Transcript of The Greatest Climber Alive: I Shouldn't Have Attempted That Climb!

It drives me crazy that nobody else thinks about risk in this way. People look at my life and they're like, Well, you're crazy. You're such a risk taker. Well, at least I'm taking the risks that I'm choosing. Because think of all the people that go out partying every weekend and they get buzzed and they drive home. Even sedentary people who are like, Well, I don't take risk. I stay home and I play video games. No, you're at a much higher risk of heart disease. They're taking all kinds of risk that they're not actually choosing to take, and you're still going to freaking die either way. So you might as well take smart calculated risks and do all the things that you want to do and at least die happy when you go.

He's done Alex Arnold has made history again, scaling one of the world's tallest skyscrapers. But the conclusion that a lot of people have arrived at is that you don't experience fear because when they look at these two brain scans, your amygdala is lighting up less when you're showing scary images.

I actually hate all the brain stuff because people always put me in this box. They're like, Well, you're different. I'm like, Well, not really. I'm a middle-class suburban kid. Nobody in my family is athletic. Just after 20 years of climbing five days a week and being really freaking scared, I respond differently than an average person. There was tons of emotional turmoil throughout it. Periods where you're just like, I'm trying so I'm just not as good as I want to be. I was living in a car. I had a couple of hundred bucks a month for 10 years. That's challenging. But you just can't master a craft overnight.

I guess that's what people don't see. How do you create the conditions to out persist other people? Then in all your career, when is the moment where you were most scared?

On an expedition to Antarctica. I kept hoping that it was going to get better, and it just kept getting worse.

I could die. Do you have a conversation with your partner before you go and do something like this? Because she wrote a letter. Oh, gosh. Obviously, this is your worst nightmare, she said. But we all have to do scary things sometimes, Alex. Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. 69% of you that listen to the show frequently haven't yet hit the Follow button. And that Follow button is very smart because it means you won't miss the best episodes, the The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. When we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. The simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. Alex, to understand you, I think from everything I've learned about you, from the research I've done, from speaking to your wife, your agent, everybody I could speak to, I think to understand your context, we first need to understand the circumstances in which you were raised and the childhood you had, because it seems to be...

I mean, for all of us, there's fingerprints left on us that define the anomaly that many of us become, including yourself. So what do I need to know? What does the viewer need to know about the early context?

I mean, how deep do you want to go? I need to get a sofa, I need to recline. Just be like, all right. But certainly, there's an imprint from my parents when I my upbringing. They had a very fraught relationship. They eventually got divorced, but they stayed together for the kids. It was a whole, say, intense home life because neither of them really liked each other. And then my mom is very driven, very high performing. And then my dad was hard to say. I think my dad was deeply depressed, basically, the whole time I knew him because he was in this relationship. It's hard to tell. He wasn't living his best life. And then, sadly, after they got divorced, he was much happier, but then he died. And so then never really got to see him blossom that much.

And your mother's high performing. And did she implicitly demand that of you in any way?

Yeah, my mother speaks seven or eight languages. She plays every instrument. It's crazy. She's very artistically minded in that way, the arts and classical But yeah, she wanted us to do all those things, too. I'm a deep disappointment in that regard.

There was a phrase that I saw when I was watching the documentary that your mother would continually say, which I think translates to something like not good enough.

Like Preskin and My grandpa almost doesn't count. It's funny because I feel like a lot of my adult life now, one of my go-to things is don't let perfect be the enemy of good. I'm really into good enough. It's better to try. It's better to do something. It's It's better to fail quickly and learn and keep moving forward than to not try something. Basically, I don't want to be crippled by perfectionism. My mom is very much perfectionist. If you can't do it right, don't do it. I'm like, I think it's better to try and learn and improve.

But she's accomplished a lot of things with that approach?

Yeah, she has, for sure.

What about emotions? This is something I've heard her talked about a lot is in that environment where your mother and father aren't getting along well, I think I heard you say that you hadn't seen your father really happy before before he had passed away. Was it an emotional household in terms of affection?

No, it was a very unemotional household. That said, though, it was a safe, relatively happy household. It was fine. And I was close to a lot of my extended family, and so I had a really good relationship with my grandparents and some of my aunts and uncles. I basically would have characterized it as a totally happy family life until I became older and started seeing other people's families more and was like, Oh, this seems even happier. You know what I mean? Where it's basically really good until you see what else it can be. And then you're like, This seems even better.

And your mom wasn't ever affectionate?

It always feels slightly conditional where it's like, she cares if you perform well, if you do well, if you're a good kid or whatever. You know what I mean?

Why did How did climbing come into your life? Because I have found some photos of you climbing and you look here with your sister, I believe. Here we go. This one here.

Yeah, classic. How old are you there? I don't know. I don't know, like six or something or eight. It's hard for me to tell medium-sized kids' ages.

Why climbing?

Oh, why not? It's so freaking cool. Have you rock climbed?

Yeah, I have. You're going to a gym?

Yeah, I have. And wasn't it the freaking cool thing?

It was fun, yeah, for sure. I mean, saying I've climbed when I'm sat with you, I feel like.

Yeah, but you have tried it.

Yeah, I have, yeah.

As an adult. If you can imagine as a kid how fun that is, and then if you just keep doing that nonstop, and then you find that you have some aptitude for it, you enjoy it, it's like you can imagine going down that path. It's so cool.

But is there something What about the challenge of climbing that you think just was a jigsaw piece for you, your brain, like problem solving?

I think there's something elemental about climbing in the same way as running or swimming. It's like a basic movement thing that I think is quite enjoyable. I think that I also... I think I have an innate love of being on top of things, being at the top. Basically, I love big views. I like the expansive. I like air, and so I like being up on stuff. So I don't know. I think it just hit a few sweet spots like that where I was like, oh, climbing is just so cool.

I'm So you're assuming you never thought this could be a career.

No. Actually, even when I started rock climbing full-time, I still didn't think it could be a career because there just wasn't really professional climbing at that time. It was much smaller. The industry was way smaller. Climbing is way more fringe and less of a thing.

But you weren't motivated by money or anything because one does not pursue rock climbing to become rich?

No, not to become rich. No. I said my father died the season before that. And because my parents had just gotten divorced, he basically left his retirement to my sister and me. And she used it to finish college. I just put it into bonds and was living off like 300 bucks a month or whatever, which worked. I was living in a car. I stole my mom's minivan at the time. I had like a couple of hundred bucks a month, and it was enough to just go to be a 19-year-old just camping. Was it this minivan? No, that's my second one. That's the Ford Econoline. That's the first actual van that I bought. I lived in that van for 10 years. For 10 years?

Yeah.

So I bought this van. I mean, this is classic, but so I bought this van for 10 grand. And And then originally, this is the last build-out, which is the classiest build-out, the original one my uncle and I did for free with scrap wood in his woodshop, basically. And so then I lived in that for 10 years. You're like, Yeah, when you live in it... I couldn't even stand in this van. I was like, Oh, my back. But when you're living in your car for 10 years, you save quite a lot of money.

Between what ages did you live in your car for 10 years?

I probably bought this van when I was 20, so 20 to 30, basically. Yeah, actually, I think that's right because Because I think I met my wife when I was 30, and that same year, I switched from this van to the bigger van. If you've seen the film Free Solo, I bought the Pro Master, it was like Dodge. It was like, I could stand up in my van, finally. And I was like, I'm moving up in the world. I can stand. It's pretty exciting.

You can cook in there really well. There is a little stove in this one.

Yeah, so this, though, is the... I did three different buildouts of this van over the 10 years because the original one was super scrappy. The second build was a little nicer, and then this was a pretty nice build that I had for five or six years or something.

When you live in your van for 10 years and you have a mother who is very performance-focused. I've got her here, I believe. You're climbing with her.

Yeah, classic.

Do you not face a lot of external pressure to go get a real job?

Honestly, less so than you would think. To her credit, my mom was always pretty supportive of the whole path. I think I was lucky that I did a lot of this when I was young enough that it's all part of your gappier. It's like you're young and you're finding yourself. And then I think there was enough external validation motivation that my family could at least look at it and be like, Well, you seem to be good at this random thing, even though we don't get it and don't really know what you're doing. But at least other people think you're good at it, so keep doing your thing.

And at this point, was it rock climbing? Was it free soloing?

Yeah, it's all a little bit of everything. Basically, just being a... I mean, being a professional climber, some of it's free soloing, some of it's speed climbing, some of it's just hard climbing, some of it's going on expeditions, doing your routes. It's a little bit of everything.

For the average person that doesn't know what free soloing is, what's the definition of it?

That's climbing without a rope, so climbing without protection, which is definitely what I'm most well known for now. But in the context of professional climbing, I've done tons of other things in climbing. Most of the time you have a rope on, most of the time you're doing other sorts of things. But it's like the free soloing is what you might have been well known for because that breaks into the mainstream a lot more.

I'm really intrigued, generally, by people like you who take the path less traveled in their career and then maybe nearer the end of the graph, pick up traction. I have this piece of paper in this pen because I'd love if you could, from the age of, let's say, 80, you're now 40 years old.

Yeah, I turned 40 this year.

Could you draw a graph showing how your career looks in terms of success. You can measure that by money or attention or whatever.

Let's see. So it was like...

Nothing.

Slow a little bit, and then this-ish, and then basically just It's like this, where you basically flat but growing, and then you have free solo where it jumps a ton. It's like crazy. And then it keeps growing at a slightly faster rate than before, and then it basically jumps a ton because of the building thing again.

I find this fascinating because Most people in their lives wouldn't be willing to endure this phase 18 to 29.

Well, but it's not enduring. It's so great. I would do that again. I loved it so much. I often think I'd be so happy to just start over from zero. Because all the places that I go climbing now, I've been climbing there for 20 years, and I've done most of the things I can do, and I've tapped out a lot of stuff in the Western US. And I'm like, Man, I would love to just hit the re-zero button and start over because you'd have so much stuff to do. It's so amazing.

I guess that's the fault of my question is that I said the word endure, but you see it as-Yeah, you get to climb every single thing you see.

It's amazing. Yeah, I mean, and that's the thing is from age 18 to 30, I basically did try to climb every single thing I could see because I was just like, I'm learning, I'm growing, this is I climb everything. Now I'm actually much more strategic about it because doing tons of easy climbing doesn't really help me at this point. I'm not going to make big technique gains. It basically just makes me tired without the right gains. It'd be like an elite runner just jogging for miles and miles every day, and you're like, that's not going to make you... It's not going to improve your marathon time if you're already an elite runner. It might be fun, but it's just not going to move the needle for you.

Through this period of your life, 18 to 30, you're optimizing for just having Doing fun, doing things you enjoy. Well, I mean, no, I was always challenging myself.

Basically, I was optimizing for what's the next thing I can do that pushes me a little bit.

But you weren't optimizing for how to get rich or?

Well, then I would have gotten a job. If I was optimizing If I were getting rich, I would have freaking finished my college degree and gotten a job.

I say this in part because I interview so many people who pursue careers that are often considered not real jobs, like comedians or magicians. I tend to find the same thing between the age of 18 and 30. They They optimize for something that isn't necessarily being rich or famous. And then at some point, the graph looks like this.

I'm sure you know this, but the world really... It's like a winner-take-all economy type deal. It's basically, if you're the dude that does the thing, all of a sudden, your earnings go insane. But until you become the dude that does the thing, if you're the best magician or the best comedian or the best whatever, then all of a sudden, you make an insane amount of money. But when you're just one of many struggling comedians, you're struggling. And so I think for me, as a climber, you're like, Oh, I'm just a dude living in my van climbing. But then at a certain point, I'm like the dude. I'm like, Oh, you're that guy that climbs without the rope. And you're like, Oh, yeah, cool. And then all of a sudden, your earnings are like...

Was this a difficult period of your life, this 18 to 30?

No, it was like the best. Well, obviously, it was like, I was trying to juggle really. I wanted to get a girlfriend. You're a young 20s man living alone in a car, wanting to be better at something than you are, but not quite knowing the way, not knowing what you're doing with your life. So obviously, there was tons of emotional turmoil all throughout it. But no, I mean, retrospectively, it's amazing.

And your dad passes away, which is in part, I guess, some of the catalyst for you.

Yeah, honestly, my dad passing away should be the beginning of that graph. This should basically start at 19. Because at 18, I went to university. And so then starting at 19, I guess, I went on the road.

Your dad passing. What impact did that have on you outside of it somewhat liberating you to make decisions that outside of his expectations?

Well, I mean, obviously, it was It's sad. It's hard. And especially now, I'm like, Oh, it's too bad that I don't have a relationship with my dad, and that my kid's not a grandfather and all that. I was like, Yeah, it's tough. I think that the most immediate impact that I had, maybe, was just reminding me of my own mortality. He died unexpectedly at 55, just fell over in the airport and just fell over dead, like heart attack. And so I think that that reminder of my own mortality has had a big impact on my career, my life, my climbing in the world, whatever.

One might not expect you to go, quote, unquote, do risky things because of-Well, no, because the thing is, I think one of the reasons that people don't do risky things is because they have this mistaken idea that They can live forever, basically.

Basically, because people don't want to think about their own mortality. And so they're like, Oh, I don't want to take any risks. I could die. And you're like, You know that you're going to die either way. And either way, when you die, you're going to be bummed that you didn't live longer because it's like the life expect in the US is 78. You're like, Great. Say you make it for men, whatever. Say you make it that far, you're still going to be like, Man, I wish I had 22 more years to watch my grandkids graduate college or whatever. It's still going to feel like too little. And so I'm like, You're better off dying at 55 in an accident, but having done many things that you're proud of and led a life that you're proud of, then dying at 78 and still wishing you had more, but having done none of the things that you wanted to do.

It is interesting. It does appear that people live as if we think we're going to live forever.

Yeah, it's totally insane. I mean, everyone's like, Oh, I don't take any risk. And you're like, Yeah, well, you can take no risk in your life and you're still going to freaking die. So you might as well take smart calculated risks and do all the things that you want to do and at least die happy when you go.

What does this mean to you to live intentionally?

Well, that's exactly it. Choosing the risk that you're willing to take, making choices, using your time the way you want to use it.

I was looking at, I think it was your personality, a personality test you did.

Did I do a personality test? How much material do you have? I'm Jesus Christ. How many things do you have?

I have unlimited things.

I know. I'm so impressed.

On this personality test, it says you're higher on thrill-seeking and sensation-seeking, but then also significantly higher than the average male on urgency, which I think overlays with what you were just saying there of making the decision to do something.

Yeah, basically because your time is short and you're going to die. So get on with it.

It says here you're higher on conscientiousness.

Very polite.

Drill seeking, sensation seeking. You're low on boredom.

I think low on boredom means that you don't get bored.

Perseverance, you're very high on perseverance.

Yeah, I think that's the same as low on boredom.

And low on neuroticism.

That's for sure.

What's the definition of the word neuroticism? Is it like- One thing is like the...

Well, I'm sure there's a clinical definition, but I think of it as general anxiety type stuff, people spinning in their heads about things that don't matter.

Has that always been the case when you look back through your life and the feedback you've had as a kid and a teenager?

Kind of, yeah. I think so. I think I've never been too I'm too concerned about... I don't spin. I mean, obviously, occasionally I stress about things, but just not the way I think a lot of people do.

I'm trying to figure out if that's a learned behavior or maybe a little bit learned and a little bit from your upbringing, genetics, whatever it might be. Because can one learn that? Can one learn to be less neurotic?

Well, presumably. I mean, like meditation, things like that. I think people can find a way to let go of certain things.

Isn't this quite interesting? When people ask you questions inevitably about fear, and how you take on such, to muggles like me, terrifying challenges, there's an element of all of this, which is you do have a nature and a nurture, which somewhat is impossible for someone like me to replicate because your brain and my brain are completely different. Your parents, your early contacts when your brain was being wired and malnated are completely different to mine. I always find this is the trouble of giving people advice is we're dealing with different... Different natures.

Different natures. But I do feel like in my case, the biggest difference in nature is the fact that I've just always loved climbing. Basically, I think that nurture is the majority of this. If you spend 30 years training a thing, you're going to get better at the thing. And so I think that the biggest difference between me and somebody who's not into rock climbing is I freaking love rock climbing. I could do it 10 days a week if I could, you know what I mean? But sadly, I get too tired, my body breaks down. And so I basically have a limitless capacity to do the thing. I just love doing the thing. And I think that that is probably the biggest difference in nature because everything else you can overcome. If you loved rock climbing as much as I love rock climbing, no matter what your genetic disposition towards neuroticism and all that stuff, you would just work through all that stuff, and you'd find your own path to getting good at climbing, basically.

If your kids came to you, you have two girls, right? Yeah. If they came to you and said, Dad, give me advice on what I should aim at in life, would you tell them?

I wouldn't give them advice. I'd be like, You do you. You find the thing you love to do, go hard. Basically, learn some skills, get good at something. What do you like to do? That's the thing for me, especially with climbing, is if someone had told me, you're going to train climbing for the rest of your life, I'd be like, Oh, that sounds like a grind. Because it is hard work. You're hiking uphill with a heavy backpack and it's cold, and it's windy. It's basically physically uncomfortable. Being a professional rock climber means that you're physically uncomfortable all the time, often. It's hard. But if you're doing it because you freaking love doing it, it doesn't feel very hard. I think the key for a kid is find the thing that doesn't feel like hard work.

And when you started, were you scared of big, tall rock faces and stuff like that?

I mean, yeah, I had a healthy intimidation. My first season in Yosemite, the first time seeing El Cap as a climber, I was 19, and it looks impossible. It looks completely insane. I was like, That's so big. But then within a couple of seasons, I climbed some bigger walls, learned how to climb, and then a friend and I had the season goal. We were going to climb in Yosemite all season with the aspiration at to climb El Cap in a day. Basically, there was this long progression on El Cap, specifically where it's like you go from just trying to get up it to trying to get up it faster to trying to get up it with just your hands and feet, still using protection. Basically, there's all these steps you can take. Over a bunch of seasons, I climbed El Cap 60 times, different routes, all these different things. And then eventually, you're like, Oh, maybe I can start thinking about free-souling it, which is where the film free-souling comes in. And then eventually, you do this thing. But then people are like, Well, aren't you scared? And you're like, Well, I've spent 10 years building up on this thing.

It's the thing.

I guess that's what people don't see.

Yeah. The documentary Free Soul, I think, does a pretty good job of showing the direct preparation, the training involved in doing that specific climb. But it just doesn't show the eight years before that, I guess, because the documentary was filmed over two years. I guess I've been going since 2006. So it was nine years before that that I've been going to Yosemite, and I've been spending maybe three months a year climbing walls.

I guess that's the illusion of all people that do great things and become athletes or sprinters or whatever, Ronaldo or Messi, is you don't get to see the-Yeah, the whole life that they put into doing the thing. Yeah. It looks like a magic trick when we see the outcome. When we show up on Netflix to watch you climb Taipei, we're like, whoa, he's hanging with it from his leg.

People watch some of those programs and they're like, he just walked up and did it. And you're like, well, yeah, after 30 years of practice, I just walked up and did it. But no, it's not like just walking up and doing it. What are the illusions? I've literally been five days a week for 30 years. That's so much climbing. I freaking love climbing, and I climb a lot.

On this idea of exposure therapy as it relates to fear and anxiety and confronting one's things that terrify them, was there in the early days, I'm trying to understand, were you scared at some point?

Oh, all the time. That's actually something that I think... I've obviously done so many interviews around fear and managing fear and all that. I've talked about fear a lot of different ways over the years. I think as a founder or older, I've come to realize that actually, you're just scared all the time as a climber. Like, low-level fear, but climbing is fundamentally scary. It's always scary because there are always consequences. Even if you're climbing with a rope, you're still always visualizing what happens if the rope breaks? Is this safe? Is the gear good? Is this actually safe? And so you're always a little bit scared. And so after years and years of always being scared, you get pretty good at managing that stuff.

Because there's a lot of misconception swirling around this brain scan you did.

Yeah, I know. I hate all that stuff. That's just all from the film, Free Solo. It was too short of a scene in the film. They needed a little more. They need to let it breathe. To explain things a little better, I think.

So they scanned a control subject. Another person scans you, looked at the amygdala in your brain, and the conclusion that a lot of people have arrived at is that you don't experience fear because when they look at these two brain scans, your amygdala is lighting up less when you're shown scary images, basically, right?

But shown just this image, what does that even mean? My brain's purple and his brain is orange. You're like, What does that mean? I don't But no, I mean, the thing is, though, and this is what I wish was explained in the film better, is that we're being shown black and white photos inside an fMRI. So you're inside a sealed metal tube, you're totally safe, you're physically safe and comfortable, and you're being shown black and white photos. And so to me, obviously, that's not going to light up the fear response in my brain because you're looking at pictures, you're like, who cares? I'm totally safe. But in a control subject, apparently, your brain responds to images one way or another. But I'm like, I've been climbing for 20 years, so I've been scared quite a lot. And you're like, well, black and white photos start to lose their edge if you've been scared all the time for 20 years. So it's like, obviously, that's not going to trigger much.

Yeah, and I imagine everybody in their life can think of it as a scenario where they have mastery. A stand-up comedian looking at a stage probably wouldn't be as scared as me because that would terrify me. So again, this is not necessarily some neurological deficiency.

No, I think the real takeaway is that I have an amygdala and it works. You know what I mean? Because I think it If the results had shown that I was missing my amygdala, then I would have all kinds of... I would have died already at youth because I wouldn't be able to function as a human, basically. But had it shown something like that where there are structural differences or some real change. But this is basically just showing that after 20 years of conditioning, I respond differently than an average person. And you're like, yeah, no kidding. If you put a monk into an fMRI, their brain responds totally differently than an average person as well.

Which I actually think is a really inspiring conclusion because it means that we can all grasp our fears better. And even people won't know this about me, but 10 years ago, I sat down on camera with my friend, Ash, in his apartment to record a two-minute video. And as I sat there, I was so scared, I couldn't get the words out. So actually in this two-minute video that comes out, you see it go from night and day in the background just because we did that many cuts over seven hours, try and get me to say two minutes on camera. And obviously, after 10 years of being on camera, I can now speak without shitting myself. And I imagine my brain state looks significantly different because of my exposure therapy. Totally.

Yeah, you should do the fMRI. Yeah, you should have done 10 years because then you'd have your control, and then you do it now, and it'd be totally different.

But also the psychologists I've sat with all confirm this. They talk about exposure therapy.

I went through exactly the same thing with public speaking. I was always so afraid of public speaking. I was also very shy and just not It was terrifying. And now, because of the free solo film tour and all the public things I've done since then, I'm basically fine. It's like you still got a little nervous, but it's basically easy now. You're like, Well, that's a total change. It's like, obviously, There's a tremendous capacity for humans to learn.

People talk to you about fear all the time because...

I mean, your work-Climbing is really freaking scary. It makes sense. It's totally understandable. Yeah.

And they also realize, I think at some deep level, that the thing holding them back from who they think they want to be or who they aspire to be is fear often. It's judgment of someone else. It's taking a risk. Totally. So you've become for many people the like, tell me, tell me how to overcome.

Yeah. Well, I think that everyone's like, what's your hack overcome fear. And you're like, there's no hack. You just get really freaking scared over and over for so long, and eventually it's not that scary anymore. But I will say that that's a very enduring way to overcome your fear. It's like, if you're willing to go through that process, then you are actually unafraid. Because Because you can do hacks. You can crank up loud rock music and just go for it. And there are plenty of examples of that in what I'd call gravity-assisted sports. Say, if you're going to jump a cliff on skis, you can get to the edge, be like, This is really scary, and then be like, three, two, one, do it, and just let go. In climbing, you can't really do that as much because it's so slow. When you climb, you make one move, and then you make another move, and then you're like, Do I still want to be here? Basically, fear creeps in a lot more. But in gravity-assisted sports, you can have more of that moment where you just overcome your fear, and then it happens, making a big drop in a kayak or skis or things like that, where it's like once you commit, it's happening one way or another.

Anyway, there's a lot to get into it.

No, but I want to get into it. I watched a video of you climbing Halfdome, I think it was, and it looks like You got scared halfway up.

Yeah. That video was actually filmed later. The voiceover in that video is me talking about the experience of me free-salling when I was totally alone. I did get really scared on Half Dome, and I had this whole somewhat dramatic climate experience, and you're at the top of the wall. But then when we to come back to film it, I had a different traumatic experience while we were filming. Less dramatic, but very scary for a moment. And they got that on camera. So basically in the film, they just cut the two together because it shows me being really scared.

What's Half Dome to start with? And then what was the dramatic experience?

Yeah, so Half Dome, for anyone who hasn't seen, is this just totally amazing wall in Yosemite. It's a 2000-foot granite face. Actually, it's the North Face logo. That's Half Dome. Oh, okay. Yeah, so it's like an iconic wall in Yosemite. It looks like half of a dome, but actually, it's more like a hockey buck just shoved in. It's actually a full dome, depending how you look at it. But the Northwest face is vertical for 2,000 feet. It's incredible. And so I free solo. That was one of the first major free solos I did in 2008. And one of the things that made me a professional climber in a But when I did the climb, I did the bare minimum preparation. I basically didn't know. It was the biggest thing I'd ever free soloed. I didn't quite know how to go by getting ready for it. Anyway, I climbed it and basically hadn't practiced enough. I was really freaking scared, got off route, got confused, skipped some stuff, and then at the very top had this whole moment of extreme panic. Basically, I got up into some stuff and all crumbled mentally and barely managed to finish this upper slab.

The hardest part of the climb was right near the top. I was trying to walk across this ledge. Basically, I've walked across that ledge face in and face out. Normally, people hand traverse it or they crawl across it. There are different ways to go across the ledge, and I've done it every which way. Then we were up there filming, and I was like, I'm going to walk it face out. But it turns out when you walk it face out, it's really freaking scary. I made it halfway and was like, Oh, my gosh, and then bailed.

When you say you were having a crisis in your mind, what is that? Is that just, Oh, my God, what am I... How does that sound?

In this case, When you're walking across this ledge, it starts maybe as a foot wide, so your foot is fully on the ledge and you're shuffling across it. But then at a certain point... Yeah, I mean, that's... I'll put it on the screen for anyone watching. Yeah, that's the ledge. But basically at the narrowest part, your feet are sticking out over the lip of it and the wall bulges ever so slightly, so it forces your back out a little. And so you're basically like rocking on your heels with, I don't know, like a 1,700-foot drop or something, or 1800-foot drop, like straight down below you. And so it's pretty It's pretty intense. Anyway, and so I thought I was going to walk across it like that, and I made it to the bulging part and was suddenly like, Oh, my God, this isn't for me, and then managed to shuffle back and change my strategy.

Is it like panic in your head?

It's not panic, but you're like, Oh, I made the wrong choice. This is bad. This is bad. I mean, it's not like full five alarm bell, panic, panic. But yeah, you're like, Oh, I'm so screwed.

And you have fallen a long way before. I was hearing it by the time when you were young and you fell off a mountain and managed to call your mother in there.

Yeah, that was sliding down an icy coular type thing. It's a little different than free falling off of a cliff that's sliding down a mountain. But yeah, I got totally messed up. I've broken my arm several times as a kid falling off things. And then with a rope as a climber, you take big falls routinely when you have protection. That's part of the sport, basically. I mean, it's certainly easy to visualize falling 700. When you're standing on a little ledge and it's bulging and you're looking down, it's easy to be like, Oh, my God. It's like if you just bend forward a little bit, you're just going to take a swan dive like 700 feet to the ground.

The stats in this sport are, I mean, of fatalities. How do they compare to other sports?

Safer than you would think. That's the thing. Everyone thinks it seems crazy, but it's not that crazy. I don't know actual statistics, but I suspect that it's actually pretty comparable to skiing or something because recreational skiers die all the time, falling in tree wells or going off cliffbacks and things like that. Climbing is actually surprisingly safe, which is one of the things I love about climbing. Climbing is very binary where it's either you're totally safe or you're going to die. And the odds of you dying are very small. But because they're there, they always keep you on. You know what I mean? It basically keeps you alert, but you're never really going to get hurt.

Is thatIncluding free soloing?

Yeah, for the most part. I mean, a couple of people have died free soloing. People occasionally die free soloing, for sure. But actually, most of the cutting-edge free solists have not died soloing. They've died in other things.

I think it was in the documentary on Netflix, Free Solo, where one of your colleagues-Yeah, Tommy is like, Most free solos are dead now, which is true, but it's slightly misstated.

I mean, he's just speaking off the cuff, and it's not strictly true. A couple of the best free solos have died free soloing, though they died on very easy terrain. But then the majority of other great free solos have died in climbing adjacent accidents, like wingsuit base jumping, and one got swept to sea by a rogue wave while he was out climbing a sea cliff, but he was standing on shore and got swept out to sea. Things like that where you're just like... Obviously, they're taking risks in their lives and they wind up dead, but it's not the way that people think. You see a photo like that and you're like, free-souling, you're going to die for sure. And they're Well, people don't actually really die that way. I mean, they have. I mean, not to say that it doesn't happen, but way less frequently than people would suspect.

If I was to try and professionally torture you, and again, I'm not talking in extremes here, but what life would I prescribe you to live?

Being a finance bro or something. Having to just work spreadsheets my whole life. Is that what you mean? What is my worst? I don't know, something like that. Or honestly, being a choreographer for dance or something. I just couldn't do. Or being an opera singer. I would just kill myself. I just couldn't do that.

Why would being a finance bro be the worst thing for Alex?

Just the idea of sitting a computer in a cubicle, just typing. I'm contrary. I don't like rules. I don't want to jump through hoops. I don't want to do arbitrary things. I don't want some manager to come and tell me, Oh, you got to file that report again. You missed a line. I'd be like, You go after. I just walk out of the building. I just don't know if I could take that. I'd be like, No.

But that's how most of the We all live. We all live in like...

I just don't know if it's for me. I don't know. I mean, doesn't that just seem... I mean, I had this moment. I've been in New York a couple of days, and I took the subway down to see some friends, and I was coming out of the tunnel, and it's packed with people, and I was just like, I was looking at the ground and I was just following someone else's footsteps up this beat down path of stairs. I was like, I couldn't live like this. Not day in and day out every day. This is just... I feel like you're just doing the exact same thing as everyone else around you. I'm like, Oh, it seems so It's so boring.

It's funny because so many of us look at your life and go, Wow, that's not very normal. But actually, maybe at a foundational level, you're living a much more normal life than... I mean, you're out in nature, you're moving your body.

Yeah, in that way, for sure. I'm like, going on cool adventures, going out. I don't know.

I think that's also part of the attraction and allure with your life, especially when you watch Free Solo, is you do seem to be a free man. In a way where most of us aren't free as such.

Yeah, I think we're all aspiring to that to some extent. Most people see that, though, is like, they get their vacation for the year. They're planning to retire at some point, and then they're going to have their freedom. They're like, I don't know. Maybe you got to try to live that way as much as possible.

If your young girls came up to you, June and Alice, and said, Dad, what is a meaningful life? What are the principles of living a fulfilling, meaningful life? Would you give them advice there?

Yeah. It'd be a long, rambling, multi-day conversation with them But following your own goals is, I think, certainly one of the cores of having a meaningful life. Having things that you find valuable. Really living in line with your values, finding things that are important to you and pursuing them with as much as you can give them.

When you look at your early 20s to '30s, it looks like you're living like a Buddhist a little bit.

I went on a trip once where they called me the monk just because I was living such a acetylic lifestyle. I was reading. I've never I don't drink and I don't party, just for personal preference, whatever. So I'm just living in my little van and reading books and climbing all the time. Those are the things that I'm into doing. It's just doing what you want to do.

Have you ever been depressed?

Yeah, probably not deep clinical depression, but there's certainly periods from time to time where you're just like, What am I doing? Or why? Or what are my goals? And I think to me, the The most depressing thing is that I've put my whole life in a climate like trying to be the best you can be all the time. Sometimes you put tons effort in and you just don't see results. For whatever reason, you just suck. You're like, I'm trying so hard and I'm just not as good as I want to be. That's challenging. But that's I mean, everybody faces that to some extent where you're like, I'm working hard at a thing, but I'm just not achieving the results that I want.

Between that period of no man's love, the '20' and '30, where your career hasn't taken off yet, the documentary is not out, you've not climbed Taipei, how much money are you earning from climbing?

I mean, my first couple of years, my sponsorship through the North Face was like... I think my first year was like 10K a year. I was like, This is amazing because I was living in my car. And maybe Making 10 grand when you live by yourself in a van is more than you need, basically. It obviously went up beyond that at some point. But it was in the 10 to 100 range for the first... For the whole... Yeah, for years.

Then at some point it increases.

Yeah, and then it increases. Then free solo is obviously a big thing, and that opened up all these opportunities. Because then I started doing corporate speaking and stuff like that. As I'm sure you know, that's just a whole different world. And so then you go from just making some money from sponsors to making money from other corporations. Then you're like, okay, now you're making some money.

One of the things when I was hearing you talk about some of your incredible climbing stories is I was trying to understand what role visualization or your preparation plays and how that's transferable to me in my life. We talked a little bit about just how much preparation you did for something like L Cap, but it sounds like you really break down the challenge into smaller bits and then really go through those individual steps Whereas a lot of people just look at L Cap and go, Oh, my God, they'll be terrified. And that's impossible.

Yeah, which is fair. I spent years looking at L Cap and being like, that's too big. That's impossible. And then after years of that, I kept hoping that I would look at it and it would look easy somehow. And I'd be like, cool, now I'm going to do it. And it just never looked easy. And so then finally, I was like, Okay, I'm going to have to put some real work into it. And then I started slowly breaking it down. And then once you break it into pieces and start working on the pieces, then you're like, Okay, it starts to feel more reasonable.

Break it into pieces and start working on the pieces. What does that mean in terms of climbing? I've got this model here of Type A.

Type A.

This is also a metaphor for any challenge I have in my life.

But this is actually perfect because it's right here. I scout I did this in September of this year. I did the climb in January or whatever. In September, we went and... Well, we had to, one, make sure it was possible before you commit to it doing a whole TV program. You're like, Let's make sure we can do this. And then they also had to get all this marketing material. You get the photos of the building, all the stuff that becomes the trailer and whatever. And so we went in September to do the prep. And so I basically checked out all the different pieces. And so anywhere where you see it looking a little bit different, it's this whole bottom part is a low angle slab. It's punctuated with these two little rubies. These are coin things or whatever, the clouds or whatever there. Then there are the dragons on the corners. These are all overhanging. Each of these eight blocks is a big overhanging thing. It feels a little bit different. Then you get up here, there's these balconies. These are actually overhanging. Basically, each little segment of this is quite different. Obviously, on this model, it looks the same, but each transition between the different pieces is a thing.

So I checked out all of them with ropes. And you just go piece by piece all the way up the whole thing.

And you hadn't ever climbed it before. We saw on Netflix Live?

Well, I hadn't. I didn't know, but I had climbed it. I'd climbed all the pieces with the rope for sure. I'd like, checked out the different things.

Okay, so you look at these as individual challenges every step.

Yeah, it's like you go... Even just getting off the ground the first move is a slightly different move than any of the other moves. You have to jump up to a thing and press it out. Then climbing over these little clouds is a different thing. Each dragon is a different thing. Yeah, I mean, it's just... There's a surprising amount of complexity to it. And so our first on the scout, I had a note on my phone, and I'm just writing down all the different... Basically, I'm trying to learn it the way you study anything, where I'm just making notes and from floor 54 to 72, it feels like this. I climb the southeast corner, the left are at, and then just writing it all down.

And I mean, There's this famous photo of you hanging with your leg.

Yeah, that's this. These are the rings up here.

So you're hanging from here with your leg. This is really a question of endurance. How do you plan to have the energy? How do you know if you're going to have enough energy when you're up here, when you're just planning it?

This is what makes it exciting because you can't be sure. But I've done a lot of climbing in my life, and I've done a lot of climbs that were 24 hours. I had this experience in Patagonia once. It was a 54-hour push. The last 20 hours, we hiked without food because we got caught in a storm. It's a whole crazy story. But basically, I've had a lot of experience in my life where I've done hard exercise for more than 24 hours. And so I expected to take me somewhere in the hour and a half, two hour range. I'm like, Yeah, I mean, I'll be tired after two hours of exercise, but I'm not going to be exhausted. You know what I mean? I know that I have a much deeper reserve than that.

So much of the conversation around after you had done this, or some of the conversation was around whether this was a harder challenge than El Capitan.

No, it's obviously much easier. I mean, I'm doing it on live television. It's like, obviously it's easier. But what makes it cool is that it's different, it's fun, it's challenging. For me, it's really in my sweet spot where it is challenging enough. It's It's not easy. You know what I mean? Saying easier than L Cap, it doesn't. L Cap was a 10-year life project that I did in absolute secrecy. I did on my terms on the correct day. After years of effort, I had failed attempts. You know what I mean? L Cap was an all-consuming life project for years. Obviously, you can't do that for live TV. It's like you just can't put... Anyway. But this was very much in my sweet spot where you're like, Oh, it's hard enough that it's hard. It's cool. It's fun It's interesting. The climb is engaging. It gave me something to train for for months. It's super fun. But it's not the absolute limit of what I can do because you just can't do that on live TV. I mean, if nothing else, I was climbing the Southeastern Red because it gets good morning light and it looks beautiful and it's great for filming.

But if I was trying to do the absolute most cutting-edge climb I could do, I'd be climbing the Northwest or at it because it'd be full shade, because it'd be better conditions, it'd be colder. You just don't want to be in the sun. It makes your skin, it makes you hot and stuff. Just things like that. You're like, well, if you're doing it for TV and you're trying to broadcast it, then you want it to look good. But if you're trying to do it for hard climbing in good conditions, you do it in full shade.

Netflix had a 10-second delay just in case you fell.

I'm sure part of it's in case you fall, but part of it's like, what if somebody unplugs one of the things? You know what I mean? It's so complicated. There's so much stuff going on. It's insane.

Was there a hardest part of this, a part where you were a little nervous?

The thing I was most nervous about when I started were the bamboo boxes, doing these eight overhanging segments because they're just so relentlessly the same move, and it's just pretty physical. You get tired for sure. I mean, the actual physical hardest moves, actually, randomly, one of these corners up here would have been quite a hard move, but there was this freaking security camera bolt out of the wall. And so you use the security camera as this handle? It was really freaking cool. And it was bolted on these giant bolts, so it looked super safe and it was very robust and secure. But it would have been this extreme jump, which I wasn't... It's probably possible, but would have been a major thing. But instead, you just I took off the security camera. I was like, That's so cool. So there are a few things like that, individual moves that are muscley. But overall, it's the stamina, the challenge of doing this over and over for hundreds of feet. That was the hardest thing.

Do you have a conversation with your girls and your wife before you go and do something like this about just in case you don't come back?

Not with the kids because they're too young and they don't understand it anyway. And not with her because she came with me to Taipei or she was there for the whole end of it. I went a little bit earlier, so I could adapt to the times then more and feel better. But basically, she was with me. So we went to bed together that night and I woke up that morning, had breakfast together. So it didn't feel like a big goodbye. Actually, she was with me at the base. We did the start together, and then I literally was like, Okay, bye, and walked I went and did the thing and saw her again at the top. So we were only apart for an hour and a half. And I saw her through the window a couple of times. And so it felt like she was just there having the whole experience with me.

Did you look at other buildings in the world, like the Burge?

Some, yeah. I've scoured the Burge twice over the years. Back when this project, this project almost happened in 2013 or something, and so I'd scoured some buildings then. The Burge was just a little too extreme. It was just too hard. But someday, maybe, who knows?

Because there's not enough... It's too slippery?

Yeah, it's super slippery. Also, it's just the way the holds are. The beauty of type 101 is that the holds, they're good things to hold that are close together and you're just like, and you can hold them and you feel secure. The burge, I can barely span tip to tip to reach between the holds. And so And then your face is right against the glass. You're holding on like this, and it's pretty hard. And you have to do the same thing 112 times in a row. It's pretty hard to do it once, then you have to do 100 times. You're like, it's hard.

The other thing that I saw online after you'd climbed it about one or two days after everyone talked Start talking about how much you were paid to do it. I think because you did an interview.

It's funny. There were some quotes that were taken out of context because a New York Times reporter asked me how much I was getting paid, and I was like, I don't want to talk about it because it's embarrassing because all my friends, it's an embarrassingly high amount for in my community. In the climbing world, if you're getting paid to rock climb, you're like, Great success. You're getting paid to climb. That's insane. And so I thought it was an embarrassingly large amount. I'm like, Oh, this is weird. But then he poked around and he started comparing it to boxing matches and stuff where people get paid $20 million to fight someone boxing. And I was like, Well, no, compared to that, it's an embarrassingly small amount. Or if you compare it to Major League baseball contracts and things, then it's like, Yeah, it's an embarrassingly small amount. But I was never complaining. I thought it was great. I mean, I would do it for free. I mean, I've paid money to go up to the observation deck. The observation deck is way up here at the top, and the view is insane, and the city is incredible.

It's like 20 bucks or whatever to take the world's fastest elevator to the top of the building. I've done that in the Burge as well, where you pay the money and you go to the very top of the building and the view is insane. It's like, I do that anywhere I travel, like the Willis Tower or whatever, the Sears Tower in Chicago. I've paid the money to go to the observation deck and see the view, and it's so cool. I'm like, if someone's willing to pay me to climb up to the observation deck, that's freaking I think it's because people, again, they believe that this is you're risking your entire life.

Yeah. And so they don't think of boxes as risking their entire life in the same way. Except they are. They are, yeah, but they don't see it as that.

I know, of course, they don't see it as that. And that's totally understandable. I get that. But I see it as anybody going into the box in your ring, particularly if they're very mismatched, you would think that there is some real chance of grievous injury or death. It's like it's insane. And so I think that people over... The thing is, I think people that don't know anything about anything, don't know anything about climbing, look at me climbing a building, they're like, It's 50/50 if he lives or dies. No idea. And you're like, No. If you put this in the context of all the things that I've gotten in my life, I felt very confident that I wouldn't fall off the building. I was like, Obviously, it's never 100% because whatever it's life, but it feels like 100%. You're like, Oh, there's no chance I'm falling off this building.

The rumors were that you got 500K to climb it from Netflix.

Throughout my My whole career as a climber, I basically have never worried about money, and I've always just tried to do the thing and let it all play out at the end. And so I've done a ton of work for free over the years. Actually, we were talking about that Half Dome film earlier, where I'm shuffling along. I did that film for free. I did tons of films like that for free just because you're like, Oh, it's part of being a professional climber, and I get to go climbing, and I'm up with my friends filming on a thing. You're just like, You're working for free. It's fine. But by doing all that stuff for free, I never stressed the day rate. I was like, I don't need to get paid to go with my friends on a wall. It's fine. But as a result of that film, a year or two later, they went up doing a photoshoot up there for the cover of National Geographic. And so you just wind up in other things. And then that got seen, and I wound up being profiled by 60 Minutes, which actually was one of the first career inflection points.

It was like this 60 Minutes profile in 2011 or something. But basically, I've done a ton of work for free over my life as all part of... It's all part of the game, and I just love playing the game. And so you just let it play out. And it's funny Because with this building, a lot of people thought that I was underpaid by it. But afterward, some people have approached me about some bonuses and some other work stuff, and basically a lot has already happened, and it's only been a couple of weeks since the building. I'm like, You don't need to get paid for the thing itself because it always works, basically. I'm like, I don't know. I'm like, Don't get hung up on how much you get paid. Just do the thing, make sure it's freaking rad, and it all sorts itself out.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's also been like, that's completely true for my life as well. Even this podcast, when we started the podcast in my kitchen, I mean, this is a replic of my kitchen, and Jack was here. There was no payment when we started it. Yeah, exactly.

You're just doing a thing, you make it as good as you can, and eventually it all works. And you're like, cool.

Because that pattern you've just described has played out for 15 years of my life, and again, my CFO, my Commercial Director might not love me saying this, but they know this about me, and we even talked about it recently with a particular It's like, don't let the inability to see where the money is going to come from in the near term stop you pursuing something that you think is going to create value because history shows that actually value, giving value out into the world, precedes the economics. Totally. If it happened 15 years in my life, I remember when I started the social media business and a guy sat me down in Google in London and explained to me why I would never make money from that business. He did the math for me, and the math was solid. He was like, If you do once, you won't make any money.

And I was like, Yeah, but I don't think that's true. You have no evidence. Yeah, but you just know it's going to work.

The Uber CEO sat here with me yesterday in that CEO, and he was telling me, he was like, the thing is, there's this thing called Jevon's Paradox, where when something-Yeah, efficiency. Yeah, when something was more efficient or whatever, people think of things in linear progression, but actually there's exponential progression. So when we launched Uber, more people started taking taxi. So all of the models about how big this market were were all wrong. I find the same in that. And I find the same in podcasting when we started about five years ago was, yeah, you set me down and go, well, Steve, CPMs, you're going to have to be getting a million downloads to earn a living.

But-we're like, Wait and see. Yeah. We'll just do the thing and let it happen.

I mean, you're a prime example of that.

Yeah. It's always better to focus your energy on being the best at the thing that you're trying to do than figuring out how to monetize it or make money off of it. I don't know. My whole life as a climber, I've always tried to focus on how do you send, which in climbing terms means do the hard thing. You always focus on sending, and then everything else follows.

Whoa, what's that on your face? This is my bondcharge face mask. I've been wearing this for some time now. They're a sponsor of the podcast. I put this on for 15, 20 minutes a day. I can sit here in the chair and wear it. Boost my collagen production, helps with fine line blemishes, my complexion gets better, and then more people listen to the podcast because I look better. Professional-grade equipment in such a small box. It's non-invasive. Having sat here with so many of the world's leading health professionals, there's various things that I repeatedly hear work and some things I'm a bit skeptical about. This is one of the things that almost all of my guests on this show have confirmed works. It is really, really, really effective. They offer fast, free shipping worldwide with easy returns and exchanges. You'll also get a one-year warranty on all of their products. They're HSA and FSA eligible, giving you tax-free up to 40%. You can get 20% off when you order through my link at bondcharge. Com/doac. That's bondcharge. Com/doac. The deal applies site-wide. I've had so many founders speak to me and say, Why didn't this particular ad that I ran on this platform work for me?

Maybe the copy wasn't good, the creative wasn't strong, but usually the problem is they're not having the right conversation because that ad never reached the right person. If you're in B2B marketing, that is much of the game. This is where LinkedIn ads solves that problem for you. Their targeting is ridiculously specific. You can target by job title, seniority, company size, industry, and even someone's skill set. Their network includes over a billion professionals. About 130 million of them are decision makers. So when you use LinkedIn ads, you're putting your brand in front of the right people. Linkedin ads also drive the highest B2B return on ad spend across all ad networks in my experience. If you want to give them a try, head over to linkedin. Ca. Linkedin. Com/diary. And when you spend $250 on your first LinkedIn ads campaign, you'll get an extra $250 credit from me for the next one. That's linkedin. Com/diary. Terms and conditions apply. It's funny, you're talking about mortality earlier on. I think in the last couple of years, my mortality, realizing that I'm going to die someday has been such a wonderful thing to really remind myself of on a frequent basis.

How come?

Just because... Okay, so there's many things. One of them is the whole idea of sunk cost bias, where you become successful at a thing and now you have something to lose. So people go into a state of loss aversion, where they start to protect what they have. Totally. This narrows your life in a way where you stop taking challenges, stop taking risks, stop doing new things. The other thing, generally, about knowing you're going to die and really reminding yourself of that is it liberates you from getting caught up and worrying about things that in the grand scheme of cosmic reality are totally inconsequential. I was hearing someone say the other day, Do you know the name of your great grandfather? Do you know his first name? Not really. Do you know the life they lived and what they were worried about and how they were embarrassed and their shame?

Yeah, exactly. No, you don't know any of that.

And the point is, if you don't even know your own family's bullshit.

Nobody else cares.

But even extremely famous people, a couple of weeks after, they trend on Twitter, and then a week later, everyone just gets on with their life again. Totally.

Well, I'm already experiencing that with this stuff. The building was insane for a moment. But now it's the Olympics and there's a lot going on in the news cycle, and it's like, the world's moved on. And I'm like, great. I'll go back to just being at home with my family and climbing as much as I can.

Being at home with your family. You said earlier that when you were in that van for 10 years, you wanted a girlfriend. Now, I'm not being funny, but people that fit your profile, and to some degree, people that fit my profile, struggle in intimate relationships for a variety of reasons. And I think I actually saw this in the documentary when I watched Free Solo. I saw you had a partner at the time. There was an accident on the cliffside where you fell and she was supposed to be protecting you. And generally, I just saw someone who probably is more on the less affectionate, more commitment avoidance side of life. Is that accurate?

I don't know about commitment avoidance because actually I have had long term girlfriends and things, but definitely I'm less expressive. I'm less emotionally intelligent than my wife.

Has she ever given you feedback that she wishes you were more emotionally available? I mean, I get that.

I mean, yeah. In In different words, perhaps. But yeah, basically.

Sarni.

Yeah, Sarni.

Is her name. She wrote a letter.

Oh, gosh.

That's funny because the first two words are, Oh, gosh, an intimate letter out loud.

Oh, gosh. She does know me.

Obviously, this is your worst nightmare, she said.

She knows me so well.

But we all have to do scary things sometimes, Alex. My coach. She said, I remember when you read a book once about a woman who said she was less affected by emotions than most people. For her entire life, people tried to convince her that she was wrong, that she was suppressing her feelings, but at the end of the day, she just wasn't. As you were reading, you turned to me and said something similar, something like, Everyone wants to believe that I'm burying all these things, these feelings deep inside, but I'm just not. I laughed and I joked, Don't worry, I know you're dead inside. If I remember correctly, you gave me a hug. But I've thought about this conversation a lot because as the person married to you, I spend a lot of time trying to understand you. And while there obviously are emotions that drive you, I was mostly joking about the dead inside part. I do think you are far less affected by some feelings like anxiety, fear, shame, guilt, or self-doubt than many of us. But the longer I know you, the more I see an ocean of something else hiding beneath the surface, filling the space that would normally be taken by all these feelings is the ability to truly see things.

You move through the world like a Hawk while the rest of us are lost in thought. As a climber, you can see the way up a rock face, the climbability of a building, or the laid history of a mountain range. As a father, you notice the quiet, intrinsic desires of your daughters or the chores that need doing around the house. And as a friend, you see the raw potential in every person that you meet. Sometimes this is the hardest thing about you. Nothing unnoticed. Neither the strengths nor the weaknesses, the moments of dedication or the moments of laziness. You are practical and blunt in your assessment of your choices and our lives. But that's also because you see us, and paying attention is love. Your ability to see the world so clearly allows you to also appreciate it more clearly, and that is a special form of your love. Perhaps there's a well of emotion in there after all. But for the For the purposes of this letter, Alex, I want to give you your gift back to you and tell you what I see, particularly in the last four years since we had kids, because I think the way you move through the world with us is a unique love story.

I see you rushing down the trail from the climbing area so you can get back in time for dinner with me and the girls. I see you flying the red eye so you can be home a day sooner. I see you cramming in your gym session, even when you have a huge goal on the horizon so that I have time for my workout too. I see you pushing your body to the absolute limit during the day, but still managing to stay awake long enough to chat to me at night. I see you taking on an extra day of travel just to convince someone with money to donate to your foundation and help save the planet. I see you adjusting your whole training schedule for work opportunities in order to provide a wonderful life for me and the girls. I see the insane juggling act you do every day to not only be a great athlete, but a great dad and husband. I know it's not easy, but I see it and I appreciate it. We love you as you are, Alex. Not overly emotional, but present, committed, and always seeing what others miss. Yours, Sally.

She's very astute. I was like, That's why I married her. I don't know.

She's very astute. I learned a lot about you from reading this.

What do you think?

We all show our love in different ways. Sometimes I think the conventional way that the world tries to measure love is through the verbal expression of it and romantic gestures and those kinds of things. But there's another type of person who often struggles, I think, in life's expectations of what love looks like, who show it through acts of service.

That was literally one of our last big arguments about something like in bed the other night, not like a total blowout, but basically she was like, I just need more of the verbal kind. And I was like, I'm literally doing all the things. And I always say, action, speak loud in the words. I'm like, if you're doing all the things, you're doing the correct things, you don't need to talk about them because you're doing the things. That was basically a back and forth. I took her point that occasionally you have to say the right thing, too.

Well, I have the same Same argument on repeat with my fiancée.

She needs the words, too.

Yeah, she has a different language. She's speaking Spanish, I'm speaking French. Also, by the way, I have to say, at some deep level, again, because of my early context, where, like you, I wished my parents would break up. I wish they would just get a divorce because the model of love I saw was not a happy one. I think at some deep level, I have a commitment problem or an intimacy problem where even growing up, calling someone my best friend somewhat made me cringe. Saying affectionate words someone at some deep level made me feel deeply uncomfortable. And so you can imagine me being ding. And then I think oftentimes we go for the opposite in the person we end up marrying.

Yeah, certainly for me. Yeah, well, certainly for me as well. My wife is way more emotionally intelligent than anyone in my entire extended family. Yeah, same. This is how you build a rich life is that you basically... I mean, it's like hiring. You find members of the team who have all the strengths that you need. It's like the things that you can't do. It's like filling your blind spots, basically.

Have you got better at saying the words?

No.

Any progress?

Yeah, progress, probably. But very slow. But in a way, that's great because we're going to be married the rest of our lives. And so that could be another 50, 60 years together. And so you need to see incremental progress. Because really, There's nothing better in life than making progress. And I've started at such a low point, and I'm making progress so slowly that I basically have a good project for the rest of my life.

We touched on it before, but one of the things that's been in front of mind for me at the moment is actually something I saw in your personality test, which was you were high in perseverance. And we talked earlier on about mastery and how it's important to persist to get good at something. But this has just been in front of mind for me, I think for a long time, because even as a podcaster, I realized that a lot of the game... I'm five years in now. When I look at someone like Joe Rogan, he's been going for, I don't know, 15, 17 years or more. I go like, so much of the game in becoming It's great as something. It's grinding. It's just going an unusual amount of time.

It's like compounding interest. I'm like, look at Warren Buffet. Have you ever seen stuff with Warren Buffet where it took him, whatever, 40 years to make his first couple of million or whatever, took him another 10 or 15 years to make his first billion And then it took him whatever. In the last eight years, he's made $100 billion because his whole wealth is like, whoa. Basically, if you put enough time into something and you let it compound, it slowly gets bigger and bigger.

It's exactly that. So I've been thinking about-Also, all those numbers are incorrect, but the shape of the The graph is correct. We'll put it on the screen so everyone can see.

Somebody correct my numbers. The principle is correct.

It's the same as this graph here that you drew of your career. It's the same as the podcast growth where three years no one was listening, and then we have this. I I think as a principle-That's why you focus on doing something about you.

Because with the podcast, if you feel like you're doing something useful and that you think it's cool and you think there's something there, you just keep doing it, and eventually people got on board.

Okay, so on that train of thought, I I've thought a lot about how do I create the conditions to out persist other people in the areas that I love. And one such thing, for example, with a podcast is never have a conversation that I'm not looking forward to because that's unsustainable over the long term.

Totally, because then it feels like hard work as opposed to something that we're like, This is amazing. Yeah.

So when I look at my cat, they'll say, Oh, this person wants to come, and they've got 160 gazillion followers.

But you're like, I don't care about that person.

Yeah, because if I use that as a decision frame, in the next 10 years, I'll quit.

Yeah.

Do you think about the conditions to out persist in your domain?

I mean, yeah. I haven't had to think about it too much because I freaking love climbing in all its forms. And so basically, climbing comes easily. But in terms of the work stuff I do, I think I was talking to you before we started recording, but I host this podcast called Planet Visionaries. It's like a Rolex perpetual planet. I interview these scientists and conservationists and whatever. And for whatever reason, every time I do this podcast, I come out of it feeling all energized and like, I should train more, I should study, I should learn something. Basically because the people that I'm interviewing are all so who are uniquely good at what they do, and they're all trying to save the world in different ways. Marine biologist, exploring the deep sea floor and things like that. Yesterday, I interviewed these two women about the fact that we've only explored 0. 001% of the deep sea, which represents two-thirds of the planet. So basically two-thirds of the planet we know literally nothing about. And there's this rich underwater world of cool stuff going on in the ocean floor that we've never seen and nothing about. It's insane.

I was like, That's so cool, and I got all fired up about it. And so I come out of work things, quote, unquote, work things like that, and I'm energized and excited to learn and grow and push myself. And I'm like, That's the type of work that I want to do as much as possible. And then there are other kinds of things where I'll do corporate speaking or something where you show up at a conference and you just get ground down. When you leave and you go back to your hotel and all you can do is just lie there on the bed for an hour being like, Oh, what am I doing in my life? You feel like I'm wrecked. So it's like, if you can focus on the work where you come out of it feeling inspired and excited to try hard, versus the work that makes you want to mindlessly scroll on something for hours. You know what I mean? Because sometimes you're just like, Oh, I'm just so over it.

Yeah, someone said that to me in my career. They said, Whenever you find domains that make you feel expansive, Totally. You should double down on those domains because that's the path to master. You're going to be able to continue.

Yeah, because you can just keep pushing super hard on that. Yeah, and thankfully for climbing, that's always just been added. I just freaking love climbing. It's so great. You should do it more.

I know. You make us all want to climb more, Alex. That's one of, I think, the great consequences of watching you do something like Taipei. I mean, there was loads of kids in the streets of Taipei, I think, that were all trying to climb buildings. There was those funny videos. Then obviously, they were only getting a meter up before they fell.

I was like, Hopefully, it's not too much copycatting. But we got some crazy numbers from Netflix that I think half of people, or more than half of people who have a Netflix subscription in Taiwan, watch the building climb on. In Taiwan, it was like, insane. Like, literally, everybody watched. It's such a singular striking building in Taipei. It's like a total national icon.

It's insane. Have you already started thinking about what you're going to do next?

People are always like, what's your next big thing? And I'm like, If you just focus on doing lots of little things all the time. Occasionally, the big things just happen, and you can't totally know ahead of time. Explain that to me. I have climbing goals going back 20 years. I have all these notes on my phone. I always have to-do lists, especially when I lived in the van and I was traveling, you're seasonally moving between climbing destinations nonstop. So I'd layer out all these different types of goals. I want to do these types of things. Certain goals lead to other goals because they're the same type of fitness, let's say. So doing really big things help you do even bigger things later, but doing really hard and intense things help you do other hard and intense things later. In some ways, in the way you stack your goals, you can build up to big things or build up to really hard things or whatever. I've always had running to-do lists of like, I'm going to try to do all these climbs this year. And realistically, Basically, I normally do half of them, or some of them I never even get to because the weather's not good, and I wind up going to a different area, or I don't go to that climbing destination at all, and so I never even tried the project.

But I've always had tons of goals like that. Looking back at years and years of that type of those types of lists, I just see that it's slightly hard to predict when you're going to achieve the things that are cutting edge or groundbreaking or whatever. You just have to keep doing the things nonstop. And every once in a while, some of them rise to the top. This goes back to the same value creating things. You don't know which things are going to be rad. You just do all the things, and some of them wind up being rad.

And the decision framework there is to just do things you love and that challenge you.

Yeah, things that push you, things that are new for you, that are hard for you, that are challenging in the right ways. But you don't always know ahead of time which of those things are going to stand out or not. But you just do them anyway because you're learning from them, you're excited about them, they're hard. And then some are cool, some aren't. Some you never even I'm like, That's fine. You just keep doing things.

The CEO of Uber, Daria, was sat there yesterday, and one of the contrarian pieces of life advice he gave, which is overlaid with what you just said, is he said, People need to stop making... Young people in particular need to stop making life plans. Because it narrows them to the serendipity and opportunity and things that might happen if they're broader and open-minded.

Well, or my wife and I sometimes joke that we both have very strong opinions loosely held where it's like, Oh, I'm totally sure of a thing, right up until I get some data that It shows that that's wrong. And then you're like, Oh, never mind, throw that away. And that's how a lot of my to-do lists have always been or my goals, where I'm like, Oh, I have all these goals. But if I take a slight fork in my ear where it turns out for whatever reason, something else lines up and it makes sense to do all these other things, then I'm just like, oh, right turn and just change.

And it overlaps with what you said earlier about not worrying so much about how much it's going to pay me today or what the big thing is. It's just keep doing cool things.

It'll all work out.

I would love if we could scan your brain and look at all the parts, especially in the context. I learned about this particular region of the brain called the anterior midsingulate cortex, which I heard Andrew Huberman talking about. It's a part of the brain they discovered quite recently that lights up when you do things that you don't want to do. So not things that you enjoy doing that are somewhat difficult, like running a marathon, but things that you actively avoid and resist but do anyway. Pain, fear, effort, discipline. This is the circuit that decides whether you quit or you push through, and it grows the more you do things you don't want to do. So it's like they now consider it to be the muscle of willpower in the brain. When they look at athletes, they have bigger ones. When they look at people who are struggling or are more sedentary or struggling with their weight, they often have smaller ones. Anyone that avoids discomfort has a smaller one. In the context of the way you've lived your life, you've continued to do things that are hard. I mean, you can love climbing, but you don't necessarily love-Yeah, but just doing one more set every time is like, that's always a challenge.

You're always like, my whole body hurts, but I'll just do a little more. Yeah.

And I think the thing, I guess, here is about neuroplasticity, which is going to be a ton of people listening right now that are so far away from their Taipei, from their Taipei 101. They're so far away from that. They're in a job they just don't like. They're maybe the finance bro, that you talked about a second ago. And their life is absent of adventure. And they probably look at you and go, well, he just has something I don't have.

I know, but I just don't. I mean, I've structured my life in a different way, and I've made many different choices and all that. But that's the thing is I don't really think I have anything different. I actually hate all the brain stuff because people always use that to put me in this box of like, Well, you're different. And I'm like, Well, not really. I'm a middle-class suburban kid. Nobody in my family is athletic. Nobody is good at sports at all. Basically, if you were to look at the... If I was a video game character and you were to look at all my little bars, you'd be like, That guy's not going to be an athlete. He's not good at this. It's like, My parents are professors, and we freaking read books. I'm not There's no aptitude for anything, really. And I was bad at sports as a kid. I'm not good with balls. There's no reason. But really, I just have loved climbing enough that I've been willing to put in a tremendous amount of time and effort and eventually get good at it. I'm like, to hear people say, Oh, your brain's different.

You're like, well, everybody's brain is a little bit different in some ways. It doesn't mean that you can't devote yourself to something that you care about.

But with this in mind, and with all the neuroscientists that I've interviewed, your brain is different in part because you've done different things. And neuroplasticity says you can change your brain right the way up throughout your entire life. One of my friends, Tom Bilyeu is a good example of that. He's a big podcaster. You might know Tom Bilyeu. I don't think so. But he was, I can't remember the rough age, but I'm going to say he was 30 years old. He was so, in his words, lazy that he would lay in bed all day. When his girlfriend came home, he said he would jump up out of bed just so she didn't believe that he was in bed all day and he didn't want to be embarrassed. And when he asked his, at the time, girlfriend, if he could ask her dad if he could marry her, dad said no. He was like, Lazy and down and out. Over the next 10 years, he makes decisions to take on more difficult challenges, builds a billion dollar company, sells it. If you meet this guy today, you'd think like, athlete, genius, super smart, motivated. You'd beg him for advice on discipline and motivation.

He's that guy.

Yes, so what do you do?

He read a book about neuroplasticity, and he realized that he wasn't stuck. He learned about neuroplasticity, which means that at any age in your life, the decisions you make change your brain. And that's why I love this discovery of this anterior midsingulate cortex, because it means that maybe in part, the reason why I'm not taking on my Type A one-on-one is because I haven't taken on my Type A one-on-one.

Yeah, well, you haven't taken on your Type A1. You're Type A 12 or whatever, just the little pieces at the bottom. Because that's the thing is... Actually, this is why when you ask about any big goals, I'm like, sometimes I think the big goals are slightly limiting because if your friend who's laying in bed, Type A 101 is not the appropriate goal. You know what I mean? You need a Type A 4. You need to just get out and do a little thing. You need to achieve some success. You need to see that you can do something, and you need to take on appropriately-sized challenges. Because I think having a great white whale is great sometimes, but that's not always what you need. And partially for me right now, we're raising two little kids and we're just in the midst of it. It's like, bedtime right now is hanging. It's just a lot. And I'm like, I don't need an L-cap size goal right now because we're just trying to make it through a certain phase of life, really. Not to say that I'll never have other big goals, but you're like, you want your goals to be appropriate to the time and space that you have available.

I had a psychologist say to me about this idea of just setting yourself a Type A one, like a small goal. The reason why people don't do it is because they see it as almost so embarrassingly small that they don't think it matters.

Yeah, but that's why you focus on it doesn't matter to you. Is it something that you haven't done? Is it good for your growth? Is it challenging for you? It's good enough.

But that same psychologist told me that when they were dealing with a patient who was so demotivated and that they couldn't get out of their bedroom, which was stacked to the ceiling with plates and cutlery, that day one was bringing the Hoover into the room. That was day one. Day two was plugging it in. That was day two. And by day 30, they're outside. This is someone who is scared of going outside. They're outside walking around, the room is clean. But he said to me that people don't take that first step because it's so embarrassingly small that it's almost shameful to say, Today, what are you going to bring the Hoover in?

Yeah, but that's the thing. It's always better to take a step than to not take a step. Yeah. I mean, that's how I've always felt with all these things. You're like, Well, you might as well go out and do the thing, do something. You remember at the beginning, I was like, You don't let perfect be the enemy of good. You do the good thing because don't let perfectionism cripple you. That's why I think, Type A 101, if that's your perfect goal, is like, Don't let that hold you back from going out and climbing Type A 4 or Type A 8 or some of the surrounding little buildings because it's like, Oh, you practice on what you can.

It goes back to this point of perseverance. I read a quote many years ago that said, Greatness doesn't exist. Greatness is just good repeated.

This is what I'm saying about having lots of little goals is that I would actually say that if you repeat good enough, every once in a while, some of those are great, actually, but you just don't totally know. I noticed that a lot in my climbing life, in the long arc of climbing, there are tons of things I did in Yosemite, where in a season, I'd have five or six goals in Yosemite, and I'd do all the things. And one of them, for whatever reason, would wind up being like, That's rad, and it makes climbing news and things like that. And the other ones, maybe less so. But you don't totally know ahead of time which ones are cool or not and which ones are going to stand the test of time. At one point in the not too distant past, I held a speed record on every major formation in Yosemite. Now, a few of them have been broken over time. But those are the kinds of things where you never really know how long those types of records will last, because sometimes you do them, and then your friend comes and breaks it the next season, and you're like, Cool, and you go back and forth and it's all part of a fun game.

And then some of them, you set a speed record and it last 15 years. You're like, Oh, I didn't realize that this was going to be such a milestone.

It reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote about how you can only really connect the dots looking backwards. Totally. Steve Jobs quote from his commencement speech was, You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. Clarity isn't a prerequisite for action. It's the reward you get after you move.

That's the thing, I think, because I do so many interviews with like, When was the moment you decided to be a professional climber? I'm like, There's no moment. I just did the thing for years and years, and now looking backward, it looks like this amazing arc. But at the moment, you're always... I spent years being like, Should I go back to college? Do I need a degree? And then I spent a few years wondering if I should go back and get an executive MBA or something because I was like, I don't want to go back to undergrad. I've been living in my van for 10 years. But you're like, still, I need that validation. I want to jump through the hoops. And then really, it's only now that I'm like, I don't think I need that.

In part, I think the reason why so many of us get forced into procrastination when we're trying to connect the dots looking forward is because we face these questions from society, which is like, what's your plan? What's your career? What are you aiming at? And we don't have answers. So we fill in the gaps. We have to say something to mom and dad. We have to say, what's the plan for the future? You can't say nothing. No plan.

Or you just say, I'm living. I'm just letting it play out. We'll just see what happens. It's going to be a grand adventure. I hope my kids feel confident with that. Just like, Well, I'm doing the best I can. I'm practicing the things that I care about, and we'll see how it plays out.

We'll see how it plays out.

Because either way, it's going to play out with me and them and everybody else dying. You're like, you know how it's going to play out at the end-end. And so you're like, the whole space up to there is like, oh, you just try to fill it with as many things that you're proud of as you can.

It's a remarkably simple way to live in a world that's increasingly complex, Alex.

Well, it doesn't need to be that complex. But this is why I think spending some time in nature It helps remind you of some of those sorts of things.

This company that I've just invested in is growing like crazy. I want to be the one to tell you about it because I think it's going to create such a huge productivity advantage for you. Whispers Flow is an app that you can get on your computer and on your phone, on all your devices, and it allows you to speak to your technology. Instead of me writing an email, I click one button on my phone and I can just speak the email into existence. And it uses AI to clean up what I was saying. And then when I'm done, I just hit this one button here and the whole email is written for me. And it's saving me so much time in a day because Whisper learns how I write. So on WhatsApp, it knows how I am, a little bit more casual. On email, a little bit more professional. And also, there's this really interesting thing they've just done. I can create little phrases to automatically do the work for me. I can just say Jack's LinkedIn, and it copies Jack's LinkedIn profile for me because it knows who Jack is in my life. This is saving me a huge amount of time.

This company is growing like absolute crazy. This is why I invested in the business and why they're now a sponsor of this show. Whisperflow is frankly becoming the worst kept secret in business, productivity, and entrepreneurship. Check it out now at whisperflow, spelt W-I-S-P-R-F-L-O-W. Ai/steven. It will be a game changer for you. If you knew that you only had one week left to live, and this was the week, and you could only do one last climb, go back and re-capture the record, go do L CAP again, I don't know, a different building. You have one week, and assume you're sufficiently prepared for whatever the climb would be.

What would you do? I'm allowed to do cutting-edge futuristic things?

Yeah.

Then I'm like, I don't know. I mean, the Burge, it'd be insane. But no, the free triple in Yosemite is the three biggest walls in Yosemite. So it's El Cap, Half Dome, and Mount Watkins. Mount Watkins is a Half Dome-sized wall that's further up valley. So it was the three biggest walls in Yosemite. So Tommy Caldwell and I have free-climbed the triple. The two of us did it together with ropes, but we climbed the whole thing. And then I've soloed the triple. So I've done all three with ropes by myself. It was 18 or 19 hours or something of climbing. But it's never been free solo. I free soloed Haftam individually, and I free soloed El Cap individually. No one's ever free soloed Watkins. But the idea of doing all three in a day would be, I think, totally next generation achievement. There are certain things like that where I'm like, if I was starting over, if I was an 18-year-old who was trying to make it as a professional climber nowadays and had a higher level of skill than I do now, basically was trying to do this again. There are things like that that would be the obvious next generation challenge.

Free solo all three in the same day. Yeah.

It'd probably take... Well, it'd take a bit under 24 hours, probably.

What is your training regimen these days?

I just going to rock climbing a lot. Today, I did a little workout in the hotel gym this morning.

Your hands are quite different. They're quite big hands.

Well, I think like a stone mason just grinding away their whole life.

I see. I don't know if people can see that on camera, but it does look like you have very wide fingers.

Yeah, my fingers have taken a lot of abuse in their time.

Because I see you putting them in between walls and stuff.

Yeah, crack climbing. It's like you basically put your fingers into a crack and you torque them. So the side-to-side pulling does make your connective tissue bigger.

And does that hurt? Yeah, it hurts. I was wondering when you're doing it well with good technique, it's not that painful.

It depends on the type of rock, but some rock is sharp and painful. But yeah, this goes back to strengthening your... What's the part called in your brain?

Anterior midsingulate cortex. Yeah, exactly.

That guy. I mean, that's the thing is that even when done well, climbing, it hurts your fingers and toes. Crack climbing, where you're jamming your toes into a crack and you're torquing them side to side and you're wedging your fingers in. When you're doing it well, it has a pleasant feel of safety to it because you can really lock into cracks and it feels comfortable and you feel like you're swimming. You're like, This is beautiful. But when you really come down to the sensations, you're still crushing your bones into a crack like it still hurts.

When I look at this photo, it looks like you're hanging by one and a half hands Yeah. And you're going to fall to your death if your grip isn't sufficient. It makes me think you must have the world's greatest grip strength.

I definitely don't. But you have your grip thing, you can find out.

What's below you there in this photo?

Well, actually, so there is a sloping cliff thing below me. So I'm actually only 30 feet off the ground or 40 feet. But if you fell, you'd bounce off and you'd go basically to where it looks like down the valley floor down there. Terifying photo.

It's funny, actually.

Have you seen Free Solo? Yeah. Do you remember the camera guy that can't look, the guy that's shooting the long shot on the ground, Mikey. He's a really good friend of mine. I've done tons of things with him. He shot the Taipei climb as well. Mikey was the photo assistant for this photo. He was holding the photos, and he did the whole shoot just looking into the wall. He just never looked at any of the things happening. Jimmy Chinn was taking the photo, and Mikey did all the rigging and the lights and everything, and Mikey did the whole shoot just looking into his arm, looking the other way. He was like, I am not part of this.

I would like to see his brain sky.

He was stressed. But he's an elite climber himself, and he's amazing. But basically, watching free soloing is stressful, and nobody wants to do it if they don't have to.

In all your career, when is the moment where you were most scared, where you thought maybe you had pushed it too far?

I've had several moments, but actually, mostly with ropes on. That's the thing is that because when you're free soloing, you generally keep it within a healthy margin or you practice ahead of time. Basically, because you're going to die, you make sure that you can do it. But when you have a rope on, you're way more willing to push into the unknown because you're like, Surely I'll get some protection eventually. I'll just keep looking. I'll keep looking. I was on an expedition in Antarctica, actually, in 2017, and did a bunch of climbing that was very extreme, but with a rope. But as I was saying, Antarctica is really freaking cold. Conditions are challenging. The rock is crumbling. Everything is scary. And you just keep hoping that it's going to get better, and it just keeps getting worse instead. And eventually you're like... Because the thing is, having a rope on doesn't mean anything unless you get good protection, which means you have to be able to put gear into the rock. And if you can't find places to put gear into the rock, then you can go. The rope is 200 feet long. If you go 200 feet without getting good gear, then you're looking at taking a 400-foot fall before the rope catches you, which is almost certainly fatal.

If you fall that far, even though the rope will catch your corpse, but you're still just going to hit the wall after 400 feet, you're screwed. Anyway, my scariest experiences have all been situations like that, for the most part. This is why I'm saying, climbing, you get scared a lot. I was like, That expedition we were climbing Coming basically day on, day off. Each day we would go climb one of these crazy spires, and we'd have these experiences where I'd be so scared. Then the next day, we would just sit in the tent because it's Antarctica. It's really cold. You're in the cook tent, and I would basically just spoon Nutella all day, totally shell shocked, totally just completely traumatized. And then you'd be like, rest enough, and you'd go out the next day and do it again. And we just did day on, day off of full trauma fear for the whole trip. And then we climbed everything in the range. It was amazing. It was an incredible trip.

So you do get scared.

Yeah, I was so scared the whole time.

Are there Are there any techniques that are proving to be effective for you to deal with that fear? People talk about breath work.

Yeah, take some deep breaths, try to compose yourself. I mean, I try to stay rational. Am I in danger? Because sometimes, in this case in Antarctica, I am actually in danger. If I fall, I could die. But oftentimes you feel... You get those feelings of fear, and you're not actually in danger. It's your mind running away from you. Sometimes, you can rationally rein in a little bit where you're like, No, I am safe. The protection will hold me. The rope is... My gear is good. And then you just take a deep breath and you just carry on.

And do you visualize falling ever?

Oh, yeah, of course. You have to understand what the consequences would be. Because that type of visualization is also how you can know when you're safe. Because if you have a rope in gear and you're trying to visualize, if I fall, am I going to hit the ground or is the gear going to catch me before I hit the ground? There are often situations like that where you're like, If I fall, am I going to hit that ledge and break both my legs, or am I going to clear the ledge and fall in a free space, in which case it's totally safe? And so it helps to be able to have a clear-eye visualization of Because most people visualize the worst case. If I fall, I'm going to die. And you're like, well, oftentimes, I'm talking about with a rope, if you fall, you're going to be fine. But it's important to know the difference.

So you don't avoid the confrontation with the negative outcomes?

No, because you're trying to avoid the negative outcome. You have to think about it because how else do you mitigate that stuff?

But you can't let that stop you taking actions when the risk profile is okay.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is like a whole rant about risk-taking and everything. But I mean, That's the thing, is you want to be taking the risks that you want to take. And it drives me crazy that nobody else thinks about risk in this way. Because think of all the people that go out partying every weekend, and they get buzzed, and they drive home, and whatever. It's like they're taking all kinds of risk that they're not actually choosing to take. You know what I mean? They're just choosing to go out and party and have a good time. But then they're driving a little buzzed and they're like, No, it's fine. But you're like, No, obviously, you're taking a risk. Or you're putting yourself into situations where you're in a vulnerable situation because you're incapacitated, because you're drunk or whatever. So You're putting yourself at high risk for crime, things like that. You're taking risks. You just haven't chosen to take those risks. The thing with climbing is that I'm choosing to take the risks, and I'm pretty clear-eyed about the risk that I'm taking. I'm not going to say it's perfect, but for the most part, I think I have a pretty good idea of which aspects are dangerous, like when the consequences are high, what will happen if I do fall.

You try to think it all out as much as you can. I'm like, how many people in normal life actually think through all the risks that they're taking? And even totally sedentary people who are like, Well, I don't take risk. I stay home and I play video games. You're like, no, you're at a much higher risk of heart disease. You're going to die from other things. And you're still going to freaking die either way. Okay, I'm done ranting. I'm sorry.

No, but it's really important because I think we are all taking risks, but some of us aren't intentional about the risks we're taking, essentially.

That's exactly it. Even if you take no risk, you're going to die. You're taking a different set of risks. And so people look at my life and they're like, well, you're crazy. You're such a risk taker. And I'm like, well, at least I'm taking the risks that I'm choosing, and I'm choosing them very intentionally, and I'm pretty careful about them, and I mitigate them as much as I can. I'm like, Well, can you say the same for the risk that you're taking? I'm like, The average person, I think, doesn't think about risk as much as they should.

And is there anything that you would give them as a framework to help them be more intentional about those risks?

Is it just-It's like, you're going to freaking die either way. So choose the things that you care about and then do them well.

And do them well. Prepare.

Yeah, execute. Have a plan. But don't just take risk willy-nilly. Don't just get drunk and go out and do a thing. Because that's stupid. That's not the risk you should be taking. Don't put all your money on black and just hope. You know what I mean? Basically, don't just roll the dice. Don't let fate just roll the dice with your life. Make choices.

And free soloing is There's a bigger existential risk with no margin for error.

But it's very intentional.

Very intentional. Drinking as a risk is like a volume knob. The more you do it, the more the risk increases. And the other one is like an on-off switch, which you can do it today. Exactly. Yeah. So grip strength.

I wouldn't be even a little bit surprised if you can pull that more than I can actually. But we'll both try.

Okay, this is a grip strength meter.

Okay, so let's see, we're at zero. Kilograms will be extra small. I mean, the thing These are like, okay, actually, let me just preface this with like, I've had tons of people be like, Well, surely you're going to break the machine. I'm like, no, because for climbing, you just have the strength that you need to do the things that you're trying to do.

How much do you weigh?

Right now, 165, which is actually basically the heaviest I've ever been. Maybe 163, if I'm lucky right now.

So 165 pounds in kg is equivocal to 75 kilograms, roughly. Okay, go ahead.

49 or 50. 49. 9. I'm not going to draw much more. It's just like... Yeah, 49. But those are just like... It's just a different thing. You know what I mean? That's not climbing.

49 Kg in pounds is Interesting.

Yeah, let's see yours.

Are you strong with different arms?

It's about the same with both hands. It should be.

62?

Yeah, see, there you go.

You're twice as strong as been. I can't lift my bodyweight.

I can climb a It's a little bit to like... Yeah, I might be able to muster a little more in it, but...

63 on that one.

Let me try again. But I don't think... Do you work out? You do weights and stuff?

I lift them, done battles, but I'm not doing anything grippy. I curled and stuff, but I don't do anything grippy. I know, I'm at 50 and a half. How many pull-ups can you do?

Don't know, but I can... Yesterday, I did a couple of one-arms. Yeah. One-arm pull-ups. One-arm pull-ups? Yeah, which is very hard.

Yeah, I don't think I can do one-arm.

Yeah, That's the thing. That's why grip strength stuff, you're like, nah. Or actually, have you done weighted pull-ups in a gym?

We weighted pull-ups? No, I just do my own body weight. I weigh a lot, so I'm deceptively heavy. Really?

Yeah. Very dense.

Very Very dense. Can't flow in water. No, like big bones.

You just sink straight to the bottom.

How much kilograms do you think I weigh? In pounds, you'd know, but this is-Well, now I'm guessing.

I don't know. Now that you're saying that you're big, I'm like, maybe 185 or something.

I'm 211.

Yeah, with actually That's another thing with grip strength. It makes sense that your grip strength is proportionate. I mean, you're 25% bigger than me. Basically, so it's like you would expect it to be at least 25% stronger right there just because if you can do bodyweight pull-ups, you're going to be much stronger. Yeah.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is, what do you want to achieve in your life outside of your mainline job that you haven't yet achieved?

I don't know. There are basically two other avenues that I care about in my life. My family, I want to be a good dad. I want to make sure my kids grow to be healthy, well-adjusted people that live their best lives. And then I have a foundation that supports community solar projects around the world, and I'd love to see that thrive. Basically, we give as much as we can to solar projects around the world, and I'd love to see that do more.

On that point of your foundation, What is the thesis there? You want to... For solar projects?

Yeah, solar. It's basically energy access around the world. Solar, okay. Yeah, I think now we've given over 13 million to something like over 100 partners around the world, basically like small scale community solar projects. So people getting access to energy for the first time, basically using solar for anything ranging from light to say, food refrigeration to pumping water. I mean, whatever people need energy for, which is basically everything.

More than 13 million across 130 projects in 30 countries impacting 650 people and creating 1200 plus jobs, protected 50 million acres of biodiverse forest as well.

Yeah, some of those things are like the secondary and tertiary benefits, where it's like when you empower certain kinds of communities, then they're better able to take care of their lands and things like that. Something that has to do with indigenous sovereignty and things like in the Ecuadorian Amazon and places where it's like when the local people have power, suddenly they can protect their land from illegal logging, illegal mining, things like that. And so then you end up having this knockoff, like environmental benefit that's also great in addition to the human aspect where you're like, well, these people are living better lives and to help save the planet.

And you're giving away roughly a third of your wealth to cover the majority of the foundation's overheads.

Yeah, I've been given roughly a third of what I make every year since 2012. And that's basically just coincidentally tracked with the overhead for the foundation. So it just means that anything that people contribute, go straight to projects because I basically cover all the staffing and everything.

How does one contribute to that?

Honelfundation. Org is the easiest way. You can support directly. You can see all the projects that we're working with.

And donors can go there if they want to contribute to this. They can go to the website. Okay, I'll link the website below. And if anyone is interested in continuing to support the great work you're doing there, I'd highly recommend they go and make a donation. It's also just a way, I think, to give back to you as a person for the inspiration you've given so many of us.

I appreciate that.

You know.

To me, the foundation has always been my attempt at doing something useful. I love rock climbing. I think it's so fun. But in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter in the world. And I feel like the work that we're doing through the Holland Foundation, at least, materially improves the well-being of other humans. It actually has a real impact both for the environment and for people.

Well, I don't know, Alex. I think watching you climb Taipei and watching the millions of people all around the world climb Taipei was an expansive moment for all of us because it holds a mirror up to us in a really inspiring way and goes, what obstacles can you overcome in your life? And the many, many millions of people now have that visual, and sometimes it is an absurd visual that does that and it's most memorable, etched into their brains. And that means that they in their own life, are looking for their own Type A 1s or Taipei servants or Type A 101s. And if you play that forward as a ripple in the ocean of how people are going to strive and maybe live more intentionally, maybe it does really, really matter. Maybe the whole conversation, which was my entire Twitter feed for days and days and days of people saying, this is a miraculous human achievement, that's the first half of a sentence. The other half of that sentence, which we never really hear, is like, so now what can I do? And that is a profound thing.

Well, that's definitely the best frame. That's the framing that I hope for. But I think that's the best case scenario for my climbing, and I hope that that's how people take it. But I will say that the work through the explanation at least has a direct material impact immediately. You're like, Oh, you don't have to hope for ripples or anything. You're like, Well, this person can now read after dark for the first time ever, and you're like, That is game-changing. If anything, I've been talking a lot about action speaking louder than words, and I'm like, Yeah, I hope to. It's great if the climbing I do inspires people, that's all good. But at some At some point, you just do a direct thing that actually helps people's lives, too.

And you're doing both?

Yeah, aspiring to. Doing my best.

The tangible and the intangible. Exactly. Alex, thank you so much.

Thank you. Maisy conversation. Thank you.. Thank you.