True Patriot Love - November 09, 2026


He Summited Everest—Then His Oxygen Failed ft. Alan Mallory

Carney’s 2026 Budget： Who Really Benefits？ ｜ Part 1⧸4

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 1 minute

Words per minute

199.58

Word count

12,275

Sentence count

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 well today i'm lucky enough to have alan mallory with me hey alan how are you good man hey i'm so
00:00:11.520 reading your bio so uh a very interesting bio uh musician i always gonna start with musician
00:00:19.120 because i love music climber uh psychologist well i have a master's in psychology i've spent a lot
00:00:25.440 of my life studying the human mind it was mostly because i went through my own mental health
00:00:30.080 journey but yeah yeah yeah an engineer yeah yeah it was really interesting an odd background yeah
00:00:35.520 yeah it's a very well i think it's a great background to tell you the truth i mean it
00:00:39.840 you know um i always say to my kids and i say to friends all the time you know i don't think
00:00:44.480 the human mind is meant to just do one thing in life the human brain is meant to do many things
00:00:49.680 in life quite frankly so you know when people say to me oh you know i've been in the same career my
00:00:54.000 whole life i'm like oh you know because i've had lots of careers so you know and now i'm doing
00:00:58.960 podcasting so there you go but you know i i took a look at your your bio last night as i was getting
00:01:05.440 ready for the show and then i i started going into your family history and i'm going to drop back
00:01:09.920 there for a minute because i i'm so interested because of course we've we've we've watched
00:01:14.640 movies on mount everest we've we've you know sir hillary edmund uh and zing is now all over the
00:01:21.120 place there's a movie note now um that talks about the summiting um tell me a little bit about
00:01:27.680 your family background and and everest and the connection because it's a really interesting
00:01:32.640 connection because i did know the story of george mallory um and then i started reading and there's
00:01:39.120 a connection yeah tell me about it yeah so we didn't actually know whether we were related to
00:01:44.160 george mallory at all it was actually after we did the climb that a lot of people kept asking and
00:01:48.640 asking and so my father actually hired a genealogy company to try to figure it all out
00:01:53.040 and his as far as we know his his grandfather married one of my ancestors whose name was julia
00:01:57.760 mallory and had to adopt the mallory name okay so that's really the connection now there doesn't
00:02:02.640 appear to be a direct blood link because she died quite young and he remarried okay but so his full
00:02:08.240 name is george herbert lee mallory but the mall he's known as george mallory from that first
00:02:13.280 marriage of his grandfather and so uh which is kind of interesting because you think it would
00:02:17.760 there because he was uh you know adventurous somebody a little bit adventurous a little bit
00:02:22.240 crazy and uh and so are we that there would be a kind of a genetic blood link there yeah i was but
00:02:28.400 um i think it's more of a uh yeah anyway it's just kind of a coincidence more than anything
00:02:33.280 although we do have that familial uh link but in terms of our expedition really my father got us
00:02:40.000 into uh each of my siblings and i i have a brother and sister uh into mountaineering when we were
00:02:46.800 fairly young when we were 19 he took each of us to climb one or more of the seven summits
00:02:51.200 and then he really you know kind of instilled that um idea in in us but also
00:02:59.760 emulated emulated the importance of setting lofty goals in life yeah and uh he's in his 70s now and
00:03:04.960 he's still doing uh he did an iron man triathlon this year so oh good for him good for him and
00:03:09.920 your dad's name dan dan okay all right um and because there's a john mallory that you read
00:03:15.840 about all the time also and is that a i'm not sure where that connection distant cousin probably yeah
00:03:21.920 yeah okay because you know just the george so when i got into it and i had read the story that
00:03:27.920 for those for the viewers and i'll just go back for a minute to there the george mallory story
00:03:33.040 is a very interesting story so it's a story of uh uh expedition that summits mount everest
00:03:40.480 but doesn't make it back well we don't know that for sure yeah but he was a famous climber back in
00:03:46.800 the 1920s he made a number of attempts in 1924 he was seen right near the summit of mount everest
00:03:54.000 on the north side with this high power telescope but then he disappeared uh him and his climbing
00:03:59.120 partner sandy irving uh and so he really didn't become famous until about 70 years after his death
00:04:05.120 in 1999 when they discovered his body right and they extrapolated from what they they knew in
00:04:10.640 terms of his speed and there was a bunch of different clues his glacier glasses he had a
00:04:15.200 picture of his wife he was going to leave at the at the summit yeah and so in certainly in the
00:04:19.040 mountaineering community there's this hypothesis that he did make it 30 years before edmund hillary
00:04:23.920 and was on his way back down right now they've been trying to find their camera which would be
00:04:28.480 the conclusive evidence right and so it you can't really rewrite the history of the mountain without
00:04:34.000 you know having more conclusive evidence right that's that's the urban legend or the legend of
00:04:40.880 george right is that if they find his camera they'll find the picture of him and his partner
00:04:45.760 at the summit well there's a lot of what ifs they have to be able to develop it would have to be
00:04:50.240 even if they could develop a few pixels but uh you know who knows whether that'll ever happen
00:04:54.800 yeah but it's a interesting story and a lot of books have been written about him a very quick
00:04:59.440 favor before we continue. A large percentage of you who watch or listen to TPL Media every week
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00:05:24.720 costs nothing keeps you informed so thank you now back to the show so your dad so this is i'm going
00:05:31.440 to just jump into this because this is very you know i'm i'm always so intrigued uh when you tell
00:05:35.840 this story you know what um i i did triathlons for years i adventure raced um you know i've always
00:05:42.240 loved all all uh different adventure sports but your dad canadian yep how does he get into how
00:05:49.520 does he get into mountaineering and how does he start climbing and then what does he um and then
00:05:55.600 he makes the jump and says to you and the and your family your brothers and sisters who summited with
00:06:01.520 you yeah you got to learn this too like how does that because i delve into it with me a little bit
00:06:07.280 because i find it i find it so unique and really cool tell you truth that he actually uh thought
00:06:13.040 it through you know how i have three boys so yeah yeah and i wouldn't say he really pushed this on
00:06:19.120 any of us although it's hard to kind of say how much is nurture in nature you know it's kind of
00:06:24.240 coincidence that we all you know are you know well we got into mountaineering but also we
00:06:30.240 you know we've kind of let's say adopted that mentality of setting lofty goals in life you
00:06:36.080 know my sister and i we did the canadian iron man this year as well and that was a everest
00:06:41.680 for me you know i've been working on it for a lot of years so how much of the way that my
00:06:47.440 father and mother raised us really went into that instilling of that um that what i said i guess
00:06:54.080 it's goal-setting mentality a lot of the things i've done in life i would say are some sort of
00:06:59.520 a journey of self-discovery to prove to myself that i can yes and you know is that something
00:07:05.600 that parents instill in their kids is that something that's through emulation or is there
00:07:10.160 just a genetic element to it um you know there's lots of debate about that i just think it's
00:07:16.240 healthy to try to instill that in your children as best you can so he didn't get into mountaineering
00:07:22.400 until he was maybe in his 40s um and with my mother they they climbed i think pico bolivar
00:07:30.080 um in peru or something like that was one of the the first mountains and then he just liked doing
00:07:35.440 a lot of outdoor adventures with his kids and so that's where the other mountains came in in my
00:07:42.640 case it was uh mckinley or denali in uh in in alaska and um and then my brother was the the
00:07:50.240 highest in south america mount aconcagua my sister was mount alberus in russia and so we'd already
00:07:56.560 climbed some of the seven summits the highest on each of the the seven continents uh even before
00:08:01.920 that discussion happened around everest and so he brought it up i remember just originally around
00:08:07.120 the dinner table you know we kind of thought well that'd be an interesting challenge and then the
00:08:11.600 more we looked into it i mean at least for myself like it it really you know morphed into you know
00:08:17.520 quite a personal dream and uh oh yeah and it has to because otherwise you talk yourself into turning
00:08:23.600 back long before you get to the end of that uh the two-month expedition like there's a lot of
00:08:29.200 different layers of challenges that you're having to uh push through and if you can't if you don't
00:08:35.440 have that deep dream you're not going to be able to dig deep enough to find the resilience that's
00:08:41.360 going to be needed um and that's why when we were there it's the the statistically it was 70 percent
00:08:47.200 of climbers turned back long before that the the end of that two-month expedition there's just a
00:08:52.240 lot of layers of exciting yet horrific challenges yeah yeah you know it's interesting so um
00:08:59.200 i i mentioned you know on many shows that um i'm not as well traveled as you but quite frankly i
00:09:05.360 was lucky enough to travel to a lot of places in the world and um i lived for uh over a decade in
00:09:12.640 the u.s and one of the unique individuals i met with a guy named joe de francis and he did k2
00:09:18.400 okay yeah um and joe joe is uh you know and shout out to joe because he's he's a terrific guy but
00:09:25.200 he actually trained and he used to train at a gym and it was he lived in baltimore and he used to
00:09:30.800 rock climb there and he and every morning he used to get up and he used to do um a thousand push-ups
00:09:36.240 and a thousand sit-ups um and he was built like a rock a little italian uh guy and um he went up k2
00:09:43.920 he actually on the way back down had an accident it was a an avalanche and they caught him uh the
00:09:49.840 the periphery of it and uh tore his knee and shoulders but he made it back uh tells the story
00:09:55.600 he did a lot of climbing but you know the danger in climbing so the you know when you you know for
00:10:00.880 the viewers i think it's interesting at some point you know i understand why you turn back because
00:10:05.840 it's one of those things where your excitement it's like life you know and and when i'm reading
00:10:10.160 your your keynotes you do um there's you know you talk a lot about sort of you know the the start of
00:10:16.720 a journey and then you know the challenges during a journey and mountain climbing is is a lot well
00:10:23.680 definitely the same because i can imagine you know you're excited to go but then when you get there
00:10:28.160 and you're at base camp or you look up you're like wow like there's a lot of challenge right
00:10:33.920 there's a lot of things you're going to encounter here yeah yeah and that's why i would say you
00:10:38.720 know it's it's the ultimate analogy for business and life not only that we have to basically take
00:10:44.800 an iterative approach in mountaineering where you make these pushes into the altitude yeah but if
00:10:49.040 you stay there you get a demon lose your life and so you come back down on everest you know some of
00:10:53.440 the lower mountains you don't need that you don't need this um so then you use what you learn from
00:10:58.320 that particular iteration to make adjustments and and go into the planning of your next iteration
00:11:03.280 and so that there's a you know an adaptation element to it and those teams that were successful
00:11:10.000 we're successful in being able to you know take that real world um data or lessons learned in in
00:11:17.280 the moment and adjust anyone who is too rigid in their mindset um eventually they just come
00:11:22.640 to the conclusion well no one could could climb through this right you're deathly ill and you
00:11:27.600 know there's just all kinds of reasons why um you can talk yourself into turning back
00:11:32.320 um and that's what resilience is in many ways you know you cultivate it by by how you deal with
00:11:39.840 smaller challenges throughout your life so that you're able to kind of extrapolate from the ways
00:11:45.360 that you've you've uh you've solved those other challenges and and apply that to your current one
00:11:51.440 so that's why a lot of what we did in adventure racing and in triathlons and winter camping and
00:11:56.720 white water kayaking it's not mountaineering but there's enough um what i call it parallels
00:12:02.880 or similarities that you can draw from to to try to get yourself out of the current bind that
00:12:08.240 you're faced with yeah yeah well we all you know and i believe you know every morning i'm up early
00:12:14.160 and i i try to you know i i go to the gym i try to you know create challenges for myself physically
00:12:21.040 so i'm kind of ready for the emotional challenges of the day but you know i i love the way you put
00:12:26.080 that because you know i went through it in my life and i tell young people when they ask me all the
00:12:30.640 time they say you know how did you um build this program from a business perspective and i said well
00:12:37.840 you know what it took me years and it's hard to explain as an entrepreneur it's hard to explain
00:12:43.760 to people sometimes how you do it people say to me you know how did you do this or how did you
00:12:50.000 build this program or build this company and i'll say you know it's a culmination of a bunch of
00:12:54.960 things that i learned over time and i had to build up the strength to overcome the fears and the
00:13:02.480 anxieties of certain things but there were times where i had to step back because there were they
00:13:06.800 were overwhelming and quite frankly those are the tough times because you're saying to yourself you
00:13:11.600 know i don't want to go backwards but really i know that i don't have enough fortitude to go any
00:13:16.160 further right now enough strength to get to the next level um you know that's an important lesson
00:13:22.000 that you know i'm glad you talk about because yeah i think people think it's easy i yeah i got a note
00:13:28.560 from a cousin this is a really interesting story and he was wanted to open a electric bike business
00:13:35.920 in bc and he and it was it was a little bit insulting and i at the beginning when i got it
00:13:41.920 i was insulted by it but i don't know if he was trying to insult me i don't think he was
00:13:45.840 and i took it that way and i had to step back and he wrote me this long letter and he said
00:13:50.480 you know uncle paul i want you to uh tell me how you raise money and did this and did this
00:13:57.040 and you've you know it's always been easy for you and i thought to myself no and i wrote him back
00:14:04.240 and i said the reason people uh invested in me was the number of they saw me kind of summit
00:14:12.640 through challenges over time that got me to certain places and i built a reputation and i
00:14:19.120 said you know when i went to the u.s and built my business in the u.s it was interesting because i
00:14:24.400 had to then prove i had to go there and they said well you're canadian i said what do you mean i'm
00:14:29.520 canadian you've never built anything in america i said well you built stuff in canada you haven't
00:14:33.840 built and it was developing projects building projects right construction and uh i'd say well
00:14:38.880 yeah but i built in canada they go oh it's much different here and you know and i and so i wrote
00:14:43.600 them back and i said it's a it's you know it's a they're steps right they're not it's not you might
00:14:50.160 not have seen those steps when you saw me maybe it looked yeah easy yeah after the fact it always
00:14:55.840 easy looks easy when people look back and they don't realize well there are a lot of different
00:15:02.000 perseverance mattered yeah yeah well that's the resilience right that's the ability to you know
00:15:08.080 fall down get back up and keep going and yeah and and when you do your keynotes i notice you
00:15:14.720 which is interesting the one that jumped out at me and i actually i i i read through it you know
00:15:21.040 mind over matt mountain so when you do that keynote and it was so interesting because i
00:15:26.480 was reading through it uh last night and i was talking to my wife and i said you know what my
00:15:31.920 groups right building uh building mental resilience by strengthening focus adaptability
00:15:38.560 and emotional stamina under pressure that's so key like it's it's it you know it is so key and
00:15:44.960 people don't understand it is a muscle like it's uh it is a process some people do just win the
00:15:52.560 resilience lottery you know there is a genetic element to it some people are just you know
00:15:57.600 naturally more resilient and they can kind of pat themselves on the back for that but it's not really
00:16:01.920 you know, they just kind of, you know, lucked out. But I would say it's kind of an abdication of your
00:16:07.800 own, what would I say, responsibility to just use that as an excuse. If you aren't someone who's
00:16:14.400 naturally resilient, you know, can it be cultivated? And as far as I can tell, yes, it can.
00:16:19.520 You know, it might not be as easy for people, but you develop basically resilient habits that you
00:16:25.340 can draw on and so that it becomes more automatic and natural for you to just you know be resilient
00:16:33.300 when when things are thrown at you even small little things you know be careful of your own
00:16:37.420 internal monologue you know if you make a a commitment to something and you you a lot of
00:16:44.180 people kind of take that new year's resolution approach where you know a few weeks later what
00:16:48.720 does it really matter it's it's all out the window the statistics around new year's resolutions is
00:16:53.140 is dismal well you're kind of convincing yourself that you you are the type of person that just kind
00:16:59.380 of lets your own internal commitments lapse right that's how you what do you call it erode the
00:17:06.260 resilience in in yourself and so i would say i try to be careful with that you know pick things
00:17:12.340 that are in in life challenges in life that are are meaningful to me and uh and that's hard enough
00:17:18.420 in itself figuring out what's what's really meaningful to you rather than what people in
00:17:24.500 your life have kind of pushed you towards and then when i make those commitments i try to follow
00:17:29.860 through with them um psychologically that actually matters have an everest in in in some area of your
00:17:36.340 life i've had times where the rare times where everything's just kind of working out and there's
00:17:43.940 almost something missing and i've found the antidote is actually find another way to push
00:17:49.460 yourself out of your your comfort zone yeah which is really interesting like we're almost we're
00:17:53.860 we're hard we're wired to overcome some sort of adversity on the way to overcoming you know maybe
00:18:00.580 accomplishing something of value and we have to do that throughout our whole lives and when they
00:18:04.900 interview people that have achieved longevity that's exactly what they say you know they keep
00:18:08.980 pushing themselves mentally and physically yeah yeah i know for me when i when i mentioned to you
00:18:14.260 about the triathlon um i got into it quite frankly because of emotional pain okay yeah so you know i
00:18:20.660 was going through some stuff and i was feeling emotionally you know distraught about some things
00:18:25.620 and i said okay you know i need i need an everest to kind of take my mind off it and believe it or
00:18:30.660 not you know people say well you're torturing yourself i wasn't torturing myself i was making
00:18:34.500 myself feel better yeah um and i loved it you know i did the the supra races i was i did a bunch of
00:18:40.820 races and a bunch of triathlons in the u.s uh and i loved doing them quite frankly i really enjoyed
00:18:46.420 it um i had adventure race for years as i mentioned so it was new to me i had to learn
00:18:51.300 all about it so the learning curve and cut when i was it was kind of the forest gump story and i
00:18:56.820 always laugh when i tell this story to people people say well why'd you stop i said well i
00:19:03.380 I felt better but just kind of I got to the end I finished a race and I didn't do very good quite
00:19:09.460 frankly it was probably the worst race I had run and you know it wasn't because I didn't do great
00:19:14.140 I just went home and I said you know what I I'm fine with it now like I feel good I'm I'm feeling
00:19:20.800 happy and I feel in a better place I'm mentally feeling better and whatever kind of was in my
00:19:26.900 head at that time it was gone and so quite frankly I just got on with life and I took those challenges
00:19:32.320 and i put him i put that energy into business yeah and that's i think the main thing you didn't leave
00:19:36.960 a void there you just moved on to something else so you kind of made sure you chose another ever
00:19:42.400 she kind of summited that one to some degree right so yeah um yeah and that as far as i can tell is
00:19:48.160 pretty pretty important yeah yeah well it was because it got me and and the funny thing is
00:19:53.040 you know when uh and in business it's it's a lot of similarities quite frankly that i learned you
00:19:59.680 you know, you know, when I was doing the triathlon stuff, you know, it's when you're going through
00:20:04.500 those pain points, it's actually almost figuring out a way to get yourself to push yourself through
00:20:10.200 them. You know, so when you're feeling that insecurity or and, you know, I used to laugh
00:20:15.940 because I hated to run. And so I was I had a running team that I used to run with a swimming
00:20:22.560 team. And I had a biking team that I kind of worked with on infrequently because of my work
00:20:28.940 schedule but you know i uh one of the guys who ran with me he said to me he said you're a terrible
00:20:34.380 runner and i was i was i was i was awful i'm not built to be a runner and uh he said but you know
00:20:41.100 what you have to get your mind to believe you are a good runner so he what the way he did it he
00:20:47.580 created a fictitious character in his mind which was um which is like a nigerian uh marathoner
00:20:55.500 that he ran like yeah and so he even renamed himself and he actually it sounds crazy but he
00:21:00.700 put himself in the headspace to actually create the environment that he could run he felt like
00:21:05.740 he was running better splits and he was doing better and he got better at it and i got better
00:21:11.260 too um you know so everyone kind of creates methodologies and systems that fit you and
00:21:17.660 when i told people that's oh that sounds crazy but it worked for me yeah and so in business
00:21:21.740 sometimes like i'll be doing something and someone will say well that process is out of line and
00:21:26.620 i'll say well it might be out of line in your mind but to me it fits perfectly in the strategy of
00:21:31.500 where i'm going yeah and i need to be here for a while until i can go and do something else right
00:21:36.300 and and it's hard because people think well that seems bizarre but it's not bizarre because i'm
00:21:41.980 not ready to yeah you know go to the next challenge in that business yeah i found that
00:21:47.500 strategy I call that playing the right mental movies and I found in my life
00:21:53.500 that's been particularly important because you know my younger years I had
00:21:57.460 quite a severe social phobia and anxiety disorder generalized anxiety disorder
00:22:01.360 that's actually what pushed me in the in the psychological direction oh I
00:22:05.200 studied the human mind for a lot of my life an engineer by trade so I kind of
00:22:09.940 knew the mechanics side but you know I was I was weak in the in the psychological
00:22:15.040 side. And that's made me a much more rounded person, I would say. But so, you know, I would play
00:22:24.560 as part of that journey, and I would say, you know, overcoming my own internal challenges,
00:22:31.440 I studied a lot of different, what do you call them, techniques and how you can, and some of
00:22:38.440 them were just, I found fluff, some of them really worked. And I would say one of them was playing
00:22:42.500 the right mental movies now there's different ways of doing that you can kind of you know how
00:22:46.600 you picture yourself and i played with them all and many of them work but i used to you know our
00:22:51.120 mind is always playing these mental movies most of them are disaster endings i know right and it
00:22:56.500 happens very fast and that's really you know where any phobia or anxiety um it happens because you
00:23:04.860 know it's us falling on our faces as us failing it's us being uh you know embarrassed in front
00:23:09.300 of our peers and our family and all of that and um that just not you know especially someone who's
00:23:14.620 who's prone to anxiety that's happening all the time so i kind of now i have some strategies where
00:23:19.720 i just kind of stop that movie and i play the right one that it's even if it's fictitious like
00:23:25.360 like you you were just talking about but it's it's me kind of and it's important to play the
00:23:29.920 movie through all the way you know where you kind of okay you're finished that run you're finished
00:23:34.280 that whatever it is presentation and um that kind of rewrites your automatic um emotional response
00:23:42.600 system i guess yeah and i really did find that that that worked well you know it takes a little
00:23:48.000 bit of getting used to and i think it helps when you have a you know kind of a um what do they call
00:23:53.600 that eidetic or you know a um where you can picture things clearly in your mind yeah but i just play
00:23:59.240 that right movie that i want to happen and and that helps it's interesting golfers that use that
00:24:04.120 and and uh you know lots of different athletes that they they rehearse what they want to see
00:24:10.280 they see the ball going through the air and then they rehearse that over and over again
00:24:14.360 and uh and how it works well you know when you talk about your climbing experience the thing
00:24:19.320 that pops to mind is cold i'm not going to use a very small example but i think it's very important
00:24:24.360 especially for canadians so um you know every time my family goes outside you know and we get in the
00:24:30.280 car in the middle of the winter they say how cold it is and i say no it's not cold regardless of how
00:24:36.200 cold i feel i always tell them it's not cold and i tell them and they say and people say well i hate
00:24:41.400 the winter when i hear that nice and i always say them i love the winter so i always reverse that
00:24:46.840 thinking all the time so if i keep telling myself and people say well that's kind of crazy you don't
00:24:51.160 you don't love that i said i do love the winter yeah right and i now now over um you know lived
00:24:56.600 in a number of places lived in florida at one point i didn't like florida because i missed
00:25:01.880 the winter so i had convinced my mind over time that i loved the winter so when i came back to
00:25:06.520 canada and i relocated back here where i was born i love i love the four seasons i love the winter
00:25:12.440 and i've kind of over time now did i always love it no i remember as a kid i probably didn't you
00:25:17.400 you know, as a teenager, I probably didn't love it. But over time, I've convinced myself. So when
00:25:21.860 I think of you going to the top of Everest, and being out of oxygen, and being cold, and being
00:25:27.800 sleep deprived, how many pounds are you losing in a period of time? You're dropping weight.
00:25:33.480 As you're summiting, I think Joe told me he lost, Joe is not as big as you. He's a small guy.
00:25:41.380 He lost like 23 pounds. I lost 30 pounds over that two months.
00:25:44.920 yeah yeah yeah so your body's eating your body's eating itself and you're trying to convince
00:25:49.480 yourself so your mind is keep to keep going is overcoming that challenge and telling itself that
00:25:56.040 the goal is more important than the things that are happening to you that's a really great like
00:26:03.800 just the mental strength to do that i find so admirable because that is that is the success
00:26:10.040 in business and in life that you have to endure you know that entrepreneur to get to the end
00:26:14.440 And you never are a success because in your mind, no matter how good you're doing, you never believe you're a success because you've trained your mind to keep striving.
00:26:25.680 Because if you believe that you stop, now that's probably the challenge too that can hurt yourself.
00:26:32.820 You can't stop, right?
00:26:34.760 So it's the same as a climber in a way.
00:26:37.740 Yeah, well, you can tell me if you would relate to this in your own journey.
00:26:41.480 but as far as i can tell there's a psychological explanation to what has been coined the law of
00:26:49.320 attraction which i don't actually think exists in terms of like a cosmic force of you know the
00:26:54.600 universe conspiring to bring but there's anyway there's lots of books around it i don't think you
00:26:58.360 need a cosmic uh explanation because when you're when you are consciously solutions focused like
00:27:05.720 what you're saying focus on the positive the old uh adage that uh our teachers used to tell us that
00:27:10.760 we all hated um you tune your perception to some degree and so you start to notice the like we we
00:27:18.440 take in millions of signals through our five senses we can only consciously process a small
00:27:24.520 fraction of them yes and so you tune your perception to the point where it um affects
00:27:30.840 which signals you process right if someone who's solutions focused and is trying to find the silver
00:27:37.240 lining they start to notice all those small little things that they can capitalize on that will help
00:27:42.440 get them there someone who's in that negative dark cloud mentality all the time just notices
00:27:47.880 more problems you know all the reasons why this is never going to work and you'll have worked with
00:27:52.200 both of those types of individuals oh yeah um now now some of that again is uh is genetic there's
00:27:59.160 kind of a a positivity lottery that some people win you know one of my daughters is just sees
00:28:05.480 everything with rainbows and flowers and that's a you know a wonderful kind of gift to have
00:28:12.680 but not all of us have that and if you don't well what can you do again it's almost a habit forming
00:28:19.080 well maybe i won't focus on the the negatives you know is there anything positive in this that
00:28:24.440 in this situation that life has thrown at me now you start to tune that perception a little bit
00:28:29.560 and so i think it's similar to what you did with with the canadian winter when you're kind of
00:28:34.360 changing your mentality about that now you probably started to notice well just a second
00:28:39.080 there's some beauty in this in this snow that i'm seeing you know what if i got into some sports
00:28:45.160 that are winter sports and so that is probably what culminated in your entire kind of experiential
00:28:53.880 change around uh winter and you're right you know for many canadians they just grumble in
00:29:00.040 the entire winter and i think why are you living here i mean move somewhere it's warm if you can't
00:29:05.160 find some silver lining in this i build a rink every wherever i live i build a rink for the kids
00:29:10.200 in my community so i find the park yeah and i go to the i go to the community and i get water a
00:29:15.640 water valve put in okay and i make a rink yeah and that's kind of my way of kind of overcoming it and
00:29:21.640 it's interesting because it actually gets me outside it gets me in the cold and it allows
00:29:27.320 me to adapt to my environment so and i find it healthier mentally to be moving and i and at the
00:29:33.160 end my result is i get to see a bunch of little kids playing hockey and my own sons come and they
00:29:38.200 play hockey with me and my wife and everyone skates so that's my that's all positive right
00:29:43.800 that's even something you look forward to in winter probably so yeah yeah i mean and that's
00:29:48.040 a conscious choice you made you know there's plenty of other people that are just sitting
00:29:52.520 there in their couch staring out the window wanting for it to all end you don't have that many years
00:29:57.640 on this on this planet so uh if you live in a cold climate find a way to enjoy it i find it's
00:30:04.280 interesting so joe tells me a story so this is this is a crazy climbing story that when he was
00:30:09.320 doing k2 and i always remember this story because it's it's the epitome of resilience and your
00:30:15.640 emotional state so he's halfway up and he uh he had wears contacts now they got so cold that his
00:30:25.720 contacts contacts started sticking to his uh eyes okay so then he had he took them out uh one night
00:30:34.360 because he was his eyes were really bad put his glasses on um and then he unfortunately when he
00:30:41.000 trying to put them in he poked his eye and so and he was having some eye problems so rather than
00:30:49.240 stop he took a piece of tape and closed his eye and kept climbing and he said and i said well
00:30:56.920 weren't you worried that you've done damage to your eye or that you know wouldn't you have gone
00:31:00.760 and he said well i just convinced myself that it was fine and that i would treat it when i came back
00:31:05.320 down um yeah so it's interesting how you know he was you know he again the the the target the
00:31:13.640 the summiting is you know he just kept you know and he was fine he got his eye was fine in the
00:31:20.120 end and everything he was right but he didn't know yeah um you know yeah that that can be i mean
00:31:26.280 you know he's a very resilient person that finds solutions yeah we had to do that at times as well
00:31:31.320 now you could say well that that could be taken to the extreme is like some of the deaths on these
00:31:35.640 mountains are climbers that kind of you know throw all um rational thinking to the wind and they they
00:31:41.960 just march onto their own demise some of it's him knowing himself enough i guess and being able to
00:31:47.640 accept the you know the potential risks that are around that you know he realizes this is not a
00:31:53.240 typical environment he's in and he's going to have to do things like that yeah um if he wants to um
00:31:59.000 you know achieve this thing that's really meaningful to him so um so yeah anyway that's
00:32:05.080 interesting but when you got to so i was reading your story about uh climbing when you got to the
00:32:09.960 top when you and if i get it right when you went to come down so you're you're tired you know again
00:32:16.120 you've hit the summit oxygen is your key issue because your body's so deprived your tank was
00:32:22.440 empty we don't know exactly what happened in in the end but um because we'd been climbing you
00:32:28.120 In that final push, you climb for upwards of 30 hours straight, right through the night,
00:32:33.000 because you don't actually sleep at Camp 4.
00:32:35.260 You're in the death zone at that point.
00:32:36.740 Your body's not fighting to survive.
00:32:40.940 So yeah, what ended up happening is on the way down, just after I went down the Hillary
00:32:44.820 Step, I ran out of oxygen.
00:32:46.840 I ripped off my mask, collapsed on the ice, just gasping for breath.
00:32:51.620 And it was pretty scary.
00:32:53.280 almost immediately my inner core there's this weird cold feeling and my limbs started shaking
00:32:58.400 uncontrollably oh and uh that's a bad place to have it happen because there's a 2 000 foot drop
00:33:04.320 on both sides of that narrow summit ridge i didn't make it very far at all before i basically
00:33:09.920 collapsed again and we did have two sherpas with us they were local nepalese climbers and they were
00:33:16.720 a connection back to the outfitters that supplied some of the logistical support
00:33:21.360 And so they weren't really a guide, per se,
00:33:24.000 but we needed that external support,
00:33:27.420 someone replenishing our food supplies and all of that
00:33:31.560 over the two months.
00:33:33.420 So we developed a great relationship with them,
00:33:36.060 our two Sherpas.
00:33:37.060 And at that point, Asange was not too far from me.
00:33:40.760 And I turned to him, I said, I need oxygen.
00:33:45.120 I can't keep going.
00:33:46.400 And so he decided to give me his oxygen cylinder, which
00:33:51.340 is pretty incredible i'm quite thankful because he you know it's not like they can just march up
00:33:56.220 and down it's pretty difficult for them as well now they're maybe that much more acclimatized
00:34:01.340 because they've spent more time and lived there yeah and they you know they show up a month before
00:34:06.540 to set up base camp and all that so um so that's what happened he switched our cylinders and i kept
00:34:12.140 continuing down and the symptoms just continue to get worse and that's when i really started to
00:34:17.340 panic i thought i'm on oxygen this is getting worse i'm gonna die up here and that was a
00:34:23.980 pretty terrifying conclusion to come to yeah and and not one that
00:34:31.740 there'd been over 200 other climbers die in that same area and most of them would have entered
00:34:36.700 it would have entered into the the same situation i had entered into so you know i i couldn't say
00:34:42.940 well this is an irrational conclusion to come to it was very rational right and um so it was
00:34:48.700 actually my father he'd now run out of auction as well and when i stumbled up to to him not too far
00:34:53.660 from where i was and uh i asked him to go in my pack and turn my regulator right up to the maximum
00:34:59.340 and he's the one who discovered there was actually a problem with my regulator which was preventing
00:35:04.300 the auction from coming out at all oh my goodness and so in the end we don't really know whether my
00:35:09.180 original cylinder was empty or not right because there were various factors involved in in all
00:35:16.540 of that but uh but anyway he was able to you know rectify this the the issue he actually doesn't
00:35:22.620 even remember what was wrong with it and it's interesting how the wow it's interesting how
00:35:28.060 the lack of oxygen actually plays with your your short-term memory yeah and um you know when when
00:35:34.140 crack wire wrote into thin air he had the same thing a lot of the other climbers afterwards
00:35:39.260 said well you you know basically hallucinated some of that stuff you said in there and this
00:35:44.620 is how it really happened and uh now i can see how that could come to pass because you really
00:35:52.060 are foggy on on the details and so that was why it was actually key that we kept journals i
00:35:58.380 originally i'd never journaled really much in my life but i wanted to you're spending a lot
00:36:02.620 of time acclimatizing and so um every night i would kind of jot down what happened uh that ended
00:36:08.540 up being key years and years later when you know enough people had told me you've got to write a
00:36:13.820 book you've got to write a book and uh i said well i'm not that was my first book the family
00:36:18.300 conquered everest and i thought well i'm not really a writer but maybe i'll just you know
00:36:23.260 start i can write a page i can write two pages and i couldn't remember these things and i pull
00:36:29.260 out the journal and i said did that even happen and it would kind of jog my memory and so there
00:36:35.260 is a there is a memory issue uh when you're i guess starving your brain of of uh of available
00:36:41.180 oxygen yeah yeah well i've heard that and you know you hear the stories where in the fog that people
00:36:46.460 get in their brain even to the point where when the when they're in the last camp quite frankly
00:36:50.220 they got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and they go right off the side of
00:36:53.580 them like there's some crazy stories about how yeah you lose your bearings and you lose your
00:36:58.380 direction and yeah it's very really interesting so tell me i gotta ask you this question because
00:37:05.980 music so you you took have you always loved music yeah i would say i've always loved music i start
00:37:12.860 i started uh my parents got me into playing the violin when i was quite young okay and now i
00:37:18.380 didn't play it my whole life because in uh grade 11 i did an exchange to switzerland a student
00:37:23.740 exchange and i flew off a cliff snowboarding and broke both bones in my arm my wrist was just kind
00:37:31.260 of hanging over the over the exposed bones that um so that put a little bit of a damper in my
00:37:39.340 violin career and for probably 10 15 years i really didn't play at all um and then when i
00:37:47.180 actually just discovered the electric violin is when to kind of you know re um you know got me
00:37:53.340 back into it you know i can play with the sound i can you know i play a lot of uh modified cover
00:37:58.460 songs now that i find a lot of that are really quite fun yeah yeah no i love it actually we do
00:38:03.740 uh my other business we have musicians all the time come in and play and uh we do this thing
00:38:09.100 where we have djs and electric violinists okay it's really fun and people love it they dance
00:38:14.300 they have a lot of good time so so okay so a kid you know uh didn't love to public speak at the
00:38:21.020 beginning now you're doing keynote speaking you're a musician so tell me like how do you get in the
00:38:28.860 experiences so you know it's challenging yourself all the time it's actually taking on that's how
00:38:34.300 you got into it well the music element in in particular and how this um morphed into a whole
00:38:42.380 you know series of of uh of programs like as you could say you know keynote presentations but i
00:38:47.980 also do you know i went through them by the your website quite different uh alan mallory.com yeah
00:38:53.980 right if anyone wants please go on it just the actual read is is great in itself you did a really
00:38:59.420 nice job on it yeah and quite frankly just going through the site and reading all your experiences
00:39:04.220 yeah i really enjoyed yeah i i guess when i i got back into the the music i always you know when i
00:39:10.540 started when i got the electric violin see i was a one trick pony i had the everest story i had
00:39:15.660 lots of different ways of doing it but it was quite common that after i would deliver a keynote
00:39:19.820 at a conference that the organizers say well you know that was amazing we you know the feedback
00:39:23.740 from our members we'd love to have you back what else do you have yeah and uh and so that got me
00:39:29.740 thinking well it's a lot easier to have that repeat business if i can have a few different
00:39:35.740 streams and that's what i have now i do a you know a lot in ai for example in technology
00:39:40.940 and then um i would say my the the kind of connection and psychological well-being
00:39:46.140 um it's called stream of programs is where i i um integrate the electric violin so i have music
00:39:52.860 throughout i get them up dancing at the end and it all kind of is built around connection with
00:39:57.340 yourself and others and understanding individual differences and so and it was you it was unique
00:40:03.580 see that this was a bit of a challenge for me because i i thought well you know i have the
00:40:07.660 everest story am i more than that like is it actually possible for me to to create a program
00:40:14.140 that doesn't have any everest in it and it's still to be uh popular and i wasn't sure whether
00:40:20.700 whether i could do that um so but the way i've integrated with the violin you know lots of
00:40:25.900 groups that have never even seen my my everest program they find that really impactful and i get
00:40:31.020 repeat uh work from it and so that um you know made me a multi-trick pony i guess you could say
00:40:37.980 yeah and um is it is it in the way i kind of read it so tell me if i'm wrong it's it's basically
00:40:44.860 uh dealing into your own personal so the music helps you kind of unpack yeah your own personal
00:40:51.980 feelings and then from there you can kind of then go into your style and how is that yeah well the
00:40:57.740 core of the program is about there's there's kind of three pieces if we're talking about the resonance
00:41:02.060 effect which is is the you know my most popular music uh one the first is uh under connecting
00:41:07.980 with yourself and so that's where understanding your own personality the types of things you might
00:41:11.980 be um predisposed to and um you know you really use the music to kind of introduce each of the
00:41:19.260 sections because music takes people on an emotional journey and so they can really connect with the
00:41:24.220 the messages i'm sharing when i'm integrating the the live electric file in so then the the other
00:41:30.380 two pieces are well once you understand that not everyone thinks the way that you do and um and
00:41:36.860 you understand a little bit about your you know individual differences how it is that how can you
00:41:40.780 be more impactful when you now when you start to notice characteristics in individuals that give
00:41:47.100 you an idea of their their personality and so that's really quite practical and that's almost
00:41:52.220 something i stumbled on because that wasn't the the main reason that i started studying
00:41:56.940 personality it was more to overcome my own um mental health challenges yeah um but then i thought
00:42:02.700 well this is really quite practical because you can adjust your your interactions and it actually
00:42:09.020 really does work you kind of speak the other person's language in that sense yeah yeah um so
00:42:13.740 there's a practical element and then the third piece is integration you know how that applies
00:42:17.580 when you have a you know a whole a culture of different personalities and uh and what you can
00:42:23.260 do about that yeah and then um and then of course i you know the the the dance at the end kind of
00:42:28.620 uh you know ties it all together and that almost you know it just makes it unique you know in the
00:42:33.580 speaking world there's you go to enough conferences all the speakers start to sound the same right
00:42:39.180 i think they really appreciate that i you know both of those programs the everest one and in
00:42:44.140 electric violin pretty unique right oh yeah kind of a when i saw it i was like oh this is interesting
00:42:50.940 well i love the electric violin yeah so right away it caught my attention i started reading through
00:42:55.580 it but so okay so keynote right um and that's interesting because you get up in front of you
00:43:04.860 know hundreds thousands of people whatever the number is coming to the conference yeah um dealing
00:43:10.620 with the anxiety and the feeling how do you deal with it because quite frankly um do you take
00:43:16.780 yourself do you have a mechanism to do it um talk to me about that because you know a lot of people
00:43:22.300 who are watching today viewers probably are challenged by that you know i i just did um
00:43:27.900 uh biz lunch uh for a group of people we run a business association i did and the lady came
00:43:33.900 after she says how do you you know uh how do you how do you you know get up and speak so openly
00:43:39.900 and confidently in front of people and i said you know what it took me years yeah it took me and it
00:43:44.860 just i just had to start yeah i have that all the time people come up and they say wow you're just
00:43:51.100 so you're so such a gifted natural speaker and i think in my own mind you knew my journey yeah and
00:43:57.980 And so, you know, I wasn't a gifted natural speaker.
00:44:01.940 I would say it was a combination of self-education,
00:44:07.200 you know, what we've already talked a little bit about,
00:44:09.260 playing the right mental movies,
00:44:10.540 understanding how your mind, you know,
00:44:12.580 develops these disaster situations
00:44:14.300 that just feed on this spiral to bring you down
00:44:18.400 into more and more anxiety and worry.
00:44:21.080 So, you know, once you, now this is difficult,
00:44:24.020 took me a lot of years to try to figure this out.
00:44:26.320 And I still wouldn't say, you know,
00:44:27.720 i'm you know perfect i have no anxiety you know i just have strategies now that to to to work
00:44:33.880 through it and um and i think that is actually what the psychological research supports you don't
00:44:38.760 actually ever lose the phobia let's say you're you have a phobia of spiders or heights yeah
00:44:43.800 you know you will always have kind of pangs of anxiety but you don't allow it to spiral out
00:44:50.760 of control because you have the right strategies to to to help you work through that to the point
00:44:55.800 where it doesn't negatively affect your your life and that's what you're aiming for yeah right and
00:45:00.600 so there was that piece the self-education the second piece i would say was what we call voluntary
00:45:06.440 exposure therapy put yourself in the situations that you've been avoiding when you avoid
00:45:13.240 situations your mind flags it as a threat and that just you know you think you've avoided the
00:45:19.720 emotional response you've just deferred it to later on where it will be worse so before i would
00:45:25.640 speaking in front of thousands of people I did smaller events I you know little local clubs and
00:45:32.700 things like that I tried out my material and so that in a mental health from a mental health
00:45:40.980 perspective kind of is the evidence you need to support the fact that you're not going to
00:45:47.660 fall on your face or even if you do you'll survive something like that and so that's that's almost
00:45:53.720 the repetition element and um yeah and it was those two things you know now that i'm doing it
00:45:59.080 all the time i find you know and i still the some of my programs are more um more of a challenge for
00:46:06.600 me than others you know the ones when i've you know i've told our everest story and integrated a
00:46:11.560 lot of you know the different practical tools and business strategies so many times that you know i
00:46:17.000 really don't have to almost prepare for that you know i make sure i kind of lay it lay it out but
00:46:21.880 But I don't have to, you know, play the right mental movies and so on.
00:46:26.840 Now, on some of my other programs where I have, you know, there's lots of different people.
00:46:31.400 It's a variation of my electric violin where they're asking me to do different things.
00:46:35.500 I did a program where I was teaching juggling, for example.
00:46:38.240 I can juggle, but it's not really my core thing.
00:46:42.800 You know, those ones are a little bit more.
00:46:44.800 There's some unknowns there that I think it's natural to feel anxiety around those.
00:46:49.400 I use the same strategies, though.
00:46:50.700 you know i just play the mental movies look i'm not juggling maybe i'll drop the ball on my head but
00:46:55.600 the movie i'm playing is me being successful them and them enjoying it learning them laughing
00:47:02.540 and uh even if that doesn't come true it's going to be a lot easier on my my my i just say nerves
00:47:09.640 and my emotional response if i've played the right movies to begin with right yeah and those are the
00:47:15.260 building blocks it's interesting when you're talking because i'm you know i'm sitting there
00:47:18.700 and I'm listening to you, and I'm thinking of small moments, as I mentioned earlier on,
00:47:23.340 the building blocks that you build to do those things. And they come back. And I remember living
00:47:30.140 in Florida, and a guy said to me, I was out at a function one night. He said, so you're doing
00:47:35.920 triathlon? I said, yeah, I'm doing triathlons. He said, come swim with us. And I said, where are you
00:47:39.620 guys swimming? He said, we're swimming in the ocean down off of Lauderdale Beach. And I said,
00:47:44.260 great. And so it was a bunch of lifeguards. And I went, and I was terrible. And quite frankly,
00:47:48.260 never ocean swam before and so i you know and it was scary and it was scary for me because quite
00:47:53.780 frankly i'm trying to keep up with these guys who are ripping through the ocean and i'm trying to
00:47:58.580 and i'm thinking of sharks i'm thinking all those things and when i got in i thought wow that was
00:48:04.100 amazing that i actually got back and then the next day it got easier and the next day got easier and
00:48:10.340 the next day it got easier and then finally i never i didn't think about it anymore quite frankly
00:48:14.500 and i got to the middle of the pack and i was never the best but i wasn't the worst and
00:48:18.580 and it got better but it took time and and you know you apply those lessons to other lessons to
00:48:23.940 where when it came time to do this when we came time to do the podcasting yeah listen there's days
00:48:29.460 i'm not as good at it you know mike and jim and those guys they've been in broadcasting their
00:48:33.780 whole life they get up and they go and you know they do a great job and quite frankly you know
00:48:39.220 i admire what they do because they've honed a skill yeah um i'm honing that skill over time
00:48:45.620 but you know it takes time because you know i'm my my background is i was an accountant
00:48:52.340 i was cpa i don't practice anymore but quite frankly so most of my time was with numbers head
00:48:58.260 down introverted so to get out and have a conversation and do this i have to work yeah
00:49:04.340 yeah so it took time but those skills that i built doing other things allowed me to kind
00:49:08.180 to transition to this skill yeah um and i enjoy talking to people like i i enjoy talking to you
00:49:12.980 when i'm reading your story and the thing that makes me so interested in learning about you and
00:49:17.860 people that i meet every day is their story because then i take away and i think to myself
00:49:22.980 okay alan was able to convince himself to summit everest with his whole family with his with his
00:49:28.740 brother his sister his father and your mom would have went she got hurt but you know quite frankly
00:49:33.540 how did they make like and then it intrigues me and i think okay i'll leave today and i'll think
00:49:39.680 am i doing enough it's interesting i say should i challenge myself more should i create another
00:49:44.860 summit but i'll learn that from you and that which is a great thing to learn and you know a boss i
00:49:51.300 had once said to me it was a i thought it was a great expression she says you don't get smarter
00:49:55.120 as you get older you just see more and those things you see and you learn from people you adapt
00:49:59.520 into you yeah yeah which is great yeah yeah i'm the same that's why you know a lot of the books
00:50:05.280 i read there's some some they're they're often kind of in that they'll probably be coined the
00:50:09.680 self-help space but they're kind of strategies that i can practically use in in in my uh in my
00:50:15.760 own life and so uh so yeah i mean and maybe that's i mean we talk about people that come up with new
00:50:22.640 ideas every idea is you've learned from someone and you've kind of extrapolated put it together
00:50:28.560 and creating that idea so the more varied people you you speak with you you you learn from you
00:50:35.960 know the better you're able to to formulate your own ideas yeah well that's what I love about
00:50:40.020 podcasting because quite frankly it's a culmination of a bunch of ideas not all of them I agree on
00:50:44.860 with but there's bits and pieces that I do agree with and I get to take it and form it you know
00:50:49.820 I want to talk about this before I lose it so being an author okay I'm interested in being an
00:50:57.280 author right how did you get the discipline to sit down and form was it something you had to push
00:51:05.180 yourself to do to like you mentioned you took you took your notes you remembered you used a life
00:51:10.480 experience and and jim so jim lang who who does podcasting with us he is you know is a probably
00:51:18.040 the longest hardest working sports broadcaster in canada um he comes in and does a couple shows a
00:51:24.460 with us does a terrific job um he's a writer but he sits down every day he blocks out time
00:51:30.540 and he writes kind of the hemingway approach where he makes sure he belts out those pages
00:51:34.860 you know gets it done how did you do it it wasn't natural for me you know as i say i'm an engineer
00:51:39.980 by trade like i wasn't really even very good at the english language i would say maybe the
00:51:45.900 technical terms but um you know i kind of when i started writing it was mostly from people just
00:51:51.580 saying you've got to write a book you've got to write a book it seemed daunting to me and
00:51:55.180 so but i use the same strategy i use with a lot of the goals i've set in life i say well
00:52:00.380 you know that seems like an impossible everest to to publish a book but i can probably write a page
00:52:07.180 i can probably write a few pages i can probably write a chapter before you know it there's a
00:52:11.660 momentum there now that wasn't natural either though uh i would always have other things that
00:52:17.580 seemed to pull me away from it probably because i didn't particularly i guess enjoy it or although
00:52:22.220 sometimes i would get in the groove and so that's where i would actually play these mental games
00:52:26.780 with myself and uh i think in one of the books i actually mentioned this where the accountability
00:52:32.300 partners i found helpful you know people that are doing the same thing and we kind of tried to hold
00:52:36.380 each other accountable but also i would make these mental or these uh what would you call
00:52:41.580 them packs with myself where i would say okay look i know i need to do this um this is almost you know
00:52:49.580 i think they would call this delayed gratification it's something you don't want to do in the here
00:52:53.100 and now but you know it would be good for you later down down the road and i knew the end goal
00:52:57.980 is something i wanted especially my second book you know it's it's it was it's a mental health
00:53:02.060 book more than anything and i think i a lot of people can can benefit from it and so i would um
00:53:08.780 you know i would say well you know some of the packs of one that was was common was i'd be
00:53:13.820 hungry and i'd say look when you get uh this many words done or this many pages and i would kind of
00:53:19.740 set something that wasn't out of the you know a crazy goal for myself but something that was you
00:53:24.460 know enough of a stretch then you can eat and so the more hungry i get the more i want to get that
00:53:31.020 done and so i'm typing away typing away and then and then when i've completed it i get the reward
00:53:37.260 and so it's almost like a duality of mind type strategy that worked for me yeah and so and i
00:53:45.500 actually do that pretty often when anyone there's other things i don't want to do i say well here's
00:53:50.460 what i want to do i know i need to get the first done i'm gonna i'm gonna just set this this i don't
00:53:57.100 know what i'd call it a pact or agreement with myself it's kind of an odd an odd thing to even
00:54:01.580 think of think of it like that but i say look if i want to do that if i want to go mountain biking
00:54:06.380 well here's what i what i know i need to get done first and so then it's there's a you know i'm
00:54:11.580 motivated to get to get it out of the way because i'd rather be out mountain biking yeah so yeah
00:54:16.780 you know you're setting priorities to get yeah the things done that's amazing so summits of self is
00:54:22.540 the book you're referring to yeah yeah thank you you know both of the first ones about our everest
00:54:27.100 expedition both took me probably five five six years to with all the writing and editing but
00:54:32.700 summits of self has just a lot it was a more difficult book to write for one it's like a deep
00:54:37.980 dive into introspection for myself but also there's a lot of you know practical um psychological
00:54:44.620 strategies and and uh and evidence-based approaches that i wanted to make sure i got right
00:54:51.420 yeah and so i so i wasn't kind of steering people down the wrong path um now as i mentioned i tried
00:54:58.780 a lot of psychological strategies in my own life the ones that didn't work i threw out the ones
00:55:02.940 that did are in that book yeah so i tried so in that sense there is an i don't know we might call
00:55:09.260 that an anecdotal evidence in my own life but that's why people are you know they've seen me
00:55:14.700 speak they see my strategies and they want to learn from what i've what what i've been successful
00:55:19.580 with and so um well and i think the results honestly the the family that conquered evers
00:55:25.340 when you you know when i read your story the thing that you know intrigued me and attracted
00:55:30.580 me to the conversation was the fact that you had done something as a result driven task and and
00:55:37.240 achieved it you know because sometimes i read books and i think to myself it's hard if i don't
00:55:41.620 have if i don't see an author that's done something it's hard for me to and that that might be the
00:55:46.740 entrepreneur in me and maybe that's in being too uh critical but but you know i i like i you know
00:55:52.880 if I see someone who's formed a great business or done something uniquely challenging physically,
00:55:59.420 then I'll say, I want to learn. Because obviously they had something that drove them to successfully
00:56:04.780 complete that task. And that really, you know, that intrigues me. Yeah. For my second book,
00:56:10.580 that's why I thought, because I was a little bit nervous. I'm putting a lot of myself out there,
00:56:14.880 you know, as I say, there's the mental health aspects and, you know, different things from
00:56:18.980 my life that might have predisposed me to that. But I thought, well, if I want to actually be
00:56:25.140 useful to people, I am in a situation, I'm the type of person that I would have wanted to discover
00:56:33.040 in my younger years. Because when I was going through my mental health journey, I spoke to
00:56:38.360 different psychologists and different practitioners in that space, and they would give me strategies
00:56:44.880 and so on and i would think well that's easy for you to say you're not living it you haven't you
00:56:49.040 haven't gone through this like it's not that easy yeah and a lot of what they said probably really
00:56:54.320 were the right thing but i almost didn't allow it to settle in and um i don't think i finally was
00:57:02.400 able to uh allow it to settle in if we use that word until i actually read some books from people
00:57:08.480 that had really lived it and been through it and i actually forget the name of the book but it was
00:57:12.720 a gentleman in the uk i think and you know he kept it wasn't particularly well written but he
00:57:17.120 kept saying the same thing you know you are the i he was telling it from his own personal
00:57:22.880 perspective of how he finally realized he was the one perpetuating the the anxiety
00:57:28.480 through focusing on it and try to diagnose it and all of that and i kept just saying the same
00:57:34.320 thing from different angles and eventually i i i finally realized it stop fighting your yourself
00:57:40.080 it's you it's you you and i was the one that was perpetuating that that's what the generalized
00:57:45.120 anxiety disorder is the noticing of your own negative symptoms is enough to perpetuate the
00:57:50.160 the disorder oh yeah yeah and so and that's hard to break it like it's easy for me to say it now
00:57:55.440 i was you know eight years of of trying to learn strategies and you know i don't know if i could
00:58:00.640 point to one that was the the you know what worked it was well a lot of years of what i just talked
00:58:05.920 about yeah self uh study you know studying the human mind and the voluntary exposure therapy
00:58:13.200 so uh yeah so that's how it worked in my in my uh experience engineering we didn't talk about it that
00:58:19.280 much yeah uh you know is it the discipline of engineering that drew you to so you know
00:58:26.240 because i also found that interesting you know the your diverse background but the engineering part
00:58:31.760 is it uh is that a another part of you that maybe is the more technical part or the more that you
00:58:38.000 like to uh i don't say get lost in but that's something again it's project driven you know i
00:58:45.040 think you're are you a mechanical engineer mechanical engineer yeah so you get kind of
00:58:48.480 lost in the structure and form of a of us of a structure really right it was the innovation side
00:58:54.960 that i loved about engineering you know my brother and i we've been building contraptions uh our
00:58:59.600 whole lives that of most of them are to kind of fling ourselves through the air in our younger
00:59:04.880 years like a lot of really kind of crazy contraptions and that's probably what pushed
00:59:09.040 me in the engineering direction yeah also i think i went that way because i had my own social phobia
00:59:16.480 and i thought well i'm not going to have to you know speak with anyone now i don't know how much
00:59:21.200 of of um like i know in high school for example i would sometimes choose my courses based on the
00:59:27.680 ones that i didn't think i was going to have to do presentations in right so yeah so uh so
00:59:34.720 yeah like was it maybe if i didn't have that maybe i would have went in the psychological
00:59:38.640 direction to begin with you know i've i'd say that's what i'm particularly passionate about
00:59:43.280 but um but we're still inventing things we're still so i think there is a there is a a natural
00:59:48.960 draw in the in that mechanical direction and um you know i'm not using my engineering degree like
00:59:55.120 I was when I worked as an engineer but once you you kind of use that um I don't know what you call
01:00:01.840 it deductive reasoning in solving problems all the time yeah 100 look at me I must see I was a CPA
01:00:08.560 yeah you know and people say you don't you don't come off like a CPA and I said yeah that was years
01:00:14.640 that was that's one part of what I do or what I was and I use that you know when I do shows it's
01:00:21.120 it's funny because when i um the next show i'm going to do is based on uh last night's election
01:00:26.880 in the u.s and so the guys who i'll do it with quite frankly they do shows with me every week
01:00:32.240 i do the analytic side so the number of seeds who won what i'll do that because i think numbers
01:00:37.800 so my right away my comfort zone because not being totally extroverted takes me to numbers
01:00:44.060 so it's easy for me to rhyme off numbers sometimes i get them wrong sorry guys but you know i do
01:00:49.360 sometimes but for the most part it's my comfort zone so i go there first and that gets me more
01:00:54.640 comfortable to get into the shows so you know if i'm dealing with a tough issue i go to numbers
01:01:00.480 and then i go to the show and that kind of is how i morph into it as i get better at it but yeah
01:01:06.080 alan thank you man i really appreciate it and you know for those of you um i think i mentioned
01:01:11.680 alan's website is amazing uh you know and he has some really uh great keynotes uh so please take
01:01:19.040 a look two great books summits of self and the family that conquered evers so please check it
01:01:24.960 out and uh please come back yeah yeah i enjoyed