though is that this is where being a professional comes in so I did the climb we all gorged at the buffet and then I think I spent the next five days in a row up on ELC cap filming so I mean it was like did the climb was like this is a life achievement and then we spent five more days up there like shooting close-ups of things shooting like moving ropes around like shooting you know cuz if you watch it like the little hand holds exactly all the little hand holes that get cut in like the little Foo holes the close-ups of things even some of the soing like we shot some of the still photos um cuz there was a article on National Geographic magazine they shot like a VR like a 360 thing you know just like things that accompanied the film basically we did all the other stuff oh and like you know in the film there's an aerial shot of me summiting um but it's illegal to f a helicopter in us and they they went all the way to the head of the park service in Washington DC trying to get permission to fly a drone never got permission it's illegal to use drones in the Park which is great which I think is an appropriate rule but in this case but well so in this case though it would have been a lot better to fly drone but so as it turns out the legal flight ceiling for Eed is is either 1 or 2,000 feet above the rim of the valley and ELC cap is the rim of the valley so basically using a clex like a giant long lens in a helicopter 1,000 ft above ELC cap they were able to shoot it like normal and it's technically legal but very much outside the like we kind of knew that that was well we I had nothing to do with this like you know but the the the crew kind of knew that that would burn some bridges at the park because that's very much outside the scope of of what you're supposed to do in National Park M as it should be but you know they tried every other way and they were like we need aerial footage and so basically the very last thing we did we did five more days of film we did whatever and then I resoed the last 600 ft um like two or three times in a row for the helicopter as like our last thing and then we all like wrapped and then we all fled the park again this makes me super mad dude this this every time I hear you about you reenacting stuff and it makes me mad I get frustrated I get mad look dude I cannot imagine being like hey broke can you just get that one more time hold on take off your harness and get it again oh talk about a burden yeah well so I did some of the the the posing so like I don't want to give the wrong idea that like the film is faked or posed or anything because it's not I mean it like they have a long shot of me doing the entire clim and it's all but then we went back and and reshot some of the sections or reshot Stills so some of the things I did that when we were back posing um I would I had like a little tiny like a belt basically under underneath my pants and so for a couple of the shots I had a rope going down my pant leg and then like in a big loop of slack going out of the frame and so then you could do like a bunch of stuff and still be you could still be attached but with this sort of catastrophe system where if you fell it would rip your pants off and you'd get caught by the basically like a seat belt around your waist and so like you would survive but it would be catastrophic you know like your pants would tear off like everything would be bad and you'd be like ow you know it' be super painful but you wouldn't die at least but so there were a couple sections of the root that I did you know six times in a row over and over with this giant like death Loop of slack out and I'm kind of like like this isn't that much less scary than just SOL I again you know I was like this is kind of extreme were you miked up on the real one um for from the boulder up or something basically at a certain point I put on a mic yeah like when I pass some of the crew somewhere so I actually was listening to music off my phone for a lot of it because that's like I like to do that when I'm sing but you can't really do that when you're miked because they're not going to license a bunch of like '90s metal and stuff and so they're like oh he licensed a bunch of tool like you know Metallica like cuz you're breathing in the boulder problem you can hear yeah that uh I forget if I was miked for the Bold or not yeah well what whatever they did it definitely I was also miked for tons of other climbs so they have tons of audio of me just trying hard climbing it's like who knows like what it's from but um but yeah I was miked for part of it but part of it I wasn't miked for because I kind of didn't want the like I didn't want weight you know like you have like a transmitter on you the whole time like you have extra stuff you feel the cable on you it's just like another thing that you're sort of like I just don't want like don't feel like I got caught up in a cable you know and Jimmy Jim wasn't like cripping a diva dude yeah totally no I mean there you know that's the hard thing is that they didn't want to compromise the climate experience he seemed like the he seemed like you know he handled it as good as a human being could handle he certainly did his best you do what you you do what you got to do like I mean he's a climber and he totally understands like the you know he doesn't want to compromise my climbing experience he also wants to make a great film and and he doesn't want to compromise the the ethics of it all you know wants it to be real I mean it's yeah it's super hard it's a hard film to make MH I mean you know so they actually kept me incredibly well insulated from the like most of what I know about the film making process I sort of learned afterward during the tour because we were all doing events together and like talking about the cinematography and talking about all the stuff you know that was all just sort of the Hollywood tour but during the process they kept me incredibly well insulated from from the whole production side of it so I would stay in my van by myself production would all be in in a rented house like doing their own thing and you know they're up until like midnight dumping footage and erasing cards and like changing lenses and packing bags and doing all the stuff and they're like working and then getting up at like freaking 3 to hike up the mountain and repel in and meanwhile I'm just like chilling in my van you know just like doing my thing but that's kind of how it had to be because it had to be the real you know like I had to just be working on my climbing project and they just had to be documenting but yeah I mean it's a crazy it's it was it was a whole crazy process so going back to like when did it set in that you you I mean obviously you understand the freaking the the gravity of the situation of you making it but then you make it is it still like how long does it take before you're like damn I I'm I'm kind of like I'm kind of legendary right now I'm kind of a legend right now well so in the climbing scene you kind of knew immediately like this is a big deal for climbing but you know nobody could have guessed that the film so the film wasn't released until 2018 the next year and then even then the film is released but you know it's a it's a documentary about rock climbing like who knows how that's going to do but then it did really well at film festivals and then it did um then the theatrical release was better than expected and then it went bigger than expected and then it went to IM and then it freaking won an Oscar and so the whole you know kind of snowballed basically and by the time we won at the Oscars you're sort of like this might be kind of a thing you you're like holy [ __ ] like this is really taking off but you know but before that I mean who whoever would have guessed that climbing would be so mainstream like that you know it's like you just I mean there was no real precedent for that I mean there's yeah nothing yeah I never would have guessed did your did you how about like financially did your financial World change dramatically or was it a slow build I would say it changed dramatically after the film I mean it's hard to say in one way it didn't change at all because I was already I already was making what I needed and I was already doing exactly what I wanted so in terms of Lifestyle like nothing changed at all but in terms of you know Financial Security and freedom and taking care of the family yeah it's totally insane because like corporate speaking I'm sure you know all that kind of stuff like making appearances and giving talks and and like doing public things I mean once once you're like you're the guy from the movie you know you're like yeah cool you can go go give talks about being the guy in the movie I mean like man been a lot of uh you know a lot of like CEO kind of folks that are like oh yeah you're the guy that that freestyled in Yellowstone and you're like oh man you're like but you're like yeah yeah no I'm I'm the freestyle guy in Yellowstone the place with the geysers you know it's cool yeah have you been there with Buffalo it's it's nice like big herds big herds of Buffalo uh when was it that you did the speed Rec record that was 2018 2019 it was like the next year or oh it was the next year okay I think so there's like a competitive Drive you're a mellow dude but there's obviously like a a little thread of competitiveness thats through you yeah for sure I mean if you also part of it is if you think that you can do something that other people can't do it's almost like an obligation that you know you have to do it no I mean to me I I I do feel that a little bit with climbing history climbing what whatever it's like there are certain things that I feel like I'm better suited for and and just frankly better at than than than some others in climbing I'm sort of like oh I feel an obligation to do the things that I'm able to do you feel how much of it is just you got the perfect genetic uh makeup for this let me give you an example some people are really explosive right they got like explosive like they're meant for wrestling right they're just explosive some people have really what is it slow twitch muscles and they're really good at endurance uh I'm really weird have you ever heard of medium twitch muscle well it's like it's a newer thing yeah it's in between that's kind of what I have I was never like a the fastest Sprinter and I wasn't the best at the endurance but what I would do really good is put on a ruck sack with weight in it and be able to go like pretty much indefinitely you're built for the freaking arms arm Services yeah yeah no like legitim Ely like that's I was about to say the Army and then I was like [ __ ] I don't want to get stabbed with one of these knives I was like [ __ ] the Navy the Navy and then like uh I I don't need to sleep a lot so for the job that I went into it was like oh this is you found your calling yeah was so nice to like be able to have some of the things like if you need to sleep all the time and you're in the military much less the sealed teams like it's going to be a lot harder on you whereas if it's not that big of a deal then then cool so you know you mention earlier like oh there's people that are better at this part of this type of climbing and that other type of climbing and this other type of climbing whereas you're the type of climbing like you're going to go 3,000 ft no rope like that's what you're doing do you feel like you're the like your genetics are built for that I don't know I mean what what you know what genetics make you so I think that if if I have any natural gift for climbing I think it's actually just more of a like my psych my my desire for it my love of it because I mean I don't really have any physical gifts you know nobody in my family is an athlete like nobody's nobody's gifted in any way you know I was never winning competitions I was never I was never great in that way but what I've always had is I just love freaking climbing you know like and I've Loved climbing enough for almost 30 years now that I've been willing to do it five or six days a week like a couple of my friends have said I I would never make this claim for sure but a few of my friends have sort of AR and it could be true I've maybe done more climbing than almost anybody else on Earth because because I favor these big endurance sort of things like I like doing a lot of climbing and I've been doing that non-stop for you know 20 or 30 years now you know I'm like that is a lot of freaking climbing and and as it turns out I think that that type of mileage like that volume is maybe one of the most important things for free soling because in order to free solo and it it might not be necessary I'm sure other people could take a different path to success as a solist but for me it's hard to free Sol without feeling confident on rock and it's hard to build confidence on Rock without just a ton of time on Rock like feeling consistent feeling you know just feeling at home on in vertical terrain and so I think that having that that passion for climbing has probably been the most important thing for me it's like being willing to practice all the time for many many years yeah I was watching your master class and uh one of the things your in your master class you're talking about your half crimp is weak or was weak and you it's got a lot better it's it's much better than it used to be and and what was funny was I was thinking about my entire climbing career of being a total loser on climbing but you're like yeah I was weak at this and I was like that's the way everything felt to me when I try CL be like no this is all horrible so you have a weakness what' you do about it oh well yeah I trained it it's gotten better over time yeah I mean basically certain grips like I mean this is like way too Niche for a mainstream audience but basically there's certain types of ways that you hold your hand that I used to be I used to think that there was like something about particular types of holds that just forced my hand open you know I was like there's something wrong with that hold but then come to find out it was there's something wrong with my hand you know that it's just really [ __ ] weak I was like oh that's too bad you know it just turns out that it's not the shape of the hold it's that I'm very weak in this kind of in between grip and so but that in between group grip is what you typically use on a hangboard like on a training tool and I've now trained more consistently for for many years which is funny because I guess it's been like at least five or six years now that I've been like training more and and I am much stronger in that position now and so like that type of hold now feels totally normal to me I'm like oh it turns out there's nothing wrong with The Rock I just had to get my fingers a little stronger there's another good quote in that master class and it's actually both you and Tommy kind of say it together or one of you starts at the other but you you guys talk about like one of the one of the benefits of climbing is being quote spiritually uplifted in the midst of complete disaster and physical hardship and it's like that right there is such a good thing for humans right to go through hard things and to come out of them uplifted because sometimes they're hard things that just break you down and then leave you sort of traumatized and and that's I mean Tommy and I actually talk about this a lot Tommy just spent a couple weeks for their their kids school vacation at at our place in Vegas and so I've been climbing with the last couple weeks and playing with the family and it's like all been great playing with the kids but we talk a lot about the the idea of sort of elective hardship is what he likes to phrase it but you know having the the sort of luxury to be able to choose to do hard things because you know if hard things are being forced upon you it's like not necessarily the best growth opportunity but if you're in a comfortable enough place in life that you can choose to do hard things you know on occasion things that push you outside your comfort zone things that things that challenge you in the right ways then yeah those can be some of the biggest growth experiences of your life I guess but but you know it's all about the right challenges yeah and how often do the elective challenges become un elective challenges half through right I mean that happens yeah I mean I have a I have a like a bit of a family joke sort of that that all my rest day hikes always wind up in some sort of unplanned scramble you know there's always like ropeless climbing at the end of one of my hikes cuz like I you know and it's not always true but it does seem to happen that my rest day hikes you know where I'm like I'm going to go check out this other place or like look at this thing and they almost always went wind up with like oh and then I had to climb over this thing or you know and then like you know I once descended I live uh outside of Las Vegas um have you have you cled to Vegas ever you never been there like um Red Rock Canyon is like the big famous they're basically the 3,000 foot Sandstone walls like just outside of town I have been to Red Rock clb yeah it's really pretty it's it's beautiful it's a destination but so those big mountains have like canyoning routes and pretty technical desense off some of them like full-on like what you imagine Utah slot canyons where you do you know 15 repels and like swim through pools water and stuff anyway so some of my rest day hikes have ended in canyons and things like that by accident where you're like oh I was hiking and I was out of food and water and I was just trying to get back to the car and then I had to down climb 15 repels and then and then climb across these pools and stuff cuz I don't want to freaking swim cuz you're like in the middle know you're like this is crazy but yeah but that's the kind of elective challenge that you're like you know yeah you often get in over your head and it becomes more than you expect but it's still by choice yeah when does the when does it get too too hot to climb in Vegas it never really gets too too hot because uh there's a mountain above town that goes to 12,000 ft okay so you can climb you know 8 or 9,000 ft in the summer uh in full shade good wind it's like you know basically it's I I mean I live in Vegas for a reason it's the best climate in the country yeah know I I remember when you first moved to Vegas and I read an article about you're like explaining why you move there and you're like oh there's just climbing everywhere yeah everybody just thinks of the strip and they're like why would you go to Vegas and you're like Yeah The Strip is is crazy but just outside of town is the best climate in the country the strip is actually even worse is when you go like four blocks Off the Strip yeah and it's like they're really sad like like light industrial sort of it's depressing yeah it's really Grim it's it's like but the mountain access in Vegas I think is the best in the country I mean the it's insane like from the from the Suburban edge of town like you can be in full-on like Cookie Cutter suburbs houses with like grocery stores next to you you can drive 15 minutes to a trail head and then you can like run or bike for 15 minutes and you can be in the middle of nowhere where you're never going to see a soul and then you know with like an hour of scrambling and Hiking you can be back in some Canyons where you're like I'm going to die alone out here and no one will ever find my body it's like it's crazy I mean in a way that that's hard to experience like anywhere like all the famous sort of mountain cities in the US like you know Salt Lake City or Denver things like that most of those if you live in town you have to drive for like an hour to get to like the real nature part like you can't be in the middle of nowhere and even then there's so many people that you know the trail hoods are crowded the back country is crowded it's like I don't know Vegas is insane mhm how has your process of domestication come along I mean how long did you live in a van for I Liv in a van uh by myself basically for 10ish years and then I had a different van um for another fiveish years sort of maybe 15 years on and off in the van and then I bought a house with my now wife and now we have an almost 2-year-old and yeah domestication is uh strongly on on track I'm domesticating for sure and you're not losing mind too bad no it's funny you know sometimes I'm like should I be more upset about this or like should I be chafing but I I kind of like it like my daughter's great I'm having a good time I'm training I'm climbing I feel like I'm still able to do all the big climbing Adventures that I want I think part of is that my Hunger is way diminished for it MH and part of that I'm like oh is that because I'm losing my fire am I losing my Edge but I think part of that is because I've done many of the things that I want to do and I'm just kind of like you know if there was like a longer list of classic Roots around the Western us that I hadn't done then you know I'd probably be more excited but I'm like I don't know I've done a lot you know I'm sort of like I've done a lot of the things I want to do and um I don't know I like I like dading I like training at home I'm just like I don't know it's fine you say you like dading yeah ding yeah like verb yeah well you're already done dading almost so yeah I'm almost done you're practically done Y and hopefully like I said hopefully people can learn learn from my mistakes there so I don't and not train their kids for hours a day and jiujitsu you're like weirdly every time I punch my kid in the face he get upset about it so I just you know I didn't even break his arm it just felt like it was going to break I'm like I don't know what he's so pissed about you kind of in that 10 to 15 years living in your van you I would say you you must have pretty much mastered like the minimalist LIF style yeah for sure though though it doesn't feel like you're you're basically just you know the goal is always to climb as much as possible and so you're doing whatever is required to climb as much as you can and nothing else matters really and so it's not like you're embracing minimalism to be a minimalist it's just that you don't need anything you know mean that's kind of it's like you're a true minimalist cuz you're like whatever just don't need it yeah people are like oh you know living in a van is that hard you're like well I mean the van yeah I mean it's it's nicer to have a shower or something in your house but it's hard to beat the backyard because with a van it's like you just open the door and you're in the most beautiful places and if the weather gets bad you go to the next place and it's like you're just sort of floating between the best destinations in the whole Western us all year long like it's kind of amazing not a bad gig yeah it's it's a really really nice gig I mean I do I do still sort of fondly miss that you know when you're deep in D like you're changing diapers and my wife's pregnant right now and it's like a lot going on at the house you're sort of like man I used to just sit in the van by myself doing nothing all day on a rest day it's like that sounds nice and what about the uh the honold foundation that you I think um when you talk about it you went to a trip to Chad and that was sort of the the inspo behind that that was part of it I mean yeah the trip to Chad was my first trip to Africa was like in 2009 but but really so the H Foundation supports Community solar projects around the world and um basically it's like we give grants to to community nonprofits that that then use solar to to sort of better their lives in various ways and around the so it's been over 10 years of supporting solar projects around the world and so I started the foundation I guess in 2012 is a little more than 10 years um and I basically just wanted to do something positive for the environment you know I mean as a climber you're just Outdoors Non-Stop and you know I was worried about climate change worried about environmental degradation in general and just sort of like you know you want to do something useful for for planet Earth but I also sort of realized that there's no point in helping the environment that doesn't help humans as well I mean so like that expedition to Chad in particular you see human population is living in just the I mean just the Grim just abject poverty you know it's the grimmest condition in a way it's almost not even fair to say poverty because like there's no market economy at all you know it's like not fair to say they're poor because like there money doesn't even factor into their lifestyle at all because there's nothing to buy because they're so remote and so rural it's like you know it's just people hurting goats in the desert and just surviving and you know handful climate expeditions to places like that and realizing you know I mean I was reading a lot of sort of environmental non-fiction and and just non-fiction in general and you know there's something like a billion people on Earth without access to uh to to power and you know I mean basically there are a billion people on Earth in poverty that are sort of you know I mean the the world is constantly getting richer and sort of you know progressing getting more comfortable except for the sort of billion is people who are largely left behind and you know I just felt like if I was going to be supporting environmental nonprofits like putting money toward the environment had to help that those billion people as well so anyway that's basically where the H Foundation came from and and that's just about getting power to to these people yeah sometimes power I mean sometimes that means lights like if you're in rural places in Africa it's like realistically the grid is never going to get there um it'll never be cost effective so like solar power Lantern solar power in home systems um sometimes that means more robust systems uh you know like Refrigeration in real places like uh like agricultural processing you know B you know I mean there Limitless things that people use power for and so I mean now so last year the H Foundation actually the last couple years we will have given um over 2 million in Grants to to different organizations around the world and normally the grants range from like 50 to 20000k let's say and you know so it's not like huge money it's like relatively small scale projects but that can be enough to like completely transform somebody's life because I mean especially when you're in rural villages in Africa I mean if you get light for the first time like that's a big deal because in I mean I mean you know in the tropics it's dark for 12 hours a day MH and so you know if you suddenly have an extra four or five four or five productive hours a day I mean that's that's a big deal for kids going to school for people for people just living you know just like having a nice life like having a light is a big deal and then like having a radio having a refrigerator like having basic you know appliances anyway yeah the projects vary the the scope varies we're we're trying to do as much as we can I don't know I'm just I'm just rambling it's like it's just it's there's this crazy pipeline of projects there we get so many applications so what I was trying to say was that we can vet the applications by the the projects that have the most sort of win-win like added benefits where it's like oh you're using solar to do this thing that's also good in this other way like there's also a Workforce Development component or like it's also the local people learning skills to do to do such and such servic systems it's like we kind of get our our pick of the Litter with the projects that we're funding because there's such a huge demand and you know realistically we just can't fund that you know like we don't I'm a climber like I don't make that much I'm not like a tech billionaire I kind of wish I was because it'd be nice to to distribute the money better but um but yeah so anyway we can choose like the most win-win sorts of projects yeah and even you know doing civil Affairs projects overseas when I was in the military like $50,000 $100,000 invested into a community that's like a it's a yeah it's a massive Game Changer so totally that's awesome what what does your day look like like to you know not today but like what's a normal day look for you look like for you right now well so right now my wife is uh is due with our second child in six weeks so so I'm kind of settled at home it's also like it's the holiday season there have been a lot of folks and family coming and it's like chill at home um so I've been in this this routine at home where I'm climbing Outdoors at this this cave that I've been climbing at um trying this hard project like this rout that I can't do and I've been trying for two months still haven't done it but it's it's really hard um but uh and so I go to the cave one day I train in like a home gym one day and then I rest one day and my rest days are sometimes like supplemental workout stuff like you know shoulder PT stuff and um sometimes run a little bit sometimes just bed rest just depends on how worked I am from the other two days but so basically it's a 3-day cycle that just repeats at nauseum for the last two months and then when the baby's born uh are are you I mean do you have other projects that you're looking out in the next years this year so the last two years were both sort of built around these big summer Expeditions that I went on so two summers ago I went on a six week trip to Greenland which became a TV show for National Geographic which actually comes out pretty soon in February I think and then this summer I did a two-month Bike Tour to Alaska uh with Tommy Caldwell so we bike like 2400 miles and we climb big walls along the way and it was it was funny that with the Greenland trip my wife and I were like you know what 6 weeks away from the family it's too long like not going to do that again that was too much cuz we were in the most remote part of Eastern Greenland like totally out of touch like 6 weeks away it was it was a lot because we had the new baby and so we were like not doing that again and then the next summer I'm gone for 2 months we're like [ __ ] it was like kind of kind of a botch and and then that trip you know my wife is now pregnant and our daughter is like a year old and it's all sort of it's like a lot so anyway but that's also going to be a TV show for National Geographic probably next year or something whenever they finish making it but so so what I'm saying though the last two years have been sort of focused on these big big Expedition TV project things um and then you know as much personal climbing as I can fit around family and everything as well this year I think it's unlikely that I'll do a big Expedition like that just because uh because the TV schedule like the things are being released this year it doesn't really make sense to do another one straight away and I don't know if I quite have the appetite for it because the two-month bicycle trip to Alaska as it turns out took me several months to recover from and like to regain Fitness from and um I kind of dug myself into a hole biking 2,000 miles so I get fast as we could to like we we just got kind of worked how much training did you do for the bike part literally none I did 100 mile ride just to make sure that I could and then uh but I do have a bit of a biking not base but I've done a couple bike tours back in the day and uh and for several years before I was living on my van I didn't have a car so I was biking a ton and so I have a little bit more of a biking base than than other things but um but no I got so crushed it was terrible it was it was terrible so in recovery mode way yeah that's the thing and honestly like so I'm 38 now and I don't consider myself old yet but I am like recovery is slower than it was in my mid 20s and it's hard to say how much of that is age and how much of that is like having a young daughter and like you know just family stuff and just a different lifestyle and whatever yeah but um but I'm sort of like a lot of the recovery like recovering from the Bike Tour I would have thought like oh maybe like a month maybe two and you know it's more like maybe three until I actually feel better and I'm kind of like yeah and the grand scheme things like that's fine you know what's three months but but it would have been nice to recover in 3 weeks you know well would you mention that Bas thing right cuz I remember when I like going through SEAL training like you run you run so much you run just going to eat is six miles a day so just just running to the it's like a mile to the chow hall and then a mile back so you do that three times a day so just without any part of the training you're running six miles a day so you basically that is totally crazy why why not uh why not sleep a little closer to the to the running so but you build up this base where you know when I was I wouldn't run for months or what for whatever reason or would run for a month you just go out and run and just make it happen but then you get a little older you're like yo all a sudden someone puts a watch on you and you're like all right let's we're going to run Four Mile time run you're like oh yeah no problem and you're like yo what happened what happened to my quote unquote base it ain't there no more it's funny you say that cuz actually so I said I've been hanging out with Tommy and um how old Tommy he's eight years older than you um I think he might 7 he might be 45 maybe he's 44 I think he's 45 but anyway yeah he's a bit older and he actually tore his Achilles Last year so he went through like a year and a half recovery process because it ruptured two other times so basically he tore his a killes three times and it was the whole process to like get it better and uh so and that's part of the reason we did the bike adventure together because he'd been biking a lot as part of his PT and he was all fired up on biking and he was chomping at the bit to have a huge Adventure because he has two kids who are you know 10 and seven and so he hadn't done any big trips B since he had his family and then he he was overcoming this injury and he was biking a lot he was like I'm fired up to do something epic and I was kind of like I've been doing Expeditions every year and I'm a little more tired and I was like man I'm just not quite at the same level that he is for like this this kind of Adventure I was like this is this is a lot but how do he hurt his Achilles sometimes people hurt their Achilles they were like I was grabbing a bag of groceries and my achilles blew out no he took this kind of Epic fall climbing I mean it was a normal lead fall where a rope caught him but he came into the wall one footed and the foot that hit the wall ruptured the Achilles ruptured and he said he immediately was like oh you know my ailles just ruptured and then had to like hop all back down from the mountain but yeah was like when you watch the video it is like a normal lead fall fall sort of but he like swings in all crazy leading with one foot and then hits the wall one footed and you're like oh God you know like I think even if his Achilles hadn't ruptured I think it would have hurt his ankle a bit you know cuz like you're hitting the wall pretty hard with one foot but swinging in all but once again rock climbing is safe it's for the family yeah yeah no it's totally safe you'll be good to go totally safe though he was doing something uh very difficult like kind of Cutting Edge yeah exactly that's and if you're doing that kind of climbing yeah there's a higher probability or and even still he wasn't really hurt I mean the thing is he's had like Achilles issues his Achilles were tight he's a middle-aged man you know he probably should have been stretching a little more but no but I was going to say though that with the the two of us talking about Bas like so the two of us have been climbing together a ton and both of us have always had a good endurance based climbing um like good stamina and I think both of us are trying to be like I'm not sure if the base is like quite what we thought it was you know like you've always just counted on it being in the bank and now we're like I think our I think our accounts are empty you know we got to like start rebuilding some endurance and like so both of us are kind of like rebuilding some climbing like some base climbing Fitness that that we've always just sort of counted on but we're like it could be better maybe yeah it's wild watching you guys do that speedrun up l cap the way you guys are just freaking breathing like you're sprinting yeah yeah though I mean it's still objectively very slow it's still 2 hours to do 3,000 ft of vertical so it's like you know I was thinking about that too like if if I was going to go for a run right now and it's was like hey this is a we're going for a run it's 3,000 feet of vertical you're like oh that's like that's a that's a kick in the nuts run kind of but you could probably run that in 45 minutes maybe or like something like that it still is a gut check yeah it you know it' be hard work for sure but okay well here you want a fun thought experiment so so the I mean this is also really Niche but an interesting thing to think about it so um so I wrote up an article about the no speed record at some point and I was on a plane and didn't have internet but it just doing back of the envelope math was like okay if you compare uh Elite sprinting to Elite marathoning you know so 100 meter sprint to the to the marathon and you compare the times like so I did all the math on you know meters per second and so basically the marathon pace is roughly half of the sprinting pace so I was like okay so if you take the 2hour nose Ascent which is kind of comparable to the marathon and then there's actually a World Cup speed climb which is a 15 M vertical wall that people that the world record for men is like roughly 5 seconds so it's kind of similar to the 100 meter sprint and I was like so if you take the same half that pace and when when you watch World Cup speed climbers climbing it looks like a monkey or something looks totally insane yeah it's totally insane it's it's it's incredibly fast but I was like so if you took physiologically though if you took half that pace and you applied it to LC cap how long do you think it would take to climb LC cap I don't know what's the math uh is either 8 or 12 minutes I forget but but yeah so it's like basically 10 minutes to climb out cap so so I concluded My article with like you know while we're very proud of two hours and we tried hard and it's a good effort we're sort of like it's very far from the physiological limits of like the conceivable like what somebody could do on a you know on a 3,000 foot wall I think that that somebody could go down to like 145 or an hour and a half at some point obviously you can never go down to 10 minutes because there's gear in this rope and there's safety considerations and you know you're still climbing this crazy wall but I was kind of like uh the physiological limits are much further well you've done a lot but it sounds like you're not even close to where you could be but that's ex that's exactly that's exactly I know I'm like after 20 years of effort all I've learned is that I'm so far from what I could have been I should have been training harder the whole time well there's there's a clip in in the movie one of the movies when you when you make that and um you're on the phone with Tommy uh I think his wife and she's like are are you going to cry and you said no that feeling is passed I feel like we suck and should have done done better and that's that's where you're basically at so yeah EXA exactly exactly well awesome stuff you are we up to speed ises that get us up to speed that basically gets us to Modern Life I mean that gets us to the holiday season just trying to build some Fitness I don't know yeah it's I was saying the the the TV the Expeditions that I've done the last two years I mean both of those I think will release this year which in some ways buys me as a professional climber it buys me like a year or two of having to actually do anything in a way because there's like content coming out like there's a movie coming out like I think uh February for the Greenland piece uh and then you know potentially later in the fall for for the Alaska Expedition with Tommy and and so you know it takes some pressure off feeling like you have to like do something that year or like create something cool but that basically means that I can just keep grinding away at the schedule that I've been on this sort of like three-day which I'm kind of into because I've been really enjoying myself and it's a nice way to stay with the fam and like be at home and and just grind cuz I I love like I love just climbing two on one off two on went off like I could do that the whole rest of my life and be happy and and it's interesting I'm curious to see if I'm going to improve a lot from it or not because like in a way just like grinding away and training like my arms have basically been very sore for two months straight now I'm kind of like eventually I'm going to get much stronger you know I think I don't know if it'll take two months or four months or 6 months but I like doing it and I don't mind waiting and you know we'll just wait and see like how it plays out so I'm I'm pretty psyched in in a way having the films come out gives me sort of this buffer to just like keep training and definitely while the new child comes and and we just like keep settling into home life so I don't know we'll see I it's less glamorous than being like I just roam the west coast and do Cutting Edge free solos whenever I want but I'm like I still really like it you know it's like it's a really nice I don't know do you have a way of measuring like pragmatically your strength like do you do finger hang for this amount of time with these two digits and yeah hangs with weight is like one simple way it's basically weightlifting both with hangs um and then also like training boards like uh you know steep boards where you're like doing Boulder problems for certain grades like that's an easy way to sort of measure but but also a big part of it is the sensations of like how do you feel when climbing cuz there are times when you feel kind of weightless and you're just like oh like I feel great and then there are times when you're like I just kind of suck you know like to me it's the sensation of doing something you didn't think you could do CU like often you'll pull on two holds and you'll look up and you be like there's no way I could like make it to that hole there's no way I could catch that but then you try anyway and then occasionally you stick something that you're sure you couldn't do and to me that's like the best feeling CL when you're like I knew I couldn't do it but I tried anyway and I did it was a miracle you know like that's so cool and two months into this cycle do you feel like you can hold more weight when you're hanging and you feel Improvement right now yeah objectively nothing great yet like get in there get in there we'll see how's your diet are you get enough protein yeah I think so I've been um I've been doing all kinds of diet like experimentation and playing around and and uh yeah I think I think it's good I've been like sleeping enough you know very health clean lifestyle you know the baby goes to about at 700 we're in bed at like 8:30 it's like it's all pretty yeah it's all uh but that's it's funny daddy well exactly yeah Dad Dad yeah well that's the thing is it sounds so boring but I I kind of like it you know it's like it's a great lifestyle and yeah allows me to climb like the way I want I don't know yesterday uh because because I was coming here to chat with you today uh like today would have been a day at the cave but I was kind of like oh I won't be in town so yesterday I climbed as a day three but day three is always kind of useless cuz you're so tired from the first two days so um so I went with my wife to like a beautiful sunny wall and we just climbed like a bunch of rots and my wife is very pregnant right now so she just uh was climbing on top rope and like just having fun in the sun and I was like man it's so fun to just go to a cliff that we haven't been to in a while and just climb tons of roots you know I did like 15 Roots yesterday or something and so kind of like a fun volume day just to like see how you feel and just have fun climbing how long is the session in the cave in the the hard cave that I'm going to um normally like I don't know 6 hours or less or something but the thing is you aren't actually climbing the whole time cuz like you drive there you hike up you get to the cave basically I do six roots in a day like two warm-ups and then four hard things then I go home is like the uh the aspiration or or maybe sometimes five Roots like one warm up and four hard things and then go home and that's where you're at that's all I do and that's the thing it's It's a Grind because it's like you just go you fail and then you go home and like my last day up there I went up and it was freezing cold like bitterly cold and so I failed because I was too weak but I also failed because my skin felt like glass cuz like with you know it was like 0% humidity and and freezing cold and so it means that your skin like feels incredibly dry and hard and you like can't even interface with the rock like you can't even touch it it's like feels glassy and so then you're kind of like well I failed because I'm weak but I also failed because I can't even freaking feel my fingers or toes and I can't even touch the Rock and you're just like Jesus and then you go home feeling totally worked are you seeing some progress though uh well I've kind of seen negative progress on my cave project but it's hard to say because because the conditions have gotten way worse um but no I'm seen progress on the board like I don't know I I think it's the right path but this is always the challenge with training for a long time is because you start to second guess the path a little bit where you're like oh am I on the correct you know it's like because I assume with like all the weightlifting and things that you do if you're just like grinding for months at a time you're not going to see big PRS while you're grinding but then if you take some time off and you chill then you're probably going to feel a lot better Y and so I'm kind of at that point where it's like you don't want to give up on the process cuz you think it's the right process yep I was literally just talking about this yesterday like everyone says these days like trust the process trust the process and you're like cool and so you're like I'm going to do what I got to do every day I got to set up my schedule I got to be disciplined about it but occasionally you got to take a step back and be like yo are you making progress if you're not then that sucks yeah but you got to know the time frame of like how much like how long are you willing to work or like wait for it yeah cuz sometimes that progress is so slow and yet the path you're on is the correct path exactly but it still is like a rough actually so on on the leadup to free selling Al cap I had an experience like that where I was like grinding for months and all my friends were telling me that it was like the bad path but all of my friends are sort of professional rock climbers where they care about performance like they're trying to climb hard grades and I wasn't really trying to climb the hardest grades because I was trying to free Sol out cap in a few months which isn't the hardest grade you know it's it's it's rated 512 or you know 13 minus or whatever so like the rating is Elite but not like not Cutting Edge by any means and so was doing this tremendous amount of volume and and as a result was tired all the time and so I was never really performing at my my physical limit let's say and so my friends are all like oh you should be resting more so you can perform more at your limit but I was kind of like that's not really the point like that's not what I'm training for and I kind of like stuck my guns stuck to the path but then you know several months into it by by sheer whatever like part of being professional climber like had some work stuff or something for whatever reason like took a break for several days because I had like something going on and then came back and felt like a total hero was like yeah I had basically one day outside where I was like it's working I feel amazing and then I went back to just like grinding for a couple more months and then was in E just grinding and then basically peaked for the climb and then was done you know I was like okay you know but basically felt like I was sucking for 6 months except for one day that was like a signpost they're like you're doing okay and then and then the climb itself how much time did how much how many days did you rest before I don't even know um not not that much I mean I was kind of like day on day off um it was interesting because I actually had all the prep work was like okay I'm ready I'm fired up and then it freaking rained so like I was going to do it but then it rained the forecast was bad and you know rain that day and then and then I wanted to repel the entire wall again to make sure that nothing got wet and you know I had chalk marks on keyh holds here and there like sort of marking left foot here right foot like you know cuz on on a crack up a blank wall like it's hard to remember if it's like your left finger in there or your right finger in there but sometimes it's like critical which which way you do things so a lot of it was like marked with chalk and the chalk washes off if it rains and so I wanted to make sure that it hadn't rained too much because even though it hadn't rain that much down Valley like or up Valley in my van you never really know you know a mile or two way it could have just dumped on the summit and just like pressure washed the entire upper pitches and so so then I went and repelled the whole wall to like double check everything and it was all fine everything was dry my chalk was there but then you're tired from freaking repelling the entire wall so then you're like okay you need another rest day I mean this is the challenging thing with free soing is that like you want to sort of strike while the Iron's hot but then you know but then life gets in the way and you're kind of like ah then you got to start the whole cycle again I don't know anyway so yeah I took a rest day and then then went the day after but it was like I'm all fired up and then it rains and then you actually don't get to go for another like three days or something got to grind and you got to rest Echo Charles over here is a big proponent of rest days monitoring rest yes you could say what you want we know what's happening over there uh does that get us up to speed now are we good yeah I think we're good I think we're good sorry I'm just rambling no it's it's all good um people if people want to find you look I've mentioned alone on the wall we mentioned free solo like if you haven't read this book if you haven't watched those movies just go watch them they're they're they're awesome they're awesome stories it's awesome to see again what I think is I don't know what could be a a a a harder feat by a human being but this is right up there some somebody wants to hit me up on social media and tell me what was a more impressive feat I'm I'm all yours I'm listening but check out the movies uh you're on the interwebs Alex hon.com you got your own podcast indeed climbing gold and you you bring on people from history talk through trips that you've done yeah this year I think we'll be focusing on the the Olympics again okay and climbing gold we originally created it because of the because climbing joined the Olympics in in 2020 for Tokyo though though it happened in 2021 because of Co but um but basically we created the podcast because we're like this is a moment for climbing you know going to the Olympics for the first time feels like a big thing and could be a big thing for the sport um and so this year I think we'll be focused on the Olympics again right on yeah we'll see right on so tune in to that you're on Instagram you're on Twitter you're on Facebook Alex honold it's h o n n o l d you're on master class too indeed got to mention that uh eeko Charles you got any questions yeah I got some questions you me what is crimping crimping half CRI is that what's the what's the term it's just the it's the way you Hold Your Hand it's like a half it's like the way you hold an edge like this yeah but uh but yeah crimping just refers to how you hold your fingers on an edge so what's half crimping half crimping means the so full crimping imagine this is oh here I'll use the edge of the knife this is this is like a good Edge so full crimping is with your thumb over your fing fingers like crimping half crimping would be just your fingers halfway like this and then open hand would be like this like draping off of it like oh dang dang okay all right and I notice your hands like you know how like in Jiu-Jitsu right if you're the ghee guy you get like crooked fingers Knuckles whatever uh cauliflower ear right is this like and it's actually not your hand it looks like it's your fingers that are like real muscular yeah but I don't think they're actually muscles in your fingers I think my fingers are just kind of fat just big are they would they you think I mean you've been climbing since 10 years climbing a long time yeah I think I think I probably would have had pretty big hands just by Nature cuz my my dad and my grandpa have like big hands yeah but um but also I think your connective tissue gets bigger like it's like cranking sideways on your fingers Non-Stop and cracks like I think you get though I'm going to bet you have some big old hands too pretty normal sizeer hypertrophy in your fingers yeah I've noticed yeah probably yeah yeah impressive you know but I mean if you saw like a stone Mason that worked their whole life like chipping Stone you like yeah they're going to have some big old Ms it's just hard work with your hands also probably some percentages is probably calling and stuff you probably sand it all off it's just like extra skin sand off the fingers well no I mean yeah your tips like you're my tips CU like so much well I mean that's why like you know I was joking but crimping the edge of this knife like I can't actually feel this that that well yeah you know bed I mean this isn't sharp though huh not not that sharp it's it if you don't know this Echo Charles like yeah rock climbing is up painful sport fre painful Muay Thai do you know what Muay Thai is yeah likei it's like kickboxing that is a painful sport too like get kicked kicked you're getting kicked in the legs you actually you do things to deaden the nerves and your shins it's it's but it's a very very painful sport but rock climbing is also like just there's there's pain you have rocking is painful in like a way that feels kind of light duty compared to like Combat Sports where you're like getting hit climbing hurts in a way where like oh your skin hurts and like the tips of your toes hurt and when you're in the sun like climbing shoes are really tight black rubber and it's like your toes will be burning and so it's like your fingers and toes are burning and uncomfortable and just like you're holding I mean some some climbing hes are literally like the edge of some of these knives like the back edge of this knife would be like like something you're just pulling as hard as you can it feels like it's cutting your fingertips it's just like it's painful but in a way that's like very unglamorous you know it's not like it punch in the face like it doesn't seem like it should be that painful but you're like man it just you just you're like wow it's it is freaking painful it's I'm here to tell you it's freaking painful so like gloves that's like is that a big no no can't because uh you lose the sensitivity you can't like yeah I mean if you think grabbing tiny little things it just tears the gloves like it's better better to have the skin makes sense they'd be like trying to play guitar with gloves just a non-starter yeahhuh I mean in extreme cold like I have climbing gloves like I've done two expeditions to Antarctica and normally I would climb all the easy train in gloves because if it's easy enough it doesn't really matter but then normally when you get to the hard stuff you basically pull your gloves off with your teeth and then like climb barehanded for a bit and then try to put your gloves back on oh yeah you it's like but I mean it's it's how you try to save your skin if you're in like Subzero temps you know it's like it's pretty unpleasant to climb in to rock climb in Antarctica what else Echo Charles uh you watch movies yeah what's your gem Cliffhanger you ever watch that one dude bro cffh actually so so fun fact so Cliffhanger is Loosely based on on a story on on like real events in used and and actually my podcast com in Gold we did Deep dive into that whole story like this uh in the 1970s a plane carrying $2 million with the marijuana crash landed in a lake in eede and in Valley Uprising right yeah it's in Valley Uprising so we did this deep dive where we interviewed all the people involved because a bunch of climbing like dirt bag guys that are like living in a tent with like no possessions all hik in the back and come out with like Bales and bales of marijuana which they then dry and then sell and uh so then all of a sudden bunch of climbers like driving sports cars and like going to Europe and like doing anyway it's a classic story but yeah Cliffhanger is a great movie H yeah that was that's all I got that's all you got yeah that was it that was it come on man it's good to meet you yeah Alex any closing thoughts man no no just a pleasure chatting you know just I what a scene I mean I do my podcast like in my actual closet in my house it's like a tiny little thing and I just look at a wall and I'm like maybe I need more climbing accessories and like cool stuff you know it's like it sets a mood there's a there's a real mood in here that that my closet lags well this one definitely started this used to be the maintenance closet and it was half this size and then we recorded in the maintenance closet for a while and then eventually we once we had that little desk over there with a bunch of crap uh getting piled up on it the podcast place was a little too small so we made it this big but what's crazy is you go and talk to you go you know like when you did your Hollywood tour and you'd go to whatever major broadcast network and they've got got 12 people in the back room like looking at you through the glass and all these cameras and everything they don't more people listen to this than that which is nuts right freaking Echo Charles with his thousand worth of equipment presses record and more people listen to this than listen to whatever that major broadcast is so eka Charles does the work at 12 men is what you're saying oh see my man right here he knows bro that's when you know I don't know I doubt it uh well I thought he was going to chime in early when you were talking about you know guys are prepping cameras and downloading cards and scrubbing I was like oh he's going to echo's going to chime in with how hard his job is and you know I'm just over here climbing freaking l cap right that's what's happening freaking echo's just pressing record that's the way it's going down uh anything else though no no pleasure actually yeah I I want to look around the gym a little more after this I ask a few questions oh yeah what if he jumped in the G Jiu-Jitsu you would have automatic Advantage Advantage with those with your hands no but I'm pretty I don't want to hurt my you wouldn't do it twist them all even like even if I go to like a massage parlor I'm always like don't touch my hands you know when people are like oh I'm going to crack your knuckles I'm like no don't mess my fingers cuz like at any given time you know I always have one finger that hurts a little bit in some way and you're always like kind of like taking care of a few things I'm like no Nobody messes with my hands you ice your hands or anything like that do you do any kind of protocol on them no I get like Body Work once a week and stuff like that but no like hand stuff crazy like a guitar player right where it's like it's like so critical I don't like to get my hands wet actually cu you don't want to get your skin soft you know I mean like if you get all pruny like if you're in a hot tub I always hot tub with my hands out of the hot tub which I know sounds totally stupid but that's actually pretty common for climbers cuz it makes your skin so soft and like you can't you can't grab the edge of a knife with soft skin I have a weird I have a weird like similar phobia of like lotion like oh yeah yeah I'm a hard with our daughter my wife has to apply all like creams and lotions and things I'm like I do not touch any I'm 100% with you I'll change diapers I'll do all the things I'm just not doing the lotion like you know like when my wife's out of town I'm just like well bad news she's knocking any of the things you want on her until you get back you know that's the other weird thing you're to fight about kids like the first kid you're like boiling the boiling the freaking bottles and making sure that the Caps had been by your like I got four kids by the fourth kid it was like I think it'll live like it just like eating mud by the fourth one you're like if the first one doesn't feed him I guess he'll just be hungry exactly I'm tired that's the way it goes down man uh awesome man well hey thanks for joining us man after after watching you and following you and seeing you for so many years uh it's it's really awesome to sit down here and talk to you and thanks for inspiring so many people and sharing your experiences your Lessons Learned and thanks for what you're doing every day to help people around the world and make the world a better place man appreciate it oh thank you yeah appreciate it and with that Alex honold has left the building after another what's it been hour and a half of talking hour we should have just kept I don't know you just little other topics come up and you just carry on with uh trying to learn and trying to understand and he's asking questions about stuff and I think maybe he felt like he didn't want to interview me when we when we were actually on the podcast so uh but man very very cool and you know man really just like the it's not too often you get to meet someone that's at the Pinnacle of their world you know they're at the Pinnacle of their world doing things that no one's done before by the way no one's done since you don't see people just rogering up to just go jump on that gig again and just super nice super humble super good dude man awesome yeah I think that it was or one thing that stood out that was interesting after hearing it and then thinking about it more was you know how he was talking about hey I don't I don't want to get he's like I'd rather stare death in the face and not get hurt every day you know ra you know that's better I I remember thinking dang I think I'm literally the exact opposite I would rather get like spraining fingers and you know this and that and not have to stare death in the face every single you know um but at the same time what that illustrates is like okay this guy obviously like thinks and looks at things like in a way different way than maybe me or the very least me but I think most people are like that I'd rather get bumps and bruises than have to look at death like life or death like that um but it kind of offers like okay this is a different way of looking looking at things if I look at if since I don't look at it like he looks at it what am I missing in I don't know life or whatever like what am I missing here and then so when you listen up you can kind of find out things that you never would have really thought about ways to look at stuff yeah it is interesting too like when we got we were just downstairs and we were all looking at our hands looking at each other's hands and like his hands are M are mutated yes like he kind of denied it in here a little bit yeah but then down there your tendons grow right and he's been doing this since he was 10 years old thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of pressure so his hands are definitely M I wanted to like like uh give him things to squeeze like give him like tests you know what I mean right want to give him like like hey here's a grip strength test thing I want to do that I want to try this I want to see how long so I kind of wanted to see what that was all about I was going to be like Hey cuz you know when you you know when he first came up I was like hey good to meet you whatever shook my hand he didn't like squeeze my hand he didn't do nothing was normal and then it wasn't until he was talking I was like freaking you know how you can tell like I said and I kind of mentioned it where it's like okay Jiu-Jitsu guy this guy's been in Jitsu he's been in all the hard battles you're going to see on his body you're going to see remnants of those battles his ears his hands his face a lot of the time um and him right he's in the same exact boat so it's like okay but where's his where were those B where are those battles where is he wearing them and then you look at his hand and it's actually not really his whole hand it's just his fingers when you look at it like this part of his hand like look at Dean List's hand it's his whole hand it's like a freaking abnormally huge like two mints right him Alex's hand is like normal but his fingers are all like to me they look like big muscles on his fingers yeah but and it makes sense tooo where you're just holding cuz like consider this so when I got in when I got real more into lifting weights right and I have a twin brother genetically um identical MH and I got into Lifting for like years after you know like after college and stuff like that and then I remember and he kind of stopped a little bit and I remember this was after years maybe five six seven years I remember like we made a fist and he made a fist next to mine and his fist was like way smaller than mine his whole fist but I'm like oh this is just from just lifting you know so it like happens now Alex hell does the same exact thing it's just his fingers though so they're like all hug times starting at 10 years old yeah yep very impressive you know uh I was getting neck surgery and the doctor you have to go through the doctor he's got to tell you the risks and he's like hey you know you could get paralyzed you could get killed you could whatever right tell me all these things I go doc what I mean what are the chances what are you talking about like how many I said how many sides are on this dice like 10,000 MH and he goes like 200 and I was like hm I I wish I would have asked that to Alex like when you're doing the the boulder problem at 1,800 ft like obviously there's mistakes that could happen like how many times would you have to do that how many sides are on the dice where you like go to kick your foot across and it catches on your pant leg for a half a second and that's it you know whatever the case may be so and uh yeah man the the margin of error like how big is that box you know you when you read the book you definitely read the book he talks about that like about how different situations his mindset is like yeah the margin of sure it's a catastrophic result mhm but the margin of error like you can he could make a lot of mistakes before something goes wrong but also it's hard to translate when you put your shoe your rock climbing shoe on the Rock like like I said I'm beyond I'm below a novice in rock climbing I've like done it and had fun whatever but I it never feel it never felt like secure to me like I can't imagine being 500 feet with my foot on a ripple and that's got all my body weight yeah that yeah it's it also shows you and we did talk about this a little bit but like the amount of technique that is involved is it's just like every sport man it's like every sport is so Reliant upon technique and if you don't have technique well not every sport but there's so much technique to most sports and some some like we talked about some of them are real obvious that there's technique some of them you don't see the technique boxing you don't you look if you know boxing you know how much technique is involved if you don't know boxing it just looks like you're slugging it out with another human then you go get in a ring with somebody that knows how to box dude you're getting worked worked rock climbing like I said I I thought man I can do freaking 200 pull-ups in a workout this would be no problem fre I was pathetic when I started rock climbing pathetic it was it was weird and actually we were just talking downstairs we were talking to that big dude who Rock climbs Grant yeah and Grant's like yeah you know it's I get a big pump my arms and Alex is like well look you've got the same basic size fingers as me you have to hold 200 whatever pounds and I only have to hold 162 lbs imagine you and I do a a a deadlift contest and I have to deadlift 135 and you have to deadlift freaking 315 for reps who's going to win well I'm going to win I only have to dead 135 it's like of course y so man so much stuff going on uh very cool to see what the human being is capable of the the mindset it was interesting too he said his Advantage when he said psych I thought he was going to say psychological no he's like psych like fired up he's like the psych cuz I want to climb I want to do it all the time I want to try hard problems I want to figure them out that is his biggest Advantage how glorious is that my biggest Advantage is I'm just freaking really into this yeah super psyched about this so very cool the human being capable of a lot of things uh let's see what we're capable of let's push the envelope a little bit de reset how's the de reset going for you well good I'm on the path if that's what you mean look am I doing the actual de reset well actually I am actually write anything down I got to write stuff down check the boxes yeah I don't have that thing but if I when I go through the list of stuff I got to do I've been doing that yes okay yeah get up early you know I've been getting up early cuz you text me I'll text you right back right there in the morning you like that don't you yeah kind of yeah um but anyway it's going well thank you for for asking we we I did a little workout with K Dog the other day got on film nice fil it have you done any of uh Jason kala's workouts yet no good little metcons bro throw them in there I know throw in there yeah I I want to so every time I do mine like you know how like so I'll do rounds I told you what I do and I do rounds and I write it on uh on the wall with chalk you know like each round or whatever so I'll take a picture of the chalk rounds and I'll send it to Jason I'll be like full credit today six rounds full credit and like bro get on the app do I'll give you this and that and I'm like cool cool and but I never got around to it I will though yeah but yes I will I hear good things yeah the train hard app check that out Jason kipo they're they're good freaking workouts and they're not you know what's cool about them they're actually really good for de reset because they're like complimentary to whatever you're doing they're like oh for 13 minutes whatever nine minutes like you're going to do something you're going to get a good workout uh one of my deaf reset things is 100 burpees a day yeah and yeah let's just say it's not fun every day it's full credit I that's like a like that's such a good Benchmark that and even the way you structur it is actually really good when you're like hey get 100 burpees or what's the two it's 10 minutes of burpees or 100 burpees whichever one right exactly right well we're all we all got it going on um Chris Pratt's been getting getting his death reset on which is cool getting after it but so many people stepping up making changes doing the right thing eating clean fuel just awesome theede reset.com check it out uh Joo fuel you know we got what you need here's a I got greens creatine and throw a hydrate in there this is like a tasty tasty tasty little treat that that gets you the triple threat yeah the triple production have you done that before not with the greens but my normal daily not daily every single morning is the creatine with the with Hydrate with hydrate yeah greens too I'm just saying if you want to give that a crack look bro I'm not I don't like I'm not I'm not want to eat no broccoli you know what I'm saying broccoli so get the greens in anyways joof fuel.com check it out ml we got joint Warfare we got we got what you need to fuel your system there's new coffee MK by the way never mentioned that are you into that cuz you never were into coffee so coffee is not my jam yeah as we like to say yeah that being said I taste tested it because I'm putting it out there so I'm at least going to see what it tastes like and it tastes freaking good yeah so my daughter she's 10 by the way she was like um she was like you didn't tell me you got new coffee milk and she had been drinking them I was like there's caffeine in that thing 95 migam caffine that's still caffeine and you know I'm not I'm not giving my 10-year-old caffeine yet you know but she's just pounding them apparently she's like oh you didn't cuz she likes coffee the flavor of coffee she like drinks decaf coffee not all the time but I'm like all right sister but she approves of the even though she can't do it anymore I kind of ban her and she's unhappy about that but hey honestly people life like anyone that's into coffee Jamie like people just freaking love they love that new MK the M Coffee what is it sweet cream coffee that's what it is it tastes good it's got 95 milligrams of caffeine 30 gram of protein this is basically the best freaking breakfast a human can have am I wrong you're not wrong because yeah cuz that's it's a thing like people will be like yeah I'm on this freaking I'm I'm on the path I'm doing all this stuff I start my morning with coffee but they get the one from wherever with all the creamy latte ventti like all the stuff you the caramel maio or whatever it's called and it's bro it jams your whole [ __ ] up it's like 500 calories on that one so yeah and so you're off the path just right in the like as you start your day you start your day off the path right there see what I'm saying no reason for this no reason for that not anymore sure there you go check out the new coffee if you like coffee you'll love this you'll love it uh you can get this stuff at Wawa at the Vitamin Shop GNC military commissaries Apes Haner Dash St in Maryland W wake Fern shopright HB down in TAS thank you my people in teas for getting after that HB crushing same thing with Meer up in the midwest crushing thank you Harris Teeter Lifetime Fitness Shields and small James if you want to sell if you are at a gym or you go to a gym or you own a gym email JF sales jof fuel.com get jof fuel to your people that's what we're doing origin USA by the way if you need americanmade stuff which you do if you want to support America if you want to support American communities if you want to support freedom in the world go to origin usa.com and get some Goods by the way we got some good stuff that actually it might not be on the website yet but it's like it's there uh we got like a jacket you know the kind of uh little puffy jacket that everybody wears around you know around the world yeah sure like it's just the standard wear like hey California New York arkans doesn't matter where I go people are wearing this type of jacket we have one now it's freaking perfect it's so good to go um yeah so we got that we made a vest with it too yeah wait is there does that style have like a name I I the closest I'd say is maybe people call it like a puffy jacket just puffy jacket but it's the typical the big Outdoors companies make them yeah yeah and everybody wears them yeah yeah that dig it so if you want one that's not made by slave labor if you want one that doesn't ruin the environment by dumping a bunch of chemicals into the ocean if you want to support freedom for human beings in the world go to origin usa.com check it out genes by the way yes sir jeans look how many pairs of jeans you have me no people people in the world two it's a lot well I don't what everybody shoot I don't know I have uh I don't know eight maybe you got eight pairs of jeans bro yeah all yeah origin jeans all in the rotation what is that a lot that's a lot that's a lot yeah oh for real yeah but okay hey look you might not need eight pairs of jeans like eeko Charles has going on in this world hey I do a guy all right so we're all good hey that's what we're doing making stuff in America check it out hunt gear training gear t-shirts boots just go to origin usa.com check it out get some Freedom it's true also Joo store it's called Joo store for so discipline equals Freedom we're representing on this path whether you're on the death reset or not even though you are you want to represent on the path you want to wear your shirt or hat or hoodie or shorts by the way we got shorts and we are uh we have socks coming come on bro hey a lot of some some of us choose to represent on various levels see I'm saying and socks that's just one level check and available some soap on there some good stuff on there check Jo store.com there's also the shirt Locker which is like hey if you want a new design every month you can you sign up for this subscription you get a cool new design every month it's relevant there's layers on these designs people seem to like it check it out uh it's called the short Locker yeah check out also if you need some steak which you do yes you do need steak check out colorcraft beef.com and also check out Primal beef.com this is the best steak you're going to get out there and you know you need steak boy is there anything better than a good steak it's it's very hard to find something it's very hard to find something better than a good steak and if you want to get the best steak go to Primal beef.com go to colorcraft beef.com get some steak let's go also subscribe to the podcast also subscribe to Joo underground Jack underground.com we just got done recording one of those so check that out we answer your questions we talk about some adjacent topics that's what we're doing over there we got a YouTube channel subscribe subscribe to the YouTube channel subscribe C what is it click like subscribe yeah what the like share like sh share subscribe all that stuff hey check out our YouTube channel we put stuff on there origin USA check theirs out jao fuel check theirs out Eon front check their is out psychological warfare Flipside canvas.com Dakota Myers got cool stuff for you to hang on your wall books obviously covered a book today all alone on the wall by Alex honold with David Roberts freaking good book check it out the new version has the entire uh Ascent of lcap in there so it's just it's just a crazy awesome book to read also I've written a bunch of books about leadership I've written a bunch of kids books too way the warrior Kid 1 2 3 4 five kids books Also Mikey the dragons also extreme ownership dichotomy leadership have Echelon front it's a leadership consultancy we solve problems through leadership go to Echelon front.com for details going to do something live right now for you Jack Daniel You Know Jack Daniel yeah I know iard Jack Daniel Hill he just sent me uh he just sent me an email I'm gonna read it to you it says impact we're Echelon front a leadership consultancy we teach Leadership Lessons Learned on the front Echelon of combat thus the name these Leadership Lessons were often Written in Blood our mission is to pass on those lessons so that they do not have to be Rewritten in more blood end quote when I tell that to clients I emphasize that I know that sounds extreme however while what they do in their human endeavor may not be life or death what their people are doing 40 plus hours a week isn't just the job it's their life furthermore in some instances your ability to implement some of the lessons we we teach could be the difference between life and death and then Jack forwarded a real world example and I'm not going to go into it just for the privacy of the client but a client was in a real world life and death situation they resorted to the principles that we teach at Eon front and got the problem solved and life was saved so that's what we do Echelon front.com if you want to know about our leadership consultancy you can find out about it there we also have an online line training platform these Leadership Lessons that we teach can keep you alive as I just mentioned in critical moments can keep your family alive can keep your friends alive hopefully you don't need it for that hopefully you can just use it to increase your profit take care of your people build your relationships do better at work go to extreme ownership. comom for our online training also if you want to help service members active and retired you want to help out their families gold star families check out Mark Le's mom mama Lee she's got a charity organization if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to Americas mightywarrior33 [Music] themselves again and also Jimmy May's organization beyondthe brotherhood. if you want to connect with Alex he's on the interwebs Alex hon.com he's on Instagram Twitter and Facebook at Alex honold and I'm on there as well I'm at Joo willink Eko is at Echo Charles just watch out for the algorithm just just be careful of it you it doesn't come with a warning sign by the way when you log into social media it doesn't say warning this could waste your enti entire freaking day should say that but it doesn't it just shows you something that you really want to see that's what it does doesn't say a warning it just says hey this is something you really want to see and if you move your finger from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen it's going to show you something else you really want to see and if you do that over and over again there goes three hours of time don't let that happen thanks once again to Alex honold for joining us awesome to meet you man very cool and also thanks to the men and women in the military around the world right now the world is a volatile place right now and you are standing ready to protect us also thanks to our police law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMTs dispatchers correctional officers border patrol Secret Service and our park rangers hadn't talked about them I kind of incl I include them when I say all First Responders when I say law enforcement yeah I'm talking about you all Park Rangers but I'm also thinking about right now talking to Alex the park rangers I've been going to the state parks and national parks with my family for a long long time and have been helped out in minor ways right maybe directions maybe people got stung by stingrays at some state beaches and whatnot sure it happens you know what I'm saying maybe we could use a little extra water out on a hike so we get we get some we've got some help along the way so thanks to all of you and all other First Responders for what you do you keep us safe here and we are thankful for that and everyone else out there I got one more quote from Alex honold I think it's applicable to all of us he said my comfort zone is like a little bubble around me and I've pushed it in different directions and made it bigger and bigger until these objectives that seem totally crazy eventually fall within the realm of the possible and look you don't need to risk your life you don't have to free soul LC cap or half doome but I think it's safe to say that we can all push a little further out of our comfort zone take some risks get uncomfortable push the envelope and basically get up every day and to some extent please go and get after it and until next time this is EO and Joo out
