In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with the founder of the climbing podcast "The Joe Rogans Experience" to talk about what it's like to be a professional climber, and how he got into the sport of climbing. We talk about the history of the podcast, how it came about, and what we're doing to keep it going in the lead-up to the 2020 Olympic Games in Rio, as well as what it means to be an Olympian, and why it's important to have a good relationship with the sport you're in. I also talk about how climbing has changed since the early days of the sport, and the impact it has had on the way we see it in the world of sport climbing and sport performance in general. Check it out! Check out the show on YouTube: and subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE! Subscribe, Like, and Share! I'm looking for a high quality, high quality interview with a rock climber? I'll be looking out for rock climbers in the next episode! Cheers! -Jon Sorrentino Jon Rocha, Tom and Alex, "The J.R. Experience" The J. Rogan Podcast by Night All Day All Day by Night, All Day, by Night all Day by Day, All by Night by Day All By Night, By Night All By Day, Jon Rogan, by Night and All Day all Day All by Day and Night by Night , by Night! Jon and Alex discuss climbing and rock climbing and all day, by Day to Day, all day by Night. Jon talks about his life, climbing and life, by day, climbing, training, and all by Day. , climbing, and everything in between. Alex and Alex talk about life and climbing and what they do to prepare for the Olympic Games, and much more! . Learn more about the Olympic Climbing Podcast, and other things related to climbing and bouldering, and life in general, and so much more. . . . Jon chats about the Olympics, and climbing, of course! Alex talks about all things climbing and other stuff! ...and other things! Joe talks about it all! , and so on! Enjoy!
00:00:34.000Yeah, I don't know if you remember, but you went off for quite a long time and like, you should do a podcast, you should do a podcast, and sure enough, it's like, yeah, I did a podcast.
00:00:40.000Well, I mean, you have an interesting perspective and you have a fascinating life.
00:00:44.000Yeah, actually, we don't really get into it that much.
00:00:48.000I don't actually talk about myself very much.
00:00:50.000It was sort of leading up to the Olympics.
00:00:53.000You know Climbing's in the Olympics this year?
00:00:56.000Yeah, so climbing's in the Olympics for the first time this summer, and so the podcast was supposed to be sort of a primer leading up to the Olympics.
00:01:02.000More as like, here is the state of the sport leading up to this singular moment in climbing.
00:01:08.000But then the Olympics got cancelled last summer, well pushed.
00:01:11.000And so then we decided to sort of go a little deeper in backstory stuff, since that's the first season that's basically premiered right now.
00:01:18.000So did you record them all in advance?
00:01:32.000The idea is that we wanted to—well, I mean, as you can imagine, climbing is a very broad sport, starting from sort of classical alpinism in the Alps and mountain climbing.
00:01:43.000Now to Olympic climbing, where the people who win the Olympics this summer, most of them are super young and they're basically like gym kids, sort of like gymnasts who just train indoors nonstop.
00:01:52.000And so the podcast is sort of an exploration of this spectrum of full adventure to full athleticism and like where climbing has moved in between.
00:02:04.000I don't know, because, you know, when I grew up as a, like, I was one of the first climbers in America to sort of grow up climbing in a climbing gym.
00:02:10.000And so that's part of the reason I wound up as a professional climber is I sort of had access to better training facilities than, like, the generation before me.
00:02:17.000And now we're looking at the next generation who's going to the Olympics.
00:02:19.000And it's, like, even more of that athletic background.
00:02:22.000And it's, like, you know, it changes the sport.
00:02:24.000And so a big part of the podcast that we started was basically to see how it changes the sport.
00:02:41.000So, in the World Cup circuit for climbing, like, they're already established climbing competitions in the world, and normally they do three different styles.
00:02:50.000You know, speed climbing, difficulty, and bouldering.
00:02:52.000So, difficulty and bouldering are basically just like how high you can climb up a wall before you fall off.
00:02:57.000Difficulties with a rope and bouldering is without a rope, but smaller walls.
00:03:01.000And then speed climbing is naturally just how fast you can climb a set course.
00:03:04.000So the first one is how high you can climb before you fall off?
00:03:10.000So you're climbing with a rope and you're climbing say a 15 meter, say up to like a 50 foot wall and they set a very, very difficult course and then everybody basically falls as they get higher.
00:03:21.000Because it just gets to a point where no one can complete it?
00:03:23.000You just get pumped out of your gourd, yeah.
00:03:25.000Ideally, if setters have done a good job, then it means that the world champion or whoever wins will wind up making it to the top and everybody else will fall progressively lower.
00:03:34.000And the world champion, if he does make it to the top, clearly someone else is going to come along that's maybe a little bit better than him in the future.
00:03:58.000Yeah, so they're professional route setters that do that.
00:04:00.000And so they're sort of internationally certified for competitions.
00:04:02.000And there's a whole art to the route setting.
00:04:04.000And that's a big part of what we explore in this podcast leading up to the Olympics is like, you know, who are the international organizing committees that choose these people?
00:04:20.000In a given competition, the root setters are aware of who the competitors are going to be, so if one of the women is much taller than the rest, they kind of have to bear that in mind a little bit to keep the roots kind of fair.
00:05:04.000I'm actually not sure what the format is for the Olympics, but they normally do some kind of super final thing where they make a harder route or they change it in some way.
00:05:09.000And then eventually they count back on time.
00:05:12.000Or they also count back to semis and qualifiers.
00:05:16.000Like, whoever got higher on the previous rounds of the competition.
00:05:19.000You know, they look back at your cumulative points, basically.
00:05:31.000And in the World Cup circuit there is.
00:05:33.000Because actually there are a few very sort of famous stories of some of the best climbers in the world having World Cups taken away for testing positive for weed and stuff.
00:06:58.000I mean, if there were drugs that vastly improved your recovery, that probably would be performance enhancing because it would allow you to train at a higher volume.
00:07:06.000But even anabolic steroids, I'm not sure if they actually help for climbing because it's so much about strength to weight ratio.
00:07:10.000And I've heard that, and I don't know if this is true, but that some steroid use affects tendons and ligaments.
00:07:17.000Like you wind up with damage to connective tissue.
00:07:19.000What it does generally, at least I'm not really an expert, but what it's been explained to me is the muscle tissue gets too strong for the tendons and the ligaments.
00:07:30.000And so the idea is that you're growing muscle at a ridiculous rate because you're taking steroids.
00:07:37.000But generally it's guys who are like power lifters and bodybuilders.
00:07:41.000I don't think that would apply to climbers because you're not putting on massive amounts of muscle.
00:07:45.000So the idea is that you're pushing heavier and heavier weights because your muscles are growing at this extraordinary rate but that your tendons can't keep up.
00:07:55.000So that same principle though is actually a very common problem for beginner climbers.
00:07:59.000It's like if you're an 18 year old man who gets into climbing in the gym It's really easy to get stronger biceps, but the connective tissue, like the tendons in your forearms, like basically the tendons that control your fingers that go down your forearm and touching your elbow, takes a very long time for those tendons to get stronger.
00:08:15.000So it's really easy for your muscle to get stronger and then basically pull your tendons off.
00:08:20.000It's actually pretty common for sort of beginner climbers to sort of outpace their development and then injure themselves in different ways.
00:09:25.000Whitney Cummings is dating a guy who's into climbing, and he's a climber, and she had it on her Instagram today, she was making fun of him, that he's watching videos of girls climbing.
00:09:37.000She's like, should I be concerned about this?
00:11:30.000Yeah, a friend of mine had a squirrel expert on his podcast, my friend Steve Rinella, and this squirrel expert was talking about these squirrels climbing and they, apparently squirrels only, the females only come into estrus for like six hours a year.
00:12:14.000So I actually once walked up to a cliff, like a huge overhanging wall, like this giant, like imagine like an overhanging, like leaning, it's almost like an amphitheater, like a huge thing.
00:12:54.000It made it about 20 feet further, and then it fell.
00:12:57.000And we were like, oh, the squirrel fell off the cliff!
00:12:59.000And then, uh, sure enough, it stuck this, like, there's one tree growing at the base of the cliff, and with, like, this one little limb sticking out, and the squirrel fell probably 25, 30 feet, and then hit, like, one little twig and basically landed on it and ran into the tree.
00:13:10.000And it was like total, I mean basically like kind of hit it, you know, as the tree bends, the squirrel just like skitters away and like made it into the tree and stuck the landing.
00:13:20.000But like we're just standing there like, did anybody see that?
00:13:22.000It's like anytime you have nature experiences where you see animals basically fall, you know, basically when you see animals struggle in their natural habitat, you're like, that's cool.
00:13:31.000Right, especially something completely rare, like watching a squirrel fall from a cliff.
00:13:39.000And we were actually admiring the bighorns, like, oh, they're moving so great, because we were having a really hard time getting up this big mountainside.
00:13:46.000It's like really big, challenging boulders, and we're like, this is so difficult.
00:13:49.000And then we're like, look, those bighorns, they're so graceful.
00:13:51.000And then one of them fell down and just tumbled down the rocks, and we're like, oh!
00:13:55.000There's a gnarly series of photographs that this guy took of a mountain lion encounter with a bighorn and they both wound up dead on the highway.
00:16:38.000That's funny, just the other day I was like hiking up a mountain and we passed some bighorns and then we were like strolling uphill and we followed cat tracks for probably half a mile up.
00:17:45.000We're, like, studying these endemic species of the tapuies.
00:17:48.000There's, like, this whole interesting natural history component to it, or sort of biology component.
00:17:52.000But we were just trying to climb this mountain that had never been climbed before.
00:17:55.000So the priority is obviously just to get up it, to, like, find these species of frogs, to, like, do all the things that are important for the TV show.
00:18:01.000But then, because I was there, I was like, oh, you know, on the side, I can at least do something that I'm proud of in climbing that's also pretty cool.
00:18:56.000Yes, it's difficult because you're hanging.
00:18:57.000And so you're like in these crazy positions where you're dangling from your arms, but you feel safe doing it because the rock's so good and the holds are so good.
00:19:03.000And you're just like, what a crazy place.
00:19:45.000So for the free solo, I already had a pretty good sense of how I should tackle that part because we'd already been sort of living up there a bit.
00:20:23.000So, okay, the trip was, the trip is crazy.
00:20:25.000I mean, we can just talk about the whole time.
00:20:27.000I read freaking eight books while we were there because it's the jungle and, you know, it's the tropics, so it's dark from six to six every day.
00:22:29.000So if you could pan that photo to the left, though, obviously you can't because it's not in the frame.
00:22:32.000We climbed this little mountain to the left.
00:22:34.000And so this is a really famous peak because the summit of it marks the boundary between Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana.
00:22:40.000It's used as, like, the marker to separate those three countries.
00:22:43.000And so we were climbing this sort of little bastard stepbrother next to it.
00:22:46.000But, you know, that peak, though, had never been climbed and was, like, new to science for the different species of frogs and all that kind of stuff.
00:22:53.000If you're an explorer and you've stumbled upon that you would think that that was like a structure.
00:23:35.000Yeah, and so you see these pictures where you're like, it's so beautiful, and you're like, yeah, for 30 minutes a day, you know, and the rest of the time, you're just in the water, yeah, getting to work.
00:23:58.000Yeah, so that's the stuff I was reading while we were there.
00:24:01.000So it's, like, this huge bed of sandstone, which then gets metamorphosed, like, compressed into quartzite, so, like, really, really hard sandstone.
00:24:26.000And so, this rock is most similar to rock in parts of Africa, actually.
00:24:32.000And so, part of what makes the biology there so interesting is that the creatures on the summit of some of the tapuies are more closely related to creatures in Africa than they are to the ones in the jungle below them.
00:24:49.000Because the top of those islands, basically, they've been separated from the jungle below for so long that they more closely resemble where they came from in Africa than the creatures that live in the rainforest below.
00:25:11.000They don't exactly know what they did or what their culture was all about, but they had these heads that they left behind, these sculpted, gigantic stone heads that resemble African people.
00:25:42.000And these images are very African-looking faces.
00:25:47.000And they don't really know what the history of them were.
00:25:51.000And they think some of them existed in the neighborhood of 6,000 years ago.
00:25:57.000But, you know, when you're looking at stone, it's hard because they carbon date the stuff that's around the stone as they unearth it.
00:26:05.000But it doesn't really necessarily give them an accurate sense of when it was constructed.
00:26:11.000It just gives an accurate sense of how...
00:26:13.000The sediment that eventually covers it.
00:26:16.000The stuff in Guyana, though, is on a totally different scale.
00:26:22.000The stuff that I'm talking about, I think the Tapuys have been eroded away, like isolated for 40 million years or something, which far predates humans.
00:26:30.000And then I think the rock itself is like 1.5 billion years old.
00:26:42.000It's funny because, I mean, you saw the pictures, it looks like islands, and, you know, early explorers thought that they must be islands or something, but it's actually just the eroded remnants of what was once like a giant, you know, elevated plateau.
00:26:57.000I have a bunch of photos like that on my phone.
00:26:59.000It's just like scrappy little iPhone pics of like, here we are on this crazy...
00:27:03.000You know, because you're like in the clouds, you're in the mist.
00:27:06.000It's like kind of grim and it's raining.
00:27:08.000But then the summit is like this totally wild...
00:27:11.000So like all those plants are incredibly well adapted to this harsh environment.
00:27:15.000And they're really high rates of carnivory, like plants that eat things because there's basically no soil.
00:27:19.000One of the books I read said that described it as a rain desert.
00:27:22.000Like you think of a desert normally as having...
00:27:25.000Lots of soil but no water and there you have infinite water but no soil because it's a stone surface that's getting rained on so much that it washes all the soil away.
00:28:32.000And so these organisms, these creatures that live up there, they're closely resembling creatures that live in Africa.
00:28:39.000And so that was part of what you're studying.
00:28:42.000Yeah, so we were with this biologist who was trying to do an elevational transect of the river basin that we were in.
00:28:47.000So basically starting from the rainforest, where the frogs are pretty well known, and then going up through the cloud forest, which is kind of as you gain elevation to the actual wall.
00:28:54.000And then the species all change as you gain elevation, which is kind of normal.
00:28:59.000And then the things on the summit of the Tupuis, on the summit of the stone island, are completely different again.
00:29:06.000And so he was basically doing research on how the different species...
00:29:12.000And it's really difficult to get there, too, right?
00:29:14.000Yeah, it took a very long time to walk through the jungle to get there, and then no one had ever been to this wall before, so cutting a trail up to the wall was totally insane.
00:29:55.000Yeah, so I was in, you know, all synthetic clothing and synthetic sleeping bags, so I was warm enough, but then you're just laying in a puddle, like a little puddle of water, because, you know, the bottom of the hammock, it all sags to the bottom, so it's all just pooling, and you're sort of like, oh, man.
00:30:08.000Does the synthetic stuff act like merino wool acts?
00:30:11.000Like, do they have that dialed in, where even when you're wet, you can still stay warm?
00:31:00.000Did you have to bring a month's worth of food?
00:31:02.000No, so we had local sort of logistical support.
00:31:06.000So like an outfitter in Guyana had hired a bunch of Amerindian porters, so the local indigenous folks, like basically all the men from this last village that we hiked out of, like all hiked into the jungle with us and helped carry things for the team and the film crew and everything.
00:31:20.000But so the logistical sort of operator and country had, you know, provided rations for the trip.
00:31:28.000But it was basically just Top Ramen for the whole trip.
00:31:50.000Um, they had some little freeze-dried, I mean, we just didn't have, you know, we brought a bunch of snacks, um, you know, and I'm normally vegetarian, but on that trip I was eating, like, salmon jerky and just whatever, like, team snacks that we brought.
00:32:02.000Um, but, yeah, I mean, when we were at the wall, so, so, that kind of logistical support was when we were trekking through the jungle both ways, but when we got to the wall, you couldn't really establish a camp because we were, like, right on the side of a cliff, and so we were all just kind of dangling on the side of the cliff, and so we were taking care of ourselves more.
00:32:19.000But so then we were eating trail mix for basically breakfast and lunch, and then a couple bars, things like that, like energy bars, and then having freeze-dried dinners at night, and that was just like our whole scene.
00:32:29.000Basically, we did like a week or 10 days of just kind of like trail mix and bars and...
00:32:34.000It was kind of a grim, you know, we were like, well, really, you know, really hurt for a salad or something.
00:32:43.000Well, so funny enough, I made it back to Georgetown, the capital, and we were staying in, like, the nice hotel in Georgetown or whatever, and I got the worst food poison in my life in town.
00:33:01.000The camping off the cliff thing, that is the one that freaks me out the most when I watch those images or see videos of people that are climbing that pause in the middle of the face and set up a camp and they have, like, a little hammock thing.
00:33:24.000But you don't freak out in the middle of the night and just think, oh my god, I'm dangling off the side of a fucking cliff a thousand feet in the air.
00:33:31.000At a certain point, you're just like, if you fall, you just relax.
00:34:21.000Huh, if the whole thing fell off the cliff, you'd be like, but you don't, but it seems unlikely to happen, because you're kind of like, realistically, the load that your hammock's putting on the tree is a lot less than the load that the wind does, you know, when it's storming or something.
00:34:31.000So you're kind of like, ah, I think it's fine, and you just sort of evaluate the risk, you know?
00:36:36.000Camping in snow is amazing, because if you have to pee, you just pee, and your pee burrows its own little tunnel straight down into the snow.
00:36:42.000I did an expedition to Antarctica, and I was peeing out the same back flap of my tent every night, and your little pee tunnel just gets...
00:37:14.000But this ice hotel, my friend who stayed in it, I can't remember who told me they stayed in it, they did it one night just to say they did it.
00:38:25.000Yeah, so I met him in New York for this thing for Real Magic because he was talking about maybe doing a climbing thing And I was totally into teaching him how to climb the outside of a building, basically, because it's one of those things that people would assume there's a trick to it, but in some ways it's actually easier just to learn how to do it well enough that you can just do it rather than do a trick.
00:38:44.000Because that's kind of the whole thing with the ice pick, is people assume there must be a trick to it, but you actually just do this crazy thing.
00:39:16.000Like, we had to stop because I hit a nerve and then we did it again.
00:39:20.000So it hit a nerve, and then there was one point in time where after we did it, he was concerned that maybe blood was pooling up in a weird way, so he had our medic look at it.
00:39:33.000We stopped once, and I put it back in again, and then we go all the way through, and then after it came out, we had to stop again, and then one of our guys had to look at it, because it was just bleeding in a weird way.
00:39:46.000He was worried that it was creating a hematoma, and it could be...
00:39:50.000Yeah, if you ever watch the show, you know, Reeler Magic, whatever, it's really good, but in one of them, like, he puts the ice pick through his hand, and then he pulls it out, and he's like, look, see, it's fine, and it's like, and it looks totally fine, like, it's not bleeding, you know, it's because your hand is so elastic or whatever, but I asked him about it,
00:40:07.000you know, I was like, oh, what's the deal with that, because you pull out, you know, it's like, is it a trick?
00:40:10.000And he's like, no, you pull it out, and as long as you're holding your hand above your heart, it doesn't bleed for a little bit.
00:40:14.000He's like, but then when you put your hand down, obviously it bleeds, because you have fucking a hole through your hand, and I was like, oh, Jesus.
00:43:41.000I mean, it'd be the same for David Blaine.
00:43:42.000Like, when you watch the David stuff, it's like, if you were putting an ice pick through his arm and he was just screaming, like, if he was just sobbing the whole time, you'd be like, I don't want to watch this.
00:45:55.000And then, at the time, I was dating this girl in New York really briefly, and a couple days later, we all went to the climbing gym together, because, like I said, I was kind of encouraging him to do some climbing thing.
00:46:08.000And then we went to lunch again, and he basically did the same set of card tricks for this girl that I was dating, but having already climbed for like an hour or two.
00:46:15.000And it was funny, because his execution in the card tricks was...
00:46:20.000I could tell that he was doing all his tricks worse once his arms were totally wrecked from climbing for two hours.
00:46:27.000Basically, his fingers and his forearms were totally wrecked.
00:46:29.000That actually made me appreciate how difficult the tricks are even more.
00:46:32.000I was like, oh wow, if your fingertips hurt and your muscles are wrecked and it's hard for you to hold your arms steady, then it's very hard to fan the deck evenly and to pick cards properly.
00:46:43.000It made me appreciate just how much skill is involved in what he was doing.
00:46:48.000You know, basically to see somebody do something at their peak and then when they're also totally wrecked and then to see kind of the overlap, you're like, oh, this is actually quite hard.
00:46:54.000Like, what he's doing is a challenge, you know?
00:48:10.000Yeah, normally pretty rough, and then also just really calloused on the tips.
00:48:13.000I mean, often, you know, I can pick up, like, hot things and, like, not really notice it quite the same way or, you know, things like that.
00:48:19.000I mean, if you're grabbing, like, grabbing a very coarse rock all the time, it's like you have to wind up with really calloused fingertips.
00:48:26.000But so then something like manipulating the edge of a card, it's like I can't even imagine feeling it.
00:48:30.000Have you seen, there was a guy that was on this television show called Dual Survivor, and he was known for walking, is that what it's called?
00:48:43.000It was, these two guys would go together, and they would, you know, and the idea was that they would help each other out, but his feet, he always walked barefoot, everywhere.
00:49:04.000Yeah, there's one of the bottom, the middle image.
00:49:06.000You can see the bottom of his foot is just, like, this disgusting...
00:49:10.000I'm kind of not into that, because, I mean, you know, there are probably a billion people on Earth that basically don't have access to footwear.
00:49:17.000You know, like, there are a billion people on Earth who do that just because that's how they live.
00:49:21.000And, dude, it's funny because I've been thinking a lot about this kind of thing because, you know, having just spent the month of February in Guyana, we had all these Amerindian porters helping us carry all the stuff in for the show.
00:49:30.000And I was thinking a lot about survival shows in the U.S. because it's so popular to be like, oh, we're surviving in the woods.
00:49:35.000And you're like, dude, there are at least tens, if not hundreds of millions of humans on Earth that basically live in survival shows like that.
00:49:42.000You know, that's just their day-to-day.
00:49:54.000And being on this trip and watching the Amerindians and just how easily and effectively they could live relatively comfortably in the jungle, it made a total mockery out of reality TV-style survival stuff.
00:50:08.000Because we'd get to a new camp zone, and you'd see eight or ten guys just fan out with their machetes and chit-chat.
00:50:15.000An hour later, there's a camp erected with a fire going and water boiling and they've all changed clothes.
00:51:54.000And then they went and did this other show.
00:51:56.000And then he got busted for sleeping in hotels.
00:51:58.000Well, so the way Bear Grylls tells it is more that the first several seasons of the show was basically like surviving where it's like everybody's just out in the bush like doing the hard thing and it's kind of grim and then basically said over time you just realize that the show is as well received either way like basically people enjoy the entertainment of the show regardless and he's like you don't need the whole crew to suffer you don't need to suffer like nobody needs to be out there like getting worked and wherever for nine days when you can make a good show in two.
00:52:25.000That sounds like what I would say if I got busted.
00:52:27.000Well, and so anyway, but now his new show, though, basically has just taken a different track.
00:52:31.000Because ultimately, the, what's the thing, Running Wild Burger, the thing he does now is basically just take other people out and, like, have an experience with them.
00:52:39.000And it's basically just a format for interviewing, like, interesting people.
00:53:51.000I mean, that's the thing is, like, all this, like, survivory stuff, you know, it's like, when you go into, like, indigenous villages in the Amazon, like, they want refrigeration, they want electricity, they want direct TV. Yes.
00:54:00.000Actually, this village we were in, the guy was like, I want DirecTV.
00:54:03.000And we were kind of like, well, you need power first.
00:54:18.000I just think it's a little weird to celebrate the survivory stuff where it's like, oh, you should toughen yourself up and get back to nature.
00:56:33.000We're so used to our toes being in shoes in what you would call a cast.
00:56:40.000There's a lot of different feet of different humans that live like that walking around barefoot that you can see that splay out like that.
00:56:48.000No, our porters were mostly wearing wellington boots, you know, like rubber boots.
00:56:53.000And then there were a handful that were just barefoot and you'd be like, oh dude, we're like five days from a village in the middle of nowhere and you're just like trekking barefoot through the mud.
00:57:01.000Though the jungle is actually a more hospitable environment for going barefoot than a lot of places.
00:57:39.000But no, I was just there as a climber to climb this new wall.
00:57:42.000And just because, you know, on a personal level, it's like an incredible life experience to have a trip like that put together where you get to go somewhere totally wild, learn about an incredible place, like, you know, yeah, climb on new rock.
00:57:59.000Honestly, I mean, my last couple years, you know, I had like the whole crazy free solo film tour, which is like a year of crazy travel and work.
00:58:07.000And then a year of COVID, which is also, you know, really different with like no expeditions, no travel.
00:58:12.000And so I hadn't really done like an overseas climbing expedition in that way in a couple years.
00:58:20.000Just to remember that there are hundreds of millions of humans on Earth that live in completely different ways that it's hard to even remember if you're not reminded of it from time to time.
00:58:58.000There's a reason that people have developed power grids and communication infrastructure and all those kinds of things.
00:59:02.000It's because it makes life safer and more comfortable.
00:59:05.000And on the whole, humanity has embraced all those things.
00:59:09.000So, you know, I kind of hate the backward looking, like, oh, we should just get back to our roots, you know, like the Thoreau style, you know, like, you know, get rid of all this stuff.
00:59:17.000You're like, no, like, we have all this stuff for a reason.
01:01:54.000Like, through all of human history, most subsistence, you know, basically human groups that live in that way are always, you know, like one famine away from death, basically.
01:02:07.000Sure, or one broken leg away from death.
01:05:00.000Actually, it was dark and we didn't have headlamps, so I would take our backpacks with an iPhone and walk down to sort of scout the path and then dump our stuff and then go back and pick him up and then carry him down.
01:07:34.000Like, for the climbing community in Vegas, you couldn't even really tell that COVID was a thing, you know?
01:07:39.000Because the governor of Nevada explicitly allowed out to recreation throughout lockdown, so it's like you're still able to go hike and climb.
01:07:44.000That's a very good thing, because they didn't do that in California.
01:07:47.000It was one of the problems with California's lockdown, is that it's nonsensical.
01:07:51.000And, you know, when they were trying to pretend that it's science-based, If it's science-based, you would know that the science says that COVID dies almost instantly in contact with sunlight.
01:09:27.000It's also the reason why brown folks and black folks have a much harder time with COVID with vitamin D levels.
01:09:33.000Like, my friend is a doctor and he said that he was working in New York City and some of the patients that he had that were black people, he would test them and they had indetectable levels of vitamin D. That's interesting.
01:09:44.000Is it true that the dark-skinned folks generate less vitamin D? Yeah, from the sun.
01:09:51.000See, because vitamin D is one of the rare things that we actually require sunlight to generate.
01:09:57.000And the reason why black people have it, obviously, is when you're from really hot climates, your body actually needs to be protected You're getting plenty of vitamin D, but your body's protected from the dangers of the sunlight with more melanin.
01:10:13.000So the darker skin gives you less vitamin D, but you're getting plenty because you're outdoors and a lot of your skin is exposed.
01:12:12.000Because basically once we were camped on the wall, we didn't even have any porters around us anymore because we were sort of separated from like the main camp.
01:12:32.000Because the thing is they have to be getting the malaria from somewhere.
01:12:34.000So if you're in the full-on middle of nowhere where there are no other living things around, there wouldn't be malaria because there's nothing to carry the malaria.
01:12:42.000Oh, so it's a what came first, the chicken, the egg type deal.
01:12:46.000Well, I mean, it's kind of true for all diseases that plague humanity is they're found more in villages and towns and around population centers.
01:12:57.000But if you get out in the middle of nowhere, there are not enough people to...
01:13:05.000That's where the mosquitoes are coming from, right?
01:13:07.000Yeah, the stagnant water breeds the mosquitoes, but then the mosquitoes have to get malaria from somebody that's carrying the virus, and they can transmit it around.
01:13:16.000So is that stuff that you were taking, is that like a prophylactic?
01:13:19.000Does it prevent you from getting it, or is it a treatment?
01:15:03.000I'm sure it must exist, but, you know, again, I don't know.
01:15:05.000Like, I've gone to Morocco three times, spent a month each time, never even thought about it.
01:15:09.000But I've also been in the mountains, you know, climbing mountains and things like that, but...
01:15:14.000Yeah, I mean you should look at it case by case because you know like I did a month-long expedition in Chad and technically like if you looked at a global health thing you know Chad is a malarial zone because the the southern part of Chad is like near the Congo it's like sort of you know tropical but the whole rest of it is full-on desert like there's no water and so you know we were in the deserty part and it's like obviously you're not worried about malaria the whole time.
01:15:35.000Have you ever got any funky diseases doing these crazy journeys of yours?
01:15:44.000Knock on wood, I don't think I've had any parasites or anything like that.
01:15:47.000But the trip to Chad, I had the worst stomach stuff going on the whole trip, but I think we were drinking sort of dirty water and the food was kind of weird.
01:15:55.000And so I was basically sick the whole time, but I think it was like normal sick.
01:16:19.000So on this trip in the jungle, we were using iodine a little bit, using SteriPens mostly, and then untreating, just having a bunch of it untreated, depending on circumstances.
01:17:03.000One of my partners on the trip came home and thought he had a parasite, so then I was really paranoid about having a parasite for a couple weeks.
01:17:11.000I haven't checked, and I think it's all good, so we'll see.
01:17:13.000Justin had a gnarly one that lasted more than a year.
01:17:20.000Because, you know, he was deep in the Congo, and they think he might have gotten some sort of unrecognized parasite, or undiagnosed parasite, or, you know, undiscovered.
01:18:36.000Well, that's why I typically don't go to the jungle.
01:18:39.000It's all about the mountains and, like, deserts, you know, big rocky places.
01:18:42.000But this particular trip is just such a unique, you know, wonder of the world, basically, to climb rocks like that sticking out of the jungle.
01:19:22.000That's such an interesting aspect of your life.
01:19:25.000Yeah, well, perhaps once we run out of all the content that we're trying to cover, then we'll just start telling crazy stories.
01:19:32.000So mostly what you're trying to cover is the content of the sport itself.
01:19:37.000Yeah, so far we've been interviewing some of the biggest names in climbing and then sort of drawing out specific themes.
01:19:44.000So like basically getting the best stories from some of the best climbers to speak to specific aspects of climbing.
01:19:49.000And it's all, you know, it's being produced.
01:19:52.000So like we're editing it afterward, we're cutting things together, adding sound effects and stuff.
01:19:56.000But basically, trying to tell very specific stories about, like, how the sport started, how different aspects of it came to be.
01:20:02.000You know, we're trying to be a bit of an educational resource for people who are interested in climbing but don't totally know where it's come from or, like, what's happening with it.
01:20:10.000You know, because basically, with climbing going to the Olympics, there's, like, this huge influx of attention in climbing.
01:20:16.000And, like, I mean, I went to the climbing gym here yesterday.
01:20:20.000And I have this experience more and more when I go to the gym.
01:22:46.000And this guy was just absolutely absorbed with climbing his whole life and never gave a shit about making any money and all he cared about was making these routes and then writing these routes down.
01:23:00.000He had these insanely detailed handwritten notes that he kept in boxes.
01:23:05.000He had like stacks and stacks of these notes of all these different places that he climbed and then it's also interesting watching because spoiler alert towards the end of the movie he's really old and he can't I mean you look at his body it's incredibly frail and he he just They're still pretty fit for a 90-year-old.
01:23:23.000You know, when you think of it, I mean, because he was still climbing as a 90-year-old, and you're sort of like, it was pretty impressive.
01:23:29.000I mean, he was still going into the mountains at like 85. Oh, yeah.
01:23:56.000You'd be like, whoa, it's the Fred Becky.
01:23:58.000But, I mean, obviously, I've climbed tons of his roots all over the country.
01:24:01.000It's like, yeah, I mean, he's a visionary for lines.
01:24:04.000But, I mean, but that's exactly what we're trying to sort of preserve through Climbing Gold through the podcast that we've been working on.
01:24:11.000So, you know, I mean, he had that first ascent vision.
01:24:16.000Our second episode, which is out right now, is with this woman, Joanne Uriasti, who lives in Las Vegas, who basically put up all the classic roots in Vegas.
01:24:24.000So she was kind of like Fred Becky on a local scale, where she's lived in Vegas her whole life.
01:24:30.000And now, Vegas, like Red Rock in particular, is a global climbing destination.
01:24:35.000People come from everywhere to climb there because it's incredible rock.
01:24:37.000But in the 70s, no one was interested because they thought it was like, it's the desert.
01:24:45.000And so she and her husband sort of had the run of the place.
01:24:47.000And they basically put up all these incredible routes, which are now extremely popular.
01:24:53.000Like, on a typical weekend day in Red Rock, you know, in the canyons, there's probably no joke, a hundred different parties of climbers climbing on different routes of theirs scattered throughout the canyons.
01:25:07.000All those climbers are all, you know, they all started climbing in the gym in LA like three years ago, basically.
01:25:12.000I mean, people coming to Vegas, like, a lot of them are road tripping up from LA. A lot of them started climbing within the last few years.
01:25:29.000You know, because now when you climb a lot of the routes in Red Rock, they're, like, buffed in chalk.
01:25:33.000Like, all the holds are, like, have, you know, chalk all over them.
01:25:36.000And it's like really obvious where to go and how to climb them and they're like really clean and safe.
01:25:40.000But when they first got put up in like 1974, they were like wild, full-on adventures and largely done by this woman, Joanne.
01:25:48.000And so our second episode is like interviewing her and sort of exploring what it takes to do First Ascent and what it takes to have that vision of like, we're going to go somewhere totally different and do things that no one's ever done before.
01:26:12.000And that's what's so crazy is that when we're talking to these old school climbers who have done incredible things over the last 50 years, they all started with these outrageous stories of like, oh, I hitchhiked across the country to go climb this one mountain with a buddy who I'd corresponded with by mail.
01:26:36.000So the birth of the climbing gym, you think that's responsible for the escalation of the sport?
01:26:41.000Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it.
01:26:44.000And then even also just pop culture type stuff, you know, I mean, something like film like Free Solo, like obviously popularized a little bit or films like Valley Uprising or The Dawn Wall or like other sort of relatively mainstream climbing films that reach a broad audience.
01:26:56.000They just bring more people into the sport.
01:26:58.000And then because climbing gyms have become so much popular, there's a venue for all those people to try it.
01:27:04.000There's an access point for the sport.
01:27:06.000And people find it really challenging in terms of an exercise.
01:27:12.000It's like all the challenge of doing CrossFit or something, let's say, but with maybe more of a social element and also just more hanging out.
01:27:22.000It's more chill and easier in a way than something like CrossFit.
01:27:25.000But still like great, you know, full body workout and toning and all that.
01:27:28.000Yeah, and the social aspect is a big factor too, right?
01:27:32.000When you go to a boulder gym, most people are just laying on the pads like chit-chatting.
01:27:36.000And then every once in a while you get up and you try the boulder problem and you try really hard and then you have to rest again.
01:27:40.000So, I mean, it's fundamentally a relatively chill and social sport, you know, when you're in the gym like that.
01:27:46.000There's a lot of jiu-jitsu guys who got into rock climbing as a supplemental activity.
01:27:52.000That's funny, because I know climbers that go the other way.
01:28:08.000The idea of that, you know, because you need a lot of grip strength or something like that.
01:28:13.000The nogi, which is what you do like rash cards usually or shorts and t-shirts, is a lot of like gable grips and hand grips and learning how to grip your hands together as opposed to gripping other people's stuff, gripping the clothes.
01:28:26.000But the jiu-jitsu guys find it like a great supplemental exercise for hand strength.
01:28:32.000The whole idea is, you know, Using your own body weight.
01:28:47.000Especially right now, it's like going through a cool moment where people are like, oh, that's a fun, new, sort of edgy thing, but not too...
01:28:52.000Because when I was a kid, it was edgy, but it was too edgy because no one knows what it is and they all think it's weird.
01:28:59.000And you're like, oh yeah, let's go do that.
01:29:00.000It is funny that climbing has been around for so long as a human activity, but then as a sport and now as a popular sport, it's experienced this renaissance.
01:29:21.000It is interesting because real technical rock climbing has been going on for more than 100 years.
01:29:28.000But, and you know, mountain climbing predates that.
01:29:31.000And then, like you said, as a human activity, and people have climbed trees forever for sustenance, you know, or to escape predators or whatever else.
01:29:36.000I mean, you know, it's like, yeah, I mean, climbing is deeply ingrained in humans.
01:29:44.000And you're like, all right, you know, it's like, it's an interesting time to explore it.
01:29:47.000It's crazy how things happen like that, where they just catch fire.
01:29:50.000And then all of a sudden, it's in the public zeitgeist and Totally.
01:29:53.000Well, I imagine, you know, skateboarding, snowboarding, other sports have gone through that, but I was slightly too young to realize that that was happening when they happened, you know, because I was like a little kid when skateboarding was getting cool.
01:30:03.000And, you know, and snowboarding, I think, has arguably gone full circle and it's just like not cool anymore.
01:30:25.000Yeah, well, I mean, think of, like, Western, like, each year it's kind of like, oh, you know, the resorts didn't open until super late, they closed super early, they have kind of bad snow.
01:30:34.000It's like, there have been a bunch of, like, pretty bad years in the last decade, you know?
01:30:38.000That's interesting, because I've been going to Park City.
01:30:48.000I mean, I'm from Sacramento and California, so I know Tahoe pretty well.
01:30:51.000But the snow line is now sort of more like 7,000 feet instead of 6. Like the lake is at 6. And now it's like you kind of expect snow going from 7 up.
01:31:01.000And you're kind of like, you know, it is slowly sort of drying out.
01:31:05.000It's like the resorts just don't have the kind of snow you'd expect.
01:31:08.000You know we got hit with a giant snowstorm here, right?
01:31:14.000Yeah, well, so funny enough, so while I was in the jungle, so I came out and I had like a mountain of email and I had an email from my utility in Nevada that was like entitled, you know, could what happened in Texas happen here?
01:31:23.000And I was like, what happened in Texas?
01:33:05.000It's like, I mean, realistically, it should be tied into both, and then you'd actually have a national grid, and the whole system would be more stable.
01:33:11.000Well, hopefully now they'll recognize that it's possible for it to freeze for a fucking week.
01:33:16.000But the concept of global warming is interesting because it's like, yeah, overall it is warming.
01:33:22.000Well, that's why people say climate change instead.
01:33:28.000Yeah, where it's like when you get your whole season's rainfall and two big storms that basically dump a ton of rain, that's not good for anybody.
01:33:36.000Even if the numbers wind up like, oh, we had this much rain this season, but it all came at once and it washed the whole mountainside away, you're kind of like...
01:33:43.000They're starting to build these electric exploring vehicles, like electric adventure vehicles, which is pretty interesting.
01:33:51.000There's a company called, I think it's called Rivian.
01:35:12.000Well, not just that they pay me, but also it's a little bit of the design ethos behind it.
01:35:18.000Basically, Rivian has a second life application in mind for their batteries.
01:35:24.000They design the battery packs knowing that eventually they won't be in vehicles anymore and that they will be used for, say, grid-scale storage and things like that.
01:35:32.000One of the projects that Rivian is working with my foundation on is this microgrid in Puerto Rico.
01:35:36.000The idea is that So Rivian has 100,000 electric delivery vans ordered from Amazon already.
01:35:44.000So in theory, they're providing 100,000 vans to Amazon for electric deliveries.
01:35:53.000Basically, Amazon has just pre-ordered a shitload of vans because they need electric vans.
01:35:56.000And so just right there, you know that eventually there'll be a pipeline of 100,000 used van batteries going offline in like 10, 15 years or whatever.
01:36:06.000And so the way you design those battery packs matters because, you know, in 10 years, you're going to have to reuse them for something, either recycle them or reuse them for something else.
01:36:14.000And like Rivian's put a lot of thought into how it will eventually reuse its batteries.
01:36:19.000And, you know, I don't really know about Tesla batteries.
01:36:22.000And I would just assume that GM is probably like that's almost certainly not built into their brand in the same way.
01:36:28.000GM is just kind of like, oh, the Hummer is a brand that people already care about.
01:36:32.000Let's just revamp it with electricity now because it's cooler.
01:36:35.000It's a completely redesigned thing, though.
01:36:37.000The way they've done it, I know what you're saying, but the way they've done it is more in some ways of an expression of the possibilities of technology.
01:36:49.000Because they've incorporated all sorts of, like it can crab walk.
01:36:54.000But do you need a thousand freaking horsepower in an offered car?
01:37:13.000What that means is like in certain things where it's almost impossible to gain traction, this thing can actually go like this and crab walk.
01:38:58.000Well, I mean, actually, if anything, I'm saying this more because I've worked with Rivian through their whole design process is that, you know, I've done photo shoots with them where we were driving like the prototype truck.
01:39:09.000And so it's all like a carbon fiber frame.
01:39:11.000Like it's not the real production, like metal truck.
01:39:36.000One of the shoots we did, all the electronics were being controlled by an iPad and there was an engineer laying down behind the seat in the back using the iPad to keep the suspension working and keep everything working properly.
01:39:47.000Because it's like a model one-off demonstration.
01:39:53.000I don't know that much about cars, but you assume that something that's not in production yet is for sure like that.
01:39:58.000It's like some mock-up model until it's actually being built properly.
01:40:02.000Especially something that has that much technology.
01:40:06.000As soon as you start on new features like that that don't technically exist yet, you know that there's some engineer in the backseat frantically pushing buttons, being like, come on baby, work this time, work this time!
01:40:22.000See if you can find this startup because what they're going to be able to do is instead of charging your battery...
01:40:30.000You know, it goes to 1,500 miles and then they can swap it out in 90 seconds.
01:40:35.000And it's got 15,000 miles of range or 1,500 miles of range rather, which is pretty incredible.
01:40:43.000I'm all for better solutions to this problem, you know?
01:40:48.000And apparently, the energy storage capacity of this particular type of battery, whether or not it actually exists or it's vaporware, is substantially better.
01:40:58.000Because the new Tesla Plaid, which is their new Model S... Why is it plaid?
01:41:14.000And so this company, I read an article about it actually this morning, and this company is going to, they'll be able to swap out your battery in 90 seconds.
01:42:04.000I'm kind of into it, though, because I feel like if everyone just keeps pushing as hard as they can at the thing they're interested in, you do wind up with good ideas, you know?
01:42:10.000I mean, like, Teslas are great, and they've done, like, great things for, you know, like, I'm...
01:42:15.000Realistically, the faster humanity can transition to electric, or basically transition away from fossil fuels, the better.
01:42:21.000And so it's like the more interested people with good ideas, the better.
01:42:24.000Porsche has developed fuel for their internal combustion engines that is completely clean and has less environmental impact than electric cars do.
01:43:21.000But in Porsche's defense, they have been at the front lines of making cleaner exhaust fumes to the point where the 911 Turbo, if it moves through, like I saw this on Top Gear, they were saying that if it went through a polluted place,
01:43:38.000like whether it's downtown LA or Calcutta or whatever.
01:44:15.000Like, I don't know if you've saw all of them.
01:44:17.000That guy has the most insane fucking car collection I've ever seen in my life.
01:44:22.000But, yeah, it was, well, yeah, definitely the most insane thing I've ever seen because, like, I don't, you know, I don't know any car collectors.
01:44:30.000The tour that we had from one of his helpers basically gave us this pretty cool tour of the garages.
01:44:40.000He said it was something like 167 cars, 187 motorcycles, and it's through all of human history.
01:44:45.000It's like from 1890 type or 1905. But my takeaway was that there were so many interesting false starts and sort of dead ends in technology where you have like a steam engine car.
01:44:57.000And then the ones that I keep thinking about are the 1950s like jet turbine cars.
01:45:02.000They were like cars with jets in them from the 50s.
01:45:15.000But, you know, I think it's cool that humans have explored so many different avenues like that.
01:45:20.000You know, it's like when you have a new technology, you kind of have to try every different version of it and, like, see what actually works.
01:45:25.000You know, Henry Ford had made hemp fenders and hemp-bodied cars in the early 1900s.
01:45:33.000It's kind of too bad that it didn't take off.
01:46:47.000The very first cars were split with electrics, but then battery technology wasn't there and it just wasn't.
01:46:52.000Well, sure, and then there was a documentary called Who Killed the Electric Car?
01:46:55.000Well, but that was in the 90s, but I mean like 1905. The original cars were...
01:47:00.000How interesting the world would be if it had gone all electric at the beginning instead of having a century of internal combustion engine cars.
01:47:08.000I mean, think of like urban air pollution and stuff if there had just never been internal combustion cars.
01:47:12.000Not that I'm like condemning that because obviously, you know, for tractors and all kinds of uses, you know...
01:47:19.000I mean, there are plenty of great things about internal combustion cars and like, you know, I drive one, you know, it's like mobility is important, but you're sort of like, it would be interesting if humanity had taken a fully different path down that road.
01:48:18.000It's a perfect way to describe it, yeah.
01:48:20.000But Elon was talking about Tesla's idea, Nikola Tesla's idea, of Westinghouse put the kibosh on it, but he wanted to develop these towers to broadcast electricity the same way radio waves were broadcast.
01:48:57.000So, his idea would have been great, but if it had been implemented, it would have completely stifled the concept of electronics and computers.
01:49:42.000The only thing that feels a little slow to me is virtual reality, because I assumed that would be way ahead of, it's pretty cool right now, but I assumed it would be, like, impossible to detect by now.
01:49:53.000That it would be, like, you put this thing on, and you'd be like...
01:50:54.000Isn't it funny that even a guy like you, who has done all these experiences, loves climbing, still like the climbing Everest, like, fucking, what's that all about?
01:51:03.000Well, it's like, I would be, I mean, I like climbing things, and you know, if it's the tallest thing to climb, you're like, oh, that's cool.
01:51:10.000I'm just sort of turned off by the crowd, you know, the popularity, the like, it's just too commercial, basically.
01:53:57.000Unidirectional treadmills, essentially, you have a halo around your waist, and it's got these cables that connect you to this circular post that goes around you.
01:55:34.000You're pulling heads out of people and stuff.
01:55:37.000But if you get to a point where a game like that, if you have an omnidirectional treadmill and it comes with some sort of gun that feels like a gun that has some heft to it and you can actually shoot things.
01:55:51.000But if it has heft to it, then you get worked after an hour of playing.
01:56:04.000For people who are just gamers, who, like, would love to go to the, you know, the amusement park or whatever it is, or arcade, and put money in and play Dance Dance Revolution.
01:56:14.000They got obsessed with it, and they lost, like, shitloads of weight because it's cardio.
01:57:57.000Yeah, well, the VR thing, if, you know, we're supposed to be doing this year, it would be more like a film that, you know, it's less like a game and you're just, like, watching something in VR. So you don't move at all?
01:58:08.000Well, you can move as much as you want, like, looking around, you know.
01:58:11.000But basically, you're sort of experiencing a climb from, you know, a bird's eye view where you can either watch somebody climbing through the frame or, like, look at the mountains and see the exposure and see the scenery and all that kind of stuff.
01:58:22.000So will they see your hands reach up and grab all the rocks?
01:58:35.000Yeah, though it can't be hovering because that's the thing, what you're talking about with software.
01:58:39.000For VR, for like full 360 video, you can't really do it from, you kind of have to have it on a wall, I think.
01:58:45.000So it's like bolted in place to be more stable.
01:58:47.000Because I think the challenge of like watching things in VR is that people get really motion sick if the whole frame of reference is moving nonstop.
01:58:54.000So, ideally, you have the filming sort of stationary and then interesting things happening around you so that you feel like you're stable when you're watching it, but you can see other things happen around you.
01:59:06.000Because, like, if you did POV in VR, it would make you super motion sick because then when you're the viewer, everything would be rushing all around you at all times.
01:59:13.000You'd be like, holy shit, I feel like I'm gonna die, you know?
01:59:17.000Like, a lot of people get really motion sick in VR. Like, my wife is, like, full hard no, like, won't do VR. Like, you know.
01:59:23.000There's a company called Sandbox and they have these warehouses set up and you do these VR experiences and they have this one that I'm obsessed with called Deadwood Mansion.
01:59:34.000And I had third place in the world at one point in time in this zombie killing game.
02:08:14.000Well, it's just like, that's a lot of time on your phone.
02:08:16.000People that hate their job and they pretend they're working and just watch YouTube all day.
02:08:21.000Yeah, I suppose if you're working security or something, you're just like at a desk and you just like have, you know, you have one earbud in, you're just like listening to a show, it's under the desk and you're just like, uh-huh, uh-huh, sign the form, uh-huh.
02:10:00.000They're like, oh, I'm working through this thing, and when I finish it, I set it down.
02:10:03.000You know, like, that kind of, like, there's a satisfaction in, like, working through a thick book that a Kindle...
02:10:09.000I mean, in some ways, the Kindle feels like this insurmountable thing, because it's like you have the whole complete works of Shakespeare on there, and you're like...
02:10:15.000You literally could be clicking away at it for the rest of your life and never actually finish anything, and you're like, damn.
02:10:48.000Well, what's really scary is that the technology that we're utilizing, whether it's with solid state drives or hard drives or what have you, if something happened, if there was like an immense solar flare and it killed the grid or it killed a large percentage of the population,
02:11:04.000we could conceivably lose most of human knowledge.
02:11:09.000If you think about what we have written down versus what we have stored in our minds, the disparity is astronomical.
02:11:18.000There's very little stored in our minds and so much on hard drives that if something big happened, some huge reset, super volcano, that kind of shit, asteroid impact that kills 50% of the population.
02:11:34.000Because I feel like most things right now are still written down in physical form.
02:11:39.000I can see what you're saying like 20 or 30 years from now, you would expect that if digital devices were wiped out, that humanity would lose an immense amount of knowledge.
02:11:48.000But right now I'm sort of like, oh, I feel like we're still sort of on the edge where like most things that are really important still get written down in physical form in some way.
02:12:09.000But I think the real thing would be all of the information in regards to how they constructed these solid state drives, how they constructed these motherboards.
02:14:50.000Well, totally, but if it's not fulfilling a purpose and you're like, a better purpose would be building my home.
02:14:56.000You can see how that stuff gets pilfered.
02:14:58.000Well, there was also a long history of robbing these tombs and robbing these sites and a lot of money, especially when you're dealing with extreme poverty and you can dig a hole in the ground and find a fucking golden sarcophagus that's worth more money than your family will ever spend for the rest of your life.
02:15:17.000You're out like digging an irrigation ditch in your field or something, you find a golden sarcophagus, you're like, Well, some of the stuff that they found in Egypt, some of the most spectacular shit, they really did just find.
02:15:28.000You know, like where they found Tutankhamen, where his site was, I think it was a kid that was carrying water, noticed that there was this weird sort of curved, sharp edge.
02:15:43.000And so he starts kicking it and moving it around, and then they realize, like, hey, this is a...
02:15:48.000An actual stone that was carved and put into this position and then they clear it out more and next thing you know they discover the tomb of King Tut.
02:15:57.000And then that little kid's like, yeah!
02:16:04.000Yeah, but that's the thing about the Library of Alexandria, is that that could conceivably be, like, all the information that we have about Bitcoin, or about, you know...
02:16:18.000Honestly, if it goes, it goes, you know?
02:16:22.000I feel like when we were talking about societal non-starters and interesting paths that technology goes, I kind of think that cryptocurrency is maybe not going to be one of the winning paths, but we'll see.
02:16:38.000I know, but it's incredibly energy intensive to do something.
02:16:40.000It's like you're basically reinventing a system in a more energy intensive way, which doesn't really make sense because in general, most technologies get more and more efficient.
02:16:56.000Because all the data processing, all the number crunching, basically the amount of power and infrastructure required to make it work is far more than currency, you know?
02:18:18.000If the power goes out, if hard drives stop working...
02:18:22.000I mean, there's going to be people that remember how to build houses.
02:18:25.000There's going to be people that remember how to make it.
02:18:27.000I mean, there's ways to build generators that work off of the flow of rivers.
02:18:32.000Like my friend Steve Rinell that I was talking about earlier, he has a cabin in Alaska, and the electricity is powered by water flow from a river.
02:19:19.000And then a third come back as zombies.
02:19:21.000Well, if we do two-thirds of the people, the problem is what third lives?
02:19:26.000The ones that were all in their bunkers.
02:19:29.000The ones that were all in their, like, prepper hole.
02:19:30.000The ones that are walking around barefoot developing thick calluses at the bottom of their feet.
02:19:34.000No, those guys don't even notice anything happened.
02:19:36.000I mean, they were like, oh, it was really bright for a day and whatever, and then they go back to, like, planting their cassava fields and they just, like, live their normal life.
02:21:30.00070,000 BC, a volcano called Toba, Sumatra, that's where it is, in Indonesia, went off blowing roughly 650 miles of vaporized rock into the air.
02:21:40.000It's the largest volcanic eruption that we know of, dwarfing everything else.
02:23:57.000I read a study out of, I think it was out of, I think it was Jerusalem, where they've done, they're doing these intensive hyperbaric studies where they take people and they put them in hyperbaric chambers on a regular basis.
02:24:14.000You know, these rich oxygen environments.
02:24:17.000And they found that they, you know, the way they determine biological age, Is the length of your telomeres.
02:24:24.000And they've determined that through this hyperbaric chamber therapy, they were able to reduce people's biological age by 20 years.
02:24:55.000And hyperbaric chambers they've used in the past, like I know fighters have used them for injuries.
02:25:00.000I know that people that have broken bones, they found that it heals things quicker.
02:25:05.000In these oxygen rich environments and then some people have used them for those.
02:25:11.000But as far as like health and wellness, the use of them is I think it's pretty recent that people started using them just for elective health and wellness type situations where you're just trying to improve your health.
02:26:38.000Because that's the thing, if you're in a restricted calorie state for your whole life, it means that you're lacking the energy to go running or play in the mountains.
02:26:47.000All the things that I care about, obviously, you couldn't do in that kind of restricted calorie state.
02:26:51.000But I do kind of wonder sometimes, if I was a painter or something, I was just sitting inside thinking up crazy ideas and drawing or whatever.
02:26:59.000It might be worth only eating 600 calories a day and living to 150. Or seeing if it works out that way.
02:27:06.000Do you anticipate a time where climbing is no longer interesting to you and you want to pursue other things?
02:27:13.000Or do you ever feel in any way that you are a prisoner to your earliest passion?
02:27:23.000I'm still kind of with the good ideas, things that I think at least are good ideas.
02:27:26.000I'm like, oh, that'd be cool, and I'll do this thing, and it'll be interesting.
02:27:29.000I mean, and I am sort of following the natural progression of, like, you know, doing the podcast.
02:27:33.000It's like, now you're talking about it, and you're sort of sharing.
02:27:35.000I'm supposed to be doing commentary for the Olympics, so it's actually not unlike your whole scene.
02:27:38.000Where it's like you talk about fighting and then you like talk to interesting people about, you know, it's like, you know, as you wind up being sort of like a spokesperson for your sport in some way.
02:27:46.000And I'm like, and I'm great with that if it means that I still get to climb as much as I want.
02:27:50.000That's really cool that you're going to do commentary for the Olympics.
02:28:03.000Though that really takes a lot of the appeal out of doing commentary for the Olympics if I'm just watching a live stream and talking about it.
02:28:09.000Well, what if you're on one of those Buffalo Wild Wing screens, big giant fucking 50-foot screen watching it, like sitting in...
02:28:38.000And, I mean, I think I am actually in a good position to be a bit of a spokesperson for it because I do kind of come from a different generation of climbers.
02:28:46.000I am more, by nature, I kind of prefer the adventurous side of climbing.
02:28:49.000Like, I like the big, you know, sort of adventurous climbers.
02:29:12.000I'm happy to be able to talk about both.
02:29:16.000One of the things that came up in Free Solo, and I guess just as a reality of later in your life, is that you started getting injured.
02:29:26.000No, that was actually just bad luck in Free Solo.
02:29:33.000And I think there's a line in the film where I'm like, oh, I hadn't been injured in years and then I got injured a couple times in a couple months after I started dating my now wife and stuff like that.
02:30:03.000But so Pat's like this incredible body worker, and I see him as regularly as I can when I'm in town, and I really think that's actually helped quite a bit.
02:30:11.000It's like getting the oil changed, basically, whenever you can.
02:30:16.000Yeah, so I mean, I think that basically having a home, you know, eating well, getting body work down, all that kind of stuff, like good healthy lifestyle, like I don't think I've had any injuries.
02:31:30.000Yeah, there's this for educational stuff, so school kids can just have a smartphone and then go to world-class aquariums and stuff like that and experience crazy...
02:31:38.000Go to the Great Barrier Reef or whatever.
02:31:40.000And fry your retinas and kill your vision real quick because it's all inches in front of your face.
02:31:46.000Yeah, so do you do other stuff to supplement your climbing like any other kind of working out or stretching or anything like that?
02:31:55.000Like, this morning I did this, like, shoulder mobility stuff and, like, opposition stuff, sort of like, you know, push-up, handstand-y type, like, shoulder stuff.
02:32:02.000And then some core and then some stretching.
02:32:04.000I mean, it's all, like, basic, normal stuff.
02:32:06.000Did you go to a trainer to teach you this stuff or did you learn it from books?
02:32:09.000No, just, I mean, it's all basic bodyweight exercises, so it's like...
02:32:13.000But, I mean, I have read some books about it.
02:32:15.000You know, all of my friends at Professional Climbers have obviously talked to everybody about it.
02:32:43.000And this is just something he developed for himself?
02:32:45.000No, I'm sure he learned it from some book, but I just hadn't really seen it applied in that way.
02:32:49.000I mean, it's totally stupid, but it's just moving your arms in different ways and shoulder mobility.
02:32:53.000But because my shoulders are not great at that kind of thing, it feels useful for me because that's a personal weakness.
02:32:59.000I mean, so much of climbing is identifying your personal weaknesses and working on those.
02:33:03.000Because, like, what's good for some people isn't going to be useful.
02:33:06.000Like, I don't do that much stretching, and it's because I'm naturally, like, moderately flexible.
02:33:11.000And, you know, being extremely flexible doesn't help that much as a climber.
02:33:14.000But if you were extremely tight, it would be a hindrance.
02:33:16.000You know, and so I kind of fall in the middle ground where it's, like, it's not really worth putting a lot of effort into because it's not going to give me that much more of a gain.
02:33:23.000Is it one of those things where if someone was extremely flexible, would it be possible for them to reach areas, particularly with their legs?
02:33:30.000Yeah, if you can just easily do the full splits.
02:33:33.000I mean, it does open up all kinds of technique that a normal climber wouldn't be able to do.
02:33:39.000But, you know, the thing is, me being relatively tall and relatively flexible, I can get most of the way there without actually being able to do the splits.
02:33:46.000And it'd be like a lot of work for me to do the splits.
02:34:08.000Yeah, on the other hand, though, I'd probably be able to use those same footholds because I'm taller, you know, because they're a certain length apart.
02:34:15.000Like, you know, really, if you're short, you kind of have to make up for it in a lot of ways like that.
02:34:20.000Like, you have to be able to stretch really far.
02:34:22.000But I would imagine you being taller, and also, if you were as flexible as her...
02:34:36.000There's a picture on my Instagram of me with a straddle leaning all the way forward, like flattening my chest out on the ground with my legs out like this.
02:36:17.000I don't know if you've ever been in suburban Vegas, but it's really big with suburban housewives and stuff.
02:36:23.000I theorize that people are into hot yoga because they sweat so much, they feel like they did something, and they're like, oh, I went to a workout class.
02:36:29.000But you're like, no, you just freaking stretch for an hour.
02:36:31.000I'd much rather just stretch on my living room floor.
02:36:33.000I hear what you're saying, and I understand why you would think that, but it's very difficult.
02:36:38.000It's not just you're sweating because you're stretching.
02:37:00.000I've done a conventional yoga class in an incredibly hot room and it's just kind of like flow, you know?
02:37:07.000Yeah, it depends on what you're doing, how you're doing it, and who's teaching it to you.
02:37:11.000I went with my wife, and at the end, there were too many people in the room, and it was, like, too hot.
02:37:16.000And then everyone sweat so much that it became, like, humid in a way that was, like, crazy.
02:37:20.000Like, there was a cloud at the top, and everyone was, like, about to die.
02:37:23.000And I just remember the end of the class, my wife just being, just laying on the mat, just, like, shallow breathing, like, trying to survive, basically, for the class to end, you know?
02:37:31.000I was like, dude, we're all just gonna die in here.
02:38:04.000You can't like do that and then go get your groceries on the way home and like run a bunch of errands because you're like a total disaster.
02:38:47.000There's one when you're standing on one leg and you're extending your other leg backwards and then you're leaning your body in a straight line.
02:38:54.000I think it's like standing stick pose or something like that.
02:39:44.000You gotta learn how to just slowly ease into it, and then you gotta learn how to just deeper, and then deep, and then hold it, and it just takes, it's just, you have to be consistent, too.
02:39:56.000It might be what I'm lacking in my stretching.
02:39:57.000I stretch to, like, a point where I'm like, this is comfy and it's keeping me fine, but I hardly ever, like, push my stretching, you know?
02:40:40.000I certainly could build up to it, obviously.
02:40:41.000You might not be able to do it right now, but you definitely could.
02:40:44.000There's a real benefit to that because the more pliable your tissue is, the more range of motion you have, I think the more you can alleviate injury.
02:40:53.000I think it's got to be one of the reasons why I can still do the kind of workouts that I do in terms of martial arts stuff because...
02:41:37.000It's funny because I'm pretty much always sore from something.
02:41:40.000I mean, I go climbing six days a week or something, so I'm always a little achy or sore.
02:41:44.000And especially right now with the stuff I'm working on in Vegas, I'm sort of alternating leg day and arm day.
02:41:49.000Basically like hard climbing, which is more in your arms, and then sort of adventures like what I was talking about, traversing all the mountains.
02:41:55.000That's like more in your legs because ultimately you're just going up and over all these mountains.
02:41:58.000And so on any given day, I'm always kind of like, oh, my legs, my back, my feet, whatever.
02:42:03.000That's why I'm surprised that you've never fucked around with CBD. It's really good for inflammation.
02:42:10.000There's a bunch of topical stuff that...
02:42:12.000Honestly, well, it's kind of new, and it's, like, good for everything, and I'm like, anything that's good for everything, I assume is, like, you know, good for nothing.
02:43:05.000You're doing podcasts about podcasts or whatever.
02:43:07.000We were talking about REM sleep because the Whoop tracks your sleep stuff.
02:43:12.000And it was a bit of a weird, like, personal, I don't know, it was like a moment of enlightenment almost.
02:43:17.000But apparently, I get significantly greater percentage of my sleep in REM sleep than average.
02:43:23.000And it's funny because every day the app says, like, your REM sleep is much higher percentage than whatever.
02:43:28.000Like, you must be making up for, you know, mist or something.
02:43:31.000But like, it's just always super high and apparently that's the REM sleep is the stage of sleep that, you know, sort of gives calmness and like, you know, mitigates anxiety and things like that.
02:43:40.000And I am sort of like, it is interesting if I'm like, maybe my whole thing in climbing just comes down to the fact that I'm a naturally really heavy REM sleeper, you know, and I just like, my mind is always kind of calm because I get like an extra, you know, 15% of my time in REM sleep every night.
02:43:56.000Yeah, it was one of those weird things because, you know, I've literally spent years with people doing interviews being like, what's the secret?
02:44:48.000When you are accustomed to doing things that are physically taxing and you've done it since you were little, I think you have more calmness and you're more mellow period.
02:45:00.000Yeah, totally, because you're just so accustomed.
02:45:02.000Anything you've done for 25 years is going to feel pretty relaxed when you do it.
02:45:05.000Also, I just think you're exerting a lot of energy.
02:45:08.000I think one of the things that stresses a lot of people out, I believe your body has certain requirements just from an evolutionary perspective.
02:45:17.000Our bodies were designed to run away from predators, to fend off enemies, to do whatever we had to do to survive in terms of trekking and doing things.
02:45:27.000And for most people, they don't use their body like that at all.
02:45:30.000And I think this extra energy manifests itself as anxiety, as depression, as bad feelings because you're just like, ugh, because your body's just not getting what it deserves.
02:45:59.000Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, like, you know, that fight or flight response, like what you're describing, the, like, fleeing from predators.
02:46:06.000I mean, I think that is kind of a root of anxieties, like modern life, like things trigger fight or flight that shouldn't necessarily, you know, it's like stress at work and your boss or whatever, and it, like, triggers that same thing.
02:46:17.000Yeah, it is true that in my life at least, the things that trigger fight or flight are like legitimate life or death sorts of situations where it's like, oh, you know, you are about to fall off a cliff or like, oh, you know, like the storm is coming and you're out in the middle of nowhere and you're like, I'm about to get worked.
02:46:31.000You know, it's like typically when I feel that kind of major anxiety, it's like for a real reason.
02:46:45.000And also, most of the guys that I've met that do what you do, and I don't know if I've met anybody that does exactly what you do, but guys that climb a lot, they're pretty chill.
02:46:57.000Well, dude, I think part of that is because you get worked by nature so often that then when you're in sort of normal life, everything feels pretty relaxed because you're kind of like, oh, I'm physically comfortable.
02:47:12.000Yeah, that's my philosophy about really difficult exercise.
02:47:16.000It's really important because it makes other things seem easy.
02:47:20.000I think we have just like a standard base level of stress.
02:47:24.000And when you artificially impose a higher base level electively, like whether it's through climbing or other kind of exercise, whatever you're doing, it makes the rest of life seem easy.
02:47:37.000Dude, I had earlier this year, There was a winter storm warning for Vegas.
02:47:42.000It does snow in Vegas sometimes, and the mountains especially get snow.
02:47:45.000There was a winter storm warning for this storm coming through, and I'd climbed like 20 days in a row basically or something, and I wanted to use the storm day to try to hike this one section of the traverse that I'm trying to do of all these peaks.
02:47:57.000I figured I would take advantage of a non-climbing day to do the one walking section to figure out where the route goes.
02:48:02.000And so I went out in this crazy storm.
02:48:04.000And when I started, it was like snowing a little and I was like in crazy wind.
02:48:47.000Eventually, I just had to give up and turn around, but I'm now 2,500 feet up this mountainside.
02:48:54.000Then I turned around, and then it all was way more socked in.
02:48:57.000I couldn't even see my tracks anymore because everything's filled in and visibility is nothing.
02:49:01.000I had a Garmin watch on, so I kept looking at the little track on my watch being like, am I to the left or the right of the track that I came up?
02:49:08.000No idea where I am, full mountainside.
02:49:13.000Yeah, but like sliding over things or tripping on rocks.
02:49:16.000It's really steep hillside with like, and you're stepping through, you know, say six or eight inches of fresh powder, but underneath it's still like loose rocks and cactuses and things like that.
02:49:24.000So it's like, you know, the terrain is, it's not like a snow base or something.
02:49:27.000It's like you're just stepping through it and falling over.
02:49:30.000Anyway, so I fell into cactuses a bunch of times.
02:49:32.000And so the thing is, I was totally hypothermic, completely wet, totally worked.
02:49:37.000And my hand had all these cactus thorns in it.
02:49:39.000And my other hand was too numb to manipulate anything.
02:49:42.000So I wound up biting the biggest thorns out and then just left the rest of them because I just couldn't use my hands and just keep staggering down the mountain.
02:49:50.000Anyway, eventually I made it back to the car, made it back to the house, and then I had my wife pull all the thorns out because I couldn't really use my hands.
02:50:04.000I mean, I was hoping that it was going to go better than that and it didn't really work out.
02:50:07.000But that is kind of the point that when you take on that elective love, you know, I was like, I had a goal that I wanted to piece together this section of a hike.
02:51:22.000I was like, yeah, it doesn't take much to feel very comfortable.
02:51:25.000Do people in your neighborhood recognize you?
02:51:27.000No, I mean, all three of my neighbors are seven-year-old ladies that have lived in the neighborhood since it was first built in 1989. It's pretty classic.
02:52:02.000So there's definitely a reason for climbers to live there.
02:52:05.000And I think the climbing scene in Vegas is actually even more robust than I know because I'm constantly at the cliff and I meet someone and I'm like, oh, where are you from?
02:53:25.000So that's kind of the thing is that...
02:53:27.000You know, or certainly like LA especially, you're like, oh, well, LA, you know, the city of downtown LA has a certain population, but there's so many people living within a two-hour drive that it's like, it's this crazy bowl, you know?
02:53:55.000Or like your old studio in the hills or what's it called?
02:53:58.000In the valley, whatever, that was like north.
02:54:00.000I mean, that's like totally, you know, you're like, it's LA, but it's actually like an hour drive away in crazy traffic with millions more people.
02:54:06.000And you're like, where the fuck is it?
02:54:11.000You know, last time I talked to you, I was in that studio and it was during the free solo tour and I had to leave because I was like going to the airport.
02:54:17.000And I was super late because we always chat so freaking long.
02:54:21.000And it was like an hour to LAX from there or something with traffic.
02:57:18.000And this was, unfortunately for the people that were fighting, it was a heavyweight title fight.
02:57:23.000So imagine being a giant person, which you're already had a hard time with cardio anyway, and then being at 7,000 feet above sea level, and more cardio requirements, and then pollution.
02:57:35.000Dude, presumably they go early for that kind of thing and spend some time getting used to it.
02:58:12.000And this first guy, Fabrizio Verduem, he did it for months, but Cain Velasquez only did it for a couple weeks.
02:58:20.000I think he had like 11 days, actually.
02:58:22.000Somewhere in that neighborhood of a couple weeks.
02:58:24.000I don't remember exactly, but they were saying, when you talk to actual experts, you're almost better off coming in right before the event.
02:58:32.000Then, you know, whereas you can get all the work and do the hard cardio leading up to that and then have the, you know, you're going to be diminished because of the altitude.
02:58:41.000But at least your body has gone through the hard work.
02:58:44.000Yeah, you still will have been on your own program.
03:02:03.000You know, and then in our first episode with this guy, Peter Croft, who's like a personal hero of mine, is about vision and sort of inspiration in climbing.
03:02:10.000Like, why does one generation's vision end and another generation surpass it?
03:02:16.000You know, like, Basically, why can the last generation of climbers not see past into what the next generation is going to do?
03:02:22.000I mean, it's just interesting because Peter was an incredibly talented climber and he kind of took free soloing to a certain level.
03:02:28.000And I basically started at the level that he ended at and then took it to a different level.
03:02:33.000But now I'm sort of like, you know, I wouldn't say that I'm necessarily at the very limit of my vision, but, you know, I'm close.
03:02:39.000Like, doing El Cap and the Film Free Solo, all that kind of stuff, definitely represents the edge of what I consider possible.
03:02:45.000But then already now I see sort of Olympic competitors who are just physically so much more gifted that, in theory, they'll have a totally different vision.
03:02:54.000Anyway, so those are the sorts of ideas that we've been exploring.
03:02:56.000It just seems like a good time for it.
03:02:59.000And there's nothing like that in climbing podcasting right now.
03:03:04.000I mean, there are a handful of sort of long-form interview podcasts, kind of like what you do in climbing, where they chat with interesting climbers and tell long stories.
03:03:13.000But it's not edited down to be thematic.
03:03:15.000It's not explaining the sport in an approachable way.
03:03:23.000And so the idea was always to have sort of a limited run, like 10 to 20 episodes leading up to the Olympics and sort of explaining the sport in a way that people can access.
03:03:32.000And then once you've done that, do you anticipate continuing it for years?
03:03:36.000No, the idea was just to do this one-off thing, but I'm sure as you know, you just never know where it's going to go.
03:03:44.000Yeah, I've really been enjoying talking to the guests because so many of them are personal heroes of mine.
03:03:49.000Like, people I've looked up to my whole life are like, oh.
03:03:51.000And then some of the stories, like I was telling you, the woman, Joanna Riosti, the first ascensionist in Vegas.
03:03:55.000Like, hearing her stories, I was like, this is crazy.
03:03:58.000So I find it, like, really personally inspiring.
03:04:00.000You know, like, it excites me to go out and climb other things just because I'm like, wow, like, I can't believe she was doing that in the 70s.